'I can put her into an emergency descent, sir.'
Seabright looked at the man. He was scared, and they didn't have the time for that.
'If we set her up in that attitude, Jimmy, think what happens if the controls lock again or we lose the engine. Or both. So be a good chap, now. Watch the engine. Watch the panel. Let's get out of here.'
There was nothing for Mulligan to say right then. He just nodded. And watched the screens. Something was happening there already and it was impossible to judge what it meant. Before, when the panel had gone down, it was as if it had actually died, had felt the lifeblood run out of its circuits, spill out into the atmosphere, and leave nothing behind. This seemed like the opposite. Everything was racing. Every gauge, every dial was coming to life, glowing, winking, brightly, furiously in front of him.
He felt like laughing, in between the anger, in between the red rage that ran around his head. There was something so ironic here. They'd survived being starved of electricity. Now it looked as if they'd be drowned by the stuff, dripping in from outside, down the windows, into the aircraft, into the wings, the control systems, every electronic nerve in its being.
And the fuel tanks too, Mulligan thought. Never forget the fuel tanks.
He watched what was flitting across the panels, not listening to what Seabright was saying, not even letting the words — and they were angry, getting angrier all the time — come close to his head, which hurt, which felt as if it were ready to explode. Because this was something new, this was something you never saw in the books. This was an entire aircraft being swallowed whole by some unknown, shapeless entity that fell from the sky, something blue and hissing, like a venomous electric serpent hooked to the biggest power grid in the world. You didn't read about these things in the books. Nothing prepared you for this, ever.
He felt something on his shoulder, looked, and it was Seabright's hand, shaking him roughly, trying to get him back into line.
Outside, beyond the wing, the 747 was closer now, moving slowly toward them, as if drawn by some gigantic magnet.
Jimmy Mulligan was, above all, a practical man. He took one last look at the gauges, closed his eyes for a second, tried to still his thoughts. His hands weren't shaking when he took off his harness. He felt calm, extraordinarily calm, felt that something inside his head was measuring these seconds as they ticked away so relentlessly.
Ian Seabright, still locked on the yoke, watched the blue fall farther, fall until it was halfway down the screen, far enough for the passengers to see through the cabin windows. Out of nothing more than habit, he wondered what was happening beyond the bulkhead. The aircraft flew on, steady as a rock. He stared out the window. The 747 was still closer. Only two hundred yards. And by the tail a new shape was growing, yellow and fiery.
Ali Fitzgerald had her eyes shut, cradled her head in her hands.
Mulligan knelt down in front of her, took her fingers, and she looked at him. She wasn't crying. In some way she wasn't even afraid.
Then she stood up, her back to the cockpit door. He rose too, felt her arms go around him, felt his face in her hair, against her cheek, soft and warm, damp with sweat, so real, so human it made him want to cry with rage.
She didn't kiss him. They didn't need that, clinging together like this, in some tiny tin cabin, held aloft in the atmosphere by nothing but the whim of the air outside. She just let her mouth brush against his neck, felt the way his did the same against her skin, and both thought, in a single image, of another time, two pale bodies twisting against cotton sheets in an anonymous hotel in an anonymous Japanese suburb, such physical delight passing between them it seemed impossible they could ever grow old or vanish from the face of the earth.
He leaned forward, gripping her more tightly, heard the sound from behind, unlatched the door, let it fall open, feeling these precious seconds slip away from them, seep out through the fabric of the aircraft, disappear like motes of light dispelled by some greater, all-consuming luminance.
It was like the hot breath of a dragon, so bright and yellow through the pale brown skein of her hair, half-obstructing his vision. The fireball rolled ponderously down the length of the cabin toward them, a perfect golden sphere, roaring as it came, so loud that he could hear no screams above it, with such deadly certainty that he could believe, perhaps, there were none.
Then the dragon breathed in his face, with a heat and searing proximity that took from his head the physical presence of Ali, the faint perfume of her skin, the whispering of her hair, the warmth of her touch, left nothing in its place but the temporary electrochemical stain on the cerebellum that went under the name of memory. And in a second even that was gone.
Twenty miles away, in the control tower of the military base of Bratsk, the two small green marks that Dragon 92 and Air Force One had painted on the ancient radar screen merged. Then, without warning, disappeared altogether.
Five thousand feet above ground, something glimmered briefly, a vast, fiery, elongated shape, bright and gold against the sky.
Like a halo.
Like a parhelion.
Like a sundog.
CHAPTER 8
Toast
'You want the good news or you want the bad?'
"The bad,' Annie said immediately.
'Okay, you asked for it,' Lieberman growled. 'You see the sun — no,' he interrupted himself so quickly, aghast he could have been that stupid, did his best to interpose his body between them sitting in the shade and the big yellow furnace burning into his back, 'no, I don't mean look at it. You must never do that. Never. Later, with my little toy here, I'll show you how you can look at the sun. Until I do that, don't even think about it. You understand why? It's too hot and it's so bright.'
'All right,' Annie said, a little disappointed that Lieberman had a serious side to him too.
'Okay, so… the bad news is,' he said, staring at the screen of the computer to remind him how this was supposed to go, 'the sun is a star.'
He watched the girl's hand go straight up and thought: This could take a long time.
'Stars come out at night,' Annie said. 'Everybody knows that.'
'Annie,' Mo Sinclair interrupted, smiling at him with, he recognized, the sort of conspiratorial self-indulgence you got in adults. 'Michael here is a professor.'
Lieberman wasn't going to let this pass.
'Hey! No problem, Annie. You got a point there. Stars don't come out at night, of course. They're always right there. It's just that the sky's so bright — or they're so dull, whichever way you want to look at it — that we don't see them. The point is the sun is a star too and we get to see that during the day. Now, why do you think that is?'
Two hands went up straightaway (so the grown-up wanted to play this game too; he could handle that). Lieberman picked Mo's.
'It's bigger and brighter than the rest,' she said, her smile curling down at the corners of her mouth as if to say: Two can play this game.
'Yeah? That could be one explanation. Not the right one, but it could have been. Maybe when you were nine years old you believed that.'
'Me.' Annie was scratching at the sky with her hand as if she wanted to hook her hand into the bright blue firmament.
'Okay?'
'It's closer than the rest.'
All the way there in under a minute and she didn't look as if it made her sweat. Mo smiled. Not bad. He could think of a couple of schools back home where it might take you half a day to get half that far with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds.
'It's closer than the rest. And one day that will be a bad thing. You see, stars are just like us. They grow. They change over time. Right now the sun is a nice, happy young little star — little and young in star terms, of course, not ours. But one day, when it gets older, it will wake up and decide to do what Main Sequence folk like it have to do, and that's transform. Like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. One day it will run out of fuel, all the stuff it burns to be a star, and then it will start to change into what stars grow up to be, which is what we call red giants.'