Underneath the space station, aimed directly for Centauri-Earth, is a massive missile. The biological bomb, the one that will kill every single hybrid.
Including Amy.
I have one shot at this.
Godspeed careens toward the station.
* * *
I imagine it all in slow motion, each cause-and-effect scenario playing through my mind. Godspeed will crash into the station. The station will rip apart, fall in on itself.
Possibly the missile will go off without launching at the planet, setting off an explosion bigger than I can imagine.
Or maybe the ship’s engine, a lead-cooled fast reactor fueled by recycled uranium, will explode first.
And there will be me, in my tiny rocket, swallowed whole.
“I’m sorry, Amy,” I whisper, despite the fact that I’ve cut off all communication. I know she won’t hear me, but I also know one day she might forgive me for breaking my promise to her.
I’m not going to come back from this one.
69: AMY
I don’t think I really understood why Elder cut the communication link until I see the dots on the electronic map start to fly toward each other. The escape rocket and Godspeed, on a crash course toward the space station.
And then I realize: he didn’t want me to hear him die.
I shut my eyes and cover my ears, trying to hold in the scream that is rising from within me.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I’m going to be sick.
“Look,” Chris says, pointing as the map flickers and dies, showing nothing but a black screen.
I rush to the door of the communication room and throw it open. The hybrids don’t bother trying to stop me. I suppose it’s because I’m one of them now, or maybe they just know there’s nowhere for me to run. A blast of cool air hits me, making my hair swirl in front of my face. I swipe it away and run to the center of the compound, where the auto-shuttle stood not too long ago, before Elder boarded it.
I throw my head back and stare into the sky.
And I see.
The dark sky.
A hundred million stars.
More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.
Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.
The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.
And then we see the end.
Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb.
There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.
Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.
Nothing else to signify Elder’s death.