The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “No? We have orders. Under my command, we don’t get to decide whether we like our orders or not. This has already been decided.”

  Rao stared at her fingers. She kept rubbing at them as if they were dirty. Hawkins wasn’t sure she’d even heard what McAllister had said.

  “I’ll go back. Just me,” Jansen said. “That was my plan all along. I’ll go—alone—and see what I can do about establishing communications with 2I. And while I’m over there I’ll look for the KSpace crew, and—”

  Hawkins slapped the table, hard. Rao flinched and pulled away. He felt bad about upsetting her, but he needed to lay down the law here.

  “We’re not voting on this!” he said. “I’m not asking for volunteers.”

  Of course Jansen refused to back down. “You have to let me try.”

  Hawkins nodded. He knew she wasn’t going to like what he said next. Even if he was technically giving her what she wanted. “Yeah. You’re going back.” He tried to catch Rao’s eye. Failed. “We’re all going.”

  “What?” Jansen asked. She pushed away from the table until she was floating over it. Staring down at him from above. Did she think a power move like that was going to sway him? “No,” she said. “It’s too dangerous! No—look—I made a mistake, I get that. I fucked up! But there’s no reason for… for all of us…” She was looking at Rao, and Hawkins got her point.

  The astrobiologist was barely functional. She hadn’t eaten or slept or spoken more than a few words since Stevens died.

  But Hawkins had made up his mind. There was just too much at stake. Their lives meant nothing if they couldn’t stop 2I. He would sacrifice every one of them for a chance to protect the Earth. “It’s dangerous over there,” he said. “You think I don’t know that? So we’re all going, because there’s strength in numbers. And that’s final.”

  She opened her mouth, so he pushed himself up into the air as well and stared her right in the eye, challenging her to speak. To question his orders.

  “It’s final,” he said again.

  Jansen rummaged through every cabinet and locker in the HabLab, throwing useless stuff over her shoulder, digging deep as she looked for equipment that would help keep them alive over there.

  If they were going—and it looked as if they were—they needed to be prepared.

  She looked up as Hawkins kicked past her, but she didn’t stop what she was doing. “We need lights, most of all,” she said. “I stole some packages of glow sticks from Wanderer, and some flares. They’re self-oxidizing, so they should work even in an argon atmosphere.” She checked the ascenders she’d taken from Wanderer’s 3-D printer. They still worked just fine. “We’ll need plenty of water, and every O2 cartridge we’ve got. We have no idea how long we’ll be over there.”

  She popped open the kits that held the tools meant to be used to repair Orion if it was damaged in space. She didn’t think they would need any pistol-grip tools or hull patches, but there was plenty of safety line in there, as well as carabiners they could use for climbing. There were also several tool pouches and backpacks designed to fit over space suit arms, which they could use to carry their gear.

  She launched herself back through the hatch to the command module. She grabbed the survival kit—a bag full of thermal blankets, water bottles, and basic medical supplies. It was designed to keep them alive if, when they returned to Earth, they landed somewhere remote and it would take a while for NASA’s recovery teams to reach them. Wanderer’s crew might need those supplies.

  Assuming they were still alive.

  She knew there was a good possibility that they were dead. She’d known that all along. She’d committed herself to the search for them, even if it just meant recovering their bodies. If there was any chance of saving them, though—

  “I’ll get the suits ready,” Hawkins said.

  Hawkins moved over to the control panel for the EVA suits and started running through a checklist there. She tried to see over his shoulder, make sure he knew what he was doing.

  He ran through the checklist as if he’d done this a hundred times before. Well, he had, after all—back in the simulators down on Earth. She forced herself to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  She had to remind herself she wasn’t MC anymore. It was something she was just going to have to learn to accept. She was a NASA astronaut, and she’d been trained for this. When an MC was removed from duty, the crew needed to rally around the new MC. That idea had been drilled into her a million times during her training. Space missions were far too dangerous for personal feelings to get in the way of the chain of command.

