Deluge | Book 4 | Ice
Page 1
ICE
Deluge Series
Book 4
By
Kevin Partner
Mike Kraus
© 2020 Muonic Press Inc
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.
Thank you!
DELUGE Book 5
Available Here
Chapter 1
ISS
Five months after the deluge
Yuri Sharipov floated in the Cupola and gestured at the northwestern United States. “It looks like Siberia.”
Commander John Brady grunted. “Yeah. I didn’t imagine things could get any worse after the flood, but…” He gestured impotently at the view through the seven windows of the ISS’s observatory module.
“You were born in Kentucky, no?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen it turn from green to blue, and now it’s going pale.”
They floated in silence for a few seconds, each gazing at the slowly revolving spectacle below them.
“Anything from your people?”
“Niet. Yours?”
“No.”
It was a pointless conversation, since if either had heard from their respective mission controls, they’d have told the other. But Korolyov was under three hundred feet of water and Houston was even farther down. Pasadena, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and every mission control in Europe was silent.
Sharipov watched as the mission commander floated away. He’d be making his way to the Columbus module to examine the data again. He was a talented man and a good commander, so he must know that the bear doesn’t change into a goat just because you stare at it for a long time, but there was little enough to do here and looking at columns of temperature and depth readings gave his mind something to do, it seemed.
As for himself, Yuri would comfort himself with a shot of whiskey. He’d gotten into the habit years ago when he was training for his first mission. There had been an Englishman there, and he’d challenged Yuri to try a tot of single malt. Since then, Sharipov had enjoyed a very un-Russian taste in liquor.
His mouth watering at the prospect, he swung himself around and reversed back into Tranquility. Over the general hum of the station and the occasional clinking sound as different components emerged from the planet’s shadow, he could hear the whine of a treadmill. He turned to see Mikhail climbing Everest again from the ceiling of the module. Ever since the flood, the third crew member had been preparing for an emergency evacuation, and the more he exercised, the fitter he’d be to cope with Earth gravity when they landed. That was his excuse, anyway. Yuri suspected that exercise was Mikhail’s drug of choice just as the commander’s was data and his was single malt. He should have felt guilty, but being stuck in a tin can with only sporadic contact with the ground strained even the most stable of minds. If a mouthful of whiskey once or twice a day helped him keep despair at bay, then it was a good thing in his mind.
Expedition 67 had been going according to plan, and they’d been awaiting a Dragon resupply mission that would add three crew members to bring the complement back to its usual level. But then they’d watched as the world turned blue. He’d seen it from the circular windows of the Zvezda module as he’d just gotten out of his sleeping bag, woken by the commander’s call. He would never forget the sight. The orbit of the ISS only permitted views of the south of Russia, but it had been enough to assure them that this was a global disaster greater than anything that had gone before. Yuri had wondered, when they’d passed over the Yucatan Peninsula a few weeks earlier, what the asteroid impact that had wiped out the dinosaurs would have looked like from up here. What he’d actually seen was probably even more cataclysmic. Billions of people dead and the planet’s ecology destroyed.
They’d heard nothing for weeks, and only sporadic communications since then—some of those from the Chinese National Space Administration. And then, as if to prove the old Russian proverb that things can always get worse, they’d seen the American continent begin to whiten, spreading from a focal point over what had been Florida and now covering much of the continent.
So, here he was, back in Zvezda, listening to the familiar whine of the air circulation system and looking out of the ports as the landscape moved below the station. They were close to the southernmost point of their orbit, allowing them to skim the Antarctic. Yuri pulled a bottle of Wolfburn Single Malt from its wall pouch. He’d had to cash in every favor he could to get clearance to have it in his personal baggage for the trip up, but it had been worth it. He poured exactly 50 milliliters into the plastic measure and then raised it to the portraits of Yuri Gagarin and Sergei Korolev—first man in space and father of the Soviet space program, respectively.
“Za vas,” he said, before downing it in one, enjoying the burning sensation that was almost immediately tempered by a gentle warmth.
He put the bottle and measure back in its place, then glanced back at the view. “What’s that?” He screwed up his eyes and floated as close to the largest porthole as he could. Was it the damn floaters again? No, there was something unusual on the planet’s surface. He reached to one side of the window and pulled out the telescope. No precision instrument—it had belonged to the captain of the steamship Izhora so its lenses were a hundred and fifty years old—but Yuri preferred its soft optics to the precision of the Celestron that Hadfield installed. But then, like most Russians, he was proud of his country to the point of obstinacy.
