Rocket’s Red Glare

by David Hardy

  Sobered, she watched on the screen as Kurt opened the hatch into the orbital module and sent the drone through.

  A body floated in the EyeSpy’s searchlight.

  The dead man wore a bulky spacesuit, but no helmet. No oxygen tank, either. Kurt steered the EyeSpy to get a look at the dead cosmonaut’s head and – “Jesus,” Sierra breathed.

  The cosmonaut had been a man in his ‘40s, perhaps, just a hint of grey in his dark brown hair. His eyes were shut as if asleep, his mouth slightly open. He looked as if he had died in the past week or so, not the better part of a century ago. Sierra supposed that the bacteria in his body would have died once the oxygen in the craft was used up.

  Kurt drifted in closer for a look.

  “Nametag reads... Varankov.”

  “Ring any bells?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  Pulling up the database, Sierra ran a quick search.

  “No cosmonauts from that era with that surname . . . but there was a Colonel Leonid Varankov, who supposedly died in a plane crash in 1968.”

  “Convenient,” her husband said with a snort.

  Sierra suddenly remembered something she’d read when skimming the Soyuz entry earlier.

  “Wait, weren’t the Soyuz two-man ships?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So where’s the second cosmonaut? There was only one seat in the descent module.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Let me think.” His helmet cam showed he was looking around the capsule, finally settling on a metal cylinder.

  It was almost a meter long, crudely welded into place, with a tangle of wires connecting it to the spacecraft’s systems. There was no writing or other markings on it to indicate its function.

  “I think this is connected with that strange antenna,” Kurt said. “Maybe the additional payload is why they only had room for one cosmonaut.”

  A small box connected by a wire to the cylinder floated nearby. There were a handful of buttons and a bright red switch on the box.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not touching it,” Kurt assured her.

  “Good. So what do you think it is?”

  “No idea. But, considering the time period and the fact that this launch was covered up, I’ll guess it was a weapon of some kind.”

  She wasn’t exactly a history buff, but she didn’t remember hearing about anything like this.

  “Sierra, see those EM readings?”

  She examined the feed from the EyeSpy. A graphic showed spikes in the local EM field. They were strangely random, but growing stronger by the second.

  “Yes. What’s the source?”

  “Just a sec... Looks like it’s coming from that cylinder.”

  “You mean it still has power? After all these years?”

  “No, that’s the strange part, no active power sources except for me and the drone. I have no idea what’s generating that EM.”

  “It’s not dangerous, though, right?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Be careful, Kurt.”

  “Don’t worry, it looks too weak to do anything. It’s just strange.”

  “Careful.”

  “I hear you.”

  The EyeSpy rotated around and Kurt examined the cylinder more closely. A few seconds later she heard:

  “Shit!”

  From the feed she could see he was shaking his right hand wildly.

  “What happened?”

  “Hand brushed that thing. Like a shock... Huh. Cold all of a sudden.”

  His biometric feed indicated his internal temp was 25 degrees and dropping.

  Her stomach tightened. “I think there’s a problem with your suit’s heating system.” 17 degrees and dropping.

  “Breath’s fogging my faceplate,” he said, an edge of panic in his tone. “What’s going on?”

  Sierra shook her head. “I don’t know, but you should get back here pronto, there could be a problem with your temperature regulation system.” But she had no idea how something this major had been missed in the pre-EVA check. Something to do with the EM?

  Kurt wasn’t moving. 13 degrees. Sierra’s hands tightened into fists.

  “Get back here. Now!”

  Kurt did not seem to hear her.

  “Lonely place to die, thousands of kilometers from anyone. Can’t imagine how it would feel... cold... alone... ” He said something else she couldn’t quite make out. Didn’t even sound like English.

  “Kurt?”

  For a few seconds, Kurt’s helmet feed was glitching, the image breaking into rainbow sparks. Audio was a garble of distortion.

  “Kurt, come in! Come in! Kurt!”

