Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “Ninety seconds,” Lebedev said.

  “Walli, more!” Zhirov called.

  Beckwith jerked the thruster handle again; the little jets outside whooshed in a higher, more urgent register. The station struggled up and away.

  “Thrusting,” Beckwith said.

  “Copy,” Zhirov acknowledged.

  “Seventy-five seconds,” Lebedev announced.

  Moscow, helpless to do anything at all, remained silent.

  For the next thirty seconds, the crew worked wordlessly, Beckwith driving the station, needing no more instruction from Zhirov to know that every degree she moved the huge vessel was a degree less damage the onrushing Progress might do. Suddenly, however, she felt a hand on her shoulder and she looked around. It was Zhirov.

  “I will do this,” he said. “You get in the spacecraft.”

  Before Beckwith could respond, Lebedev called out, “Forty-five seconds.”

  Beckwith fired herself toward the module exit. “Get in the spacecraft” was the station’s agreed-upon command for “Abandon ship.” It was the last command, the all-is-lost command, the command Beckwith had trained to respond to but had never really thought she would hear—least of all on a flight commanded by Zhirov.

  She shot from the Zvezda module and into an upward-facing module known as the Poisk, or Explore, where the Soyuz spacecraft in which the three of them had arrived seven weeks earlier was docked. She yanked open the Soyuz hatch, then dove inside the spacecraft toward the center seat, Zhirov’s seat, pushing aside the heavy pressure suits that had been left in place like empty effigies.

  Beckwith quick-flipped a long row of breakers on the instrument panel and felt a flicker of relief for the first time since the emergency had started as the panel lights blinked on and the interior fans whirred into motion. The Soyuz lifeboat seemed fit. She reached for the switches to engage the life-support systems and the engines, when all at once the thrusters outside screamed rather than whooshed, as Zhirov’s violent maneuvering caused the station to lurch again. Beckwith’s head snapped backwards, cracking against the hard ridge of the spacecraft seat. Her hand went instinctively to the site of the pain, and she felt a slick of blood.

  “Twenty seconds!” she heard Lebedev call through the rising sound of the thrusters outside.

  That was followed by “Fifteen seconds.” Then, “Nine seconds.” And then, as the station bucked upward one more time, a final “Four seconds!”

  A moment later, Beckwith was aware of only three things: a bang first; a hard, violent lurch to starboard next; and a sudden, knifing pain in her ears. She clapped her hands over both sides of her head and doubled forward, rocking in pain. She stayed like that for what was surely just seconds but felt like much more. Then she held still, steadied her breathing, and through her hands covering her ears could faintly hear the station’s emergency Klaxon sounding everywhere. That cleared her mind and steadied her thinking—and the circumstances fell into place.

  The Klaxon sound was the collision alert. The starboard swerve meant a portside hit. And the lightning bolt of pain meant the hull of one of the modules had been breached and the station was depressurizing. Still, while the circumstances were worse than they ought to be, they were better than they might have been.

  If the breach had been a fatal one, Beckwith would have been deafened first as her eardrums ruptured and dead directly after as the station’s atmosphere exploded completely away. As she was neither—yet—she knew she had things to do. She crawled out of the Soyuz, batting aside storage bags, flight plans, and other drifting items that had been knocked loose by the collision, and exited the upward-facing Poisk module—closing the hatch behind her to prevent any further depressurization. She pushed off quickly to the downward-facing Pirs module, where Lebedev was and the impact had likely been. She immediately collided with Zhirov, emerging from the Zvezda module.

  “Walli!” Zhirov exclaimed. He took Beckwith by the shoulders and then by her head, turning it this way and that. He came away with blood on his hands from her slowly leaking wound. He wiped it on the leg of his pants.

  “Your ears,” Zhirov said, his voice sounding muffled. “You can hear?”

  “Some,” Beckwith answered.

