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  "Which is why there's a Space Shuttle II now," says Nick.

  "Yesssss," says Laura. "Which is about ten percent lighter because of thaumic heat shielding, and also because it has ring-and-sigil attitude controls, and... a bunch of other stuff which they didn't want to retrofit into an existing orbiter."

  "Has there been a Space Shuttle II launch yet, and if not..."

  "Not for another few years," says Laura.

  "...Are you going to watch those launches too?"

  "I don't know," says Laura.

  "You never answered my first question," says Nick.

  "Which question?"

  "My first question. Because space travel is cool and all, but you nearly missed an end-of-term exam last year."

  Laura doesn't answer.

  "Are you waiting for another Atlantis disaster? Because that was our generation's 'do you remember where you were' moment. You want to see a Shuttle blow up live?"

  "No," says Laura, staring into her drink. And adds, "I've already seen that once." Here goes nothing, she thinks.

  There's a pause.

  "You saw the Atlantis disaster live?"

  "Yeah."

  "Wait, TV live or live live?"

  "We were there," says Laura.

  "You were there? You and your family?" Laura nods. "You were what, fourteen?" Another nod. "Wait. Wait." Nick realises there's something important here. He does some mental arithmetic.

  Laura stares, holding her glass in both hands, eyes defocusing. She's been working up to telling him this for how long? And she still doesn't have more than the first few words worked out.

  "Was that how your mother died?"

  The countdown starts ticking again. Nineteen minutes, fifty-nine seconds.

  "I don't know."

  Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. Fifty-six.

  *

  It's December 1993 and the Space Shuttle has never failed. As a super heavy lift launch system, the Shuttle program has a mind-boggling quoted probability-of-mission-failure figure of 1 in 60,000. The actual figure will later be discovered to have been closer to 1 in 60, with the difference made up by carelessness, lax safety culture and systematic managerial overconfidence. This overconfidence has arisen predominantly from the Shuttle's flawless track record. The Shuttle program is broken and unsafe. It is unsafe largely because everybody thinks it is safe. It is about to fail because it has never failed before. Tomorrow's headline will be: "LOST".

  At 10:08:08 on 17 December, T+45.5 seconds into Shuttle mission STS-77, a large chunk of ice is pulled into Space Shuttle Atlantis' fuel system. The ice is there because the fuelling system was accidentally exposed to air while the External Tank was being filled. Two of the Shuttle's three main engines are destroyed instantly. The flight controller immediately orders "Abort RTLS", Return To Launch Site. At this point in the mission, Atlantis is still attached to two much larger Solid Rocket Boosters. Once triggered, SRBs cannot be shut off, so they are left to run out and detach as normal at T+123 seconds. Then the orbiter and External Tank, still mated to one another, pitch forward and fire their one remaining engine in the opposite direction, cancelling out their forward and upward velocity and accelerating back along the flight path. The plan is this: achieve a satisfactory course and trajectory back towards Florida; roll upright; disconnect the External Tank; and glide in to land at a dedicated landing strip at the launch site, which is ready for this exact eventuality. This is an insanely risky plan with many variables, chief of which being that whatever knocked out the first two SSMEs could imminently knock out the third. However, it is the best and only plan conceivable, and it has been prepared for. An RTLS has never happened before in reality, but it has happened ten thousand times in simulations: the pilot and six crew are as ready as any humans could ever be. If anything could work, this is it.

  At T+181 seconds, Atlantis' last engine goes dark. A second piece of ice has been pulled into the turbopump system, which is now gutted and haemorrhaging liquid oxygen and hydrogen into clear air. The vehicle is 22 miles up and 31 miles downrange, still travelling directly away from its landing strip at well over a thousand miles per hour, upside down, with no motive power and freefalling like a thrown rock. The mission is now over. There are no more abort modes. There is no pulling out of the trajectory, no chance of crossing the ocean to a transatlantic abort site, and no crew bailout capability. In another minute, Atlantis will reach peak altitude. Around five minutes after that, it will crash into the Atlantic. Everybody on board will be killed. And everybody watching on the television and everybody listening on the radio and everybody watching from the ground is going to stand there while it happens. Except one.

