There was something happening there.
Hildegaard narrowed her eyes.
The sky above Sylvester blazed.
She held her breath.
From one moment to the next, the stars were swallowed up by a smear of blazing light as though a second sun were being born inside the crater. Instantly, she turned her eyes away, flew a 180-degree curve and realised that she now had full control of speed and direction. Her second little crater was some distance off by now, but the ground below was no longer hurtling past. She had won the battle against her acceleration and now she had to find shelter. All around, the slopes and cliffs, even the distant polar massif, were glowing in the light of the nuclear explosion, but that died away so suddenly that she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She turned the hopper.
The light had vanished.
For a moment she thought that Sylvester had absorbed the energy of an entire nuclear explosion, but something was different now. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing, but then the shock of recognition hit.
The ridge of the crater wall had vanished.
No, not vanished. It was hidden by a screen of dust that shrouded the upper slopes and fountained skywards, swallowing the stars, a plume many kilometres high, growing higher and higher, unreal, bizarre, a nightmare image—
Crawling down the slopes.
Crawling?
‘Oh shit,’ whispered Nina.
All of a sudden, the wall of dust had become a huge wave, spilling over the crater wall in all directions and racing down towards the plain. Nina had no idea just how fast it was travelling, but it was certainly coming ten times faster than her little hopper could fly, twenty times, thirty. For a moment she was paralysed, not able even to tear her eyes away, then she yanked the machine around and thrashed it back towards the nameless little crater. After the breakneck ride out of Callisto, it was as though the hopper was just creeping along. She risked another look. Sylvester had vanished completely. There was only the dust racing towards her, swallowing the sky and devouring all before it.
Faster. Faster!
The crater wall, her only hope of shelter!
Desperately, she yanked the grasshopper upwards, and it hauled itself up the slope as though worn out by the excitement of the past few minutes. Its telescopic legs scrabbled across the rocks and it tottered from side to side, then with one leap it was over the ridge. Nina spread her arms and leapt from the platform. Her body slammed into the steep regolith and then she was rolling down, over a sudden edge. She fell in a long arc and landed quite a way further off, in the shadow of a sheer cliff-face. From the corner of her eyes she could see the grasshopper tumbling end over end. She braced her feet in the scree slope and managed to stop her downward slide. She crawled into the shelter of an overhang and curled up into a ball.
Above her, the sky grew dark.
In the next moment, everything was grey. A hail of pebbles, tiny stones, pattered down into the crater’s bowl. Nina cowered as small as she could, protected against the pressure wave and the rubble by her overhang, but the rocks falling in front of her sent up a spray of regolith in turn. She crossed her arms in front of her helmet for protection and hoped that the suit would hold up to the onslaught. She could see nothing at all, merely a thick grey cloud on a grey ground, and she shut her eyes.
The wall raced past her.
She had no idea how long she had been lying there. When she finally dared take her arms from her faceplate, the impacts had stopped and a hazy, shifting cloud of dust hung everywhere.
She clambered to her feet and stretched her limbs. She could hardly believe that she was still alive. That nothing had broken. Apparently, she was totally unharmed.
She had survived an atom bomb.
On the other hand, she was now stuck in a nameless crater miles from Peary with no means of getting away. Her own little crater, that had saved her life. She had an intact spacesuit, her radio and enough oxygen for the next few hours until Io found her. At least, she hoped that they’d be looking for her and hadn’t simply assumed that her death was inevitable.
First of all, she decided, she had to get out of this crater. Better for the radio reception once Io turned up.
Resigned, she set out on the long climb.
London, Great Britain
I’m sorry about this, Yoyo—
Whatever else Xin said after that reached her as mere wordsound, a voiceprint only, since at that moment her overloaded nerves gave way. The nervus vagus, that had survived so many lesser crises before now, simply stopped all regulatory function and left the organs under its command to their own devices, plunging them into chaos. Without higher functions to command them, arteries let the blood rush unhindered to her legs, her heart found nothing to pump, her brain waited in vain for the oxygen to arrive and Xin’s next words were nothing more than a half-heard electrochemical impulse. ‘You lose.’ Maybe he said them, maybe he didn’t. At that moment, all systems shut down. Her eyes turned up, and she slumped. Shot down by a bullet that never hit her.
That was how Jericho found her. As part of a collection of bodies scattered over the flight deck: two dead guards, the dead traitor, and Yoyo lying there as though dead, without a pulse, unbreathing, drenched in cold sweat. She hadn’t picked up when Shaw called from her extension, nor when he tried his own phone. One look into Norrington’s office told them that he wasn’t there. This was enough to send him up to the sixty-eighth floor, worried, where he found Diane lying pitifully, her cables wrenched out, and clear signs of a fight. No sign at all of Yoyo but a trail of blood on the floor, on the gallery, the bridge, the steps up to the deck.
The rest was intuition.
He had burst out onto the roof just in time to see the airbike vanishing into the sky, and for a dreadful moment he thought that Yoyo was dead. He sank to his knees beside her, broken by his failure, seeing clearly the grief that would seize Tu and Hongbing when he brought them the news. But then he heard a barely perceptible heartbeat, his ear pressed to her ribcage. Another followed. A slow, faltering rhythm that picked up speed and grew stronger, and then the blood flowed back to her brain and consciousness returned. When he propped her legs up she came to, groggy, confused, just about able to see and speak. Who am I? Headache, tired, sleep.
Xin had let her live.
Why?
Meanwhile Shaw was growing apoplectic. Norrington’s guilt still had to be proved, even if she no longer doubted it. She was prey to a whole swarm of suspicions about what the deputy head of security could have done to damage Orley, and she ordered his data combed, his body searched. They found a datastick disguised as a house key, containing only a single program which uploaded as the image of a nine-headed snake, a shimmering, pulsing sign of his treachery.
That was the point when Jericho decided to give up.
They could fix their own problems. He couldn’t do any more, didn’t want to. It was as though he and Xin had some tacit agreement now that the killer had spared Yoyo’s life and vanished, leaving a curt but unambiguous message: Mind your own business. Maybe Xin had simply recognised that by now Yoyo’s death was unnecessary, since so many other people knew her secret. It would have been pointless to kill her now, and somehow or other pointless actions simply didn’t fit into Xin’s… philosophy, if that was what it was.