Ravenous Dusk (61 page)

It was neither a joke nor a test, though in the ordeal of launch from Baikonur on Halloween, he asked God repeatedly if it was not both. In the ensuing months aboard
Mir
, he'd had plenty of time, when he wasn't helping to repair some critically failing system, to wonder what he was doing here. With only Arkady and Ilya for company, with none of the fame and media attention that America lavished on its astronauts, lukewarm though it was in the shuttle era, he'd had only his assignment to keep him focused—observing and recording a phenomenon for which he still had no explanation. When the leaden-voiced taskmasters on the ground received his data, they offered no advice, no reaction. When the day of their scheduled return came and went without any sign of a shuttle, they offered only the location of a secret cache of "psychological support rations"— plastic bags of vodka—in lieu of an explanation. That was a week ago.

It was a joke indeed, on him, on space travel, and on science itself.

An hour later, Arkady called them back to the command center. Moxley watched from the telescope in the Priroda science module, but all he could see was the ass-end of the Russian space-plane, its thrusters blazing full-tilt, then shutting off, attitude jets along the flattened fuselage venting plumes of gas like escaping atmosphere.

The Russians had canned their Buran shuttle program in 1991 after only one test flight, but he once heard that they tested a low orbit space-plane in the early Eighties as an interceptor for the American space shuttle. The program was discontinued after the
Challenger
disaster caused NASA to abandon Vandenberg, rendering the interceptor unfeasible. Obviously, the paranoid fuckers never stopped testing, because the BOR space-plane he was looking at was far in advance of anything even on the drawing boards at NASA.

And nobody knew it was up here.

The space-planes were delivered into orbit by hypersonic aircraft, not rockets, so its launch probably would have gone unnoticed. He looked down at the darkened earth, a looming wall of azure and moon-chased, lacy rosettes of maritime storm. They were over Africa, bearing northeast in a night-cycle orbit. If memory served, they wouldn't come over a radar station capable of picking them up for another few hours. Were the United States and Russia at war? Did the United States even know, yet? In the last six weeks, he'd gotten to see the cosmonauts at their worst, raging at the ground and at
Mir
and often at him. But they weren't pissed at him. They were confused and scared. Arkady said it wasn't ours anymore. What the hell did that mean?

The terminator raced across the face of the earth like a cosmic brushfire, an effect that never failed to still Moxley's racing mind and lift him outside himself. Even now, he had only to watch the world light up like the eye of God awakening to their presence, and none of it mattered quite so much.

Moxley was a devout Christian who had yet to find a rigorous enough faith that would accept the wonders science had revealed about the universe—evolution, genetics, quantum theory, the possibility of extraterrestrial life. To take as literal gospel a book that so many cabals of zealots, Papal censors and conniving monarchs had raped and mutilated for their own ends was sheer foolishness. Would it be such a blow to God, to deny that He created the Heavens ten billion years ago, and the Earth and the Sun five billion years later, and then set into motion the self-perpetuating process of life and consciousness? Moxley believed that it was a sinful act to reduce God to the level of a poorly conceived character in a shoddily written book, and deny Him the genius to have set the universe in motion to grow and change and know itself, as it grew to love and understand its Creator. No matter how big, or how old, science made the universe, outside it all, waiting for them, was God.

Up here, he could feel God looking at him, and seeing that what they were doing was good. In this place, in defiance of all the laws of nature, humans reached out to other worlds as their remotest ancestors reached out when they crawled onto land for the first time and breathed with the first lungs. This was evolution he was witnessing, and he knew in his heart at moments like this that it was what God wanted.

When he heard Arkady shouting, he raced back to the command center and watched the grainy feed from the shuttle-cam.

Ilya and the commander sat before the monitors. Neither of them looked up when he swam in, but Ilya waved him over. "Come and see this, Sherman."

He crowded in behind the cosmonauts and stared into the main screen, but he had a difficult time resolving what he saw with what could possibly be out there.

