extending in every direction, up and down. It was like an enormously complicated toy.
Alex was slumped in a chair, his face grim, still dressed in the borrowed combat clothes. Ed Shulsky and Tamara Knight were sitting opposite him. Tamara looked exhausted, grey with pain and fatigue. She’d accepted a shot of morphine but nothing else. She wasn’t leaving Alex until a decision had been made.
The fourth person in the room was Professor Sing Joo-Chan, the man in charge of the Gabriel 7 launch. The flight director seemed a completely different person. He had lost his calm and self-possession and looked as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. His face was pale and he was sweating profusely, dabbing at his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Like everyone else, he claimed to know nothing about the bomb, nothing about Drevin’s real plans. He had promised to cooperate, to do anything the CIA required, and for the time being Shulsky was giving him the benefit of the doubt. But Alex wasn’t so sure. The professor had been recruited by Drevin; he had been in charge of the operation from the very start. Alex was certain he knew more than he was letting on.
“This is the situation,” Shulsky said. “Gabriel 7 will dock with Ark Angel at half past two this afternoon.
It’s carrying a bomb which will go off exactly two hours after that.” He glanced at Alex. “Drevin told you that himself.”
Alex nodded. “That’s right. Half past four. That’s what he said.”
“Now, as I understand it, there are three docking ports on Ark Angel.” Shulsky pointed to the diagram.
“Two of them are positioned at the very centre … here. But that’s not where Gabriel 7 is heading, because if the bomb blew up there it would simply rip the whole space station apart.” He reached out and tapped a section on the other side, at the end of a long corridor. “Gabriel 7 will dock here,” he explained. “Right on the edge.”
“Yes—the very edge!” Sing agreed. Alex noticed that the professor’s eyes were wide and unfocused. He was taking care not to look at anyone directly. “That’s how it was decided. That’s what Mr Drevin insisted.”
“The bomb must be inside the observation module,” Shulsky said. “And I guess it’ll be in exactly the right position. Most of the force from the explosion will go outwards. It’ll have the effect of a push in the wrong direction, propelling the entire space station back to earth.” He took a deep breath and for a moment something like panic flashed in his eyes. “The hell of it is, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can’t blow up Gabriel 7. And according to Professor Sing here, we can’t access the computers to reprogram it.”
“You can’t!” The white handkerchief was out again. “Only Mr Drevin had the codes. Only Mr Drevin—”
“I’ve checked it, Alex,” Tamara said. “It’s true. The entire system has been shut down. It would take us days—possibly even weeks—to hack into it.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but that leaves us with just one option,” Shulsky went on. “We have to send somebody up to Ark Angel. Believe me, Alex, it’s the only way. Someone has to find the bomb and neutralize it—by which I mean switch it off. And if that isn’t possible, then they have to move it. They have to carry it into the middle of the space station and leave it there. That way, the force of the explosion will have a completely different effect. It’ll destroy Ark Angel. What pieces are left will scatter and burn up in the outer atmosphere.”
“You will destroy Ark Angel!” Professor Sing whispered the words as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard.
“I don’t give a damn about Ark Angel, Professor!” Shulsky almost shouted the words. “My only concern is Washington.”
“Move the bomb or switch it off—what difference does it make?” Alex asked. “How is anyone going to get there?”
“That’s the whole point,” Shulsky said. “The Soyuz-Fregat is ready for launching. It was all set to carry Arthur into space.” He paused. “But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t carry you.”
“Me? You really want to send me into outer space?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not an orang-utan.”
“I know. I know. But you have to understand! What we’re talking about here, it’s not as complicated as you think. I mean, a rocket is a pretty simple piece of machinery. It’s just like a tank. It’s not as if you have to control it or anything—that’s all done from here.” Shulsky gestured around the room. “We still have access to the flight programs for the Soyuz-Fregat. The computers marked COMMAND tell the rocket what to do.
The docking, the re-entry … everything. And those marked TELEMETRY allow us to monitor the health and well-being of the passenger. You.”
“Not me.”
“There is no one else,” Shulsky said, and Alex could hear the desperation in his voice. “That’s the whole point, Alex. We’re adults. We’re all too big!” He turned to Professor Sing. “Tell him!” Sing nodded. “It’s true. We planned to put Arthur—the ape—into space. I made all the calculations personally. The launch, the approach, the docking—all of it. But the first differential is the weight. The weight of the passenger. If the weight changes, then all the calculations have to change and that will take days.”
“What makes you think I weigh the same?”
The professor spread his hands. “You weigh almost the same, and we can work within a margin. It’s possible. But it’s not just the weight. It’s the size.”
“The capsule has been modified and none of us would fit inside,” Shulsky explained. “There isn’t enough room. You’re the only one who can go, Alex. Heaven knows, I wouldn’t ask you otherwise. But there is no other way. It has to be you.”
Alex’s head was swimming. He hadn’t slept for almost thirty hours; he wondered if this whole conversation wasn’t some sort of hallucination. “But how would I even find the bomb?” he asked. “And if I did find it, how would I know where to put it?”
“You put it here.” Again Shulsky pointed at one of the modules in the diagram. “This is the sleeping area.
You’ll pass through it on your way to Gabriel 7. It’s the very heart of Ark Angel. This is where the bomb has to be when it blows up. I’ve gone over it with the professor and he agrees. If it happens here, Washington will be safe.”
“I’m just meant to carry it from one place to another?”
“It’ll weigh nothing at all,” Sing reminded him. “You see—it’s zero gravity!” Alex felt weak. He wanted to argue but he knew that nobody was listening. They had all made up their minds.
