‘Well, would you have agreed? There’s plenty of room. See? I’m fixing the closest approach now. I’ve made us as visible as can be, on purpose mind you, and they can see where we’re going. They can see this is a gesture, not a threat of destruction.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘It’s a symbolic threat. We’re missing the ship, that lumbering hulk. We don’t need to damage the damn thing to make our point. Which is, don’t screw with the Consortium. Because we could hold up this mission as long as we like. Don’t sweat it. This is check, not checkmate.’

  She snorted. ‘Believe it or not, Earth boy, the Lunar Consortium wants to get rich, not start a war. We want to work within the law if we must, change the law to a more equitable regime if we can. We do not threaten, we do not destroy …’

  ‘I thought you were some kind of lunar rebel.’

  ‘Well, I am compared to some. But I want to achieve practical results, not make hollow gestures. And there are limits—’

  A blaring siren.

  Screens lit up with red flashes now, and a sepulchral voice began to sound, evidently overriding their mutes. ‘Collision alarm. Collision alarm …’

  North stabbed a mute button.

  A second of silence, as they stared at each other.

  ‘Can’t be,’ North said. ‘I’m clearly missing the Cronus.’

  They turned to their stations and paged through screens.

  ‘There,’ Doria yelled, pointing. ‘Dead ahead. Not the Cronus. Something else.’

  He turned to see it. Coming out around the curve of one of the big spherical structures.

  It was a small craft, maybe some kind of ferry, coming out of the shadow, orbiting Cronus.

  ‘That’s not supposed to be there.’ North hammered at his controls.

  But the ship itself had become aware of the potential collision. Now attitude thrusters fixed to the outside hull squirted on automatic, each brutal thrust sounding, feeling like a giant slamming the outer hull with a sledgehammer. North and Doria were jostled and shaken as the compact rockets fired and banged.

  And North glared at expanded views of that approaching craft. It was just a short-range passenger shuttle, in this configuration at least; it must have cargo modes. Its roof was transparent – so as to show off the view to dumb tourists, no doubt – and he could actually see them, see that there were maybe a dozen people on board.

  He stabbed the screen with a finger to get higher magnification. And even from this angle North recognised one of the crew. Emmanuel Caspar himself, commander of the elevator hub, at the controls of the craft.

  And a kid beside him, looking straight up and out at Aquila, it seemed, his mouth open with horror.

  ‘That’s not supposed to be there,’ Jeorg said again, weakly.

  Doria leaned past him and, with her fist, hit an override propulsion-control button.

  From Caspar’s point of view, the ship that approached, falling from out of the sky, coming from behind the curving hull of the great forward sphere of Cronus, was a blunt, rough cylinder, with a dazzling flare of hot ions emerging from a huge exhaust nozzle.

  Emmanuel Caspar knew it immediately. Yet he couldn’t believe his eyes, just for a heartbeat, two. It was a famous ship to any pilot, a Lunar Consortium ship, and an advanced fission-engine design – a ship his crew had had to study as it had dogged the Cronos all the way to Saturn. It had to be the Aquila itself. Despite having come all that way, ship and crew had been denied access to the hub complex and to the Cronus, for reasons of diplomacy at higher levels than Caspar worked at.

  Yet there was the Aquila anyhow.

  Caspar, hub commander, was out of the loop. As his staff and the automated systems reacted to the intruder, here he was stuck in this limping little ferry. Piloting it just because he could. Just so he could impress his son on this last day together.

  And here was Aquila falling out of the sky at him …

  And he was right in its path …

  ‘Dad? Is it supposed to do that?’

  He’d done nothing at all for long seconds, he realised. React, Emmanuel.

  ‘Strap in, Fabio.’ Caspar tapped consoles. ‘Emergency evasion! Execute.’ He punched a smart button to verify his authority with the ferry’s systems.

  Emergency lamps flared red, as the ferry prepared to respond to the sudden threat from above with emergency manoeuvres.

