Gardner sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s not like that. It’s just… it’s just that I don’t want to get caught up in a wild goose chase and end up like these guys.’
‘Wild goose chase?’ Sally repeated, incredulous. ‘You’ve seen UV One with your own eyes. You know it’s real.’
‘I know, but what’s happening to our crazy new friends isn’t going on out there,’ he said, pointing towards the MLM. He then pointed at his own head. ‘It’s in here.’
A noise from the other end of the module made Sally turn and look. It was Novitskiy. How much had he heard? Not too much, she hoped.
‘Morning,’ she tried to say in a cheery way, but her voice ended up as an unnatural squeal instead.
‘And to you,’ Novitskiy replied. His grin was absent. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes,’ Sally and Gardner said at the same time.
‘Good.’
He floated up alongside them. His face seemed to have aged decades without the smile tightening the lines of his cheeks and jaw.
‘I want to apologise,’ he said, ‘for not being forthright with you about Romanenko.’ He scratched his beard, eyes unfocussed. ‘Let it be said that he was a good man. A great man, in fact. But for some too much is just too much.’
Sally looked at Gardner, whose face was blank, like he didn’t know what to think. Novitskiy’s smile re-appeared, but it was heavy with sadness. His bushy black eyebrows upturned, making his eyes sparkle with regret.
‘He hadn’t been able to cope with it, with being here. I should have done more to help him, but I just didn’t think to.’ He stopped talking, his face flushed. He looked to the floor and sniffed a wet sniff. ‘He didn’t deserve this — none of us did,’ he said, still looking at the floor. He sniffed again, and when he looked up, his eyelids bulged with weightless tears. ‘Excuse me, I have to go,’ he said, and he turned and left, swimming through the module and out of sight.
Chapter 13
‘Hi, David, Sean here. Have you managed to dig up any more information with that card?’
Sean waited, mobile phone pressed against his ear, while David proceeded to knock over a pile of something loud.
‘Sean — I’ve hit a dead-end. This thing is seriously well protected. I can’t get anything off it, I can’t use it with anything — this is proper homeland security level stuff. To be honest, I’m not comfortable playing with it any more.’
Sean swore to himself and took a second to recompose. ‘No worries, thanks for trying. I’ll come and get it off you now if that’s okay?’
‘That’s fine. And Sean?’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any more help. I know how much this means to you.’
David really was a good egg. Sean smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Okay. Bye then.’
‘See you soon.’
Sean hung up the call and tossed the phone on the bed. He leaned back in his chair, cradling his head in his hands, cursing the cul-de-sac he seemed to have wandered down. He had tackled some difficult stories before, but this — this took the biscuit.
‘What am I going to do now?’ he said to himself, watching through his hotel window as yet another aircraft thundered overhead. Easing himself up from the chair, he shuffled to the bathroom, unbuckling his belt on the way. As he sat on the toilet, a familiar digital chiming chirped in through the doorway.
‘God damn it…’ he muttered through gritted teeth, wrestling his trousers up again and stumbling back into the bedroom. He picked up the phone: unknown number. Frowning, he put it to his ear.
‘Hello?’ he said, answering in a cautious voice.
‘Is that Sean Jacob?’ a Russian accent replied.
‘Who’s asking?’
‘My name is Aleksandar Dezhurov. I work — worked, I mean — with Lev Ryumin. He gave me your card. I was hoping that I could talk to you about — well, you know.’
Sean’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Sure, of course.’
‘Where shall we meet?’
‘Can you get to the Novotel hotel next to Sheremetyevo airport’ — he needed time to get the card back first — ‘in, say, four hours?’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘This has been given a proper going over,’ Sally said, looking in disbelief at the brutalised wiring that made up what was left of the communications system. ‘Long range comms are shot, short range comms are shot — even the inter-module comms are shot.’
‘There’s nothing you can do?’ Gardner asked.
‘Not a thing. There isn’t a component here that hasn’t been trashed.’ She probed inside with an insulated rod, re-examining the extent of the damage, and shook her head. ‘I wonder why Romanenko did this?’ she muttered.
‘I’ll be damned if I know,’ Novitskiy said. ‘Chris and I discovered the damage when we tried to radio him after he’d taken Soyuz. Perhaps he didn’t want us to contact him. Is there any way we can use the communications module on board Progress? That should still be working, yes?’
‘Progress is decompressed,’ Gardner replied. ‘Seal failure. We’d need to make some repairs before we could use it again. Chris is an engineer, isn’t he? He’d probably know how to repair Progress.’
Novitskiy pulled back as though he’d been shocked by the exposed wiring. ‘Ahhh, I don’t know…’ he said, crinkling up his face. ‘He’s very delicate at the moment. I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
‘Do we have any other choice?’ Sally asked.
She and Gardner looked at Novitskiy, who opened his mouth, then shut it again.
‘I suppose not,’ he said.
‘Great. I’ll go and talk to Chris,’ Gardner said. ‘You never know, it might be good for him to have something to focus on. Oh, and Sally — do you feel up to starting your research on UV One? That’s why we’re here, after all.’
‘Yeah, I think so. I’ll have to make do with the equipment on Columbus what with this lot being out though,’ she said, gesturing to the bird’s nest of severed cables.
‘As long as you’re sure. It’s fine if you want to take a day out to recover.’
‘I’ll be okay. Like Chris, I probably need the distraction.’
Silent nods all round confirmed agreement. Gardner and Novitskiy floated away to the MLM to talk to Chris, while Sally headed to the Columbus module to begin her research. On her own, she noticed how quiet the station was. Yes, there was a constant low-level hum from the air extraction vents, but the silence of space seemed to permeate through it, mask it somehow. She was certain it was just her mind playing tricks on her, the very knowledge of being in space making her awareness so acute. That didn’t stop it being unnerving, though.
As she perused the equipment on offer — and there was a lot of it, from floor to ceiling and left to right — she could hear voices getting louder. They were talking to each other, varying intonations passing a verbal ball back and forth, muffled by the many twists and turns between them and her. The voices got almost loud enough for her make out the conversation they shared, but before they did, they faded again into a muted burble. Gardner and Novitskiy must have persuaded Chris to come and help them.
Now Sally knew the MLM was empty, she felt an urge to go and look out the rear-facing window again. It was a silly thing to want to do, she knew that — after all, what possible benefit would looking at UV One bring over the quantifiable results of scientific equipment? But still, she wanted — almost needed — to go.
Oh, what the heck… she thought, and dusted off into the main shaft of the station. As she slid towards the Russian section, the voices grew louder again, peaking as she flew past the junction with MRM One where Progress was docked. She shot into the FGB module, excitement pounding in her chest, and changed direction with a clumsy roll down into the MLM. It was dark at its end, darker than before, and as she tumbled to a stop she realised the window covering was down. A small crank underneath the window with directional arrows marked in Russian seemed the obvious way to open it again. Sally turned the crank and sure enough the covering retracted. She blinked as the stunning bright glow of Earth’s multi-coloured surface shot in through the growing gap, and by the time her eyes had readjusted, the crank had reached its stop.