The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  He was smelling raw hydrazine. Raw rocket fuel, which had aerosolized and filled the tiny module. He was standing in a cloud of flammable gas.

  GARTH UDAHL, ORION PROGRAM FUEL TECHNOLOGIES SUPERVISOR: Hydrazine is very hazardous stuff. It’s a simple chemical, but it’s incredibly corrosive. The smallest amount, if you breathe it in, can burn the lining of your lungs. It can also self-ignite, given the proper catalyst. Say a patch of rust on the inside of a panel. It’s my opinion that once Dr. Wilson entered that module, he never stood a chance.

  “Wilson!” she screamed. “Move!”

  She pulled herself along the side of the excursion module, pulled herself level with one of the viewports.

  “Boss?” Obrador asked again. “What’s going on?”

  Through the viewport Jansen could see him burning. Hydrazine flames were invisible, but she could see Blaine smashing his arms against the consoles, trying to put out the flames. She could see his hair curl and turn black, could see his mouth open in a horrifying silent scream. He reached toward the viewport, reaching for her. Begging her for help.

  Some cosmic mercy had killed his radio. She couldn’t hear him, didn’t have to listen to him burn. She saw him slam his hand against the viewport, over and over, maybe he was trying to break it, to get out, to get away from the fire—

  In a second that fire was going to spread through the hatch. It would spread down into the HabLab. It could spread through the whole spacecraft. It wouldn’t stop until it had consumed everything.

  Somebody had to get the hatches closed, to contain it. But the only person close enough to do that was Wilson.

  There was another way.

  Sally Jansen had trained for a million different ways things could go wrong in space. She had drilled endlessly for every possible contingency. She knew exactly what to do in this case. It was right there in her brain, ready to access. All she had to do was open her mouth and say it.

  If the two modules separated, their hatches would automatically slam shut. It was a safety feature.

  It was the hardest thing she had done in her life. But she was an astronaut.

  “Dinwari,” she said. “Ali, can you hear me? Jettison the excursion module.”

  “Commander?” he asked, his voice very small. He might as well be back on Earth, shouting at her through a megaphone.

  “Do it!” she said.

  “I can’t! Wilson’s in there!”

  Jansen had no time to waste arguing. She scrambled along the side of the excursion module, moving as fast as she dared. She found an access panel between two fuel tanks and tore it open. Inside was a lever painted bright red, marked CAUTION: EMERGENCY RELEASE.

  She pulled it, hard.

  Explosive bolts connecting the excursion module to the HabLab detonated instantly, one of them going off right in her face. Light burst all around her and she was blinded for a second—a very bad second, during which she heard her faceplate start to crack. The explosion threw her bodily away from the module, swinging out into deep space on her tether, out of control and tumbling.

  She could barely see anything as she went flying head over heels. She got only a glimpse of her spaceship coming to pieces.

  A billowing cloud of condensing water vapor jetted outward from between the two modules, air rushing out of the HabLab. The cloud was cut off instantly as the hatches between the two modules slammed shut.

  The excursion module tumbled as it accelerated away from the HabLab. The flexible habitat module sprang back and forth in an obscene motion that Jansen barely saw. She was spinning, spinning out to the end of her safety line, and then it snapped taut and she doubled up, her arms and legs flailing. She grabbed at the line and tried to stabilize herself, tried to get a grip as she looked back over her shoulder.

  The excursion module was still moving, still flying away from them, tumbling wildly into empty space, its landing legs whipping around crazily.

  Hands grabbed the shoulder joints of her suit, hands that pressed down and pushed her against the side of the HabLab, her cracked faceplate buried in the silver fabric even as ice crystals started growing across her view.

  It was Obrador, crouching on top of her, protecting her from the debris that pelted the side of the HabLab all around her.

  “Boss! What did you do?” Obrador screamed, but Jansen barely heard her. “What did you do?”

  There was only one thought in her brain.

  Jesus, God, whoever, please. Let Blaine die fast.

