“Sir, I was ordered to my station by Lieutenant Batkin. I have confirmed that it is not functional. This transmitter is destroyed.”

  “Yes, I know. Did you see to your injuries?”

  “Some aspirin and topical medicine.”

  “You forgot to bandage this.” Volsky took a sticky bandage from his shirt pocket and pressed it to the wound on Andrei’s head. “It is bleeding, though not much.”

  “Thank you, sir. I am waiting for Udinsky to splint my broken fingers but he has enough to do, dealing with Sorrin.”

  “Ah. Udinsky thought Sorrin had a small wound in his abdomen, but in fact he had considerable internal damage from a fragment of bulkhead. He has just died.”

  Six left now, Andrei realized. Two badly injured.

  “What can I do to help, sir?”

  “Udinsky says he saw you seal the breach in the bulkhead. Yes?”

  “Well—yes sir.” Arsov felt an inward glow at this acknowledgment. “It was small.”

  “Still, very quick thinking. We will need that, but you look quite pale. I will have Udinsky attend to your hand, give you a vitalizer shot, and a little numbing agent—not too much, we need you alert. To carry out your part of the plan.”

  “The plan, Commander?”

  “Yes,” Volsky rumbled. “A very simple one. First, we make some additional repairs. The sealant is only temporary. We have twenty magnetic sealing cups that will better secure the breaches. I’ll put you in charge of applying them to any areas that need them. Then—we destroy the American craft. I feel sure they will return to attack us again, so we must act offensively. Once that is done, we use our thrusters to reach a lower orbit, and travel in that orbit eastward. We will contact the Siberian base—they are best equipped to send help for us—and I will inform General Prositov that we have carried out our orders, and the Gogol-1 is unfit for habitation.

  “We will return home. How do you like my plan?” He raised his bushy eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Superb, sir, if I may say so.”

  Volsky chuckled. “You see! There is indeed still gunpowder in our flasks! Wait here. I will send Udinsky over, and then you will take over Sorrin’s position at secondary radar. We will locate the enemy, and destroy them.”

  * * *

  “I still don’t see why we’re in this alone, sir,” Des Andrews said, frowning, as he looked for a biosuit that would more or less fit him. Andrews and Burkett already had their electromagnetic boots on so they could stand on the deck to suit up easily. “Why shouldn’t other S-series help us out, Lieutenant? Or maybe surface-to-orbit missiles. They do exist.”

  Looking critically at his own suit, Burkett replied, “We’re not set up for this geo-orbital situation, Sergeant, because we abide by our treaties. Like the one that says we won’t deploy surface-to-orbit missiles. There are some in storage, but the only prepped surface-to-orbit missiles are protecting DC, which the treaty allows. Orbitally fired missiles like the ones that hit Base One are supposed to be against the treaty rules, too.”

  He brushed a fleck of old dried blood off his biosuit. “Seems like Veronin and Krozkov make their own international laws, but we’re going to bust them for it.” Blood or no, Burkett was stuck with this suit. There’d been one that had fit like a glove, but it had been wrecked by Syrkin.

  “It’d take too much time to scramble the other S-series,” he continued. “We’re here right now, so we’ve got to stop them before they’re in a position to kick off the rest of their missiles at SB-1. Anyway, it’s not like our orbcrafts have cannon or missiles, either. They’re no more designed for orbital combat than the S-7.”

  Andrews nodded. “I get it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m dodging a fight, Lieutenant, but reinforcement isn’t exactly an unknown concept.”

  Burkett nodded. “Des—we’re not alone in this. We get intel from Sergeant Prosser and the CIA, and we got a fuel resupply from home. Griskin provided a control code for the combine, but I’m not going to blow smoke. We’re walking a tightrope out here. It could get ugly. I heard a few minutes ago that the Russians are saying we committed an act of war by striking their battle station.”

  Andrews turned to him, staring. “They fired on an American base!”

  “Russian foreign minister is saying that was self-defense—that someone had locked onto Gogol-1 from below. That, of course, is a damned lie, but some people will choose to believe him.”