“What is that?” he muttered. After a few moments, he rotated and pulled himself out of the Russian module, propelling himself toward Harmony. He needed Mikhail to see this. But his Russian colleague wasn’t there. He could see the feet and torso of the commander floating with his head in the Cupola.
“You see it, too?”
“I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”
Yuri pulled himself alongside. “Here, try my telescope.”
Brady looked down at the thin tube with its faded leather covering, smiled and held out his hand. “Je
ez.”
“What do you see?” Yuri asked. He didn’t want to look a fool in front of his American friend.
“It’s some sort of settlement, off the Antarctic Peninsula. Maybe it’s a base of some kind.”
“And what else? You see it?”
Brady took the telescope from his eye and turned. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s an oil spill.”
“If you did not know better?” Yuri said, trying to encourage his commanded to follow the line of reasoning to its conclusion. Its dangerous conclusion.
“There’s no sign of a tanker, or any reason why one would be there, so logically the spill—if it is a spill—must come from drilling operations either on land or inshore waters, but both are illegal.”
Yuri grunted agreement. “And who is drilling for oil when our countries are crippled? It is not my people, I am certain of that.”
“Agreed. I reckon the last thing the United States is thinking about right now is oil. In a few years, maybe, but right now they must be focused on survival.”
Looking down the telescope as the ISS began to climb again, Yuri said, “I see ships, maybe civilian, maybe military. Pizdets, I wish we could see the rest of Antarctica. Maybe it is crawling with these lice.”
As they watched, Antarctica rolled away and they were over the Atlantic again.
“Hey, you guys. Want something to eat?”
Mikhail was floating beneath them, holding up a plastic bowl. “Tvorog. Good for the bones.”
“Cottage cheese again?” Brady groaned as he reversed into Harmony.
“How do you say? Beggars, they cannot be choosing? We are scraping the bottom of the fish tank.”
They floated in a circle like three levitating gnomes as, with varying levels of enthusiasm, they consumed their meal and discussed what they’d seen below.
The overriding opinion was that they had to tell the ground somehow and, the following day, the ground called them.
“This is John Brady, commanding the International Space Station, please identify yourself.”
The voice that came through was barely identifiable until, suddenly, it clarified. “This is Denver Institute of Technology Communications Center. Please report station status.”
Brady glanced at the other two, who’d floated through from the Russian module as soon as the radio had begun crackling into life. Yuri could see the hesitation in his commander’s face. This was not, after all, an official channel. But then, how could it be? Who was he expecting to hear from?
“DITCC, this is ISS. Situation nominal. Supplies running low, but manageable for now. Do you represent NASA?”
There was a pause, before the voice—it was a woman speaking in an American accent—continued. “We are now an agency of the federal government. On the next rotation, I should be able to arrange for you to speak to the president.”
“President Turner’s alive?”
“No. Vice President Buchanan now has executive authority.”
Yuri remembered Buchanan. Small woman with mousy hair. Hadn’t struck him as much of a leader. Ha! One crumb of comfort: he was willing to bet whoever was leading his people would be more capable than this Amerikosy female. That’s the trouble with democracy, he thought, it comes with inconvenient baggage in times of emergency. But he really wanted to hear from Moscow, or at least the government of the Russian people, wherever it had been evacuated to. It was infuriating that so little of their country could be seen from the ISS. What there was, however, was ocean.
“Mission Control,” Brady said, leaning into the microphone. “Why are you communicating on an open channel?”
“No choice. TDRSS is not an option.”
“Do you have a plan to get us home?”
Again, there was a pause. “Now that we know your condition, Commander Brady, we will work on a plan. For now, stay put and we’ll be back in touch shortly.”
Brady sighed, but it was ten minutes before Control was through with him. They insisted he provide a full report of the station’s condition, and they were just about to go out of range of the ground transmitter when he finally asked the question Yuri had wanted to hear.
“Control, we’ve identified activity in Antarctica. Looks like at least one settlement and shipping off the coast.”
The voice on the other end of the line waited a few seconds before responding again. “Please submit a detailed report on the next rotation and we’ll liaise with the appropriate authorities, see if we can come up with some answers. Thanks for letting us know.”
