‘I can’t,’ he panted.
‘Are you mad?’ Of course he could, why couldn’t he? ‘Do you want to die?’
‘No – please—’
Stupid jerk! Trying to hold her up! All the docking ports could be relocated along the ring, she knew that. He would just park the Charon somewhere else, and instead take one of the pods to the airlock and anchor it there.
‘Just do it,’ she hissed.
‘I can’t, I really can’t.’ The astronaut gulped and licked his lips. ‘Not during the launching process.’
‘Why the launching process?’
‘Wh-when a ship launches, I can’t relocate the docking port, I have to wait till—’
‘Launches?’ she yelled at him. ‘What’s launching?’
‘The—’ He closed his eyes. The movement of his lips was oddly out of time with what he said, as if he were praying at the same time. Spittle glistened at the corners of his mouth, and he was losing control of his bladder.
‘Open your mouth, damn it!’
‘The Charon. It’s the Charon. It’s – it’s launching.’
‘Daddy?’
Julian gave a start. He had just been talking to Jennifer Shaw, when a second window had appeared in the holowall.
‘Lynn,’ he said with surprise. ‘Sorry, Jennifer.’
‘Daddy, you’ve got to stop her.’
Her face was right up against the camera, sunken and waxy, as if she were about to lose consciousness. He immediately switched Shaw to standby.
‘Lynn, is everything okay?’
She shook her head feebly.
‘Where are you?’
‘In the spaceship. I’ve launched Charon.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m flying away – I’m taking – the bomb away from here.’ Julian saw her eyelids fluttering and her head tipping over. ‘She’s smuggled a second bomb on board, she or – Carl, I don’t know—’
‘Lynn!’
His hands gripped the console. Slow as snake venom the realisation of what was happening seeped into his consciousness. Of course! It made horrible sense. This wasn’t just a blow against the Americans, it was an attack on space travel!
‘Lynn, don’t do it!’ he urged. ‘Bring Charon back! You can’t do this!’
‘You’ve got to stop her,’ she whispered. ‘Dana – it’s Dana Lawrence. She’s the – she’s Hanna’s—’
‘Lynn! No!’
‘I’m – I’m sorry, Daddy.’ Her words were barely audible, a breath. She closed her eyes. ‘So sorry.’
The spaceship decoupled. The massive steel claws that connected it to the airlock opened to reveal the Charon.
It drifted slowly out into open space.
Julian’s voice reached her ear. He called her name, over and over again, as if he had lost his mind.
Lynn lay down on her back.
Nonsense, of course, she was weightless. Just a matter of perspective whether she was lying on her back or her belly. She might even have been lying on her side, of course she was lying on her side, all at the same time, but from here she could see the bomb that floated above her, spinning listlessly.
The display blurred in front of her eyes.
08.47
No, not 8. Wasn’t that two zeros? 00.47?
00.46
46 minutes? Minutes, of course, what else. Or seconds?
Not enough time. She needed thrust.
Thrust!
Before her eyes, little red spheres wobbled through space, some tiny, others as big as marbles. She reached for them, rubbed one to goo between her fingers, and suddenly she realised that the red bead curtain was coming out of her chest. There was something annoying there, eating away at her strength and restricting her movements, and she was terribly tired, but she couldn’t lapse into unconsciousness. She had to pick up speed to put some distance between herself and the OSS. Then, once she was far enough away, get rid of the bomb. Somehow. Throw it overboard. Or escape into the landing module and decouple the habitation unit with the mini-nuke. And get back.
Something like that.
Her jaws opened and closed like a fish. She painfully pumped air into her lungs and rolled around.
‘Haskin,’ yelled Julian. He’d tried to call the terminal, but there had been no answer. Now he was talking to the technical department. In fact, Haskin hadn’t been on duty that night, but in the circumstances he’d been willing to assume charge of the standby team. Unfortunately he was in Torus-5, in the roof of OSS, far from the space harbour.
‘My God, Julian, what—’
‘Comb the station! Look for Dana Lawrence, arrest the woman. Possibly she’s in the terminal!’
‘Just a moment. I don’t understand—’
‘I don’t care whether you understand it or not! Look for Dana Lawrence – the woman’s a terrorist. No one’s answering in the terminal. And stop the Charon. Stop it!’
He left Haskin’s helpless, startled face on the screen and whirled around to the cabin bulkhead.
‘Open up!’
Dana stared at the controls, with the barrel of the gun pressed against the astronaut’s temple, and listened to the radio traffic. She’d heard every word. The touching conversation between Lynn and her father, Julian’s patriarchal bellow. Lynn sounded injured, she’d managed to hit the miserable spoilsport. Small consolation, but Haskin’s men would be here soon.
‘Block access to the torus,’ she ordered.
‘I can’t,’ panted the astronaut.
‘You can! I know you can.’
‘You don’t know shit. I can close the entryways, but I can’t lock them. They’re going to get in, whether it suits you or not.’
‘What about the pod?’
‘The Charon’s too close. I swear that’s the truth!’
Then she would have to do something else. She didn’t need the external airlock. There were emergency entrances to the pods themselves, wherever they happened to be parked, she just somehow had to get to the outer ring and grab one of them. That jabbering piece of humanity there couldn’t help her, but she might still need the guy. Lawrence whacked him over the head again and left the toppling body to its own devices as she headed for the shelves of helmets.
Julian was consumed with anxiety. He bumped his shoulders and his head as he dashed through Torus-1 towards the corridor that led up to the terminal, tried to regain control of himself, and that wasn’t good. He’d never found any of the distances in the station particularly great, but now he felt as if he were floating on the spot, and he kept crashing into things.
He was terribly worried.
She had looked as if the life was flowing out of her. Her voice had been getting more and more halting and thin – she must have been injured, seriously injured. But the worst thing was that Haskin had hardly any chance of getting the Charon back. It wasn’t a drifting astronaut this time, it was a massive spaceship, and if Lynn—
Oh, no, he thought. Please not. Don’t start the engine.
Lynn! Please don’t—
—start the engine.
Again and again she had to fight the descending darkness, while her fingers groped around, but as long as she couldn’t see anything it wasn’t much use. She knew she was still too close to the OSS. For safety’s sake she needed to get a lot further away, because otherwise there was a danger that the burning gases would damage parts of the construction. With the best will in the world she couldn’t remember the time span on the display of the mini-nuke, just that it was tight, bloody tight!
She coughed. All around her, weird and beautiful, drifted the sparkling red beads of her blood. Weightlessness had the advantage that you couldn’t really collapse, you didn’t need any energy to stay on your feet, so that her physical systems were able to mobilise one last, impossible reserve of energy. Her vision cleared. Her fingers, determined, albeit hesitant and straying, went travelling: stretched and bent. Indicators lit up, a soft, automatic voice began to speak. She forced her body into the pilot’s seat, but she hadn’t the strength to buckle herself in. Just to start the acceleration process.