by S. K. Vaughn
He let Ian drift away and tried to reach for the depressurization controls, but Stephen was in the final stages of asphyxiation. His entire body was numb. His heart, which had been hammering in his chest, was now fluttering erratically. His vision blurred, then darkened, then faded to black.
93
Bright lights flashed and cut the darkness. Stephen thought he was underwater, trying to breathe, but feeling as though his lungs were filled with heavy liquid, expanding like balloons on the verge of bursting. There was no way to catch his breath. And when he did try to breathe, stabbing pains in his chest shot down through his arms and felt as if they were exploding out through the ends of his fingers. He heard voices. They were yelling, fearful, insistent. They wanted something from him. Needles pierced his skin. His mouth was being forced open. Gagging, coughing. The bright lights became explosions, with painful strobes that shed light on where he was.
It looked like a hospital. The people around him looked like doctors. They wore surgical masks, scrub caps, gloves. He heard a woman screaming. It wasn’t one of the doctors. They weren’t screaming. Where was it coming from? He moved his head. The doctors tried to hold it in place, but he forced it against their hands, looking, trying to free his arms, which he couldn’t move. Something was digging into them, holding them. When he turned his head, he saw the woman. She was screaming. And there was blood. It floated around her and the room in bulbous crimson bubbles, dividing into smaller ones, smaller, smaller. They were everywhere.
Then she stopped screaming. Something was going down Stephen’s throat. He wanted to scream. He wanted to vomit. He flexed his muscles, fought, pulled, shook his head. Then another needle. Jammed into the crook of his elbow. And something cold rushing into him, spreading through him, loosening his muscles, killing the pain, weighing down on him, stealing his breath, bleeding his consciousness out, slowly, till there wasn’t even darkness, only bright white light and the feeling of burning.
94
It’s only a dream. Wake up. It’s only a dream. Wake up.
The white light darkened and patterns emerged. Lines crisscrossed within larger squares, many of them: a grid. The lines became sharper, the patterns more defined, lights embedded within. A ceiling. Sounds faded in, a constant machine hum, shrill beeps. The smell was clean, a sharp chemical clean, sanitary. Soft sheets, blankets, warmth.
Thank God it was only a dream.
Stephen tried to lift his head. Too heavy. His hands felt stronger than his neck. He gripped the sheets and pushed, scooting his bottom back, shoving his head and neck up onto pillows, slightly more upright than before. Now he could survey the room. The infirmary aboard Maryam I. How did he end up in there? The way he felt, it had to have been bad. His head ached, lungs burned, heart thumped dryly in his chest. Feeling as though he were having trouble catching his breath, he remembered. Ian. The airlock. No air. Ian was dead.
From a dream to a nightmare.
The infirmary was empty otherwise. It felt abandoned. He felt the same way. Vulnerable. Ian is dead. The bed next to him. When he looked at it, he remembered the screams. May. The fear came with the fragments of recollection. Screaming. Blood droplets floating everywhere. Blood everywhere. Then silence. May, oh God, May. She wasn’t there. Her bed was empty, clean, machines standing like soldiers waiting for the next battle. Past the foot of the bed, near the supply cabinets, a clear container secured to the floor. Linens stuffed inside. Blood on them.
As it all came back, accompanied by fear and dread, so did Stephen’s strength. His singular desire to get out of that bed overtook him. The oxygen mask hit the floor. The IV needle came out and swung back to the machine, dangling and dripping. Sheets and blankets were thrown to the side. Then the hard part: sitting up in one of Ian’s uncomfortable giagnostic gravity suits. He shoved his fists into the mattress behind him, forcing his torso up into a sitting position. After holding that for a while, allowing the blood to get into the muscles and the waves of dizziness to leave his head, his legs swung over the side and his feet came down on the cool floor. Then he stood, held on to the bed for balance, stayed there till the room settled and his legs could be trusted.
He tried to call out, but quickly realized that was a nonstarter. His vocal cords were raw and swollen and unwilling to let out anything other than a raspy gurgle. He walked to the corridor, also empty and feeling abandoned. Where the hell was everyone? Not that there were many left. Where was May? Her bed was empty. The room was clean. How long had she been gone? How long had he been asleep? Another corridor, empty and silent. His fear blossomed; he desperately wanted to find someone, anyone, but didn’t know if he could handle it if he did.
He was getting closer to the flight deck, but there was still no sign of anyone and no sound beyond the machine hum, the ambient mechanical note, sung low and flat without end. How could there not be voices? The idea of walking in there to find it empty made his stomach twist with despair. He stopped in the corridor just outside the flight deck entrance and listened. Maybe he’d been mistaken about the quiet? He wasn’t. It persisted. He had to walk in there. It didn’t matter if he was ready. Whatever he saw he would have to accept. May. There was no living if . . . That he wasn’t willing to accept. Not possible.