Tamara reached out and took his hand. “Alex, I’d go if I could,” she said. “I’m just about small enough and I guess I weigh the same as you. But I don’t think I’d make it. Not with this bullet wound…”
“I thought most kids would give their right arm to go into outer space,” Shulsky added unhelpfully.
“Haven’t you ever dreamt about becoming an astronaut?”
“No,” Alex said. “I always wanted to be a train driver.”
“Statistically, the Soyuz has an excellent reliability record,” Tamara said. Alex remembered seeing her reading about space travel on Drevin’s plane. “Hundreds of them have gone up, and there have been only a couple of hiccups.”
“How long will it take him to get there?” Shulsky asked. As far as he was concerned, Alex had already agreed to go.
“He’ll be launched along the plane of orbit,” Professor Sing replied. “I can’t explain it all to you now. But he’ll follow a trajectory that exactly matches the inclination of Ark Angel. Eight minutes to leave the earth’s atmosphere. And he will dock in less than two hours.”
“And the Soyuz-Fregat is ready?”
“Yes, sir. It’s ready now.”
That struck Alex as odd. He knew that the second launch had been brought forward—but why had Drevin been preparing to send the ape into space at all, just hours after Gabriel 71 If his plan had worked, Ark Angel would have been destroyed soon after the second rocket arrived. Not for the first time, Alex was aware that there was something they didn’t know, something that everyone had overlooked. But his thoughts were in such confusion that he couldn’t work out what it was.
Tamara was still holding his hand. “I know it’s too much to ask,” she said. “I know you don’t want to do it.
But, believe me, we wouldn’t ask you if there was another way. And you’ll be safe. You’ll make it back. I know you will.”
Suddenly everyone was silent. They were all looking at him. Alex thought of the bomb that was closing in on Ark Angel even now. He thought of an explosion in outer space, and the space station plunging towards Washington. What had Drevin said? Four hundred tonnes of it would survive. The shock wave would destroy most of the city.
He thought of Jack Starbright, who was somewhere in the middle of it all, visiting her parents. And he knew that—just like Arthur—he didn’t have any choice.
He nodded.
“Let’s get you suited up,” Ed Shulsky said.
After that, things moved very quickly. For Alex, it was as if his world had disintegrated. He was aware of bits and pieces but nothing flowed. From the day he’d managed to get himself caught up with MI6, he had often found it hard to believe what was happening to him. But this was something else again. He seemed to have lost any sense of his own identity. He was being swept along, out of control, edging closer and closer to something that filled him with more horror than he had ever known.
He was made to shower and dress in the clothes that he had seen in the building where he and Tamara had been imprisoned: a white T-shirt and a blue tracksuit with the Ark Angel logo stitched onto the sleeve.
Straps passed under his feet to hold the trousers in place and there were six pockets fastened with zips.
Suddenly he was surrounded by people he had never met, all of them giving him advice, preparing him for the terrible journey he was about to make.
“You need to watch out for what we call the breakaway phenomenon!” This from a man in glasses with hair on his neck. Some sort of psychologist. “It’s a feeling of euphoria. You may like it so much up there that you won’t want to come back.”
“I somehow doubt it,” Alex growled.
“We’ll be attaching EKG and biosensor leads…”
“We’re going to give you an injection.” This was a blonde-haired woman in a white coat. She was holding a large hypodermic syringe. “This is phenergan. It’ll make you feel better.”
“I feel fine.”
“You’ll almost certainly throw up when you reach zero gravity. Most astronauts do.”
“Well, that’s something you never see on Star Trek,” Alex muttered. “All right.” He rolled up his sleeve.
“Not your arm, Alex. This goes in your butt…”
He wondered why they hadn’t given him a proper spacesuit, the sort of thing he’d seen in old films of the moon landings. Professor Sing explained.
“You don’t need it, Alex. Arthur, also, wouldn’t have worn a spacesuit. You will be inside a sealed capsule.
If there was a leak, it’s true that you would need a spacesuit to protect you; but that’s not going to happen, I promise you. Trust me!”
Alex looked at the dark, blinking eyes behind the spectacles. He knew that Sing was ingratiating himself with the CIA, trying to persuade them that he had been innocent from the start. He was sure that Ed Shulsky and Tamara would be watching him throughout the entire launch. But he still didn’t trust the professor. He was certain there was something he wasn’t being told.
They gave him a headset and radio and wired up his heart. It seemed impossible to Alex that anyone could go into space like this, without months of training. Tamara never left his side, trying to reassure him. A fourteen-year-old was more adaptable than an adult, she said. It was going to be a bumpy ride, but he would come through it comfortably because he was young. And maybe Ed Shulsky was right. It would be something to talk about. An experience he would never forget.
And then he was in an electric buggy with Tamara and Professor Sing, feeling strange in his tracksuit, the material soft against his skin. The rocket was ahead of him. He looked at it but didn’t see it. It was as if the connection had been severed between his eyes and his brain. It was huge. The capsule that would carry him into space was at the very top of a silver tank as tall as an office block, suspended between two gantries. Water was cascading down. Was it raining? No, the water seemed to be coming from the rocket.
He could hear the metal creaking as if it needed a huge effort just to keep it in place. There were clouds of white steam pouring out—boil-off from the propellant. Alex saw a deep trench running from the launch pad towards the sea; he guessed it would carry the flames from the solid rocket boosters. It seemed impossible to him that this oversized firework could actually rise up and carry him into space.