  No reply. More distortion. Then, suddenly, the image began to clear, though distortion still jumped and flickered a little. His helmet cam showed he was looking at his right glove, flexing his fingers one by one.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Everything is fine,” Kurt finally replied, his audio clear and crisp. His voice was strangely calm. Temp was 10 degrees and stable.

  “There was some kind of interference and I couldn’t—”

  “Everything is fine.”

  Something about the way he spoke told her that it was anything but fine. His tone of voice, his whole manner, felt somehow different. There was no single thing she could put a name to, but after knowing him all these years, she realized instantly when something was not right.

  Unsettled, Sierra said nothing. Instead, she brought up the drone interface and tapped the icons to rotate the EyeSpy around until it faced Kurt.

  He looked directly at the EyeSpy, frowning and squinting at the device as though he had never seen it before. There was nothing of Kurt in that gaze. It was her husband’s face, yet it wore the expression of a complete stranger.

  Her breath caught. She tried to understand, process what the hell was happening.

  “I am returning to ship now,” he announced.

  Her husband – or whoever was inside of him – swam out of the orbital module, headed back towards the Soyuz entry hatch.

  Into the docking collar. And then, the Scrapper.

  Jarred from her paralysis, Sierra accessed the airlock controls and locked it out from external entry. Too late to keep him out of the docking collar. He pulled himself towards the Scrapper’s airlock. If this thing could speak English with Kurt’s voice, it could still override her lockout with Kurt’s verbal command codes.

  Frantically, she brought up the command menus and started searching for Kurt’s codes. Using her own overrides, she deleted his one by one.

  Kurt – Varankov – was at the Scrapper’s airlock.

  The computer announced:

  Sierra let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.

  Varankov tried the manual controls, but when they failed, he tried the verbal interface. Failing again, he just floated there, staring at the membrane.

  “Open airlock please,” he said with Kurt’s voice.

  Sierra didn’t answer.

  “Open airlock.” The voice was harder now. Less of Kurt, more of the thing that had stolen his body.

  When she did not, he muttered something that sounded like Russian, braced himself against a bulkhead and started hammering the frame of the airlock. The membrane shuddered, smart plastic rippling with the blows. When that didn’t work, he started clawing at it instead.

  Sierra opened Kurt’s channel.

  “Varankov!” she shouted.

  The clawing stopped.

  “Please... just let my husband go.”

  Varankov looked up at the cam above the airlock, his face expressionless, but did not answer her.

  “Please.”

  “You are American. Enemy.”

  “No, that war is long over. The Russia you know is gone! Please, there’s no need to harm my husband.”

  “I want to live. Why is this so wrong?”

  “You had your life! You can’t have Kurt’s!�
��

  But Varankov ignored her and began clawing at the airlock again.

  Guilt tore at her. It had been her decision to send Kurt aboard. Back when she was a shuttle pilot, there had been no time to second guess when trouble hit. You did what you had to. There would be time to think about what went wrong afterwards, if there was an afterwards.

  She considered what little she knew.

  Somehow, her husband’s body had been taken over the consciousness of a dead cosmonaut. No time to wonder how the hell that was even possible. First, she considered waiting until her husband ran out of air before making a move, which meant waiting nearly an hour and a half. But that was assuming that Varankov didn’t breach the airlock membrane in that time. Smart plastic was tough, but not indestructible. If he managed it, she would lose her only advantage over him. And what was stopping Varankov from abandoning Kurt’s body for hers?

  Sierra contemplated entering the collar and removing Varankov’s helmet, forcing the dead cosmonaut out of her husband’s body with the lack of air. In addition to risking cerebral haemorrhage and burst lungs for Kurt, it had the same problem of keeping Varankov from seizing control of her body.

  Unless...

  Sierra tore off her restraints and swam for the hatch. By the time she reached the airlock, she had a plan.

  She donned the remaining EVA suit, rushing through her seal checks. She wasn’t breathing the pure oxygen as long as she should, and she didn’t know what effect that her earlier time in the airlock would have. Whatever happened, she knew it would only take a minute or two, either way.

