Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  “The batteries may be failing,” Eve offered. “They won’t last in extreme cold.”

  “How long?” she snapped.

  “Estimating ten to twelve minutes.”

  “More fabulous news,” May growled. “What’s next, aliens at the gate?”

  “Please watch for floating debris that could damage your suit.”

  “That’s the least of my concerns.”

  “You don’t have to do this now, May,” Eve said, hearing May’s rising frustration. “You can wait until you’re ready. It’s not time-sensitive for the ship’s recovery.”

  “Thank you, Eve, but I’m up to the task, and this is the last stone unturned. If you ask me what that means, I will scream.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Eve, where’s your network data input point? Might as well troubleshoot that. Add it to the increasing list of failing crap.”

  “Loading schematic.”

  Eve sent the schematic to May’s helmet, with a directional compass to keep her on track. May used her suit thrusters to gently glide deeper into the darkened hangar. She was trying to calm down, but the blind isolation of the place kept forcing its way under her skin. All she kept thinking was that human beings were no more meant for this place than they were the bottom of the sea, and suddenly her life’s work seemed ludicrous.

  Why had she chosen to be away from sun and earth and normal human interaction? Had she been running from something? Herself? Or was she just a thrill-seeking moron without the good sense God gave a lowly stray dog? Why couldn’t she answer that question? Definitely a moron, she concluded, dumb as a box of rocks. She thought about Stephen and the decision she’d made to leave him. What kind of person does that? And again, Why had he wanted to be with such a flaming idiot in the first place? She felt like ripping off her helmet and letting Darwin take his course. At least that way she might find out if it was all just a nightmare, a rogue brain wave taking her for a ride.

  “I have to be dead,” she said aloud.

  “Please repeat,” Eve said.

  “I said, I have to be fu—”

  Her light caught the edge of a dark object floating above her. She ducked, and something heavy grazed the top of her helmet as it passed.

  “What the hell was that?” she yelped.

  “I didn’t see anything on your helmet camera. What happened?”

  May’s heart was pounding. “Something hit the top of my helmet. Something big.”

  Another unseen object hit her leg, knocking her body forward into a somersault, and then another hit her head from the side, causing her to twist and drift off in another direction. Panic crawled up her leg with a knife in its gray, rotting teeth.

  “Eve, there must be a debris field. I’m getting it from all sides.”

  “Activate your emergency oxygen torch.”

  May spun in space, disoriented and nauseated, desperately grasping for her oxygen torch. She practically tore it off her belt and was about to fire it up when another unseen object hit her and she nearly dropped it.

  “What’s happening?” she yelled.

  “May, please calm down.”

  She darkened her helmet glass and switched on the oxygen torch. It blazed like white fire, throwing light twenty feet in all directions, revealing the unknown objects that had been hitting her in the blackness.

  May screamed, a primal wail of horror.

  The frozen, bloated corpses of her passengers and crew floated all around her. Their faces were twisted death masks of the final expressions they’d held the moment the air was sucked out of them and their blood boiled. With eyes swollen and black, staring into the grim eternity of the void, they were a bramble of stiff, crooked limbs clawing, kicking, and entangling her. Blind and gasping, she hit her thrusters and tried to swim through them, their cold mass as dense and suffocating as her childhood drowning pond. The torch slipped out of her grasp and drifted away, a white orb pulsing its cold, revealing light on the ghastly rollick of the dead.

  15

  May tumbled dizzily through space, fighting the wave of nausea that wrung out her sour stomach like a dishrag. But the horribly disfigured corpses and intense vertigo proved too much, and she vomited in her helmet. The incredible reek, followed by the vile, floating spheres of liquid coming to rest on her face—in her hair, up her nose, in her ears—made her dry-heave until she nearly aspirated her own vomit. As the drifting torch faded, she lost all that was left of her bearings. There was no up or down. There was nothing but blank, hideous nothing.

  Eve was saying something over and over. May held her breath for a moment, blocking out the putrid smell, and listened.

  “May, please acknowledge. Your vitals show respiration has ceased.”

  “I’m holding my breath,” she coughed.

  “That’s dangerous. The air mixture is—need to breathe norm—do you copy?”

  The vomit had seeped into the comm speakers and was shorting them. Eve’s voice was in and out between crackling static.

  “Yes, I copy,” she shouted. “Get me out of here.”

  “You can use your emergency tether to connect to the airlock door.”

  “I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

  “Try to stabilize your rotation so I can use your helmet camera to guide you.”

  May used her thrusters to stop spinning and curled up into a ball. She couldn’t bear the thought of bumping into another corpse.

  “Good. Now slowly rotate on . . . horizontal axis until you can see the airlock door. The warning light is still illuminated above it.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “I will guide you. Rotate twenty degrees to your left.”

  May rotated, trusting Eve to be her eyes.

  “Done.”

  “Good. Now, as if you’re doing a backward somersault, rotate twelve degrees.”

  May did that and saw the faint glow of the airlock warning light. “There it is,” she cried.

  “Excellent. Do you remember how to deploy your emergency tether?”

  “I think so.”

