“Nothing much, last couple of days. You wanna come listen in tonight?”
“I’ll see if I can find space in my social schedule,” the old man said. “May have to cancel a party I’ve been invited to.”
Bobby chuckled. “Yeah, sure. Well, why don’t you have dinner with us before we head to the listening post?”
#
Earl was on time, arriving at the door of their apartment with a smile on his face, a bottle in his hand and wearing a freshly laundered set of coveralls.
“Earl’s here!” Eve said, bringing him inside.
Maria screeched and ran into the old man’s arms. “Tio Earl!”
He straightened up and produced seemingly out of nowhere a toy figure. “Here, kid. Found this today.”
Bobby knew he was lying. Earl likely came across the toy days ago and had been waiting for the opportunity to give it to Maria.
“It’s Jessie!” Maria cried out, holding up the cowgirl doll for everyone to see. “Thank you.”
“You spoil her,” Eve said, taking Earl’s coat and directing him into a chair at the head of the table.
“Yeah, and I like doing it,” he said, with a smile.
Bobby poured him a small glass of bourbon and sat down beside him.
“Bobby’s made us a chili,” Eve said. “It’ll be ready in ten minutes. I get to warm it up.”
Earl watched her head into the kitchen. “You sure lucked out there, Bob. Prettiest girl in Ragtown, I reckon.”
“Yep.” Bobby grinned at her retreating figure.
“Sometimes it takes folk a couple tries before they find the right one. Second time lucky for you. Say, any news from Santa Clarita? Don’t want to put my foot in it.”
Bobby shook his head. “No. Last she heard, Josh was doing fine, and Michael’s got a secure job in admin. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t encouraged her to get in touch with them.”
“Ah, it would’ve come out sooner or later. I guess you’ll have to take her back there sometime. Doesn’t do for a mother to be separated from her child, ’specially at this time.”
Bobby shrugged. “That’s the whole point, Earl. It’s not for me to tell her how she should feel or what she should do. Day to day, she’s happy with us.”
“Her new family?”
“Yeah, I suppose you could call it that. I’m worried that one day it’ll all catch up with her and then…”
“Boom.”
“Yeah.”
They slipped out once Maria was in bed. Eve had extracted a promise from Bobby that he’d be back before midnight, so they hurried back to the base, passing through two checkpoints before finding their way to the garage where Bobby had hidden his equipment.
It was a supplies store used by the engineering department and Bobby waited until the door was sealed and locked before feeling his way around the edge of the room to find the low-wattage desk lamp and flicking it on. The radio was hidden in the bottom of a filing cabinet and beneath a tray of spare parts.
Bobby pulled it out and, with a groan, set it on the desk, pushing aside the junk, then found and connected the cable that led to the antenna.
“When does it come over the horizon?” Earl asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
Bobby checked his watch. “ISS? It’ll be an hour yet. Thought we’d scan the local frequencies first.”
Earl pulled up a chair and slumped down, not bothering to hide his disappointment. “I dunno, Bob. I sure have lost interest in what’s goin’ on down here since we picked up that transmission.”
“I know what you mean. I’d forgotten them completely. It’s just a pity, we must have missed some of the communications and the signal’s patchy.”
“Well, we know they’re up there and we know we don’t have a way of launchin’ a rescue mission. Poor fellas.” He shook his head. “Seems stupid, to be frettin’ about three men—two of ’em Russian—when the world has gone to hell down here. I mean, what sort of a world are they gonna come back to? If they come back at all.”
Bobby fiddled with the dial, trying to find something local to listen to. “Just imagine what they’ve seen from up there. They must have watched the flood happen and…and whatever’s happening now to the weather. They may know more about it than anyone down here.”
“But these folks at Denver. Who are they, d’you think? I never heard of this institute.”
“Me neither. I just wish we could get a clearer signal. I heard something about a president, but I don’t know whether they meant the real president or Governor Schultz.” Bobby kept turning from frequency to frequency, hoping to find something to distract them. Sinclair had been governor of Colorado when the flood had happened. Since then, he’d formed a federation of states running along the spine of the country. Each had its own governor, but they acted together under his overall authority; presumably in the national interest as well as their own. Presumably.
“Switch it back to the ISS frequency, just in case we miss it,” Earl said.
It had been a big surprise when he’d stumbled across a live conversation between the ISS and a ground base on an open channel, but he was convinced it was genuine. He tuned to the right VHF channel and they listened to static while they waited for the station to emerge from the Earth’s shadow.
“D—V-R.—is—ISS. C—mman—r B—”
Bobby turned up the volume as the two men leaned into the set, looking at each other as they tried to make out the message.
“ISS, this is Denver Control. Report.”
All he heard in the response was the words Denver, Chinese and something that sounded like Shenzhou. Then, finally, the static cleared a little. “Denver, they are demanding entry. What are your instructions?”
After a few seconds, the clearer, louder signal returned.
“ISS, you are ordered to deny them access. ISS is international territory and must not be yielded to…”
The line went dead. Then a new voice emerged from the radio.
