The commander sat back from the dining table and studied his work. He lit a cigarette, oblivious to Moxley's hacking. For weeks after arrival, Moxley had been prone to sneezing fits from the fungi that thrived in every nook and cranny of the old space station. Ilya once told him that the cosmic radiation had warped the stray spores that cosmonauts brought up on their feet and in their hair. Athlete's foot learned to live on nylon and vinyl, and bread molds became free-floating colonies of black nastiness that burst if touched. The cigarette smoke was many, many times worse.
"What do you think is, that does this?" the commander finally asked. He held up a photograph of the light over the Ukraine. Lines around his eyes deepened, and his mouth contorted into a mirthless smile. Moxley had seen this look enough at Star City to know it meant he was being tested.
"May I speak freely?" he asked, looking around for support. Arkady stayed welded to his screens, too keyed-up by what he saw to blink. Ilya, wincing and clutching his stomach like always, nodded at him. The commander's face reddened, released tiny bursts of live steam. Fine, then. "I think it's a manmade object, maybe some kind of directed energy weapon, except I can't see it or ping radar off it, or read heat from its thrusters or its power source, even though it ought to be hotter than Chernobyl for hours after it discharges, if it's a laser. If it's some kind of solar-powered lens, it should be the size of Texas, to register gamma rays like it does, but I can't see it. And I don't have any idea what it's doing. Right now, I couldn't even tell you for sure that it wasn't God, signaling the Second Coming."
"This is all you know?" The commander gestured to the sheaves of non-data on the dining table. It was all stuck to the table with refrigerator magnets, Sherman's many F's in Astrophysics.
"A lot of scientists on earth probably know a lot more about it than me, by now. Working alone like this, with the equipment problems, the comm breakdowns…I do know quite a bit about elementary physics, though, like how incredibly fucking stupid it would be to discharge a firearm in zero-gravity, not to mention inside a pressurized spacecraft. Why the hell do you have a pistol in outer space, anyway, Commander?"
"Dr. Moxley, is enough," Arkady grunted, but Moxley wasn't done.
"Why are you here, Commander? We were expecting a shuttle to come and take us home. Is it coming? What are you doing here?"
The commander vaulted out of his seat and over the command center, heading for Kvant. He turned and smiled at Moxley. "I don't know when you will go home. We are here only to fix broken satellite." He dove into his space-plane and closed the docking port.
A few minutes later, the shuttle disengaged from Mir and pushed itself away. Moxley went to the porthole and watched as it seemed to drop back towards earth for a minute. The dorsal surface of the shuttle was open, just like on an American shuttle. The two suited commandos sat in seats in the open compartment. They'd worked fast. Something that looked like seventy feet of aluminum train track extended out of the open back of the shuttle, and Moxley recognized it for the physicist's dream-toy that it was—a rail gun.
"Who the hell are they, Ilya? Arkady? What the hell is going on, here?"
Arkady watched the monitors. Ilya looked out the porthole at the retreating thrusters of the black shuttle. He looked like he hadn't slept since he got here. "We were not supposed to be here, still."
"What do you mean?" Moxley got chills. He started thinking like a Russian.
"They're going to shoot it down," Ilya said.
"What? Shoot what down?"
Arkady tapped on the monitor in front of him. Moxley climbed over to him, clumsily, because the walls were buried in items Velcro-strapped in place–laptops, CD stacks, clipboards, food pouches… He looked over Arkady's shoulder, puzzled for a moment until he realized he was seeing a camera feed from onboard the black shuttle.
"What was that ship? Were those guys cosmonauts?"
Arkady and Ilya glued to the monitors. Not looking, but looking away.
Finally, Ilya answered him. "In Eighties, brain-dead cowboy President—dyes hair, listens to astrologer—talks big fight. Talks about Star Wars—A-OK fucking movie, but stupid, stupid asshole plan. Russians don't believe empty talk, but prepare. While you talk, we prepare for war in space." He pointed at the monitor. "BOR assault space-plane, shuttle interceptor, satellite-killer. We see now, you were not all talk, either. Stupid, palm-reading cowboy built Star Wars orbital energy weapon, and forgot about it."
