Burning Chrome
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Next page Workers of the world.... "You must tell them that I need it," he said, pinching his shrunken wrist, "in my very bones." She embraced him and slipped away. He waited alone in the docking sphere. The silence scratched away at his nerves; the systems crash had deactivated the ventilation system, whose hum he'd liv- ed with for twenty years. At last he heard Tatjana's Soyuz disengage. Someone was coming down the corridor. It was Yefremov, moving clumsily in a vacuum suit. Korolev smiled. Yefremov wore his bland, official mask behind the Lexan faceplate, but he avoided meeting Korolev's eyes as he passed. He was heading for the gun room. "No!" Korolev shouted. The Klaxon blared the station's call to full battle alert. The gun-room hatch was open when he reached it. Inside, the soldiers were moving jerkily in the galvan- ized reflex of constant drill, yanking the broad straps of their console seats across the chests of their bulky suits. "Don't do it!" He clawed at the stiff accordion fabric of Yefremov's suit. One of the accelerators powered up with a staccato whine. On a tracking screen, green cross hairs closed in on a red dot. Yefremov removed his helmet. Calmly, with no change in his expression, he backhanded Korolev with the helmet. "Make them stop!" Korolev sobbed. The walls shook as a beam cut loose with the sound of a cracking whip. "Your wife, Yefremov! She's out there!" "Outside, Colonel." Yefremov grabbed Korolev's arthritic hand and squeezed. Korolev screamed. "Out- side." A gloved fist struck him in the chest. Korolev pounded helplessly on the vacuum suit as he was shoved out into the corridor. "Even I, Colonel, dare not come between the Red Army and its orders." Yefremov looked sick now; the mask had crumbled. "Fine sport," he said. "Wait here until it's over." Then Tatjana's Soyuz struck the beam installation and the barracks ring. In a split-second daguerreotype of raw sunlight, Korolev saw the gun room wrinkle and collapse like a beer can crushed under a boot; he saw the decapitated torso of a soldier spinning away from a con- sole; he saw Yefremov try to speak, his hair streaming upright as vacuum tore the air in his suit out through his open helmet ring. Fine twin streams of blood arced from Korolev's nostrils, the roar of escaping air re- placed by a deeper roaring in his head. The last thing Korolev remembered hearing was the hatch door slamming shut. When he woke, he woke to darkness, to pulsing agony behind his eyes, remembering old lectures. This was as great a danger as the blowout itself, nitrogen bubbling through the blood to strike with white-hot, crippling pain... But it was all so remote, so academic, really. He turned the wheels of the hatches out of some strange sense of noblesse oblige, nothing more. The labor was quite onerous, and he wished very much to return to the museum and sleep. He could repair the leaks with caulk, but the systems crash was beyond him. He had Glushko's garden. With the vegetables and algae, he wouldn't starve or smother. The communications module had gone with the gun room and the barracks ring, sheared from the station by the impact of Tatjana's suicidal Soyuz. He assumed that the collision had perturbed Kosmograd's orbit, but he had no way of predicting the hour of the station's final incandescent meeting with the upper atmosphere. He was often ill now, and he often thought that he might die before burnout, which disturbed him. He spent uncounted hours screening the museum's library of tapes. A fitting pursuit for the Last Man in Space who had once been the First Man on Mars. He became obsessed with the icon of Gagarin, endlessly rerunning the grainy television images of the Sixties, the newsreels that led so unalterably to the cosmonaut's death. The stale air of Kosmograd swam with the spirits of martyrs. Gagarin, the first Salyut crew, the Americans roasted alive in their squat Apollo... Often he dreamed of Tatjana, the look in her eyes like the look he'd imagined in the eyes of the museum's portraits. And once he woke, or dreamed he woke, in the Salyut where she had slept, to find himself in his old uniform, with a battery-powered work light strapped across his forehead. From a great distance, as though he watched a newsreel on the museum's monitor, he saw himself rip the Star of the Tsiolkovsky Order from his pocket and staple it to her pilot's certificate. When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well. The hatch wheeled open. In the bluish, flickering light from the old film, he saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head. She wore goggles, a silk aviator's scarf twisting behind her in free fall. "Andy," she said in English, "you better come see this!" A small, muscular man, nearly bald, and wearing only a jockstrap and a jangling toolbelt, floated up behind her and peered in. "Is he alive?" "Of course I am alive," said Korolev in slightly ac- cented English. The man called Andy sailed in over her head. "You okay, Jack?" His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. "We weren't expecting anybody." "Neither was I," said Korolev, blinking. "We've come to live here," said the woman, drift- ing closer. "We're from the balloons. Squatters, I guess you could say. Heard the place was empty. You know the orbit's decaying on this thing?" The man executed a clumsy midair somersault, the tools clattering on his belt. "This free fall's outrageous." "God," said the woman, "I just can't get used to it! It's wonderful. It's like skydiving, but there's no wind." Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth. "But you don't even have a launchpad," he said. "Launchpad?" the man said, laughing. "What we do, we haul these surplus booster engines up the cables to the balloons, drop `em, and fire `em in midair." "That's insane," Korolev said. "Got us here, didn't it?" Korolev nodded. If this was all a dream, it was a very peculiar one. "I am Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Koro- 1ev." "Mars!" The woman clapped her hands. "Wait'll the kids hear that." She plucked the little Lunokhod moon-rover model from the bulkhead and began to wind it. "Hey," the man said, "I gotta work. We got a bunch of boosters outside. We gotta lift this thing before it starts burning." Something clanged against the hull. Kosmograd rang with the impact. "That'll be Tulsa," Andy said, consulting a wristwatch. "Right on time." "But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply con- fused. "Why have you come?" "We told you. To live here. We can enlarge this thing, maybe build more. They said we'd never make it living in the balloons, but we were the only ones who could make them work. It was our one chance to get out here on our own. Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier want it in your bones, right?" Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back. "We grabbed those power cables and just pulled ourselves straight up. And when you get to the top, well, man, you either make that big jump or else you rot there." His voice rose. "And you don't look back, no sir! We've made that jump, and we're here to stay!" The woman placed the model's Velcro wheels against the curved wall and released it. It went scooting along above their heads, whirring merrily. "Isn't that cute? The kids are just going to love it." Korolev stared into Andy's eyes. Kosmograd rang again, jarring the little Lunokhod model onto a new course. "East Los Angeles," the woman said. "That's the one with the kids in it." She took off her goggles, and Korolev saw her eyes brimming over with a wonderful lunacy. "Well," said Andy, rattling his toolbelt, "you feel like showing us around?" New Rose Hotel Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I can almost feel it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag, run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes. Fox is dead now, Sandii. Fox told me to forget you. I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different spheres of influence, in- ternal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational corpora- tions that control entire economies. I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ven- tures into intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox's grail, |
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