The video started in the middle of a horror show. GRAM’s scalpel arm flashed across the screen, again and again. Cutting into tendrils that stretched and spread across Stevens’s body. They were tough and rubbery, and the scalpel barely sliced them open. Dark fluid oozed from the cuts, fluid that hardened almost instantly, sealing the cuts shut again.
GRAM kept cutting, slashing. Until one tendril lifted from Stevens’s body and wrapped around GRAM’s slender metal wrist. GRAM tried to pull its arm free but it was stuck, caught in a grip it couldn’t shake.
A hundred new tendrils snaked across GRAM’s arm and its torso, then grew across one of its eyes, cutting the video display in half.
The view shifted as GRAM was pushed backward, slowly, so slowly. It crashed against the far wall of Wanderer’s command module. The image shook wildly as the tendrils lashed across GRAM’s torso and face, then stopped moving once the robot was caught fast in their net.
One of GRAM’s eyes was still clear enough that she could see Stevens. What was left of him, anyway. He was obscured under a writhing mass of thick tendrils. They continued to grow from his middle, looping up into the air in the absence of gravity and then slapping against the walls. They streamed out in every direction, growing and branching off constantly. They grabbed objects out of the air, grabbed them and wove thick dark cocoons around them. They slithered across the screens of the module, all of which were flashing red. They oozed across the module’s viewports. They disappeared through the hatch that led to the orbital module. They covered everything in a colorless network of gently pulsing filaments.
Eventually they grew across GRAM’s other eye, and the video went dark.
Rao was still screaming, her arms slashing away at the air, even though GRAM could no longer mirror her movements. “Shit, she’s still over there,” Jansen said, and kicked across the air to grab Rao, grab her into a tight hug. Hawkins came up to help, peeling the devices off Rao’s face. Cutting the connection to Wanderer.
Rao rocked back and forth in Jansen’s embrace, her face digging into Jansen’s collarbone, hot tears soaking the fabric of Jansen’s shirt. It seemed her screams would never stop.
PREMATURE SHUTDOWN
It wasn’t your fault,” Hawkins said.
Rao was still cradled in Jansen’s arms. She’d sunk into a withdrawn, listless state. Jansen kept rubbing her back because she had no idea what else to do.
“What?” Rao asked, her voice very small and distant.
“I said it wasn’t your fault,” Hawkins said again.
Jansen felt Rao’s body stiffen, her muscles contracting as if she’d been struck. “Who said it was?” she demanded.
Jansen tried to shoot Hawkins a look, to tell him to just back off, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Rao’s face.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he tried.
“I know that. I’m a doctor. I’m aware of my limits, thank you very much.” Rao pushed her way out of Jansen’s arms, causing the two of them to drift off in opposite directions. When she reached the far wall of the HabLab, Rao kicked off, launching herself toward the dormitory compartment.
“I know you and Stevens had… feelings… for…”
Hawkins was floundering now. Jansen almost felt sorry for him. She shook her head. When he still didn’t take the hint, she drew a finger across her throat. Stop it, she thought, as if he could hear her via telepathy. Just shut up.
“He was a good man,” Hawkins sputtered.
Rao’s eyes shimmered with the start of tears. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go freshen up,” she said, and disappeared through the dormitory hatch.
Hawkins turned to appeal to Jansen, but she was already kicking her way across the HabLab. She pushed through the hatch and found Rao gripping the sides of their shower unit. It was a segmented plastic bag designed to be folded away when not in use. It looked as if Rao was trying to open it up but couldn’t quite get the latch to work.
Jansen glided over and reached up to hit the latch herself. The shower unit popped open and automatically extended to its full length.
Rao just hung there in the air, staring at it.
“I feel like I need to scrub myself until I bleed,” she whispered. “I feel like I’m covered in blood.” The younger woman clutched her arms around herself. “I wasn’t actually over there. I didn’t touch anything, you know? I’m sanitary. But I feel—I feel infected.”
Jansen put a hand on Rao’s shoulder. Rao didn’t shrug it off. After a moment a sob erupted from her chest, a deep, seismic explosion of grief.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” Rao said, her voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shh,” Jansen said. “You feel what you’re going to feel. It’s OK.”
“No,” Rao said. “No. I can’t—I can’t let him see me like this. He’s going to make me out to be the grieving widow. He’s going to feel so sorry for me.”
Jansen understood.
“I’ll keep him clear of you,” she promised.
Rao gave her a grateful look, then touched her devices and moved to a nearby screen, which showed a scrolling list of telemetry logs.
“What are you doing?” Jansen asked.
“This is all the data GRAM collected during the surgery. I’m going to go over it and try to figure out what happened.”
Back to work. Rao had just lost the man she cared about and she was already back to work.
Jansen didn’t really understand that at all, but she knew people grieved in different ways. She rubbed Rao’s upper arm for a moment, then left the dormitory, zipping the hatch shut behind her. Orion was too small for any concept of real privacy, but she would give Rao as much space as she could.
