Vessel (5 page)

Aleks'
face fell a little, and he looked at his desk.

'
I'm sorry you've brought me all this way to hear that, but there's nothing I can do to help you. You'll have to wait for the storm to die down.'

'That's the problem,
' Bales said. Sally looked at him; his narrow eyes were fixed on hers. 'The storm ended more than two days ago. We've had a clear window of communication for over twenty-four hours and there hasn't been a single response to any of our broadcasts.'

Chapter 5

Sally blinked, hearing but not understanding.
'I don't … I don't know what you mean,' she said. 'I mean, I do know what you mean, but I don't know what you need me for?'

That
churning, nauseating anxiousness began tumbling inside her again, and she held the desk to steady herself.

'Are you ok
ay?' Aleks asked.

Sally nodded.
'I'll be fine,' she said, not feeling fine at all.

Bales
placed his hand on her shoulder.

'We wanted you as
an advisor to the ISS crew, to help them figure out how to make contact with UV One, but it's clear that's not going to happen now.' He paused, as if letting his words sink in. 'Sally, we need you to go to the station with one of our astronauts and resume the research yourself.'

'But
,' Sally whispered, her throat tightening, 'can't I do that from here?'

'
The station is in the best location, has the best equipment and offers you the best chance of making contact with UV One,' Bales said. 'I've been told there isn't anyone better suited to this job than you, and right now we can't do with anything less than that. This is a matter of global security. We can't cut corners.'

He
lifted his hand from her shoulder and clasped it together with his other. Aleks' eyes flitted backwards and forwards between them.

'Take some time to think about it,' Bales said, his tanned face breaking into a reassuring smile
that his stern eyes did not mirror.

On the plane, Sally had hoped beyond hope that something like this would happen. She had done for a long time before, too. But now it was here, real, it was the last thing she wanted.
Sitting in the corner of the canteen, clutching a tepid cup of coffee, she stared through the wall and way into the distance. The people around her came and went, some on their own, some in groups talking among themselves, but they registered only as a blur. She had hoped to find solace on her own in the canteen — it was how she worked best, how she cleared her mind. Solitude was who she was and she sought it out, embraced it even. But this — this was on another level. She felt more than alone: she felt
lonely.
She was already far away from home, from the comfort of familiarity, and they wanted to send her even further away. She didn't cry — she never was one for crying — she just felt lost, confused, and desperate to be back where she belonged.

The sound of
chair legs dragging against the floor made her jump, and she looked up. It was Aleks, who placed a steaming cup on the table in front of her.

'I brought you fresh coffee,' he said.

'Did John send you here to try and convince me to go?' Sally asked, staring at the old cup pressed between her palms.

Aleks
sat down next to her. 'No, not at all, nothing like that.'

H
e took a deep breath as though he was going to continue talking, but instead he just sighed a long, loud sigh.

'He'
s my friend you know,' he said after a while. 'Mikhail, that is. Has been for a very long time.'

'You don't think he's coming back?' Sally asked.

Aleks shrugged. 'I don't know. I haven't known what to think since — since
it
showed up.' He looked around the deserted canteen, his face anxious. 'I just want to know what's going on,' he said. 'I want to get some answers. Find out what happened to Mikhail and the others. For all I know this thing could kill us all tomorrow, and I don't want to go without knowing why.' He took a sip of his coffee. 'That's the reason why we — why
you
— are here isn't it? To ask why?'

Sally gave an inward nod
, but outside said and did nothing.

'I don't trust Bales,' Aleks continued,
'and I don't like him either, but for now at least we're on the same team. I
do
trust you, though. I think you could be exactly what we need to sort this whole mess out and find some answers.'

H
e put his cup down on the table and heaved himself to his feet. 'Do whatever you think's right, okay?'

Sally nodded.
'I will.'

Aleks
nodded himself and wandered away, leaving Sally alone with her thoughts.

The next day, with a clear mind, Sally was
able to see things afresh, and her decision was made. It came easier than expected, and when she told Bales, she felt a sense of relief. Before she knew it, she was riding in a helicopter bound for Star City. Also known as
Zvyozdny, Shchyolkovo Fourteen
and
Closed Military Townlet Number One,
Star City was home to the secret cosmonaut training centre,
Military Unit 26266
,
established during the 1960s space race between Soviet Russia and the US
Now called the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre — after the cosmonaut that made Soviet Russia the first power on Earth to put a man in space — and under civil command, it was a thriving town with its own school, shops, post office, cinema, railway station and even museum. Between the old Star City and the new, one thing still remained: its sole reason for existence was to train cosmonauts to cope with the rigours of space. Sally had dreamed of coming to this place since she was a little girl; for her, it was a Mecca of extra-terrestrial exploration and a doorway to the heavens.

The beating blades of the helicopter thumped through
her headphones, and Bales gave her a reassuring nod from the opposite seat. She watched through the glass bubble as the patchwork quilt of green fields slid beneath them, her heart pounding with each revolution of the blades. Clinging on to the dangling handhold, she tried to concentrate her mind on the beauty of the view rather than what was waiting for her at the end of it.

'Not long now,' Bales
' voice came, muted and muffled, over her headset. He tapped his watch to reiterate what he was saying in case it had been lost over the noise. And he was right: a mere minute or so later and the helicopter was descending down among a network of peeling grey buildings stretched out in uniform rows. The immediate skyline was punctured with other, more unusual buildings; in the fleeting moments of the descent, Sally noticed cylinders and domes dotted around the Eastern Bloc monotony.