In a lift, climbing higher and higher, still with Tamara and the professor. He could see the whole island, the sea stretching out an amazing blue—and there was Barbados in the distance. He was still being given advice. So many words. But they didn’t actually penetrate. They just flitted around him like moths.
“…do everything lightly, do everything slowly. Don’t look directly at the sun. It’ll blind you. Don’t even look at the clouds around the earth. The sun reflects… Some parts of Ark Angel will be hot—some will be cold. There have been problems with the air-conditioning… You’re going to feel strange. Don’t worry if your face becomes puffy or swells up. If your spine stretches. If you need to go to the toilet. It’s the same for all astronauts. Your body has to adapt to zero gravity…”
Who was talking? Were they really being serious? How could anybody expect him to do this?
“You’ll need to access the observation module of Gabriel 7 to get to the bomb. There’s a hatch. You saw it on the diagram. You move it to where Ed showed you and then you get back into the Soyuz’s re-entry module. Don’t waste any time. We’ll control everything from here. You’ll feel it disengage…” And then he was inside. They had certainly been right about the amount of space. No adult would have been able to fit into it. He was lying on his back in a metal box that could have been some kind of complicated washing machine or water tank, his feet in the air and his legs so tightly packed in that his knees were touching his chin. There were tiny windows on either side but they were covered with some sort of material and he couldn’t see out of them. There were no controls. Of course not. Arthur the orang-utan wouldn’t have needed controls. Professor Sing was wiring him up. More monitors. Now Alex was the one who was sweating. They had told him he would sweat even more when he was in outer space. Because of fluids moving up, the body’s salt concentration being upset. Alex tried to put it out of his mind. He didn’t even believe he would get there. He didn’t think he would survive the journey.
Tamara Knight leant over him. He was strapped into his seat. His stomach was clenched tight and he had difficulty drawing the air into his lungs. He could move his arms but nothing else. He was already cramped and he hadn’t even started. Her face was very close to his, filling his field of vision.
“Good luck, Alex,” she whispered. Nothing more. She waved a hand with fingers crossed.
“You will hear the countdown,” Professor Sing said. He was somewhere behind her. “You have nothing to worry about, Alex. We will guide you through it all. You’ll hear us over the radio. We’ll look after you.” They sealed the door. Alex felt the air inside the capsule compress. He swallowed, trying to clear his ears.
Apart from the sound of his own breathing, everything was silent.
He was alone.
“T-minus thirty.” A crackle and a hiss of static. The disembodied words had come through the headset.
What did they mean? Thirty minutes until blast-off. In thirty minutes’ time he would be leaving the planet!
Alex tried to make himself more comfortable but he couldn’t move.
“How are you doing, Alex?” It could have been Ed Shulsky talking. Alex didn’t know. The voices echoed inside his head and they all sounded the same.
“T-minus twenty-five… T-minus twenty…”
He could only sit there, doubled up on himself, as the countdown continued. The strange thing was, it felt that time had gone wrong too. A minute seemed like half an hour. Yet half an hour was passing in only minutes. He concentrated on his breathing.
“T-minus fifteen.”
Inside the control room Ed Shulsky was watching Sing and his team of thirty as they went through the final preparations. He walked over to the professor. He was wearing a gun in a holster slung over his shirt.
“I don’t mean to worry you right now, Professor,” he muttered. “But I want you to know that if Alex Rider doesn’t come out of this in one piece, I will personally rip your guts out.”
“Of course!” Sing smiled nervously. “There’s nothing to worry about. He’ll be fine!” Tamara Knight sat motionless in front of the observation window. Smoke was still rising from the rainforest where the Cessna had crashed. There were no birds to be seen. The whole island seemed to be tensing itself for the moment of launch.
“T-minus five.”
What had happened to T-minus ten? Alex was feeling sick. The injection he’d been given hadn’t worked.
He could hear something in the distance. Was it his imagination or was something rumbling far below him?
“T-minus four… three … two … one.”
It began.
At first it was slow. Alex felt a shuddering, vague to start with, but soon it was all-consuming. The entire capsule was shaking. He wasn’t sure if he was moving or not. There was a thud as the clamps holding down the rocket were automatically released. The shuddering got worse. Now the whole capsule was vibrating so crazily that Alex could feel the teeth being shaken in his skull. The noise level had risen too; it was how a roar that pounded at him with invisible fists and, lying on his back with his legs bent in front of him, there was nothing he could do. He was defenceless.
And still it got worse.
He was definitely rising; he could feel the force of the rocket’s thrust. He was being pushed into the seat—
not pushed, crushed! His vision had almost gone. His eyeballs were being mercilessly squeezed. He tried to open his mouth to scream but all his muscles had locked. He felt as if his face was being pulled off.
And then there was a deafening explosion and he was slammed forward in his seat, his neck straining, the belts cutting into his chest. Alex panicked, thinking it had all gone wrong, that part of the rocket had blown up and any moment now he would be either incinerated or sent plummeting back to earth. But then he remembered what he had been told. The first stage of the rocket had burnt out and been ejected. That was what he had heard and felt. God help him, he really was on the way. From nought to seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour in eight minutes.
Everything had been calculated. There should have been an ape inside the orbital module—instead there was a boy. To the computers it made no difference. At exactly the right second, the next stage ignited and once again he was thrown forward, the g-forces pulverizing him. How long had passed since the countdown had ended? Was he in outer space yet? It seemed to him that the shaking was more violent than ever. The whole capsule had become a distorted mass of jagged, flickering lines, like the image on a broken TV screen. He was at max Q, sitting on four hundred and fifty tonnes of explosive, being rocketed through the sky at twenty-five times the speed of sound. The main engine was burning fuel at over one thousand gallons a second. If the Soyuz was going to blow up, it would happen now. He was on fire! Blinding light suddenly crashed into the capsule. A nuclear explosion. No. The fairings on the windows had come free.
