Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  “I am well, Moscow, thank you.”

  He eases his head farther back and now he is gazing down at an inverted Europe. He sees the Mediterranean and below it the Alps and below them Scandinavia. The whole continent is framed within his solar visor. His breathing levels, his heart slows.

  Gevorkian’s voice joins him inside the helmet. “The senior flight physician is satisfied. You may proceed.”

  Yefgenii works his way along the rail. The tether loops behind him, back into the open hatch of the BO. His muscles strain to bend elbows and knees, flexing against the suit’s rigid inflation. His breathing becomes rapid again, sounds coarser within his helmet. He can hear the pounding of his own heart. There are no other sounds. Already the interior capsule of the suit stinks of leather, rubber and his own sweat. He smells the sweat on his upper lip. It’s a rank smell, the smell of his bodily fluids.

  The world floats beneath him in complete silence. As he maneuvers along the rail, he becomes oriented upward, so his head is now north. He can see the Baltic gliding under his chest, the Black Sea between his feet.

  Yefgenii reaches a boom mounted on the outside of the BO. He’s transferred himself only a matter of metres from the hatch, but he feels hot and tired already. Every tiny movement in gripping the rail is complicated by an opposite and equal reaction that modifies his position and direction of movement. He struggles to ensure every motion produces the correct effect on his progress.

  At last he secures himself to the boom. He activates the boom’s motor and the structure telescopes out toward the LK, carrying him with it.

  The L-3 spacecraft Voskhodyeniye is a stack of modules, a Soyuz 7K-LOK attached to additional propulsion units and the lunar lander, the LK, all housed in a metal payload shroud that curves round the stack like the closed petals of a tulip. The LK is housed on the LOK’s nose, the engines sprout from its tail.

  Now the stack is passing over Russia. Yefgenii glimpses the Urals floating up from the east, mountains rising in seconds rather than millions of years. He witnesses the illusion of the Earth turning from east to west as the spacecraft girdles the planet once every ninety minutes. The terminator bisects the Soviet Union and curves down into the Indian Ocean. He peers down upon bright blue waters that fade and blur eastward into night. It is night in India, in China, in Japan.

  He reaches the hatch of the LK. He depressurizes the module from outside. He receives a green indicator light to proceed and a confirmation from Mission Control. He blows the hatch, unhooks the tether and clips it to the handrail, and then he enters the lunar lander. Outside night falls in an instant.

  Inside the lander, the gauges, displays and power lights glow with current. Yefgenii closes the hatch, then repressurizes the cabin. He is breathing hard. His heart is racing. He fights to keep them under control, worried the flight physicians in Moscow will recommend a mission abort.

  As the cabin pressure rises, his suit softens. Gevorkian’s voice says, “Voskhodyeniye, you are advised to rest. Five minutes.”

  Yefgenii wants to argue but he knows he’s completed the daylight-critical transfer as planned. He has more time at his disposal. “Roger, Moscow.”

  As the atmosphere thickens, sounds return. He hears the hum of current, the whir of fans. When rested, he removes his EVA helmet, his bubble helmet and his space gloves. His gloves and helmets unlock from the metal rings and hover in the lander till he stows them in the storage locker set aside for his Krechet-94 Moonsuit. Fans pump out hot air but it will be many minutes before the cabin warms to room temperature. Vapor balloons from his mouth and nose into perfect evanescent spheres. The chill refreshes him.

  He carries out the checks on all the LK’s systems. He reports each phase to Mission Control. He does so with a tingle of nerves. One faulty piece of equipment and the flight will be scrubbed.

  The flight plan allows for three revs while he works his way through the LK checklists. More than four hours later, in night broken only by the LK’s internal lighting, he puts his gloves and helmets back on and depressurizes the cabin. He exits the hatch into dawn. The terminator has tracked five hours west. The line that divides day and night on Earth arches across the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland to Antarctica.

  Yefgenii returns to the BO. Once repressurization is complete, he removes the Orlan space suit, getting down to his gray two-piece flight suit. He drifts, with loose limbs. His muscles ache, his back is sore.

