and his hands fell away, instinctively coming up to protect himself. Alex brought his legs up and kicked; his feet slammed into Kaspar’s stomach. Alex’s back was against the wall, and Kaspar was sent hurtling towards the other side of the module.
The Sabatier knife was right behind him.
It had been hovering there, its deadly point aimed at Kaspar’s neck. As Kaspar travelled backwards it went with him, but then the handle came into contact with the wall. The blade entered the city of Beijing and continued its journey, burrowing into the world’s surface. Kaspar’s body jerked as if he had been electrocuted. Then he was still.
Lying underneath him, Alex watched in disbelief. Kaspar’s arms were hanging down towards him. He was in the middle of the module, not touching any surface, suspended there. A string of bright crimson marbles appeared and began to orbit around his head. They grew larger. Now they were golf balls, trailing away, glistening red.
The knife had severed an artery. Kaspar’s blood hung around him like a grotesque Christmas decoration.
Alex had had enough. The module was heating up rapidly, still exposed to the sun, and he reached out and closed the shutter. A shadow fell across Kaspar’s face. The marbles darkened.
With his skin crawling, wanting to get away from the obscene, floating body, Alex dragged himself into the next module using a series of Velcro grips. He found himself next to a space toilet, a grey plastic box with some sort of cone device floating at the end of a pipe. He needed to use it. He was going to be sick. Grimly he swallowed, forcing himself to stay calm. He didn’t want to find out what vomit looked like in outer space.
The bomb…
How much time did he have left? Alex looked at his watch. One minute past four. Just twenty-nine minutes left. He had to move quickly. To have come so far, to have been through so much, only to die now! He forced himself to concentrate, to control his movements. He remembered the map he had been shown in the control centre. He knew where he had to go.
The hatch leading into the capsule that had brought Kaspar into space was open, and Alex saw the bomb at once. It was shaped like a torpedo, black, with six tiny switches and a glass panel with a digital read-out.
The whole thing was strapped to the wall, held in place with Velcro. With a ghastly sort of fascination, Alex lowered himself into the module and floated next to it. There was a six-figure display, rapidly counting down: 27:07:05. Alex checked it against his watch. Yes. Three minutes past four. He had just twenty-seven minutes left.
Could he turn it off? Alex examined the switches but there were no symbols, nothing to tell him what function they performed. Did he dare press one? If he made a mistake, he’d be blown to smithereens. He reached out a finger. His mouth was dry. Being so close to the bomb filled him with horror. But he had to try, didn’t he? Drevin might have perverted the genius of Ark Angel but, even so, the space station was a technological miracle, completely unique, the world’s first hotel in orbit around the earth. Could Alex really allow it to be destroyed? His finger rested against the top switch. All he had to do was flick it. It might deactivate the bomb, but it might set it off. The question was, did he dare take the risk?
The numbers in the display were still counting down. Now they showed 25:33:00.
Alex swore. Why didn’t they have some sort of rubbish chute? Then he could get rid of the bomb, jettison it into outer space. There probably was an airlock on Ark Angel, but he had no idea how to operate it.
Anyway, there was no time. His finger was still touching the switch. One of six switches. A one in six chance of getting it right.
Not good enough.
Alex let out a long, shuddering breath and withdrew his hand. He took hold of the still-ticking bomb and gently unfastened it, then eased it up through the hatch and back into the centre of the space hotel. Ed Shulsky had told him where to leave it, but Alex made the decision for himself. The toilet. Somehow it seemed a fitting end. He lowered the nose of the torpedo into it and left it there.
It was time to go.
He pushed himself off as gently as he could and was rewarded with a slow, careful progression back towards the waiting module of the Soyuz. He passed underneath Kaspar, taking care not to look up. In a few minutes’ time, the dead man was going to be given one of the most spectacular cremations anyone could ask for. It was more than he deserved.
The docking station was ahead of him—but there was one last thing he had to do. He looked at his watch.
Eleven minutes past four. There were just nineteen minutes remaining, and Alex knew it was madness to waste even a few seconds. But he would never have this opportunity again. He found another window on the opposite side from the sun, opened the shutter and looked out.
And there it was.
Planet earth. Seen from outer space.
His first thought was how big it was; his second, how small. Of course, he had seen images of the earth taken by astronauts. But this was different. He was seeing it with his own eyes. And he was moving. As he crouched in front of the porthole, he was travelling so fast that it would take him just ninety minutes to go all the way round. No wonder it seemed small. And yet the earth filled his vision. All the life in the universe, five billion people, was concentrated there. And the thought of that was enormous.
He was struck by the colours. No photographs could have prepared him for the sheer iridescence of the planet. It looked as if it were lit from inside. At first it seemed that everything was blue and white—most of the planet was water—and Alex remembered lying on his back when he was small, staring at a perfect summer sky. If he could have turned the sky into a ball, that was what he was seeing now. But as he gazed down he began to make out the shape of the coastlines, a thin line of emerald green; and then Ark Angel turned the corner of the world and there was Africa—all of Africa ahead of him—and suddenly he was seeing intense gold, yellow and red … mountains and deserts but no cities. Nothing moving. And he wondered, if he was an alien and came upon the earth, could he pass by without being aware of the teeming life below?
But then day became night and he found himself over the western Mediterranean seaboard, and even from three hundred miles away he could make out thousands of electric lights that had to be man-made. Spain and Gibraltar,. Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria and the Lebanon—all of them were visible at once, the tiny lights blinking like fireflies. There were storms over Europe. Alex saw the lightning shimmer through the clouds.
It wasn’t just that there was life on earth. The whole earth was alive. Alex could feel it pulsating beneath him, and suddenly he knew that for all its technology, Ark Angel was a sterile, dead place and he didn’t care that soon it
