Pale Blue

by Mike Jenne

  As he nibbled on one of the vitamin-enriched wafers that he had once deplored, he used a hand-held microfiche viewer to examine schematics of the fuel cell. Letting go of the battery-powered viewer so that it floated before him, he wished that Travkin were still here. A consummate problem-solver, Petr would have rectified this issue hours ago, and they would already have been well into another marathon of durak or chess.

  He heard a flight controller’s voice in his earphones: “Krepost, Krepost, this is Control. Are you ready to copy the restart protocol for the fuel cell?”

  Am I ready? Why, yes I am. Vasilyev grabbed his pencil and pad. “This is Krepost,” he replied. “Go ahead with the protocol.”

  It wasn’t a simple procedure; he spent at least ten minutes frantically copying down the complex protocol that Control read up before he put it into practice. After verifying all of the circuit breaker settings and switch positions, he came to the last step of the instructions. “Now?” asked Vasilyev. His right index finger was poised over the master switch for the fuel cell.

  “Da,” replied Control. “You may turn it back on.”

  Vasilyev threw the toggle switch and heard a series of disconcerting metallic clicks, followed by a faint rattle. He checked the gauges on the power status board. Nothing. The needles had not moved, not even a flicker.

  “Now that the cell has re-started,” said Control, “re-set breakers one through nine…”

  “Nyet,” he snapped. “The fuel cell did not re-start.”

  The radio emitted mild static for several seconds. Vasilyev could picture the earthbound engineers scratching their heads, flailing with their slide rules, and jabbering nonsense at one another. Finally, after almost thirty seconds, there was an anxious voice from Control: “The fuel cell did not re-start?”

  “That’s what I said,” replied Vasilyev, trying mightily to conceal his seething anger. Their scheme had cost him precious time.

  “Nothing?” asked Control.

  “Nothing.”

  As if they had been waiting for him to say something, Control immediately responded: “Krepost, we will provide additional instructions on next orbit. We are collaborating with the designers of the fuel cell, and they will coach you on shutting down and restarting it.”

  Vasilyev cursed. The designers of the fuel cell? So, were they were calling someone in Connecticut, where they had stolen the plans from the NASA contractor who built it? It certainly wasn’t the guidance that he expected or wanted. Obviously, continuation of the Egg mission—and not necessarily his survival—was their current priority. He was already over four hours into this potential crisis and had already expended his own limited array of diagnostic tools, so now he was at a crucial decision point.

  The next step was not one that he could take lightly. With his resources dwindling and a deadline looming, he was compelled to finally admit that the fuel cell outage was not just a passing annoyance, but a genuine emergency. Despite this, once he formally declared a crisis, his chances of a return trip to space were essentially nil. It was a foregone conclusion that his every decision would be questioned, and that he would be hereafter perceived as a timid soul who would snivel and retreat before reaching the absolute brink. The RSVN was not the least bit lenient concerning cowardice or even perceived cowardice.

  As he mentally inventoried the various tools stored in a locker in the docking hub, he heard a voice over the radio and recognized it as Travkin’s: “Pavel, this is Petr. Listen, the engineers are positive that they can formulate a solution for the fuel cell. They want you to wait another revolution, and they will have it for you, I promise.”

  Vasilyev cursed. Maybe the mission planners believed that Travkin’s soothing voice could somehow lull him into calm complacency, but he didn’t appreciate the sly ploy. Although he knew that he could be candid with Travkin, there were others listening in on the comms loop, so he resisted the impulse to speak with frankness.

  He couldn’t believe that they expected him to waste another ninety minutes just so they could have another engineering séance. Can’t they comprehend that the damned fuel cell is broken? And if those asinine engineers know so damned much about the proper care and feeding of the fickle fuel cell, then why couldn’t they have designed and built one of their own, instead of filching plans from the Americans?

  “Pavel? Did you hear me, brother?” asked Travkin from Control. “The engineers will have a solution for you on the next pass.”

  “Da,” replied Vasilyev, gritting his teeth in anger but feigning a tone of optimism. “I concur. I understand that I am to wait for instructions and I will comply.”

