“Good morning, Moscow.”
“How is the weather up there, comrade?”
Yefgenii laughs. “Cold outside. Some yellow sleet.”
“All systems are continuing to show nominal readings. Please commence countdown sequence for translunar injection.”
Yefgenii returns to the pilot’s seat for the first time since he’s made orbit. He straps in and begins to work through the sequence of checks ordered by Mission Control. His eyes are weary, his back stiff. Smells of rubber and metal fill the ship.
A splinter of sunlight bursts into the darkness. Second by second it streaks into a curving band of orange, white and blue. Cloud, sky and sunlight squeeze through what appears like a crack in the fabric of space. The edge of the dark Earth is rupturing, burning up in a great celestial fire of heat and colour as if it has fingers that are struggling to pry open the blackness. He sees the sky opening. It’s opening for him.
“Voskhodyeniye, you are to initiate TLI burn at mission-elapsed time 25:44:16; burn duration 05:47; do you copy?”
“25:44:16, 05:47, copy that.” Yefgenii scratches the numbers onto his thigh-pad.
He punches the numbers into the flight computer. At the end of the sequence his finger hangs over the keyboard for a second or two. He can still choose to de-orbit and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. He presses the key to proceed.
At twenty-five hours, forty-four minutes and sixteen seconds from the moment the N-1 rocket lifted off the pad at Baikonur, the computer initiates ignition of the craft’s Block G engine. Yefgenii feels acceleration no more violent than a push. He senses he is veering sideways. The fluid in his inner ear sloshes and he experiences a sudden attack of nausea, but this passes, and he rides the rocket out of orbit. Yefgenii monitors the instruments. He is accelerating from orbital velocity to escape velocity.
A rocket roar travels up through the structure of the ship while the brilliant glow of its tail burns behind him. A creature from Earth is carrying fire to the Moon. The gases freeze in space, becoming a shower of ice particles, and then the crystal shower disperses, drifting back into the Earth’s gravity, to burn up in the atmosphere, to vanish in an instant.
Ges’s voice cuts through. Yefgenii hears it in his earpiece. “Telemetry shows you are good in the burn, Voskhodyeniye.”
Now Yefgenii shakes in his seat. The whole vehicle trembles. The rocket engine thrusts toward the culmination of its burn, toward 10,830 metres per second, the speed required in its original orbit to overcome the Earth’s gravity.
The lights flicker. Yefgenii feels the brilliance change around him. The light plays across his face and mixes with the yellow glow of the rocket burn that haloes his bald head. His hand grips the throttle. It shakes for the first time he can remember, not since the early days of flight training. The computer clock counts down to the end of the burn but the display flickers. Yefgenii has set the chronometer of his watch; he notes the duration etched on his thigh-pad and starts to perform the countdown himself, off the chronometer. The computer blinks out. The cabin lights blink out. In panic he glances at the control panel behind him, sees circuit breakers tripped and tripping. The burn continues a split second past the auto-shutoff; the computer has failed.
Yefgenii shuts down the engine, but as he does so a bang rattles the entire spacecraft. Storage lockers fly open and their contents spew out into the cabin.
The rocket roar dies in an instant. The afterglow fades. He sees ice crystals glinting in earthlight, a shower of tiny stars, but no light shines within Voskhodyeniye, and there are no voices on the radio, not Ges’s, nor any other from Earth.
At once he knows something very serious has gone wrong. Objects float round the cabin. A tube of food concentrate bumps his head. An instrument package has ripped open and packing material is swirling out — tiny polystyrene balls. The disarray unsettles him. His hands are still quivering, his stomach flutters. There’s no ejector seat or possibility of a glide down to a friendly runway. A paper-thin metal hull is all that protects him from the unsurvivable vacuum of space.
He keys the transmitter on his communications helmet.
“Moscow, come in, Voskhodyeniye.”
He waits. He tries again.
“Moscow, come in, Voskhodyeniye.”
He waits.
“Moscow, Voskholdyeniye, do you copy?”
The spacecraft is rolling slowly to port but none of the thrusters are firing. His mind begins to function again, to diagnose problems and calculate solutions. In a matter of seconds the shaking of his hands has diminished. He releases his straps and hovers. A band of sunlight streams through one of the portholes, illuminating a section of the BO to an unbearable intensity; the remainder lives in an eerie dusk created by the Sun’s reflections off glass and metalwork.
With a little push he glides into the sunlight, cutting the beam. Darkness falls across the control panel, and then he clears, and it’s lit again, so he can see to reset the communications system circuit breaker. The breaker won’t hold. It springs back when he throws it, and the power lights dotted on the radio control board won’t blink to life. A bus failure has disarmed nearly all of the ship’s electrical systems.
A deep worry grips him. He drags himself hand over hand to the environmental control system. He pulls himself close. He listens. He can hear a flow of oxygen, a hum of motors.
He swings to his left. The fluid in his ear sloshes at the sudden movement, and his stomach churns. He makes a tiny retching sound, but that’s all, and the wave of nausea passes.
Out of the portholes, through the constellation of ice crystals, he glimpses the Earth, now a disc that he can visualize from pole to pole in one scan. He pauses to absorb the view, and to ponder his predicament. The burn has accelerated the spacecraft far out of orbit; in the next hour the planet will become nearly 40,000 kilometres more remote. He’ll travel a distance roughly equivalent to the circumference of the globe. He forces himself through the moment, back to the task.
Yefgenii hauls himself down the tunnel into the SA. He felt a bang at the end of translunar injection and now he’s looking for the cause. Nothing in the SA appears changed from his previous orbital check, apart from the sporadic electrical paralysis. He returns to the BO and peers out of the portholes one by one. A trail of gas is running out from Voskhodyeniye. He can’t get a view of where it’s being vented from, but it’s snaking away from the spacecraft, a tiny thread of white cotton he missed the first time he looked out after the bang. The gas is already ice when he sees it.
Without guidance from Mission Control, he must think his way through the steps on his own. He assumes the material being vented from the spacecraft must be related to the bang and the subsequent electrical problems. He holds on to a hope that the fault is confined to the Block G engine. At this point in the flight plan, the engine is all but spent, and should be jettisoned. Yefgenii maneuvers to the control panel. The switch responds. He feels a rush of joy. He still wields some control over the ship and therefore over his fate. He jettisons the Block G.
Yefgenii presses himself against a porthole. Soon the dead rocket drifts into view, in a slow roll, travelling at almost the same velocity as Voskhodyeniye. It hangs aft of the stack, spraying crystals, the remnants of its fuel. As it rolls, he gets a sudden glimpse of a V-shaped rupture at the base of its aerocasing. The metal is bent and blackened. He concludes that a small explosion occurred in the Block G engine at the end of the translunar injection burn, possibly due to the sudden ignition of some uncombusted fuel, and that it must have caused collateral damage to the stack.