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  "Where to?" Linda asked, but we had no answer.

  This close, the scanners and optical arrays could see the Earth's surface in minute detail, cloud cover permitting but we had infra-red and every other emission detector working at maximum gain. We all crowded round the consoles as the results were displayed, hoping against hope that we had been the victims of some astronomic joke, or at least I did, which just shows you how self deception is difficult to break.

  "Present velocity is point two six percent light unity." Mary remarked. "Every hour we get better definition."

  "It's good enough." I said. "Look at the readings. No anomalies at all."

  "But no signs of human presence either." Linda pointed out. "No Northern cities. The scanners can't find anything except vegetation where most of cities were. "

  "No asteroid hit anywhere, no comet, I don't believe it." Mary pushed her cloud of hair out of her eyes and looked up at Mike Zelenov standing behind her. He was the environmental biophysicist and more than that, he was the only one who could look at Selena and make her forget how stunning she was. He had been doing that for a long time and it worked apparently.

  "Four centuries." He fingered the dark stubble on his chin. "Given free growth and no radiation or solar interruption you would have to look damned hard to find any city at all. Remember the Mayans? Huge pyramids but no one could see them, the whole city just went back to the jungle."

  "We're picking up signs of ruins around Cairo and the Pyramids are still there. There's still a lot of evidence of human activity. You see?" Linda cut in.

  "Yeah." Max agreed. "But ruins. Like thirteenth century castles left to rot. All you see are the wall patterns. South America is a blank. Most of Europe likewise. Everything is gone, it's all gone back to the Earth that made it."

  Linda stared at him, but Mary was still tapping away at the keyboard. "Details are coming in." She said. "But it just backs up what we're saying. One or two bridges are still standing or bits of them, the Golden Gate, Sydney Harbour, you can see part of the towers. Las Vegas is a pile of rubble in the middle of a desert. You can't see any roads anywhere, no railways, just ruins of big things, big constructions."

  "We need more definition." Mike put his head close to the main screen. "But I'm willing to bet that the vegetation is what you'd expect. Coniferous forest across Russia, a complete tropical rain forest covering South America, equatorial Africa and Asia, deciduous forest in North America and Europe. None of these readings say anything abnormal except there's a hell of a lot more forest than when we left."

  "No radiation hot spots." Mark Delaney, the physics wizard scribbled over paper and shook his head in his clinical way. "I don't buy any nuclear war. We'd have isotopes, radiation plumes and we got nothing." He gazed at the lines of data scrolling down the screens. "Whatever it was, it wasn't no asteroid, no war, no solar flare. These figures just won't support any theory like that." He seemed pleased, no, not pleased, complacent almost. His grey eyes caught mine and he smiled a thin smile. "No orbital perturbation, either. Everything's normal."

  "Disease." I suggested. "Worldwide epidemic."

  Selena frowned at me. "It would have to be artificial, a mutated virus to produce worldwide extinction. No natural pathogen would behave like that, no virus kills everyone because it would kill off itself." She explained coldly, her face pale, lined and somehow older. "And even if some fool let out a shifting antigen virus it still wouldn't kill everyone overnight. Besides..." She hesitated but stopped.

  "And there would be survivors." Elizabeth cut in. "Nothing is one hundred percent."

  "Ninety nine percent will do." Max stated flatly, staring at the image of a blue Earth, the picture so clear you felt as if you could reach out a hand and touch it. His expression seemed so serene, so unmoved that I found myself gazing at his profile with a feeling as if ants were dancing on my back. What was going on inside that head?

  "They would have warned us." Linda said positively. "Besides, it doesn't marry up with the ship's records. Look," she spread out the complicated printout. "Nearly every Earth radio and television transmitter went off the air practically simultaneously. Within a day every single one ceased transmission except some automatic beacons for shipping, aircraft and so on."

  "Tuning signals stayed on for a time and a few stations kept a repeating identity pattern for a long time, they must have been powered by their own generators." Mary pointed out.

  "But no live transmissions after a day." Linda nodded.

