Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter Page A

failing
Soyuz.
He had literally no idea what might await them on the ground, and he wasn’t sure if he had the courage to face it.
    Musa reached over with his bearlike hand and pressed Kolya’s knee. “Nothing in our past—our training, our tradition—has prepared us for an experience like this. But we are Russians. And if we are the last Russians of all, as we may be, then we must live, or die, with suitable honor.”
    Sable had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
    Kolya, reluctantly, nodded. “So we land.”
    “Thank God for that,” Sable said. “Now, the question is—where?”
    The
Soyuz
was designed to come down on land—happily, Kolya realized, for surely an ocean landing, as the Americans had once used, would have been the death of them without support.
    “We can decide where to begin the reentry,” Musa said. “But after that we are in the hands of the automatic sequence; once we are dangling from our parachute, we will have little control over our fate. We don’t even have a weather forecast—the wind could drag us hundreds of kilometers. We need the room for a messy landing. That means we have to land in Central Asia, just as our designers intended.”
    He seemed to have expected an argument from Sable over that, but she shrugged. “That’s not necessarily a bad idea. There are signs of people in Central Asia—nothing modern, but human habitation, quite a concentration—all those campfires we saw. We need to find people, and that’s as good a place as any to look.” This seemed logical, but Kolya saw a puzzling hardness in the set of her mouth—as if she was calculating, already thinking ahead to the situation beyond the landing.
    Musa clapped his hands. “Good. That’s settled. There is no reason to hesitate. Now we must prepare the ship—”
    A buzzer sounded from the living compartment.
    “Shit,” said Sable. “That’s my ham radio rig.” With a single movement she launched herself up through the hatchway.
    The simple detector Sable had rigged up had actually detected two signals. One was a steady pulse, strong but apparently automated, coming out of a site somewhere in the Middle East. The other, though, was a human voice, scratchy and faint.
    “. . . Othic. This is Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic, USASF and UN, at Jamrud Fort in Pakistan, broadcasting to any station. Please respond. I am Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic . . .”
    Sable grinned, showing gleaming teeth. “An American,” she whooped. “I knew it!” She began to adjust the tangled equipment, eager to reply before the radio footprint of the
Soyuz
drifted too far.

12: ICE
    On the day Bisesa’s scouting party was to set off, the reveille was sounded by a trumpeter at five A.M. Bisesa woke blearily, her body still not quite accustomed to this new time zone, and went to look for her companions.
    After a quick breakfast, the party formed up, lightly loaded with gear. A unit of twenty troopers, mostly
sepoys
, under the command of newly minted Corporal Batson, had been assigned to escort Bisesa—and here were Josh and Ruddy, both of whom insisted they couldn’t possibly miss this jaunt. They were all on foot; Captain Grove, reasonably enough, didn’t want to risk any of his dwindling population of mules. Grove was also uneasy about allowing the journalists to go. But there had been no sightings of Pashtuns to the north and west, not a single sniper’s bullet. Even their villages seemed to have disappeared, as if apart from Jamrud humanity had been scraped off the planet. Grove relented about Ruddy and Josh, but he insisted that the party was to keep to tight military discipline at all times.
    Off they marched. Soon Jamrud had disappeared over the horizon, and the world seemed empty, save for themselves. It was the tenth day since Bisesa’s stranding.
    The going was tough. They were clambering over country that was little more than a mountainous desert. At noon the heat climbed ferociously, though it was