Chapter Thirty-Two

Kallandra grinned at Derek’s cunning. Elaine must have allowed through one of his verbal messages, probably while Disraeli was out of the building and didn’t have an opportunity to hover over him with a hand on the microphone. She ensured the Apoidea’s nearby sound and cam recorders were turned off.

‘Hello Kal. I suppose it’s the afternoon there, fifteen hundred hours, give or take a minute.’

Yes it was, clever timing to use the Apoidea’s time zone, which of course was set to synchronize with Greenwich Mean Time, and aft 3 refers to the suspect hold.

‘Don’t forget it’s our fourth anniversary tomorrow since we met; don’t all those months fly?’

It’s three years and three months so what was he telling her? She was hoping for a code to hack into the hatch for number 3 aft, but forty eight could refer to an encrypted channel. Of course he was devious enough to make it forty eight minus the actual thirty nine. She’d have to try a few combinations.

“Bad news back in Britain. A severe quake. Blake sent me a picture of the Bristol Channel as it happened.”

NASA sent her news streams so she knew about the quake but at least it seemed Blake must be OK and maybe referring to channel was a clue for her to use the previous numbers for an encrypted radio channel?

“On another matter, I don’t think you should put Apoidea through those stop-start pressures again, nor yourself. Maybe we can work out a drone to do it like you’re probably thinking about. See you later, love.”

She immediately punched in channel forty eight, an unused data radio channel.

Crackles, then she heard an auto-signal retrieval tone followed by what sounded like a fax machine signal. Her system automatically recorded it. After a few minutes, she decoded and transformed the cacophony into Derek’s voice.

“Congratulations. Still no real confirmation of the contents of number 3 aft.

Earthside inventory lists LSS stores as planned. I’m convinced it might hold dangerous cargo so be careful. In this signal, further encrypted code D is a backdoor hex password for all hatches with locks for Apoidea. Disraeli and MC frontliners don’t know it. Tabitha Wish is on our side now to not destroy the spheres. I think she and Claude had something going, but she doesn’t blame us, now. Be careful up there. Kisses.’

Why so much about Tabitha Wish? Kallandra had the wink of bad feelings that Derek might have urges to expand his romantic experiences. He’d had a sheltered life, even in student days, so it would be understandable, even if not forgivable. Tabitha and Claude? Possibly, but she wasn’t the Amanda Belton in his files.

* * *

The code worked, and the internal hatch for number 3 aft unlocked so she could enter without going for an outside walk. As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t broken any rules. NASA might be hiding something nasty in there, but they hadn’t told her she couldn’t investigate, only locked the door and threw away the key. She wasn’t averse to breaking rules, however, safety protocols were important to her; they’d kept her alive as a test pilot. She sealed off the rest of the ship except for an internal airlock outside the hatch, and while letting pressure and temperature normalise in the store she donned a radiation suit.

She cracked the hatch, sent in a robot sniffer, and closed it. Her screen displayed a cam image along with radiation levels and gases. Neutron and gamma-ray emission accumulated as the robot, propelled by small compressed air jets, manoeuvred about the crowded and dark cargo hold the size of a minibus. Racks around the walls normally held containers secured by tongue and grooves for auto-retrieval, but many of them floated around presumably knocked around when Apoidea attempted to talk to the spheres. She smiled wryly at the thought that not all her additional resources had been removed.

The radioactive readings increased as the sniffer approached a dark box, the size of a padded coffin that seemed to be bolted down. She waited a few minutes for the sniffer to accumulate data and analyse the emissions. It then concluded that the box was consistent with being a plutonium bomb, probably 12 Kilograms, a tungsten tamper, with a shielding of lithium hydride.

At the nearest console she sent a coded message to Derek.

“Derek, I’m putting the readouts from a two by one by one metre box in there.

Any ideas how I check if it’s armed—and then disarm it? I have some nuke armaments training, but only to USAF Level Two handling. There are no radio emissions from the box. Ciao.”

