And they needed the time. It seemed to take an age to arrange the uploading of Earthshine – or a decent partial that was, it seemed, ultimately destined to become the primary copy – into a compact, high-density portable store, a unit small enough to fit into the Earth-to-orbit shuttle. Penny had wondered why Earthshine could not simply be loaded digitally into some store on the hulk ship. Well, this unit was the answer to that; it was a technology she’d not encountered before, a technology no doubt protected by layers of corporate secrecy and government black research – a technology of which Penny Kalinski, a physicist who had advised the top levels of the UN, knew precisely nothing.
At last the orbital shuttle, sitting on its tail at the Kourou field, was loaded up and ready to go. As she boarded Penny was aware of the significance, that this could be her last footstep on Earth, but mostly she was just grateful to get out of the heat.
They lay on their backs in their rows of couches, Penny beside Jiang. Earthshine was here too, a virtual projection in a seat just ahead of Penny, in the cabin with them as a gesture of shared humanity, he said. But his image flickered continually; his base persona in the tunnel under the English Channel was continuing to download material into the store aboard the shuttle, and would do so, Penny understood, as long as the comms links survived.
Without warning the automated shuttle leapt from the ground. Penny felt acceleration press her hard into her couch. Beyond the windows the sky darkened quickly to a velvet blue-black, and as the shuttle banked Penny glimpsed the Earth, a curved horizon against the black.
It took only minutes to reach orbit, and Penny felt a vast regretful relief to be off the planet at last. So far so good.
But here they stalled. It was going to take half a day for a translunar ferry ship to catch up with them, and even then it would be more chemical rocketry aboard the ferry that would take them to the moon. Despite the urgency of the looming war, all of Earthshine’s influence, and all of Sir Michael King’s money, even now no kernel technology was allowed closer to Earth than Penny’s own old lab on the far side of the moon. Penny Kalinski still couldn’t get from Earth to moon any faster than the standard three days.
Stranded in Earth orbit for these long hours, Penny watched the planet unravel below, the daylight side as bright as a Florida sky. From this perspective the Mighty Winter had made little difference: a few more lights glowing in the heart of the old, largely abandoned low-latitude cities, and glaciers reforming in the mountains, splashes of white against the crumpled grey of the rock. What she definitively didn’t see was any sign of war. No armies on the move, no cities burning, no missile sparks flying. And that was remarkable, when you reflected that China and the nations it had co-opted into its Greater Economic Framework faced an enemy over just about every border. Even as the two blocs prepared to batter each other in the sky, the surface of the home planet was left untouched.
‘For now, anyhow,’ Penny said when she discussed this with the others.
‘You sound cynical,’ Jiang Youwei said. ‘There is an agreement. It is a question of honour.’
‘Honour?’ Earthshine replied. ‘No. It is a question of madness. If war is insane, to fight a kind of partial war with rules is even more insane. To smash everything up, if you are going to act at all – that ought to be your intention, or at least your threat. Otherwise there is no disincentive to fight; there is no overriding desire for peace.’
Penny grunted. ‘I follow your logic. But you’ve rarely sounded less human, Earthshine.’
At last their lunar ferry arrived, and they transferred. Like the Earth-to-orbit shuttle, there was no human pilot aboard – no crew at all save a solitary steward with paramedic training, there to dish out prepacked meals, keep the lavatory clean, and deal with any heart attacks in transit. They left orbit, left Earth. But Penny looked back, all the way.
And on the second day of the flight, halfway to the moon, she saw fire at last: sparks flaring all around the equator of the Earth, but offset from the planet. She woke up Jiang, who was dozing. The passengers, and the steward, pressed their faces to the small windows, trying to see.
‘Orbital assets being taken out,’ Jiang guessed. ‘The Chinese are attacking UN stations in space, and presumably vice versa.’
‘But there are no missile trails. They aren’t being attacked from the ground, by either side.’
‘No. From orbit only. Nothing to connect the war in the sky to the protected Earth. And – oh, look!’
It was a Chinese junk, its filmy sail casting a pale shadow across the face of the Earth, clearly visible even from a couple of hundred thousand kilometres out.
‘So it begins,’ was Earthshine’s only comment.
On the third day the news got worse. The real fighting had started.
It had begun on Mars. Nobody seemed sure precisely what had been the final trigger – there were scattered reports of a remote Chinese base, intended for the nuclear mining of aquifer water, being destroyed by one of its own weapons. An act of UN sabotage maybe – well, that seemed to be the working assumption. In response Chinese troops had marched into the UN’s Martian enclaves, like Eden, more or less unopposed. Mars was now China’s, overall, but UN guerrilla forces out on the rusty plains had already mounted retaliatory strikes against Chinese emplacements. Mars was a big planet on a human scale, and empty; it would be a slow-burning battleground. However, just as Earth as a whole would be preserved, both sides had agreed to leave Mars’s greatest monument, Obelisk, untouched. Earthshine shook his head at this fresh gesture of foolish sentimentality.
Then they heard that some of the Chinese junks, having looped around the Earth, were heading for the moon. Another countdown clock started ticking in Penny’s head. Could Earthshine’s party land on the moon, board the waiting interplanetary hulk craft, get away, all before the Chinese struck?
On the fourth day, as the ferry prepared for its landing on the moon, news came of a fresh development: an attempted UN assault on Ceres, with hulk ships that had been stationed there, under stealth cover, for months. But the situation was complex. It turned out that the ships had already been heavily infiltrated by Chinese agents. When the attack on the asteroid began, some of the UN ships had turned on their fellows, disabling them, in one case destroying. And then the Chinese at Ceres, having taken control of the surviving hulks, evidently following a preplanned design, began using the remaining vessels to build – something.
Penny followed the news as best she could, a fog of partial reports, silences, and probably downright lies, whose opacity only increased her gathering sense of dread.
CHAPTER 83
The landing on the moon was astonishing.
The passengers were told nothing about what was to come, not before the craft entered its approach orbit and came dipping down towards the satellite’s crumpled landscape, under a jet-black sky. Through the thick round window beside her seat Penny watched crater-rim mountains reach up like claws.
She grabbed Jiang’s hand; she couldn’t help it. ‘We’re going hellish low.’
He shrugged. ‘There is no reason why not. No atmosphere on the moon, remember. You can dip an orbit as low as you like—’
The craft passed through another mountain shadow.
‘—as long as you don’t hit anything in the process.’
‘As long as? Youwei, we’re lower than the mountains, and still at interplanetary velocities.’
Earthshine grinned. ‘This is what you get when you hand over control of your life to an AI. I mean to the automated pilot of this craft, not a relatively empathetic, quasi-human individual such as myself. The sky is full of Chinese warships, remember, which are closing in on the moon. The craft has undoubtedly been given the overriding instruction to bring us down as quickly as possible, and that is what it is doing. This is an exercise in orbital geometry, not reassurance.’