  He took off his headset and let it float, tethered by its cable. Seething with anger, he pounded his left fist against a bulkhead until his knuckles bled. Next, he drifted through the station and shut off everything that was drawing power, except for the most vital systems. There wasn’t an established protocol or procedural checklist for the shut-down, but he just didn’t give a damn at this point.

  Rubbing his swelling left hand, he coaxed himself into believing that it was essential to remain calm. He heard a buzzing sound and pivoted to look at the Channel Three recorder. Its blue light flickered, indicating that it was automatically receiving an intelligence update. The wire recorder whirred for a few seconds and then stopped. Vasilyev thought it very odd, since the recorder normally took at least three to five minutes to completely capture a single compressed message. Assuming that the recorder might be malfunctioning, he went through the steps to process and decrypt the burst transmission so he could listen to it.

  He donned his headset and plugged its jack into the Channel Three recorder. Expecting to listen to a report concerning yet another calamitous event threatening peace on Earth, he was surprised to hear General Abdirov’s distinctive voice: “Comrade Major Vasilyev, I regret to inform you that the international security situation has deteriorated to the extent that the General Staff of the High Command has authorized me to issue you an Independent Action Code. That code is Seven-Six-Eight-One-Zero-Seven-Two-Three. Again, your Independent Action Code is Seven-Six-Eight-One-Zero-Seven-Two-Three. Because of exigent circumstances, assuming that a major conflict is imminent, you are now authorized to deploy the warhead at your discretion. This code will remain in effect until the security situation has stabilized and the High Command determines that exigent circumstances no longer exist. Comrade Major, I trust you to exercise your best judgment.”

  Vasilyev quickly scribbled the eight-digit code on a scrap of paper and stashed it in the chest pocket of his coveralls. Stunned, he rewound the message and replayed it several times. The world was obviously descending into chaos; otherwise the High Command would have never entrusted him with the incredibly powerful Independent Action Code. It just seemed somewhat bizarre that they would transmit it when he was on the brink of a potential emergency with the fuel cell. Of course, they might have abruptly sent it in the expectation that communications might be severed at any moment.

  He contemplated the sobering implications. If thermonuclear war erupted below, even if he did not deploy the Egg, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be stuck up here forever. Without doubt, Kapustin Yar and Baikonur would be priority targets for American warheads, so there might not even be the necessary infrastructure to send up a Soyuz to fetch him home. Even if the launch sites miraculously escaped destruction, organizing a mission to rescue a single cosmonaut would hardly be high on the list of priorities.

  Although he did not doubt that the code was legitimate, there were significant discrepancies in the manner it was conveyed to him. Why would Abdirov personally transmit the message? After all, as powerful as he was, the weapons deployment codes were still under the domain of the Perimetr leadership. Moreover, why was the code transmitted on Channel Three? Logically, if the High Command had authorized the Independent Action Code, it should have been transmitted on the dedicated Perimetr channel. Had something gone wrong with Perimetr? Had the Americans found s
ome way to interdict the much-feared “Dead Hand” network? Could there have been a clash between the High Command and the Perimetr bureaucracy? If that was the case, could the High Command have purged the Perimetr leadership? In the relatively short history of the Soviet Union, stranger things had certainly happened.

  Vasilyev remembered his conversation with Gogol, on the night the cosmonaut came to his cottage in search of vodka. Considering that Gogol had insisted that they would deploy the Egg during their mission, it seemed more than a coincidence that Vasilyev was on the verge of doing just that. If Gogol had been granted such warning, could this be part of a massive and long-planned scheme arranged by the High Command? Could they have somehow orchestrated the chain of international incidents to force a nuclear confrontation with the West?

  17:50 p.m. GMT

  GET: 30 Days 17 Hours 5 Minutes, REV # 491

  Fitfully dozing in the darkened control area, Vasilyev was rudely awakened by a squawking alarm. Tumbling and flailing in the dark, he struggled to find the satchel that contained his emergency respirator, but eventually found it floating near one of the portholes. He placed its canvas strap around his neck, pulled his flashlight out of his pocket, and headed to the forward area of the Krepost.

