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‘Finn! Finn! – Finn!’

‘Miranda!’

Then she fell.

Her body tipped over the cabin shaft, flashed in the sunlight and then disappeared behind the head of Gaia, which did a half-turn, seemed to stand still for a moment, then fell completely from the shoulders, crashing into the immense Romanesque window of the abdominal wall.

‘Inside, everyone inside!’ shouted O’Keefe, his voice cracking. ‘Nina!’

‘What’s wrong, Finn, we—’

‘She fell!’ He jumped into the cargo hold. ‘Miranda fell overboard; you have to go round to the front section.’

‘Is everyone else in?’

His eyes darted around. Next to him, Tim stumbled across, a groaning Olympiada in his arms, and collapsed down to the floor of the hold.

‘Yes! Quickly, for heaven’s sake, go quickly!’

Not waiting until the hatch was closed, he ran like crazy to the connecting bulkhead and pushed himself through while there was still barely a crack’s width open. Stumbling along the central gangway, he was hurled against a seat, the revving of the engines in his ears as Nina steered the Callisto backwards over the figure’s tattered stump of a neck. Then he struggled to his feet again and rushed into the cockpit.

And looked down.

The abdominal cavity was destroyed. Fireballs appeared which extinguished as soon as they were ignited. Rubble rained down as the ribcage containing the suites
collapsed floor by floor. Then, Gaia’s immense, regal skull, the glazing on the face surprisingly still intact, rolled over the gentle inclination of the upper thigh towards the valley, passed the knee almost hesitantly and shattered on the plateau two hundred metres below.

‘Go down! Down!’

The shuttle sank, but Miranda was nowhere to be seen, neither on the upper surface of the thigh, now covered in debris, nor on the moon surface around it.

‘To the plateau! She was torn down with it! You have to—’

‘Finn—’

‘No! Look! Look for her!’

Without arguing, Nina turned the shuttle around, descended further and flew in a curve directly over and around the widely scattered remains of the head. By now, the others were gathering together in the space behind the cockpit.

‘She can’t have disappeared!’ screamed O’Keefe.

‘Finn.’

He felt the soft pressure of a hand on his upper arm and turned round. Heidrun had taken her helmet off and was looking at him with red eyes.

‘She can’t have just disappeared,’ he repeated softly.

‘She’s dead, Finn. Miranda’s dead.’

He stared at her.

Then he started to cry. Blinded by tears, he sank to the floor in front of Heidrun. He couldn’t remember ever having cried.

* * *

Lynn sat in the first row of seats, distancing herself from the group, completely expressionless. She had beamed her former light for the last time, had unified the group in the glow of the dying star that she was, had illuminated them, blinded and driven back Dana, her enemy, but the fuel of her life’s energy was used up now, her collapse unavoidable. Everything inside her skull was rushing around with maximum kinetic energy: impressions, facts, probability of occurrences. Dependable knowledge was pulverised into hypotheses. The unending condensing of impressions caused them to be fractured into the smallest, the very smallest thought particles, to which no time, no perceptual level, no history could be assigned. Increasingly brief thought phases, thought particles whirling at the speed of light, a collapsing spirit, unceasingly crashing without the opposing pressure of will, falling short of the event horizon, no transmission, only reception now, ongoing compromise, the end of all processes, of all contour, all form, just situation, and even the pitiful remains of what had once been Lynn Orley would corrode and evaporate under their own pressure, leaving nothing behind but an abandoned, imaginary space.

Someone had died. So many had died.

Her memory was empty.

Yoyo, presumed missing, had arrived at the stroke of 22.00 just as Diane was carrying out the electronic exhumation of a person presumed dead. Presumed, because no one had been able to get even a fleeting glance of the corpse. Because it was still undiscovered, as all objects moving in unknown or unpredictable orbits tend to be.

‘Victor Thorn, known as Vic,’ Jericho said, without deigning to ask Yoyo why five minutes had turned into three hours and what Tu was up to in his state of rage.

‘I’m sorry, I …’ Yoyo fidgeted hesitantly. She had a frog in her throat and it had to come out. ‘I know I was planning to be back much sooner—’

‘Commander of the first moon base occupation. A NASA man. In 2021, he ran the show for six months.’

