“Fully shut down.”
“All right.” The captain checked the position of that engine’s fire handle and thrust lever. “We’ll go for a restart. Begin the checklist.”
The crew struggled through their checklists and drills—start levers to cut-off, standby ignition on, start levers back to idle—and Jane felt for them, forcing themselves through their complex procedures, mastering their own fear.
Kerosene ignited in the engine, and a huge flame shot from the jet efflux. But the engine didn’t restart.
The silence was eerie. Jane could hear the crew’s scratchy breathing.
The captain was using her autopilot, Jane saw. Five hundred feet per minute descent. She picked up a little of what was happening from the crew’s terse conversation. They were trading height for speed; their airspeed was two hundred and seventy knots, somewhere near the speed for minimum drag for the present all-up weight. And the pilot was turning back toward Prestwick. Good, Jane thought, somebody who knows what she is doing. Even after total engine failure, the aircraft was still under control. In fact it could glide for another twenty minutes or more from this height, and surely the engines would restart at a lower altitude.
But still, a dead stick unpowered landing back at Prestwick—or worse, a ditching—would be no fun.
A warning horn sounded in the cockpit. Cabin pressure was dropping. No air was being pumped into the aircraft.
Oxygen masks dropped before the crew, and they fitted them to their faces. There was none for Jane and Jack, where they stood at the back of the cabin. The flight engineer’s mask didn’t fall properly; he had to get out of his seat and pull it down, but when he did so the supply hose just fell to pieces.
“Shoot,” the captain said softly. She disconnected the autopilot, dropped the aircraft’s nose and pulled on the speed brake lever. There was a rumble, and Jane braced herself. The captain was throwing away her precious height, the height which could be traded for speed and distance, which might save all of their lives. But now she had no choice.
The altimeter dropped steadily. But Jane could see that the electrical garbage in the atmosphere outside was playing hell with the instruments. The inertial navigation systems showed random digits and patterns, and the distance measuring equipment was blank altogether. Even communication with Prestwick was disrupted by bursts of static.
The SFO said, “We might have water contamination in the fuel tanks. And in that case—”
“There’s no way the engines will start again. Oh, shoot.” The captain looked ahead steadily. “All right. We’ll head toward Prestwick, and then turn westbound to ditch. You know the drill. Land along the line of the primary or predominant swell, and upwind into the secondary swell, or downwind into the secondary swell…”
“My God,” Jane whispered.
She felt a stab of anger. To have come so close, to have survived so much. And now, even as they were escaping from the blighted country, this.
The wounded plane flew on as the crew worked steadily.
“Five minutes,” Geena told Henry. “Close your helmet.”
Henry pulled down his visor. His breathing was loud.
Geena reported, “We are in the preparation regime. Everything on board is correct. And everything is correct in the control bunker.”
A reply, in Russian and English.
“Shit hot,” Henry said quietly.
“Two minutes,” Geena said evenly.
He looked across at her. “This is one hell of a strange divorce we’re having, Geena,” he said.
She ignored him.
Still there was no countdown.
And a little after that—
There was a rumbling, deep below, beneath his back. It was like an explosion in some remote furnace room.
An analog clock started ticking on the control panel. It was the mission clock.
Oh Christ, oh Christ. They were serious, after all. They really had fired this thing, with Henry and his ex-wife stuffed in the nose. And now—
“One minute before the turn,” the SFO said.
The aircraft had been without engines for twelve, thirteen minutes, Jane estimated. She had lost count of the number of restart attempts while she’d been up here, and there surely wouldn’t be time to restart now. There were maybe five minutes left before the ditching.
Jane listened to the crew’s diagnosis and projection. With only battery power, there would be no radio altimeter for precise height indication. Not even any landing lights. The captain wouldn’t be able to lower her flaps, so the ditching would be fast—faster than the stall speed of a hundred and seventy knots—the engines would surely break off on impact; the wings and structure would be damaged…
The cloud cleared; low sunlight poked into the cabin, briefly dazzling Jane. The play of electrical light over the windscreen dissipated.
The flight engineer cried out. “Number four has restarted!”
Now Jane felt the roar of the engine; she could see the engine gauges rising, the power settling. Gingerly the captain advanced the thrust lever, and the engine was running at normal power.
They had ducked under the ash cloud, she realized; that was what had enabled the engines to start.
“Here comes number two,” the captain said.
“Prestwick,” the SFO said, “we seem to be back in business. We have diverted back to Prestwick and will land in fifteen minutes.”
“Number one. Number three.”
The captain pulled the plane into a shallow climb. Immediately the cabin was swamped by the dark, smoky cloud once more, St. Elmo’s Fire dancing on the windscreen.
“Good God,” the captain said. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers.”
She dropped the nose, and the plane dipped beneath the volcanic cloud and into the light once more.
An engine surged violently, recovered and surged again. The bangs were audible on the flight deck, and the aircraft shook.
“We’re going to have to nurse this poor old girl home,” the captain said. “Shut down drill, number two engine.”
Jane peered through the windscreen. There seemed to be mist lingering there, or perhaps spilled oil, but the busy wipers were having no effect. It was sandblasting, she realized, scarring by particles of volcanic ash.
