Kip looks over his left shoulder, as if a living relief pilot might be sitting quietly back there. He feels the bile rising in his stomach, his head spinning. The view of the Earth turning below suddenly seems an exquisite form of torture—home being dangled in front of him, but out of reach.

No! Oh my God,he thinks, swallowing hard. What the hell am I going to do now? I can’t just sit here and wait to die.

He yanks the barf bag from his ankle pocket just in time, and when the release is complete, he cleans his face and disposes of the thing in a sidemounted trash receptacle, glad for something rote to do, his mind still reeling with the thought that he’s missed something. He opens the relief port then—a small funnel-shaped urinal dumping to the vacuum of space—and drains his bladder, before retightening the straps connecting him to the command chair.

This can’t be it. I can’t be stranded. There has to be a solution I haven’t thought of. Calm down! This is just a machine. Machines can be made to work!

He remembers the spacecraft simulator back in Mojave. The door in and out is on the rear cabin wall of the simulator and he remembers how comforting it was to know that at any time they could just turn the doorknob and walk out of the box into the hangar to safety. Just like that. Just open a door and leave the nightmare.

The urge to turn around and look at the rear cabin wall obsesses him. He struggles against the seat belt to turn around far enough, gripping the back of the command chair, his focus snapping to the unbroken surface of the back wall.

There is, of course, no door.

That fact triggers a buzzing disbelief and panic which crashes over him like an emotional tsunami. He feels tears on his face as the images before him begin to compress into a tunnel, and then to a single point of light, just before everything goes dark.

Richard DiFazio takes the news from Arleigh quietly. Most of the controllers have left their stations since the realization dawned that there would be no more information on the video monitors. They stand in small groups now, scattered around the room, grim and tense as they wait for something to be relayed from cameras and sensors they don’t have, the frustration compounded by their having no sources of their own.

The CEO of American Space Adventures quietly returns to the conference room and lifts a receiver, punching in the number he’d considered calling earlier, an international number he guards carefully in his PDA. The male voice answers in Russian and switches adroitly to English with a cheery greeting which changes to a serious tone at the news of Intrepid’s dilemma.

“And, of course, it will be a balmy day in the Bering Strait before our good friend Geoffrey is willing to help, no?”

“You’ve got that right. But you’ve got a resupply mission coming up in two weeks, correct?”

“What you’re thinking is not possible without money, Richard, and maybe not even then.”

“But you’ll try?”

There is a long pause and a weary sigh.

“Can your people last for eight days?”

“No.”

“Then you’re asking the impossible, regardless of money. Launching inside of eight days from now would be suicide.”

“They’re damaged up there, Vasily. Our astronaut… you’ve met him, by the way… Bill Campbell.”

“Yes, I have, but it doesn’t change the reality of what we can do.”

“They were hit by something, they’ve lost all comm, and apparently he can’t get the engine to light to kick him out of orbit. He’s flown through three chances we know he’d take.”

There’s a long stretch of silence and the two wait each other out, Vasily giving in first. “I already knew of this, Richard. John Kent called me and our people have been monitoring, too. But even if we could get there, you have no docking collars, no compatible hatches, and only one space suit. We can’t tow him back home.”

“We have an airlock. We can stuff a spare suit inside the lock. Bill gets the passenger ready and out, then takes the spare suit and comes out himself.”

“Perhaps. But it takes eight days, Richard. I’m sorry. Maybe NASA can move faster.”

“I’m begging, Vasily.”

“Don’t beg, my friend. It isn’t becoming. Unlike Shear, we would help if we could. But you knew the risks when you started your business, and we all warned you about rescues.”

Consciousness returns slowly. Dreamlike, fuzzy images of an upside-down cabin slowly coalesce until Kip realizes he’s floating in zero gravity around the ceiling, upside down in relation to the cabin floor. How long he’s been out he isn’t sure. He’s never blacked out before, except for one time as a kid when a larger classmate bounced an impressively large rock off his head in the school yard.

It’s the same scene, the same nightmare he’d left. Bill’s body, the absence of an escape door, the hiss of the air conditioning, the plastic and antiseptic smell of the interior. Everything.

He reaches out tentatively and grasps the back of the command chair, working his body into it again, facing forward. He feels foolish and exhausted. They had explained that the cabin pressure in orbit would be the equivalent of a ten-thousand-foot altitude and that too much physical exertion would net light-headedness. That must have been it.

I moved too fast and blacked out from lack of oxygen.

That’s better than the alternative explanation. No way could he have just fainted.

Kip clicks the seat belt on again and looks at the clock. He’s only been out a short time and nearly eighty minutes remain to the next retrofire point—the end of Orbit 4. He tries to pump himself up with the idea that he can try to fire the engine yet again, but he knows he’s deluding himself. For some reason the Eagles’ “Hotel California” suddenly begins playing in his head, the haunting lyrics and one phrase in particular sending a shiver up his spine.

He lets himself sink into the bizarre images it paints in his mind as he shivers, unwilling to believe he’s hit the wall with no more options, and equally unwilling to delude himself that there are some. His anger returns, but this time there’s no energy left for hitting or throwing or yelling. He sits, doing a slow burn, searching for someone to blame and coming up empty.

About as productive as blaming God!he thinks, his mind still ricocheting off a dozen possible solutions, each one of which evaporates into little more than wishful thinking.

And suddenly there is nothing left but reality, and it feels like a black hole in his soul, sucking everything that remains of him into another dimension. He sees movement in one of the side windows and looks, realizing the image is his, startled by the mirrorlike reflection of the fear in his eyes.

And the guilt! The overwhelming, crushing guilt that he’s done exactly what Sharon tried to prevent. He’s killed his children’s father, her husband. He’s walked stupidly into the abyss.

He feels tears again cascading on his face and he buries his head in his hands, eyes closed, body shaking, wishing, praying, begging for deliverance as the silent, anguished cry of “No!” fills his mind. He rocks back and forth in agony until he’s stunned enough and tired enough to escape into the blessed release of a numbed sleep.

On any normal day the sight of Richard DiFazio walking into ASA’s maintenance office would be routine, but his sudden bursting through Mark Burgess’s office door just now catches everyone by surprise. The director of maintenance turns with a shocked expression as the CEO motions him to a corner office and pulls the door closed behind them.