  Caspar braced. He didn’t look back at the rest of the passengers. He just yelled, ‘Strap in!’ He knew that if their automatics had worked each passenger would already be cocooned by heavy straps folding out of their deep cushioned seats and closing around their bodies. He made sure Fabio was being properly restrained. He didn’t have time to check further—

  And he felt a jolt in the back. That was the big rear engines kicking in, as hard as they could. He was pressed back in his couch as the thrust built up.

  And he dared glance upwards again.

  That damn craft was still descending – but sliding sideways in his view, as the ferry’s engines strove desperately to push him aside and out of Aquila’s way. Caspar knew the specs of the lunar ship well, had been enough of a flyboy himself to have studied its design and testing. The Aquila was six hundred tonnes of mass plus fuel, and a hundred metres long.

  That was the crucial statistic.

  This ferry’s low-power fission engine was usually sufficient for the slow, cautious assignments around the fragile hub facilities it was designed for. It and its siblings had even been used to help nudge Cronus into its jig bay. The question was whether that feeble acceleration could do enough in the time available to shift the mass of the ferry through that crucial hundred metres, before the larger mass of the Consortium craft came falling down, down out of the sky, a slow-motion approach but with enough momentum to crush the smaller craft—

  The exterior light shifted. He looked up from his screens. The Aquila was closer still, actually blocking out the sparse sunlight, even the pale brown glow of Saturn. And still closing.

  Somebody screamed.

  That seemed to open the floodgates. Other passengers screamed, yelled; he heard hasty comms messages being sent out, and he imagined terrifying messages being picked up all over the hub complex, even in the Cronus.

  And still the light shifted.

  There was nothing more Caspar could do.

  Fabio sat silent, looking at his father. Perhaps too bewildered to be afraid. No, not that; Fabio was too smart. The kid knew what was going on. Caspar reached over as far as his own harness would allow and enfolded his son in his arms, leaning over him as if his own broad back could save the boy.

  Inside the ferry the noises of screaming, yelling, proximity alarms all seemed to rise to a crescendo.

  And then the alarms halted, suddenly.

  Caspar realised he had his eyes clamped shut. He felt the warm body of his son in his arms, could feel him breathing.

  He opened his eyes, sat up straight, glanced at his consoles. It was over, the closest approach passed without a collision. ‘Not dead yet, damn it.’ Without looking around, he called out to the passengers. ‘All OK?’

  A clamour of voices, a chorus of complaints, cries, demands for information.

  But one clear report, a woman’s voice. ‘No injuries back here, Commander. And no visible damage to the hull.’

  ‘Whoever said that, you just got commissioned. Now let’s see what’s going on.’

  He had a feeling this wasn’t over yet.

  Working by eye and instruments, Caspar drew the ferry away from the site of the near-collision. And, even before he got fully clear, he looked back.

  He saw the Aquila immediately. The craft’s own attitude thrusters were flaring, evidently having pushed it away from its collision course with the ferry.

  Shit. But it shouldn’t have gotten so close in the first place. He knew there would have to be some kind of inquiry – even prosecutions. Even if the manoeuvre had been intended as just some kind of gesture of political protest, nothing justified this.

  He was guiding the ferry gently now, gently, backing further away from the site of the near crash. He glanced at Fabio beside him. He could have been killed. Still could. Caspar felt his anger gathering into a knot—

  The proximity alarm sounded again.

  What now?

  He followed the same reflexes – checked on his ship, his son, his passengers. Then he turned back to the instrument board, only to find a muddled picture, that proximity alarm but no imminent damage warnings.

  Ah. But the danger wasn’t to the ferry this time. He swept clear an area of the board, folded down other indicators, trying to make sense of the data.

  Not a danger to the ferry. The Aquila had missed the ferry, yanking itself onto a revised trajectory, but in the process had set itself on another collision course.

  With the Cronus itself.

  Again he hammered his boards with warnings, snapped out commands to the crew of the Cronus, to the hub base.

  He hailed the Aquila itself. But there was no reply. And it was too late anyhow.

