Page 2 of Stars
“Mach 15. 180,000 feet.” With a sluggish stick and limited response, he was a falling rock. “Mach 10. 150,000 feet.”
He needed to slow down.
“Houston, launching parachutes now.”
“What?” Mission Control sputtered through his headset. He heard a coffee cup slam down over the open mic. “Andreyev,negative!It’s too early! You’re going to rip the drogues off!”
He ignored Houston. He gripped the control stick, his fingers curling over the hard plastic. Even through his suit, he could feel the shape of the stick, the power transferring from the craft into him and vice versa. Pilot and craft, bound through the tiniest of steering columns. Their souls melded and merged through that single point.
This will work. Sergey’s face, his wry smile, flashed in his mind.This will work because itmust.
It was a very Sergey-like thing to say.
Sasha reached for the parachute release, ignoring Mission Control’s shouting. TheEclipsehad two sets of chutes: drogues, to slow the craft down at supersonic speeds, and landing parachutes, to be used once he was no longer peeling back the speed of sound. Both were designed to be deployed at lower altitudes. The supersonic parachutes’ operating ceiling was Mach 8.
He armed the pyrotechnics that fired the drogues. Hopefully those still worked.
Sasha watched the numbers on the altimeter and the velocity gauges fly by. He was still technically in space, the sixty-mile-tall zone of varying atmospheric density. Mission Control yammered in his ear, ordering him to disarm the drogue controls and return to reentry procedures.
Bang. Pyrotechnics fired when he slammed his palm down on the release. TheEclipselurched forward, almost dumping him from his seat. His restraints held him fast, digging into his collarbones. He expected to hear wind, straining metal, the groans and screams of theEclipsequaking against the atmosphere. He did not.
“Houston, descent slowing!” he shouted into his radio. He read off the altimeter, flicked the control stick. Thrusters fired weakly, and he watched out the window as his heading shifted, adjusted. “Mach 5. 130,000 feet! AligningEclipseon descent vector one-alpha! Mach 1.5. 100,000 feet.”
The craft rocked as he dipped below supersonic speed. Sound finally caught up to him. The shock wave he’d created passed over and through him, a cannonboomthat quaked theEclipselike a gong bursting apart. He winced, the sound too loud in his ears. A freight-train roar followed, wind hammering him on all sides.
Mission Control was quiet. “Andreyev, you’re nowhere near Canaveral. You’re going to plow into Louisiana’s swamps.”
“I am not finished with my landing yet, Houston,” Sasha growled. “Releasing drogues in three, two, one—”
The drogue chutes snapped off, and the craft righted itself. He flew back, gravity yanking on theEclipseand heaving her downward once more, no longer fighting against the friction of his chutes. “Altitude dropping! Speed increasing! 60,000 feet, almost Mach 1 again!”
“Andreyev, you’re going to crash.” Mission Control sounded defeated. And pissed.
Sasha squeezed theEclipse’s control stick and yanked hard right, banking the craft in a move she was never designed for. His windows smeared. “Houston, firing RCS now. Full RCS burn.”
“What thefuck, Sasha?” Mark’s confused voice sounded over the comms.
Sasha grinned.
TheEclipsetrembled, the simulator responding to his commands, shaking the enclosed crew cabin as if he’d truly initiated the RCS, as if he were using the maneuvering thrusters like OMS engines for a full burn. He watched his altimeter slow, then hold, as theEclipsescreamed over the southeastern United States.
“Altitude, 35,000 feet.” At this height, he could wave to passenger planes. Good thing there weren’t any around. “And…”
His GPS beeped, the little image of his gumdrop-shaped craft on the piloting display flying on its side over the Florida peninsula and then out over the Atlantic. “Cutting thrusters. Deploying main chutes.”
The simulator’s main engines cut, and the triple bang of the main parachutes’ deployment echoed through the cabin. He felt the roll of the simulator, the thrum that tried to mimic a true final descent, the sway of the wind and the steady hum of atmosphere whistling past the hull. The altimeter bled away, fluttering with the pitch and roll of the slow and steady descent, and over his comm, he heard the grumbles of Gordon Conway, the sim sup who ran the simulator for theEclipse.
“Son of a bitch, Sasha,” Mark said, breaking into the radio loop again. Sasha frowned. Mark wasn’t scheduled to be observing this training run. They weren’t supposed to cross paths today.
Still, it was always good to be around Mark. Sasha could picture him next to Gordon, arms crossed, legs spread and shaking his head, watching as Sasha’s ugly gumdrop simulator shimmied and shook on its hydraulics. Hopefully he was smiling that wry,devil-come-get-megrin.
Commander Mark Keating, chief of astronauts at NASA, was the main training officer for Sasha’s astronaut corps. He was a god among the mere mortals who walked the earth, at least in Sasha’s mind. Superheroes wanted to be him when they grew up. Sasha dreamed of one day being as substantial as his shadow. Mark had already flown as mission commander for twelve separate SLS and Orion missions. He’d circled Earth over a hundred times, spent weeks living on the Lunar Gateway in orbit over the moon. He’d even lived aboard the aging ISS. He had a picture-perfect family, too, a beautiful wife and young twin girls, curly-haired brunettes who stole the spotlight and Mark’s heart. He’d done it all, it seemed, and he was still there to give more.
Everyone knew that Mark was going to command the first mission to Mars.
It was Mark who made the call for every astronaut in training: go or no-go for ascension to the astronaut corps. Go or no-go for the hundreds of flights leading up to NASA’s Mars missions: long-duration spaceflight, out past the moon, halfway to Mars and back. Chasing comets and asteroids and heading toward the retrograde of Venus.
Every dream Sasha had as a pollution-riddled boy in the Arctic Circle was scattered above in the stars... and in Mark’s hands.
