His job was unglamorous, taking care of the routine. His real assignment, he knew, was to be prepared for an emergency, but in the interim there was no end of tasks: vacuuming air filters, calculating garbage dumps, scheduling orbital maintenance burns, and doing preventative upkeep on the ten thousand valves and fans and pumps that kept them alive.
He met Ryan Martin on his fifth ferry trip up to the orbiting laboratory.
Ryan had, at first, seemed to be just another of the scientists: a pony-tailed young man with a growth of facial hair just too short to be called an actual beard. He found Ryan buried in the equipment or taking data or talking with the other scientists; John Radkowski had never been good with people, and it took him a long time to even learn his name. Then it surprised him to find out that he was not one of the scientists at all, but actually one of the Canadian astronauts, on his first mission to the space station. It wasn’t his job to fix the equipment; it wasn’t his job to take data or talk to the scientists. He just liked doing it.
The American space station—it was by name an international space station, but everybody called it American—was not the only space station in orbit.
The Russians had originally been a partner in the American-led space station program, but after the bloody civil war and the war of Kamchatkan independence, they had dropped out. Nobody had ever thought that their space program would ever be resurrected, but, dogged and determined, the Russians had held on. Small, cramped, and perpetually on the verge of breaking down, the Mirusha was built and kept operational—barely—as a matter of national pride. Its name, the “little Mir,” was a tribute to the earlier Mir space station, long since burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Russians did not intend for anybody to forget who had had a space station first. It also meant a little world, appropriate for the tiny cylinder of atmosphere in orbit around the Earth; or with a slight change in pronunciation and spelling, it meant “little Mary,” which was the pet name the Russian cosmonauts unofficially favored.
As it happened, although the Mirusha was at a nearly identical altitude, it had an orbital plane tilted in a different orientation. The laws of orbital mechanics mandated that there is no easy way to change orbital planes. To get to the Mirusha from the international space station required so great an orbital plane change that the easiest way to do it would actually be to return to the Earth and take off again into the new orbit.
So when the news came through the grapevine that the two Russian cosmonauts in the Mirusha were in trouble, that the station was leaking and the Russians had blown up two launch vehicles trying to rescue them, John Radkowski nearly ignored the news. They would be rescued, or not rescued, but the situation, he figured, had nothing to do with the American space station, or with him.
5
Descent
They lowered the rockhopper slowly, with Ryan watching the cables to make sure that they didn’t snag or rub. The cliff was smooth and almost vertical. Even in his Mars suit, Ryan Martin was sweating. Lowering the rover was exacting work, and he was terrified that a frayed cable would let the rover slip, or a miscalculation might let it swing into the rock face.
It took them over an hour to lower the rockhopper two hundred meters to the top of the scree. As soon as they had all six wheels resting on the talus slope, to Ryan’s relief, Commander Radkowski called a break.
Ryan took a deep breath, and then lay flat back on the ground, face upward. It was a relief to stare into the blank flatness of the sky and not worry about a rope snagging and the rover tumbling down the cliff.
After a brief rest, it was time for the crew to begin descending. The rockhopper was still precariously balanced on the talus slope below, with the taut cable holding it from sliding down the slope. “I can tie off the cable to the rockhopper, to free up the winch to start lowering the crew,” Ryan said.
Radkowski shook his head. “Tie it off,” he said, “but we can’t leave the winch behind up here. We’ll rappel down.”
Radkowski got into the harness first and clipped the rappelling brake into it. He checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the harness and the connections, then checked the anchors.
“Those anchors held fine when we lowered down a two-ton rockhopper,” Ryan said. “I think it will hold you.”
“I’m checking it anyway,” Radkowski said. He leaned back, pulled at the superfiber with his full weight. The anchor, unsurprisingly, held up. He clipped a second line to his harness. “On belay,” he said.
Ryan moved to the deployment spool. “On belay,” he replied. He turned and said, “Trevor, watch me on this, you may need to know.”
“I have done rappelling before, you know,” Trevor said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “I don’t think you can teach me anything. It’s easy.”
“Good,” Ryan said. “Have yon used bare superfiber?”
Trevor shrugged, a gesture all but invisible under the suit unless you knew what to look for. “I don’t see how it makes any difference.”
Superfiber ropes were used for rock climbing on Earth, but almost always the superfiber itself was covered in an external woven sheath. The outer coating gave the climbers something to see, and made it less dangerous to handle. “Watch me anyway,” Ryan said. “You can let me know if I do anything wrong.”
“I’m heading down,” Radkowski said. He stood at the edge of the cliff, looked back over his shoulder, and then leaned back over the edge, holding on to the rappel brake with one hand, leaning back farther and farther until he was almost horizontal, and then he matter-of-factly began to walk smoothly backward down the cliff.
6
Dumping Garbage
Each day that he was space station commander, at the end of his shift Radkowski would float through the space station, checking all the seals, verifying that the safety equipment was accessible and that none of the pressure hatches were blocked by cables or equipment. He came across Ryan Martin in the electronics laboratory module. He was working on an electrical breadboard that was connected to a microwave antenna pressed hard against the small external porthole. From the look of it, Ryan had built it himself.
“A C-band transmitter?” Radkowski said. “You have a frequency-control permit for that?”
“Nah,” Ryan said. “Nobody uses those old low-frequency microwave bands but the Russians; a permit would be nothing but paperwork. Anyway, it’s a low-power rig, not good for much but orbit-to-orbit.”
Radkowski liked the young astronaut, but it bothered him when he dismissed management directives so quickly. Who knew what experiments the science crew might be running that could be ruined by unregulated electromagnetic interference? Well, for that matter, Ryan Martin probably did know—he kept up with all the work that the scientists were doing, and seemed to always know what experiment runs were being scheduled when.
Ryan looked at his calculator. “They should be over the horizon any second now.” He powered up his homemade transmitter. “Mirusha, this is Space Station. Mirusha, Space Station. Are you there?”
“Da, Mirusha here.” A heavily accented voice. “This is Martin?”
“Yes, Martin here. How are you holding out down there, buddies?”
“Holding out not so good.”
“Any chance of rescue?”
There was a long pause. “We think not.”