Orbital Decay (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by Malcolm Cross

  “Well... Well gosh-darn,” Alvin mumbled hesitantly.

  Krister and Charlie both laughed; Alvin went beet red. He hadn’t ever really picked up the habit of swearing healthily, like Charlie had.

  It only took Alvin a few minutes to eat his breakfast and check with Houston about what the computer crash had done to his schedule for the day. More than half of his original schedule had been pushed over to tomorrow, and then some of tomorrow’s work into the day after that, everything toppling like dominoes until his free time had been chipped down to the bare essentials of eat, exercise, excrete and pass out with exhaustion.

  “You built it, so you better fix it, hm?” Krister kept on laughing, after finishing his coffee.

  Alvin shook his head. “I only helped design the replacement boards and system software.”

  “Still! You better fix it before we fall out of the sky.”

  Falling out of the sky was an exaggeration. The occasional lost atmospheric molecules that hung around in low orbit slowed Space Station down only fractionally, but the two flight computers—which were supposed to work independently and check themselves against each other—were tied in to Space Station’s power and atmospheric systems. Urgent, extremely urgent, but not an emergency. Yet.

  For now he had to forget about the mice. But they’d come up again.

  After all, they were on his schedule.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AFTER THE TROUBLE with the flight computer, Alvin got roped into helping the three Russians troubleshoot Zvezda’s electronics problems for days. Zvezda was Space Station’s service module, the ship’s bridge in a sense, and even though Alvin was comfortable reading Russian, the Cyrillic forced him to concentrate on double checking the procedures manuals.

  But forgetful as he was, the mice did come back to him, although it took almost a full week. A week after his not-quite nightmare about Marla. A week of steadily worsening news-clips from the ground.

  But even if thousands, even tens of thousands of people had died as the pandemic worsened, the mice burned back into his consciousness like a meteor hitting the sky beneath Station. What made him notice the mice this time wasn’t the nature of the experiment, but the fact it had been prioritized.

  Station repairs got prioritized, trouble with the CO2 scrubbers got prioritized, experiments? Experiments got torn to pieces to fix Station’s systems or ignored or unplugged. Experiments were, for all their importance, very seldom the priority when living in a set of pressurized cans strung together two hundred and fifty miles over the ground. In his five and a half months on board Space Station, Alvin had never seen an experiment leap up his schedule and wind up marked as a priority.

  It was slotted in for the afternoon, and he had the plans in his hands, but the first thing he did with his thirty minutes for eating lunch was find Charlie.

  “I’m running late. Can this wait a minute?” Charlie was floating with a medical monitor strapped to the inside of her wrist, checking the monitor’s screen and making entries on one of the computers.

  “Yeah.” Alvin ran his hands over his neck. He was still, barely, on schedule. He could find time to suck down a meal later.

  “Okay,” Charlie said after finishing up, taping the monitor’s cables down against her arm before turning herself around to face him, with a quick twist of the body so that her face was aligned with his. “What is it?”

  “Remember the blood group thing?”

  She squinted for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, Tom told you something and you were asking about viruses.”

  Alvin nodded. “About the virus.”

  The news still coming up to Station, filtered by Mission Control, was still terrible and alien enough it seemed like something happening in another country—on another planet. The National Guard had been called up all across the US, something similar was happening in most of Europe and China. The authorities were begging for calm in the face of rising public panic. The pandemic had gone from the first death to the first hundred in days, and a week later the official count of the dead was up past forty thousand. Around the globe, people were fearfully waiting for it to hit a hundred thousand, while hospitals in every nation were crammed full of sufferers.

  “Here. Look at this.” Alvin held out the folded print-out he’d made of the AAMICE project details. He figured Charlie could get more out of them than he could. After all, microbiology was her field.

  “Mmn.” She accepted the pages with a lack of grace, a hint of this-is-a-waste-of-my-time, but her expression calmed, became focussed before she’d even finished reading the first section. Without looking up she said, “I didn’t know you could do that to mice.”

