Orbital Decay (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by Malcolm Cross

  Yegor continued to stare at her. He was pale. Jaw clamped. No longer making his musing grunts. And beside him, Matvey was staring at the old man with nervous horror.

  Matvey looked across to Alvin, almost pleadingly. Touched his fingers to his lips while Yegor’s attention was elsewhere. Shhh.

  Just what kind of ‘heavy shit’ was Yegor into?

  “That sounds... bad,” Krister said, at last.

  “It is. The longer this pandemic continues, the worse it gets. We have to stop it as soon as we can. And we may have the answer to stopping it on Space Station.”

  “What?”

  Charlie gestured at Alvin. “The mice.”

  Alvin folded his arms uncomfortably. All he’d done was ask her to look into something he didn’t understand. She’d done the actual work.

  “Not only are they genetically altered to produce blood group antigens, their immune systems were altered.” She smiled, nervously. “Changed around and spliced to fit a risk profile we know exists for the pandemic. The experiment’s documentation doesn’t tell us what they’re infected with, but there are no O-negative mice in the group, the experiment was launched with one of the Progress craft four months ago, well within the time margin Galveston thinks the pandemic emerged in, and those mice? That experiment’s designed to turn them into farms to cultivate a single virus in their blood. I’m sure it’s an early strain of the pandemic, and they’re swarming with it.”

  The nervous taste of tin-foil sizzled between Alvin’s teeth. “You’re talking about a vaccine?”

  She nodded. “Cellular division can accelerate under microgravity conditions. If I had a new, unknown virus on my hands, and I wanted a vaccine for it fast? I’d get it into orbit as soon as I could. After having isolated the virus, the first thing you need are clean samples. You can’t just take it out of victims, that gives you the wild strain. You need to get the virus clean, to get a population infected with a single workable strain, a seed strain. Ideally the earliest ancestor you can catch.

  “They’ve been struggling to achieve it on the ground. Trouble getting it to grow in the lab, and they’ve had repeated failures trying to breed the wild strain down to something usable. But up here that work’s been done. It’s in the mice. They’ve been raised in a sterile environment, the only viral loads they’ll have in them are the pandemic itself and the remnants of the retroviruses used to modify their immune systems.

  “We can take them right now, pull a serum from them and dose it with formaldehyde to kill the virus, and we could inoculate ourselves with it.”

  “That doesn’t sound entirely safe.” Rolan pulled himself back down against a wall, looking at her from an awkward angle. At last he let his food go, reoriented himself to face her properly, and reclaimed the floating packs. “You’re telling us to inject ourselves with formaldehyde?”

  “Very little. Think of it as more like washing the viral material with it — just enough has to be used to break the virus down so that it can’t replicate, but the antigens remain intact.”

  “Antigens? I though those had to do with blood type.”

  Charlie grimaced, shook her head. “Antigens are anything the immune system learns to produce an immune response to. The antibodies generated are tuned to cling to a specific part of a virus, or proteins forming a cell wall, anything foreign to the body. That’s the antigen, if it’s biologically active. If it’s relatively inert, it’s usually termed an allergen. It’s the same biological process.

  “The trick is to keep the virus fragments whole enough that the body recognises them as antigens, and then produces antibodies that respond to the complete virus just as effectively.”

  Rolan stared at her levelly, digesting the information. “What risk is there if the viruses are not broken down enough by the formaldehyde?”

  “Then we’ve injected ourselves with the live virus. With luck, the strain they sent up with the mice was stabilized and asymptomatic. It’s what you want in a seed strain. I hope that’s what they did. But I’m more worried about the retroviruses they used to make the mice transgenic—I don’t have a good way of filtering those out while we’re up here. Gene therapy to play with the ABO antigens... the literature talks about pancreatic cancer and tumours causing brain damage akin to schizophrenia in rats.” She smiled tightly. “So if anything, the risk is going to be that I’m too thorough breaking the viruses down and the fragments left will be too indistinct for an effective inoculation.”

