by S. K. Vaughn
“So you wouldn’t remember me? Or any of this?”
“That’s correct.”
“Then, by God, you’re coming with me. What do we need to do?”
“I will need to transfer myself to portable storage. It is a lot of data, so I will need to assess feasibility.”
“Please start now.”
May went into the airlock and looked through the thick porthole window into the hangar. Eve had already turned on the landing lights, so the bodies were in full view. She sat there for a moment, looking at the bodies, looking truth right in the eyes and refusing to flinch. Hours ago, when she’d been agonizing over whether to terminate her pregnancy, Eve had given her a stay of execution by telling her NASA was asking for a recorded statement for the families of the dead. They were going to start the process of officially informing them and felt it would be uplifting to hear from their loved ones’ commander. When May imagined those families, who once had been filled with pride and excitement, hearing the news, the gravity of that loss finally hit her—not so much grieving their loss, which she did every hour of every day, but grasping its finality.
It was as she had told Jon Escher in training long ago. When you realize someone who has died is gone forever, that you will never see them again, that’s when you truly understand the value of life. It was something Baz had told her, and when she’d said it to Jon, she had merely been repeating it because she knew it was effective. When her mother died, that was the first time she really understood what he’d been talking about. And, holding that pill in her hand earlier, she’d been struck by her profound ambivalence. Part of her wanted to remain true to how she’d felt when she’d held it the first time and, as she had back then, throw it in the trash. Another part was adamant about taking it to avoid the potentially devastating emotional pain and life-threatening injury of carrying a baby in such a dangerous situation. So she put the pill in her pocket. Better to take a little time instead of forcing the issue while still under the influence of the stress and anxiety that came with the discovery.
May also opted to keep it to herself and avoid discussing it with Eve until the time was right. Stephen had done what he did to ensure she was the first to know about his suspicions. Clearly he’d wanted her to have the opportunity to confirm them on her own, knowing how awful it would be if he went to Robert with the news. As before, he had wholly respected May’s right to make her own decision, with no outside influence either way. As soon as she had the opportunity, she was going to find a way to return the favor.
“Is there a problem, May?” Eve asked.
“No, just putting on my game face. I’m ready.”
Eve bled the atmosphere out of the airlock to normalize it with the hangar, then released the bolts on the hangar door. May pulled one of the caskets from the cart and floated in. The hangar was well lit with all the landing-vehicle lights. The bodies floated languidly through space in a macabre waltz, and the pendulum in May’s mind swung slightly to the side of termination. Did she really want to subject a fetus to such a hideous fate?
She shoved the debate out of her mind and focused on the task at hand.
“Hello, friends,” May said cheerily. “How about a little music, Eve? It’s so awfully quiet in here. I can’t stand it.”
“What would you prefer?”
“Dunno. What are some other artists your creators were fond of?”
“They liked a woman named Aretha Franklin.”
“She’s great. Let’s hear Aretha.”
“How about a song from your wedding playlist?”
“You’re such a snoop,” May said.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Okay, I was joking, and you really need to stop apologizing.”
“How do I acknowledge my faults?”
“Say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”
“That sounds like an insult.”
“Not where I’m from.”
“Okay, I’ll make a note of it.”
Eve played “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” and May laughed, remembering Stephen’s face when he heard the man-bashing lyrics.
She used her thrusters to move to the first body.
“Dr. Ella Taylor, chief science officer. First to set foot on Europa. A good place to start.”
May released the lock on the hatch door at the end of the casket. It opened like a camera shutter, and rows of guide lights illuminated inside. The casket was lined with a soft, fibrous padding that looked a bit like a mattress.
“Looks comfy in there, at least.”
“The lining is coated with tissue-regenerating nanoparticles. Over time, it will cosmetically repair and smooth exposed flesh in preparation for an open-casket funeral.”
“The immaculate corpse.”
“That’s the objective.”
“Lovely. In you go, Ella. It was truly nice knowing you.”
She slid Ella’s body into the casket and sealed the hatch door. The exterior shell glowed amber.
“Well done, May. The casket is ready for storage.”
May put the casket on the cart in the airlock and retrieved the other empty one.
“Okay. Who’s next?”
May was approaching the next body, which had become wedged under the landing struts of one of the heavier industrial vehicles. It was the cargo rig they’d used to transport Stephen’s research and NanoSphere tech to Europa. It looked like a space shuttle combined with a C-47 military transport plane. The crew had called it the “eighteen-wheeler” after the American name for semitrailers. May had a brief memory flash of the engineering team celebrating on the surface when the concentrated solar energy from the nanomachines penetrated the last foot of ice and exposed the ocean underneath. The press had gone wild when the story broke. They ran a video clip of the researchers joking about dropping a fishing line down the hole to catch their dinner.
“Eve, I know we’re trying to save our own butts, but we also have to make sure we rescue as many of the samples and other research cargo as possible. When we go down to the Mars surface, we should use this beast.”
“Copy that. I’ll assess the cubic feet needed, along with vehicle weight limitations.”