They weren’t needed any more. He was looking at the sun, which was streaming in, dazzling him. Was that blue sky or the sea? How much longer could his body stand the battering it was receiving? It occurred to Alex that nothing in the world, no amount of training, could have prepared him for an experience like this.
The rocket stopped. That was what it felt like. The noise fell away and Alex felt a quite different sensation: a sick, light-headed floating that told him he had, in an instant, become weightless. He was about to test it but then the third stage kicked in and once again he was propelled forward on this impossible fairground ride. This time he closed his eyes, unable to take any more, and so didn’t see the moment when he broke through the onion peel of the earth’s atmosphere and went from blue to black.
At last he opened his eyes. He wanted to stretch but that was impossible. Alex looked out of the window and saw stars … thousands of them. Millions. Once again, he had no sense of movement. Was he really weightless? He fumbled a hand into one of the pockets in his trousers and brought out a pencil a few centimetres long. He let it go. The pencil floated in front of him. Alex stared at it. Before he knew what he was doing, he was laughing. He couldn’t stop himself. It really was like one of those cheap special effects in a Hollywood film. But there were no hidden wires. No computer trickery. It was happening right before his eyes.
“Alex? How are you? Are you receiving me?” Ed Shulsky’s voice crackled in his ear, and the strange thing was that it sounded no different, no further away—even though Alex was already almost a hundred miles from the earth’s surface.
“I’m fine,” Alex replied, and there was a tone of wonderment in his voice. He had survived the launch. He was on his way.
“Congratulations. You’ve just broken a world record. You’re the youngest person in space…” He was in space! With the shock of the launch behind him, Alex tried to relax and enjoy the view. But the windows were too small and in the wrong place. The earth was behind him and out of sight, but there were the stars and the infinite blackness all around. How strange it was, this sense that he was going nowhere.
The pencil was still in front of him. He touched it with his finger and watched it spin. Round and round it went. Alex was hypnotized by it. Nothing else seemed to be moving. This wasn’t a ride at all. He felt as if everything, his entire life, had stopped.
And then he saw Ark Angel.
At first he was aware of something shaped like a spider appearing in the periscope attached to the window inside the capsule. It looked like a star, but much brighter than the others. Gradually it drew closer. And suddenly it became clear, an awesome construction of silver modules and corridors, interlocking, criss-crossing, hanging from what looked like the tower of a crane, with massive panels stretching out in every direction, absorbing the energy of the sun. It was huge; it weighed almost seven hundred tonnes. But it was floating effortlessly in the great emptiness of space, and Alex had to remind himself that every piece of it had been laboriously constructed on earth and then carried up separately and assembled. It was an engineering feat beyond anything he had ever imagined.
Slowly Ark Angel filled his vision. Both he and the space station were travelling at seventeen and a half thousand miles per hour, so fast that to Alex it made no sense at all. But he seemed to be going very slowly.
Then a booster rocket fired and the Soyuz accelerated, moving in on the central docking port. It was the only way Alex could measure his progress through outer space … a few metres at a time, getting closer and closer. The rockets were controlled from Flamingo Bay but they were accurate to a fraction of a millimetre.
Alex saw the curving metal plates, the intricate panel work that made up the space station. He saw a painted Union Jack and the words ARK ANGEL printed in grey.
The last part of the journey seemed to take for ever. The space station was swallowing him up and he had to remind himself that if something went wrong now it would have the impact of a bus smashing into a wall.
There was a slight jolt—nothing compared to what he had felt earlier. That was it. A voice crackled in his headset and he thought he heard applause—unless it was radio static. Whatever his misgivings about Professor Sing, it seemed that the flight director had been true to his word. Alex had arrived.
He looked at his watch. Someone had given it to him when he got dressed for the launch. Three o’clock. He had one and a half hours to find the bomb and either turn it off or move it. But there was something wrong.
For a second Alex panicked. Had the oxygen supply stopped? He swallowed hard, three or four times, gasping for air. He could feel his heart hammering and he was certain he was going to die. But it wasn’t that. There was still air in the module—he just had to draw it in. Alex forced himself to calm down. What was it?
Of course. The silence. Nobody was talking to him. Either he was on the wrong side of the planet, out of range of the control centre, or the radio had broken down. The silence was total, absolute. He had never felt more empty, more alone. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t need anyone to talk to him.
He knew what he had to do.
He unstrapped himself and reached for the circular hatch just above his head. It was his first experience of zero gravity and he knew at once that he’d made a mess of it. He rose out of the seat far too quickly and his head thudded into the metal wall, knocking him back down again. He ended up where he had begun—but with a bruised forehead and the taste of blood in his mouth. A bad start.
Everything had to be done slowly. He reached up again and found the handle. He pulled it out and turned it. The hatch swung outwards.
Alex braced himself. If there was any error, if the airlock wasn’t secured, he would be exposed to the most lethal environment known to man. And he would die the most horrible death. The air would be sucked out of his lungs and his blood would boil. All his internal organs would seize up and he would be ripped apart by the total vacuum of space. He tried not to think about it. It wasn’t going to happen. In less than ninety minutes he would be on his way home.
He found himself looking into a tunnel, about eighty centimetres wide and a couple of metres long. This was the entrance—they called it the node—between his capsule and the reception area of Ark Angel.
