“Station,” Boysen said, “it is the flight surgeon’s conclusion that crew status is critical. The flight director concurs. You are out of time.”
Beckwith had suspected that Boysen would say that, and she’d known that when she did say it, she would phrase it in the third person, since that was the language of the training protocols. She closed her eyes against both the light and her swimming vision, but even in the darkness everything continued tumbling. The pain in her head was everywhere; it was a thing with form and weight and presence. She thought of the word “critical.” Crew status is critical. And she knew it was true. She was quite likely going to die.
“Houston,” she said.
“Copy, station.”
“Vasily?”
“Yes, Walli.”
“Tell me about the reentry coordinates.”
In Mission Control in Houston, Boysen sat back and released a deep, trembly breath of relief. In Mission Control in Moscow, Zhirov punched the air in triumph and flashed two thumbs up to Bazanov across the room. Then he collected himself and spoke.
“Copy that, station,” he said. “We have two entry windows in the next twenty-four hours. One opens up in . . .” He glanced at the Mission Elapsed Time clock in the front of the auditorium and did a fast mental calculation. “. . . in six hours and fourteen minutes. The next is roughly eleven hours after that.”
“And tomorrow?” Beckwith asked.
Boysen cut in, “Station, you can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“The vote in Washington is this morning,” Beckwith said. “It starts in less than an hour. It could go on all day.”
“Do you want to be alive to know the results?” Boysen asked. Her tone was sharp, angry. “You are out of time!”
“Yes,” Beckwith conceded, taking her head in both her hands and trying to contain the pain. “I understand.”
Zhirov proceeded. “The first window brings you down near Zhezkazgan; the second takes you to Karaganda, but there’s heavy cloud cover there.”
“So it’s Zhezkazgan,” Beckwith said.
“Yes, it is.”
“In six hours.”
“A little more, but yes,” Zhirov said. “And, Walli, one more thing.”
“You’re flying me ballistic,” Beckwith said.
“We’re flying you ballistic,” Zhirov confirmed.
There had been little question from the outset that whenever Beckwith came home, Moscow would order a ballistic reentry, which was what was called for if a crew member with no experience commanding a Soyuz was in the center seat. But if there had been any doubt, the fact that the crew member was mortally ill sealed the question.
Ordinarily, a Soyuz would reenter the atmosphere at a comparatively shallow angle, tweaking its route to roller-coaster its way down in a rising and falling trajectory. That would bleed off speed and keep the gravitational load to no more than four g’s, so that an astronaut like Beckwith, who weighed 138 pounds on Earth, would feel as if she weighed 552 pounds. Lying prone in a Soyuz couch, she would feel that weight distributed across her body, which would be easier to take than if she were sitting straight up, but it would still be like trying to fly under a quarter ton of rocks. The problem with such a nominal reentry was that if anything went wrong with the descent, the commander would have to take over and fly by stick, which was out of the question today.
The alternative was to fly at a steeper angle of descent, dropping through the atmosphere like a stone in a well. It was faster and it was all but foolproof; the entire crew could be asleep, and the ballistic reentry would still deliver them safely to the steppes of Kazakhstan. The Soyuz 11 crew had been dead, and their landing was still spot-on. But a ballistic reentry meant a load of eight g’s or more. Beckwith’s 138 pounds would now become 1,104.
“You’re prepared for this?” Zhirov now asked her.
“I’ve eaten more than ten g’s in the centrifuge, Vasily.”
“Not when you’re sick.”
“The physics is the physics,” Beckwith said. “So I have six hours and now”—she glanced at her watch through one eye—“twelve minutes.”
“Copy. But boarding the Soyuz will be earlier, in four hours.”
“Then I have those four hours to work.” Beckwith opened her laptop slowly, clumsily, and launched her browser and her email.
“You should rest, Walli,” Vasily said.
She agreed with him. Spending four hours at her bright, screaming screen seemed unthinkable. But she had arrived at this point after weeks of grinding effort, and all of that would either succeed or fail in Washington today. She could still send the occasional tweet to whip up the Washington crowd or pressure a wavering lawmaker, and she surely wanted to watch the congressional vote as it unfolded. She dimmed the brightness on the screen as low as it could go and still be visible and turned the sound on the computer down the same way.
“I’ll rest on Earth,” she said to Zhirov.
“Copy that,” Zhirov answered. She was coming home; he would allow her anything else she needed. “Moscow out.”
At his console, Zhirov leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms, and shook out his hands, feeling a month’s worth of tension beginning to uncoil. His long, broken mission was at last about to end. He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Gennady Bazanov standing above him. He sat back up.
“That was good work, Vasily,” Bazanov said. “She will be home soon.”
“It will be a relief,” Zhirov said.
“It will,” Bazanov agreed. He hesitated. “But you cannot be here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You may be in the room. You will yield the microphone.” Bazanov inclined his head up the center aisle. The Capcom who was not due to begin his shift until much later was there. He walked down the aisle toward the console. Bazanov then turned back to Zhirov. “You know Belka Beckwith too well,” Bazanov said. “The reentry will be difficult; there is no room for sentiment.”