  "Doug," Rachel Ferno says to her husband, and surprises him by kissing him as he turns to look at her. "I love you," she says. "Kasta anh sukudat mirsii. Kids!"

  "Rach, what are you—" Douglas Ferno begins, then stops, distracted, as the five pieces of Rachel's two-metre-long magic staff jump out of her rucksack and screw themselves together in mid-air. This apparently simple trick astounds him. He's seen his wife do a lot of magic, and he's seen the staff a million times, but he's never seen her assemble it except by hand, laboriously, taking at least a minute each time. He's a treasurer, no mage, but he knows that a spell like this takes about a month of writing and a month of practice, because of the laundry list of failure cases that have to be handled. How do the pieces know how to exit the rucksack? How do they pick a spot in the air to assemble at? How long should the assembled staff wait to be collected? What if there are only four pieces, what if half of them are stuck behind a wall?

  Laura and Natalie are teenaged, and don't pick up on her urgency when Rachel hugs them both at once, one with each arm, and says "I love you," again. She tries to cover her bases by inflecting somewhere between "I love you: see you in a little while" and "I love you: goodbye forever". "Eset kasta oerinuum OOLO," she adds, which starts her oxygen supply. It's not tuned properly: it blasts her hair downwards like an invisible localised hurricane. Her clothes flicker in the gale and the grass under her feet splays out in all directions. But there's no time for corrections. Here are the components that do matter: "Sedo oerinuum INKEH sedo MOMEH. Kasta esduq jachta!"

  Douglas Ferno doesn't recognise the phrasing; the words just wash over him. Laura and Natalie fare worse. They have enough basic magical knowledge to understand that what their mother is doing is either nonsense, or so far beyond the modern magic state of the art that it might as well be... well, whatever comes next. Rachel Ferno has just initiated a pair of high-throughput transduction spells with almost fractal complexity. The patterns of mana radiating off her are incomprehensible. More than that, they're as bright as a sun. To a tuned mind, they're blinding. Who can handle spells that advanced? Who can imagine them?

  Rachel Ferno's feet rise a few centimetres from the ground. She moves her hands around, something like sign language, distributing virtual controls to points in space where she can reach them. She's building a virtual cockpit. And she's just using hand signals and finger and thumb rings to do it. She's not even saying any words now. "Mum, what are you doing?" cries Laura. She and Natalie can now see luminous manifolds of mana closing up around their mother, like ornate armour.

  Douglas Ferno can't: he reaches for his wife but is stopped by the invisible force field. "Rach, what's happening?" And he's right to be confused, because the smallest, simplest force fields in the world require a portable module the size of a motorcycle to project, and they categorically cannot be curved. Nothing she is doing is possible. "Rachel!"

  Rachel reaches out with her right hand and collects her staff from where it was waiting, suspended in air. "Here goes nothing." As she touches it, there's a single pulse of real light, like a camera flash. Then she's airborne, following the exhaust trail out to sea and the plummeting orbiter.

  *

  Of course there are witnesses. It's impossible to watch a Shuttle launch from a good spot without company; the Fernos' spot is a crowded p
ark in Titusville. That Rachel Ferno has disappeared, the police are prepared to believe. That she disappeared out at sea, during a Shuttle launch? The coastguard take the notification seriously and a search is begun. But even the people who watched it happen - even the people with photographic evidence - don't believe that she flew away.

  A human being doesn't show up on radar. A human being in the air at 40 miles' range is too small a speck of dirt to show up on the video footage.

  At T+318.9 the venting liquid oxygen and hydrogen finally ignite, blowing up the External Tank. The crew compartment of the orbiter survives the explosion and hits the Atlantic almost intact, though it and its occupants are pulverised on impact.

  Seven bodies are recovered from the crash site by NASA.

  *

  (Nine minutes.)

