Natote!

/A copy to the General Headquarters

Of the 3rd Galactic directory

19-55.

Mars 18 a.c.

Commander of 156th squadron of 1U Fleet,

Colonel yagd Kokum Yohoud.

***

The earth, covered with glittering scales of cirrus clouds, decorated with scrolls of ocean cyclones seemed to be a figment of someone's whimsical fantasy.

Slowly spinning around like a huge lazy ball, it seemed, it took dense blackness from deep space and spread it on its surface in various colors and shades of blue, from smoky, white and blue on the edge of the atmospheric film, to dark ultramarine over the ocean breaks.

Awakening continents slowly crawled out on the sunlit side, showing spots of deserts, forests, wormholes of megalopolises, negligent strokes of Islands and zigzags of coastlines.

Pilot of the shuttle "Independence" Lieutenant of the SAS air forces, Ronald Whitehouse sighed deeply and not paying attention to this magnificent picture, rubbed his neck on the collar of his spacesuit:

– When it comes to it, nothing ever turns out! – He put a krypton cutter that has not yet cooled off, in his backpack, circled around the bent bracket that jammed the docking rim of the rescue capsule, and perched on the edge of the shunting engine.

Aiming, he slung a piece of the rod from a broken solar battery from hand to hand, and brandished:

– Geronimo!

A blow.

The bracket trembled slightly, but didn't move an inch.

The astronaut himself flew off to the whole length of the tether on an impact and, after he had stopped the indiscriminate tumbling with great difficulty, began to maneuver the back pack, attempting to re-approach the odious piece of iron:

– Hey, Mackliff, Mackliff, hey! I can’t do it. We should try something else. Maybe we can descend with the Germans?

 Air crackled, and the nervous voice of John Mackliff, the flight engineer, came through:

– The Germans are in no better conditions than us. Depressurization of the capsule. All of their life support systems have failed. Ronald! If you don't straighten out this piece of iron shit, we are going to die, damn it!

Prickly shivers ran down Whitehouse’s back; the indicator of the sleeve altimeter showed indifferent figures-«334».

Only three minutes ago the altimeter was showing 335, 5 miles at perigee. "Independence" was falling down rapidly, narrowing down the number of turns of orbital rotation. Having miscalculated the power of the back pack jet, Whitehouse hit the casing of the radio telescope, broke the sun visor of his pressure helmet and having made a ridiculous flip, found himself on the other side of the Shuttle.

At the right side of ‘Independence’, like a dark sprout, the streamlined hull of the German military ship ‘Das Rhein. WN-4962’ was sticking out.

An authentication check box of the Euro-Asian Community contrastingly stood out on its black armor.

Six hours ago, when ‘Das Rhein’ started a complex maneuver on the selection of the supply container in close vicinity to the research Shuttle, one of its shunting engines broke down.

At high speed the armored nose pierced the belly of ‘Independence’, which was covered only by sunshield.

The blow was terrible.

The right solar battery and the wall-mounted fuel storage containers have been torn off from the shuttle; the shield of the aerodynamic braking was messed up, a valuable telescope was broken to pieces, the rescue capsule was damaged, almost all of the flight control systems were deactivated, and the equipment for ozone-plasma synthesis, intended for ozone input into the atmosphere was broken as well.