“ISS, this is President Booker, based out of California. Your station is under our jurisdiction and I order you to cooperate with our Chinese friends. They are there to rescue you. Please admit them to the station and use Soyuz MS-20 to return to Earth. All future communications will be with ground control in Pasadena using secure channel. Confirm your understanding of your orders.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Jeez,” Earl whispered. “Are we really giving in to the Chinese? How in the heck do they even have a space program?”
Bobby shook his head. Something had changed. Against the backdrop of the worst disaster to hit planet Earth since the end of the dinosaurs, the power balance had shifted. Now, it seemed, the Chinese were calling the shots.
Chapter 4
Descent
“This is Wang Haisheng, commanding Shengzhou 15. Please acknowledge and prepare for docking.”
The crew of the ISS floated beside the radio as the message repeated.
“We have no response from Korolyov or any other part of Russia,” Yuri said.
Brady nodded. “Yeah, and I’m not sure the response I got has any authority. I’ve heard of Booker, but he was a senator, not the president. Maybe the executive has moved west. He flat-out contradicted what Denver said. And I didn’t like what he had to say. There’s no way I’d abandon the station without being sure who was giving the order.”
Yuri nodded. They’d talked over and over about that last communication from the ground, and he could see that though Brady was a respecter of the chain of command—they all were—he wasn’t about to hand over the station without definite evidence that the chain still existed. Anyone could call themselves “president” after all.
“So, what do we do?” Mikhail asked, his heavy features set into a frown.
Yuri looked at his two crewmates. “I do not like it. ISS, it is partnership between my country, yours, Europe and Japan. Not China. Never China. I know them. They see the world go”—he made the shape of an explosion wit
h his hands—“and now they think, ‘How can we take what is not ours?’.”
“They made the flood?” Mikhail said, eyes widening. “You think?”
Yuri shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows?”
“It’s beside the point,” Brady said. “What we’ve got to decide is what we do here and now. They can’t force an entry…”
The words “can they?” hung in the microgravity.
“Maybe they are armed? We are not,” Yuri said. “If we shut down power to the docking nodes…”
“Whatever we do, we can’t keep them out indefinitely,” Brady said, before turning to Mikhail. “When is the next launch window?”
The Russian ran a pencil down the front page of his notepad. “In four hours, twenty-two minutes.”
“And that’s for a landing in Nevada?”
Mikhail shrugged. “Nevada, Colorado, I do not know. Dry, hopefully.”
“Dry will do. So, we have two things to decide. How do we keep them out for four and a half hours, and do we let them take control of the station once we’ve left?”
“And what do we take with us?” Yuri added. “Maybe it is a coincidence, but they turned up soon after we told your ground control about base in Antarctica. Perhaps it is big secret.”
“Okay. You copy all the images and data to one of the laptops and we’ll bring it with us.”
Yuri grunted. “Ha! I will download also to SD card. I do not trust your HP laptops and their flimsy disk drives.”
“And what happens once we get away with the evidence?” Brady said, looking at his crewmates one after the other.
The Russians exchanged glances before Yuri said, “Boom?”
Brady nodded, then looked sadly around Tranquility. “Boom.”
Yuri floated into the orbital module, and checked that all three Sokol space suits were stowed in the right place before heading through the open hatch into the crew module below. In normal times, the three of them would train for the return to Earth a week ahead of deorbiting, but today they would have to fly by the seat of their pants, to use that American saying. They’d all spent years learning the systems, but it had been over six months since any of them had had to put it into practice. And everything depended on Mikhail’s calculations. Which would have been problematic enough if they’d been landing in Kazakhstan… No one had ever attempted to touch down in the United States. It might have looked like a big enough target to aim for, but from up here it was like trying to hit a postage stamp with a dart from the back of a motorcycle. A postage stamp stuck to the side of an artillery shell. But if anyone could work out the math, it was Mikhail.
He looked down at the three seats, imagining himself sitting in the commander’s chair—for ascent and descent he took charge, with Mikhail in the co-pilot’s seat and Brady taking position to his right as the turist. Yuri liked the mission commander—you learned to like people when you’re stuck with only their company for months—and he knew the American hated being a passenger, but, though Brady had done the training, he didn’t have Mikhail’s experience. Politics had been put aside for the sake of efficiency, for once.
Yuri wanted to run a systems check, but if he turned on power to the Soyuz, the Chinese in their larger Shenzhou spacecraft would notice and any chance of what passed for surprise at the gentle pace of orbital maneuvers would be lost. So, he contented himself with a visual check—making sure that everything looked as though it was where it should be—before stowing the laptop and SD card in its shielded container in a payload bag strapped to the wall.
When he emerged, he could hear Brady’s voice echoing along from Destiny.
“Shengzhou 15, please hold position until we have received authority from the ground.”
Yuri wondered how long the Chinese would remain patient. They must know that no such authority had survived the flood. His guess was that they wanted the station intact and were willing to wait just a little to achieve a peaceful takeover. Either that, or they thought the crew were stupid enough to believe their nonsense story about being here to relieve them. This was an invasion, plain and simple.
