Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

“Out,” said Hannaday. “Open the cargo bay.”

Nichols popped the door seals in a wash of fuel reek, then dropped the aluminum boarding ladder. I made my way carefully after him, one step at a time on my bad legs.

It stank outside, of fire and something nasty-chemical. Hydrazine? Nichols was banging on the cargo hatch as I bent to look under the plane, scanning for the source of the reek.

I found it. “Holy fuck.”

Nichols was distracted. “What?”

Hannaday dropped down between us and knelt. “Nice.”

The thing was half rounded, like a stubby bullet, and blackened all to hell. It sat on the flat side. Smoke curled off, dancing in the dry grass around the… the…

“Soyuz TMA-3 landing capsule,” said Hannaday. “Get the ladder. And stay the hell away from the bottom. There’s a gamma-ray emitter down there that will fry your nuts.”

Nichols had found this weird folding ladder, sort of halfway between a painter’s stepladder and a scaffold. He shouldered the Mossberg and dragged the ladder toward the Soyuz with that shiny-eyed focus I normally associated with an impending massacre.

Soyuz . We were dusting off a fucking spaceman. “Somebody’s looking for this.” I glanced at the sky for the fleet of Russian Hinds that must surely be in the air.

Hannaday laughed again. “Yeah, a couple of thousand klicks from here. Get the camo netting out of the hold, Allen.”

I got the camo netting.

Up close the capsule had that brutal precision so typical of Sov high tech. It could have been whittled from stone, then ground off. Reentry had done the thing no favors either. The surface was covered with burned streaks and pits. A round hatch stood open near the nose, from which lines of a parachute stretched out some few dozen yards across the grass. The smoking ground testified to the retro rockets that had soft-landed the capsule.

At that range the smell was worse, hydrazine and baked metal and some weird ozone thing. It made me wish for a breather mask. I dropped the mound of camo netting and sat on it.

Hannaday took the ladder and set it up against the blunt cone. The scaffold part fit across the top. Of course it did, I thought. He went straight for a little opening, pulled out something I would swear was a key, and went to work on the nose.

“Help me out, boys,” he said and he wrestled open a hatch.

Of course I didn’t shoot him. The Antonov pilot would have taken off without us.

Spy guy fished out a real live astronaut, someone small in a jumpsuit who couldn’t stand on his own feet. Nichols and I got the guy down the ladder, then Nichols took off for the Antonov with the space traveler in a fireman’s carry while Hannaday and I spread out the netting and covered the capsule. He didn’t bother to retrieve his ladder.

“Nice one.” I coughed through the reek. “You’re running a scam of epic proportions. I assume we’re nixing satellite surveillance here.”

Hannaday grinned around the curve of the capsule. “Everybody’s got to make a living, Allen.”

When I pulled myself back up the Antonov’s ladder, I found Nichols up front by the locked pilot’s door, staring back down the narrow aisle. He was pale and sweating.

“What?” I said. “You find Elvis there?”

“She’s a girl.”

I went and looked. Our spaceman was a girl, not more than fifteen, eyes bloodshot from reentry gees, barely moving even as she stared at us. Blue-black skin, shaved head.

A girl.

Who’d dropped out of the Central Asian sky in a Russian spaceship.

Kids on the International Space Station? Not fucking likely. Not in this lifetime.

“Hannaday,” I breathed, “who the fuck is she?”

The Antonov lumbered back to camp. Nichols sat in the back of the plane with his shotgun, watching the kid and cursing in an extended monotone, mostly Russian. I perched in a chair at the front of the cabin opposite Hannaday.

“Who is she?”

He had the familiar old Hannaday I’m-in-charge-here smile. “No one you’ll ever know, Allen.”

“Bullshit. We’re supposed to run her through live-fire countersecurity drills for a week? We’ll know her happy ass before we’re through.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words. Hannaday’s smile just tightened a little. “Don’t break off no bits and pieces. Not any of her bits.”

We were both thinking of Beier then, the man who would do anything to anyone.

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”

He shrugged. “Speak Russian for a week, push her around, scare her, then let her be dusted off. Don’t put any bullets or body parts into her, you’ll be fine. What could be easier?”

My legs ached where he had shot me. “Who is she?”

“Ah-ah.” I swear to God he wagged his finger at me. “That would be telling.”

On landing Nichols bolted from the plane like he had the Tehran trots. That meant the girl’s presence would be known to everyone in five minutes, tops. As if I could control that anyway.

Hannaday looked at me. “I don’t guess you’re going to carry her down the ladder, are you?”

“Got these old war wounds in my legs.”

He smiled, gathered the girl close to his chest, and made it down the ladder himself. Looking down from the door I seriously considered popping a cap in his crown, just as a public service. But then he’d drop that poor kid and where would we be?

Within moments there was a swirl of mercs, mostly barking in Russian or English with Peter Ustinov accents. Hannaday gave up the girl to them, shouting back in Russian about security and escape, then returned to the plane as I made it to the ground.

“Be good,” he told me.

“Fuck you.”

“Whatever gets you through the night.” He set his hands on the boarding ladder, then stopped. “Oh… Allen…?”

My hand strayed to the Smitty. “Yeah?”

“Do take good care of her.”

“Right.”

They poured Evian water and Mongolian vodka down that poor kid until she sputtered to life. Then the Belgians harangued her in an incomprehensible mix of Flemish and Russian for a while before dragging her outside. She wasn’t up to running around our improvised training course, so they hauled her to the firing range, Korunov trailing behind like a loose grenade.

Oh good, I thought, get the kid drunk then make her shoot.

Better than shooting at her.

Nichols pushed me back into the kitchen tent, where Beier was still sleeping standing up.

“He’s crazy.” Nichols’s voice was a strident hiss.

“Plane’s gone. You don’t have to whisper.”

“We run her through the course, we’ll kill her.”

“We’ve got a forty percent fatality rate as it is. Never bothered you before.”

Nichols looked around, taking a long, hard stare at Beier. The South African was snoring gently, mumbling on each exhalation. “She’s a fucking kid, ” he said after a moment.

He knew something, I realized. Nichols knew something about this. “You’re inside this job, aren’t you?”

“No!” Nichols snapped. He glanced at Beier again, then down at the greasy, carpeted floor of the ger. “It’s… look, I’ve never…”

“Yeah?” My voice was getting harder than I wanted it to. I couldn’t lose control with Nichols. He was the closest thing I had to a friend in this chickenshit outfit, and God only knew I needed my friends right now.

“I never told anyone this,” Nichols said, still talking to the floor.

“Yeah?” Get to the fucking point.