Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  BY THAT POINT, THE shuttle was so cold that Jesse could see his breath in the air, and ice condensing and cracking on the inside of the little portholes, forming spidery white veins along the edges. He pulled a pair of gloves on and shuddered. His lips and chin had grown numb while he slept, and he wondered how Harry had retained his mobility in the sub-zero temperatures.

  ‘The crew on Orlando have performed an orbital boost that puts us in almost the same orbit. Now, as we descend to dock with them,’ Poppy was saying into her microphone, ‘we’re being captured by the moon’s gravity. Which is about a tenth of Earth’s. We’re flying just above station now.’ She pushed out of her seat and held the camera near the frosted window. Jesse could just make out the tiny shadow that their shuttle cast over the station’s hulking frame.

  ‘It’s a very tense moment now, as we reach the space station,’ she said in a shallow whisper. ‘If the thrusters fail to slow down the shuttle could crash into the station—’

  ‘Harry’s about to perform a side-burn so that doesn’t happen,’ Solomon reassured them, with a relaxed smile at the camera.

  That had happened to Jesse a few times on the simulator. He’d come close to the station but failed to slow down in time and crashed into a solar array or, worse, an entire module. At the speed the Congreve and the Orlando were travelling, even a small collision would be enough to tear through both hulls. He felt a brief flicker of relief that it was Harry behind the controls, not him.

  ‘Is that a docking probe you’ve extended or are you just pleased to see me?’ Captain Briggs chuckled over the intercom.

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard that one,’ Commander Sheppard replied, rolling his eyes.

  ‘You boys.’ Jesse saw Sie Yan laugh and nudge her husband on the monitor. It was nice to see the easy intimacy between the three of them.

  Jesse leant forward in his seat. This was the hardest part. With the docking probe extended, Harry had to bring it in for ‘the kiss’, as Solomon called it, where it would push into the port. Jesse realized he was holding his breath – they all were. There were two hand-controllers to pilot the shuttle; one that controlled lateral movement and another that controlled rotation. Though he ached to watch his own hands steer, Jesse admired Harry’s precision, the exact angles he turned, and he watched through the window and on the monitor’s schematic as they moved into the perfect docking position.

  ‘Hang in there,’ said Captain Briggs. ‘You’ve got a skilled pilot there, Shepp.’

  ‘Trained him up myself.’ Sheppard’s voice was humming with pride.

  They were about 100 metres from Orlando when it happened. Harry had been about to issue the final command. Jesse had been staring so intently at his display that his memory of it came not from witnessing the incident himself, but from the video that survived on Poppy’s camera.

  There was a flash of blinding light, like a star collapsing, but no sound at all.

  The Orlando’s central module burst open, metal exploding into the darkness of space.

  THERE WAS NO TIME to scream. The shockwave flung their shuttle away from Europa. Jesse’s neck snapped back in his seat. There were a few seconds of pure terror during which he was certain he was about to die. He pushed down hard in his seat to fight the blackness clouding his vision as all his blood was washed into his feet. For a moment, the acceleration was so great that the pressure on his chest and lungs meant that he could not take a breath. By the time Harry and Commander Sheppard had regained some degree of control over the Congreve and they began to slow, Jesse was nauseous and balancing on the dizzying fringe of consciousness.

  ‘Is everyone okay?’ Commander Sheppard asked. They had been plunged into darkness – the interior lights had gone out, and nothing but the buttons on the control panel and the ghostly light of Europa illuminated their vessel.

  Poppy let out a gasp of pain, and Jesse opened his eyes to find that she had been thrown against one of the steel walls. She had unbuckled her belt to film the approach, he remembered – she must not have strapped herself back in. Her eyes were squeezed together, blood trickling from her nose.

  ‘What just happened?’ Jesse asked, working hard to catch his breath. His voice trembling.

  Poppy crawled to her seat and pushed the button on her dashboard’s intercom.

  ‘Orlando?’ she called, throat thick with swallowed tears. ‘Orlando. Congreve. Comm check.’

