Orbital Decay (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by Malcolm Cross

  THE AFTERBLIGHT CHRONICLES

  ORBITAL

  DECAY

  MALCOLM CROSS

  ABADDONBOOKS.COM

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  First published 2014 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Sam Gretton

  Design: Simon Parr & Sam Gretton

  Marketing and PR: Michael Molcher

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  The Afterblight Chronicles™ created by Simon Spurrier & Andy Boot

  Copyright © 2014 Rebellion.

  All rights reserved.

  The Afterblight Chronicles™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-678-7

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-679-4

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  The Afterblight Chronicles Series

  The Culled

  by Simon Spurrier

  Kill Or Cure

  by Rebecca Levene

  Dawn Over Doomsday

  by Jasper Bark

  Death Got No Mercy

  by Al Ewing

  Blood Ocean

  by Weston Ochse

  The Afterblight Chronicles: America

  An Omnibus of Post-Apocalyptic Novels

  Arrowhead

  Broken Arrow

  Arrowland

  by Paul Kane

  School’s Out

  Operation Motherland

  Children’s Crusade

  by Scott K. Andrews

  CHAPTER ONE

  “HI. MY NAME is Emily, and I’m eight years old. My question for Alvin is, are you safe from the bird flu pandemic in space?”

  The transmission ended, leaving only a static-eaten silence.

  Two hundred and fifty miles over Emily, and travelling at a little under twenty-eight thousand kilometres an hour, Alvin froze. He nudged the ham radio’s tuner just a hair, giving himself another second to delay before answering Emily’s question.

  Kids were meant to ask ‘How do you go to the toilet in space?’ He had an answer for that. But this? All he had was the canned response Mission Control had given him.

  “Well, Emily, before we were launched to Space Station, we were held in quarantine to make sure none of us were sick. But if we do get sick, we have the training and equipment to take care of each other, and if we need to we can even get advice from doctors on the ground. Thanks for your question, Emily.” He swallowed back a tense, tin-foil taste in the back of his throat. “We have enough time for one more question.”

  A moment passed while microphones changed hands, and then a far more enthusiastic voice came across the radio. “Hi, my name’s Oliver and I’m ten years old and I want to be an astronaut and my question for Alvin is can you please tell us how to be an astronaut because I really, really want to be an astronaut!”

  Alvin smiled. At least you could count on kids to want to be astronauts when they grew up, no matter what was happening on the ground. “Thanks, Oliver. What a great question. The most important thing is to find something you love doing, something you can practise until you become real good at it, but studying math and science help a lot! I’m sure your school or parents can help you look up more about that on the NASA website, and good luck with achieving your dream, Oliver.”

  Oliver’s ‘thank you’ came through fuzzy, burned with radio hiss. It took just a nudge of the tuner knob to correct—Space Station’s orbit was fast and low, fast enough that radio signals between Station and ground receivers Doppler-shifted across radio frequencies depending on the alignment of orbit and Earth. Even corrected for, though, Alvin could hear the trademark bubble and pop of ground interference.

  “I think that’s all we have time for. Station’s probably about to pass over the horizon from your perspective.”

  “Well, thank you, Alvin, for talking to us down here at Bannerton Elementary in New Jersey,” one of the teachers said, so grave and formal he must have thought he was part of a historic broadcast to the moon landings, his voice torn to bits by static. “The Amateur Radio on the ISS program is a fantastic opportunity—”

  “Thank you for the opportunity to talk to all the kids,” Alvin cut in. “Our transmit window’s closing, so this is NA-One-SS signing out. Good luck and God Bless to all the kids and staff at Bannerton Elementary. Out.”

  No matter how hard he listened, adjusting the dial, all the static gave him were a few warbles that might have been a class full of kids yelling an enthusiastic ‘bye!’ at him. It had been a short window; from the ground, Space Station had streaked across a corner of the sky in just twelve minutes.

  Alvin Burrows hooked his toes under the handrails on the surface he was treating as a floor, to anchor himself down while he turned the amateur radio set off. The silence in Zvezda, the Russian command module, was broken only by the ever-present humming of the airflow fans. As far as Alvin was concerned, after five months and one week in space, that just about qualified as pin-drop silence.

  “Space Station, this is Houston. You’ve finished with the ARISS event?”

  Alvin unhooked his toes and pushed away from the radio set, turning and twisting to re-orient himself toward the ceiling, and the communications panel. He leaned in to touch ‘transmit’ on the microphone. “That is correct, Houston. All went as scheduled.”

  “Okay, Alvin. That was your last piece of volunteer work for today. For next week’s session you’re going to be in contact with the school in Reims, France. Any issues?”

