THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

Laura was suspicious. “Bern, what’s up? Are you drunk? You’re not supposed to drink when you’re pregnant, are you?” She leaned closer, hoping to smell Bernadette’s breath.

But Bernadette pushed her away and curled up. “I said bog off.”

Laura gave up and rejoined the others.

They sat in a circle around a candle, Laura, Joel, Mum, Nick. Their faces floated in the dim light.

Nick still had his sunglasses on. “ ‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

“There are four of us,” Joel said.

“ ‘When the hurly-burly’s done. When the battle’s lost and won.’ Macbeth. Did it for O-level.”

“Is this helping?” Mum asked sensibly.

“Sorry, Missus Mann.”

Mum turned to Laura. “So what do we do?”

Laura blurted, “You’re my mum. You should be telling me.”

Mum smiled, a bit sadly. “Dad gave you the Key, not me. It was probably a wise choice.”

Joel said, “What are the options?” He counted them on his fingers. “One. You could give the Key to Agatha, as she asks. So she can kick off her Single Integrated Operations Plan and kill all the Russians.”

Nick said, “You’d be swapping tens of millions of deaths in the Sunday War, for hundreds of millions in the Nuclear Spring.”

“I don’t want to be responsible for one death, let alone a million.”

Joel shrugged. “Fair enough. So the Nuclear Spring timeline bites the dust. Who’s going to tell Agatha?”

“Option two,” Mum interrupted. “You could use the Key the way Dad told you to. You have the code, the phone number. You could call this Regional Who’s-it Controller of Whatchamacallit.”

“I’ve got a threepenny bit,” Nick said, mocking. “You can pay me back after the nuclear holocaust.”

“Then we’ll all be taken into safety in some government bunker. And drink tea and eat choccy biscuits until it’s all over.”

“No,” said Laura. She was making her mind up as she spoke. “The Key. I can’t use it.”

Joel said, “What? Why not?”

She’d been thinking this over ever since reading Agatha’s diary. “The Key controls a nuclear bomber. Megatons. Agatha wants to use it to set off a global nuclear war deliberately. Well, maybe if I try to use it at all, I’ll set off a war by accident.

“You know what the diary says about Agatha’s timeline. How the Sunday War starts tomorrow. Something triggers it, some small incident somewhere. What if the Key is the trigger?”

Nick said, “It might be nothing to do with your Key. It’s probably some divvy on either side in Berlin, or Cuba—”

“But it might be the Key.” She patted her chest. “And I know that if I keep the thing tucked away in here it can’t do any harm. I don’t want there to be a nuclear war,” she said fervently. “Any war. Because, for one thing, as soon as any bomb falls, anywhere, Dad will be killed.”

Mum looked away.

Joel nodded. “Right. And that’s why you tried to get your dad to come and get you out of here, when you rang him this morning. Because you can’t risk using the Key.”

“H-Bomb Girl,” Nick said, “listen to yourself. You are a fourteen-year-old girl, stuck in a hole in the ground, in Liverpool. How can you talk about causing wars or not? How can you talk about choosing futures? Who do you think you are, the Virgin Mary or Supergirl?”

But she was at the pivot, Laura thought. Because of the Key. She was at the place the futures were fighting over, to become real. She didn’t ask for it to be that way, but that’s how it was. Maybe everybody thinks they’re the centre of the world. But, Laura thought now, maybe whole futures, whole worlds, billions of lives and deaths, really did depend on the decisions she made in the next few hours.

She looked around at them, her mum, Agatha, battered Nick, troubled Joel, curled-over, pregnant Bernadette. “I’ve made my mind up,” she said.

Agatha asked, “To do what?”

“For a start, not to give you my Key. There’s not going to be a Nuclear Spring.”

Agatha dropped her head.

Joel asked her curiously, “Are you angry?”

“I don’t know. I might be angry later. Here and now I’m with you, Mum,” she said to Laura. “That will have to be enough.”

Nick said, “So what are you going to do, H-Bomb Girl?”

“I’m not going to start a nuclear war. Any sort of one. And I’m going to save everybody.”

Nick laughed. “And how will you manage that?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, we can’t rely on your dad,” Joel said gravely. “We might have to look after ourselves. We need a Plan B.”

In fact Laura had a Plan B, in her head. But she didn’t want to tell anybody about it, not yet.

Bernadette screamed.

They all rushed over. Agatha brought a torch and held it up.

Bernadette was lying on the hard brick floor, with dark sticky stuff pooling between her legs. She was crying, her face twisted in agony, and her mascara was all over the place.

Mum took charge. “Move back. Let me see what’s what.” Her motherly tone got through to them, Joel in distress, Nick in near-hysteria. Mum pulled up Bernadette’s skirt and began to examine her.

Laura leaned close to Bernadette and smelled her breath. “Gin. I thought you were drunk. You had a bottle of gin in your school satchel, didn’t you?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Bern croaked. She opened her smudged eyes. “Nicked it from my mum. I tried all the usual stuff. Gin. Castor oil. Made me throw up. The baby just did the backstroke in it.”

“Oh,” Joel said, “you’re trying for an abortion.”

“And then she used this,” Mum said. She lifted something up, dripping with blood. It was a knitting needle.

“I hid it in the lining of my blazer,” Bern said.

Laura looked at it with horror. “Bern. How could you?”

“What choice have I got? I don’t want my baby growing up like her.” She pointed at Agatha. “If the bomb falls it’s better off dead. So am I. We all are.” She broke down, and Joel cradled her head, rocking.

“No,” Mum said. She