The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  Our capsule spirals forward, and I can see the red planet better now, looming closer. I let out a whoop of adrenaline, my body thrumming with equal parts excitement and terror. Because this is it—the moment of no return. Either I successfully achieve the rendezvous and docking with the Pontus and the Mars supply ship, or I am doomed to flounder in space until I die. Not exactly low pressure.

  “Okay, Leo, it’s time to begin Mars Orbit Insertion,” Lark directs me through my headset. Even she is starting to sound on the edge of her seat.

  I nod and, entering the commands on the touch screen, I fire the ship’s rockets, slowing my speed to match Mars’s orbit. The action brings me back to the day Naomi and I completed a simulation of this very event, the same day I kissed her for the first time—and I am suddenly dizzy at the nearness of her.

  This isn’t a dream, or a simulation. I am actually looking at Mars. I’m closer to heaven than I’ve ever been. And I could be just minutes away from seeing Naomi again.

  I study the scrolling numbers on the screen in front of me, watching with bated breath as my velocity starts moving closer and closer to that of Mars. And then—with a whoosh that takes my breath away—the WagnerOne is sucked into orbit.

  My hands shake as I use the Search for Satellite feature on the cockpit’s touch screen, watching as, for the first time, it lights up green. Satellite(s) Found.

  Two green dots blink straight ahead, about a hundred miles apart. The Pontus is making headway toward the Athena supply ship—and based on the calculations on my Orbital Dynamics screen, I have approximately twenty minutes to catch up. Which means it’s finally time to make contact.

  I grab the wire transceiver and lean over the microphone, uttering the words I’ve dreamed about saying for months as I radio the Final Six.

  “Ciao to my friends on the Pontus. This is Leo Danieli, approaching on the WagnerOne spacecraft. I’ve been sent from Earth as reinforcement to your mission, and I’ll be close enough to dock in T-minus twenty minutes.”

  I can barely breathe as I wait for a reply, imagining how Naomi will react, what she will say. But then Kitt reminds me we need to accelerate and I return my focus to the cockpit console, steering us through the air until I am almost in the Pontus’s wake.

  I continue radioing the Final Six, resending my message every three minutes, but the only response is static. I punch at the wireless, trying to figure out why I’m not receiving a reply—until I hear Kitt shout out, grabbing the joystick in front of me. I follow his gaze just in time to see a flock of laser bullets flying in my direction.

  “We’re under attack! Lark, Wagner Enterprises, do you copy? Our ship is under attack!” Kitt barks as I plunge our capsule downward, just missing the strike. But this drop in altitude could cost me everything.

  Of all the complicated reactions the Final Six could have had to my arrival, I never would have predicted this. They can’t have known it was me, but still . . . what does it say, what does it mean, that their first instinct on seeing a foreign ship isn’t to welcome us and ask questions, but to kill? And while I might have survived their attempt, it almost doesn’t matter—not now that I’ve lost alignment with the Pontus and am dangerously close to missing the ship altogether.

  Eighteen

  NAOMI

  A WARNING FROM CYB CUTS THROUGH MY DREAMS, HIS VOICE echoing across every room of the Pontus.

  “ALERT: Suspicious spacecraft sighting. Deploying warning missiles in defense.”

  What? I struggle to make sense of the words in my groggy state. We’re just hours away from our Mars rendezvous, which means we’re too far into deep space for there to even be another spacecraft. Unless . . . could this have something to do with our last connection to Earth? Did ISTC try sending us a lifeline, only to have our AI mistakenly go into attack mode?

  I jump out of bed, not even bothering to change out of my pj’s before hightailing it out the door and to the elevator pod. I collide with Sydney along the way, and we make it to the main hatch just as Minka, Beckett, and Dev are climbing through. The five of us move as fast as we can through the winding tunnels and capsules in zero gravity, our panic costing us our coordination as we jab each other with elbows and limbs. Every couple minutes, the ship roars with the sound of hurling weaponry, sending a shudder through the walls and a stab of fear through my chest.

