The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  “That would mean taking his helmet off.”

  When Rao had washed up on the island and crawled out of the dark water, she’d found him in that same awkward position. His condition hadn’t changed in the last fifteen minutes. “Yeah,” she said. “I would have to take his helmet off.”

  The two women stared at each other, terrified of what that might mean. They had no idea what might result from exposing Hawkins to the atmosphere of 2I. Rao looked down at the trace gas analyzer on the front of her suit and saw that there was plenty of oxygen now, and nothing poisonous floating around. The analyzer couldn’t tell her what else might be in the air, though. Particulates, or mold spores, or any of a number of airborne toxins.

  “We might poison him,” Rao suggested. “And my medical supplies are pretty limited. If he breathed in something toxic, I would have no way to protect him from that.”

  “And if you don’t examine him?” Jansen asked.

  “He could die of his injuries.” She sighed and laid one gloved hand on the curve of his helmet. “Or he could just recover on his own.”

  She couldn’t see Jansen’s face very well, with all of their lights shining in different directions.

  “I saw one of the KSpace crew on that arch,” the older woman said eventually. “We saw them.”

  “Jansen—”

  “No, listen. Whoever they were, they weren’t wearing a suit. Just what looked like a thermal garment. If they can survive here, exposed to the elements, then maybe he’ll be OK, too.”

  “Are you one hundred percent sure that’s what you saw?” Rao had seen nothing but a shadow and a flash of orange.

  She could hear Jansen breathing heavily. It sounded as if she wasn’t in such great shape herself.

  “No,” Jansen said, finally. “But we need to make a decision. Come on. Help me with this.”

  There were two catches that had to be released—fail-safe mechanisms to keep anyone from accidentally removing the helmet. Then, together, they twisted the big helmet around in its metal collar ring. It made a loud clicking sound as they rotated it through the last quarter turn, another safety mechanism. Rao pulled her hands away, but Jansen didn’t hesitate. She finished the rotation, then lifted the helmet, careful not to scrape Hawkins’s chin or touch his head.

  A little air—healthy air—sighed out of his collar ring, and the fabric of his suit draped over his legs as the suit lost pressure. He didn’t stir or even murmur in his sleep, but almost instantly tiny beads of sweat appeared on his upper lip. Rao had forgotten how warm it had gotten inside 2I while she remained perfectly cool inside her own suit. She prayed she’d made the right decision.

  The two of them watched his face very carefully. For a moment it looked as if he was dead, that he had stopped breathing.

  Then his whole body convulsed and his mouth opened and he sucked in a long, labored breath.

  Jansen looked up at Rao. Neither of them said anything until he exhaled again, the air sighing out of him.

  “He didn’t die,” Jansen said. “He took a breath and he didn’t die. That’s a good sign, right?”

  Rao scowled. It meant nothing. “Get out of the way and let me work,” she said.

  With the helmet off she saw that his white snoopy cap was brown with dried and clotted blood. It stuck to his cheek and scalp as she pulled it gently free of his skin. It looked as if his head had taken multiple hits while they’d been dragged through the water. The whole left side of his jaw was one solid purple bruise, and the skin of his forehead had split open—that was where the blood had come from.

  Rao did what she could for him. She pulled the water tube up from inside his collar ring and used it as a spray, washing as much of the blood off his face as she could. The wound on his forehead started to ooze blood again almost instantly. She grabbed a bandage out of the survival kit and pressed it against the cut. She pried open his eyelids and found his eyes drifting in their sockets. His pupils were very large—adapted for the darkness of 2I, perhaps—but at least they were the same size. She pointed one of her suit lights directly at his face and watched the pupils contract. A little slower than she would have liked.

  “Is he going to be OK?” Jansen asked.

  Rao didn’t know. She kept pressure on the wound and hoped for the best.