  “I’m surprised the battle station is still operational, sir.”

  “Seems damaged, but—they’re maneuvering back to a position over Base One. We think they plan to destroy SB-1 to get rid of its communications and digital infrastructure, weaken the command system for Drop-Heavy so they can make their next move. We can’t let them do that.” The two men began to pull on the suits, helping each other with sealing. The lower part of the suit was designed to pull easily over the boots, but it still required tugging and grunting before it could be sealed.

  “We’re going to make sure they use up—damn, this thing’s stuck—the last of their missiles,” Burkett continued. “CIA figures the station has three, or at most four, missiles left. We’re either going to take that vessel out, or we’ll provoke them into using up what they’ve got—and hopefully we’ll evade those missiles. In the end, if our next move doesn’t work, we might have to attack the station EVA.”

  There’s a good chance the wrong people might die in a fight like that, he thought. Andrews was silent, and Burkett glanced at him. Saw a mild look of surprise on the Sergeant’s face, and a slight smile. Burkett figured he was surprised that the XO had shared so much with him. But Mayweather was going to tell everyone the same thing. They had to be ready for what was coming.

  Sealing the torso of the biosuit, Burkett glanced through the hatch, saw Dhariwal talking to Magonier. The scientists looked gloomy. He suspected that they regretted, at least a little, their decision to stay with the orbcraft. But if they hadn’t, the S-7 would have had only one module to work with. The orbcraft might not have survived the attack on the Russian station.

  Still, Burkett felt bad for the two men. They hadn’t asked to be kidnapped, and they were going above and beyond. They weren’t professionally ready to die for their country, like the Rangers.

  He found himself thinking about Ashley, and Nate, wondering what they were doing right this second. There had been a plan for the Rangers to have a video transmission talk with their families, but Mayweather had nixed it. They didn’t have enough stored power for everyone to call home. Why should only the officers get to talk to their wives, their loved ones? Morale was critically important right now.

  Resentment, though unspoken, wouldn’t help.

  “Helmets and SAFER on, Sergeant. Let’s get out there.”

  * * *

  Twenty-eight minutes later, Burkett and Andrews were EVA in a debris cluster.

  “Hold on here for a moment, Sergeant,” Burkett said. They braked with their trajectory joysticks and took stock—as well as they could, seeing by moonlight and suit lights.

  Most orbital clusters were fairly diffused, with debris separated by kilometers, so it was difficult to see two pieces together. Griskin’s junkyard, however, had been gathered together by his robotic plasma thrusters, organizing the materials into twenty cubic kilometers for mass disposal. So individual objects were fairly close, sometimes as little as ten meters apart.

  Griskin’s clean-up plan included a remote-controlled “debris combine.” The device gathered up space junk in specially designed nets, towing it to a low Earth orbit over a safe disposal area, for eventual release into the atmosphere. Later he hoped to shoot the other, bigger debris into deep space, setting it on a course for the sun.

  Burkett looked around, trying to get oriented. The sun was still hidden from them, but that wouldn’t last long. Meanwhile, his HUD reported that his biosuit was working hard to keep him warm. Dhariwal, Magonier, and Linda Strickland had managed to ramp up the power storage in the suits, so maybe there’d be no heating crisis this time.

  To his right was the enormity of the darkened Earth—dark but haloed in light—seemingly a perfect globe from here. The seas on the dark side seemed cobalt, partly streaked by gray-black clouds. He saw a grid of lights he thought might be Denver. To his left floated Sergeant Andrews, turned to gaze down on the Earth. The S-7 was behind them, but a quarter-klick away to keep a reasonable maneuvering distance from the space junk.

  Burkett checked his HUD’s directional display, found the radar bounce from the combine, touched the magnification tab on his helmet, and zoomed in a bit closer to a distant hourglass-shaped object of metal panels alternating with solar-power panels.

  “Tracking Griskin’s combine,” he said over the headset.

