But now he could see people, inside the ugly bubble cockpit of the helicopter. The reality of it suddenly shocked him. Was he really about to snuff out human lives, like squashing bugs?
The chopper surged over his position, and its downdraft, a mighty punch of air, scattered his flimsy cover. All choices had vanished, save one; he must not hesitate, lest he be killed before he carried out his duty.
Laughing, he launched the grenade.
***
Abdikadir shouted, “RPG! RPG!” Casey hauled on the stick. Bisesa saw a flash, and a smoke trail stitching through the air toward them.
There was a jolting impact, as if the chopper had run over an invisible speed bump in the sky. Suddenly the cabin noise rose to a roar, and from some split in the hull the wind poured in.
“Shit,” Casey shouted. “That took a piece out of the tail rotor.”
When Bisesa looked back that way she could see a tangle of metal, and a fine mist where oil was being lost through a ruptured pipe. The rotor itself was still working, and the chopper flew on. But everything had changed in that instant; battered by the wind and the noise she felt exposed, horribly vulnerable.
Casey said, “Everything nominal, except oil pressure. And we lost part of our gearbox back there.”
“We can run without oil for a while,” Abdikadir said.
“That’s what the manual says. But we’re going to have to turn this bird if we want to get home again.” Casey worked his stick experimentally, as if testing the tolerance of the wounded aircraft; the Bird shuddered and bucked.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Bisesa muttered.
“It was an RPG,” Abdikadir said. “Come on, Bisesa, you’ve attended the briefings. Every day is kill-the-Americans day here.”
“I don’t mean the RPG. I mean that .” She pointed out of the window, west the way they were headed, at a reddening, setting sun.
“It’s just the sun,” Casey said, evidently finding it hard to focus on something outside the cockpit. Then: “Oh.”
When they had taken off, surely no more than thirty minutes ago, the sun was high. And now—
“Tell me I’ve been asleep for six hours,” Casey said. “Tell me I’m dreaming.”
Bisesa’s phone said, “I’m still out of touch. And I’m scared.”
Bisesa laughed humorlessly. “You’re tougher than I am, you little bastard.” She pulled down the zipper on the front of her flight suit and tucked the phone into a deep pocket.
“Here goes nothing,” Casey said. He started the turn.
The engine screamed.
***
The tube’s sudden heat burned his flesh, and hot smoke billowed around his head, making him choke. But he heard the fizz of the grenade as it looped away through the air. When the grenade exploded, shrapnel and bits of metal sang through the air, and he cowered, hiding his face.
When he looked up he saw that the chopper flew on away from the village, but it was trailing thick black smoke from its tail section.
Moallim stood up and roared, wiping dirt from his face, punching the air with his fist. He turned and looked back toward the east, to the village, for surely the people would have seen his grenade launch, seen the damage to the chopper. Surely they would be running to greet him.
But nobody was coming, not even his mother. He couldn’t even see the village, though he had been not a hundred meters from its western boundary, and he had clearly been able to see its crude rooftops and slanting walls, the children and goats wandering among the houses. Now it was gone, and the rocky plain ran to the horizon, as if the village had been scraped clean off the earth. Moallim was alone, alone with his scratched foxhole, his smoking RPG, and the great smoke column slowly dispersing above his head.
Alone on this huge plain.
Somewhere an animal roared. It was a low growl, like some immense piece of machinery. Whimpering, shocked, Moallim clambered back into his hole in the ground.
***
The turn was too much for the damaged rotor. The airframe vibrated around Bisesa, and there was a high-pitched whine as the dry gear shafts started to seize up.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute since the RPG had hit, she thought.
“You’ll have to put her down,” Abdikadir said urgently.
“Sure,” said Casey. “Like where? Abdi, out here even the sweet little old ladies carry big knives to cut off your balls.”
Bisesa pointed over their shoulders. “What’s that?” There was a structure of stone and beaten earth, no more than a couple of kilometers ahead. It was hard to make out in the glare of that anomalous sun. “It looks like a fortress.”
