by Temi Oh
JUNO
07. 02.13
4 P.M.
‘OH, THANK GOD. YOU’RE alive. Orlando has exploded,’ she said to Jesse over the CAPCOM. Juno had seen it with her own eyes, a splinter of light in Europa’s dark perimeter, then a supernova.
‘I -hink . . . saw it . . .’ came Jesse’s distorted voice over the headset.
‘It looked like—’ Juno felt her voice crack. ‘Jess, it’s just gone.’
‘Jesse—’ Juno cried out, but then there was a scream in the background. It sounded like Poppy’s voice. ‘Watch out!’ she shouted before a howl of static poured through the headset, loud enough to tear Juno’s eardrums. She yanked her headset off and looked up to find that all readouts had dissolved from the screens on the communication deck, where Fae was frantically stabbing at buttons and pulling dials.
‘Damocles, Congreve, comm check,’ Astrid shouted down her mic.
Silence. Juno couldn’t breathe.
‘Congreve? Congreve? Commander Sheppard . . . ? Harry? Poppy? Jesse?’ Astrid pulled off her headset and stood up. ‘It could be us. A problem with our transceiver. Maybe we’re not receiving their response.’ Juno saw the desperate hope in her sister’s eyes.
‘You go check,’ Fae commanded, and Astrid shot out of the control room.
‘There’s no point,’ Eliot said, pulling away from the display where both the Congreve and Orlando had disappeared. He raked trembling fingers through the greasy strings of his hair. ‘I knew this was going to happen.’
‘You what?’ Juno looked up at his face, the reflected light of a star chart making silver freckles along his jaw. Igor too, leant over from the commander’s chair on the raised platform of the control deck.
‘A hydrazine leak,’ said Eliot. Hydrazine was the highly explosive fuel found inside Orlando’s auxiliary power units. Juno knew that APUs were extra engines used for functions other than propulsion. On Orlando, the APUs provided the energy to kick-start the engines that boosted the station into a higher orbit, pushing it further away from Europa and in this case allowing it to more easily dock with the Congreve.
‘The crew on Orlando reported a lower than expected tank pressure a couple of days ago,’ Eliot said. Juno remembered that. Because hydrazine was so dangerous – highly flammable and toxic to humans – the news of a possible leak, almost a month ago, had been alarming.
‘But no leak was detected,’ Igor reminded him. ‘It was a machine error.’
‘Happens all the time,’ Fae said.
‘Then what caused this explosion?’ Juno cried, her voice hysterical to her own ears, pointing out the window to the blurred mass of metal where, a few minutes ago, there had been a space station.
‘I have a theory,’ Eliot said, biting his lip, Orion’s Belt projected by the computer across the bridge of his nose. ‘The melting point of hydrazine is minus two degrees, and the surface temperature around Europa is more than one hundred times lower than that, so . . .’
‘You think the hydrazine leaked and then froze, blocking the hole. Of course.’ Igor’s face fell.
Eliot nodded. ‘Fuel leak, maybe it happened a while ago, weeks or months or years. Sometime between now and the last time they used the APU. The lower pressure is registered during a routine check, they shut it down and examine it but don’t detect any hydrazine because it has frozen, blocking the hole. We get the all clear, the Congreve moves to dock with it. The APU is used to perform an orbital boost, and during the engine burn –’
‘– hydrazine melts, the leak begins again –’ Igor continued.
‘– spills maybe, on a hot surface and –’
‘Bang.’ Igor said it loud enough to startle Juno.
‘I mean, hydrazine’s highly flammable and the atmosphere on Europa is basically pure oxygen.’
‘The worst-case scenario,’ said Fae.
Eliot’s words rolled over Juno in a sickening blur of white noise. She was still having trouble absorbing the implications. ‘Everyone on Orlando is . . . ?’
‘Dead,’ said Eliot. ‘Most likely.’ The blood rushed from Juno’s head and she sat down again, heavily. ‘I saw this coming.’
‘What?’ Juno frowned. ‘When?’
