24.

On the day of launch I woke early and checked the news. The balloon with its controversial payload had lifted from Machrihanish on schedule at dawn. The day was calm with high cloud and what little wind there was coming from the east, weather fronts almost stationary far to the west. Conditions for the experiment were ideal. I knew the controversy inside out and I had no need or wish to follow the commentary on the craft's remaining hours of uneventful ascent. I rattled out a few responses and then, feeling like a creep as usual, watched Gabrielle go to work.

Gabrielle had been gone over half a year. A dozen pairs of her shoes were under the bed. Dried-out cosmetics and jewellery clutter made the top of the dressing-table a dusty shrine. Every so often I'd think of sweeping the lot into a black bag. Sometimes I'd get as far as taking a bin-liner into the bedroom. I'd stand there, half-crouched, my arm drawn back to swing across the surface.

The Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood overlooks a terraced plaza of concrete and grass, designed as a place for crowds to gather and demonstrations to culminate, and opens out to Holyrood Park and the lower slopes of Salisbury Crags. The effect, perhaps intentional, is to make any gathering there seem insignificant. The only one I've seen that didn't was the Forum, all those years ago, and that was unique in its scale and purpose, overwhelming its surroundings like a great flood. The morning of the launch the space dissipated rather than contained a couple of hundred protesters, with the usual placards and banners and a high above earnest, angry faces a the more original gimmick of a bobbing fleet of silvery balloons, from which hung carefully and aptly safety consciously designed cardboard and plastic mock-ups of dangerous-looking bits of old ironmongery and deadly-looking missiles, nose-cones pointed down.

Under high cloud and a watery sun the chant went up: 'Nae tae the Rammie! Nae tae the Rammie!' With open space behind and beside and a complex facade in front, the sound died away amid its own distorted echoes, but it persisted. I forbore to sneer, but I didn't spare the demonstration more than a glance before I ducked into the Media Tower. My face has long been on the list so that was no problem. Security scan is an automated archway of short-range radar and sonar, and always gives me a creeped-out feeling, a sort of shudder as I pass through, but that's probably psychosomatic. I took a right and hurried up the stairs to the journalists' pen in the lobby of the press conference hall.

At barely ten twenty I was early but the pen was buzzing, at least in a relative sense. The woman from the BBC was talking to the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Aberdeen, who was arguing against the Rammie on behalf of all the North Sea's wind farmers, oil workers, ferry passengers and remaining fish. Karl from the Guardian, alarmingly younger than me, waggled his fingers in the air with an occasional pause to swig from a plastic cup. Two young women from a station in Jakarta were walking around wearing antique recording gear like tiaras over their hijabs, boom cams and mikes projecting from the sides of their heads. The dozen or so drones parked on a shelf had all been booked by agencies or channels. A couple of tables had been set up with company and project reps behind them and freebie clutter on top. I hung about for a minute, taking all this in on my glasses, and then checked in at the project table to pick up a badge. After a chat I moseyed into the cramped kitchen with its familiar smells of microwave and instant. A tallish guy with his back to me was moodily waiting for a kettle to boil.

He turned, looked up. It was Calum. Black hair fashionably collar length and wavy; three-piece suit. His face thrust forward, leading with the strong forehead and jaw; his bright inquisitive eyes under bushy black eyebrows looked momentarily startled. I could see the wheels turn, then he plastered on a grin and stuck out a paw.

'Ah, Sinky! Good to see you, man!'

His voice rang with insincerity. I returned him the quickest handshake consistent with politeness. Calum had good reason to feel awkward and a bit guilty towards me, and he knew I knew. I had two entirely different, and each equally good, reasons to feel awkward and guilty towards him, but he didn't know this, at least as far as I knew. Hence a certain froideur in our interaction. I tried to keep it out of my voice.

'Hi, Calum. How's things?'

'Fine, fine.' He poured hot water into a cup, added milk, fiddled with a sachet of sugar.

'And what brings you here?'

'We're covering the weather.'

I already knew that Calum's employer, StrathSpace, had that contract and/or sponsorship deal: hyper-local meteorology for the balloon ascent and the payload drop. I bloody well should have not just known that but expected him to be there, having a fortnight or so earlier written the article that had given today's experiment its modicum of global publicity.

'We're daein the live feed as well, obvs,' Calum added.

