Within an hour, seven separate claims of responsibility had been made to the media — all of them from Pro-apocalyptic or Millennialist groups. Crude triangulation had provided the possible locations of the targets. The news channels certainly had no facts, just grainy footage of the explosions, captured by chance, looping endlessly behind pointless, repetitive speculation. It had been a very long and frustrating three hours.
There was a knock at the door and a communications technician, a middle-aged chimpanzee, came in. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.
“We’ve made contact with Top Side.”
Allan was instantly on his feet. He silenced the news channel.
“We’ve got voice only, and slow data links,” continued the technician. “You wouldn’t believe the lash-ups we’ve had to put together to get even that. Face to face will have to wait.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“I’m just grateful you got anything so soon.” said Allan. “I’ll be down to the comms room as soon as—”
“No need.” The technician waved Allan back to his seat. “It’s patched through to your desk. You can talk to them from here. Get things sorted before everyone finds out we’ve re-established contact.”
Allan gave the chimpanzee a smile. The chance to talk to Top Side privately before he had to face the media and the rest of the project staff was more than he could have hoped for. “Thank you,” he said. “You look done in. You should get a rest.”
The technician gave a weary smile and pointed at their coffee machine. “I could do with a coffee,” he said. “We ran out two hours ago.” Clara poured him a mug and he left, holding it like a sacred object.
Allan opened a channel on his com and beckoned Clara to join him.
“Top Side, this is Coordinator Allan, who am I talking to?”
There was a delay. Top Side station was just below the Sail’s surface out beyond where the Moon used to be before it had been moved and reshaped into a great silver sheet. Top Side was the sail’s helm. From there the Sail and its cargo would be steered, nudged forward slowly by the solar winds, and then gaining full speed driven by the solar hurricane of the expanding Sun. The greatest sunjammer the universe had ever seen. Its destination, the Centauri system, 4.3 light years away.
“Hi, Allan,” came the reply. “It’s Ruiz.” Ruiz’s voice, which had the gentle lisp of all the evolved apes, was distorted and echoed. From the acoustic, it was obvious he was wearing a space suit.
“Ruiz. Good to hear your voice. What’s going on up there? What can you tell me?”
“Not a lot,” said Ruiz. “As far as we can make out, three of our own people and a couple of ’stroid miners making deliveries somehow managed to get nukes up here and suicided. Looks like a coordinated attack. They all kamikazed into major ganglia. Christ knows what they thought they would achieve. They could have done a lot more damage a few klicks further down. Could have ripped the whole thing if they had taken out a couple of the Mainstays.”
“Any casualties?”
“Amazingly, no!” said Ruiz. “The bombers were the only deaths. We got a couple of people who are going to need retina transplants and one guy needs to grow a new arm, but nobody else dead. We were really lucky.”
“Space is a big place,” said Allan, relieved. “Even lobbing nukes around, it’s hard to hit people.”
“Mind you,” said Ruiz, “with all the construction finished there’s only a few of us left up here. Everyone else has gone home. And the damage isn’t as bad as we first thought: shrouds 84g12 and 84f13 are torn, and two more are holding but will need some serious fixing. It’s a mess but no show-stopper. There’s a lot of debris flying about. I mean, a lot. We’re all in suits up here — which is slowing work up. We’ve had three living quarters blow out after being hit by some of this crap.”
“Christ!” said Allan. “Sounds messy.”
“It is. Very messy. Good news is that the Sail will hold. It’s had a few holes punched in it, and it’ll distort a little when we launch, but the simulations I’ve managed to run say it’ll still hold, even in a worst, worst, worst case scenario. We designed this thing well; hey, I’m proud of us!”
“Ruiz?” Clara leant in over Allan’s shoulder. “The torn shrouds, can you send visuals?”
“Should be with you already. We have a couple of data links open. I’ve been sending down the clearest images I can get. I know that voice. Is that you, Clara? I heard you were finally visiting. It’ll be nice to meet you in person.”
“Hello, Ruiz. Yes it is. It’ll be nice to meet you, too.”
Allan cut in. “Ruiz, be good when you meet her, shake hands; she’s human, not Bonobo.”
“And you’re a prude,” laughed Ruiz.
“I think we need to come up,” said Allan. “Assess the situation for ourselves. When do you think you’ll be able to clear a shuttle?”
“Couple of days at least,” said Ruiz. “There really is a lot of crap flying about up here. We’ll have most of the big stuff under control in a day or two. The smaller stuff we are just going to have let go and burn up. You’re going to get some pretty spectacular meteor showers for a few days. I’ll be able to tell you more when I can get full communications restored. As it is we’re having to bounce signals all over the place to get through to you; some of the delays between teams up here are potential killers. People are going to die in stupid accidents if I don’t get things working soon. Allan, I have to go.”
“Okay, Ruiz, thanks. Good luck.”
He killed the connection.
And threw his stylus across the room with sudden violence, “Goddamn Suiciders!”
Clara drew back. “Suiciders?”
“The nut-jobs who did this.” He saw her blank expression. “Hell, you really were out of touch on Centauri weren’t you?” He sighed. “It’s a doomsday cult with a real doomsday to look forward to. After thousands of years of people prophesying the end of the world, their day has finally arrived for real.”
“They want to stop us moving the Earth?”
“If they can. Stop us and the world ends. I really don’t understand why they want Earth to be destroyed, but they do. I mean, this is Earth. This is where we all come from. It’s got to be preserved. There are five main groups. All of them with different reason for thinking the world should end and most of them are divided into various factions. The only thing that stops them from tearing each other to shreds is the fact that they hate us even more than they hate each other. We’re the enemy. You noticed the security on the way in?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. Seemed excessive.”
“I suppose it might seem so when you meet it for the first time but it’s not tight enough. We’ve had lots of minor stuff. Sabotage, cargoes destroyed or contaminated, more every day, but nothing on this scale before. No nukes. And they’ve shied away from killing people until now.”
“If they all want to die, why don’t they just go to Mars or Venus? We’re not saving them.”
“I don’t think dying is the point,” said Allan. “I think it’s being around when God comes back that’s the point. I guess those five who blew themselves up had early bookings to Valhalla, or Nirvana, or wherever they think He’s taking them afterwards.”
“And God comes back?”
“You guessed it,” said Allan wearily. “God comes back the day the Sun explodes.”
Clara looked Allan full in the face, green eyes staring into his. Unblinking. Intense. “We have to go brief the press now,” she said. “We’re breakfast news in five hundred systems. But when we’ve finished…” She paused and blinked, then put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. She kissed him full on the lips.