Ark Angel Read online

  “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 7? 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. Th
e 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 now 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 compare
d 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.