Paragaea (2 page)

Leena gritted her teeth, anticipating a jarring impact. She closed her eyes and felt a wave of unease flood over her. There came no jolt or bang, nothing to indicate the object had struck her craft.

Tentatively, Leena opened her eyes. Through the viewport, the mirrored sphere was nowhere to be seen. What she did see, however, was impossible.

Where before there'd been only the gray sand dunes of the Mediterranean with the southern edge of Turkey just visible on the horizon, she now saw mountains surrounded by lush green forests, blue ribbons of rivers slipping down to the seas, tan deserts stretching out across the far distance.

Leena knew her geography. She'd studied the projected path of Vostok 7 in its orbits until she could have drawn maps of the continents from memory, had pored over the photos snapped by the earlier
cosmonauts until they painted her dreams, and at no point, in all of those months and years of work, had she ever seen anything like the vista stretching out before her.

Wherever she was, whatever had just happened, she was no longer orbiting the Earth she knew.

The whisper of static bled from the speakers in her helmet, no voice from the ground station calling alarms or the all-clear, but Leena hardly noticed. She didn't have the luxury of confusion, no time to stop and reflect on the impossible situation in which she found herself. With unfamiliar vistas stretching out below, the Vostok module began slowly to rotate out of true, falling out of orbit toward the strange planet below.

Below her on the cabin floor, just visible past the edge of her helmet's visor, the eight ports of the Vzor periscope device flashed the story of Leena's coming doom. When the craft's attitude was positioned correctly, the module centered perfectly with respect to the planet's horizon, all eight ports would be lit, the sun's light reflected through an elaborate mechanism worked into the hull of the sphere.

As Leena watched in growing horror, the ports began to wink out and go dark: first one, then three, then six. Then, as the rotational force dragged at her insides like a fist, the ports lit again, then grew dark,
then lit, strobing in increasing frequency as the module began to spin faster and faster.

There followed a faint tolling, like distant bells, the automated onboard systems indicating a rapid increase in velocity and drop in altitude. A high-pitched scream began, at the edge of hearing, the upper reaches of the atmosphere clawing at the surface of the module as the craft dipped ever lower towards the planet's surface.

The temperature within the cabin started to climb, and even nestled within her insulated SK-1 pressure suit Leena began to feel the heat.

Leena would have cursed if she'd had the chance, would have screamed herself red with rage at the injustice of it, but this was another luxury she could not afford herself. She would have to do something, there being no one now who could help her, or in very short order she would be dead.

The controls of the Vostok module were all set to automatic by default, any necessary course changes controlled remotely by technicians on the ground in Baikonur. The chief designer had been concerned since the beginning about the fallibility of those chosen for service in the Cosmonaut Corps, and had put as many safeguards between the effectiveness of an operation and the potential breakdown of the cosmonaut as possible. The authorities had relented, though, in the face of continued opposition from the cosmonauts themselves, by allowing manual control in emergency situations.

This situation was an emergency, if any could be, so Leena had no compunctions against initiating the appropriate protocols.

Unfortunate, then, that the combination needed to unlock the manual controls was transcribed on a slip of paper in an envelope kept safely in a zippered pocket on her left thigh. Unfortunate in that the rotational forces whipping the module ever faster had left Leena feeling too sick even to blink, her arms pinioned against the walls of the cabin as securely as if they'd been glued there.

The manual controls, just centimeters away, would allow Leena to
fire the attitude rockets, stop the maddening spinning of the craft, and eject the service module in preparation of ballistic reentry. With too much longer a delay, the craft would descend too far into the atmosphere for the rockets to be of any use, and with the service module still attached to the reentry sphere the whole of the craft would burn to a cinder in the resulting friction.

The fire would finally have her, at long last.

Unable to move, vision swimming and stomach in revolt, Leena plummeted to her doom.

She was going to die; she was dying; she would be dead, her life ended—burned down to particulate matter at the heart of a cold steel sphere, to rain down as dust and ash on the surface of an unknown world. She would die with questions left unanswered, left even unasked, mysteries she would never solve: Where was she, and what had brought her here?

The curiosity that had led her from Stalingrad to Moscow to university, then sustained her through years in military service, then driven her to excel when first selected for the cosmonaut program, burned within her hotter than the red tongues that now licked the outer surface of the module. In a sense, Leena had been an explorer since childhood, blazing a trail alone through a strange and hostile world since the day the firebomb had taken away her parents. Now, a whole new world of discovery before her, the thought of surrendering to the doom that had dogged her heels was unacceptable. Whatever the cost, whatever the risk, she would survive. She simply had to know.

The module was now spinning on three axes, the rotational forces pinning Leena to the inner surface of the module. Her hands and arms were unable to move more than a few centimeters; her head was forced to one side with her ear pressing hard against the helmet's lining.
Metal clamps on the floor of the cabin held her booted feet in place, but Leena felt the centrifugal pull working against them, dragging her knees up and towards her chest.

If her left boot could be worked free, the force of the rotation would be enough to bring her left knee up almost to her breast, the zippered pocket on her thigh only centimeters from her left hand. The inside of the module was growing hotter still, hazing like the air over hot desert sands. If Leena was going to act, she would have do it now.

To release the clamps on her boots, without her hands free to aid in the process, Leena had to force her feet down and forward, and then pull up at her heel. Opposite the forces pulling her body the other direction, with her weight feeling as though it doubled with every centimeter she moved, she inched her painful way towards her goal. Drawing on her last reserves of energy, Leena managed to work her booted foot fractionally forward in the clamp. Centimeters like kilometers, eyes closed against the maddening gyrations of the craft, she crossed the small distance.