  PARMINDER RAO: It’s notoriously hard to make a prognosis about a concussion. Without the proper tools I had no way of knowing if he’d just had a bad knock on the head, or if his brain was bleeding into his pia mater and he would die within an hour. I could monitor him for bloodshot eyes, for disorientation and nausea… Until he woke up, though, it was anybody’s guess if he was going to make it.

  Jansen checked their gear, going over each piece individually and examining it for damage. They’d been lucky. Their packs had been beaten up when they were tossed around in the water, but NASA had made their equipment well. The neutrino gun was working just fine, and more importantly their suit radios were functional, too. Their lighting situation wasn’t quite as rosy. The TBL and its light were long gone—she’d dropped it when she fell off the ice floe. They’d lost almost all their glow sticks, though she still had two flares. Next she checked their survival equipment. They had Rao’s medical kit, and a couple of foil emergency blankets. Finally she checked their water and air supplies. She found one oxygen cartridge with a bad dent in it. No way to tell if it would still work without plugging it into one of their suits and activating it. They had a number of other cartridges, all of which looked intact and full. She counted them. She tried to count them. She kept losing track in the middle and having to start over.

  What was happening? She looked down at the cartridges in her hands. There weren’t that many. One, two, three…

  “How long have we been in here?” she asked.

  Rao looked up at her with a start.

  They both had clocks built into their suits. It was easy enough to check—they just had to remember what the time had been when they left Orion. Jansen blinked slowly as she tried to work it out in her head. It was hard to think, inside 2I. Thoughts tended to get halfway formed, then wiped out of your mind. Was it an effect of the constant darkness? 2I’s magnetic field? Or was she just tired?

  She was definitely tired.

  “I can’t… I don’t remember if we…” Rao looked confused.

  Jansen checked the clock. Subtracted the time they’d arrived at the airlock. “We’ve been in here nearly twenty-four hours,” she said, when she’d finished her calculation.

  “That doesn’t seem possible,” Rao told her. “But I guess… I mean, I remember switching out my oxygen. A while back, back when we… Wow. I don’t remember exactly when I did that. I must have, though.”

  Jansen nodded. The carts lasted only twelve hours. She took a perverse kind of joy in knowing that if her mind was going, Rao’s was, too.

  “How are your suit batteries?” she asked. There was no way to replace or recharge those, not inside 2I.

  “I’m still at sixty-four percent,” Rao reported.

  Jansen nodded. “If we’re going to be here a while, we should switch off our lights. Those’ll burn power a lot faster than your life-support pack.”

  “Seriously?” Rao asked. “I don’t know if I can handle the dark.”

  “You won’t have much choice, if your batteries run down.” Jansen stacked up a couple of glow sticks in a pyramid like they were a campfire. They did almost nothing to keep the shadows away, but it was better than not being able to see at all.

  The two of them made Hawkins as comfortable as possible. They had a whole stack of plastic sample bags. Wadding them up, they made a pillow for his head. Rao stretched his legs out, then the two of them rolled him gently onto his back.

  He was still breathing. Jansen checked several times.

  “We can give him a few hours,” she said. “As long as nothing tries to kill us in the meantime.”

  “You could use a little time off your feet yourself,” Rao said. “I wan
t to take a look at you, if that’s all right. I saw you limping before, and—”

  “No, it’s not all right,” Jansen said. “I’m fucking fine.”

  Rao reeled back, stung, and Jansen immediately regretted her tone. Even as she’d spoken she’d known she was just lashing out, the frustrations and privations of the journey getting to her. She cursed herself, thinking she had to be very careful not to get too snappish now—now when they were counting on each other for so much. She forced herself to take it down a notch.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just my knee. It’s never been great, and it got bumped in the water, but it’s fine. Really.”

  “You’ve been pushing yourself really hard. It’s a cartilage problem? That’s not unusual in a woman of your age—”

  Rao stopped speaking so abruptly that Jansen thought maybe she’d seen something coming toward them out of the dark. It took her a second to realize it was her own facial expression that had scared the younger woman.

