“Knew it,” Phillips exults. He tosses the book aside. Pages spill out of it when it lands, splayed like a hand of cards. He delves into the rucksack with serious purpose, throwing aside the half-empty water bottles and the tool (a claw hammer) to come up with his prize: a half-empty packet of Marlboro Gold cigarettes and a second pack that’s still sealed. Hard currency in Beacon, but there’s no way these cancer-sticks are going to travel that far.
Khan dips her gaze and looks at the scattered pages of the book. One of them has a picture, of two children sitting in a flying chair, holding on tight to the arms as they soar over the rounded turret of a castle tower. There is a caption below the picture. “Why, our magic chair might take us anywhere!” Peter cried.
“Got what you need, Dr. Khan?” Phillips asks her. He’s cheerful, expansive, riding on an emotional high from the mere thought of those smokes.
“Yes, Gary,” Khan tells him, studiously deadpan. “Everything I need.”
The journey back to Rosie is blessedly uneventful but, like the trip out, it’s protracted and exhausting. By the time they’re through the airlock, Khan is pretty much done and just wants to lie down in her bunk until the day goes away. But John Sealey needs to greet her and—under the guise of a casual conversation—to ascertain that she’s okay. The boy Stephen Greaves is less demonstrative but she knows his body language: he needs even more reassurance than John, and on top of that he needs, as always, to restore their normal status quo through the rituals they’ve established over the years they have known each other—greetings and exchanges whose importance lies entirely in their being said rather than in any meaning they carry.
“Good day’s work, Stephen?”
“Not too bad, Dr. Khan. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Did you enjoy your walk?”
“Very much. It’s a lovely day out there. You should take a stroll yourself before the sun goes in.”
She disentangles herself delicately, first from John and then from Stephen, and now she’s free and clear. The colonel is up in the cockpit. The rest of the crew have their own shit to deal with and no wish to get mixed up in hers.
Khan goes into the shower, since Phillips has already grabbed the latrine. She locks herself in and undresses quickly. Her body is slick with sweat but there is no smell apart from the slightly bitter tang of e-blocker. If there had been, of course, she would have found out about it before now.
One by one she unwraps the three packages, stowing the wrappers in her pockets. The boxes, folded down tight and small, follow. In each package is a flimsy plastic wand. The designs are slightly different, but each wand has a window halfway along its length and a thickening at one end to show where you’re supposed to grip it.
Squatting on the floor of the shower, legs slightly parted, she does what needs to be done.
The chemistry is straightforward, and close to infallible. Anti-hCG globulin is extremely reactive to certain human hormones, including the hormone gonadotrophin. Properly prepared, it will change colour in the hormone’s presence.
And the hormone is present in a woman’s urine. Sometimes.
Having peed on the business end of the three wands, she waits in silence, watching the three little windows. A negative result will tell her very little. The protein layer on the prepared strip inside the wands may have degraded too far to catalyse. A positive, on the other hand, will mean what it always meant.
Khan gets the hat trick.
Mixed emotions rise in her as she stares at these messages from her own uncharted interior, a high tide of wonder and dismay and disbelief and misery in which hope bobs like a lifeboat cut adrift.
Seven weeks into a fifteen-month mission, ten years after the world ended and a hundred miles from home, Dr. Samrina Khan is pregnant.
But this is not Bethlehem, and there will be no manger.
2
There are twelve of them, but they break neatly into two groups of six.
The science team is headed by Dr. Alan Fournier, the civilian commander with overall responsibility for the success of the mission. He is a thin, overly precise man with a habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence to get his thoughts in order. It’s an unfortunate habit to find in a leader, but to be fair nobody thinks of him as one.
The escort, comprising soldiers and officers of the Beacon Muster, is under the command of Colonel Isaac Carlisle, sometimes known as the Fireman because of his association with the offensive use of chemical incendiaries. He hates that name. He hated that mission. His feelings about this one are not on record.
In the science team, there are three men and two women:
Samrina Khan
Lucien Akimwe
John Sealey
Elaine Penny
Stephen Greaves
epidemiologist
chemist
biologist
biologist
nobody is entirely certain
In the escort, likewise, two women and three men:
Lt Daniel McQueen
Lance-Bombardier Kat Foss
Private Brendan Lutes
Private Paula Sixsmith
Private Gary Phillips
sniper and second in command
sniper
engineer
driver
quartermaster
The ruling bodies in Beacon, the civilian council called the Main Table and the Military Muster, did not choose their best or their brightest, though they made a great show of doing exactly that. What they actually did, or tried to do, was to strike a balance that gave them the most plausible shot at survival. A larger escort would have been possible simply by allocating more vehicles to the expedition, but every soldier sent out would have weakened Beacon’s own defences. McQueen and Foss, trained in the sniper corps, are elite soldiers and the hardest to spare. Their skill set is needed every day to thin out the hungries gathering at Beacon’s gates. The scientists are a different matter, but in their case too there are issues of day-to-day urgency to which their expertise could be applied. By sending them out, Beacon is making a commitment to the future. But it is a commitment filtered through a bed of pragmatism.
Twelve men and women in a great big armoured truck are not such a huge risk, when all is said and done. They carry a great many hopes and dreams with them, but if they should chance to be lost, their loss can be borne.
They know very well that they are expendable.
3
Seven weeks brought them to Luton. Seven months carry them on to Scotland.
The year is closing in on them, and so is everything else. The last of the good omens evaporated long ago. They have made no progress, no discoveries. Thousands of samples have been taken and tested, thousands more are still to come, but nobody on the science team believes any longer that there is any point. Each hides his or her resignation, cynicism or despair for the sake of the others, reduced to hoping now at second hand.