Like a prisoner on death row walking his final steps to the execution chamber, Stephen rounded the corner and went inside.
A baby started to cry. Then it wailed. The sound split the silence in half, and Stephen stopped at the threshold of the flight deck, arrested by it. At the fore, near the engineering module, Zola, Latefa, and Martin were all bent over something, speaking in odd singsong voices that rose in volume as the crying got louder. Stephen kept walking. The baby kept crying. When he got to the passenger launch chairs, May rose up from the other side of the crew, and she and Stephen were face-to-face. He didn’t want to move any farther, fearing all of it might be a mirage that would quickly fade. May was also still, feasting her eyes on him, unwilling to look away.
The crew turned and smiled. Latefa and Martin came to Stephen, thinking he needed help, but he held up his hand, letting them know he was just fine. He continued forward, passing through the seats, and saw what they had been huddled over. It was an incubator bassinet. Inside was a very small baby girl with a very loud voice. Cheeky. He moved closer, carefully, still waiting for all of it to feel solid and real. When he reached the bassinet and looked down, Cheeky stopped crying. Like a light, she just switched it off and looked right up at him. Her eyes were May’s, deep and magnetic, with a spark of mischief, encircling you and drawing you in wherever you stood.
He put his hand on the top of the bassinet. The baby was small enough to fit inside it. She reached out, trying to touch his hand, wanting to grasp his fingers. Stephen laughed and cried. When the baby realized she couldn’t get to his hand, she got frustrated and started to cry too. May came over and stood next to him. She took hold of the hand on top of the bassinet, and then took hold of the other. He turned to face her, to look into her eyes for what felt like the first time, to kiss her. They held their embrace until they were no longer afraid to let go.
95
“You, Dr. Knox, gave us quite a scare.”
May was giving Stephen a waggle of her finger while he hovered over the bassinet. Cheeky was asleep. She was attached to many tubes, including an umbilical catheter, providing medication, hydration, and nutrition. A nose cannula gave her a much-needed oxygen boost. It was frightening to see all that on someone so tiny, so Stephen had made Latefa explain everything. She had also explained what happened to him. After they had dragged him out of the airlock, he had been so severely hypoxic that his heart had stopped and he was clinically dead. The only reason they were able to save him was that he was also severely hypothermic. The cold had slowed his metabolism and kept his brain from dying, but they’d been forced to put him into a coma and intubate him for the first twenty-four hours of a forty-eight-hour recovery.
“Now we can add having been in a coma as
one of the things we have in common,” said May.
“That, and very poor judgment.”
Eve chimed in over the PA. “I’m trying to teach May how to be grateful for you saving her, instead of obsessing over the incredibly irrational thinking it took for you to do so.”
Stephen smiled. “That’s what happens when you hang around May too long,” he said, his voice having been upgraded to a raspy whisper.
“Amen to that,” Eve said. “And I am grateful. In fact, to show my gratitude—”
“Eve, you said you were going to let me tell him,” May complained.
“I couldn’t help myself,” Eve said. “It just slipped out.”
“Bullshit,” May said.
“Tell me what?” Stephen asked.
“Go ahead, Eve. Glory hound.”
“Stephen, after you heroically saved me from the Hawking II and May and Zola were good enough to wake me up, I decrypted the MADS recorder.”
“Was it intact?” he asked excitedly.
“No, we just built this up to tell you it was empty,” May joked.
“Why don’t we show him the news feed?” Zola said.
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” May replied. “Eve, please do the honors.”
“Of course.”
A video loaded in the eye. It was a news broadcast from Earth. Theme music played over an animated logo, and then the announcer’s voice faded up.
“Former NASA mission director Robert Warren was taken into custody today . . .”
As she droned on, Stephen watched footage of Robert being walked from his mansion in Washington, DC, in handcuffs, flanked by local cops and federal agents. He was loaded into the back of a police car.
“. . . Federal agents also apprehended his accomplice, former NASA mission specialist Glenn Chambers . . .”
The scene switched to Glenn’s mug shot. He looked old and beat up, all his southern charm having disappeared in a federal holding cell.
“Jesus,” Stephen said.
“I beamed the data to the FBI as soon as Eve decrypted it,” Zola said.
May smiled proudly. “All the money in the world isn’t going to buy him out of this one. It’s about time we put the Robert Warrens of the world on notice.”
“Stephen knows something about that,” Zola said.
They had not yet talked about Ian.
“We saw what he did to you in the footage from his helmet camera,” Zola said. “Stephen, I’m so sorry. I would have never, in a million years, have thought him capable of that.”
“Obsession does strange things to people,” Stephen said, looking at May.
