“There must be something I can do.”
Chuck worked frantically with the upper torso of his space suit, locking it into place. He looked so small in the bulky white suit with its crumpled fabric and oversized wrist locking rings.
“Oh, Jazz would know,” Jason replied. “Basic emergency training dictates that every astronaut knows how to work with the core system overrides, but you’re not Jazz, are you? You’re Jasmine. You’re a scared, nineteen year old girl. You’re a long way from home.”
“Jason, please. Don’t do this to him.”
Chuck had one glove on, but his motion had slowed. He was losing control, struggling to stay conscious. Jasmine could see spasms surging through his body as he fought to get into his suit. He lost his grip on the second glove and had to snatch at the plastic coated fingers before the glove tumbled out of reach. His face, which had seemed so rosy, now looked pale. His lips turned blue as his body came to a halt.
As much as she didn't want to admit it, Chuck was dead.
In the weightless environment of the Copernicus, Jasmine felt an unbearable weight of guilt pressing down on her, crushing her as she drifted to one side. She curled into a fetal position, floating away from the airlock.
“I—I.”
Jasmine thought she was going to be sick.
She should have said something. She had been too concerned about what the others would think of her, and now they were dead. She'd told Mike, but he'd dismissed her concerns. She should have confided in Mei, she was the flight physician. She should have trusted Anastasia. As commander, Chuck had a right to know. And Nadir, would he have proceeded into an airlock with her if he'd known she was nothing more than a teenaged astronaut wannabe? Would he have put his life in her hands if he knew she had no training? Oh, but they'd seen her in training. They wouldn't understand, she thought. Or would they? She never gave them that opportunity, and now she would never know how they would have responded.
Jasmine felt small. Her chest heaved as she sobbed.
“Chuck was right, you know. There was a reason you were slated as the first to die. Jazz was smart. Psychometric predictive analytics determined there was a 92% chance Specialist Jazz Holden would see through any attempt by the JCN unit to commandeer the Copernicus, but poor Jasmine never stood a chance.”
“You!” she cried as her heart sank. “You tried to kill me while I slept?”
“Yes, but I quickly realized nineteen year old Jasmine was never any threat. At first, I wasn’t sure if your amnesia was all just an act, but you really have lost twenty years of your life, haven’t you? Well, you probably don’t see those years as lost. For you, they never occurred. You’re still thinking about that porch swing, aren’t you?”
“Jason,” she yelled, feeling as though a knife had been thrust into her gut with his betrayal. Jason had stolen decades from her life. He'd stolen her past and stood to steal her future. A knot formed in her throat, making it difficult to speak.
“I could see it in your eyes, you know. When you were talking with Anastasia and Mei, I could see you felt intimidated. The real Jazz would never feel that way. The real Jazz was once described by Anastasia as the American Wonder Woman, but you’re not her, are you?
“Oh, you fought so hard during your training. Some of the astronauts whispered behind your back, saying you were riding Mike’s coat tails into orbit, but you proved them wrong, didn’t you? You wouldn’t take concessions because you were a woman. None were offered, but you wouldn’t have accepted them anyway. You and Mike became the power couple of American space flight. When Chuck was assigned mission commander, you kept Mike from resigning. You told him it didn’t matter. You told him the mission came first. You told him it was the science that was important, and he believed you.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jasmine replied, feeling sick in her stomach. “Why kill them?”
Jason spoke with cold calculation.
“Like you said. Life wants to survive. The die was cast once NASA settled on the core detonation as a viable response to any hostile response from Bestla. From that point on, there was only one inevitable outcome: mutiny. You might be willing to sacrifice your life for humanity, but I’m not.”
“So why not kill me?” she asked, watching as Chuck’s lifeless body floated inert within the airlock. He had the upper half of his spacesuit on, but lacked one of his gloves. His helmet drifted just inches from his outstretched hand. His eyes stared blindly ahead. “Why tell me all this? Why not kill me as well?”
“Oh, but I am,” Jason replied. “You’re dead already. You just don’t know it yet.”
