Ravenous Dusk (60 page)

At the same time, he fought the urge to back away as far as he could. This ship had not come to take them home. Ergo, it was more people coming into an already unbearably claustrophobic place. They were practically castaways here, already, with only two more weeks worth of food and potable water left, and no resupply shuttle, no Progress drone on the way, which was probably a good thing, since one had crashed into
Mir
in 1997, and almost killed them all.

In his months aboard
Mir
, he had learned nothing if not how to think like a Russian. Astronauts expect safety and comfort; they expect good things to happen. Cosmonauts expect disaster, and they are seldom disappointed.

This was not what they needed, right now. It was one more enigma in an already unfathomable, unacceptable mystery. Literally anything could be behind that hatch, but nothing good.

"We're not expecting anybody?" Moxley probed.

Behind him, Ilya, the engineer, laughed and shoved aside billowing plastic sacks of trash they stored in the docking module. "We were expecting not to be here, so why tell us anything?"

The shuttle manually docked, and the docking port gasped and popped open readily enough after Ilya beat on it with a spanner. A crewcut head on a meaty bull-neck jutted into the Kvant module. The cosmonaut regarded them blandly for a moment, then shook out a cigarette and lit it. Moxley watched the flame with a caveman's mixture of awe and fear. In zero-gravity, the flame from the gunmetal blue Zippo lighter was a perfect, expanding sphere, like a new sun.

There were three of them. Their commander took Arkady aside for a brief, heated exchange while the other two swooped through Kvant and the core module, ducked through the node and into Kvant 2 as if they had the layout memorized, and had been training in zero-G all their lives. Moxley looked to Ilya, but the engineer's morose frown kept him from speaking up. The commander barked something at Ilya, and he retreated, presumably to help the other two cosmonauts.

Arkady settled into the command center, a foxhole amid stacked computer monitors, joysticks, clipboards and manuals. He punched up EVA protocols. Moxley was aghast. Before an EVA was even seriously discussed, the cosmonauts always wrangled for hours with Energiya. Contracts had to be revised, bonus allotments had to be posted, and insurance rates adjusted. But their visitors weren't regular Energiya employees. These men moved like the cosmonauts of yore, like the second coming of Yuri Gagarin. They moved like soldiers. They wore black jumpsuits with a single red star on the shoulder. The commander had a silver eagle on the collar of his tunic. He had a pistol in a holster at his hip.

Five minutes later, the two commandos emerged from the airlock at the far end of Kvant 2 in
Mir
pressure suits and speed-crawled, hand over hand, down the science module and back out onto the core. The one time Ilya had outfitted Arkady for an EVA, it had taken an hour to suit them up and check all the safety systems. Moxley had never asked, or been invited, to go outside. Ilya crawled back into the core module and hovered by the hatch, staring hard at the back of the shuttle commander's head.

Moxley resisted an absurd urge to tap on the glass and salute as they passed his porthole. Had they been detailed to repair some critical experiment Arkady couldn't be trusted with? But no, they were creeping over the skin of their own ship, of which Moxley could only see the nose from Kvant. He moved node-wards to find a better vantage, but the shuttle commander blocked the way.

"What do you know about it?" he demanded. His accent was so thick he might have been cold-reading from a phrase book. Moxley didn't answer, couldn't, so lost was he in the stranger's face. It had been three months since he saw any living, breathing person aside from Arkady or Ilya. After such a lapse, a new person is a new species, speaking a new language, and must be acclimated to. Compounding the problem was the officer's face itself, which appeared carved out of flint, and turned molten before Moxley's startled eyes. "You were sent here to study. What did you learn?"

Moxley blinked. This was about him? About his wasted time in a can in orbit, watching something that defied all his understanding of astrophysics, and being able to tell no one on earth about it?

He told the commander what he'd told Houston. He made a production of it. He got out his charts, his spectrographic analyses, his gamma ray and X-ray images, hundreds of photographs.

From
Mir
he had logged eighteen separate events, documenting many of them extensively, given the limits of the outmoded, cranky Russian equipment, and the indeterminable nature of the event itself. At infrequent intervals, at a fixed point in space about a thousand miles above
Mir
, ordinary sunlight underwent an almost alchemical transformation into an energy that spiked all wavelengths in a complex pattern that overloaded his instruments, but left no quantifiable record at all, for a duration of one to six seconds. It was like hearing a cosmic symphony, when he could only perceive one percent of the notes.