Thinking of Ian in that moment, Stephen no longer felt the rage he’d felt in the airlock. Instead he felt pity. Ian Albright had been a brilliant man, even one of Stephen’s heroes when he was younger, a man for whom it seemed nothing was impossible. The Ian who’d sat quietly, waiting for Stephen to die so that he could take May and her child by force, had been a shadow of his former self, a broken caricature playing out a tragic script only someone poisoned by his own monstrous ego could believe. Their objectives might have been different, but, as fate would soon show, Ian Albright and Robert Warren were the same.
96
May sat on the edge of the bed in her quarters, humming to Cheeky. Like all the sleeping quarters on the Maryam I, it was a cramped little space with only the bare necessities, but May had done what she could to make the place cheerful. She was especially proud of the little mobile she’d made out of machine parts, bits of wire, and colorful medical supplies. It hung over Cheeky’s bassinet, making a pleasant jingling noise as it spun and occasionally glittering with light from the approaching sun. These were the measures often needed to get Cheeky to sleep. The poor little thing was constantly uncomfortable from all the medical attention she needed, and being unable to hold her made May more disagreeable than usual.
Finally, Cheeky settled down. May slowly and carefully lay back down herself. She kept very still, avoiding any sudden movements, and reveled in the continuing quiet. Congratulating herself on setting a new speed record for getting the baby to sleep, she started to drift off. As soon as she took the smallest step into dreamland, Cheeky let loose one of her infamous screeching high notes, instantly pulling May out of her slumber. Back to the humming and spinning the mobile.
Then there was a knock on her door. It was Stephen.
“Can you please quiet that baby down? Some of us are trying to sleep.”
“I’m at my wit’s end,” she said, stepping aside so Stephen could come in. He was happy to oblige; he could watch Cheeky for hours.
“She’ll be a lot happier when she gets out of this stuffy little prison,” Stephen said.
“I can relate,” May laughed. “What about you? Climbing the walls?”
“Let’s just say I don’t want to be an astronaut when I grow up anymore.”
“Again, I can relate.”
“Come on, you live for this,” Stephen said.
“Maybe, but now I live for other things too, so . . . we’ll see.”
Stephen was back to being mesmerized by Cheeky.
“I know I’ve already said this, but thank you, Stephen.” May joined him next to Cheeky, who had gone back to sleep. “I did good, huh?” she said tearfully.
“You did better than good.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” May asked.
“What?”
“The elephant in the room. Kind of hard to miss in a space this small.”
“It doesn’t bother me. Kids love elephants anyway.”
“Stephen, don’t you think we should at least—”
“If Cheeky will have me, I’m here for her.”
May was really crying now. Stephen held her.
“I feel the same about you,” May said. “I just don’t know where to begin.”
Stephen sat down with her on the bed. “Remember what you said to me on our first date?”
May smiled at the memory. “You remembered my birthday.”
“What did you say to me before you blew out your candle?”
She thought back to that moment, and tears welled up in her eyes when it dawned on her why he was asking.
“I said, ‘You know what, Dr. Knox? I have an idea.’ ”
“What’s that?” Stephen said, playing along.
“ ‘When I blow out this candle, let’s forget about everything that’s ever happened between us before this moment. I want this to be the beginning.’ ”
Acknowledgments
Flight Crew: Michael Braff (Skybound), Ed Wood (Sphere; Little, Brown UK). Mike and Ed, thank you for being fearless editors who care deeply about story and who pave the way for writers to do their very best. Mission Control: Skybound, Sphere (Little, Brown UK). Engineering: Sam Morgan (The Lotts Agency), Brad Mendelsohn (Circle of Confusion), Jeff Frankel (McKuin Frankel Whitehead LLP), Foundry Literary Agency. Sam and Brad, thank you for your incredible advocacy and for continuing to believe in me. Flight Control: Jon Mone (Universal Pictures), Bryan Furst, Samantha Crawley (Skybound Film & Television). Mission Specialists: Melanie Iglesias Pérez, Kate Caudill (Skybound), Katie Abbott (Circle of Confusion), Rob Goldman (McKuin Frankel Whitehead LLP), Jill Goldstein (JGoldsteinPR). Thanks also to Kevin Tong for the rad cover and Andres Juarez (Skybound) for his art direction.
Special thanks to Alan Smale (Goddard Space Flight Center) and Peter Stoltz for helping me ground this science fiction novel in science fact.
To my family (Amanda, DRMK, KRBK, JoMama, Kenneth Vaughn, Tina, Kara, Lady, Sky, Ozzy, Liir, Louis, and Rita), I thank you for your love, support, tolerance, and sense of humor. Without you, I would be forever adrift in the Void.
About the Author
S. K. VAUGHN is the pseudonym for an author of three internationally bestselling thrillers. Vaughn’s first science fiction novel, Across the Void, will be released in multiple languages and territories worldwide. S. K. Vaughn lives and works in the neighborhoo
d of North Beach, San Francisco.
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/S-K-Vaughn
@SkyboundBooks @SkyboundBooks
www.skybound.com/across-the-void
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