When he reached the commander, Brady had put down the headset. “You should let Mikhail speak to them, John. He is good Chinese speaker.”
“Well, I’m getting nowhere fast. They’re continuing their approach. Looks like they’re heading for Harmony’s PDA.”
“I wondered how they were going to dock. This is what comes of publishing plans for everyone to see. I guess they will use PMA 1.”
Brady nodded. “I agree. So, we know where they’re coming in, but can we stop them?”
“We can refuse to open the hatch. They would have to EVA. Maybe cut through…”
“ISS. This is Shenzhou 15. Be warned that we have been authorized to use force to gain access to the station.”
Yuri cursed. “So, they show their cards at last. But what do they mean? They cut their way inside? Without depressurizing?”
Brady rubbed his chin. “I’m beginning to think they don’t care about depressurizing. We are disposable. They could soon enough repair any breach and take over the station.”
“But why? All our science is published. Well, all your science is.”
“We know what they’re doing in Antarctica, Yuri.”
Yuri whistled. “So, it is what we know that frightens them.”
“It’s us they want to silence.”
Mikhail, who’d appeared from Zvezda, the Russian module and hung there listening open mouthed as his colleagues talked, now gestured toward the airlock hub. “Which means we are sausage. ISS is sizzle.”
“Da. If they think we get away, they destroy station. Boom! With us inside. But how?”
Brady grunted. “Not difficult. A hull breach in one of the main modules would do it if we didn’t have enough notice to seal it off.” Then he slapped his hand to his mouth. “Jeez. Show me the outside.”
Yuri spun around and switched on the external monitor. He swore under his breath in Russian, then gestured at the screen. Two space-suited figures were hanging off the hull working on a small object they’d stuck to the side. He flicked through the views from the various cameras. “There!” he said, pointing at an identical domed object. “This one, they have finished. My friends, we must eva—”
They felt the explosion before they heard it. Like a fist banging on the outside, followed by an explosive hiss and the sudden blaring of alarms. At the same moment, they saw on another monitor, the Shenzhou inching toward the airlock.
“Let’s get out of here,” Brady yelled over the blaring alarms. He pulled himself over to the main radio, put on the headset and flicked several switches. “This is Commander John Brady of the International Space Station broadcasting in the clear. We are being forcibly boarded by Chinese nationals. I repeat, we are being forcibly boarded by Chinese nationals. We have no choice other than to scuttle and abandon the station, taking a trajectory that will result in a landing in the Western United States. God bless America.”
He closed the hatch that led to the Russian section.
Yuri held on to the commander as he turned, shouting over the alarms. “They must know we will do that, John. They will stop us.”
“We’ve got no choice!”
“We’ve got two Soyuz!”
“What are you saying?”
“You go in MS-20, I go in MS-21. I take them out!”
“You want me to fly it?”
Yuri shook his head. “No. Mikhail will command.”
Mikhail punched him on the arm. “Niet! You go with John. I am better pilot.”
“No, we all go together,” Brady said.
“That is foolish, Commander. We go together, we all die and the world does not find out what Chinese do. Goodbye, my friends.”
He thought Mikhail was going to refuse him, but he pulled Yuri into a hug. “Just don’t be idiot. Use solar array to disable them, then follow us down. I programmed nav computer, just in case.”
Another bang on the hul
l, and the wheeze of escaping air resumed. Yuri said, “Come on, John. Let me be hero for once. You Americans cannot have all the glory.”
John Brady took his hand and shook it then, without another word, pushed himself toward the lower airlock.
Yuri watched them for a moment and then headed up the shaft and into the orbital module of MS-21, sealing the airlock behind him and pulling on the first spacesuit he came to.
It seemed to take forever to get the clumsy thing on in the half-light, but finally he settled into the commander’s position and, taking a deep breath, activated the ship’s systems, watching as the instrument panel lit up in green. There was no time for anything more than a cursory check—after all, he only needed to be able to maneuver enough to collide with the much bigger Chinese craft. If he got it right, the explosion would be enough to crippled or destroy the station. He cursed himself for not having seen through the Chinese plans from the beginning. They could have destroyed the station much more simply by activating the engines in Zvezda and sending it out of orbit to burn up in the atmosphere. But no point crying over spilled vodka.
From force of habit, he said, “Open the hooks” to no one, then punched the release button and felt the tiniest jolt as he watched the ship inch backward on the viewscreen. Well, the polecat was out of the woodpile now.
The manual said to wait three minutes before activating the thrusters for a fifteen-second burn to accelerate the Soyuz away from the station, but he figured that any damage they did by being so close would only help hasten its destruction. He leaned forward in his chair, counting down until he knew he was far enough away to be able to turn.
Now he was going entirely against the manual. Instead of heading for orbit, he fired the attitude thrusters and used the yoke between his legs to bring the Soyuz around the ISS until the Shenzhou appeared behind one of the trusses with its long solar panel.
“What?” he yelled, before spitting out a series of Russian curses, each more profane than the last.
Deluge | Book 4 | Ice Page 3