The Last Astronaut Page 8

  From the command module she could just hear Jansen say, “KSpace vehicle. Please come in. Please acknowledge.”

  The new equipment was all incredibly sensitive and fragile. It had been stored during their journey because it was too delicate to be mounted on the outside of Orion while they were performing high-g maneuvers. None of it was designed to function inside the HabLab’s thick walls, though, which meant somebody had to go outside to install it all.

  Jansen had chosen to do the EVA alone. As mission commander, she should normally have given the task to somebody else. But she was the only one of them who’d ever completed an EVA before, and she didn’t have time to train the others.

  She pulled on her liquid cooling and ventilation garment—basically a one-piece romper made of plastic tubes full of water, which would keep her body temperature stable while she was out in space. Then she put on her snoopy cap, a tight-fitting head cover that had headphones and a microphone built into it, so she could communicate with them by radio while she was outside. Then she was ready for the actual suit.

  Jansen remembered having to struggle into space suits, back in her day. Wrestling with the hard upper torsos and bonking your head on the inside of the helmet, every time. The long hours of prebreathing you used to have to do, to avoid getting the bends from the underpressurized suits.

  Getting into the suit was a problem NASA had finally solved—by turning the suit into a miniature spacecraft all its own. Their Z-3 suits had suitports, hatches on their backs that could be connected directly to an airlock on the HabLab’s wall. Meaning that to get into the suit, Jansen just had to open a door and climb through feetfirst. It still wasn’t easy. She had to get her legs situated, then push her arms partway into the sleeves, then squeeze her head down against her chest until she could maneuver it up into the helmet. It was not a comfortable process, but it took a few minutes instead of the better part of an hour. Once she was in she simply sealed the back of the suit—closing the airlock behind her at the same time—and then undocked from the HabLab, exactly as a visiting spacecraft would do.

  Except first she had to wait for permission. “Pasadena, this is Jansen. I am ready to begin my EVA. Please confirm.”

  The time lag was down to twenty-nine seconds each way, getting shorter every day as 2I approached Earth. It would still take a full minute, though, before she got a response. She could only sit there, her arms and legs dangling in front of her, stuck by her back to Orion. She spent the time trying not to stare at 2I. She failed, of course. It filled up half the sky in front of her. She felt as if she could reach out and touch it. Though Stevens had told her that was a bad idea—if you tried, its fractal surface would scrape your flesh down to the bone. It would be like running your hand over a belt sander.

  She tried to look, instead, at the orange dot that was Wanderer, currently floating near one end of 2I. Forty kilometers away—it might as well be on the far side of the moon. She had rarely in her life felt so alone.

  When McAllister’s voice crackled in her headphones, she had to fight her natural urge to flinch at the sudden sound.

  “Jansen, you are cleared for EVA. Be careful.”

  “Right,” she said, and reached a hand across her chest. The hard upper torso—the inflexible chest of the suit, which felt like a cuirass—was covered in equipment and screens and controls. She found the one she wanted. It was a simple knob, made large enough that gloved fingers could turn it easily. She had to lift a clear plastic cover to get to it. Trying to keep her breathing normal and calm, she twisted it all the way to the left.

  The suitport connection behind her gasped as it released. She felt herself drift forward, just a few centimeters.

  She was free of the ship. Floating free, eight million kilometers above the Earth. Two kilometers away from an alien megastructure.

  Very much alone, with nothing at all above or below her, forever.

  “Suit is responding as expected,” she said. “Internal temperature is a comfortable twenty-one Celsius.” There was a reason astronauts endlessly reported their status while on EVAs. It wasn’t for the sake of NASA, which was too far away to do anything if something went wrong. It was to help them focus on their work. If she kept talking, she wouldn’t think to look down.

  Down, at this moment, being in the direction of Earth, a crescent of blue so far below her it looked very small and noncomforting. Especially when compared to 2I.

