Page 46 of Stars
“They need a Russian up there. Someone who knows our systems inside and out. Someone who can translate, both the language and the software. The hardware.”
The air was suddenly too thin, and he gasped. He blinked, and stars streaked across his eyes, black holes forming in the center of his vision. “No, no, no…”
“Mark chose me as his right seat. I’ll be piloting the mission. In three days, I will launch with him and Sarah Hogan on EMR-1. We leave for Cape Canaveral tomorrow.”
This wasn’t real. He was dreaming. No, he was having a nightmare. He had nodded off in his seat, and any moment now he would wake up. He had only imagined calling Sasha. He hadn’t actually done it.
“It’s too dangerous,” he whispered. “It’s—”
Suddenly, Sasha was babbling, acronyms and terms Sergey was only now becoming familiar with flying at him fast and furious. Sasha in the NBL and practicing EVA maneuvers. Sasha and Mark underwater as they practiced boarding the Soviet satellite, practiced clambering across a bulky superstructure in simulated weightlessness.
“Ilya…” Sergey gasped for words, for thoughts. His mind was a vacuum, as black as space, and all he could see was Sasha in his space suit drifting farther and farther away, out beyond the moon and then off into nothing. He hissed, squeezed his eyes shut. Gritted his teeth and slammed his fist on his desk. “Ilya is trying to find where that fucking scrap heap launched from. There’snothing! It’s a ghost! And do you know what Soviet ghosts mean?”
Sasha was quiet.
“Soviet ghosts are supposed to stay dead,” Sergey hissed again. “If this satellite was so terrible the Soviets killed it—if they launched it out there to die in space and erased every last trace of its existence—then it needs tostay dead!” He was shaking. Shaking so hard he couldn’t see, the world blurring around him, papers and wood and the Russian flag bleeding together.
“That is why we must launch,”Sasha said.“Mark said you agreed to this plan. You and President Wall—”
“I didn’t thinkyouwould be on the mission!” Sergey cried. He grabbed his thin hair, squeezed his skull. He was trying to hold on, grab on to anything. He was on the edge, the very edge. “You just became an astronaut! Last week! You said it would be years before your first mission!”
“It was supposed to be—”
“Then—”
“How could I say no?” Sasha breathed. “I am the only Russian astronaut left. Who else can read Russian in orbit? Know in an instant what is on that satellite? Any signal delay might mean the difference between life and death, Seryozha!”
Groaning, Sergey flung himself from his chair, pacing across his office. He cupped his hand over his mouth. If he let go, he’d scream. And he might never stop.
“That thing is a floating weapons platform,” Sergey growled. “It will kill you!”
“Its only targets are other fixed orbital positions or down in North America. NORAD says the rail gun is locked in position. It’s not a DShK machine gun.” He pronounced itdishka, like the Soviets had. Sergey buried his face in his palm. “It has to change orbital trajectories to fire. We’ll know if it tries to launch an attack on us in orbit.”
“Isn’t the ISS in a fixed orbital position? How safe is it to be up there with this killing machine blowing satellites up?”
“Its targets are from the Cold War and the eighties. The Americans have put the same military satellites in the same orbits for decades. The ISS wasn’t begun until 1998. And that was the Zarya module. Russian. But if it tries to attack us, we will have time to maneuver. Our technology is forty years beyond what this satellite had.”
His head shook, left and right and back again, like he could erase Sasha's words. “No! It is too dangerous. You don’t know what you’ll find up there. What did the Soviets throw away,hmm? Unstable nuclear weapons? Nuclear waste? With a rail gun in orbit, they could have dominated the planet, but they let the weapondie. There’s areason, Sashunya!”
“Whatever is up there, we will take care of it.”
Blyad, Sasha even sounded American now. Full of confidence and determination—that same stubborn Slavic streak he’d always had, polished to an American shine. Russian stubbornness and American confidence, what could possibly be worse? Sergey slumped against his office wall, his head hitting the wood paneling with a heavythunk. “You don’t know the Soviets. You’re too young. You have no idea what they were capable of.”
Sasha was quiet. “What would you have me do? Back out of the launch? Not go, when I am the only one who can?”
“Why are you always the only one who can go?” Sergey snapped. “This feels like Volga all over again.”
Except this time there won’t even be a goodbye kiss.
It hit Sergey in the center of the chest: Sasha was going into space. He was leaving the planet. He was going to be as far from Sergey as any human being possibly could be, and there wasn’t a damn thing Sergey could do about it.
Not even be there to say goodbye.
Damn the secrecy. Damn their commitment to Russia and her stability. He’d fly to America tonight, run to Sasha, sweep him in his arms and never,everlet him go. He’d make love to him until Sasha begged him to stop, until all he was saying was Sergey’s name, pleas and desperate cries and the grunts and gasps he made just before he came inside Sergey. He wouldn’t let Sasha leave Earth without knowing exactly how much, how deeply, he was loved.
Stay with me. Come back to me.
Why did the world always rise between them? Geopolitics moved like an eclipse, blocking him from Sasha at the moment he most needed to be at his side.
