The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  “Hurts,” Jansen mumbled.

  “Is it your leg?” Rao asked, terrified. She looked down at the left leg of Jansen’s suit. There was no way to make a visual inspection, not without taking the suit off. She reached down and carefully grasped Jansen’s knee. “Is it worse than before?” she asked. Then she palpated it. Gave it the gentlest of squeezes.

  Jansen screamed.

  Hawkins followed Channarong up to a little ledge in the side of the arch, not a cave but just a shallow depression where they could sit and talk.

  “Food,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Food. You have to have some food. NASA prepares for everything. Better than we did. They must have sent you in here with some food.”

  Hawkins was too out of breath to give her a real answer.

  “You owe me. I saved your life. I haven’t eaten in three days.” It felt as if she’d been waiting to say this. As if she’d written a script in her head. She must have thought of little else while she was saving them from the worm, he imagined.

  “Just… some sugar water,” he told her. “A little bag of sugar water, in my collar ring. I’m happy to share, but—”

  She grabbed him by the front of his suit and stared down his neck. Her face was intimately close, but all he could see was the dead, white flesh of the necrotic craters. The ruined patch of skin where her ear used to be.

  She found the little tube that delivered the sugar water. It was placed so he could suck on it from inside his helmet without using his hands at all. She had to press her nose against his Adam’s apple to get to it.

  She drank long and deep. Then she released him and took a step away. She wiped at her mouth with her hand.

  “Thanks,” she said. Snarling the word. Sounding as if she hated him because she’d been so desperate.

  He had more important things to worry about than her emotional state.

  “Where is Foster?” he asked, sitting down hard on the bone. “We’ve seen some of his video files, but they were badly degraded. What happened to the three of you?”

  He’d figured he would start with the easy questions. She just turned her face away.

  “Look, I need information. If we’re going to help you—”

  She reached into a pocket and took something out. She tossed it to him, something very small and dark, and he had to lunge to grab it out of the air.

  “What is this?” he asked. Even though he could feel it in his hand. Another damned memory stick.

  “Foster made it,” she said. “It’s a message for you. He wants to make a deal.”

  Of course. KSpace was a commercial operation. It would never give anything away for free. He set his jaw and slotted the stick into the front of his suit, waiting to hear what Foster would demand. There was one file on it, as usual.

  VIDEO FILE TRANSCRIPT (5)

  Willem Foster: We have to know. You understand, right? You understand why we’re doing this.

  Sandra Channarong: I do. Just… can we make it quick? I’m losing my nerve, boss. I know, I know it’s important, but—

  Foster: I’ll only leave it on for a second, then I’ll peel it off. It’s going to be fine. Don’t worry, Sandy. I’ve got you. Ready?

  Foster: I’m setting the timer. Now… applying the tentacle to the left arm. Damn, these things squirm. There. It didn’t take long for Taryn to make contact. It wants to talk to us, I’m sure of it. This one’s sluggish, that’s probably good, but… OK, it’s attaching.

  Channarong: Oh shit. Oh, that doesn’t feel right… Wow. That’s starting to hurt. Can we…

  Channarong: Boss, I’m not sure if it’s working, and—it’s branching. Boss! Boss!

  Foster: Just a few more seconds. Sandy. We have to know.

  Channarong: I can feel it, I can feel… Oh God. It’s old. So old. It’s been waiting so long. It’s cold, where it came from, it… it… I can’t…

  Foster: What does it want? Can you tell me? What does it want with Earth?

  Channarong: It—oh God, this hurts—it—it wants—

  [The recording jumps, and the time stamp indicates that two minutes and fourteen seconds have been edited out. When it continues Channarong is screaming.]

  Foster: Oh my God.

  Channarong: Get it off me! Get it off!

  Channarong watched his face carefully as he listened to the recording. When it was done, she held out her hand. “That’s mine,” she said. “My property.” He ejected the memory stick and handed it back to her.