  When Jesse turned to Commander Sheppard, he noticed the eerie fact that Captain Omar Briggs, with his softly lined face, was still smiling out at them. Holding his rough hands up at the camera in a final thumbs-up before the frozen picture splintered into hissing static.

  Commander Sheppard stared at the screen, then began stabbing the intercom. ‘Omar?’ he called. ‘Orlando – do you read?’

  Jesse turned his gaze painfully to the window. He must have lost his bearings. He couldn’t find the station. But it had to be there.

  ‘Are you there?’ A voice crackled through his headphones. The Damocles.

  ‘Juno?’ he whispered.

  ‘Oh, thank God.’ Her voice was crackling, indistinct. ‘You’re alive. Orlando has exploded.’

  ‘I think we saw it.’

  ‘It looked like—’ Her voice cracked. ‘Jess, it’s just gone.’

  ‘Watch out!’ Poppy screamed behind him. Jesse whipped around, saw it long after it was too late to do anything, something careening towards them, reflecting light like a knife. If anything pierced the hull of their shuttle moving at a high speed, it could tear through it like a missile. The air would explode out and, in a few seconds, they would all be dead.

  They were hit.

  Jesse felt the force of it through his seat, thought he could smell the burn, the scorch of metal. The O2 alarm began to whine.

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Commander Sheppard said. ‘We need to get out of the moon’s orbit as fast as we can.’ The shattered space station was throwing off debris. Another hit could cripple the ship, or kill them, and if they wanted to avoid it they would have to get out of the range of the explosion.

  ‘Up, Harry,’ Sheppard cried. ‘Open it up; thrusters at full speed. Burn all the fuel you need to get us out of here.’

  Poppy cried out again, and when Jesse lifted his head to look out the front window, he saw that another object was lancing towards them. A piece of machinery, unrecognizable after the explosion, something with sheer edges moving at terrible speed. Sheppard and Harry were ready this time, grabbing the controllers, they forced the shuttle out of its path.

  Jesse’s head spun as the blood rushed down his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tilting wave of nausea, and when he opened them again he could see the space station – or what was left of it. What had moments ago been a majestic feat of design and engineering was now no more than rubble. It had been torn open like carrion; blackened truss, seared metal and hanging machinery all accelerating away from it at different speeds. It was a sickening sight – solar panels, switchboards and smashed components tore towards them, glittering in the light like shattered glass.

  Commander Sheppard’s face was a mask of dread. ‘Okay . . .’ he said, shakily at first but his voice steadied as he continued. ‘Okay, Harrison, we’ll navigate through this together. Follow my instructions. We can get out of this debris field and maybe we can make it out of here with our lives.’

  Harry’s face, reflected in the window, was chalk white. His eyes seemed fixed on a shadow in the distance. Jesse followed his gaze and realized it was a body: bloated and pumpkin-orange in a regulation flight suit. It spun through the wreckage, one half of it burnt black, chalky hints of charred bone glinting beneath a flayed skull. Bile rose in Jesse’s stomach. There was another body close by, missing an arm, drifting through the blackness, its helmet visor reflecting the gutted station below.

  ‘Harry?’ Sheppard said. Jesse had never seen Harry look so frightened. Commander Sheppard clicked his fingers, hoping to rouse the boy. ‘Harriso
n? Harrison, we need you.’

  But perhaps Harry was thinking, Those are people we know. He’d blinked and they’d turned into corpses. Kennedy, perhaps, or James. Captain Briggs with his gentle voice and quiet, constant hope. People just like him, astronauts, vain souls who knew that space did not care for them – but hoped against hope that it would not be their burial ground. Jesse was thinking those things, certainly.

  ‘Out of the way!’ Solomon shouted – the kind of howl that shattered the nerves. Jesse saw something coming for them in the window, a gas tank, a huge boulder of metal. Harry lunged for the controls and, at the same time, Commander Sheppard leapt to protect him.

  The impact they felt was so hard that Jesse’s skull slammed back against his headrest, stars exploding behind his eyelids. When he came to, four different pressure alarms were roaring and Harry’s gloved hands were covered in blood.

