Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

This was fifty-year-old technology. The booster was a derivative of an old ICBM design. The first Sputnik had been flown aboard a booster basically the same model as this. So had Yuri Gagarin. He couldn’t work out whether that was reassuring or terrifying.

The bus lurched to a stop at the base of the booster. Henry followed Geena out. People stood around, watching them: technicians, managers, generals, politicians, wives, even a couple of kids running around between the legs of the adults. Henry clutched his microscope box to his chest. He couldn’t believe they let so many people get so close to what was basically a liquid-fuel bomb.

Geena led him to a short flight of metal steps, which were set right against one of the fat first-stage boosters.

Henry looked up at the booster. Foreshortened, it was like a busted-off piece of the Kremlin. But the booster was uncompromisingly real, dominating its flat surroundings. There seemed no doubt, at last, that these guys were serious: they really were going to lock him into that little capsule at the top of this thing and fire him off into space.

He took his first step on the metal stair. One foot in the dust of Earth, one on metal. This is the moment, he thought, when I leave the Earth. All the rest is detail.

He wondered where Jane was, right now, what she was thinking.

He lifted his other, spacesuited foot, and climbed the stair.

Geena led him to the elevator cage at the base of its tower. A single pad rat stood in here. When Henry and Geena had crowded in, their pressure suits billowing, there was barely room to stand without touching.

“Penthouse, please,” Henry said. Nobody laughed.

The elevator lifted up with a clatter. Henry looked out through the bars of his cage. A few pad rats remained, their faces turned up to his. The bus was already pulling away.

So here he was, rising past the flank of an ICBM.

It was like climbing the spire of some huge metal cathedral. White mist billowed around him — the cryogenic fumes smelled, oddly, like wet dust — and he could see ice, great sheets of it, condensed and moulded against the smoothly curved flanks of the rocket. The ice shone in the sunlight, but beneath the surface sheen, the metal of the booster was cold and dark. He could have touched the damn booster, run his gloved hand over that metal flank.

The elevator clanked to a halt alongside the heavy faring that shielded the Soyuz. More pad rats were waiting on a small platform that led to a round hatch cut in the side of the faring. Geena strode forward, and climbed in first.

Henry looked down. The booster flared gracefully under him, two cone-shaped strap-on boosters clearly visible. The flame pit was a concrete scar in the ground, but it was dwarfed by the immense flatness of the steppe, the land coated with a dull green, flattened by a heavy blue sky.

He heard the wind moan, and the booster swayed, creaking.

Following the pad rats” mimed instructions, he turned and sat down on the lip of the hatch. The pad rats pulled a protective cover off his helmet, and hauled outer boots off his feet.

The last pad rat, a heavy-set older man, looked him in the eyes. “ Ni pukha, ni pera.”

“Huh?”

“May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather.” He grinned. “I am wishing you luck. Now you must tell me to go to hell.”

When in Rome… “Go to hell.”

The pad rat took his hand, and receded slowly, over the metal platform; Henry, unexpectedly, found himself clinging to this last human contact, his last hold on Earth.

The fatherly pad rat let go.

Henry swung his legs inside. He had to climb through the faring to get to the spacecraft, which was completely enclosed inside its protective cover.

And so he entered the Soyuz.

He was in the orbital module. It was a cramped cabin, like a small box-room, its walls lined with storage compartments and handholds. It was just about big enough for one person to stretch out. The hatch behind him was a circle of bright daylight. Another hatch, open, was set in the floor, leading to another compartment called the descent module.

He lowered his feet through the floor hatch and twisted down into the space below. It was cramped in here, with three upturned frame seats in a fan shape, side by side. The inner walls were lined with yellow insulation blankets, and there were bundles of equipment: a life raft, parachutes, survival clothes.

Geena was already in the left-hand seat, working through a checklist. Stiff in his suit, Henry wriggled until he had lowered himself into the right-most seat.

And so here he was, lying on his back, tucked up inside an antique Russian spacecraft that had been assembled by guys who probably hadn’t even been paid for half a year…

As Henry had predicted, the Moonseed dug through the continental crust beneath the Midland Valley of Scotland, the primary infection site, and things rapidly got worse.

Jane picked up what she could, from the news broadcasts and her limited contact with Henry.

It sounded as if the ancient volcanic plugs all over Scotland were breaking open. There was some kind of event at the Binn of Burntisland, across the Forth from Edinburgh. That cut off the northern escape routes, then. To the west, closer to Glasgow, more vents were going up in strings, from Fintry to Dumbarton and along the Campsie Hills.

In the open air, she could hear it, feel it. Explosions, floating on the air. Shudders transmitted through the ground. As if the Earth itself was waking.

Time to leave.

Jane and Jack had reentered the national database of refugees at the Rest Centre they stopped at in Berwick. If you could call it a Rest Centre. The second-wave evacuation camp was a crude tent city, hordes of people clustered around medic tents and food trucks, malnutrition and disease and open sewers. A Third World scene, in prosperous Scotland. It took twenty-four hours after they arrived there for a policeman to come find them, and drive them out to a field on the edge of town, where an Army Air Corps helicopter was waiting for them.

They were to be flown to the US, thanks to some obscure string-pulling by Henry, and, she suspected, his ex-wife. She wasn’t about to argue.

But air traffic, even the military stuff, was utterly screwed up, because of the pressure the flood of refugees was putting on the requisitioned commercial fleets and military transport, and because of the mess the Midland Valley disturbances had made of the air space there.

So Jane had found herself hopped over to Prestwick by an Army Air Corps Gazette — actually, that had been rather fun, especially for Jack — and now here she was on an ageing 747, a British Airways airliner crammed with Scottish families, part of the great flood of refugees fleeing Britain, eight hundred of her fellow citizens seeking succour in a foreign land.

She got a seat in First Class, and, remarkably, the crisp, rather snooty BA stewardesses in here were still serving champagne before the take-off.

But even here, the cabin was crowded with refugees, adults and squalling infants and grumbling, distressed old people; the overhead lockers overflowed with hastily packed suitcases, even carrier bags. There was great distress, in some cases from injury, more often because of what had been left behind: family members, mothers and sons and grandparents, even pets; homes that had been the focus of lives for, in some cases, decades.

Waiting for take-off, Jack buried his nose in a book, and Jane receded into herself.

She ran a poll of her anatomy, her stomach and breasts and throat; surreptitiously she checked the moles on her legs.

She hated being so aware of her body. So frightened of it, in fact. So far she’d found little to concern her, little she couldn’t dismiss as hypochondriac overreaction. But nevertheless she had been exposed, with Jack, to whatever foul sleet had come pumping out of Torness, when she had taken them both blundering past so carelessly.