  “You have a radio,” she said. “Some way to talk to Earth. Don’t lie—I’ve seen you using it, though I have no idea how it works.”

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Foster needs to make contact with KSpace. He needs to tell the Hive what we’ve learned. He’s at the south pole right now, near this fucker’s brain. I’m going to take you there and he’ll tell you everything you want to know—but he gets to use your radio.”

  He pointed at her arm. “Foster did that to you as—an experiment?”

  She nodded. “And it worked. He can talk to the Object. He’s talking to it right now.”

  Hawkins stared at her in disbelief. He’d thought that communication with 2I was impossible. If Foster had figured out how to do it… that could change everything.

  It also made everything a lot more complicated.

  She was waiting for an answer. “Tell me if we have a deal.”

  Still he said nothing.

  Her eyebrows crawled up her forehead as she waited for his response. He was enjoying himself far too much to let the moment go.

  Eventually, though, he had to answer.

  “No deal,” he said.

  WINDSOR HAWKINS: I could visualize you jumping out of your chairs, down there in Pasadena. You didn’t need to worry. I had a plan.

  “Clearly Foster was thinking he was dealing with NASA,” Hawkins told Channarong. “That’s no longer the case. This is a space force mission now, and the space force doesn’t negotiate. You have a duty to your country to tell me what you know.”

  Channarong frowned. “KSpace is a multinational corporation,” she pointed out. “Most of its shareholders are Korean.”

  Hawkins shrugged.

  Foster must have thought he had the ultimate bargaining chip. He had some way to communicate with 2I—or at least he claimed to. Maybe his information was even correct and verifiable. Hawkins didn’t really care.

  2I needed to be destroyed. After a couple of days inside, Hawkins had never been more sure of it. It didn’t matter in the slightest what the organism wanted, or how it planned on getting it. Long before it reached Earth orbit, it needed to be blown out of the sky. As soon as Hawkins found the brain, General Kalitzakis would have a target, and he could launch his kill vehicle, and that would be it.

  He knew that McAllister—and probably the president—would still want to know what 2I had wanted from Earth. Even after the question became moot. Still, he didn’t want to give Channarong and Foster anything if he could help it. They were civilians.

  “You say Foster’s at the brain. That’s where I was headed anyway. I’ll go find him and get what I need from him, one way or another.”

  Channarong nodded. He could see she wasn’t done trying to bargain with him, though. “Help yourself,” she said. “Of course, you’ll never make it there alive.”

  It was his turn to wait patiently for her to elaborate.

  “There are at least five more worms between here and there, eating up the landscape. You wouldn’t have survived meeting your first one if it hadn’t been for me. I know how to get around in here, how to navigate the—”

  “Wait,” Hawkins said. “Wait.”

  He looked down over the edge of the arch. His lights couldn’t reach the ground, not from this height. He looked anyway, thinking he might find some sign of the worm that had tried to eat them.

  “There’s more than one of those things?”

  Channarong gave him a cold smile. “
About thirty, at the moment,” she said. “You saw one of the bigger ones, but they eat constantly, and they’re always growing.”

  “Thirty,” Hawkins said, scowling. That changed some things.

  Channarong walked up to stand next to him. Then she lifted her left arm, the one with the flashlight mounted to it. The light was much stronger than his suit lights, and its beam reached farther. She brought it up and let its light sweep slowly along a length of arch just over their heads, a bridge of bone maybe three hundred meters long.

  Hanging from the underside were dozens of oblong shapes, leathery sacs attached to the arch by thin stalks. One of the sacs twitched violently as they watched, as if annoyed by the light—though that must have been a coincidence.

  Hawkins had no doubt as to what she was showing him. Each of those things was a cocoon with a worm inside, undergoing metamorphosis. Each of them as big as a city bus.

  She brought her arm around, illuminating another arch. More of the sacs hung down from that one. More and more. A third arch—they were surrounded by them, and he was looking at only a tiny number of the arches inside 2I. He could only imagine that every single one of them supported a similar number of cocoons.