  Alvin shut his eyes and tried to picture the path that Space Station took over Earth. On a flat map it looked like a sine wave, bobbing North and South in long curves, although in reality it was just a regular orbit around the Earth, tilted away from the equator and making a full circle every hour and a half, while the world rolled sedately beneath. If France passed below, before that they’d either be coming in from the direction of Spain, or Britain... “Will the orbit let us fit in that private boys’ school if we start early? Have the session with them, then the French, one after the other?”

  “I think so, Alvin. We’ll check into that for you. Any other business?”

  “No.” Alvin stopped, staring at the photographs the Russians had stuck up on the bottom end of Zvezda. He was alone in the module right now, but it was part of the Russian living space. They, or their predecessors from earlier expeditions, had turned a wall into a shrine to rocketry, with photographs of Yuri Gagarin and other Russian heroes of their space program, but his crewmates Matvey and Yegor had colour photos of their children there, too.

  Their children on the ground.

  The taste of tin-foil in Alvin’s mouth was overpowering. He swallowed. “Actually, Tom, what’s the news on the pandemic down there?”

  It was okay for
the kids to ask, Mission Control had a rehearsed answer for them, but if Alvin asked about the pandemic there was always a thirty second pause before Tom transmitted an answer.

  It wasn’t officially a pandemic, of course. Officially it wasn’t anything except this year’s bird flu outbreak. But whatever it was, officially or unofficially, the plague simply hadn’t existed when Alvin had launched on his Soyuz from Baikonur to Space Station. Now, people were infected everywhere from Alaska to Azerbaijan to Australia, and in the past few days victims were beginning to die. First, one or two; then dozens. Now? Hundreds.

  It felt like Tom took far more than the usual thirty seconds to come up with an answer. “Not much different than in the news this morning. What’s the problem, Alvin?”

  “I just don’t know what to keep telling these kids, Tom. They all want to know about the bird flu, whether we’re safe up here, if we’ve got a cure. They’re scared, and it’s heartbreaking, it’s just real heartbreaking, you know?”

  Another thirty second delay ticked away, but it wasn’t Tom’s fault. Tom was another astronaut, assigned as CAPCOM on one of the communication shifts from Mission Control at Houston. He was older, though Alvin knew him well on a personal basis. Tom invited him over to barbecues and church fairly regularly, even though Alvin was still fresh blood, this his first mission. Hell, Marla—Alvin’s wife—traded baking recipes with Tom’s eldest daughter. Tom Rawlings was good people; Alvin trusted Tom. But that thirty-second delay put a sick, half-electric tinny taste down the back of Alvin’s throat.

  “Well,” Tom said, “if necessary we can cancel some of the amateur radio sessions until the pandemic settles down and things start cooling off.”

  “I’m coming home in three weeks, Tom. There aren’t that many ARISS sessions left.”

  “Three weeks is a long time. I’m sure we’ll start hearing some good news about all this before the end of the week.”

  Now it was Alvin’s turn to remain silent for a stunned thirty seconds. He shook his head slowly. “Well, I hope so, Tom. I guess that about does it.”

  “Okay, Alvin.” No delay at all, now. “Once again, thanks for volunteering some of your free time. We all appreciate it.”

  “No problem, Houston. Station out.”

  Giving up free time was a big deal. On Space Station, free time meant time to clean, eat, and sleep. Thankfully, so far as sleep went, Alvin had found himself needing less and less since coming up to Station. His usual seven hours a night had dwindled to six, then gradually to five and a half. He hadn’t lost that last half hour of sleep a night until the pandemic had started.

  Seemingly, it had popped up everywhere at once. There had been speculation that the pandemic started spreading at an airport, either Heathrow or JFK, but the news was calling it bird flu. Every recent bird flu outbreak, like SARS, had started in China, and spent months passing between humans and farm-bred birds before making the jump to human-to-human transmissibility.

  The pandemic wasn’t bird flu, and wherever it had come from, it was global now. It started with the sniffles and a dead tired fatigue, usually accompanied with a fever. In the supposedly rare cases where someone had died, a cough started and got worse and worse, eventually turning bloody.

  Alvin didn’t understand the first thing about it. Just knew he didn’t like what he heard on the cut-down news segments Mission Control sent up. Just knew he wished he was on the ground with his wife Marla, taking it quiet and easy in a cabin in the woods somewhere far away, like having a do-over of their honeymoon.

  He missed her. At least he could call her, there was a laptop in the Cupola. They didn’t have a whole lot of bandwidth on Space Station, but there was enough for the internet phone. On weekends the whole crew got a slot with a private, or at least semi-private, video conference call home, but Alvin really didn’t want to wait that long to talk to Marla, no matter how badly he wanted to see her face.

  He bent down—in orbit, it was more like pulling his legs up toward his chest—and pulled his socks straight and snug over his feet. As usual, the surface over his toes where he hooked in under handrails was a little dirty, but he’d be okay with this pair of socks for another three days at least. Some engineer who’d apparently mistaken Space Station for a party-oriented college dorm had decided it’d be acceptable to wear the same clothes for a week, then just throw them out. After all, doing laundry in space was hard.