‘—Tian isn’t really like that. I mean, you know him.’

‘It seems that Thorn did a good job. So good, that in 2024 they entrusted him with another six-month mission.’

‘To be honest, we haven’t spoken that much,’ said Yoyo, a little shrilly. The frog was croaking on her tongue. ‘He was just terribly angry. We ended up watching a film, pretending everything was normal, you know. It was probably the worst conceivable moment, but you shouldn’t believe—’

‘Yoyo.’ Jericho sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s your business. It has nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course it has something to do with you!’

The frog was on the move.

‘No, it doesn’t.’ To his amazement, he meant it. The old, unconquered hurt which had lingered on him so long, like a bad odour on clothes, gave way to the insight that neither Tu nor Yoyo was responsible for his bad mood. However well they were getting on, it really had nothing to do with him. ‘It’s your lives, your story. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

Yoyo stared at the monitor unhappily. Their surroundings left a little to be desired in terms of intimacy. The space in the information centre had been screened in a makeshift way; people were working all around them, like microorganisms in the abdominal cavity of the Big O, digesting and processing information, then expelling it.

‘And if I
want
to tell you something?’

‘Then now is definitely not a good time.’

‘Fine.’ She sighed. ‘So what’s this about Thorn?’

‘Well, assuming that the explosion of the mini-nuke was planned for 2024
without fail
– then someone must have been up there at the time: to hide, position and ignite the bomb. Either that or someone else was supposed to travel on after it and do that.’

‘Sounds logical.’

‘But no explosion was registered, and the people from MI6 think that storing a mini-nuke in a vacuum for too long could pose the risk of a premature decay. So why wasn’t it ignited?’

Yoyo looked at him, a small, steep line of thoughtfulness between her eyes.

‘Because the person in question wasn’t able to carry out the ignition as planned. Because something happened.’

‘Correct. So I sent Diane on the hunt. There’s information on the internet about all the space missions in the last year, and I stumbled across Thorn. A fatal accident during an external mission on the OSS, on 2 August 2024. It was completely unexpected and happened before he could take up his position on the Peary Base, but the most significant thing is that it was almost three months to the day after Mayé’s satellite was launched.’

Yoyo gnawed at her lower lip.

‘And the Chinese? Have you checked?’

‘You can’t “check” the Chinese,’ said Jericho. ‘The best you can find is their own statements, and according to them there was no loss of personnel in 2024.’

‘Apart from the Moon crisis. The commander of the Chinese base was imprisoned by the Americans.’

‘Oh, come on! First they shoot an atomic bomb up to the Moon as part of some unbelievably elaborate and sophisticated camouflage manoeuvre, then a few taikonauts stumble into American mining territory like a couple of idiots and get themselves caught?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo wrinkled her forehead. ‘So someone took the elevator. But to do that they would either have had to plant someone in an authorised team—’

‘Or bribe someone who was already in it.’

‘And Thorn
was
in the team.’

‘On his mission to the Moon, all official and above board.’ Jericho nodded. ‘In the role of a commander, with almost unlimited access. And above all, he knew his way around up there like the back of his hand. He’d been there before.’

‘Have you told Shaw and Norrington about this?’ Yoyo’s eyes were gleaming. Suddenly she was a Guardian again, infected by curiosity.

‘No.’ Jericho stood up. ‘But I think we should remedy that right away.’

* * *

Shaw and Norrington were wandering around somewhere in the Big O with delegates from MI5, but Edda Hoff gobbled up the fillet steak of their investigations hungrily. She knew about Thorn’s case of course, but so far no one had come up with the idea that the respected two-time commander of the Peary Base might have been the chosen one for blowing Gaia to smithereens. She promised to put together some information about Thorn and fill her superiors in on Jericho’s theory. Then Tu Tian reappeared, looking perfectly composed, as if nothing had happened. He told a joke and listened to the latest news before retreating into the guest area.

‘Business,’ he said, with an apologetic gesture. ‘The day’s just getting started in China. Armies of hard-working competitors are sharpening their knives; I can’t act as if I don’t have a company to run. So if you don’t need me to save the world—’

‘No, not right this moment, Tian.’

‘Excellent.
Fenshou
!’

