"Good talking with you, Garry," Gerhardt said sharply. "Now, let's get busy and move those sons of bitches off the Stone."

"Only Takahashi. Don't touch the Russian team."

"God, no," Gerhardt said. "We won't do that until it's too damned late for anyone to be sensitive."

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Within the belly of the ocean-launched heavy-lift cargo vehicle, battalion commander Colonel Pavel Mirsky listened to the technicians of Orbital Sentry Platform Three refueling the tanks surrounding and below the cramped aft compartment, preparing them for the next step of the journey.

Mirsky had learned to enjoy weightlessness; it reminded him of skydiving. He had spent so much time falling from airplanes (and floating in the bellies of falling airplanes) in Mongolia and near Tyuratam—and experiencing the real thing during his training in orbit—that weightlessness seemed only natural.

The same could not be said for many of his men. Fully a third were in the throes of desperate space sickness. The three tight, stuffy compartments, stacked atop one another along the heavy-lifter's centerline, had not been designed for comfort. The orange bulkheads and dark green quilted pads snapped over most surfaces did little to make anyone feel secure.

The troops had already spent twenty hours in confinement. In that time they had been subjected to the stress of lift-off and now weightlessness. The motion sickness medicines had turned out to be long past their shelf life, pharmaceutical antiques in plastic bottles.

Mirsky took such things in stride and offered what support to his men that he could.

"What do you think of history now, eh, Viktor?" he asked his deputy commander, Major Viktor Garabedian.

"Fuck history," Garabedian said, waving his hand listlessly. "Shoot me now and get it over with."

"You'll be fine."

"Fuck health."

"Drink some water. Yes, and fuck it, too, if you wish." They hung in their slings in the forward compartment, surrounded by the smells of sickness and tension and the sounds of men trying to be quiet, lying in their slings, some eating out of ration pouches and tubes, most not.

When they had launched out of the Indian Ocean, just over the southern extremity of the Carpenter Ridge, they had used a slot scheduled for resupply of a near-earth Sentry platform. They were the fourth of seven heavy-lifters, one launched from the Moon. The seven bore the code names Zil, Chaika, Zhiguli, Volga, Rolls-Royce, Chevy and Cadillac. Three of the heavy-lifters, including Volga, their own, carried generals—code-named Zev, Lev, and Nev, after a popular comedy dance troupe. Six of the ships carried two hundred men and the small arms and contingency supplies they would need if they succeeded in the first part of their mission. The seventh—Zhiguli—carried heavy artillery, extra supplies and fifty technicians.