Moxley blanched at the steel in Ilya's tone. "But we don't have any orbital weapons," he shot back, but he was less sure of himself with each syllable. Where did all that money go, in the defense spending-mad Eighties? He knew the government was stupid, but he'd never really believed they'd plunked down for six hundred-dollar toilet seats. He'd used those toilets. They invariably clogged.
"He said it's not yours anymore," Arkady said.
"What's that supposed to mean? Anyway, who were those soldiers? Because they sure as hell weren't cosmonauts."
"Spetsialnoje Naznachenie," Arkady spat. "Spetznaz. Like your Green Berets, only tough."
"I want to talk to the ground," Moxley said.
"No. No radio. They listen."
"Well, the hell with them, and both of you, and your whole shitty country. Unless you have a pistol too, Arkady—" He floated over to the ham radio they used to talk with the ground, but Ilya blocked him, hands out, palms open and empty. His droopy face hid no malice or violence, only terror. Sweat pasted his coverall to his shallow, fluttering chest. His hand clutched absently at his stomach. "Please, Sherman. We're over fucking Atlantic Ocean. Nobody would hear you, but them."
"What are they going to do?"
"I don't want to know," Ilya shouted, his voice cracking, "nor do you. In old days, Spetznaz never fix satellite. They kill things—commandos, like your Rambo, yes? Kill foreigners, kill terrorists, kill anyone who sees them. Nobody believe they still exist, you know? Gone to mercenary work in Chechnya and Bosnia, other shithole countries. This is bad, Sherman, very bad. If not for you here, I think we would be in very big fucking trouble."
"What do you mean?"
"This is shit most serious, Sherman! Russian cosmonauts are expendable, even now. But you are American, big TV star astronaut, very, very famous, with you here, we are safe, I think."
"But Ilya—nobody in America knows I'm here."
Ilya's face drained of blood. "Oh shit, then we are fucked the most, I think."
From the beginning, it had all seemed too good to be true. Moxley was not even a front-line astronaut, but a research physicist who had worked extensively with NASA on radiation experiments in space. He'd always dreamed, naturally, of going up himself, but there were hundreds of real astronauts prowling around Johnson Space Center who would never go up, many with better qualifications as scientists, never mind their training. When they asked him in July if he'd like to go to Mir, he looked for the hidden camera, figuring for sure it was a prank, and not even an especially believable one. There was an urgent situation that required in-orbit analysis, and the Russians were putting together a classified mission to go back up to Mir, which would be emptied of its last official crew in August. Could he go to Russia next month?
He was still dubious when they flew him to Russia the following week, still looking for the punch-line as he sweated out three months of marathon cram sessions in Russian language and astronautics training, but the workload was so demanding, he never paused to wonder whether this was or wasn't really happening, let alone ask why they were sending him. It was a dream come true, and he was scared to make a peep of dissent, lest he wake up.
The politics of who got to go up were so legendarily Byzantine that he did not really believe he was anything more than a back-up, a third-or fourth-string understudy. The greased slide he stepped on had to be some sort of test of emergency readiness, because there seemed to be no emergency. It wasn't like those dumb action space movies, with the asteroid or the comet or whatever hurtling towards earth, and hysteria and l
ooting, with the maverick demolitions crew being rushed through training. He was just another greenhorn American to the Russian trainers at Star City, and when his training was up on October 30, and they told him he was going up tomorrow, he thought it was only another joke.
It was neither a joke nor a test, though in the ordeal of launch from Baikonur on Halloween, he asked God repeatedly if it was not both. In the ensuing months aboard Mir, he'd had plenty of time, when he wasn't helping to repair some critically failing system, to wonder what he was doing here. With only Arkady and Ilya for company, with none of the fame and media attention that America lavished on its astronauts, lukewarm though it was in the shuttle era, he'd had only his assignment to keep him focused—observing and recording a phenomenon for which he still had no explanation. When the leaden-voiced taskmasters on the ground received his data, they offered no advice, no reaction. When the day of their scheduled return came and went without any sign of a shuttle, they offered only the location of a secret cache of "psychological support rations"— plastic bags of vodka—in lieu of an explanation. That was a week ago.
