Maybe just to punish herself, maybe because she would take any distraction, anything that would get her out of her own head, she decided to see what was on the stick. What message Foster had left for her.
She found the slot on the side of her communications panel and slid the stick in. Just as before, there was only one file, encoded in a video format. She blinked twice to make it play. The screen came to life, flickering with noise and darkness.
“Let’s see.” Commander Foster’s words filled the CM. GRAM lifted its plastic head, recognizing its master’s voice, perhaps. She adjusted the volume so as not to wake Stevens. “The temperature has climbed to minus nineteen…”
VIDEO FILE TRANSCRIPT (2)
Willem Foster: Let’s see. The temperature has climbed to minus nineteen degrees and the air pressure has increased by nearly three hundred percent. Weather conditions are deteriorating, but I’m confident we can find our way back. After what we’ve seen, I’m not sure if the environmental changes started when we entered the Object or if they were going on before then. Whether the Object is responding to us or if it’s even aware of us.
Taryn Holmes: Scan’s done.
Foster: Good. Let me see… Sandra, don’t get too far ahead.
Sandra Channarong: Don’t worry about that. I can barely see you from here, I’m not going to wander far.
Foster: Just checking this scan… Hold on, it’s loading. Damn, the resolution on this thing is amazing, but it takes forever to render. In the meantime… We’re all getting tired, but morale is good. What we’ve found here was… not what we expected, obviously, but as Taryn’s been telling us the whole time, this isn’t a place made for humans. It was built by beings that think differently than we do, and probably have a very different way of life. Maybe this is what their home world looks like. Though I can’t help but think that we’re seeing something primal, in the process of becoming—
Holmes: Here, look, on the screen. That’s the thing I saw before.
Foster: Good. Good to have confirmation. It’s tough knowing even what we’re looking for in here, but we’ve mapped part of the interior with our lidar/radar imager and it looks like we’ve found our first point of interest. There’s a large, low-density mass about twenty kilometers away across the ice sheet. It’s the first sign we’ve seen of any kind of structure or building inside the Object. Sandra, come here. Look.
Channarong: What is it?
Foster: That’s what I want to find out. But listen, you two—I scheduled us for a twelve-hour EVA. It looks like this might take a while longer to explore. How do we feel about that? About maybe spending the night inside?
Channarong: I’m good. Hungry, and a little beat. I didn’t expect this to be a hiking vacation!
Holmes: Yeah, yeah, I want to see this thing with my eyes. You know? Maybe that’s where the aliens are. Maybe they’re waiting for us to come to them.
Foster: OK. We’ll head out straightaway. This place. It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? A little terrifying, maybe, but it has a grandeur to it. I wonder if this is what Shackleton felt like, or Amundsen.
Holmes: If you say so, boss.
When the video stopped playing, Jansen turned to the others. They were all back in Orion’s HabLab—she’d flown over as soon as she saw what was on the video. She knew the others needed to see it, too. Now she waited for them to say they understood. That they saw what she’d seen.
“We know where they are. We know there’s a good chance they’re still alive.”
Hawkins shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
“They didn’t get lost in there,” Jansen said. “They planned on deviating from their timetable, and they knew exactly where they were going. I saw this thing, this structure. I saw it with my own eyes. I know where to search for them.”
Hawkins and Rao traded a look.
Jansen didn’t like that look.
“I think they’re still alive. Maybe trapped—maybe they can’t get back to the airlock. I can go back,” Jansen said. “I can help them, somehow.”
How did everybody not get this?
“Look, this time I’ll go alone. I get what you meant before, Hawkins, about putting the crew at risk to chase after people who—who might be dead. I get it. I won’t ask anyone else to go, not knowing how dangerous it is over there. But I have to go back. As long as there’s any chance at all that I could find them.”
They were still staring at her as if they hadn’t heard a word she’d said.
Hawkins sucked in a deep breath. “Jansen,” he said. “A message came in from Pasadena, while you were over on Wanderer. There’s been a decision… I know you’re not going to like this.”
She stared at him, wondering why he wasn’t getting the point. Hadn’t he seen the video?
“The decision is that you’re being removed from your position as mission commander. I’m supposed to take over your role. Effective immediately.”
Jansen stared at him. “Wait,” she said. “What?”
Hawkins didn’t repeat himself.
“The hell you are,” Jansen said. “This is my ship.” She ground her teeth together. “I’m MC on this ship. You don’t get to just announce otherwise.” Jansen knew she was losing her self-control. That she was letting her anger get the better of her. She fought to keep from raising her voice. “Damn it,” she said. “I won’t allow it. You’re not taking my goddamned job.”
“I already have.”
ARCS chose just that moment to float over to them. It had a hot food tube in each of its three hands. “Pardon the interruption,” the robot said. “None of you have eaten in more than twelve hours, and—”
Jansen knocked the food tube right out of the robot’s goddamned hand. The robot went pinwheeling after the tube before it could splatter on anything important.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw herself on Hawkins, scratch his eyes out and make him bleed. He couldn’t do this to her! This was supposed to be her second chance, this was supposed to be her opportunity to redeem herself for twenty-one years of failure. She wanted to fight and kick and shout.
