Above It All

“I— I don’t know how to fly a Soyuz.”

“We’ll get Kaliningrad to talk you through the separation sequence.”

“No — no, that won’t work.”

“Sure it will. We can bring the Soyuz descent capsule into our cargo bay, if need be — but hurry, man, hurry!”

“Goodbye, Charlie.”

“What do you mean, `Goodbye’? Jesus Christ, Paul—”

Rackham’s brow was slick with sweat. “Goodbye.”

The temperature continued to rise. Rackham reached down and undogged his helmet, the abrupt increase in air pressure hurting his ears. He lifted the great fishbowl off his head, letting it fly across the cabin. He then took off the Snoopy-eared headset array. It undulated up and away, a fabric bat in the shaft of earthlight, ending up pinned by acceleration to the ceiling.

Paint started peeling off the walls, and the plastic piping had a soft, unfocused look to it. The air was so hot it hurt to breathe. Yuri’s body was heating up, too. The smell from that direction was overpowering.

Rackham was close to one of the circular windows. Earth had swollen hugely beneath him. He couldn’t make out the geography for all the clouds — was that China or Africa, America or Russia below? It was all a blur. And all the same.

An orange glow began licking at the port as paint on the station’s hull burned up in the mesosphere. The water in the reticulum of tubes running over his body soon began to boil.

Flames were everywhere now. Atmospheric turbulence was tearing the station apart. The winglike solar panels flapped away, crisping into nothingness. Rackham felt his own flesh blistering.

The roar from outside the station was like a billion screams. Screams of the starving. Screams of the poor. Screams of the shackled. Through the port, he saw the Kristall module sheer clean off the docking adapter and go tumbling away.

Look below, the voice had said. Look below.

And he had.

Into space, at any price.

Into space — above it all.

The station disintegrated around him, metal shimmering and tearing away. Soon nothing was left except the flames. And they never stopped.

THE END