It was a joke indeed, on him, on space travel, and on science itself.
An hour later, Arkady called them back to the command center. Moxley watched from the telescope in the Priroda science module, but all he could see was the ass-end of the Russian space-plane, its thrusters blazing full-tilt, then shutting off, attitude jets along the flattened fuselage venting plumes of gas like escaping atmosphere.
The Russians had canned their Buran shuttle program in 1991 after only one test flight, but he once heard that they tested a low orbit space-plane in the early Eighties as an interceptor for the American space shuttle. The program was discontinued after the Challenger disaster caused NASA to abandon Vandenberg, rendering the interceptor unfeasible. Obviously, the paranoid fuckers never stopped testing, because the BOR space-plane he was looking at was far in advance of anything even on the drawing boards at NASA.
And nobody knew it was up here.
The space-planes were delivered into orbit by hypersonic aircraft, not rockets, so its launch probably would have gone unnoticed. He looked down at the darkened earth, a looming wall of azure and moon-chased, lacy rosettes of maritime storm. They were over Africa, bearing northeast in a night-cycle orbit. If memory served, they wouldn't come over a radar station capable of picking them up for another few hours. Were the United States and Russia at war? Did the United States even know, yet? In the last six weeks, he'd gotten to see the cosmonauts at their worst, raging at the ground and at Mir and often at him. But they weren't pissed at him. They were confused and scared. Arkady said it wasn't ours anymore. What the hell did that mean?
The terminator raced across the face of the earth like a cosmic brushfire, an effect that never failed to still Moxley's racing mind and lift him outside himself. Even now, he had only to watch the world light up like the eye of God awakening to their presence, and none of it mattered quite so much.
Moxley was a devout Christian who had yet to find a rigorous enough faith that would accept the wonders science had revealed about the universe—evolution, genetics, quantum theory, the possibility of extraterrestrial life. To take as literal gospel a book that so many cabals of zealots, Papal censors and conniving monarchs had raped and mutilated for their own ends was sheer foolishness. Would it be such a blow to God, to deny that He created the Heavens ten billion years ago, and the Earth and the Sun five billion years later, and then set into motion the self-perpetuating process of life and consciousness? Moxley believed that it was a sinful act to reduce God to the level of a poorly conceived character in a shoddily written book, and deny Him the genius to have set the universe in motion to grow and change and know itself, as it grew to love and understand its Creator. No matter how big, or how old, science made the universe, outside it all, waiting for them, was God.
Up here, he could feel God looking at him, and seeing that what they were doing was good. In this place, in defiance of all the laws of nature, humans reached out to other worlds as their remotest ancestors reached out when they crawled onto land for the first time and breathed with the first lungs. This was evolution he was witnessing, and he knew in his heart at moments like this that it was what God wanted.
When he heard Arkady shouting, he raced back to the command center and watched the grainy feed from the shuttle-cam.
Ilya and the commander sat before the monitors. Neither of them looked up when he swam in, but Ilya waved him over. "Come and see this, Sherman."
He crowded in behind the cosmonauts and stared into the main screen, but he had a difficult time resolving what he saw with what could possibly be out there.
"They found it, I think," Ilya said. Arkady scratched at his face and stared, mute, unblinking.
Devoid of perspective up there in the dark, it looked like a flashlight. It was a tapered black cylinder with a cone-shaped protrusion at one end. Filling the view from the ascending space-plane, the object leapt into stark relief as the terminator splashed across it. The sunlight brought out its texture, which was only half metal.
It had solar collectors like Mir, great, razor-edged sails that radiated out like the petals of a daisy from the blunt end opposite the cone. But they were unmistakably organic, translucent, fleshy constructs that looked like a hybrid of flower petals and bat wings.
