The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  “Wanderer,” she called. “Foster. Can you hear me?”

  Stevens had fallen silent at last. She had to keep looking back over her shoulder to make sure he was still down there.

  She thought of the cosmonauts on Mir, the world’s first real space station. Back in the 1980s, long before she was born, the Russians had sent two cosmonauts at a time up to Mir. Just two people, often up there for hundreds of days. They had had a rule that no matter where you were in the station, you had to keep some part of your body—even just a hand or a foot—visible to your partner, so they never felt completely alone in space.

  Jansen imagined trying to explore 2I by herself. The thought terrified her. Without Stevens’s stream-of-consciousness monologue, 2I was so silent. So oppressively quiet. The only thing she could hear was the constant clicking tone and the high-pitched electric discharges—the radio noise she’d noticed before. It was eerie and wrong, not a sound a human being was ever supposed to hear.

  She knew they would have to turn back soon. But going back—even temporarily—meant defeat. Every hour that passed, their odds of finding Foster and his people shrank. Every minute she was outside 2I was a minute she wasn’t searching. She—

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a crackling discharge, much louder than any she’d heard before. It made her jump, her feet shifting noisily on the ice.

  “Jansen?” Stevens called.

  “Shh,” she told him.

  She pointed her lights out across the white plain. The glare made her squint. Had there been… something? She had sensed something.

  Maybe.

  Her eyes were useless, but some other, more liminal sense had been triggered when she heard that last crackle.

  There had been a change in the way the mist moved, maybe. Or perhaps it was just a gut feeling. Astronauts hated gut feelings, as a rule. Space was almost by definition counterintuitive—nothing in the high vacuum acted the same way it acted back on Earth. Gut feelings got you killed. Yet she couldn’t deny she’d sensed something—

  The crackle came again, not quite as loud as before, and she could have sworn there was a flash of light way out across the ice plain. A light that wasn’t just a reflection of her own suit lights.

  Once she had imagined it, she couldn’t help but sense it. Something out there, something dark—and big. Very big, hunching in the fog.

  She couldn’t see it. There were no more flashes of light, and the one that she’d seen—that maybe she’d seen—had been so faint it was all but drowned out by her lamps.

  With trembling hands, she reached up and switched them off.

  “Jansen?” Stevens asked. “Jansen, where’d you go?”

  “Quiet,” she said.

  Stevens turned in circles. Jansen had stopped in place and turned off her lights. What the hell was she thinking?

  His own lights showed nothing new, nothing changed, except maybe there was more water around him. In fact, he was standing in a field of slush a couple centimeters deep over the slick ice that coated the floor. He looked to the side, to the wall of ice, and saw its whole surface glistening. Dripping. As he watched, a row of icicles came loose from an overhang, falling to shatter on the ground, one by one.

  He checked his suit display and saw that the temperature was nine degrees Celsius. It was still getting warmer. From below freezing when they’d arrived, it had gotten to the equivalent of a sunny day in early spring back on Earth.

  He looked up just as a whole gusher of water sluiced over the side of the ice wall, splashing noisily all around him. It made him jump—and he started to slip. He had to grab a thick stalagmite of ice to keep from falling right on his face. Even as he hugged the solid column, he tried to get his feet back under him, but they kept sliding on the slick ice. “Come on,” he said. “Come on, come on, come on—”

  A soft chime sounded inside his helmet. He looked down at his display and saw the readout of his trace gas analyzer. It still showed that the atmosphere was almost entirely made of argon with some water vapor, but now it also contained a tiny amount of oxygen. Even as he watched the display, it flickered and changed again, and the oxygen was gone. It was as if a gentle puff of it had wafted past him.

  He ignored it and focused on getting his footing. He heard the chime three more times as he struggled to stand. Once he was bipedal, he flexed his knees a little and stretched his arms out to either side for balance. He tried to calm his breathing, which had gotten completely out of control.

  The sluice of liquid splashing down next to him hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was growing stronger. Stevens needed to get away from the river of water and half-melted slush. He needed to find more solid ground.

  He was looking around, trying to see if he could spot some solid-looking ice, when his light caught a cavern in the wall to his side. The beam speared right down into the depths of the hollow, and for a moment he saw something dark in there. Something that wasn’t ice. Then his light moved away as he swiveled on the slick surface and nearly fell down again.

  He made himself perfectly still. Then he reached up and manually adjusted his lamp so it shone into the cave. He couldn’t seem to find the thing he’d seen. It must have been a trick of the light. Just his brain playing tricks—

  Then the dark thing moved, pulling itself out of range of his beam.

  It moved. He definitely saw it move.

  “Jansen!” he howled.

  SUNNY STEVENS: The rising temperature, the sudden gusts of oxygen—if it hadn’t been clear before… Yeah. Things were changing inside 2I. They were changing fast.

  Jansen tried to block out all distractions. Stevens’s voice, for one. Her own heartbeat, which she could hear louder than the ticking beat coming in over her suit radio.

  She let her eyes relax, focusing on nothing. She started to see little flashes of light that she knew were just her brain struggling to make sense of the darkness. That wasn’t what she was looking for.