The pilot laid the s
kids on the concrete and gave Bales a thumbs up. Bales slid open the cabin door and jumped down, waving Sally to follow. She clambered out, letting him push her head down as they both ducked underneath the thundering blades. As soon as they cleared the helicopter's footprint, the pilot wound the engine up to full speed, sucking the metal and glass bird into the sky. Bales led the way. They turned onto what seemed to be the main boulevard, a wide strip lined with trees and tall concrete buildings whose patchy surfaces were weatherworn from many decades of harsh winters. The morning cloud had begun to break, letting in a stream of sunlight that glowed on Sally's back. The warmth made her feel at home, like it was an early Spring morning in California, and she shut her eyes for a few seconds to let the soothing reassurance calm her nerves. Just for a moment all was well as she stepped off the mental rollercoaster that had thrown her here and there ever since the call from NASA.

They walked up to
what looked like an apartment block, and Bales held the door open for her. Inside it was no different to any of the cheap motels Sally had stayed at during her student days: dirty, flaking paint, cheap fixtures, long corridors and a funny — but not unpleasant — smell.

'Let me show you to your room,'
Bales said. He stopped at room twenty-four and opened the door. 'Lunch is at midday in the cafeteria building opposite. Training begins straight after. We've got a window of three weeks before the earliest launch date, and you've got six months of training to get through. It's going to be tough.'

Sally walked into the sparse room and sat on the firm, narrow bed.

'Good luck,' Bales said. 'You'll do just fine.'

And then he was gone
. The one window in the room was open, and a gentle breath of air flowed through, carrying with it the mysterious silence of the centre.

* * *

Over two thousand miles due South-East, in a remote patch in the middle of the hot, acrid desert of rural Baikonur, Kazakhstan, a flurry of activity was taking place under the watchful eye of the Cosmodrome Director. Although the parched landscape stretched out for many hundreds of miles in every direction, visible from space as a muted brown wasteland, the few square miles of his jurisdiction was the unlikely home of the space vehicle Soyuz.

F
ifty metres tall, ten metres wide and three hundred tonnes, the gargantuan evolution of 1960s rocket design was not where it should have been. The Director's schedule dictated that transport to the pad should have started four hours ago, yet the cylindrical craft remained prone in its folded gantry inside the MIK preparation building. Many anxious-faced engineers and scientists swarmed around it, working at a furious pace.

Watching as
the fragile, insect-like cargo was removed from its metal cocoon, it struck the Director — as it did every time he saw it — how incredible it was that such a tiny and delicate object required over one hundred and fifty tonnes of fuel to lift it just two hundred and fifty miles upwards. In the dust-free workshop, its shrink-wrapped foil carcass exposed, it seemed defenceless and frail against an atmosphere it wasn't designed for, a silvery fish rendered useless on dry land. Excess was not a word used in the design of these modules; anything that could be pared back was, leaving only a delicate skeleton behind.

The Director didn'
t have much time for his muses, though. Following a last minute instruction from NASA via the RFSA, the cargo was to be modified. The Soyuz rocket usually carried one of two capsules: the first, also called Soyuz, was a seven-metre-long transport ship made of three sections. At the front was a pressurized sphere two-and-a-half metres in diameter, used as a docking module and storage space for a small amount of cargo. The middle section, shaped like an egg with a flattened bottom, was home to a maximum of three crew for the short journey to the ISS, and was also capable of withstanding the destructive friction of the atmosphere during re-entry. The rearmost section contained instrumentation and propulsion, including two folding solar panels that stretched out on either side like wings.

The capsule he had been instructed to dismantle
was called Progress, an unmanned, automated tug that simply acted as a cargo transport to and from the ISS. It was not designed to cater for life on its trip; it acted as a hollow space to hold the supplies and equipment needed by the station and its crew, lacking the vital middle section of the Soyuz craft in favour of an additional fuel tank for refuelling the ISS.

As a Soyuz capsule was not ready for immediate replacement, the best possible solution was to reconfigure the Progress craft by replacing the second module. The silver sheath was retracted, and the craft deconstructed, ready for its adaptation. The Director reported that the additional workload would delay the launch by
two weeks and four days, pushing it back to three weeks from now. It was going to be tough, but he knew his team could do it.

* * *

'What we intend to do,' the instructor said through a treacle-thick Russian accent, 'is train you in three weeks, what most mission specialists learn in two years.'

'I thought it was normally a six
-month course?' Sally asked.

'Six months is the intensive course.'

Sitting at her desk in the musty classroom, Sally said nothing further, waiting for her new mentor to continue. All of a sudden, the weight of her burden seemed a whole lot heavier.

'This, as you m
ay realise, is an impossibility. We can only teach you what is necessary. You must be prepared.'

The first day was easy: she w
as taken on a tour of an ISS mock-up and shown the basic emergency medical and fire procedures. Then they showed her how the facilities worked, from the bathroom to the galley to the gym. A brief tour of her soon-to-be workplace, the Columbus module, followed. She hoovered up the knowledge and by the time evening rolled in, she was feeling confident about her ability to become space-ready in such a short amount of time.

The next day was
physical training, and with it an early start. Still groggy from sleep, she slipped on one of the provided tracksuits, then left the dormitory. Wandering down the deserted main strip, guided by the first few glimmers of morning, she headed for the gym, building up a quick pace to fight off the chill.

'Have you had breakfast?'
That was the first thing her instructor asked her as she entered the gym.

'No
…' she said. 'Breakfast doesn't agree with me this early in the morning.'

'You need to eat,'
the instructor said, hands on hips. 'You need your strength.'

They warmed up and went for a run around the
centre. Within a hundred metres Sally's lungs felt full of molten lead, and after a hundred more her tracksuit was thick with sweat. Fifteen minutes later, they were back at the gym and Sally collapsed onto a bench, gasping for breath. She wasn't given long to recover before weight training began.