  "That's it?"

  Laura shrugs.

  "So what happened? ...Laura, what happened?"

  "We don't know! We stayed in Florida for a month, waiting for information. And they never found her. The police, the coastguard, NASA. If NASA were looking for an eighth body, which is doubtful. We don't know what happened. We don't know for sure that she tried to save the Shuttle. We don't even know if she's actually dead. She's been missing for... well, not long enough. In another few years we can declare her legally dead. Does that answer your question?"

  "Christ," says Nick, and takes another long pull from his pint while he thinks. And once he's done that, he says, "No. It doesn't.

  "You loved your mum. But when you talk about her she always sounds as if she was half-teacher and half-rival. She taught you everything you know about magic - you and Natalie - and you were well on your way to catching up with her and then eventually surpassing her. No problem. Then just at the moment when you were starting to be a real match for her, she pulled the rug out from under you both. She did seven or eight completely impossible things right in front of you, things which she had never bothered to try to explain were possible, and then she flew away without telling you what she'd done or how she'd done it. She left you with no idea how much else she was holding back, or even who she actually was, because in that last second, she—"

  "It was like she'd dropped the mask of mum-slash-wife," says Laura. "'This is who I really am. I'm a fucking Titan, I'm a cloaked thaumic witch-goddess and I can do anything. Goodbye.'"

  "She was like an actual magician—"

  "—never revealed her secrets," says Laura. "That interpretation had occurred to me too. But - and I'm sure I've covered this - magic is the worst-named field of science in the world. It was a lousy, stupid nickname for some genuinely new physics, and it stuck, and now everybody hates the man who coined it. Including himself. Magic isn't magic. It is a field of science. You do not sit on results. Not results like that."

  "So you don't follow the launches because you're scared of another launch failure and want to be the one who stops them from happening," says Nick.

  "No."

  "And you don't follow them because you miss her."

  "No."

  "Although you do miss her."

  "I do."

  "And you definitely don't secretly want to be like your mother."

  "God, no."

  "So I don't get it. She made you angry. This is nothing but a big bad memory. What do you want?"

  "...What I want is for us to go into space right now," says Laura. She takes off a few bangles and spins them idly between her fingers. "Just us two. We could walk out the door and it would take about ten minutes to get there, straight up. I just need the right words to say. I want autokinetics, air UI, the fluid pump spell she used for O2, non-vocal casting, DWIM, dynamic shielding, and whatever it is she used for a mana source. To begin with. I want it all and I want to be the first person to go into space without a vehicle. Today, if possible. And more after that.

  "Magic's not the Force. It's not mystical, it's a gauge theory. It explains observations. It is, at its root, a collection of dry and unpalatable nonlinear partial differential equations which are known to be not totally accurate. Magic does not speak to us or obey our commands. Getting magic to do anything, let alone what you want it to do, is close to impossible without insanely complex equipment. The equipment itself couldn't be built prior to around 1981, and prior to 1990 computer-aided design and manufacture weren't sophisticated enough. That's to say nothing of the mental gymnastics. You know that people on my course are supposed to spend at least twelve hours a week meditating?"

  Nick does know this. He also knows that Laura gets away with less.

  "Magic is difficult," she continues. "It's harsh and expensive and obtuse. Magic isn't magic."

  "...But it should be," Nick concludes.

  "Yeah."

  "It's not likely to happen today, Laura."

  "This week, then."

  Nick shakes his head. Laura shakes her head too. She knows what she's asking for.

  Their glasses are both empty. "Another?" Nick asks.

  "In a minute," Laura says, pointing.

