Perhaps it is best. Where I am from, we would never have dreamed of trying to justify such philosophies to Americans. Well. Despite American hostility after Apollo 11, we continued to fly in space – never to the Moon, not then, as I was growing up. But we flew to orbit in our robust Soyuz ships, and we built our space stations, the Salyuts, the Mirs. We learned how to live in space. We learned how to fix things. Baby steps towards the goals of Cosmist thought, I suppose.
But all the while we faced pressure from the Americans. They had gone to the Moon, you see, further than us – save for our robots – but now, after Apollo 11, they turned back, to Earth. And they built a new generation of winged spacecraft, with a focus on operations on Earth, and near it.
The space shuttles?
The war birds, our own newspapers called them. Designed to serve the needs of your military, at least in part. The craft had great cross-range capability – that is, an ability to fly down from orbit over battlefields at wide latitudes, and deliver targeted payloads.
In 1985, I was ten years old, the shuttles began to demonstrate practice bombing runs, high in the stratosphere above Moscow, Leningrad, Vladivostok. To show, you see, that no part of our nation was beyond the reach of America. Of the Rocket State, as President Reagan called it.
That didn’t happen in my reality. Oh, the shuttle had a military input, and there were some reconnaissance missions . . . On the other hand, where Malenfant came from, he said he saw a shuttle bombing run during the Iraq war . . .
I know nothing of an Iraq war. But I assure you that everything I told you is true, as I experienced it. A certain climax was reached in 1986 when a Soyuz spacecraft, on its way to the Mir, was snatched out of orbit by a shuttle orbiter. The Americans claimed that the crew had been engaged in illegal espionage activities. In fact their cargo was experimental biology: pea plants and chicken eggs. The crew were paraded in handcuffs. I don’t know what happened to the pea plants and chicken eggs.
There was nothing we could do. The Soviet state tried to respond, technologically. But we could not afford it. Though we had the engineering expertise, we have always had that, we could not match American investment. So, in the late 1980s . . . You really know nothing of this?
I was born in 1970. I lived through a version of it, I guess.
So, in the late 1980s, our leaders, the Soviet leadership, tried to reach an understanding with the West, with America. The only other way we could have responded, you see, was to launch a war that would have devastated the planet. And so, despite American insults, American crowing, we chose peace.
That sounds . . . noble.
It was. But we paid a price. The Americans maintained their economic pressure. The Soviet Union itself fell, its leaders deposed. Many of the constituent republics – Ukraine, the Baltics – had already broken away, thanks to independence movements that proved to be supported, even founded, by the CIA. Russia became a democracy, of sorts. But as the assets of the old Soviet state were privatised, the American corporations moved in. We became corrupt, corporatised, our government like gangsters in hock to the Americans. It was a conquest, Emma Stoney. Not in name, and with scarcely a shot being fired. But a conquest all the same, of ideology and economics. Still, we consoled ourselves—
Better that than global extinction.
Indeed. Gorbachev said as much before he died in prison.
And, as would prove to be crucial in my own life, we maintained our independent space programme. Even though now we had to make deals with Kazakhstan, an independent nation, for access to Baikonur, the old Soviet launch facility.
Influenced by my father, I myself was determined to fly in space however I could, whatever missions were available, and I gave myself the best opportunity I could. I trained as a civilian pilot, and then test pilot. And in parallel I trained as a plumber.
A plumber! Well, having endured long-duration spaceflight myself, I can see the logic.
Indeed. A crewed spacecraft consists of little but a rocket engine and plumbing. And the longer the time spent away from Earth, the more reliable those unglamorous but essential systems have to be. I myself pioneered new generations of closed life-support systems which make intensive use of recycled human products. Russians lag behind the West in computer technology and other areas, but not in the means to endure in space. And that worked in my favour, you see. There were better pilots than me. There were braver heroes. But there wasn’t a better space plumber in the whole of Russia.
And I was in the right place at the right time, in a sense. Emma, if the 1990s had been calamitous for my country, the new century was more productive. A happier time. Our economy began to grow healthily, a new generation began to build economic and political ties with neighbours which had once been satellite states and dependencies.
After 2010 I flew two long-duration missions aboard versions of our Mir space stations. Longer in fact than the journey which, in the end, brought me to Phobos itself . . . But, of course, it was Phobos that caused the great destabilisation.
What do you mean?
It was in the year 2018 that the anomalous nature of Phobos, observed by the scientists, became public knowledge.
Umm. It was rather earlier in my timeline. Did you ever hear of an astrophysicist called Shklovsky?
I am afraid that in my evidently warlike world, it was the potential of acquiring alien technology that made Phobos seem such a prize – or rather, such was the nature of the combatants’ psychology, it was necessary to be sure that the other fellow didn’t get there first.
But the prize itself, it was always clear from the beginning, was in Russia’s grasp. For while the Americans had continued to fly their baby-step hops out of the atmosphere and back again aboard their ugly war birds, we, since 1970, had patiently been developing a capability to endure long periods in space – even, so we had rehearsed, without resupply from the home planet, for months. We had always had our eye on Mars, you know, as the long-term goal. It did not take a great leap of the engineering imagination to swivel our sights to Phobos, mysterious moon of Mars.