She knew he’d not want her to take a hammer and chisel to the box. The problem was that the bastards had probably sealed the bomb by welding the edges. It could be booby trapped, but unlikely since they want it to detonate in the vicinity of the spheres, not if the crew of Apoidea got curious. Whatever priming or trigger mechanism had been wired in place, it was robust enough to survive severe rattling. Nevertheless, it was likely that an assault with a cutting tool, mechanical or laser, could be hazardous to her health, life and the mission.

While she waited for Derek to make a return call, she set about investigating the inventory for a mobile engine that could be used to simulate the spheres’ time decoherence communications.

She couldn’t find anything bigger or more powerful than the small robotic mechanisms like the sniffer. She’d have to use the main engines again on the Apoidea in spite of Derek’s misgivings. With that decision made, she set to trying again to interpret the Sphere’s signals.

She opened the latest message from the group of Artificial Intelligence and linguist experts gathered at Houston. Hopes that they’d cracked the code evaporated.

With the optimism of a one-legged tight-rope walker, she’d sent them the three sets of the spheres’ flickering. There was nothing in the patterns that could be interpreted for humans. A twig tapping a window on the breeze made more sense.

The experts had suggestions; they wouldn’t have had their bank balances enhanced otherwise. Repeating the spheres’ flickering back at them had a minority backing. Sending them her own pattern carried the majority. The message could be the expected declaration of PI or prime numbers—up to her. Sending a declaration of peace would probably be more meaningless to them than it would be to Earth’s warring factions, assuming they possessed deciphering skills. She thought she’d better stay clear of broadcasting to them NASA’s published Vision: “…we boldly expand frontiers in air and space to inspire and serve America and to benefit the quality of life on Earth.”

Nothing there about peace and goodwill to non-Earth species. If anything, Earth was saying move over, we’re on our way to expand in your territory.

PI was out of the question as far as she was concerned. Why would people think that transmitting PI to the nth decimal place would make aliens think the signal came from an advanced species? PI was the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. There were plenty of circles and diameters in nature. So it was feasible that among the millions of radio signals emitted by a spherical celestial object, a signal like PI would be found.

Sending a sequence of primes wouldn’t mean anything more than an intelligent species sent it. The spheres already knew humans were sufficiently savvy to build space ships, so no need to send PI, primes or anything like the 1974 Arecibo message to space. She needed to exude peace and an appeal for help—an intergalactic SOS.

It was all right the linguistics experts saying send the message in hex or Morse code because the intelligent spheres will work it out—but they haven’t talked to anyone for two billion years! It was possible the spheres weren’t actually communicating with each other with their time decoherences: they could have been random movements.

Jiggling to get comfortable.

In an attempt to diversify communication methods, Kallandra initiated a holographic display system that would project still images of floods and disasters behind the Apoidea.

“What’s the point?” She’d argued with the team two days before leaving Earth.

“How would spheres recognise a disaster when they’ve spent the last two billion years blindly simmering deep underground?”

“My dear Kal,” said Rob Summers, acting in his official capacity as NASA psychologist and apparently extended to alien mind-reading, “the spheres may well have all sorts of sensors once out in space. A holograph display would be an unusual event, worthy of investigation. Granted they’d have to be relatively close to notice it, so don’t waste time and energy on projection when they’re thousands of clicks away.”

Now they were only sixteen-hundred kilometres, give or take a stone’s throw— she gave a quick loud laugh at that thought because a thrown stone out here could travel forever—she’d asked for more images of despair to project. It seemed weird to her that her situation was a bit like a backseat automobile passenger trying to attract the attention of a following police car. Holding up ‘Help Me!’ signs but the police driver didn’t understand English, or even the concept of help messages.

She recalled more arguments:

“Suppose pictures of earthquakes with falling and burning buildings, destroyed bridges and floods mean absolutely nothing to them?” she’d asked Rob.

“I agree. We should send them images of people; their distraught faces, broken people—”

“But the aliens might not have faces—the pictures could be as significant to them as finding meaning in a plate of scrambled egg for us.”

“You’re a bit negative, Kal, aren’t you?”

She opened her arms in mock apology. “Trying to think beyond the obvious, Rob.”