  She grabbed a handrail on the side of Orion and turned around so she could look at her ship. She did a quick visual inspection—standard practice during an EVA. It looked as if Orion had come through its long journey undamaged.

  She had worried about this moment. The last time she’d performed an EVA had been twenty-one years before. The day that she killed Blaine Wilson. She’d half expected to have a panic attack. Instead all she saw was the work ahead of her. She could do this.

  Piece by piece, the signal equipment was passed through an airlock on the side of the HabLab. She removed each piece from the lock and snapped a tether on it, making sure it wouldn’t float away, then went back for another.

  In ideal conditions—back on Earth, say, on level ground—installing the equipment would have been child’s play. Doing it in a space suit made the work exhausting but not exactly mentally challenging. The new equipment was all designed to slot into sockets on the exterior of the HabLab, standardized connectors that would let her just click the gear into place. The neutrino gun screwed into a round collar near the cupola. It took forever to rotate it until it locked into place. She had a little trouble with the parabolic dish of the multiwavelength antenna, but only because it was so big—nearly a meter wide. Even though it weighed nothing now, it still had mass, and she had to wrestle it into place. Once she had it seated, though, all she had to do was plug in two patch cords, one for signal and one for power.

  The tunable laser gave her the least trouble. It had to be mounted to the front of the HabLab, on a complicated universal joint that would allow it to be pointed in any direction. Then she just had to hook it directly into Orion’s main power feed—it would pull a lot of current when it was switched on.

  Her work was done. She started to say she was ready to come back. She was sore and tired from even this short EVA. It would be good to get back inside, to get all this gear off her back.

  Except—

  She was already out here. This might be her only chance.

  She looked over at Wanderer, the KSpace ship. It was about ten kilometers away, just floating there. As enigmatic as 2I, in its way.

  Well within her range.

  She switched on the high-gain transceiver on her suit’s communications package. “KSpace vehicle,” she called. “Please come in. I’ve been trying this frequency for… fifteen hours now. Please give me some sign you’re listening to this channel.”

  There was no response.

  Nothing. Not a word. Stevens claimed that was just KSpace’s way—that the big company didn’t play well with others. Jansen had a nagging feeling there was another reason.

  Maybe they were in trouble. Maybe they’d had an equipment failure. Maybe—

  She didn’t even want to think about it. But what if they were dead in there? Wanderer looked fine through their telescopes, but plenty of terrible things could have happened to the crew that would leave the ship undamaged. They could have lost pressurization and all asphyxiated. Or maybe 2I didn’t like people snooping around. It could have attacked them before Orion arrived.

  She had lost Blaine Wilson on Orion 6 because space was inherently dangerous. Because there were so many ways it could kill you faster than you could react. The only thing that kept astronauts alive was that they paid attention. When little mysteries and unexpected readings came up, astronauts jumped on them.

  She needed to know. She needed to know why KSpace wasn’t answering her calls, because it might make all the difference in keeping her own crew safe. She was not going to let another astronaut die, not now. Not
when her second chance depended on it.

  “Pasadena,” she said. Don’t ask for permission, she thought. Beg forgiveness later. “Pasadena, I’m going to extend my EVA by approximately one hour. I’m also going to go off tether.”

  YSABEL MELENDEZ, EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY OFFICER: Astronauts don’t unhook their safety lines. Ever. It’s just too risky. We experimented with it back in the eighties, during the STS missions. We gave our people MMUs, or Manned Maneuvering Units. They looked like big high-tech armchairs, and they let you fly around like Superman. Astronauts loved them. Looooved them. Astronauts volunteer to sit on top of rockets full of extremely volatile liquid fuel and get shot into space. Astronauts are crazy. We got rid of the MMUs fast—they were ridiculously unsafe. And way too tempting.

  Jansen reached down and unhooked the carabiner that attached her to Orion. She took a deep breath, even though space suit protocol advised against that. She was still a human being, and she was frightened half out of her wits. She was also determined to do this.

