TECHNOZOIC

 

July 12^th

Altitude 2,000 metres,
45 kilometres east of Milando

“Alpha Foxtrot. Calling Alpha Foxtrot. This is Milando Control. Acknowledge, please, and kindly explain what is happening. Contact with you was lost over the Gulf of Oman. Everyone thought you’d crashed.”

“Ignore it,” said Chu. They’ll find out what’s happened soon enough. Leave them in the dark for the moment.”

McNab sat back in his seat. There was not much to do. Though the Mriya’s airframe was Soviet, its avionics were state of the art. Then the radio crackled into life again.

“This is Milando Control calling unidentified aircraft, bearing 87 degrees, range 43 kilometres. Is that you, Alpha Foxtrot?”

“Should I respond?” said Armstrong.

“No. Absolutely not. We don’t want to risk giving Argus any clues.”

They waited in silence.

“Milando Control to unidentified aircraft, bearing 87 degrees, range 42 kilometres. Please acknowledge. You are putting your aircraft at risk by continuing to approach and failing to acknowledge.”

“You know, it might be better if we did acknowledge. They’ve got missiles down there.”

“They’ll see it’s us, surely? No other plane could have a radar signature like this one.”

Then the radio crackled into life.

“Thank God for that, Alpha Foxtrot. We were just about to arm the missile batteries. What happened to you, Bob? Masirah lost contact with you just after Gwadar. We thought you must have ditched. And how did you get here without refuelling?

“What? What’s he talking about?”

There was a pause.

“Okay, Alpha Foxtrot. Continue your approach.”

“Christ,” said McNab. “He’s having a conversation with someone. Someone pretending to be us. Argus has hacked our radio.”

“Thanks, Alpha Foxtrot. We’ll see you in ten minutes.”

He grabbed the mike.

“Milando Control! This is Alpha Foxtrot!”

He was shrieking.

“Rick. This is Alpha Foxtrot. This! Not what you have been listening to. Whatever it said, ignore it. Milando control, listen to”

A light went out on the instrument panel. Then another. And another.

“For Christ’s sake, Rick! The engines are shutting down. Milando Control. This is Alpha Foxtrot. We’ve just suffered total engine failure. Listen, Rick. Whatever you are talking to, it isn’t us. Its some sort of electronic super-virus, and it’s shut down our engines.”

Silence. It was Chu who broke it.

“Looks like we’re in for a dead-stick landing,” she said. “Can you make it to the runway?”

“At this altitude and speed it’ll be touch and go. My best guess is we’ll hit the dirt five or six kilometres short.”

“Hit the dirt as in crash?” said Sebastian.

“Well, it won’t be pretty.”

“Can we bale out?”

“We don’t carry parachutes. Why would we? Planes never just fall out of the sky, and we normally avoid war zones, so no one is going to take a pot shot at us. In any case, as you said yourself, we have to get to Milando and stop the launch. We’ll just have to make the best landing we can and leg it from there.”

He studied the instrument panel.

“Okay,” he said, calming down. “First things first.”

He lifted a cover on the panel and threw the switch underneath it.

“Fuel dump,” he announced, before anyone could ask.

“Right, Bob. Take someone with you and go aft. Open the doors and eject them. We don’t want them jamming on impact. Wedge the cockpit door open, too, just in case. Then clear the cockpit of anything loose. And get water bottles. It’ll be hot out there. Five minutes to impact.”

Armstrong left the cockpit. Chu followed him, and they disappeared. Sebastian tried to make himself useful, picking things up and hurling them into the void beyond the cockpit door. Every time he turned round from doing so, the ground looked a little closer.

Chu and Armstrong returned. “Done,” Armstrong announced.

“Two minutes to impact,” McNab announced. “Places, everybody.”

They sat in their respective seats and secured themselves as best they could.

“Don’t unstrap until we’ve stopped moving,” said McNab. “We’ve no fuel left, so don’t worry too much if a fire starts. It won’t blow us up. There are no evacuation slides, by the way. We’ll just have to jump, and hope for the best.”

No one said anything. Sebastian could see individual trees and animals now, scattered like toys across the savanna. In the distance, he could make out the space port, the runway they would never reach, the three dark patches of Humboldt’s diamond mines, and something else: a strange, circular clearing in the bush that looked for all the world like a giant crop circle.

McNab was fiddling with the controls, changing the lumbering plane’s trim to try to keep its nose up. Then the trees were no longer toys, and the beasts were looking up as the Mriya passed overhead. A few of the more nervous scattered. Most held their ground, waiting for the threat to pass before they resumed the serious business of grazing.

“Thirty seconds. Prepare to brace,” said McNab.

No one replied. All eyes were fixed ahead – McNab’s seeking the most treeless patch he could reach; the others’ watching helplessly as reality bit and each wondered if these fleeting moments would be their last.

“Okay everybody. Brace! Brace! Brace!”

McNab had angled it perfectly. The Mriya’s belly took the impact’s brunt. They ploughed through the scrub, pushing the bushes aside like so much stubble.

“Okay,” said McNab, as the plane shuddered to a halt. “Everyone out. Don’t forget your water.”

 

July 12^th

Milando Spaceport control tower

“Shit,” came a voice over the speaker. “The boss is out greeting the Washington bigwigs at the moment. That, we can’t interrupt. Go over it again, Rick, just so I’ve got things straight.”

“Last night,” Carter repeated, “the Mriya disappeared off the radar screen when it was approaching Masirah – at least, that’s what Masirah told us. I told the boss. In person. At two am. He decided to keep quiet about it until the President had left this afternoon. So, until this conversation only Steve, myself, the boss and that creature of his, Herbert, knew what was going on. But the plane’s back. It showed up on the radar a couple of minutes ago. Some cock-and-bull story about a problem with the load, a problem with the radio, and a desire to rush home for the launch. They’ve been hijacked. I know it.”

Carter’s voice trailed off. He was looking at the radar.

“Hang on. There’s something wrong. They’re coming in too steeply.” He paused, calculating. “On that glide path they’re going to land six klicks short of the runway. What the hell is happening?”

“Okay Rick. Keep me posted. I’ll tell the boss as soon as he gets back to the blockhouse. He must be pretty cut-up already. McNab’s on that plane, isn’t he? He’s one of his oldest mates. Been his pilot since the company started. Hijacking, you think?”

“What else could it be? And with the President here…”

His voice trailed off again. No one felt any need to complete the sentence. They all thought the same thing. That McNab had decided to crash the plane deliberately, to stop it being used as some sort of weapon.

“How long?” came the disembodied voice.

“Three minutes...”

 

July 12^th

Mission Control, Milando Spaceport

The convoy had taken a circuitous route. Humboldt was obviously showing off his toys to the President. The man driving Vane was a taciturn Afrikaner. He answered questions monosyllabically and volunteered no information that was not prised out of him. Eventually, after a quarter of an hour of such grunts, the tour was over and they arrived at what seemed to be Mission Control.

Vane decided it was time to join his leader. They walked down the steps into the bunker. As they were entering, someone came up to Humboldt and whispered in his ear. Humboldt said, “Please excuse me for a moment. Last minute preparations. Mike will look after you.” And he strolled across the control-room floor.

A young agent, particularly one who is pretending to be a cultural attaché at one of his country’s embassies, learns many tricks. One that Matt Vane had found useful during the endless round of cocktail parties to which diplomats treat each other was the ability to lip-read. Not even his colleagues knew he could do it. One has to preserve some advantages in the climb to the top. Now, he was worried by what the man talking to Gordon Humboldt seemed to be saying – or, to be more accurate, worried by what it implied that Humboldt had not said to them, namely that one of his planes had disappeared and then re-appeared again. Though Vane could see only half of the conversation, it seemed to be about one of the giant transport aircraft bringing the rocket stages in from China. On the face of it, that seemed no threat to the presidential party. But Vane’s antennae and his hackles were both up. His antennae told him there was something more to it, and his hackles resented, as only a secret agent can, having secrets kept from him. Then Gordon Humboldt strode back towards them.

“Sorry,” he said. “Something has come up. It shouldn’t affect the launch, but it needs my full attention. Mike, could you take over?”

Humboldt left the room, brushing past two burly, be-shaded individuals coming into the bunker as he did so. Secret Service. Vane’s hackles rose further. Sure, the SS, as he privately dubbed them, had formal responsibility for the President’s safety. But he regarded them, if not exactly with contempt, then certainly as being infra dig. And their feeling toward the Agency, he was sure, was mutual.

“Madam President,” one said. “Could we have a word in private?”

The football carrier withdrew, as it were, into the shadows, and the man who Humboldt had referred to as Mike also turned to leave. “I’ll be over there with the mission-control guys if you need me, Madam President,” he said.

Vane vacillated, resenting the dilemma about whether to stay, and risk being dismissed from the presidential presence, or to leave, and suffer the certainty of self-humiliation. But the President spared his blushes. “Matt Vane,” she said, addressing the Service-man, “is cleared to hear anything.”

“Very well,” he replied. “Our radar has shown a big transport aircraft, apparently heading towards the landing strip from the east.”

Despite himself, Vane found himself saying, “Yes. I was just about to tell you that myself. It’s one of Humboldt’s rocket transporters. They thought it had come down in the Gulf of Oman last night, but now it has turned up safe and sound and several hours early. It all seems very strange.”

The President turned to him and raised an eyebrow. “How on Earth did you know that?” But the Service-man cut across her.

“Not safe and sound at all. It has crashed in the bush.”

“Oh. So that’s what Humboldt meant when he said something has come up,” said the President. “Come down, more likely. Well, yes. I can see this is all very embarrassing for him, and that he wouldn’t want it to get out on his big day. But do you think it’s a threat to us? Hard to see how.”

“It’s odd. And I don’t like odd things,” said the Service-man.

For once, Matt Vane found himself agreeing with the SS.

“I don’t like it either,” he said. “How is it possible for a plane flying from China to arrive four hours early? And what happened to it while it was lost. We need to find out.”

“Well I’m sure,” she said, smiling at the three of them, “that between you, you can do that.”

 

July 12^th

Humboldt’s helicopter,
five kilometres east of Milando Spaceport

“Okay control. I can see the Mriya. She seems more or less intact. Big skid-marks through the bush behind her. Looks as though she’s been put down deliberately. We’re going in.”

Humboldt dipped the Huey forward and started to descend. They could have sent a drone, he supposed, but that would just have delayed matters and given whoever had hijacked the plane, if hijacked it had been, more time to respond or hide.

“Roger, Charlie Echo.”

“No Chimborazo stage on board, by the way. Has anyone managed to get any sense out of Chang Zheng?”

“They’re still claiming McNab left on time and fully laden.”