  She’d never really thought it would happen to her. She’d thought of Orion as her ship, her mission.

  But she had failed, hadn’t she? She’d gotten Stevens killed. Maybe it was time to accept that she wasn’t meant for the MC’s job. Maybe it was time to start thinking like a team member instead of a boss.

  Then she turned to look at Rao, who was floating in the middle of the HabLab. Just floating, staring into space. She had a bundle of oxygen cartridges in her hands, but she wasn’t moving.

  Hawkins was MC. Fair enough. Maybe she could acknowledge that she didn’t always know best. But she couldn’t just stand aside and watch him put Rao in danger. She had to try.

  “Maybe it’s better if one of us stays behind,” Jansen said.

  The words sounded desperate, even to her own ears.

  Hawkins looked up. “Orion can take care of itself,” Hawkins said. “I’ve set the autopilot to keep station with 2I. If the aliens move again, Orion will get out of the way.”

  Jansen grabbed the glow sticks and started cramming them into a nylon bag. “Parminder,” she said.

  The younger woman didn’t look up. It looked as if she were locked in a VR trance, but Jansen knew that wasn’t the case. She was stuck inside her own head.

  “Rao!” Jansen shouted.

  “Yes?” the woman finally said, looking up—though she still didn’t make eye contact.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Jansen told her. “You can refuse. No one’s going to call you a coward.”

  Rao scowled. “I’m going,” she said. “We’re all going.”

  “It’s dangerous over there. I—we lost Stevens because I made him go over there. That’s on me. I can’t stand the thought of losing you, too. Are you sure you want to do this? Absolutely sure?”

  Rao reached out and grabbed a handrail, then shoved herself along the padded curve of the HabLab wall toward a screen. “I need to write up some notes before we leave. It’ll only take a minute or so, but I’ve got a theory. Call it a working hypothesis, and—”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Jansen pointed out.

  Rao did look directly at her then. Straight on. “We have work to do.”

  Then she turned away and got to it.

  SALLY JANSEN: I knew we needed her. She was our astrobiologist. Hawkins and me, we were grunts, we were there to keep the wheels from falling off the bus, that’s all. She was the only scientist we had, after Stevens died. If someone was going to find a way to talk to 2I’s crew, it was her. That was what it came down to, we had so much to lose, we were out of ideas—Roy McAllister is a good man, I’ll never say otherwise, but the only option he had left was to throw warm bodies on the problem and hope one of them lived long enough to find a solution.

  EXCURSION (2)

  As they waited for the airlock to cycle, Jansen pointed her lights toward Hawkins where he floated in the middle of the hollow sphere. She had to give him credit—he didn’t seem particularly scared. Then again, he hadn’t seen the interior of 2I yet. He had no idea what he was in for.

  Rao looked calm, too. It was a different kind of calm, though, one Jansen knew well. The look of somebody who is so inside their own head that the fear never reaches their skin. Somebody distracted enough to do stupid things.

  Maybe she would snap out of it when they started climbing, J
ansen thought. Rao seemed to rise to the occasion when given something to do. There was a lot of strenuous physical activity ahead of them.

  “There’s a climb of about seven kilometers before we reach the floor of the drum,” Jansen said.

  Hawkins nodded inside his helmet. He blinked and squinted in the glare of her lights. He was watching the airlock’s weirdly shaped aperture close behind them.

  The aperture turned until it faced the interior, until it was open to 2I’s cavernous expanse. Jansen started to move forward, toward the cone. Before she could get there, though, a strong wind ruffled the fabric of her suit and pushed her backward, away from the aperture.

  That… was new. The wave of pressure lasted only a moment before the air inside the airlock equalized pressures with 2I’s interior atmosphere, but last time she’d hardly felt more than a puff of breeze. She looked down at the display on her trace gas analyzer and saw that the local air pressure had risen to nearly a tenth of an atmosphere—and that was up here at the drum’s axis, where the air was thinnest.

