Page 150 of Stars

Floodlights from a space capsule burned into his helmet. Pinpricks of flame burned silently from RCS thrusters as the capsule steadied its position, hovering a hundred yards away. Painted on the capsule’s nose was a red flag emblazoned with five gold stars.

Sasha gasped for air. Blood spattered the inside of his helmet. He raised his hand, trying to reach for the capsule.

Someone came out of the airlock, floating on a jetpack toward him and Mark. His vision narrowed, tunneled down until there was nothing, and there was no oxygen, nothing to breathe, and he drowned as he tried to inhale through the blood that choked his throat.

Sergey—

* * *

47

Siziwang Banner

Inner Mongolia

Two bodies layon gurneys inside the painfully white isolation room.

Mark and Sasha lay in halos of blood, their sheets soaked through, rivers of red streaming down their faces and legs. Intubation lines were taped to their cheeks, gauze over their ears and eyes. Fresh blood pumped into their veins, trying to keep pace with the bleeding.

Kilaqqi sat at Sasha’s bedside, holding his bruised hand.

Instead of an infusion, Kilaqqi’s blood was being extracted, his antibodies harvested by the Chinese doctors and nurses and scientists who hovered outside the treatment room in their isolation suits.

Behind a thick glass wall, Sergey and Jack watched and waited, alone in an empty cinder block observation room in a concrete bunker buried in the wastes of northern China.

Jack hadn’t known if the mission was going to succeed. From launch until touchdown deep in Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia, they had been at the mercy of President Wall’s Trident missiles.

Song had relayed to them Beijing’s call with Elizabeth and the upgrading of American forces to DEFCON 1, the ready state for imminent nuclear war. “She’s given the ready order to a ballistic submarine,” Jack had said. “If they launch, you’ll have three minutes to abort the mission and save your crew.”

“We will not abort,” Song had said.

They held their breath through theBeautiful Star’s entire ascent.

Elizabeth had not launched against them.

When theBeautiful Starfound Sasha and Mark, both men were hemorrhaging in their space suits, the insides of their helmets coated with blood. They’d had minutes of their shared oxygen left.

The Chinese crew kept their module decompressed for the entire two-hour mission, staying in their space suits from launch through the recovery operation and into reentry and touchdown. They kept Sasha and Mark inside their suits as well, attaching individual oxygen tanks to their emergency valves and bringing the ship down during the next deorbital window.

TheBeautiful Starlanded without incident. The three Chinese astronauts were decontaminated, and then their suits and theBeautiful Starwere destroyed.

Sasha and Mark were taken to the Chinese government's biological research center. Sergey, Kilaqqi, Lindsey, Jack, and Ethan went with them. Ethan’s team stayed at the Jiuquan facility as guests of the Chinese government.

As soon as Kilaqqi arrived, he demanded to be placed in the isolation room with Sasha. “Myhutechineeds me. There is no time to waste.”

Within the hour, the doctors were harvesting Kilaqqi’s blood.

It wasn’t enough, though.

“We have an idea,” Song had said, pulling Jack aside as Sergey stayed rooted outside the lab. “We need more antibodies. Kilaqqi is not producing enough for both men. We need to send probes into orbit with his infected blood.”

“Excuse me?”

“Cells behave differently in space. On Earth, they grow in flat sheets—moving horizontally across a petri dish, for example. Gravity constrains them. In space, with no gravity, cells have no restriction on how they can grow. They flourish, exploding in three dimensions. If we send a probe into orbit, we can harvest a hundred times as many antibodies.”

“But the virus will grow exponentially as well, right?”

“That is how the antibodies are formed, by fighting the virus. Mr. President, if you want to save both men, we will have to turn to unusual procedures.”