Holdout
Page 19
And once in a great while there would be a shout of, “We’ve got a match!” if, say, the health description of the twenty-something male Enawene with burns to the extremities also happened to mention that he was missing the fourth and fifth toes on his right foot due to a childhood accident with an ax—a detail that would surely have been included in the Mercado camp’s own exceedingly thorough records.
Sonia did her work as diligently as she could, but her breath would still catch if a list included a child—more so if that child was Guarani and male. She would then look and look and silently plead for a mention of a recent case of chicken pox or flu, but Oli’s flu had long since resolved itself, and if there were any faint spots remaining from his bout with chicken pox, they were too small and inconsequential-looking to attract attention, much less a mention. The most she ever got was a “possible.”
On the fifth day after the computer network had been set up, well after dark, when Mia and the database doctors had at last gone to bed, Sonia sat alone with her laptop outside the infirmary building, enjoying the evening quiet and reviewing two reports—one from the northern camp and one from the south. Both had come in almost simultaneously during the day, and she and Mia had read them quickly. Sonia found herself wondering if something might have slipped by them. So she called both reports onto her screen again and scrolled through them more carefully, looking once more for a small male child.
There was nothing to be found on either list. She threw her head back and looked up at the sky. It was a very clear, very starry night, and if her tía-mama had been passing over, she’d have been able to see her easily. She drew a deep breath of the jungle air and took a fleeting bit of calm from that. And then, suddenly, came a ping from her computer.
She jolted up and looked at the screen. A new report had come in. It was from the western camp—the lazy, cursed, worthless western camp, whose lists were so poor and whose filings so late. She opened the file and saw a shamefully short census of barely thirty names—thirty names in a camp that held at least eighty thousand people. She scanned it fast, with a mix of resentment, fatigue, and stubborn, hollow hope—and then she sat up straight and tensed.
There was a child, a male, under ten years old, the report said. And he was Guarani. And then, in the column labeled “Saúde,” for health, there were just two words: “Muitos arranhões.” Many scratches.
Sonia looked up—and then leapt up.
“We’ve got a match!” she cried out to the silent jungle.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Beckwith was in the midst of the day’s maintenance work when Mission Control called to tell her that the Soyuz rocket Vasily Zhirov and Gennady Bazanov had sent to fetch her was at last approaching. Had the station been passing over Baikonur when the engines on the Soyuz lit, Beckwith would have been able to watch the show. It could be a striking sight from space—the match flare on the surface of the planet and the rising white contrail behind it. In this case, however, the contrail was following a rocket that was bringing a spacecraft whose arrival Beckwith was very much dreading, so it was probably just as well that she was too far southwest of Baikonur to see anything at all. Usually the time would drag before a newly launched Progress or Soyuz—bearing fresh supplies or, better yet, fresh crew—actually arrived. Today it all went too fast—not least because the trajectory on which the rocket was launched would bring it to the station in a zippy six hours, instead of the two days a rendezvous usually took. Moscow wanted Beckwith off the station and off it now.
“Station, Houston,” came the call from the Capcom. It was not Jasper. “Anticipating Soyuz in fifty-four, thirty-eight,” he said—the count referring to minutes and seconds.
“Copy your five-four, three-eight,” Beckwith said.
“Expect visual confirmation in eighteen minutes.”
“Copy,” she responded. “I’ll be watching.”
Beckwith kicked off toward the Russian end of the station where the Soyuz would be docking. She dove down toward the Pirs module on the bottom side and then stopped herself. The Pirs was wrecked—wrecked and sealed and probably now empty of air, the temporary patch of paper and clothes that had bandaged the breach in its bulkhead having long since worked loose. She turned back around and instead vaulted upward, toward the upward-facing Poisk module, where the Soyuz that took Lebedev and Zhirov home had been docked.
Moscow was hoping to execute the arrival of the new Soyuz entirely automatically, so as to keep the X-factor of the crazy American out of the equation, but in the event of another mishap like the last attempted docking, both she and the controllers knew a human would have to be on duty to intervene. No sooner did she open the Poisk hatch and drift inside than Mission Control—this time Moscow’s—hailed her.
“Station, Moscow,” said the Capcom.
She had expected it to be Zhirov, and it was Zhirov. Beckwith had little doubt he had been at the Baikonur launch and just as little doubt that, once the Soyuz was safely in orbit, he had hopped a Roscosmos plane straight for Moscow. The three-hour flight would have him back on the ground well before the docking. For once, Beckwith was not happy to hear his voice. She would have preferred an anonymous Russian at the mic, rather than someone whose good opinion mattered very much to her.
“Moscow, station,” she responded. “Looks like you sent me a package.” Her instrument panel indicated that the approaching Soyuz was forty-eight kilometers—or thirty miles—below and behind the station, closing at thirty-one meters per second, or sixty-nine miles per hour.
“I did,” Zhirov said. “Package at forty-eight, closing at thirty-one. We have capture at forty-nine minutes.”
“Copy,” Beckwith said.
