Orbital Decay (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by Malcolm Cross

  He cleared his throat. “A lungful gave me a headache. It was... rank. Not from Matvey—just, hot. Real stale.”

  “Yes, but was it enough for Matvey to have asphyxiated on?”

  He thought about it, frowning.

  “Was it?” she asked again, tone sharper.

  “Probably,” he said. “It shouldn’t take much, in still air, if you don’t move.”

  “But you’d move, wouldn’t you? That headache, that tight feeling in your chest. That shit would wake me up.” Charlie bit her lip. Uncertain, but not so uncertain she gave up on the thought. “And besides, just breathing hard, and taking deep enough breaths, that’d make the air circulate, surely.”

  “You don’t like the idea that Matvey was moving around that soon before his accident, do you?”

  She nodded. “If it was an accident.”

  Alvin took a breath and swallowed. Trying to dispel his nervous energy. “What bugs me,” he whispered, even though they were alone, “is that the first phase of rigor mortis is supposed to take around half an hour to start.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Alvin smiled awkwardly. “Marla has a ton of CSI box sets at home.”

  With a half-amused, half-disgusted smirk, Charlie just shook her head. Her smile vanished fast enough. “So...”

  “Either Matvey went in, fully conscious, and somehow died just after Rolan saw him, or it was someone else,” Alvin said.

  She brought her hands to her face, pulling back her hair and clutching at her scalp. She struggled to say it, but did anyway. “Someone who killed Matvey.”

  “But no one’s admitted they were the one Rolan saw.”

  “Unless Rolan’s lying.”

  “Bull,” Alvin whispered. “Why the hell would he lie about that?”

  She gritted her teeth for a moment. “I don’t know. But he might have been lying.” She glared at him. “I know I didn’t do it. Did you?”

  “God, no!”

  “So it was Rolan, Krister, or Yegor. And Yegor is into heavy shit, remember?

  “Charlie...”

  “Yegor’s KGB and FSB and all that bullshit, and Matvey’s not even supposed to know any of it, and you saw how Yegor clammed up when I was talking about the pandemic.” Charlie’s eyes were raw and angry, and full of challenge.

  “That’s insane. Don’t, don’t let this run away with you. Calm down.”

  “I’m... mostly calm.”

  Alvin palmed at his face. “Good for you. I’m not even slightly calm.”

  Charlie laughed half-heartedly at him. “I want to go and ask Yegor about this. Back me up?”

  “Ask him if he killed Matvey?”

  “No,” she said, voice low, so icy Alvin could just about believe her claims to calmness. “Ask him about the ‘heavy shit,’ and see if it’s the kind of thing worth killing Matvey over.”

  THEY PASSED BY Rolan in Zarya, picking obsessively through spare parts lockers for something to get the air vents in Rassvet going again, and slipped down through the hatch into Zvezda. Yegor hung in front of one of the Soyuz consoles, frowning at the data and referring to a pre-flight manual over and over.

  Alvin wasn’t sure if Yegor was being thorough, or if he was forgetting what he read the moment he’d finished reading it.

  Charlie glanced back at Alvin, her fire quenched by the vulnerability of the older Russian, hunching over that manual and hardly seeing it, body limp with grief, but she pressed on, dragging herself down beside him. Close... but not within arm’s reach, Alvin noticed.

  “Yegor?”

  It took him a moment to look up, but not because he was concentrating. “Yes?” He blinked at her, slowly.

  She hesitated. “A few days ago, before we lost Houston, before Matvey died...”

  Yegor frowned. “Yes?”

  Charlie grimaced, looked to Alvin for support.

  He gnawed his lip. “Yegor, Matvey was talking about your background, your career, he said you might know people... people in the government who might know something about the pandemic.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Yegor muttered, turning back to the display.

  “When I was talking about the pandemic’s effects, you got this expression on your face,” Charlie all but pleaded. “A difficult expression, and—and Matvey was so nervous about you, like he wasn’t supposed to know something...”

