Page 122 of Stars

Outside the airlock, Sasha watchedFreedomsilently roll to the right and pitch, then dart forward as if yanked by a string out into deep space. Her engines burned a blue flame behind her, a streak of color as cold as ice, as brilliant as Sergey’s gaze looking down on him from above. His heart lurched, watching their capsule disappear, vault into the black beyond.

“ISS, what are you doing?” Zeytsev roared. “That is not the correct trajectory!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Mark bellowed. He grabbed the handhold he’d used to lockFreedom's hatch and pushed intoDestiny, heading for the communications console. “Shut up, you motherfucker! You did this! You made us come up here, you fuck!”

He raised his hands over his head, then brought them down, slamming the pipe into the consoles and computers. Over and over he swung, shattering the consoles, screaming, swearing, sobbing, bouncing wildly off the bulkheads with every impact.

On the station, one of the very last systems to cut out on emergency power was communications. Communications would hang on even after the oxygen pumps had failed and the emergency lighting had died. It was a lesson from Apollo 13: if there was communication, there was hope, and when there was hope, there was always a way home.

Zeytsev’s voice, his curses, his beratings, scratched like a record player into static and silence.

Mark turned the communications console to scrap, beat the computers and the displays until they were broken and shattered, bits of plastic and fractured circuit boards spinning throughDestiny. He screamed, one long, last lingering shout, desperation and agony and aching, furious hopelessness exploding out of him.

Sasha knew that sound. He knew it well. It was the sound of a soul fracturing.

He kicked across the module to Mark and stopped his next swing, gently taking his wrist and pulling it toward him and dragging Mark into him. Mark collapsed, boneless, as if the very life inside him had been ripped out.

“I want to go home,” Mark finally growled. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

“I want to go home, too.” Speaking was difficult, the thin air scraping his lungs, his throat. “How?”

“I have an idea,” Mark said. “Let’s get Phillipa. I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t.”

Together they moved intoIndependence, their flickering flashlights casting hollow shadows on the bulkheads, monsters and apparitions that rose like Goliaths inIndependence’ssilent hold.

Something wet brushed past Sasha’s ear. He saw Mark jerk back, then reach to wipe his face.

His fingers came away red.

They turned their flashlights on Phillipa’s sleep sack.

It hung on the bulkhead, empty.

Next to the sleep sack, a drill tumbled in midair, spinning and shooting drops of blood from the bit on each revolution.

“Fuck,” Mark breathed.

A hatch slammed on the station, down through the tunnel and back on the ISS. Sasha dove first, swimming down throughIndependence’sdocking collar and bursting intoDestiny, Mark hot on his heels. He spun towardUnity—

And came face-to-face with a secured airlock. Phillipa’s blood-drenched face pressed against the glass, staring him down. Her eyes were pitch black, same as Michaela’s and Rafael’s. Rippling on the edges of her gaze, lines of crimson spilled out of her eyes and floated away in drops and long, gooey strings of blood. Three holes in the center of her forehead wept black blood, a reverse waterfall that ran up and into her hair in a halo of death.

Mark crowded beside him at the airlock, then reared back.

Phillipa bared her teeth, snapping her jaws. She clawed at the window, at the hatch, screaming that dead scream Michaela and Rafael had. Air passing through liquefying organs, forcing itself out of a destroyed body.

“She’s between us and the Soyuz!” Mark cursed again. “That’s our escape module!”

The station rumbled, quaking around him, and Sasha tumbled backward and rolled into Mark, both of them crashing intoDestiny’sfar bulkhead. “What the fuck was that?” Mark snapped.

Ice broke off fromDestiny’swindows, and a beam of sunlight slanted into the module, the first illumination they’d had in over a day. Something had shaken it loose.

Sasha craned his neck, looking all around, trying to see what. Had something hit them? Debris? Were they crashing into another satellite?

Was this the end?

“Sasha…” Mark said, peering out another ofDestiny’s windows. “Look.”

Moving over the ISS, the long body of a Minuteman III ICBM roared on a vibrant flame the color of the sun. The missile had just missed the station, grazing across her broken truss as it hauled ass into deep orbit.