Last Plane to Heaven Read Free Page B

animals had a wide range, but they weren’t left completely unattended.
    â€œOut,” said Hannaday. “Open the cargo bay.”
    Nichols popped the door seals in a wash of fuel reek, then dropped the aluminum boarding ladder. I made my way carefully after him, one step at a time on my bad legs.
    It stank outside, of fire and something nasty-chemical. Hydrazine? Nichols was banging on the cargo hatch as I bent to look under the plane, scanning for the source of the reek.
    I found it. “Holy fuck.”
    Nichols was distracted. “What?”
    Hannaday dropped down between us and knelt. “Nice.”
    The thing was half rounded, like a stubby bullet, and blackened all to hell. It sat on the flat side. Smoke curled off, dancing in the dry grass around the … the …
    â€œSoyuz TMA-3 landing capsule,” said Hannaday. “Get the ladder. And stay the hell away from the bottom. There’s a gamma-ray emitter down there that will fry your nuts.”
    Nichols had found this weird folding ladder, sort of halfway between a painter’s stepladder and a scaffold. He shouldered the Mossberg and dragged the ladder toward the Soyuz with that shiny-eyed focus I normally associated with an impending massacre.
    Soyuz . We were dusting off a fucking spaceman. “Somebody’s looking for this.” I glanced at the sky for the fleet of Russian Hinds that must surely be in the air.
    Hannaday laughed again. “Yeah, a couple of thousand klicks from here. Get the camo netting out of the hold, Allen.”
    I got the camo netting.
    *   *   *
    Up close the capsule had that brutal precision so typical of Sov high tech. It could have been whittled from stone, then ground off. Reentry had done the thing no favors either. The surface was covered with burned streaks and pits. A round hatch stood open near the nose, from which lines of a parachute stretched out some few dozen yards across the grass. The smoking ground testified to the retro rockets that had soft-landed the capsule.
    At that range the smell was worse, hydrazine and baked metal and some weird ozone thing. It made me wish for a breather mask. I dropped the mound of camo netting and sat on it.
    Hannaday took the ladder and set it up against the blunt cone. The scaffold part fit across the top. Of course it did, I thought. He went straight for a little opening, pulled out something I would swear was a key, and went to work on the nose.
    â€œHelp me out, boys,” he said and he wrestled open a hatch.
    Of course I didn’t shoot him. The Antonov pilot would have taken off without us.
    Spy guy fished out a real live astronaut, someone small in a jumpsuit who couldn’t stand on his own feet. Nichols and I got the guy down the ladder, then Nichols took off for the Antonov with the space traveler in a fireman’s carry while Hannaday and I spread out the netting and covered the capsule. He didn’t bother to retrieve his ladder.
    â€œNice one.” I coughed through the reek. “You’re running a scam of epic proportions. I assume we’re nixing satellite surveillance here.”
    Hannaday grinned around the curve of the capsule. “Everybody’s got to make a living, Allen.”
    When I pulled myself back up the Antonov’s ladder, I found Nichols up front by the locked pilot’s door, staring back down the narrow aisle. He was pale and sweating.
    â€œWhat?” I said. “You find Elvis there?”
    â€œShe’s a girl.”
    I went and looked. Our spaceman was a girl, not more than fifteen, eyes bloodshot from reentry gees, barely moving even as she stared at us. Blue-black skin, shaved head.
    A girl.
    Who’d dropped out of the Central Asian sky in a Russian spaceship.
    Kids on the International Space Station? Not fucking likely. Not in this lifetime.
    â€œHannaday,” I breathed, “who the fuck is she?”
    *   *   *
    The Antonov