Orbital Decay

by Malcolm Cross

  Marla grunted noncommittally, in the way she did, with the cute little squeak at the end. “Meh. They’re talking about extending the quarantines from downtown to the whole city, so Lil closed the office early. If the quarantine extends it’s not like anyone’s going to keep their dental appointments.”

  He carefully tucked the photo against the screen, and let the laptop drift in front of him while he tried to massage the tension out of his skull. “Well. Is it an ‘if it extends’ or a ‘when it extends’? It—uh. It sounded like the Milligans are caught up in a new quarantine extension.”

  “Yeah? What did Charlie say?”

  Alvin bit his tongue. “She didn’t say anything. I—I pretty much overheard things with her kid.”

  “Mmm. Hm. I haven’t heard anything on the radio, but they’re on the other side of Houston, so I don’t know. Why’s the government being so cagey about this, honey? There are so many conflicting messages and nobody’s really certain about anything... I heard one thing on CNN that said not to drink tap water, to drink bottled water only? Then Fox said that tap water’s fine, it’s more of a risk to go out and buy bottled water.”

  “Do you have masks?” He folded his arms. Hugged himself, really.

  “Yeah. I have surgical masks. I stole a box of them out of the supply closet.” Her smile came through in her voice. “Enough for me and enough for you, when you get home, assuming this isn’t all over by then.”

  Smiling back at her picture, Alvin shook his head. “I’m sure the Russians will give me plenty of masks the second the Soyuz pops open.”

  “Mmm. But will theirs smell of perfume and whiskey?”

  “Hey, if you’re going to talk dirty at me, let me double-check I’m alone...”

  “Oh, I’m sure everybody up there’s dying to know that after a couple of drinks you like me with a dab of Chanel and nothing else.”

  His nose was a little stuffy—yet another problem of life in zero gravity—but he could just about smell the floral tang of her perfume mixed with the edge of aged alcohol on Marla’s breath. Alvin turned his back to the experiment airlock, kept half an eye on the module’s entrance, and quietly murmured, “To be honest, honey, I think I’d rather keep your sweet-talk all to myself.”

  “Aw. Does that mean you’ll read me sweet little French poems? Or will it be Italian ones, now?”

  “I was thinking about trying to learn Mandarin, they’ve got lots of poets...”

  Marla laughed. Alvin did too, and for a little while home didn’t feel all that far away.

  LATER, AFTER HE and Marla’s bandwidth had run out and they’d said their goodbyes, Alvin grabbed packets of barbecue steak, shrimp sauce and tea along with his chopsticks from Zvezda, then settled in with Charlie in Tranquillity, the two of them taking a meal above the Cupola. Charlie was shaking her head, accepting a clean pair of scissors from Alvin, using them to clip open her food packet.

  “I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.” She clamped the packet shut before the pink, plasticky looking crumbs floated out, and squeezed a little water into her ‘Clam Chowder,’ giving it slow and careful shakes to rehydrate the food. “Rudy”—her husband—“he... fuck. Just... fuck. Rudy almost, almost, got quarantined out of the neighbourhood, and Nate was alone at home. He was driving home with the groceries just as the army, the fucking army, were putting in quarantine checkpoints.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Apparently one of the houses two blocks over—two blocks—is wrapped up under a giant cover, like exterminators are going to fumigate it for termites. A whole fucking house in plastic.” She shook her head again, and sucked from the open corner of her food packet. Champed the mush between her lips, pulled a face, and massaged the packet to mix it up a little more. “Fuck. It doesn’t even taste of anything.”

  A flick of the finger sent the shrimp sauce slowly in her direction. Alvin nodded at it. “Try some of that.” Being in space was a little like having a head cold, no gravity to pull the fluids down out of your head. It dulled the senses, but sometimes the shrimp sauce managed to taste of something.

  “Thanks.” Charlie plucked the sauce out of the air and squirted some into her food. Started mixing the pack all over again. “Anyway.” The expression of disgust for her food was replaced by utter misery. “Rudy and Nate caught up in that shit... Whatever this is, it’s just not influenza. It’s just not, and I can’t understand why everyone keeps pretending it is.”