  "No disease could do that in a day." Elizabeth said tightly, looking stricken.

  "How long after we left did this all happen?" I peered at the mass of paper containing long lines of mathematical symbols that meant nothing to me.

  "That's one of the odd things." Mary ran her finger along the printing. "Me and Linda have been trying to work it out. What we have here is an amalgam of several hundred programs and this machine is giving us an exception summary." She glanced up, her dark eyes puzzled. "We've been tracing the separate programs but it's a huge task because the main frame just wasn't set up to cater for what was, after all, a billion to one eventuality. Somewhere in there is the data but in effect all we have is that NATIVITY was activated sometime after we left. I think I can track it down. I'm going to..."

  "No, you are not!" Max's voice was uncharacteristically sharp. "Forget the damned time table! Find out what the hell is down there!"

  Everyone looked at him, but his set lips and firm jaw deterred argument. "As far as we can tell from here, nothing is down there." Linda said calmly, regarding him with one of her best frowns. Selena said nothing but gazed at Mary with blue eyed concentration before flicking her gaze to Max. It was quite noticeable, a look of warning? I started to form questions of my own when Max cut in with blaring vehemence.

  "Do your jobs! Get your brains working! We need answers!" He snarled, his blue eyes turning icy.

  "We are not brainless army ants." Mary stared at him.

  "No, you are under my command and you will do as I say." He replied harshly.

  I glanced at Mike to find him staring at Max with raised eyebrows. We exchanged looks but said nothing. Max was acting out of character, way out, which some of the assembled crew didn't like and started to argue but the sheer bulk of him, that towering six feet six and two hundred pounds plus of muscle was intimidating. I couldn't see why he suddenly changed, what he hoped to gain by it. The arguments became bitter and loud, so I took the opportunity to slide out and leave them to it. They didn't need me to talk about mineral treasures, indeed I didn't think my particular expertise with rocks would be in much demand in future, but I had other skills.

  Our exotic ship looked like no other vessel that had ever sailed the seven seas. Three giant globes tethered together, terminating in a vast flower like assembly that housed the fusion generators, but they were at the end of a long, thin, finger like construction, keeping them a hundred meters away from the main ship. Between us and them was a wide radiation shield, mostly tungsten, protecting us from the furious flare that stretched behind us for a thousand miles when the engines were running. Each of the three globes had masses of functions ranging from experimental hydroponics to small cages of spiders brought along to see if they liked interstellar travel. The stern globe was almost entirely taken up with the control systems for the fusion engines and fuel, the middle one was stores and laboratories, the leading one was navigation and life support. Of course, some parts had artificial gravity by rotation to stop inconvenient equipment from floating off, not to mention the crew. Ahead of us in deep space had been an ablation shield of thick ice but that was now discarded. What I wanted was in the middle globe.

  Only I had the key code to open the small compartment that I kept my hardware in. It was just big enough inside to stand up and you could swing the proverbial cat although it wouldn't have liked it. Sitting myself down in front of the interface screen I tapped in my private password.

  This somewhat clinical compartment wa
s where the weaponry was stored. Rows of automatic rifles were arrayed against the bulkheads. Handheld missile launchers were still in their boxes, untouched, the warheads unprogrammed. Flame throwers, the only things that made me nervous, were packed away, their fuel locked in armoured cabinets. Grenades, various, unfused, were in metal containers. We even had long to medium range mortars, the rounds programmable for air burst or proximity. Stun guns, chemical killer rounds, electric charge projectors, the stacks of exotic armaments were all round me, most of it still unpacked. We had not needed it.

  Linda never came in here, no one did except me and I know they all thought I was slightly obsessed because I made regular checks to see the stuff was well oiled and healthy. Of course, the ammunition and hardware had been kept close to absolute zero during our long sleep between the stars, so I had been spending time making sure it still worked. I was the defence officer but more than that I was their unofficial snoop. I can't help it, I get inquisitive about people. All the eggheads and Max had their own access codes to bits of the expedition that they felt were their own personal possessions, but highbrow scientists are not the best people to keep secrets. By watching them and grinning I had found most of their codes and using my devious personality I had gained access to lots of places on the main frame that Linda would have been surprised about. Not too happy either. It comes of being an ex-military man used to arguing with political types about the cost of shooting people that they didn't like.