“Fair doos. Aborigines back home tried to communicate with early white settlers using body paint and tribal dancing. Sadly, they waved pointed sticks and got shot. If we use a mathematics number series instead of people—”

“Ah, then we could break it to show things aren’t well on Earth,” she said, realizing that a math series but disrupted could be a meaningful message.

“That wouldn’t work. For one thing, assuming base ten is in their numerical vocabulary, they might know a number series that does that, or they might assume our transmitter was faulty. Good concept though, and worth working on—I’ll get back to you.”

He hadn’t, yet. A burst of telemetry from Houston had not only sent her new images of bridge collapses and floods, but moving images and software enhancements to enable moving quasi-holograph footage to be displayed.

Following that transmission came comments from a Professor Tiptley at MIT that prickled the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Major Harvard, some observations of mine may be of technical interest to you in your predicament. The way the holograph system we’ve put together for you makes use of a Doppler frequency shift using coherent light reflecting from moving objects.

The Doppler data is manipulated by using both temporal and spatial filtering of modulated reference wave holograms, which…” the rest was too much blah blah for her to take in without more coffee, but the magic words temporal and Doppler sent her brain into a spin of its own.

She’d started to frame a set of questions to ask the professor if the modulations could be programmed to approximate to the type of sphere flickerings, and to what level could they be boosted. Did she have an alternative in the holograph drivers to using the Apoidea as a time decoherence machine? She’d already guessed it wasn’t the visual output that spheres seemed to communicate with, but the underlying time decoherences. So, if the Doppler modulations also registered with the spheres’ sensing devices rather than the actual images displayed, then just maybe a comms channel could be opened between them that didn’t involve her insides turning to jam. She sent off her questions feeling one of the worry knots undo in her stomach, and a warm satisfying glow making her reach for the kitchen area store for chocolate.

* * *

Three-hours’ sleep later, beeping announced the arrival of messages. When was she going to get a full eight hours shut-eye? She heated a coffee and tapped the comms console. Derek first.

‘Hello Kal. The bomb is enough to vaporize the ship and damage the spheres— depending on exactly how close they got and what the hell they’re made of. And, of course, whether they’d stand in the same time spot to be affected. The whole device seems to be desperate and doomed to fail. On the other hand, it might annoy the spheres so much they’d leave us to our fate. In my opinion the best course of action is to jettison the thing. I doubt it’s booby-trapped, but that’s a risk for you to consider. I’ve uploaded inside this message code for the robotics to use the jigs and open the external hatch, but you’ll have to use power tools to manually unbolt the box from the bulkhead and superglue a hydrazine gas jet to it. Good luck. Oh, I’ve also uploaded a program to probe the electronics in the box. It might do nothing or tell us what’s going on in there.

Derek xx”

The spheres would be more than annoyed if the Apoidea blew up in their faces, they’d be fucking pissed off, rush to Earth and put its core into the middle of last week, eight million kilometres away from the rest of the planet. So, now she had to suit up and work on Disraeli’s Trojan Horse surprise, and update the holograph display, as well as single-handedly housework the ship. To think she’d brought all the Bronte sisters’ novels to read in case too much spare time was going to be a problem.

A response arrived from the professor.

“Major Harvard, you obviously know less about Quantum Mechanics than your spheres do about making coffee. Ditto for the way the holograph projection system works. You obviously didn’t read past the first couple of pages of my previous memorandum. Time decoherences are several levels of relevance from the temporal modulations used in the new gadget we’ve provided for you. Nevertheless, considering these are desperate times, I’ve added the parameters for the projectors and holographic ‘engine’ to maximise their quasi decoherence emulation. Good luck. Tiptley.”

So the holographic fireworks are unlikely to be used as communication, either.

She’d give it a go anyway. Whatever happens, at least the spheres were heading back with her, whether to ensure they were not followed again or to make amends probably didn’t depend on her efforts.

She’d set the holographic display in a rush, eager to get rid of the plutonium bomb. Even so, she would have liked to see what the display looked like from the Spheres’ perspective. Her rear camera view wouldn’t reveal the working holograph.

