Page 11 of Stars
Welby, older and more refined, seemed to take in the sights everywhere they went. If he made any romantic connections, he kept that to himself.
Welby steered Pete and Blake to the second SUV, nodding his goodbye to Jack and Ethan. Ethan held the passenger door for Jack before he hopped in the driver’s seat and turned on the GPS for the drive into Valletta, the famous Maltese harbor city. The highway hummed beneath their tires, and Jack leaned back in his seat, smiling as Ethan drove.
“Still not telling me where we’re going?”
“Nope. I told you. It’s a surprise.”
Jackhmmed. He settled back and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”
Ethan guided them through the twisted streets of old Malta to the Valletta peninsula. Clay walls rose around them, and outside the SUV’s window a different millennium seemed to unfold.
Finally, down a cobbled side street beneath the glow of St. John’s, Ethan pulled to a stop outside the stone archway of a boutique hotel. Water lapped at the harbor a few streets away, the night quiet enough that he could hear buoy bells chiming in the strait and the soft slap and curl of waves against wooden hulls.
He checked in while Jack waited in the SUV. Minutes later, Ethan grabbed their bags and held open Jack’s door, guiding him inside with a barely restrained grin. Jack played along, holding his hand as Ethan led him up a twisting stone stairway to the top floor of the hotel.
Ethan let Jack push open the wooden door to their suite, let him have the first breathtaking view. Their room overlooked the peninsula, the entire medieval city, and the harbor. Outside the windows, St. John’s gleamed and the harbor lights spread out on rippling black waves like fallen stars tumbling in the tide. The old city’s lights twinkled, a golden glow sliding between cobblestones and twisting through Renaissance alleys before bleeding into shadows. Malta after midnight was silent, the city asleep, and from the open balcony doors, they might have been the only two people in the whole world.
“Oh, wow…” Jack headed for the balcony.
Ethan plucked a rose from the bouquet laid across the foot of the bed and followed, standing close behind Jack. His arms wound around Jack’s waist, and he buried his face in Jack’s neck as he breathed in his husband’s sweat-tinged scent.
He dragged the rose down Jack’s cheek and over his jaw, down to his heart. “Happy anniversary.”
Jack’s smile was brighter than the city lights, brighter than the cathedral reflecting the stars. He leaned back, his head pillowed on Ethan’s shoulder, and caught Ethan’s lips with his own. “Happy anniversary, husband.”
* * *
3
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
“Zvezdamodule, do you copy?”
“Loud and clear, Houston,” Joey Espinoza radioed back. “I have enteredZvezdamodule and have turned on the lights.”
“Roger,Zvezda.” Mark, serving as CAPCOM in Mission Control, nodded to Sasha and beckoned him to the desk the CAPCOM and flight director desks shared. “Let us know when you’re ready to begin.”
“Give this old girl time to shake out her circuits. She’s tired.” On the giant display screen at the head of ISS Mission Control, Joey floated in front of a flickering control panel along one ofZvezda’swalls. He waved to Mission Control and then did a somersault, what every astronaut did in zero g, showing off for their gravity-bound colleagues stuck on Earth.
Mission Control was crowded, full of engineers and astronauts who were hanging around and watching theZvezdamodule on the ISS slowly work through her power-up procedures.Zvezda, one of the first modules of the ISS, had been the powerhouse of the station for two decades, housing most of the life support and navigational systems. When Russia ran itself bankrupt under President Putin and support for the ISS and Russia’s space program tanked, NASA had scrambled to switch over the essential RussianZvezdaoperations to the redundancies built into the American modules. Most life support and guidance functions were now run out of theUnitymodule on the American side.
But with Sasha now an astronaut and Sergey rebuilding Roscosmos in Star City, the Russian components of the ISS were being brought back online.
Every Russian astrophysicist and orbital engineer employed under Putin had left the country after the space industry collapsed, trading in their $300-a-month salaries in Russia for six-figure incomes in Canada, India, and Europe.
Now, Roscosmos was filled with college graduates, fresh young faces from the technical universities of Russia. Sasha had realized one morning when he toured Roscosmos with Sergey that he was the oldest member of Russia’s new space industry. His belly button had tried to kiss his spine.
A few of the midnight-shift Roscosmos engineers listened over the radio connection from their Star City base outside Moscow. They, and Sasha, were working with NASA and the astronauts on board the ISS to turnZvezdaback on. Roscosmos engineers had studied the old systems and helped craft new power-up and integration sequences.
And Sasha was the man to explain it all. He filled in at CAPCOM in Mission Control whenever there was time scheduled for Russian module operations.
The work was tedious, reading checklists and repeating orders in Houston and translating smudged Russian scrawled on sticky notes and duct tape from the ISS. But it was good to be a part of restarting Russia’s presence in space. It stoked his patriotic pride and his red Russian blood, the way his heart beat for the stars and for Mother Russia as one.
The first time he’d stepped into Mission Control for the ISS, he’d almost face-planted as his eyes darted everywhere, trying to take everything in. The rows of clustered workstations facing a wall of screens showing telemetry from the ISS and monitoring satellites spread from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. His eyes had traced the sine-wave orbit of the station, parabolic arcs that covered Earth every ninety minutes. Live video from the station’s modules showed astronauts at work in the labs, or catching water from a straw in zero gravity in the galley, or getting suited up for a space walk. He almost couldn’t breathe, watching it all.
“Houston, go for power-up sequences.”
