“Send your warning,” he said. “You will tell them nothing they do not know.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Rick Delanty shouted.
“Look,” Pieter said.
Leonilla’s voice was strangely flat. “There is another flare above Moscow. A new one.”
“Eh?” Johnny Baker looked from the Russian general to the woman, finally let himself drift toward the viewport. He knew already. He knew what it would look like, and he saw it at once. At the edge of the red-orange glare that marked Moscow, a tiny vivid mushroom bloomed in red and violet-white.
“Late strike.” The lie was thick on his tongue, for HamnerBrown was two hours past and his eyes were already searching for the others. He found two small mushroom-shaped clouds and a tiny sun that blossomed as he watched. “Jesus,” he said, “the whole world’s gone crazy.”
“Gilding the lily,” Rick Delanty said. “Not enough to get hit by a comet. Some son of a bitch pushed the button. Aw, shit.”
All four now watched the scene below: the rising fireflies of Soviet rockets, and the sudden blue-white glares across what had been European Russia. Whatever industry might have survived the comet was…
Madness, Johnny Baker thought. Why, why, WHY?
“I don’t think we’ll be welcome down there,” Rick Delanty said. His voice was strangely calm, and Johnny wondered if Rick had gone crazy too. He couldn’t look at Leonilla.
Finally Rick snarled deep in his throat. Just a sound. It had no meaning and was directed at no one. Then he turned and kicked himself away from them all, down the length of Hammerlab. Jakov was at the other end, near the airlock to the Soyuz, and Johnny Baker had the insane thought that the Russian was going for a concealed weapon.
That’s what we need. A pistol fight in orbit. Why not?
Madness and revenge were fine old traditions where Jakov came from.
“That’s that,” Johnny said quietly. “It would have been nice to stick together. The last of the astronauts. But I guess not. Rick?”
Rick was down at the Apollo airlock, and he was cursing, quietly, but loud enough that they could hear.
Johnny turned back to watch Jakov. The Russian made no move to open the airlock to the Soyuz. He hung in space, poised as if ready to do something, but he didn’t move at all. He was staring down at the stricken Earth below.
Rick’s bellow echoed the length of the cabin. “Shit!” Then, “Sir. The Apollo’s in vacuum. Shall I close up my hat and go see if the heat shield’s damaged?”
“Don’t bother. Shit!” A hole anywhere in the Apollo would kill them during reentry. They were back to one spacecraft. Johnny turned back to Pieter Jakov, who was still watching through the viewport.
A blow to the back of General Jakov’s neck, right now, before he expects it. Or go back to Russia. As prisoners of war? Hardly. Johnny Baker remembered scenes from the Gulag Archipelago. His hand arched to strike. Rick could handle Leonilla, and they’d have…
He thought it, but he did nothing. And Pieter Jakov turned toward them all and said, carefully, “They’re moving east. East.”
They stared at each other, Baker and Jakov, for a moment that stretched endlessly, then both dived frantically toward the communication panel.
“Roger, Looking Glass, White Bird out,” Johnny Baker said.
“You got through?” Rick demanded.
“Yeah. At least somebody acknowledged.” Johnny Baker looked down at the roiling mess below. “I think God hears us pretty well up here. I don’t see any other way we could have got a message through that.”
“Skip distances. Random ionization patterns,” Jakov said.
Johnny Baker shrugged. He wasn’t interested in arguing theology. The capsule fell silent as they watched the flight of the missiles. The sparks were going out now as they reached their trajectories. They would light again, but far more brightly…
But before the flames died, it had been easy to see that the missiles were not rising to curve over the North Pole. A slim crescent of Earth showed, more than enough to let them orient themselves, and the missiles were plainly moving east, toward China.
And there had been the nuclear explosions over Russia. The Chinese had attacked first, and what the Hammer had spared was now radioactive hell.
Pieter’s family was down there, Johnny Baker thought. And Leonilla’s, if she has any. I don’t think she does. Jesus, I’m lucky. Ann left Houston weeks ago.
Johnny laughed quietly to himself. Ann Baker had no reason to stay in Texas. She’d taken the kids to Las Vegas for a divorce that had probably saved her life. As for Maureen… Yeah. Maureen. If any woman could have survived Hammerfall on brains and determination, it was Maureen. She’d said she was going to California with her father.
“There is much to be done.” Pieter Jakov was a study in professional detachment, except for the quiet edge in his voice. “We cannot survive here more than a few weeks at most. General, we have no onboard computer. You must use your equipment to compute our reentry.”
“Sure,” Johnny said.
“We will need both of you.” Jakov tilted his head toward the other end of the capsule, where Rick Delanty seemed huddled in on himself.
“He’ll help when we need him,” Baker said. “He’s got to take this pretty hard. Even if his wife and kids are still alive, even if they got them out, he’ll never know it.”
“Not knowing is better,” said Pieter. “Much better.”
Johnny remembered Moscow, doubly destroyed, and nodded.
“Perhaps Dr. Malik should administer a tranquilizer,” Jakov was saying.
“I told you, Colonel Delanty will be all right,” Johnny Baker said. “Rick, we need a conference.”
“Sure.”
“Why?” Jakov demanded. “Why did they do it?”
The sudden question did not surprise Baker. He’d been wondering when Jakov would say something.
“You know why,” Leonilla Malik said. She left her place at the viewport. “Our government had already coveted China. With the threat of glaciers coming, Russians have only one place to go. Europe has been destroyed, and there is very little to the south. If we can reach that conclusion, the Chinese can also.”
“And so they attacked,” Jakov said. “But not in time. We were able to launch our own strike.”
“So where will we land?” Leonilla asked.
“You are very calm about this,” Jakov said. “Do you not care that your country has been destroyed?”
“I care both less and more than you think,” she said. “It was my homeland, but it was not my country. Stalin killed my country. In any event we cannot go there now. We would land in the middle of a war, if we could find a place to land at all.”
“We are officers of the Soviet Union, and this war is not over,” Jakov said.
“Balls.” They all turned toward Rick Delanty. “Balls,” he said again. “You know damn well there’s nothing you can do down there. Where would you go? Into China to wait for the Red Army? Or down into the fallout to wait for glaciers? For Christ’s sake, Pieter, that war’s not your war, even if you’re crazy enough to believe it’s still going on. It’s over for you.”
“So where do we go?” Jakov demanded.
“Southern Hemisphere,” Leonilla said. “Weather patterns do not usually cross the equator, and most of the strikes were in the Northern Hemisphere. I believe we will find that Australia and South Africa are undamaged industrial societies. Australia would be difficult to achieve from this orbit. We would have little control over where we landed, and we would starve if we came down in the outback. South Africa—”
Johnny’s laugh was bitter. Rick said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stay here.”
They all laughed. Baker felt the tension easing slightly. “Look,” he said, “we could probably manage South America, and we wouldn’t find much damage there, but why bother? We’d be four strangers, and none of us speaks the language. I suggest we go home. Our home. We can set down pretty close to where we aim for, and you’ll be two strangers with native guides. And you know English.”