The best she could manage was a simulation on a computer.

She felt she needed to work fast to get rid of the bomb before Disraeli sussed out what was going on. She hadn’t heard from him for more than half a day, though she turned the cams on enough to keep Houston busy, and their main interest was the location of the spheres. Her guess was that Disraeli and his cronies really did want the spheres to help Earth, but only if that intention was explicit. If no such indication arrived, then there must be a threshold distance from Earth at which the Apoidea would be used to destroy the spheres. The idiots, as if the spheres hadn’t already demonstrated their ability to dance around explosions.

Despairing at the unconnected thinking back on Earth wasn’t going to save her neck up here so she gathered equipment and turned off the aft cams. She sent a boring mission update report to Houston to keep them thinking mundane activity kept her occupied, and after refreshments and ablutions, she dressed up and entered number 3 aft.

Her first task was electronically listening to the bomb. Nothing. It could have been dead, switched off maybe by the spheres already. She could send it some test signals but nooooo….

Next she superglued two fire-extinguisher-sized tanks of hydrazine to opposite sides of the box. Radio controlled nozzle actuators gave her elementary control so that once spaceborne, the explosive coffin wouldn’t boomerang back to her. She added small transmitters to two opposite corners.

A portable electric wrench wouldn’t shift the first bolt. She glowered at the hexagonal black beast holding a welded right-angled bracket to the floor. It was no good trying the other five if that one stuck. It meant fetching the heavy-duty air-pressure wrench from a distant tool locker. “Fuck and bugger you, Dizz the…” she couldn’t think of a rhyming expletive as she opened the hatch, and set off tool fetching.

This time, with the help of the noisy air compressor, she whipped off the bolts.

After triggering the external cargo hatch the weightless box lifted slightly with the evacuating air after which it was easy with the jig to manipulate it out into space. With a remote control she switched on the jets and watched the box accelerate away at right angles to Apoidea’s trajectory. There was no need for them to jet for long. Once it started moving it would maintain velocity until something stopped it.

Unless the spheres accelerated, they wouldn’t intercept the bomb, which, although moving away from Apoidea, continued its forward momentum. Once it was two-thousand kilometres from the spheres she could activate the nozzles to send the box on another course away from Earth.

Any satisfaction she felt dampened when Disraeli shouted down the radio at her an hour later. Not that she felt threatened by men shouting at her. Her pa yelled at her often enough, his raucous voice echoing across their Arizona yard dust urging her to come on down off the roof. Even when he hit her for answering back, she stood up to him all the more until he gave up. Now, Disraeli shouted as if she was his wayward daughter and in the same room. She laughed but with nervous bravado. She had no surety that Houston hadn’t an override to Derek’s programming. They could mess up her Life Support System, induce a hibernation or worse. After all, they were prepared to sacrifice her and Claude; atomise them. And the military hawks could launch missiles against the spheres, but they’d know that was useless and counter-productive.

She felt pleased that Disraeli bellowed a give away piece of information: the bomb had indeed been disabled. However, he’d assumed she’d done it and of course it had to be with Derek’s connivance so he was detained.

She knew that Derek accepted their conspiracy might be uncovered. She had to make sure the media knew. Maybe, as Derek had said, Tabitha would help.

With her fiancé locked up, Kallandra felt more alone than ever.

She punched up a view of the trajectory of the box to ensure it didn’t need redirecting before she hit the sack for a few hours. A red line tracked its progress. A vector image created by the transmitters she’d placed showed the box wasn’t rotating, making course adjustments easier. She made the gas jets do a ten seconds burn for more acceleration, and as a test. Would the spheres notice what she’d done, and interpret it as a peaceful gesture: ridding them both of a bomb? Or as aggression, by laying a one bomb minefield? Not the latter, surely, as it must have been them that disarmed it, unless it had malfunctioned.

