Another chasm yawned in her thoughts. That was Carl Hanna, the guy who would rather have been a pop star. Hanna, maybe a little stand-offish, but pleasant enough for all that, popular with all, the man she’d chatted to one late evening in Gaia, the man whose muscular body she’d imagined – just for a moment – on hers, his strong hands passing skilfully across her, if only she could work up the nerve to drag him off to her suite. That hideous suite, oh hell, where the mirror held a hysteric, a notorious madwoman who gulped down green tablets, that was why she didn’t like to spend time in that suite. Hanna had been cool and collected, and she had reined herself in, and after that there were a few chapters missing in the chronology, things were mixed up. Somebody had said that Hanna was a bad guy, that he wanted to blow up her hotel. Just a few words had turned her world topsy-turvy, and now the same nice guy she’d been flirting with in the Mama Quilla Club had shot poor Tommy Wachowski, and all of a sudden she felt a horror of his muscular body and his skilled hands. Fear bathed her brain in ice-water, so that for a moment she could think clearly again, at least enough to know that she mustn’t move a muscle, mustn’t surrender to the urge to whimper helplessly and whistle the songs of a little girl lost, because if she did, the man who’d been calling himself Carl Hanna would kill her too.
She held her breath and listened, heard him curse, heard every word he spoke, heard his secrets.
Hanna
Change of plan. Dana was no longer a factor. Whatever had happened to her, he had to go on without her.
Those were the rules.
Hanna swung the dead man over his shoulders like a sack of Christmas toys and went back down to the Great Hall, dragged him out into the airlock and watched his face distend in the vacuum. Then he pulled Wachowski into the cave beyond and didn’t spare him another thought. He ran to the cleft, squirmed in, got down on his hands and knees and slithered along like a snake until the passage opened out again and the familiar pile of rubble appeared in the torchlight. He shovelled the stones aside with both hands, opened up the control panel on the mini-nuke, lifted the cover—
And froze.
The detonator had been programmed.
For a moment, there was a vacuum in his mind. He refused to believe what he saw, but there was no doubt, somebody had activated the bomb. And that somebody could only be—
Dana Lawrence.
She was here! No, she was gone. As good as gone. If Dana Lawrence didn’t want to risk being vaporised on the slopes of Peary Crater, she had to be leaving the base on board the Charon, probably at this very moment. Which meant—
He scrambled hastily backwards out of the tunnel, stood up too soon, bashed his helmet on the roof, found his way out, and then ran along to the rift, following the bobbing light from his headlamp. He leapt down to the canyon floor, stumbled along the grooved path, climbed the cliff wall by the first bridge and heaved himself over the edge. He loped along the road in long strides, past the residential towers, hurrying over the dusty regolith.
Igloo 2
Minnie DeLucas glided her fingers over the touchscreen and completed a set of four bases.
She had always argued that it would be possible to raise moon calves in the catacombs of Peary Base. Chickens could barely survive in the extremes of zero-g, but they did well enough in one-sixth of Earth gravity, laying eggs that dropped neatly to the floor of their hutches. They also made a pretty good lunar chicken burger. So why shouldn’t calves and lambs thrive at the Pole? Maybe even pigs, although the whole problem with the smell meant opening up some of the more distant caves. As a scientist, DeLucas was used to tackling problems from the practical and the theoretical side, and since there was no livestock to be had, she was busy experimenting with the genomes. Watching other people sleep wasn’t exactly a challenge. As long as none of them fell out of bed, she could work undisturbed. Right now she had loaded data from some experiments with Galloway cattle embryos to the sickbay computer, and was so busy with the results that at first she didn’t realise someone was talking to her.
‘Peary, please come in. Io to Peary. This is Kyra Gore. Wachowski, why aren’t you picking up?’
DeLucas looked at the clock: ten to five. Io was back within radio range. They’d got back surprisingly quickly, but why were they calling her?
‘Minnie here,’ she said.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ Gore asked urgently. ‘Where’s Tommy kicking his heels?’
‘No idea. Perhaps he’s gone to the little boys’ room.’
‘Tommy wouldn’t go pee without taking his radio with him.’
‘He’s not been by to talk to me. Where are—’
‘We’ll be with you in five minutes! Listen, Minnie, you’ve got to get the people out of there! Get out of the base! Bring them all to the landing field.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The bomb’s in the base.’
‘In the base?’
‘It’s been hidden somewhere under our noses! The guy who’s going to prime it is on his way to you. Get everybody into their spacesuits and bring them outside. And go look for Tommy.’
The Landing Field
Dana had switched her transceiver to pick up all frequencies, so that she heard Io’s call as she went through the gate to the spaceport.
She stopped dead. What the hell were they doing back here already? At the very most, she’d have expected Tommy Wachowski to radio her to ask what she was up to, since she’d made no effort to stay out of sight as she dashed to the landing field, but now Io was coming in to land. And to make it even worse:
They knew about the bomb!
Now she really did have just a matter of minutes.
Dana began to run.
DeLucas
Fighting to remain calm, Minnie ran next door and shook the German women awake, then the Indian couple. Which wasn’t so easy, as she found out. Certainly Mukesh Nair started up from his sleep with one last trumpeting blast of snores, and Karla Kramp sat up straight, blinking curiously, but Eva Borelius and Sushma Nair both lay there as though in an enchanted slumber.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Kramp.
‘You’ll have to get dressed,’ DeLucas said, her eyes skittering about. ‘Everyone into their spacesuits. We’re leaving the base.’
‘Aha,’ said Kramp. ‘And why are we doing that?’
‘It’s a – precaution.’
‘Against?’
‘Sushma?’ Mukesh Nair was struggling visibly against the sedatives, and it looked as if he was losing. ‘Sushma, my love! Get up.’
‘I just want to know what’s going on,’ Kramp said, but she was obediently gathering her belongings as she spoke.
‘So do I,’ DeLucas said as she hurried out. ‘You just make sure that everyone here is ready to leave in five minutes.’
Instead of taking the lift, she ran up the stairs to the top floor, looked in the lounge, then sprang back down the steps and checked the fitness studio. Hadn’t Dana said that she would be running? And where was Tommy lurking? Where was Lynn Orley? Her uneventful vigil had suddenly turned into herding cats. DeLucas dashed back up to the top floor, hurried along the passageway to Igloo 1, and went into the control room. It was lit only by the dim glow of computer screens, and seemed deserted.
‘Tommy?’ she called.