“Not one of ours,” Abdikadir said.
Now the chopper was passing over people—scattered, running people, some in bright red coats. Bisesa was close enough to see their mouths were round with shock.
“You’re the intel expert,” Casey snapped at Bisesa. “Who the hell?”
“I truly have no idea,” Bisesa murmured.
There was a stunningly loud bang. The Bird pitched forward and began to spin. The tail rotor assembly had disintegrated. With the rotor’s weight vanished from its rear, the airframe tipped forward, and with the tail rotor gone there was nothing to stop the aircraft spinning around its main rotor spindle. Though Casey jammed his pedals to the floor, the spinning continued—and accelerated—and kept on, until Bisesa was braced against the wall of the cockpit, and yellow earth and blue-white sky whirled past the bubble windows, blurring.
***
Something came rising up over a low hillock. Josh saw whirling metal, blades like swords wielded by an invisible dervish. Beneath it was a bubble of glass, and rails of some kind below that. It was a machine, a whirling, clattering, dust-raising machine, of a kind he had never seen before. And it continued to rise, lifting into the air until its lower rails were far above the ground, ten or twenty feet. Its tail trailed black smoke .
“My giddy aunt,” breathed Ruddy. “I was right—the Russians—the blessed Russians! …”
The flying machine suddenly plummeted toward the ground.
“Let’s go,” called Josh, already running.
***
Casey and Abdikadir worked the main engine’s power levers, struggling to raise their arms against the spin’s centrifugal force. They got the engine shut down and the chopper’s spin abruptly slowed. But without power the chopper fell freely.
The ground exploded at Bisesa, bits of rock and scrubby vegetation expanding in unwelcome detail, casting long shadows in the light of that too-low sun. She wondered which bit of unprepossessing dirt was to be her grave. But the pilots did something right. In the last instant the bubble tipped up, and came almost level. Bisesa knew how important that was; it meant they might walk away from this.
The last thing she saw was a man running toward the stricken Bird, aiming some kind of rifle.
The chopper slammed into the ground.
5. Soyuz
For Kolya the Discontinuity was subtle. It began with a lost signal, uncertain sightings, a silent stranding.
The time for the Soyuz ferry ship to detach from the Space Station had arrived. The last handshakes were exchanged, the heavy double hatches were closed, and though Soyuz remained physically attached to the Station, Kolya had already left the orbiting shack where he had spent another three months of his life. Now there was only the short journey home, a mere four hundred kilometers down through the air to the surface of the Earth, where he would be reunited with his young family.
Kolya’s full name was Anatole Konstantinovich Krivalapov. He was forty-one years old, and this tour of duty on the International Space Station had been his fourth.
Kolya, Musa and Sable, the crew of the ferry, clambered down through the living compartment of the Soyuz, making for the descent module. They were clumsy in their thick orange spacesuits, their pockets crammed with the souvenirs they intended to keep from the ground crews. The living compartment was to be jettisoned
during reentry and would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and so was full of junk to be removed from the ISS. This included such items as medical waste and worn-out underwear. Sable Jones, the one American in the crew of three, led the way, and complained loudly in her coarse southern-USA English. “Jeez, what’s in here, Cossack jockstraps?”
Musa, the Soyuz commander, gave Kolya a silent look.
The descent compartment was a cramped little hut, filled by their three couches. Sable had been trained up on the ship’s systems, but she was the nearest thing to a passenger on this hop back to Earth. So she was first into the cabin, where she scrambled into the right-hand couch. Kolya followed, clambering down into the left-hand couch. During this descent he would serve as the spacecraft’s engineer, hence his allocation of seat. The compartment was so small that even as he headed for the furthest point of the cabin he brushed past Sable’s legs, and she glared at him.
And now Musa came plummeting down, a bright orange missile, helmet in hand. He was a bulky man anyhow, made more so by the layers of his suit. The couches were so crammed together that when the three of them were at rest their lower legs would be pressed against one another’s, and as Musa awkwardly tried to strap himself in, he shoved Kolya and Sable this way and that.
