Orbital Decay

by Malcolm Cross

  “I don’t know any of you anymore.” She gave the next cable a shove, leaving it to twist over the Soyuz’s hatch, and vanished back into its depths.

  Krister sucked down a breath, and croaked, “It’s the vaccine. She’s injected herself with formaldehyde and infected herself with the virus. You heard what she said, the virus drives you mad.”

  Not Charlie. She wouldn’t do that to herself. Would she?

  Alvin held himself well above the hatch, where she’d left him. “Charlie,” he tried. “I want to go home, too. Let me go home with you. Please.”

  “Take your own damn Soyuz, Alvin.” She appeared at the hatch, holding the Soyuz’s airlock doors open, glaring up at him. “This one’s mine, the rest of you can fit in the other one.”

  “What about Yegor and Matvey’s bodies? Rolan? That’s Yegor and Rolan’s Soyuz, too. Are you taking Rolan and Yegor with you?”

  Charlie stayed put, watching him. Silent, now.

  “Rolan’s seat is in that Soyuz. His suit is in there. Krister and I can’t take him with us, Matvey’s a lot shorter than Rolan, he won’t fit in Matvey’s seat. If he’s not snug in that seat when the Soyuz hits the ground...”

  She continued to stare at him, cat-like.

  They had all spent hours being fitted for their Soyuz seats. They were like cradles, hand-carved to fit them exactly. It wasn’t for the force of the launch, but the landing. The Soyuz capsule had parachutes, but it hit the ground with the force of a car crash, even with the cushion of fire provided by the retro rockets that triggered an instant before landing. The rockets and the parachute slowed it enough to be safe. Safe, at least, for an astronaut snug in a form-fitting seat designed specifically to support them in that instant of impact.

  Charlie’s seat was in her Soyuz, along with Rolan and Yegor’s. If she took Rolan’s seat, she doomed him.

  “Please, Charlie. We can take out Rolan’s seat and put in mine. You’re going to try and get it to land in Texas anyway, aren’t you?” He could feel the desperation in his voice, and hated it. “That’s where I want to be; the Russians probably won’t even let me go home. You trust me. You know me. And I trust you. All I want to do is get home to Marla.”

  “I have a mission,” she said, voice wavering. “I have to get the samples home. To Galveston. Stop the pandemic. You going to help me?”

  “I want to stop it too.”

  Charlie scrunched her eyes shut. Shivered. “Fine. Get your suit and seat.”

  Alvin nodded and scrambled away for the next junction in the Russian section, to the other Soyuz.

  Krister met him, smiling. “Good. You’ve bought time, now we have to secure Space Station...”

  “No, Krister. I’m going home. Two of us are dead, both capsules have to return now.”

  Krister stopped, still clutching the pressure bandages on his arm, and stared at him. “We need to keep Space Station manned and flying, Alvin. She killed Yegor and Matvey, we need to get her restrained. Mission Control makes the next decision, not us.”

  “I don’t know that she killed them.”

  “She wants to go home to her family. Killing Yegor ensured her capsule would return home.”

  Alvin locked eyes with Krister. “How do you know I didn’t kill them? I want to go home, too.”

  Krister searched Alvin’s eyes. “You’re not a killer,” he said, at last. “I know that much.”

  Alvin looked away first, and pulled himself into the second Soyuz.

  While he suited up in his Sokol, skipping the safety checks with the intent of running through them with Charlie later, he heard her shout at Krister to stay away from the hatches. Alvin started pulling his seat free from the capsule’s hull, and Krister came by to check on him. Then the Swede simply drifted off, no doubt to consult with Mission Control.

  Mission Control could go to hell.

  Finally, forty tense minutes later, Alvin was ready to transfer his seat. He knocked on the hatch, and Charlie stared hard at him through the narrow gap.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’re ready here.”

  She pulled open the Soyuz’s lock properly, and pushed Rolan’s suit out first. Alvin pulled it along and left it to drift back through the docking module. Then, Rolan’s seat. It was bulkier than the suit, and she struggled with it in the tight space, until at last she relented, letting Alvin get in closer to help pull it through and leave it to drift in the docking module.

  “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and get your seat installed.” She pulled back the faceplate of her Sokol and came out into the docking module, gun loosely in her hand.

