The ground was hard, and he fell to his left, hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and his head slammed into the exposed rock.

Quick-release the harness strap clips. Release the seat kit… No pain. Shock again?

He could see his parachute, billowing and collapsing, and, bizarrely, his rubber life raft, bouncing over the scrubby ground.

It was turning into one lousy morning.

He didn’t come to until they lifted him off the ground, wrapped up in some kind of silver emergency blanket. He heard the whup-whup of chopper blades.

Here was Jake’s face, hovering over him.

“You’re okay, buddy,” Jake was saying. “You’re a hero.”

“Bullshit.” Christ, his voice was a croak.

“It’s true. The whole damn Canyon looks like a dried-out river bed,” said Jake. “Ledges, buttes of bedrock, gravel bars, teardrop hills, like a piece of the Mississippi delta. And you should see the IMAX images taken from the Space Station. We’re famous, man. We’re on TV.”

Garry grabbed Jake’s sleeve. “But the Seed, man. The Moonseed.”

Jake’s face split in a grin. “We stopped it. NASA said so, those sensors they have up there. It stopped spreading. Listen, you get yourself fixed. I got two shots of Jeremiah Weed lined up at Edwards already…”

Garry thought about the new volcanism he’d witnessed from the air: the deep wound the Moonseed had dug into the continent’s oldest, hardest rocks, that even the Colorado could only scratch, the silver patches there.

Maybe they had bought some breathing time, at least.

He knew his mother said efforts like this were only superficial. More about making people feel good, feel they were fighting back, than about canning the Moonseed.

But hell, maybe that was all anybody could do.

He wished he could do as much, by analogy, for his mother.

In the oily interior of the Chinook, he stared at the metal frame ceiling, until the rotors roared and he was lifted, and he closed his eyes.

19

Henry and the mission planners were receiving a briefing, by a quiet young military officer, on the systems they were installing to support the nuke.

“We removed the code box, the permissive action link. For your purposes we engineered a time fuse and detonator and matched them with the warhead. You will have a timer, but you will be able to abort the detonation at any time up to the final moment.” The young man, earnest and soft-spoken, referred to the bomb as a “monkey’.

The nervousness this topic roused in the program managers and controllers and astronauts intrigued Henry. These were hardened, experienced people; why should the idea of carrying a weapon into space spook them so much?

Unless it was the very fact that a weapon was now deemed to be necessary.