“Prestwick,” the SFO said, “we seem to be back in business. We have diverted back to Prestwick and will land in fifteen minutes.”

“Number one. Number three.”

The captain pulled the plane into a shallow climb. Immediately the cabin was swamped by the dark, smoky cloud once more, St Elmo’s Fire dancing on the windscreen.

“Good God,” the captain said. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers.”

She dropped the nose, and the plane dipped beneath the volcanic cloud and into the light once more.

An engine surged violently, recovered and surged again. The bangs were audible on the flight deck, and the aircraft shook.

“We’re going to have to nurse this poor old girl home,” the captain said. “Shut down drill, number two engine.”

Jane peered through the windscreen. There seemed to be mist lingering there, or perhaps spilled oil, but the busy wipers were having no effect. It was sandblasting, she realized, scarring by particles of volcanic ash.

Even inside the cabin there was black dust on every surface. Jane picked it up between thumb and forefinger. It was gritty, with a sulphurous smell.

When she looked out, through the murky windows, she could see a new ash cloud, miles wide, still higher, black as coal, reaching into the air from some new geological horror.

If that cloud had been a little lower, if the base of the ash had dropped to ground level, the plane wouldn’t have got out.

Cautiously, leaning to see through the remaining clear patches of windscreen, the captain nursed her craft to the ground.

…And now, three seconds in, the rumbling got louder, and the cabin started to shake. Henry knew he must already be off the ground, but the booster was poised there, burning up its fuel just to raise its mass through these first few yards.

So here he was, locked into a cabin on top of a Soviet-era ICBM, which was balanced on the rocket flames jetting from its tail.

But the roar built up, and so did the vibration — every loose fitting seemed to be clattering around him — and now came the sense of acceleration he’d expected, almost comforting, pushing him hard into his couch.

The bunker spoke to Geena, and she responded, her voice deep and shaking with the vibration.

Henry wished he had a window, or a periscope. He wished he could see Kazakhstan falling away as if he was in some immense elevator; he wished he could see the great plains of central Asia opening up beneath him.

The acceleration continued to mount. He closed his eyes. Simple physics, Henry told himself. Acceleration equals force over mass. As the fuel load decreased, the mass went down, the acceleration had to grow… But knowing what was going on didn’t help relieve the pain in his chest, the heaviness of his limbs.

When he opened his eyes again he could hardly make out the instruments, so severe was the vibration.

There was a series of clattering bangs on the outside of the hull.

Geena shouted, “There goes the escape rocket. And now—”

And now another jolt, much bigger, fundamental. Henry knew that must be the clustered first-stage boosters dropping away. Now only the centrally-mounted main engine was burning.

The thrust built higher, smoothly.

“Thirty miles high,” Geena said.

Another clatter from the cabin hull, and suddenly the faring was gone. No longer needed, Henry realized, because they were already above most of the air.

The windows were clear. There was a shaft of yellow sunlight, lying across his spacesuited lap.

He looked right, through his Captain Nemo window.

There was a loose snow, drifting past his window: ice, breaking off the hull of the capsule. They were so high now there was no air friction; only the ship’s steady acceleration carried him away from the ice fragments as they spun.

The second stage rocket died with a bang.

The acceleration vanished. Henry and Geena were thrown forward against their restraints, two puppets, helpless in this steel fist. A second of drifting. The ticking of the cabin instruments, the cooling creak of the hull.

Then came another bang as the final stage lit up, and they were slammed back into their seats. The acceleration soon built to the most ferocious of the launch.

There was nothing smooth about rocket flight, Henry realized, nothing gradual. It was all or nothing.

He glanced at the clock. Less than eight minutes ago he was still sitting on his back on the pad—

The third stage cut, in an instant. Henry was thrown forward against his restraints. He gasped. His chest was sore, probably bruised. His back hurt.

One instant the stage had been burning as hard as it ever had, the next it was dead.

But there was no more rocket fire, no more lurches of acceleration. It was, it seemed, over.

The light shifted across his lap.

Through his window he could see the Earth: the curving blue breast of an ocean that had to be the Pacific, laced with streamers of cloud, like a slice of day. And above a blurred horizon there was a jet-black sky, the sky of space.

The launch was over. This was Earthlight on his lap. He was in a spaceship, and it was rolling, and he was on orbit.

Holy shit, he thought.

23

For two and a half hours after launch, they had to stay strapped in their couches. Geena worked through more checklists, ensuring the comms, solar panels, computer, pressurization, propulsion and other systems had all survived the launch and were working correctly.

Henry could loosen his straps. He felt his body float a little way above the seat, so his layered suit wasn’t sandwiched under his back any more. The ventilation was working the way it was supposed to, and he started to feel pleasantly cool; the sweat that had gathered in the small of his back dried up quickly.

If he relaxed his muscles, he found his hands rose before him, as if raised by invisible threads, as the muscles of his arms reached a new equilibrium.

Floating: no pressure points on his body, the temperature neutral. If he closed his eyes it was as if he was suspended in some fluid, in a sensory deprivation tank maybe…

But by his right-hand side, through the stout little Nautilus porthole, he saw the Earth.

White clouds, curved blue sea: his first impression. The clouds” white was so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look at the thickest layers too long, as if a new sun was burning from beneath them, on the surface of the Earth. And the blue was of an extraordinary intensity, somehow hard to study and analyse.

It was easier to look at the land, where the colours were more subtle, greys and browns and faded greens. Cultivated areas seemed to be a dull sage green, while bare ground was a tan brown, deepening to brick red.

But Henry was struck by how much of the planet was empty: all of the ocean, save for the tiny, brave lights of ships, and great expanses of desert, jungle and mountain. To a first approximation, Earth was a world of blue ocean, baked-brown desert, and a few boundary areas.

And the Earth was immense. The Soyuz, for all the gigantic energy of its launch, was trivial, circling the planet like a fly buzzing an elephant, huddled close to its hide of air.

The sense of motion surprised him. No feeling of acceleration, of course; but still the Earth unrolled beneath him, new features washing steadily over the horizon, littered with clouds that were strikingly three-dimensional. Here came the Florida peninsula, for instance, like a raft of land suspended on the royal blue waters of the ocean, its coast fringed by a delicious electric blue, the shallower ocean floor of the continental shelf. A little way out to sea, over the Atlantic, a bank of cloud was gathered in great three-dimensional ripples, like scoops of ice cream layered over the pond-like air. On the land itself, he could make out the spit of land that marked Cape Canaveral. Straight inland from that, surrounded by the central lakes, he could see the Disney World complex, splashes of white and grey. On the other side of the peninsula he made out Tampa Bay, and Miami in the south. The cities were bubbly grey, their boundaries blurred. The whole thing looked like a map — but in three dimensions, with that visibly thick layer of air above it.