But she was a professional. An astronaut. So she settled for glaring daggers at him and folding her arms across her chest.
“We need to refocus, now,” he told her. “We need to remember why we came here in the first place. To establish communications with the aliens. We can’t afford to send anyone back over there—especially now we know how dangerous it is.”
“Hawkins,” she said, trying to stay calm, “the KSpace crew is still over there, you can’t just let them die—”
“It’s been decided that we should operate under the assumption they’re already dead.”
Decided. Maybe by some general in the Pentagon. Maybe by Hawkins, just now, and he was covering his ass.
She brought her hands up to her chest and wove her fingers together. Almost as if she were praying. “We can’t stop now. We can’t just give up. We need to finish this.”
“I can see how much you need it,” he said.
Her heart stopped beating as she realized this was actually happening.
“That isn’t—that isn’t it at all, you’re being—”
“I’m being what?”
She forced herself not to say what she’d been thinking.
There was nothing more she could accomplish here. She kicked off the wall and headed toward the dormitory area, just to get as far away from him as she could.
Of course he followed her.
TELEMETRY SILENCE
Stevens hurt.
Pretty much every part of him hurt. He felt hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, and the damned robot wouldn’t leave him alone.
It would have been an unbearable situation, except for one thing: they’d loaded him full of painkillers. He heartily approved of that decision.
Everything, all the pain, all the fear he knew he should be feeling, was held at a distance. It was kind of magical, actually. He knew that eventually he wa
s going to have to deal with what had happened. He would feel all the agony of his wounds someday. But it didn’t have to be today.
He didn’t have to do anything just then. He didn’t even have to think. Which was good, because the painkillers made every notion that went through his head feel like a passing cloud. He couldn’t have grabbed on to those thoughts if he wanted to. And the drugs made sure that didn’t bother him too much.
He could see Parminder’s face on the screen in front of him. She was a kilometer away, in Orion, but she’d promised she would be in constant contact. They’d removed his devices, so he couldn’t look at her in VR mode, but he could see her face. He wished she didn’t look so scared, but he would take what he could get.
“My stomach feels like shit,” he told her.
“Are you nauseous?”
“No, more like… It feels like something’s pushing on it. It’s weird. Did you say Hawkins is in charge now?”
Rao rolled her eyes. “I’m not even sure what that means at this point. Don’t worry about them. Are you hungry at all?”
“No,” he said. Even the idea of food just made him hurt worse. “Parminder—stop assessing me. Talk to me. How are you?”
There was a pause before she replied. Not a long one, but he heard it.
“I’m just fine, thank you. You, on the other hand, are showing the signs of a hyperimmune response. I’m not crazy about that. I think maybe we should take a look at your stitches, see if you’re healing OK. GRAM, can you please show me a view of Dr. Stevens’s abdomen, specifically around the wound area?”
“Of course, Dr. Rao,” the robot said. Its hexagon turned green as it grasped Stevens’s sheet with its spindly hands. Stevens took a breath, preparing himself to be exposed to the icy air.
“This could be a little gross,” Rao said, “but don’t worry. I’m a doctor. I’ve seen everything that can happen to a human body.”
Stevens laughed—which hurt a lot. “I figured the first time you saw me naked would be a lot more fun. Parminder, come on, babe. Isn’t there any way you can come over here and be with me? Even if you have to wear a space suit?”
“I can’t, and you know that. I want to, but—”
Her face froze.
“Parminder?” Stevens frowned. He tried to slap the side of the console, as if that would make the video come unstuck. He was so weak he barely made contact. “I think you’re buffering. Your audio cut out, or something.”
“No,” she said. “I’m still here.” Her voice was very small and weak. As if her signal had grown attenuated, he thought.
Or maybe she was just scared.
“Oh shit,” he said, because he wasn’t stupid. He clamped his eyes shut. Which just made him aware of the smell. The smell he must have been smelling all along, but that his brain had clearly blocked out.
He opened one eye and looked down at his exposed stomach.
There was a hole down there. A hole where there definitely, 100 percent should not be a hole. The stitches were gone, and it looked as if half the flesh of his stomach was gone, too. The edges of the hole were bright red and inflamed. Inside the hole everything was gray and full of weird white filaments.
“Parminder,” he said. “Parminder.”
“I’m… I’m right here,” she said. She wasn’t looking at his face.
“Look at my face,” he said.
Slowly her eyes moved up the screen until they had something like eye contact.
“This hurts,” he said, “but not as much as you’d expect. Is that a good sign?”
“It’s because the nerves are dead,” she told him. Just point-blank. “They’re gone.”
His head started to spin. He didn’t want to hear that, but he needed to. He needed to understand. Because understanding a problem was the first step toward fixing it.
“I don’t feel like I’m about to die,” he told her.
“You’re not. You’re…” Her lip trembled a little. “You’re going to be fine.”
KARLA UTZ, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER: The wound had turned necrotic. We had no idea why. The necrosis was spreading through his tissues, consuming more of Dr. Stevens’s cells as it progressed. If it reached his heart or either of his lungs—and it didn’t have far to go, given the location of the original wound—he would die. The standard treatment for necrosis is debridement, meaning the surgical removal of dead tissue.