Zhirov was performing the comfortable ritual of the nominal docking: the range-finding, the call-and-response, the predicted time to an agreed-upon result—capture at forty-nine minutes. But the cosmonaut was also silently pleading with Beckwith to honor that agreement. The more closely he stuck to the precise routine, the more she might be carried by habit and muscle memory to see it through to its end.
Beckwith followed that script too as the Soyuz closed to thirty kilometers and its speed steadily slowed to twenty-three meters per second. The upward-facing windows of the Poisk made it impossible for Beckwith to see the approaching spacecraft yet, but the camera on the bottom side of the station captured it. The Soyuz drew closer still and moved slower still.
“Target at seventeen and twenty-one,” Zhirov said.
“Copy seventeen and twenty-one.”
“Sixteen and nineteen.”
“Sixteen and nineteen.”
“Fifteen and fifteen,” Zhirov now said.
“Fifteen and—” Beckwith began and was brought up short. It was when the Progress had slowed to fifteen meters per second at a fifteen-kilometer distance during the previous approach that it had stopped slowing, that it had then begun to accelerate to sixteen and eighteen and then twenty-eight and everything had come unraveled. She shook off the memory. This wasn’t the Progress, it was a Soyuz, and this wasn’t the previous approach, it was now. “Copy fifteen and fifteen,” she repeated. And then, to her deep relief, she saw the readout on her screen slow to fourteen.
The Soyuz continued to behave itself, drawing steadily closer and moving steadily slower. It at last matched the station’s altitude and then rose above it, climbing a predetermined additional half kilometer and beginning a slow rotation until it was pointed nose down. It hung there motionless. Now Beckwith could see it through the Poisk’s upward-facing windows, and the two monitors on her instrument panel showed the same twin perspectives the monitors in the Pirs had shown during the Progress docking: the station as seen from the camera in the approaching vehicle, and the approaching vehicle as seen from the camera on the station. She knew that the screens in both Mission Controls, in Houston and Moscow, displayed the same two views, and, she suspected, the networks and
cable channels were airing them too.
“Commencing approach,” Zhirov said. “Soyuz to point-four-nine and one.” Now just under a half kilometer away, the Soyuz was moving at one meter per second, or 2.2 miles per hour—slower than walking speed.
“Point-four-nine and one,” Beckwith repeated.
She alternated her view between the approaching Soyuz outside her window and the images on the screens, but her mind was not on either. All morning, she realized, she had not been entirely certain what she would do when this moment arrived. Accepting the Soyuz—allowing it to dock with the station as she’d been ordered—did not mean she would have to board it.
But Houston was watching, Moscow was watching, and, she was certain, the world was watching too—as was the president of the United States, the man who had insulted her so lewdly and lied to lure her home, which would have led to her mortification if she had believed it and returned to Earth. Letting the Soyuz dock would have very different meanings for those very different audiences. She looked down at the screens. The one showing the view from the Soyuz was now entirely filled with the image of the station, with the Poisk’s docking port at the center. The one from the station showed the approaching docking probe of the Soyuz.
“Five and point-three,” Zhirov said, as the Soyuz, now just five meters, or sixteen feet, away, crept forward, closing the small remaining distance. “Now four and point-two.”
Beckwith said nothing and then made up her mind. She darted to the Zvezda, punched the circuit breakers on the guidance panel, and fired the system up. She seized the thruster controller and yanked it into a hard yaw. The whoosh of the jets sounded through the station walls, and the motion threw her off-balance. On the screens in Houston and Moscow and all over the world, the station slewed hard to port.
“We have you in a yaw, station,” Zhirov said.
“Copy that,” Beckwith answered.
“Stabilize please.”
“Copy,” Beckwith said. She held the station steady and watched as Moscow repositioned the Soyuz so that the docking port was back in the center of its sights. Beckwith now hit the thrusters in the opposite direction, and the station slewed hard to starboard.
“Reading opposite yaw,” Zhirov said. “Repeat: Stabilize please.”
Beckwith ignored him. She could see the jets fire on the Soyuz as it tried to adjust and she hit the thrusters again, jerking back to port.
“Station!” Zhirov barked. “Walli! Stabilize.”
Beckwith replied evenly: “No, Moscow.”
“No?” Zhirov repeated. “No?”
Beckwith looked at the screens in front of her—at the docking probe on the Soyuz and the docking port on the station—and smiled, thinking of the personal-safety course she and the other female midshipmen had taken in their first year at the Naval Academy.
“No, Vasily. No means no,” she said. Then, for emphasis, she added: “No on stabilize, no on approach, no on docking.”
Zhirov said nothing, and now, to Beckwith’s astonishment, she heard Joe Star, in Houston, break into the air-to-ground feed.
“Station, Houston,” he said, without bothering to introduce himself. “You have been given instructions from Moscow, and Houston concurs with them. You will comply.”
“I will not,” Beckwith responded. “I ask that the Soyuz station-keep. Request that it retreat to one trailing kilometer and maintain that distance pending future instructions. There will be no docking today.”
She waited for a verbal response from Star, but none was forthcoming and none came from Moscow either. There was silence on the air-to-ground loop, but she suspected that the lines between the two command centers were crackling. She imagined that some of the controllers were fantasizing about simply dumping the Soyuz, sending it on a flaming plunge into the ocean, and, in doing so, telling the mutinous astronaut to go straight to hell. It’s what Beckwith would have been tempted to do if she were on the ground.