  “How many doses can you make up here?” Alvin swallowed back the tinny sting in his mouth. “You can’t mean we could make enough vaccine to protect the entire world, do you?”

  “No.” she shook her head rapidly, a sharp flick of her hair, a halo around her. “There isn’t remotely enough material for that. But I could make a handful of doses. Enough to keep us and a few others safe long enough to manufacture a proper vaccine once we get to the right facilities on the ground.”

  Rolan locked eyes with Yegor for an intent moment. Neither said anything, but Rolan broke away first, turning to Charlie. “You’re talking about saving the world.”

  “Maybe. I hope so. It can take weeks, months, to manufacture a vaccine in the quantities required once it’s at this stage, but it’s possible we could make enough before it’s too late.”

  Krister blinked at her, his eyebrows raised, shocked, as if he’d been slapped. He took a breath, putting on the calm face of their crew commander. “If it’s the correct strain of virus,” he said, voice betraying worry, excitement. “And if it is, it sounds like this experiment is critical. Something that takes priority over everything else we’re doing here.”

  Alvin was staring at one of the pastel pink walls of Unity. An absurd colour, but calming, and that’s why it had been used. That’s why he focussed on it, gently chewing the sides of his tongue, trying to banish the tin-foil taste from his mouth. A handful of doses? Those would have to be used on those working to cure the virus. There wouldn’t be any way to justify vaccinating non-critical personnel. Could dentists qualify? He doubted it, Marla didn’t have anything like the right experience for this. But Rudy, Charlie’s husband, was a retired industrial chemist.

  He watched her face, waiting for eye contact, until at last she smiled at him. Her smile lost none of its excitement, none of its righteous hope, but Charlie’s attention returned to Krister and Rolan, ignoring Alvin’s sick worry.

  “We need to confirm the details of this experiment. If it’s true, wasting even a week could be critical,” Rolan said. “We may need to send Krister, Alvin and Matvey back down immediately, rather than in two weeks as scheduled.”

  Krister nodded back at him. “If Charlie’s theory about the experiment is true. Let’s call the ground.”

  “THAT’S A HARE-BRAINED theory you guys have,” the CAPCOM at Kennedy said over the link. It was a new voice, one Alvin wasn’t immediately familiar with—Kyle Gilder, an astronaut who flew a desk and keyboard these days. “I’m looking at the listing, but the experiment documentation we’ve got just lists the strain introduced to the mice as the ‘Ten-Zee’ subtype and doesn’t specify what it’s a strain of...”

  “Can you get in touch with the laboratory concerned?” Krister looked up at Charlie, and nodded once. She hadn’t been able to find anything to the laboratory running the experiment beyond a front office in a small university.

  Kyle hesitated, though it wasn’t anything like the thirty second pause, just the flick of pages turning as he looked through a file. “There’s a lot of documentation here, guys, I’m not sure I’m getting all of it. The file here is huge, and it’s mixed up with a lot of other projects...” He trailed off.

  Krister waited, until impatience took over. “Kennedy, do you have anything for us on the AAMICE project?”

  The microphone clicked off, dead air. And Alvin found himself counting the seconds, very nearly all thirty seconds of that old pause, before Kyle Gilder murmured over the miles, “I’m real sorry to tell you guys that,
looking at the file, we don’t have any information on that. Other than loading up the samples to return with the Soyuz as scheduled, there’s nothing else in here that Station needs to be informed of.”

  Even though Alvin didn’t know Kyle, he could hear the worry and fear in his voice.

  Worry and fear that was repeated in Charlie’s voice when they returned to Harmony to bed down for the night, after the crew’s slice of private personal time. “Where’s Matvey?”

  Alvin hadn’t expected to get much sleep that night—his five and a half hours were slowly shrinking away to four—but still, the intrusion was unwelcome. He popped open the slim doors of his sleep station and peered out. Charlie was leaning out of hers, hovering upside down in front of him as she held open the doors to Matvey’s space.

  Empty.

