The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  “I think it’s responding to Dr. Stevens’s brain waves,” she said, before he could even think of the right question to ask.

  McAllister blinked rapidly. “It can hear him thinking?”

  “We’re broadcasting Stevens’s biodata on an open radio channel—the channel we use for all of our telemetry. Do I shut it down? Sir—I need to know whether I should shut down that channel—”

  “Sir!” Someone else bellowed. “2I is accelerating!”

  EEK… EEK… EEK…

  The sound turned Jansen’s blood to concrete. She felt frozen in place, even though she knew she needed to move. She needed to move right now.

  Hawkins had been hovering over Rao’s shoulder, looking at her screen. Now he looked up, and Jansen saw an expression of pure terror ripple across his features. He knew that sound. He’d heard it before—they all had.

  It was Orion’s proximity alarm.

  Her arm moved independently of her will. By pure muscle memory it lifted, and her fingers touched the devices on her cheekbones. She switched to pure VR, and everything went away, empty space flooding in all around her. Directly in front of her, filling most of her view, was the dark-red bulk of 2I.

  It was getting bigger.

  She didn’t need to consult any instruments to know what was happening. Suddenly she was in control of herself again. She snapped out of VR and looked around the HabLab, doing a quick check to see what wasn’t bolted down, what was going to go flying when she started up Orion’s engines.

  She saw two things immediately. Two people. “Grab something! Hold on,” she shouted. Hawkins reacted instantly, kicking over to the wall and grasping a handrail. Rao was still glued to her screen, watching Stevens’s biodata.

  “Hawkins,” she shouted, “help her!”

  He reached over and grabbed Rao with one arm, pulling her tight to his chest. Rao struggled, clearly annoyed at being pulled away from her screen, but Jansen didn’t care. She called up an AR window and fired Orion’s retros, tapping for an emergency burn.

  The ship lurched backward. Loose tools and food tubes and trash went flying toward the cupola, toward the nose of the spacecraft. ARCS went spinning across the HabLab—as the robot flew past Jansen’s head, she could hear its soft voice issuing some kind of dire warning. It struck the soft wall right next to the cupola’s hatch, its three hands grasping wildly for anything it might hold on to.

  Hawkins and Rao swung from the handrail, suddenly dangling over a six-meter drop. Jansen felt her shoulder collide with something hard, and she realized she’d made the stupidest mistake a pilot could make—she hadn’t bothered to secure herself before the maneuver. There’d been no time—

  She looked down to see what she’d smashed into. She grabbed the angular frame of the treadmill and just tried to hold on.

  GO/NO GO

  Orion, this is Pasadena. Come in. Orion, come in, please.” McAllister’s hands were shaking, and he could feel sweat slicking down the hair on the back of his neck. He had three screens open at once, showing views of space around 2I. Everything was moving, and he could barely keep track of it all. “Orion, report,” he called again, even though he knew it would be nearly a minute before he could get a response.

  One of his screens showed 2I’s magnetic field. It was constantly changing shape, the lines of force twisting and then snapping into new configurations. He couldn’t shake the impression he’d had before—that it looked like a butterfly’s wings. They were flapping now.

  “Is this how it moves?” he asked.

  Nguyen, their physicist, twisted her lower lip between her fingers. “It reminds me of something, something we actually experimented with a while ago. A… a… I forget what it was called, an—”

  “Electric solar sail,” someone else chimed in.

  McAllister twisted around. It was Fonseca, the FDO whose name he’d forgotten before. He remembered it now.

  “An e-sail, we ended up calling it the e-sail,” she said. “It works just like a ship’s sail on the ocean, exactly like that, except instead of canvas catching moving air, it uses a magnetic field to catch the solar wind. This is how it moves, sir—this is 2I’s propulsion system.”

  McAllister didn’t care about the details. As long as the magnetic field wasn’t a weapon. “Is it strong enough to cause damage to Orion?”