  “Roger that,” Des said. “Hold on. I see it too.”

  “We make for that. About forty meters from it there’s a net full of space junk, thanks to the high-tech garbage truck. We’ll see if it’ll be useful.”

  Andrews used his trajectory joystick, triggering tiny gas jets on his SAFER, and turned his suit so he could look back at the S-7.

  “Orbcraft’s a long way off. Looks crazy small from here. You ever been this far from a spacecraft out here, sir?”

  “Hell no. It’s spooky, all right, but if we use the SAFERs like we were taught—minimal thrust—we’ll get where we’re going and back.”

  “You lead, I’ll follow, Lieutenant.”

  “More people should think like you,” Burkett suggested. “Come on.”

  They used the jets to propel them toward the center of the cluster of debris, where the combine waited. The objects in the three-dimensional field had been drawing slowly together, since they were herded nearby. Even small objects exerted gravitational force.

  It made Burkett nervous, as he and Des entered this inner cluster. Too many random factors with broken metal edges, drifting along too closely. At least—unlike most space junk—this debris was moving relatively slowly, having been held in place by the plasma thrusters and their own weak gravitation.

  “This is… weird,” Des said, taking in the slowly whirling scraps of metal and plastic and frozen liquid around them. The liquid was urine in clumps of yellow crystals, refracting the moonlight and the flashing from their helmet lamps.

  “Yeah, it is.” Burkett saw a circular steel console with trailing wires—it looked like a robotic jellyfish. He was reminded of footage of the undersides of the big drifting islands of garbage in the oceans. Random shapes, familiar and yet unfamiliar, slowly floating past one another.

  “There’s one of those goddamn bowling balls, glowing at us.”

  “Move slowly toward the combine, Sergeant, keep one finger on the braking button. We need to conserve maneuvering jets.”

  “Roger that.”

  Burkett led the way. They weren’t in immediate danger of colliding with anything, most of it was some meters away, but they had to stay alert. He watched a unit that looked like a broken cylindrical vacuum cleaner strike one of the bowling balls. The impact sent the ball spinning toward them, for a moment looking like a rogue planet. Burkett had to use his joystick to dodge right a couple of meters to get out of its trajectory, and it passed between him and Andrews.

  “This orbit’s a billiard table,” Des muttered.

  Burkett corrected his course. A roll of plastic wheeled by, turning end over end. The big spindle of the combine became more and more detailed as they got closer. The sun began to edge over the Earth to their right, like the stone on a wedding ring, and it lit up one side of the hourglass shape, revealing a thin cable extending from it.

  In this light the cable looked like a strand of spider silk, stretching out toward an object about five hundred meters away—the object resembled a bug wrapped in a spider’s web, from here, but it was a netting full of space junk. On Earth, Burkett had read, it would weigh about twenty tons. In the microgravity of orbit, the junk collection weighed very little, which meant it could be moved relatively easily.

  Lucky, Burkett thought, that Griskin hadn’t gotten around to moving the net over its disposal target on Earth.

  He accelerated a little toward the combine, and then a shadow whipped over him, and he caught a glimpse of something like a giant razor blade coming at his head: a meter-square slab of ragged-edged metal. In an unconscious overreaction he pressed the joystick too hard. He was pushed rapidly down, relative to his former position, by the SAFER’s small nitrogen-gas jets.

  “Son of a mother…”

  Burkett hit the brake-motion, and several jets fired to stabilize him, but when he looked around, he couldn’t see Des Andrews anywhere. Not in any direction.

  “Des? You okay?” It occurred to him with a chill that Des might’ve been hit by the sheet metal debris. “I don’t have eyes on you! Go to the combine! Do you copy?”

  “Sir, I’m okay, but…” There was a crackle. “Not…” What was wrong with comms? “…can’t…”

  And then endless static.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Andrei! How goes the jamming?” the Commander asked, kneeling by Andrei’s position, the radar and comms post recessed into the deck. He held onto a stanchion to keep from floating away in the station’s weightlessness. “Did you get it to work?”

