22

As Henry had predicted, the Moonseed dug through the continental crust beneath the Midland Valley of Scotland, the primary infection site, and things rapidly got worse.

Jane picked up what she could, from the news broadcasts and her limited contact with Henry.

It sounded as if the ancient volcanic plugs all over Scotland were breaking open. There was some kind of event at the Binn of Burntisland, across the Forth from Edinburgh. That cut off the northern escape routes, then. To the west, closer to Glasgow, more vents were going up in strings, from Fintry to Dumbarton and along the Campsie Hills.

In the open air, she could hear it, feel it. Explosions, floating on the air. Shudders transmitted through the ground. As if the Earth itself was waking.

Time to leave.

Jane and Jack had reentered the national database of refugees at the Rest Centre they stopped at in Berwick. If you could call it a Rest Centre. The second-wave evacuation camp was a crude tent city, hordes of people clustered around medic tents and food trucks, malnutrition and disease and open sewers. A Third World scene, in prosperous Scotland. It took twenty-four hours after they arrived there for a policeman to come find them, and drive them out to a field on the edge of town, where an Army Air Corps helicopter was waiting for them.

They were to be flown to the US, thanks to some obscure string-pulling by Henry, and, she suspected, his ex-wife. She wasn’t about to argue.

But air traffic, even the military stuff, was utterly screwed up, because of the pressure the flood of refugees was putting on the requisitioned commercial fleets and military transport, and because of the mess the Midland Valley disturbances had made of the air space there.

So Jane had found herself hopped over to Prestwick by an Army Air Corps Gazette — actually, that had been rather fun, especially for Jack — and now here she was on an ageing 747, a British Airways airliner crammed with Scottish families, part of the great flood of refugees fleeing Britain, eight hundred of her fellow citizens seeking succour in a foreign land.

She got a seat in First Class, and, remarkably, the crisp, rather snooty BA stewardesses in here were still serving champagne before the take-off.

But even here, the cabin was crowded with refugees, adults and squalling infants and grumbling, distressed old people; the overhead lockers overflowed with hastily packed suitcases, even carrier bags. There was great distress, in some cases from injury, more often because of what had been left behind: family members, mothers and sons and grandparents, even pets; homes that had been the focus of lives for, in some cases, decades.

Waiting for take-off, Jack buried his nose in a book, and Jane receded into herself.

She ran a poll of her anatomy, her stomach and breasts and throat; surreptitiously she checked the moles on her legs.

She hated being so aware of her body. So frightened of it, in fact. So far she’d found little to concern her, little she couldn’t dismiss as hypochondriac overreaction. But nevertheless she had been exposed, with Jack, to whatever foul sleet had come pumping out of Torness, when she had taken them both blundering past so carelessly.

Maybe she deserved to soak up the hard rain, for her stupidity. Not Jack, though. Not Jack.

She watched him while he slept, inspected him too. She didn’t want to voice her concerns, for fear of frightening him — or perhaps, she thought, for superstition, as if the evil when uttered might become real.

At last the jet surged down the runway, and Jane glanced out at the tarmac, sliding off beneath the wing. The take-off run was unusually long, she thought. Something to do with the heat of the air, probably. The plane lifted, and banked right before settling on its airway, its invisible track across the sky.

When they were airborne, Jack asked to be taken up to the cockpit; a smiling stewardess complied. When he was gone — out of her sight for the first time in days — Jane closed her eyes. She felt safe here, in the hands of professionals; she felt she could relax.

She sank into the seat, and a small chorus of aches rose from her body…

She slept for a while.

There was a flash, visible even through her closed eyelids, coming from the window to her right. Lightning. She turned and watched absently. There it was again. Roiling black clouds, too distant to be any threat.

Jack wasn’t here, presumably still up in the cockpit.

There was hazy cloud outside the window now.

Sparks flashed across her window, miniature forks, like scale model lightning bolts. St Elmo’s Fire, she thought, discharges from an electrically charged cloud.

She leaned in her seat so she could look forward to the wing.

The whole of the wing was enveloped in a cold glow. St Elmo flashes broke out across the metal, and flecks of light streamed beneath the leading edge like tracer bullets.

She could smell ozone. Puffs of smoke, of some kind, were seeping out of the air conditioning nozzles above her.

The seat belt light came on with a soft chime.

“Jesus,” somebody said. “Look at the engines.”

Jane looked.

The two engines on the wing were illuminated from within, as if by a magnesium flare. Shafts of lights shone forward, like searchlight beams, flickering as the fans turned and strobed the light.

One engine flared more brightly. There was a brief impression of the strobing reducing in pace. Then the electrical fire-light died.

The plane tipped to the right, subtly.

“Jesus…”

There was a thumping noise. The other engines were surging. Dying.

Acrid smoke was curling across the cabin floor. The cabin lights had dimmed, but bright electrical light was shining in through the windows; it was as if the whole wing had caught fire.

The sounds of subdued distress had been replaced by a chatter of concern.

But under the chatter, Jane could detect an eerie silence.

No engine noise. All four must have gone.

And now, beyond the wing, she could see a cloud, an ash tower that looked as if it was reaching to the sky, black and shot through with lightning.

She stood up. A stewardess came to force her down again, but Jane insisted. “Get me to the flight deck. My son’s there.” The stewardess led the way.

The Soyuz was shaped like a pepper-pot. Its main body was a squat cylinder called the instrument-assembly module, which housed fuel tanks, oxygen, water supplies, ancillary equipment, and the big retro-rocket that would, in a normal flight, be used to return them from low orbit to the Earth. On top of this sat the descent module, a dome-shaped tent of metal, where Henry would sit to ride to orbit. And over this was fixed a bulbous misshapen sphere called the orbital module, with equipment for operations on orbit.

The Soyuz had been designed, all those years ago, as the core of a system that should have taken Soviets to the Moon. It had never gotten that far. Instead the Soyuz had become an orbital ferry, carrying cosmonauts to three generations of space stations: the old half-military Salyuts, the Mir, and now the International Space Station. When it was time to return to Earth, the orbital compartment and the service module would be cast off to burn up, and only the descent module would reenter and parachute to the land, somewhere in the echoing heart of Asia.

The descent module was unbelievably cramped, even compared to the Apollos he’d seen in museums. It was just a crude stretched hemisphere of thick metal, so small your legs would be jammed up against the next guy’s, and it was impossible to straighten them out.

The ship’s main controls were here. But there was a disturbingly small number of instruments fixed to the walls. Some of them had even been hand-lettered with Cyrillic characters, or fixed on top of other components. The windows were small, circular and featured big heavy panes of glass and rings of bolts, like portholes from Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. But he could see no daylight through the windows right now; that big white faring saw to that.