There was a chance for them up here. Some of them, at least.
She had a secret that she had held back from Emily, not wanting to cause her anymore undue distress than the poor girl had already gone through, but now that the Vengeance had shown up, she had new hope.
Mulligan shifted her body and maneuvered herself with practiced skill through the narrow spaces between modules, floating down to the Destiny module. For the third time since she had said good-bye to Emily earlier that day, she repositioned herself in front of the round observation port. Through the window she had a clear view of the rest of the station’s modules. And there it was. Their last and only chance. Locked onto the side of the space station, between the two Heat Rejection Subsystem radiators, was another spacecraft: a single Soyuz-TMA escape vehicle.
The Soyuz-TMA was a specially redesigned version of the Russian spacecraft used to ferry loads, supplies, and crew back and forth to the ISS. But this iteration of the craft had been specifically reengineered by NASA to act as an emergency escape vessel from the ISS. Normally, there were two of these space lifeboats docked with the station, enough to accommodate all of the crew. But just two weeks before the red rain had arrived, a life-threatening injury to an astronaut had proved too much for the medical facilities available at the station, and with no resupply craft scheduled for several months it meant one of the spacecrafts had been used to return the critically ill astronaut back to Earth. No replacement craft had ever arrived.
After the rain came, there seemed little reason to even consider the capsule. The commander and her crew had discussed it, of course, but the single escape pod could accommodate only three astronauts; the remaining would be forced to stay on the ISS, doomed.
The craft was programmed to land on the steppes of Kazakhstan in central Asia, but it was feasible to override that programming and to use the manual guidance system to navigate the spacecraft for the majority of the two-and-a-half-hour trip back to Earth to any location. This latest edition of the Russian craft, while designed specifically to place the astronauts safely on land, did have the capability for a water landing. It could last up to three hours at sea before the crew either were rescued or abandoned it, forced to take to the inflatable emergency life raft.
And right there had been the sticking point for the crew.
Even if they did make it back to Earth safely, with no recovery crew to pick them up, whether they splashed down in the middle of the ocean or managed to survive a landing somewhere in that strange spread of red that now covered the majority of land, they would still face almost certain death.
Her crew had chosen to remain together.
Emily, she was such a sweet girl, so strong, but she had faced her own trials and problems, so Commander Mulligan had chosen not to tell her about the one escape route they had. There had been no reason to trouble her even more than she already was, but with the arrival of the Vengeance and its crew, there was a chance for half of her crew to escape.
When she got off the radio with Emily and Jacob she had immediately called her crew together and told them the news.
There had been arguments about who should go and who would stay. Her crew, as always, had made her proud, each volunteering to remain behind, insisting that someone else should take one of the three precious seats available, but eventually, they had resorted to the time-tested short-straw pick. And, with only one spot left, it had come down to herself and Muranov, the Ukrainian astrochemist, and two straws (actually, plastic toothpicks). Muranov had drawn the short one.
The commander had insisted that the Ukrainian take her place on the Soyuz, but he had refused.
“My family is gone,” he said in his heavily accented English. “I stay here, join them when I am ready.”
And so it was settled; they had a way off of the station and back to Earth. Now all she needed to do was persuade Captain Constantine that the three of them were worth risking his crew and craft to collect.
CHAPTER 7
They began work on repairing the submarine that very same day, right around the time the first of the most seriously injured crew was back up and on his feet, to cheers from his remaining, still less badly injured colleagues. His name was Parsons and he was the Chief Engineer for the boat. Emily assumed he had a first name, but nobody ever seemed to use it. Hell, for all she knew Parsons could be his first name. After a quick meeting with the captain, he emerged from the office and immediately rousted up three of his men, flexing his burn-scarred hands.
The fire had gutted several areas before the crew had managed to get it under control, and, while those areas had been destroyed beyond repair, a preliminary survey by Parsons showed there was no permanent damage to any of the submarine’s critical navigation, weapons, or propulsion systems. The real problem was the smoke damage. It was everywhere. With such a severely diminished crew onboard to fight the fire, watertight doors that should have been closed had remained wide open and the smoke had quickly penetrated throughout the boat, coating everything in a sticky black tar that gunked up controls and obscured vital computer screens. It was all going to have to be cleaned off before the craft was seaworthy again.
Parsons was a short, gruff Welshman with a thick beard and a habit of yelling at anyone beneath his rank, and occasionally, a few above him. He reminded Emily of the belligerent dwarf from The Lord of the Rings movies, but he had developed a soft spot for Rhiannon during his recuperation and would slip the little girl chocolate bars from a private stash he kept in his cabin. He had taken to calling her his little cariad, which he said was Welsh for love.
The cleanup took just under a week to complete. The Vengeance had to undergo a seaworthiness test, and then, if everything was “shipshape and Bristol fashion,” as Captain Constantine put it, they would be ready to leave at a few hours’ notice.
“We’re just going to take her for a short jaunt out to sea, make sure there are no holes or leaks,” said the captain straight-faced. “Would you like to come along?”
Emily laughed. “I think I’ll take a rain check until you’re sure the submarine’s not going to spring a leak and sink.”
“Oh, but that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do,” said the captain, smiling broadly this time. “Sinking is what that sub does best.”
CHAPTER 8
Hours later Captain Constantine and his selected crew members returned from the sub’s test run and met with the rest of his crew in their quarters. The boat had a few minor kinks that needed to be ironed out but otherwise she was seaworthy, he explained, to a rousing cheer from the assembled men.
“She’s ready to put to sea whenever we are,” Parsons added. “So you lazy buggers had better not get used to this cushy life or you’ll have me to answer to.”
There was a smattering of laughter at the comment, but Emily wasn’t sure Parsons was joking.
“And that leads me to the next item, and why I’ve invited our hosts to join us in this meeting.” The captain gestured to Emily, Rhiannon, and Jacob sitting at the table across from the crew who were either standing or sitting on one of the now unoccupied hospital beds.
“I don’t need to tell any of you that our situation would have been far more… uncomfortable, if it had not been for the kindness shown by our new friends, and for which I would like to officially thank you on behalf of both myself and my crew.”