  “You looked like you were about to bite my head off,” Rao said. With a little laugh. A very unconvincing little laugh.

  “I need sleep,” Jansen said. It was the best she could do in the way of an apology. It was also, she realized, very, very true.

  “Go ahead,” Rao told her. “I’ll stand watch.”

  Jansen nodded and curled up, as best she could, on the rubbery ground. She felt it shimmy underneath her every few seconds—a sensation she found oddly comforting. Like a mother’s heartbeat, she thought, like—

  The thought never had a chance to come together in her head. She was out like a light.

  It was a dream.

  Inside 2I it was sometimes hard to tell. There was no clear delineation between the darkness external and internal. Dreams came on like reveries, like especially vivid memories. Fantasies.

  In her dream Jansen was alone, orbiting the Earth. An endless cloudscape that rolled beneath her. She could just make out at the top of her vision the limb of the planet, the curvature of it, but she couldn’t move her head. She heard a beep, and a distorted voice whispered to her:

  glide path OK retros OK decay time in four three two one

  A cyclone spun up across Africa, long white streamers of cloud snarling over the South Atlantic. She realized she wasn’t in a ship, she was floating free, in orbit. Except that instead of being in the perfect slowed-down motion of a spacewalk she was at the mercy of a current, as if she were diving—her arms and limbs wavering as if they were being pushed by cold water. She heard a beep.

  acs to set fpi to blowthrough standby verniers to off position at mark

  Was she—was she getting warmer? Was that the motion of air she was feeling? The voice didn’t panic, and she tried not to, either, but if she was too low, if she’d fallen too low in her orbit, if she was going to enter the atmosphere then she—she—she wasn’t in a ship, she was just in a suit that couldn’t possibly survive atmospheric heating. Storms lined up along the Atlantic coast of North America, one two three four, splitting off from a major hurricane in the Sargasso Sea. She wasn’t equipped for this, if she tried to enter the atmosphere like this she was going to—looked like a wet day for most of the Midwest, honestly.

  Beep.

  external temp three hundred and rising go angle is good go chutes prepped go

  She was shaking. She was shaking violently, her shoulders bouncing and her head moving inside her helmet. The Earth was so very, very big, and the atmosphere so thick and full of water vapor. Water vapor condenses around dust in the upper atmosphere to create raindrops, which collect in—

  She looked down and saw her gloves were cherry red. Glowing cherry red. Her fingers started to melt.

  The lights were too bright. Spears of light coming at him from every direction, surrounded by halos in every possible color that burned inside his eyes, that burned, burned—he fought, tried to swim upward through, through the thoughts that churned inside his head, whispering words, little whispering words that he tried to—tried to stick together into coherent thoughts, but—but—good God, his ears were ringing, so loud. So loud.

  “Gaaaaah,” he moaned. His tongue was stuck to his teeth, dried up and glued to the ridged, ranked shapes of them.

  He sat up and rubbed at his mouth with his gloved hands, trying to get the worst of the dried, crusted drool off his lips and chin. It was then he realized something terrifying.

  He wasn’t wearing a helmet.

  Dear God—someone had taken his helmet off. Who had done that? Who, damn it? He twisted around—shit, that made his head spin way too much—and saw Parminder Rao lying there on the ground, one arm under her own intact helmet. It couldn’t have been her, she was a good kid. Where was—where was Jansen?

  He found her curled up in a ball on the unsolid ground. Fast fucking asleep. Everyone was asleep but him. What the hell? Didn’t anybody else ever think about operational security?

  He reached down and touched a pocket on the front of his suit. A pocket he had kept carefully zipped up since they’d left Orion. If Jansen had stolen what was in that pocket, if she’d figured out his secret and—he would—he didn’t know what he would—

  Good God. His brain was mush. He couldn’t think straight. He was getting paranoid, and not the healthy kind of paranoia that came with his job. Jansen hadn’t stolen anything from him. She wasn’t the type. She’d taken his helmet off, yes. She must have had a good reason.

