“Hi. Jonah, is Colin here?”
“Colin? ’Course not. Why would he be here?”
Stubbins gazed at her, and Marianne felt a shiver in her brain, as if he could see directly into it. See her thoughts, know what she now knew. He was preternaturally insightful, as aggressors often were. Was her body language giving away her revulsion, her fear, her fury at what he planned to do? Or was she responding to one of his infernal pheromonal scents? No, that was fanciful; she was under too much stress; her suppositions were ridiculous.
No, they weren’t. Stubbins knew she’d discovered something. He knew.
She said, “Colin ran away. I know he’s fascinated with the ship so I thought maybe—”
Judy, oblivious but helpful, said, “He isn’t here, Marianne. We’re just winding down for the day.”
“Okay, I’ll just—”
Then everything began at once.
Aaarrrrr! Aaarrrr! Aaarrrr! Blat blat blat!
Sirens sounded, just like a fire engine but a lot louder. Colin had heard those sirens once before, when the bad guys fired missiles at the other spaceship and wrecked it. The Venture was getting attacked!
He burst out of the storage cupboard and fell, his legs wouldn’t work right, they were all cramped up. A moment later he was up. He ran through the door from the shuttle bay just before it swung shut and made a locking sound.
The big door to the airlock swung shut and locked, too, but not the bathroom door because there still wasn’t one. Colin bolted for the toilet and made it just before it would have been too late. Only the toilet didn’t have any water in it or pipes; it wasn’t hooked up yet. He didn’t care.
Grandma’s voice behind him—what was Grandma doing here? Nothing made sense! “Colin, what are you… oh my God!”
Colin finished peeing and turned around. The wall screen in the big room was filled with a man’s face. He looked familiar, like somebody Colin had seen around camp. He also looked scared.
“Incoming, incoming,” the man said. “Impact in ninety seconds…. Jonah, the Venture is the target! Eighty-five seconds…”
Bad words were shouted from the bridge, a very lot of very bad words. Mr. Stubbins. Colin didn’t know what to do. Then Mr. Stubbins said, “I’m lifting,” and Dr. Taunton yelled, “No!” and Grandma grabbed Colin and he screamed, too, because all the grown-ups were so scared.
The spaceship made different, new noises, coming to life.
Dear God, the Venture was taking off.
Marianne grabbed Colin, who stood with his jeans around his ankles, pissing into a pipeless toilet. Stubbins cursed from the bridge, loud raspy noises as if the very words choked his throat. Judy yelled something—
Judy. What had Judy said, months ago? “A very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her.”
But nothing seemed to be happening, not even motion. No press of gees on Marianne’s body, no tilt to the floor, nothing to say the ship was lifting except the clanging shut of the airlock and shuttle bay doors and the two images on the wall screen, now split between the twisted face of the ground officer and the land falling rapidly, silently away beneath them.
“My pants!” Colin cried. “Let me go!”
“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen—” said the ground officer.
An aerial view of the building site, then the no-man’s land around it, then the perimeter fence and guard towers.
“Grandma, my pants!”
“Thirteen, twelve, eleven—”
Hills and farmlands coming into view. Frightened cows raced away from the thing in the sky.
Marianne released Colin, who yanked up his jeans. On the bridge Stubbins still shrieked and Judy matched him in volume. The door to the storage bay flung open and a man stumbled out, his face ashen. “Jonah—”
“Seven, six, five—”
Marianne threw Colin into one of the seats—as if that would help anything! The ashen-faced man, she knew him, from somewhere…. “No one knows what will happen…” Incoming incoming….
“Three, two—”
Far below them, something streaked white across the landscape, and then the place where the Venture had been exploded into light and flame, almost immediately obscured by thick smoke. Marianne forced her eyes to stay open, to watch… no mushroom cloud. The weapon had not been nuclear. But how much of the site had been taken out? Jason and Luke—
She dashed to the bridge. The ship rose steadily, light as a soap bubble. Stubbins stood in the middle of the bridge, meaty hands gripping the back of the captain’s chair, with Judy and Eric Wilshire in the two side chairs facing consoles, studying data displays just as if they knew what they were doing. Stubbins said, “How bad?”
The ground officer’s face, pupils dilated as if on drugs, said, “A direct hit, probably from a high-explosive Scud. Hard to see through the smoke but it seems… two buildings severely damaged. Casualties unknown. Havers, come in, Havers… Johnson… Olvera…”
But Wilshire, even paler than the man in the main cabin, said desperately, “Mr. Stubbins! What—”
“Stop the ship!” Stubbins roared. And then: “Do you know how to stop the ship?”
“No one knows what will happen—”
The ship stopped.
Marianne clutched at something, anything, to keep herself upright. Her hand found the back of Judy’s chair. There was no lurch beneath her feet, no sound of grinding engines. The ship simply stopped; again her dazed mind thought of a soap bubble, gently hovering. A soap bubble with perfect Terran gravity inside it…. My God, what forces must be contained here! How had human engineers built this?
Below, in panoramic sweep and brilliant Technicolor, lay Pennsylvania as it might be seen from a jet liner thirty thousand feet up. Life-support machinery must have switched on somewhere; there was warmth and oxygen and light.
Stubbins began to laugh.
The sound was shocking, unreal—more unreal even than the alien ship around them. “We did it!” he cried. “We fucking did it!”
Marianne felt something clutch her legs. Colin. She found her voice, although it didn’t sound like hers. “Jonah—the children? On the ground?”
Stubbins didn’t hear her. She had seen faces like that in medieval paintings, on stained-glass windows. His broad features and small eyes shone, transfigured with unholy joy.
“Jonah! The children!”
She might as well have spoken to the bulkhead. But Judy, who’d been talking in low, rapid tones to unseen people on the ground, said, “The kids were nowhere near the impact, Marianne. Jonah, NASA codes coming in.”
Stubbins took her seat. Judy grabbed Marianne and dragged her off the bridge, Colin still clinging to her. “You don’t belong here. Classified. They don’t need me in there. Kid, you all right?”
Colin nodded. The man who’d burst out of the storage bay stood uncertainly beside a crate. Judy said, “Who the fuck are you?”
“I know who he is,” Marianne said because, all at once, she did. “Wolski. Samuel Wolski, the geneticist. You did that work on HFRS infecting Mus!”
Judy started back toward the bridge but stopped as if shot when Marianne said, “The infected mice. They’re aboard, aren’t they? To release on World.”