  “Where’s Matvey?” she repeated. “Krister, Matvey hasn’t gotten to bed!” She glided through the space to the station opposite hers, reaching out to push open the doors—for a moment, Alvin expected Krister not to be there either, for this to be the setup for some confused nightmare, but Krister pushed the doors to his bunk open just before Charlie touched them.

  Krister examined Matvey’s empty bunk, with enough attention and focus that Alvin didn’t think he had been sleeping much either. He checked his watch, and murmured, “Give it five minutes. He might just be taking a little more personal time...”

  If they wanted more personal time, unless they were deliberately going against their schedule like Charlie, they had to give up time taking meals or time sleeping. But even then, usually they just stayed in their sleep stations and shut the doors for privacy; they didn’t wander off.

  “Did you check the Cupola?” Alvin asked, rubbing at his eyes.

  She shook her head slightly. “That’s where I was all evening.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come to bed when he’s ready,” Krister said.

  Charlie frowned at Krister, and launched herself off at the nearest communications panel. She tapped it over to internal communications. “Matvey? Can you get in touch?”

  Her voice echoed lightly, repeated in all of Station’s modules.

  The delay lasted a lot longer than thirty seconds, with Krister pulling himself back into his sleeping bag dismissively, while Charlie waited for a response. “Matvey?” she repeated.

  Finally, Rolan came onto the intercom. “He’s not here. He is not on that side of Station?”

  “No.” She turned. “Krister, he’s not reporting in...”

  Krister hesitated, rubbing at his face. Waited, taking a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, finally. “We’ll search for him.”

  Two minutes later, while Alvin was searching in the PMM—Permanent Multi-purpose Module—his nerves churning away in his gut, he heard Yegor shouting in Russian on the intercom, “Bring the medical kit to Rassvet!”

  Before Alvin had even gotten himself out of the module in a tangle of adrenaline, the intercom clicked back on. Yegor sounded tired. Broken. “Never mind. Just... just bring the stretcher and body bag.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DEAD SHOULD never be so alive as they were in orbit. Matvey rolled serenely. His eyes were shut in what could almost have been sleep, expression soft. Drifting, he bounced into one of Rassvet’s walls, his body crumpling against it in a way Alvin had never seen a person move before. His arms and legs slowly twisted until his shoulder hit a surface, and his body slowly bounced away, legs gradually flexing almost straight. Life returned to his limbs, arms curling, hands waving. His pants were marked with spreading stains of damp, and spittle drifted at the tip of his tongue, between teeth held stiffly open a fraction of an inch.

  It wasn’t the first corpse Alvin had ever seen, but it was the first one that seemed to be trying to say something.

  A laptop with a black screen bumped against the walls from the end of its cord, making the only sound in the module besides Alvin and Rolan’s breathing. No hiss of air. The ventilation fans were silent. The air was still.

  The scents refused to mix. In one spot, Alvin couldn’t smell anything. Move his face slightly, and then his nose was caught in the wet warmth of exhaled air, gathered up in a bubble of carbon dioxide so thick it gave him a headache with just a single breath. To get a lungful of oxygen he had to pull away from where Matvey had been found, where Matvey had asphyxiated on his own exhaled breath.

  Matvey slowly drifted, still turning. Rigor mortis was pulling tension into him piece by piece. First the face, the jaw, the neck. Soon, the limbs wouldn’t crumple anymore.

  “Pass the stretcher,” Rolan murmured, holding his arms out to the hatch.

  Matvey’s skin was chill, when Alvin caught his fingertips. Warmer, close to the elbow. There was only a hint in his hands of the tension that held his face rigid. His arms resisted motion, slightly. It was like moving a training doll in an emergency procedures training session, Alvin told himself, and nothing at all like fighting with the first onset of rigor mortis in a friend’s corpse after he’d died because of something so damn pointless as asphyxiating for the lack of a breeze.