  Fonseca took a deep breath and blew it out again. “No. No, I don’t—I don’t think so. A strong enough magnetic field could blow out a lot of the spacecraft’s electronics. It could even affect our people’s brains, give them seizures. I don’t think this one is that strong. I don’t—I’m not sure.”

  “Figure it out,” he barked at her. He glanced at another of his screens. It showed Orion moving backward, jetting away from 2I. Scooting out of the way to avoid a collision. It looked as if someone up there had acted fast enough to save Orion from being crushed. A pilot racked by seizures wouldn’t be able to do that. McAllister sat down in his chair, very slowly. Be thankful for small favors, and—

  Oh God. He’d just thought of something.

  “What kind of tracking do we have on Wanderer?” he asked. “Can somebody give me a camera view? What have we got?”

  A new screen popped up in front of him. Just in time to let him watch Wanderer die.

  There was no one on board the KSpace ship capable of operating its engines. No one to drive, to get it out of the way. 2I wasn’t accelerating very fast, but it had an enormous amount of mass. When it smashed into Wanderer, the smaller ship didn’t stand a chance. Its service module snapped free of its reentry module and flew off into space, spinning wildly. The spherical orbital module crumpled like a tin can, air and water and fuel bursting from its ruptured pipes and tanks. Lights flickered inside the wreckage, then went out.

  The reentry module, where Sunny Stevens still lay strapped into a crew seat, was torn apart by the colossal teeth of the superstructures. Its windows cracked and exploded. Metal shredded.

  McAllister put a hand over his mouth. He spared a quick glance up at the screen that showed Stevens’s biodata. It was all flatlines now.

  At least the man’s suffering was over.

  “Dear Lord,” McAllister said. It wasn’t a prayer. It was just pure tension leaking out of his mouth.

  “Sir? Sir—2I has returned to its previous course. Still no word from Orion.”

  “Telemetry coming in. Sir—sir!”

  “Sir,” Meryl Nguyen said. She was crouched down next to him, at his level. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Sir, I know this may not be the time, but there’s something we need to consider—”

  Everyone wanted his attention. He couldn’t focus enough to answer any of them. He blinked and looked over at her. He felt as if he were floating free of his body, hovering over his chair.

  Then he was instantly pulled back to himself because he heard the radio crackle.

  “Pasadena?”

  It was Hawkins, coming in over the radio. Responding to McAllister’s calls.

  “Pasadena, we’re all right up here—we had a bit of a bumpy ride, but there are no injuries. We’d really like someone to explain to us what the hell just happened.”

  “It’s fine,” Jansen protested. Rao kept poking at her shoulder. It hurt, but it was fine, damn it.

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” Rao said. “Not dislocated, either.”

  “It’s fine,” Jansen said. “I just bumped it. Can you please—”

  Then she saw the look on Rao’s face. She knew that look. Rao needed something to do. Something to keep her mind off what had happened to Wanderer—and the fact that Sunny Stevens’s body was on the surface of 2I, crushed by the broken spars of the KSpace ship.

  “We have some analgesic cream in the med kit, right?” Jansen asked. “Maybe that would help.”

  Rao nodded and flipped backward, headed for the supply cabinets. Hawkins passed her, kicking his way along the wall of the HabLab. “Understood, Pasadena,” he said.

  Then he p
unched the soft wall, hard enough to make it ripple.

  “What did he say?” Jansen asked.

  Hawkins looked as if he might punch the wall again. And again and again. He took a moment to breathe before he answered.

  “He said to stand by for new orders.” Hawkins ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair. He turned himself around and pushed his back against the wall. “Stand by. Hurry up and wait.”

  Jansen understood his frustration. She wished she could say something that would help alleviate it. She wished someone would say something to her.

  Roy McAllister touched the device on his ear and was patched through to a conference call. Maybe the most important one of his life.

  He winced as he heard a dozen voices talking at once. Someone was shouting about liability issues—about the fact that KSpace was almost certain to sue the government for the destruction of Wanderer. Someone else wanted to know what plans were in place for moving vital government assets to underground shelters if 2I crashed into the Earth.

