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‘Can you guys make it? Shall I help?’

‘I can get up there by myself,’ groaned Olympiada defiantly.

‘No, you can’t,’ said Heidrun. ‘Your leg is injured; you can hardly stand on it.’

The main problem resulting from the change to their spatial surroundings was not so much the tilting of the floor, as that of the airlock. The front section was now turned towards Gaia’s glass face and pointing downwards. And it wasn’t just that it was incredibly difficult to get into it in this way; if they didn’t watch out up there, they would fall outside faster than they intended.

‘You’ll have to try to get behind the elevator as soon as you get to the terrace,’ said Tim. ‘It will give you something to grip. Oh, and bring something long and sharp with you, like a knife.’

‘What for?’ groaned O’Keefe, as he steered Olympiada towards Miranda Winter’s outstretched hand.

‘To block the cabin so it doesn’t go down again.’

‘I said I could manage.’ Olympiada wrapped her hands around the cabin railing and pulled herself into the elevator with a grimly determined expression. ‘Go and look for your knife, Finn.’

They grasped the railing tightly and waited. O’Keefe was only gone for a minute. When he came back, carrying an ice pick, he had a wad of material flung over his shoulder. Miranda let the bulkheads close and pump the air out.

The cabin shuddered.

‘Not again,’ groaned Olympiada.

‘Don’t worry,’ Miranda reassured her. ‘It’ll stop in a second.’

* * *

‘What are you planning to do?’ asked Dana.

The bulkheads had finally opened and the armoured plating had crept back into the hidden cavities. Freed from her prison, Dana had jumped down from the gallery over the bridge into the lobby, all the while thinking through her next steps: to break off the rescue mission, capture the Callisto, and get the hell out of here. In the course of the past hour and a half, she had been forced to win back trust by making out she sympathised with Lynn, but that was over now. Julian’s hated daughter was alone in the control centre. She was no serious opponent; the loss of Dana’s weapon wouldn’t make the task easy, but she could make do with her hands.

‘I’m flying up there,’ said Lynn, her face devoid of any expression, then went back into the room and hauled out two large boxes containing spacesuits. Dana cocked her head. Had she not seen Sophie? No, there was no way she hadn’t seen her, but why did she seem so unaffected? Surely such a sight would have thrown her off track, but Lynn looked indifferent, as if she were on autopilot. Her gaze empty, she took off her jacket and began to unbutton her blouse.

‘Come on, Dana, get yourself a suit too.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re flying one of the hoppers. The more of us there are, the quicker—’ Suddenly she stopped and stared at Dana with her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Hey, you’ve piloted the Callisto before, right?’

Dana came slowly closer, bent over and readied her own bodily murder weapons.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly.

‘Good, then we’ll do it like that. No hoppers.’

Incoherent conversation came out of the loudspeakers, hastily uttered sentences. Silently, Dana walked around the console.

‘Hey, Dana!’ Lynn wrinkled her forehead. ‘Are you listening to me?’

She moved faster. Lynn craned her head back, looked her up and down from beneath her half-closed eyelids and took a step back. Her expression came back to life. A hardly perceptible flicker betrayed her suspicion.

‘You’ll fly the Callisto, do you hear me?’

Sure, thought Dana, but without you.

‘No, that won’t be necessary!’

As if she’d been hit by lightning, Dana stopped and turned round. Nina had come into the control centre, accompanied by Karla. She was dressed in her spacesuit, carrying her helmet under her arm, and looked thoroughly contrite.

‘I’m sorry, Lynn, Miss Lawrence, I’m very sorry indeed: I wasn’t at my post. I fell asleep in the rest area. Karla walked past me three times, but then she managed to find me after all and told me everything. I’ll fly the shuttle.’

Dana forced a smile. She would have been confident enough of taking on Lynn and Karla, but Nina Hedegaard was incredibly fit and had quick reflexes. At that moment, Mukesh Nair stormed in, bathed in sweat, and the bubble of Dana’s quick getaway burst.

‘Karla,’ he called, exhausted. ‘There you are. And Nina! Miss Lawrence, thank heavens.’

‘Our plan has changed,’ said Lynn. ‘Nina’s flying up with the shuttle.’ She walked over to the console and spoke into the microphone: ‘Sushma, Eva, back to the control centre. Right away!’

Dana folded her arms behind her back. Nina was by far the better pilot; any objections on her part would have been futile.