  SALLY JANSEN: No. No. Stop—that’s a lie. That isn’t what I was thinking at all. I… I’m not proud of this, but if we’re doing this, if we’re going to be honest… my thought at that particular moment was just, you know. This is over. This is it. I’m never going to Mars.

  TELEMETRY CHECK

  EXCERPT FROM AUTHOR’S FOREWORD TO THE 2057 EDITION OF THE LAST ASTRONAUT, BY DAVID WELLINGTON

  It’s my firm opinion that you can’t understand what happened later unless you know what she was thinking, what she was feeling, that day in 2034.

  When I was hired to write about the events of October 2055, I was told we needed to get the story on people’s streams as soon as humanly possible. The public needed to know what had happened and what it meant. I was able to fulfill at least one of those goals. I did the research and put together a thing that looked like a novel and read like the instruction manual for an X-ray machine. The technical information was there, and the facts that were a matter of public record. Nobody understood what any of it signified, though. I didn’t understand, myself. I’m not sure I fully understand it now.

  I’ve been lucky enough to receive a lot of new information since then. Most importantly, I was given exclusive access to interview the people involved. I’ve included snippets from those interviews in the text of this new edition. I’ve also included the brief examination of the last day of the Orion 6 mission that you’ve just read. I think it may be the key that unlocks the true meaning of what happened during the mission of Orion 7.

  But I’ve gone further than that. This is no longer a piece of journalism, no longer just a recitation of facts. I’ve tried to explore the psychology of the people who were there, even when this is, for various reasons, no longer possible. In many ways Sally Jansen’s 2055 mission was not just an exploration of objects in space, but also a journey into the human mind. I feel the story is better for these introspections. You can judge for yourself.

  Our story picks up twenty-one years later, when only one man in the entire world knew what was happening. I’ve done my best to examine what he was thinking, that day he jumped out of bed and onto a train.

  Sunny Stevens pulled at the drawstrings of his hoodie. He wished he’d thought to change his clothes before he crossed half the country for this meeting. It had all been so last minute… When NASA actually answered his message, he’d basically just walked out the door. He’d never actually expected this to happen, and he hadn’t thought to prepare.

  Now it was time to make an actual decision. He could still walk away—say he was sorry, but he’d made a mistake. Take the train all night to get home and go to bed and pretend he’d never even thought of this crazy plan. Go back to work tomorrow at the Hive and hope nobody was monitoring his email.

  Or he could go through with this.

  He’d been sent through security, taken down a long hallway, and told to wait. Someone had asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee, and he’d said yes, because he hadn’t actually been listening. Now he was sitting on a yellow leather sofa that probably dated back to the Gemini program, deep inside the maze of office complexes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA headquarters, ever since 2052, when they’d shut down the Johnson Space Center in Houston, after the flood.

  A place he’d wanted to be since he was five years old. Back then, he’d wanted to be an astronaut. He’d wanted it so bad he’d devoured every piece of space news that came across his stream. When Sunny was ten he’d watched Blaine Wilson burn alive in space, over
and over.

  By the time he was fifteen America no longer had an astronaut program.

  Sunny had been devastated. His dream was shattered. Instead of flying through space he’d studied it through telescopes and become an astrophysicist. He would get out there, among the stars, one way or another. By the time he’d gotten his PhD, he’d accepted the fact that he was never going to pilot his own spaceship, never going to talk to Ground Control from a million kilometers away. He’d learned to live with that, to almost accept it.

  And yet… now he was here. In Houston. For real.

  He was thirsty, and he was hungry, but mostly he was worried that he wouldn’t be good enough. That he wouldn’t be able to make his case convincingly enough to even get NASA’s attention. But his data was sound. It was good. There had to be someone here who understood its importance.

  He’d been waiting for only about fifteen minutes when a man in an old-fashioned suit and a string tie came walking down the corridor toward him. The guy was white, maybe seventy, maybe seventy-five. He was what Sunny’s mom would’ve called bone skinny. He was carrying two cups of coffee.

