From the heart of Scotland, behind the fleeing car, came boiling clouds and a continuous roar of thunder. More planes flew overhead, and she imagined the fight against the Moonseed, all over the suffering planet.

18

Garry Beus stepped out into the flat California sunlight.

Edwards Air Force Base was a chunk carved out of the western desert, marked only by Joshua trees, twisted and arthritic and sinister. The land that time forgot. It was early, but already heat haze was shimmering off the flat, pale salt lakes on the horizon, obscuring his view of the giant aircraft hangars here.

And there was a muddy brown colour to the sky. Volcanic shit. The reason he would be earning his hazardous flight pay today.

It had started off as a normal morning. Shower and shave, a pass on breakfast. But when he climbed into his flight suit, an ugly sonofabitch in olive green with a zipper from balls to neck, and he took his wallet and log book, and he pulled on the thick socks he always wore in case of a cockpit heating failure — well, his heart had started to pump.

Edwards had always been the place to be for a pilot, a place you could come burning down out of the sky and always find a place to land on those broad salt flats, where you could touch down faster than some airplanes could fly. Chuck Yeager flew here. This was the home of the X-15. They even landed the Space Shuttle here. But in truth Edwards was a place for test pilots, like Garry himself.

Today, though, Garry had some real work to do here.

He walked to the squadron building. Here was the ops desk where he had to check in to confirm his mission, and his wing man for the morning’s two-ship flight, Jake Parrish.

The briefing between the two of them took a solid hour, led by Garry. He covered the mission objectives, and the motherhood stuff, the basic principles for every sortie: operating standards, radio procedures, contingency plans, SAR — search and rescue procedures — and the weapons, though today that just meant the two laser-guided bombs each F-16 would carry on its underwing pylons. There was some special briefing material on volcanic effects they might hit: hot updraughts, microbursts, ash in the carb, toxic gases, other shit.

Then it was back to the ops desk. There were no maintenance delays, no clouds, and the volcanic shit in the sky shouldn’t cause any hold-ups.

But here was Garry’s mother.

She was reduced to a shrivelled little husk, hair a wisp of grey, probably only half his weight. It just wasn’t damn fair, Garry thought. But she was smiling at him, so he smiled back and hugged her.

“My God, mom, what the — what are you doing here?”

“Well, it’s my fault you’re going,” Monica Beus said.

“Your fault?”