‘The batteries, though, are a finite resource. They are Russian-built and a damn fine product, but they have limited capacities. They are designed for an outage of eight hours. They are said to be comfortably capable of lasting twelve hours, without recharge. Longer than that it’s tricky, but the mission designers have tried out catastrophe-scenario rig-ups where they can be made to last more than twenty-four hours – last, meaning keeping a crew alive while holding back enough juice for a restart when the power supply is restored.

  ‘But to do that, long before the first twelve hours are gone, you have to retreat to the storm shelter, which has got a lot of thermal insulation, and it’s recommended you put on pressure suit layers to keep in the warmth – and, well, you just hunker down in your little hi-tech igloo, while the batteries dribble in the power, and you save all your body heat, and play poker until the cavalry arrives. OK?

  ‘While the main cabin just freezes.

  ‘So, after the first half-hour or so, as we started to realise this situation wasn’t going to be resolved any time soon, we started working through those survival protocols. We stowed our key consumables in the storm shelter, along with the pressure suits and other bits of clothing – a lot of that stuff was in there already, it’s a kind of handy cupboard when not in use. That didn’t take long; we were ready.

  ‘And, under TsUP orders, we all started spending most of our time in the shelter from the start.

  ‘But at the same time we were handling the second of our issues, which is that drift off course.

  ‘I spoke about this before. We were concerned about measuring that drift. With the loss of data from the Sun sensor we were worried about the stability of the basic position-finding algorithms. And though the other automated position trackers kept working, for now – our star sensors, the inertial tracker and such – we couldn’t be sure how long that would last, because as the power levels drop the systems automatically shut themselves down, one by one.

  ‘So TsUP asked us to start making manual observations of the stars, with the little sextants we always carry, as long as we could, even before the automated sensors packed up. Because the more checks we made the better handle they would have on our position.

  ‘Fine. Good. We kept at our jobs. I think we found making the star sightings . . . comforting. Something we could actually do.

  ‘Ten hours passed. By then we had everything inside the storm shelter, but were still moving around.

  ‘Eleven hours. By then we were going out one at a time, just to stay economical. Making our position reports, calling them in. Eleven hours thirty.

  ‘OK, and here is where it went wrong, and I ain’t blaming anybody. Mostly myself, but even me, not so much. I think a combination of factors worked against us.

  ‘We knew the twelve-hour lockdown deadline was coming. But we thought we had half an hour, plenty of time. So, solely on my own initiative, I decided to dash out of the storm shelter one last time, for one final position reading.

  ‘So there I was, alone in the habitat’s main area, in my long johns – inside the shelter, we were putting on our pressure suits at the time – when the power started to cut down, seriously. I heard the hum of the air-conditioning fans stop. The water pumps slowing. The main lights flickered, and the low-power LED emergency lamps came on. Long, deep shadows everywhere. And then I heard a deeper hum, fading. I think that was the gyrodynes, the big flywheels we use to help maintain attitude.

  ‘It’s amazing how noisy a space habitat is, normally, and now I was hearing it grow quiet, for the first time since we left Mars orbit, I guess, all those months ago.

  ‘I was slow, I admit it. I was listening to it all, trying to figure out what was happening, where we were in the sequence. I don’t think I’ve experienced that kind of power-down before – we never simulated it. I was slow, unforgivably so, to figure out what was going on.

  ‘Then I heard the door slam.

  ‘The door of the storm shelter. And I heard it click locked.

  ‘I saw their faces at the window. Ito, Marina, their palms as they slammed at the door.

  ‘As I said, it’s nobody’s fault. Certainly not the manufacturers’. But I think maybe there is an interfacing issue, with the habitat, a Jones, Inc. product, mostly Californian-built, and the storm shelter, which is itself a smart gadget, but built in Russia. And I think maybe the batteries, draining, gave out a dip in the output, in the overall decline. The shelter detected that fairly abrupt drop in power levels, and interpreted it as some catastrophic failure, and did what it was supposed to do. Which was to slam its door shut, to protect the crew within.

