Skyfall

Whatever regrets he had were too late. The bedroom door slammed behind her and the bits of lace and the crumpled dress were the only reminders of what had been just short instants before. He talked to her through the door, tried to apologize, explain, but she never answered. Nor was he very clear in what he said because he was not sure himself just what had happened. In the end he dressed, poured another large drink, left it untouched on the bar and stamped out into the hot night. At the last moment he had even caught the door as it slammed shut behind him, fury instantly becoming concern, closing it quietly and wondering just how he did feel about her. About everything.

He never had made his mind up completely. Some things seemed clear, he thought he had the right answers, but seeing her there in the stuffy room in Baikonur changed everything one more time. Four months. Nothing had changed. The same exit, the same closed door. He envied her her certainty of decision. Exactly how he felt was not clear at all.

“Tovarich,” a deep voice said and he turned with relief and took the proffered glass of vodka from the Soviet officer.

“Mir, mir in our bloody time and forever,” he said, and drained the glass.

“Reilly, do you realize that it's only nine in the morning and it's already so hot you could fry an egg on this oscilloscope. This place is worse than the Cape.”

“I feel so sorry for you, Duffy. If you don't like it why did you sign up?”

“For the same reason you did. When they folded the C5-A project NA SA was the only place hiring. What does this bunch of screwball letters mean?”

“The alphabet is called Cyrillic, Duffy, don't flaunt your ignorance. Zemlya 445 L. Connection of that number. Yevgeni…” He turned to the stolid technician who stood on the platform beside them and rattled off a quick question in Russian. Yevgeni grunted and flipped through the thick manual he held and found the correct diagram. Reilly squinted against the intense sunlight, then read the translation aloud. “Secondary starter circuit first stage servo disconnect.”

Duffy removed the stainless steel screws from the support collar and examined the multi-connectors where the looms passed through a bulkhead into a high-pressure helium tank. He carefully pulled back the clips and with a rocking motion pulled out the uppermost fifty-way plug and sprayed cleaner on the gold-plated pins. Satisfied, he reconnected it and nodded to Yevgeni who made an entry in the thick manual.

“Thirteen down and maybe four million to go,” Duffy said. “Ask your buddy where the next one is in this system. You know, I been wondering, how come a good mick named Reilly speaks this lingo?”

“My adviser in college said it was the language of the space age, that and English.”

“Looks like he was right. I took two years of Spanish and I didn't even learn enough to argue a buck off the price when I got laid in Tijuana.”

The Russian technician worked the controls and the inspection platform rose slowly up between the towering cylinders of the booster rockets. The ground was three hundred feet below them and the figures of the other men on the ground appeared tiny as ants. Above their heads the stainless steel wall rose another hundred and fifty feet. Great braces joined the boosters to each other and to the core body. There were hydraulic lines, fuel exchange pipes, power cables, oxygen drains, computer monitoring readouts, telemetry hardlines, hundreds of connections for services of every kind joined the units of the immense vehicle together.

They were all needed. They must all be able to function perfectly. The failure of a single component among the thousands and thousands could jeopardize everything.

If Prometheus exploded, it would be the largest non-atomic bomb ever made by man.

2

Gregor Salnikov heard the car when it was still far away, a hum no louder than the bees busy in the flowers beyond the open window. There were other houses further down this road, and no shortage of cars among the officials here at Baikonur. A shortage of paving though; whenever one passed a cloud of white dust rolled along after it. Apart from the dust he was unaware of the cars that went by; they had nothing to do with him. He carefully spread peach preserve on the thick slice of bread, then poured the heavy glass full of tea. The car stopped in the road outside — then the engine was turned off. Here? A car door slammed and he stood up to look out. It was a big, black Czechoslovakian Tatra, more of a tank than a car. An old one too, with the triple tail fins, and there was only one like it in all Star City. He went down the passageway and his hand was on the knob just as the knocker sounded.

“Come in Colonel,” he said.

“Vladimir if you please, Gregor. I think we know each other wet! enough by now. And what would the Americans think if it was 'Colonel Kuznekov' and 'Engineer Salnikov' all through the flight.”

“I'm sorry, Vladimir, come in please. Bad manners the heat…”