I hadn't noticed, but now that I looked again at the display a a barely changing view of the darkening sky, the balloon and the suspended payload, whose central shaft and paired side pods had drawn an online flurry of schoolboy sniggers a I saw the SkEye logo in the lower corner. The view was from directly below, from a camera on the end of a needle-thin carbon-fibre boom extending from the payload's nose-cone.

'Ah, right,' I said.

Calum stepped aside; I lurched for the kettle, then had to stand politely aside myself as Josie from the Herald made an entrance. Like a Dr Who companion striding from the 1850s to the 1890s between one footfall and the next she deftly shrivelled her modish metafabric meringue to a crinkled column of pleats, but even so there wasn't enough space in the galley for all of us. I delicately edged my hips past her now-bustled butt, and let her in to take care of her tea. There was a triangular exchange of pleasantries. I got back to the kettle as Josie shimmied out. Coffee at last. Calum was standing just outside the doorway.

'Kindae funny looking at that thing,' he said, gazing apparently at nothing but actually at the SkEye feed of the steadily ascending silver sphere. He glanced round, and dropped his voice. 'Given, you know. Our previous.'

'Arr,' I said, in that generic Scottish imitation of an English rural accent from some phantom shire between the Dales and Devon, all straw-chewing yokels and soot-smeared cloth-capped barefoot dole-fed blacklisted miners' waifs, 'when we were lads, like, we called them tharr shiny flying things Yow Eff Ows, we did.'

'And if owt sayed 'e'd seen inside 'un,' Calum fell in, 'we'd string t'bugger oop fer a witch.'

This didn't release the tension between us, but it cracked us up. It was close to the bone. Things got closer to the bone a moment later, as we both shifted from the kitchen doorway and saw the Shadow Minister for Technology arrive with a researcher and an adviser. Baxter noticed us noticing, then looked quickly away.

'Fuck me,' Calum muttered, still staring, 'the gang's all here.'

Anyone overhearing might think this referred to the politician and his retinue, but I knew it didn't. We're the close-encountered and he's the Man in Black, is what it meant.

'You know Sophie's company supplied the metafabric?' I remarked, by way of swerving from the subject.

'Yeah, course I know,' Calum said. He looked around. 'Fuck me, she's no here too, is she?'

'No,' I said. 'Why? Oh, I see. Then the gang really would be all here.'

'Aye,' said Calum. 'Think ae all ae us being involved, eh?'

At this I had a moment of panic that he was on to me, then I realised he meant us old school pals all having different involvements in the Rammie. Or was this all he meant? Luckily for me, the actual Minister for Technology arrived flanked by the Rammie project director, Hayley Walters, and her PA, so I didn't have time to wrap this particular rope any more turns around the bollard as I joined the crush for quotes and pics.

The Technology Minister, Simon Nardini, held up his hands and called out, 'OK, OK, everyone, plenty of time for questions when we get started. Ten minutes!' He disappeared into the press conference hall with Walters and the PA. I spent the ten minutes trying not to catch Baxter's eye, which wasn't too difficult because he was deep in conversation with the Indonesian lassies, and avoiding Calum, which again was easy because Calum was minding the StrathSpace table. Nobody else but Karl and Josie knew me anyway, and they were chatting to Baxter's adviser. Just as I finished my coffee and was looking for a place to dispose of the empty cup the doors opened and we were all invited in. I hung back as everyone trooped through. The drones whirred into the air and followed, leaving a vacant shelf and solving en passant my problem about where to leave the cup.

The Holyrood press conference room has a few disorderly rows of plastic chairs in front of a stage with a podium in front and a 3D HD screen behind. The screen isn't strictly necessary but it's dramatic and kind of traditional. Here and there in the room, like misplaced coat trees, are perches for drones. Most drones these days can hover unobtrusively and silently for hours, but the ones available to hire in the Media Tower aren't among them. The logos of their current users were flagged in my glasses, and this morning they were (rather aptly considering the hardware) heavyweight: Popolare, al-Jazeera, Xinhua, Frente, Zeit.

I grabbed a seat beside Karl and behind Josie, both of whom gave me the quick dismissive glance that's more or less a contractual obligation for staff to give freelance, at least in public. Chairs scraped, gear clicked, everyone settled down.