He held out his hand for the headset; Zhirov hesitated and then removed it and handed it over.
“Thank you for your very hard work,” Bazanov said to Zhirov.
“It was my responsibility as the commander of this mission,” Zhirov said.
With that, he turned and strode up the aisle. In the back row, Lebedev was at work at a console, studying the glyphs on his strip charts, monitoring the data points on his screen.
“Yulian,” Zhirov said in a low tone. Lebedev looked up. “Please finish what you are doing and come with me.”
Lebedev asked no questions. He made a few final notations in red grease pencil, squared and neatened his stack of papers, and stood. There were more than six hours left in his mission, and his commander had just given him an order. The two men wordlessly left the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
September 18; 7:08 a.m. Western Amazon Time
At about the same moment her tía-mama was waking up feeling utterly awful, Sonia was waking up feeling surprisingly well. The oleander had done its terrible work quickly and left her system just as quickly—thanks to the small dose she’d been sure to take, the medicines she’d been given when she returned from the main camp, and her own stubborn constitution. She woke up this morning with both an unexpected appetite and a stubborn worry.
Going by the space station app on Sonia’s phone, it had been more than twenty-four hours since the station had last made a clean pass over the Amazon, which meant that it had been more than twenty-four hours since Sonia’s tía-mama had gotten a look at whatever violence might be mobilizing far below her. Bobo-deCorte’s generals were now completely wise to the space station’s routes and flyovers; that meant they had known that the twenty-four blind hours were coming and could plan for them. If they were going to launch an offensive, today would be a very good day for it.
As soon as
Sonia woke, she went outside and scanned the horizon in a full 360 degrees, looking for the orange or yellow cast in the sky that would signal a fresh blaze or even the violet that would mean an even fresher but ready-to-bloom one. To her relief, she saw nothing. She glanced at her watch and saw she now had less than forty-five minutes before she and Raymond would be making their 8:00 a.m. visit to the main camp—no need for Lindsey since there was no ruse to pull this time. She hurried over to the food tent, gobbled down an energy bar, and drank two glasses of milk, needing very much to replenish everything she’d lost yesterday. Then she left the tent and prepared to join Raymond in the infirmary, tending to patients for half an hour before they had to go.
It was on her way to the infirmary that she was stopped cold. Far off to the west, at least eight miles away, where the horizon began at this elevation, she saw a shimmer of ultraviolet rising and spreading. She stood completely still and blinked several times to refocus her eyes and ensure she wasn’t imagining it. She wasn’t.
“Fire!” she shouted to no one in particular—and no one in particular turned and looked where she was pointing. “¡Fogo!” she added, and then “¡Fuego!” and at that, the people milling through the camp and gathered on the soccer field did turn and look and squint—and they saw nothing at all of the shimmery purple. Then suddenly they did see, as the purple gave way to an explosion of orange and yellow and the inky shadow of smoke. On the ground—unlike in space—a fresh wind from the west also carried in the smell of the burning forest, with the blaze unmistakably approaching fast.
At that, the people in the showpiece camp screamed as one and broke for the eastern gate, where the guards, who had been patrolling lazily in the hot morning sun, sprang into position, blocking the opening and brandishing their guns in the direction of the terrified internees. The guards had been prepared for this—had been told a fire might be coming today—and had braced themselves to contain the stampede that was now unfolding.
The timing made sense—from Bobo-deCorte’s point of view at least. With the American politicians planning their vote this morning, it was possible their army could be arriving at any time, and the Brazilian president was determined to fortify his gains before that happened. The fires in the east, in Brazil, had pushed the tribes west, toward and through the gates of the four resettlement camps as he had planned. But tens of thousands of them had broken from the flow, sweeping wide of the camps, making straight for the border and pouring into Bolivia. Once the fires in the east stopped, the people would pour back into Brazil and try to retake their lands. So now it would take westward fires, on Bolivian lands, to push them back into Brazil and back toward the camps. The fires would be lit fast and extinguished fast—as soon as the tribes had been moved. The Bolivians would be furious, though Bobo-deCorte was prepared to remind them that they were also perfectly welcome to thank him for the land he’d cleared for them to use for ranching and farming.
That was the plan, and it might well have worked as neatly and quickly as had been imagined had the weather not turned and the wind not shifted—blowing much harder to the east than anticipated. The fire, breathing deep of the fresh gusts, followed the wind in that direction, devouring scrub and forest in its path, spitting embers that flew ahead of it, lighting daughter fires hundreds and thousands of feet away, all moving directly toward the Brazilian border and the western camp.
Raymond and the other doctors in the infirmary building, alerted by the screams of the people rushing the gate, poured outside just as a fresh gale swelled and a bright orange-and-yellow halo rose on the horizon, spraying a shower of sparks, which spread and ignited everything ahead of them. The blaze was still six or seven miles distant, but it was advancing by the second.