  “It’s not?” Alvin tentatively caught a square of steak with his chopsticks, and nudged it against the bubble of shrimp sauce clinging to the plastic sheet he’d duct-taped to the wall for a ‘plate.’ “I mean, I don’t really think it’s regular bird flu, but I don’t know what it is. The bloody cough doesn’t sound right.”

  “You can wind up coughing up blood with influenza if your throat’s raw, and you cough hard enough to rip the lining.” Charlie knew more about it than Alvin did. Alvin knew about computer viruses, Charlie knew about real viruses. She’d studied microbiology before entering the astronaut corps, and Alvin had done systems design for satellites. “But that’s clearly not what’s happening to these people. Just about all the cases of deaths in non-infants and non-elderly, the ones out of the three hundred and fifty-ish cases that are public, anyway—”

  “Three hundred and fifty? Christ.”

  “I know, right? Anyway, they’re almost all haemorrhaging somehow. Coughing up blood, bits of sloughed off lung tissue, like, like...”

  “Like Ebola?”

  She frowned, wagging her head side to side. “Kinda, not really, sort of.”

  Alvin sucked up some of his tea, staring at her. “This isn’t the thing those people you know at Galveston had the accident with, is it?”

  “No, no, no, no,” Charlie stuttered. “They were working with actual Ebola Zaire at the Galveston National Laboratory. And that was six months ago, it can’t be related to this. This, this bird flu thing, it’s not a filovirus like Ebola.”

  He kept watching her. Watched her steadily go paler and paler as she thought about it.

  “Ebola sits in your liver, the virus digs into your liver cells and hijacks them, makes them replicate more and more copies of itself until the cells burst. Then the organ breaks down, literally breaks down into pieces, and it spreads to the rest of your body, and it’s absolutely not the same... The pandemic isn’t killing nearly that many people, even if less than ten percent of sufferers are recovering from the chronic effects.”

  Alvin sipped his tea, looking down at the Cupola. “You know, when Tom and I were talking earlier, he mentioned that they’d cancelled leave for about ten percent of the astronaut corps.”

  She frowned quizzically at him. “Ten percent?”

  “Yeah. Tom figured it out, mentioned it while we were chatting. They’re pulling in everyone who’s O-negative. They pulled in Greg Manley and Josh Thursten, he was in the same graduating class as them, and the NASA docs with them on survival training used to tease that they’d have to provide blood transfusions for everybody else. Think it’s related?” Alvin asked, shepherding floating steak squares with his chopsticks.

  She hesitated, then shook her head slowly, ducking her head forward to keep the mass of her hair out of her face. “Blood type... it’s not very relevant, immunologically. Not usually.”

  “What’s your type? I’m O-positive.”

  “B-negative.” She kept frowning, staring down at the Cupola. At Earth.

  “So this thing isn’t why they’re pulling up all the O-negatives? It’s something else?”

  “Probably. Well... I don’t know, there’s viral envelopes, around the capsid.”

  “Capsids?”

  “A capsid is the virus’s coating, its skin. And some viruses kind of... wrap their capsid up in a sheath of material they pull out of a victim’s cell walls.” She squeezed a little chowder out of her packet, a big floating globule. “So if the chowder is the cell wall membrane, a virus kinda...” She snatched away
one of his steak squares and nudged it against the watery surface of the chowder.

  Surface tension immediately bonded the steak to the chowder glob, but the chowder wasn’t entirely liquid, it was thick, slow. Bit by bit the glob pulled the steak into itself, like a drop of water on a window swallowing another droplet. Gradually the glob enveloped the steak, leaving only the evidence of an oily sheen of shrimp sauce on the now misshapen globe of pinkish chowder.

  He blinked at it. “So it pulls part of the cell wall out to use as camouflage.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie sucked her fingers clean, then lunged over and slurped the steak and chowder mix out of the air. She patted her mouth dry and stuck her napkin back against the exposed duct tape on the wall. “That’s one theory for why we have distinct blood types. So our bodies can defend themselves against viruses with envelopes pulled out of other people with slightly different blood types.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah. And that’s probably why if we had to try and transfuse my blood into you, or if we gave you a transplant from someone whose tissue didn’t match yours, your immune system would attack the foreign cells. Not very useful for us.”

