Page 97 of Stars

It was instinct, an animal’s response. He waited, wide eyed, as the roar of decompression blasted throughUnity. Next would be the pop of his ears, the bursting of his eardrums as pressure plummeted until his lungs exploded. Then his blood would boil, before freezing as the station’s pressure reached zero or he was sucked out to space, whichever came first.

Sergey, I love you. I will see you again.

He closed his eyes.

“The leak is inTranquility!” Phillipa shouted. “Tranquilitywas torn off the station!”

“We can isolate it!” Mark roared back over the sound of escaping air. “Let’s go! Sasha!”

He followed Mark on autopilot, swimming toward the leak though everything inside him was desperate to turn around and rush the other way. Escaping air carried him along, and he swam with the currents, moving toward the breach even if he didn’t want to. He bounced off bulkheads and equipment and the arms of a space suit as the vortex knocked him left and right. In the flashing crimson lights, shadows lengthened, the ISS suddenly sinister, as if it wanted to kill them all. For the moment, it did.

Mark, Phillipa, and Sasha landed on the edge of the airlock to what used to beTranquility. Half of the module was gone. Oxygen rushed past them, nearly knocking them from their feet. The air was misty, ice crystals forming as oxygen and the cold vacuum of space traded places.

Sasha’s breath came hard and fast in shallow, almost desperate gasps. His head swam, and black spots floated at the edges of his vision. He almost tumbled into the wind tunnel but grabbed a webbing strap and wrapped it around his hand. If he pitched forward, he’d fly out of the station.

“We need to pull this hatch closed!” Mark shouted. “It swings shut towardTranquility! All we need to do is get it off that bulkhead and it will swing into place!”

The three of them grabbed the airlock handle and braced their feet against the bulkhead. They were trying to deadlift the airlock hatch, working against the vacuum of space and the force of decompression. What had taken the lightest press of a finger only hours before was nearly impossible now. Sasha felt muscles tear in his arms, felt a shoulder begin to separate. Mark roared, and though his mouth was next to Sasha’s ear, Sasha could barely hear him over the scream of decompression.

The hatch moved in millimeters, then centimeters. Then, finally, it began to give. Phillipa swung over the back side and pushed, throwing her shoulders against the hatch and pressing up off the bulkhead as Sasha and Mark kept pulling. The hatch arched into the wind stream, and then, all at once, caught the edge of decompression and yanked out of their hands, slamming into place.

Sasha and Mark tumbled free, slamming into the far bulkhead in a tangle of arms and legs as Phillipa shot off the bulkhead like a rocket, flying into a laptop stand and a tangle of cables.

They hung in the weightlessness, gasping, clinging to each other. Emergency lights burned and the klaxon wailed, a desperate, shrill crescendo that knifed into their skulls.

“We need to contact Houston,” Phillipa said. In the sudden silence, her rasping voice—hoarse from the decompression and shouting—was as startling as a gunshot.

“We’re still at caution.” The station’s alert system was still active, warning lights in every module. Mark untangled from Sasha and pushed off towardUnity, following Phillipa. Sasha trailed behind.

“We’ve lost a chunk of the station and we’re drifting,” Phillipa said. “I’m surprised we’re alive.”

Mark shook his head. “We’ve got to get the station back under control, or we might not be for long.”

* * *

Putoransky State Nature Reserve

Siberia

Jack staredat the far wall of the cabin.

A hurricane of loose papers was tacked to the wood, everything from long diatribes scribbled in spirals to pencil drawings of corpses and severed body parts. A roughly sketched American flag burned over a melting Earth.

Chemical symbols and biological notations lay scattered in the chaos. And one word repeated, scratched onto papers and into the wooden frame of the cabin, one word screaming at Jack from everywhere he looked.

Lazarus.

“What is this?” Jack whispered. “Who lived here?”

“General Sevastyanov’s life’s mission.”

“You said that already. What do you mean?”

“One day, after serving his country for decades, General Sevastyanov buried his darkest secret as deep as he could and then took off his uniform and buried that almost as deeply in the ground. He swore he would never touch it again.” Kilaqqi nodded at the cabin. “This is that secret.”

“A man?”

“Lazarus. A mananda mission. The Soviets used Lazarus to develop a virus, something that could turn the Earth into the dead lands and turn men into demons.”