A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever

By Leigh Kimmel

Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit.

Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan.

Now he's trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country's space program as much a hindrance as a help. It's becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he's going to need to go clear to the top.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215870792

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. All names of persons, places and organizations are fictitious or used fictitiously.

COVER CREDITS:

Moon over Earth: NASA

Font: Snowstorm

This is your last flight ever, Baikal.

Vitali Grigorenko blinked at the sudden moisture in his eyes, realized he was getting sentimental. Something a cosmonaut couldn’t afford, and especially not one in the commander’s seat.

The Buran orbiters had been obsolete for over a decade — they’d been designed back in the last days of the old Soviet Union, based on half-understood plans for the Amerikanskis’ first-generation Space Shuttle orbiters. Still, there was still a heck of a lot of history in this old bird. He’d flown several of those missions, including the rescue of the crew of the Falcon at the tail end of the Energy Wars.

All things must come to an end, he reminded himself. And far better to fly one last exemplary mission and let Baikal go off to a museum, to be replaced by the new generation of orbiters, than to keep it flying until some catastrophic failure.

Which made it all the more appropriate that this mission should be his last as well. He was pushing fifty, and he couldn't deny he'd had a good run, both as a cosmonaut and as a pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Force. He'd stay on in an administrative role for a few years, then a comfortable retirement getting to know his grandchildren. Maybe sit on a few corporate boards, write his memoirs. Some former cosmonauts had run for seats in the Duma, but he really didn't see himself getting into politics. He'd gotten quite enough of that business as a teenager in the Lanakhidzist Revolution, thank you very much.

His reverie was interrupted by a shout of alarm. In a response so automatic as to approach reflex, he scanned the instrument panel, found all gauges and indicators nominal.

Sasha Abramov pulled himself through the hatch from the orbiter's mid-deck to the flight deck. Hey, boss, there's something out there. He gestured in the direction of the spacecraft's main hatch.

A flare of alarm arose in Vitali's hindbrain: any unexpected object in a spacecraft's vicinity could pose a deadly danger. Were you able to get an identification?

The younger cosmonaut answered in the negative. Not surprising, given that he was a scientist rather than a pilot.

On the other hand, he didn't just stick there by the hatch, staring through the porthole-like window in abstract observation