Page 119 of Stars

ISS

Tumbling in Earth’s Orbit

Sasha’s teethwere chattering so hard his bones hurt.

Environmental controls and life support were completely dead. The modules weren’t getting enough sunlight, even on the dayside of Earth, to warm up the station. Ice coated the windows now, as thick as he remembered growing up in Norilsk.

Had he ever been this cold? The last time he’d nearly frozen to death, Kilaqqi had lifted him from the snow and saved his life. Where was Kilaqqi, hisaminmi, now? Was he somehow the body on the satellite?

He floated inDestiny, curled in a ball to try and stay warm in the pure dark of the broken ISS. Even the emergency lights were gone now.

Mark had shivered his way up intoIndependenceto check on Sarah and Phillipa.

Hours ago, they’d strapped Phillipa inside a sleep sack and secured her to the bulkhead. She was unconscious, bleeding from her eyes, ears, mouth, and fingernails, and had soaked her cargo pants. Mark had cupped her cheek and stroked her hair, staring at her bloody, still face for a long, long time.

Sarah hadn’t started bleeding, but pain ravaged her body. She put on a brave face, but even she, tough as nails, had been reduced to sobs as the virus made her writhe, made her claw at her skin to try to get the pain out from her insides. Mark gave her a double dose of Valium, and they’d tucked her into a sleep sack as well.

If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that space had flooded the station and spread out like wet velvet to every corner. The air was thin, barely there, and Sasha’s inhales were short and harsh, knives to the center of his chest. If he pushed against the darkness, it pushed back with pain.

Sounds made Sasha twist. He clicked on his flashlight, pointing toward the shuffling. The light barely flickered on, the batteries struggling to work in the cold.

Mark swam down fromIndependence’shatch. His face was ghostly pale in the flickering beam, smeared with salt crystals where his tears had frozen on his skin. He stared at Sasha, not speaking, his haunted eyes filled with horror.

He was watching his friends, his lifelong friends, die around him one by one.These people are my family. And I will protect every one of them,he’d said only weeks ago.

“Come here,” Sasha mumbled, gesturing to Mark. Silently, Mark came, pushing off the bulkhead. He glided right into Sasha, burying his face in Sasha’s chest as his hands fisted in Sasha’s flight suit and jacket. They were both dressed in as many layers as they could find, from their flight suits to the emergency cold-weather jackets and hats stuffed in the cargo netting Michaela had been tied down in.

Sasha wrapped his arms and legs around Mark and pulled him close. Mark trembled—from the cold or from shock, Sasha couldn’t tell. He rubbed his hands up and down Mark’s back and pressed his cheek to Mark’s frigid skin.

Mark’s tears were as hot as the sun. They bubbled out of the corners of his eyes and slid across Sasha’s cheek.

“I don’t know what to do,” Mark said. His voice was like a rake across concrete, utterly destroyed. “I don’t know how to save them.”

Sasha said nothing.

“What do we do? Do we launch? Fuck Houston’s orders and just go? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we could pilot a reentry for Russia instead of America—”

“They would still shoot us down. General Duncan was clear. Anything that leaves the station for Earth will be shot down.”

“Motherfuckers. They’re abandoning us. Leaving us to die up here.”

“We’re going to freeze to death, and then the air will run out. It won’t be the sickness that gets us if we don’t get ECLS back online.”

“The system is shot. ISS is a dead bird.Independenceis hopelessly contaminated, andFreedom…”

Freedomhad a nuclear warhead and Joey’s half-eaten corpse sealed inside.

“Soyuz can give us her oxygen.”

“She’s a free-return vehicle. If we launch in the Soyuz, she’ll fall back to Earth. And the air force will blow us out of the sky before our hull even touches the atmosphere.” Mark growled, his fists tightening in Sasha’s jacket until his arms shook. “They’re killing us!”

Sasha closed his eyes. His teeth chattered, and even Mark’s warmth wasn’t enough to stave off the cold and the looming caress of hypothermia. He could feel his mind slowing, his thoughts elongating.

As always, everything circled back to Sergey. He saw Sergey’s face dancing in the darkness, painted in gamma-ray bursts sparking off his optic nerve. Sergey’s smile danced in the starlight pushing fractals through the ice-covered windows. His eyes were galaxies twirling beyond Saturn, and his arms were the warmth promised if Sasha closed his eyes and let go.

You and your love were created in the same moment of the same atom, and then scattered for a billion years. You knew him once inside a star. You know him again now on Earth. You will know him again in the future in another form.

And when you reach the end of time, your love will still be there with you. Because he is of you, and you are of him.