Orbital Decay (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by Malcolm Cross

  “You should try the orange juice again,” she said, with more of a smile than Alvin expected. She’d had another call from home today.

  “Okay.” He squeezed out a careful blob of tea into the air, reddish and almost clear, blew it lightly in Charlie’s direction. “I’ll swap you some tea for some orange juice.”

  She gulped the tea out of the air, sent a blob of orange juice heading back, and Alvin caught the blob between his chopsticks, struggling for a moment to keep from flicking his traded beverage away, but with a little care he got the juice in his mouth.

  “Still doesn’t taste of much of anything to me,” he said, as cheerily as he could.

  “Bah!” Matvey stuck his head into the conversation, giving the board a flick back across the node to Yegor. “Our food still tastes of something in orbit, even if Roscosmos gave us sand instead of coffee!”

  Charlie managed to laugh. “Hey, do you have any of those cans of honey? Want to trade some American peanut butter for it?”

  “Sure, sure! Give me a minute.” Matvey pulled himself over to the rack of plastic binders with their food packets, and searched through Unity’s small stockpile of Russian food.

  At the folding ‘table’ mounted to the wall, just a board angled to form a ledge, he held the can down with his thumb to keep it from floating away, and levered it open with a camping-style claw opener before giving it to Charlie. Charlie had her own supply of peanut butter, part of the small number of personal foodstuffs sent up with each resupply on the Progress vehicles. She unscrewed the tub, took Matvey’s spoon from him, and pulled out a lump that would never have balanced on a spoon on Earth. It didn’t drip, just hung on.

  “There you go,” she said.

  “Spasiba!” he said. Thank you!

  “Puzhalsta,” Charlie replied with a grin. Please, it’s nothing.

  A regular little feast and celebration, ‘family dinner’ on Space Station. Alvin smiled, glancing back down at the movie everyone was ignoring, playing on one of the laptop screens. Some box office bomb; Tank Girl, Alvin thought.

  Alvin watched Matvey spread peanut butter on one side of a piece of toast from the bag on the table... but only one side. He lifted his finger and pointed at the dry side. “You should butter both sides.”

  “Hm?” Matvey quizzically turned the bread around, looking at both sides.

  “No gravity, no bottom side of the bread. You can put peanut butter on both sides, there’s no plate for it to smear off against.” Alvin popped a piece of brisket into his mouth, kept talking with his mouth full. “Got told about it at NASA. One of our guys up here a few years ago figured it out.”

  “Hm!” Matvey massaged his spoonful of peanut butter onto the dry side, too, holding the toast at the edges carefully. “Interesting. Another fine example of international cooperation!”

  They both laughed.

  Alvin cast a worried eye in Charlie’s direction a moment later. She’d drifted away from the group a little, while putting her peanut butter away. Was looking thoughtfully at the other personal food items she’d gotten. A lot of them were packed up and chosen by the astronaut’s families, and Charlie’s family were still stuck in the Houston quarantine.

  The quarantine had expanded, as expected. More houses in her neighbourhood had apparently been wrapped up in plastic sheeting marked with biohazard trefoils, doctors in hazmat suits making the occasional journey through the suburban homes, soldiers delivering Red Cross packages with food and essentials. No one in or out.

  Little Nate was apparently okay, but her husband Rudy had been coughing at her over the phone. No other symptoms, though, and even though the quarantine had been broken—a couple of neighbours breaking through their plastic wrap only to wind up getting tasered and handcuffed by the patrols within minutes of their ‘escape’—there was every reason to believe he just had a regular cough. Or at least, every reason to hope that.

  Of course, Alvin hadn’t been the only one to notice Charlie going off by herself. And bit by bit, instead of talking about comfortable nonsense like food and complaining about how things didn’t taste of very much in space, the conversation edged its way onto the subject of the pandemic.

  “Several districts in Moscow are going to be evacuated,” Rolan said, voice low, keeping it in Russian, even though the others had learned it to at least a conversational level, Charlie included. “Not that we were told. Do you know how the kids are?” he asked Yegor.