  ‘Memo to TsUP and Jones, Inc.: do some more integration testing before you send up another long-duration Shelter-habitat mission.

  ‘Anyhow you can bet that storm shelter door won’t open again. Only if the main power comes back, miraculously.

  ‘There’s no manual override, if you’re thinking of that option. The Russians don’t do manual overrides. Yuri Gagarin could have told you that.

  ‘So here you have this ridiculous situation, of my crew safe and snug in a shelter that won’t open, and me drifting around in a virtually powerless hab module, with not a sunbeam to warm my face. In my underwear, literally. Having got myself shut out.

  ‘I have to tell you that Marina already figured that without power the temperature in here is going to drop fast. Several degrees an hour? So it’s going to get pretty cold in – well, you can do the math. I’m hoping this whole dumb situation will be resolved before then. TsUP are talking to the manufacturers, I know that.

  ‘In the meantime, since you ask, I’m going to keep busy. I’ll make notes of the batteries’ power output, and on the behaviour of other systems as their power share falls below nominal. All of this will be of use to future contingency planning.

  ‘This is what we do. We record, and we learn, so we can help the next guy.

  ‘Oh, and I will keep on sighting the stars, since it was our one last attempt to do so that has stranded me out here. And with the information that gives, I hope we will eventually be able to bring the Al-miriykh home safe. With all its crew, because I ain’t dead yet.

  ‘TsUP, this is Jim Boyd, signing off . . .’

  ‘No.

  ‘Not yet. I have more to say.

  ‘Look, however this turns out, I can’t regret it.

  ‘Nobody said getting to Mars and back would be easy, or safe. They did tell me how wonderful it would be, and so it was.

  ‘You’ll have seen our science reports, or the summaries. We landed on the Medusae Fossae Formation, a million square kilometres of pumice – hugely ancient, a raft of debris from a long-dead volcano, which had itself formed beneath an equally vanished sea. We proved that was what that formation had to be. As if we had discovered that antique ocean.

  ‘But Mars is more than the science. Mars is Mars.

  ‘Just to see these landscapes we had all peered at for so long, through camera images returned by those clumsy, brave little rovers. It had been like looking at a wonderful land through a pinhole. When you’re there, when you’re down on the surface, Mars is . . . huge.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like some small world at all. That tremendous sky, the shrunken Sun. The light is low, and you have this twilight feel, the soft brown of sky and land. And the huge features, the cliffs, the canyons, the craters. All so still, so silent. The track marks from some of those antique rovers have lasted decades. The rovers themselves are still there, you can find them, as if waiting for a call from their distant makers.

  ‘I don’t regret any of it. How could I? I just wish you could have been with me, Zhi.

  ‘Oh, and please don’t dock my pay over this. I know that’s the Russian way.

  ‘Or the crew’s pay.

  ‘Zhi, I love you.’

  15

  6 January 2057, midnight GMT

  Midnight, Mel recorded – a new day, after this longest of days – and still no sign of the deleted Sun in a star-littered southern sky.

  And Skythrust Two, in this unending night, had reverted to type – or rather to its designers’ primary purpose. It had become a party boat, a kind of vast sybaritic resort floating above the troposphere, with lights blazing in the night, and the overlapping sounds of music and laughter and the chink of glasses, even the clatter of cutlery on midnight-feast plates. It was a kind of defiance, Mel thought. After all, the great vacuum-lift ship relied on solar energy just as much as did the Al-miriykh, out in space. But Skythrust had a hell of a lot more battery capacity aboard than the fragile Mars ferry, and even a small nuclear plant as backup.

  But it felt cold enough here, Mel thought, on this deck, even under a clearwood, air-conditioned viewing blister.

  She and the Astronomer Royal, with a few other dogged types, sat side by side in low-slung deck chairs, wrapped in coats, leggings, blankets, even big fur-trapper lined hats. Keeping up this vigil of the empty sky, as pointless as it seemed right now. They were accompanied by a handful of other watchers, human reporters and a couple of drones humming in the air. Observing the observers. There was some interest in their professional perspectives, evidently.

