The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  “How, Valya?” I ask him, my eyes still closed. “How am I forcing you?” I imagine myself sitting by the open fire in our house, the bitter cold kept at bay by the burning wood I collected during the day. Mischa sits by my side, her stockinged feet stretched across my lap. She is knitting a bonnet for Niki, using the rough wool from our own goats. I am happy.

  If only that damned alarm would shut up.

  “We can’t stay here, tovarisch,” Valentin says from somewhere very far away, a world away, four hundred kilometres and an apocalypse away. “Surely you know that. Nobody is coming for us. There is nobody left to come for us.”

  “No,” I breathe.

  “The Americans knew it,” he continues. “Coulter knew it. Sutton knew it.”

  Commander Pete Sutton was the first to go. Not that long after the last formal transmission from Earth, I passed him in the access tube. He told me he was going to get some fresh air. I hadn’t thought much of it, had other thoughts on my mind, selfish thoughts. We’d all said that exact phrase numerous times during our stay on the ISS; the Elektron oxygen generator and C02 scrubbers kept us alive, but it could never quite free us from that stale smell of chemicals and exhalations. Ironically, the cleanest air in the station was in the EVA spacesuits, with their independent oxygen supplies, so sometimes we’d crawl into one, just for half an hour or so, to be free of the repeatedly-recycled air for a while. Getting some fresh air.

  That was the last time anyone saw Sutton. He went into the Quest airlock module, where the EVA suits were stored. All the suits were present and accounted for. The logs show that the internal airlock door opened and closed, and then the external door was opened. We closed it from the service module afterwards. I often think that I should have realized what he was going to do, should have tried to stop him. But I was caught in my own despair, thinking of Mischa and Niki down below us, and the ever-spreading plague.

  “One minute, Pasha,” Valentin’s voice comes from the intercom. “What’s it going to be?”

  “I can’t... I can’t leave them.”

  “Pasha, they’re dead. They’re all dead. You know that.”

  “What about those short-wave transmissions we got?” I ask. I open my eyes again, certain that now, surely now, there will be a glimmer of light in the darkness beneath us. There is none. “The people talking about that place in America?”

  “Grants Pass?” Valentin asks, derision clear in his voice. “It’s a myth, Pasha. A desperate belief, based on a viral email. Don’t be fooled into false hope.”

  “Any hope, even a false hope, is better than none.”

  “Chush sobachya,” he spits, and the venom in his voice makes me flinch. The darkness of the world beneath the station suddenly seems to lunge at me, fills the control module, and I understand that my friend, my comrade, my self-proclaimed brother Valya’s soul has also been engulfed in the shadow of a dead planet, a lost future. “There is nobody down there for us anymore, Pasha. Nobody to come and get us. Nobody to return to. The only way is up. Up and out and away.”

  “No.”

  “So be it.”

  The siren stops. For a moment my heart is filled with relief; he must have cancelled the false alarm, come to his senses.

  Then, in the shocking silence, I hear a hiss.

  A breeze plays with the sleeve of my jumpsuit, softly at first, then stronger. The hiss becomes a dull roar, and then a howl, as the emergency vents in the Zvezda service module open wider and wider. It takes me a moment to truly understand what’s happening.

  The module is open to space.

  In an emergency fire situation, such as the one Valentin simulated, the system allows time for crew to evacuate the module before sealing the hatches to the rest of the station and opening the vents to space. The air is expelled, like one long foul breath, and the fire is instantly suffocated. As is anyone unfortunate enough left behind in the module. Of course, there are systems in place to prevent that happening. Systems that Valentin has overridden.

  The air is growing thinner, the sound of the wind slowly fading. Each breath is a challenge now. I take a deep breath and hold it, reflexively, even though rationally I know it’s the wrong thing to do. I know I can’t survive this, but the body does what it must to at least try. Clinging to desperate hope, like stories of a town in Oregon, a haven from the end of the world. Too far, though, too far for Mischa and Niki. Too far for me, though only four hundred kilometres away, still too far.

  Sparkles of light dance in the corners of my eyes. My lungs are burning. I don’t have long. There is still air in the room, enough to flutter pieces of paper that pirouette past my eyes, but not much.

  There is nobody down there for us anymore, Pasha.

  No.

  The only way is up. Up and out and away.

  No. There’s another way. One that doesn’t involve dying here, trapped in an airless tin can, four hundred kilometres away from home.

  I push myself away from the window, towards the hatch. I float to the wall beside the hatch, and press the release button, the one I’d locked earlier, to keep Valentin out, to keep him from carrying out his crazy plan.

  The door doesn’t open.

  Of course it doesn’t. I’ve unlocked it from my side now, but the fire alarm has sealed it. I’m going to die here after all.

  I release my breath, the air oozing from my lungs like a sigh or surrender, a final exhalation, a death rattle. I can barely hear it. My hands and feet are swollen and numb. Something pops deep in my skull, behind my left eye, and pain fills my head. I try to scream, but have no breath for it.

  Then the wind hits me in the face, and I’m hurled back into the Zvezda’s comfortless environs. I hit the far wall hard and bounce away, tumbling in mid-air. My breaths in the cool, stale air are ragged but thankful. My eyesight slowly returns, at least in one eye, blurry and red as it might be.

  The first thing I see is Valentin standing over me. No, not over me; over the controls I’m slumping against.