‘Just after the Congreve left it occurred to me but—’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Okay,’ said Igor, throwing his hands up. ‘Now is not the time for a post-mortem. It wasn’t Eliot’s job to recognize a fault. It was the MMACs’ and the senior engineers’. Aberrant machine readings happen often, so it’s a conclusion that mission control are often too quick to jump to. It’s called “normalization of deviance”, and sometimes it takes a pair of fresh eyes, like Eliot’s, to spot the problem.’
‘But if Eliot knew—’ Juno began, anger bubbling inside her.
‘He didn’t know,’ Fae said. ‘He had a hunch.’
‘He should have said.’
‘I didn’t trust myself.’ Eliot hit his head hard with a closed fist. ‘It’s my fault, I killed them. Like I killed her.’
‘Eliot Liston,’ Igor barked, ‘control yourself. Now is not the time.’ For the duration of the mission, while Sheppard was on the Congreve, Igor was their commander. ‘We’re not out of danger. The explosion means that the sky above Europa will be filled with debris. Some objects will be moving faster than bullets, fast enough to escape the moon’s gravity.’
‘No,’ Juno pleaded, ‘they’re in danger. Jesse, Commander Sheppard, Harry and Poppy. We can’t leave them. The further we travel, the more fuel they’ll have to burn trying to reach us . . . they might not make it.’ But, as she said it, the ground shuddered. Dropped from under her feet with a hard shockwave that felt like an earthquake. Juno had the sudden, sickening thought that this must have been what it felt like when the Titanic scraped against the keen edge of an iceberg. Everyone on the control deck froze.
Then the lights went out and the sirens began to howl.
ASTRID
4.15 P.M.
THE FIRST HIT CAME with a loud bang, as the air inside the ship exploded into the vacuum outside. There was a sudden loss of pressure, which made Astrid’s ears pop as they sometimes did in the first few minutes after a plane take-off.
Air was escaping through a crack in the porthole window between the equipment bay and the hatch that led to the service module, at the far end of the corridor where Astrid stood. The porthole was narrow, only a little larger than a splayed hand, and through it Europa’s silver light cut like a scythe. Astrid edged towards it, and as she did felt the thin but insistent suction of oxygen through the deadly crack in the borosilicate glass.
A micrometeoroid, Astrid supposed – they were too far from the explosion for debris to have reached them yet. It was just bad luck that this had happened at the same time. Micrometeoroid strikes were something they had been trained for. The ship’s tracking system was sophisticated enough to anticipate a hit from most medium and large asteroids, giving Harry or Commander Sheppard enough warning to perform a side-burn that took the Damocles out of the object’s path and out of danger. But micrometeoroids were smaller, scraps of metal or rock as old as the solar system speeding through space. Tiny particles small as a fleck of paint had been known to blast like a bullet through a window. A larger object could cause enough damage to result in decompression. In which event, Astrid might have as little as eighteen seconds of useful consciousness before her brain was starved of oxygen.
Her training came back to her at the moment of the hit, overriding her natural instincts to run for cover. She had been taught to respond methodically to disasters, to assess the situation and to come up with solutions. She listened to the pitch of the air escaping and deduced that their atmosphere was leaving the module slowly enough for her to attempt to patch the hole. Astrid examined the sliver of broken glass and pressed her palm against it. The hissing stopped instantly, suggesting that this was the only hole. On the other side of the window was
space, and the suction felt like a knife slice along her palm as blood burst from the capillaries under her skin. Stepping back, Astrid looked around for something she could use to plug the hole. She grabbed a first aid kit from a wall fixture, tore it open and found a hydrocolloid wound dressing, the jelly-like plaster they were meant to apply to burns and stitches. It would do for now. A short-term measure before she could go to the engine room and find some proper sealant. Peeling the plastic backing away, she applied it to the crack in the window. For a moment she wasn’t sure if it would stick. She watched as crystals formed quickly in the gel as it was exposed to the vacuum outside. Then she registered the equalizing in pressure in her inner ear.
Success! Astrid thought, with a flush of joy. In her training she’d been taught that the big three disasters an astronaut could face were fire, ammonia leaks and decompression. She had stayed calm and fixed the problem on her own.
