“Weeks! Jesus, how come mission control never picked up anything wrong on their monitors and scanners?” Steve Romero turned angrily away. “Got to be some real major communications foul-up. Some gold-star asshole needs an ass kicking.”

  Jim Hilton looked over at his number two. “What d’you reckon, Marcey?”

  She pursed her lips. “Mom’s speech was screwed up, as well. Something out of the park here. Maybe we ought to contact mission control right away.”

  “Makes sense. Pete, you and Ryan cover him up. Just lower the capsule lid on him and seal it. Will do for the time being.”

  “Sure.”

  “And turn up the air freshener.” Jeff Thomas pinched his nose.

  The dead man didn’t smell all that much. The various chemicals that had been pumping through him had helped suppress some of the processes of putrefaction. But there was still the distinct sour-sweet odour of decay.

  “Let’s get to it, ladies and gentlemen.” Jim Hilton sighed. “Poor way to return. Still… Everyone to command positions, and we’ll start to fly the old eagle home again.”

  THE WHOLE CREW were seated in their regulation deep-space flying configuration.

  Jim was in the captain’s chair, with Marcey at his left side, both facing forward through the vid ports. Kyle Lynch, the navigating officer, sat immediately behind Jim, and communications operator Steve Romero was jammed in next to him.

  The others were sitting farther aft in Aquila, everyone conscious of the rotted corpse of Bob Rogers, which was hidden inside its capsule.

  “Testing intercom,” said Jim. “Everyone receiving me?”

  There was a chorus of muttered affirmatives, all the way down the line to the supercargo journalist, Jeff Thomas.

  “All right, everyone, now hear this. Bob’s death’s cast a giant shadow over this mission. Up to now it’s gone well. We got there. We did what we had to do, and we’re on the way back. Just one of those things, I guess. Seems like there was an equipment failure and he just… figure he just stopped breathing.”

  “Still like to hear the answers to some questions from some lard-ass at control as to why it wasn’t monitored and fixed,” said McGill, his voice crackling through the quiet vessel.

  Jed Herne’s voice slipped in. “Only been awake for a few minutes, but there’s other things gone wrong on the electronics front, Skip, that need some thought. Looks like a failure in communications between us and Earth.”

  Steve Romero heard the ball lobbing over into his section of the court. “Meaning it’s me that’s rucked up, Jed?”

  “No. Just looks—“

  “Heard you say it was communications.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s me, right?”

  Jim Hilton cut off the squabble before it deteriorated any further. “Enough, guys. Plenty of time to sort this out after reentry. Could be that you’re both right. Debriefing’ll show us what went wrong, and when.”

  “My intercom isn’t working properly, Jim,” called Jeff Thomas.

  “You hear me at all?” Jim asked, channeling him through Steve so he could be patched in with the others.

  “That’s better. There’s a lot of breakup. And the servo on my chair isn’t functioning, either.”

  “Same with mine,” added Carrie Princip. “The dupe board on the nav console is showing false data for our approach trajectory.”

  Ryan O’Keefe coughed apologetically. “Sorry to add my mite to the problems, but I couldn’t open my personal locker when we got woken. The security device on it seemed to have jammed.”

  “All right, all right.” Jim Hilton couldn’t hide how angry he was. “Have to be breakdowns along the line. We’ve got a whole day to sort these things out with mission control before hot-zone time. Steve?”

  “Yo, Captain.”

  “Let’s get in touch, shall we? Establish what might have happened.”

  “Sure thing.” He pressed and turned dials. “Aquila calling mission control. Come in, Stevenson. Do you read?”

  Everyone on the vessel could hear the faint atmospheric hissing.

  And nothing else.

  Chapter Four

  “Twenty-seven hours and nine minutes to the commencement of final reentry procedures… procedures.” Mom lapsed into silence for thirty heartbeats. “Thirty-one hours and eight minutes to preset landing time at mission base.”