Reconditioned air, cold and dry, blew into his face. He pushed up with his feet, the lightest movement possible. Effortlessly, he rose. It was just like he had seen in countless films. He was flying.
The node led into the first module. Ark Angel had been built for tourists. It called itself a space hotel. But of course, it was in truth a space station very similar to Mir or the ISS, with very little room and every available inch crammed with cupboards, lockers and all the wires, pipes, dials, gauges, switches, circuits and other essentials needed to keep its inhabitants alive. Each section was a cylinder about the size of an ordinary caravan, lit with a harsh white light and jammed with equipment and handrails on three sides.
There were more handrails and Velcro straps on the fourth. Alex understood that to stop himself floating off he would have to hook his hands or feet into the floor.
He had expected the interior to be silent. Instead he was aware of the humming of the air conditioners, the throb of pumps circulating liquid coolants through the walls, the grinding of metal against metal… tonnes of it bolted together even as it spun round in orbit. He breathed in deeply. The air was very dry. He wondered how it was produced. Did it come out of a bottle or was there a machine?
Alex floated—or tried to. Once again, he pushed too hard with his feet and the entire chamber turned upside down as he spun helplessly around, totally out of control. Despite the injection, he was suffering from what NASA called space adaptation syndrome. In other words, he was about to throw up. He tried to steady himself. One of his hands caught the wall, sending him spinning the other way. He no longer knew what was up and what was down. He couldn’t even see the capsule that had brought him here.
He reached out and managed to hook a finger into one of the straps. That slowed him. But the whole experience so far had been horrible. Alex had seen Star Wars. He’d watched Harrison Ford blast his way across the universe, and like millions of others he’d bought into the dream. The reality was nothing like it.
His body was sending his brain weird signals. He was sweating. The balance of his inner ear had gone. His bones, no longer needed, were leaking calcium. His back was aching because of the elongation of his spine.
Inside his stomach, his guts were floating helplessly, and because of the shift in his fluid level, he felt a desperate need to go to the toilet. None of this had ever happened to Harrison Ford.
And it got worse. Alex stopped spinning and found himself floating in the very centre of the module.
Either he was moving very slowly or he wasn’t moving at all. The rails and Velcro straps were now uselessly high above his head. He stretched out his arms and discovered that the walls were a couple of centimetres out of reach. It was like some terrible nightmare. Every time he strained forward, his body moved back. He was quite literally stranded, floating helplessly, going nowhere.
What now? How did he make himself go up or down? He jerked his body and pedalled with his legs. It didn’t help. He tried waving his arms like a bird in a bad cartoon. Nothing.
Alex started to panic. Nobody had warned him about this. He was stuck in zero gravity and he began to wonder if he wasn’t doomed to remain like this until Ark Angel blew itself apart. He couldn’t move!
It took him what seemed like an eternity to work it out. It was amazing really that a physics lesson on a damp Wednesday at Brookland School, should suddenly come to mind and save his life. He took off his shoes and threw them with all his strength. The forward motion produced an opposite reaction, a bit like the recoil from a gun. Alex was thrown back and managed to grab hold of a handrail. He clung there for a moment, breathing heavily. It had been a nasty moment and he would have to be very careful it didn’t happen again.
He had to get moving. He hadn’t been able to see the observation module and the remaining stages of Gabriel 7 on the far side of the space station, but he knew they were there. The rocket had docked automatically almost an hour ago and had brought with it an activated bomb. He looked at his watch again. Twenty-five minutes had passed! There was barely an hour left. If the bomb exploded at the right time and in the right place, he would be vaporized, and a four hundred tonne missile would begin its deadly journey back to earth. Alex thought back to the map of Ark Angel he had been shown and knew that he had to navigate his way through an interlocking series of modules to reach his destination. He remembered what Ed Shulsky had told him.
“Don’t try to defuse it unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing, Alex. You press the wrong button, you’ll be doing Drevin’s work for him. Just move it into the sleeping area. That’s all you have to do. Move it and then get the hell out. Fast.”
It was ticking right now. Alex could imagine it. Just the two of them. Him and a bomb on a space station orbiting the earth.
He was about to set off when he heard something. The clang of a hatch closing. It was quite unmistakable.
He stopped and listened. Nothing. What next? Martians? He must have imagined it. Alex pushed off with his feet, as gently as possible, trying to steer himself towards the next module. Once again he had pushed too hard. His shoulder hit the roof—or the floor—of the node and for a second time he found himself spinning out of control.
He reached out with his hands to steady himself and found himself holding onto a lever that jutted out of the wall. It was a shutter release. Unable to contain his curiosity, he opened it, wondering if it would give him a view of the earth. But the space station was facing the wrong way. Alex reeled back, almost blinded, as brilliant light burst into the module. Professor Sing had warned him not to look directly into the sun.
Even in that brief instant, Alex had almost blinded himself.
He closed the shutter again and waited for his sight to return, then continued, gently flying into the sleeping area, the bunks attached vertically to the wall with straps to keep the crew members or guests from drifting off. In space you could sleep sideways, standing or upside down; it made no difference.
There was a long, brightly lit corridor straight ahead—four or five modules bolted together. Everything was white. This was the very heart of Ark Angel, with the dining room, the exercise room, the showers and lavatories, a living room and two laboratories all laid out next to one another. Gabriel 7 would have docked at the far end.
Alex tensed himself, preparing to make the next leap. He reached out with the palms of his hands. And froze.
A man had appeared in front of him, dressed in an identical suit to his own. The man was wearing a skullcap but, seeing Alex, he tore it off, revealing a mirror image of the world three hundred miles below.