Shaw and Norrington came back in, but Hoff was tied up in a video conversation with NASA. Jericho was just about to speak to Shaw about Vic Thorn when Tom Merrick announced that, in all probability, he had found the reason for the communication blockade but was unable to lift it.

‘Knowing why it doesn’t work is still progress,’ said Shaw as they gathered in the large conference room.

‘As I already mentioned’ – Merrick’s gaze flitted from one face to the next – ‘to be able to cut the Moon off from all communication, you’d need to interfere with so many satellites and ground control stations that it would be practically impossible. So my guess is that it’s something else: IOF.’

‘IO what?’ said Shaw.

Merrick looked at her as if he found it incomprehensible that people didn’t talk exclusively in abbreviations.

‘Information Overflow.’

‘Paralysis of the terminal device by botnet mass mails,’ said Yoyo. ‘Data congestion.’

One of the MI6 people present looked confused.

‘Imagine there’s someone sitting in a room, and you want to silence them,’ she explained. ‘And you don’t want them to be able to hear either. Assuming that you succeed in getting your hands on all the keys, you’ll try to bolt all the doors in order to cut them off from the world. The doors are the satellites and ground control stations, but you can’t stop more and more doors being built in, not to mention the fact
that you won’t be able to get all the keys anyway. The alternative is incredibly simple. You just go into the room, put a gag in their mouth and cotton wool in their ears.’

‘So, as far as I understand it, that man is Gaia’s computer.’

‘Two men,’ said Merrick. ‘Gaia’s computer and the Peary Base system.’

‘Don’t they have any mirror systems?’ asked Jericho.

‘Okay, four men then.’ Merrick waved his hand impatiently. ‘Or even more, as it’s possible the shuttles’ satellite receivers were gagged too. In any case, the procedure is much more efficient because you only interfere with the terminal device, that is the IP addresses of the people you want to target. Everything is fine with the satellites –, you can have a million of them flying around and it won’t change anything, quite the contrary. Nowadays, satellites and ground control stations function increasingly as knots in an IP network, like an internet in space! The botnet can jump from one knot to another in order to fight its way through.’

Jericho realised immediately that Merrick was right. In essence, botnets were old hat. Hackers gained control over as many computers as possible by implanting special software. Generally speaking, the users didn’t know that it would make their computers turn into bots, soldiers of an automated army. Theoretically, the illegal software could lie dormant in the infiltrated computers indefinitely, until it awakened at a pre-programmed time and prompted its host computer to ceaselessly send emails to a defined target: totally legal enquiries, but in torrential proportions. On the black market for cyberterrorism, networks with up to 100,000 bots had been exposed. When the botnet struck, it simultaneously fired billions of emails and flooded the target with data, until the attacked computer was no longer able to cope with the volume and perished under IOF, Information Overload.

‘What are your thoughts, Tom?’ asked Shaw. ‘How long can they keep their attacks up for?’

‘It’s difficult to say. Botnets are usually unstoppable. You tell the software in advance how long it should keep at it for, then smuggle it in. After that, there’s no way of getting to it.’

‘So you can also program into the software when it should stop?’

‘Sure, you can do anything. But my suspicion is that the one we’re dealing with is a little different. The attack came as a direct reaction to our attempt to warn Julian and the Gaia, so someone
must
have started the bots individually.’

‘Which means they must have directed a query at this someone after the software was installed,’ said Yoyo. ‘And that question was: Shall I attack? So the person in question must have said yes at some stage.’

‘And while they were attacking the Gaia and the Peary Base, they directed another query at Mister Unknown,’ nodded Merrick. ‘This time: Shall I stop?’

‘So if we only knew who started it—’ said the MI6 man.

‘Then we could make him stop it.’

‘Where could the person be?’ asked Shaw.

Merrick stared at her. ‘How should I know? There could be a number of people involved. The person who set the attacks in motion could be on the Moon. If he smuggled control software into the Gaia’s computer, then it would have been no problem for him to start the bots from there, although admittedly he would have crippled himself in the process. So I suspect the jerk who can stop all this madness is somewhere on Earth. For heaven’s sake, Jennifer!’ His arms flailed around wildly. ‘He could be anywhere. He could be
here
. In the Big O. In this very room!’