Sable’s reactions were predictable. “Where did they make this thing, a tractor factory? …”
It was a moment Musa had been waiting for. “Sable, I have listened to your mouth flapping for the last three months, and as you were commander there I could do nothing about it. But on this Soyuz ,I, Musa Khiromanovich Ivanov, am commander. And until the hatch breaks open and we are hauled out by the ground crew, you, madam, will—what is the English phrase? Shut the fuck up. ”
Sable’s face was like stone. Musa was a tough veteran of fifty who had served as Station commander himself, and had even been to the Moon, though not to command the multinational base there. They all knew that his admonishment of Sable would have been listened to by their comrades on the Station and, crucially, by the ground controllers.
Sable said through gritted teeth, “You’ll pay for that, Musa.”
Musa just grinned and turned away.
The descent compartment was cluttered. It contained the spacecraft’s main controls, as well as all the equipment that would be needed during the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation bags, survival gear, emergency rations. Its walls were lined with elasticized tags and Velcro patches, and were covered by material to be returned from the Station, including blood and stool samples from the biomed program, and cuttings Kolya himself had made from the pea plants and fruit trees he had been attempting to grow. All this stuff crowded in from the hull, reducing the space available for human beings even further.
But amid the clutter there was a window, to Kolya’s left-hand side. Through it he glimpsed the blackness of space, a slice of sky-bright Earth, and the struts and micrometeorite-dinged walls of the Station itself, shining brightly in the raw sunlight. The Soyuz, still docked to the Station, was carried by the bigger craft’s ponderous rotation, and shadows slid across Kolya’s view.
Musa worked them through the preseparation checklist, talking to the ground and to the crew in the Station. Kolya had little to do: his most important item was a pressure test of his spacesuit. This was a Russian ship, and unlike the pilot-oriented American engineering tradition, most of the systems were automated. Sable continued to grumble as she reached for various controls, which were situated around the capsule at all positions and angles. Some of them were so awkward to reach, veteran cosmonauts learned, it was better to poke at them with a wooden stick. But Kolya took a perverse pride in the ship’s low-tech, utilitarian design.
The Soyuz was like a green pepperpot, with lacy solar-cell wings stuck on the side of its cylindrical body. Seen from the windows of the Space Station the Soyuz, bathed in the brilliant sunlight of space, had looked like an ungainly insect: compared to the new American spaceplanes it was a clumsy old bird indeed. But the Soyuz was a venerable craft. It had been born in the Cold War age of Apollo, and had actually been intended to make journeys to the Moon. Remarkably, Soyuz craft had been flying twice as long as Kolya himself had been alive. Now, of course, in 2037, people had returned to the Moon—Russians among them this time! But there was no room on such exotic journeys for the Soyuz; for these faithful workhorses there was only the plod to and from the battered ISS, whose few scientific purposes had long been superseded by the lunar projects, and whose glamor had been stolen by the Mars missions—and yet which remained in orbit, kept aloft by political inertia and pride.
The moment came for the Soyuz at last to undock from the Station. Kolya heard a few subtle bumps and bangs, and the faintest of nudges, and a small sadness burst in his heart. But as an independent spacecraft the Soyuz ’s call sign that day was Stereo, and Kolya was comforted by Musa’s patient calls to the ground: “Stereo One, this is Stereo One …”
There were still three hours to go before the descent was scheduled to begin, and the crew were now set to inspect the exterior of the Station. Musa activated a program in the ship’s computer, and the Soyuz, firing its thrusters, began a series of straight-line jaunts around the Station. Each thruster burst sounded as if somebody had slammed a sledgehammer against the hull, and Kolya could see exhaust products jetting away from the little nozzles, fountains of crystals flying off in geometrically perfect straight lines. Earth and Station wheeled around him in a slow ballet. But Kolya had little time to admire the view; he and Sable, sitting by the windows, photographed the station manually, as a backup to the automated pods mounted on the Soyuz ’s exterior. It was an awkward job as each of them wore heavy spacesuit gloves.
