“The whole mission was my idea, I’m afraid. I wasn’t best pleased when you called and told me you’d been assigned to the flight.”

He grinned. “So, you want to split the hazardous-duty pay? It’s all of a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“I think you’re going to earn that today,” she said quietly.

Jake had joined them. “Don’t worry, Mrs Beus.”

“Doctor,” Garry said.

Jake said, “I’ll watch his ass, pardon my French, and bring him home safely.”

“Make sure you do that.” She looked up at Garry, as once he’d looked up to her, and he felt his heart break once more.

“Mom, how’s…”

She let him off the hook. “The brain tumour?” She smiled thinly. “Not so bad as you’d think. I get sickly headaches. Wiggly lines at the edge of my vision. If I had your job, they’d ground me.”

He wanted to hug her. “Mom—”

“Now, Garry, if I can handle it you can. Things can’t get any worse, after all. And I’m not ready to have a child die ahead of me. But you know how important this is.”

“…I know.”

“We need some good news here.” And she talked briefly through some of the issues that were coming across her desk.

The breakdown of government and society, the great swathes across Africa, Asia, even parts of Europe. Massive population movements. Deaths from geological events, and simple crop failure and breakdown of trade, on such a scale nobody dared estimate. The die-back they were calling it.

Even in Fortress USA the problems were immense. Rationing was already breaking down. The survivalist types had made some parts of the interior ungovernable. Lethal force was meeting refugees from Mexico and Cuba and Canada, for God’s sake.

It was worse than Garry had heard. Worse than had been made public. Somehow the censoring of the news was the most striking thing.

“We have to make a stand against this Moonseed. You are an American, fighting in the forces which guard your country and your way of life. You are prepared to give your life in their defense.” She was quoting the servicemen’s code of conduct. “That’s never been more true than today.”

Jake nodded gravely. “We’ll do our jobs, ma’am.”

When they walked off to the life support room, Jake nudged his arm. “Was she always so serious?”

Garry thought about that.

His mother had seemed a plump, warm giant to him throughout his growing-up years. Despite her high-powered jobs, as her academic career took her to a variety of universities around the world — and, at last to Washington, where she had, it seemed, got the ear of the President herself — she had always made time and space for Garry, never been less than a mother. Something he appreciated even more now he was thirty, and he thought about his own young family in LA, Jenine and young Tommy…