But that was out of the question. The twin space agencies could not abandon her—much as they might have liked to do so—since that would mean eventually leaving her to die in space. They could not order her to dock the craft if she refused. Nor could they even contemplate a forced docking, since Beckwith could always override the systems that would be needed to latch the two vehicles together, and either way the odds were too great of another collision—one that this time the world would watch unfold.
Instead, the people on the ground could only comply with her command—obey her command. Slowly, the Soyuz retreated, returned to a nose-first attitude, and puffed its forward thrusters until it had backed away a hundred meters, then a few hundred, then a full kilometer. There it stopped, absolutely motionless relative to the station, its running lights flashing as it hung in space.
Beckwith stared at it for a long moment. Then, without warning from either of the two Mission Controls, everything around her changed. The interior lights flickered and went dark. The constant churn of the pumps and compressors and computers around her fell silent, and all she could hear was the whir of a fan, circulating atmosphere throughout the Russian segment. Almost immediately, a chill began to grow in the Zvezda. She hugged herself against it and thought about the mice. Before long, the cold would spread to the American segment too.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
September 11
In Mission Control in Moscow there had always been two kinds of quiet. There was the quiet that descended in the time between missions, when the great room was hushed and mostly empty, and there was the quiet that settled over the room during a mission—which wasn’t a true quiet at all, but an intense focus on the business of keeping cosmonauts alive in the killing environment of space.
But the quiet in Moscow Mission Control after the people of Roscosmos shut down Walli Beckwith was of a third, entirely new kind: It was a silence of indifference, of abdication. It was a silence that came from having only the most basic of a spacecraft’s vital signs flickering across the screens and little more—requiring no focus at all, much less an intense one. If Beckwith radioed down, safety protocols demanded that Moscow respond. But otherwise, Mission Control would have nothing to do with her.
“The goat is at last eating up the wolf,” Gennady Bazanov said with a smile as he approached Vasily Zhirov, who was sitting glumly at a half-blank console at the back of the room.
The goat eating the wolf was the Russian equivalent of the pig flying, and it was what Bazanov had always said would happen if he ever spent a boring day in Mission Control. Zhirov frowned up at him.
“Only because we fed it to him,” he said.
“It had to be, my friend,” Bazanov answered.
Zhirov didn’t respond. It was a bad business to make flight decisions based even partly on pique, and that’s exactly how this one had been made. Nothing captured that official pettiness better than the crew picture of Beckwith on the left side of the viewing screen.
Despite his support of the power-down decision, Bazanov had insisted that the picture remain in place. It was not so much out of loyalty to Beckwith as it was out of superstition. Crew members’ pictures had never been pulled down until they were home, and it would court bad luck to break that tradition now. But when the Russian segment went off-line, the Roscosmos administrator, who outranked even Bazanov, demanded that the picture go with it. Zhirov agreed with Bazanov that the picture must stay and even threatened that if Beckwith’s face disappeared from the screen, he would disappear from Mission Control, storm straight out, and denounce the administrator and the entirety of the Roscosmos brass to the press—a press that adored him and had never heard of them.
Finally a compromise was reached. The picture would stay where it was, but it would be grayed out—dimmed a shade like an on-screen computer tab that was technically there but inaccessible and pointless. That, in a lot of ways, was worse.
* * *
• • •
Grayed out was exactly how Walli Beckwith felt, all alone aboard her half-functioning space station. It didn’t take long before the largely powerless Russian segment grew as chilly as the silence coming from the Russian controllers, with the cold soak from space seeping through the bulkhead. Within forty-eight hours the humidified cabin air had begun to condense out into beads of water along the walls and Beckwith’s exhalations frosted up into clouds.
The American end of the station was warmer, but Beckwith did not want to seal the hatch between the two segments to preserve what heat she had. There was too great a risk that the temperature differential on the opposite sides of the closed door would cause the different types of metal that made up the hatch to expand and contract at different rates, jamming the latches shut. Over time, the temperature all over the station thus began to fall. The space station was a ghost ship, and Beckwith its sole drifting spirit, with very little to do.
There was only so much time she could spend on the treadmill without pulling a muscle or exhausting herself, and only so much she could devote to surveilling the jungle with Zoe and Ivy. The station rarely made more than two passes over the Amazon in any twenty-four-hour period, and when it did, the entire flyby was over in minutes. There were few experiments left that needed tending in the American segment and none possible in the dead Russian segment. Beckwith was able to complete basic maintenance work like cleaning air filters in as little as an hour. After that, she was reduced to busywork.
She reflected that she had never much cared for the untidiness of the Russian modules and devoted a couple of hours to cleaning them up for no reason other than the work ate those two hours. The Zarya was a particular disaster, with thawed water and condensation drifting through the air everywhere. It was easily the dampest of the dark and chilly modules. She sopped up some of the mess near the laboratory console with a cloth, discarded it in a garbage bag, and wiped her hands on her pants. Then she was once again at a loss for how to fill her time.