She suddenly wished she was on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she felt cut off.

But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance, at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over Lourdes, and yet I pine for my online womb. Well, I’m a woman of my time.

The artefact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly approaching. Planes criss-crossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the wheel yet — or if it had been fired on.

“Holy shit,” said Malenfant. “Do you see that?”

“What?”

He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas blisters that encased them. “There. Near the bottom of the ring.”

It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of iron filings.

Malenfant lifted small binoculars. “People,” he said bluntly. He lowered the binoculars. “Tall, skinny, naked people.”

She couldn’t integrate the information. People — thrust naked into the air eight miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones… Why? Where were they from?

“Can they be saved?”

Malenfant just laughed.

The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the centre of the ring was significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there, almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel’s electric blue frame.

And now that lumbering business-type jet reached dead centre of the artefact. It twisted once, twice, then crumpled like a paper cup in an angry fist. Glittering fragments began to hail into the ring.

It was over in seconds. There hadn’t even been an explosion.

Fire:

Wind gusts. Lightning flashes. There is no Loud.

People come spewing out of the Mouth. They fall to the grass. The rain falls steadily on the grass, hissing.

Emma Stoney:

“Like it got sucked in,” Malenfant said with grim fascination. “Maybe the wheel is a teleporter, drawing out our atmosphere.” The plane Juddered again, and she could see him wrestling with the stick. “Whatever it is it’s making a mess of the air flow.”

She could see the other planes, presumably military jets, pulling back to more cautious orbits. But the T-38 kept right on, battering its way into increasingly disturbed air. Malenfant’s shoulders jerked as they hauled at the recalcitrant controls.

“Malenfant, what are you doing?”

“We can handle this. We can get a lot closer yet. Those African guys are half trained sissies—”

The plane hit another pocket. They fell fifty or a hundred feet before slamming into a floor that felt hard as concrete.

Emma could taste blood in her mouth. “Malenfant!”

“Did you bring your Kodak? Come on, Emma. What’s life for? This is history.”

No, she thought. This is your wash-out. That’s why you are risking your life, and mine, so recklessly.

The artefact loomed larger in the roiling sky ahead of her, so large now that she couldn’t see its full circle for the body of the plane. Those iron-filing people continued to rain from the base of the disc, some of them twisting as they fell.

“Makes you think,” Malenfant said. “I spend my life struggling to get into space. And on the very day I get washed out of the programme, the very same day, space comes to me. Wherever the hell this thing comes from, whatever mother ship orbiting fucking Neptune, you can bet there’s going to be a clamour to get out there. Those NASA assholes must be jumping up and down; it’s their best day since Neil and Buzz. At last we’ve got someplace to go — but whoever they send it isn’t going to be me. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? If Mohammed can’t get to the mountain…”

She closed her hand on the stick before her, letting it pull her passively to and fro. What if she grabbed the stick hard, yanked it to left or right? Could she take over the plane? And then what? “Malenfant, I’m scared.”

“Of the UFO?”

“No. Of you.”

“Just a little closer,” he said, his voice a thin crackle over the intercom. “I won’t let you come to any harm, Emma.”

Suddenly she screamed. “…Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!”

Reid Malenfant:

It was a Moon, but not the Moon. A new Moon. A Red Moon.

It was a day of strange lights in the sky. But it was a sky that was forever barred to him.

The plane was flung sideways.

It was like a barrel roll. Suddenly his head was jammed into his shoulders and his vision tunnelled, worse than any eyeballs-back launch he had ever endured and harder, much harder, than he would have wanted to put Emma through.

His systems went dead: softscreens, the clunky old dials, even the hiss of the comms, everything. He wrestled with the stick, but got no response; the plane was just falling through an angry sky, helpless as an autumn leaf.

The rate of roll increased, and the Gs just piled on. He knew he was already close to blacking out; perhaps Emma had succumbed already, and soon after that the damn plane was going to break up.

With difficulty he readied the ejection controls. “Emma! Remember the drill!” But she couldn’t hear, of course.

Just for a second, the panels flickered back to life. He felt the stick jerk, the controls bite.

It was a chance to regain control.

He didn’t take it.

Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.

He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn’t get off.

But the plane plummeted on towards the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.

He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as Emma’s canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her clear.

And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.

He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upwards like a toy and sent tumbling in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by the sudden silence.

Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.

Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.

He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his “chute. Yet he couldn’t. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone. It made no sense, but there it was.

At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.

Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he was dangling. He looked up and saw his “chute open reassuringly above him, a distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.

But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum, and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having trouble breathing; his chest laboured. He pulled a green toggle to release his emergency oxygen.