  Yegor shrugged, a surprisingly full-bodied motion as he drifted. “I’ve heard little. They’ll tell me what they think I need to know,” he said, before peeling a cloth chess piece off the board with a Velcro rip

  Yegor was the veteran in the room. Now in his late fifties, as a younger man he’d been in possession of a luxuriously Stalin-esque moustache. He’d shaved it off after perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and since then had been a mainstay of the Russian space station programs, having clocked in close to four hundred days in space. He was the type to be happy with what he was told. But Rolan, and especially Matvey, were younger men. A little more interested in the world.

  “This plague is only going to benefit the criminals,” Rolan muttered. “Isn’t that right? All an evacuation will do is get the police out of the city, leave it to the ruffians who stay behind.”

  Matvey caught the chess-board, once Yegor finished his move and threw it over. A thoughtful look at the state of the game, and he stuck it to his shirt for later while he finished off the toast. Another shrug, more expressive than Yegor’s. “I don’t know. Maybe the plague will kill them if they stay behind. Then only the law abiding citizens who left will be safe.”

  “Pfah! As if this plague could do any good at all.”

  “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” Alvin murmured. He didn’t know if there was a similar expression in Russian.

  “It could be for the best,” Krister rumbled, his Russian accent better than his English one. “We are all using too much oil, too many natural resources. The natural consequence of overpopulation. Tens of thousands have died so far, but even hundreds of thousands is too little. If millions died, then, then perhaps the problem could be solved.”

  No one answered that.

  No one could, all of them staring at Krister.

  Krister turned a little red in the face, uncomfortable. He was in Earth sciences. Weather patterns, pollution, global warming. All the ways in which man was destroying the planet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. My mouth ran away with me.”

  Charlie glared at him. Shook her head, leaning back. The motion hid her face in the floating cloud of her hair.

  Rolan and Yegor shared an awkward look over the silence. At last Yegor looked away when Matvey returned the chess set.

  “They’re probably partway to finalizing a vaccine for it anyway,” Alvin said, just to hear someone talking.

  “Why say that?” Krister asked, relieved that the conversation was moving again.

  Alvin let go of his chopsticks and spread his hands helplessly before recovering them from the air. “They’re smart with viruses and immunology. It just takes time, right? I was just preparing experiment samples today that go home with us in two weeks. I don’t understand it myself, but they’re doing this real advanced stuff with mice.”

  “What stuff?” Krister demanded.

  “Oh, well, they have these mice genetically modified to display human antigens on their cell surfaces...” Alvin explained it as best he could, but he knew he fumbled it. He wished Charlie would step in and explain, but all she contributed to the conversation was that the research documentation looked incomplete, or maybe even false.

  “They haven’t listed what infectious agent they’re studying, they haven’t explained why they have every blood group represented except for O-negative... It really doesn’t make any sense.” She grimaced. “There’s something seriously wrong with it.”

  “Haven’t you asked the research coordinators about it?”
Matvey asked, amazed.

  Charlie shook her head. “It’s not my project, it’s Alvin’s.” She stared at him, almost accusingly.

  “I wouldn’t have thought to ask,” he said, meekly. “If it was an electronic engineering project, I might have picked it up, but, I don’t know what the ‘normal’ procedures are in biology. Sorry.”

  “Well.” She kept shaking her head. “I did try and look up the university and department the experiment’s being conducted for, but apparently it’s just this office that gets private funding, so, who knows? That thing could have been sent up by almost anyone.”

  “If you tell me what I need to ask, I’ll get Tom to ask for us as soon as I can.”

  “Shit.” Charlie palmed at her face. “Tom. Tom’s O-negative friends.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are they sick?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  Charlie kept rubbing at her face. “Are any of the O-negative guys sick?”

  “What’s this?” Matvey jutted in to ask, chess set floating forgotten beside him. “O-negative guys?”