  By the time we make it to the command module, the only light I can see through the dark windows is the blinking steel dragonfly in the distance. But I know that ship—it’s the same one we’ve been chasing, the Mars supply vessel.

  “What happened?” I demand. “Where’s the other spacecraft you saw?”

  “Shot down,” Cyb says with a mechanical nod. “I’ve reported the unknown ship to the Deep Space Network. Our sightline is now clear.”

  “What?” I screech. “Why did you have to attack? What if it was another crew sent by NASA to help us, one with a working connection to Earth—”

  “Don’t you think Cyb would have recognized if it was an Earth-originating ship?” Beckett gives me a patronizing look. “He’s only been programmed with the specific job of protecting us. For all we know, we just dodged a serious alien threat.”

  “Wait a second.” I narrow my eyes. “I thought you didn’t believe in aliens, remember? And if that was a real UFO, you really think we were supposed to just shoot it, without making any kind of contact?”

  “I followed my training orders,” Cyb says calmly. “Copilot Soo and I both did as we were taught.”

  “I didn’t really do anything,” Jian says uncomfortably. “I barely got a good look at the ship. Cyb is the one who hit the button. . . .” His voice trails off, and then he takes a sharp breath. “But we have a bigger problem.”

  “What now?” Minka groans.

  Jian points to the pilot’s touch screen.

  “Look at the map. Something’s changed. It’s now showing the supply ship as tracking miles below the orbital plane that our flight navigation software is sending us to. If we stay this course—our ships will bypass each other completely.”

  My stomach lurches.

  “The fuel leak is causing the satellite to drop faster than expected,” I realize. “We need to program an orbital inclination change into Cyb’s flight nav, starting with recalculating our velocities and position vectors.”

  The others look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. As the resident physics expert here, it falls on me to make sense of the numbers scrolling across the screen, plug them into Kepler’s equation, and figure out our new orbital route. Jian offers me his chair and I sink into it, settling in for a night of math ahead.

  It takes two attempts to course correct, with me frantically scrawling equations across the tablet screen as the Pontus flies miles above the Mars supply ship, still treacherously far from its target.

  I quickly plug the new trajectory into the flight nav and give Jian back his copilot seat, hovering over his chair as the Pontus accelerates and plunges to the correct orbital plane.

  The supply ship materializes through the cockpit glass, growing from a light in the dark to a full-fledged satellite looming large. We edge closer and closer to it, and Dev springs into motion, calling out orders for the docking. And then—with a pop! and a click—the two vessels join together.

  “YES!” Dev pumps his fists in the air, throwing his arms around me. Sydney, Jian, and even Minka join him, the five of us celebrating the landmark moment with cheers and a group hug. But something is still nagging at me as I look over at Cyb.

  “First Phase Complete,” Cyb announces. “Congratulations, crew. Dev, Sydney, and Naomi, it’s time to suit up and prepare for your EVA. To confirm, Dev and Sydney will patch up the fuel leak outside the supply ship while Naomi runs diagnostics on the tech inside. Copy?”

  “Copy,” we answer in unison as Dev spins Sydney around. “Spacewalk time, baby!”

  She rubs her hands together with glee. “It’s going to be like performing surgery among the
stars.”

  Even though I won’t be setting foot outside with the two of them, I still feel shivery with anticipation as Minka and Jian help me into my EVA suit. Dev, Sydney, and I float into the airlock together as the tracking cameras on our wrist monitors flicker on, projecting a live feed of everything we see back to the Pontus.

  The outer door opens first, and I gasp at the never-ending stretch of black, just waiting to catch us. Dev and Sydney grip hands through their gloves, and I watch their tethers trailing behind them as they step outside, into the void.

  After the outer door swings shut behind them, I pull the inner hatch door open and climb out into a dark space capsule, a fraction of the Pontus’s size.

  “I’ve entered the Athena supply ship,” I report into my headset as I feel around for the lights. I spot something glowing in the dark: a spongy amber substance, clinging to the wall outside the airlock. I radio the Pontus again.