  But there was nothing to say. Because there was nothing to see.

  Nothing, Mel supposed, other than a glorious night-time panorama. The atmosphere could never have been more transparent, with whatever moisture there had been in the stratospheric air above having long condensed out. And, tonight, there wasn’t even the impediment of the zodiacal light – the background interplanetary glow reflected by the debris in the plane of the Solar System, lit up by the Sun on any other night. No Sun, no glow. Even the equatorial belt of human-launched satellites and debris, usually a thin, sparkling band, was invisible tonight, without the sunlight to catch it.

  This, she realised, must have been the best night to observe the stars themselves from the location of Earth since the Sun had lit up more than four billion years before. Some thought.

  Then, just after midnight, one of her phones buzzed.

  Just as Marlowe’s did likewise. With a rueful glance at each other, they consulted their screens.

  Mel’s message was from Zhi. ‘Shit,’ she said.

  ‘I see your shit and raise you. You first.’

  ‘News of Jim Boyd. The fiancé of my friend on—’

  ‘I know who he is by now. As does the whole world, I fear.’

  ‘Well, he still seems to be OK. But the internal temperature in that thin-walled habitat is still dropping steadily. Down to freezing soon.’ She checked the time. ‘Two hours since the shut-down? Sounds about right.’

  Marlowe grunted. ‘I suggest you look up the symptoms of hypothermia.’

  That was the kind of seemingly unfeeling remark from Marlowe that, Mel had learned, was best left unanswered. She touched a tab to listen to a little more of Zhi’s message. His crew, locked in that storm shelter, with all his own warm clothing . . . What can they be feeling? What a screw-up . . . ‘So, you’ve got worse shit than that?’

  ‘I’m following feeds from around the world. The virtual meeting of the FIS Security Council has reconvened. Finally. Thank the Lord that’s gone above my level for now. I suppose our pal Fred Bowles will be supporting that, briefing his own superiors, the other ambassadors . . .

  ‘And, look at this. At the moment of nominal sunrise, in any given place, people have been congregating. Maybe that’s the right word. Just coming out of their homes as dawn approaches, or when it should be happening in their location. New Zealand, Australia. As if it’s one massive New Year’s Day celebration. . . There’s no logic to it, of course. And a profoundly depressing response.’

  Mel felt faintly irritated. ‘Well, what are we supposed to do? Charlie, you can’t condemn people for reacting this way. With . . . awe. Surely that’s a natural, even appropriate human reaction.’

  ‘I suppose so, actually. We, Melissa, are scientists, and we can’t let awe hobble our capacity to think. But what religious fables do remind us, though, is that once people believed they lived in a universe shaped by intention. By the intention of a god or gods, or other primordial beings, whatever. The Renaissance was our painful awakening from that fundamental belief. Well, I’m afraid this whole contemporary episode of ours is a cosmic phenomenon that does indeed reek of intention. Even that hard-as-nails politician Mara Caine seemed to see that much.’

  ‘You mean the timing of the, umm, disappearance, to coincide with the eclipse.’

  ‘The action itself, the deletion, is almost beyond our imaginations. Perhaps it’s meant to be. But the link to the eclipse is clearly deliberate. A message. And as we’ve seen from the beginning a message that could only have meaning for minds on Earth, minds capable of interpreting that strange shadow. In some sense this is all for us. Our task now will be to figure out what that message is, what we must do next.’

  ‘If we survive long enough to figure out anything.’

  ‘There is that.’

  Mel tapped her screens again, longing for a fresh call, yet at the same time dreading any coming in – certainly any from Jane, her daughter, who she hoped was sleeping quietly in her school in England.

  16

  6 January 2057, 0100 GMT

  Jim Boyd’s cabin temperature had indeed fallen below freezing about midnight.

  So Tash learned, following the feeds on her phone.