  “The same,” Zhirov said. The depressurization had caused the air in their inner ears to expand painfully and grow trapped there, stopping just short of causing them deafness—for now. Zhirov looked toward the Pirs module, where Lebedev was. Both of them dove for the open hatch and stopped cold at what they saw: Lebedev was floating in mid-module, unconscious, blood running from his right ear. They lunged toward him and grabbed him, and Zhirov began shaking him and slapping his face.

  “Yulian!” he shouted. “Yulian!”

  Lebedev’s face was pale and his lips were blue. Beckwith lifted one of his eyelids with her thumb. The white of the eye was shot through with the deep red of burst blood vessels. This was how a man who was dead of vacuum asphyxiation looked. Beckwith turned to Zhirov and then quickly turned back as Lebedev stirred.

  “Yulian, Yulian!” Zhirov shouted, louder this time. It was his implacable calm in moments of crisis that had set him on his path to his Golden Thousand, but at the moment, there was little of it in evidence. Lebedev muttered something and his eyelids fluttered open; he turned away from the fluorescent lights directly in front of him. He could see, and, from one ear at least, he apparently could hear.

  “Yulian!” Zhirov shouted again, this time in joy, and grabbed Lebedev in a clumsy hug.

  Through Beckwith’s own clogged ears, she heard both the ongoing sound of the Klaxon and a high whistle along with it. She turned in the direction of the whistle and saw a small mound of debris—papers, packing material, a pair of jumpsuits, and more—wadded up against a misshapen portion of the bulkhead. This, she knew, was where the Progress had hit. The hull had ruptured, the air had begun to rush out, and any loose detritus in the module had then streamed toward the hole and, in effect, stopped it up. Their lives had been saved by junk. But the whistling was the sound of air still slowly escaping. Beckwith grabbed Zhirov by the shoulder, then pointed to what she’d seen.

  “Out,” she said. “Let’s go. Now.”

  The lucky patch would hold only so long. When it worked loose, the catastrophic depressurization would resume. Zhirov nodded his understanding and, in an unaccustomed moment of obedience to a subordinate, swam toward the module hatch, pushing Lebedev ahead of him. Beckwith followed, and when all three of them were out, she slammed the hatch and sealed it. The module was wrecked, but the wound in the station had been cauterized and the interior atmosphere elsewhere was secure. The Klaxon sounded heedlessly on.

  Zhirov led the way to the larger Zvezda module and threw a switch on the instrument panel, shutting off the alarm. In the silence, a low, steady roar continued inside Beckwith’s head, the result of her damaged ears.

  Lebedev opened his eyes, saw Zhirov, and muttered simply, “Vasily.” Zhirov smiled and Lebedev smiled back. The commander then passed Lebedev on to Beckwith and keyed open his air-to-ground channel.

  “Moscow, station,” he said.

  There was no response.

  “Moscow, station,” he repeated. The air-to-ground loop emitted a loud crackle.

  Zhirov frowned and looked out the window. The collision had left the station in a slow, wobbling spin, and the Earth was passing by outside at a sickening angle. If reliable radio contact was going to be reestablished, he would have to bring the motion to heel and allow the antennas to establish a lock with the ground. He grabbed the thruster controls and carefully began to work them, slowly nulling out the rate of spin. Eventually, the communications link crackled to life.

  “Station, Moscow,” came the call. “Station, Moscow. Confirm your status please.”

  “Moscow, station,” Zhirov answered. “Impact with vessel. Pirs hull is breached, station is stable
. Crew is four-two-four.”

  Beckwith looked at him, struck by the phrasing. Zhirov was an old-school cosmonaut—deeply mindful of the Soviet traditions—and he was speaking old-school code. Ever since the earliest Soyuz landings, recovery crews would open the hatch and call out the status of the crew members on a one-to-five rating. Five meant healthy and well. Four meant some injuries. Three and two meant serious injuries. One was the code that a crew member had died. Only once in history had a one been heard—in 1971, when Soyuz 11 depressurized during reentry and a grim recovery officer had opened the hatch after the spacecraft made an otherwise perfect landing, then turned and reported hoarsely: “One-one-one.”

