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.