  I hold my hands up to him, seeing the blooms of haemorrhages under the skin and down my arms, blood pooling beneath the thin layer in broad swirls and strokes, a red and blue finger-painting. “Wait...” I croak, though I don’t expect him to.

  He does. He looks at me.

  “I can’t leave, Valya,” I tell him again. “But I know you have to. I understand now. I understand.”

  He nods. He asks me something, but I can’t hear him; my head is filled with ringing, like I’ve been to a rock concert. But I can see his lips well enough; I know what he’s saying. “What do we do?”

  I tell him.

  ~ * ~

  From four hundred kilometres up, the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift across the curved faceplate of my helmet, distorted by the thick polycarbonate fishbowl that’s keeping the cold emptiness at bay. Or, at least, the cold emptiness that s outside my spacesuit.

  “Pasha? How are you doing?” Valentin’s voice is tinny but loud in my ears. It makes me jump a little.

  “How do you think I’m doing?” I nudge my thruster controls and rotate to face the station. I’m surprised how far I’ve travelled already; the ISS is large in my view, but not as large as I expected. From here, maybe two hundred meters out, it looks like some kind of robotic insect, with its golden solar panel wings and spindly body. It’s beautiful as well, much more beautiful from outside than from within.

  Of course, my eyesight isn’t what it once was. My right eye has almost returned to normal, its vision focused and clear enough. The left is still just a blur, though, from the damage it sustained. My hearing is still shot too, a maddening, relentless tinnitus filling my ears. Valentin told me my eardrums had nearly burst, that I’m lucky I’m not entirely deaf. At any rate, adjusting the volume on the radio in my suit did the trick.

  “I’m going to activate the boosters in a minute,” Valentin tells me. “Run them dry.”

  “Do you really think you can break orbit, Valya?” I ask. I’m no
physicist, but his scheme doesn’t really strike me as practical.

  “Of course,” he replies, but there’s hesitation in his voice. I know him well enough to recognize when he’s lying.

  “Well, with only you on board, the food and water supplies should last much longer,” I point out.

  “Not that much longer,” his voice crackles in my ears. “But long enough to finally become a true cosmonaut. My father would have been pleased at last.”

  “I’m sure he already was,” I told him, thinking of my boy, my Niki. My chest hurts.

  Valentin chuckles at that. “Well, I suppose I’ll find out, when I see him in hell.”

  I smile. “You do know you’re insane, don’t you?”

  “You can talk, tovarisch. I’m not the one attempting to walk home from outer space.”

  That makes me laugh out loud. “Hey, it’s only four hundred kilometres. Piece of cake.”

  Valentin laughs as well, for a moment, but falls silent. For a long moment, the only sound is my breathing within the suit.

  Then he speaks again. “Do svidaniya, Pasha,” he says seriously. “It’s been an honour working with you.”

  “And with you. God speed.”

  I imagine the face he would have made at the religious reference, but he says nothing, which I appreciate.

  Bright light flares on the station’s attitude and altitude control boosters. There is no sound, not here in airless space. Nothing seems to happen at first, but slowly the station begins to draw away from me, its orbiting speed increased bit by laborious bit. It grows smaller in my helmet’s visor, becoming little more than an insect itself, then a bright star. Finally it vanishes altogether, hurtling around the curvature of the Earth. I know that, if I remain facing this way, it will come back into sight eventually, overtaking me as it speeds around the earth even faster than me, faster than twenty five thousand miles an hour. But I don’t want to see it again. I’ve said my goodbyes to my friend.

  It’s time to go home.

  I use my own thrusters to rotate back towards Earth. Once again, I watch the terminator drift across the planet beneath me, sending the world into darkness. I just stay there for a while, enjoying the peace.

  But it won’t last. I put my rear thrusters on full, and push myself towards Earth as fast as I can.

  It takes only three minutes of solid thrust to empty my tanks, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference, not yet. But once gravity gets a better hold of me, I’ll start to notice it. It’s like skydiving. In fact, it is sky-diving, just from an impossible height.

  And at an impossible speed.

  I know I’ll burn up like a meteor once I hit the atmosphere. Even if I’d used my thrusters to slow my orbital speed down, I’d never have managed to decelerate enough to survive this. But that’s alright. I’ve accepted my fate, the same as Coulter and Sutton had. The same as Valentin has.

  Something catches my eye, to my right. A glimmer of light on the ground, the first I’ve seen in weeks. My heart seems to stop for a moment. Could it be the town in America, Grants Pass, where survivors have fled to start a new life, a new world? Or perhaps it’s a farm house near Vladivostok, miraculously spared the ravages of the worldwide pandemic that has killed so many others.

  It makes no difference. Not now.

  I watch the light track across my view as I fall from space, until it vanishes in the blur that is my damaged left eye. I couldn’t leave them; I had to stay, to return home, as I promised my beautiful wife, my young son. Tears fill my eyes, beading in the weightlessness, floating inside my helmet like stars, like ghosts, like wishes.

  A spark scintillates across the visor of my helmet. Then another. And another.

  Don’t be afraid, Mischa, Niki. Papa’s coming.

  * * * *

  Perth-based writer Martin Livings has had over sixty short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His short works have been listed in the Recommended Reading list in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and have appeared in both The Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy, Volume Two and Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2006 edition.

  His first novel, Carnies, was published by Hachette Livre in 2006, and was nominated for both the Aurealis and Ditmar awards.

  http://www.martinlivings.com.

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