Each thruster maneuver took the Soyuz a little further from the Station. At last the line-of-sight radio contact began to break down, and as a farewell the Station crew played them some music. As the Strauss waltz swirled tinnily under the hiss and pop of static, Kolya indulged in a little more nostalgic sadness. Kolya had grown to love the Station. He had learned to sense the great ark’s subtle rotations, and the vibrations when its big solar arrays realigned, and the rattles and bangs of the complicated ventilation system. After so long aboard, he had more deeply embedded feelings about the Station than any home he’d lived in. After all, what other home actually keeps you alive, minute by minute?
The music cut off.
Musa was frowning. “Stereo one, I am Stereo one. Ground, I am Stereo one. Come in, I am Stereo one …”
Sable said, “Hey, Kol. Can you see Station? It should have come back into view on my side by now.”
“No,” said Kolya, looking through his window. There was no sign of the Station.
“Maybe it went into shadow,” Sable said.
“I don’t think so.” The Soyuz had actually been leading the Station into Earth’s shadow. “And anyhow, we would see its lights.” He felt oddly uneasy.
Musa snapped, “Will you two be quiet? We lost the uplink from the ground.” He pressed the control pads before him. “I’ve run diagnostic checks, and have tried the backups. Stereo One, Stereo One …”
Sable closed her eyes. “Tell me you potato farmers haven’t fouled up again.”
“Shut up,” Musa said menacingly. And he continued to call, over and over, while Sable and Kolya listened in silence.
The ship’s slow rotation was now giving Kolya a direct view of Earth’s immense face. They were flying over India, he saw, and toward a sunset; the shadows from the creases of mountain ranges to the north of the subcontinent were long. But there seemed to be changes on the surface of Earth, dapples, like the play of sunlight on the floor of a turbulent lake.
6. Encounter
Josh and Ruddy reached the downed machine with the first group of soldiers. The privates had rifles, and they warily circled the machine, mouths open, eyes wide. None of the party had seen anything like it before.
Inside a big blown-glass cabin there were three people: two men in seats in the front, and a woman
in the back. They watched, hands held high, as the armed soldiers circled them. They cautiously removed their bright blue helmets. The woman and one of the men appeared to be Indian, and the other man was white. Josh could see how the latter grimaced in pain.
Considering how hard it had landed—and that it was light enough to have flown in the air in the first place—the machine seemed remarkably intact. The big glass shell that dominated the front end was pocked here and there but was unbroken, and the blades were still attached to a rotary hub, not folded or snapped off. But the tail section, an affair of open pipe work and tubing, had been reduced to a stump. There was a hissing noise, as if some gasket had broken, and a pungent oil leaked onto the stony ground. It was evident that this mechanical bird would fly no more.
Josh hissed to Ruddy, “I don’t recognize those blue helmets. What army is this? Russian?”
“Perhaps. But see that the injured one has a Stars and Stripes stenciled on his helmet!”
Suddenly a trigger was cocked.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot …” It was the woman. She leaned forward from her perch in the back of the sphere to try to shield the wounded pilot.
A soldier—Josh recognized him as Batson, a Newcastle lad, one of the more levelheaded of the privates—was pointing his rifle at the woman’s head. He called, “You speak English?”
“I am English.”
Batson’s eyebrows raised. But he said carefully, “Then tell your chum to put his hands where I can see them. Jildi! ”
The woman urged, “Do it, Casey. That gun might be an antique, but it’s a loaded antique.”
The pilot, “Casey,” reluctantly complied. His left hand came up from under a panel of instruments holding some sort of gadget.
Batson advanced. “Is that a weapon? Give it to me now.”
Casey shifted in his seat, winced, and evidently decided he wasn’t going anywhere. He held out his weapon to Batson, butt first. “Have you rubes ever seen one of these? It’s what we call a skinny-popper. An MP-93, a nine-millimeter submachine gun. German make …”
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