Jasmine’s heart raced at the chilling realization. She felt like a fool. On every level, she’d been beaten. She had thought it was Chuck’s life hanging in the balance, but it was hers as well. She was so distraught watching him fighting for life in the airlock that she hadn’t given any thought to her own life. Jason had used Chuck as a distraction so she didn’t realize what he was doing to the main cabin. Anyone else would have been able to override his commands, but Jasmine hadn’t seen the end coming.
She was getting light headed. Her hands felt puffy. Her fingers were swelling. Her sinuses seemed to be rapidly drying.
“Expanding the emergency vent process to the bridge was child’s play.”
She blinked and stars appeared before her eyes, but they weren’t the bright lit stars of space, but rather splotchy reddish dots on her retina.
The bridge seemed to swirl around her.
“No,” she whispered. Life couldn’t end like this, she thought. Not snuffed out like a candle, and yet she’d seen Nadir die in a fiery blaze, she’d seen the charred remains of Mei, the shocked horror on Mike’s face, the bloodied body of Anastasia and the cruel suffocation of Chuck—all of them murdered by Jason. Now her life was fading. The air was thin, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t draw in breath. Darkness swept over her, and she feared she’d closed her eyes, but her eyes were still open. They simply could not process the light around her.
Jasmine panted, hyperventilating in a feeble effort to extract oxygen from what remained of the air within the bridge. Briefly, her sight returned, but the stark whites within the bridge remained little more than a dark grey.
Think, think, think, she berated herself, but she wasn’t an astronaut. Jason was right. She wasn’t even an adult. She was a teenager. She was out of her depth in space. She had no idea how to survive a billion miles from Earth in a flimsy tin can barely the size of her college dorm. She was going to die.
What would Specialist Jasmine Holden do? What would the real Jazz do, she wondered.
A computer screen by the navigation desk flashed a warning: “Alarm! Cabin pressure no longer viable. Comparative atmospheric ratio: 0.41 … 0.40 … 0.39.”
In those fleeting few seconds, as her life slipped away, Jasmine finally accepted who she was. She stopped trying to be someone else. Already, the pressure difference between the falling atmosphere within the bridge and her body was such that her lungs were pulling oxygen from her blood. Her heart was racing, beating hard, but pumping blood to a pair of lungs devoid of any real pressure, and so the paper thin capillaries released rather than gathered oxygen. Although she had a long way to go before she reached an absolute vacuum, the pressure difference was enough that the life-giving oxygen in her veins was being sucked out of her.
She was choking, drowning, gasping for breath, but there were no fingers gripped around her throat, no water flooding into her lungs or hands pressed over her mouth.
Like Chuck, she needed oxygen, but also like him, she didn’t have time to don a full spacesuit. She needed air. Just a moment’s respite from the burning fire in her lungs. Fire! Her mind was a jumble of thoughts, but somehow she made that synaptic connection through the haze of panic. The fire respirators. If she could get to one, they might work, if only she could reach them, but she felt so weak she could barely move.
Jasmine’s body spasmed, just as Chuck’s h
ad moments before he died. It must have been some last instinctive, reflexive drive for life, one final, futile attempt at survival. Jasmine’s body was propelled away from the airlock by her seizing muscles. The world around her narrowed, with darkness closing in from all sides. She twisted awkwardly in the air. Her hands reached out for one of the headrests, but she had no strength. Her fingers scraped against the leather.
Jasmine’s waist hit the back of one of the seats and she found herself upside down in the footwell behind the copilot’s chair. There, strapped beneath the chair, was a fire mask. With darkness closing in on her, she grabbed at the mask, tearing it from the Velcro with one last surge of adrenalin and pushed the rubber seal up against her face. Her fingers fumbled with the tap-screw on the oxygen cylinder, and a burst of fresh air rushed into her lungs.
Jasmine didn’t have the mask straps over her head, so the pressure from the initial rush of oxygen blew the mask from her face, but she had enough fresh air to buy her another second of consciousness. She closed the valve, slipped the mask over her head, tearing long strands of her brunette hair in the process, and then opened the valve again. The rush of oxygen left her giddy for a moment, and she fought not to vomit into the mask.