  Yegor’s face went scarlet. “Nervous!?” he roared, whirling around to face the both of them. “What the fuck are you accusing me of? I made Matvey nervous? So that means I killed him, obviously!”

  Charlie blinked, backing away with a push. “I’m not saying anything, we’re not saying anything, Yegor; it’s just—”

  “Don’t play coy!” He bared his teeth, like a cornered animal, swiping an arm out at her in a single violent gesture that could so easily have been a blow. “Obviously one of us killed him! Obviously! Are you stupid? Since the fucking Mir fires we have air flow sensors on all the hatches, if there is an air flow problem an alarm goes off! I go and check the alarm, what do I find? The alarm was fucking switched off!”

  “Jesus,” Alvin breathed.

  “Now you accuse me? I know it wasn’t me! I was alone! So it was you, or you, or him”—Yegor swept his arm up at Rolan in Zarya—“or a suicide, but now you find a motive because the idiot boy cannot keep his mouth shut! You know who I think it was? I think it was Alvin!” Yegor stabbed a finger at him. “You want to go home to your wife, so kill Matvey and you know that you and Krister have to return in the Soyuz immediately!”

  Charlie had her hands up, palms flat. “Yegor...”

  “There is your motive! Don’t you pin this on me; Matvey was my friend!”

  “Yegor, he was our friend too—”

  “Hey, hey!” Rolan had pulled himself down to the module hatch, and was staring at all of them. “Stop arguing! What is going on?”

  “It is just another American argument, Rolan. American conflict resolution,” Yegor grunted. “We are talking and we are shouting and that is all. It is alright. Don’t worry yourself.”

  With a nervous glance from face to face, he backed away slightly. “This is true? Alvin, Charlie?”

  She nodded mutely, but Alvin found himself staring at Yegor, still.

  Alvin couldn’t imagine him killing Matvey. He couldn’t. Finally he nodded slightly. “It’s alright, Rolan.”

  “Okay. If you need me to intervene I am just in the next module.” Rolan gave himself a push, and drifted back to his work, looking back over his shoulder at the three of them.

  The old man struggled to get his breathing under control. He shook his head, wiping his face with his sleeve. “I must blow my nose,” he announced, and pushed away to grab a wipe from the small secondary eating area in Zvezda.

  Alvin and Charlie waited for him to finish going through three tissues, all with his back to them, shoulders shaking quietly, before at last he drifted to his small bunk in one of Zvezda’s niches, then returned with his face damp, his eyes red.

  “I didn’t kill Matvey,” he said. “You know why he is nervous about me? Because I am Station’s next commander, and because he was present when I was given this.” He held up a thickly wadded plastic envelope covered in Cyrillic-lettered seals. There was a stack of DVDs inside, bound together with something very much like a handgun’s trigger-guard lock — a bolt that went through their middle, with a lock at one end, bolting them together, making them impossible to use without undoing the lock.

  He offered it out to them. Charlie was the one who took it, carefully turning over the package. “And... what is it?”

  Yegor lowered his voice. “Long before any of us launched to the station, long before we are told about the pandemic, while we were all on the ground last year? They bring I and Matvey and Rolan into an office, and they say, ‘Yegor. You are to be the Russian Commander, but in case you are killed or cannot complete your duty, the others must be briefed as well. In the event that the whole Russi
an government collapses after a disaster, these are the codes to control our satellites, and these are the radio codes to destroy or launch the parts of our nuclear arsenal that can be given remote commands.’”

  The old Russian threw his hands apart and shrugged helplessly, horror digging into his features. “And here we are. And you are talking about a virus that will almost certainly collapse not just my government, but all governments. What the hell am I to think? Nothing like this has happened, not even during the Cold War.”

  He stared at them bitterly, demanding an answer, but neither Charlie nor Alvin had one to give him.

  “What am I to think? Hm? I certainly do not think of killing Matvey.” With that, he took the envelope back, and held a handkerchief to his eyes.

  YEGOR’S PREDICTION, THAT Alvin would get to go home, proved true. In the few NASA emergency procedures manuals that said anything at all about deaths on Station, they only got as far as step three-point-five, finish securing the crewman’s body, before hitting step four—wait for further instructions from Mission Control.