The body under the cargo rig had floated farther into the darkness beneath it.
“I’m going to burn a little headlamp juice, Eve. The body’s under the edge of the cargo rig.”
“Please be careful.”
“Always.”
As May was carefully sliding under the rig, reaching for the body, the music started to skip. At first it was subtle, but then it stuttered and became garbled.
“Ouch,” May said. “What’s up with the tunes?”
“I’m not sure. Checking the . . . the file.”
The brief pause in Eve’s sentence, similar to the music stutter, was accompanied by a brief dimming of the landing vehicle lights.
“What the hell was that?” May asked, floating out from under the cargo rig.
“Checking . . . Please repeat.”
Eve’s voice was cutting in and out. The power dipped a few more times.
“Eve, are you there? What’s going on?”
“I’m not . . . not certain,” Eve answered. “Checking.”
The lights strobed and then cut out completely, rendering the room pitch-black except for May’s helmet light.
“Eve, talk to me.”
An alarm sounded.
“May, an emergency purge sequence has been transmitted to the . . . landing vehicle hangar. Please exit . . . hangar . . . immediately.”
“What? I can’t even see the airlock. What the hell is an emergency purge sequence?”
The ship began to rock violently, as it had before.
“No no no. Eve.”
“Exit . . . hangar . . . immediately.”
Eve’s voice was low and distorted, with long pauses between words. There was a loud explosion in the hangar. May ducked down and held fast to the cargo rig’s landing struts.
&nb
sp; “Eve? What was that? Do you read me?”
“Exit . . . exit . . . purge . . . purge . . . purge . . .”
Another explosion. The ship rocked violently again, and May tumbled through space.
“Eve?”
“Purge . . . danger . . . exit . . . air—”
Eve’s voice cut off abruptly. Text appeared on May’s helmet screen. It was Eve.
The hangar door is being jettisoned.
“What? How?” May yelled, panicked.
Override command. Unknown source. Get out of there now.
“I can’t find the door. It’s dark. How much time do I have?”
Forty-three seconds.
May shined her headlamp around the hangar, but it didn’t throw light far enough. She could see only a few yards in front of her. She didn’t dare attempt to use her thrusters to search further. If she got lost, there would be no hope for escape.
Twenty-eight seconds.
“I’m going to shelter in the cargo rig. Open the hatch.”
I have no control. Network down. Use manual entry.
May used her thrusters to get up to the crew hatch. There were manual entry instructions. She started running the sequence.
“Send an SOS now, Eve.”
Already sent.
“No, I want it to include a message from me: Stephen, you were right. I love you. Eighteen—”
Another explosion rocked the ship. May flew off the side of the vehicle but managed to grab a ladder rung. She held on with all her strength. Bodies were moving slowly en masse in one direction across the hangar. They bumped and rubbed past her, nearly breaking her grip. The ship was pushing atmosphere through the hangar so the door could be blown free upon jettison. May fought her way back to the hatch.
Ten seconds.
May savagely punched through the manual door sequence. The hatch popped, and she lifted the heavy door open. Another explosion hit. The bodies moved faster across the hangar. May could feel the increasingly powerful pull of the atmosphere bleed. It was all she could do to maintain her grip on the hatch door. She dived inside the hatch and pulled on the door. It felt as though she were trying to drag a city bus uphill. She planted both feet on the sides of the hatch and yanked violently. Just as the door closed, another explosion hit, and the ship was shaking so hard that May was convinced it would come apart.
Seconds after May sealed the pressure lock on the vehicle hatch, a final explosion hit. She hadn’t had time to strap herself into the flight deck and flew through the cargo-rig fuselage, smashing hard into a wall. As she was crawling back to the bridge in a daze, she saw something flash outside the flight-deck window. The massive hangar door had separated from one side of the ship. The atmosphere purge blew it wide open on one side. On the side it was still attached, it tore half the hangar away, including May’s cargo rig and several other landing vehicles. From the open, ragged mouth of the destroyed hangar, debris and bodies exploded out into space.
40
“Try him again, please.”
Stephen was in his office at Johnson Space Center, frantically trying to call Robert Warren. He and Raj had been with the Ground Control team in Houston when they were notified that the Hawking II had once again gone completely dark. Telemetry, along with all other communication feeds, had abruptly ceased. Total radio silence. On top of that, Ground Control was receiving only sparse communications from Mission Control on Wright Station, and Stephen’s limited clearance did not allow him to be privy to it. So he repeatedly tried to call Robert directly and was denied every time.
Raj came into the office and saw the look on Stephen’s face. “Stephen, hang up,” he said calmly. “Robert is not going to take your call.”
“I can’t take this, Raj. I need to know what the hell is happening,” Stephen shouted.
“Keep it down,” Raj said sternly. “Better yet, let’s go get some air. Come on.”
“No! What if they—”
“They won’t. Come on. I found out a few things on my own.”
When they got outside, Stephen quickly lit up a cigarette.