Kaspar. Of course.
Alex had forgotten about him. So had everyone else. But Professor Sing must have known that Kaspar had been on board Gabriel 7—that was the one piece of information he had been keeping to himself. Why? Had he been so scared of Kaspar that he couldn’t bring himself to reveal the whole truth?
It looked as if Alex would never know. Kaspar had seen him. He was only twenty metres away, at the other end of the corridor. He hadn’t spoken a word but now—expertly, as if he had been trained—he pushed forward, floating through the air towards him. He was confident, in perfect control.
And he was holding a knife.
RE-ENTRY
« ^
t was something straight out of a nightmare. It was every nightmare rolled into one. The hideously tattooed face, the knife, Ark Angel, outer space… Alex could only watch helplessly as Kaspar headed towards him, flying, arms outstretched, legs trailing behind.
What was he doing in the space station?
And suddenly Alex understood.
The second rocket, the orang-utan, Drevin’s so-called experiment in weightlessness—they had all been part of the plan. There was no experiment. There never had been.
Kaspar had gone up in Gabriel 7. And Alex knew why. His own experience of the launch should have made him see that it would have been completely insane to try sending an armed bomb into space. The terrible vibrations would have set it off before it had even left the atmosphere. Only when it was in space could it be armed, and that had meant sending someone up with it. Kaspar. But now he needed to get back again. That was the point of the second rocket. Professor Sing must have known all along. The Soyuz had been sent up to collect him. And Kaspar would surely have left instructions behind. If anything went wrong, if the rocket didn’t arrive, the professor would have been killed. No wonder he had looked so nervous! In the end, he had made a choice. Send the rocket and let the two of them fight it out.
That was something else Alex understood. There were now two of them in the space station. But there was only one seat home.
Kaspar passed through the first node, where he was bathed momentarily in soft, pink light before he emerged into the glare of the next module. He seemed to be adept at manipulating himself in zero gravity.
He had aimed carefully and pushed off lightly. One hand touched a wall to correct himself; the other still clasped the knife. He was taking his time—but then he knew Alex had nowhere to hide. Just seconds remained before they would come face to face in a module barely large enough for them both.
Alex searched around him for a weapon, anything he could use to defend himself. But everything was packed down too neatly. The cupboards and lockers were closed. He was still feeling sick and disorientated and every movement he made threatened to propel him in the wrong direction. If he lost control and went into another spin he would be finished. Kaspar would cut him to pieces.
Kaspar passed through the next node. In a few moments he would arrive in the same module as Alex. The sleeping area. This was the place Professor Sing and Ed Shulsky had shown him on the map. The heart of Ark Angel. It seemed an appropriate meeting point. Maybe he could reason with Kaspar. The mission was pointless now—surely he would see sense?
But Alex doubted it. Kaspar’s eyes looked empty, mad. There was a twisted smile on his lips. The knife he was holding was a Sabatier, the blade a single piece of high carbon stainless steel, hand-honed and about ten centimetres long. Where had he got it from? He couldn’t possibly have brought it with him. Then Alex remembered. Ark Angel was a hotel. One day it might have a chef cutting sirloin steak for some American multimillionaire, and someone had made sure he was properly equipped. Kaspar must have picked up the knife as he passed through the kitchen.
As Kaspar entered the sleeping area, Alex did the only thing he could. He crouched low, then kicked out, propelling himself along, a few inches above the floor, as if he were swimming underwater in a pool. His movement caught Kaspar unawares, and the man sailed past above him. Alex realized that there was one thing you couldn’t do in zero gravity: change direction. Kaspar continued to the far wall, but as he passed him he slashed down with the knife. Alex felt the tip cut into the suit between his shoulder blades. He was lucky. Another few millimetres and it would have drawn blood. It had sliced the suit’s material but hadn’t pierced his skin.
Kaspar reached the far wall and clung onto one of the handholds. Alex continued through into the next module and managed to stop himself. He found himself surrounded by gym equipment: a treadmill, a pair of chest expanders, a rowing machine—but nothing he could throw at Kaspar. Where were the weights? Of course, there was no point having weights in a weightless environment. Alex scrabbled for one of the lockers and the door fell open. There were tools inside. A hammer, a curiously shaped ratchet, some sort of bolt tightener. He grabbed the hammer, pulled it free and held it in front of him.
Alex turned and saw Kaspar preparing to launch a second attack. The man seemed crazed, as if he were on drugs. Perhaps he was. Or perhaps he found the experience of being in space as terrifying as Alex did.
“Kaspar!” Alex wasn’t sure what to call him. What was his real name? Magnus Payne? But that wasn’t how the two knew each other. “It’s over,” he went on. “There’s no point in this. Drevin is dead. The CIA’s in control on Flamingo Bay.”
“You’re lying!”
“How do you think I got here? There’s nothing for you to do. Dropping Ark Angel on Washington—there’s no point. Drevin’s dead.”
“No!”
Two continents twisted in anger and disbelief as Kaspar kicked off, this time travelling diagonally down.
Alex knew there was no point trying to reason with him. Whatever had happened on Flamingo Bay, Kaspar needed the Soyuz. Alex stood in his way. So Alex had to die.
Kaspar flew towards him. Alex brought the hammer round and threw it with all his strength. For a moment he thought it would travel in slow motion. Wasn’t that what happened in films? But it didn’t. The hammer spun at full speed through the air and hit Kaspar on the shoulder. But would the hammer do any damage if it weighed nothing? Once again Alex thought back to his physics class, starting work on his GCSEs. The hammer picked up energy because of motion; the energy was dispersed when it came to rest.