  ‘Shepp?’ Harry said. Their commander’s body was slumped forward in his seat, limp. ‘Commander Sheppard?’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Poppy asked. Harry twisted around in his seat to face them.

  ‘I think he hit his head, just now. Trying to save me.’ He shook the commander again, but Sheppard rolled across the dashboard. ‘He’s not conscious, I don’t think.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘Oh God. I don’t know.’

  ‘Check!’

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Jesse said. Consciousness was rolling back to him on waves of panic.

  ‘We’re dead,’ Poppy said, her breathing coming fast and irregular. ‘Dead.’

  Jesse knew that it was true. It was as if they’d driven a car into an ocean and the sea was bursting in with constant and deadly force. Time was running out with the same speed.

  His heart was thundering so hard that he was sure it would burst in his ribs. He was terrified, paralyzed. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to breathe, to work the problem as they had been taught in school, to think of a solution. And as he did, it began to resolve before him. Jesse had been here before. He had been on this ship a thousand times, looking out at a sky that blazed destruction. During the game, Jesse had piloted his virtual crew through dusty asteroid belts when they were running low on oxygen. He’d navigated his way through space junk and landed in deserts without his ship burning up like a firecracker in the atmosphere. At least – not every time.

  Jesse saw, again, that his time had come. As adrenaline roared through his veins, he started to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘I can do it,’ he said, lunging forward, just as he had the night of Ara’s death. ‘I can get us through this, Harry.’

  ‘But—’ Harry turned to Jesse to protest, but then realized he had no choice. ‘If you can, you’re a genius.’

  Jesse fought hard against the dizziness and the acid boil of nausea in his stomach. ‘I can do this. I’ve done it before.’ Together they pulled their commander’s body from the front seat and then Jesse strapped himself into Sheppard’s chair. Pulling off his gloves, he worked to keep his trembling hands from slipping off the controls. Before him, in the window, huge chunks of delicate, brutalized machinery were crashing into each other and erupting into splinters of white hot metal. In space, a little acceleration went a long way, so by the time he was ready to fly, the wreckage was coming at the shuttle from all directions. Jesse fought the urge to abandon the controls and cover his eyes.

  He took a deep breath and mustered his courage, determined to believe that this was not the day he would die. That a burnt-out canister would not crash through the window of the cockpit and suck him silently screaming into the hard vacuum of space. He and Harry could save themselves, and the rest of the crew. They would burn the engines until they were free. They would make it back to Damocles. They would make it to the sun-warmed earth of Terra-Two.

  So he flew. He was playing the game then, the simulator. Working in harmony with Harry to execute joint commands, his fingers flying across the control panel as if it was a fretboard.

  Something hit the shuttle and it shuddered. Jesse heard the scream of torn metal and his heart crashed beneath his sternum. Was death coming? Harry ignored it and kept yelling commands, his face red, veins bulging from his neck. They dived out of the way of a swinging truss. If he could conquer the game, he could conquer this – the asteroid belt of destruction. The sky flinging splinters of sparkling metal at them.

  ‘This is not how we die,’ Jesse declared as they soared.

  ‘Damn right!’ Harry said with an ecstatic howl of relief. And then he and Jesse were aware only of the flight. They ducked and weaved through the debris, Jesse’s subconscious drawing trajectories, calculating where the junk was flying, following Harry’s lead and then indicating where to go next, their hands listening as they dived and careened left, then right, but always up, up. Soon, the remains of the station were only blips on the radar and their shuttle rose out of its orbit and into the clear open space beyond.

  It was then that Jesse became aware of the whine of the oxygen alarm. ‘I said, put your mask on,’ Harry barked at him. Jesse’s fingers were too stiff with cold to find it above his seat. The O2 was dropping, the monitor on the dashboard reading 60 per cent, 55 per cent, 40 . . . ticking down. Jesse’s vision began to tunnel and he slipped down in his seat. Harry swore, scrabbled around, then found the mask and pressed it to Jesse’s face. He felt the relief of it in his lungs, and Harry laughed. ‘We better not lose you now,’ his voice came over the com. ‘You crazy fucking genius. You – we . . . did it.’ He collapsed back in the pilot’s seat, his hands shaking violently, and Jesse thought he could see tears in his eyes.