  “Apparently NASA ordered part of our astronaut corps into quarantine at Sheppard Air Force Base,” Alvin explained. “We think they’re all O-negative.”

  “And none of the modified mice are O-negative?”

  Alvin shook his head. “Not one.”

  “Are the Russians doing anything similar?” Charlie asked. “Rolan? Yegor?”

  Yegor simply shook his head. Silent. As he had been since the conversation shifted. He was staring intently at them, his arms folded. Rolan, floating beside him, was just as tense. Just as quiet.

  As Matvey caught their gaze, he turned pale. Shook his head, and that was all.

  At last Krister said, “I don’t think any of the quarantined ones are sick. I haven’t been getting any responses to e-mails from them—I remember Josh saying he was being relocated—but the other astronauts I keep in touch with, both in ESA and NASA, they haven’t been called up for anything. Some of them are in hospital.”

  Charlie, Alvin and Krister compared notes. Gossiped about who they knew who’d wound up in hospital, who they knew who might have been relocated to Sheppard. All while the Russians ignored them and watched Tank Girl, following Yegor’s forceful example, silently staring at the screen.

  LATER THAT NIGHT in Harmony, when Matvey finally made his way up from the Russian section, he looked over his shoulder a dozen times before settling into his sleep station. Went to the bathroom twice.

  Nervous as hell.

  So, floating in his sleeping bag and gazing across the gap as Matvey returned for the second time, Alvin called out, “Hey. What’s up?”

  The young Russian shook his head miserably. “Nothing is ‘up.’” Then he smiled, thin-lipped and pale. “We are in space, remember? No up, no down.”

  Alvin snorted out a half-laugh. “True, true.”

  Krister floated by, sticking his tongue out after brushing his teeth. “Bleh! I still can’t stand swallowing my toothpaste!” Of course they all had to swallow, no drains to spit into on Space Station. No faucets to run a brush under, either, so Krister sipped some water to rinse the brush in his mouth with.

  Matvey and Alvin both laughed, but Matvey’s laugh was weaker than Alvin’s.

  Alvin watched him. “Yegor got you down?”

  Matvey started to shake his head, but stopped. “Yegor. He... He is into some heavy shit, you know?”

  “I don’t know.” Alvin blinked. “Like what?”

  “Like FSB, KGB before the dissolution of the union.” Matvey smiled weakly. “You know, he wasn’t in the air force before he became an astronaut. Not the proper air force, anyway. He flew spy planes in the ’eighties. Yegor has connections you would not even want to imagine.”

  “Christ,” Alvin muttered.

  Charlie pulled open the thin doors on her bunk, above Alvin’s, from Alvin’s perspective. From hers, he was above hers. “Are you serious? Does he know something? Is that why he shut you guys up?”

  Matvey grinned nervously, pushing his arms through the slits in the sides of his sleeping bag and hugging himself. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Shit. I bet he does know something,” Charlie said, leaning out to lock eyes with Alvin. “Maybe not about the mice, but about this whole mess.”

  “Maybe...”

  “Don’t ask him, please.” Matvey held out his hands. “I am not even supposed to know these things about Yegor. I just pay attention to rumours, maybe too much attention, you know? They are just rumours.”

  “Rumours like what?”

  “Rumours like, during the war in Afghanistan, the pandemic was deployed there on KGB orders.” Matvey just got paler and paler. For him, ‘the war in Afghanistan’ was the Soviet invasion in the ’eighties. “But you know, that’s one that my daughter heard on the school ground, and I had to write to her, Kalinka, that is silly, and besides, if it were true they would have censored your e-mail to me, so there is your answe—”

  Keeeeeeeeeee!

  The alarm cut Matvey off.

  “Fuck!” Krister yelled, kicking off from the wash stand and hurtling across the module to grab onto the small emergency panel near the hatch.

  “What is it?” Alvin asked, struggling his way out of his sleeping bag. “Air leak?”