I can understand that. My own mission to Phobos was an American–Soviet joint venture. And, yes, the Russian experience of long-duration spaceflight was the key to our success. Such as it was . . .
As soon as the mission profile emerged, as soon as it was clear this would need to be a two-person crew, Misha and I were inevitably the prime candidates: Misha the best space pilot, and I, yes, the best plumber.
The mission itself was planned rapidly.
In the end it took three rocket launches to assemble our Phobos ship. There were two launches of our heavy-lift booster, the Energia: one to lift our interplanetary booster, the other to lift a smaller rocket – the second stage of a Proton launcher – fully fuelled, along with a habitat module based on our proven Mir hardware. In the third launch, we two rode a Soyuz to low Earth orbit to join our ship, already assembled. The interplanetary booster would hurl us, in our Mir, to Mars, and the Proton stage would brake us to orbit around Mars. Later another Proton with a fuel load would be dispatched to bring us home. As we were not attempting a landing on Mars the mission profile was much simpler than many we had studied. We needed only a lightweight lander craft, little more than a frame open to the vacuum, with which to approach a small space rock like Phobos . . .
Our ship, our great mission, was called Spektr.
We left Earth orbit on 15 November 2026. We arrived safely at Mars on 30 July of the following year. The plan was we would stay more than a full year, and then leave in October of 2028, following a minimum-energy interplanetary trajectory, to arrive back at Earth nine months later.
The mission went so well! Even from the start.
I remember how cheerful we were, as we trained at Star City, Misha and I and our backups, despite the mice in the training rooms, and the cats chasing the mice, and the lights turned down so low to save money you could barely read a checklist, and the mission controllers disappearing all the time to
their second jobs as car-park attendants and window cleaners . . .
And then to Baikonur: an island of technology in the middle of the desolate steppe. Those ugly concrete buildings, now scarred by the looting and rioting that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Rusting satellite dishes. Wild dogs, even wild camels, rooting in heaps of metal that had been fuel tanks or the fins of space rockets. And we had to wear masks to protect ourselves against the toxic dust that blew in from the dried basin of the Aral Sea.
At last the training was done, the mission assembled, despite equipment failures and staff shortages, and what we suspected were attempts at destabilisation, even sabotage, by the Americans or their allies. Launch day arrived. We suited up in Building 254, and drove in a bus across the steppe, and saluted the general in command of the station – we follow such traditions scrupulously.
A Soyuz rocket on the pad is grey metal. You can see the rivets. It looks what it is, a proud, robust piece of Soviet engineering.
The Soyuz capsule is small and cramped, even when there are just two crew – it is built for three. Under the protective cowl needed for launch it is dark and noisy, the walls covered with thick yellow Velcro. We wait two hours as the final preparations run down.
The pumps whine. The stack shudders. And then—
Ignition!
After one full orbit, we closed on our ship, the Spektr, the assembled stack of thruster rockets and habitat. Our docking was automated; it was fast and efficient, and Misha and I didn’t have to do a thing.
And we said goodbye to the Earth.
So we settled into the Mir. Both Misha and I were veterans of such missions; it was a home from home.
I saw your module, what was left of it. I guess it wasn’t looking its best . . .
Indeed. You understand that our module was equivalent to the base block of a full Mir complex – just the core. But it is sufficient for dining, for sleep – perhaps you saw the table with its ingenious lidded niches, where food is heated in safety. Misha was always rather obsessive about using the treadmill, you know. When he was on that gadget he would make the whole stack shake at a frequency of about one Hertz.
But I, I was always buried in my systems, the Elektron and Vozdukh that respectively looked after our oxygen supply, and the carbon dioxide in the air. And of course my elaborate recycling system. It was not a closed system; there were leaks, slow build-ups of residue and waste, but it would have supported us through the years before we were due to return to Earth.
If fate had not intervened.
Indeed. We reached Martian orbit. We rendezvoused with Phobos successfully. Phobos was big and ugly and inviting, and with that core of anomalous wonder at its heart. So we thought. And we prepared to explore.
We made our descent at the north rotation pole, the apex. I remember exiting the lander . . . the hatch stuck, briefly . . . Then we were out.
We dug into the loose dirt of Phobos. And we found – marvels.
We discovered the Sculpture Garden, as you called it. That internal chamber, the blue hoop system. But for us – we found it all under only a few metres of loose-packed rubble, and at the moon’s pole. Whereas you found it all in a kilometre-deep shaft, at the equator! This is a great mystery to me.
Tell me about it.
As I said, we had intended to stay for over a year, at Phobos. We had to decide how to maintain our Mir in close proximity to the moon, without the need for continual orbital adjustments which would deplete our attitude-rocket fuel. We even considered tethers, attaching the habitat to an anchor at the pole, perhaps.