In this instance, it came to rest because it had hit Kaspar square on. Kaspar howled and dropped the knife.
Energy dispersed equalled pain!
But the forward motion was enough to send Alex stumbling back, and for a moment he lost control. His shoulders crashed into a wall. Or perhaps it was the ceiling or the floor. It made no difference. Kaspar had leapt forward. He plunged down as if he had been fired from a gun, and a second later he was on top of Alex.
The blue and green skin of the man’s face was just inches away. Eyes full of hatred glared at him. Kaspar’s hands closed around his throat and began to tighten. The man was strangling him. And there was nothing Alex could do. He had no gadgets, no weapons. He couldn’t even move. He could feel metal plates against his shoulders, one of the lockers pressing into his back. Kaspar was floating horizontally above him, connected to Alex only by his hands. The breath was no longer reaching Alex’s lungs; the grip was too tight. He felt dizzy. In a few seconds he would pass out.
Barely knowing what he was doing, he scrabbled behind him. His knuckles brushed against some sort of lever. What was it? Even as his consciousness began to leave him, Alex remembered. He knew what the lever did. But now he couldn’t find it. Desperately he lashed out and his flailing hand caught hold of it. He pulled down.
The shutter opened and the light that had almost blinded him before exploded into the module a second time, shafting in over his shoulder. The window was facing directly into the sun and the light had a physical force as it burst in. Alex could feel it burning his neck and shoulders. The whole capsule seemed to disintegrate into a brilliant chaos of white and silver, all other colours sucked out.
Kaspar screamed as the light seared his eyes. It was as if he had been punched in the face by the sun itself, and his hands fell away, instinctively coming up to protect himself. Alex brought his legs up and kicked; his feet slammed into Kaspar’s stomach. Alex’s back was against the wall, and Kaspar was sent hurtling towards the other side of the module.
The Sabatier knife was right behind him.
It had been hovering there, its deadly point aimed at Kaspar’s neck. As Kaspar travelled backwards it went with him, but then the handle came into contact with the wall. The blade entered the city of Beijing and continued its journey, burrowing into the world’s surface. Kaspar’s body jerked as if he had been electrocuted. Then he was still.
Lying underneath him, Alex watched in disbelief. Kaspar’s arms were hanging down towards him. He was in the middle of the module, not touching any surface, suspended there. A string of bright crimson marbles appeared and began to orbit around his head. They grew larger. Now they were golf balls, trailing away, glistening red.
The knife had severed an artery. Kaspar’s blood hung around him like a grotesque Christmas decoration.
Alex had had enough. The module was heating up rapidly, still exposed to the sun, and he reached out and closed the shutter. A shadow fell across Kaspar’s face. The marbles darkened.
With his skin crawling, wanting to get away from the obscene, floating body, Alex dragged himself into the next module using a series of Velcro grips. He found himself next to a space toilet, a grey plastic box with some sort of cone device floating at the end of a pipe. He needed to use it. He was going to be sick. Grimly he swallowed, forcing himself to stay calm. He didn’t want to find out what vomit looked like in outer space.
The bomb…
How much time did he have left? Alex looked at his watch. One minute past four. Just twenty-nine minutes left. He had to move quickly. To have come so far, to have been through so much, only to die now! He forced himself to concentrate, to control his movements. He remembered the map he had been shown in the control centre. He knew where he had to go.
The hatch leading into the capsule that had brought Kaspar into space was open, and Alex saw the bomb at once. It was shaped like a torpedo, black, with six tiny switches and a glass panel with a digital read-out.
The whole thing was strapped to the wall, held in place with Velcro. With a ghastly sort of fascination, Alex lowered himself into the module and floated next to it. There was a six-figure display, rapidly counting down: 27:07:05. Alex checked it against his watch. Yes. Three minutes past four. He had just twenty-seven minutes left.
Could he turn it off? Alex examined the switches but there were no symbols, nothing to tell him what function they performed. Did he dare press one? If he made a mistake, he’d be blown to smithereens. He reached out a finger. His mouth was dry. Being so close to the bomb filled him with horror. But he had to try, didn’t he? Drevin might have perverted the genius of Ark Angel but, even so, the space station was a technological miracle, completely unique, the world’s first hotel in orbit around the earth. Could Alex really allow it to be destroyed? His finger rested against the top switch. All he had to do was flick it. It might deactivate the bomb, but it might set it off. The question was, did he dare take the risk?
The numbers in the display were still counting down. Now they showed 25:33:00.
Alex swore. Why didn’t they have some sort of rubbish chute? Then he could get rid of the bomb, jettison it into outer space. There probably was an airlock on Ark Angel, but he had no idea how to operate it.
Anyway, there was no time. His finger was still touching the switch. One of six switches. A one in six chance of getting it right.
Not good enough.
Alex let out a long, shuddering breath and withdrew his hand. He took hold of the still-ticking bomb and gently unfastened it, then eased it up through the hatch and back into the centre of the space hotel. Ed Shulsky had told him where to leave it, but Alex made the decision for himself. The toilet. Somehow it seemed a fitting end. He lowered the nose of the torpedo into it and left it there.
It was time to go.
He pushed himself off as gently as he could and was rewarded with a slow, careful progression back towards the waiting module of the Soyuz. He passed underneath Kaspar, taking care not to look up. In a few minutes’ time, the dead man was going to be given one of the most spectacular cremations anyone could ask for. It was more than he deserved.
The docking station was ahead of him—but there was one last thing he had to do. He looked at his watch.