  The instructions were to begin immediately prepping the Soyuz that would have carried Alvin, Matvey and Krister home a week from now. They got their sleep, though. No panicked hurry about it, they first had to wait for the process of rigor mortis to end.

  Matvey’s clenching muscles had to tire after their death-spasm, so that his body-bag was flexible enough to be manoeuvred into his seat on the Soyuz, and back out of the hatch when they were on the ground. That was why the body storage closet wasn’t chilled—it had to be warmed, so Matvey’s body could go through the process of rigor mortis as quickly as possible.

  Alvin didn’t sleep very much that night, nauseous little fragments of tin-foil swirling around in his gut. He had another nightmare, that he was waiting for Marla to answer her phone and call him, just waiting, for hours and hours and hours... except when his eyes fluttered open again, he wasn’t sure if it had been a dream, or if he’d really been waiting all night to hear her voice instead of sleeping.

  In the morning, nine hundred thousand people were dead. The virus was getting enthusiastic about its slaughter.

  Mission Control informed them that the entire crew was evacuating. Not just Alvin and Krister, with Matvey. Perhaps it was the situation on the ground, or more likely the result of Alvin, Charlie and Yegor quietly informing Mission Control about the airflow alarms, after which they had all separately denied having done it.

  Alvin’s routine was close enough to normal. Point one on Alvin’s list of tasks before going home on the Soyuz was double checking his vital signs to make sure he could survive the trip back. That was no problem, it was the second item on his list, marked ‘priority,’ that gave Alvin trouble.

  The canister he’d stored in the MELFI freezer, full of dead mice, was missing.

  “IT HASN’T BEEN mislaid! Things we store in the MELFI don’t just wander off like a lost pen until we find it on the air vents a week later!” Alvin was yelling, and he knew he was yelling, and he knew that yelling was counterproductive. Especially when yelling not only at Krister, but over the intercom at the others, too.

  “Are you sure,” Krister repeated.

  “Of course I’m—”

  “I’m sorry,” the intercom buzzed. Charlie.

  “What?”

  “I took the samples, Alvin. Who the hell else would?”

  He grabbed the open microphone. “Charlie...”

  “I made the vaccine. Just like how we discussed. There’s plenty of material left for a seed strain, but we’ve also got twelve doses.”

  Krister hissed between his teeth. “We don’t know what they’re infected with, we don’t—”

  “We do know, Krister.” Her voice was eerily calm. “I haven’t been able to run all the same tests as the ones on the ground, but I’ve compared it with the notes I’ve gotten from Galveston, and it’s either the same pathogen, just as we thought, or one very similar. This thing is so fucking insidious. Do you know what this virus does? Those maniacs were right to call it the Cull. Although ‘AB-positive virus’ might be a better name...”

  Krister clicked off the open microphone, jaw set at a desperate angle, his teeth clenched. “Where the hell is she?” he growled.

  “I don’t know,” Alvin said, staring at the intercom as she went blithely on.

  “...Down on the ground? It mutates. But it doesn’t just mutate. Viruses have genetic recombination events. Kind of like our chromosomes... little spots in the genetic code like hinges or brittle chain links, where the whole code breaks apart into pieces and comes back together.”

  “Make a guess.”

  He stared at Krister, half listening to Krister, half listening to Charlie. “Uh...”

  “The virus’s genetic code... it has a head, and that’s very, very stable. But there’s a long, long tail to its genes, and it’s very brittle, full of fragile chain links. It breaks into dozens of pieces that come back together almost randomly, every time it infects a cell and makes that cell build copies of itself.”

  “Where?” Krister demanded.

  Alvin swallowed. “She’ll have been working somewhere with a glovebox. Maybe the JEM.”

  “It’s so precise,” she murmured into the microphone. “Each little piece of its scrambled genetic code needs to link into the next bit to do anything, otherwise it’s almost inert. But when it does? When one random little scrambled set of genes finds the next piece in the chain, links up correctly?”