  From the BO he shuts down the LK’s systems. One by one they go to sleep for the voyage to the Moon. Only the lander’s batteries hold a charge of their own.

  He enjoys a short rest period, with the opportunity to take in food and fluid, while Mission Control evaluates the data he’s returned over the past sixteen hours. Sweat drenches his flight suit. Dark patches, fringed with salt, underhang his armpits; damp triangles cover his chest and back. Already the spacecraft reeks of human water in its various forms.

  Gevorkian’s voice breaks the silence. “Voskhodyeniye, congratulations. All your systems are working perfectly. It’s been a hard day, but you’ve performed your duties admirably. You are clear to sleep.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Goodnight, Voskhodyeniye.”

  “Goodnight, Moscow.” He says it to the TV camera, to the banks of faceless technicians watching in Mission Control, the only people on Earth who are witness to the embarkation of his voyage. In comparison, Apollo astronauts perform live telecasts viewed by millions, by billions — but perhaps something other than the standard operational secrecy of the Soviet system lurks behind the contrast.

  When Soviet cosmonauts travel into space, a fear stows away that’s harder to shake loose than gravity: a recognition of the fragility of man and his works. Maybe the Americans have been blinded by the photo flashes of ticker-tape parades, but, for the Soviets, it’s so much easier to see, particularly since the passing of Gagarin, a man the size of a country who seemed as indestructible. The people he left behind understand that anything valuable can be stolen, anything vital can cease to exist, even those creations possessing the breadth of empires or the length of history.

  And so, as Yefgenii Yeremin unfolds the metal frame of his mesh hammock and straps in to sleep, only the officials and technicians of the inner circle are permitted to share the hopes and fears of his perilous voyage; the world is not.

  BLINDS COVER THE PORTHOLES of the BO. Through the night sharp daggers of sunlight have stabbed out from their edges. His sleep has been fitful. Too many worries have swooped and dived through his consciousness. The pitch of a fan changes and he wakes. He listens to it, straining in the darkness, till he convinces himself nothing’s wrong.

  In the end he unstraps himself from the mesh hammock strung across a folding metal frame and floats free. He lifts the blinds an hour early on the start of his second day in space, though at this time his part of the sky remains in darkness. The black Earth turns beneath the portholes. The oceans are blank slabs of slate.

  He takes on water from a plastic tube. His mouth feels dirty. He is stubbled and unwashed. He needs to urinate. He pops open his fly and rolls the convene of the waste management system over his penis. He turns the valve and feels a pull that disrupts the normal action of relaxing his urethral sphincter. It takes a few uncomfortable seconds before he passes water. It’s deep yellow from his dehydration. He closes the valve and unrolls the convene. A drop of golden liquid escapes. It forms a tiny sphere that drifts away into the cabin. He finds a wipe and folds it over the globule of urine. As he does so, yellow crystals drift past a porthole. His water has been jettisoned to space and turned in an instant to ice, a string of yellow beads. In train the crystals glide Earthward where, on contact with the atmosphere, travelling at orbital velocity, they’ll flash to vapor.

  An increase in heart rate has alerted the flight physicians that he’s awake, but Mission Control has deferred communicating with the spacecraft to preserve an illusion of privacy. Now the flight clock reaches 24:00. “Good morning,
Voskhodyeniye, come in,” says Ges, starting his shift as communicator.

  “Good morning, Moscow.”

  “How is the weather up there, comrade?”

  Yefgenii laughs. “Cold outside. Some yellow sleet.”

  “All systems are continuing to show nominal readings. Please commence countdown sequence for translunar injection.”

  Yefgenii returns to the pilot’s seat for the first time since he’s made orbit. He straps in and begins to work through the sequence of checks ordered by Mission Control. His eyes are weary, his back stiff. Smells of rubber and metal fill the ship.

  A splinter of sunlight bursts into the darkness. Second by second it streaks into a curving band of orange, white and blue. Cloud, sky and sunlight squeeze through what appears like a crack in the fabric of space. The edge of the dark Earth is rupturing, burning up in a great celestial fire of heat and colour as if it has fingers that are struggling to pry open the blackness. He sees the sky opening. It’s opening for him.