  “Mmm.” Except Alvin wasn’t paying full attention anymore. That thing about blood types... it was almost familiar. He was sure he’d read something about that, and recently. He struggled to remember where, but before he could think of it, Charlie pointed down at the Cupola with a gasp.

  “Look! It’s night.”

  The Cupola was huge. Seven panes of glass, six around the circular centre, forming a rough dome you could stick your body into and look outside, look around at Station and Earth and space.

  Naturally, as the spot with the best view and always angled towards Earth, it was where everyone tried to get a photograph of their hometown from orbit. In fact, Alvin and the other NASA astronauts had all spent a couple of weeks training with professional photographers specifically for making sure their holiday pictures from space would be as striking as possible.

  Privately, Alvin didn’t think that amateur photographers would need all that much help to make photographs from Station striking. Below them—above them, as he flipped over to join Charlie at the glass—the faint glow of the sunlit sky formed a slender blue band in the distance. The moon was barely visible as a greyish freckle of reflected light on the Atlantic Ocean to one side of Africa, turning the streaks of clouds a glowing silver. Speckled dots of light clustered around Africa’s coasts, faded and wandered across the continent like rare stars, and bloomed into fire at the base of the Nile, racing up its course to the Mediterranean, ringed in golden light. Above that, Europe was compressed into a glowing, glittering band of sparkling pinpricks vanishing over the horizon.

  The sight of Earth at night, and the glitter of the cities below, pulled Alvin away from his worries and made him focus on the simple wonder of where he was. Of how small the world seemed, of all the people down there, of the vast distance he could take in with just a glance.

  Charlie gently cranked open the shutters on the six side-panels, turning the knobs beneath the windows one by one. Opening up the view, giving Alvin a glimpse of Madagascar at the horizon and the dark gulf of the Indian Ocean beyond, the dark bulk of Space Station around them, light spilling from the few small windows in the other modules.

  “Such a clear night,” she murmured.

  They’d only be over it for another forty minutes or so. When everything below them was so very fleeting, there only a moment before it vanished, it was hard to look away.

  ALVIN FORGOT ABOUT his troubles until the next morning. He woke up to the hum of the ventilation fan pulling air through his sleep station, and muddled his way through the first moments of consciousness by trying to remember what was real and what was just a dream. Sometimes the sense of weightlessness, the absolute and total comfort of floating free, felt too much like he was still asleep. After all, most people only got to fly in their dreams.

  He’d been dreaming that he’d been walking along the station’s spine, from Zvezda down toward Unity. Not floating, walking, under gravity. And that once he’d struggled through the narrow canal of the PMA, brushing aside bags of water that had floated away from him, he’d been in a long dark corridor, like a deserted hospital, and that he couldn’t find Marla. But his father had come by and given him Marla’s medical file, and he’d seen that her blood type was AB-positive, not O-negative, and something about that had made him afraid.

  That was when he remembered his conversations with Charlie and Tom. When he remembered the nagging feeling of not quite remembering something. And in the calm, relatively quiet warmth of his sleeping bag, lightly anchored to the wall of his sleep station, he remembered exactly where he’d seen it. The mice were AB-positive, A-positive, B-negative. And none of them were O-negative.

  He fumbled around, trying to find where everything in the little wardrobe-sized cabin had floated to during the night, and unfolded the laptop in there with him against the wall. He left it there to boot up, silently unzipped himself from his sleeping bag, and slipped out still in just his underwear.

  The lights were on, but Space Station was still. The doors of the other three sleep stations, flimsy and curtain-like as they were, were still shut. It was still a little while before the wake-up call came, but as usual, Alvin had woken earlier than anyone else in Harmony.