  He’d seen ARCS’s map. He knew how many arches there were, had traced the extensive network of them that filled most of 2I’s upper air. He did some quick math in his head. Millions, maybe, he thought. There could be millions of them—

  “There’s going to be a lot more of them, and very soon,” she said.

  “Oh shit,” Rao breathed. She could see Jansen panting for breath inside her helmet, see sweat pouring down her face. “You’re going into shock.”

  She had felt how swollen the joint was. It must have doubled in size. Jansen had been walking on that this whole time. “You said before it was a cartilage problem. I thought it was just bursitis, maybe. But that feels dislocated.”

  “I couldn’t…,” Jansen said, gritting her teeth through the pain. “I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t worth…”

  “Worth what? Talk to me, Sally. I need to know—”

  She stopped because Jansen’s mouth was moving. Forming words she could barely hear.

  “Second chance. I wasn’t worth… I couldn’t save him. Parminder—I couldn’t...”

  Shit. Shit shit shit. Jansen was clearly delirious with pain. That was a really bad sign. If they didn’t do something about that knee, Jansen might never walk again, and inside 2I that could be a death sentence. How could Rao help her, though, while she was inside her suit?

  She dug through her backpack. There was a medical kit in there. It wasn’t much, just some emergency supplies like the bandage she’d put on Hawkins’s head, some antibacterial spray, a couple of pills. She pulled out a blister pack of a generic NSAID.

  Jansen was wavering in and out of consciousness. She was still sweating profusely, and her eyes were rolling up into her head.

  There was nothing for it except to get Jansen out of her suit.

  The helmet first. She reached up and grabbed the latches on the side of the helmet and flipped them open. Then she rotated the helmet, Jansen’s face disappearing as the faceplate swiveled around.

  “Couldn’t save him,” Jansen raved.

  “Who?” Rao asked, hoping that if she engaged with Jansen it might help her stay conscious. “Who couldn’t you save? Holmes? Sunny?”

  “Blaine,” Jansen said.

  Her collar ring clicked, and then the helmet came off with a puff of trapped air. Rao rolled Jansen over on her side so she could get the suitport open. “That was a long time ago, Sally. And there was nothing you could do. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Jansen was probably only peripherally aware of where she was or what was happening. Rao kept talking to try to keep her awake.

  “I know it’s eaten you alive, all these years, what happened to Wilson,” Rao said. “But you need to forgive yourself.”

  “Blaine.” Jansen laughed. There wasn’t a lot of breath behind the laugh, but it still managed to sound bitter. “Blaine the bastard. I hate that guy.”

  Rao almost pulled her hands away from Jansen in surprise. She shook her head and went back to the complicated work of getting Jansen out of the suit. At least Jansen could help, a little, wriggling her shoulders to get her arms and torso through the opening at the back of the suit.

  “I don’t think you meant that,” Rao said. “OK, this is the hard part. Your legs. Your knee is dislocated, and when we pull your legs out—it’s going to hurt.”

  Jansen turned her head, suddenly, to stare at Rao. Her eyes were bright and feverish.

  “I just wanted to go to Mars! I worked so hard for it. I worked hard! And then Blaine killed my dream. He killed it. I hate him for that. I would never say this out loud. But sometimes… sometimes I’m glad he died.”

  Rao shoved the suit down, over Jansen’s legs.

  It was enough to set Jansen screaming again—and this time, it didn’t stop. Jansen’s body started convulsing, her arms beating against the hard torso of Rao’s suit. Rao grabbed her hands and tried to hold them still, but Jansen wouldn’t stop shaking.

  “Jansen! Jansen, listen! I’m going to have to reduce your patella.” Rao tried to hold her still so she wouldn’t do any more damage to herself. “That means I’m going to have to pop your kneecap back into place. Manually.”

  “What the hell was that?” Hawkins asked. “Did you hear it?”

  “Someone screaming,” Channarong said. As if he’d asked about the weather.

  He shook his head and clambered back down the side of the bone arch, back to the cave where he’d left the others.