  “Are you guys seeing this? Any idea what it is?”

  Minka’s voice comes crackling through. “Maybe . . . looks like it could be an exploded food packet?”

  I make a face. “Well, that wouldn’t bode well for our suppl—”

  I break off as my hand finds the light switch, illuminating the room in fluorescent yellow. And then I let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  A corpse is floating before me, upside down, its skeletal limbs brushing the ceiling like some kind of horrifying Halloween display. The dead man’s body is still clad in a NASA Athena space suit, the frayed cloth name tag reading REMI ANDERS. A name I know by heart, from my days as a young girl watching every news story I could find on the Mars mission. But there’s no recognizing Remi’s once-handsome face in the waxy blue mask before me.

  I keel over, about to be sick from the sight—and that’s when something dark brushes against my helmet. A shout rings through my ears.

  “Naomi—in front of you!”

  Frozen with dread, it takes every ounce of my courage to look up. That’s when I discover Remi Anders wasn’t alone.

  Four of the five missing Athena astronauts are here in the supply ship, their dormant bodies circling on a never-ending loop through the recycled air and microgravity. The same glowing amber substance from the airlock door is smeared across all of their suits.

  “Naomi, get out of there and come back to the ship,” Jian barks through the headset. “Dev and Sydney, abort spacewalk and return to the Pontus. Now.”

  “But I s-still have to—to get the supplies,” I whisper, putting one foot in front of the other as if in a trance.

  “The supply vessel is contaminated!” Beckett shouts in my earpiece. “I’ve seen that stuff before, and we can’t risk taking it with us. Let’s go!”

  “As pilot, I override this command,” Cyb interjects. “We cannot leave without procuring the food and supplies needed for the Europa colony.”

  “But—” I break off at the sound of something familiar, something that sends prickles through my skin. I step forward in spite of my better judgment, following the sound to a radio transmitter—which plays the six-tone musical phrase. A-T-H-E-N-A.

  “It was them,” I gasp. “The radio-wave message we picked up—it must have been the Athena crew’s help signal from years ago.”

  There’s a stunned silence on the other end of my earpiece, and then Jian says, “But how could Houston miss something like that?”

  “This supply ship wasn’t built for human occupancy, so it only has the most basic of comm systems,” I say, circling the space. “I don’t see any interior cameras, and it looks like they have the bare minimum of radio capabilities—which is why their signal could never reach Earth.” My voice breaks. “And why they were never rescued.”

  “What were they even doing up there?” I hear Minka’s voice asking in the background. “They were supposed to be on Martian land, in their Hab—”

  “They were running from something,” I answer, stopping in my tracks at the glob of amber peeled to the floor—the same substance on the dead astronauts’ space suits. Except now it’s . . . twitching.

  I cover my mouth in horror as the amber starts stretching itself into a new shape, with black stalks sprouting all around it, like the petals of a deformed flower.

  “All three of you, get back to the Pontus immediately,” Jian commands sharply. “Do not touch a thing.”

  I push my way back toward the airlock, and I’m nearly there when the sound of screaming throws me off track. My hand slips off the railing, my body tumbling backward as Sydney’s voice cries through my earpiece, “Something’s out here!”

  A skittering sound follows her scream, and I propel myself forward to the small porthole window. I can see Sydney and Dev on the outer module by the open fuel tank, their expressions frozen with terror behind their helmets. And then there’s a flash of movement. Sydney staggers back as Dev yells, “It’s on her space suit!”

  My heart jumps in my throat as I stare out the porthole, scanning for something, anything, they can use.

  “The bolts!” I shout. “Grab one of the bolts from the fuel line seal. You can use it to peel that—that thing off.”

  “And whatever you do, don’t bring any trace of it with you,” Beckett says, a desperate edge to his voice that I’ve never heard before.

  While Dev reaches for the bolts, I push my way back to the airlock door, leaving the supply ship of horrors behind. I hear the yell in my headset as Dev plunges the bolt into the spongy creature, freeing Sydney from its grasp, and I throw the outer door open.