  In Government House the long night stayed quiet, relatively. Quiet for Tash and Grace anyhow. They had both supported Fred Bowles, as he in turn helped prepare the English Federation’s representative to the FIS Security Council for that level of meeting. And with that done, right now Fred was locked in with his own subordinates, advisers and peers, including the Chief Scientific Adviser, the Chief Medical Officer, police and military chiefs, considering next steps. Tash and Grace could only wait for a call.

  She wondered if everybody else was holding their breath. Waiting to see if this strange nightmare of cold and dark would end. Everybody in the world, waiting.

  A little after one, she and Grace made a decision to attempt to get some sleep.

  Together they made their way through the cool warren of corridors that was House – a crowded warren tonight with so many people working over – and found the small overnight accommodation suite they had been allocated: two bunk beds, a minuscule bathroom and a coffee pot, empty.

  They agreed one would try to sleep while the other covered the phones, taking turn and turn about. In the end Grace, who among her other superpowers seemed to possess an ability to thrive on a lack of sleep, volunteered to take the first shift awake. Some animal part of Tash was glad of it.

  So Tash changed, washed, and cleaned her teeth with ministry-supplied brush and toothpaste, while Grace went out hunting down coffee refills.

  When she lay down, Tash felt too wired to sleep, too exhausted to stay awake. But she was determined to lie here, asleep or not.

  While, gradually, her thoughts crumbled.

  She did sleep, but only lightly, and in fragments.

  Kept waking up fretting. Furtively checked her phones, out of sight of Grace.

  Mostly checking for news about Jim Boyd.

  At around two a.m., Jim, still cheerful – or putting on that face – still compos mentis, was monitoring his own heartbeat, finding it high, and reporting the results.

  I’m doing what I can, he said through a throat tight with the cold. I came out here in my damn underwear. So I’m improvising. Pulling on every stray bit of clothing I can dig out. I’m looking at the insulation we have cladding the walls, behind the hygiene panels. I’ll get at that.

  I know the theory. My body is doing what it should be doing. I’m shivering, heart pumping, my body burning up stores of energy in a last-ditch attempt to keep my inner core warm. My vital organs. I’m still wearing my med sensors – we’re supposed to wear that stuff inside the storm shelter – so anybody who chooses can follow my vital signs. Maybe I can provide some data on the advance of hypothermia in a healthy young male – youngish – even if I don’t recommend you make the same mistake I did . . .

  Amid the grand spectacle of a whole world shivering in the dark, Tash, along with much of the human race, found the small human story of Jim Boyd, stuck out in space, utterly compelling. Hardly surprising for her since he was the fiancé of a friend, though Tash had never met him personally. But it was also a neat, self-contained story in its own right, on a night of overwhelming events.

  Maybe it was always this way, a means for mere humans to comprehend such immense disasters. Saving Private Ryan, about a survivor of the Second World War. Refugee Tears, about a survivor of the 2030s border clashes between China and Russia – a phase of a long-lasting, slow-burning conflict in which Zhi’s own father, conscripted, had been killed.

  Saving Jim Boyd. Except there seemed no way to do that.

  Tash fell asleep to the calm murmur of his voice.

  When she woke Boyd seemed more confused.

  I’m trying to take my damn heartbeat but now it says it’s slower than normal and that can’t be so . . .

  It was four a.m., Tash saw. The Russian mission controllers of Al-miriykh weren’t releasing the predicted cabin temperature any longer. It had to be far below zero. She sent another sympathy message to Zhi on the Lodestone, but – even if it ever got through the habitat’s mission controllers – as with its predecessors she got no reply.

  Tash made to get out of bed, but when she opened the door to the tiny lounge area Grace, sitting there, shook her head. ‘Nothing’s happening. Get some rest while you can, because you never know when you’ll get another chance. Listen to an old soldier.’

  ‘I thought you were an old marine.’

  ‘Classified.’

  She was right, of course. The morning would see chaos, and mountains of work, come daylight or darkness, sunshine or frost. Besides, some deep, frightened part of her, she suspected, just longed to escape back into the oblivion of sleep.