  He found Rao bent over Jansen—who was out of her space suit. Rao was grasping Jansen’s leg just above and below the knee. And Jansen’s knee—

  It was twisted over to one side, pointing outward from her leg at the wrong angle. It looked more like a tumorous growth than a natural part of Jansen’s body.

  “What the hell?” Hawkins asked.

  “Her knee’s dislocated. It’s been dislocated for a long time and she finally went into shock. Listen. I don’t have any painkillers except NSAIDs,” Rao said. “This is supposed to be done under anesthesia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need to pop it back into place.” Rao gestured him over. “Can you help me?”

  “What should I do?” Hawkins asked.

  “Hold her down. Hold her shoulders. Do you have anything for her to bite down on? A piece of leather is traditional. Or a bullet.”

  He shot her a look. What did she mean by that, asking him for a—

  No, there was no time to wonder what she might or might not know. He searched their gear and found a piece of gauze from the medical kit, folding it over and over before pushing it in between Jansen’s teeth.

  “In the movies they always make it seem like this’ll somehow help with the pain,” Rao told him. “It’s actually just to keep her from accidentally biting off her tongue. You ready?”

  She didn’t wait for Hawkins to say yes.

  The movement was simple and over very quickly. Rao pushed up on Jansen’s leg until it was bent, then pulled it straight again—at the same time shoving the kneecap very hard until it fell back into place with an audible pop.

  Jansen let out a scream that could probably be heard from one end of 2I to the other. It made Hawkins want to clutch his ears, but he knew better—Jansen was thrashing in his arms and he had to hold her down, hold her still.

  Hawkins felt his own stomach lurch with the wrongness of it. He could only imagine how much that had just hurt. It didn’t last long, though. Eventually the screaming and kicking stopped. Jansen’s face went white, and her eyes fluttered closed. She sucked in a series of long, deep breaths.

  Rao made her as comfortable as possible, bunching up the soft parts of Jansen’s suit to use as a pillow.

  “I don’t know how she kept walking on that knee for so long,” Rao said. She lay down next to Jansen, her own face
awash with sweat. “Sheer bloody-mindedness, I guess.”

  Hawkins shook his head. “She was damned lucky you were here.” If they hadn’t had a doctor with them, if Jansen had gone into shock and it was just him—what would he have done? He would have had no idea what was happening.

  Jansen could have died, he thought. She could have died here and he would have had to just leave her body behind.

  He fought to keep his face neutral as he thought about that.

  Sandra Channarong came and stood over Jansen, looking down at her with narrowed eyes. “How soon can she walk again? We need to get moving.”

  “What? Walk?” Rao asked. “Where?”

  “Channarong is going to take us to Foster,” Hawkins said. “To the brain.”

  PARMINDER RAO: Jansen would ask me later about what she’d said when she was in shock. She claimed not to remember, but I think that was a lie. There are things we can’t say to each other, things no one should ever hear. What she said about Blaine Wilson… I told her it was just gibberish, that I hadn’t understood a word. She seemed relieved to hear that.

  COURSE CORRECTION

  They put Jansen on a safety line, but it was obvious to Rao that the patella reduction had been a success. They’d let Jansen sleep for nearly four hours, and once she was awake she’d been able to put weight on her leg. Normally Rao would have put the knee in a cast, and probably demanded that her patient use crutches for six weeks. That simply wasn’t an option inside 2I. She’d been desperately afraid of what might happen once Jansen started moving under her own power, but it was clear that she was already moving better than she had before. She was able to use both legs for climbing, and was barely out of breath when they reached the flat top of the bone arch.

  Rao, who had spent most of her adult life in one graduate program or another—and not a lot of it going rock climbing—almost envied Jansen her endurance. She sprawled across the hard surface and took her time getting used to the fact that the ground wasn’t made out of rubber, nor was it slowly pulsing. The beat of 2I’s heart had gotten deep inside her, and now it felt strange to be cut off from it.