Part 2 (1/2)

After half a second a short phrase blinks into life: Fail code 393.

Everything else, all the rows and columns of figures, have disappeared. She has no contact with the s.h.i.+p.

Fail code 393? It means nothing to her. Heart pumping, hands trembling, she riffles through the code handbook in mounting panic. 349... 382... 397... 402... What the h.e.l.l is 393?

There is no 393. Not in the book.

Launch asks again, impatient now.

'Guidance Telemetry, are we go?'

Think. Think.

Faces are turning towards Mikkala Avril. She feels the gaze of Director Khyrbysk on her back. The chief engineer is watching her. Papa Rizhin himself is watching her. She can feel it.

'Guidance Telemetry?' says the launch controller a third time. 'What's happening, Avril?'

'I've got a 393, Launch.'

'What is that?'

'I'm working on it, Launch.'

Ignore them. Focus only on the immediate need.

She has no idea what Fail code 393 means. It isn't in the book, which suggests it's a core manufacturer's code, not set up by Task Number One. It might be trivial, only a glitch in the machine. But it could equally be a fundamental system failure that would send Proof of Concept pitching and yawing, tumbling out of the sky to crash and burn.

It is either/or, and the only way to find out is to switch the machine off and start it up again. And that will take ten minutes.

'Last call, Avril,' says the launch controller. There is tension in his voice now. The beginning of fear.

She hesitates.

It is the epochal moment of the world, and it turns on her.

If she says go and the guidance systems misfire... No, she will not even think about the consequences of that... But if she calls an abort, Papa Rizhin's flags.h.i.+p launch will collapse in ignominy in front of the entire Presidium, the amba.s.sadors, the a.s.sembled press of the Vlast. It will be dayspossibly weeksbefore they can try again. And if the abort turns out to be unnecessary, only a twenty-three-year-old inexperienced woman's cry of panic at an unfamiliar display code...

She hears her own voice speaking. It sounds too loud. Hoa.r.s.e and unfamiliar.

'Guidance Telemetry is go, Launch. Go.'

'Thank you, Avril.'

Launch moves on to the next station.

With trembling hands, Mikkala Avril powers off her console, counts to ten, and switches it back on. The cathode tubes begin cycling through their ponderous loading routine.

'T minus three hundred, Proof of Concept.'

Thank you Launch.

Five minutes. The sugary music cuts out at last. There is a swell of voices and a sc.r.a.ping of chairs as the dignitaries turn to the window and put on their dark gla.s.ses.

'Can't see a b.l.o.o.d.y thing from here,' mutters Foreign Minister Sarsin. (The Vlast needs a foreign minister now. So the world turns.) 'It's below the f.u.c.king horizon.'

'You will see, Minister,' says Khyrbysk. 'You will certainly see.'

An argument breaks out as camera operators try to set up in front of the dignitaries.

'You don't have to do this. There's another team on the roof.'

'Something could go wrong up there. We should have back-up footage.'

Khyrbysk makes angry signs to the press liaison officer to close the disturbance down. He hadn't wanted the press there at all, or the amba.s.sadors for that matter, but Rizhin insisted. Rizhin is a showman; he wants to astonish the world.

'The risk,' Khyrbysk had said to him on the telephone. 'What if it flops?'

'You make it not flop, Yakov. That's your job.'

Rizhin needs risk, Khyrbysk realises. He burns risk for fuel. Everything races hot and fast, the engine too powerful for the machine. Parts that burn out are replaced on the move, without stopping. The whole of the New Vlast is Rizhin's Proof of Concept, his bomb-powered vessel heading for unexplored territories and goals only Rizhin understands.

The cosmonauts feel the colossal engineering beneath them sliding into life, the coolant pumping round the shock-absorbing pillars, the bomb pickers rattling through the magazines in search of the first charge. Proof of Concept is a behemoth of industrial construction, but it is also very simple.

Mikkala Avril's screens come back up with ten seconds to go. Everything is fine: readouts dead on the line. She is so relieved she wants to cry, but she does not allow herself; she is stronger than that and holds it in. She is the heart of the youth of the New Vlast and she is good at her job and she will not fail.

Two seconds to go, she remembers to put her dark gla.s.ses on. She turns up the brightness on her screen, closes her eyes, presses a black cloth against her face and begins her own interior count. For the first ten bombs it will be too bright to see, and Proof of Concept will be on her own: then Mikkala must open her eyes and be not too dazzled to work.

Before the chief engineer discovered the properties of angel flesh propellant, what Mikkala was about to do would have been impossible: the bombs' electromagnetic pulses would have broken all contact between s.h.i.+p and ground. But now the s.h.i.+p's instruments will sing and chatter as she rises, and be heard.

The cosmonauts' cabin s.h.i.+vers with the clang of the first apricot locking into the expulsion chute.

Launch control is whited out in a flash of illumination that erases the sun.

Bompbompbomp. Bigger explosions each time. Brilliant blinding flashes. Slowly at first then faster and faster Proof of Concept rises, riding a crumb trail of detonations, climbing a tower of mushroom clouds.

The cosmonauts groan as each detonation slams their backs with a brute fist of acceleration. The whole s.h.i.+p judders and creaks and moans like a bathyscaphe under many thousand atmospheres of pressure.

For the observers in the launch control blockhouse at Chaiganur Test Site 61, the s.h.i.+p itself is lost, the explosion trail hard to watch. The repeated retinal burn forms blue-purple-green jumbling images. Brilliant drifting spectral bruises in the eye. President-Commander Rizhin stands at the window, the hot glare pulsing on his face, an atomic heartbeat.

I am the fist of history. I am the mile-high man.