  “Voskhodyeniye, you are to initiate TLI burn at mission-elapsed time 25:44:16; burn duration 05:47; do you copy?”

  “25:44:16, 05:47, copy that.” Yefgenii scratches the numbers onto his thigh-pad.

  He punches the numbers into the flight computer. At the end of the sequence his finger hangs over the keyboard for a second or two. He can still choose to de-orbit and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. He presses the key to proceed.

  At twenty-five hours, forty-four minutes and sixteen seconds from the moment the N-1 rocket lifted off the pad at Baikonur, the computer initiates ignition of the craft’s Block G engine. Yefgenii feels acceleration no more violent than a push. He senses he is veering sideways. The fluid in his inner ear sloshes and he experiences a sudden attack of nausea, but this passes, and he rides the rocket out of orbit. Yefgenii monitors the instruments. He is accelerating from orbital velocity to escape velocity.

  A rocket roar travels up through the structure of the ship while the brilliant glow of its tail burns behind him. A creature from Earth is carrying fire to the Moon. The gases freeze in space, becoming a shower of ice particles, and then the crystal shower disperses, drifting back into the Earth’s gravity, to burn up in the atmosphere, to vanish in an instant.

  Ges’s voice cuts through. Yefgenii hears it in his earpiece. “Telemetry shows you are good in the burn, Voskhodyeniye.”

  Now Yefgenii shakes in his seat. The whole vehicle trembles. The rocket engine thrusts toward the culmination of its burn, toward 10,830 metres per second, the speed required in its original orbit to overcome the Earth’s gravity.

  The lights flicker. Yefgenii feels the brilliance change around him. The light plays across his face and mixes with the yellow glow of the rocket burn that haloes his bald head. His hand grips the throttle. It shakes for the first time he can remember, not since the early days of flight training. The computer clock counts down to the end of the burn but the display flickers. Yefgenii has set the chronometer of his watch; he notes the duration etched on his thigh-pad and starts to perform the countdown himself, off the chronometer. The computer blinks out. The cabin lights blink out. In panic he glances at the control panel behind him, sees circuit breakers tripped and tripping. The burn continues a split second past the auto-shutoff; the computer has failed.

  Yefgenii shuts down the engine, but as he does so a bang rattles the entire spacecraft. Storage lockers fly open and their contents spew out into the cabin.

  The rocket roar dies in an instant. The afterglow fades. He sees ice crystals glinting in earthlight, a shower of tiny stars, but no light shines within Voskhodyeniye, and there are no voices on the radio, not Ges’s, nor any other from Earth.

  At once he knows something very serious has gone wrong. Objects float round the cabin. A tube of food concentrate bumps his head. An instrument package has ripped open and packing material is swirling out — tiny polystyrene balls. The disarray unsettles him. His hands are still quivering, his stomach flutters. There’s no ejector seat or possibility of a glide down to a friendly runway. A paper-thin metal hull is all that protects him from the unsurvivable vacuum of space.

  He keys the transmitter on his communications helmet.

  “Moscow, come in, Voskhodyeniye.”

  He waits. He tries again.

  “Moscow, come in, Voskhodyeniye.”

  He waits.

  “Moscow, Voskholdyeniye, do you copy?”

  The spacecraft is rolling slowly to port but none of the thrusters are firing. His mind begins to function again, to diagnose problems and calculate solutions. In a matter of seconds the shaking of his hands has diminished. He releases his straps and hovers. A band of sunlight streams through one of the portholes, illuminating a section of the BO to an unbearable intensity; the remainder lives in an eerie dusk created by the Sun’s reflections off glass and metalwork.

  With a little push he glides into the sunlight, cutting the beam. Darkness falls across the control panel, and then he clears, and it’s lit again, so he can see to reset the communications system circuit breaker. The breaker won’t hold. It springs back when he throws it, and the power lights dotted on the radio control board won’t blink to life. A bus failure has disarmed nearly all of the ship’s electrical systems.

  A deep worry grips him. He drags himself hand over hand to the environmental control system. He pulls himself close. He listens. He can hear a flow of oxygen, a hum of motors.