  Europa’s icy surface was receding from view when Jesse finally allowed himself to believe that they were out of danger. His body was gripped in a vice of pain. Whiplash, concussion, exhaustion. The weight of his limbs in this gravity was almost more than he could bear. But in a few hours, he knew, they would return to the Damocles. As he and Harry flew back, Jesse imagined them all. In his mind, Fae, Jesse, Cai and the twins were all bathed in the cool light of the monitors and when he emerged, they were all clapping. Clapping for him.

  HARRY

  5 P.M.

  HARRY HAD ALMOST DIED once before. During a joyride with Jack Redcliffe, his roommate. They had been friends for years, had attended the same exclusive prep school before they’d both been selected for Dalton. They shared the same birthday and, the night before they both turned seventeen, Jack had convinced Harry to sneak off the grounds for the first and only time during his school career. Harry would have said no if Jack had not showed him the new car his Californian uncle had bought as a birthday gift. A dark green Cadillac, the most beautiful piece of machinery Harry had ever seen.

  Command School was situated far out of London, past the M25, in the middle of open fields with not even a post office for miles. He and Jack pushed the car to its limits along the deserted roads, unlit tarmac curving before them like a black river. Jack turned the radio up and screamed under the vibrato trill of a rock guitar. It felt almost as good as flying: the solitude, the speed, the strange exhilaration that came from breaking the rules. Where were they going? He had no idea. In his mind, they would just keep driving, the road as infinite and inviting as space; they could skate right off the flat edge of the Earth and he’d still be laughing so much that his face hurt.

  They didn’t see the truck until it swung around the corner. Headlights exploded in Harry’s face. ‘Jack! Watch out!’ he screamed, thinking This is how I die. His friend lunged at the steering wheel, throwing them off the road. Burning smell of rubber. Roar of brakes. Pain. This is how it happens. I die like this. Now I know. Harry hit his head so hard that he blacked out.

  When he came to, his face was covered in blood. The driver’s seat was deserted. Jack had crawled from the car and was lying on his back beside the road.

  Is this how it feels? Everything hurt. When Harry pulled himself out of the car, his mouth tasted of metal. Jack was grinning like a maniac, his nose twis
ted – later they would discover that the airbag had broken it – lips and teeth brown with blood.

  ‘I thought we were going to die,’ Harry said, his voice trembling.

  ‘No shit!’ Jack laughed, sitting up with some difficulty. Harry knelt down so that they were eye-level.

  ‘Hey,’ Harry said. ‘You idiot. Get off the road.’

  ‘Haha!’ Jack turned to him. ‘You’re crying.’ Harry touched his face to find that it was wet. Not with blood. ‘You’re alive.’

  Harry nodded. He could not remember the last time he had cried, but even as he rested on his knees by the side of the road, more tears blurred his vision, seared his corneas. Soon his breath was ragged with sobs. ‘We’re alive.’ The blood was like fire in his veins, his heartbeat a battle cry. You’re alive, it thundered in his chest. He thought he would never feel this way again. That the stars would never be this bright again. He would never be this young again. You’re alive. Never so alive again.

  THE ORLANDO HAD EXPLODED and Harry had never been so terrified. He did not believe in God or destiny. He had only ever believed in himself and in hard work, and that this life – this life as an astronaut – had always been his to snatch. But, the second of the explosion, Harry really did think he saw his life flash before his eyes. Saw Jack Redcliffe in his car, moonlight glittering on blood-spattered asphalt. The swing-set his grand father had built in the Bellgrave orchard. Himself and his brothers barefoot on the sun-warmed deck of their uncle’s boat. London. Dalton. Whatever other life he could have had with his feet on solid ground, the world below him.

  Harry and Jesse had flown, like men possessed, out of danger, to the only home they had, back to the Damocles. And the whole while Jack’s words beat in Harry’s eardrums: You’re alive. Alive. Alive.

  PART THREE