  Alarms screamed again.

  Aboard the Cronus, John Smith, in his own cabin, huddling in a survival suit – hastily donned following much-drilled emergency protocols – had actually watched the near-collision of the rogue ship with the ferry. And the ship was soon identified by the smart room’s systems as the lunar craft that had been haunting the site, the Aquila. Of course it was Aquila. Ferry and Consortium craft had come close to a collision, but both, painfully slowly, had pushed their way away, apparently just in time.

  And Smith felt his heart hammer in the aftermath of the near-miss. He knew little Fabio and his father were aboard that ferry, and no doubt Smith would be on at least nodding acquaintance with most of the other passengers. All of them, it seemed, spared by luck and good piloting, by Caspar on the ferry – and presumably, in the end, the lunar miners in their own ugly craft. Surely the approach of the Aquila had been meant as a threat, a gesture, not a suicidal attempt to crash. But something had gone wrong.

  Well, collision averted. Maybe it was over.

  But now he saw the further aftermath of the initial approach, slowly unfolding. He had a dread feeling that the Aquila’s pilot wasn’t quite as careful, quite as watchful as they should have been. Because while Caspar’s ferry fairly scooted out of trouble, away from both Aquila and Cronus, the Aquila itself, having completed a hasty avoidance manoeuvre away from the ferry, now lurched backwards – and was heading straight for the curving hull of the Cronus.

  Straight for the main sphere.

  Inside which Smith sat staring like an idiot.

  Very belatedly Smith realised he himself could be in danger. But which way to run?

  He yelled to the automatics, ‘Show this room! This room, relative to the outer hull!’

  A panel on the wall turned semi-transparent to show a three-dimensional map of this part of the ship, the interior within the spherical hull, a honeycomb of corridors and rooms and clumps of machinery: air-conditioners, elevators. All of this, of course, recently built inside a converted fuel tank.

  And even in this display, outside the hull, a skeletal sketch, the form of the Aquila, loomed large. The Aquila wasn’t heading for him, not for his part of the hull, he saw immediately. He felt a surge of relief, and of immediate guilt, for his sparing only meant that the danger was passing to somebody else—

  The two craft closed very quickly—

  And Aquila hit.

  It was a soft, almost noiseless impact. A kind of crumpling.

  John Smith, in his cabin, heard this through the fabric of the ship itself.

  But after a couple of seconds he felt the room around him shake. He thought he was feeling a kind of deep, long-wave shudder, as the shock of impact travelled through the structure of the ship. And now he heard the fabric of this spherical hull groan, the screech of tearing metal giving way under the stress.

  A gust of air, as if of wind, brushed his skin. Wind, in a spacecraft?

  The images on his screens fritzed, and went down altogether.

  Smith, alone in his cabin, sat silently for a moment.

  Listening.

  Feeling the breeze.

  Think, John. If there were a major breach of the atmosphere-bearing hull, if whatever safeties were built into the ship and his own cabin itself were to fail under this gross damage, these could be his last breaths.

  He should be counting.

  Two breaths. Three. He counted, eyes closed.

  When he got to ten, he opened his eyes. He could hear the continuing soft hiss of air cycling through his room. Lucky. So far.

  He needed to know what had become of the rest of the ship.

  He shouted into the air, delivering all the emergency reboot commands he could think of. It didn’t take long before he got an image, of sorts, on just one screen. A corridor, empty. For long seconds that was all he got. The systems had become, unsurprisingly, unreliable, and he had to play around with more commands for some minutes before he got an external view – and while he did so he quickly realised this viewpoint must actually have come from that near-miss ferry, standing off from the main ship.

  There was the ship’s hull, that smooth, huge spherical flank. And he could see a complex shadow, sailing past that flank and out of shot.

  He demanded his systems identify that intruder. He wasn’t surprised to learn it was the Aquila. Flying in close to the hull – no, now flying away from the hull.

  But behind it the hull was smooth no more, he saw. Illuminated dimly by Saturn’s light, the layered hull had been cut through, peeled back.