  He edged over, just a few feet, tumbling gracelessly, grasping at the handrails and bungee cords strung up against the walls until he’d lined himself up right. Then he kicked off a rail, shooting from Harmony, through Destiny, and up towards Unity. He lightly patted the module wall in Destiny, kept himself on course, and stopped himself in Unity, just short of the twisted throat of the PMA.

  The PMA’s interior was one of the few dark places on Space Station. To his sleep-fogged eyes, the bundles of white packages strapped along its sides seemed like organic, cancerous lumps. Alvin shuddered, despite himself.

  If he was going to face down his problems, first he needed tea.

  With a packet of tea stolen from the clear plastic binder it was held in, he tucked himself through the hatch into Tranquillity to get a shot of lukewarm water from the purification machine beside the toilet. With the water recycler’s help, yesterday’s tea was going to become today’s tea.

  He scuttled back into his sleep station with a guilty thrill of secrecy, as if he’d raided the fridge at midnight, and sank back into the warmth of his sleeping bag to suckle tea and go over his schedules for the past few days to look for what worried him, now that his laptop had finished booting.

  Space Station was, in essence, a colossal flying laboratory. The goal was science, and almost every surface of Station not dedicated to supporting life and station operations was covered in racks. The racks were simple places to slot in and operate scientific equipment and self-contained experiments, providing them with power and cooling or heating or water or whatever it was the experiment required. Some needed tending, some were almost automatic, the astronauts aboard Station slotting them in and out like modular components in a computer.

  It didn’t take Alvin long to find what he’d been trying to remember the previous day. It was about the mice. Or more properly, the AAMICE.

  Antigen Altered Microgravity Immune Cell Experiment.

  He’d had to check its status a few weeks earlier. The mice were an experiment in a sealed box, mounted on an external pallet outside the Japanese Experiment Module. Among the thirty or so other experiments he’d had to interact with—some of them with fanciful acronyms like JEXTER and EXERCISE, some with more prosaic strings of letters like BKCE and VDMM—the mice were the only experiment that he needed to bring physical samples home from. In fact, he knew just the spot in the cramped Soyuz capsule he was supposed to stick them into, a little nook just three inches wide.

  It hadn’t interested Alvin for any reason beyond having to prep it himself before bringing it home. He’d only scanned the experiment’s details long enough to make s
ure he didn’t need to practise any procedures for it beforehand. Looking at it again, the details made his spine prickle. The sealed box contained a colony of mice, an infectious agent, and their life support.

  The mice had been genetically altered with retroviruses to produce human blood group antigens on their red blood cells—a significant undertaking by itself, since mice had completely alien tissue. But as he scanned the list of compartments in the life support box, one thing became clear. Of the eight major blood groups of the ABO and Rhesus system, only seven were represented in the transgenic mice. AB-positive and -negative, A- and B-positive and -negative, and O-positive.

  Not one of the little mouse astronauts was O-negative, like the astronauts on the ground that Tom knew, all with their leave cancelled.

  But what the hell did that mean? Were they trying to make sure O-negatives couldn’t mix with the rest of the astronaut corps? Trying to make sure no O-negative mice could foul up their experiment by infecting the rest?

  Alvin thought about it in the minutes he had until the first strains began to play of music that Houston piped through the station’s speakers for the morning’s wake-up call, but he didn’t have the time to concentrate on it for longer than that. At breakfast proper, while Alvin surreptitiously discarded his empty tea-packet, Krister Munson—the crew’s commander, a Swede from the European Space Agency—pulled a thin sweater down over his buzzed-down hair, pushing his free-fall fattened face through the neck hole. He turned to Alvin, only to grumble, “The flight computer crashed, again,” in his thick, Nordic accent.

  “Zvezda’s?” Alvin asked, making space for Matvey—one of the Russian astronauts who slept in the station across from Alvin’s—to get by on his way along Station’s spine. “Or ours?”

  “Of course Zvezda’s. And it brought down ours with it. So that’s your job for today.”

  “Well... Well gosh-darn,” Alvin mumbled hesitantly.

  Krister and Charlie both laughed; Alvin went beet red. He hadn’t ever really picked up the habit of swearing healthily, like Charlie had.