would no longer exist. He had made the right decision. At that moment, Alex felt a sense of loneliness he would remember for the rest of his life. He wanted to go home.
He made his way back to the Soyuz module, trying to control his progress but still crashing into the walls.
Only by holding onto the handrails did he prevent himself from going into another sickening spin. He had a raging thirst and wished he’d found himself something to drink before he left. What happened when you opened a can of Coke in space? He would never find out.
Somehow he reached the entrance and folded himself in. He was operating on automatic. All he wanted was to get away. He reached up and closed the hatch, turning the lever to lock it before blastoff. This was the compartment he had travelled up in. But it was going to stay behind. There was a second hatch underneath him and he opened it, passing into the re-entry module below. There was more room here. Of course. The re-entry module had to be big enough for Kaspar. He strapped himself into the seat, found another headset and put it on, wondering if it would work.
“Alex? What is your status?” It was Tamara’s voice. He had never been happier to hear anyone.
“The bomb is still active,” he said. He looked at his watch. Twenty-five past four. “Professor Sing lied to us,” he went on. “Kaspar was here. And now I’ve only got five minutes left. Get me out of here.” Another burst of static. A disembodied voice was muttering half-words that made no sense. There had to be something wrong with the radio. Alex wondered what would happen next. How long would he have to sit here before he disengaged? And what would happen if he didn’t? The second hand on his watch ticked round. It seemed to be taunting him, moving faster than it should. The time now was twenty-eight minutes past four.
Already he was sweating. Hunched up on his back with no view, he had no idea where he was, how much further he was around the world. Twenty-nine minutes past four. Had he reached the last sixty seconds of his life?
He felt a sudden jolt. For a terrible moment, he thought that the bomb had detonated. Then he realized that was impossible. He hadn’t heard anything but he was suddenly aware that the module’s retro-rockets must have been fired. He twisted his head round and peered through the periscope. Ark Angel was already a mile away, vanishing into space like a pebble dropped into a well.
And then it exploded.
The bomb blew up, a burst of orange flame that ripped the entire space station apart, sending the different modules spinning in different directions. The arms with the solar panels fell away. There were two more explosions. A shower of brilliant sparks and a dazzling burst of white light that stretched out in silence.
Alex felt a sense of euphoria. He had succeeded! He had put the bomb in exactly the right place, and instead of propelling Ark Angel towards Washington, it had simply destroyed it. There was nothing left. A few pieces were falling through space but they would quickly burn up. At last it was over.
He fell.
The crackle on the radio stopped abruptly. Alex found himself in the grip of a silence so complete that for a moment he thought he might have died, and he had to remind himself he wasn’t home yet. He was plummeting down, feet forward, moving at eighteen thousand miles an hour. Five miles a second. This was the most dangerous part of the entire journey. If the control centre had miscalculated, he would be incinerated. Already he was aware of a pink glow outside the window as the module began to rub against the earth’s upper atmosphere.
And then he was on fire. The whole world was on fire. The very air was breaking up, being smashed to pieces, the electrons separating from the nuclei.
The module had become a fireball, and Alex knew that his life depended on the hundreds of thermal tiles that surrounded him. He was in the heart of a living hell.
He yelled out. He couldn’t help himself.
Then the red disappeared, like a curtain being torn apart.
He saw blue.
There was a second, back-breaking jolt as the parachute deployed. The world seemed to shimmer on the other side of the window and Alex saw the Pacific Ocean spread out before him.
A splash. Steam. Waves lashing at the windows. Sunlight turning the water into diamonds.
And at last silence.
He was rocking back and forth, a hundred miles off the eastern coast of Australia. The wrong side of the world—but that didn’t matter.
Alex Rider was back.
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