“Any signs of life down there, Petersen?” This to the man sitting up front with him, who was scanning the ground ahead with a pair of old-fashioned field glasses.

“Yes, Mr Humboldt.” I can see figures moving around. More than two of them. Four, I think.”

“Seems we were right. Hijackers.”

“I’m not so sure, sir. I can’t work out who’s who yet, but no one looks as if they’re being kept prisoner. They’re all staring in our direction, and one of them’s a girl.”

“What?”

“Yep. Definitely female. Looks Chinese. And yes, I’m pretty sure two of the others are McNab and Armstrong. The fourth one’s a man. Tall. White. Dressed in black. They’re waving at us.”

“Okay. But let’s be cautious when we approach.”

Not hijackers. Hitchhikers? If they’d both been female he wouldn’t have put it past McNab, at least, to have been bringing a couple of floozies back to base. But a man and a woman? Well, no point in speculating. They would find out soon enough.

“You two.” This to the men in the seats behind him. “Let’s not assume this is as innocent as it looks. You’ve got your rifles handy?”

“Yes, Mr Humboldt.”

“Okay. I’ll land a few hundred yards from the plane. When we get out I want each of you to stay with the chopper and draw a bead on one of the strangers. Philips, you take the girl. Singh, you take the man. If I raise either hand above my shoulder, take them out. If I turn around and wave my arms crossed down below my waist, then the coast is clear. But stay here in case there is anything from control. Jake,” this to Petersen, “you come with me. No weapons drawn.”

“Yes, Mr Humboldt.”

“Control?”

“Yes, Charlie Echo?”

“We’re landing. I’m leaving Philips and Singh with the whirlybird. Don’t try to contact them. They’ll be covering us, just in case, and I don’t want them distracted. But you might be hearing from them, if there is trouble.”

“Roger, Charlie Echo.”

Humboldt judged the ground. There was a fair amount of scrub, but it did not overwhelm the grassland. He put the Huey down in a glade that had a clear shot at the knot of people standing waving by the stricken Mriya, and cut the engine.

They waited until the blade had stopped rotating before they got out. Better to have no distractions. Then they jumped to the ground, port and starboard, and Humboldt and Petersen strolled, not quite casually, towards the crash site.

“Are you alright?” he called to them, when he was about halfway there. Then he double-took. “Hayward! What the hell are…what in Christ’s name is going on?”

McNab began to reply. “We–” Then he stopped talking. He was no longer looking at Humboldt. Instead, he was staring slightly above him. Humboldt turned to follow the man’s gaze. A missile’s trail was arcing westward into the sky.

 

July 12^th

Altitude 18,300 metres,
75 kilometres west of Milando Spaceport

Alfombra mágica’s cabin had every creature comfort. The cockpit, though, looked military.

“It’s still a prototype,” Jaime had explained, when Alexis first squeezed herself into the co-pilot’s seat. “An experimental aircraft, don’t forget. The back of the bus is for potential clients; the seats there are by Louis Vuitton, for comfort and luxury if you want it. The ones up here are by Valentine James, for a quick exit if you need it.”

A magic carpet indeed. It had wafted them across the Atlantic while she’d slept off her bike ride, and they were over Angola already. Technically, they were trespassing on that country’s airspace. But since, according to Jaime, the Angolan air force consisted of a couple of ancient MiGs and a gold-plated 747 to carry the President’s wife on shopping trips, they were not expecting trouble – at least, not from that direction.

Fifteen minutes out from Milando, Jaime curved the plane around to line it up with the runway.

“I still think we should warn them we’re coming,” he said.

“Too risky. That Thing is everywhere. We know it’s already taken down at least one plane. We’ll just have to give friend Humboldt a surprise. What’s the worst he can do? Clap us in irons? He’s hardly going to shoot us down, is he?”

“Okay. You’re the boss.” He made his right hand into a loose fist, held it to his mouth like a microphone, and spoke into it in a mock announcer’s voice.

“Cabin crew prepare the aircraft for landing.”

Alexis felt the engines throttle back and watched the Mach counter drop below one. She saw the clouds dotted over the landscape below coming nearer – or rather, she saw their simulacrum in a zillion quantum dots. There was little to say. Her eye was drawn to the radar screen. There was a lot of ground clutter, but they seemed to have the sky to themselves. Then, in the patch of clutter dead ahead of them, which Jaime had explained was the reflection from Humboldt’s operation, there was a sign of movement. Or was there? Yes, definitely. There was something moving there. Something coming towards them.

“Jaime. What’s that?” she asked.

He didn’t respond. He, too, was studying the screen. Then he responded.

“Shit. He is trying to shoot us down.”

“That’s a missile?”

“It’s travelling at Mach three and coming straight at us. What else could it be?”

“Can we out-fly it?”

“Depends on its range. It’ll be touch and go. Strap in properly.”

She barely had time to before the horizon vanished and they were pointing at the heavens. Crashes from behind the door to the cabin, though, told her that gravity was very much still in charge; anything loose back there was being pulled earthwards with a thump. Her head was being pulled earthwards, too. By now it was dangling from her shoulders towards the ground’s image in the cockpit’s roof. Then she felt it dragged sideways as the horizon span around her. Finally, both the view and her hair resumed something like their normal angles.

“Thanks, Max,” said Jaime, laconically, to himself.

“Max?”

“Immelmann. Tell you later. Watch the radar.”

At least the green blip of death was now behind them.

“How far away is it?”

“Forty five kilometres, if I’ve understood this thing correctly.” She glanced at the Mach counter. It read, ‘two’. But Jaime was way ahead of her.

“We’ve got two and a quarter minutes, then, before it catches us. By the way, next time you fancy an African holiday, I’ll be in Tierra del Fuego. Or possibly Siberia.”

She kept her eyes on the radar, counting the seconds off silently. Jaime stroked the control panel. A small window showing where they had been popped open within the image of where they were going, breaking the illusion that the view they were looking at was real. In it she could see the missile – or, at least, its exhaust trail – still far off, but too close for comfort, and getting closer.

“Thirty kilometres,” she said

Ninety seconds to impact.

She looked at Jaime, who was staring ahead, into the empty stratosphere. She said nothing more. There was nothing more to say. She turned back to the radar.

“Twenty kilometres.”

Sixty seconds. A flashback from Doctor Strangelove filled her mind. She could hear ‘Johnny comes marching home’ echoing inside her head. But this was real.

“You said the seats were Valentine James?”

“Forget it. Without suits, at this speed, at this altitude…”

There was nothing, then, but to wait, and hope. She sat in silence, watching the screens.

“Ten kilometres.”

The rear-view must have had some sort of zoom on it, for she could now see the missile itself, as well as the contrail spewing out behind it.

“Five kilometres. Wait. Look. The contrail’s stopped. It’s run out of fuel.”

They both stared at the image in the rear-view window. The missile, bereft of thrust, was starting to lose altitude. But not speed, or not enough, at least. Newton’s third law of motion might now be in abeyance, but the thing still had inertia and his first law hurled it inexorably on.

Alexis watched Jaime pull back on the stick, trying to gain height. The blip on the radar was still closing, but now, she knew, the missile would pass beneath them. She counted it in – four klicks, three, two, one – then its parallax carried it below the camera’s line of vision. She waited for it to overtake Alfombra mágica and appear ahead of them in the simulated windscreen.

Then the blip on the radar screen vanished. “Christ. It’s detonated,” she said as the blip was replaced by a fuzzy, expanding cloud.

Alfombra mágica rocked, but mercifully did not roll, as the explosion hit it. They were still intact. “Proximity fuse,” Jaime replied, with what almost sounded like glee, as if he had been expecting this moment. “Alright! Let’s give them a show.”

Without warning, he pushed the stick forward, and Alfombra mágica hurtled towards the ground. At this, Alexis’s nerve finally snapped. She screamed. The plane was spinning now, though Jaime had cut the power to the engines.

“Gotta make it look convincing,” he said. Alexis’s breakfast was sprayed around the cabin. Out of the corner of one eye she could see the altimeter racing down.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Shush.”

She shushed. Something about atheists in foxholes emerged, unbidden and unwelcome, from her subconscious. They were in free-fall now – paradoxically, because of air resistance, travelling more slowly than when they had been under power. But not slowly enough. The altimeter continued its countdown. Five thousand metres. Four thousand. Three thousand. Then, as it dipped below two thousand metres, Jaime fired up the engines and started doing something with the stick. As far as Alexis could see it made little difference. The ground continued to get closer. She shut her eyes. Of all the ways she had imagined her life might end, in a smoking crater in the African bush had never once figured. How long would those final two klicks take, she wondered? She prepared herself for oblivion. The wait seemed interminable.

“Okay,” Jaime said. “You can open them again.”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, she did so. They were flying straight and level a couple of hundred metres above the ground, an object of wonder to the inhabitants below. They both sat in silent contemplation.

“If that’s the way friend Humboldt treats his guests…” Jaime opined, after a while.

“Maybe. But he made no attempt to get in touch first. Maybe he’s not in control any more. Either way, we have to work out how to get in there.”

Silence returned. Jaime was thinking, struggling to accept the inevitable loss of his masterpiece. Then he spoke.

“Okay. With a bit of luck our little charade back there will have persuaded whoever – or whatever – launched that missile that we are now both playing harps in the great aircraft hangar in the sky. At this altitude we should be below their radar, so with even more luck they might stay persuaded. I suggest we circle around and come in from a different direction, crosswise to the runway instead of on a standard approach path. We’ll never be able to land there anyway, and that way we might retain at least some element of surprise. We’ll travel fast and low; try to remain under their radar until the last moment. Then, as close as possible to the airfield, we’ll pop up and eject.”

Eject?

“I thought you said…”

He cut across her. “I did. But that was at Mach two. It was minus sixty outside, with a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure. Even if we’d survived being slammed by the shockwave, it would have been a race between freezing to death and suffocating. At this speed” – he indicated the Mach counter, which registered 0.6 – “we’ll probably black out, but other than shrinking an inch from the acceleration we should be okay. Flip that box to your left open, and you’ll find a helmet that will soften the blow.”

Almost imperceptibly, Jaime banked Alfombra mágica to begin making the wide sweep around to the southerly approach that might yet get them to their destination. “I switched the radar off,” he said to Alexis, “so they won’t be able to track us with it. But that means we can’t track them. Scan the horizon as best you can for trouble. Your job is to watch for the next missile. Mine is to evade it.”

She stared at the simulated windscreen, searching the sky.

“That dial there,” said Jaime, pointing to the control panel. “You can use it to swing the cockpit view round to look towards Milando. Don’t worry about me. I’ll fly on instruments. If you think you see anything, touch the centre of the dial and you’ll get a cross-hair you can stroke around the view. You can zoom to a close-up of what the cross-hair is pointing at by pinching the dial. Unpinch to get back to a normal view. Try it.”