  The last burst of information came out at a babbling, hysteric speed, as though Mom had been secretly sniffing helium, but nobody on the crew was paying the comp voice much attention.

  They’d moved back out of the control section of the Aquila, going through into their rest quarters. The ship had originally been designed for the crew to be split up into shifts, so that no more than three-quarters would be awake at any one time. Now, with everyone there except for Steve Romero, it was uncomfortably crowded.

  The radio operator was still at his post, leaning forward, trying every channel, his voice growing hoarse with the repeated, futile efforts to raise some kind of response from Earth.

  “Come in, please. This is the USSV Aquila broadcasting an international Mayday call. Please respond to this wavelength. Come in for the Aquila, homeward bound from deep space.”

  As they spiraled closer to Earth, Steve tried again and again. Mission control wasn’t responding from Nevada. The Thatcher Memorial Research Base in Surrey was silent, and so was the Yeltsin Space Center, near what had once been called Volgograd, in the wastes of ancient Kazakhstan.

  Bases in India and Australia and South America and the Arctic and Antarctic were dead and still as a nameless tomb in a desert of permafrost.

  Jim had called up the ship’s manuals onto the screens while all of the experts concentrated on their own areas of specialty. Section by section, everything was rapidly checked. Aerials and the outside linking receivers were all examined with the tiny mobile vid cameras.

  Nobody could find anything wrong.

  Steve Romero’s voice flooded into the room where everyone else was huddled. “Come in, please. This is the Aquila, flying on down.”

  Jim Hilton clapped his hands. “All right, everyone. Let’s just look at this one together. Anyone got any ideas?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Aquila calling Earth. This is the USSV Aquila calling fucking anyone!”

  Jim Hilton sighed. “So nobody’s got any bright ideas?”

  “Got to be something down between Earth and us,” said Marcey Cortling. “Major fault that means we’ve totally lost all contact.”

  Henderson McGill shook his head. “Real brilliant, Marcey. Tell us something we don’t know.”

  “What we don’t know is everything.” Michael Man was perched uncomfortably on the edge of one of the bunks.

  “Sounds pretty zen,” Carrie said with a smile, but it was a thin, frightened smile.

  Mom’s voice came through the speakers, unexpectedly loud. “We shall be commencing our descent through the atmosphere at noon on the twenty-fifth day of September. Thank you for flying Aquila Airlines.”

  “Having a breakdown, by the sound of it,” said Pete Turner.

  Mom hadn’t quite finished. “Midi, le vingt-cinq Septembre.”

  “What?” Ryan O’Keefe laughed. “Now she’s gone bilingual on us.”

  “Mittag, der fünf und zwanzigste September.”

  “Trilingual now.”

  The computer-generated voice fell silent, leaving them to consider their situation again. Steve Romero had finally given up on his Mayday calls, joining the others.

  “We’ve got a whole day and night to check this out and establish contact with mission control.” Jim Hilton stood up.

  Jeff Thomas raised a hand. “What if we don’t get in contact? Do we burn up on the way down?”

  “Probably not, though it could get warm. The ship’s programmed to get through even without help from Stevenson.”

  “How about landing?”

  The captain rubbed fingers through his thinning, pale blond hair. “I did it often enough on the simulators. But there isn’t any question of that happening, Jeff. Must be some sort of electrical interference up above the atmosphere. Once we break through, everything’ll be fine and we’ll be back on target again.”

  Jim Hilton wished that his own voice had sounded a little more convincing.

  IN THE NEXT FEW HOURS the crew of the Aquila began to piece together a partial picture of what had been happening during the second “sleep” of the two-year mission or, put another way, what hadn’t been happening.

  It was like an infinitely complicated jigsaw puzzle with some vital sections missing or wiped clean.

  Kyle found that the automatic cameras set up to record a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view around the big shuttle every fifteen minutes had malfunctioned.

  “Got pix all the way up to ten months ago. Not long after we capsuled again. Then zilch.”