  “Repairs were successful, sir. I caught some of their transmissions. They are not able to say much. Almost nothing.”

  “Very good! That will give us an edge. I knew that device would come in handy.”

  Arsov nodded. “Yes sir.” He glanced past Commander Volsky at the dead men floating nearby. They were tied together in a bundle of corpses near the ceiling of the battle station’s main cabin, with another line holding them to a ring on the overhead. The storage they would have put them in was too badly damaged. Thus, they floated nearby as if quietly listening to everything that was said.

  “And the radar, Andrei?”

  “On radar, the S-7’s last known position was about fifty kilometers away at…” He read the elaborate three-dimensional position out, hoping he’d got it perfectly right. “They were about a quarter-kilometer from the outer bounds of the Griskin debris dump, sir. They detached two objects, possibly men on extra-vehicular activity, and they moved to another position, putting the debris dump between us and them. This was just two minutes ago—I was about to call you, but I was double checking.”

  “They sent men out, and then moved? That’s an odd thing to do.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t men. Perhaps… weapons of some kind?” Volsky seemed to be scarcely listening. He was frowning at the radar screen.

  “They are keeping the dump between us. Interesting. Well, of course, that will obscure our readings of them.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I am awaiting orders from the General, and he is awaiting orders from Vladimir Krozkov. But… perhaps we can briefly change our position to make an attack on the American orbital craft a little more feasible. I am concerned that if we fire all the missiles at the base, we may be all but defenseless against the Americans. We must at least roust out the mines…”

  * * *

  Burkett realized he had not only gone relatively “down” from his last position—using the SAFER nitrogen jets to stop his errant motion had pushed him a half-kilometer farther out from Earth. He looked around.

  One twitch of the hand, and I’m headed for the moon.

  It really did feel like being on the edge of death. Looking out into space from here, with the stars blotted by the glare of the emerging sun, he saw only deep, infinite blackness. And wasn’t that what death was supposed to be like?

  Burkett turned to look at the Earth. It was so immense. He could see green tones in the Rockies. Underbrush, trees—life. Somewhere, not far from there, were Ashley and Nate. The knowledge reassured him.

  Taking a long slow breath, he let it out gradually, to slow his pulse. Then called the orbcraft.

  “I am not sure you’re reading this, S-7, this is Burkett; error with my joystick, lost the correct position, do not see Sergeant Andrews. Do you read?”

  Static.

  He waited. A crackle… perhaps a slight fillip of a voice. A foreign phrase. One word came through clearly.

  It sounded like, “Vrag.” The accent was Russian.

  Every biosuit helmet had a translation database. “Translation, Russian word: vrag,” Burkett told it.

  A female-sounding AI voice said, “‘Enemy.’”

  “Great,” Burkett muttered. Then he turned his attention to the available readings. The helmet’s heads-up display wasn’t entirely working. He couldn’t find the combine’s position from where he was, but he was able to scroll back, in a sense, to order the HUD to disgorge past readings, and find the last fix he’d had traveling to this position.

  There. The usual positioning wasn’t working, but he knew a trick.

  “Triangulate position eleven with this position and Base One.” The result came, and he did a little trigonometry. “Give me radial direction to that figure within cubic area C.”

  He had a direction now, and aimed the joysticks, following a radius line through the established geometric sphere to its center—his position before getting lost. He moved “up” and forward. Glancing at his SAFER bar, Burkett saw that his maneuvering nitrogen was 75% depleted.

  Never quite enough of what this biosuit required, he thought. Thanks, SubOrbital Supply. If he lived through this, he’d clamor for some serious redesigns.

  Breathing slowly and carefully to avoid using too much oxygen, Burkett maneuvered on toward what he hoped was the debris combine. Godsend that Sergeant Andrews had heard his order about meeting there.

  How close were the Russians? Would they come after him, somehow? The CIA might be wrong about their available weapons. He looked around but couldn’t see the battle station.

  Just concentrate on getting back on track, he told himself.