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‘What? Who was that, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Gerald Palstein.’

‘What? Why would they want to get Gerald?’

‘That’s the easiest question to answer,’ Norrington chipped in. ‘When Palstein was shot, that meant that he had to pull out of the moon trip at short notice and make room for Hanna.’

‘But how—’

‘Later.’ Jericho came closer. ‘The most important thing for you to know right now is that the attack isn’t aimed at Gaia.’

‘It’s not?’ Julian asked. ‘But you said—’

‘I know. It looks like we made a mistake. In the meantime we’ve been able to decode more of the message, and it seems that the bomb isn’t there to destroy your hotel.’

‘But what, then?’

There was silence for a moment, as though everyone in the room was waiting for someone else to spill the beans.

‘Peary Base,’ Shaw said.

Julian stared at her, his mouth open. Jia looked as though the ground had opened up under his feet.

‘Beijing would never plan—’ he began.

‘We’re not certain that Beijing’s behind it,’ Shaw interrupted. ‘At least, not Chinese government circles. But that’s irrelevant right now. Hydra want to contaminate Peary Crater, the Mountains of Eternal Light, the whole region! They don’t want anything from us, they just used us to get up to the Moon. Contact the base straight away, however you do it! They’ve got to search the place with a fine-toothed comb, and evacuate if need be.’

‘Good God,’ Julian whispered. ‘Who are Hydra?’

‘No idea. But whoever they are – they want to wipe America off the face of the Moon.’

‘And Carl’s headed there right now.’ In an instant, it all became clear. He leapt to his feet and stared at Jia. ‘He’s going to arm the bomb. He’ll arm it, and then clear out!’

* * *

They couldn’t reach Peary Base with the Chinese satellite either, which made Orley even more frantic. They tried to reach Gaia, with no luck. Then the base again. Then Gaia again. Shortly after four o’clock, they gave up.

‘It can’t be anything to do with our satellite,’ Jia argued. ‘We could talk to London no problem.’

Orley looked at him. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘That the bomb has already exploded, and that’s why we can’t reach anybody?’ Jia rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ll admit, I had considered it.’

‘It’s horrific,’ Orley whispered.

‘But we heard that the satellites aren’t the problem. It’s the communications equipment. Peary Base and Gaia have been attacked; we haven’t. Which means that we can communicate, just not with the hotel, and not with the Pole. Besides, a nuclear explosion—’ Jia hesitated. ‘Don’t you think we’d have been told? My country keeps a very close eye on the Moon. I think your hotel must still be in one piece.’

‘But the base is in the libration shadow, which means that your country can watch until they go blue in the face, they won’t see anything!’

‘Please be assured that China has nothing to do with it.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Orley paced around the small control room. ‘I simply don’t understand. What’s all this in aid of?’

Jia turned his head. ‘When do you want to set off?’

‘Now. I’ll tell the others.’ Orley paused. ‘I am really very grateful, Commander. Very.’

‘Keqiang,’ Jia heard himself say.

Really? For a moment, he felt an urge to withdraw the offer, but he liked this easygoing, long-haired Englishman. Had he been too harsh in judging the relaxed Western ways? Maybe being on first-name terms was a step towards harmony among the nations.

‘One thing’s for sure, Keqiang,’ Orley said with a sour grimace. ‘There’d have been no Moon crisis if it had been down to us two.’

At that moment, they heard his name.

* * *

It droned from the loudspeakers, part of a looped message, an automatic broadcast signal.

‘Callisto to Ganymede. Callisto to Julian Orley. Please come in. Julian Orley,
Ganymede, please come in. Callisto to—’

Jia leapt up and raced to the console.

‘Callisto? This is Jia Keqiang, commander of the Chinese mining operations. Where are you?’

For a second there was only crackling from the loudspeakers, then Nina Hedegaard’s face appeared on the screen.

‘We’re flying over the Montes Jura,’ she said. ‘How come—’

‘We’re keeping our ears open. Are you looking for Julian Orley?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded emphatically. ‘Yes!’

Julian shoved into view. ‘Nina! Where are you?’

‘Julian!’ Suddenly Tim’s face appeared next to hers. ‘At last! Is everybody all right?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘But—’ Tim was visibly distraught.

‘That’s to say, Amber’s fine,’ Julian reassured him hurriedly. ‘What happened to Lynn? And Gaia? Tim, what’s going on here?’

‘We don’t know. Lynn’s – we’re alive.’

‘You’re
alive
?’

‘Gaia was destroyed.’

Julian stared at the screen, lost for words.

