Titan. Stephen Baxter

thought about the news from Titan, wondering vaguely what it might mean for her.

      The low-level arc floodlights in the payload bay glowed like a captive constellation.

      

      The suit technician removed the protective cover from Jiang Ling’s helmet. Jiang sat down on the lip of the hatch and hauled herself into the orbital module, head first. Another technician pulled off her outer boots, and she swung her legs inside the module.

      She was alone, here in this orbital compartment, this elongated sphere within which she would spend a week in low Earth orbit. The compartment was like a miniature space station, crammed with storage lockers, provisions, scientific equipment and literature. Everything was gleaming white, new and shiny.

      The technicians were framed in the hatchway. They were both Han Chinese: military officers, with their brown uniforms visible under their white coats. They grinned at her. But, she thought, their eyes were hard.

      One of them passed her a small brass bell. She took it in her gloved hand. It was inscribed with the face of Mao Zedong, in comfortable, corpulent middle age.

      The technician grinned at her. ‘Maybe ta laorenjia will bring you luck.’

      She raised her hand in thanks.

      The technicians stepped back into the white room beyond the doorway, and hauled the hatch closed. It shut with finality. Even the quality of the sound changed. She was aware of a sense of enclosure, almost of claustrophobia.

      Clutching the brass bell, she put such thoughts aside as irrelevant.

      Beneath her was an inner hatch. She twisted around and lowered herself through this. Now she was entering the second of her craft’s three modules, called the command compartment, which she would ride to orbit – and home to Earth again, to her planned soft landing in the Gobi Desert.

      Below her, inaccessible now, was the third part of her craft: an equipment module, containing fuel tanks, oxygen, water supplies, life support, and the mass of equipment that ran the on-board systems. The equipment module would be used to manoeuvre the craft in orbit, and when Jiang finally returned to Earth this stage would be used as a retro-rocket, before being jettisoned along with the orbital module.

      She settled into her couch. The command compartment was a compact half-sphere, its walls curving up before her. There were bulky compartments and packs all around her, strapped to the walls and floor, most of them containing equipment that would be needed for the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation gear, emergency rations, blankets and thick clothes. The spacecraft’s main controls were set out before her: an artificial horizon, handsets for attitude controls, communications and monitoring gear.

      She was hemmed in, embedded in this solid mass of equipment like a wrapped-up porcelain doll.

      The astronaut trainees, morbidly, called the command compartment the xiaohao, after the small isolation cells which were still operated within Qincheng Prison in Beijing. But her brief feeling of confinement had passed, for the capsule was already alive: the cabin floodlights glowed cheerfully, complex graphics scrolled through the softscreens embedded in the walls, and green lights shone all over the instrument panels.

      There were two small circular windows, one to either side of her. Now there was only darkness within them, because the spacecraft – perched here a hundred and seventy feet above the ground at the tip of the Long March booster – was enclosed within its protective fairing. But there was a small periscope, its eyepiece set in the center of the instrument panel before her, whose extension poked out beyond the fairing.

      Seen through the periscope, the sky was a vast blue dome, devoid of moisture.

      This was Inner Mongolia, the north-east of China. The desert was a vast, tan brown expanse, as flat as a table-top, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Beijing was hundreds of miles east of here. To the north, beyond the shadow of the Great Wall, camel trains still worked across the Mongolian Gobi.

      The Jiuquan launch center itself was modest. There were just three launch pads set in a rough triangle a few hundred yards apart. The pads were concrete tables, a hundred feet across, with minimal equipment at each; there was a single gantry almost as tall as the Long March booster itself, which was moved on rails between the pads. She could see the railway spurs which brought booster stages here. There was no surrounding industrial complex, as at Cape Canaveral or Tyuratam. There was only an igloo-like blockhouse close to each pad, buried partly underground, containing the firing rooms; further away there were gleaming tanks and snaking pipelines for propellant storage and delivery, and a small power station.

      The launch complex, in fact, was dwarfed by the thousand-mile hugeness of the Gobi.

      To Jiang, the elemental simplicity of this facility was its power. Here in the mouth of the desert it was as if her booster had barely any connection with the Earth it was soon to shake off. To Jiang, Jiuquan was the reality of spaceflight, reduced to its core …

      The flight was still to come, of course. But already, she sensed, the worst of her mission was over: the public tours, the attention from TV and net correspondents, the speeches to thousands of Party cadres in Tiananmen Square, even the meeting with the Great Helmsman himself. Of course there would be many more such chores after the flight, but that was far from her mind.

      For now she was alone in here, contained within the xiaohao – in this environment she had come to know so well. Here, she was in command, and she was ready to confront destiny: to become the first Chinese, in five thousand years of history, to break the bonds of Earth itself.

      A voice crackled in the small speakers on her headset. ‘Lei Feng Number One from the firing room. Are you ready to begin your checklist?’

      She was still clutching the brass bell. She reached up, and fixed it to the handle of the hatch above her with a twist of wire. She touched Mao’s face with a spacesuited finger. The bell rang gently. She smiled. Now, ta laorenjia could protect her as he did millions of Chinese; Mao Zedong, three decades after his death, had become the most popular household folk god.

      She settled back in her couch. ‘This is Jiang Ling in Lei Feng Number One. Yes, I can confirm I am ready to proceed with the checklist. Today is a good day to fly!’

      

      The work seemed to come in waves, with clusters of switches to throw and settings to check in a short time. In addition she had to record measurements in her log book. And she had to work to reduce the condensation inside the cramped compartment. In orbit this would be done automatically, but on the ground the light pumps were overwhelmed by Earth’s gravity, and she had to open and close valves at set times, and she had a little hand-pump she used to move condensate from one part of the cabin to another.

      There were several long holds in the countdown, when malfunctions were encountered. During these periods she had literally nothing to do, and she found them difficult times.

      She was aware of continual movement and noise. She could feel the rocket swaying as the thin desert wind hit its flanks; and there was a succession of thumps, bangs and shudders, as ancillary equipment was moved to and from the booster. She was very aware that she was suspended at the top of a thin, fragile steel tower housing thousands of tons of highly explosive propellant.

      There were cameras all over the cabin, focused on her face behind its open visor, their black lenses glinting in the floods. She tried to keep her expression clear, her movements calm and assured.

      She felt a deep nervousness gnaw at her, more worrying even than the prospect that some catastrophe might claim her life, today. If something went wrong, if the mission was aborted, was it possible that she would somehow be blamed?

      Jiang was not Han Chinese. She was a Turkic Uighur, a Muslim minority which emanated from the westernmost province of Xinjiang. Jiang’s family came from the desert capital Urumqi; her family had moved to Beijing when she was a child when Jiang’s father, a mid-ranking Party cadre, was posted to the Minorities Institute in the capital in the 1970s. Since her father was both an official and a Uighur, the family had been treated