by Temi Oh
‘We certainly will with that attitude,’ Juno said. ‘There is no law up here, Jesse. So someone has to make it. We can’t just go around treating each other however we want, hurting each other. One of us has to stop it.’
‘And who made you the judge? Why does it have to be you?’
They were standing in a row now, Astrid and Eliot on the furthest end, Harry and Juno advancing on them, Poppy and Jesse in between. Poppy could see the fire and fear in Juno’s eyes, and she looked around at the senior crew, hoping that they might put an end to the fight, but Fae was leaning over the dashboard on the communications deck in tears, muttering something like ‘enough’ or ‘one thing after another’ in German. Poppy knew that she hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours. Neither had Igor, who was wheezing into his fist. Cai had never inserted himself into an argument before and he didn’t now.
Disappointed, Poppy felt as if she’d leant over the seat of a lurching taxi to find there was no driver at the wheel. Who was in charge? On Terra-Two, the Betas were the people Poppy would have to make decisions with, would have to defer to and trust. Yet, at this moment, it seemed as if they hated each other.
‘Okay!’ Poppy shouted and raised her hands. Everyone turned to look at her. ‘In light of the fact that Commander Sheppard is not here and this decision involves all of us, we should have a vote.’ Fae lifted her head. Igor – who was leaning heavily against a desk for strength – attempted to straighten his back. ‘Please can we?’ she asked them both.
‘Vote over what?’ asked Fae.
‘What to do next,’ Poppy explained. ‘I’m not saying that what Astrid and Eliot did was right, disobeying orders. But maybe it’s right that with large decisions like this, life or death decisions, we should all be involved.’
‘That’s not how a ship works,’ Igor said. ‘Or any mission. There is a chain of command.’
‘That’s right,’ Harry said. ‘It’s not a democracy.’
‘Well maybe it should be,’ Jesse said. ‘Poppy’s right. This is a chance for us to decide what kind of society we want to live in. How we make choices. How we deal with disagreement—’
‘We can’t do anything now,’ Juno interrupted. ‘Astrid and Eliot have sabotaged our escape shuttle. They made that decision without consulting anyone.’
‘So let’s vote on how to punish them,’ Harry suggested.
‘Whether or not to,’ Jesse said.
‘That sounds reasonable,’ Igor said, exhaling heavily.
‘It does to me too,’ Juno said.
‘Okay,’ said Poppy. ‘If Astrid and Eliot should be punished—’
‘For disobeying orders and putting our lives at risk,’ Juno interrupted, ‘put up your hand.’ She raised hers, and so did Harry.
‘If Astrid and Eliot should be canonized when we get to Terra-Two for being brave enough to save the mission and everyone’s life. . .’ Jesse folded his arms. ‘I don’t think that Astrid should be punished for doing what she thought was right. When the Russians save us we’ll be thanking her.’
‘If,’ Juno said.
Igor spoke. ‘Both Astrid and Eliot should be stripped of their duties and responsibilities and confined to the infirmary.’
‘I support this punishment,’ Fae said. ‘They put us all in danger. We’re a crew; mutiny will destroy us as quickly as engine failure.’
‘Me too,’ said Cai from behind her. ‘On Mars they would have been punished.’
‘Obviously,’ said Harry, ‘Astrid and Eliot do not get a vote.’
‘Which leaves one person.’
They all turned to Poppy. Five people were in favour of a punishment, one person against.
‘I . . .’ Poppy looked at Astrid’s pleading eyes, but then turned to Juno and the rest of the crew. Poppy loved Astrid for her daring, but she was terrified of what would happen to them all now. ‘I . . . I can’t decide,’ she admitted, and when the rest of the crew remained silent she noticed a low but insistent noise coming from one of the computers on the communication deck.
A message. She ran to it and opened the attachment that had finally loaded. It was a voice file.
‘What are you doing?’ Fae leant over.
‘Ultra-high-frequency radio communications,’ Poppy said. ‘Our transceiver picks them up sometimes.’
‘Eto Damoklov?’
‘Is he speaking—?’ Juno began, but Poppy shh-ed her violently, and pushed the slider to increase the volume. Reduced some of the background noise.