We decided in the end it would be possible simply to dig through the loosely packed layers of dust and rock to the cavity of the blue hoops, and – cautiously, cautiously – to use our Soyuz thrusters to nudge the Mir into contact with the moon itself at that point. A kind of docking. So that the forward airlock of the Mir would give directly into that cavity. Thus we would achieve stability of the craft, and easy access to the moon’s interior. There were complications to do with the orientation of the solar panels, but—
But there’s that paradox again. You say you attached your Mir to the surface. We found it entirely buried in the regolith!
Emma, we soon discovered that distances, relative locations, within and on Phobos are not what they seem – or, not what they ought to be. Even a great object like the Mir can be – well, in two places at once.
Umm. You’re obviously right, of course.
We have much to discuss, of such matters. Notes to compare.
Indeed.
But I, I will never complete my report of all this to my superiors in Star City. Because the war intervened. And then Misha was lost . . .
Tell me about the war.
We knew little enough about it. Our controllers tried to filter out the news. But some of the junior technicians, and the cosmonauts who assisted them—
Capcoms?
They were our friends. They told us more.
Perhaps it was the Phobos mission itself that was the trigger. Perhaps it was simply that tensions had been rising for too long anyhow. My own feeling is that the hawks in the American administration, who had longed to see a war with Russia as a logical conclusion to their decades-long global strategy, simply got the upper hand at last. Any excuse would have been enough to trigger it.
It began subtly, it seemed.
Suddenly there was agitation in the republics. The Baltics, the Ukraine, even Kazakhstan. Once the vassals of Moscow, now our neighbours. So-called evidence of Russian interference in democratic processes, and so on. And an agitation among Russian ethnic groups who had been cut off in the newly independent republics. Reactions to that agitation. Terrorism, assassinations, massacres. It was not hard to see the hand of the CIA in this. Indeed we Russians regard ourselves as masters of the art of this kind of subtle destabilisation. We call it maskirovka.
Meanwhile we understood that while America might trigger this war, it would not choose to fight alone; it must find a reason for all twenty-eight NATO states to unite in the cause.
It was not long before such an excuse was found. American citizens were killed in the Ukraine, during a riot.
And on the Latvian border, a US fighter patrol, encroaching in Russian air space, was shot down.
The provocation had been continual; some such incident would have occurred eventually.
If not that trigger, then another.
Exactly. The NATO countries were persuaded to mobilise, with a major mustering of land forces at Berlin, and a naval conjunction in the Baltic. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there was a swift mobilisation of national forces, orchestrated, my friends believed, by American ‘advisers’ on the ground.
And it was on the Ukraine border that the real fighting began – at the Crimea, in fact. Russians and Americans fighting at last.
This was in June of 2028.
Then came the invasion of the home country, across the north European plain from Berlin. In the air a wave of F-18 fighters, and fighter-bombers, and helicopters, and tank brigades on the ground. The aim was to cripple; among the first targets were infrastructure elements like airports and power plants. There had also been preliminary cyber-attacks to disable our defences. It was the greatest mustering of anti-Russian forces since Hitler. A thrilling sight, no doubt.
Misha and I were shocked, witnessing this from afar. We knew our history – we knew that even the Cuba missile crisis had not escalated to this point.
Well, our leaders were dealt a weak hand, but they were not fools. And they were united in a way that the NATO commanders could not be; our first government, after the Soviet era, had been a group of ex-KGB officers from St Petersburg.
And they were imaginative. They quickly mounted a daring counter-offensive, into the Baltic States. They hoped to secure a quick victory, acquire some NATO territory, show strength, and establish a bargaining position before the war escalated further. A bold strike.
Did it work?
It was hard for
us to tell. Our troops got bogged down when local resistance groups rose up against the Russian invader.
Communications became difficult.
Evidently there was further escalation. Among the NATO responses that we knew about was a strike with tactical nuclear weapons on Russian space facilities. Which included Star City and the TsUP, our mission control – and even Baikonur, in the sovereign territory of Kazakhstan. Our Capcoms spoke to us as long as they could, described what they saw, until we lost contact and, I suppose, they died.
We were cut off.
So a line had been crossed. The use of nuclear weapons on the space facilities, presumably on other battlefields. Tactical only, but—
Indeed. After that came high-altitude nuclear detonations in the Earth’s ionosphere, intended to disable the electronics across much of Asia, but which served also to obscure further most information-bearing signals we might have received.
Just before I lost Misha, though, we heard fragmentary rumours of a new front, an invasion of Russian territory by China in the Far East.
Finally strategic nuclear weapons were used.
Oh, God.
I am an atheist. But – yes. Oh, God.
From Mars, you know, if you watch through a telescope meant for interplanetary navigation, a nuclear blast looks like a pebble thrown into a pond. You see the ripples in the atmosphere, then the fires, and the smoke smears on the breeze. You can see this from Mars.
I’m so sorry.
This was not your America. Evidently it isn’t your fault.
And – you said – you lost Misha?
We had continued our work. Our scientific exploration of Phobos. Even as war blossomed at home. We discussed this, and decided it was our duty, and besides would be good for our own morale. After all we could do nothing to affect the outcome of the war – we couldn’t even get home until the planets aligned, in October. Conversely the war could not affect us. There were no American saboteurs in Spektr.
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