  “Camera fault?” asked Jim Hilton, sitting in his pilot’s seat and receiving the variety of status reports from everyone.

  “Comp-control failure emanating from Stevenson,” replied the navigator. “Most of the course-correction data ceases around the same point. Like they stopped caring about us.”

  Pete Turner had been recalling some of the routine input tapes received by the Aquila while the crew were in their state of suspended animation. Normally that would have been one of the jobs of the late Bob Rogers.

  “They stop, as well, Captain. Ten months ago. Everything since then is blank.”

  Jim Hilton closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said wearily. “Think this is some sort of exercise? One of their fun little tests?”

  Mac was leaning on the back of his seat and he laughed. “Too realistic for one of their realistic simulations, isn’t it?”

  “Guess so. You got any ideas? You been around longer than any of us.”

  McGill shrugged. “Eighty years ago I’d have said the Commie bastards had come out of their tunnels and started the next… the last world war. But now… I really don’t know. Could there be any clues on the news tapes?”

  Jim Hilton called up Jed Herne. “Mac suggests a look at the most recent news input tapes in the return familiarization section of the library. Can you do that now?”

  “Sure thing.”

  The ex-quarterback made his way along toward the stern of the shuttle, up a narrow ladder, his old knee injury barely noticeable.

  He called back to the captain almost immediately. “Tapes stop. Nothing incoming and recorded since the middle of January. Fifteenth. Usual two-minute updated bulletin. All the earlier ones are there.”

  “Put it through, Jed.”

  “Last one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey!”

  “What is it?”

  Jed sounded puzzled. “Just noticed. The tapes after January. It’s not that they never came in, though… Oh, I get it. From January through to the beginning of April they came in on schedule, but something happened then to instigate self-erase mode. Yet there’s no command record here.”

  Jim Hilton glanced across at his number two, raising his eyebrows. But Marcey didn’t offer any kind of response.

  “Yeah. After the start of April they never came in no more. Nothing. Whatever happened to freak out the comps on the ship must…it must’ve happened between the middle of January and the middle part of April.”

  “Put the last one on the intercom, Jed. Might be something in it.”

  “Sure. Here it is.”

  The voice was male, perfectly calm and ordinary. Jim recognized it as belonging to the broadcaster whom he’d met down at Stevenson on one of the media picnics.

  “Andy Corwen,” Jim said. A man who was visibly brimming with the extraordinary self-deluding self-importance of the professional, network newsreader.

  “Here’s the way it is for the fifteenth day of January, ‘24. The headline story is the fire at the Felix Turner Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. Latest figures put deaths at forty-two, with many more missing. Local fire chief Randall Meissen says first indications are that the fire may have suspicious origins. The Presidential primaries will shortly be opening in New Hampshire with little change in the opinion polls. The homicide of alleged Mafia hitman Larry ‘Bookman’ Giacomo in San Bernardino last night is believed by police to be part of an ongoing feud between warring families.”

  “Can’t wait to get back home to all this death and violence,” said Marcey Cortling. “Two years away and nothing changes.”

  The taped news bulletin was continuing.

  “Vid rock superstars the Mutant Scum Legion continue to break all venue records in their tour of the Bible Belt, while also outraging the Mothers of Moral Rectitude. Conference championships this coming Sunday, building toward Superbowl in San Diego in two weeks. Federal intervention has today been threatened in…”

  “He never told us which teams are through,” moaned Jed Herne. “What an asshole!”

  “… dispute which has already lasted five months and brought the nation’s capital grinding to a halt. Heavy snows are forecast across the Pacific Northwest in the next twenty-four hours. Finally an item of international news. The fundamentalist military government of Kurdistan has complained to the World National Council over alleged outrages in their border conflict with southern Iraq. There are unsubstantiated claims of chemical and ecological warfare using agrarian toxins. And that’s how it is.”

  There was a loud, final click as the tape reached its end.