If the disabling of the bomb had been by the spheres, they could have just as easily annihilated Apoidea by sending it into another time. Perhaps they only took avoidance action. She couldn’t recall an instance when the spheres pre-emptively destroyed missiles. They treated humans and their artefacts with contempt or more likely didn’t recognise their existence just like humans taking notice of a dandelion asking for its rights to be respected. Nevertheless she’d found she couldn’t start Apoidea’s engines. She felt like she was being herded home like a lost sheep.

Too tired to think around more contradictions and alternatives, she retired to bed, setting a wake-up alarm for four hours time.

* * *

She awoke more tired than when she went to sleep, but was anxious to see if there’d been any developments. The fact she could open her eyes meant the military hadn’t somehow detonated their plutonium firework.

The bomb was just over eight hundred kilometres distant, she sent a signal to puff the jets for twenty seconds of acceleration. That should be enough to clear a couple of thousand clicks before she needed to go to sleep again so she could send the thing to the sun instead of the Earth.

Checking aft cameras revealed the spheres might’ve been enjoying the holoshow but weren’t applauding. Nada, and maintaining distance. The comms console told her there were messages. Probably a Disraeli rant. She’d put that off while she snacked on noodles and ginger sauce, and read the CNN news bulletins.

She couldn’t finish her snack. Southern Britain was a disaster zone. Shocks toppled buildings that have stood solid for centuries and more easily, schools, hospitals and offices built in the last fifty years. Emergency services hadn’t been able to cope with the thousands of dead and millions injured. Floods and fires followed the quake and typhoid looked like it was adding its deadly toll. Northern France and Eire couldn’t help as they too had many casualties and floods.

Tabitha had published an exposé on the Apoidea as a nuke Trojan Horse, but it was relegated to several pages down. Warring factions in Africa and the Middle East had declared ceasefires while the timequake havoc continued. More airplanes, ships and trains crashed or disappeared. Britain wasn’t the only place to have unaccustomed large quakes. The planet seemed to be gearing up for disintegration. She couldn’t read any more.

She hit the button for the radio messages. Nothing Disraeli could say would be worse than the news. Surely, even he must realise the error in trying to destroy their only chance to get back to some survivable state.

The first message was from Elaine.

“Hi Kallandra, I hope you had a restful sleep. We see you’ve successfully ejected the bomb…”

Shhhh, shut up, Elaine! But then everyone there must know from the imprisoned Derek’s saved messages, even if the bomb-box was too small and the transponders too weak for Earth to detect.

“Colonel Dwight Disraeli has been replaced on orders from President Cabot.”

She hadn’t seen that on CNN, maybe she should’ve kept on reading.

“His replacement is Colonel Maggie Fernandez, and she says to wish you the best of luck. You’ll have no problems with the Apoidea being used other than originally agreed by you.”

Kallandra had seen Fernandez at NASA social functions but not to talk to. If she was as described, then that could only be good news. Come on, Elaine, had Derek been released?

“We need to know telemetry data for the bomb, Kallandra, assuming you have them? We wouldn’t want it to come here and cause a problem on re-entry.”

Fair enough, but what about Derek?

“There’s no need now for you to keep turning cams off, especially as you seem to forget to turn them back on. At the last check, we had no aft and only one lateral visual.

Only one forward.”

Oops, Kallandra felt like she was a naughty schoolgirl being admonished. Derek, Derek.

“We’ve scheduled some tests for 1700 hours. Test firing of engines one, two and three will take place to a plan at the end of this message.”

Interesting. She’d already told them of her inability to restart engines. She’d assumed it was the spheres’ interference but maybe Houston had disabled them. That, and Elaine not mentioning Derek in the message worked on her encroaching paranoia.

There was another message from Professor Tiptley with more image data and software enhancements. For someone who’d implied she was wasting her time, he was sure working overtime on the holoshows. She upgraded the system and set it going.

The prof wanted her to boost the power output to it even though his previous notes had said it would either do nothing or break it.

While she remembered, she turned all the cams on, and checked the telemetry was transmitting all the necessary ship’s data. She might as well let Houston have it even though she didn’t trust anyone there now. Not even her friend, Elaine. Maybe she’d been got at, or had been persuaded it was her spaceborne friend who couldn’t be trusted. Well, that wouldn’t be surprising. Kallandra released a short laugh at the accumulation of all her disobediences—no wonder Houston might want to be able to control Apoidea.