  Doing just about anything in space was hard, except for moving around. Once you got used to it, anyway.

  Turning himself over, he got his feet pointing away from the long drop ‘down’ from Zvezda along the long line of modules that formed Space Station’s spine. After all, Alvin was just a little afraid of long falls, so he turned over instead and faced the drop head-on, turning it into a narrow sky above him. He flew up into it, with just a tug at the handrails.

  Space Station was a maze of a smaller modules breaking off from the main ‘spine’ of the station, like the crossbars on an orthodox crucifix, a world of orderly right-angled bends. Alvin spotted Rolan in the first side-module he passed. Rolan Petrov wasn’t the easiest man in the world to stay friendly with—he was a little too detached, that flat-iron face of his seldom breaking into any expression, let alone a smile—but Alvin waved anyway, and Rolan looked up briefly from the book he was reading to wave back.

  Alvin kept going ‘up,’ past Rolan’s module, the hiss of air loud in his ears while he squeezed his way through the dark, bent Pressurized Mating Adaptor. The PMA was a goose-necked tunnel that separated the Russian and American sections of Station, linking the Russian Zarya module to Station’s crossroads—Unity Node. Storage bags layered every wall of the PMA, all strapped down with bungees, making the already narrow gap tighter still. It was dark, and the bend of the PMA blocked line of sight until he finally got into Unity, which was effectively Station’s kitchen and living room, in addition to being a giant airlock holding the two halves of Station together.

  Alvin grasped the edge of the next side-module’s hatch, and swung himself through into Trinity—primarily a living space and life support module, where the biggest window on Space Station—the Cupola—had been installed. But someone was already in the Cupola’s niche.

  Charlie Milligan was nestled in the blossom of her ruddy brown hair. Loose, it stood out at all angles, a foot long and slightly frizzy, as though she had a colossal afro. A hairband was floating beside her, and she was drifting in front of the Cupola, silhouetted in the light reflected up from Earth.

  The module’s laptop was open in front of her, drifting at the end of its cable, and from its speakers Nate Milligan was crying for his mother. “M-mommy, everyone’s wearing plastic and we’re not allowed to leave the neighbourhood!”

  “Shh. It’s okay, sweetie. Mommy’s here. It’s going to be okay, it’s just for a little while.”

  “A plastic man said I wasn’t supposed to be in the yard and he yelled at me and then dad yelled at him but I don’t want to wear plastic mom I want it all to be normal like it was I’m scared—”

  Alvin didn’t wave this time. He just shut his eyes and silently pushed himself back out of the module, trying to forget what he’d seen. He and Marla didn’t have kids yet, but he knew he wouldn’t want one of his crewmates intruding on a moment like that.

  Poor Nate. He might have to wait for his mom for a very long time. Charlie and Alvin were on slightly different expedition shifts—the Soyuz craft that took them to and from Station only carried three people, and there were six crew on the station. Every three months, three of the crew left, and three new crew members came up. Alvin was due to go home on the next return launch, but Charlie was going to be up here and away from her family for at least another three months. Maybe longer, if this pandemic thing impacted the launch schedules.

  Alvin wouldn’t be able to stare at Earth through the Cupola’s glass like usual while he called Marla. Not the biggest sacrifice to make, even if he preferred pretending he could spot her, somewhere d
own there. Instead he crossed over into Harmony and went to his sleeping station—a closet bolted to the ‘ceiling’ packed with a sleeping bag, his few personal things, and one of Station’s laptops—and found his pictures. He wasn’t allowed to bring much up to Station, no personal electronics, so Marla had gotten his pictures printed on glossy photo-quality paper.

  He pulled out his favourite photo from the thin stack, leaving the rest in their Velcro envelope stuck to his bunk wall, and smiled at Marla’s smile. In the photo he was standing next to her, and they were close to the same height.

  Alvin finally got ahold of his privacy in the JEM—Japanese Experiment Module—and settled himself down with the laptop from his sleep station in front of him, and the experiment airlock door behind him.

  He had to wait for the internet phone to load up, and his request for a call took another minute to go through the system before he got permission to use the bandwidth. Then it rang for a little longer still, until Alvin started to worry, jiggling himself lightly from his perch, one foot hooked under a handrail, the other foot pressed down on top.

  At last the fuzzy sound of her phone ringing gave way to the fuzzy sound of her voice, sweet as ever. “Alvin?”

  “Hi, Marla. Do you have time to talk?”

  “Of course I do. But do you?”

  He laughed. “Well, I should get something to eat, but I’m not real hungry. What time is it over there? Four?”

  “That’s right.”

  The clocks and schedule on Space Station were set to GMT. Back home, in Houston, it was six hours earlier. Sometimes Marla didn’t have much time to talk, even if her husband was an astronaut. After all, sometimes she was with patients... Alvin frowned. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at work?”