Leena's skin began to prickle, an instant sunburn spreading over her like scalding water. With teeth gritted she managed to angle her heel up the slightest fraction of a centimeter. That centimeter was all it took. As soon as the grip of the clamp was loosened, the rotational forces pulled her foot away from the cabin floor like a rocket, her knee forced up and slamming into her sternum with a thud.

Knocked breathless, Leena could not afford elation. With every passing second the craft spun faster, hotter, and nearer disintegration.

The fingers of her left hand were bare centimeters from the pocket on her thigh, now forced against her abdomen. Once the envelope was free, she'd have to mangle the contents out, read the combination, reach nearly thirty centimeters along the wall to her right and unlock the emergency controls, then manually fire the braking and attitude rockets.

Seconds to go, and she'd only come a fraction of the way.

Straining, her mind and will almost to the breaking point, Leena fell into a kind of fugue. With one portion of her being concentrating on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else, another smaller part of her conscious mind walled itself away, seeing events unfold as a detached observer. Like watching an actress in a play, Leena saw herself struggle against the bonds of force to wrest the envelope from her pocket, watched the mad fumble as she brought hands together from left and right to tear and claw at the envelope's seal, watched herself fighting to lift her head forward far enough to read the combination typewritten on the paper clutched in a vise grip in her hands.

Throughout it all, watching herself slowly dying, Leena could only think how sad it was that there would be no one back at home to mourn her. A plaque somewhere, perhaps, if she was lucky; a cryptic and official notation in the government files back in Moscow if she was not. But no statues, no parades to the glorious dead. Those back in Baikonur would not know how she had died, only that she was dead, and the grand work would continue, the march into the future of the Soviet Man continuing without her.

As Leena watched herself batter at the combination tumbler, spinning the last number into place, she was strangely disappointed. She had been quite involved with imagining her own funeral in absentia, and now plans would have to be delayed.

Her last erg of motivation draining, Leena stabbed at the switch that initiated the braking procedure.

She slammed forward in her harness, thrown towards the center of the module, as the braking rocket fired. The g-load reversed, then increased, the straps biting into the fabric of her pressure suit, bruising her skin. The rotations of the module increased, and then after forty seconds of thrust the rockets petered out. With a resounding bang, the service module broke free, and the reentry module continued its descent.

The module began again to spin, this time back and forth, ninety degrees to the left and to the right. Leena felt herself being tossed back
and forth in her harness like a rag doll, the g-load steadily increasing as the craft dipped farther and farther into the atmosphere.

Leena caught a glimpse of the instruments, the hand of the altitude dial spinning like a propeller, and then everything began to grow fuzzy. A blanket of gray falling over her, Leena could only trust in the automated systems to take over for her.

There came a whistling of air, and flashes of red from the viewport overhead, stars dimly visible through the burning curtain of sky.

At seven thousand meters, the first explosive bolt on the hatch blew like a shot, then another. Leena blinked, her eyes for the moment sightless, unsure whether she was yet free of the craft or not. The forces on her relaxed, and she lifted her head, hoping to make out her position through the haze that blurred her vision. At that moment, her chair shot up through the hatch with such force that she bit down hard on her lip, blood streaming out onto the helmet's visor. She and the module, now separated, fell on parallel courses towards the planet below, the service module burning up somewhere in the atmosphere above them.

The ejection chair, Leena strapped firmly in place, spun end over end, tumbling like a falling leaf through the cold blue sky. A cannon fired, jarring Leena with the shock of it, and the stabilizing chute shot out from the top of the chair, dragging behind and straightening her descent.

Leena rotated slowly to the right in the chair, blinking back tears of panic and exhilaration, trying to see something of the land below her. To the south there were mountains, purple and tall, to the east an endless expanse of oceans, and below her a carpet of forest stretching out to the western horizon, a wide river ribboning through it.

The next parachute opened, blossoming orange and huge above her, then the next, both dwarfing the miniature stabilizer that had opened first, hanging small and white above them, a moon to their twin suns. The chair's rate of descent slowed, and looking down past
her feet Leena saw the river and dense foliage below her. Unable to direct the motion of the chair, she could only watch as touchdown grew nearer.

Fluttering down beneath orange canopies as if on a slight breeze, Leena's chair dropped slowly and directly towards the wide river below.

As the chair touched down, Leena's feet disappeared below the surface of the water. The water burbled up to her waist, the weight of the steel chair dragging her down, and Leena couldn't help but think that she might have her funeral in absentia after all.

With a splash of finality, the chair disappeared beneath the swift currents, the three parachutes floating on the surface like fallen leaves until they, too, were drawn under.

The ejection chair sank like a stone into the murky depths of the river, drifting slightly with the strong undercurrents. Strapped securely in place, Leena experienced something very near a state of shock while breathing up the last of the oxygen reserves left in the pressure suit. The air hose, which should have sealed off when separated from the life-support systems of the Vostok module, had failed to close completely, and a hiss of water spilled with slow but relentless finality into the helmet. The silty water had filled up to the level of Leena's chin, and it would be a close race whether the helmet filled first with water or with exhaled carbon dioxide.

The chair touched down on the soft bed of the river, kicking up clouds of silt that were drawn away downriver by the current like smoke in a strong wind. Leena, head tilting ever farther back to escape the rising level of the inflow, moved her stiff fingers in slow motion through the water to reach the strap releases.