‘And I was on the maiden voyage of the International-One. Just a snot-nosed kid at the time.’
Earthshine glanced over his spotless uniform. ‘I doubt you were ever snot-nosed, General McGregor.’
Beth Eden Jones glared at them all, furious, frustrated, killing the small talk with her sheer hostility.
The elevator slowed to a halt, and the door slid open. Penny found herself on what was obviously a bridge, with a big command chair surrounded by banks of consoles. There were no windows, and the lights were subdued so the illumination of the control panels was bright. A couple of crew members, young, one male, one female, in ISF uniforms, were already working steadily through a series of checks. There was an air of calm, of order, as if they were in a tremendous clockwork device ticking through programmed motions.
Penny recognised one item of decoration: the bizarre concrete panel that had once adorned the wall of Earthshine’s office in Paris, much eroded and incised with circles and grooves, now fixed to the wall of a starship. Penny had no idea what its significance was.
Lex McGregor hurried to his control couch. ‘We launch momentarily. Please strap yourselves in.’ He waved at a bank of couches against one wall. ‘I know it’s all rather a rush, we haven’t even shown you around the ship – well, we’ll have time for that once we’re on our way. To give you a sense of the hasty timing, the passenger buses that brought you aboard are still nuzzled up against the ship. Poor little beasts will be atomised when we lift. But given the proximity of those Chinese warships – we must get away safely, that’s the only priority. Please, sit down and strap in, do hurry.’
They made for the couches, all save Beth Eden Jones, who stood in the middle of the cabin, hands on hips. ‘This is insane. Stop your count. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I’m very much afraid that you are.’ McGregor, already working through his own countdown checks, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Mr Jiang, I wonder if you could help?’
Jiang nodded, walked over to Beth and took her arm. ‘The ship will launch whether you are seated or not. If you are not strapped in you may come to harm. Please.’ Gently, firmly, he pulled her towards the couches.
She followed, but she kept protesting. ‘This is ridiculous. It’s all been chaos since I got stuffed into that Hatch with my parents at the Hub on Ardua. I wanted to go back with my father, but my mother put a stop to that.’ Her voice became harsher, more resentful. ‘I was stuck in this damn cluttered system with your big ugly overbright sun, your stupid crowded worlds full of ruins and skinny people and useless, distracting tech . . . And now this.’ Jiang got her to a couch and started coaxing her to sit. ‘I was with my mother on Mercury, the big ISF plant at Caloris. They took me away in cuffs!’
McGregor, distracted, murmured, ‘Your mother was rather insistent. She believes it’s for the best, you know. She wants to keep you safe, that’s all.’
‘Safe from what? What the hell’s going to happen to Mercury?’
‘I’ve no real idea. My security clearance isn’t that high. I imagine your mother was making educated guesses, when she asked me to ensure your safety—’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
McGregor grimaced. ‘Ancient history. She said I owed her a favour. On balance I decided she was right. Are you strapped in?’
‘She is,’ Jiang said, settling in his own couch beside Penny and the Earthshine virtual.
‘Then we’re all set. On my mark – thirty, twenty-nine . . .’
The craft shuddered, rocking Penny sideways in her couch. ‘What the hell was that? An earthquake?’
‘I doubt it.’ McGregor touched a panel.
One of the screens filled up with a visual feed. The lunar plain was sharp to the horizon. And in the black sky above there was a ripple of light, reflections of moonlight washing over a roughly spherical panel.
‘More junks,’ Earthshine said.
‘Yep. And they’ve already started hurling down rocks. As if getting their range. They know we’re here, that’s for sure. Well, they’re too late. Seven, six . . . Now they’re going to need to concentrate on getting out of our way. Full acceleration coming. Two, one – fire!’
The whole ship shuddered. Suddenly a full Earth gravity was sitting on Penny’s chest, pressing her back in the couch. On the big screen, the lunar landscape whipped out of sight, leaving only a black sky, a star field that shifted as the ship rolled on its axis. As the ship lifted, the ride smoothed out quickly.
‘Tatania is under way,’ said Lex McGregor softly. Penny saw him clench his gloved fist in triumph.
Penny found herself thinking of Beth’s mother. Mardina Jones, an ISF officer abandoned by the fleet to become a baby machine on Per Ardua. And now here she was dispatching her only daughter off into deep space. That must have been a hell of a wrench, Penny thought. What did Mardina know? What did she see coming, that she wanted to save her daughter from so badly?
The craft shuddered, and the acceleration bit deeper, making her gasp. Once again Penny grabbed Jiang’s hand, and he squeezed tight.
CHAPTER 84
‘It’s coming,’ said Monica Trant. ‘The Nail. We’ve seen it. Here it is.’
Mardina Jones didn’t want to believe what she was seeing in the slate Trant was holding, even as Trant, now in her seventies and still working, a deputy director of UEI’s kernel facility here at the Caloris base on Mercury, walked her through a diagrammatic reconstruction of orbits and trajectories.
Around them, as they tried to talk, everybody was evacuating the facility. There was panic everywhere in the dome, people running, their feet paddling at the ground in the one-third gravity, hauling personal luggage, boxes, precious slates loaded with a career’s work tucked into pouches at their belts. Many of them already had pressure suits on, ready to flee for the transports that were assembling to take them off, to escape from the blow to be struck by this ‘Nail’.
But Mardina didn’t want to go anywhere. Mardina was an ISF officer, or she had been before her two decades on Per Ardua, and now she was again, having taken up her duties once more on returning through the Hatch. Most recently she had been assigned to the top-secret technology offices here on Mercury to advise on renovations of hulk ship designs.
She was an ISF officer. She always had been, always would be, despite the ISF’s own betrayal. And ISF officers didn’t run from their duty. She dug deep inside for focus, for personal discipline. Her own safety wasn’t the issue just now, and hadn’t been for a long time. She wanted to stay right here, in the kernel facility’s main comms room, until she was assured that Beth was on board that big old hulk taking off from the moon, as Lex McGregor had promised her, and the hulk itself was on its way out of this damn inner-system war zone at last, and safe from the Nail. That was her duty now.
Trant was still talking.
Mardina looked at her. Trant, about her own age, looked just as scared as Mardina – more so, no doubt, since she understood what was going on so much better. ‘I’m sorry. Tell me again . . .’
The Nail: the ugly weapon that the Chinese had launched at Mercury.
‘We knew the Chinese were cooking something up at Ceres. Our intelligence there even gave us a name – hence “the Nail”. Now it’s on the way. Look. These are deep-space images taken over three days ago. This is what the Chinese assembled at Ceres, after the abortive UN attempt to attack their base with ISF hulk ships . . .’
The assault had failed because of Chinese subterfuge. Long before the attack their special services had infiltrated the hulk crews. There was a brief firefight, hulk against hulk, a deep-space battle between huge ships capable of ferocious acceleration and carrying powerful missiles, an extraordinary spectacle in itself.