‘You have a lot to make up for,’ she said strictly. ‘I’m sure you realise that.’

‘I’m sorry, really I am!’ Nina lowered her gaze. ‘I’ll get them out of there.’

‘I’ll come too. You’ll need help.’

Without waiting for an answer, Dana walked across the control centre, went into the room containing Sophie’s corpse and jumped back. Feigning rage and horror, she spun round towards Lynn.

‘Damn it! Why didn’t you tell me about
that
?’

‘Because it’s not important,’ answered Lynn calmly.

‘Not important? Again something that’s not important? Are you completely insa—’

In a flash, Lynn stormed over, grabbed Dana by the neck and threw her against the doorframe, making her head jerk back and crash against it painfully.

‘Just you dare,’ she hissed.

‘You
are
insane.’

‘If you suggest one more time that I’m insane, you’ll get a very tangible impression of what insanity really is. Mukesh, put your suit on, the box with the XL label! Karla, box S!’

Dana stared at her with unconcealed rage. Her entire body was trembling. She could have killed Julian’s daughter with a few unspectacular hand movements, right this very second. Without breaking eye contact, she put one finger after another around Lynn’s wrist and wrenched it from her throat.

‘Now, now, Lynn,’ she whispered. ‘Not in front of the guests! How would that look?’

* * *

After Gaia’s last nod, the airlock was jutting out from the viewing platform at such an angle that it was now pointing at the far-away Earth like a cannon. They held on to the railing, and each other, as the cabin bulkheads glided to the side.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Miranda sarcastically. The view over the terrace couldn’t have been more worrying.

The world had tipped by forty-five degrees; millions of tonnes of rock seemed to be eager to topple towards them from the ravine opposite. Where the terrace ended, Tim and Ögi were huddled against the railing to prevent whichever one of them might lose their grip from falling into the depths. Miranda reached out for the frame of the open airlock, grasped hold of it and pulled herself outside. The boots of her bio-suit were equipped with powerful treads to prevent them from slipping. Her fingers found a grip in an indentation. With her legs spread and the unrolled wad of material – several tablecloths from Selene knotted together – slung around her hips, she worked her way up the slope. The makeshift rope had been O’Keefe’s brilliant idea; the other end of it was fastened to Olympiada’s chest guard.

‘Okay. Pass her towards me.’

Heidrun steered the Russian woman out of the airlock, waited until she had a firm grasp on the railing, then let her go. Olympiada immediately crumpled over and slipped down the slope, but instead of falling she hung on the end of Miranda’s umbilical cord. Miranda climbed further up along the shaft of the cabin until she was able to crawl under it. With her feet wedged against the wall of the shaft, she heaved Olympiada up, unknotted the cloth and let it back down. Heidrun then hurried swiftly upwards, followed by O’Keefe, who had rammed the ice pick into the airlock door to prevent it from shutting and sending the shaft back down.

‘Everything okay there?’ called Ögi.

‘More than okay!’ said Heidrun.

‘Good. We’re coming up to you.’

It was relatively easy to pull themselves up over the railing, but once they got there it was still a fair distance to the airlock. Miranda threw the rope to them. After two attempts, Tim finally got hold of it, knotted it around the bars of the railing, and they made their way across hand over hand. It was incredibly tight behind the cabin with six of them, but at least they had a stable wall at their backs to prevent them from sliding down. They clung on alongside one another, hardly daring to move through fear that too much movement could tip Gaia’s head clean off.

‘Lynn, everyone’s outside now,’ said Tim.

The glass wall shook. Heidrun reached for Ögi’s hand.

‘Lynn?’

No answer.

‘Strange,’ sighed Miranda. ‘I never thought I’d end up regretting it.’

‘Regretting what?’ asked Olympiada hoarsely.

‘The swimming accident.’

‘Before Miami?’ She cleared her throat. ‘The one you went to court for?’

‘Yes, exactly. My poor Louis.’

‘What exactly do you regret?’ asked O’Keefe, tired. ‘The fact that he died, or that you helped?’

‘I was found innocent,’ said Miranda, in an almost cheerful tone. ‘They couldn’t prove anything.’

A new quake ran through Gaia’s skull and refused to let up. Olympiada groaned and fastened her grip to O’Keefe’s thigh.

‘Lynn!’ screamed Tim. ‘What’s going on there?’

‘Tim?’ It was Lynn. Finally! ‘Hold on, I’m on my way. We’re coming to get you.’