‘. . . vash neschastnyy sluchay . . .’
‘Our “misadventure” . . . ?’ Astrid translated.
‘Accident,’ Poppy corrected. ‘Neschastnyy sluchay is accident. They’re talking about the explosion on Orlando.’
‘Who?’ Fae leant over to read the signature.
‘Sputnik 17,’ Poppy said. ‘The Russian station on Phobos. They heard our message. They say that their mission control has cleared them to send us a new service module. Engineers to come and fix our ship.’
Astrid dropped to her knees in relief, her eyes filled with tears. Jesse and Juno yelled in celebration.
‘How long?’ Fae asked, her eyes wide with renewed hope.
Eliot’s brow wrinkled. ‘Considering the acceleration of a VASIMR engine on a gen five Russian shuttle, and that we’re about 2.5 Astronomical Units from Phobos right now . . .’ he swallowed, like a doctor delivering a miserable prognosis. ‘About two months.’
‘Eight weeks,’ Juno whispered. ‘And with this level of oxygen . . . we’ll be lucky if we make it.’
JUNO
13.02.13
1 A.M.
TEMPERATURE: 10°C
O2: 86% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
IT HAPPENED FIVE DAYS later, when Juno was alone. Astrid and Eliot had been confined to the infirmary and so she and Fae moved their ailing commander into his own cabin. She’d been watching over him, reading in the half-light of his room, slipping into sleep herself, when the monitors started wailing. Her eyes flew open. Commander Sheppard was clutching at the duvet covers, struggling to breathe, gurgling and rasping, and Juno winced at the shallow sounds of his pain. She could see it in his eyes; the panic of oxygen deprivation, the fight in his clenching muscles. And, it was the strangest thing, she thought she could see the life drain right out of him. His face folded up on itself.
‘Commander Sheppard,’ she called out and began adjusting the machines, pulling at his oxygen mask, trying to save him, trying to keep him breathing, when she realized that he was slipping away and there was nothing she could do. She stared down at him in horror.
She didn’t know what he could hear, but she grabbed his hand in hers and said. ‘You were really good. You taught us everything you know. And you tried your best. You tried your best and you were really good.’ Before she was finished, it was over. The man was still. His wide eyes looked as if they were made of glass and he seemed . . . empty. He was still warm and soft but he wasn’t there and with the blood draining from his face he didn’t look like a person anymore, just a still thing.
She must have screamed, or shouted, or something, because the next thing she knew the others were standing in the doorway in their pyjamas and jumpers, pale and shocked.
‘He’s dead?’ Jesse said. ‘Poppy—’ they could hear her feet coming up the hall, ‘—don’t look.’ But it was too late, and she let out a wail of despair.
Finally, Fae stepped forward and took charge, pulling the duvet covers up over Commander Sheppard’s head and ushering everyone out.
Juno found herself in Jesse’s arms, barely able to stand in the corridor, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ he said, softly, wiping a thumb across the tears in her eyes.
‘I feel like such an idiot,’ she said, swallowing, still shaking.
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t realize until it was too late. It took me by surprise. I keep thinking about what I said to him – I feel so stupid.’
‘W
hat did you say?’
‘I don’t know, I just said the first thing that came into my head. That he was really good with us and really good at his job. I don’t know.’ She swallowed back another sob.
‘Those sound like good things.’ Jesse said. ‘Those were good, kind things to say.’
‘Really?’
‘You know something my mother once told me?’ he said. ‘She was thinking about what it’s like just before you’re born. Babies can hear their mother’s voices, they get distressed, they feel pain, even in their mother’s stomach. They turn towards the light, like all of us. The womb, though, is the only world they have ever known. They can see all of it, the beginning and the end, and of course, they think there is nothing else. Can’t even conceive of it.
‘So, being born, being dragged out into the cold, into the searing lights and all the noise, must feel like dying – like their whole world disappearing along with every single thing they ever knew. Maybe dying is like that too; none of us know what’s out there. But we’ve experienced something a little like it already. Being born was the best thing that ever happened to us. The world is bigger and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined and on the other side of it there were people we’d never met who already love us. They’ve been excited. They’ve been waiting.’