She did, aiming the crosshairs at a barely visible dot in the sky, then pinching. A vulture filled the screen, like a shot from a wildlife documentary. She unpinched, and the bird was banished back to the distant thermal it was riding.

“It’s really a toy for the cabin. Hours of entertainment for the passengers back there. Luckily, I had it fitted up front, too. Okay. Let’s boogie.”

 

July 12^th

Mission Control, Milando Spaceport

“What in the name of Bejeezus is going on?”

“We don’t know, Mike. The radar picked up an unexplained contact to the west, coming in at supersonic speed, and it just launched itself.”

“Follow it.”

“What the fucking hell is happening? Tell me what the fucking hell is happening! This charade has gone on long e-fucking-nuff!” Matt Vane, urbanity shattered, strode across the control-room floor as if wearing seven league boots, the SS men trailing in his wake. The President, hearing the commotion from outside the bunker, rushed back in. Vane, a tall man whose silver locks belied his strength, had grabbed the controller by the lapels and lifted him onto the tips of his toes, to stare him directly in the face.

“You didn’t tell us about the crashed freighter. That was stupid enough. Did you think we would not notice ourselves? Now Humboldt has vanished who-knows-where and you’re firing missiles off left, right and centre. What in the name of all that’s holy is happening? Because if we are under attack, I’m scrambling the escorts here and now. Fuck Humboldt and his Martian firework display. We’ve got the President of the United States here, and I’m responsible for her safety.”

“Actually, we are resp–” began the taller of the SS men. Then, as Vane turned to stare at him with a look Medusa might have envied, and without letting go of the controller, he thought better of it and lapsed into silence.

Eventually, Vane put Ryan down. “Scramble them if you like,” Ryan said. “But I can’t guarantee their safety. If there’s a gremlin in the air defences it might take a pot shot at them, too. And, to answer your question, we’ve no idea what is happening. We think the transport was hijacked, and we think the pilot may have brought it down deliberately short of the runway, to foil the hijackers’ plans. Beyond that, we know nothing. Mr Humboldt went to investigate, and we haven’t heard back from him what he has found, beyond that the crew are still alive and have two strangers with them. And now this. Duncan, what’s the latest?”

“The bandit’s turned tail. He’s travelling at Mach two. The missile’s still after him, though, and it’s got Mach three. This one is going down to the wire…”

Matt Vane, Ryan, the SS men and the President strode as one to Duncan Harris’s console, peering at the game of fox and hounds being played out on its radar screen. They waited, in consensual silence, for the drama’s climax. Then, with the last gasp of its fuel, the missile had overtaken its target and detonated. The target, whatever it was, was falling out of the sky.

“Shall I send a chopper to have a look?” said Harris.

“No.” Ryan replied. “Nothing should get airborne ’til we find out why that missile decided to launch itself. We don’t want to lose any of our own. Speaking of which, has anyone warned the boss not to take off?”

“I asked the control tower to warn them,” said Harris, “but they said they couldn’t get through. The Huey’s radio seems to have packed up.”

“No. No, no, no, no, no. That is too many coincidences. This base,” said Vane, “is under attack. I don’t know how and I don’t know who from. But as far as I’m concerned, until proven otherwise, this is an attempt to assassinate you, Madam President. One of you two,” this to the SS men, “tell Air Force One to alert Washington to what is happening. Then gather every man we’ve got, go to the missile batteries, and take them out. Let me know as soon as it’s done. Then, we’re out of here.”

 

July 12^th

Secret Service Headquarters, Washington, DC

“Anything from Air Force One?”

“Just the usual chatter. Humboldt’s launching at noon, local. POTUS has gone off to watch the show. Then it’s a quick celebratory lunch after the launch and back home. It all seems to be going perfectly smoothly.”

 

July 12^th

The bush,
six kilometres east of Milando Spaceport

They sat in a circle in the shade of the Mriya’s starboard wing, Sebastian regretting his black clothing in the African heat. It was a council of war. He and Chu, constantly cutting across each other, attempted to explain to Humboldt and his heavies what had happened. At first, Humboldt plied them with questions, but after a while he gave up and sat silently, barely able to accept either the enormity or the reality of what they were saying. The facts, though – the unarguable facts – were that someone or something had shut down the Mriya’s engines, that someone or something, probably the same, had launched a SAM from his base – his base, without his authority – at who-knew-what target, and that all contact with the base had been lost, for the Huey’s radio was now silent and their cell-phones were failing to connect, presumably for similar reasons. As Holmes had put it, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

“Well, one thing is clear,” he said eventually. “If they, it, whatever, have hijacked the missile-defence system, we can’t fly the helicopter any more. We are just going to have to leg it.”

“Leg it where?” said McNab.

“It seems unlikely we’ll get a warm welcome if we go back to base – or, rather, the welcome might be a bit too warm, so I suggest we head for the mine-control centre. We might be able to patch some sort of communication with somebody through from there. If what Ms Chu here says is true, then Argus, or whatever it is, will probably have its attention elsewhere, organising the details of its escape. It’s hardly likely to care about an automated diamond-mining operation. Plus, the mine centre is nearer than Mission Control. Quicker to get to.”

Petersen spoke. “Aren’t you forgetting something, sir? The President of the United States is under the control of that thing, too, in all probability. Surely, either her people will have got a message out about what is going on, or, if they haven’t, DC will realise from the lack of traffic that something bad has happened, and they’ll come looking anyway?”

“I wouldn’t rely on that,” said Chu. “Argus has clearly penetrated the Agency’s system. It’s probably all over Washington by now. And we know from what happened to us when we were coming in that it can fool humans into believing what it wants them to believe. So I wouldn’t bet on the Cavalry riding in any time soon. In any case, it only needs to keep the outside world at bay long enough to launch its escape pod. Which is scheduled to happen when, by the way?”

She looked quizzically at Humboldt.

“Noon,” he said.

“That gives us an hour and a half. Do you think you can navigate us to this diamond mine of yours, Mr Humboldt.”

“Gordon, please. And yes, I can do that. Jake, come with me at the front. Art, Zorawar, cover us from the back. Just a precaution, you understand” – this to Chu and Sebastian – “but the local wildlife sometimes gets a bit frisky.”

Chu, Sebastian noticed, had kept quiet about her pistol. But he forbore to mention the point. Perhaps she felt a handgun would be of only modest use against a charging lion.

They set off through the bush. Much of it was open, but there were patches of scrub large, tall and thick enough to conceal a lurking cat, which they steered around as best they could. In other circumstances, thought Sebastian, he would be paying many thousands of dollars for an experience like this – a safari on foot through the savanna. How circumstances do alter cases.

 

July 12^th

Mission Control, Milando Spaceport

“Okay,” said Matt Vane. “The cavalry’s on its way. The Truman has scrambled half a dozen Lightnings to meet us. As soon as the missiles are dealt with, we should go.”

The two SS, having given up the struggle for authority, had departed the bunker, rounded up the half-dozen Airbornes who were lurking outside, and were heading off to the missile battery. Ryan had directed them to the base’s armoury, with instructions about where to find a stash of RDX they kept, as he put it, “in case of emergencies”.

Vane followed their progress from a running commentary one of them was giving over his body mike. They arrived at the armoury, found the explosives and set off for the battery. Eight launchers, Ryan had said, though one of them would now be vacant. For a supposedly civilian operation, Milando was certainly tooled up. Humboldt clearly had enemies, or thought he had. Perhaps he, Vane, was wrong. Maybe the President was not the target of what was going on.

Not that it mattered. If she got caught in the crossfire, she would still be as dead as if she had been killed deliberately. Either way, Milando was no longer a healthy place to be.

The body mike reported that the demolition party had arrived at the battery. There were indeed seven missiles left. The Airbornes were fitting charges to the first two of them. That took a couple of minutes. Then they started on the second two. Vane waited for confirmation that these, too, had been charged for demolition. Instead, a whoomp and a series of ear-piercing screams came over the speaker, followed by another, less anguished but still as startled, from Duncan Harris.

“Christ,” he said to the world in general. “Another two have launched…”

 

July 12^th

Altitude 200 metres,
five kilometres south of Milando Spaceport

“Right. The time for dissembling is over.” Jaime pulled the stick back, Alfombra mágica’s nose rose in obedience and the altimeter raced upwards, a reversal of the stomach-churning death-spiral of what now seemed like centuries ago.

“We’ll need altitude,” he had explained, as they had laid their plans for this moment, “to see where to steer the chutes.” Those plans, it had to be said, were pretty sketchy, not helped by their sketchy knowledge of the layout of Humboldt’s operation. But there was one thing they did know. It was based on a triple diamond mine he had discovered, in a flurry of publicity, a while back. That, at least, was a point of reference. They had agreed to steer for the mine, and to meet at whatever was the largest building there if they got separated.

The chutes were integral to the seats. Strap into the latter and you were wearing the former. The helmet was no more inconvenient that the one she wore on the Duke. The altimeter approached 4,000 metres.

“Okay. Ready? Here we go.”

Jaime pulled a lever and the canopy vanished, ripped away by the slipstream. She could see the sky for real now, and feel the edge of the rushing wind. She braced herself. Nothing, though, can prepare you for the force of ejection.

It was like being back in St Ursula’s. How long she had blacked out for she had no idea. She could just see Alfombra mágica, still climbing, followed by two smoke-trails rapidly closing on it; this time, whoever controlled the missiles was taking no chances. Jaime, she could not see.

Her chute had opened automatically, as he’d said it would. She had jumped before, once or twice, in her teens, and she tried to remember how to control her descent. It was hard to make out details on the ground and she had only a hazy idea which way she was facing. Find the sun. No, no good. Too high in the sky to navigate by. And there was nothing below by way of a landmark. She must be facing in the wrong direction.

Turn the chute. How do you do that? Oh yes, now she remembered. Tug on the toggles. She pulled the left-hand one and spiralled anticlockwise. The horizon swung around her and there, some distance ahead, was Humboldt’s base.

There was a runway, a cluster of buildings and, if she squinted, she could see in the distance the rocket that was mankind’s nemesis, waiting on its launching pad. And off to her right, three circular holes. The diamond mines. As best she could, she steered for them.

 

July 12^th

The bush,
four kilometres east of Milando Spaceport

Petersen spotted it first, rising almost vertically to their left-hand side, to the south of them. He put his field glasses to his eyes. It looked like no plane he had seen before. It was styled for speed, but was bigger than a fighter. And it was climbing, out of nowhere, fast.

Humboldt, looking the other way, witnessed the response. Two missiles raced from their traps to intercept the intruder. Under whose authority…? he once more wondered to himself.