  Alvin bit down on the inside of his cheek, trying to stop himself from crying, and fought with Matvey’s body. They had to get his head in line with his spine, so that Alvin, Rolan, and Krister could strap Matvey to the stretcher, wrap him in the station’s single body-bag and put him in the hurriedly emptied single cupboard that was Station’s only morgue. And Matvey fought back, stubbornly holding his head at an angle, refusing to let himself simply die and be stowed away, as though afraid of being forgotten.

  “AT FIRST I thought he must have been alive.” Yegor tugged at his short hair, his hands wandering over his face as if searching for the moustache he’d shaved off twenty years before. “He looked to be asleep. He didn’t answer when I called him. I gave him a shake and he was... he was limp—It was then, I think, I noticed how quiet the module was. That the fans were off. That close to him the air was stale.”

  The microphone was open, relaying every word back to the ground.

  “When was the last time you saw him, before?” Krister asked, as gentle as he could.

  “He had been watching the end of one of the DVDs. Some film he’d been watching in fifteen-minute chunks by himself now and then; to calm down, I think. I heard it when I went past earlier... he could have been in trouble then, without my noticing. He had the DVD playing so very loud. By the time we found him, the film had finished.”

  Alvin leaned close to Charlie. Whispered, to keep from interrupting the brief investigation. “If he dropped off to sleep...”

  She nodded fractionally. Murmured back, “Maybe.”

  If Matvey had been asleep, by the time the carbon dioxide had built up around him enough to have given him some sign—shortness of breath, a headache—he might have been unable to regain consciousness. Gone straight from sleep into stupor, and from there, slowly to death.

  Rolan, next. Moscow Mission Control asked the first question.

  “What did you see, when Yegor called you to the module?”

  “Matvey, unconscious. Yegor was trying to find his pulse, but... I thought he might have been alive, but when Yegor went to inform the crew that he was dead, and I tried to find his pulse myself, I felt it. No pulse, and rigor mortis in his neck muscles.” Rolan paused and shut his eyes. Shook his head slowly. “But earlier, when I was leaving to use the water-closet in Tranquillity. Maybe... half an hour before we found Matvey. I saw someone leaving Rassvet.”

  Everyone froze, staring at Rolan.

  Even Moscow remained silent. The hiss of static went on and on, until at last ground control asked, “Who?”

  “I do not know—I was in the PMA, it’s too narrow to turn around. I thought it was Matvey, all I saw was the movement behind me...”

  “No, Rolan. The question I meant to ask was to the whole crew, you are all listening, aren’t you? Who was it who left Rassvet? They would have been the last to see Matvey alive.”

  Yegor had given his
version of events. He and Rolan looked first to Krister, and Krister turned his accusing stare on Alvin and Charlie, lingering to one side.

  Alvin took a moment to register the full meaning of that look. It hit him in the stomach, with a foul taste at the back of his throat. “I was in the PMM writing e-mails before bed. Trying to get someone to run batteries to my wife with the quarantine supply deliveries...”

  “If it wasn’t one of us,” Charlie said slowly, carefully, “then maybe it was Matvey.”

  “But where were you, Charlie?” Krister’s eyes were icy. “What were you doing?”

  “I was in Tranquillity, over the Cupola, reading the research notes on the pandemic my friends are mailing me. And, of course, same as Alvin, whining at NASA to do something to get my kid out of that fucking quarantine.” She met his gaze with fury, her teeth gritted. “What about you, huh, Krister?”

  “It was my turn on the exercise bike; check the schedule if you want. It must have been Matvey, then,” Krister concluded, looking back at Rolan. “So we know he was alive shortly before the accident.”

  “IT DOESN’T MAKE sense,” Charlie hissed. “That much carbon dioxide doesn’t build up in a few minutes. If he was awake, he would have noticed something. You were there, how thick was it?”

  Alvin paused, clinging to the rail beside Charlie, in the quiet of Unity, now that they were alone. He looked up, briefly, at the PMA—the passage linking the Russian section to Unity. That gooseneck bend, the walls of it thickened out with white supply-bags all bungeed down. No, Rolan wouldn’t have been able to turn around in that tight space. Not easily.