  Water streamed over her boots, but she ignored it. Her own breath sighed in her ears, so she held it, until her chest started to burn.

  Hurry up, she thought. Hurry up already.

  The thing, the massive thing she’d sensed out there, was a shadow hiding among shadows. She couldn’t see it, was aware of it only at the lowest possible threshold of sensation… but she was sure that it was there, that she was facing it, and that when it was lit up again—

  And then it happened. A tiny gray flash of light, followed almost immediately by the crackling noise in her headphones.

  It lasted only the merest fraction of a second. It lit up only a small part of the thing she was facing. Yet she saw it, saw it with her own eyes.

  It was enormous. How big was impossible to say without knowing how far away it was, but it was big. At least a hundred meters tall, maybe a lot more. It towered over her, even when seen in the distance. In shape it was roughly ovoid, bigger at the bottom than the top, with round, organic curves. Its surface was roughly textured, and its lower half was draped with a lacy network of—roots? tendrils?—that stretched down to the ice at its base. The flash of light she’d seen, the electrical discharge, forked upward across that net-like canopy.

  In the thin slice of time that the thing was visible, she had seen it move. It trembled, as if it had been shocked by the electric discharge.

  Looking at it, Jansen felt nothing but fear. A desperate, shuddering horror. She fought it down, clamping her eyes shut even though the light was long gone, even though the thing had receded into darkness again. In her mind’s eye, she still saw it, like an afterimage. And something else.

  The light had sent long shadows racing down the ice valleys and around the sides of the gently rolling hills. It flowed like water in that brief moment it was visible. And it had caught on something, a strange angular shape she hadn’t expected to see. Something very small, tiny against the immensity of the empty plain, and she hadn’t gotten a very good look at it, but something about it made her feel that it belonge
d to her. That it wasn’t part of the mysteries of 2I.

  She switched her lamps back on and blinked furiously as her dark-adapted eyes protested against the sudden illumination. When she could see again, she looked and saw a little patch of orange fluttering against the ice.

  Orange.

  It was floating on top of one of the ever-deepening pools of water. It rocked from side to side as it moved toward her, carried by the current that splashed across her boots.

  She bent down and reached for it. It was going to pass her by, just a meter or so beyond the fingers of her glove. Just as it raced past, she lunged, dropping to her knees with a nasty, painful crunch. But her hand closed on the orange thing, and she grabbed it up out of the water.

  It was a flag. A scrap of vinyl fabric about ten centimeters on a side, mounted on a stiff piece of wire. Just like the one she’d found at the KSpace base camp.

  Attached to the flag by a loop of wire was another memory stick.

  “Jansen!” Stevens cried out. She was concentrating too hard to really hear him. She took another second to study the orange flag in her hand.

  “Jansen! Help!”

  She twisted around, and her lights speared out toward the edge, where the plain of ice ended. She realized she’d walked nearly fifty meters in, away from the edge of the icy plain. Away from Stevens.

  She shoved the flag in her pocket and started to run.

  The thing from the cave had emerged, stretching its long length through the slush.

  It was some kind of tendril, or root, or… what? A tentacle? An arm? It moved like a snake, slithering across the ground. It looked more like a branch of a tree—all along its length it forked and split off new growths, new branches.

  It wasn’t alone.

  From hollows and crevices all over the melting ice wall, they crept outward. Stretching. Connecting with each other. Shooting off new branches all the time. A whole network of the tendrils was crisscrossing the ice, spreading, growing new, fat, slug-like branches as it covered the ground.

  The growth was moving toward him. Steadily, implacably. It hugged the ice, forking and spreading as it moved until it formed a dense carpet of tendrils undulating across the surface.

  Stevens backed away from them, his feet sliding frantically. He waved his arms around, trying to keep control, trying to stay balanced. Behind him the growth was moving faster than he was. It was going to reach him soon, it was going to crawl over the tops of his boots—

  He turned around and ran, as fast as he possibly could.

  He made it about three steps before his left boot smashed through a thin skin of ice over a puddle of liquid. With his left leg trapped, his right foot slipped and flew out from under him. His right ankle twisted and a bolt of pain raced up his leg, making him horribly aware of every muscle, tendon, and sinew from his heel to his hip. He cried out and tried to stagger forward, swinging his hurt leg like a crutch, stiff at the knee, but he was already off balance. He threw his arms forward but they couldn’t stop him. His faceplate collided with the ground and a microsecond later his face smashed against the polycarbonate, his nose shoved over to one side, his teeth clicking painfully against his faceplate.

  He hurt, he hurt so much, but there was no time to worry about that. He twisted around, getting his head up so he could look down across his body, at the branching growth that was moving faster now than before.

  Jansen ran back toward where she’d left Stevens, her feet barely finding purchase on the wet ice. She looked down and her heart stopped beating.

  Pinned in the double spotlight of her lamps, he was caught in a net of thick, greasy-looking tendrils. He was up on one knee, facing away from her, his arms stretched out in front of him even as new tendrils branched and grew around his shoulders, down his upper arms. The thick growth had spread all across his legs and back—only his helmet was free of them.