  Here we go, Sunny thought.

  “Dr. Stevens? I’m Roy McAllister. Associate administrator of exploration and operations.” He handed Stevens one of the coffees.

  “It used to be called human exploration and operations,” Stevens said. He set the coffee cup down on an end table. He never drank the stuff.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Sunny wanted to shake the man’s hand, but he was worried his palm would be sweaty. “Your job. It used to be called human exploration and operations. You were in charge of manned spaceflight. Back when NASA did that kind of thing. You ran the Orion program. Now you’re in charge of deep space probes.”

  McAllister’s face was sunburned and weathered and hard to read. There was no missing the pinched annoyance there, however. Had Stevens already screwed this up?

  “It’s my turn to correct you. I’m not quite so old as you may think. By my time we called it ‘crewed spaceflight.’ Not ‘manned.’”

  “Right,” Stevens said, closing his eyes in shame. “Right.”

  “At any rate, I believe I’m the person you wanted to talk to. Your message was a bit cryptic,” the old man said.

  Sunny cleared his throat. “2I/2054 D1,” he said.

  And that was it. The die was cast. No going back to the Hive, not now.

  McAllister’s smile faltered a little. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand.”

  “That’s its name. Its designation, whatever,” Sunny said. He knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t stop. “I haven’t given it a name yet. I’m pretty sure I get to name it. I discovered it, after all.”

  McAllister nodded and pointed at a door a little way down the hall. “Let’s go in my office and talk about this.”

  SUNNY STEVENS: After the Orion disaster, NASA said they would take a couple of years to study what went wrong. Make sure it couldn’t happen again. It took most of a decade, and with every year that passed NASA’s budget got slashed, and slashed again. Congress invested, instead, in private sector space programs. After NASA went bankrupt in the forties, they had to break up the second International Space Station and drop its pieces in the Pacific Ocean. After that, commercial spaceflight seemed like the only game in town. So when it was time for me to find a job, I didn’t even think of applying at NASA. By 2055, NASA hadn’t trained an astronaut in ten years. It was still around; it takes forever for a government agency to die. Their mission had changed, though. No more spacewalks or golf games on the moon. Instead they put all their budget into two things: satellite surveys of the damage caused by climate change and deep space probes to the planets. Robot ships. Nobody declared a national day of mourning if a robot blew up in orbit around Neptune.

  McAllister sat down behind a cluttered desk and folded his hands together. He gestured for Stevens to take a seat across from him. “I understand you work for KSpace.”

  Stevens grinned and plucked at his hoodie. “What gave me away?” The hoodie was bright orange—KSpace’s color—and there was a pattern of tessellating hexagons down the left sleeve. KSpace’s logo.

  It wasn’t a logo that was likely to make him a lot of friends in NASA headquarters. KSpace saw NASA as the esteemed competition. NASA saw KSpace as the boogeyman.

  “Yeah, I’m on their deep space research team, over in Atlanta.” KSpace had its center of operations in Georgia, in a sprawling campus called the Hive. The place where Sunny had lived, played, and worked for the last four years. The Hive had some first-rate telescopes, so he’d liked it there. Until now. “Basically we do cosmology and astrophysics.”

  McAllister nodded. “The message you sent me contained the orbital elements of an… asteroid? Comet? Something like that. An object passing through the solar system. I had one of our people take a look, and they just about split their skin.”

  “I have more. More data I can give you,” Sunny said.

  For more than a year, Sunny had been tracking 2I. He had terabytes of data on it. He knew its albedo, its mass—he had spectroscopy and light curve analyses. He’d been building his case for a long time.

  When he took his data to his boss at KSpace, he’d been told it seemed interesting. That the company would look into it. That had been three months earlier, and since then he’d heard nothing. Not a peep.

  Somebody had to do something. Somebody had to send a ship to go look at this thing. If KSpace wouldn’t do it, then Sunny was sure NASA would. It would have to.