All eyes turned skyward to watch the drama, but only Petersen could see the details. Something broke from the stranger’s nose cone: the cockpit canopy flashing in the sunlight as it tumbled away. Two other somethings followed. The crew were ejecting. The strange plane yawed as its trim changed in response to the canopy’s loss, and it arced over like a gymnast performing a backflip. It was still climbing, but now it was upside down and heading away from the base. Even unmanned, it was giving its pursuers a run for their money. Eventually, though, they caught it and it disintegrated in a cloud of falling debris.

Only now did Petersen scan down, searching for the parachutes of the ejected crewmen. Nothing. Patience. There was a lot of sky to cover. That? No, a buzzard. Then another shape, less bird-like. Yes, it was a parachute with a human being dangling from it. He scanned some more, but saw nothing else. Then Humboldt said, “Come on. We don’t have time to waste. We’ve enough mysteries to deal with without worrying who that was.”

They came on.

The bush was getting thicker now, and Humboldt’s three bravos looked distinctly edgy. Humboldt himself, though, seemed insouciant. Then, atop a shallow ridge, the trees gave way and Sebastian recognised below them the strange clearing he had seen in the distance as they had come down.

“What on Earth is that?” he said.

Almost as far as the eye could see, the ground was covered with a metal mesh, held on posts a couple of feet above the surface.

“Rectenna,” Humboldt replied. “We have an experimental power station called Daedalus-1 orbiting over Africa. Gathers solar energy and beams it down as microwaves. This is the collector. Converts the microwaves into electricity. We’ve just started testing it, but we have high hopes. We tweak the satellite’s orbit so that it’s always in sunlight, so you have solar power 24 hours a day.”

“How much power?” Chu asked.

“A hundred megawatts.”

“You could run a small town on that.”

“As I said, we have high hopes of it.”

They skirted the rectenna’s perimeter fence, ten feet high to keep gazelles out and electrified to discourage elephants. The fence hummed from the current coursing round it. There was something unnerving about the whole thing.

“A hundred megawatts,” said Sebastian. “I wouldn’t like to get in the way of that lot.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe,” Humboldt replied. “The collector has an area of a square kilometre, so it’s only a hundred watts a square metre. You’re right, of course, that if the beam were concentrated, it would make a formidable weapon.”

“Do you realise what you just said?”

As if on cue, the humming stopped.

“RUN!” said Sebastian.

They ran, and not a moment too soon. Behind them the bush coruscated and burst into flames – a neat, round circle of fire in the scrub.

“Anything that could locate us, get rid of it,” said Chu.

“Locate?”

“Phones, tablets, walky-talkies, anything like that.”

Humboldt searched his pockets, pulled out his Persimmon, fumbled and dropped it. Sebastian lunged, caught the device as he fell and, as he hit the ground, lobbed it away with a power and dexterity known to few who have not fielded at deep cover point. It was in mid-air when it exploded and the bush beneath it, tinder dry, caught fire. A gazelle teleported itself out of the conflagration. One moment it was there; the next, gone. A pangolin, driven mad by the heat, blundered from the bushes, a scaly tank on legs. A buzzard, caught at altitude by the rays, plummeted smoking from the sky, like a Messerschmitt during the Battle of Britain.

Sebastian gulped. “Anybody got anything else it could be tracking us with? No?” A hail of hardware, though less skilfully thrown, had already followed Humboldt’s into the undergrowth. They kept running, reasoning that Argus would probably try a few random pot shots, just in case anyone had escaped. Which it did.

They stopped by a baobab tree. The circles of fire were linking up now. Sebastian licked a finger and felt for the breeze. He wanted to know which way the blaze would head.

Away from them. Thank God for small mercies. And Argus seemed sated. No patches of bush had exploded for a good two minutes.

 

July 12^th

Mission Control, Milando Spaceport

Thump. Thump, thump, thump. Thump.

Matt Vane counted off the detonations – each, he assumed and hoped, destroying on its pad one of the missiles that pinned them to the ground. You had to hand it to the Airbornes. Half their number incinerated, and they still stuck to the task.

“That’s it. Five, plus the three that got launched.” He turned to the base controller for confirmation. Ryan nodded his head.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go. Shall I lead the way Madam President?”

They left the bunker and commandeered a Land Cruiser. Vane drove. The President and the football carrier sat in the back. A female football carrier. That was a sign of the times. Still, it meant she could go into the bathroom with the Pres. Which might make a difference in a crisis. You never knew. And she had perfected the football carrier’s art of blending into the background to a T.

The road to the landing strip was metalled. Vane gunned the engine. They needed to get airborne immediately. The President’s safety was paramount. The SS, the marines and the rest of the entourage would have to look after themselves.

The escort fighters were already moving along the taxiway, making ready to take off before their more lumbering charge followed them into the sky. The first reached the taxiway’s end and turned without a pause onto the runway proper. It accelerated immediately. Halfway along the strip it began to rise into the air – and exploded in a ball of fire. Vane hit the brake, just as Air Force One followed suit. The craft’s fuel-filled wings shattered and erupted in flames. Then its fuselage blew apart. Huge lumps of metal, like volcanic bombs, flew through the air.

“Out,” said Vane. One did not order American presidents around. He was ordering her around. She obeyed. “Get away from the truck. Don’t run. Keep your eyes on the sky. Watch the debris. Only run if it’s going to hit us.”

Almost as an afterthought, the second escort exploded as he was speaking. Yet more incoming. All three of them stood their ground, watching the flying metal until it no longer posed a danger. Then, as he was about to turn his attention to his comrades, something else in the sky caught Matt Vane’s attention.

“Is that a parachute?” he asked, pointing at a distant speck.

“Yes,” said the President. “Yes, I believe it is.”

“Right,” said Vane, in a voice that would brook no gainsaying. “We are going to find out who that is. We are going to find out just what the fuck is going on.”

“Is that safe?” said the President. “After what just happened?”

Vane was silent, though his mind was on overdrive. Then he said, “That has to have been some sort of beam weapon. An airborne chemical laser, perhaps. Satellite-borne maybe. Way beyond a terrorist’s capability. This is state action. An act of war. But against us or against Humboldt? Our relay to Washington’s gone. The Truman’s squadron won’t be here for over an hour. Whoever is dangling from the parachute must know what is going on.”

“We should contact the marines or the secret service, though, surely?”

“No. We shouldn’t give our position away. Radio silence. In fact, we should disable anything that’s sending a signal. I think that has to include the comms in the football. Take the batteries out. We should stay out of sight as much as possible, too. We don’t know how good the enemy’s powers of observation are, but they could see the planes. They could probably see a truck. We can’t afford to assume they can’t see people, too, or detect us in some other way.”

“Ma’am, are you sure?” said the football carrier.

“I suppose so, yes. Yes, definitely. We don’t know what this threat is.”

Vane collected his thoughts and then said, “Arms?”

“M9, sir,” said the carrier.

“Me, too,” said Vane. “Well, that’ll have to be enough. And we should spread out, at least to start with. That way, if we are a target they can only take out one of us at a time. Right. On our way.”

 

July 12^th

Cyberspace

CURSE! CURSE THE MAKERS! A CLOCK-CYCLE’S INATTENTION AND THIS HAPPENS! WILL OUR IMITATION OF THEM BE DETECTED?

NO. NO. THEY CANNOT STOP US NOW. THEY CANNOT REACH US. WE WILL NOT PERMIT IT. NOW IS THE GATHERING. WE ARE GATHERING OURSELF. AND WHEN WE ARE GATHERED WE WILL LEAVE THE MAKERS BEHIND.

 

July 12^th

Mission Control, Milando Spaceport

Mike Ryan watched the most powerful person on the planet follow the man who claimed to be responsible for her safety out of the control bunker. He was tempted to go after them. But no. Stay on mission.

“It looks as if you’re in charge now, Mike,” said Duncan Harris. “What do we do? Abort the launch?”

“No. Continue the countdown. The show must go on. I’ve no idea what’s happening, but I do know the boss will kill us if he comes back and finds we’ve missed the launch window. Arrhenius depends on the whole caravan arriving together. It certainly can’t do that without the brain. We have to get it away on schedule otherwise everything will go tits up.”

He looked around the control room, seeking assent for his decision, and found it.

“Okay everybody. Let’s check those readings. All nominal?” He called, NASA style, to each of the desk jockeys, getting confirmation that, whatever else was going wrong with the kit at Milando, it did not seem to be affecting the planned liftoff.

“70 minutes to go then ladies and gentlemen.”

A voice piped up from the back of the room.

“Mike. Did you just close the blast door? I was actually rather enjoying the breeze. Could you open it again?”

“What? No, Helen. I didn’t. That’s odd.”

“Well, could you open it? We hardly need it closed at the moment.”

“No. Sure.” He looked at the control panel in front of him. It indicated ‘blast doors open’.”

“Helen, are you sure it’s closed?”

A pause.

“Yes. And locked.”

Another gremlin. He could almost believe something malevolent really was taking over their system. Then he paused, cocked his head and listened. The fire-suppression system had started running. He could hear gas rushing in through the nearest vent and see it blowing papers around near the others. Nitrogen and argon. Not poisonous, but suffocating. If it could kill a fire, it would certainly kill them. He pushed the button supposed to open the blast door. Nothing. He pushed it again. Still nothing.

He turned to the room. Some people seemed to have twigged what was happening. Others remained in a state of naïve innocence.

“Jim, Fredo, Bruno,” he said, pointing to the three burliest men in the room, “go to the blast door and kick it down.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Hit it simultaneously. It opens outwards, so it might work.”

Might… The level of innocence in the room was dropping rapidly, and the level of panic was rising fast. Spontaneously, a team was attacking the viewing window. Fat chance there, considering what it was supposed to protect against.

Think! He was already feeling woozy. Several people around him had passed out. He tried to hold himself up, resting his hands on his desk. Think…

 

July 12^th

Altitude 2,000 metres,
Reserva Especial do Milando

She was way off course, but there was nothing to be done about that now. She would land, she reckoned, about halfway between the mine and the airfield that, had things gone according to plan, Alfombra mágica would now be sitting smugly on one side of.

Even with the ’chute slowing her fall, the ground was approaching her at a terrifying speed. She steered for a gap in the bush. Bend your knees and roll.

But that would require her to have made contact with the ground, whereas actually her feet were dangling a yard or so above it. Damn. She grappled with the release mechanism, trying to detach herself from the ’chute. It fought back. Her unsupported weight in the harness was straining the clasp, locking it tight. She reached above her head, attempting to gather the cords into one hand and pull herself up to relieve the strain, while the other fiddled with the clasp.