The screen lit up with the same view of the ascent we'd all been keeping track of in glasses or phones. A column at the edge gave the package's altitude and location, which a map app on my glasses translated to safely over the Atlantic, off the coast of Donegal. Now and then the view from the tiny nose-cone boom camera cut to a downward view. You could see the curve of the Earth and the white cloud layer far below. Then it cut again to the silver sphere and the blue-black sky, and stayed there. From the wings Nardini bounded to the podium, while his shadow and Walters took up flanking seats on stage.

'Good morning,' Nardini said, 'and welcome to this final stage of a great Scottish project, a giant step towards a bold and visionary method of affordable access to space, achieved by partnership between the Scottish Government and Scotland's engineers and entrepreneurs. I now turn you over to one of them, an engineer as well as an entrepreneur, Ms Hayley Walters.'

He stepped back from the podium as Walters stepped up. She tweaked her glasses, wiggled her fingers, grasped the sides of the lectern, and leaned forward.

'Thank you, Mr Nardini, and thank you all for coming. I know you're here to ask questions, and I'm ready to answer, but to tell you the truth we've answered a lot of questions over the past few weeks. Ground control at Machrihanish have just confirmed that the Rammie has reached its test altitude, the air and shipping lanes below are clear and everything is good to go. So, without further ado ...' She turned to the screen, and a no doubt in synch with her own feed from ground control a called out: 'Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ...' Dramatic downward sweep of the arm, then, 'Release!'

The silver sphere shot upward as if snatched away. The camera stayed trained on the central rocket and the ramjet pods to which it was attached until the sphere had dwindled to a bright speck, then cut to the downward view. The screen showed white cloud. The altitude and air pressure numbers were a blur, the latitude and longitude stable but for a flicker to the right of the decimal points. Back to the package.

'Any second now for the ramjets,' said Walters, voice steady.

Paired flares erupted above and merged. The view became one of three black overlapping solid circles a one large, two small a and the two projecting straight lines of the wings on a background of orange and red fire.

I added my, 'Yay!' to the general spontaneous cheer.

Cut to the downward view. The white cloud had become ragged, leaving black by contrast gaps here and there.

'Flaps deployed,' said Walters. 'Thrust vector reversal sequence initiated.'

The view didn't change, except that the texture of the cloud layer became more evident.

'Any moment now.'

Nothing happened. The dark gaps became visibly larger. I heard everyone breathe in at the same moment.

'Mission abort,' said Walters, still calm. 'Cut fuel to ramjets, repeat, cut fuel to ramjets.'

The view flicked upward. The orange fire still bloomed.

'Ramjet fuel supply control malfunction,' said Walters. Her voice steadied. 'On course for fail-safe sea-level failure mode.'

Cut again to the downward view. The colour in the gaps was now brown and green. There was the sound of everyone leaning forward at once.

'What the fuck!' said Walters, not calmly. The sentiment appeared general. Her voice steadied again. 'Automatic fuel dumping initiated.'

Quick cut upward a no change a and back down. A shape familiar from maps and satellite-pic apps filled the screen. My glasses reinterpreted what was in front of my eyes at the moment my brain did the same. Right in front of us, right below the rocket, was Edinburgh. Meanwhile the telemetry rolled on, reporting a location far to the west. This was impossible, but we were seeing it.

Someone screamed. Hands went to heads. I thought to do what no one else did: I wrenched my gaze from the screen, and looked up, blinking to EyeFly. The floors and roof became transparent. In a patch of clear blue directly overhead I saw the flare, brightening. The Rammie was coming down right on top of us. I needed no technological enhancement to hear that people outside had noticed too and were making their feelings known. The noise of pandemonium battered through the walls of the Media Tower like royal cannon fire through a baronial castle. When I looked back at the screen I fancied I could see the upturned open-mouthed faces as tiny spots of white.

At the last second the looming mass of the city, its main roads and great basalt outcrops already distinct, swung away. My quick upward glance took in a fireworks display, like a skidding turn in a shower of sparks. The screen went white, then blue. Everyone breathed out.

'Main engine firing,' said Walters.

The blue blackened by the second. Minutes passed in tense silence. I could feel my palms sweat.

'Full detonation abort,' said Walters.

The screen went black.

'Downrange confirms safe detonation abort,' said Walters. 'Debris falling clear of coasts and shipping.'

There was a moment of shaking silence. Walters took a deep breath, pulled her shoulders back, and faced forward.

