Juggernaut

Ignatiev had a radio. We each wore an earpiece and microphone.

‘Can you hear me?’ he asked. We gave a thumbs up.

We pulled on hoods. Each hood had a Lexan face-plate and an air hose at the back. We had electric filtration units clipped to our belts. Air pumped through charcoal filters. My headpiece was filled with the hiss of supply fans, and my own heavy breathing.

‘Open the box.’

I popped latches. A video camera.

‘I want you to film the interior of the craft. You will be my eyes and ears.’

Intelligence agencies always operate through proxies. They call it Resource Exploitation. Human chess. I have ordered the arrest and torture of countless men. Sat in my office and consigned prisoners to death as I sipped coffee. I never met my victims face-to-face. Never had to hear their screams, their pathetic pleas for mercy. They were numbers. Bruised and bleeding mug shots. I didn’t sign execution orders. I took great care to commit nothing to paper. I gave files to my adjutant and requested ‘stern measures’. Call it plausible deniability. Call it emotional distance, a coward taking refuge in euphemism.

Men like Ignatiev rarely get their hands dirty.

We walked from the staging area, down a sterile polythene umbilicus to the Spektr containment area. Our hazmat suits creaked and rustled.

We unzipped a plastic curtain and entered the dome.

My ears popped. Extractor fans kept the containment dome at negative pressure to prevent the back-flow of contaminated air. A sprinkler scaffold high above our heads fogged the atmosphere with a constant hydrogen peroxide mist. Lights glowed through opaque plastic sheets like weak sunlight.

The orbiter looked like a US space shuttle in miniature. Porcelain white. Black ablative bricks coated the nose, belly and aerofoil to help the fuselage withstand the white heat of re-entry.

We walked a circuit of the ship.

I reached up and stroked the pitted, seared hull of the craft. It was astonishing to think that the vehicle before me had voyaged beyond the earth. It had been exposed to the vacuum of space. The silicon dioxide tiles had been cratered by micro-meteoroids. They had been subject to absolute cold and the merciless gamma-blast of unfiltered solar radiation.

I was consumed by curiosity, desperate to climb inside the vessel and investigate. I wanted to know where it had been, what disaster had befallen the crew while in orbit.

We propped scaffold steps against the vehicle and climbed level with the hatch. We scanned the hull with a Geiger counter. Spektr had been floating in high orbit for more than a decade, baking in stellar radiation. The handset crackled triple background.

‘There’s a warning stencilled on the hatch tiles.’

‘English?’ asked Ignatiev.

‘Yes. And Cyrillic.’

‘In case Spektr crashed outside Russian territory, I suppose.’

ATTENTION

STEP ASIDE

THIS COVER MAY BE JETTISONED

PEOPLE INSIDE

HELP

‘There should be a small panel to the side of the hatch,’ said Ignatiev, over the radio. ‘Can you see it? It looks like a heat tile, but it is held in place by screws.’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘Use the hex drill.’

Hassim passed me a power drill. I unscrewed the titanium bolts and prised the tile free with the sliver-blade of a scalpel.

‘Describe what you see.’

‘Four sockets. A couple of nozzles. A couple of jacks.’

‘The port on the top left should let us test the internal atmosphere.’

We took a gas spectrometer from a high-impact case. We plugged it into the hatch panel. We took a reading.

I tore off a strip of print-out.

‘Read it to me.’

I recited numbers.

‘Lot of nitrogen. Lot of carbon dioxide. The air inside the ship is toxic but the seals are intact.’

‘How do we open the hatch?’

‘The access mechanism is identical to Progress capsules used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Those jack plugs are for the benefit of the recovery crew. If, for any reason, the cosmonauts are incapacitated and unable to exit the craft, the rescue team can deliver a simple electrical pulse and trip the explosive bolts.’