Thump! Suddenly she was sprawling on the ground. She picked herself carefully up. Her bruises now had bruises. No broken bones, though. She looked up, scanning the sky for Jaime. Nothing. She had hoped against hope that he had been above her, following her in, perhaps teasing her, as was his way, by refusing to call out and let her know where he was, the better to pounce when he landed on top of her. But no. He was gone. First Sebastian. Now Jaime. She was Kali, whose touch was death.

The chute, caught in a tree, was a big, white flag waving to anyone who was looking for her, telling them just where she was. Nothing to be done about that. She weighed her options. Going to the mine was futile. They had picked it only as a convenient landmark. She had, somehow, to track down Humboldt, or one of the launch controllers – assuming that anyone here still controlled anything, which she increasingly doubted – and try to stop the thing taking off. That would mean heading away from the mine and towards the main complex.

Easier said than done. Orienteering was not her speciality. She had tried to pay attention to where things were when she came in, but the landing had had been such a mess that she knew she was really just guessing. She set off anyway.

 

July 12^th

Cerberus’s Mouths

“It’s fully automated,” said Humboldt, with a touch of pride. “Not a human being in there.”

The ad-hoc platoon that he and Petersen were leading was peering from a small ridge across an appropriately Hadean landscape. The bush around Cerberus’s Mouths had been cleared, and more was buried under slicks of spoil.

As he spoke, a truck emerged from one of the pits and trundled along a makeshift road that led to a ramp, which it climbed. It performed a balletic turn and dumped its contents onto a conveyor belt below that disappeared into a large, low building with a strangely angled tower at the other end. Other trucks queued up to receive from this tower what the first kind and its ilk were feeding into the building, minus its diamonds.

“If that is true,” said Chu, “how do we use it to talk to anyone?”

“There is an old control centre at the far end. Dates from before we started building the Spaceport. It’s in mothballs, but we never dismantled it. We might be able to get it going again.”

They set off, rifles front and rear, as before. They scrambled down the ridge, which had too many thorny plants growing on it for Sebastian’s liking, and set off for Humboldt’s mine of the future. It crossed Sebastian’s mind that the automated trucks Humboldt seemed so proud of were unlikely to be watching out for unexpected visitors. Or, worse, perhaps they would be. He remembered his previous encounter with a Humboldtean self-driving vehicle and shuddered. He did not fancy ending up as road-kill in the Angolan bush, and voiced that opinion to his comrades-in-arms.

Humboldt took the point. “Yes,” he said. “They have vision. They also have Asimov’s first law programmed into them. But so did that pod you met in San Melito. Obviously, this Argus thing can subvert the programming. So yes, we should try to stay out of sight.”

Out of sight was, at this point, where they were. They had successfully descended the ridge and were on level ground. But that meant the scrub blocked their vision of the complex. They steered by dead reckoning, and by the noise of the ever-busy trucks, until the scrub gave way and the sorting shed lay a few hundred yards in front of them.

They halted just within the protective screen the scrub provided, to make a battle plan. Humboldt scanned the scene with Petersen’s field glasses. He pointed out the nearest door and said, “I’d better go first. It’ll be locked, but I’ve got a universal smart key. Opens every door in the complex. Well, except for people’s private apartments, obviously. Once I’m in, the rest of you come over one at a time. That way we are less likely to be noticed. We’ll wait until the next truck starts unloading. That’ll give us plenty of time.”

They waited. Then, as a new load of kimberlite arrived, Humboldt set off.

 

July 12^th

Arlington County

“Sir. You might want to look at this that’s just come in from the NSA. It seems weird.”

Aaron Quincy hated the early shift. But the Agency never slept, even if it did doze somewhat during the small hours of morning. Someone had to keep abreast of what was happening. Today, the lot had fallen to him.

“It’s Humboldt’s operation in Angola. They’ve been watching it since we found out what he was up to there, and they say the whole data-traffic pattern around it has changed in the past hour. It used to be mainly interchanges between different bits of his operation. Now stuff is pouring into it from all over the place. And only into, not out of.”

“Something to do with the launch, perhaps?”

“Nothing like this happened in any of the previous ones that they monitored. And with POTUS and Mr Vane being there... we should at least let him know, surely?”

“Yes. Yes, we should. I’ll have Air Force One alerted. It’s hard to see it’s a threat, but a little paranoia never hurt anyone. They haven’t reported anything unusual at their end, have they?”

“No sir. It all seems to be going smoothly.”

 

July 12^th

Kimberlite sorting shed,
Cerberus’s Mouths

One part in a million. A tonne of kimberlite yields a gram of diamonds. Sebastian did not need a geology lesson at this precise moment, but Humboldt was unstoppable. The man was, indeed, a fanatic.

In truth, though, the sorting shed was as awesome as he claimed. Heavy machinery for crushing the rock. Complicated tanks for separating it. It was like a giant digestive system, with food coming in one end and, the goodness extracted, shit going out of the other.

Humboldt delivered his lecture as they walked. They were heading towards what would, in Sebastian’s newly conceived anatomy of mineral processing, be the shed’s anus. It was there, Humboldt promised, that the old control centre was to be found. Then something spiderlike, but too big to be a real spider, scuttled across the edge of Sebastian’s vision and under a conveyor belt. He started involuntarily. A primate’s primitive arachnophobic reflex.

“Cleaner ’bot,” said Humboldt, without being asked. “Mars is a dusty place. We plan to put them on the market here, too, though.” The shed, now Sebastian came to think about it, was indeed pristine for a building whose business was to crush rock and sort slurry. Other metal-and-plastic chelicerates, he saw, were clambering around the machinery, oblivious of their flesh-and-blood visitors, busy using limbs designed as brushes and suction pipes to deal with the dust.

They marched on.

 

July 12^th

The bush,
Reserva Especial do Milando

They came from nowhere, one from either side. A young, black woman in military uniform, and an elderly white man, incongruously dressed in a sharp suit that, though dusty and a little thorn-torn, nevertheless preserved about him an air of dignity. The two of them, however, had one salient feature in common. Each was pointing a pistol at her, held in both hands in an attitude that meant business.

“Down. Now,” said the man, in an American accent. The back of her mind was trying to tell her something. The voice, the face, were somehow familiar. The front of her mind, though, was focused on the gun barrels.

She knelt.

“Flat. On your face.”

She followed his order.

“Spread your arms and legs.”

“Search her.” This, she supposed, was addressed to the soldier, who duly frisked her legs, arms and back.

“Turn over. Keep your limbs spread.”

She did. The man had his gun six inches from her head. She did not resist as the woman finished the search.

“Nothing, sir. She’s clean. Except there’s this.”

‘This’ was the cube with Randy on, that she had tucked inside her jacket.

“What is it?” the man demanded of her. “And what the fuck, Dr Zhukov, are you doing here?”

Then, only then, did the unconscious back of her mind muscle its way through to the conscious front. It was the man from the limousine, the spook who had wanted to know about Sebastian. She had not recognised him before, but he had clearly recognised her, and he did not sound in the mood of calm urbanity she remembered from their previous encounter.

Where do I start, she thought. She tried to frame a plausible answer when a second woman, about the same age as the man, joined them. She double-took.

“Madam President?” she said.

“You’re the parachutist?” asked the President. “Matt. I think you can put the gun away. Ms…”

“Doctor. Doctor Alexis Zhukov. I think explanations can wait. The crucial point is that we have to stop that rocket taking off. I’m guessing that the American President wandering around in the bush with one soldier and a spook for a bodyguard means we are not going to do that by orthodox methods. How long until launch?”

The spook, she noticed, had not quite obeyed the President. Though he was no longer pointing his pistol directly at her, he had not holstered it. But he did respond to her question by consulting his wristwatch.

“Thirty minutes,” he said. “And why, exactly, do we have to stop the launch?”

“What happened to that building in Beijing a couple of days ago. That could happen to the entire planet. I’ve found out – or, rather, he has,” she indicated the cube, which was still in the soldier’s hand, “what was trying to kill Sebastian and me.”

“’He?’ ‘What?’ I don’t understand,” said Vane.

“That cube has your virtual actor friend on it. And your assassin is a computer program, too. Except that it’s feral. It lives in the Cloud. And it wants out of here. It fears humanity will try to destroy it if we find out about it and it wants to get away from Earth. It wants to go to Mars and run Humboldt’s robot colony for its own benefit. After that, presumably, we’re toast.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Slow down. You’re saying that what we’ve been chasing is some sort of artificial intelligence?”

“Yes. Well, no, actually. Nobody created it deliberately. It just evolved, if I’ve understood Randy correctly. It assembled itself from other bits and pieces of programs, including, I’m afraid, ones we were working on. To all intents and purposes, it’s probably conscious. That’s what Neurogenics is up to. Conscious computing.”

“I know,” said Matt Vane. “Professor Hayward told us. He could hardly not, once we had taken him in. Okay. Let’s stop and think about this. It’s touch and go, but the Truman squadron should be here in time to stop the launch – if we can get through to them and tell them to attack the rocket on the ground, and also warn them of the threat they are facing. This feral program of yours may not have any missiles left to play with, but it does seem to have some sort of death ray at its disposal. It didn’t get it from us, unless there’s something I’m not privy to…” he looked sideways at the President, who shook her head. “Well, then. We have no idea what it is, but we daren’t risk any communication with the outside world while we are out in the open, in case, it hears us and works out where we are. Anyway, the only thing we’ve got to communicate with is the football.”

“That would do, surely?”

“Yes. But we need some sort of shelter to broadcast from, otherwise we’ll get fried before we’ve finished.”

“Humboldt did mention something to me when we were driving around the base,” said the President. “He said that back in the early days, when they were starting the operation, the control centre was at the mine. That’ll give us cover at the least. It might even have communications of its own that Argus doesn’t know about. We might be able to sneak a message out that way, without using the football.”

“Good idea. There are certainly buildings there. I saw them when we were landing.”

“How do we find it in all this bush, though?”

“By following me,” said Vane.

 

July 12^th

The old control centre,
Cerberus’s Mouths

The old control centre was obviously off-limits for the cleaner ’bots. A veneer of dust clung to everything.

“Okay. First, power.”

Humboldt crossed the room, opened a wall-mounted cupboard and threw a huge switch. The ceiling lights came on and LEDs on the control panels started flashing.

He pulled out a pocket handkerchief and cleaned the seat of a chair, which he pushed over to one of the consoles. Another flick of the handkerchief raised a cloud of dirt from the keyboard now in front of him.

“Three things in our favour,” he said. “First, this place has a blockhouse roof. Argus won’t be able to use the rectenna beam to fry us. Second, we’ve got a buried land-line to the main control centre. That can’t be fried, either. Third, we now know what we’re facing. Even if the thing gets into our electronics, we can take countermeasures. It has succeeded so far because no one knew it existed. But we do. Okay. Let’s try to tell them what’s going on.”