'Well,' she said, 'I'm afraid there's no getting around the fact that what we've just seen is a catastrophic mission failure. However, I should say even at this point that the thrust reversal worked albeit with some delay and that the mission failed safely without casualties or significant property damage, and ... and ...'

'I think perhaps you should sit down,' said Nardini, taking her elbow and guiding her to one of the bucket seats on the stage. She sat, glasses on, staring straight ahead, mouth working silently.

Nardini sighed and took the podium. 'Questions?'

Clamour followed. Nardini cut through it with a pointed finger.

'Yes a BBC?'

Josie stood up.

'Mr Nardini, I've just received confirmation from ground control at Machrihanish that as well as continuous downlink telemetry they had full radar tracking of the Rammie's location at least until the drop. How do you account for the project's being so far off course that it dropped its payload above Edinburgh?'

As I listened to the question I had a flash of what felt like sheer inspiration as the answer clicked into place. I shot my hand up at once.

'Ms Thompson,' Nardini said, 'we're all a little shaken and trying to get our heads round what we've just witnessed. But my first response is to say that I have full confidence in the competence of the project director and her team, as well as in the Scottish Government's scientific and technical advisers. There is no question in my mind that we're faced here not with mere miscommunication, accident or malfunction but something altogether more deliberate and sinister.'

'Do you mean sabotage? Surely that would imply a shocking lapse of security and dereliction of duty?'

'I think it would be premature at this stage to say sabotage, precisely, but ...' He spread his hands.

'Anyone else wish to comment?'

Baxter, who'd been as transfixed as the rest of us by the unfolding catastrophe and had sat jabbing at his phone in smouldering silence since, sprang to his feet.

'Excuse me, Simon. I wouldn't think it premature at all to call this sabotage. In fact, I would go further. We all saw where the payload was headed. We all felt it was headed directly at us, did we not? I've just run a sim of its precise trajectory, and can say with some confidence that had it not pulled out of its dive at the last moment it would have crashed on the main building of the Scottish Parliament.' He paused, and flashed a smile. 'Quite possibly, everyone here in the Media Tower would have survived.' Another pause, then a lower pitch and more solemn tone, 'In the main building, not so many. What we have just seen was an attempted terrorist attack on the government and people of Scotland.'

'Terrorist?' Josie sounded incredulous. 'We haven't had terrorist attacks in a generation. Who do you imagine could be responsible?'

Baxter's smile was thin, his voice suave. 'Ms Thompson, even someone of your generation may recall, if only from childhood, the many, many outrages a power cuts, traffic disruptions, net collapses, fires and explosions, to mention but a few a that the revolutionaries inflicted on us during the troubles. What was that but terrorism? To be sure, the media called it sabotage, but that was because the word "terrorism" was too closely associated with, ah, issues arising from the Middle East conflicts and of course with the war. But terrorism it was, by definition. I suggest this may be the first shot a perhaps a warning shot, perhaps a merciful failure in execution a in its return, and from the same source.'

By now he was in command of the press conference, and therefore at the front of a sensational story that was topping more and more news agendas by the second all round the world. I had to admire his despatch and panache, his ability to think on his feet. He'd planted terrorism and the revolutionaries at the forefront of speculation; out of the corner of my eye which I was keeping on the less respectable strands of the net I could see the hare he'd started up running, and an army of hitherto torpid conspiracy theorists bestirring themselves in their basements to shamble in its trail, all windmilling arms and wheezing halloos.

I waved my hand and stood up, but the attention was a sensibly enough a all on the big hitters.

'Gentleman from Xinhua?' Nardini indicated, trying to wrest the joystick back from his shadow, evidently so rattled he couldn't read Leung Yi's name on his glasses.

'Ah, a question for Mr Baxter. Sir, the so-called revolutionaries to which you refer dissolved their organisation many years ago. They admitted defeat. They have not been heard from since. Does it not seem more likely that this spectacular but limited action is designed to discredit the New Improvement and with it the new economic policy as a whole? And which political forces and economic interests do you think would benefit from that?'

Oh, very good, I thought. Can't beat the professionals in the conspiracy-theory game ...

'Well played, Mr Leung!' said Baxter. 'Your expensive cadre schooling wasn't wasted, I see. For the benefit of anyone who doesn't get it a Mr Leung is hinting darkly that those who've argued against the unsound economic policies foisted on the world by the Chinese communists may benefit from this outrage. To this I say quite frankly that we may very well benefit. So what? We should. I hope we do. Next.'