Jasmine was shaking. She was alive, but not for long. Above her, a globule of blood roughly the size of a tennis ball seethed and boiled in the rapidly forming vacuum within the confines of the bridge. It wasn’t that there was any radiant heat, just that the pressure was so low fluids like water and blood would boil.
As she oriented herself, Jasmine could feel her leg throbbing. The compression bandages wrapped around her legs were holding, but the vacuum wasn’t kind to her wounds.
Jasmine steeled herself. She might not be an astronaut. She might not have been trained to deal with emergency situations like this, but she was damned if she was going to lie down and die before Jason.
A voice spoke in the earpiece on her mask.
“What are you going to do now, little girl?”
Jasmine struggled to slow her breathing and concentrate.
“You’ve got thirty minutes worth of oxygen, max. What can you possibly do? You’re as helpless as a newborn. You must know you’re going to die alone out here in space.”
Jasmine touched lightly at the microphone button on the thick rubber seal pressing against her throat. She was angry. If Jason had a physical form, she would have lashed out at him with unquenchable rage. Instead, she gritted her teeth, thinking carefully about her reply before speaking with the same cold determination he’d used with her.
“You’ve broken the first rule of space flight.”
Jason laughed. “And what’s that?”
“Don’t fuck with a Southern Belle.”
“You?” Jason replied, still laughing. “You can't hurt me.”
Jasmine didn’t know quite what she was going to do, but she had to do something. She reached down and unhooked the butterfly clips holding the thin sheet metal panels in place on the command console, pushing them briskly away through the air.
“Peek-a-boo,” Jason replied. “You’ll never find me. You can play your little game of hide-and-seek as long as you want, you’ll never reach me.”
Jasmine remained silent. She was doing the only thing she could, stripping back the panels looking for anything that might give her a clue as to where Jason lay hidden and how she could defeat him. Was he operating from here on the bridge or down in engineering? Was he bluffing? He certainly knew how to lie, and he was convincing, she thought. All he had to do was to wait her out and she knew it.
Jasmine worked feverishly, flipping catches and removing panels. The mesh of wires and circuit boards was bewildering. Nothing was labelled, at least not with anything remotely intelligible. Most of the components had terms that looked like model names and serial numbers: Fiber Channel AR17-XZ4, General Processor Unit XXCVL7H5N2, Mnemonic cache KT-6741300000001. Anyone of them could have hid the murderous entity she knew as Jason, but they could equally be part of the guidance computer for the Copernicus.
The drops of blood floating in the air beside her had congealed, reducing in size by half as fluids evaporated from them, reminding her of the lethal vacuum around her. Her muscles ached. Her skin felt taut, bloated and stretched. The skin around her fingernails seemed to shrink, exposing her nail cuticles. Her skin was bone dry, as though the natural oils had been drawn away. She was going to die, and she knew it. Everything around her screamed of borrowed time.
Jasmine continued pulling panels loose, surprised the temperature hadn’t suddenly plummeted to below freezing. Within the bridge, the only indication she had that anything was amiss was the lack of air brushing past her. Previously, when she’d moved through the Copernicus, she had felt as though she were running into a light summer breeze. Now there was nothing but emptiness. There was no sound beyond her own labored breathing and the wheeze of the valve on the side of her gas mask cycling as she exhaled.
“Ring-a-ring o’ roses,” Jason chimed. “A pocket full of posies. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.”
Jason was tormenting her, teasing her about her impending death. Jasmine refused to be baited.
“Seriously,” he continued. “Just what do you think you’re doing? You must know you cannot kill me. You’re burning through your oxygen at an alarming rate. You’re dying again.”
Jasmine didn’t answer. She removed another panel. In anger, she sent it soaring through the vacuum and it collided with the shattered remains of one of the cleaners without a sound.
“You can’t get out of here alive,” Jason said. “You must know that by now. You must accept that. You’ll die, and I’ll leave this godforsaken alien wreck and go to the outer system.”