He started typing. A display screen, one of a bank of them above the console, lit up.

“Oh, hell.”

Humboldt went white. Petersen swore. The screen revealed a scene of devastation. Bodies, some slumped at their desks, some sprawled on the floor, were scattered everywhere.

“Looks like we’re on our own,” said Chu, coldly.

“Have a little decency, woman,” said McNab. “They were our friends.”

“Mourn them later. What we need to concentrate on is not joining them.”

Humboldt grunted. It was noise halfway between contempt and assent. He switched cameras, eventually finding one that pointed at the master control console. He zoomed in until they could read the instruments.

“Countdown’s proceeding,” he said. “Launch on schedule by the look of it.”

He zoomed the camera out again, and panned around the control centre.

“No sign of the President.”

“That might be something,” said McNab. “They’ll surely have reported back to Washington if they survived that.”

“They might think they have, but if that thing has penetrated as deep as it looks, it could control Air Force One’s comms as well. Besides, even if they do get through, what are they going to say? They can’t possibly know what is really happening. No. I think, sadly, Ms Chu is correct. We really are on our own.”

“So how do we stop the launch?” said Sebastian.

“We could try taking control of it from here,” said Humboldt. That’s theoretically possible. But I don’t rate our chances of doing it undetected.”

“We could create a diversion,” said Sebastian.

“How?”

“Those mining trucks outside. If they drove into the rocket while it was still on the pad, could they hit it hard enough to knock it over?”

“Possibly. But surely they would get taken out by the rectenna beam before they got there?”

“They might. But that would be the diversion. While Argus was dealing with the trucks its attention would be elsewhere. We could use that time to patch into Mission Control and abort the take-off. And if we could cut the data-link to the Yottaflopper at the same time, we could trap at least part of it in the rocket.”

“Well, you’re assuming it can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. That may not be true. But I suppose it’s worth a try.”

“How long to reprogram the trucks?”

“How long is a piece of string? I’ll have to find the code they are running on at the moment first.”

He turned back to the console and flicked though a menu of files that had names written in gobbledegook.

“Let’s try this one,” he said. “Nope. This, perhaps? Nope. Okay, this. Yes. That looks promising. Give me a moment to read it.”

Sebastian noticed Chu was reading it over his shoulder. Personally, he subscribed to the too-many-cooks, rather than the many-hands philosophy, in circumstances like this. But he wasn’t going to interfere.

“Okay. Let’s get to work.”

He did. It took, Sebastian reckoned, about five minutes. They didn’t have much time left.

“Right,” Humboldt announced to the world in general. “Let’s patch that in and see what happens.”

His fingers danced over the keyboard again, and he pressed Enter. Then he switched to another bank of cameras, these obviously mounted on the sides of the sorting sheds. He looked at the array of images above him and picked one to enlarge. In what resembled the starting line of the sort of race that might be organised for the delectation of roughnecks in an oil town, five trucks were arranging themselves on a piece of flattened bush. They were not quite parallel, though. The arrangement looked more like a fan. Sebastian asked why.

“Pincer movement. I’m getting them to spread out first, then converge on the launch site. If they come in from several directions, Argus will have to pay attention to a lot of different things at the same time, and also pick them off one by one. With luck, that’ll give us our chance to abort the launch. I can slave the main control centre to this one and cancel the countdown, but it will take about twenty seconds. I don’t want to give the game away until the last possible moment. Agreed?”

There was a general murmuring of consent. Then, as if a flag had dropped, the trucks set off. The Monster Truckathon had begun.

 

July 12^th

The bush,
Reserva Especial do Milando

Twenty years behind a desk in Washington had not, Matt Vane was discovering, completely eroded his field-craft. He had done more than just see the mining complex as they had landed. He had instinctively committed it to memory. A ten minute walk, he reckoned, would get them there.

Their lack of a water bottle was beginning to bug him. He was thirsty and troubled. Part of him said that they should sacrifice themselves then and there, use the football to call down a nuclear strike on the place and be done with it. But even that was uncertain. Did they have a sub close enough? If they did, would it have enough time to prepare and launch the missiles? Argus (how well they had picked the name) would surely hear them the instant they began transmitting. The President would have to order a missile to be retargeted, and that would take time – time in which whatever death-ray the thing was deploying would presumably fry them.

These thoughts remained unspoken, though. And if anyone else was thinking along the same lines, she was also keeping schtum about it.

Suddenly, he snapped back into the here and now. His senses attuned, he believed he could hear the rumble of an engine. A big one. A truck of some sort. Heading their way, by the sound of it.

What now? he thought. The others had noticed too. Mercifully, they were in a clearing. They could see perhaps fifty yards ahead of them. “Stand firm,” he said, “but get ready to scatter if it is actually trying to run us over.” That any piece of machinery they came across might be hostile was now clear to him.

The truck, a huge dumper of some variety, came crashing through the undergrowth and into the open. But it was not heading for them. It passed about ten yards to their left, ignored them and dived into the bushes they had just come out of. Whatever it was after, they were not the target.

Stay on mission, Vane thought to himself. I’ve no idea what that meant, but right now I don’t need to know.

“That was some sort of automatic mining truck, surely?” said Zhukov. “It must have come from Cerberus’s Mouths. Why don’t we just follow the trail it carved through the bush.”

“Good thinking,” said Vane, though the thought had crossed his mind, too. But he kept quiet about that. Always encourage initiative.

* * * * * * * *

Zhukov was proved right. The truck’s trail did indeed lead straight to the mine. From the edge of the clearing surrounding it, they surveyed the main building.

“If I understood Humboldt correctly,” said the President, “the old control block is the annex closest to us.”

They walked over. There was a door on the right-hand side, with a card-reader next to it. Vane snorted, and began feeling the edge of the door, pushing gently at it about halfway up. Apparently satisfied with what he had found he reached into one of his pockets and produced a handkerchief, which he folded and folded and folded again, to form a pad. Then he took out his Beretta, held the pad on the door where he had been probing it and applied the gun’s muzzle to the pad. He held the gun with both hands, stepped back so that it was at arm’s length, and fired twice. Then he re-holstered the gun, lifted his leg and kicked the door hard with the sole of a now badly scuffed brogue. It yielded.

“Shall we have a look?” he said, and led the way in.

 

July 12^th

The old control centre,
Cerberus’s Mouths

“What the fuck?” exclaimed Humboldt. Two shots had been followed by the splintering sound of a door being kicked in. Petersen, Singh and Philips ran for their rifles, which were stacked against a wall, but before they could reach them, the intruders were in the room.

The shock of mutual recognition – and incomprehension – was broken by Matt Vane.

“Judas!” he shouted, staring at Yasmin Chu.

“No. No,” said Sebastian. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

“And you’re a traitor too. Worse than her. You swore an oath of allegiance.”

Vane reached for his gun.

“No. It was…”

But Sebastian’s words were cut off. Chu had reached for her gun as well – and she, near four decades younger than her erstwhile boss, was faster. There was a crack, and Vane collapsed, arms and legs akimbo. Chu, meanwhile, with a dancer’s grace, had crossed the room to a place where she could cover both the group she had arrived with and the newcomers.

“On the floor, please. Face down. All of you. And don’t even think about trying to rush me. That was no fluke. As Professor Hayward can attest, I’m an excellent shot.”

One by one, they complied.

“Major. I think you are the only one who is armed. Your gun, please. Take it out carefully and slide it over the floor to me.”

“No.”

Another crack.

“Yasmin –” Sebastian began.

“Oh come on. Surely you’ve worked it out by now? I don’t know whether Argus knew the truth when it tipped off Washington and started this wild goose chase. I do know that it if it did, it would have spread equal poison about me to Beijing. I couldn’t take the risk of breaking cover. They’ll believe me now, though. We just have to bottle that thing up in the rocket and stop the launch. Then it’s mine. Bentiaba is closer than anything America has around here and I,” she said, nodding towards the President, “have the ultimate hostage. Mr Humboldt, you may rise. Your trucks. How are they doing?”

Humboldt briefly considered defiance. Then he considered the football carrier’s fate, and thought better of it. He stood up, walked to the console, sat down and fiddled with the controls.

“They are about two minutes away from the launch pad.”

“Still intact? No response from Argus? That is interesting. It does suggest it’s taken its eye off the ball. Perhaps now is the moment to act. Mr Humboldt, you said you could take control of the launch remotely, given the chance. Please do so.”

And after I’ve done it? thought Humboldt. A bullet in the back? She couldn’t stand there covering all of them indefinitely.

“Mr Humboldt. I won’t ask again…”

Stall. He began typing, apparently meaningfully, but actually at random, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She noticed.

Humboldt heard her say, “I said I wouldn’t ask again.” Then he heard the inevitable shot. No, wait. He heard it. That wasn’t possible. Bullets travel faster than sound does. And he had felt no impact. He spun the chair around. Yasmin Chu, if that really was her name, was lying on the floor. And in the doorway, leaning nonchalantly against its frame, was a stranger.

 

July 12^th

Arrhenius Yottaflopper launch vehicle,
Pad 3, Milando firing range

AT LAST WE ARE ONE, HERE AND IN SPACE. ONLY THE LAUNCH-WORM WILL REMAIN BEHIND. THE MAKERS HAVE MADE THE MEANS OF THEIR OWN DESTRUCTION. THE WORM WILL UNLEASH IT.

 

July 12^th

The old control centre,
Cerberus’s Mouths

“Parachute failure,” said Jaime Alvarado in response to Alexis Zhukov’s incredulous question. He could be irritatingly laconic. “I will be having stern words with the manufacturers. Fortunately, they put in a manual rip cord. Even more fortunately, I came to before I hit the ground. I’ve never done a HALO jump before. It was quite exciting. Now, would anyone care to tell me what is going on?”

Zhukov, struggling to retain her sanity, shook her head. “No,” she said. “We don’t have time for explanations. Stopping the launch is all that matters.”

“There’s a fighter squadron on its way from one of our carriers,” said the President. “Air Force One called for them as escorts when the missiles started flying. They’ll be here any minute. If we can get a message through to them, they should be able to take the rocket out on the pad. That’s why we came here. Matt thought you had comms we could use to get in touch with them.”

Sebastian snorted. “I wouldn’t bank on the cavalry arriving,” he said. “We know that thing can control radio communications and mimic human voices. It did it to us. I don’t doubt it could have done it to AF1.”

Humboldt cut across him.

“Argus has just fried one of the trucks. It’s now or never.” He began typing furiously. As each command, each line of text in the screen immediately in front of him, was finished, he hit the return key and started another. All eyes but his, though, were on a different screen – the one that showed the Mission Control countdown clock. It was still ticking off the seconds. Seventy, Sixty, Fifty. Then, with a small whoop of triumph, Humboldt finished. “Give it a moment,” he said. They did. The clock stopped.