Even inside the cabin there was black dust on every surface. Jane picked it up between thumb and forefinger. It was gritty, with a sulfurous smell.
When she looked out, through the murky windows, she could see a new ash cloud, miles wide, still higher, black as coal, reaching into the air from some new geological horror.
If that cloud had been a little lower, if the base of the ash had dropped to ground level, the plane wouldn’t have got out.
Cautiously, leaning to see through the remaining clear patches of windscreen, the captain nursed her craft to the ground.
…And now, three seconds in, the rumbling got louder, and the cabin started to shake. Henry knew he must already be off the ground, but the booster was poised there, burning up its fuel just to raise its mass through these first few yards.
So here he was, locked into a cabin on top of a Soviet-era ICBM, which was balanced on the rocket flames jetting from its tail.
But the roar built up, and so did the vibration—every loose fitting seemed to be clattering around him—and now came the sense of acceleration he’d expected, almost comforting, pushing him hard into his couch.
The bunker spoke to Geena, and she responded, her voice deep and shaking with the vibration.
Henry wished he had a window, or a periscope. He wished he could see Kazakhstan falling away as if he was in some immense elevator; he wished he could see the great plains of central Asia opening up beneath him.
The acceleration continued to mount. He closed his eyes. Simple physics, Henry told himself. Acceleration equals force over mass. As the fuel load decreased, the mass went down, the acceleration had to grow…But knowing what was going on didn’t help relieve the pain in his chest, t
he heaviness of his limbs.
When he opened his eyes again he could hardly make out the instruments, so severe was the vibration.
There was a series of clattering bangs on the outside of the hull.
Geena shouted, “There goes the escape rocket. And now—”
And now another jolt, much bigger, fundamental. Henry knew that must be the clustered first-stage boosters dropping away. Now only the centrally-mounted main engine was burning.
The thrust built higher, smoothly.
“Thirty miles high,” Geena said.
Another clatter from the cabin hull, and suddenly the faring was gone. No longer needed, Henry realized, because they were already above most of the air.
The windows were clear. There was a shaft of yellow sunlight, lying across his spacesuited lap.
He looked right, through his Captain Nemo window.
There was a loose snow, drifting past his window: ice, breaking off the hull of the capsule. They were so high now there was no air friction; only the ship’s steady acceleration carried him away from the ice fragments as they spun.
The second stage rocket died with a bang.
The acceleration vanished. Henry and Geena were thrown forward against their restraints, two puppets, helpless in this steel fist. A second of drifting. The ticking of the cabin instruments, the cooling creak of the hull.
Then came another bang as the final stage lit up, and they were slammed back into their seats. The acceleration soon built to the most ferocious of the launch.
There was nothing smooth about rocket flight, Henry realized, nothing gradual. It was all or nothing.
He glanced at the clock. Less than eight minutes ago he was still sitting on his back on the pad—
The third stage cut, in an instant. Henry was thrown forward against his restraints. He gasped. His chest was sore, probably bruised. His back hurt.
One instant the stage had been burning as hard as it ever had, the next it was dead.
But there was no more rocket fire, no more lurches of acceleration. It was, it seemed, over.
The light shifted across his lap.
Through his window he could see the Earth: the curving blue breast of an ocean that had to be the Pacific, laced with streamers of cloud, like a slice of day. And above a blurred horizon there was a jet-black sky, the sky of space.
The launch was over. This was Earthlight on his lap. He was in a spaceship, and it was rolling, and he was on orbit.
Holy shit, he thought.
40
For two and a half hours after launch, they had to stay strapped in their couches. Geena worked through more checklists, ensuring the comms, solar panels, computer, pressurization, propulsion and other systems had all survived the launch and were working correctly.
Henry could loosen his straps. He felt his body float a little way above the seat, so his layered suit wasn’t sandwiched under his back any more. The ventilation was working the way it was supposed to, and he started to feel pleasantly cool; the sweat that had gathered in the small of his back dried up quickly.
If he relaxed his muscles, he found his hands rose before him, as if raised by invisible threads, as the muscles of his arms reached a new equilibrium.
Floating: no pressure points on his body, the temperature neutral. If he closed his eyes it was as if he was suspended in some fluid, in a sensory deprivation tank maybe…
But by his right-hand side, through the stout little Nautilus porthole, he saw the Earth.
White clouds, curved blue sea: his first impression. The clouds’ white was so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look at the thickest layers too long, as if a new sun was burning from beneath them, on the surface of the Earth. And the blue was of an extraordinary intensity, somehow hard to study and analyze.
It was easier to look at the land, where the colors were more subtle, grays and browns and faded greens. Cultivated areas seemed to be a dull sage green, while bare ground was a tan brown, deepening to brick red.
But Henry was struck by how much of the planet was empty: all of the ocean, save for the tiny, brave lights of ships, and great expanses of desert, jungle and mountain. To a first approximation, Earth was a world of blue ocean, baked-brown desert, and a few boundary areas.
And the Earth was immense. The Soyuz, for all the gigantic energy of its launch, was trivial, circling the planet like a fly buzzing an elephant, huddled close to its hide of air.