  Most of the voices were just asking questions. Questions nobody could answer.

  McAllister focused on one voice in particular: Kalitzakis. The space force general was assuring someone, in low, reasoned tones, that the problem had been giving control of Orion to a civilian agency in the first place. That now that Hawkins was mission commander, they could expect to see a very different command strategy.

  McAllister understood that he was being thrown, if gently, under a bus. That Kalitzakis was shifting blame to NASA and Sally Jansen. Well, he had to admit that they made good scapegoats.

  “He’s coming on the line,” someone whispered, and McAllister thought they meant himself, that they were warning Kalitzakis to watch what he said. But then a rapid series of clicks sounded on the call and McAllister knew the whisperer hadn’t been referring to him after all.

  “Everyone, please stand by as we confirm the president’s connection is secure,” the whisperer said. When it came on the line, the president’s voice was heavily modulated, squelched down to a synthetic drone by the encryption on the call.

  “Everyone, this is a grave situation, and we all need to take it very seriously. I understand the space force has something to say.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Kalitzakis said. “It is the position of the military that as of now we should consider 2I hostile, and that it represents an existential threat to the population of Earth, and that immediate military action is required.”

  There was a sound like everyone on the call taking a breath at once, as if they all wanted to say something about that. Their voices were cut off almost instantly, and when Kalitzakis spoke again his voice was alone, and crystal clear.

  “The alien spacecraft killed Dr. Stevens. It destroyed KSpace’s vehicle, Wanderer. It may have attempted to destroy Orion as well, but Mission Commander Jansen, through quick and decisive action, was able to save her ship.”

  At least he was going to give her that much, McAllister thought.

  “Major Hawkins, of the space force, has taken command of the mission. We’ve been working for some time now on finding a way to destroy or at least disable 2I. As you know, we’ve already ruled out nuclear armaments. After careful deliberation we’ve decided our best chance is to use a kinetic impactor.”

  McAllister’s vision blurred, and he realized Kalitzakis had brought him into a stream in virtual reality. Presumably the president and everyone on the call was seeing the same thing.

  The virtual space was white—it had no walls, floor, or ceiling, just an infinite expanse of whiteness. In the middle of that space a three-dimensional model appeared. It showed a vehicle McAllister was familiar with, the X-37d. The space force’s drone spaceplane, a miniature space shuttle with no windows. The same vehicle Hawkins used to fly.

  The spaceplane’s cargo bay doors opened soundlessly. A robot arm unfurled from the inside, an arm holding the payload that had been nestled inside the cargo bay. The payload comprised six long cylinders, each of them mounted on a compact rocket engine.

  “These are what we call kill vehicles,” Kalitzakis said. “This is a weapon system we designed a while back, in case we needed to take out foreign bases built on the moon.”

  In the virtual space one of the kill vehicles expanded, its component parts separating to provide a better view of how they were assembled. A floating arrow appeared in the white space as Kalitzakis indicated different pieces of the system. “This is the warhead, here.” It looked as cylindrical and featureless as a telephone pole. “It’s nothing but a dense core of depleted uranium. Using the rocket engine mounted on its back, the core can be accelerated to incredible speeds. Think of it as an extremely large, very tough bullet. Since 2I is coming toward us pretty fast already, if you add its velocity to the KV’s, they meet up at maybe a hundred kilometers a second.”

  McAllister took a deep breath. You could kill a city with the kind of energy that impact would release.

  “How is this better than a nuke?” the president asked.

  Kalitzakis’s floating arrow moved back to the warhead. “It’s a matter of precision over sheer firepower. A nuclear blast spreads energy out over its full blast radius—that’s why the superstructures on 2I are a good defense, because they can absorb that energy over a large surface area. The KV hits its target in a very precise point. All the energy impacts in a cross-sectional area about the size of a manhole cover. A KV can punch right through 2I’s hull. If we can target the bridge of the alien ship directly, or perhaps its engines, we can do a lot of damage. Maybe enough to render 2I nonoperational.”