  He noticed a radiant orange light at the far end of the station, like the flickering glow of a fireplace on a dacha’s timbered wall, and assumed that something—probably the defective fuel cell—was burning. Fighting the urge to panic, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and scrambled toward the docking hub. Briefly pausing at the entrance to the access tunnel that led to the freighter, he donned the awkward respirator mask.

  He quickly floated down the tunnel to assess the situation. There was an undulating orange blob of fire, but it was outside the fuel cell’s casing, so the cell itself was apparently not directly involved. He hoped that the fire would snuff itself out like Gogol’s match on his first mission, but for some reason, the expanding blaze did not seem the least bit starved for oxygen.

  Quickly abating the blaze with his fire extinguisher, he yanked off the respirator mask and moved in for a closer examination. Fanning away the smoke with his hands, he glimpsed a dense clump of charred debris in the narrow gap between fuel cell casing and the pressure hull of the dry compartment, and recognized that the combustion had been sustained by the discarded food packages that he and Travkin had earlier tamped around the casing.

  Floating globules of firefighting foam splattered his coveralls. Thinking that he had resolved the crisis, he breathed a sigh of relief, but his reprieve was not long-lived. He heard an ominous noise, a shrill sound somewhere between a whistle and a hiss, and suspected that an oxygen line had somehow been damaged, perhaps crimped just enough to facilitate a pinhole leak. There was a sudden flash of light, accompanied by a loud whooshing noise, as the fire abruptly reignited.

  Reacting instinctively, Vasilyev braced himself against the pressure hull and sprayed the fire extinguisher at the growing inferno. It had virtually no effect, and the bottle was quickly depleted. He rushed back into the docking hub to locate another extinguisher.

  As he started back down the access tunnel, he saw that the fire was still growing. He smelled an unmistakable acrid odor and realized that the fire was now not only stoked with oxygen-saturated trash, but that metal was also being consumed. Few people—except perhaps welders and crash-rescue firefighters—even comprehend that metal could be ignited, but not only could metal burn, it typically burned with an incredible intensity. Aluminum, as an example, burned at a temperature exceeding three thousand degrees Celsius. Worse, the lattice of storage brackets within the dry compartment offered more than an ample supply of the flammable metal.

  Certainly, a garbage fire was bad enough, but now, given an almost inexhaustible stock of other volatile materials, the fire could rapidly engulf the dry compartment. If not subdued, the expanding fire could soon impinge into the docking hub and then into the main compartment, threatening the entire Krepost.

  Vasilyev forced himself not to yield to panic. When faced with an uncontrollable fire, the station’s emergency protocols mandated that he physically isolate the involved module and conduct an emergency depressurization of that compartment to snuff out the blaze. Unfortunately, isolating the freighter was not nearly as simple as wrestling the hatch shut and dogging it down. Three conduits—an electrical supply cable, roughly the thickness of a man’s thumb, a water supply hose and a flexible oxygen duct—ran from the top of the fuel cell, through the Soyuz’s forward hatch, through the access tunnel, and into the docking hub. The oxygen duct provided a steady stream of the essential gas, preheated by the fuel cell’s residual heat, to supplement the station’s life support system. Vasilyev valiantly tried to undo their connections at the top of the fuel cell, but was quickly forced back by the terrible heat of the inferno. If Travkin were still aboard, one of them could have fought the fire while the other loosened the connections, but Vasilyev did not have the luxury of an extra set of hands.

  The noise grew progressively louder and now was like the shriek of a factory whistle. With his head pounding from inhaling toxic smoke, gasping for breath, Vasilyev scurried back up the access tunnel. If he could not disconnect the cables at the fuel cell, his only option was to break the links somewhere else. Save for the ones on the top of the fuel cell, there were no other quick disconnect fittings, so he would have to somehow chop or saw through the cables and hoses. He opened the tool locker in the docking hub, but found nothing adequate for the job. There was a hefty spanner wrench, which might be handy if he could somehow bash his way out of this conundrum, but no saw, knife or axe.