That it was doing something meaningful, he could not dispute. It occurred at irregular intervals, but at very fixed locales, over the same precise points on the globe. Hovering just behind the terminator, it deflected the dying light of the setting sun onto northwestern Idaho; near Kiev in the Ukraine; several points in a belt across equatorial Africa; the Mato Grosso, in Brazil, and the foothills of coastal Peru; southeastern Iraq, hard by the Iranian border. He was no closer to knowing what caused it. He watched the sky and saw nothing until it occurred, and then he could see only the light. He showed the commander the few photographs that captured even a breath of the ugly majesty of the phenomenon. How the light twisted on itself and seemed to curdle as it poured down. It lasted for only a few seconds, and was visible for even shorter duration, but each glimpse was like a vision of some new, unimaginable eternity.

The commander sat back from the dining table and studied his work. He lit a cigarette, oblivious to Moxley's hacking. For weeks after arrival, Moxley had been prone to sneezing fits from the fungi that thrived in every nook and cranny of the old space station. Ilya once told him that the cosmic radiation had warped the stray spores that cosmonauts brought up on their feet and in their hair. Athlete's foot learned to live on nylon and vinyl, and bread molds became free-floating colonies of black nastiness that burst if touched. The cigarette smoke was many, many times worse.

"What do
you
think is, that does this?" the commander finally asked. He held up a photograph of the light over the Ukraine. Lines around his eyes deepened, and his mouth contorted into a mirthless smile. Moxley had seen this look enough at Star City to know it meant he was being tested.

"May I speak freely?" he asked, looking around for support. Arkady stayed welded to his screens, too keyed-up by what he saw to blink. Ilya, wincing and clutching his stomach like always, nodded at him. The commander's face reddened, released tiny bursts of live steam. Fine, then. "I think it's a manmade object, maybe some kind of directed energy weapon, except I can't see it or ping radar off it, or read heat from its thrusters or its power source, even though it ought to be hotter than Chernobyl for hours after it discharges, if it's a laser. If it's some kind of solar-powered lens, it should be the size of Texas, to register gamma rays like it does, but I can't see it. And I don't have any idea what it's doing. Right now, I couldn't even tell you for sure that it wasn't God, signaling the Second Coming."

"This is all you know?" The commander gestured to the sheaves of non-data on the dining table. It was all stuck to the table with refrigerator magnets, Sherman's many F's in Astrophysics.

"A lot of scientists on earth probably know a lot more about it than me, by now. Working alone like this, with the equipment problems, the comm breakdowns…I do know quite a bit about elementary physics, though, like how incredibly fucking stupid it would be to discharge a firearm in zero-gravity, not to mention inside a pressurized spacecraft. Why the hell do you have a pistol in outer space, anyway, Commander?"

"Dr. Moxley, is enough," Arkady grunted, but Moxley wasn't done.

"Why are you here, Commander? We were expecting a shuttle to come and take us home. Is it coming? What are you doing here?"

The commander vaulted out of his seat and over the command center, heading for Kvant. He turned and smiled at Moxley. "I don't know when you will go home. We are here only to fix broken satellite." He dove into his space-plane and closed the docking port.

A few minutes later, the shuttle disengaged from
Mir
and pushed itself away. Moxley went to the porthole and watched as it seemed to drop back towards earth for a minute. The dorsal surface of the shuttle was open, just like on an American shuttle. The two suited commandos sat in seats in the open compartment. They'd worked fast. Something that looked like seventy feet of aluminum train track extended out of the open back of the shuttle, and Moxley recognized it for the physicist's dream-toy that it was—a rail gun.

"Who the hell are they, Ilya? Arkady? What the hell is going on, here?"

Arkady watched the monitors. Ilya looked out the porthole at the retreating thrusters of the black shuttle. He looked like he hadn't slept since he got here. "We were not supposed to be here, still."

"What do you mean?" Moxley got chills. He started thinking like a Russian.

"They're going to shoot it down," Ilya said.

"What? Shoot what down?"

