Page 96 of Stars

“Forward!” Mark bellowed. “MARK!”

In gravity, they would have tumbled forward, falling against the bulkheads. Still, they all felt the ISS twist and turn, nearly somersault over herself as Sasha and Mark opened the thrusters up to full burn. The struts groaned and the station shook, violent trembles moving down and into the modules. Airlocks shrieked, metal hatches grinding against each other. Down the stack,Zarya, the tunnel betweenUnityandZvezda, screeched. Sasha watched it twist like a towel being wrung out.

“It’s not enough,” Phillipa warned. “The GLONASS satellite is still on a collision course! Impact in five… four… three…”

“Sasha, hard right, again!” Mark shouted. “And hold!”

The ISS rolled starboard and tried to pitch, but she was too bulky, too unwieldy, even on the edge of space. Scorched electrons blistering the upper atmosphere slowed her maneuver, and she buckled under the stress.

The P6 truss wobbled, then collapsed, the mighty golden solar sail falling like a leaf blowing on an autumn wind. For a moment it hovered above the station, spinning in weightlessness.

The GLONASS satellite slammed through the center of the floating solar array, shattering the photovoltaic mirrors into a million tiny shards before barreling toward the ISS’s main truss.

Metal squealed on metal, aluminum and titanium screaming as they were wrenched apart. Bolts popped like bullets ricocheting, and a shower of shattered glass rained over the modules, thousands of micrometeorites knifing into the delicate hull. Beneath Sasha’s feet, the ISS quaked, shaking like she was falling out of the sky, ripping to pieces and hurtling toward a fiery end.

Every light in the station winked out, plunging them into darkness, the same darkness as space. A moment, and the emergency beacons glowed, bloodred lights struggling to power up.

From down the stack, a hiss sounded—soft at first, until it grew into the roar of a cascading waterfall.

Hull breach.

* * *

Johnson Space Center

Houston, Texas

“Flight,we havenodownlink from the ISS,” comms shouted. “I don’t have any data from them at all!”

“Is the station intact?” Roxanne bellowed. “I needoneanswer: do we still have a station?”

“Negative on voice, Flight,” Dan said from CAPCOM. “Nothing over the radio.”

“Negative on propulsion. Everything cut out.”

“Negative on Guido!”

“Flight, I’ve got a reading!” EECOM’s substation officer at life support leaped to her feet. “Emergency systems are showing a drop in cabin pressure!”

“How low?”

“Five hundred psi,” the life support officer read. “Much lower and they won’t have air to breathe.”

“They may not be breathing,” Roxanne said, exhaling slowly. “That fast of a drop in pressure means explosive decompression.” Were the ISS crew already dead? Were they clutching their throats and scratching at their skin for one last desperate breath, wracked with the agonies of suffocation? Or were they already floating in space, enduring the ten long seconds it took to die in vacuum?

Was there nothing overhead but corpses?

“Find a way to connect with the ISS, any way you can. We need to know what’s happening up there. We need to help our people if there is anything we can do for them. If there’s a chance they’re alive, they need us.” She turned to Dan. “Cycle every frequency. Try to raise them on everything we’ve got.”

Dan nodded, tears already sliding silently down his cheeks.

* * *

ISS

Tumbling in Earth’s Orbit

Sasha did the wrong thing:he froze.