York tried to be tolerant, but she found it hard. She didn’t feel she had the time to hang around on a steppe with a bunch of ragged-assed Soviets. Let’s get on with this. Get it over.

Vladimir Viktorenko came stalking up to her, compact and purposeful, his flight helmet fixed over his head. “So,” he said, and he clapped her on the shoulder. She was braced for the blow, and managed not to stumble. “You are ready for your ride? And you, Ralph?”

Gershon lifted his head out of his suit neck, like a turtle poking out of its shell.

York stared up at the wall of the Command Module, her apprehension growing. “We’ve had no preparation for this. Where’s the hatch? At the top of the Soyuz?”

“Yes, it is at the top. I will climb in first.” He tapped her shoulder, then Gershon’s. “Then you, then you. You will see. It will be easy.”

The technicians were snickering. York felt her resentment build.

“So, Vladimir, why are these guys of yours laughing at me?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Vlad-im-ir,” he said, accenting the second syllable. “Oh, it is nothing.”

“Like hell it is.” She felt anger surge in her. She’d been burning up with it since Apollo-N, lashing out at anything that came in her way. She suspected it was one reason she’d been sent over there, despite her involvement in the post-accident investigations. To keep her out of the way. To cool her off, on the steppe.

Well, it wasn’t working.

She stalked over to one of the techs, a burly guy in a shirt, grease-stained, that strained at his ample belly. “What’s so funny? Huh?”

Viktorenko came to her side and took her elbow. “You must be calm, my dear.”

She shook his hand off. “Oh, sure. Just as soon as these ill-mannered assholes—”

“No,” he said, and there was some steel in his voice.

“Why the hell not?”

“Soy-uz.” He pronounced the word the way she had, as an American-eared best guess, with the syllables rhyming with “boy” and “fuzz.” Even to York’s ears it sounded clumsy. “That is what is so amusing. I suspect your English transliterations are at fault,” he said smoothly. “That ‘y’ is perhaps deceptive. You see, in the standard orthography, ‘yu’ stands for a specific Cyrillic letter, and so the ‘y’ and ‘u’ should not be split. The syllables are So-yuz, you see. Now. Since the stress is on the second syllable, we would allow the unstressed ‘o’ of ‘So’ to soften into a weaker ‘ah.’ And then ‘yuz’ has a long ‘u,’ like ‘shoe.’ Sah-yooz. But, of course, in speaking, final consonants tend to drift to the unvoiced. One must soften the ‘z’ to ‘s.’ So: Sah-yooss Sah-yooss.”

She tried it a couple of times, and drew an ironic hand-clap from the big, burly tech.

“Better,” Viktorenko said. “Now, you see, you have taken the trouble, here in my country, to pronounce correctly one of the three or four words of Russian with which one could reasonably expect an American astronaut to be familiar.”

She was aware of the tech watching her, a leer in his eyes. She glared back. These Russians were even more full of macho bull than their American counterparts.

But then, some of that might be to do with the lousy international situation. She tried to imagine what these men must feel about their countrymen fighting and dying in Afghanistan — and what went through their heads when they looked at her, a vulnerable, isolated American, and remembered the aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric that had been emanating from the White House from the day Reagan had walked in. They’d be entitled to despise her, she supposed.

Her anger dissipated. Hell. Maybe I deserve it.

She shivered, and tried not to think about it.

A rope ladder came snaking down out of the Soyuz toward the ground.

She knelt at the summit of the Command Module, with the heavy hand of a tech on her shoulder to steady her. The Command Module was like the headlight of some huge car, upended on this plain, its green paint a striking contrast with the washed-out brown of the soil. From up there the steppe looked immense, intimidating, deserted save for the small group around the capsule; the sky was iron-gray, a lid clamped tight over the land.

In the remote distance she spotted a silvery glint that might have been water. Some godforsaken landlocked salt lake.

Viktorenko clambered into the capsule first. He told York to give him a couple of minutes before following; he said he had to check the bolts holding the seats in place. As far as she could tell he was serious.

At last Viktorenko poked his head out of the hatch and waved her in. The technician pulled off her outer boots, and the antiscratch cover she had worn over her helmet.

The cabin was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module — which, after all, was of the same vintage as this Soyuz technology — with three lumpy-looking molded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. Gingerly, feetfirst, she lowered herself.

Vladimir Viktorenko was already in the commander’s seat, over at the left of the cabin. He waved her toward the other side. “Be my guest!”

She slid herself down, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The couch was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves. The couches in a Soyuz were supposed to be molded to the body of the cosmonaut; in this training rig the couches came in one size, to fit all, and were scuffed and battered from overuse.

The capsule was cramped even compared to the Apollo trainers she’d used, and was jammed full of bales of equipment for postlanding: parachutes, emergency rations, flotation gear, survival clothing. The main controls were set out in a panel in front of Viktorenko: a CRT screen, orientation controls on Viktorenko’s right, and maneuvering controls to his left. There was an optical orientation viewfinder set up on a small porthole to one side of the panel. York recognized few of the instruments, actually. But it didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be doing any flying. And besides, in this landing-drill mock-up, most of the controls were obviously dummies.

The capsule layout struck her as truly clunky. It was all sharp corners; and some of the controls were so far from the cosmonauts’ hands that they were provided with sticks to poke at the panels. It was low-tech, utilitarian.

There was a small, circular pane of glass at York’s right elbow. She peered out, trying to lose herself in the view of gray sky and flat steppe.

Ralph Gershon came clambering down from the hatch. His boots and knees were everywhere, clattering into the equipment banks and against York and Viktorenko. The Russian laughed hugely and playfully batted away Gershon’s clumsier movements.

Gershon twisted into the center seat and plumped down, compressing her against the wall; their lower legs were in contact, and there was no space for her to move away. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Ralph.”

Gershon, chewing Juicy Fruit, seemed cheerful enough. “Lighten up, York. This ain’t so bad. At least we’re out of the fucking wind.”

Viktorenko reached over Gershon and pushed closed the inner hatch, a fat plug of metal. Immediately the wind noise, the chattering of the technicians, was cut off, and York felt sealed in. Entombed.

She heard the techs slam shut the outer hatch.

The noise of the chopper increased to a muffled drone. She felt her heart pump harder. There was a pounding on the hull, and then a soft, slithering scraping, as, York guessed, cables slid over the surface of the craft.

Ralph Gershon picked his gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his seat, seemingly unconcerned.

The chopper’s engine roared. There was a brief strobing of the light at her window — helicopter blades, passing over the Command Module — and then a yank upward, as if the Soyuz had turned into a high-speed elevator.

York felt the air rush out of her lungs, and the pressure points of her couch dug into her back and hips.