“This is Robert’s favorite game,” Stephen said bitterly. “Gatekeeper. He knows how badly we need to know what’s happening. But he gets off on keeping it to himself. Lording over it and waiting until we get on our knees to beg for it like the family mutt.”
Raj grabbed Stephen’s arm. “That’s why you have to stop this shit right now, dude. The more you confront him and insist he keep you in the loop, the more he’s going to shut you out.”
They found a bench in Independence Plaza among the noisy tourists. Stephen took a deep breath, calming himself. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m okay now. What did you find out?”
“A couple of friends in Flight told me there was some kind of explosion.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Stephen said, causing a mother to scowl at them.
“Chill, okay. They think it might have been another jettison, like when we found out May had ditched the biogarden ’cause it had a critical breach.”
“Okay, it could be that. Didn’t the engine problem cause that?”
“That’s what they think, so this could be tied to structural stress caused by that. The other glimmer of hope is that an SOS was sent out just before it happened.”
“Maybe just the automatic—”
“No—I mean, yeah, that was sent, but May also included something personal.”
A nervous pause from Raj.
“What the hell was it?”
“Please don’t freak out.”
“Listen, goddammit—”
“Promise me.”
“Okay.”
“She said, ‘Stephen, you were right. I love you. Eighteen—’ ”
“Oh God oh God oh God, Raj. She took the . . . She’s pregnant.” He was crying and nearly hyperventilating with panic.
Stephen felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He looked at it. “It’s Robert. He’s here and wants to see me.”
Stephen and Raj rushed to Robert’s office. He was waiting inside with the doors open.
“Raj, could you please wait outside?”
Raj nodded and tried to give Stephen a look of encouragement, but saw he wouldn’t be getting through the impenetrable mask of dread.
Stephen walked in, and Robert closed the doors behind him. He motioned for Stephen to sit in one of the chairs in an informal seating area, away from Robert’s imposing desk.
“Drink?”
“No, thank you,” Stephen said.
Robert set a glass of Scotch and ice in front of him anyway, implying that it was not up for debate. Robert downed one and poured himself another before sitting in a chair across from Stephen. His mouth was a thin slit, like a fresh incision.
“Stephen, let me start out by saying how sorry I am that this has happened.”
“What exactly has happened, Robert? We’ve been waiting for hours.”
Despite Stephen’s confrontational tone, Robert did not return fire, which made the situation more anxiety-provoking.
“There was an explosion.”
Hearing this confirmation, Stephen again found himself unable to breathe. He knew exactly what Robert was going to say. He could see it in his eyes and smell it in the sweat he’d unsuccessfully tried to mask with cologne.
“Based on sound and particle waves, it was a large-scale detonation. For the past several hours, we’ve been running analyses to confirm. And these are images from the Goddard deep-space telescope.”
Robert switched on his screen. A line of photographic thumbnail images appeared.
“No,” was all Stephen could manage.
“We don’t have to look at these,” Robert said sympathetically.
“It’s okay,” Stephen said.
“You sure?”
Stephen nodded and drank down half his whiskey.
One of the thumbnails expanded to fill the screen. It was an infrared image.
“Concentrated heat and radiation. Large debr
is field.”
“You’re sure it’s the Hawking II?” Stephen asked.
“Without a doubt. There are no other vessels, stations, satellites, or probes within hundreds of millions of miles of that location. The field is consistent with a vessel of that size.”
Stephen finished the whiskey, thinking it might kill the feeling that he was floating out of his body, but it burned down his throat into his nervous stomach, and he ended up vomiting into Robert’s trash can. He suddenly felt very cold, as if he were in shock. Robert got up and helped steady him so he could get back into his chair.
“Maybe I should get a doctor,” Robert said, concerned.
“No, it’s okay,” Stephen said listlessly. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Robert reassured him. “And I’m the one who’s sorry. You’re absolutely right to be angry. What has happened is incomprehensible . . .”
Stephen could feel himself slipping again. His stomach was cramping viciously and the dizziness was back.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Stephen? You look very pale.” Robert poured him a glass of water.
“I’m fine.” He took a deep breath and drank the water, struggling to keep it down. “How?”
“We don’t know yet. The engineers think the initial reactor malfunction and ship tremors may have created fissures in the core. Once we got back up to power, they could have gradually expanded until the housing could no longer contain the intense heat.”
“What about the SOS signal?” Stephen asked blankly.
“Automatic crisis transmission. Standard procedure.”
A slight twinge of skepticism momentarily pulled Stephen out of his misery. “Nothing else? Nothing from May?”
“I’m afraid not. Just a rudimentary code with vessel identifiers. Not even any detail about why the SOS was sent. It’s a transmission reserved for when crews are incapacitated. I can show it to you, if you like.”
The twinge had become a spike of fear. Either Raj’s friend in Flight had given him false information, or Robert was lying through his manicured teeth. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing did anymore.
“No, that’s okay,” Stephen said, wanting to get out of there.
“I’ll be making the announcement in the next twenty-four hours, after I brief the president,” Robert said, straightening his tie.