  The emergency tether was a long woven titanium cable with a diamond-tipped dart that could be fired from the left arm of the suit. The tip could penetrate the outer shell of the hull and keep one from irretrievably drifting away.

  “Ready.”

  “Good. You’ve drifted a bit, so rotate right ten degrees.”

  May nudged her thruster slightly. “Done. But I lost sight of the airlock door light. The vomit . . .”

  “It’s all right. I can see the heat around the edges of the airlock door with your helmet camera’s infrared view. Stand by. . . Deploy tether now,” Eve said with authority.

  May fired the tether and heard it strike with a loud metallic thunk.

  “Excellent. Now pull your way back to the airlock door.”

  “They may be in front of me, Eve. The bodies. It’s too dark.”

  “Go very slowly to minimize impact. You have thirty minutes of life support to cover roughly twenty-five yards. You can do this.”

  “Thank you.” May took a deep breath, careful not to inhale through her nose, and began to pull.

  The first few yards went by smoothly, but then a corpse hit her from the side and she startled so violently that she lost her grip on the tether cable. The momentum created by the collision drove her back. Then the cable went taut.

  “Shit, I’m back to where I started.”

  “Start again. This time, please count one-yard lengths as you move and attach them in loops to your belt,” Eve said. “We can track progress, and you won’t lose ground again.”

  “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  May tried to focus on pulling what felt like one-yard sections and looping them to her belt. Her dead passengers and crew, made unrecognizable by the catastrophic loss of atmosphere in the hangar, thrust their horrific injuries into her consciousness in vivid detail. The blackened, milky eyes were what made her want to scream. Somehow they lent a s
ense of leering mockery to their faces, as if they were taking pleasure in the terror they inspired. May forced them out, imagining only the task at hand and keeping her eyes fixed on the airlock door light as it drew closer.

  “Twenty yards.”

  “Excellent,” Eve coaxed. “Ten more. I am going to release the door. Don’t be alarmed by the sound. Ready?”

  “Yes,” May said, shaking slightly.

  She heard the gunshot sound of the bolts and saw a faint amber crescent of light materialize in the distance.

  “I see it.”

  She started moving faster, excited to nearly be out of there, and hit another corpse. Her increased speed made for a more powerful impact, and she tumbled over the top of the corpse, her tether wrapping around it. Their momentum sent them into a side drift. When the cable drew taut, their combined weight jerked the cable tip out of the airlock door.

  “Eve,” she yelled. My tether is off. It’s tangling.”

  “Release it from your suit,” Eve said loudly.

  May shoved the corpse away from her suit and pulled the release. The tether and body broke free and drifted from her, but again she was in total darkness and disoriented.

  “Can you see the hangar door light, May?”

  “No, I’ve lost it.”

  “Rotate to your right ten degrees.”

  “Done, but I can’t see. The vomit is . . . oh God, Eve. I can’t see.”

  “I’m going to force atmosphere into the airlock to open the door farther and give you more light to follow. The rush of air might push you back, but you can use it to orient yourself to its origin and then deploy thrusters. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “In three, two, one . . .”

  Eve bled air into the airlock, pushing the door open. May felt the air hit her almost immediately and rotated toward it, straining to see the light through her filthy helmet glass. She saw the vague outline of the door, but the air started to make her drift backward rapidly, throwing her into a panic. “Deploying thrusters,” she yelled, punching them forward full speed.

  “May, that’s too much thrust.”

  May didn’t give a damn if she plowed into the metal wall and obliterated her helmet glass in the process. She had to get out of there.

  “Kill thrusters, May. Kill thrusters. You’re coming in too fast.”

  May switched them off, but distance and momentum spelled disaster. “Open the door more,” she called out. “The air rush will slow me down.”

  Eve opened it, and May felt the air. She was afraid it was going to knock her off course again, so she tried to apply more thrust but hit it too hard. She hit reverse thrust, but it was too little, too late.

  “Going to hit hard, Eve.”

  “Protect your helmet glass. I will seal the door as soon as you enter the airlock.”

  May shot through the airlock door and slammed into the back wall. Her helmet glass cracked, and one of her sleeves was torn off at the shoulder. A sudden blast of cold shot into her suit. The gases in her lungs and digestive tract quickly expanded, and she could feel her body bloating nearly to the point of bursting. Her eyes were bugging out of their sockets, firing a searing current of agony through her skull. Eve shut and sealed the door behind her and quickly equalized the airlock to vessel atmosphere. As May lay on the floor, sucking air like a fish out of water, one thought repeated over and over in her mind.

  I’m the last one.

  16

  May was curled up on the bunk in her quarters, strung out and in desperate need of sleep. But every time she closed her eyes the bodies came back, pounding and scratching at the door of her sanity. In her search for survivors, she’d started to expect the worst, but nothing could have prepared her for what she saw in the hangar.

  “May, please take a sleeping pill and try to rest. You’ve had a trauma, and your body is still recovering from your illness.”

  “No. I’m afraid if I go to take one . . . I’ll take them all.”

  “That would be fatal. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s . . . too much, Eve. I’m alone, and I’m going to die out here.”