After a few moments, the line went dead, and Brady swung around to face the others. Mikhail was upside down, but righted himself when he saw the commander’s expression.
“Is odd,” Yuri said. “You have many ground imaging satellites, no? And this man, he says he is from federal agency, but he does not see those images? And they have lost use of communication satellites?”
Brady shook his head, the cogs in his mind whirring so fast Yuri thought he could hear them over the ventilation pumps. “I hear what you’re saying, but the world’s gone to pieces down there. Who knows if they can communicate with orbital satellites?”
“No, I don’t buy it,” Mikhail said, folding his arms and allowing himself to drift a little. “You Americans, you always lecture us Ruskis about your ‘joined-up thinking’. If these Denver, if they can communicate with ISS, they can pick up satellites. Maybe not military—even our great Russian code-breakers can’t crack their encryption—but there are many civilian and scientific imaging missions. There must be photos of Antarctica.”
Yuri held onto his compatriot’s arm. “Maybe they have other things on their mind. Like global flood, for instance. Now come, let us celebrate. We have heard from ground at last, even if it is from United States. That is first step to getting out of here.”
Yuri lay in his bag attached to the wall, headphones playing the Rolling Stones to cancel out the station noises. The words “getting out of here” constantly appeared in his mind as if uttered by Mick Jagger. Roscosmos had a pragmatic view of the dangers of spaceflight, but because the ISS was a joint project, NASA’s insistence on contingency on top of contingency might just turn out to save their lives. NASA had become downright paranoid once the Space Shuttle program was ended and they were forced to rely entirely on the Russians for access to the station. So, two Soyuz spacecraft were docked at all times, ready to be used in an emergency evacuation. Two capsules for the maximum ISS complement of six.
So, they could have left at any time. Except that without mission control, they would have to calculate their trajectories and timings themselves, and given that Russia was largely out of visual range, the only safe place to land was that part of America above water. Yuri did not want to come down in the Western desert, helpless in the hands of his country’s rival. But, perhaps, he wouldn’t have a choice. Soon enough, their food would run out and the ISS would become nothing more than a tomb. It was obvious enough that no one was going to be coming for them, so they would have to make their own way down, whether with help from the ground or not.
As he fell asleep, bathed in the light of his home planet, Yuri Sharipov’s mind wandered the pathways beyond the manual, beyond procedure, practice and routine. The next morning, he convened a crew conference and they made their plans.
President Buchanan came on the line later that day and, despite himself, Yuri found himself impressed. Perhaps she had grown into her role, but she spoke with calm assurance and told them that her people were doing everything they could to bring the crew home.
He could sense that Brady was tempted to leave it to the ground to calculate the right time and trajectory for their escape. If he’d been speaking to Houston, he would have relaxed and returned to his science experiments, but he was obviously less confident in these people from Denver, even if they were an official agency now. The America he’d left to travel to Baikonur was now gone and Yuri sensed that his commander wasn’t entirely comfortable with placing his life i
n the hands of unknowns. So he worked on the calculations with his Russian colleagues.
Three days later, and the three of them were sharing a meal—cottage cheese and shrimp paste—when the radio burst into life.
“What the…?” Brady pirouetted around as a voice emerged.
“International Space Station. Please respond.”
The voice was astonishingly clear with almost no static. That could only mean one thing. But it was impossible.
Yuri pushed himself upward and into Tranquility, heading for the Cupola.
“This is International Space Station. John Brady commanding. Please identify yourself.”
“My name is Wang Haisheng, commanding Shengzhou 15. We are here to relieve you, so you return home.”
Yuri heard those words echoing through Tranquility as he gazed out of the Cupola. There, white, silver and gray in the pristine sunlight, floated a spacecraft. Roughly the same shape as the familiar Soyuz, it was much larger and, on its side, was emblazoned a red flag with a yellow star.
“Puzdit,” he hissed. “The Chinese are here.”
Chapter 2
Aftermath
Buzz wandered out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist, sat down at the small table beside his bed and began again.
My dear Jo,
“Oh, for the love of…” He ripped the sheet of paper from the front of the yellow legal pad and flung it across the room. My dear Jo? Who was he, some kind of Victorian gentleman? “My dear Jo, I trust my communication finds you well…”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. She wasn’t his sister, she was the woman he loved.
He began again, feeling cold drips from his wet hair running down his back.