"They found it, I think," Ilya said. Arkady scratched at his face and stared, mute, unblinking.

Devoid of perspective up there in the dark, it looked like a flashlight. It was a tapered black cylinder with a cone-shaped protrusion at one end. Filling the view from the ascending space-plane, the object leapt into stark relief as the terminator splashed across it. The sunlight brought out its texture, which was only half metal.

It had solar collectors like
Mir
, great, razor-edged sails that radiated out like the petals of a daisy from the blunt end opposite the cone. But they were unmistakably organic, translucent, fleshy constructs that looked like a hybrid of flower petals and bat wings.

The body of the satellite was flat black metal plate which deflected the raw rays of the sun away from itself. But between the plates, like protoplasmic mortar, a web of shifting organic matter—one could be no more specific than that—crawled and seethed, as if the body of the satellite only barely contained something alive.

The picture shuddered and flickered, went to snow for a moment. Arkady snarled and pounded on the monitor, but the picture snapped back on its own. A swiftly shrinking object left the space-plane at such velocity that the camera recorded it only as a trail, and hurtled at the satellite at better than four kilometers per second.

It vanished quite suddenly, but the satellite seemed to have an eternity to move out of its path. A full second. They were still eight miles away from it. Moxley gasped. The resolution on the video had lied to him. It was enormous, at least forty feet in length, not counting the vast organic appendages growing out of it, which grew and splayed themselves out like a net for the oncoming plane.

Attitude jets all down the satellite's sides ejected clouds of cool, inert gas to swing it clear of the projectile. One membranous solar petal ripped away, and the satellite tumbled end over end.

The space-plane banked and soared over the satellite, then dove, rolled and came up under it.

Afforded this uncomfortably close view, Moxley found it harder to deny that it was a coherent animal lifeform, but it was also a working machine whose purpose he could not begin to guess.

The narrow end contained a lens, about five feet across. The remaining solar fans retracted into the body, and more and more tentacles slithered out of the cracks in the metal to flail at the void.

The cone-shaped end was about ten feet in length, and looked like a closed night-blooming flower, with tightly folded petals made of aluminum girders and some kind of glass or crystal. It did something ugly, Moxley thought, something unholy, to the sunlight. A strange, twisted corona played around the cone that utterly baffled the video camera.

The audio feed crackled. "Commander Zamyatin, Dr. Moxley, you have vodka aboard
Mir
, no? We will be thirsty, this after…"

The rail gun fired.

The satellite opened like a flower. Its collection lens was turned to face the sun.

With another burst of gas, the satellite simply wasn't there when the projectile flashed past it. Its orientation was off, so that when the open flower faced the camera, the effect was dazzling, and not blinding.

The radial symmetry of the flower-lens was hypnotic in its complexity, so much so that Moxley knew it had not been built, so much as grown. It was a weapon, but something happened to it up here. Something had grown inside it, and made it its own—not merely as a weapon, but as a body, for its evasion was not the product of programming or a joystick-wielding ops controller on the ground. It was a live thing, as well as a machine, and it was smarter than them.

The lens-petals shed an intensifying glow of hideous force, amplifying the sunlight, but also perverting it. This was what he'd seen all those times, all those baffling astrophysical events that, at the time, he'd thought were merely strange and beautiful.

The satellite rolled again as the glow blanked out most of the screen.

"What's it doing?" Moxley babbled. "It's not going to hit them—"

"Idiot!" Arkady snapped. "It's not aiming at them!"

Moxley had a second to process this when the core module filled with silvery blue light like the other eye of God looking at him, and turning him to salt.

Blue-white light became glittering purple blackness. The only light source was the moonlight peeking in through the windows in the inert core module. The command center was off-line. The oxygen generators were silent. Moxley felt a bulkhead against his back, but none of the subtle, eternal thrumming of the complex of life support and information systems that had become as familiar to him as his own pulse.
Mir
was dead.

Moxley felt as if he were dying inside, too. His bowels and brains ached as if someone had run them through a taffy puller. His eyes and skin burned, and his muscles were as tender as wet rice paper. His teeth felt like they were going to fall out of his head.