  And without its skin, the ship’s inner anatomy was exposed. The area he was watching was a passenger section: rooms, ceilings, floors, recently installed in place of fuel tanks, all now exposed to space. In some rooms he saw light, from lamps, even data screens still functioning.

  All this open to vacuum.

  And people.

  Many seemed to have no protection at all. They came drifting silently out of their exposed rooms, spilling into space. Some wriggled, helpless, as if falling from a great height. Others wrestled with the silver fabric of pressure suits, or the opaque blankets of emergency bubble-shelters, even as they drifted out into vacuum. It was like an ocean shipwreck, Smith thought, people in the water scrambling for lifebelts.

  Many became still, after mere minutes, less.

  And, only minutes after the crash, he saw more people coming out of other sectors of the great hull, but these were better prepared, sealed up in silver suits, emerging from regular ports rather than gashes in the hull. They started to work through the damaged area, carrying what looked like empty sacks.

  Most of the spilled-out people were still by now – already – while others wriggled feebly. But, with puffs of attitude-control rockets, the vanguard of the suited ones pushed into the sparse, dispersing cloud of people, caught up with the stranded, one by one, and, whether they were moving or not, stuffed them inside the bags they carried. Once zipped shut, the bags seemed immediately to inflate. Air bags, emergency shelters – as Smith recognised from the drills he’d endured himself.

  Some of these saviours seemed much clumsier than others, and Smith wondered if these were passengers rather than crew, untrained in whatever procedure this was, and yet having a go anyway.

  Sometimes the rescuers were evidently too late. Corpses in bubbles. They tried, anyhow.

  John Smith wanted to go out and help with this effort. There had to be something he could do, even if only to help those retrieved. But when he tried to leave, the door was locked tight. For safety’s sake, apparently, his room wouldn’t let him out. Well, if the cabin held its air, it was probably the best place for him to be.

  Helpless, he turned back to the gruesome, slow-moving human spectacle in his screens.

  And now a single human figure drifted by his apparent viewpoint – without a pressure suit, or survival bag. No rescuers nearby. This vision delivered a visceral shock to John Smith. It was hard to guess at an age from here, in this condition. It – she – looked female, young, under twenty maybe. He thought he knew her – a student. The passenger roster wasn’t that large, and on this science vessel there had been few so young.

  And she wasn’t yet dead.

  One arm lifted, shocking him. Then she lifted her hands to her throat, pulling at the neck of her top. She kicked in the sharp vacuum. She struggled, kicking, clawing at her throat, her mouth wide. Her actions, jerky, hasty, contrasted with the smooth, silent, geometric – almost peaceful – drift of her body.

  He thought he knew her.

  He slammed his hand against the monitor screen, helpless. He yelled for help, into the air. ‘There’s a kid out there! Alive! Umm, portside, near the equator …’

  More kicking, writhing.

  There was no reply.

  The young woman was still scratching at her throat, feebly. Jerking as if she was having some kind of fit. He thought he could see blood where she had ripped the skin, blood bubbling out into the vacuum.

  Another kick of the legs.

  Then she was still.

  Maybe some last wisp of air had pushed her away. There were no rescue crews working out there, not in this area.

  It occurred to him that this was likely to be one of the most compelling images in the news broadcasts on Earth in over an hour’s time, carrying news of the crash, when the signals got there at lightspeed. And he hated himself for the thought, the calculation at such a moment.

  Suddenly his throat spasmed. He threw himself across the cabin to the small bathroom, and threw up at the sink, a messy zero-gravity vomit.

  Then he went back to his screens to watch some more. He felt, obscurely, that it was his duty to watch, even if he could do nothing to help.

  He saw a grand piano drifting, stately, out into space.

  24

  Aboard the ferry, Emmanuel Caspar, staring out at a sky full of chaos, of spreading debris, was trying to prioritise. He felt frozen, though every second that ticked by felt like a minute, a minute like an hour.