The laugh remained restricted; she was in no real jovial mood even to relieve her stress. A beeping made her look back at the spheres-watching screen. They were flickering again. If it was a form of communication, she was the only one for them to chat to. She played the pattern through the computer. Again just random; like and yet different in times and pauses to the others. They could just be fine tuning, making ready for a closer look or to finish off the bomb or the Apoidea. That can’t be right. It must have been the spheres that turned her ship around, and they’d only do that for a purpose. OK, there was a possibility the ship’s nav had lost the spheres and obeyed its programming to return to Earth while she and Claude were in hibernation, but she didn’t believe it. And why would the spheres only then notice they were followed and return?

Right, she didn’t think they were bringing her back to make sure all the humans were gonna be finished off, but all doubts had now been given room to play around.

The computers on the ship were the best NASA could buy for the job. Besides those dedicated for life support, navigation, and communication, they installed the latest code-cracking software on powerful minicomputers to supplement Earthside mainframes. Although she’d a Masters in AI and linguistics, it was the software that did all the work. A bunch of cleverer folk than she had thought of everything, except the one that worked. To be fair, they didn’t know about the flickering time decoherence as a language until the flight was underway. Even so, the problem wasn’t so much in emulating time decoherence, although that wasn’t easy, but in cracking the message and formulating their own with a species that seemed to be so unhumanlike.

It wasn’t just the AI team working on the problem. According to the messages and CNN bulletins, every person with an interest sent in suggestions from music to DNA, ancient languages to machine code, resonances to snowflake variations, dolphin-speak to the periodic table, and thousands more. All had been tried. No one had been derided. From her unique situation in space, she felt she might have a closer relationship with the spheres—a connection dating back to Glastonbury.

She sometimes felt vulnerable out here on her own, but was successful in pushing negative thoughts into her nose and blowing them into a paper handkerchief.

Maybe they’ve all been trying too hard on the communication. Looking too deep. Too much intellectualism and not enough feeling. Maybe the flickers were the visual manifestation of the spheres experiencing their emotions through time decoherences.

She had no problem thinking of sophisticated machines having emotions. Weren’t emotions partly a set of responses to sensory experiences? And that assumed the spheres weren’t a species.

She considered using her medical sensor output then thought it was too much data for a communication device so filtered everything out except a skin conductivity readout from a miniscule radio transmitting patch on her upper left arm, and sent it to the holographic machine to flicker at the spheres.

“There you go spheres, see what I feel when I’m scared shitless.”

Within moments she felt a tingling followed by a warm sensation near the transmitting patch on her arm. This couldn’t be right, there shouldn’t be any feedback in the system to her medical sensors—should there? As she checked the system diagnostics, the warm spot spread from her arm to the rest of her body, instilling contentment more than she’d experienced since making love with Claude.

Was this communication from the spheres? Maybe not a meeting of minds but of feelings: a mood exchange. She had an urge to close her eyes and let the incipient exuberance surge through her. A niggling thought tucked away in her brain’s right hemisphere hinted a warning, but she was too much enjoying the moment. It was like relaxing on a warm sandy beach, listening to the call of seagulls; the swash and backwash of gentle waves; the mixed aromas of sun lotion and seaweed; the gritty sand in the folds of the towel beneath her and the warm subtle breeze stirring the hairs on her arm. Vacations were meant to be like this.

Seconds later, two alarms impinged on her reverie. Reluctantly she opened her eyes and discovered she’d leaned her chair right back to near horizontal—not that she hardly touched it. Leaning forward she flicked off the alarm telling her the spheres had accelerated. Ah, they were coming for her now they knew she was a true friend.