* * *

Lynn had insisted on their all leaving the Gaia together. In the maelstrom of her disintegrating sanity, the realisation still won through that Dana was playing dirty somehow, and that it wouldn’t have been a good idea to let her fly alone with Nina. Resolving both evacuation and rescue at the same time seemed to be the most efficient plan, and had a sense of well-ordered finality. She graciously acknowledged Dana’s laboriously concealed rage and ferocious hate and felt herself become strangely calm. Yet at the same time she was overwhelmed by the desire to roar with laughter. It was just that, if she started, she probably wouldn’t ever be able to stop.

They went into the sweltering body of the Callisto. Nina opened the rear hatch and ignited the jets. They rose vertically up into the star-sprinkled circus dome, below which they had once had the best seats in the house for viewing magic tricks and clownery, and where they now had to pull off the murderous acrobatics of saving lives.

‘Hey, you guys,’ said Nina. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Not for much longer,’ prophesied Heidrun.

‘We can forget the shuttle airlock. It’s too near to the engines, and I have to maintain the counter-thrust in order not to slip. I’ll approach in reverse with the rear hatch open, okay? I’ll have to avoid touching the head, so get ready to do some chin-ups.’

‘Chin-ups, somersaults, we’ll do whatever you want.’

They ascended further. First Gaia’s back was visible from the cockpit of the
shuttle, then the neck with its exposed steel backbone came into full view. Lynn couldn’t help thinking about what Gaia embodied in Julian’s eyes: her own image, to excess. And they really were becoming more and more alike. Two queens about to lose their heads.

The Callisto rose up slowly over the curve of the skull.

O’Keefe helped the others onto their feet. Pressed between the airlock wall and the terrace floor, they gripped to one another and waved at the helmeted silhouette behind the cockpit window. The shuttle began to turn on its axis, first turning its side towards them, then the open rear with the lowered tailboard.

‘Nearer!’ shouted Tim.

A jolt went through the head. Ögi lost his grip and was caught by Heidrun. The Callisto swivelled two of its jets. With absolute precision, Nina Hedegaard steered the huge craft backwards. The tailboard came closer, closer still, too close—

‘Stop!’

The shuttle stopped, motionless in open space.

‘Can you make it?’ asked Nina.

O’Keefe raised both hands, grabbed the edge and pulled himself up onto the tailboard with a powerful swinging motion. He turned round right away, lay down on his stomach and stretched his arms out below.

‘Nina? Can you lower the machine a little further?’

‘I’ll try.’

His right hand brushed Heidrun’s fingertips. The Callisto sank another metre, now hovering at helmet-height across from the others.

‘That’s as far as I can go,’ said Nina. ‘I’m afraid of touching the head.’

‘That’ll do.’ Heidrun clambered up to O’Keefe on the hatch. To the right of her, Ögi pulled himself up, crouched down and grasped Olympiada, who was handed up to him from below, steadying herself on his shoulder. Hands stretched out towards Miranda and Tim, helping them up.

‘We made it,’ whispered Olympiada, then crumpled over, as the damaged bone in her shin finally broke. With a scream, she rolled over the edge of the hatch and tumbled back into the tiny gap between the terrace and the airlock.

‘Olympiada!’

Miranda, who was almost all the way up, dropped back down next to the Russian woman and grabbed her under the arms.

‘No – don’t—’

‘Are you crazy? Up you go – as if I would leave you lying here.’

‘I’m useless,’ whimpered Olympiada.

‘No, you’re wonderful, you just don’t know it yet.’

Miranda effortlessly lifted the petite woman up and towards O’Keefe, who pulled her back onto the tailboard and handed her over to Tim.

‘Yeah!’ called Miranda. ‘See, there was nothing to it!’

She laughed and stretched her arms out. O’Keefe went to grab her, but her hands were suddenly out of reach. Confused, he leaned his upper body further forward. She was moving away from him at an ever greater speed, and for a moment he thought Nina had flown away without her. Then he realised the shuttle hadn’t moved an inch.

Gaia’s head was breaking off!

‘Miranda!’ he screamed.

He could hear her choking gasps in his helmet as if she were right there next to him, while her tottering form dwindled before his eyes. She was waving her arms wildly, which in some gruesome way could have been mistaken for a gesture of exuberance, the way they knew her to be, always in a good mood, always pushing herself to the very limit, but as she called O’Keefe’s name, her voice expressed the absolute despair of a person who knew that nothing and no one would be able to save them.