The sense of motion surprised him. No feeling of acceleration, of course; but still the Earth unrolled beneath him, new features washing steadily over the horizon, littered with clouds that were strikingly three-dimensional. Here came the Florida peninsula, for instance, like a raft of land suspended on the royal blue waters of the ocean, its coast fringed by a delicious electric blue, the shallower ocean floor of the continental shelf. A little way out to sea, over the Atlantic, a bank of cloud was gathered in great three-dimensional ripples, like scoops of ice cream layered over the pondlike air. On the land itself, he could make out the spit of land that marked Cape Canaveral. Straight inland from that, surrounded by the central lakes, he could see the Disney World complex, splashes of white and gray. On the other side of the peninsula he made out Tampa Bay, and Miami in the south. The cities were bubbly gray, their boundaries blurred. The whole thing looked like a map—but in three dimensions, with that visibly thick layer of air above it.
He was struck by the land’s flatness, the way it barely seemed to protrude above the ocean’s skin. In fact Florida was indeed a karst topography, a bed of limestone laid down in a shallow, ancient sea, and the lakes were just hollowed-out sinkholes in the limestone. Little separation between land and sea.
But his view was never stable. The spacecraft turned, slowly, so that its big, winglike solar panels caught the sunlight. If Henry craned his head he could see the panels, jutting out like an airplane’s wings from the hull of the ship, the solar cells gleaming gold, as the Soyuz turned like a flower to the light.
They flew into darkness: what Geena called the shadow, the dark half of the orbit. Reflections from the cabin lights on the windows made it hard to see out at such moments, but still Henry could make out continents outlined by cities, chains of them like streetlights along the coasts, and penetrating the interiors along the great river valleys. The strings of human-made light, the orange and yellow-white spiderweb challenging the night, were oddly inspiring.
Over the Pacific’s wrinkled hide he saw a dim glow: it was the light of the Moon.
And then they flew toward the sunlight once more. It was quite sudden: a blue arc, perfectly spherical, suddenly outlined the hidden Earth, and then the first sliver of sun poked above the horizon. The shadows of clouds fled across the ocean toward him, and then the clouds turned to the color of molten copper. The lightening ocean was gray as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colors of life leaked back into the world.
He had the feeling he could spend his life up here and not tire of this.
But then, over North America, he saw a high, swirling stream of smoke. It seemed to flatten out at some high atmospheric layer, then plumed out toward the horizon. It was from the ruins of Washington State: steam and smoke and volcanic ash, disfiguring the face of Earth itself.
Eventually Geena told him he was free to leave his seat and get out of his spacesuit.
Helmet, gloves, zippers: he had to wriggle to get his arms and body out of the upper section, and then shove hard at the tight leggings to free himself. But as soon as he did, there he was floating in the air, dressed in his white T-shirt and long johns, in a freedom he’d never imagined.
The closed-over walls of the cabin seemed roomy. With a push of a fingertip he made himself float up to the control panels fixed to the roof, and with a gentle shove he could spin in the air, so he was looking down on the couch, and the spacesuit which lay there like a beached whale. He tried making himself twist further, but he found that if he moved his head too qu
ickly nausea washed over him.
Geena, moving with the slippery grace of a dolphin, opened up the hatch to the orbital module and beckoned him. Henry used his hands to pull himself after Geena through the tunnel, but—unlike Geena—he caught his knee on a control box, his foot on the lip of the hatchway. Two bruises already, and he hadn’t even gotten to Station yet. Anyhow, legs didn’t seem too much use up here, save as obstacles to movement; already his hands and arms, which would have to do most of the work in zero G, ached vaguely.
In the upper orbital module, he felt disoriented. The little boxroom, its walls lined with equipment, seemed much bigger than on the ground. Not only that: it looked different, its layout subtly altered, as if some unknown engineer had replaced the compartment he’d clambered through on the ground with this distorted twin.
Geena was working the equipment. “Lunch time,” she said.
Henry shrugged. “I’m not hungry. I’m not even thirsty.”
“Bullshit,” Geena said precisely. “I’m dehydrated from the launch, and so are you. You have to learn to live up here.” She had pressurized the water tank, and now she pressed open the valve.
A sphere of water emerged—a little thumb-sized liquid planet, shimmering and wobbling, complex waves crossing its surface, the cabin’s floodlights returning a mesh of highlights. It swam toward Henry; he watched, fascinated. There were bubbles of air, trapped inside the blob of water, like so many tiny jellyfish, showing no desire to rise to the surface. When they touched they merged, little silvery meniscuses gleaming.
He opened his lips and let the blob just sail in; the surface broke against his back teeth, and his mouth was flooded with crisp cool water. Half of it went down his air pipe, and he coughed, expelling a haze of tiny droplets.
Geena laughed.
Henry went back to the water valve and practiced, until he could suck a ball of water into his lips without wasting a drop.
Geena dug out a plastic bag of grain. She shook it before Henry. “Buckwheat porridge,” she said. She squirted hot water into it, kneaded it, then pulled it open. He dug his spoon into it, but when he pulled out a spoonful, the porridge sprayed out of the bag and began floating around the cabin.
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