  “Transmission failure.” Krister banged his hand against the array of warning lights on the panel. “Didn’t you fix that damn flight computer?”

  “I thought I did!”

  Charlie was already up and out, going through the emergency procedure manuals rattling around on their shelf. She found the right one, dodged around Matvey making his way to his station in the Russian section, and handed the manual up to Krister. He splayed it open, and Alvin moved in beside him to check the instructions.

  The voice from the communications panel crackled with interference. “Station, this is Houston, do you read? Over.” It was Tom, barely audible.

  Krister wrestled with the communications panel before he got the microphone out of its cradle. “Fucking thing... Station reads you, Houston. We have a transmission failure light blinking at us here. We are still investigating the problem on our end. Over.”

  “Well, Station, the problem isn’t on your end, it’s on ours. One of the satellite ground relay dishes has been destroyed.”

  “What?”

  “Uh, Yeah. Station, be advised that communications from Houston are going to be spotty for awhile.” Even through the static, Tom didn’t sound right.

  Alvin shouldered in next to Krister, that sick feeling in his gut back again. “Tom! I know that tone of voice. You haven’t sounded like that since you had to tell your kids the dog died. What the hell’s going on?”

  The seconds ticked by, waiting for a response. “Well, Alvin, I’m afraid I have to tell you guys that the Houston Space Center is under terrorist attack.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THIS WASN’T A procedure anyone had ever thought would be needed. Alvin told himself that, the second time he burned himself with the soldering iron, and resigned himself to fouling up again before getting it right.

  Houston was never supposed to go off the air. There was supposed to be a signal just about every moment of every orbit. Occasionally Station went into a blind spot between satellites or over an ocean, but Station went off air, not Houston.

  Houston was off the air. Tom’s voice had faded to nothingness with a crash of static as another relay dish was destroyed.

  Space Station was served by the TDRSS satellites, usually referred to as the Ku Band satellites, which kept data and bandwidth pouring into Station for all but five to ten minutes of each orbit. Then there was contact with ground stations, and a more reliable but less useful satellite constellation that just shunted voice communications back and forth between Space Station and the ground. But everything went through Houston to the satellites, and from there to Station, and had ever since the Russian communication ne
twork’s final two satellites had given up the ghost.

  “Here.” First came the circuit board, then came Rolan sticking his head and shoulders into the space Alvin was working in. It made the narrow gap behind the wall panel even more cramped, but after handing over the board, Rolan took the flashlight hanging in the air and held it steady on Alvin’s work.

  “Thanks,” Alvin murmured, and dug back into the forest of connections and exposed electronics boards behind the Ku band antenna’s internal links.

  The system, and the antenna, had only been intended for a simple data uplink/downlink, using the satellites like radio repeaters and reflectors—space-based internet routers that passed data between Station and Houston. It was all routed through sealed units and chips remotely programmed by teams on the ground; Station wasn’t supposed to need access, and they didn’t have it. No direct control of the satellites, and no direct control of the antenna. Not until Alvin finished soldering in a direct crosslink between the antenna’s system and their computers, anyway.

  Krister peered in critically at Alvin and Rolan, Alvin occasionally asking for a tool before finishing up the crosslink by feel and instinct. He’d never worked like this before—it was almost as though he was drafting up a design for a circuit, but instead of using software he was simply building it piece by piece, checking voltages with a multimeter until at last he’d cobbled together a connection into one of the laptops with pieces of the SPHERES robotics experiments.

  When he came up for air, he found out he’d been working for barely forty minutes. He sipped water in Unity and washed the scent of solder out of his nose with deep breaths — with no fans pushing air behind the panels, and no gravity to make heat rise, the vapours from soldering had built up into unmoving bubbles of hot gas.

  Krister continued to watch him contemplatively, almost calculatingly, until at last Alvin shrugged at him, not sure what he wanted. Krister shook his head and turned his attention to Yegor and Rolan, the pair of them struggling to manually establish a connection to the satellites.