  Her suit could make the trip, of that she was sure, because of the SAFER system: the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue. There were jets in the shoulders and knees of her suit that would let her fly through open space. They were supposed to be used only in emergencies, in case her tether snapped somehow, but they were rated for heavy use just in case. Every time she breathed out, the suit absorbed her carbon dioxide and stored it in special tanks. The suit jets could use that gas as propellant—and she would make more of it over time, so there was no danger of its running out.

  So it was possible. Possible, but ill-advised.

  But if she was doing this, she needed to do it now—she was certain if she changed her mind and just headed back inside Orion, she wouldn’t be given another chance.

  She touched her keypad. Jetted CO2 out of her suit nozzles and accelerated in the direction of the orange spacecraft as fast as she could go.

  For a moment—it was perfect.

  All her concerns, all her fears were put aside. She was in space again, and it was perfect. The best feeling in the world—ultimate freedom. She closed her eyes and just felt her body moving unhindered through empty space. Diving off the Florida coast had been a pale imitation of this. Even flying a plane couldn’t compare to the pure abstract liberation of floating through space. Her breathing calmed, and she thought—she could do this. She was going to be OK. She would go and knock on Wanderer’s hatch and the KSpace crew would wave at her through their windows and everybody would have a good laugh. It was going to be OK.

  And then her radio crackled and brought her right back to the realization that she was on an unsanctioned EVA, headed to what was probably a ghost ship full of dead people.

  She knew exactly what McAllister was going to say, and what tone of voice he would use.

  He was calm. Very proper. “Jansen, this is Pasadena. We have you performing an unsanctioned maneuver during your EVA. Can you confirm?”

  He knew exactly what she was doing. He had telemetry on everything from the sweat output of her armpits to the amount of propellant in her jets. She was sure he knew why she was doing it, too. He was giving her a chance to tell him he was wrong, that she had some completely different plan in mind.

  She wouldn’t lie to Roy McAllister.

  “I’m going over to the neighbors’ house,” she said. “The one with all the hexagons. I’m going to knock on their door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  It took a full minute before he spoke again. During which time she moved nearly a kilometer and a half away from Orion. The construction of her helmet made it impossible for her to turn around and look back and see how far she was from safety. She had a rearview mirror glued to one sleeve of her suit for just that reason. She made a point of not using it.

  “Sally,” McAllister said, “this wasn’t part of your EVA plan. You know we didn’t authorize this.”

  She reached for her keypad, intending to stop herself and turn around and fly home. She was already guilty of insubordination. She wouldn’t stoop to mutiny, too. If he told her to turn back, she would. Immediately.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” McAllister said.

  But he didn’t tell her to turn back.

  She was five kilometers from Orion now. Halfway there. Turning back now wouldn’t make this less dangerous. She had plenty of propellant in her tanks. She was breathing so hard—from the fear—that she was probably filling them back up as fast as she was emptying them.

  “They’ve got me worried, Roy,” she said. “What if they’re sick over there, or injured? If somebody on Orion needed help, we would expect them to give it.”

  Seconds ticked by as she waited for the signal to fly to Earth and back. Before he spoke to her again.

  “They haven’t sent a distress signal,” McAllister replied. “I’ve been in contact with KSpace headquarters, down here on the ground. They’ve been polite, but not exactly forthcoming. They wouldn’t want you to do this.”

  “Too bad,” Jansen said. She could feel her heart thundering in her chest. The KSpace ship had grown enormous in front of her. Not 2I enormous, but big enough her body didn’t like it. Deep parts of her brain were telling her that she was falling, that she was going to smack right into the orange spacecraft, fast enough to break her bones.

  She stabbed at her keypad and sent gas jetting from the four nozzles on the front of her suit, pushing back against her forward thrust. Decelerating, hard. Her knees and shoulders lurched backward but her butt kept flying forward, and she had to do some fancy flying to keep herself from spinning out.