  Then he remembered Gogol’s satchel of survival gear, and recalled that he had stashed it in the other docking tunnel. He quickly found the green bundle, unlatched it, and hastily groped through its tightly packed contents to find a wire saw. The wire saw, a short length of titanium cable embedded with serrated cutting barbs, was intended for cutting tree branches and amputating limbs, amongst other things. It would be the perfect tool to quickly slash through the cables and conduits. Soon, the confined space of the docking hub was filled with floating items—bandages, a tourniquet, compact rations, a compass, a pocket knife, a signaling mirror, a small flare gun—that had spilled out of the kit, but Vasilyev could not find the elusive wire saw. He saw Gogol’s hatchet floating end over end and decided that it would have to do.

  Clutching the hatchet to his chest, he scrambled back up into the docking hub. He made short work of the oxygen duct, but the electrical cables—manufactured of heavy gauge copper wiring—were not as yielding. Swinging the hatchet like a man possessed, he hacked at the cables at the point that they passed through the hatchway and into the docking hub. He desperately yanked at the severed cables, shoving their loose ends back into the docking tunnel. By now, the freighter’s dry compartment was fully involved, and the undulating blob of fire was climbing up the access tunnel. He wielded the hatchet again, chopping the water conduit apart with one well-placed swing. A jet of stagnant water spurted from the slender conduit, but quickly subsided as the residual pressure was exhausted.

  Severing the conduits had cost precious time. Since the growing fire was now rising up into the access tunnel, he could not close the freighter’s front hatch. If he was able to close the hatch, even if he was unable to contain the fire, he could still jettison the freighter. Since jettisoning the freighter was no longer an option, the Krepost was now limited to two docking ports rather than three, which would severely constrain future operations, assuming that they could continue operations at all.

  Since he could no longer isolate the freighter, his next course of action was to preserve the docking hub. Thinking that the access tunnel’s hatchway was clear, he slammed the hatch closed but realized that some small obstruction precluded the disk from fully sealing. In moments, blobs of flame and tiny rivulets of smoke seeped around the unsealed portal.

  Using the screwdriver tip of his pocketknife, he desperately
tried to dislodge the miniscule object—a fragment of insulation from the electrical cables—to clear the hatch. The circular hatch was mounted so that it swung into the docking hub; now, the swelling pressure within the freighter and access tunnel prevented it from completely closing. To gain some leverage, Vasilyev planted his feet on the opposite wall of the docking hub before lunging at the hatch’s handles to wrestle it closed. Yowling as the hot metal burned his hands, he realized the blunder of not wearing his gloves.

  As the pressure continued to mount inside the freighter, a plume of dense smoke spewed into the docking hub. Vasilyev heard a roaring noise like a blowtorch burning out of control, so he assumed that the pinhole break in the oxygen line had probably worsened.

  Chest heaving, he swung the hatch partially open, then slammed it shut and latched it closed. The air was filled with choking smoke, so he was forced to don his cumbersome rubber respirator. Convulsing with pain and struggling to catch his breath, he heard a muted thump as the freighter’s pressure vessel spontaneously ruptured. The entire station shuddered with the muffled blast.

  He scuttled out of the docking hub and into the main station. He worked his way down to the control area, and then looked out a porthole to witness a billowing cloud of debris spewing into the vacuum. Although he could see the aft end of the freighter, the part jutting furthest away from the docking hub, he couldn’t view the dry compartment at the front end of the freighter, so there was no way to fully assess the damages and diagnose the impact. In any event, it was clearly obvious that he was in an extremely tenuous situation.

  Just when he believed that things could not possibly get any worse, they did. He suddenly heard a steady stream of popping noises, and realized that the station’s maneuvering thrusters were firing almost constantly. Eyes burning from the smoke, he quickly moved to another porthole to assess the situation outside; gazing outside, he realized that he should be seeing the earth, but was instead looking at the sky, and then saw the earth come into view. As best as he could tell, gases flowing from the breach in the cargo ferry’s ruptured pressure vessel acted essentially like a low-powered thruster, imparting a very slow but constant spin to the Krepost. The stabilization gyros detected this torque and tried to dampen it by automatically activating the small maneuvering thrusters.