  Max intrigued me. He seemed to have had an internal explosion, some kind of mental bomb that had turned him into a loud martinet. Why? And that conversation with Selena when he told her the bad news, it replayed itself in my head, the oddness of it striking me again. I brought up his personal data file, something that was supposed to be restricted. I knew the outline, of course, we all did. Moon exploration, Martian expedition, no close relatives, unmarried, unattached even. I paused over this, as I had before. He seemed asexual, neutral. Odd, but he must have gone through the fierce psycho checks like we all had. He certainly wasn't one of them because slowly, over months, Mary had broken his personal ice. Just what they got up to was their own affair but they were a couple now which conflicted with his history. I called up in my mind's eye his cold blue gaze and serene, bland personality, always the same until now. Just how much had he let Mary see into the inner recesses of his head?

  And he was religious. Not unusual even today, but his religion was. He was an active member of the Green Church, very active, a preacher when the opportunity arrived, and they were very odd. The Gaia hypothesis translated into the will of the Creator, that was the theme, a living Earth that would in time rebel against the sacrilegious incursions of mankind. How he managed to reconcile this esoteric belief with his association with a vast enterprise designed to spread the influence of man to another world was a mystery but then so were some of the others. Most had no close relatives - it was a condition of selection - and most were agnostic if not positively atheistic but they all professed to belong to some organised church, a form of collective security complex, I supposed. And me? I was alone until I met Linda.

  Scrutinising the list of names comprising our eclectic crew provided me with no more illumination than the last time I had gazed at it, wondering if there was a message hidden in there which I was missing somehow. The paranoid fussiness of the selection process seemed to have produced a curiously unorthodox mixture of personalities, or maybe it was just me thinking so. I couldn't help feeling that there was a separate sect within the crew, unspoken, unacknowledged but present all the time if, like me, you had nervous antenna twitching for things unseen to others. Perhaps I should have been a ghost hunter, I could certainly see plenty of shady entities starting with Captain Max, then Mark Delaney, a cold fish indeed, and Zachery Stein, supposedly a world expert on micro bacteria, he looked like one himself which made his nose rubbing relationship with the sultry Rachel Meyer a thing of wonder to behold. Add Axel Gunnerson, a lanky, blond, tight mouthed Swedish Meteorologist cum gas expert who dribbled over Anna Treminski, another of Selena's biologist clan. Then, lastly, Numar Azad plus Deborah McEwan, another distinctly eccentric pairing, two more biological weirdoes.

  They all appeared to be a collection rather than a selection when compared to my circle of highly intelligent and sane characters; me first of course and Linda, gorgeous Linda, Mike Zelenov, a physics brain dabbling in biochemicals but English despite some wandering Russian in his dim distant past. Elizabeth Danton, Selena's next in line but they didn't get on, you could see it in their faces, the set of their shoulders when they argued. The big black guy Bradley Smith and his equally dark companion Hilary Tomaso were in Selena's empire but like the French pair Jules and Marie they didn't somehow appear to be members of the club. What did all these people have in common which the others - Selena, Max and co - didn't? For the life of me I couldn't pin it down to more than a shared sense of humour, a rather bizarre distinction but Max, Selena, Mark and the rest of their shadowy group never seemed to see my jokes although they laughed together and didn't tell the rest what they found so funny. Even the French pair chuckled, probably at me rather than with me, but they did show me teeth in friendly good humour.

  The more I frowned over these private details, the more I felt my own personal paranoia begin to take over like a ghostly presence sitting on one shoulder and hissing suspicions in my ear. Brooding wasn't going to tell me anything I didn't already know but somewhere buried in this mass of personal histories I felt there was an anomaly. Did it matter? In the face of the apparent wholesale destruction of our species to the point where I doubted we had the numbers to start again even if we wanted to, it seemed somewhat irrelevant to mull over the past of a doomed crew.