  At the base of the wall, the tendrils covered the ground in a branching pattern she recognized instantly. It was the same kind of growth that had been clutching the massive dark thing she’d seen across the ice plain.

  Jansen slid down to the ground, her boots stamping on the branching tendrils. They convulsed away from the impact, retreating from the ground where she stood, but only momentarily. Even as she lifted her feet they started to move again, converging on her.

  Fear made her stomach lurch. If she let herself think about what she was seeing, she knew she would scream and run away. She needed to fight that. She needed to get control if she was going to help Stevens.

  She didn’t give the things a chance to catch her. Racing forward, she got to Stevens and tried to grab one of the tendrils and pull it off his back. It resisted all her strength, as if it were fused to his space suit. It felt made of stone, though it writhed as she touched it.

  Desperate, she patted her pockets, looking for a knife, a weapon, anything she could use as a club. There was nothing—but then she looked down and saw the ground was littered with big chunks of solid ice. She grabbed one and it squirted out of her hand, slick with meltwater. With a curse she grabbed another, spreading her fingers to get a better grip.

  She brought the chunk of ice up over her head and smashed it down across Stevens’s back, against the fiberglass hard upper torso of his suit. Two tendrils recoiled, pulling back from the impact site. She hit them again and again until they pulled free of his arms.

  Where they retreated, they left a pattern of tiny holes across his suit, like an imprint of where they’d been. She hit them again and again, knocking loose more and more of the tendrils. She didn’t dare hit his legs—she might break his bones if she used too much force. Instead she ran around in front of him and grabbed his arms.

  She screamed his name, but he didn’t reply. Through his faceplate she could see that his eyes weren’t tracking her. It looked as if they were about to roll up into their sockets. He was in shock—maybe from sheer terror, maybe from some injury… She looked down, then, and saw one of the tendrils snaking up under the lower edge of his HUT, digging into him right through the fabric of his suit.

  Oh God, no, she thought. She grabbed the tendril and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, her shoulder joints creaking with the effort. She grunted and spit and raged and pulled harder and the tendril came loose, wriggling in her hand. She pulled it free and saw its end was coated in red blood. It hissed and twisted around in her hand, its end smoking and bubbling as if it were coated in acid.

  Adrenaline coursed through her and she grabbed Stevens by the arms and pulled him out of the swarming mass of tendrils, pulled at him until he came free with a sudden lurch that sent them both tumbling. She barely managed to get her legs under her and keep them from sprawling flat against the ground.

  “Jansen,” he breathed. “Jansen.”

  “Stevens! Wake up! We need to move!” she shouted back at him. She wrestled him up onto his feet, though he swayed and looked as if he was about to fall again.

  She spared one look behind her, and saw the network of tendrils still sidewinding across the ground, moving toward them. Growing toward them. Spreading fast.

  “Wake up!” she screamed at him, then shoved her shoulder into his armpit and pushed him forward, running as fast as she could across the slick ice, away from the wall, away from the towering thing in the dark. Her lights bounced wildly across the ground, across the side of his suit, across the dark sky.

  “Jansen,” he whispered. “Help.”

  ESCAPE MANEUVER

  YSABEL MELENDEZ, EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY OFFICER: When the airlock cycled again, indicating that our astronauts were coming out of 2I, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Even when we saw there were two of them, not five—meaning they hadn’t rescued the KSpace crew. We were just glad to have our own back. Then the biotelemetry from Stevens’s suit started coming in. It was… bad.

  “Orion, this is Jansen—get ready for us. Stevens has been hurt. He’s been—he was attacked. There’s no time to explain, just get the suitports ready.�
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  “Sunny!” Rao shouted. “What’s going on? What happened?” She shoved her way through the soft hatch between the dormitory and the wardroom. She saw Hawkins had already opened up one of the suitports and was shoving his legs into an EVA suit.

  “What’re you doing?” she demanded. “You heard the message. They’re coming in and Stevens—Sunny—”

  Hawkins shoved his arms into the EVA suit. “Stay put,” he told her. “I’m going to go help them. Just—you stay put. Monitor the situation.” He ducked his head and shoved his way into the HUT and helmet of the suit. The hatch closed behind him and he was gone.

  Rao launched herself across the room, over to the nearest touchscreen, and called up a view of the exterior of the HabLab, just in time to see Hawkins separate from the suitport and drift away from Orion on a safety line.

  ROY MCALLISTER: We only had one concern at that moment—we wanted to know Stevens’s condition, we wanted to know what we could do to help. The astronauts were still twenty-seven light-seconds away, though. There wasn’t much we could do.

  “Blood pressure is, shit, it’s eighty over sixty. His heart rate is over one-twenty, and his blood ox is dropping—hurry! We need to get him in here and get him stabilized. Please, Jansen, hurry!”

  Rao’s voice buzzed in Hawkins’s ear like a mosquito. He considered muting her channel. He watched as Jansen approached him, Stevens in tow. Stevens wasn’t moving—it looked as if Jansen were dragging an empty space suit. As she drew closer, Hawkins held up one hand to warn her to stop.

  “Wait,” he called, “we need to think about this.”

  “Get out of the way,” Jansen told him. “I need to get Stevens attached to one of those ports. What the hell are you doing?”