Solaris Rising by Ian Whates

through news channels.
    Nothing much was happening at the launch site in the middle of the park – the machine was still in its crate – so they were filling in with talking heads and shots of its arrival a couple of days earlier: the wide-load truck, the police outriders, the military escort vehicles, the faces and flags lining Rue de Vaugirard; the white gloves, the flashing lights, the gleaming rifle-barrels. Some comic relief as the convoy negotiated corners and the park gate. Then the crane, straining to lift the broad flat crate and lower it to the grass. The guard of honour around the hidden machine, and the real guard among the trees, armed and wired.
    I thumbed over to the phone conversation.
    “ – got to be a fake,” Jack was saying, in his usual confident bray. “You wait.”
    “We are waiting,” said Nicole.
    Laughter crackled across the phones.
    “Why d’you think it’s a fake?” Bob asked, a note of anxiety in his voice.
    “Anti-gravity, come on!” said Jack. “Where’s the theory?”
    A babble of interruptions, shouted names of marginal physicists and outright cranks, was drowned out by a collective intake of breath, like a gust of wind in the still air. I left the phone channel open and flipped to the news. Four technicians in white coats had marched out onto the grass, towards the crate. They slid the top off – it looked like an aluminium roll-up door, which they duly rolled up – and, staggering slightly, lugged it like a log to lay it down a few metres away. Then they took up positions at the crate’s corners. With a flourish, each reached for an edge, pressed some switch, and stepped well back.
    The sides of the crate fell away, to reveal a silvery lens about fifteen metres across and just over three metres high in the centre.
    A huge roar went up.
    “My God,” Milton said. “A goddam flying saucer.”
    He didn’t sound impressed.
    “If this is a stunt,” said Catherine, “they’re sure doing it very publicly.”
    “You know what this reminds me of?” said Nicole. “That scene in Jefferson in Paris , you know, the Nick Nolte thing? Where he’s watching a Montgolfier ascent?”
    “Too right,” said Jack. “It’s a fucking balloon! Just like at Roswell!”
    The SF writers all laughed. I smiled to myself. They’d see.
    Another roar erupted as the pilot walked out, helmet in the crook of his arm. He smiled around, gave a wave. The news channels were beside themselves – the test pilot was Jean-Luc Jabril, an air force veteran in his thirties, something of a mascot for the Republic because of his origins: a son of Moroccans from the banlieues who’d made good, proving his French patriotism to the hilt in the fiery skies of North Africa. Everyone around me was looking at their phones, rapt. A few metres away in the crush, a girl in a hijab had tears on her cheeks.
    Ceremoniously, Jabril put on his helmet, slid the visor down, took another wave for the cameras, and ducked under the machine’s perimeter. A hatch in the underside swung open, forming a short ramp. He disappeared inside, and the hatch closed. White vapour puffed from vents on the rim.
    And then, without fanfare, on the stroke of noon, the machine lifted into the air. It moved in a straight vertical, without a wobble or a yaw. The news channels’ microphones caught and amplified a faint humming sound that rose to a whine as the disc ascended. I could see it directly now, rising above the wall and the tops of the trees. I stopped watching on the screen and raised my phone to record. Everyone around me did the same.
    Up and up the machine rose, faster and faster, into the clear blue sky. A thousand feet, two thousand – I wasn’t thinking in metres at this point. At three thousand feet the machine was a shining dot. I wished I’d thought to bring binoculars.
    The flash was so bright that I felt sorry for those who had.
    There was a sound as if half a million people had simultaneously been punched in the gut. A