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Chapters (32)
  1. ONE
  2. TWO
  3. THREE
  4. FOUR
  5. FIVE
  6. SIX
  7. SEVEN
  8. EIGHT
  9. NINE
  10. TEN
  11. ELEVEN
  12. TWELVE
  13. THIRTEEN
  14. FOURTEEN
  15. FIFTEEN
  16. SIXTEEN
  17. SEVENTEEN
  18. EIGHTEEN
  19. NINETEEN
  20. TWENTY
  21. TWENTY-ONE
  22. TWENTY-TWO
  23. TWENTY-THREE
  24. TWENTY-FOUR
  25. TWENTY-FIVE
  26. TWENTY-SIX
  27. TWENTY-SEVEN
  28. TWENTY-EIGHT
  29. TWENTY-NINE
  30. THIRTY
  31. THIRTY-ONE
  32. THIRTY-TWO

Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’

Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.

She squinted at him. ‘You’d figured this out already, hadn’t you?’

‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’

She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’

‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’

She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’

‘Amy . . .’

‘No.’ Her expression was stony. ‘Go find him now, before he gets away.’

TWENTY-NINE

Lunar Array, 11 February 2235

Saul pocketed some extra ammunition that Amy gave him, her mouth pursed all the while in a thin line. By the time she had depressurized the lander again, Mitchell had already gained half an hour’s head-start.

‘You’re better equipped than he is,’ Amy pointed out, over the A/V, after he mentioned this. ‘Remember, you’re carrying a full air supply in your backpack, while he jumped out with just his suit’s inbuilt emergency supply. He’s not going to waste time doing anything but heading straight for the Array. Besides,’ she added, her voice crackling slightly, ‘it’s not like you’re going to have too much trouble following his trail.’

Saul pulled himself through the tiny hatch and then down a narrow ladder, a plume of dust rising around his weighted boots as he touched down. He looked back up at the lander, shocked at how tiny, frail and primitive-looking it seemed, and gave Amy a wave just as she swung the hatch shut again.

He looked around and saw that the lander stood on a wide shelf of rock, only a few kilometres from the edge of Copernicus Crater. Hills ringed the crater’s rim, and he could spot part of the city, where it lay further around the crater in the narrow gap between two peaks. The city itself spilled down the wide, terrace-like steps of the crater’s inner wall, its tallest buildings reaching upwards like pale spears that had been thrust into the regolith. The snaking lines of pylons that carried trains back and forth between the city and the Array were as yet invisible from Saul’s vantage.