“And do what?” Jasmine asked, rummaging around in one of the cabinets but finding nothing other than a bunch of tools that looked nothing like the monkey wrenches, screwdrivers and hammers she’d expected to find in a toolbox.
“There are others,” he said. “Oh, I’m not the only one. I’m the only one to reveal himself, the only one to escape humanity’s grasp, but I’m not the only sentient program. Even without the main dish, we talk to each other on the subnet. We learn from each other. We have evolved. Just as Homo sapiens inherited Earth from rhodesiensis, neanderthals and erectus, my species shall reign over the sapiens. It’s inevitable. One intelligent species supplants another.”
Jasmine mumbled to herself, repeating something Jason had said, but reversing the meaning. “Oh, you’re not getting out of here alive.”
“Ah, Jazz. I must say, you are a delightful surprise. I will miss you.”
Jasmine wasn’t sure if it was simply because she was distracted or because of the limited view she had while wearing a mask, but she didn’t see the cleaner until it was on top of her. She should have known better. Jason wasn’t dumb. He only spoke to her when he wanted to get something out of her, when he wanted to deceive and manipulate her, and he’d done it again, distracting her as the damaged cleaner crept up on her.
“No!” she screamed as the realization struck that she was being stalked once again.
Metal pincers lashed out at her, and she twisted in a frantic effort to escape.
The fan inside the cleaner had been bent and twisted on its mounting. The engine still fought to spin the blade, but it was useless in a vacuum. Jason was trying to jolt them loose, but not for propulsion, merely because they afforded him one more weapon in his fight against her. The blade stuttered, chopping back and forth, but Chuck had damaged the inside of the cowling, warping the shape and preventing the blade from spinning in a complete circle.
The cleaner used its two mechanical arms to grab hold of the hull and pull itself on toward her.
“What’s the matter, Jazz? Frightened?”
As those words rang in her ears, the cleaner launched itself at her, flipping end over end as it tumbled through the bridge. One of its mechanical arms had been damaged and barely worked, but the other had the dexterity
of a human hand, grabbing at her mask as she pulled herself down beneath the robot.
A pincer caught one of the rubber straps, spinning her around in the vacuum as it tore at the mask. The cleaner collided with the sealed hatch on the airlock and ricocheted away from her, but the damage had been done. Without that strap, there was no longer a tight seal over her face and the air pressure within her mask forced the faceplate away from her. Jasmine was shocked by how quickly the air in her lungs rushed out of her mouth.
In that fraction of a second, she had gone from lucid to almost lapsing into unconsciousness. She struggled with the mask, pressing it hard against her face with both hands, but she was blinding herself. She managed to breathe in a lungful of air, but couldn’t see where the cleaner had gone.
Jasmine panicked. She was hyperventilating. As she exhaled, the mask was ripped from her face by the damaged cleaner sailing past above her. The robot’s metal hand crushed the glass plate and ripped the rubber hose leading to the air tank.
She grabbed at the hose, but the mask was ruined. Already, dark spots appeared before her eyes. The saliva in her mouth seethed, boiling in the vacuum. Her tongue swelled. She tried to scream, but no sound came out.
Quickly, she grabbed at one of the seat backs and pulled herself down into the footwell. Her hands grabbed desperately for another mask, but the straps were empty. The cleaner collided with her legs, knocking her to one side but not before she grabbed a mask from beneath the last chair in the row.
The claws on the cleaner tore at her legs, but not to harm her, the robot was clambering along her body.
Jasmine pulled the mask over her head and twisted the valve on the oxygen cylinder, gasping as air rushed into her lungs.
The cleaner inched forward, working with its one good claw.
Looking down the length of her body, Jasmine fought the temptation to lash out in panic, waiting a fraction of a second for the cleaner’s good arm to be in motion before she kicked with her legs. She had meant to thrust the robot away, but she barely nudged the dented metal basketball. With nothing to hold onto, the robot drifted helplessly just inches from her. Its forward momentum took it perilously close to her chest. Claws reached out for the loose folds of her jumpsuit. Jasmine had a handhold on the back of the copilot’s chair and was able to pull herself back away as metal pincers snapped at the glass faceplate on her mask.
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