She would have to let Igor know immediately, so she headed away from the site of the accident and back up to the crew module. But, just as she reached up to open the hatch, the Damocles was hit again.
The impact threw Astrid off her feet and into the air. The lights shut off and, for a disorientating half-second, so did the gravity-dromes. Astrid’s stomach swooped upwards along with her entire body for a sickening moment of soaring weightlessness that felt like a cliff dive. Adrenaline poured through her like rocket fuel before the dromes sent the deck spinning again and she crashed to the ground. She shouted in pain and surprise, her knee bent awkwardly under her with a knife-twist of pain, and stars throbbed behind her eyes.
The corridor was still dark and the master alarm sounded with the kind of urgent wail that told Astrid exactly what danger she was in. They were losing pressure fast this time, but she could not figure out where from. Her amateur dressing had been torn off the porthole, and cracks spread like spiders’ webs across the borosilicate. She thought that she could see the air pouring out, oxygen illuminated by the sinister light of Europa.
‘Astrid!’ Juno scrambled down the hatch and hit the floor with a thud that she must have felt in her shins. ‘We have decompression.’
Astrid’s gaze was still fixed on the porthole. The pressure inside the corridor was slamming like a battering ram against its cracked surface. How long until it shattered?
‘Astrid, get up.’ Juno was above her now, her face a rictus of panic. Astrid grabbed her hand and struggled to her feet, although every bone in her battered body protested against her weight.
‘We should try to fix it,’ Astrid gasped, gesturing at the porthole.
‘There’s no time,’ Juno yelled, dragging Astrid in the opposite direction from the way she had come, away from the hatch that would lead them to the middle deck and the crew module, past the porthole, down the corridor towards the bridge that led to the greenhouse.
‘The other way’s faster,’ Astrid said.
‘We need to get to the radiation shelter,’ said Juno. ‘It’s the safest place right now.’ Astrid knew that the radiation shelter, which was tucked in at the far end of the greenhouse, had a reinforced shell and twenty-four hours of oxygen – buying them enough time to wait for the rest of the crew to arrive. But then what?
The illumination of the flashing emergency lights was dizzying, sending their shadows spiralling up and down the walls in a way that made the floor feel as if it was rocking under them. Under the caterwaul of the alarm, Astrid thought she could hear the most terrifying sound – the tea-kettle whistle of the air escaping into space, a sound that few astronauts had lived through to describe.
A faulty hab-lab on a Mars mission had caused such sudden decompression of the crew module that all the astronauts died instantaneously. Their remains were discovered six months later, computers still running, feet and hands covered in the red dust of that planet. They had smiles on their faces. Apparently, death had come too suddenly for them to tremble at the sight of it.
‘This way.’ Juno hurried Astrid along, towards the shelter.
Everything that was not sealed down was whipping through the air: medical wipes, vacuum-packed bandages, eye dressings and a bag of safety pins from the first aid box, flying as if propelled by a strong gust of wind. A coldpack shot at Juno’s head but she ducked and turned to find it shatter against a wall panel. They had about thirty seconds.
‘Hurry up!’ Juno screamed, but her voice had taken on a strange distant wail as the air between them vanished.
Astrid’s awareness split as she looked around at the water vapour condensing into mist, and the crack spreading across the window, and she came to a dark understanding of the danger they were in. But some part of her was light with euphoria. She felt laughter bubble up in her diaphragm. Why run? she wondered.
‘Astrid,’ Juno shouted. ‘Concentrate!’ Her sister dragged her down the corridor towards the emergency hatch that led to the bridge – the narrow passageway that connected the lower and the upper deck. Eliot was standing in it with an O2 mask strapped to his face. He motioned for them to hurry, but by the time they reached the hatch, Astrid couldn’t feel her feet, her vision was narrowing into a tunnel and once they were through the hatch she collapsed on the ground inside the bridge.
Behind her, Juno was struggling to close the hatch, her body illuminated only in the red of the emergency light. ‘It’s not closing,’ she cried, but Astrid could barely hear over the pain in her head. Her eardrums were expanding out like balloons as the pressure fell. The pain was more than she could bear, starbursts of agony through her head and jaw. Voices around her fluted into a distant whine. ‘There’s something caught in the door. Wires, I think. I need you to get something to cut them with . . . Astrid?’
