He knew about lava bombs. After the Moonseed, everyone was a volcanologist.

So now he knew what had hit him. Maybe he and Jake had indeed made the Earth quake. But the Earth, or at any rate the Moonseed, had struck back.

It wouldn’t take another lava bomb to kill him, now he was out of the airplane. Just a fragment, an ember of red-hot rock, might be enough to torch his canopy. And if he fell through the cloud his lungs were going to be filled with searing hot ash and dust and steam.

And he was falling right into that spreading cloud of black, fiery shit.

Garry got hold of the manual override handle in the right side of his seat, and pulled it.

He heard a light pop as the drogue chute emerged. There was a jerk as the drogue filled up, and then a billowing, like huge wings over him. It was a wonderful noise, the sound of his main canopy opening up.

Now there was another jerk, much harder.

Suddenly he was falling much more slowly, now at an angle to the ground, still strapped to his seat.

It was going to be twenty-five minutes before he touched down.

He would have to lose the seat at some point. A seated landing would be hazardous. But for now, it made him feel secure. Hanging in the air like this, it was hard to let go of anything.

At twenty thousand feet he pulled off his oxygen mask and dropped it earthward. His cheeks and neck immediately felt better.

He heard the roar of a jet over his head. It was Jake. The gleaming F-16, stunningly artificial against this barren, inhuman landscape, waggled its wings.

Then Jake fell off to the east. He must be low on fuel, and for all Garry knew had taken some kind of damage from the volcanism as well. But he knew his wing man wouldn’t rest until Garry was picked up.

He reached to the front of his seat and found the toggle switch that activated his distress signal.

At fourteen thousand feet his seat fell away, as it was designed to do. He looked up. For the first time he could see his canopy, a broad ceiling of orange and white and green, as visible as all hell.

He started to think about where to come down.

Even if he avoided that volcano, and any little brothers and sisters it might have, he didn’t want to land in the Canyon itself. Certainly not in the Inner Gorge, waiting for the giant flood he’d initiated to come scouring away the walls. He needed to look for a place on the plateau, then, either to north or south.

The wind hit him again, harder, and he found himself drifting through a neck of fierce volcanic cloud. Suddenly he was immersed in darkness, and his mouth and nose was full of hot, gritty dust. The buffeting got worse. There was hot air all around him, roiling and turbulent. It was possible that even if he wasn’t burned or suffocated to death, the damn turbulence could tip him upside down.

He had to get out of this. Like, now.

He reached up to the four-line release, a set of red handles either side of his head. He tugged at them sharply, to open panels to the rear at the canopy. He could feel himself shoved forward, as the air gushed out of his canopy.

In a few seconds he had come out of the cloud, into relatively fresh air. He was coughing, eyes streaming, but he was intact.

The air was carrying him a little more to the east than he would have liked, but he was able to correct that with tugs on his harness lines, and keep his heading to the north.

A thousand feet, less. He could see a lot of detail now — too much — trees and sage everywhere, scattered over a landscape that didn’t look nearly so smooth and featureless as from the air.

He’d done his time at jump school. Keep your feet together or your legs might snap — head up, and land into a roll, with contact at the balls of your feet, legs, hips and back, to disperse the energy of impact…

The landscape opened out, the horizon receding around him, the trees foreshortening, as if reaching up towards him. There was a patch ahead of him, clear save for a little sage. He had his landing area.

He hauled on the harness lines and got a little more northerly push. He kept his feet and knees together, legs slightly bent.

The ground was hard, and he fell to his left, hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and his head slammed into the exposed rock.

Quick-release the harness strap clips. Release the seat kit… No pain. Shock again?

He could see his parachute, billowing and collapsing, and, bizarrely, his rubber life raft, bouncing over the scrubby ground.

It was turning into one lousy morning.

He didn’t come to until they lifted him off the ground, wrapped up in some kind of silver emergency blanket. He heard the whup-whup of chopper blades.

Here was Jake’s face, hovering over him.

“You’re okay, buddy,” Jake was saying. “You’re a hero.”

“Bullshit.” Christ, his voice was a croak.

“It’s true. The whole damn Canyon looks like a dried-out river bed,” said Jake. “Ledges, buttes of bedrock, gravel bars, teardrop hills, like a piece of the Mississippi delta. And you should see the IMAX images taken from the Space Station. We’re famous, man. We’re on TV.”

Garry grabbed Jake’s sleeve. “But the Seed, man. The Moonseed.”

Jake’s face split in a grin. “We stopped it. NASA said so, those sensors they have up there. It stopped spreading. Listen, you get yourself fixed. I got two shots of Jeremiah Weed lined up at Edwards already…”

Garry thought about the new volcanism he’d witnessed from the air: the deep wound the Moonseed had dug into the continent’s oldest, hardest rocks, that even the Colorado could only scratch, the silver patches there.

Maybe they had bought some breathing time, at least.

He knew his mother said efforts like this were only superficial. More about making people feel good, feel they were fighting back, than about canning the Moonseed.

But hell, maybe that was all anybody could do.

He wished he could do as much, by analogy, for his mother.

In the oily interior of the Chinook, he stared at the metal frame ceiling, until the rotors roared and he was lifted, and he closed his eyes.

19

Henry and the mission planners were receiving a briefing, by a quiet young military officer, on the systems they were installing to support the nuke.

“We removed the code box, the permissive action link. For your purposes we engineered a time fuse and detonator and matched them with the warhead. You will have a timer, but you will be able to abort the detonation at any time up to the final moment.” The young man, earnest and soft-spoken, referred to the bomb as a “monkey’.

The nervousness this topic roused in the program managers and controllers and astronauts intrigued Henry. These were hardened, experienced people; why should the idea of carrying a weapon into space spook them so much?

Unless it was the very fact that a weapon was now deemed to be necessary.

Since the 1950s, if not earlier, the Solar System had been assumed to be an empty, barren place, a wilderness of gas and rock and ice, a stage on which man’s drama could be played out. A place to take a camera, not a gun. Now, suddenly, it looked as if that assumption was not true.

And they were scared…

That was when Henry got the message about some kind of problem at Torness.

He ran back to his quarters. There were several messages waiting for him, from academic contacts, the Scottish authorities, Blue Ishiguro.

Torness. He remembered the map he’d inspected with the Prime Minister. Twenty miles from Edinburgh, to the east; exactly along the route Jane said she was going to follow.

Since he told her to get out of Musselburgh he’d tried a slew of ways to get in touch with her, and had failed every time.