  Even stranger, nearly a fifth of the air was made of oxygen. Last time there hadn’t been any oxygen at all, just argon.

  “Jansen, you look surprised. What’s going on?”

  “The atmosphere in here has changed. Gotten a lot thicker.”

  She could see Hawkins frowning through his faceplate. “Thicker,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She shook her head. “There was a heavy mist in the air, too, vapor from the ice that covers the drum. That’s gone.” Her lights stretched out away from her in two clear beams, with nothing to stop them. They still showed nothing but darkness—that hadn’t changed.

  The radio noise was still there, too. As they moved toward the airlock’s opening, it flooded their headphones, loud enough that Jansen couldn’t hear herself think.

  “Christ! What the hell is that?” Hawkins asked. “On the radio—”

  “Yeah,” Jansen said, raising her voice to be heard. “We heard it last time.” The rising- and-falling, endlessly clicking noise of 2I. “It’s worse now, though. Louder. Maybe that’s the sound of its wings. You know, the magnetic field. The sail.”

  “I can barely hear you,” Hawkins shouted back.

  Jansen adjusted the controls of her suit radio. The clicking receded to a dull buzz in the back of her head.

  “Jesus,” Hawkins said. He had his hands on the sides of his helmet, as if that would somehow help block out the sound.

  She attempted to show him how to adjust his own radio, but he batted her away when she tried to touch his suit. Jansen lifted her hand in surrender. “Just trying to help. Let’s deploy the robot now.” She reached over her shoulder and grabbed ARCS.

  The robot had been clinging to the back of her suit. Now it came alive in her hand, its fingers and thumbs flexing as it ran through a diagnostic routine.

  Stevens had suggested they use robots to explore 2I. He’d thought they could 3-D print a bunch of surface rovers and set them loose inside the drum, let them map the entire place—and look for Foster and his crew. There hadn’t been time to build rovers, and the 3-D printer had gone down with Wanderer. So they would make do with what they had.

  ARCS would make a terrible rover. It could theoretically crawl along the ground, using its fingers as legs, but it had been designed to function best in microgravity. Luckily there was one place inside 2I where gravity wasn’t an issue. Along the imaginary line of the drum’s axis, there was no gravity at all. As long as the robot stuck to that middle path, it could move itself along just fine with puffs of compressed air.

  “You know what you need to do, right?” she asked the robot.

  “Yes, Ms. Jansen. I am to proceed along the axis at a safe velocity. Along the way I will map the interior of 2I with my lidar imaging system and relay what I find to your suits. I am ready.”

  Jansen hesitated. She knew the robot had no mind of its own. It couldn’t understand what a dangerous mission she’d given it. Still—it felt like a small betrayal to send what was essentially a robotic butler out into the darkness of 2I. “Good luck,” she said. It was the best she could think of.

  ARCS didn’t move. It just hung there in the middle of the airlock. “I require confirmation from the mission commander.”

  “I’ve already—”

  “It means Hawkins,” Rao said, gently.

  Right. Right. Its permission architecture would already have been upgraded. Probably somebody from Pasadena had made the change.

  “Confirmed,” Hawkins told the robot.

  ARCS sailed out of the airlock and into the cone beyond. It didn’t so much as wave goodbye. In a minute it was out of view, out of reach of their lights.

  Jansen’s hands had balled into fists. She still wasn’t OK with the change of command. This had been her mission, her chance… but she was an astronaut. Challenging Hawkins for dominance now could get them all killed. She needed to fall in line and play nice.

  It wasn’t something she’d ever been good at.

  “Everyone ready?” Hawkins asked.

  He led them out of the airlock and into the rotating cone where the ropes began.

  The rope was still there, still firmly anchored by its piton. “Let me show you how the ascenders work,” she told them, as she clipped on to the first rope.