‘There was a fire, several people died. We had to evacuate anyway, because of the bomb.’

The bomb—

‘No, Tim.’ He shook his head, and clenched his fists.

‘Don’t worry, we’re safe. At the moon base. That’s where we just flew from. There are two search parties out to—’

‘Are you in touch with the base?’

‘No, they’re cut off from the outside world.’

‘Tim—’

‘Julian, I’m coming in to land,’ Nina said. ‘We’ll be back at the Pole in an hour. Then we can—’

‘Too late, that’s too late!’ he yelled. ‘The bomb’s not in Gaia. Do you hear? Gaia has nothing to do with all that. The bomb’s stored at the Pole, it’s meant for the moon base. Where’s Lynn, Tim?
Where’s Lynn?
’

Tim froze. His lips formed three silent words:

At the Pole.

‘Don’t tell me that!’ Julian wrung his hands and looked about frantically. ‘You have to get her out some—’

‘Julian,’ Nina said, ‘the second search party set out after us, they’re circling over
the Mare Imbrium. As soon as we’ve picked you up, we’ll climb until we can make contact and we’ll send them straight back to the base. They’re closer than we are.’

‘Hurry! Carl’s on his way to Peary. He’s going to arm it!’

‘We’re on our way.’

Dana Lawrence sat in the half-dark of the command centre in Igloo 1, breathing in pure oxygen through a mask, staring dead ahead. She’d had enough oxygen back in Gaia to see to the smoke inhalation, but a couple more breaths couldn’t hurt.

‘Don’t you want to go get some sleep?’ Wachowski asked sympathetically. The lights from the control panels and screens bathed his face in an anaemic blue-white glow. ‘I’ll wake you if anything happens.’

‘Thanks, I’m fine.’

In fact she didn’t feel tired at all. For as long as she could remember, all her strength had been focused on not falling asleep. In the sickbay, Kramp, Eva and the Nairs were lying comatose, exhausted. They were all under sedation, and tended by DeLucas, the station medic and life-support specialist. Even DeLucas, though, had no idea what Lynn needed. A young geologist called Jean-Jacques Laurie had suggested leaving her in the care of ISLAND-I, an older model than ISLAND-II. The programmed psychologist had diagnosed shock, to nobody’s astonishment, along with a possible case of late-onset psychosomatic mutism. Since then, Julian’s daughter had been either lying wide-eyed in the dark, or wandering about like a zombie, a prisoner in her own body. The Ögis were the only ones who were healthy and in full possession of their wits, and they had taken a room in one of the western towers. The base was short-staffed, all the survivors were out of action, the search parties had set off on their fool’s errand, and Hanna would be trying to get back to the hotel. God knows she had done everything she could to make things easy for him, but Hanna wasn’t coming. By now it was past four o’clock, and any confidence she had had that he would turn up was gone. The plan had been that they would carry out the operation together, but in this trade, you fought side by side with your comrade until circumstances demanded you sacrifice him. In two to three hours, the search parties would be back. By then, one of them
had
to have done the deed.

She got up.

‘I’m going to stretch my legs. It’ll help me stay awake.’

‘We brew a pretty good coffee up here as well,’ Wachowski said.

‘I know. I’ve had four cups already.’

‘I’ll put on some more.’

‘I’ve had enough smoke inside me to poison my system, thanks, I won’t risk a caffeine overdose. I’ll be next door in the fitness room if anything happens.’

‘Dana?’ Wachowski smiled, embarrassed.

‘Yes?’

‘I can call you Dana, can’t I?’

Dana raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course – Tommy.’

‘Respect.’

‘Oh.’ She smiled again. ‘Thank you.’

‘I really mean it. You’re keeping it all together! After everything that happened, Orley can be glad he has you. You’re keeping a cool head.’

‘Well, I try to.’

‘His daughter’s pretty much in a world of her own.’

‘Hmm. ISLAND-I says she’s suffering from shock.’

‘Pretty severe shock. What’s up with her? You know her better, Dana, what’s her problem?’

Dana was silent for a moment.

‘The same problem we all have,’ she said as she left the room. ‘She has her demons.’

The freight train with the helium-3 tanks shot up the valley bed to Peary launch field at more than 700 kilometres per hour, but Hanna’s thoughts were moving faster.

