As the chambers rotated, the used, empty cartridges flew out in a glittering trail of tiny satellites, slowly tumbling as their orbits decayed, to fall and burn up in the atmosphere.
But the sixteenth round jammed.
The problem was the strange bullet design. To securely hold the projectile in its unusual casing, a specially built machine at the OKB-16 factory squeezed the galvanized steel from both sides, crimping it solidly in place. Round 16 had an undetected bit of a broken high--tempered steel lock washer stuck to its underside, which the machine had crimped into its casing. The round looked normal, but the primer chamber was nearly penetrated.
As the rotating drive mechanism forced the defective round into the cannon’s chamber, the casing crumpled, the primer chamber burst, and the heat and friction of the collapsing tube ignited it. The main charge sympathetically exploded, and the resulting sudden burst of expanding gas shattered the fast-spinning revolver.
Instantly, pieces flew in all directions—a deadly pinwheel shedding hardened steel parts. Some flew harmlessly off into space. But several were hurled into the pressure hull of Almaz, their ragged edges cutting through the thin aluminum as if it wasn’t there. The air in the ship’s main cabin started spewing out through the jagged holes.
One fragment followed an especially unlucky trajectory. Mounted just inside the hull was a bundle of tubes and cables carrying cooling glycol and electrical power, routed together for easy maintenance. A finger-sized piece of broken steel ripped through the bundle, cutting power to multiple Almaz systems and splitting fluid lines that immediately began spraying liquid into the rapidly dropping pressure inside the spacecraft.
Almaz was fatally wounded, a robot whale, mortally stabbed by its own explosive harpoon.
The 15 bullets that the cannon had successfully fired formed more of a spray pattern than the engineers had expected. Twelve of them had sailed past Apollo and the spacewalkers, destined to eventually fall to Earth and vaporize in the upper atmosphere.
One round nicked the edge of Apollo’s open hatch door, scoring the metal and carrying away a small piece of the rubber seal that the North American Aviation technicians had carefully fitted and glued in place around its circumference.
Another collided with Luke’s oxygen and power umbilical adapter, which attached to his suit just below his chest. Traveling at 850 meters per second, it tumbled through the delicate pressure regulator, wires and valves, tearing them open.
The third bullet struck senior cosmonaut Andrei Mitkov as he was floating back to Almaz. The bullet caught his helmet as neatly as if it had been fired by a sniper, hitting him squarely above his visor, creating a punctuation mark between the middle letters of CCCP.
The 175-gram projectile, designed to penetrate metal, passed through the successive layers of fiberglass, flesh, bone and brain as if they weren’t there. The exit hole out the back of Mitkov’s helmet was only slightly larger than the entry hole. A small spray of gray and red followed the bullet, quickly spreading and vaporizing in the vacuum of space.
Mitkov’s body spun backwards with the force of the impact, tumbling like a rag doll until it struck Almaz. His lifeless arms flew forward on impact as if giving the ship a final embrace. His ivory-colored Yastreb suit deflated against his body as he slowly bounced clear, floating silently away towards the darkness.
The remaining cosmonaut, still clinging to Pursuit, watched in horror.
As the rapid darkness of the orbital sunset overtook it, Almaz slowly tumbled in space. The effect of firing the gun and trying to counteract it with the automated thrusters had been only a best guess by Chelomei’s engineers. In reality, the forces had combined to add one last torquing moment to the ship as it died.
Inside the punctured hull, the pressure rapidly dropped to zero. Unlike the Apollo capsule, the main section of Almaz had never been intended to function in the vacuum of space. The spraying glycol from the severed coolant line had bubbled and evaporated as if it were boiling. The film canisters, with their hard-earned, precious first images carefully exposed and recorded on the wide celluloid filmstrips, had burst open. The temperature had dropped rapidly, and the ship’s automated systems failed, one by one, as they vainly tried to keep critical systems warm on battery power.
A faint, thinning trail formed behind Almaz, where the venting atmosphere had spewed small fragments and liquid as the pressure had dropped. The hull’s rotation had left a curved arc in the darkness. A keen observer might have been able to follow the track back to the slowly tumbling, lifeless body of the cosmonaut.