Page 106 of Stars

Falling to Sasha’s right, Earth rolled like a blue marble in space.

A waterfall of stars sprayed over a yawning void on their left, twirling around some infinite point. Surrounding their climb, a small galaxy of debris orbited the mangled station. Shattered solar arrays, golden glass and shredded film, shorn metal, and detritus from the decompression hung suspended as if in amber, frozen in time and space.

They were spinning slowly, off kilter, out of their orbital plane, and tumbling around the wrong axis. The planet, the solar system, the universe had turned upside down, at least to them. Any moment, it seemed, the Earth could roll away from them, gravity’s hold on the station suddenly released. He stared over the Earth, the swell of the globe—

Sasha lurched, grasping the ISS’s strut as if he were about to fall. He blinked, and Kilaqqi’s voice filled his mind as memory snapped into place over reality.We are in the highest heaven. Above space and below time.

He’d been here before.

The blood aurora. He craned his neck, trying to search above him, above the station, but his helmet choked his vision. His breath bounced off his face shield, the heat burning his cheeks as it dried out his eyes. He blinked hard, and again, and the world shifted, moved out of alignment. The moment, and the memory, passed.

But he’d felt it. That had been real. He’d been there—here—before.

When the blood aurora appears, the demons have returned. Evil is growing in the land of the dead.

Something is trying to reach the stars.

“Sasha?”

Mark’s voice hit him like a cannon. “I’m fine,” he choked out. “I’m all right.” He looked up, and Mark waited a hundred feet ahead, moving closer to the broken end of the main strut and the mangled P6 truss. “What do you see?”

“We’re massively fucked,” Mark said, sighing. He spoke as Sasha climbed. “That satellite ripped the P6 truss off the station. The whole solar array is gone. The debris is going to fuck up the rest of the arrays, if it hasn’t already.” He tapped his forearm, the radio controls, and spoke again. “Sarah, how are the power cells? What’s our power situation?”

Static, and then Sarah’s voice, as if she was far away, came on the line. “Real low, Mark. We’re almost down to our backups.”

“Turn off everything possible. We need to keep life support and guidance online if we’ve got any hope of saving this station.”

“Do you think we can?” Sasha pulled alongside Mark, taking in the damage for himself. “This is unimaginable.”

When he was a kid, a Russian passenger jet had come down on the ice outside Norilsk, slamming into the hard pack and tearing itself open as it skidded to its eventual stop. For kilometers, debris covered the ice, pieces of the jet and luggage and body parts mixed together, silver and white and red, with hints of color from T-shirts and pants and scarves blowing across the tundra. This was silver and gold and an eternal black beyond it all, as if he was just holding his breath and imagining everything floating there. If he blinked, would the crumbling station fall from the sky, plummet forever into nothing?

“I don’t know,” Mark finally said, almost whispering. “This is bad.” A piece of solar array floated by his head, and beyond the galaxy of shattered glass and shorn metal, the world spun upside down. “We need to get the main radio up and working. I want Houston to see what we’re dealing with. We need that downlink. And we have to fix main power, or we’ll die.”

“I’ll head over to the starboard-side antennas. We need to pull them and rerun the cables—”

Static filled the radio, their headsets shorting out for a moment. Sasha thought he heard something, a gasp, the start of a word. “Hello?”

“Sarah? Sarah, do you copy? What was that?”

Silence as the static peeled away, leaving only a soft buzz.

Screaming split Sasha’s skull, nearly broke the gain on the radio, whiting out the sound and spiking into his brain before everything went dead.

* * *

33

Washington DC

“Mr. Spiers-Reichenbach.”Scott beamed as he wrapped his arms around Jack, squeezing him for a moment.

Grinning, Jack pulled back, taking in Scott’s new look. “The goatee suits you.”

“Stacy says I look distinguished.” Scott rolled his eyes. “The gray certainly helps with that. I blame all of it on Ethan, so you let him know this is his fault.”

“And mine, I’m sure.”

“Well, Mr. President,” Scott demurred, “I would never accuse you of causing your detail stress.”