PARMINDER RAO: When my grandfather died, about six years ago, the whole family was there at his bedside. My mom and my dad and my cousins, all filling up the room with their tension, and Nani sitting stroking my grandpa’s hand, asking him over and over for his last words, though we all knew he was past that point, he was long past talking. Me? I was down the hall at the nurse’s station, arguing whether liquid Tylenol was going to be enough, or if we could get some damned morphine already, it wasn’t like he was going to develop a habit now. And so I missed it, I missed the moment he actually went. I kicked myself for it later, but you know, it’s what we do. It’s what doctors do, we compartmentalize. We break things down, look for the bits we can fix, that we can change. I know I’m babbling, but you have to understand this. There was nothing in the world that was going to bring Stevens back. But you don’t stop working until they pull you away. Not because you think there’s a chance, but because if you let yourself be idle, even for a second, you start thinking about what it means to lose somebody. And once you start thinking that you never stop.
“We believe that when Commander Jansen removed the tendril from Dr. Stevens’s liver, some small part of it must have remained inside the injury site.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Inside the body cavity, in a low-oxygen, warm environment, it continued to grow. We have no explanation for the runaway acceleration in growth once it emerged into the oxygenated atmosphere.”
“No explanation at this time, you mean.”
“Exactly. Its metabolic functions are, well, alien, and therefore have yet to be described in the literature, but—”
“We’re working on it. We’re studying it. Necropsy samples would be extraordinarily useful. That isn’t something we can really count on.”
“It will, of course, be impossible to recover the body.”
In the control room, Roy McAllister leaned back in his chair. He pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. People were talking to him. Talking near him. He tried not to hear them, but of course, you can’t shut your ears.
“Orion’s systems are all reporting green, good, optimal. We have limited telemetry from Wanderer, but from external views the spacecraft appears largely undamaged.”
“We should call KSpace. Just as a professional courtesy—express our regrets.”
“Though we need to make sure there are no liability issues.”
“The president wants to express his sympathies. He’s going to personally invite Dr. Stevens’s family to the White House. The meeting will have to be in secret, and he can’t tell them anything about the mission, but he says he’ll say that Stevens died in the service of his country.”
“Of all humanity.”
“But he can’t say that.”
“No, of course not.”
“Has anyone checked Commander Jansen’s biodata? She was inside 2I at the same time as Dr. Stevens. We need to make sure she wasn’t also infected. We need to make sure the remaining—I mean, the other three astronauts are OK.”
“Definitely. Just—they’ve asked for a little radio silence. Out of respect.”
“I’m not sure we can honor that request.”
“I’ve already started an investigation into what went wrong. Into why this happened. I’ve collected all of Dr. Rao’s preliminary case notes and Dr. Stevens’s test results, but I’ll need to get access to KSpace’s proprietary data from Wanderer. Sir? Can you just authorize this? I need you to sign off so I can start requesting that data and—”
“Sir,” someone said.
“Not now,” McAllister replied.
A man was dead.
He knew that this was part of his job. He knew he needed to focus, to figure out how they should proceed from here. Whether he should call Orion back to Earth and protect the three remaining astronauts. Even though that would mean giving up, surrendering when they didn’t have a plan B. But what could they possibly hope to achieve up there? What could they do except get themselves killed and—
“Sir!”
He opened his eyes and sat up in his chair. A woman in a blue cardigan was standing in front of him. She looked frantic.
“Your name’s Utz, right?” he asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “Sir. There’s new telemetry you need to see.”
He doubted it could possibly be anything good. “In a moment. I need to think, Utz. I need to—”
“Sir!”
He heard the alarm then. A strident, bleeping noise, beating out a slow rhythm. He looked up.
The big screen showed a view of the interior of Wanderer, though it was almost unrecognizable now. The tendrils had spread across every surface, branching and connecting with each other in a spiderweb of thick gray cords. They pulsed, almost imperceptibly. Swelling and then shrinking, to the same beat as the annoying bleeps.
A second window had opened up next to the big screen. It showed five line graphs. Three of them were completely flat, racing toward the right side of the screen without deviating at all. One ticked up and down, but only a tiny degree. The fifth jumped regularly, peaks of activity appearing every time the alert bleeped, every time the tendrils convulsed.
It took him a second to realize what he was looking at. It was a graph of Sunny Stevens’s biodata. Nobody had thought to turn the meters off when he supposedly died. His vital statistics still being recorded by instruments attached to his body, long after that information should have been useful. Pulse, respiration, and blood pressure were all completely flat. As you would expect from a dead man.
The unstable, fluctuating graph showed his blood oxygen levels. In a healthy human body that value should hover above 90 percent. In Stevens’s case it had dropped to about 10.
He pointed at the fifth graph, the one showing regular activity. “What is that?” he demanded.
“Neural oscillation,” Utz said.
McAllister shook his head. “No. Not possible. Those are brain waves? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
KARLA UTZ, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER: It meant that by some very restricted definition, on some basal neurological level… Dr. Stevens was still alive.
Rao launched herself across the HabLab. She needed to get to work.
Not that she was hoping for much. She was a trained professional, and she knew how the human body worked. She didn’t believe in miracles.