  “Hm?”

  “I figured that any kind of genetic modification that extreme would fail. Result in cancer, that kind of thing. As much as playing with retroviruses is a precise art, significant gene modification is tricky and this... this sounds tricky.”

  “How tricky?”

  “I haven’t been reading the journals lately, but when I graduated, this would have been impossible.” She turned the pages over with a rustle. “This experiment brief doesn’t seem right to me. The research objectives are murky; ‘observe the results of incubation in microgravity’ doesn’t tell me much.”

  “I thought it seemed okay...”

  “I’m not bitching at you, Alvin. What you have to do with the experiment’s straightforward, but this doesn’t tell me what they’re doing. What results they’re looking for. It looks like they’re testing the transmittability of some kind of infectious agent, but it doesn’t say what the agent is. And why the hell is it in a box outside?”

  Alvin folded his arms and frowned. “Shouldn’t they be doing this kind of work on the ground? A real biocontainment lab?”

  “Well, you’d think so, but up here bacteria can divide faster... microgravity sometimes seems to flip a switch in cells that’s like, hey guys”—she snapped her fingers—“go nuts.”

  He hesitated. “How nuts?”

  “Division rates go up tenfold. More. There was a virus experiment up here a few years ago that turned a petri dish into an absolute viral factory—some viruses just love microgravity. You think this has to do with...” She covered her mouth for a moment, before jerking her thumb in the direction of the module’s Earthward wall. “What’s going on back there?”

  “I don’t know.” Alvin shook his head. “This just got pushed up on my schedule for today. Has priority over everything else.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I’m taking the samples home with me, too.”

  “Huh.” Charlie frowned, reaching back briefly to pull off her hairband and shake out her hair to let it float free while staring down at the pages. She looked up at him. “You mind if I keep this? I want to look it over again when I’ve got more time.”

  “Go ahead.” Alvin smiled briefly.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning away, scratching at her scalp. “And Alvin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful when you haul these mice in. Real careful.”

  “STATION, THIS IS Houston. Do you read?”

  “Houston, Station receives you loud and clear. I’m powering up the remote manipulator’s cameras now.”

  Alvin licked his lips, and gingerly touched the switches on the control panel in the JEM. One by one the monitors flickered into life, displaying a long slender white arm stretching into the distance, still folded in on itself.

  The remote manipulator system’s robotic arm was mounted over the ‘porch’—a flat plate on the exterior of the Japanese Experiment Module, specifically for holding experiments that needed to be exposed to space. The mice were on the underside of the porch, shielded from sunlight and the radiation produced by experiments like the JEXTER laser.

  “Okay, that’s good, Station. We’re receiving the feed. Do you have the dead pixels on monitor two, or is that on our side?”

  Alvin squinted at his screen. “No, I think that’s the arm’s camera t
elling us she’s growing old.” The radiation count was high in space, and it wasn’t just from the experiments. The sun’s radiation was brutal without the atmosphere as a buffer; it was more than enough to gradually burn out the cameras on Station.

  Alvin went one by one through the slow careful steps to power up the robotic arm, double-checking himself at every turn, even if Tom at Mission Control was supposed to be handling the checklist for him.

  Tom was CAPCOM again. He usually was, on the day shift. One small reassuring piece of familiarity, even if everything else was changing. Usually Alvin would be talking to the control centre at Munich for research operations, but the Munich centre had been closed as part of the German quarantine effort.

  Going through the warm-up procedures for the manipulator arm, making sure the lubricants in the arm’s actuators were smoothly spread, Alvin wet his lips again and dared to ask, “So how you doing, Tom?”

  “Pretty good, Alvin. Wife and kids liking their trip up to visit the cousins at Muir Beach in California. Real quiet up there, still. They’re liking the seaside.”

  “That’s good.” With any luck, they’d be away from the pandemic.

  “Marla?”