ASTRID
15.02.13
TEMPERATURE: 5°C
O2: 79% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
THEY HAD ALLOWED HER to leave the infirmary only once, after the commander died. They held a memorial for him by the airlock, wrapped him in sheets and jettisoned his body into space. It was quick. No one wanted to talk much. ‘Plenus annis abiit, plenus honoribus,’ Poppy said. ‘He is gone from us, full of years and full of honours.’
Afterwards, they gathered in the kitchen, silently counting everything that they had lost. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’ Harry asked. Astrid had never seen him in such a state – unshaven and raking fingers through his greasy hair. ‘With this mission? With what’s left of our fucking lives?’
‘Don’t say that,’ Juno said. She and Jesse sat at the far end of the room, her head in his lap. As their situation grew more dire, the two of them had folded in on themselves, in the eternal conspiracy of lovers.
‘He’s right though,’ Eliot said, lingering by the window as if he was distracted by something outside. ‘You know they’re talking about suspending the Europa Project?’
‘Who?’ Astrid asked.
‘NASA.’ Poppy nodded in confirmation. ‘There were funding cuts after the 2008 recession. They never properly recovered and now, after this . . .’ She glanced out the window too, as if she could see the station there. ‘It’s pretty much guaranteed to happen.’
Astrid shuddered. ‘Do you think that the Off-World Colonization Project would be suspended if we fail?’
‘Maybe,’ Poppy said.
There had been dissenters in the UK even before their launch. Astrid remembered that a few talk show hosts and columnists had called space academies such as Dalton ‘a travesty’. Astrid had watched a video of a famous human rights activist on a politics programme saying, ‘These children are too young to give their consent. They’re trained from age thirteen, fourteen . . . brainwashed, essentially. We talk about radicalization, but it is happening right here in these schools.’
‘Crew.’ Igor entered the kitchen, looming large in the doorway, Fae behind him.
‘Commander Bovarin.’ Jesse looked up and nodded in acknowledgement.
Igor took a deep breath. ‘We lost a friend on Wednesday. Commander Sheppard.’ At the sound of his name Juno stifled a sob, and Jesse stroked her cheek. ‘And before that the crew of Orlando.’ Eliot turned to the window and bit his knuckles, his face clenched with pain. ‘All of them surrendered their lives for their mission and, unfortunately, most of their work will be lost with them. What are those achievements worth when weighed against a life? Captain Omar Briggs, Dr Sie-Yan and their young crew – Cal, James, Kennedy. Commander Solomon Sheppard. A father, a husband, a friend. I hear you ask, what should we do now?’
Astrid flinched at the fresh cut of pain in his voice. Igor came to stand at the head of the table. ‘When I, myself, chose to take part in this mission, people were shocked. “What about your children and grandchildren?” they asked me. “What about the things you will miss?” But, like Captain Briggs and Commander Sheppard, I pretended to laugh it off, then. Would they now? If they knew that this would be their end, long before their time, in a moment of fire and nothingness?
‘For a long time I’ve wrestled with these questions. I think that we can find the answer in the lives they led. In their love for their work. Their hunger for discovery. Commander Sheppard was hoping that Terra-Two could be a place for his son and family to follow after him, a place where they would be safe from war and global warming. A second chance for humanity. And, in a different way, that is what Captain Briggs and Sie Yan were doing too. They knew the risks. I think they would have said, now, exactly the same thing they said then. When they were asked, “Will you embark on this journey?” they would have smiled, and they would have said “Yes!” I would say “Yes” again, too.’
AFTER THAT, THE LAST vestiges of her dream finally evaporated for Astrid. She felt as if, with Sheppard, every good thing had gone away.
She and Eliot were confined to the infirmary for what felt like a lifetime. Long enough for the regret to set in, and the guilt. Astrid realized a few days later what a desperate situation she had sentenced them to. The fuel cells provided them with the oxygen they needed but, despite their efforts at conserving heat, the temperature dropped every day. A week after the accident, Astrid curled under her duvet and the cold hacked at her bones, chilling her right to the marrow. She felt as if she had never been warm and fought to remember hot baths of the kind she used to take at home, water so hot that when she lifted her arm steam curled off her skin. She and Eliot composed fantasy menus: boiling porridge and roast chicken with skin that cracked like leather, her mother’s shepherd’s pie, apple crumble with the saccharine custard they were served at Dalton. Many of the plants in the greenhouse had died. One night Poppy brought Astrid and Eliot their ration of food with a dessert bowl of canned peaches that had crystallized in the cupboard.
