The sky was black with the bombers, the growl of their jets filling the air. All around her people were climbing out of their cars to see, or peering out of their windows into the sky.

They were whooping, clapping. One woman was crying.

Henry had told her about this. The start of the counter-measures. Now we fight back, Jane thought brutally.

In the car, the firefighter groaned.

Jane pulled onto the road’s central reservation, and put her foot down, ignoring the blaring horns around her, putting as much distance between herself and Torness as she could manage. She tried not to hunch her shoulders against the invisible radioactive sleet that must be drenching them both.

In the back, Jack gave the firefighter water.

From the heart of Scotland, behind the fleeing car, came boiling clouds and a continuous roar of thunder. More planes flew overhead, and she imagined the fight against the Moonseed, all over the suffering planet.

18

Garry Beus stepped out into the flat California sunlight.

Edwards Air Force Base was a chunk carved out of the western desert, marked only by Joshua trees, twisted and arthritic and sinister. The land that time forgot. It was early, but already heat haze was shimmering off the flat, pale salt lakes on the horizon, obscuring his view of the giant aircraft hangars here.

And there was a muddy brown colour to the sky. Volcanic shit. The reason he would be earning his hazardous flight pay today.

It had started off as a normal morning. Shower and shave, a pass on breakfast. But when he climbed into his flight suit, an ugly sonofabitch in olive green with a zipper from balls to neck, and he took his wallet and log book, and he pulled on the thick socks he always wore in case of a cockpit heating failure — well, his heart had started to pump.

Edwards had always been the place to be for a pilot, a place you could come burning down out of the sky and always find a place to land on those broad salt flats, where you could touch down faster than some airplanes could fly. Chuck Yeager flew here. This was the home of the X-15. They even landed the Space Shuttle here. But in truth Edwards was a place for test pilots, like Garry himself.

Today, though, Garry had some real work to do here.

He walked to the squadron building. Here was the ops desk where he had to check in to confirm his mission, and his wing man for the morning’s two-ship flight, Jake Parrish.

The briefing between the two of them took a solid hour, led by Garry. He covered the mission objectives, and the motherhood stuff, the basic principles for every sortie: operating standards, radio procedures, contingency plans, SAR — search and rescue procedures — and the weapons, though today that just meant the two laser-guided bombs each F-16 would carry on its underwing pylons. There was some special briefing material on volcanic effects they might hit: hot updraughts, microbursts, ash in the carb, toxic gases, other shit.

Then it was back to the ops desk. There were no maintenance delays, no clouds, and the volcanic shit in the sky shouldn’t cause any hold-ups.

But here was Garry’s mother.

She was reduced to a shrivelled little husk, hair a wisp of grey, probably only half his weight. It just wasn’t damn fair, Garry thought. But she was smiling at him, so he smiled back and hugged her.

“My God, mom, what the — what are you doing here?”

“Well, it’s my fault you’re going,” Monica Beus said.

“Your fault?”

“The whole mission was my idea, I’m afraid. I wasn’t best pleased when you called and told me you’d been assigned to the flight.”

He grinned. “So, you want to split the hazardous-duty pay? It’s all of a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“I think you’re going to earn that today,” she said quietly.

Jake had joined them. “Don’t worry, Mrs Beus.”

“Doctor,” Garry said.

Jake said, “I’ll watch his ass, pardon my French, and bring him home safely.”

“Make sure you do that.” She looked up at Garry, as once he’d looked up to her, and he felt his heart break once more.

“Mom, how’s…”

She let him off the hook. “The brain tumour?” She smiled thinly. “Not so bad as you’d think. I get sickly headaches. Wiggly lines at the edge of my vision. If I had your job, they’d ground me.”

He wanted to hug her. “Mom—”

“Now, Garry, if I can handle it you can. Things can’t get any worse, after all. And I’m not ready to have a child die ahead of me. But you know how important this is.”

“…I know.”

“We need some good news here.” And she talked briefly through some of the issues that were coming across her desk.

The breakdown of government and society, the great swathes across Africa, Asia, even parts of Europe. Massive population movements. Deaths from geological events, and simple crop failure and breakdown of trade, on such a scale nobody dared estimate. The die-back they were calling it.

Even in Fortress USA the problems were immense. Rationing was already breaking down. The survivalist types had made some parts of the interior ungovernable. Lethal force was meeting refugees from Mexico and Cuba and Canada, for God’s sake.

It was worse than Garry had heard. Worse than had been made public. Somehow the censoring of the news was the most striking thing.

“We have to make a stand against this Moonseed. You are an American, fighting in the forces which guard your country and your way of life. You are prepared to give your life in their defense.” She was quoting the servicemen’s code of conduct. “That’s never been more true than today.”

Jake nodded gravely. “We’ll do our jobs, ma’am.”

When they walked off to the life support room, Jake nudged his arm. “Was she always so serious?”

Garry thought about that.

His mother had seemed a plump, warm giant to him throughout his growing-up years. Despite her high-powered jobs, as her academic career took her to a variety of universities around the world — and, at last to Washington, where she had, it seemed, got the ear of the President herself — she had always made time and space for Garry, never been less than a mother. Something he appreciated even more now he was thirty, and he thought about his own young family in LA, Jenine and young Tommy…

“Yeah,” Garry said. “She was always serious.”

When they were kitted out, they hopped into the van that would take them to their aircraft. The crew chief — a round, glum man of around fifty — showed him the aircraft forms; everything looked good today.

Garry’s F-16 stood waiting for him: fifty feet of sleek gun-metal grey, its colour darkened by the muddy sky. Garry walked around the bird and kicked the tyres, made sure the right weapons were loaded, and checked the oil. The weapons pods were two fat, sleek torpedoes slung under the wings.

He climbed the ladder that dangled from the cockpit, and perched for a moment on the canopy rail. He held onto the ledges and swung his legs into the foot wells, like James Dean hopping into a convertible. He finished up semi-reclining in the hardened seat pan, with his legs straddling the instrument console, his feet planted on the rudder pedals.

The F-16 was his idea of an airplane: a single-seater, single-engine bird in a tradition that dated back to the P-51 from the Second World War. And its primary mission was air-to-ground, which would give him the chance to fly at five hundred feet, the ground rushing by, the sensation of speed startling.

Garry thought his blood must be fizzing in his veins, loud enough for Jake to hear.

The preparations continued. He snapped an air hose to his G-suit, to swell the bladders that would keep his blood from pooling when he pulled Gs. He fixed clips at his shoulders and hips to his parachute risers and the seat kit with its survival gear, all of it contained within the seat pan. He pulled tight his lap belt, lifted on his helmet and fitted his oxygen mask.