  Using the handscreen, she opened two windows. One was a link to Kurt’s biometric feed. The other was to the autopilot controls. She would need both when she got back to the Scrapper.

  If she came back. Or came back as herself.

  She shuddered.

  Swallowing her fear, she addressed the computer.

  “Computer: Verbal command code Sierra-Alpha engaged.”

 

  “Seal all membranes.”

  A second passed.

  Good, she had Varankov bottled up in the collar now. “Depressurize airlock.”

 

  The atmosphere light went from green to red as the air was pumped out of the airlock.

  “When I give the order, open the airlock and seal it three seconds later.”

 

  Sierra twisted herself around with handholds and planted her feet against the bulkhead opposite the airlock, bending her knees until she was ready to spring.

  From this point on, she knew she couldn’t afford to let herself think of what lay beyond the airlock as her husband. It was Varankov. She didn’t know what had happened to Kurt’s consciousness or soul or whatever, but she knew she couldn’t leave him like this.

  She looked up at the airlock, orienting herself.

  “Open airlock!”

  The membrane dilated. Sierra kicked off the bulkhead and shot through it like a rocket, slamming into a startled Varankov. They tumbled in a tangle of thrashing, flailing limbs. His gloved hand clamped down on her faceplate, trying to push her away, but Sierra clung tightly, wrapping her legs around his.

  Every jolt and twist sent them bouncing wildly off the walls of the docking collar. His hand balled into a fist and slammed against her faceplate, but the ceramic held. A bullet would not have cracked it. She reached for his locking ring. Varankov chopped savagely at her arms, trying to break her hold. Sierra gritted through the pain and held on tight, her fingers finding the releases and stabbing down hard. Gripping the sides of his helmet, she wrenched it loose.

  A bubble of escaping oxygen and water vapor exploded from the neck of Varankov’s suit, propelling them both against the wall of the docking collar, which shuddered with the impact. The helmet went flying the opposite direction, bouncing off the Soyuz end of the tube. Varankov’s air supply choked off automatically. Enraged, he lashed out at her and even through the aerogel padding of her suit she felt the blows. Felt her husband’s fists – no, not Kurt. Not him.

  The cosmonaut opened his mouth as if to say something, then took a few, hopeless gulping breaths, eyes wide with panic.

  Kurt’s eyes. That was Kurt, struggling to breathe. Kurt’s lungs that were collapsing. Her husband’s body was dying, and she was the one responsible.

  Forgive me, Kurt.

  Exhaling sharply to empty her lungs, Sierra reached up to her locking ring and pushed the releases, then gripped her helmet with both hands and tore it loose.

  There was an explosive pop as her suit depressurized and threw her back against the airlock, followed by the deafening silence of the vacuum. Varankov lunged at her and she pushed away her helmet, letting it tumble away, out of her reach, and hopefully his. This was the riskiest part of all, gambling she could force the cosmonaut to abandon her husband and keep him from possessing her.

  But the cosmonaut caught her helmet and kicked towards her, reaching out for her with his right hand. She tried to move and his fingers closed over her face and she felt a jolt like an electric shock and then a sensation like an icy knife cutting into her and – Leonid Gregorovitch Varankov. Born in 1924 Voronezh to a family of farmers, youngest of three sons. Bomber pilot during the Great Patriotic War. After the war, a test pilot. Recruited into the cosmonaut program. Rumors of a secret mission to test a secret weapon, derived from the work of the Hungarian physicist, Nicola Tesla. A device to generate crippling electromagnetic pulses without an atomic blast. A secret mission, one that would ensure Soviet domination of space. He would be a Hero of the Soviet Union if he succeeded.

  Drowning. She was drowning.

  The secret launch, rocket thundering towards the heavens. The target, an American spy satellite. The test. Pressing the button. A buzzing he could feel in his bones. A sensation like ants crawling across his body. Panic. Something wrong. Brilliance, like lightning. Then, darkness.

  Losing herself, swept away by the tidal wave of someone else’s memories. The undertow of Varankov’s life dragged her under, down, down, down.