He tried and tried, but he couldn't remember it, the moment that God had touched them. No offense intended, he knew it was, in the end, only some kind of awful machine, but it had the transcendent aura of religious ecstasy. He knew they'd been microwaved by something far more awful in its destructive power than any laser platform the Pentagon ever fantasized about, but he couldn't shake the free-floating mantle of joy that seized him in those odd moments when he forgot to be terrified.

Perhaps it was the voice, which, aside from the light itself, was all he could remember. It was like all the voices of all the peoples of earth, speaking all the words of every language in the same infinitely recycled instant, their voices growing louder and louder, even as they became one voice.

Moxley gingerly probed the dark in front of him. Arkady and Ilya had each done two other turns on
Mir
. They would be somewhere on the station, bringing the systems back online, restoring power and communications. The Russians had a plan for this kind of unprecedented event. He remembered that he'd heard them talking about it. What did they call it? Oh yeah, the Coffin Scenario.

His hand passed through something wet and warm that he hoped was only someone's floating vomit, then he touched fabric and flesh just above his head.

Arkady groaned, and the meat under Moxley's fingers convulsed and kicked at him. A knee smashed his nose, which splattered like a tomato, and the commander seemed to go mad. Screaming in Russian, he lashed out at the walls, sending equipment of every description ricocheting around the module. Something small but heavy dented Moxley's forehead as he dove for cover in what he hoped was the direction of the node.

"Arkady, stop it!" he shouted, but his voice was a rasping croak. When he breathed, his lungs seemed to fill with foam, and when he coughed he could see the venous network of his eyelids emblazoned on the dark. Fluid gushed out of his nose and mouth, his ears and asshole.

Where the hell was Ilya?

In the node, he blundered headfirst into a sheet of floating coolant globules. He inhaled a bunch. Ethylene glycol, the nasty green shit that goes in radiators. He choked and vomited again, rolling through the coolant cloud and hitting the curved wall hard enough to drive the rest of the coolant from his lungs, but mercifully cushioned by a Gordian tangle of hoses and cords. He clung to them and tried to get his bearings.

He had to get to the ham radio in Spektr module, it was battery-powered—but whom would he call? Even if he could reach someone, the Russians were up here waging war on an American-made satellite. Why the hell hadn't they been told anything? Why the hell were they still up here?

Screw the radio. He had to get Ilya to help with Arkady, and they had to get in the Soyuz capsule. Abandon ship. He wondered if they could do it. He felt so sick, and the commander had clearly gone into shock, if not out of his mind. Even at their best, on a secret mission, they would almost rather die than abandon the decrepit old deathtrap. He hoped Ilya was fixing whatever had gone wrong. He had studied
Mir
's systems at Star City for three months, and followed the space station avidly on the Internet for years, but the cosmonauts hadn't let him participate in most of the desperate toil required just to keep
Mir
alive, so he didn't have any idea where Ilya could be. If only he weren't so sick, if only the lights—

The lights flickered on. The Elektron oxygen generators gurgled and spat air. The whole station rocked like a boat leaving harbor, slowly subsiding into its normal rhythm.

"Alright, Ilya!" he croaked. "Ilya?"

He tried to remember the Coffin Scenario protocols. They called for rounding up all the stored batteries on the station, cumbersome blocks sealed up in the floor and buried under years of clutter. All of them had to be brought to the core module and wired to the solar arrays to be recharged. The Sirius
Mir
23 crew in 1997 had to do it, and the whole process took several hours, and the station's systems weren't up to full again for two days. So it wasn't a full power failure, but a simple computer glitch, the kind of thing the Russians said happened all the time, and usually fixed itself.

Everything was back to normal.

He laughed, but gagged on the slime of ethylene glycol coating his tongue. His eyes burned, frying in his head like eggs. His brain was still spinning, even more panicked now that the lights were on, and he could see how normal things weren't.