  Today’s “four-two-four” was vastly better but not remotely good. Moscow and Houston would call an end to any mission with so battered a crew. No NASA voices were on the line, but they were surely patched into all of the air-to-ground chatter, and a small delegation of five NASA representatives was always on hand in Moscow Mission Control, just as a similar delegation from Roscosmos—Russia’s NASA—was always stationed in Houston. Any order that came up from the ground would come by agreement from both sides, and there was no doubt what that order would be.

  “Station, prepare spacecraft for return,” came the command from Moscow. “Stand by for entry time and coordinates.”

  “Understood, Moscow,” Zhirov said. Lebedev closed his eyes, and Beckwith slumped. Her ears would recover within a couple of days—she was certain of it. So would Zhirov’s. But the ground could not be as certain, and in any event, Lebedev was fit only for a hospital—as quickly as possible. Zhirov ticked his head in the direction of the Poisk, where the Soyuz lifeboat was docked. Beckwith swam toward the module hatch and opened it up, and then Zhirov and Lebedev followed.

  When they were inside, she floated back into the attached Soyuz and wrestled out the crew’s three pressure suits. Zhirov turned and shook his head.

  “No suits. If Yuli has lost an ear, the helmet pressure could take the other,” he said. “And if he flies without a suit, so do I.”

  Beckwith smiled. “And so do I,” she said. It was a risk. If a spacecraft depressurized on reentry, a suitless astronaut would die. Zhirov rarely broke a rule or cut a corner, and when he did, it was always the right call, the honorable call. Today it was a call that respected the oneness of the crew.

  She pushed the suits out of the way, collected Lebedev, who was slumped against a bulkhead, dried blood streaking his face, maneuvered him into the Soyuz, and began buckling him into his left-hand seat.

  “Thank you very much,” he said with a weak smile. Lebedev was a man to whom courtesies mattered, and old-school or not, he showed particular politeness to women.

  “Quiet, Yulian,” she said. “No boltovnyá from you.”

  Lebedev smiled at both Beckwith’s use of the approximate Russian word for “babbling” and her perfectly miserable pronunciation. Beckwith then emerged from the Soyuz.

  “Shut it down, Vasily?” she asked.

  “Shut it down, Walli,” he responded, then hailed the ground. “Moscow, station,” he said. “Proceeding with evac power-down.”

  “Copy, station,” Moscow responded.

  Beckwith kicked off for the station’s American segment. The evacuation power-down was the final step before a crew abandoned ship. It required that the lights, air scrubbers, water recyclers, and other life-support equipment be shut off in order to save power. It also called for every hatch on every module to be closed and sealed, preventing a stationwide depressurization in the event of a collision with a meteor or another piece of flying ordnance. The station had already been clobbered once today. Another hit could be the end of it.

  She followed the drill—throwing switches, slamming hatches, locking down a station she realized she might never see again. She worked hurriedly but sorrowfully—an astronaut bringing a failed mission to a sudden close—then shook off the gloom and refocused her mind. She had to power down not just the eight modules built by the Americans but also the two that had been provided by the Japanese and European space agencies, the Kibo and the Columbus laboratories. That part took all of her concentration because, despite her training, she was simply less familiar with them than she was with the American machinery.

  “Walli!” Zhirov called. “Time is short.”

  “Copy!” she answered.

  She focused her thinking, powered down the Kibo and Columbus as best she could, and slammed their hatches as she had on the American modules. The station was secure, and less than ten minutes after she’d left the docking module, she returned. Zhirov had by now powered down the Russian end of the station and was waiting for her. He and Beckwith both moved toward the open hatch of the Soyuz, and Beckwith stopped, offering a nod to the commander and gesturing for him to enter first. Zhirov floated inside and buckled into the center seat.

  At that moment, Lebedev caught his breath and grabbed his injured ear. A fresh trickle of blood ran down his face. Zhirov turned Lebedev’s head, examined his ear, and gave his crewmate a reassuring pat on the knee.