  He swings to his left. The fluid in his ear sloshes at the sudden movement, and his stomach churns. He makes a tiny retching sound, but that’s all, and the wave of nausea passes.

  Out of the portholes, through the constellation of ice crystals, he glimpses the Earth, now a disc that he can visualize from pole to pole in one scan. He pauses to absorb the view, and to ponder his predicament. The burn has accelerated the spacecraft far out of orbit; in the next hour the planet will become nearly 40,000 kilometres more remote. He’ll travel a distance roughly equivalent to the circumference of the globe. He forces himself through the moment, back to the task.

  Yefgenii hauls himself down the tunnel into the SA. He felt a bang at the end of translunar injection and now he’s looking for the cause. Nothing in the SA appears changed from his previous orbital check, apart from the sporadic electrical paralysis. He returns to the BO and peers out of the portholes one by one. A trail of gas is running out from Voskhodyeniye. He can’t get a view of where it’s being vented from, but it’s snaking away from the spacecraft, a tiny thread of white cotton he missed the first time he looked out after the bang. The gas is already ice when he sees it.

  Without guidance from Mission Control, he must think his way through the steps on his own. He assumes the material being vented from the spacecraft must be related to the bang and the subsequent electrical problems. He holds on to a hope that the fault is confined to the Block G engine. At this point in the flight plan, the engine is all but spent, and should be jettisoned. Yefgenii maneuvers to the control panel. The switch responds. He feels a rush of joy. He still wields some control over the ship and therefore over his fate. He jettisons the Block G.

  Yefgenii presses himself against a porthole. Soon the dead rocket drifts into view, in a slow roll, travelling at almost the same velocity as Voskhodyeniye. It hangs aft of the stack, spraying crystals, the remnants of its fuel. As it rolls, he gets a sudden glimpse of a V-shaped rupture at the base of its aerocasing. The metal is bent and blackened. He concludes that a small explosion occurred in the Block G engine at the end of the translunar injection burn, possibly due to the sudden ignition of some uncombusted fuel, and that it must have caused collateral damage to the stack.

  Loose items continue to drift round the cabin. He collects the larger objects and stows them, then begins the painstaking task of vacuuming up each of the little polystyrene balls. He can grab two or three at a time with the tiny battery-powered vacuum cleaner, then he must place them in a sealed bag or else they’ll float free again.

  His best hope of
contacting Moscow is to make an emergency EVA transfer to the LK to operate its communications system. From the remote command console he attempts to power up the LK but he has limited success, receiving a series of indifferent readings from the lander’s control systems. The surge of current has affected the entire Voskhodyeniye stack.

  He decides to jettison the payload shroud while there’s still power to do so, and attempt to dock the LOK to the LK. He positions himself at the docking cupola. Through the viewport he gazes at the hexagonal array of docking receptacles on the leading edge of the lander. With the thrusters he maneuvers the LOK forward, closing the gap between the two ships, till the LOK’s docking probe pricks one of the hexagonal holes. He fires the forward thruster and the probe lurches into its home, bonding the two craft together.

  Without time for a rest or refreshment break, he clears the flotsam from the cabin, knowing if he doesn’t it will all be vented to space when he depressurizes the BO. He is rushing. Sweat damps his brow and back. It takes him over an hour to clear all the objects away and then he hurries to pull on his Orlan space suit. He dons the main body, then the bubble helmet and gloves. He locks his EVA helmet to the space suit’s metal collar. He races to double-check the condition of the suit. Any error made in haste will cost him his life.

  He depressurizes the BO. The system works, sparing him having to blow the hatch. He releases the sequence of levered locks on the hatch door. The hatch swings open and he floats on the threshold of deep space. He grips the handhold in sudden trepidation: no man has carried out a spacewalk this far from Earth. He cannot see either the Earth or the Moon, and the Sun blazes on the opposite side of the spacecraft such that the hatch opens into Voskhodyeniye’s shadow. Outside stretches vast black void.

  Yefgenii pulls himself out of the port. The stiff suit resists his efforts. He is pushing himself harder and faster than on the first EVA. It isn’t daylight that’ll run out this time. It’s electrical power, the very life of his spacecraft, and with it his chance ever to return home.