With this, as so often before, Baxter over-reached. The reaction in the room and in the ever-expanding shockwave of news and comment radiating from it turned hostile or indifferent as the shadow minister saddled his familiar hobby-horse. I could see it happening, in the room and online.

Nardini took back the initiative, and my outstretched arm caught his eye.

'Mr Sinclair, from, ah ... Mr Sinclair, the freelance.'

I tried hard not to let my voice shake.

'I just want to raise a ... an obvious possibility. Maybe someone here already has the answer, but a before we get too worked up shouldn't we make sure that what we've just seen wasn't exactly what it seemed? The telemetry and radar showed the Rammie coming down over the sea, and the nose camera and the view in glasses showed it coming down over Edinburgh. Isn't it possible that it's the radar and telemetry data that were correct, and the camera and glasses views that were false? And therefore falsified, obviously, and a serious situation but not as bad as we-'

I could see heads shaking all around me. Calum was glaring; Karl was looking at me and making 'cut, cut' gestures.

Nardini frowned and turned to Walters. 'Perhaps you could answer that?'

She stayed seated. She fiddled with her glasses for a moment, then took them off and leaned forward. She spoke with a sad smile in her voice.

'I see that in the past ten minutes there has sprung up a "5/15 Truth" website that has already had thirty thousand views and climbing ...' She shook her head, as if in disbelief, and continued in a sharper tone. 'No doubt my answer will go down as part of the cover-up. Let me start by saying unreservedly that my initial comment was unduly defensive a though entirely true it missed the point. I'm an engineer, not a politician. OK. First off, the real failure was of the control system a the turn was initiated far too late. If the Rammie had been where the telemetry and radar showed it to be, over the Atlantic, we'd all be terribly disappointed and indeed embarrassed but no one would have seen this as anything but an accident or an operational failure. For any shortcomings that may have led to that failure I as project director take full responsibility.

'It was of course the descent of the Rammie above Edinburgh and the very real possibility of catastrophic loss of life that has most shocked us all and raised the questions of sabotage and conspiracy. No one would be more happy than I to say that Mr Sinclair's speculation is correct. Unfortunately it is not. I can now clarify what was for all of us a confusing complex of events. The lifting device, the self-propelled balloon, was well above the cloud layer and beyond visual tracking for much of its ascent. It was however tracked by radar, and its position was confirmed by the telemetry. Even the drop itself showed up on the radar, though the package fell out of view and the balloon rose more slowly out of range. At that point all attention was on the camera images and instrument telemetry from the package, and was further focused on the ... the delay of the thrust reversal manoeuvre. It was only when the camera images showed not sea but land below, as breaks in the cloud became visible, that we all realised that something was even more wrong than we'd thought.

'The telemetry continued to give false readings throughout. Interestingly they were a precise inversion of the true location. They showed a hundred miles or so west and a little south of Machrihanish, rather than the real location the same distances to the east and north. The package fell into Edinburgh airport radar view, and that of airliner onboard radar. The subsequent trajectory was tracked by civilian and military radar to the final detonation, which was visually confirmed almost immediately. Witnesses on the ground in Edinburgh also saw the descent and the turn, and I should add many saw it with the naked eye.'

'So why wasn't the off-course balloon picked up on radar?'

Walters stared at me. 'I see you are accredited as a technology correspondent, Mr Sinclair. You should know that there is no routine ground radar coverage at such altitudes. As it turns out, it was spotted by a passing airliner at one point, and logged as a UFO. In the precise technical sense, I hasten to add! And it may have been spotted by anti-missile radar, but no defence significance was attached to it. Will that be all?'

'Yes, thank you,' I said, with as much aplomb as I could muster. I sat down thoroughly shamefaced.

Walters took a few technical questions, and the press conference broke up in some confusion as journalists stampeded outside for vox-pops and hopefully fragments of debris, which were (I saw) already appearing on sale across the Central Belt.

I didn't join the rush. All I wanted to do was head for a cafe, rattle out a think-piece spiced with my own on-the-spot (virtually speaking) reportage, and try to figure out how the false telemetry and its radar tracking confirmation had really been done. Calum had made himself scarce, not to my surprise. I walked out, head down, toking on the sly. Baxter caught up with me on a corner of the stairs.

'You!' he barked. 'Sinclair!'