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After that: silence.
And then: sirens in the distance.
I got to my knees, and then to my feet. I opened and closed my mouth a few times to pop my ears.
I stumbled to the door and opened it. The first thing I noticed was that the small triplet of steps that once led to my door were several feet away. Then I saw the freshly disturbed earth between the steps and my door and I understood what happened.
The steps are anchored into the ground with four-by-fours sunk deep like fence posts. My portable has no such support.
My whole house moved and the stairs stayed put.
“Grace?! Are you okay?!” It was Stratt’s voice. Her portable was next to mine.
“Yeah!” I say. “What the heck was that?!”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Hang on.”
Shortly after, I saw the bobbing of a flashlight. She came to me, wearing a bathrobe and boots. She was already on her walkie-talkie.“Eto Stratt. Chto sluchylos’?”she demanded.
“Vzryv v issledovatel’skom tsentre,”came the reply.
“The research center blew up,” she said.
Baikonur was a launch facility, but they did have some research buildings. They weren’t laboratories. They were more like classrooms. Astronauts generally spent a week before launch at Baikonur, and they usually wanted to study and prepare right up to launch day.
“Oh God,” I said. “Who was there? Who was there?!”
She pulled a wad of papers from her robe pocket. “Hang on, hang on…” She rifled through the papers, throwing each to the ground as she moved on to the next. I knew what they were at a glance—I’d been seeing them every day for a year. Schedule charts. Showing where everyone was and what they were doing at all times.
She stopped when she reached the page she was looking for. She actually gasped. “DuBois and Shapiro. They’re scheduled to be there doing some Astrophage experiments.”
I put my hands on my head. “No! No, please no! The research center is five kilometers away. If the blast did this much damage to us here—”
“I know, I know!” She flicked on her walkie-talkie again. “Prime crew—I need your locations. Call them in.”
“Yáo here,” came the first reply. “In my bunk.”
“Ilyukhina here. At officers’ bar. What was that explosion?”
Stratt and I waited for the response we hoped would come.
“DuBois,” she said. “DuBois! Check in!”
Silence.
“Shapiro. Dr. Annie Shapiro. Check in!”
More silence.
She took a deep breath and let it out. She clicked the walkie-talkie on one more time. “Stratt to transport—I need a jeep to take me to Ground Control.”
“Copy,” came the reply.
The next few hours were, frankly, chaos. The entire base was put on lockdown for a while and everyone’s ID was checked. For all we knew, some doomsday cult wanted to sabotage the mission. But nothing turned up amiss.
Stratt, Dimitri, and I sat in the bunker. Why were we in a bunker? The Russians were taking no chances. It didn’t look like a terrorist attack, but they were securing the critical personnel just in case. Yáo and Ilyukhina were off in some other bunker. The other science leads were in other bunkers as well. Spread everyone out so there’s no single place to attack that would be effective. There was a grim logic to it. Baikonur was built during the Cold War, after all.
“The research buildings are a crater,” said Stratt. “And there’s still no sign of DuBois or Shapiro. Or the fourteen other staff that worked there.”
