Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

As Stone and Vedala prepped the pair of space suits, Tupa was growing more sullen. Sharing a look with Vedala, Stone paused and approached the boy. Kneeling before him, Stone shook his head sadly.

“I’m sorry, Tupa,” he said, explaining the best he could. “No kid-size suits. No . . . armor.”

Tupa turned away angrily.

Stone put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, gesturing with his other hand. “I will come back, Tupa. I will find you. I promise.”

Without the translating drone, Stone had to hope Tupa would understand the gist of his words. The boy refused to look at Stone, hair hanging in his eyes. He was scared and sad and trying not to show it.

Stone stood up.

“I promise,” he repeated.

“But we do need your help,” interjected Vedala, motioning to the control panel. She spoke slowly, using her hands. “Do you want to push buttons?”

Looking over at the glowing red buttons, Tupa couldn’t help letting out a small smile of anticipation.

“Bottons?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Vedala. “But very, very carefully.”

Destination ISS

WITHIN HALF AN HOUR, THE TWO SCIENTISTS WERE fully enclosed in the Z-3 space suits and perched on the narrow platform that ringed the climber, their legs dangling over the edge, like two children on a swing set. Each was secured to the metal grating with an improvised safety belt made of rope and tether hooks, looped through the Z-3’s hip anchor points.

Stone could feel the electrical power coursing through the bones of the platform, thrumming through his entire body. The interior of the helmet was spacious, and the visor perfectly clear. A radio was embedded in the metal collar ring where the helmet connected to the suit, and he could speak easily with Vedala on a local channel selected with a chest-mounted control knob.

At the moment he chose not to speak, as he was concentrating on not throwing up the MRE he had just eaten.

It occurred to Stone that this is what astronauts must experience as they waited for liftoff on the landing pad—ready to risk life and limb to climb to the stars. He felt a squeeze on his hand and looked over to see Vedala smiling at him through her own fear. She had lifted the reflective visor layer on her helmet so that her face was visible, and to Stone she looked very small and very brave.

“You ready?” she asked, her voice transmitted over the local radio and into Stone’s helmet.

“Not even close,” said Stone, squeezing her hand back.

Vedala nodded, then turned to Tupa. She gave the boy a thumbs-up.

As they had practiced, the boy punched the correct button. The lever had already been set to the proper velocities—a slower speed for atmospheric travel, then accelerating to top speed once in the frictionless vacuum of space.

“We’re doing this,” said Vedala, as the platform shivered. “We’re really doing this—”

The climber leaped upward.

The two rolling pins at the top rotated, accelerating rapidly, clamped tightly against opposite sides of the spire. Before he could catch his breath, Stone watched Tupa’s small upturned face recede below.

And then the boy was gone.

With gut-wrenching speed, the platform launched straight up along the spine of the spire. They were accelerating at a breathtaking five Gs for approximately five seconds, the smooth interior walls of the shaft flying past like highway pavement only an arm’s length away. When they reached the top of the spire, a startling jolt rocked the platform as the climbing mechanism clamped down on the thin ribbon tether.

The platform abruptly transitioned into bright daylight.

Vedala and Stone blinked in stunned disbelief as they emerged from the darkness of the shaft into a vivid blaze of green and blue light. For an eyeblink, the lake was stretching away around them, flat and mysterious. Then it was replaced by the emerald-green roof of the jungle beneath a dazzling, clear blue sky.

The wind hit them both like an invisible sledgehammer.

The Z-3 suits were not incredibly aerodynamic, and the platform had already accelerated to a brutal speed. The violent turbulence was shocking in both intensity and volume—pinning both scientists to their seats, mute and paralyzed.

Gloved fingers clinging to the metal grating, Stone held his breath and felt the quivering of the platform against his back and thighs. Fat drops of condensation streaked over the exterior of his helmet visor as the humid jungle air washed over him. He could feel hot sunlight raking over his chest, and also the veins of cool water flowing over his skin through the webbing of the suit’s coolant system.

He looked upward through his visor.

The ribbon filament tether curved away to dizzying infinity. It was bent at a slight five-degree angle westward, Stone realized—a result of the Coriolis effect of the spinning planet. When he glanced back down, Stone could glimpse the channel of rushing river water as it poured through the front of the dam. The trail of water quickly faded into a brown scribble. In seconds, the massive bulk of the anomaly had been reduced to a black dot far below.

Moving at top atmospheric speed, the platform had reached five hundred miles per hour—a relative crawl compared to the eighteen thousand miles per hour required by rocket-based launches into space. The ascent was steady and smooth, ripping through the dense lower atmosphere and set to reach low Earth orbit in minutes.

Vedala and Stone were undertaking a challenge completely outside the human experience. The scientists were piloting a novel mode of transportation on its inaugural voyage, an achievement on par with the first powered flight. They were living proof that science fiction can mature into science—that simply dreaming a thing, no matter how incredible, is the first step to bringing it into reality.

“Good?” asked Vedala. Her voice echoed in Stone’s helmet, barely audible over the rush of wind and the thrum of the electric motors. Stone managed a shaky thumbs-up.

The space suits’ portable life support systems activated in response to the environment around them. Thermal regulation clicked on, warming the water-filled tubes laced around their bodies. Oxygen was already circulating in the suits, and excess carbon dioxide was being scrubbed, both providing air to breathe and pressurizing each suit against an already dwindling atmosphere. On the exterior of each helmet, low-energy LEDs illuminated.

Looking to Vedala as they tore through a cloud bank, all Stone could see were her helmet lights flickering through a rush of pale mist.

Emerging above the cloud, Stone saw that in just a few seconds they had transitioned from a skyscraper view of the anomaly to a view of the Amazon from the world’s highest mountains, and finally to seeing Brazil from the height of an aircraft—albeit one dangling from a string.

The intimidating Amazon jungle sprawled beneath them, cloaked in low-hanging clouds bathed in golden daylight. From here, the jungle terrain that had felt endlessly claustrophobic an hour ago was no more. The once fearsome rain forest had revealed itself to be delicate and finite, already fading away.

One minute and twelve seconds into the journey, the climber had reached an altitude of nearly forty-two thousand feet above Earth. Through streaks of water and the tissue-paper shreds of clouds screaming past, the scientists could see only their own legs hanging over an unthinkable drop. They lingered in this gray purgatory for seconds that felt like hours.

And then the reverie exploded into chaos.

A dark shape loomed in the cloudy distance, moving fast. Stone shouted “What—” over the radio, before he was drowned out. A Russian-built Sukhoi Su-57 fighter jet had shrieked past the tether at a distance of only a hundred feet. It was followed almost instantly by an American F/A-18E Super Hornet in hot pursuit. The two supersonic jets, each moving at over a thousand miles an hour, produced a double shock wave that sent a vicious shudder through the ribbon.