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“We can get you down in twenty-two minutes.”
Rafael chewed on his lip. He shook his head but covered his mic and said to Phillipa, “I don’t like it, and I can’t guarantee I can keep her alive during descent. But if we have to go, we should go sooner rather than later. We don’t want to be strapped beside her while she’s projectile vomiting her internal organs.”
“I’ll cleanIndependence,” Sarah volunteered. “Joey and I can wipe it down while you and Mark prep the ISS.” Sarah nodded to Joey, waving him up toward the airlock. “Let’s get going. Faster we finish, faster we can leave.”
“Wear your O2rebreathers with your face masks,” Phillipa ordered. “Maybe it’s a moot point by now, but we should all be as safe as we can.” She rubbed her forehead, digging her fingers into the furrows and creases over her eyes.
“Sasha, you and I will power downZvezda,” Mark said. “We can cross-strap power from the Russian module back toUnity. Hopefully that will give us enough juice to put the station back into a stable orbit.” Outside the window, Earth twirled like a drunken top. Gyros off balance, the ISS was rotating around itself, tumbling end over end as it corkscrewed around Earth. “A few days of this and we’ll shear ourselves apart in the upper atmosphere.”
“Houston, we’re evacuating onIndependence. We should be go for deorbit burn in approximately thirty minutes,” Phillipa said. “We want to put ISS in a more stable orbit first, and Rafael needs time to secure Michaela.”
Silence and static.
“Houston?”
Mark frowned, waiting for Houston’s transmission. Sasha hung behind his shoulder, every muscle in his body aching. Too much was happening, too fast. He was ricocheting from one thing to the next without any time to react. What was happening in Moscow? At Yamantau? Where was Sergey? Was he all right?
He wanted to gohome. He wanted to find Sergey and run away from everything. From nuclear warheads and satellites and sickness and Zeytsevs who tried to overturn governments. He wanted to fly down through the atmosphere in his bare skin, jump out of the ISS and land in the Kremlin, sweep Sergey into his arms and leaveeverything. Just them, forever, away from it all.
Outside the ISS, the Earth tilted like she was going to topple over, then did, somersaulting around a wobbling point on the broken ISS truss. Debris fanned around the station, a curtain of glass and shattered and shorn metal, loose equipment and gear fromTranquility. NavigatingIndependencethrough the debris field would be a miracle.
“Houston, do you copy?”
More static and the shrill whistle of a radio tuning, and then a deep voice came over the line. “This is General Duncan. All evacuation operations from the ISS are canceled. Donot, I repeat, donotseparate from the ISS and return to Earth.”
“What?” Phillipa’s jaw dropped, and she threw Mark a wild look. “Houston, wecannotstay up here! The station is dying. We have a critically ill crewmember. And there’s an active nuclear warhead insideFreedom!”
“Your evacuation has been canceled,” General Duncan repeated. “Anything that attempts to deorbit from that station will be destroyed.”
Mark turned on his headset. “Listen to me, you son of a bitch, we are getting off this station—”
“These orders come from above me, Commander Keating,” General Duncan said. His voice was eerily calm, as if he wasn’t real. “US Joint Space Command has assumed control of NASA under the direct orders of the president of the United States.”
* * *
Kremlin
Moscow, Russia
The phone rang and rang,endless international buzzes sounding in Sergey’s ear. “Where the fuck are they?” he snarled. “NASA doesn’t go out for a smoke break and forget to leave someone to answer the fucking phones!”
Still, the phone rang, the direct line he’d been told to call anytime, day or night, that would ring the phone on the flight director’s desk inside Mission Control. He could see the station, the phone, as perfectly as if he were standing in front of it back on his tour with Sasha.If you need anything at any time, Mr. President,he’d been told days later,call this number. We will answer. Always.
“Not fucking always,” he snarled to his empty office.
After another five rings, Sergey hurled his desk phone. The cable wrapped around the flagpole that bore the Russian flag, and the headset clattered and bounced off the new TV he’d brought in for Sasha’s launch.
Not enough. Roaring, Sergey swept his desk clean, sending folders and binders and loose papers flying. His computer monitor followed, soaring through the air before cracking against the wall and fracturing. Pens and pencils rained on the carpet, standing up like darts thrown from the ceiling.
He collapsed, burying his face in his hands as he screamed.
No one came through his office door.
A vibration in his pants made him jump.Ilya. He grabbed for his phone, pulling it out and flipping the screen over.Ilya, where the fuck have you been?
It wasn’t Ilya.
Sergey, we need to talkappeared on the screen.Immediately.