  Her eyes were bloodshot. Alvin’s first fear was that it was infection, but... no. He knew those rings under her eyes. “You haven’t slept, have you?”

  “Not since we found Matvey.” She grit her teeth. “First thing I did was grab the guns. Been thinking about it since the attack on Houston. If Rolan got to them first...”

  “You think Rolan killed them?”

  “No.” Charlie tightened her grip on the gun in her hand. “I think you killed them.”

  He froze.

  “You and me. We’re the only ones who really want to go home. If one of the others dies, everyone on their Soyuz has to go back.” She wet her lips. “And that’s why you killed Matvey, isn’t it?”

  Alvin couldn’t help but focus on the gun. There was something about the shadow inside a pistol’s barrel that drew the eye’s attention.

  “And by the same logic,” she murmured, “I’m the only one who could have wanted to kill Yegor. So one way or another, at least ground control can know the killer’s off the station, and Krister can keep things going up here as long as he wants.” She smiled crookedly. “So this is a win-win, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Alvin whispered.

  “After that bullshit, with you telling me Matvey ‘fell asleep’? Fuck you, Alvin! I trusted you and you lied to me!” The smile vanished.

  “I—I didn’t.”

  “No? Then I guess it was me.” She jerked the gun toward the Soyuz hatch. “They’ll figure out this whole mess on the ground.”

  There was nothing he could do except stare at her in disbelief.

  “We’ll get the vaccine in you, get you on the ground, and then you can fucking go home to Marla.” Her voice was strangled. “I hope you’re proud of yourself, Alvin.”

  He stared at her, the tin-foil back in his mouth. “I didn’t.”

  “Just get your seat secured and let’s go home.” She lifted the gun, face cold again.

  “Okay.” He let himself breathe, shuddering breaths that threatened to turn to sobs. But he had to concentrate on putting the seat in place. He pushed it through into the Soyuz, and counted his bolts one by one, like a man praying the rosary.

  He pulled off his Sokol gloves while he worked, let them drift, painfully aware of Charlie hovering over the hatch, staring down at him as he worked, lost in thought. Thinking that he’d killed Matvey.

  But if she hadn’t killed them...

  He looked up through the Soyuz. “Charlie...”

  Her hand was tense on the pistol. She turned her head to look up, away from him, her hair a nimbus around her face.

  Charlie opened her mouth to speak, twisted in surprise, and got out, “Kris—” before jerking out of sight with a strangled yawp.

  “Charlie!”

  Everything was too crowded, too cramped. His seat crushed him against a wall as he tried to move; he had to back away and lever it aside while she screamed and the first bloody tchok of sound was met with another gunshot, another—

  “Alvin!”

  Krister was at the hatch, in the process of pulling her out of the docking module. But she had the gun, had it pointed at him—he let go of her and pushed the gun aside, and Charlie was screaming, blood pouring out of a gash in her suit, the perfect white turning slick red as baubles of her blood floated free. Distantly, Alvin could hear the depressurization alarm.

  She screame
d.

  Alvin clawed at the Soyuz’s hatch door, kicked free only to jerk back to a wrenching halt, his suit snagged on the docking latches.

  Krister beat the machete down into her face. The blade split her skin and exposed scarlet meat with a crunch of bone.

  Charlie stopped screaming. She drifted serenely backwards, trailing globes of blood, her hair gently wafting forward to hide her face, cover her wound, and show just the machete handle sticking free.

  Now Alvin screamed, like he never knew he could scream, kicking and tearing at the hatch, launching himself at Krister with just his fists and nothing else and—

  A whirl of limbs, caught in a maddening tangle. Something hot on his face, as Krister swung him around—a splash of Charlie’s blood. Krister’s teeth gritted, arms locked around Alvin’s waist. “Damnit, Alvin!” The crunch of Alvin’s knee against the module wall as he lashed out. “Stop it!”

  Alvin didn’t stop. Alvin struggled and writhed, and the keening of the alarm came back to him as Krister barked out, “Station is leaking!”

  But Alvin didn’t give a shit about Station anymore. He got his fingers into Krister’s arm, under the bandages and into Krister’s arm, alive and wet, and Alvin fled the bigger man’s grip as pain folded him double. Alvin kicked himself away from the whining of alarms, and the gentle drift of air being sucked into space.

