Then there was a final kick from his rocket engines, the injection into space.

On orbit, he opened the F-28’s payload bay doors.

The payload deployed automatically. It was a small, complex satellite with a compact rocket booster. As it unfolded from the narrow payload bay the satellite looked like a fat, ungainly toy, illuminated from beneath by the glowing blue skin of Earth.

A spring mount pushed the satellite away from the F-28. Then the main solid-rocket booster pack opened up; Deeke could see orange smoke and debris gush from the fat, squat nozzle.

He watched the satellite arc away, upwards, directly away from Earth. It was heading for geosynchronous orbit, to hover over Borneo.

Thus, less than twenty minutes after receiving the order to launch, Deeke’s mission was complete.

The satellite was a derivative of Aquacade technology. It was a communications link, one of the final pieces in the U.S. forces’ electronic coverage of the battle zone around Taiwan. It would enable other satellites — Milstar communications birds, Keyhole surveillance craft; others — to communicate directly with each other, rather than via signals to ground stations. The satellite-to-satellite links would make the system virtually impregnable to Chinese attempts at jamming or interception.

The only real Chinese threat to the U.S. forces, in fact, was their stock of cruise missiles: the M-12 intermediate-range weapon, originally a derivative of the Scud but now heavily upgraded, and generally recognized as China’s best piece of kit.

But with the surveillance systems successfully deployed, no M-12 would be able to get more than twenty miles from its launcher without intelligence on it being fed down to the battlefield. Deeke doubted, in fact, that a single cruise would get through the antimissile batteries.

Information was the key to this war. Information flowed throughout the U.S. and Taiwanese forces. Every ship, every land vehicle, every infantryman, airman and sailor was suffused with computer technology, linked directly or through the satellites. The forces, joined by the technology, were like a single organism, ready to respond as if united by a central nervous system.

There were, in fact, more warriors in this conflict deploying computers than firing weapons.

The Chinese, with their crude human-wave strategies and resources, had only the rudiments of this technology. It was like a conflict between time travellers. As if a Roman legion had taken on a band of Australopithecines.

The war might take some days to play out yet, and no doubt many lives would be lost. But for China, Deeke reflected, it was already lost. The containment was going to continue.

He cleared his helmet of its displays. For a few seconds, he allowed himself to look out through the sparkling clearness of his canopy.

Here — for the next few minutes anyhow — he was suspended between the curve of Earth below, the stunning blackness above. His mission was achieved, his fuel spent.

He felt an odd stab of emotion. It’s so beautiful, he thought. So beautiful.

Below him, hundreds of thousands of men were swarming like ants to meet each other in a conflict that would be all but invisible from this height. Across the thin sky of Earth, aircraft and missiles scratched contrails; far above him, twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, artifacts of the most advanced nation on the planet clustered, to observe and monitor and warn.

And right now, there were four human beings — four Americans — suspended between Jupiter and Saturn, engaged in the most extraordinary adventure yet conceived by man. And his role in that adventure had been to try to shoot them down on takeoff.

But space travel was an absurdity. The journeys were magnificent, but there was nowhere to go, nothing but a series of lethal landscapes, floating like islands in the sky.

And if the U.S. had reached for the stars, like a soaring tree, its enemies — first the USSR, now the Chinese — would have had no hesitation in spreading over the face of the planet to cut away its trunk.

Gareth Deeke had no doubts as to the strategic correctness of the massive U.S. military investment of the last fifty years. No doubts, in the end, about his own role in the ludicrous Titan adventure. Military spending had caused the Soviet Union to implode, with barely a shot being fired; now it would enable the U.S. to contain China indefinitely.

Space had nothing to do with humanity. Down there, in the eternal blood and mud and dust of the two-dimensional battlefields of Earth, was where history was shaped. It had always been thus, and would always be thus.

And it was possible, he thought, that over Taiwan this day, the shape of the planet’s destiny for the next century might be determined.

He closed the payload bay, and, briskly, he prepared his ship for reentry, and the long glide home to the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Day 2460

Six years and nine months after its launch, the human spacecraft Discovery reached the moons of Saturn.

The etiolated crew prepared for SOI: Saturn orbit insertion, the long rocket burn which would embed them forever in the gravity well of the giant, remote planet.

They had arrived, Paula Benacerraf thought, at the desolate rim of the Solar System.

“Okay,” Nicola Mott said. “Twenty minutes to the burn. Let’s go to auxiliary power unit prestart.”

“Rog.” Benacerraf consulted the checklist strapped to her leg, and began throwing switches on the panel to her right. “Boiler nitrogen supply switches to on, one, two, three. Controller switches on, one, two, three. Power heater switches to position A, one, two, three. APU fuel tank valve switches closed, one, two, three.”

“Copy,” said Mott. “OK, APU prestart complete.”

“Good…”

Benacerraf — sitting to Mott’s right, in Discovery’s pilot’s seat — closed her visor. Sealed inside her orange pressure suit, she was cocooned in a little bubble of sound: the hum of fans, the hiss of oxygen, over her face, her own slightly ragged breathing. She heard Rosenberg’s voice as a crackle over the speakers in her Snoopy hat.

“Rog to the visor,” he said. Rosenberg was sitting behind Mott and Benacerraf, in the flight engineer’s seat.

Bill Angel was the only member of the crew not on the flight deck; he was back on the orbiter’s mid deck.

“Bill?” Benacerraf called. “How about you? Bill, do you copy about the visor? Respond, Bill, you asshole.”

“Copy, copy. Jesus, Benacerraf, give me a break.” On the loop now there came the sound of humming: fragments of song, mostly unrecognizable, jumbled up and reassembled as if at random.

“I’ll take that as a rog,” Benacerraf said.

Rosenberg laughed. “He won’t close his suit. He told us so; we ought to believe him. Who cares? Let him play with himself all the way through the burn. Let him—”

“Can it,” Benacerraf said sharply.

Crazy or not, Benacerraf didn’t want Angel’s death on her conscience. And besides, there were no scenarios which showed how just three of them, of the five nominal crew, could expect to survive on Titan’s surface. Angel was a resource she needed, and she had to protect him.

For now, however, they had a checklist to get through.

One step at a time, Paula.

“Load the SOI software, Niki.”

“Rog.” Her gloved fingers clumsy, Mott entered a sequence of commands into the computer keyboard. OPS 702 PRO. This was a chunk of a new software mode written by the ground crews and loaded up into the Shuttle’s guidance computers. OPS 7: software to control SOI, Saturn Orbit Insertion.