  However, at the back of my mind there lurked a demon of suspicion that had kept me alive more than once in the past, so I carefully typed in certain amendments to the ship's main frame.

  Chapter 3

  GOING DOWN

  The beeper on my console told me Linda wanted me so I practised my grin in the mirror on the rear of the hatchway before leaving, an egotistical habit. The grin crinkled nicely into a friendly smile, while the mild brown eyes gazed equably at me, the dark hair flopping untidily over my brow. A face to trust and talk to, yes, true enough because I often talked to myself and got strange answers.

  The bridge was deserted except for Linda and Mary, the latter looking stricken.

  "Max nearly hit her." Linda said in a low voice, glancing at Mary. "I've never seen him like that, whatever's got into him?"

  Mary didn't speak but sat, withdrawn and rigid, staring into nothing, her thick black hair disordered, falling over her face. "Why?" I enquired evenly.

  "She wanted to plan the landing, to work out how we were going to get down. She thought we ought to go to the French control complex." Linda explained uneasily. "Max shouted at her, at us. He went completely off his head, yelling that any landing was up to him, that he would decide and no one was going anywhere near France. Talking about France made him go ape and Selena said France was a nothing target. Why are they paranoid about France?" She frowned but continued. "Mary and Mike told him we had a say and he pushed Mike off his chair and swung on Mary. I really thought he was going to..." She petered to a stop.

  "This happened in front of everyone?"

  "Selena, Mark and that lot took his side." Mary said suddenly. "She froze up, told us we didn't know what we were saying, that we were all being emotional and only heads of departments would make decisions."

  Heads of departments? Selena was head of the biology empire and Max was the captain plus being head of navigation and propulsion although Mary did most of the work. Mark Delaney was head of physics and exploration generally. They all had teams but never had we operated like a military unit, everyone had chipped in and taken on chores from other disciplines where necessary.

  Linda continued to watch me as I frowned at her, but she turned to look at Mary before telling me what I had already gu
essed. "Max, Selena and Mark have gone to the navigation centre and the hatch codes have been altered. Everyone else was ordered to return to their sections." She told me in a flat voice.

  "What's going on?" Mary seemed deeply depressed, not surprising. "How can they think they can give orders to the rest of us? We all have the same stake in this, our own lives."

  "You're not on any team, are you?" Linda faced me with set lips.

  "Technically, I am first officer." I replied, pondering things. "That puts me on Max's team."

  She didn't answer, so I sat myself down in the captain's seat and ran the latest survey results on the main screen. Linda and Mary drifted over to look over my shoulder as the sharp images scrolled across the screen. The scanners were focused on Europe, that being the hemisphere facing us. It was a solid stretch of green. Dense forests covered all of the land mass

  except small patches dotted here and there. The green carpet stretched from Spain to the Urals.

  "The mountains poke up." Mary pointed out quietly. "Italy and the Alps, the Carpathians, everywhere above the tree line."

  "Nothing in England. It's trees from the Channel to Scotland." Linda added.

  "Try the European Control Centre." Mary suggested, peering at the picture. Linda nodded and looked up the co-ordinates while I shrugged with cynical agreement. The Europeans had insisted on duplicating the highly expensive mission control complex despite the Americans and the Russians having every possible facility, typical behaviour that pushed up the costs but satisfied political egos. The scanner brought the image up to maximum gain and centred on a patch of forest near the French Mediterranean coast where there should have been a massive concrete and steel construction festooned with transmission dishes.

  "Nothing." I commented. "Most of it was below ground anyway."

  We sat and stared at a forest canopy dense with leaf growth in the Northern summer. France certainly looked dead so why did they go off bang? Maybe they all wanted to go to some American deep freeze? Why not just say so? "Four hundred years of storms would have brought down the aerials. So many trees, there must be more rainfall." Linda said miserably. It was getting to us, me as well. We were looking at a dead world, or rather a vibrant, living planet without us, humans.