  “Get in here, now!”

  A figure swings toward the open door, and I can make out the outline of Dev, pushing Sydney in first. And then, just as he’s about to follow her, he lets out a strangled scream.

  I crawl toward the door to look and immediately recoil in fear. The amber creature has leaped onto Dev’s helmet, covering his eyes. Sydney and I both make a move toward him—but suddenly, without warning, the airlock door slams shut. I pull on the hatch to no avail.

  “What did you guys just do?” Sydney shrieks into her headset. “We have to help him—”

  “We can’t put three astronauts at risk,” Cyb speaks up. “I have no choice but to prevent you two from following him. It’s what I’ve been ordered to do.”

  “But Dev—”

  I glance frantically down at the screen on my suit sleeve, and click on “POV—KHANNA.” I can see Dev swinging wildly, trying to break free of the creature. And then we hear a sickening crack.

  “My helmet—it’s breached!” he gasps.

  I sink to the floor, praying for this to be a nightmare, for me to wake up back on the Pontus with everyone safe and accounted for. But instead, I see that the same bolt that saved Sydney is what struck Dev. And now he has no air to breathe.

  “Cover the helmet with your glove!” I yell. “Cyb, open the airlock door! We’ve got to get him in here before—”

  “Not yet—it’s still on me—” Dev chokes out.

  “He’s losing oxygen fast!” Sydney screams. “We have to do something!”

  A beeping alarm sounds as the screen on my suit sleeve flashes with Dev’s vitals. He only has seconds left to survive without oxygen.

  My mind races, formulating a plan—and then I hear the sound of something breaking loose.

  I stare at the screen in disbelief as Dev uses his last surge of strength to cut his tether—sending both him and the alien creature floating away from the Pontus.

  “Th-this is the only way,” he whispers.

  “What did you do?” Sydney sobs.

  “Jian, Cyb, you have to follow him!” I shout.

  But it’s too late. The low beep of flatlining vitals echoes through our headsets.

  Dev Khanna is dead.

  Nineteen

  NAOMI

  SYDNEY’S WAILS RIP AT MY HEART. I REACH FOR HER, HUGGING her through the bulk of our space suits, as my own sobs break free.

  On the other end of our headsets, everything is quiet except
for the sound of someone’s repeated whispers of “No.” And then the floor shudders below us as the Pontus undocks from the supply ship—leaving the bodies of the doomed Athena crew, the Martian life, and all the food and supplies we were counting on to float in space forever.

  Sydney and I are forced to spend an interminable thirty minutes in a second airlock for Decontamination, lying under machines as our suits are sterilized, unable to speak or do anything but replay the trauma we just experienced on a torturous loop. Finally, we’re given the all clear to come out, and we emerge in the Astronauts’ Residence, where the rest of our team is waiting. But now, instead of the Final Six, we are only five.

  We huddle upstairs in the living room, trying to comfort each other in the face of our crushing losses. Sydney is shivering uncontrollably, and Minka finds a blanket to drape around her shoulders.

  “We have to turn back now . . . don’t we?” Jian asks, voicing what we’re all thinking.

  I’m surprised to find that the idea doesn’t fill me with the relief I expected. But then, this wasn’t how I ever wanted it to end—in massive failure, like we went through all this for nothing.

  “No.” Sydney’s voice is quiet but firm. “Dev died for this mission. He died to protect us, so we could continue on to Europa. There is no way we’re just turning around and giving up. We didn’t do it when we lost contact with Earth, and we’re not doing it now.”

  “She’s right,” I say, even as my heart twists at the thought of missing the chance to return to my family, to Leo. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let Dev die in vain.

  “I don’t want to give up either, but what are we supposed to do about food?” Jian asks. “This whole mission was predicated on the assumption that we’d be able to pick up twenty years’ worth of supplies from Mars. Now, without that, we only have enough on the Pontus for another two years, maybe three if we really stretch our portions.”