Astrid heard her name through the fog of pain and light-headedness. Juno and Eliot were struggling with the hatch, which was blocked by a dozen ventilation tubes and cables. Eliot scrambled to unplug every wire he could find; all the while his shaggy hair was whipping around his head as if in a hurricane. Astrid knew she only had a few seconds of useful consciousness left. She crawled through the bridge, where the ground under her palms was cold as ice, blood pounding behind her eyes. On the other side was the greenhouse, where leaves were being torn off their vines. She forced herself to focus, looked around for something to cut the wire with. Something sharp.
On the other side of the hatch, Juno screamed. There was a sound like a thunderclap as the air inside the greenhouse bulldozed through the bridge. Glass spires near the service module ruptured and chlorella burst out, clumps of algae suspended in acid green slime. Astrid cried out as splinters flew at her face, though she only realized she’d been cut when she felt the blood dripping down her cheek.
Shunted by the pain back into her body, Astrid grabbed a dripping shard of glass in her trembling hands and scrambled back to the bridge. Juno took it and worked immediately on the wires. The first one she cut filled the air with a lightning-bright shower of sparks and the sickly smell of electrical fire.
‘Careful,’ Eliot screamed. He had disconnected two of the plugs, and Juno severed a third. Together they kicked the snaking chords over the threshold, but discovered, to their horror, that the hatch still would not close.
The air was rushing out with such force that the internal mechanism had likely jammed, a safety precaution that prevented it from closing if someone was caught in it. It would close once the pressure on the inside and the outside equalized, but by then, of course, Eliot, Juno and Astrid would be dead.
Astrid slumped against the wall, waves of pain spasming through her, the saliva on her tongue fizzing as the pressure dropped and it began to boil. Soon the oxygen in her chest would split her lungs open and spill into her arteries, but, by then, her mind would have happily disconnected from her body. The brain was kind that way, sending dizzy waves of euphoria through the dying body in the seconds before oblivion.
Eliot, the only one who had grabbed a mask from the control room, still had the presence of mind to snatch at salvation. He yan
ked the medical officer badge from the lapel of Juno’s flight suit, his fingers stiff with cold, and jammed it into the hatch’s locking mechanism. With a hiss of hydraulics the hatch slammed closed and they collapsed on the bridge, shaking in the cold. The temperature felt as if it had dropped by about thirty degrees.
Astrid felt the change of pressure a second time, like a wind that had suddenly fallen dead. ‘Here you are.’ Fae’s silhouette came into focus by the door. She’d opened an oxygen canister and Juno was gasping, her eyes bright with tears. ‘That should help for the moment. But the ship’s been breached. It’s not safe here.’
‘Look,’ Eliot pointed to the door at the far end of the bridge. Through its porthole they could see the corridor, where the window that Astrid had patched a few minutes ago had exploded under the pressure. The module on the other side of the door had turned into a vacuum and the first aid kit, Juno’s shoe, the earpiece of a crew phone and everything not attached to the ground or the wall had been sucked out into the nothingness. ‘It could have been us,’ Eliot said.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Juno said. She’d changed colour, looked grey and waxy and was shaking violently.
‘We need to go to the radiation shelter,’ Fae said. ‘Now pull yourselves together and get up. You’ve trained for this.’
Astrid barely remembered the short journey into the radiation shelter. The pain in her ears came in keening waves and by the time she sat down on the bench, she noticed that the collar of her flight suit was wet with blood, although, between her frozen fingers, it felt like jelly.
Fae attached an oxygen mask to her face, and some of the pain subsided, giving way to an awareness of her aching body, the bloody space-hickey on her palm where she’d pressed it against the window. Astrid stared down at it in horror and disbelief.
For marooned sailors, the ocean might never be the same after they’d watched it devour another crew. It could come to seem like death personified, death with a will, death with splendid terrifying power. And so it was for Astrid, that day, as she looked down at her hand. Here was death, again, calling their names, and she had touched it.