Arkady tapped on the monitor in front of him. Moxley climbed over to him, clumsily, because the walls were buried in items Velcro-strapped in place–laptops, CD stacks, clipboards, food pouches… He looked over Arkady's shoulder, puzzled for a moment until he realized he was seeing a camera feed from onboard the black shuttle.

"What was that ship? Were those guys cosmonauts?"

Arkady and Ilya glued to the monitors. Not looking, but looking away.

Finally, Ilya answered him. "In Eighties, brain-dead cowboy President—dyes hair, listens to astrologer—talks big fight. Talks about Star Wars—A-OK fucking movie, but stupid, stupid asshole plan. Russians don't believe empty talk, but prepare. While you talk, we prepare for war in space." He pointed at the monitor. "BOR assault space-plane, shuttle interceptor, satellite-killer. We see now, you were not all talk, either. Stupid, palm-reading cowboy built Star Wars orbital energy weapon, and forgot about it."

Moxley blanched at the steel in Ilya's tone. "But we don't have any orbital weapons," he shot back, but he was less sure of himself with each syllable. Where did all that money go, in the defense spending-mad Eighties? He knew the government was stupid, but he'd never really believed they'd plunked down for six hundred-dollar toilet seats. He'd used those toilets. They invariably clogged.

"He said it's not yours anymore," Arkady said.

"What's that supposed to mean? Anyway, who were those soldiers? Because they sure as hell weren't cosmonauts."

"
Spetsialnoje Naznachenie
," Arkady spat. "Spetznaz. Like your Green Berets, only tough."

"I want to talk to the ground," Moxley said.

"No. No radio. They listen."

"Well, the hell with them, and both of you, and your whole shitty country. Unless you have a pistol too, Arkady—" He floated over to the ham radio they used to talk with the ground, but Ilya blocked him, hands out, palms open and empty. His droopy face hid no malice or violence, only terror. Sweat pasted his coverall to his shallow, fluttering chest. His hand clutched absently at his stomach. "Please, Sherman. We're over fucking Atlantic Ocean. Nobody would hear you, but them."

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't want to know," Ilya shouted, his voice cracking, "nor do you. In old days, Spetznaz never fix satellite. They kill things—commandos, like your Rambo, yes? Kill foreigners, kill terrorists, kill anyone who sees them. Nobody believe they still exist, you know? Gone to mercenary work in Chechnya and Bosnia, other shithole countries. This is bad, Sherman, very bad. If not for you here, I think we would be in very big fucking trouble."

"What do you mean?"

"This is shit most serious, Sherman! Russian cosmonauts are expendable, even now. But you are American, big TV star astronaut, very, very famous, with you here, we are safe, I think."

"But Ilya—nobody in America knows I'm here."

Ilya's face drained of blood. "Oh shit, then we are fucked the most, I think."

From the beginning, it had all seemed too good to be true. Moxley was not even a front-line astronaut, but a research physicist who had worked extensively with NASA on radiation experiments in space. He'd always dreamed, naturally, of going up himself, but there were hundreds of real astronauts prowling around Johnson Space Center who would never go up, many with better qualifications as scientists, never mind their training. When they asked him in July if he'd like to go to
Mir
, he looked for the hidden camera, figuring for sure it was a prank, and not even an especially believable one. There was an urgent situation that required in-orbit analysis, and the Russians were putting together a classified mission to go back up to
Mir
, which would be emptied of its last official crew in August. Could he go to Russia next month?

He was still dubious when they flew him to Russia the following week, still looking for the punch-line as he sweated out three months of marathon cram sessions in Russian language and astronautics training, but the workload was so demanding, he never paused to wonder whether this was or wasn't really happening, let alone ask why they were sending him. It was a dream come true, and he was scared to make a peep of dissent, lest he wake up.

The politics of who got to go up were so legendarily Byzantine that he did not really believe he was anything more than a back-up, a third-or fourth-string understudy. The greased slide he stepped on had to be some sort of test of emergency readiness, because there seemed to be no emergency. It wasn't like those dumb action space movies, with the asteroid or the comet or whatever hurtling towards earth, and hysteria and looting, with the maverick demolitions crew being rushed through training. He was just another greenhorn American to the Russian trainers at Star City, and when his training was up on October 30, and they told him he was going up tomorrow, he thought it was only another joke.