  Dead. He was dead. He knew, somehow. Consciousness deprived of all senses, a void more absolute than space. Trapped. Existing without living. The weapon had done this to him. He prayed to the God he did not believe in. Prayed the Motherland would send another mission to recover his body and return it home. Peace for his spirit, perhaps. But no one ever came. He was abandoned. Nothing to mark the passing of Leonid Varankov, except the memories of a family he would never see again and the records of a government that would deny his mission ever happened. Anger. Decades of silence and darkness, trapped in the confines of the Soyuz, facing an eternity of the same. It was Hell, without a Last Judgement. Despair.

  Finally, warmth and light again. A body. Escape! He must have a body. Take this body. Survive! He must survive and escape, no matter what. Return to the Motherland. Survive!

  Warmth beat back against the cold. Sierra held on that, all that made her, her. She could not lose herself to this invader, or Kurt would be lost. And she could not lose him, not now, not this way. Not ever. She struggled upwards, towards the surface.

  Sierra Diaz. Born in 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona. Only child. Father in the Air Force, one of the last pilots in an age of drones. Died in a plane crash when she was twelve. Loss. When she was older, she decided to become a pilot herself, even against her mother’s objections. Determination. Went to flight school, graduated top of her class. Approached by a private space venture. Her first trip into space, escaping the bonds of gravity. Exhilaration. Meeting Kurt. Love. Engaged and married. Buying the Scrapper. Finding the Soyuz. Regret. Loss. Drowning...

  She was Leonid Gregorovitch Varankov... born in 1924... drowning... oh, Kurt...

  No! I am Sierra Helm! You did not deserve what happened to you. But your life is over. You can’t have my husband. YOU WILL NOT HAVE HIM! YOU WILL NOT HAVE ME!

  The cold withdrew and she
could see Varankov floating before her, the fading shape drifting across her vision like an afterimage. The dead cosmonaut screamed a silent scream of rage, flickered, and vanished.

  Blackness crowded her vision. The helmet. Where was it? Sierra saw the helmet, floating near her husband’s limp hand. So hard to think. She fumbled for the helmet. Was she holding it? Yes. Her awareness narrowed to a dark tunnel as she fitted the helmet into the locking ring and pushed.

  Darkness. Silence.

  Hissing air flooded her helmet, the sound shocking after the utter silence. She took a deep, shuddering breath, deep and strong, coughing as fresh oxygen filled her with new life. The HUD flickered back to life, but all she could see was her husband floating, eyes closed.

  Checking her HUD clock, she saw it had been seventy-one seconds since she had removed his helmet.

  She saw Kurt’s helmet at the other end of the docking collar. Taking her husband’s arm in her left hand, she launched them both towards the far end of the collar and grabbed his helmet with her right.

  Eight-five seconds after she first removed it, Sierra replaced her husband’s helmet and locked it into place.

  “Breathe,” she pleaded. “Breathe.”

  Kurt convulsed and gasped, a cloud of tiny crimson droplets expelled from his nose. His breathing was ragged and labored, but he was breathing. She opened the airlock and dragged him though, sealing it behind them.

  “Re-pressurize airlock,” she commanded. When the light turned green she removed Kurt’s helmet, swatting away the droplets of blood.

  Gently, she kissed him on his cheek, not wanting to hurt his lips. Kurt groaned, eyes half-opening.

  “Hurt... ?” He rasped.

  “No,” she said, her voice choked as she pushed away the memory of his fists battering her. “It wasn’t you, baby. Don’t talk. You’ll be all right.”

  Sierra tore the decompression kit from its niche and opened it, removing two of the emergency respirators. One she placed over Kurt’s mouth, giving him pure oxygen. The other she used on herself. According to the handscreen Kurt was in rough shape, but he didn’t appear to have a burst lung or cerebral hemorrhaging, thank God. After giving him a coagulant for the nosebleed, she set the autopilot for Branson Station, where Kurt could get the medical attention he needed.