The body of the satellite was flat black metal plate which deflected the raw rays of the sun away from itself. But between the plates, like protoplasmic mortar, a web of shifting organic matter—one could be no more specific than that—crawled and seethed, as if the body of the satellite only barely contained something alive.
The picture shuddered and flickered, went to snow for a moment. Arkady snarled and pounded on the monitor, but the picture snapped back on its own. A swiftly shrinking object left the space-plane at such velocity that the camera recorded it only as a trail, and hurtled at the satellite at better than four kilometers per second.
It vanished quite suddenly, but the satellite seemed to have an eternity to move out of its path. A full second. They were still eight miles away from it. Moxley gasped. The resolution on the video had lied to him. It was enormous, at least forty feet in length, not counting the vast organic appendages growing out of it, which grew and splayed themselves out like a net for the oncoming plane.
Attitude jets all down the satellite's sides ejected clouds of cool, inert gas to swing it clear of the projectile. One membranous solar petal ripped away, and the satellite tumbled end over end.
The space-plane banked and soared over the satellite, then dove, rolled and came up under it.
Afforded this uncomfortably close view, Moxley found it harder to deny that it was a coherent animal lifeform, but it was also a working machine whose purpose he could not begin to guess.
The narrow end contained a lens, about five feet across. The remaining solar fans retracted into the body, and more and more tentacles slithered out of the cracks in the metal to flail at the void.
The cone-shaped end was about ten feet in length, and looked like a closed night-blooming flower, with tightly folded petals made of aluminum girders and some kind of glass or crystal. It did something ugly, Moxley thought, something unholy, to the sunlight. A strange, twisted corona played around the cone that utterly baffled the video camera.
The audio feed crackled. "Commander Zamyatin, Dr. Moxley, you have vodka aboard Mir, no? We will be thirsty, this after…"
The rail gun fired.
The satellite opened like a flower. Its collection lens was turned to face the sun.
With another burst of gas, the satellite simply wasn't there when the projectile flashed past it. Its orientation was off, so that when the open flower faced the camera, the effect was dazzling, and not blinding.
The radial symmetry of the flower-lens was hypnotic in its complexity, so much so that Moxley knew it had not been built, so much as grown. It was a weapon, but something happened to it up here. Something had grow
n inside it, and made it its own—not merely as a weapon, but as a body, for its evasion was not the product of programming or a joystick-wielding ops controller on the ground. It was a live thing, as well as a machine, and it was smarter than them.
The lens-petals shed an intensifying glow of hideous force, amplifying the sunlight, but also perverting it. This was what he'd seen all those times, all those baffling astrophysical events that, at the time, he'd thought were merely strange and beautiful.
The satellite rolled again as the glow blanked out most of the screen.
"What's it doing?" Moxley babbled. "It's not going to hit them—"
"Idiot!" Arkady snapped. "It's not aiming at them!"
Moxley had a second to process this when the core module filled with silvery blue light like the other eye of God looking at him, and turning him to salt.
Blue-white light became glittering purple blackness. The only light source was the moonlight peeking in through the windows in the inert core module. The command center was off-line. The oxygen generators were silent. Moxley felt a bulkhead against his back, but none of the subtle, eternal thrumming of the complex of life support and information systems that had become as familiar to him as his own pulse. Mir was dead.
Moxley felt as if he were dying inside, too. His bowels and brains ached as if someone had run them through a taffy puller. His eyes and skin burned, and his muscles were as tender as wet rice paper. His teeth felt like they were going to fall out of his head.
He tried and tried, but he couldn't remember it, the moment that God had touched them. No offense intended, he knew it was, in the end, only some kind of awful machine, but it had the transcendent aura of religious ecstasy. He knew they'd been microwaved by something far more awful in its destructive power than any laser platform the Pentagon ever fantasized about, but he couldn't shake the free-floating mantle of joy that seized him in those odd moments when he forgot to be terrified.
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