  “Soon, Yulian,” he said. “We will have you in a hospital soon.”

  He turned to Beckwith and gestured at her to hurry. Beckwith complied and dove in. She sealed the station’s hatch so that it wouldn’t depressurize when the spacecraft undocked, then sealed the Soyuz’s own hatch. She settled into her seat and buckled her restraint harnesses. The Soyuz felt comparatively roomy without the crew’s bulky suits, reminding Beckwith of the hours she’d spent in the simulator on the ground.

  She sat for a moment with the thought of the ground—the feel of soil, the smell of the air, the return to gravity, all so much earlier than she had planned. Then, despite herself, she thought of other things that the ground held—the things at a particular spot that could easily be seen when the station flew by at a particular point in its orbits. She dismissed that image, but it swam right back. She tried again, but it returned again, so she decided to let it stay where it was, turning it this way and that, considering its various angles and implications. The sorrow she had felt just moments ago at the idea of having to bid farewell to the station had been misplaced—a little trick her mind had played to keep her from embracing what she knew she had to do. She had already contemplated it well; she just wished she didn’t have to do it so soon. But she couldn’t control the timing; she could control only the doing, and she knew what that doing called for.

  Wordlessly, then, she punched open her seat restraints, floated back up, opened the Soyuz hatch and then the module hatch, and drifted back into the station. Zhirov, who had been trading coordinates and entry angles with the ground, looked up with a start.

  “Walli!” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I have something to tend to, Vasily.”

  “It can keep.”

  “It can’t keep.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I left the bathtub running.”

  “Ne shutítye!” Zhirov snapped. No jokes.

  “Ne shutítye, Vasily,” Beckwith responded seriously. “Ne shutítye, but I am not leaving.”

  “What do you mean, you’re ‘not leaving’?”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You cannot stay.”

  “I can.”

  “You must come home.”

  Beckwith shook her head no. “I won’t come home.”

  “Walli . . .”

  “No.” She stopped and chose her words. “I would prefer not to,” she said.

  It was an expression that had settled into her brain years ago—a turn of phrase used by a bookworm friend in high school who’d picked up so much of her language from literature. The friendship had long ago ended, but the phrase was something of a parting gift that Beckwith would employ herself when the situation seemed to call for it. She always thought it had a gracious quality to it—and a cunning one t
oo. The conditional tense—that deferential “would”—suggested that she might be willing to change her mind if this or that circumstance were different or this or that condition were met. But the circumstances were unlikely to change, and while she certainly had her conditions, no one was likely to meet them. So her return to Earth was really out of the question.

  Zhirov looked at her wonderingly and changed his tone. “Walli,” he said, patting Beckwith’s empty seat. “Be a good cabbage and come inside.”

  Beckwith laughed, despite the circumstances. “I can’t, Vasily. I know I must come with you, but I won’t.” She shifted her glance to Lebedev. “And you can’t wait for me to change my mind.”

  “This is not something you can do, Walli,” Vasily said.

  “It’s not something I can’t do, Vasily. I’m Navy. You’re Navy. It’s honor; there’s no decision to be made in that.”

  A silence followed. Zhirov held Beckwith’s eyes fast and read something in them—sorrow and anger and implacable resolve. And then he understood. Three nights earlier, he’d sensed something amiss in his station hours before the crew’s usual wake-up time and drifted from his sleep pod to find Beckwith staring out a window when the station was over that same Earthly spot that was on her mind this morning.

  “It’s a bad business, Walli,” Zhirov had said quietly, startling Beckwith as he floated up behind her. “But it’s their business, not yours.” He’d peered outside and down toward the ground, following Beckwith’s gaze. “Their business,” he’d repeated, looking back at her.

  Beckwith had nodded. “All right, Vasily,” she’d said. But she had not meant it, and he had known she’d not meant it. What Beckwith was doing now, he realized, should have come as no surprise to him at all. At that moment, they both jumped as Moscow hailed the ship.