  Except judging by the look on McAllister’s face, NASA didn’t necessarily agree.

  “Dr. Stevens, what you’re offering me is proprietary work product,” McAllister said. He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not sure exactly how business is done at KSpace, but I imagine that any research you did for them was on a strictly work-for-hire basis.”

  Sunny nodded and looked down at his hands. He’d known this would be a problem, sure. But the data—

  “Meaning that if you turn this data over to me, you could be sued for breach of contract. And NASA would be breaking the law by receiving stolen goods.” McAllister frowned and fluttered one hand in the air. “Technically.”

  “I know,” Sunny said.

  “So why don’t you tell me why you came here? What you want from NASA.”

  Sunny took a deep breath. “A job.”

  “A job,” McAllister repeated.

  Sunny opened his mouth to say more. All that came out was a laugh. It wasn’t a fun laugh. It was a laugh of desperation.

  “We’re always looking for good astronomers, but if you want to apply to work at NASA I’ll direct you to our hiring portal—”

  “I want to quit KSpace and come work here,” Sunny said. “It’s… kind of complicated, because I’m still under contract in Atlanta. I want to break that contract. To do that, I need to be protected. From, you know, KSpace’s legal team.” Sunny winced. “It’s a pretty good legal team. I want a decent salary, though that’s, you know, negotiable, and health insurance, and maybe two weeks’ vacation. I have one more demand, too, which is pretty big but—”

  “You have a demand.” McAllister’s face turned very cold. “Dr. Stevens, I don’t think you understand. I just said that I can’t accept the data you’ve offered me. Which means I can’t, in turn, offer you a job. I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here for this.”

  He started to rise from his chair.

  Sunny had one last chance. Just one chance to save himself here.

  Time to pull out the big gun.

  “It’s decelerating,” he said. “Spontaneously. It’s spontaneously decelerating.”

  Sunny had taken a pretty big risk, coming to NASA with this. He had hoped to talk to one of its scientists, not an administrator. His only hope now was that this sunburned bureaucrat had enough of a background in orbital mechanics to get the point.

  McAllister didn’t stand up. His eyes didn’t bug out,
and he didn’t gasp for breath. But he did reach up and scratch the side of his nose, as if he was giving Sunny’s outburst a little bit of thought. Finally he said, “All right. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  Maybe—maybe he did get it. Maybe he understood why this was so important.

  McAllister studied Sunny in silence for a while. “Perhaps you should take off that sweatshirt before we go any further.”

  Sunny grabbed two handfuls of orange hoodie. “Uh, I’m not wearing anything underneath. Today’s my day off. When your message said to come here, I just ran for the train. I didn’t think about clothes.”

  McAllister reached up and touched the device clipped to his ear. Presumably he was calling an assistant or somebody. “This is McAllister. Yes. Would you do me a favor and find a man’s shirt, somewhere? I know it’s an unusual request. Just bring it to my office.”

  A staffer showed up a few minutes later with the new shirt—a white T-shirt from the JPL gift shop. It showed the old logo, a red swooping curve over a navy blue disk.

  “Welcome to NASA,” McAllister said.

  REENTRY

  Glide angle good. Fuel at 2%. Solar panels charging with 81% efficiency.

  The data flickered across the top of Hawkins’s consciousness, never quite penetrating the threshold of attention. His pulse and respiration were slightly elevated, but well within acceptable parameters. He was hungry for a fight, and he was very close to getting one.

  It wasn’t easy, matching velocities with a Russian spy satellite. The Russians had learned to take up improbable, eccentric orbits that brought them over their targets only once every forty-seven days, or orbits that swung so low that to catch them you had to graze the atmosphere. Even finding his prey had been difficult. It was wrapped in a Vantablack blanket, blacker than coal, which absorbed radio waves instead of reflecting them. As if he were hunting a sniper, he’d looked for the glint in his prey’s eyes—the lenses of its cameras.