Against Gravity

He looked over to the tanker, which had now stopped moving. Its upper decks looked as though they had been modelled after an aircraft carrier, and a dozen sleek-looking military-style jump jets stood alongside more missile-carrying armoured helicopters. Dozens of figures, insect-like at that distance, moved across its acres of steel. Kendrick thought again of Angkor Wat and wondered if the huge vessel was some kind of mobile secondary base of operations for Draeger.

He gazed up at the early-evening sky, the first stars revealing themselves as the light began to fade. The Archimedes was orbiting somewhere far above his head, and the reality of his decision to go there was only just begi

Buddy came for him a while later, clapping him on the shoulder.

"This is it," he said. "You ready to go?"

Kendrick turned and looked at his old friend. "Are we really going to do this?"

"Sure we are. Still full of misgivings, aren't you?"

Kendrick looked back over the sea. "Can you really leave all this behind?"

"I probably wouldn't survive more than another few years here before my augments killed me," Buddy said calmly. "You seem different – care to share?"

"I experienced something like a vision, Buddy. I think it was what you saw. As though I was taken on a carnival ride through the history of the universe."

"All the way?"

Kendrick nodded. "All the way."

Buddy cocked his head at him. "But you still don't really believe it, do you?"

Kendrick sighed and turned away from looking at the launch platform. He remembered his conversation with McCowan. "Not like you do: no revelation, no firm sense that this is absolutely the right thing to do."

"Kendrick, for most of the people going with us there is no other way. Even if they felt they were just taking a chance they'd still take it. It's either that or stay here on Earth, hated and despised, and wait for a long and lingering death. It's not much of a choice. Remember, I hate Draeger just as much as you do. I want you to find the proof you're looking for. I just don't like the thought of staying here and dying slowly, maybe locked up in a secure ward somewhere."

Kendrick shook his head. "Look, the one thing I know about Draeger is that he doesn't lie. He could stab you in the back, but he's too proud of his achievements to ever make claims that are unsupportable."

"You're talking about that cure he offered you, right?"

"I met someone out at Angkor Wat who assured me that his rogue augments had been stabilized by Draeger's treatments. The same treatments that I was receiving from Hardenbrooke."

Buddy regarded him sceptically. "So you're saying that you'll return from the Archimedes with evidence to incriminate Draeger, but then you'll still take his cure?"

"If Draeger's really found a way to control the Labrat augments, then other people can develop the same techniques. But even if there were no cure yet, I'd still want to come back. There's always hope."

"Maybe for you, Kendrick, if you want to take that chance." Buddy shook his head. "But I already told you, I've got more faith in the Bright than I have in any number of spurious claims about curing something that I don't believe can be cured."

The funeral service never happened, because Doctor Numark had felt constrained to incinerate Caroline's remains immediately as a precautionary measure. Kendrick felt his temper rise when she told him that he couldn't even keep the ashes for a ceremony later as she wanted to keep them isolated. To Kendrick, the need to mark Caroline's passing in some way felt vital, necessary.

It was in case, Doctor Numark argued, there was even a slight chance of a containment breach. Kendrick almost laughed in her face, insisting that since he himself constituted a walking containment breach it wasn't likely to make much difference to him. She replied stonily that unfortunately there wasn't much she could do about him.

In the end, he dragged Buddy back out onto the deck, since he was the only other Labrat still alive who had really known Caroline. They took sips from a bottle of whisky that Buddy had acquired from a crewman and stared silently out to sea. There really wasn't much either of them could bring themselves to say.

Within the hour they were ferried by boat to the launch platform and each of them was given a lightweight spacesuit to wear, marked with the colourful logo of Sabak's private launch company. A hundred or so Labrats trooped onto the platform, looking not so different from the kind of rich tourists who'd spend an afternoon orbiting the Earth as an alternative to skiing in the Alps.

Kendrick soon found himself inside a steel-walled hut set high up in the gantry, from where he and the rest could look down the length of the shuttle, to its engines far below.

27 October 2096 Cocha Canyon offshore launch platform

The evening skies above them were still clear, the sea still calm. Ancillary launch technicians wearing jumpsuits and hard hats carefully inspected each of the space-suits three times. Kendrick could hear continuous, incessant systems checks crackling over a nearby intercom.

Just as the checking procedures were completed, the attack finally came.

First, there were dark spots on the horizon. Then, just as Kendrick and the rest were being guided through the gantry and along an elevated platform towards a door set in the side of the shuttle, three sleek silver shapes rocketed past the platform, moving over Draeger's ship in a flash and continuing onwards in a long, curving trajectory.

At the same time, Kendrick noticed a helicopter lifting from the deck of Draeger's ship. It landed on the launch platform's landing pad barely a minute later and he watched as several small figures stepped out and looked around, half bent over under the whirring blades, before stepping quickly to one side. He could see Draeger among them, and the others, he was sure, were the men he'd seen waiting in the shadows of the ruined buildings of LA. They all wore spacesuits modified with black Kevlar body armour.

A moment later another figure stepped out of the helicopter just before it lifted to return to the tanker. This time it was Smeby.

"Jesus Christ," he heard someone mutter. Kendrick turned to see Sabak standing nearby. "Will you look at that?"

They all turned to look as one, as three simultaneous explosions of light shot upwards from the main deck of the tanker. Something flared, arrowing in towards the three jets which were now twisting round in their trajectory to take another pass over the launch platform. This time, Kendrick was sure, they would fire on it.

He glanced around, seeing how utterly exposed they all were on the gantry. There would never be enough time to get them all inside the shuttle, and even that was far from the safest place to be.

Then he saw the jets veer in a curve that would bring the shuttle directly into their line of fire. A moment later two of the aircraft twisted away in a high-speed manoeuvre as the missiles launched from Draeger's ship rapidly closed in. Kendrick felt his heart crawl into his throat as two of the pursuing missiles sped into the ocean in an explosion of salt spray.

The third missile, however, zeroed in on the third jet, whose pilot had veered too close to the waves, and as he pulled up and away from the ocean the missile gained on him. The two met in a blossoming ball of fire a few hundred metres away from the launch platform. People yelled and screamed around Kendrick as shredded pieces of the jet's fuselage shot overhead. A deep shudder ran through the platform's structure.