  Alvin fled. He squirmed through the PMA, choked for a moment in the drifting baggage blocking the tunnel, only to burst free and send himself flying-falling-screaming through Unity and down Station’s spine, plummeting straight and true until he grabbed a bar and stopped himself, just above Matvey’s sleep pod.

  “Rolan? Rolan, fuck, I’m sorry, you were—”

  Rolan’s throat had been cut. Blood lined the seam between the sleep pod’s doors, drifted away in broken droplets the moment he’d opened it to see Rolan’s trussed corpse drifting listlessly.

  He’d done it. Alvin had helped. Had helped Krister do it.

  Alvin cast about, he didn’t know where the fuck to hide from his mistakes, from his sins. He stopped. Rolan still had everything he’d been planning to use on Charlie, didn’t he? They’d stuffed the tape back into his pockets.

  Alvin fought down his disgust, and started frisking Rolan’s corpse.

  After a moment the alarms keening from the Russian segment stopped. And then Krister appeared at the PMA hatch, far above, pushing free of the baggage-snarl.

  “Alvin—”

  He bolted. Down, down and away, with a kick at the wall to send him careening into Columbus.

  Yegor was still there. Still dead. And so were the tools. Alvin threw himself aside, shut his mouth and tried not to inhale Yegor’s congealing blood while he searched for the Russian EVA hammer.

  He could feel Krister behind him, and just as he touched the hammer’s cold metal, and turned, gripping the long handle in both hands, he heard, “Alvin. Stop. You need to stop, calm down, and listen to me now.”

  Heart pounding in his chest, Alvin turned, hammer raised, angled back-spike facing outward, and waited for the attack.

  The attack didn’t come. Krister didn’t even have the machete anymore. He simply drifted at the hatch to Columbus, behind Yegor’s floating corpse, hands open, placating.

  Alvin had seen that before.

  “It’s okay now,” Krister said, gently.

  “It fucking isn’t.”

  “Zvezda is depressurizing, but I have the hatches shut. It’s no longer an emergency, Alvin. Now, just... just listen to me.”

  KRISTER HAD KILLED Matvey. Matvey had been watching his movie, and Krister had switched off the fans, and then put him in a headlock until Matvey had fallen unconscious and left him there to die in the still air. One of those things Krister had learned how to do in Sweden’s air force.

  Then, yes, he had killed Yegor. The drill was just... expedient. Krister had been worried about Rolan, but with Alvin’s help it had gone alright, and, well. Alvin had seen him kill Charlie, but it was worth confessing that Rolan had died shortly after Alvin had started messing around with the Soyuz seats.

  The truth was, “You’re the only one who can do it, Alvin.”

  Alvin had both of Charlie’s guns.

  Krister had given them both to Alvin, and that was, perhaps, the only reason they were now speaking in Tranquillity, over the Cupola, with Earth far below them.

  “What do you mean, I’m the only one who can do it?” Alvin had his finger curled over the trigger-guard, and the gun pointed at Krister.

  Krister kept his hands apart. Body language open. Charlie’s blood on his shirt, in his hair, mixed with some of Rolan’s and the bandaged smear of his own gore around his arm, made a mockery of what Krister was trying to express. Calm and peaceful friendliness.

  “Of us all, you’re the only one with any involvement in the actual construction of systems on Space Station. The rest of us, we actually need the ground to keep Station running. We’re like people struggling with DVD players or toasters or whatever overcomplicated appliance has fallen into our hands.” Krister took a level breath. “We need guides that set out everything step by step, and if we were never trained to do it, we’re in trouble. I saw it when you fixed the antenna—you know how these things work, Alvin. You’re the one who can maintain Space Station.”

  The tin-foil in his mouth was steadily giving way to acid. Alvin fought down the urge to retch. “What?” His voice was quiet. So very quiet.

  “The pandemic down there is going to kill everyone.” Krister breathed slowly, forcefully. Keeping himself calm. “A vaccine? It’s too late, Alvin. They’re all infected, down there. Tonight, it’s going to be more than a million people dead. Tomorrow, more than two million, and by the end of the week hundreds of millions will be dead. It’s too late to use a vaccine, even if it worked. It’s too late for us to do anything, Alvin.”