She had to drift over to another console to turn the other alarm off. What? Her whole body system shocked itself to fully alert when the screen told her the bomb was within a few kilometres. She punched up vectors. Damn, when she’d accelerated the box last time, one of the nozzles must have malfunctioned and she’d turned the box around. Or Houston had. Damn she’d sent the telemetry from the box onto Houston with the normal ship’s data. An alternative cause could be the spheres. A shiver down her spine contrasted with new warmth from her arm, and spread to her neck. Noooo, the spheres didn’t turn the bomb. It must have been a malfunction, the box was also too far from Earth for them to know exactly where it was or to affect the gas jets on board, surely? She wasn’t a hundred percent sure of anything. The chances of the box changing its course were high, but it seemed suspicious for it to be heading straight for her. True, both the ship and the box had the same Earthward momentum but if one of the jets malfunctioned or partially blocked there were an infinite number of directions it could have taken. Surely the gravitational attraction of the Apoidea was too small at the distances involved? Ah, maybe so, but she didn’t know what was in the box besides death. There might have been some kind of homing device that the military hoped would steer it to the spheres only it headed for her ship instead.

Had the spheres noticed the box’s return before Apoidea had, and that’s why they were closing in? For a moment she’d hoped they would read that thought and transmit warm for yes and cold for no, but she was thinking too much like a rational human instead of ‘species sensory’.

She punched in commands to the control she’d earlier set up for the box’s navigation and made it do the tricky three dimensional geometry calculations to at least stop its approach. She needed to know which jet nozzle was malfunctioning and spent ten minutes testing. Both seemed normal. She frowned. Either the problem had righted itself or there wasn’t a problem with the jets. She transmitted to the actuators on the box and watched the vector graphic turn around while still heading for Apoidea.

Then she fired both gas jets and felt a glow of satisfaction to see the box slow down, stop and accelerate away. Damn, she was looking at the projected outcome display not the real-time images!

Her signals had gone out but the feedback when fed into the display showed no change. The box hadn’t decelerated at all!

For once she started to panic, but did it matter too much? The nuclear weapon was deactivated, wasn’t it? It was just a battering ram. She should treat it like a wayward meteorite and take avoiding action, but the Apoidea’s engines wouldn’t start, or didn’t last time she checked. She propelled herself to the master console and initiated a burn sequence for engine one. Nothing. Returning, she tried sending signals again to the jets to turn the box. Was it not receiving the signals or had the hydrazine been used up by the malfunction?

Options for dealing with intercepting meteorites and small asteroids included shooting at them. She had missiles and explosive bullets. A missile could be used at the hundred-and-sixty kilometres range the box was now at. It would be foolish to have it attempt to destroy a plutonium bomb. It wouldn’t be likely to trigger a fission reaction unless the missile detonated the imploding explosives in the right way. A big risk. She set a missile to detonate alongside the box at a hundred metres distance; enough to whack it off its course.

Ten....

As she started a countdown, she wondered why she needed one, after all there was no one to get out of the way, take shelter; and then a surge of well-being came over her.

Nine....

Why? Were the spheres congratulating her on solving a tricky, potentially lethal problem? That must be it and she smiled.

Eight....

A thought nagged through—surely the spheres could have solved this problem…

Seven....

Belay that heresy. The spheres were bosom buddies. She’d always felt a rapport since she touched the Glastonbury.

Six....

Her tactile memory oozed up and she realized it had resonance with the sensations she now experienced.

Five....

On the other hand, why were the spheres getting closer? Maybe they weren’t closing in on the Apoidea, it was just that the ship was en route to Earth and wanted to pass by her.

Four....

Or, the spheres really fell for the holoshow and they wanted to get up close to it.

Another smile.

Three....

The message alert beeped. Had Derek been released? Elaine wanted to apologise for forgetting to mention Derek—that was it. And Maggie wanted to apologise on behalf of Disraeli for turning the bomb back towards the Apoidea. At least the message alert proved Earth remained intact.

Two....

She wondered how the spheres were going to put the time situation right on Earth. Probably they’d seed the planet with mini-spheres. She visualized them burrowing into the crust and down three kilometres. Would they use the same places or would new ones, in time, become sacred places too?

One....

Her finger hovered over the glow-red button. She felt at peace, there were few sensations more satisfying than pressing a red Fire button.

Zero....