“Nordwijk, CRV-1,” he said. “Thanks for the update. How long before I expect to acquire signal from Mirusha?” The mission control at Houston had been cool toward the idea of trying to fly a rescue mission—probably they still remembered the humiliation of the Russians pulling out of the space station project—but they had not actually forbidden it. The European space center in Nordwijk, on the other hand, had been enthusiastic, and guaranteed him as much help as they could give. This was little enough—radar readings from the ground tracking stations to confirm what the interior navigation of the crew return vehicle already told him—but he was glad enough for it.
“CRV-1, you should be getting transponder now,” Nordwijk told him.
He frowned. He was getting nothing. No, there it was on his rendezvous radar. But where was the transponder?
He was coming up on it backward; by the strange ballet rules of orbital mechanics, Mirusha was coming up from behind him as he rose to meet it. He could see it now, a brilliant, lumpy star blazing in the sunlight. “Roger, I’ve acquired it visually,” he said. He checked the rendezvous radar. Eight kilometers, closing rate one-fifty meters per second. He corrected his vehicle pitch slightly and made a three-second engine burn with the maneuvering engine, raising his perigee to bring his orbit closer to synch with the Russians, and checked the radar again. Five kilometers, closing rate fifty-two. In his window, the Mirusha was a fat insect with blue metallic wings. He should be able to raise them on the radio. They knew he was coming.
“Mirusha, this is the American ship CRV-1. Do you read? Mirusha, CRV-1.”
No reply.
The station was dark. He brought the crew return vehicle in cautiously. With the crew on the Mirusha not responding to his increasingly insistent signaling, it would be impossible for him to dock to the station as planned. This was a problem. He was wearing a pressure suit, but it was a precaution against a vehicle depressurization only, not a suit rated for an extravehicular activity. There was no help for it, though. He had come this far, it would be pointless for him to stop.
“Mirusha, CRV-1. Do you read? Mirusha, do you read?”
He brought the CRV in as close to the Mirusha as he dared. He had only one safety line, a twenty-foot line, and he clipped one end of it to the CRV and the other to the hook on his suit. Then he did a final suit check, opened the hatch, and jumped.
The docking hatch was barely six feet. He hit the station’s skin, scrambled for a handhold and missed, rebounded away, and as he started spinning away, by flailing wildly he managed to hook the EVA handrail with one hand. He clutched at it and held on, and then, more calmly, pulled himself toward the hatch.
It opened freely.
There was no way for him to stay attached to the CRV when he went into the airlock. He had to unhook. The manual would have instructed him to attach a second safety line to the Mirusha before unhooking from the CRV, but there was no second line available. He unclipped the safety line and clipped it on to the EVA handrail, trusting blindly that it would be strong enough to prevent the CRV from drifting away and leaving him stranded.
He entered the airlock and closed the inner door. A light should have illuminated when the inner door closed, but the chamber was pitch black. He flicked on his suit light and by its feeble illumination, found the hand-wheel that opened the inner door.
The wheel spun freely. There was no pressure on the other side.
In the long, slow fight against a steady leak to space, the two Russians on the space station had lost their fight. There would be no heroic rescue. The dark space station and the lack of internal pressure told him that there was no one left to rescue.
Time had run out.
In all his future years, John Radkowski would remember that lesson. You can be clever, you can come up with daring ideas, and sometimes they even work.
But sometimes, all of your work and all of your courage is not enough. Space is cold and empty and unforgiving, it does not care about human tragedy or last-minute heroics or brilliant piloting skills.
Sometimes your time runs out.
9
On the Slope
The lesson that John Radkowski had learned from the failed Mirusha rescue was that Ryan Martin was bright, impulsive, and that he needed to be carefully watched.
And the second lesson he learned was that sometimes, despite the best you can do, missions fail. And then people died.
He had no time to waste in thinking about ancient failures, Radkowski told himself. The footing at the base of the cliff was treacherous. He was standing on a slope of loose rock that had broken free of the cliffs above and sloped down at a forty-five-degree angle to the true bottom of the canyon. He tested the surface cautiously. The angular rock fragments ranged in size from small pieces the size of dinner plates to enormous ones the size of refrigerators and even small automobiles. They seemed to be loosely cemented in place by a coating of some form of desert varnish. It seemed relatively stable. Good. He worked a piece that was roughly the size and shape of a guitar loose with his foot, kicked it down the slope, and watched it bounce and ricochet another five hundred feet down the hill. It knocked a few smaller rocks free, but didn’t start an avalanche. Good.
The rock fragments were light yellow, much lighter in color than the dark rocks they had been traversing. The cliff walls were light-colored as well, he noticed, all except for a dark stripe maybe a hundred feet wide at the very top.
He drilled a bolt-anchor into the cliff and tied the rockhopper down to free the winch line. There wasn’t much he could do but wait for Ryan Martin to start lowering Estrela. He didn’t like not being in control, but there was nothing he could do at this point.
He checked the rockhopper again, to make sure it wasn’t about to slide down the slope, and decided it was secure enough that he didn’t need to put in another bolt. Right up against the cliff face the loose rock was almost a ledge. John Radkowski sat.
No sense in doing nothing. He was still high enough up to get a good overview of the base of the canyon. He unpacked the binoculars and scanned the terrain.
From here, the base of the catena looked rougher than they had expected from the orbital view. It was a jumble of tilted slabs of rock.
Painstakingly, John Radkowski began to scout out a path.
10
On the Slope
“I’m sweating,” Estrela said.
“For heaven’s sake, turn on your cooling loop, then,” Radkowski told her.
“It’s already up all the way.”
After lowering Estrela, Ryan and Tana disassembled the winch and were lowering it down to Commander Radkowski. This was a slightly tricky operation—they had to lower it by hand—and Radkowski had little time to hold Estrela’s hand if she had forgotten how to program her interior climate settings. He ignored her.
Estrela went into the rockhopper, still complaining that she was too warm. She was awkward in climbing in, with only one arm, but she finally got inside and pulled the hatch closed behind her. Radkowski barely noticed.
Trevor, then Tana, and finally Ryan came one by one down the cliff. Ryan had to give Trevor some instruction in rappelling—the kid had a tendency to bounce down, instead of lowering himself down at a smooth walk to minimize the stress on the anchors. But eventually the entire crew was standing on the slope at the base of the cliff.