  She stabilized, then tapped out a few more quick burns to move herself closer to the spacecraft, toward the spherical module at its nose.

  “I’m already here,” she said.

  SALLY JANSEN: Space is dangerous enough without everybody measuring their dicks all the time. If KSpace was in trouble, I was going to help. That’s all I was thinking.

  When Sally Jansen first saw the KSpace ship, despite its orange paint job she’d recognized its design immediately. Just as Orion was based on old Apollo technology, Wanderer was a near copy of the old Soyuz spacecraft.

  She ought to recognize it. A Soyuz had been the first spacecraft she ever flew on. She’d been on board strictly as a passenger, of course. Her very first mission to space had been a quick trip to the second International Space Station, where she’d finished her astronaut training. She’d flown up to ISS-2 in a Soyuz-MS, then returned to Earth in its command module. That had been back in 2030. Before the Russian and American space programs had stopped working together. Back when Americans were still allowed aboard Russian spacecraft.

  That Wanderer was based on the Soyuz spacecraft wasn’t altogether surprising. They were the most reliable spaceships ever built—in their various permutations they had performed hundreds of missions ferrying astronauts and cosmonauts up and down, to and from low Earth orbit.

  It did, however, make her feel sorry for the KSpace crew. Their ship had no HabLab, no special crew modules. Most of its mass was taken up by a big service module, its engine, which contained no crew-accessible space. Ahead of that it had a command module, which was just big enough for three people lying down in crash couches, and the spherical orbital module, which wasn’t exactly roomy. The three KSpace astronauts must have spent weeks in those cramped quarters, while the NASA crew had space to stretch out and comfortable places to sleep. The Wanderer’s journey to 2I must have been miserable for the crew. They must be going stir-crazy by now.

  Assuming they were still alive in there.

  Wanderer didn’t have handrails like Orion, so she pulled herself along the side of the orange ship using whatever handholds she could find, until she reached one of the porthole-like windows in the orbital module.

  Moving carefully, she reached up and turned on one of her powerful halogen headlamps so it shone in through the window. She peered inside.

  There was nothing to see in there but shadows. All the
lights inside had been switched off.

  Maybe the KSpace crew was just sleeping. Well, if they were, she was about to wake them up.

  She pulled herself around to the nose of the craft, toward the airlock. Jansen knew how to open it. She’d trained in how to do just that almost thirty years before. It was designed to be easy for someone wearing bulky space suit gloves to handle.

  She had a moment of panic as she reached for the hatch, wondering if it might be locked—but no, nobody would build an airlock that could be locked from the inside. What if you got stuck outside with no way back in?

  The hatch swung back easily.

  If this had been a Chinese mission, or a Russian ship, what she was doing might be an act of war. KSpace wasn’t a government agency, though, it was a private company. Which meant she was only breaking and entering. She figured it was worth it.

  She shouldered her way inside and closed the hatch behind her. She and her suit just fit inside the narrow airlock. She activated the inner door, and there was a roaring rush of sound as air filled up the airlock before the door swung open.

  Beyond it was darkness.

  She braced herself. If something had gone wrong, if the crew had run into trouble, they would almost certainly be dead by now.

  What if there was—something—in there with them? Something that had boarded their ship and torn them to pieces? Maybe 2I’s crew had boarded Wanderer. Maybe there was some homicidal alien still inside—there was no telling what the aliens looked like, much less how they would react to humans getting so close to their ship. What if they had boarded Wanderer and slaughtered all the crew?

  She told herself she was being ridiculous.

  Still. It was time to call Orion and let them know what she was about to do.

  “Orion, come in,” she said. “I’m entering the KSpace ship now. Everything OK over there?”

  “This is Hawkins. We’re fine. McAllister wants me to pilot Orion over to your position, so when you’re done you won’t have to fly all that way back. You OK with that?”