He had to arm the bomb, but before he did that, it would be best to make contact with Dana. He hadn’t the first idea what might have happened at the hotel. All he knew for sure was that with his cover blown, they had a lot less room for manoeuvre. If he waited for her at the Pole, they could escape together, but he’d find himself an officially wanted man, by the time they boarded the OSS at the latest, and he could forget taking the elevator back down to Earth. The whole screw-up called for quick action. Set the fuse timer, then get out of there on the Charon. Xin’s finely crafted plan could still work. Not exactly in all details, perhaps, but with the same results.
It would be best if Dana were still safely tucked away in the Vallis Alpina, putting on a show of concern, and hoping that the Chinese could put her through to Earth under their treaty obligations for mutual assistance.

The high plain drew closer. He could see the blast walls around the spaceport, the hangars, antennae, the neat lines of human presence. He was pressed against the tank in front of him as the maglev slowed, much more sharply than the Lunar Express. For a moment he was afraid that he had misjudged things, that he would be crushed in the murderous deceleration, then the train slid round the last curve as gently as a Sunday excursion and drew to a halt at the station. Hanna jumped onto the platform before a manipulator arm could mistake him for a helium-3 tank, taking care to stay out of sight of the surveillance cameras. All around him the machinery awoke to life, forklifts rolled up, the arms began to unload. He scurried to the further edge of the platform and leapt the fifteen metres to the ground in a single bound. Two kilometres of rough ground stretched away ahead of him, broken only by the road from the spaceport to the igloos. They showed starkly against the hills beyond and the factory buildings around, flanked on either side by the towers of the residential quarters and, in amongst them, a seemingly random assortment of warehouses and huts. Some distance away, a vast structure reared out of the stony surge of a hillside, the shell of the helium-3 power station, under construction.

Hanna loped away at an even, unhurried pace, keeping off the road and in the shelter of the slopes for as long as he could see the base to his right. Soon enough there’d be another sun shining here, only briefly but so blazing bright, and it would change everything. The landscape around. The course of history.

She went up to the top level of Igloo 1 in the lift, then took the connecting walkway between the two domes. Beneath her the road ran off to the factories behind. There were a few small windows here, with views out to the edge of the crater, the industrial plant and the spaceport. The sun cast a panorama of shadow like a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, but Dana had no eyes for the surreal beauty of the landscape under the billions of stars. Intent on her task, she crossed to Igloo 2 and took the lift down to the lounge, where she put on the armoured plates and backpack of her spacesuit. She picked up her helmet and then took the lift on down, past the fitness studios and the sickbay, through a layer of rock into the winding labyrinthine
caves and pathways of the underground level. She had memorised every detail of Peary Base from Thorn’s maps and descriptions, so that without ever having been here before, she knew what lay ahead of her, knew which way to turn once the lift doors glided apart.

She stepped out onto a seabed.

At least that was how it looked. The glass walls of fishtanks stretched up, metres high, all around her. Flickering pools of light chased one another like will-o-the-wisps across the floor, reflected from the water when the ruffled surface was stirred up by salmon and trout and perch as they darted about, by the schools of fish flitting back and forth. A little while later the cave divided, most branches leading off into the darkness, only a few passages shimmering with blue-green or white light, and beyond them the greenhouses, the genetic laboratories and production facilities which kept the moon base stocked with fruit and vegetables. She crossed a passageway, walked along a short corridor and emerged into a vast, almost round stone hall. She could have taken a lift down here directly from Igloo 1, but Wachowski had to believe that she was in the fitness studio. Her eyes swept around the place, looking for cameras. There hadn’t been any here back in Thorn’s day, nor could she see any now. Even if there was any such thing down here, Wachowski would have enough on his hands – short-staffed as the moon base was – watching the external cameras. The fishtanks and kitchen gardens were the last thing that he would be looking at.

Several passageways led off from the hall, leading to the laboratories, storehouses and residential blocks. Only one passage had an airlock, that gave onto hundreds of kilometres of unexplored caves, unused, branching endlessly in the vacuum. Most of the lava tubes petered out in the cliff-like rim of Peary Crater, while others burrowed downward, some of them opening out into the canyon fault that ran through the whole site. She put on her helmet, stepped into the airlock and pumped out the air. After a minute, the outer door opened. She switched on her helmet lamp and went into an unhewn rocky passageway which led her onward into the darkness, black as night. The torchbeam skittered nervously over vitrified basalt. After about a hundred metres, she saw a gap open up in the wall to her left, just as Hanna had said. It was narrow, unnervingly so. She squirmed through, pulled her shoulders in, got down on all fours when the roof suddenly dipped down towards her, and crawled through the last part of the cleft on her belly. It had almost become too narrow to bear when the walls suddenly swept apart and she could see a pile of rubble that had obviously been heaped up by the hand of man; she stretched out both hands and moved the rocks aside.