  “We have to find her. Come.” With that, Krister twisted around, kicked off a railing, and shot through the nearest hatch. Alvin struggled to keep up.

  “Occasionally, just occasionally, it bonds. It doesn’t break up anymore, it kicks out the recombination zone, and then that part of the genome’s stable too. And these stable chains, they’re tiny, and it can take them weeks, months to find each other, to stabilize, to unlock another chunk of itself. It’s like rolling dice... and if you roll a six, and then another six, and then another six in a row, another little piece of the virus is unlocked...”

  Krister pulled ahead. Far ahead. Alvin struggled to keep up, grabbing the bars in quick hand-over-hand yanks, building up speed and momentum.

  “And there’s a little piece that breaks down your lungs, and that’s in all the strains where people are coughing up blood until they die, and then there’s another piece that attacks the gut, and another that causes muscular degeneration, another and another and another, and there’s another piece that attacks the brain. A piece that will drive you crazy.”

  If anyone sounded crazy, it was Charlie. Krister had gotten past their sleep stations, was nearly at the hatch to the JEM, Alvin was behind him—

  “It kind of—it kind of eats the cells in your frontal lobes... it makes you... irrational?” She sounded alone. Lost, scared. “Nobody’s done any real research on the effects, there hasn’t been time, but, I think it’d make a person lose focus, make snap judgements? Not think things through, act on instinct... hear voices, worship trees and fucking rocks, as if everything that made us civilized people just got ripped out.”

  “She’s not here!” Krister met him at the hatch, swooping out. The JEM’s interior was dark. No one had switched on the lights. Krister flew across Harmony and into Columbus, searching, yelling. “Charlie!”

  “Whoever made this thing wasn’t a civilized person.” She went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “And this virus was made, obviously designed so that its lethal genes stay dormant long enough for it to infect everybody, and then it just sits there until those dice roll six after six after six...”

  “Where are you, Charlie?” Yegor yelled down the length of Space Station, having emerged into Unity from the Russian section, a thick roll of grey work-tape in his hand.

  Alvin looked up the long central row of modules that formed Station’s spine, shook his head, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled back, “She isn’t down here!”

  “I don’t even understan
d how anyone could do it,” she murmured over the intercoms. “Make something like this. I wonder if the ones who did were the ones who put the mice up here, with us? I had friends on the ground look into it, since Mission Control won’t do anything. The university department that sent it up here? It’s a fucking storage closet in a university building, ten miles away from Lake Erie. There’s nothing there but dusty lab equipment.”

  Yegor’s muttered response was lost in the distance. He darted from hatch to hatch, and Alvin moved up toward him.

  Rolan wriggled through the choked PMA tube, looking around quizzically. He had another roll of the grey tape, tied to one of his belt-loops with a piece of string. “I don’t think she’s in the Russian section.” The tape, Alvin recalled, was specified to be used as a restraint in the event of a psychotic or suicidal emergency.

  “Of course you couldn’t make this virus with dusty lab equipment,” Charlie said, wherever she was hiding. Rambling. “They fucked it up, though, so maybe they weren’t all that smart. There’s a part of the virus that’s supposed to steal part of you. Use your genes and the antigens your body thinks are parts of you to make your cells stop dividing and start pumping out proteins to line its capsid with... except all the strains they’ve found were already locked in. They’d rolled all their sixes too soon, and some Caucasian woman with AB-positive blood? The virus is using fragments of her like a ring of keys, trying each one in your immune system’s locks until it finds a way in...”

  The longer she went on, the more agitated Yegor got, floating across empty space up in Unity, turning around and around, as if he could follow the all-pervasive sound of her voice to find her.

  At last Yegor lunged out for the intercom. “Where are you? Don’t you understand that you’ve infected everyone on Station by opening that thing!?”

  Her voice was cool, calm. Less afraid. “No, I haven’t.”

  “You’ve exposed us all!”

  “I know what I’m doing, Yegor.” Her tone turned colder. Defensive. “I have the vaccine, I’m going home, and I’m delivering the seed strain.”