  “But we’ve got it. She, she made a vaccine... She knows... knew what she was doing!”

  “You heard her. I read the research papers just like she did. The virus covers itself in a coat of the body’s own antigens. A vaccine sensitizes the immune system to react to antigens.” Krister smiled, weakly. “You can’t vaccinate yourself against your own cells, Alvin.”

  “It has to work.” Alvin put his hands to his face, the gun cold against his cheek. “Charlie made a vaccine and it has to work, then we have to, to bring the samples to Galveston and they can make more of the vaccine and—”

  “It’s not going to happen. It would take months, even if it could be done, and in months everyone will be dead. If we go down there, we’ll catch the pandemic, and we will die like the rest of them. You hear me?”

  Alvin stared at Krister’s legs, too afraid to look into his eyes. “I hear you.”

  “This plague is going to wipe out almost all of humanity. And you have to survive, because when things calm down on the ground, when there can be said to be anything like ‘survivors,’ they’re going to be in a very different world—” Krister choked on his words. His eyes were watering, but he didn’t try and clear them. “They’re not going to have schools, they’re not going to have telescopes, they’re not going to have antibiotics, they’re not going to have even the basics of a civilization left. Not unless there’s someone to teach them what those things are. Someone to steward it all.”

  Krister squeezed his eyes shut. Bit by bit, his eyelids were covered in a film of tears. “And that has to be you, Alvin. You’re the one who can teach. Who can use that ham radio to stay in touch with the ground. You know more languages than the rest of us; English, Spanish, French, Russian—you could learn more if you had to, couldn’t you?” He spluttered out the words, almost begging.

  “I—I could,” Alvin stammered.

  “There’s enough time still for ground to give you the bandwidth from the Ku band satellites, upload textbooks on just about everything. This is a disaster, Alvin, but—but afterward? Clean sciences. By the time they’re ready, the world will be
so much cleaner. If you teach them, they can skip the polluting industrial ages, go right to clean energy sources, live in harmony.” Krister smiled, eyes tight shut. “This could be the best thing that ever happened to mankind.

  “And that’s why I had to kill them, Alvin, because you have to survive, and you’re not a killer. I’m a killer,” Krister said, breathing unevenly. “I can do what needs to be done, and this way, this way you don’t have that on your head. But now, now there’s six times as much food for you to survive on, six times as much water, air, power, everything. You’ll be able to keep things going up here for years,” Krister babbled, “if you have to you can store the bodies outside, in the station’s shadow they’ll freeze, you could live off them for months more—”

  “Shut up!” Alvin yelled.

  Krister drifted back, stunned.

  Alvin shook his head violently. He couldn’t take it, couldn’t believe Krister was right. “They’ve—they’ve got to have prepared something like that on the ground. Somewhere safe, some—some bunker somewhere.”

  “Just look,” Krister said, gesturing down at the Earth below them.

  It was morning, still, by Station’s clocks. Night, below. The west coast. California. And even as Alvin watched the world turn by, below, he could see that the sparkle of lights wobbling down the coast, from city to city, was uneven. Patches of LA and the Bay Area were dark. The Nevada desert was filled with shadows where Las Vegas should have been blazing all the vice and sin of its neon glory up at the sky.

  “They’re dying. Nobody thought this would happen. Call up the ground, Alvin. Ask them to put you through to the bunkers under the White House, or find someone to answer questions about those damn mice... they’re not there anymore, Alvin. They’re dead, they’re running away... No one’s there.”

  “No,” Alvin murmured.

  “I killed them so you wouldn’t have to, Alvin. It has to be this way.”

  “No. I’m supposed to go home, I’m supposed to find Marla—”

  Krister slipped past the pistol, and wrapped his arms around Alvin. His embrace was sickeningly warm and reassuring. “It’s okay, Alvin. You’re an innocent; it was all me, my sin to bear, not yours. You won’t even have to put up with me, I’ll be gone.” Krister’s voice wavered back and forth, guilt warring with a desperate childlike need to be told it was alright. That he’d done the right thing. “When things are alright, and you’re ready, I can, I can just go to sleep in Rassvet like Matvey did ...”