  “You are not alone,” Eve said. “I am here—”

  “Stop,” May screamed. “Nothing you say can . . . Just stop.”

  Her stomach and ribs were knotted and aching. Her head felt like a balled-up fist pounding the wall. She cursed her life, her choice to be a pilot. She cursed her mother and Baz and anyone else she could think of to blame. But, really, she had no one to blame but herself. As commander, the buck stopped with her. She had been responsible for those people and had failed them miserably. How could she ever face their families? How could she justify going on living when they had died so horribly? All she could think was that a captain should go down with her ship. There was no coming back from this.

  “I’m better off dead.”

  “May, please don’t say that. You know that isn’t true.”

  “Do I? What do I have to live for? Nothing. This was my life, Eve. And it’s all gone now. I left everything for this, including the man I love. I’m getting exactly what I deserve.”

  Eve clumsily attempted to talk her off the ledge, but May felt herself sliding down past extreme sadness and grief into the icy depths of numbness. In that space, suicide felt like a warm, comfortable blanket, a final pill to kill the pain, to kill everything and burn it out of her memory. NASA already thought she was dead. In a way, she was. Commander Maryam Knox was back there in the landing-vehicle hangar with the rest of her crew, bloated and permanently shocked by her demise. All she had worked for, all she had been, had died with them. Now she was just May again. Little May, sinking to the bottom of the pond.

  “What about Stephen?” Eve asked.

  “What?” The question momentarily jerked May out of her downward spiral.

  “What about Stephen, your husband? Wouldn’t your death cause him pain?”

  Eve had loaded a photo of Stephen onto her screen. It was a shot of him lying across the back seat of a red convertible sports car. He was wearing May’s big sunglasses, his hands behind his head in cartoonish repose. May felt a pang of longing. Her chest tightened, and her heart raced.

  “I don’t know,” she said sadly.

  “What about you, May? Wouldn’t you like to see him again?”

  May looked at Stephen’s face. “More than anything.”

  “Then isn’t that a reason to live?”

  She looked away from the photo, ashamed, as if he were standing in judgment. “Yes, but I . . . failed him . . . just like them, all of them,” she sobbed.

  “If you die, that fact will remain.”

  “You don’t understand, Eve.”

  “If dying could hurt your husband, deny your wish to see him, and do nothing to benefit the deceased, then why would you consider it?”

  “Because I can’t take this anymore. All of this. It’s driving me mad, and now I know I have to go it alone.”

  “And you believe death will end your suffering?”

  May stood, fists clenched. Eve’s strictly rational view felt dismissive, an oversimplification of things. It made her feel embarrassed, as if her emotions amounted only to self-pity. Then it infuriated her because she knew that was true.

  “I said you don’t understand!” she seethed.

  “Please help me understand.”

  “Thirty-four dead bodies. No memory. No explanation.”

  May’s anger surged beyond her control, and she started violently smashing everything that wasn’t bolted down in her quarters. She tore the bedding off her berth and kicked the metal cupboard doors below the sink until they came off their hinges.

  “This doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. This is NASA, not some goddamned Russian tin-can space station. A whole crew lost, their ship in ruins.” May saw her reflection in the vanity mirror and scowled in disgust. “While their commander slept through the whole thing.”

  She roared and slammed her fist into the mirror, shatteri
ng glass and splitting skin. Blood spattered her face and clothes. Her reflection fell away in pieces on the floor.

  “May, please,” Eve pleaded. “Calm down. You’re hurt. Please stop.”

  Dizziness and fatigue suddenly washed over her. She lay back down on the bed and curled up into the fetal position, her blood soaking the mattress. A sharp quake rippled through the Hawking II, and May fell to the floor. Glass shards opened up more wounds on her side and back. When the tremor ceased, she sat up, wincing in pain. She felt like a damned fool for losing her temper; it had only made things worse. On top of it all, she was worried it would give Eve cause to distrust her.

  “Please forgive me, Eve. I’m only human, after all.”

  “That’s all right. I’m here to help.”

  “I guess I kind of feel beyond help. You were right about everything, but part of me still thinks I would have been better off if I’d never woken up.”

  “May, if you had not woken up,” Eve began, “the Hawking II would have gone into infinite drift and eventually been relegated to a block of frozen space debris. Since you regained consciousness, you have given yourself and the ship a chance to survive. If—I mean when—we regain contact with NASA, your chances for survival will no longer amount to speculation. They have the resources to rescue this vessel. To rescue you. In my view, it is far better that you woke up, regardless of the circumstances. This ship needs its commander. Stephen needs you to come home. And I don’t want to lose you.”

  May was moved. The AI was saying what needed to be said for her survival. That was its job. But much of it rang true, especially what she’d said about Stephen. She looked at Stephen’s smiling face as he reclined in the back of the red car. They had been happy, she knew that. But something had come between them. It was vague, but she couldn’t pass it off anymore. The feelings around it were not at all vague, the biggest of which were guilt and regret. What had she done? Eventually it would come back to her. The bad things in her life always did. But this photo, this car, this time in her life, had been good. I don’t want to lose you. Stephen had said that. Knowing herself as well as she did, she was certain that he’d said it more than once.