  “We used something similar in basic training,” Hawkins said, snapping his own ascender to one of his D rings and expertly threading the rope through the ascender’s gears. Then he helped Rao do the same with hers. “I appreciate your experience, Jansen. I’m glad we have you here to help us get acclimatized. But I need you to remember—I’m in charge of this mission, now.”

  SALLY JANSEN: The temperature inside 2I had climbed to nearly twenty degrees Celsius. Almost room temperature, and it was still going up. As wet as it was inside the drum, I suppose I thought the black growths were some kind of fast-growing mold. That was the mistake we made over and over. We kept trying to understand what was going on inside 2I in terms of things we knew from Earth. But nothing we saw followed our rules.

  “Look,” Jansen said, and pointed at an amorphous black stain on the surface of the cone above her. “That wasn’t here before.” Nothing more than a patch of discoloration, really, no larger than her hand. She thought she could see some small bubbles at its center, but she would have to get closer to check.

  She had no desire to get any closer.

  Swinging her lights around, she saw two more patches, similar spots on the cone wall. She had no idea what they were. She could only hope they didn’t matter.

  “More of it, there,” Rao said, sliding to a stop on the rope. Jansen reached up and adjusted her helmet lights. They illuminated a broad patch of the black discoloration on the wall not six meters from the rope. The growth was wide-ranging, maybe twenty meters across, manifesting in three broad stripes that ran mostly straight, though at an angle to their descent. Where the growth was thickest it had risen up from the surface of the drum to form thick clusters like bunches of black grapes. Except some of the spherical extrusions were as big as cantaloupes.

  She saw dozens of patches of the black stain on the walls of the cone. Each new one they found was bigger and more clearly defined than the last.

  “Just stay clear of it,” Hawkins said. “I doubt it can harm us inside our suits, but safety first, right?”

  They had reached the point where they were rappelling backward into the dark. It was a little less nerve-racking than the last time she’d done this.

  A little.

  Jansen’s knee had stopped hurting, which would have been good except that it had stopped bending, too. It was nearly frozen, leaving her in a permanent half crouch that worked for rappelling but left her wondering what was going to happen when she needed to walk again. She ignored it as best she could.

  Ignoring things was an effective strategy for dealing with the darkness and the uncertainties of the climb. At least, right up until it stopped working. The way her helmet was co
nstructed made it very difficult for her to see what was behind her. She had the rearview mirror mounted on her sleeve, but it wasn’t much use when her lights were pointed forward.

  About halfway to the bottom, she braced her legs and pushed off, letting herself slide down the rope until the friction of her belay caught her and she settled back down to the ground, a little slower than she would have in the cylinder’s full gravity.

  Her right boot hit something slick and wet, and she nearly went sprawling. She grabbed for the rope with both hands, terrified of falling, terrified her ascender would give out somehow, that she would go tumbling all the way down. None of that happened. The ascender caught her, just as it was designed to do. She got her left boot braced against the drum’s wall, felt it grip.

  Only then did she look down.

  A broad patch of the black discoloration ran across the slope, four parallel linear growths, each of them thick with globular clusters. The growth ran across the path of the rope, and flecks of black had splattered the orange line.

  Jansen had stepped on one of the globes, and it had exploded under the pressure of her weight. Black slime covered her right boot and stained both of her legs. Drops of black coated the slope and were slowly rolling down out of her light and into the dark.

  “Is your suit punctured?” Hawkins asked.

  “Run a diagnostic!” Rao called.

  “I’m fine,” Jansen said, mostly just feeling embarrassed. She should have been looking where she was going. “It’s just slime, it’ll wash off—”

  “Rao’s right. Run a diagnostic,” Hawkins said. He let the line slip through his ascender, just a little, as he crab-walked down toward her. His eyes were wide. “That’s an order.”

  If her suit had been breached she would have heard a strident alarm in her headphones. There was no alarm. Mostly to humor him, though, she reached up to the controls of the instrument pack on the front of her suit and hit the button that would run a complete systemic check. It would take about ten seconds. “I’m fine,” she said again. “Why are you so—”