She tapped her way through the communications interface. As the mission’s flight surgeon she had access to biodata on all of Orion’s astronauts. She could also have opened up a window showing her video of what was happening inside Wanderer. It might have given her more information. But—no. She didn’t want to see.
What was on her screen was frightening enough. “His heart’s not beating,” she announced.
“Is it possible that’s a false reading?” Jansen asked. It sounded as if she were kilometers away. Nothing mattered except the numbers and graphs on the screen in front of Rao.
Rao bit her lip. “No,” she said. “No. This is accurate. This is right.”
She had found that in life, more often than not, the information you saw that was the most heartbreaking was the most accurate. It was the hopeful stuff you had to be wary of.
“He’s showing brain activity,” Hawkins said. “That has to be good, right? If he was flatlining—”
He stopped talking abruptly. Maybe Jansen had shut him up. Rao didn’t look up to see.
“This is…” A wave of vertigo swept through her. Emotions trying to overcome her. She would not let that happen. She gripped the side of the screen until her head stopped spinning. “These are just nu-complex waves. You see this in coma patients, sometimes. It’s activity from the hippocampus, that’s all.” Come on, Sunny, she thought. Come on. Prove me wrong. Let me see some delta waves. Some sign you’re still alive in there.
“Rao? What does that mean?” Jansen asked. “We’re not doctors. We don’t understand.”
What makes you think I do? Rao thought. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. Nobody had ever been infected by an alien parasite that first killed you and then brought you back to life… She threw that thought away. She was a doctor and she would function like a doctor. She watched the peaks and valleys on the graph, looking for any sign of change. “His brain is ticking along, but he’s not conscious, he’s not—” Tears threatened to leak out of the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t let that happen, not now. “His brain’s getting oxygen. Don’t ask me how—those tendrils must be feeding it. They must’ve punctured his skull, or, or—” She felt as if she were going to explode with the horror of this. “They’re keeping his brain alive. That’s—how is that even possible?”
Jansen didn’t answer her. It was nice, Rao thought, having someone around who understood when a question was rhetorical.
“It’s suffusing all his tissues,” she said. His blood oxygen levels were back up to about 50—nowhere near where they should be, but something was definitely pumping oxygen to his cells. “His lungs aren’t moving, his heart… his heart…”
“Rao?”
What she saw on the screen scared her so badly she could hardly think. “The brain waves. The waves—the, the frequency’s the same, but the amplitude—”
On the screen the spikes in the line graph had looked like ripples on a pond before. They’d been tiny. Now they grew taller and taller, while the valleys stayed shallow. “The signal’s getting stronger,” she said. She didn’t say what she was thinking. This is impossible. Because obviously it wasn’t. “It’s getting stronger.”
“What the hell is going on?” McAllister demanded.
They’d brought a whole new team of people into the control room. Doctors, astrobiologists from Parminder Rao’s department at JPL. Neurologists from Caltech. Anyone they could find who might possibly answer his question. They were all clustered around one console at the side of the room.
None of them even looked up. Not one of them voiced an opinion.
The big screen showed the view from inside Wanderer’s reentry module. It was hard to see anything—the growth of tendrils had obscured most of the cameras inside the spacecraft and covered over most of the lights until only a dim brown radiance filled the view. The one good camera fe
ed they had showed Sunny Stevens from the nose down to his navel. The growth had covered so much of his flesh that only tiny portions of him could be seen—a patch of chest hair, the crook of one elbow.
His mouth opened. Tendrils snaked across his lips, down his throat. Yet somehow he was getting enough oxygen that he was able to gasp. A weak, spasmodic gesture, but McAllister could see his chest rise and then collapse, again and again.
“Is he saying something?” McAllister demanded. He couldn’t be, could he? “Get me sound on that feed.”
Speakers set into the ceiling of the control room came to life. The noise Stevens made boomed and crackled over their heads. It wasn’t a word. It didn’t even sound like a human voice—just one repeated sound, an explosion of breath from collapsed lungs.
“Puh. Puh. Puh.”
“Sir,” someone said, and actually grabbed McAllister’s arm. He looked down and saw the graph of Stevens’s brain activity. The spikes were still growing stronger. Then one jetted up so high it went right off the screen.
Instantly a dozen alarms went off at once. Screens flashed red and technicians reared backward, as if unable to believe what they were seeing. The big screen blacked out, then switched to a whole new image.
“My God,” McAllister said.
The image was in gray scale. It showed a black silhouette of the shape of 2I, small enough that he couldn’t make out the individual superstructures. As big as 2I might be, the screen needed to display something much larger. Something that looked a great deal like round wings made of long, graceful white loops that swooped out from the alien starship, then swung back again to connect to its center of mass. Like a butterfly’s wings…
“What—what is that?” McAllister asked.
“It’s a magnetic field—2I is emitting a magnetic field.”
McAllister looked down to see a young woman sitting in front of him, sitting in front of one of the consoles. It was Nguyen, he thought. Their physicist.
He stared at her, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with that information.
The Last Astronaut Page 17