Read Online A Step Beyond by Christopher K Anderson - Free Book Online

no hard evidence he could point to. Just suspicions. The way she acted around Komarov. Hands sliding by each other and hesitating before continuing, the tone of her voice when she talked to him, or a smile when there was no reason for a smile. When he confronted her she would become angry and deny it was anything more than his overactive imagination. The more suspicious he became the more angered she would become and the more it would seem, as a result of her anger and a desire to strike back, that her attentions were diverted to Komarov.
    Vladimir did not want to believe that his wife could be unfaithful. There were periods when she would act as if no other man could possibly interest her, and she would love him and caress him and speak softly to him, and he would forget his suspicions. But he had no way of knowing for certain whether or not she was having an affair. It angered him not to know, and it angered him even more that he did not know whether his anger, which she resented, was justified.
    Komarov, he knew, was not to be trusted. He did not know if he could trust his wife. He did not know if he were distorting innocent gestures into something secretive and lustful. It might be, as she said, nothing more than his imagination. There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to catch them in the act. His thoughts were disrupted by a distant voice that he recognized as Colonel Schebalin’s. The colonel was reviewing the scheduled activities with the crew.
    They would spend the next three days in geosynchronous orbit, running through a seemingly endless checklist to verify that the system components functioned according to specifications. The components and their redundant counterparts had been checked and rechecked a multitude of times, at the manufacturers’, prior to assembly at the RSA plant, after assembly, prior to launch, after launch while in low-Earth orbit, and now in geosynchronous orbit, before the final burn that would send the ship and its crew on their way toward Mars.

Queen’s Gambit Declined
    “L
iberty
, this is control. You are go for burn, over.”
    The crew aboard the
Liberty
were making final preparations for trans-Mars injection, a maneuver which would free their ship from the gravitational pull of the Earth and establish a trajectory for Mars. Carter checked his flight-deck console and, pleased with what he found, gave Tom Nelson a thumbs-up.
    “Roger, we are go for burn. Out.”
    Carter could feel his heart beating. He watched his hand as it moved in slow motion through the weightless environment of the spacecraft. His finger trembled as it pulled down on the metallic gray switch to ignite the main engines of the spacecraft’s Trans-Mars Injection stage. The TMI stage held 450,000 kilograms of propellant. Within the next few minutes, the entire 450,000 kilograms would explode in the rocket combustion chambers beneath them. The force of the explosions would accelerate the ship to a velocity of 26,000 kilometers per hour. Carter heard a voice counting backwards.
    “. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. We have first-stage ignition.”
    A stream of supercold liquid hydrogen flowed into preburners, where it combined with liquid oxygen to produce hydrogen-laden steam. The steam drove the turbopumps, which fed the fuel and oxidizer into the main injectors. The
Liberty
was fitted with two engines; each engine had four turbopumps and one main injector. The injectors sprayed a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen into the combustion chambers. The entire fuel supply for the first stage was forced through the system within a matter of minutes. If an injector failed to maintain a critical pressure within a combustion chamber, then the chamber would become unstable and explode. The ship would be destroyed. Despite the danger, the risk was relatively low. The basic design of the engine had been in use for many years in the space shuttle. The thrust from the engines pushed the crew back into their