  Like maybe she had wanted to kill him.

  She was resentful about his taking over command of the mission. She hated him. Maybe she—she—

  He crawled over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders. Shook her hard.

  “You took my helmet off,” he said.

  Her face twisted up, her features all contorted and spread out by fear, as if they were trying to get away from each other. He kept shaking her.

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why would you do that?”

  Suddenly Rao was talking to him, trying to get his attention. She hauled at his shoulders and the life-support pack on his back, and he lacked the strength to even pull away from her. He had to let go of Jansen and turn to face Rao.

  “Don’t you understand?” he asked. “She took my helmet off.”

  “You have a concussion,” she told him. “We had to take it off to keep you safe. You’re disoriented, that’s common with—”

  “Fuck that. I’m perfectly fine,” he said, the act of talking making bones shift inside his head. His head hurt like a motherfucker. He wanted to grab Jansen again, grab her and shout in her face. She’d killed Blaine Wilson. She’d killed Stevens. Now maybe she had killed him, too.

  In a second he would tell her. As soon as the pain in his head stopped making it impossible to think. God, his head hurt. It hurt so bad. He reached up and pressed the balls of his thumbs against his temples. He ground them against the skin.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked Jansen. He wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that. She hadn’t tried to kill him. No, of course not, that was just his headache talking.

  The old woman turned around, finally, to look at him. To look at her mission commander, who was talking to her. What the hell had she been thinking, taking his helmet off? It wasn’t safe here, it wasn’t… The thought made him want to laugh.

  Get it together, he thought. Just get it together.

  Jansen held up one gloved hand. She stretched it out toward him.

  “Do you see this?” she asked. “It’s not just me hallucinating?”

  There was a short little memory stick in the palm of her hand.

  “I don’t know where it came from,” Jansen said. “When I woke up it was there. When I sat up it fell out of my hand and I grabbed it back up.” She shook her head inside her helmet. “I don’t understand. Did you—did you fall asleep?”

  “No,” Rao said, though it sounded more like a question. No? “If I did, it was just for a second. I knew I needed to stay awake, to keep watch.”

  Be
hind her, Jansen could see Hawkins sitting down, his head in his hands. He seemed to have calmed down a bit.

  She wished she could.

  Jansen took a deep breath. She looked around them, swinging her light across the rippling surface of the island. There was nothing out there. Nothing she could see.

  She slotted the memory stick into the receptacle on her communications panel. As usual it held just one file. But whereas before the files had all had simple alphanumeric, computer-generated names, like 4AC68883.mp7, this one had a readable name:

  YOUNEEDTOLEAVE.mp7.

  Jansen was almost afraid to play it.

  VIDEO FILE TRANSCRIPT (3)

  [Unlike the previous video files, the video does not suffer from degradation. It clearly shows three prone figures. Two are wearing full space suits. The third is wearing most of a space suit but its helmet has been removed. A small pile of glow sticks is the only source of illumination. The camera moves toward the figures, which do not react to its presence. The camera examines their faces for some time. Then, from out of the camera’s field of view, bare human hands appear in frame to rummage through a backpack.]

  Sandra Channarong [whispering]: You didn’t bring any food. No. Of course you didn’t.

  [The view shifts wildly, as if the camera is being turned around. A woman’s face—not belonging to any of the previously seen figures—appears, but it is seen only in silhouette.]

  Channarong: You need to go back. Turn around and go back to Orion. If you stay here you’re going to die. I’m sorry.

  [The video cuts off abruptly.]

  ASCENDING NODE

  There wasn’t much discussion about what the video meant. Rao wished they could have taken some time to discuss it, to talk about how they should respond. Looking at the others’ faces, though, she could see they’d already made up their minds.

  For Hawkins it was a threat, clear and simple. And the way he responded to threats was by engaging them directly and refusing to accede to demands.

  For Jansen it was proof the KSpace astronauts were still alive. Alive, and close by.