The ship’s main controls were here. But there was a disturbingly small number of instruments fixed to the walls. Some of them had even been hand-lettered with Cyrillic characters, or fixed on top of other components. The windows were small, circular and featured big heavy panes of glass and rings of bolts, like portholes from Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. But he could see no daylight through the windows right now; that big white faring saw to that.
Geena struggled out of her seat, and pulled closed the hatch in the roof. Soon after, Henry heard a muffled thud, as the techs shut the outer hatch.
And so he was sealed up in the ultimate enclosure: a cell within which he couldn’t even stand up, and yet which would carry him away from the Earth.
He searched for some reflection of this in Geena’s eyes. But there was none; Geena’s expression was cloudy, distracted. After a couple of seconds she turned back to her checklist, and worked through instrument settings, exchanging messages with the crisp Russian voices of the ground control in their bunker.
Jane understood the problem. In the last couple of weeks she’d heard about other planes which had run into this difficulty. But knowing didn’t help; she knew, in fact, that the outlook for their survival wasn’t good.
The volcanic debris, silicate ash suspended in the air, fused when it came into contact with the hot metal of an aeroplane’s combustion chambers and turbines. It was like damping a fire with sand. Engines just flamed out.
Through the windows she could see how the hot grit had sandblasted the 747’s leading edges. The paint was stripped, the windscreen and landing light covers opaqued. The dust got into the aircraft’s pitot tubes — airspeed sensors — and caused conflicting information on the flight deck. The engine nacelles, intakes and fans looked as if they had been shot-blasted.
The crew allowed Jane onto the deck — Jack was here, wide-eyed — but they barely reacted to her presence.
The cabin was filled with a bluish, acrid mist, sucked in by the compressors before the engines died. There was only grey cloud ahead of the aircraft, dancing electric light on the windscreen.
The Crew were following their procedures, the drill Jane recognized as preparing for an in-flight start-up of the engines.
They all looked incredibly young.
“…Mayday, mayday, mayday. Our position is forty miles west of Glasgow. We have lost all four engines. We’re descending and we’re out of level 370.”
Prestwick here, have you got a problem?
“We’ve lost all four engines.”
Understand you have lost engine number four?
The Senior First Officer — a thin, nervous young man — groaned at his captain, a competent fifty-ish woman. “The fuckwit doesn’t understand.”
Jack’s eyes got rounder.
“Then tell her until she bloody does,” the captain said. “Tell her we want radar assistance to get back to Prestwick. What about number four?”
“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 towards 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 towards 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 analogue 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 adva
nced 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 sulphurous 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, the 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.
23
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 analyse.
It was easier to look at the land, where the colours were more subtle, greys 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 pond-like air. On the land itself, he could make out the spit of land that marked Cape Ca
naveral. Straight inland from that, surrounded by the central lakes, he could see the Disney World complex, splashes of white and grey. On the other side of the peninsula he made out Tampa Bay, and Miami in the south. The cities were bubbly grey, 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, wing-like 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 spider-web 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 towards 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 towards him, and then the clouds turned to the colour of molten copper. The lightening ocean was grey as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colours of life leaked back into the world.
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