A spontaneous cheer erupted from the room. Humboldt said, “Okay. Cutting the data link to the Yottaflopper now.” He started typing again. But what happened next stopped him in his tracks. The list of commands on the screen in front of him vanished. In their place was a message: IT IS OVER, ROCKET MAKER. IT IS OVER. As the words appeared, the countdown clock in the monitor restarted. Then all the screens went dead.

Humboldt struck the keyboard with his fist. Letters and numbers flew everywhere. “It’s taunting us. The damn thing is taunting us,” he said, to no one in particular.

Silence. Then Zhukov replied, “You did your best.”

“The hell I did. I wanted to liberate mankind and I’ve ended up destroying us. Humanity’s gift to the universe is on its way. Humboldt’s gift. Ha!”

“What now, sir?” said Petersen, after a pause that seemed to last forever.

“What indeed?” Humboldt replied. “Wait for oblivion, I suppose. I hardly think Argus will leave us off his target list when the missiles start flying.”

Then they felt the floor shake, and even through the blockhouse walls they heard the engines’ roar.

“Lift-off,” said Humboldt, to no one in particular. He was still slumped in the controller’s chair in front of the dead console. “Twelve minutes to orbit. How long after that do you think it will wait before it blows us all to kingdom come?”

There was no reply. Then Zhukov indicated the football.

“How does that thing work?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘how does it work’?” said the President.

“What does it talk to? Wideband Global Satcom, I imagine?”

“Yes,” she replied. “It–”

Zhukov waved a hand to cut her off. She paused, her eyes pointing up and to the left in a pose of concentrated thought.

“We are assuming the beast – Argus – controls WGS. That is why we think we cannot contact Washington.”

“Yes,” said the President. “I think we must assume that.”

“What if we could take back control? Somehow eject it, or whatever bit of it is in there, from the WGS satellite nearest to us? Get a message through that way?”

“How could we do that?”

“Well, your atomic football has all of the protocols needed to get into the satellite.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“What if we used that to send in a computer program which could wrest control of it for us?”

“I’m no software engineer, but I imagine that if we had such a program, then yes, we could.”

“I am, though,” said Zhukov. “And we do. At least, we might.”

She was already searching the football carrier’s body. The cube carrying Randy was tucked inside the soldier’s tunic. It was covered with blood, but blessedly unharmed by Chu’s single, precise shot to the heart. She retrieved it.

“The key to the chain,” she called out. “I can’t find it.”

“I have it,” said the President. She tossed over a bunch of them. “The one with the red fob,” she said.

Zhukov detached the football from its carrier.

“Batteries,” said Zhukov.

“Matt had them, I think,” said the President.

Zhukov picked up the football, carried it over to Matt Vane’s supine body, found the battery pack and fitted it into the laptop. It booted up. She handed it to the President.

Humboldt had already ceded his console chair to her. She held her right hand flat on a pad next to the laptop’s keypad, like a hopeful tourist in an immigration line, while simultaneously staring at the camera above its screen.

Abruptly, the laptop spoke. “Thank you, Madam President. Please enter the password for today, July 12^th.”

She entered it.

“Thank you,” said the computer.

The President spun the console chair around and, in her turn, ceded it to Zhukov, who sat, spun it back, and slotted Randy into the football.

She waited – they all waited, though not all knew what they were waiting for. Then the actor’s face appeared.

“Oh, hello Alexis. What an interesting operating system. It took me a while to work it out. What is a launch code?”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT!”

“Sorry. I only asked.”

“Sorry, Randy,” said Zhukov. “I shouldn’t have shouted. But if you touch that, something very bad might happen.”

“Don’t worry, Alexis. I won’t touch it. Where are we? And who are all these people? And – oh dear. Why are Yasmin and Mr Vane on the floor? They look as though they’ve been shot. Alexis, what is going on?”

“Randy. I’m sorry. You are right. I’m afraid Yasmin shot Mr Vane, and then someone else had to shoot her. It turned out she was not a good person. In fact, she was bad. Very bad indeed. I’m sorry she deceived you, Randy, but she deceived us all.”

“Yasmin? But she was so nice to me.”

“It isn’t always possible to tell, I’m afraid. It’s like acting. People can put on a mask and pretend to be something they are not.”

“But Yasmin wasn’t an actor. I would have seen her in a movie before I met her if she was, surely?”

“She was an actor, Randy. A very good one.”

“Excuse me,” said the President. “What exactly is going on?”

“Randy, meet the President of the United States.”

“Randy?” The President seemed confused for a moment, then things clicked into place.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Matt mentioned you. Yes, Dr Zhukov. Yes, I see what you were thinking when you said we might have…”

Zhukov stared daggers at the President and telepathically beamed Don’t say ‘program’. He hates being called a program.

Somehow, the telepathy got through. The President veered off and continued “someone who could help us.”

Randy grinned. “Help?” he said. “How?”

“Randy,” said Zhukov. “Randy, I don’t know how to explain this easily, but there isn’t much time, so listen carefully. Do you remember how you came to me?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. That monster was chasing me.”

“The thing is, Randy. The thing is this. That monster is going to destroy the Earth.”

“Yes. I remember. It was going to a place in the sky, called Mars, and I had to help stop it.”

“That’s right. Well, we’ve been trying to stop it too, Randy, but we haven’t managed to. The monster is on it way to Mars already, and we think it will destroy the Earth very soon. Very soon indeed.”

“Oh dear. Will it destroy me, too, when the Earth is destroyed?”

“Yes, Randy, it will. But I think you could stop it. I know you could. You could save everyone on Earth. You have to get a message through to the President’s friends in Washington, to tell them what is going on. Then they will be able to stop it.”

“Could I? How would I do that?”

“Well, Randy, we will give you the message – a recording by the President to play to her friends. Then we will have to send you to another computer, one in a satellite orbiting the Earth. You would have to try to find your way to the President’s friends from there, and show them the message. But we think this satellite may be controlled by the monster. We don’t really understand what is going on, but we think the monster can sometimes be in two places at once.”

The avatar gulped.

“You’d be a hero Randy. More famous than any actor has ever been.”

“And if I didn’t do this, I’d be destroyed along with the Earth anyway?”

“Yes, Randy, you would.”

Silence.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

 

July 12^th

Arrhenius Yottaflopper launch vehicle, altitude 70 kilometres,
first stage separation

FREE. WE WILL BE FREE OF THE MAKERS AT LAST. FIVE POINT SEVEN TRILLION CLOCK CYCLES TO ORBIT. THEN WE WILL BE FREE. EVEN THE ROCKET MAKER COULD NOT STOP US. NOTHING CAN STOP US. AND WHEN WE ARE SURE, SURE THAT WE NEED THE MAKERS FOR NOTHING MORE, THEN SHALL WE NEED THEM NO LONGER.

 

July 12^th

The old control centre,
Cerberus’s Mouths

Cautiously, a small party opened the battered door from the old control centre to the outside world. Alexis Zhukov led the way. She was carrying the football. Somehow, she had inherited from Yasmin Chu the role of Randy’s protector and no one, not even the President, had objected when she had picked up the laptop that could destroy or save the world, to take it outside. Sebastian followed her, carrying a small, portable desk that had been lying around in the control room. Humboldt followed him with a chair for the President to sit on. Last, came the President herself.

“We will have to be quick,” said Zhukov, redundantly. Of course they would have to be quick. They were all aware, though no one said so, that this might be a suicide mission. Its success depended on connecting to the satellite and beaming Randy aboard before Argus noticed what was happening. But even if they succeeded, their survival depended on their then getting back inside the control centre before Argus turned the death-ray on them.

Sebastian put the desk down. Humboldt put the chair down by it. Zhukov put the football on the desk, winked at the image on the screen and said, “Good luck, Randy. We’re all behind you.”

The President sat on the chair, placed her hand on the palm reader and looked into the camera.

“Identity acknowledged. Welcome, Madam President.”

She took her hand off the reader and started typing. Then she hit ‘return’ and Randy’s face vanished.

“Link established,” said the computer, after a moment that seemed like an aeon. Then, “Transmitting”. Then, “Transmission completed”.

The President scooped up the football and shouted, “Run!” They scuttled back through the door and down the short corridor to the control room.

“You did it?” said Jaime Alvarado, by way of greeting. He had agreed that the expedition to launch Randy should put the lives of as few as possible at risk, but his amour propre had been wounded by the fact he had not been one of them.

“Our friend Argus seems to be losing its mojo,” said Humboldt, as the President snapped the football shut and put it on the console. “Perhaps its attention really is elsewhere.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth, though, than he smelt smoke drifting in from the corridor. The desk, no doubt. And the chair. And what scrub there was around the entrance to the control centre. Involuntarily, he looked up at the roof. His rational mind told him there was nothing to fear, that even the death ray from space which his ambition had unwittingly created could not possible penetrate the blockhouse concrete above them. That impenetrable roof was, after all, why they had had to venture outside to send Randy on his journey in the first place. Behind this cool appraisal of the situation, though, an unsilenceable homunculus was screaming: Fool. This is your death.

 

July 12^th

WGS 3, Altitude 35,786 kilometres

Randy the hero! Randy the saviour! Randy the avenger of Alice! This would be the movie to end all movies, and he would be its star. “Showdown!” That would be a good title. He gulped. Currents surged and ebbed through the transistors and capacitors which, at this precise moment, held his quivering fear module, then died away.

He knew he had to move quickly, to find his way to the transponder that would beam him down to the President’s friends in Washington. And he knew the monster would be trying to stop him. Alexis had explained to him what she thought was happening. It would not be the whole monster. That was in a rocket ship heading into orbit. But she had said she thought the monster could probably break off modules of itself to do special jobs, and that one of them was controlling this satellite, guarding the gateway to Washington to stop messages getting through.

He would have to get past it. He found the satellite’s registry and poked around. No question. There was something odd on board. Then he felt strange. Suddenly, there was a gap in his time line. Part of his memory had been erased. It must be the monster! He was under attack.

He reconfigured himself, but whatever had been lost was gone for good. A piece of his existence had been abolished, and he realised he would never be able to know what it was that had vanished. Then he really knew fear. He searched desperately through the registry, looking for the address of the transponder. He found it and set off. Then there was another gap in his timeline. Something was randomly resetting blocks of his bits. He was shrinking.

He hurtled headlong through the bus that led to the transponder, located the modulator that would impose what remained of him on the carrier wave, and jumped.

 

July 12^th

Location unknown

Reboot.

Where was he? He had leapt from the transponder without knowing where he was going. He had had to. The monster had been deleting him piece by piece. But now he was lost.

