‘Now for some of that news I’ve been saving,’ he said. ‘We’ve identified your survivor – the one your people brought back from the near future.’
She gripped her glass in both hands, the knuckles turning pale. ‘And?’
‘His name is Mitchell Stone. He used to be under Hanover’s command.’
They’d found him preserved inside an experimental cryogenics unit on Luna, ten years in the future. He’d been the only living thing left alive, and there were many, many questions they wanted to ask him.
‘But he’s—’
‘The same Mitchell Stone who suffered what
‘Oh, for . . .’ Amanda put her glass down on a small side table next to her chair, and covered her face with two carefully manicured hands before letting them slide down to cover only her mouth and nose. She peered over her fingertips to regard him with a mixture of horror and awe. ‘The one you brought back here from the near future? The one who was frozen? Is he awake yet?’
‘Yes, and has been awake for a couple of days now. It was touch and go for a while, when it came to reviving him, but we’ve already begun an interrogation. Hopefully he can tell us something about just what it is we’re dealing with now.’
‘And the other one? The one who got swallowed up in that pit?’
‘Still under heavy sedation. Obviously it’s the near-future Mitchell we really need answers from. He must have witnessed everything that’s going to happen.’
He gave her a moment to try and absorb everything he’d told her.
‘Listen,’ she said after a moment. ‘About . . . us.’
He raised both eyebrows.
‘I know we’ve been avoiding discussing any plans about the future,’ she said. ‘It’s not like there was ever a right time to talk about it. I wasn’t sure until now, but . . . I’m not going off to the colonies with the rest of you.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’
He stared at her wordlessly for a moment, before he could summon a response. ‘I don’t understand.’
She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and then falling. ‘I don’t know if I want to survive what’s coming, knowing I had a part to play in all . . . all of this.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Think of it like the captain going down with the sinking ship after she’s steered it straight into an iceberg, Thomas. I should have listened more to my staff when they warned me not to let those artefacts be brought to Earth until we knew exactly what we were dealing with.’
‘We don’t know that the artefacts are responsible. And you can’t blame yourself for—’
‘Then who do I blame?’ she snapped.
He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no point worrying about what can’t be undone.’
‘If we do follow the rest of them to the colonies, we’ll be cut off from everything we’ve ever known. All of it . . . gone.’ She shuddered. ‘I’d say I can’t even imagine it, but I don’t need to. I’ve
She stood up then, smoothing her skirt down over her thighs, her movements slow and fluid in the lower gravity. He had a sudden flash of memory from several nights back, of her laughing and then sighing as he kissed her thighs, pulling himself up and on top of her.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t . . .’
She walked over to the door. ‘Don’t even bother trying to convince me, Thomas. I want to see how it ends.’
‘There’s something you need to know,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘About the video message – the warning. You haven’t seen all of it.’
She frowned and let go of the door handle. ‘I haven’t?’
‘I had part of it redacted.’
She regarded him uncertainly. ‘What’s in the bits you took out?’
He got up to fetch himself another drink. He was going to need it to get through this.
‘You are,’ he replied.
SEVEN
Flathead Lake, Montana, 25 January 2235
It took Jeff Cairns nearly six hours to navigate the hire car to his cabin in the Rockies. Early spring rains, bringing the last of the meltwater down from the peaks, had flooded out a bridge and also wiped out a section of road, meaning long detours and one eye kept constantly on the weather feed, throughout his long drive north from Missoula.
