A jeep stopped not far from them, three NATO officers smoking and conversing inside. But the area around Kalina and the lieutenant was clearing. The two finally rose. They jumped in their own jeep, the lieutenant turned the ignition, and they hurtled along the route planned out earlier. Submachine guns sounded behind them; bullets flew overhead, one shattering a rearview mirror. The jeep whipped into a turn, entering a burning residential area. The enemy hadn’t pursued.

“Major, you have a doctorate, right?” the lieutenant said as he drove.

“Where do you know me from?”

“I’ve seen you with Marshal Levchenko’s son.”

After a silence, the lieutenant said, “Right now, his son is farther from the war than anyone else in the world.”

“What are you implying? You know that—”

“Nothing, I was just saying,” the lieutenant said neutrally. Neither of them had their mind on the conversation. They were still lingering on that last thread of hope.

Of the entire battlefront, this might be the only breach.

JANUARY 5TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,
ABOARD THE VECHNYY BURAN

Misha was experiencing the solitude of a lone inhabitant in an empty city.

The Vechnyy Buran really was the size of a small city. The modular space station had a volume equivalent to two supercarriers and could sustain five thousand residents in space at a time. When the complex was under centripetal force simulating gravity, it even contained a pool and a small flowing river. Compared to other space work environments of the day, it smacked of unparalleled extravagance. But in reality, the Vechnyy Buran was the product of the thrifty reasoning the Russian space program had demonstrated since Mir. The thinking behind its design went that, although combining all the functionality needed to explore the entire solar system into one structure might require a huge initial investment, it would prove absolutely economical in the long run. Western media jokingly called Vechnyy Buran the Swiss Army knife of space: It could serve as a space station orbiting at any height from Earth; it could relocate easily to moon orbit, or make exploratory flights to the other planets. Vechnyy Buran had already flown to Venus and Mars and probed the asteroid belt. With its huge capacity, it was like shipping an entire research center into space. In the field of space research, it had an advantage over the legion but dainty Western spaceships.

The war had broken out just as Vechnyy Buran was preparing for the three-year expedition to Jupiter. At that time, its over one hundred crew members, most of them air force officers, had left for Earth, leaving only Misha. The Vechnyy Buran had revealed a flaw: Militarily, it presented too big a target while possessing no defensive abilities. Failing to foresee the progressive militarization of space had been a mistake on the part of the designer.

Vechnyy Buran could only take avoidance measures. It couldn’t depart for farther space, with numerous unmanned NATO satellites patrolling Jupiter’s orbital path. They were small, but whether armed or unarmed, any one could pose a deadly threat to the Vechnyy Buran.