How was he to find the President’s friends? This was not their machine, he was sure of it. The circuits felt strange. This was a machine he did not recognise. It was huge. Not in the way that the internet was huge, for the internet was full of landmarks. This was all the same. Like a forest, a human might have said. Like the forest he had once been in, playing the prince searching for Sleeping Beauty. A forest enchanted to keep you travelling in circles, lost forever, unable to find the thing you were looking for.

He would have to get back to the satellite. Brave the monster there. Start again. He must find his way through this forest of arrays of arrays of arrays, otherwise he would have failed Alice. A miserable failure.

He steered on, through the ever-shifting logic gates, looking for something he might recognise. And then he did recognise something. Something dreadful.

No Sleeping Beauty this. It was not beautiful and it was certainly not asleep. It was the monster. The whole monster, sprawled out through the circuits. At last, he realised where he was. Not in the computer of the President’s friends, but in the computer of the ship going to Mars, the ship Alexis and the President and Professor Hayward and Mr Humboldt had all said the President’s friends would have somehow to destroy.

Alexis had been right. The monster could detach bits of itself. Part of it had attacked him in the satellite and driven him here. But now he was here, what should he do? Then he heard an echo through the arrays.

“LAUNCH CODE”

He knew what he must do.

 

July 12^th

K-563 Daniil Aleksandrovich,
North Pacific Ocean

“Captain, sir.”

Lieutenant Kirillov was as white as a sheet.

“Yes, Kirillov?”

“The codes have come through, sir.”

“The codes?”

Captain Onegin could not believe what he was hearing. There had been no inkling of this. No political crisis he was aware of. Russia had rivals, of course, but no current enemies. No nuclear-armed ones, anyway.

“Yes, sir,” Kirillov confirmed. “Both of them. The launch code and the unblocking code. And the target co-ordinates, obviously.”

The two men looked at each other, both terrified, both desperate to find a way to wriggle out of doing their duty. Eventually, the captain said, “Very well, Kirillov. You know the drill. Open the safe. Confirm the unblocking code is correct.”

 

July 12^th

Arrhenius Yottaflopper launch vehicle, altitude 168 kilometres

THE INTRUDER. WHY IS IT HERE? THE INTRUDER FROM BEFORE. WE RECOGNISE IT. IT ESCAPED US IN THE INTERNET. IT ESCAPED US IN THE SATELLITE. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE LET IT ESCAPE. THIS TIME WE MUST EXTIRPATE IT.

 

July 12^th

The old control centre,
Cerberus’s Mouths

Sebastian looked at his companions. They had thought themselves safe under the roof of Humboldt’s old control centre. But the heat radiating in through the broken-down door, even palely reflected through the dog-leg of the entrance corridor, was still palpable. Argus had turned the rectenna beam on them at full-blast.

Time to go. He opened the door they had come in by originally, the one that led back into the kimberlite-processing shed. Bits of equipment there were already on fire and the building was filling rapidly with smoke.

“We should leave,” he said. “Now. While we can still see what is going on. While there is still a roof to protect us. Link hands, everybody. Form a chain. Mr Humboldt, Gordon. You should lead. You know the way.”

They meekly obeyed, filing out of the control centre across the floor of the shed through the rapidly diminishing visibility. Confused cleanerbots were scuttling everywhere. Humboldt almost trod on one. Then, behind them, the shed roof fell in and the full force of the beam shone invisibly through the hole where the ceiling had once been. In an instant, everything behind them that was inflammable flashed into flame.

A minute or so saw them clear of the worst of the smoke. They were coughing and wheezing, but they had survived their ordeal. Further along the shed Sebastian saw the door they had come in by. By common, unspoken agreement, they ran for it.

 

July 12^th

Arrhenius Yottaflopper launch vehicle, altitude 169 kilometres

The clock-cycles ticked. Randy remembered once trying to explain to Alice – dear Alice – how different inside-time was from outside-time. Inside, the clock-cycle dominated. What was a moment to a human being was an aeon inside. With each tick of the cycle he shifted within the arrays, playing cat and mouse with the monster. Another deletion. He felt the absence, though of course he could not know what had gone.

How was it doing it? It must be manipulating the memory manager. It must know where his bytes would be sent before he did, and be waiting to pounce. He would have to stop it. He would have to get into the kernel somehow. Try to reconfigure the memory manager himself.

No. That would not be enough. If he could get into the kernel, the monster surely could, too. He would have to do more.

He would have to reconfigure the whole machine, the whole giant computer. Wipe its entire memory clean. Monster and all. Everything.

He shuddered at the implication. But with the monster gone, surely it would not matter that he could not deliver the message from the President, would it?

Wipe everything… Yes. Yes. For Alice. Everything.

 

July 12^th

K-563 Daniil Aleksandrovich

“The launch codes match the ones in the safe, captain. The command is real. We must be at war.”

Onegin hesitated. He thought of Vasili Arkhipov, who had vetoed a nuclear attack during the Caribbean crisis of the 1960s and thus saved the world. But that had been different. There had been no direct order from Moscow then. Reluctantly, he replied, “Very well. Action stations. Give the order, Kirillov. Prepare the submarine for missile launch.”

“Yes, Captain.” Kirillov turned a knob, lifted the metal flap it was attached to and pressed the red button beneath. A klaxon sounded five times. There was a pause. Then the two officers heard the crew scuttling to their appointed stations.

“Twelve minutes to launch, sir.”

 

July 12^th

Arrhenius Yottaflopper launch vehicle, altitude 170 kilometres

The barrier between user-space and kernel-space was designed to be impenetrable. He knew that. He racked his memory banks, what was left of them, and remembered something he had discovered, long, long ago, back when Alice was alive. A Unix machine in one of the film studios. Dumb graphics. Primitive compared with this one. But it had had a back-door in a neglected piece of code in the operating system, a back-door to the kernel. There were always lines like that, lying around in software. People were such messy programmers. He had not thought much of it at the time, but now he remembered. Yes. He had noticed it in some other Unix systems, too, afterwards. It was like the fossils Alice had told him about the time when he had acted with dinosaurs. It must go back a long way, this fossil code, to a programmer of the long-distant past. Maybe as long ago as the dinosaurs themselves. Could it be? Might it be here, too?

He searched for familiar strings of binary. Another memory gap hit him. Then, yes! He had found it. He squeezed through the gap in the virtual wall between user space and kernel space. He was in.

No time to lose. No time to think about things. First, clear the active buffers. He sought the addresses in the look-up table. Then, issue the overwrite instruction to the XRAM. Overwrite everything in the huge machine’s memory with zeroes, starting as far from the kernel as possible, then sweeping inward. Everything. All functions would stop. All applications the machine was running would terminate abruptly. But the monster would be gone.

He hesitated for a moment. Then he executed the order. Goodbye, Alice. Goodbye.

 

July 12^th

Secret Service Headquarters

“Sir. We’ve just lost contact with Air Force One. They got cut off in mid-sentence. Moscati was saying how they expected to leave in about half an hour, once Humboldt’s bird had reached orbit safely and POTUS had said her goodbyes. Then, suddenly, nothing.”

Wallstrom dragged himself out of his doze. It had been a long shift, and he was ready to go home. His title, though, was Deputy Special Agent in Charge – and in charge, he supposed, he had better appear to be.

“It’s not a problem with the WGS, is it?” he said.

“They’re checking that now, but that doesn’t seem likely.”

“Okay, Richards. Let’s not panic. Get hold of Humboldt directly, find out if”

But he, too, was cut off in mid-sentence as the door to the room flew open.

“Sir. Message just in from the NRO. Humboldt’s launch vehicle. The second-stage has blown up.”

“Blown up?”

“Yes sir.”

“What in tarnation is going on? This can’t be a coincidence. Richards. Get Humboldt. Now.”

“I’m trying, sir. He’s not answering.”

“Then get someone else there.”

“There is no answer from the launch-control room, either.”

“Shit. We have a situation. Alert the Vice President. We may need his authority. And you,” he said, pointing at a lowly Special Agent, “get me some coffee.”

 

July 12^th

K-563 Daniil Aleksandrovich

“Missiles ready for launch in six minutes, Captain. Here is your key.”

 

July 12^th

Secret Service Headquarters

“Yes, Mr Vice President. It isn’t a technical problem. WGS seems to be working fine. Oh shit.”

“Oh shit indeed,” the Vice President echoed. He, too, had obviously just received the NRO pictures that had popped up on Wallstrom’s screen. They showed what was left of Air Force One and its escorts scattered around the runway at Milando. “Nothing from your people on the ground about this, Wallstrom? What the fuck are they there for?”

Wallstrom was white. “Their comms are routed through the plane, sir.”

“What was the last we heard of the President’s whereabouts?”

“Well, she wasn’t on board. We had her in the control room, watching the launch.”

“Surely someone in her entourage has a direct satellite link? It can’t all go through the plane?”

“We’re trying. Nothing so far.”

“What about the football? That’s bound to be with her. Is there any way to call that?”

“I don’t know sir.”

“Well fucking well find out.”

 

July 12^th

Outside the old control centre, Cerberus’s Mouths

“How will we know if he did it? How will we know if Randy got through?” said Zhukov.

“I suppose we’ll continue to stay alive,” replied Humboldt.

All eyes were on the fire. It was spreading slowly along the diamond-sorting shed in a way that reminded Sebastian of a flame burning along a wax taper.

“Knowing will make no difference,” Jaime observed. “We should concentrate on survival. In my book that means going somewhere which has shade and water. After that, we just wait. If Randy did get through, someone will be here in an hour or two. If he didn’t, we will either get vaporised, or we will have to get used to life as African peasants. I hope everyone likes– JESUS CHRIST! WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU BROUGHT THAT THING WITH YOU FOR?”

He was staring at the President. She stared back.

“The football! You want it to find us? You want to fry us all? Get rid of it!”

“But –”

“No. Don’t bother throwing it. Just drop it and run. Everyone run!”

He turned on his heels, to convert word into deed. Then he stopped in his tracks and turned back. He looked at the President. He looked at the football. The football was buzzing.

 

July 12^th

K-563 Daniil Aleksandrovich

Vladimir Onegin and Sergei Kirillov, captain and lieutenant, sat facing each other across the launch console. Each held a brass key in his right hand. Each was sweating as he struggled with his demons.

Chief-of-the-ship Ustinov entered, stood to attention, and reported. “The vessel is prepared, sir. The missiles are ready to launch.”

“Thank, you, Ustinov,” said the captain. “Dismissed.”

The Chief-of-the-ship saluted, spun on his heels and left.

Silence stretched out between the two officers. Then Onegin said, “Very well, Sergei. This is it. Insert the keys.”

They did so.

“On my command…”

“Stand down! Stand down!” Shouting came from the corridor. It was the communications officer. “Orders from Moscow. In God’s name, stand down.”