Already, the partial pressure of the oxygen on the ship was decreasing, the air growing thin. It was as if they were ascending a mountain at higher and higher altitudes. The manual listed a range of symptoms for them to look forward to: headaches, nausea, gradual loss of consciousness, high-altitude cerebral oedema, paralysis, coma. Death. Which, since they were unable to fix the oxygen tank, would likely occur within a few weeks, if not sooner.
Hallucinations were also amongst the symptoms; Astrid witnessed this one night when she woke to see Eliot in his bed opposite, fevered glitter in his eye, talking to his shadow. ‘Get away from me,’ he told it.
‘Eliot?’ Astrid rubbed her eyes, straining to see in the darkness of the infirmary. Eliot’s face was oddly lit by Fae’s desk lamp.
‘There’s someone out there.’
‘Where?’ But then it occurred to her. ‘Eliot, you’re dreaming.’ She climbed out to shake him awake, and he looked at her, startled.
‘What?’
‘You had a bad dream.’
‘Ara was here.’ He scrambled out of bed and checked beneath it, grabbed at the metal bars of the gurney, checked everywhere. ‘She was here in this room.’
‘That sounds like a good dream,’ Astrid said, turning away.
For her, sleep did not come easily. She lay awake most nights, torn up with regret for the choice she’d made. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her teeth chattering, rolling under the duvet, tears in her eyes. Sometimes she was on the edge of sleep, dreaming of drowning just off the shores of Terra-Two, her crew on the beach as she thrashed the waves, watching her die. Commander Sheppard, smiling the way he had a year ago on one of the early mornings when she’d found him
singing to his son on the flight deck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. Could he hear her? ‘I made a mistake.’ But the wash of the undertow swept her back into her own cold reality.
POPPY
IT CAME AS A surprise to Poppy, how hard Harry took Commander Sheppard’s death. He disappeared after the memorial, and she spotted him heading down the corridor and into a room next to the cockpit. It was Solomon’s room, with his name embossed on the door in silver letters beneath a pair of outstretched wings. Poppy often wondered if their commander had slept soundly, or if the burden of being captain of their lonely ship bore down on him, even as he dreamt.
The door was slightly ajar, and a thin stream of yellow light broke into the dim corridor. ‘Hey,’ she said, her breath misting in front of her. Harry was sitting on the bed, his back to Poppy. She lingered for a moment on the threshold. She could hear the melancholy wail of a clarinet through speakers, and over it the catch of a breath. ‘Harry?’
She pushed the door open a little further. The room was only dimly illuminated by the lamp on the desk and the hot glow of Jupiter through a large window. Commander Sheppard’s room was smaller than she had imagined it would be. It smelt of him, which, now, made Poppy feel a little creepy. She took a tentative step inside, her heart in her throat. The rug was soft and thick under her feet and Poppy noted everything as she passed. Solomon’s uniform folded up on the easy chair. On his desk was an armillary sphere. Earth was a golden ball in the centre and the lamplight twinkled off the frame of delicate rings. Poppy ran her finger along the tiny engravings on the surface, lines of latitude, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It was the most exquisite thing she had seen in a long time, and it gave her a thrill to try to imagine Commander Sheppard leaning over it late at night, tracing the constellations as they passed.
On the pin-board above the bed were photographs. Pictures of his son, his wife. She, feather-haired and smiling, his arm draped casually around her shoulders. Another, their wedding day, his hair grown out into an afro, his hand on her waist as they pressed a knife into luxurious white marzipan. Him playing the saxophone at sixteen or maybe seventeen, forehead scarred by acne. Him, pushing the British flag into the cracked surface of Mars. Seeing these pictures now was like peeling open a flower to find the vivid, surprising organs inside.