O’Keefe thought of the disc of the wharf, where spaceships were being built for bolder missions, of machines dashing through the silence of the universe and solar panels sparkling in the cold, white sun. Heidrun had pushed him out of the airlock up there, she had made fun of him, and Warren Locatelli had puked in his helmet.
How long ago was that? A decade? A century?
He wouldn’t be coming back, he knew that, as he set his helmet down on its shelf. Making brash science-fiction films, saving the universe, any time! Whatever the script called for. But no going back.
‘No,’ he said to himself.
‘No?’
Heidrun set her helmet down next to his. He turned his head and looked into her violet eyes. He studied her elfin face, saw her hair forming a flowing white fan in zero gravity. Felt his heart like a lump in his chest.
‘Would you come back?’ he asked. ‘Here? To the Moon?’
She thought for a moment.
‘Yes. I think I would.’
‘So you found something up here.’
‘A few things, Finn.’ She smiled. ‘Quite a lot, in fact. And you?’
Nothing, he wanted to say. I’ve just lost something. Before I had it.
‘Don’t know.’
He would never see her again either. He would stay out of everyone’s way. The world was full of lonely places, it was a lonely place. You didn’t have to go to the Moon to find one of those. Heidrun opened her lips and raised a hand as if to touch him.
‘In our next life,’ she said quietly.
‘But there’s only this one here,’ he answered roughly.
She nodded, lowered her head and slipped past him. A strand of her hair passed across his face and tickled his nose.
‘Mein Schatz,’ he heard Walo say. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Coming, sweetie!’
The lump was starting to hurt. Finn O’Keefe stared at his helmet, turned round and drifted after the others, his mind a blank.
Midnight had just gone. It had been such an effort to quell the excitement of the last few days that no one felt much like reviving it with caffeine, so everyone pounced on fruit juice and tea in the Picard. Julian would have liked to have some soup, but because eating soup in micro-gravity was pretty much a no-no, there was lasagne. He sawed a piece of it off and disappeared into the tunnel that led down to the suites, to phone the Earth from there.
Dana Lawrence joined him.
‘Not hungry?’ he asked.
‘No, I am. I just left my report in the Charon.’
He stopped outside his cabin, balancing his lasagne. Did this woman make any sense at all? In Gaia, she had proved her mettle, she had challenged the traitor Kokoschka and finished off Carl Hanna. Lynn couldn’t have made a better choice, and yet, thinking about it, it was the fact that any other choice was rationally unthinkable that unsettled him. Perhaps it was because of the image he had of women, of people in general, that he couldn’t make head or tail of her. He couldn’t imagine her bursting into tears or bursting out laughing. Her Madonna face with its heart-shaped mouth and piercing eyes made him think of a replicant, of Brooke Adams’ post-pod character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in the scene in which she opens her mouth and emits the hollow, unearthly scream of an alien. Clearly very intelligent and passably attractive, Dana Lawrence was miles away from any kind of passion.
‘I must thank you,’ he said. ‘I know Lynn wasn’t always – always quite up to it during the crisis.’
‘She fought remarkably well.’
‘But I also know that Lynn’s initial enthusiasm for you turned into rejection. Don’t blame her. Lynn’s judgement was clouded during this trip. You were farsighted and brave.’
‘I did my job.’ She mimicked a smile, making her features softer but no more sensual. ‘Will you excuse me?’
‘Of course.’ She floated past him and disappeared down the next side corridor.
Julian immediately forgot about her. He hungrily sniffed his lasagne, looked into the scanner and slipped into his cabin.
Dana reached Torus-1, with its bars, libraries and common rooms – then continued on and slipped into the long tunnel which led towards the upper level and connected the OSS Grand with Torus-2. Only two astronauts were still on duty at the terminal.
‘I have to go to Charon for a minute,’ she said to them. ‘For some documents.’
One of the men nodded. ‘Fine.’
She turned away, disappeared into the corridor that linked Torus-2 with the outer ring of the space harbour and drifted towards the airlock behind which the spaceship lay at anchor. Everything was still going to plan. Hydra still hadn’t lost, quite the contrary. It was only Lynn’s suspicion that unsettled her, as she couldn’t work out how it had come about. But even that wasn’t particularly important. Dana opened the bulkhead leading to the Charon and looked behind her, but no one had followed her down the corridor. In the Picard they were indulging in lasagne and homesickness. She sped into the landing unit and on into the habitation module, crossed the bistro, the lounge and started working away at the wall covering.
Hanna had told her exactly where to do it.
And there she was.
The lightning flash of memory. Amazing how it appeared in the middle of heavy cloud cover. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done in the igloo, but she could see Carl Hanna very clearly, before she had sunk to the floor by the coffee machine, frozen with terror. She saw him murdering Tommy Wachowski, heard his quiet, traitorous cursing:
Dana, for fuck’s sake. Come on!
Dana.
Her suspicions had already been aroused a few hours ago, when Dana Lawrence had hypocritically asked her how she was, but now it was certain. Hanna had tried to make contact with the bitch, in a way that revealed that the contact had been prearranged. Why? Drawing the necessary conclusions would have taken a considerable amount of energy, too much to put Julian in the picture as well, particularly since she didn’t talk much to her father any more. It had dawned on her that she felt a lot better as soon as she banished him from the centre of her thoughts. At the same time she missed him, as a puppet misses the hand that moves it, and she was already aware, at least on an intellectual level, that she actually idolised him. Maybe she no longer felt what she felt, but at least she still knew what she felt.
Something had gone wrong in her life, and Dana Lawrence had played an inglorious part in that.
Lynn peered down the corridor.
Determined not to let her enemy out of her sight, she had followed Dana Lawrence when she had left the Picard with Julian. The cunning of madness, she thought, almost with amusement, but the madness had fled. A few seconds passed, then she slipped after Lawrence. At the end of the corridor she saw that the Charon’s bulkhead was open, and knew that Lawrence was in the spaceship.
I’ll get you, she thought. I will prove you’re a snake, and the seething hatred that I know you feel for me will be your downfall. You shouldn’t have allowed yourself to be dragged into all this, unapproachable, unassailable, controlled Dana, but you aren’t unassailable after all. You didn’t try to shatter the others’ confidence in me for nothing. You will pay.