  “I don’t want to hear ‘maybe,’” the president said. “Give me a probability.”

  “We project a seventy percent chance of success. However, there’s a complication. We don’t know where 2I’s bridge is, or its engine room. We would need more data before we could deploy the KV. I have a plan on how we’re going to get it. We need to send someone back inside.”

  McAllister could feel his hands shaking, even if he couldn’t see them. Send someone back in? After what happened to Sunny Stevens?

  “It will be a dangerous mission, of course,” Kalitzakis said. “2I’s interior is enemy territory. But it’s crucial we have this data. We need a map of the interior, and someone to identify its weak points. We need to know where to fire our bullet to kill the beast.”

  “It’s clear we need to do something,” the president said.

  “This is our best option, sir,” Kalitzakis told him. “I’d like authorization to begin a second excursion immediately. Time is of the essence.”

  “Wait,” McAllister said. He didn’t care that his voice was probably muted, that no one would hear him. “Wait! There’s more to consider! We need to—to—”

  “Is that NASA talking?” the president asked, sounding annoyed.

  McAllister felt sweat building up on his forehead. They’d heard him. “Yes, sir.”

  “You have something to add?” the president asked.

  McAllister talked fast—he knew he wouldn’t get a second chance at this. “Sir. I would like to propose that there’s a possibility 2I’s actions weren’t hostile at all.”

  Kalitzakis scoffed, but McAllister needed to say this.

  “We simply don’t know enough about the aliens to understand what happened. Why 2I destroyed Wanderer. What we do know is—is—” he struggled to think of what to say next. “Sir—what we saw up there was Orion successfully completing its mission.”

  “They lost an astronaut,” Kalitzakis sputtered.

  “Yes. And we at NASA feel that tragedy more than anyone. But Orion’s primary mission was to make contact with 2I—and they did just that. The timing of 2I’s maneuver is not coincidental. Dr. Stevens, in his final moment, reached out to 2I. And it responded.”

  “By killing him!”

  “Enough, General. Let him finish,” the president said. “What are you proposing, McAllister?”

  “We should try to establish furthe
r contact. Actually communicate with the crew of 2I.”

  “And how do you do that? Expose them to the—I think we’re calling them tendrils? Sacrifice more lives?”

  “No. Of course not.” McAllister’s hands balled into fists at his sides. Was he really going to say this? It was the last thing he wanted. It was the worst idea he could imagine. It was all he could think of.

  “Someone or something inside 2I reacted to Dr. Stevens’s attempt at communication. It may—it must—be possible to find them and open a dialogue. General Kalitzakis has proposed we send someone back inside, to find these hypothetical weak points. I’m saying we send someone inside to try to talk to 2I’s crew. I’m proposing we send someone in to talk, not to destroy.”

  God help me, he thought. Did I just consign one of my people to death?

  “We have two action proposals, then,” the president said. “But it sounds like they’re at least temporarily compatible.”

  “Sir,” Kalitzakis said, but the president cut him off.

  “Does anyone see a reason why we can’t try both?”

  The call was opened up again—all the muted listeners could suddenly talk once more. Every single one of them took the opportunity, and the call turned into a babble of raised and excited voices.

  ROY MCALLISTER: They were astronauts, whether they’d trained for years like Jansen or just a few months. NASA employees. Our duty to them, first, last, and always, was to keep them safe. I know they signed up for a hazardous mission. What I asked of them now, though—it’ll haunt me until the end of my days.

  The three of them floated close together around a screen, watching 2I spread its magnetic wings. There was no doubting it. 2I had moved because Sunny Stevens had somehow told it to. The question was how.

  They had listened to the orders that came up from Pasadena. McAllister had repeated them twice to make sure everyone understood. Now it was Hawkins’s turn, as mission commander, to put those orders into action.

  He gathered the three of them around the little folding table where they ate their meals. “We’re going back, then. You got your wish, Jansen.”