  “Mad as a cat on a hot tin roof about not being able to go in to work, but she’s good.” Alvin kept an eye on the screens. Wet his lips yet again. But it didn’t matter how often he licked his lips, if he didn’t ask. “So what’s the news like, Tom? Anything on the quarantines?”

  The air fans hissed at him.

  Silently, the insulation-wrapped steel out there in space wobbled back and forth, as though the spindly arm was doing its own little mechanical tai chi routine.

  Alvin sucked down a breath, swallowed down his spittle, and asked, “Tom?”

  “Sorry, buddy. It’s all rolling along, you know how it is. How’s that warm-up going?”

  So the thirty-second rule was still in place. Alvin sighed. “Yeah, it’s going. You know how it is.” He laughed mirthlessly. “So is there anything we can talk about? How’s everyone doing with their leave cancelled?”

  “Huh?”

  “Greg and Josh and all them?”

  “Oh. Them. They got taken out to Sheppard Air Force Base. Don’t know much about it; nothing I could talk about, anyway,” Tom said, with a subtle edge to his voice.

  Alvin blinked, quietly thinking that over. “Uh-huh.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well give them my best if you see ’em. Houston, I’m starting the procedure now.”

  With that, Alvin delicately started moving the manipulator arm. While the mice were the point of the exercise, Alvin was scheduled to get in as much useful work with the manipulator as he could while it was warmed up.

  There were canisters to remove and exchange, a non-functional gas spectrometry experiment to unbolt, which he lifted off the porch and relocated to an unused sunny spot where the radiant heat of the sun, when Station wasn’t in Earth’s shadow, wouldn’t matter any. And of course that opened up a shaded space to move another experiment into...

  All told, it took Alvin close to an hour before he got his first look at the mousebox.

  Two thick metal bolts held it to the underside of the porch. The box itself was a cube about ten inches to a side, with slender extrusions where a gas cylinder was screwed into it.

  It didn’t seem very big. Especially not for a mouse colony to fit inside, with all its life support and food.

  In the dark of Space Station’s shade it was hard to make out the corners, wrapped up in yellow reflective tape, like an industrial hazard strip. The closer the manipulator got, reflecting sunlight off its white insulation, the brighter the mousebox got.

  Alvin leaned over to the small window in the module’s hull. The manipulator looked like an anglepoise lamp trying to make itself small and hide, bent over with its head hidden under the porch. Maybe like someone awkwardly stretched to check down the back of the couch, where something had been lost and forgotten.

  Looking at the mousebox on the monitor, Alvin had the feeling he was the first to look at it in a long, long time.

  The camera shuddered side to side as he brought the arm’s head in closer, close enough to read the letters engraved in the box’s white skin. Model organism colony support apparatus 656. And beneath that, pasted over a biohazard seal, written on a white sticky label that had dried and curled away from the box in the absolute dryness of hard vacuum, was the hand-pencilled word ‘Pandora.’

  Alvin stared at the monitor, the bitter taste of tin-foil bubbling up in the back of his throat.

  “What the devil are you, then?” he whispered.

  STEP ONE IN the procedure for removing the mousebox required that he use the manipulator to twist a control on the box’s exterior, triggering the remote euthanasia mechanism. He’d expected step one to result in a puff of air, venting out of the box, but the box remained still and inscrutably silent. Step two specified five minutes to wait for the mice to die, and that wait didn’t sit right with Alvin. He toggled the internal battery (step three-point-one), disconnected the power feeds (step three-point-two), and waited for the computer to confirm the box’s systems were ready for removal (step three-point-three). Finally he made it to step four—pulling the mousebox off the porch and bringing it into the experiment airlock.

  He stared at it, slowly bouncing around in the lock, after he’d shut the external door and powered down the manipulator.

  The cube turned serenely, then a little faster, buffeted by the air filling the airlock. The handwritten label blew off, flicking against the hatch window, sticking fast and filling the window with the word ‘Pandora.’