Without needing a command, all of the doctors, including Sonia and Raymond, took off in a dead run in the direction of the main camp. The swarm of people on the soccer field was still surging in the opposite direction, retreating from the blaze and heading for the heavily guarded east gate. The SSA group fought their way through them, struggling toward the rear of the showpiece camp. It was gated here too, but there would be no soldiers, as none of the internees were trying to escape into the very teeth of the fire. The doctors passed through the rear gate, and when they did, it seemed as if they had entered a living oven, as the heat climbed higher the farther they ran. Sparks danced around them everywhere, a stinging rain that singed them when it landed on skin and popped into miniature blazes burning dry grass when it hit the ground. The front entrance of the main camp was just twenty yards away, and the sight that greeted the doctors was hellish.
The camp was backlit by fire that now loomed high into the sky and reached around to the north and south—flaming arms appearing to try to gather in everything in their path, including the camp itself. Fire whorls spun from the ends of the arms, skittering along the ground in all directions. The guards who were supposed to be here had abandoned their posts but left the gate locked. The fencing that surrounded the camp was well anchored, thick-wired, and tightly woven to make it hard to climb and impossible to topple even by a crowd so huge. The fence was twelve feet high and topped by a coil of barbed wire. The gate was sturdier still—a barred iron door secured with two separate padlocks. The people trapped inside pressed against the wire and bars, crying out for help.
The western edge of the camp had now been reached by the fire, igniting tents and the occasional pine storage building. People were being burned—it was impossible for them not to be, though impossible, too, to know how many. On the other side of the fence, the doctors could already see some of them—their flesh scorched black or red—as they were passed hand over hand, above the heads of the crowd. The injured adults were hoisted and heaved from person to person. The injured children and babies were literally tossed. All were laid on the ground on a clear patch of land directly inside the front gate—burnt offerings to the doctors if they could only get inside. The SSA team rushed the fence and began to climb it from the outside, finding toeholds and handholds where they could. The people inside did the same, but the barbed wire at the top made it impossible for anyone on one side simply to cross over to the other.
No one, however, was trying to do that. Instead, the prisoners began gathering up their injured, swaddling them in blankets to protect them from the barbed wire, and passing them from person to person up the fence. The doctors mirrored them, forming a similar chain on the other side to pass the injured down. The handover at the top was slow and terrible; the blankets—and, worse, the burned flesh of the victims—often caught and dragged on the barbs. Some of the people cried out; those who had lost consciousness did not. Each time a person was laid on the ground outside the fence, the blankets were tossed back over for the next.
Sonia was the first up the fence, scrabbling easily to the top and halfway leaning over the barbed wire, points of blood dotting her shirt where the barbs pressed and cut her flesh. She was self-evidently too small to muscle any of the adults across, so the children and babies were handed her way. Raymond was part of a different chain, next to Sonia’s, midway down the fence, collecting the injured prisoners from the doctor above him and passing them down to the one below.
In the distance now, Sonia could hear a high, waspish whine and looked off toward the horizon, where a vast flock of black shapes approached through the sky. They were, surely, the Consolidation helicopters; nothing else made that angry sound. And they were surely coming to extinguish the wildfire the soldiers themselves had lit, as was their practice after the tribespeople had been driven from their lands and into the camps. In this case, though, whether they would be able to contain the huge, wind-fed blaze was impossible to say. The government in Brasilia clearly understood the severity of the problem, and the helicopters were accompanied by heavier, larger firefighting airplanes.
Sonia pulled her gaze from the helicopters and bent back over the fence, reaching down for an injured baby who could not have been more than
a year old and had burns on its arms and legs. She could not tell if the baby was a boy or a girl; she could tell that either way, it was badly undernourished. Year-old babies should not be so light she could hold them so easily with one hand. She passed the baby off to the doctor directly below her on the fence, looked back over for the next child—and then her head swam at what she saw.
A child had been laid on the ground at the inside of the gate. He was a boy. He looked to be about five. His upper body was terribly burned, the remains of his shirt little more than a few scorched scraps. His limbs hung loose with the unmistakable slackness of the dead. And his legs, brown, unburned, were covered with a merry crisscross of scratches.
Sonia released a terrible animal howl. She did not hear herself; she was not conscious of herself. She was conscious only of a huge internal gulf, one that as soon as it appeared was filled by a pain so deep it almost had mass. She howled once more and people turned to look. She howled yet again and then lost her grip and fell the twelve feet to the ground. There was a loud cracking sound as a bone in her right wrist snapped clean in two. She did not feel it. She pounded the ground with both her hands, the broken wrist flopping hideously. She was aware, faintly, of someone bending over her, trying to stop her pounding, saying her name over and over again. It was a man. It might have been Raymond. She wrenched herself away and screamed some more and pounded the ground some more. And then she was aware of one other thing—a sound as high as the wasp sound, but sweeter, softer, better. She heard it again and then again and then it resolved itself into a word.
“So-nee-ya!” it called. And once more, “So-nee-ya!”
She raised her head and scanned about, and just on the other side of the fence, dressed in little blue shorts and a too-big T-shirt, with his small brown fingers clutching the wires and a merry crisscross of scratches on his arms and legs, was a different boy, an unburned boy, a boy who came into the world as Kauan but who would forever be Oli to her.
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