  Jim Hilton looked around at the rest of the crew. “Doesn’t sound like the last bulletin before the horsemen of the apocalypse come galloping in with the final curtain, does it?”

  Kyle Lynch spoke for everyone. “Just sounded normal to me. No clues at all.”

  “Usual crap. No reason for us to get cut off up here.” Ryan O’Keefe shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

  But they were all wrong.

  Chapter Five

  Henderson McGill was Jim Hilton’s oldest friend on the Aquila. They’d come through basic training in the same year, after Mac’s transfer from university, and they’d both been out into deep space a number of times.

  Now they sat together in the ship’s small astrophysics laboratory. On the wall behind the captain the repeater clock showed that they would be coming up to reentry in less than two hours, with the projected landing back at the USAF base a little under six hours off.

  The strain of the past day and night was showing on Jim Hilton’s face, and he rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “Jesus, I’ve had it.”

  “You manage any sleep?”

  Jim gave him a wan smile. “Sure. I reckon I managed all of nine seconds. You?”

  “I figure I must’ve dozed for a couple of hours during the night.”

  “So we head for burn-up at noon. Sounds like one of those cheapo-cheapo vid productions that Lori was always appearing in. Burn-up at Noon.”

  McGill was rolling a blunt pencil between finger and thumb. “We had twenty-four hours to come up with an answer, Jim.”

  “We don’t even have much of a guess, never mind anything like an answer.”

  The older man sniffed. “You turned me on years ago to that Victorian detective guy. You remember? Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Sure. Moriarty and going over the falls. Elementary, my dear McGill. What about him?”

  “He said something like, when you had a problem, after you’ve eliminated all the sensible possibilities, then what you’ve got left, however stupid, has to be the solution.”

  “Problem’s easy as can be, Mac. Mission went well. We all go back into the sleepers. While we’re out something happens. Bob Rogers goes off on the last flight west.” He hesitated. “Poor bastard. Communications folded its tent into the night and stole away.”

  “Nice image, Jim. Should’ve been a poet instead of a starship commander.”

  “Sure. No clues. No radio response anywhere on Earth. So, logic says something has to be wrong....I mean really very wrong, Mac, back home.”

  “Surely they’d have found some way to let us all know?”

  “Yeah, I just… Look, talk’s cheap and action costs. Best get ready for reentry. If we’re going to have to take over on manual, then I guess I’d best get in some reading on the controls. Been a long old time, you know.”

  McGill nodded. “Sure. Remember one thing, won’t you, Jim?”

  “What?”

  “Port is left and starboard is right.”

  “EVERYONE BELTED IN SAFE? I got around five minutes showing.”

  “Assuming the clock’s working, Captain,” said Marcey Cortling, “and that it won’t go the way of Mom.” Steve Romero had finally switched off Mom, with the help of Mike Man.

  The computer control had been deteriorating with increasing speed, leading to the motherly Kansas voice gibbering out streams of numbers and abstruse mathematical formulae in high-pitched, fluting tones.

  Kyle Lynch’s voice came through the intercom. “Checked the data on reentry comp control, and it all looks like an ace on the line. Can’t find anything wrong.”

  Jim Hilton laughed. “Comes under the category of famous last words, Kyle.”

  As the Aquila encountered the top surface of the atmosphere, it was beginning to vibrate. The outside sensors were already inching up the temp scale, out of the green and into the pale yellow section of the repeater dials, but still way short of the crimson segment.

  “Least we might be able to get a better view of Earth once we break through.” Kyle was gripping the arms of his seat with white-knuckled fists. “Cameras and deep-focus lenses all show a blur. Could be cloud cover, but you wouldn’t expect the whole planet to be shrouded like that.”

  The shaking was building up, and the interior of the ship was filled with a piercing humming noise.

  The temperature was out of the yellow and sliding fast toward orange.

  “Hang on, everybody,” said Jim Hilton, calm as if he were taking the twins for an afternoon drive into the Hollywood Hills. “Here we go.”