  Alvin stared at it, hesitating, hand on the hatch. He looked over his shoulder, as if he was doing something foolish, something frightening. He wanted someone to come by and stop him, but Alvin was alone.

  ‘Pandora.’ The box just had to have ‘Pandora’ for a label.

  “Great,” Alvin mumbled under his breath. “Real great.”

  He opened the hatch, and the world didn’t end. It didn’t even wobble when he picked up the label—through surgical gloves, naturally—and pasted it back to the sickeningly warm box’s side. It had a living warmth, at least on the side where it had been facing the sun on the way into the airlock. The shadowed side was cool, almost dead to the touch.

  If there had been more stowage space on the Soyuz, he wouldn’t have had to open up the mousebox, but he had to separate it out into smaller samples that could be taken home. Thankfully, he could do that in the sealed glovebox.

  The glovebox wasn’t anything special, just an airtight box with a window and set of rubber gloves built into the side to safely handle hazardous materials, complete with its own separate air supply. The only real difference from any glovebox on Earth was that this one vented into space if he pulled the right valves. It was standard, theoretically safe, though now that Alvin actually had to use it he didn’t feel very safe.

  He sealed it up, tucked his hands into the sleeves of the gloves, and anchored the mousebox to a piece of double-sided Kapton tape on the inside wall. One last check to make sure all the seals were secure, and he set about opening Pandora’s box. He had to force the lid-latches on all four sides with a hard shove of his thumb until he felt the click. One by one, until air hissed with the fourth click.

  The lid exploded out with a blast of pressurized air, spinning madly, sending razors of panic raking down Alvin’s spine with every bang of the box lid against the glass in front of his face. He caught hold of it with a reflexive grab and searched desperately for a crack in the glass, but, nothing. Everything was still sealed, safe. He forced down a breath, and did his best to ignore the sick tin-foil taste in his mouth.

  The mousebox was full of dead mice, pinned between wire grates in cages no more than an inch tall. They floated in a congealed mixture of their own shit and piss.

  Even spared the smell, Alvin retched.

  Their white fur was stained faecal brown in places, some
had licked themselves cleaner than others, some had torn out clumps of their own fur, leaving bloody little marks on their bodies. They didn’t look sick, though. They looked like they’d all been alive until Alvin had turned the control that killed them.

  There were twenty-eight mice packed into a small section of that ten-inch cube, cramped into cages crowded out by the far larger mass of their life support. One by one Alvin took them out of their battery-farm cages, tucked them into plastic pre-labelled envelopes, and transferred them into a three-inch-wide sample cylinder that had been in storage for the duration of the experiment.

  Thank God he didn’t have to touch them. Not with his hands, at least. He used a set of long-handled tweezers, and did his best not to look at them.

  When he’d finally finished, the sample cylinder sealed up and wrapped in two layers of tape and another plastic envelope, he sealed up what was left of the mousebox and stuffed it into an airtight biohazard trash container. He taped up the container, and vented all air from the glovebox’s interior. Even so, and even with a filter mask over his face, when he opened the glovebox back up he could have almost sworn he could smell death in the air.

  He stuffed the sample cylinder into the MELFI storage freezer, and welcomed the opportunity to try and forget all about it.

  AFTER THE COLD loneliness of packing away the mice in the JEM, the bustle and warmth of Unity at dinner time almost had Alvin wondering if he was dreaming.

  Matvey and Yegor were smiling at each other, playing chess with a set made from Velcro and fabric swatches that they could fling back and forth to make their moves in the midst of the crowd of six. Even Krister was hanging out from the ceiling, manoeuvring spoonfuls of paste back and forth before catching them in his mouth. Rolan floated below him, using a new pair of scissors to cleanly open the food packets after getting them out of the toaster-sized warmer.

  Alvin accepted his brisket with a smile, and carefully bumped his bag of tea against Charlie’s bag of orange juice. “Cheers.”