Eleven minutes past four. There were just nineteen minutes remaining, and Alex knew it was madness to waste even a few seconds. But he would never have this opportunity again. He found another window on the opposite side from the sun, opened the shutter and looked out.
And there it was.
Planet earth. Seen from outer space.
His first thought was how big it was; his second, how small. Of course, he had seen images of the earth taken by astronauts. But this was different. He was seeing it with his own eyes. And he was moving. As he crouched in front of the porthole, he was travelling so fast that it would take him just ninety minutes to go all the way round. No wonder it seemed small. And yet the earth filled his vision. All the life in the universe, five billion people, was concentrated there. And the thought of that was enormous.
He was struck by the colours. No photographs could have prepared him for the sheer iridescence of the planet. It looked as if it were lit from inside. At first it seemed that everything was blue and white—most of the planet was water—and Alex remembered lying on his back when he was small, staring at a perfect summer sky. If he could have turned the sky into a ball, that was what he was seeing now. But as he gazed down he began to make out the shape of the coastlines, a thin line of emerald green; and then Ark Angel turned the corner of the world and there was Africa—all of Africa ahead of him—and suddenly he was seeing intense gold, yellow and red … mountains and deserts but no cities. Nothing moving. And he wondered, if he was an alien and came upon the earth, could he pass by without being aware of the teeming life below?
But then day became night and he found himself over the western Mediterranean seaboard, and even from three hundred miles away he could make out thousands of electric lights that had to be man-made. Spain and Gibraltar,. Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria and the Lebanon—all of them were visible at once, the tiny lights blinking like fireflies. There were storms over Europe. Alex saw the lightning shimmer through the clouds.
It wasn’t just that there was life on earth. The whole earth was alive. Alex could feel it pulsating beneath him, and suddenly he knew that for all its technology, Ark Angel was a sterile, dead place and he didn’t care that soon it would no longer exist. He had made the right decision. At that moment, Alex felt a sense of loneliness he would remember for the rest of his life. He wanted to go home.
He made his way back to the Soyuz module, trying to control his progress but still crashing into the walls.
Only by holding onto the handrails did he prevent himself from going into another sickening spin. He had a raging thirst and wished he’d found himself something to drink before he left. What happened when you opened a can of Coke in space? He would never find out.
Somehow he reached the entrance and folded himself in. He was operating on automatic. All he wanted was to get away. He reached up and closed the hatch, turning the lever to lock it before blastoff. This was the compartment he had travelled up in. But it was going to stay behind. There was a second hatch underneath him and he opened it, passing into the re-entry module below. There was more room here. Of course. The re-entry module had to be big enough for Kaspar. He strapped himself into the seat, found another headset and put it on, wondering if it would work.
“Alex? What is your status?” It was Tamara’s voice. He had never been happier to hear anyone.
“The bomb is still active,” he said. He looked at his watch. Twenty-five past four. “Professor Sing lied to us,” he went on. “Kaspar was here. And now I’ve only got five minutes left. Get me out of here.” Another burst of static. A disembodied voice was muttering half-words that made no sense. There had to be something wrong with the radio. Alex wondered what would happen next. How long would he have to sit here before he disengaged? And what would happen if he didn’t? The second hand on his watch ticked round. It seemed to be taunting him, moving faster than it should. The time now was twenty-eight minutes past four.
Already he was sweating. Hunched up on his back with no view, he had no idea where he was, how much further he was around the world. Twenty-nine minutes past four. Had he reached the last sixty seconds of his life?
He felt a sudden jolt. For a terrible moment, he thought that the bomb had detonated. Then he realized that was impossible. He hadn’t heard anything but he was suddenly aware that the module’s retro-rockets must have been fired. He twisted his head round and peered through the periscope. Ark Angel was already a mile away, vanishing into space like a pebble dropped into a well.
And then it exploded.
The bomb blew up, a burst of orange flame that ripped the entire space station apart, sending the different modules spinning in different directions. The arms with the solar panels fell away. There were two more explosions. A shower of brilliant sparks and a dazzling burst of white light that stretched out in silence.
Alex felt a sense of euphoria. He had succeeded! He had put the bomb in exactly the right place, and instead of propelling Ark Angel towards Washington, it had simply destroyed it. There was nothing left. A few pieces were falling through space but they would quickly burn up. At last it was over.
He fell.
The crackle on the radio stopped abruptly. Alex found himself in the grip of a silence so complete that for a moment he thought he might have died, and he had to remind himself he wasn’t home yet. He was plummeting down, feet forward, moving at eighteen thousand miles an hour. Five miles a second. This was the most dangerous part of the entire journey. If the control centre had miscalculated, he would be incinerated. Already he was aware of a pink glow outside the window as the module began to rub against the earth’s upper atmosphere.
And then he was on fire. The whole world was on fire. The very air was breaking up, being smashed to pieces, the electrons separating from the nuclei.
The module had become a fireball, and Alex knew that his life depended on the hundreds of thermal tiles that surrounded him. He was in the heart of a living hell.
He yelled out. He couldn’t help himself.
Then the red disappeared, like a curtain being torn apart.
He saw blue.
There was a second, back-breaking jolt as the parachute deployed. The world seemed to shimmer on the other side of the window and Alex saw the Pacific Ocean spread out before him.
A splash. Steam. Waves lashing at the windows. Sunlight turning the water into diamonds.
And at last silence.
He was rocking back and forth, a hundred miles off the eastern coast of Australia. The wrong side of the world—but that didn’t matter.
Alex Rider was back.
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