Ark Angel

seemed like half an hour. Yet half an hour was passing in only minutes. He concentrated on his breathing.
    “T-minus fifteen.”

    Inside the control room Ed Shulsky was watching Sing and his team of thirty as they went through the final preparations. He walked over to the professor. He was wearing a gun in a holster slung over his shirt.
    “I don’t mean to worry you right now, Professor,” he muttered. “But I want you to know that if Alex Rider doesn’t come out of this in one piece, I will personally rip your guts out.”
    “Of course!” Sing smiled nervously. “There’s nothing to worry about. He’ll be fine!”
    Tamara Knight sat motionless in front of the observation window. Smoke was still rising from the rainforest where the Cessna had crashed. There were no birds to be seen. The whole island seemed to be tensing itself for the moment of launch.

    “T-minus five.”

    What had happened to T-minus ten? Alex was feeling sick. The injection he’d been given hadn’t worked.
    He could hear something in the distance. Was it his imagination or was something rumbling far below him?
    “T-minus four… three … two … one.”
    It began.
    At first it was slow. Alex felt a shuddering, vague to start with, but soon it was all-consuming. The entire capsule was shaking. He wasn’t sure if he was moving or not. There was a thud as the clamps holding down the rocket were automatically released. The shuddering got worse. Now the whole capsule was vibrating so crazily that Alex could feel the teeth being shaken in his skull. The noise level had risen too; it was how a roar that pounded at him with invisible fists and, lying on his back with his legs bent in front of him, there was nothing he could do. He was defenceless.
    And still it got worse.
    He was definitely rising; he could feel the force of the rocket’s thrust. He was being pushed into the seat—
    not pushed, crushed! His vision had almost gone. His eyeballs were being mercilessly squeezed. He tried to open his mouth to scream but all his muscles had locked. He felt as if his face was being pulled off.
    And then there was a deafening explosion and he was slammed forward in his seat, his neck straining, the belts cutting into his chest. Alex panicked, thinking it had all gone wrong, that part of the rocket had blown up and any moment now he would be either incinerated or sent plummeting back to earth. But then he remembered what he had been told. The first stage of the rocket had burnt out and been ejected. That was what he had heard and felt. God help him, he really was on the way. From nought to seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour in eight minutes.

    Everything had been calculated. There should have been an ape inside the orbital module—instead there was a boy. To the computers it made no difference. At exactly the right second, the next stage ignited and once again he was thrown forward, the g-forces pulverizing him. How long had passed since the countdown had ended? Was he in outer space yet? It seemed to him that the shaking was more violent than ever. The whole capsule had become a distorted mass of jagged, flickering lines, like the image on a broken TV screen. He was at max Q, sitting on four hundred and fifty tonnes of explosive, being rocketed through the sky at twenty-five times the speed of sound. The main engine was burning fuel at over one thousand gallons a second. If the Soyuz was going to blow up, it would happen now. He was on fire! Blinding light suddenly crashed into the capsule. A nuclear explosion. No. The fairings on the windows had come free.
    They weren’t needed any more. He was looking at the sun, which was streaming in, dazzling him. Was that blue sky or the sea? How much longer could his body stand the battering it was receiving? It occurred to Alex that nothing in the world, no amount of training, could have prepared him for an experience like this.
    The rocket stopped. That was what it felt like. The noise fell away and Alex felt a quite different sensation: a sick, light-headed floating that told him he had, in an instant, become weightless. He was about to test it but then the third stage kicked in and once again he was propelled forward on this impossible fairground ride. This time he closed his eyes, unable to take any more, and so didn’t see the moment when he broke through the onion peel of the earth’s atmosphere and went from blue to black.
    At last he opened his eyes. He wanted to stretch but