  On the television screen, because she knows what to look for, Laura can see the launch pad sound suppression system activating, dumping a thousand tonnes of water onto the pad just before liftoff in order to protect the orbiter from acoustic damage. In the pit underneath the Shuttle's engines, a shower of red sparks erupts, burning off any lingering pockets of flammable hydrogen before the engines themselves fire. In the absence of an on-screen timer or an audible commentator, Laura is counting to herself:

  "Nine. Eight. Main engine start—"

  They start, all three of them, bright red at first, then white, then ramping up in a matter of seconds to a temperature where the hottest part of the flame isn't visible. The whole launch stack pitches forward slightly, reacting to the off-centre thrust, then gently leans back towards vertical. All that's left now is for the SRBs to ignite. "Four. Three. Two. One."

  What You Don't Know

  Dr. Dan Czarnecki arrives at the lecture theatre thirty seconds after the lecture was supposed to begin and stalks down to the front through a noisy cloud of conversations-in-progress. He throws his leather briefcase at a chair, grabs a marker pen from the nearest shelf and begins scrawling a board-wide equation on the far left whiteboard. His handwriting is appalling, even worse on the board than it is on the heavily photocopied notes he sometimes remembers to hand out. Today, the marker pen is running out. Czarnecki realises this halfway through the equation, glares at what he's written, glares at the pen, caps it and hurls it overarm into the waste paper bin at the other end of the wide, mainly circular stage. The bin is metal, and there's a sharp and satisfying tang as it catches the pen. Czarnecki finishes the equation with a different colour. Only then does he turn around and start removing his gloves, hat and coat. This is also the point at which he will start speaking, regardless of how many people in the room haven't managed to shut up yet. But they've shut up by now, because at the speed Czarnecki works, not listening for more than half a minute is a recipe for irreversible, eternal confusion.

  "If you have the slightest recollection of what's happened to you in the last five-and-a-half weeks you'll recognise this as Vidyasagar's First Incomplete Field Equation, which I showed you on the first day of the course. You will also remember that when I showed it to you, I told you it has three errors in it. I corrected the first error right away. Can somebody tell me what that was?"

  Czarnecki's tone of voice indicates that he wants this answer fast.

  "Pi should be two pi," shouts a voice from the mid-left of the theatre.

  Czarnecki adds a "2" to the equation. "Reflectivity," he clarifies. "Full-blown fully-accounted 5D thaumic flow is self-interfering. Good good. Vidyasagar's First Incomplete Field Equation was derived correctly, but derived from partial observations and inaccurate assumptions. When it was shown to disagree with the first 'real' uum casts, Rajesh Vidyasagar corrected one of his assumptions and revised his work. Good. This equation was for some years known as Vidyasagar's Completed Fi
eld Equation.

  "The word 'Completed' was dropped and replaced with the words 'Second Incomplete' as a result of the Shelburne-Sharma experiment, which you duplicated in microcosm in the laboratory last Friday afternoon. At that time, all we gathered was raw data. Partially that was due to a shortage of time, but mostly that was to give you a chance to collate the data and draw a conclusion. Does anybody have a conclusion? Does somebody want to put their hand up and admit to having done some work last weekend? A vague stab will do. A guess?" Czarnecki starts snapping his fingers rapidly. He paces around the stage. "Come on. Come on, come on, come on! Not you."

  Czarnecki's class is attentive and blank, but he singles out one girl at the front on the right. Czarnecki makes a deliberate habit of calling everybody "you" even though he has picked up just over a third of the sixty-five or so names. In his view, it is fairer if he pretends to not know any of them. But everybody knows Laura Ferno.

  "Okay. Will somebody whose Veblen arbitrator didn't bleed out on Friday, and who therefore at least collected good data, and who has since had access to graph paper or an electronic substitute thereof, please summarise their observations for the benefit of the class? Come on. Who actually made graphs? Anybody? Yes! So what did you see? You?"

  Czarnecki seizes on a student at the back of the class who has hesitantly raised his graphs in the air. From this distance the graphs look good: for one thing, at least five different plots are visible.

  "They disagree," says the student, whose name is Mathis Schröter.

  "What disagrees with what?"

  "The measurements predicted by... Vidyasagar's Second Incomplete Field Equation... and the actual measurements don't match onto one another properly. There's a difference between them. But—"

  "Characterise that difference for me."