You can do this, Rao told herself. You can. You just have to focus.
She reached up and touched the devices mounted on her cheekbones and switched to full VR. Suddenly she was seeing through the eyes of GRAM. The display wasn’t optimized—Stevens was enormous, twice his normal size, and GRAM’s color vision was all off, making him look purple. Even worse, GRAM never stopped moving—the robot was light enough to be blown around by Wanderer’s ventilation system, just nudged back and forth a little, but in the magnified view it felt as if Rao’s whole body were swaying.
I can’t do this.
She started to reach for her devices, intending to log out of the VR space. GRAM’s arms moved up toward its face, copying her movement, and she saw the swirling colors of its eyes reflected in the scalpel and she almost vomited right then and there.
I can’t do this.
“Parminder?” Stevens said. “Is that you, in the robot? Hey, what’s going on? I thought we were going to do a procedure or something.”
She opened her mouth to say something and realized she had no idea what to tell him. If he didn’t have this operation, he was going to die. But—oh boy. The wound was so ugly. The necrotic tissue was deathly white, and it peeled off in thin layers. She was incredibly thankful she couldn’t smell it.
The necrosis had come on with a suddenness. It had spread far faster than it had any right to—nothing on Earth, not brown recluse spider venom or industrial chemicals, could cause a reaction like this. 2I had pumped Stevens full of some incredible toxin, something unprecedented.
Which was the last thing you wanted to see when you were in charge of a patient’s medical care.
She opened up GRAM’s settings and forced the robot to stay still, to compensate for the breeze blowing through Wanderer’s reentry module. She resized its view and considered restricting her connection to a windowed mode. But no. She needed true VR, she needed to be right up in the wound so she could tell the difference between dead and healthy flesh.
She moved GRAM until it was almost sitting on Stevens’s neck. Maybe it would help if she couldn’t see his face.
“Parminder,” he called.
“Shut up,” she told him.
She extended the scalpel, moving her actual arm so that GRAM’s arm moved in sync with her. She touched it to Stevens’s flesh, and a tiny drop of blood welled up. GRAM had already prepped him by giving him a local anesthetic. Stevens wouldn’t feel a thing.
She could do this.
She took a deep breath.
Then she pressed down hard with the scalpel, cutting through the skin. It parted easily, a thin line of blood following her cut as she traced a circle around the affected area. With a debridement like this you couldn’t just cut the necrotic tissue away. You had to excise the entire affected area—which meant cutting out healthy tissue, as well. As little of it as possible.
She cut a wide, round flap of skin out of Stevens’s abdomen. She used GRAM’s free hand to peel it away so she could get at the living flesh beneath. She would need to sew up all the major blood vessels, then graft on new skin. She had the patch ready, a circular piece of bright-pink plastic courtesy of Wanderer’s 3-D printer. It wasn’t perfect, but it would hold long enough to be replaced with real skin once Stevens was back on the ground.
First things first. She had a large plastic sample bag ready. She would transfer the excised skin to the bag, then seal it. Then she would sterilize everything—the scalpel, GRAM’s hands, Stevens’s skin—before she started the microsurgery. It was a little tricky getting the sample bag open—GRAM’s fingers didn’t have fi
ngerprints, so they slipped on the plastic—but she managed. She got the bag shut and sealed. Then she turned back to the wound. GRAM had placed a suction hose to keep it clear of blood—blood they would analyze later, to make sure it was free of—
“Oh fuck,” Rao said. It was almost a whisper.
“Baby?” Stevens asked. “Can I look now?”
The excision she’d made had gone deep enough to remove all the necrotic tissue. All the same, she was certain she hadn’t punctured the abdominal wall. She didn’t think she had. Yet as she stared into the wound she saw Stevens’s muscular tissue splitting open, and she got a good look into his abdominal cavity. It looked like a nest of snakes in there. At first she thought she was looking at his intestines. Except the writhing, snakelike things were the wrong color, a dull, pale gray. And they were moving under their own power.
As she watched, one of them got a pointed tip out of the wound, like a worm poking its head out of wet soil. It quested around for a moment, then started to slither upward and across Stevens’s chest. No, she realized. It wasn’t crawling. It was growing. It put out new branches as it moved, thin tendrils that snaked through his chest hair, coiled around his nipples.
“Parminder? What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
More of the worms emerged from the wound, five more, a dozen. They were wet with blood that they smeared across Stevens’s hips and groin as they emerged. Exploring. Growing. Clutching him in their net.
Rao muted her microphone. She couldn’t let him hear her scream.
Jansen was still arguing with Hawkins when she heard the screaming. She turned and kicked her way out of the dormitory at once—it sounded as if Rao were being tortured out there. Ripped apart.
In the wardroom Rao floated in air, her hands waving back and forth in front of her as if she were warding off a monster. One look around told Jansen what was actually going on. Rao was deep in a VR trance, presumably connecting via telepresence to the GRAM robot over on Wanderer.
Jansen flew over to the nearest touchscreen and called up a video of what Rao was seeing.
The Last Astronaut Page 16