The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  Hawkins moved sideways a little, his body blocking her access to the suitports. “He can’t come in,” he said.

  “What the hell?” Rao shouted. “What the fuck are you saying? He’s going to die and you’re wasting time!”

  Hawkins winced but refused to move. “You say he was attacked by something inside 2I. Some kind of alien creature.”

  Jansen was close enough that he could see her face through the gold tinting on her faceplate. She didn’t look happy.

  He was prepared for that. “You have a responsibility to the rest of us.”

  “Hawkins, if you don’t move, I’m going to move you,” she growled.

  “Is his suit intact?”

  Jansen just glared.

  “Tell me that his suit is intact,” Hawkins demanded.

  “It was punctured,” she admitted, through gritted teeth.

  “He could be infected with some kind of alien virus. If you bring him inside, you could infect us all.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Rao called out.

  “Dr. Rao, I know you have a relationship with Dr. Stevens, and—”

  “Bullshit! There’s no alien virus. This is just some kind of power play. How could Stevens catch an alien disease? We couldn’t even share DNA with anything on 2I, much less any kind of systemic parallels with—”

  “Rao, be quiet a second,” Jansen said. “Maybe Hawkins has a point.”

  YORRICK DEBENS, PLANETARY PROTECTION OFFICER: Although we never take chances with potential extraterrestrial microbes, Dr. Rao was probably correct in her assessment. Pathogens like bacteria, viruses, and parasites that we find on Earth evolve to attack a specific host. They survive by taking advantage of very specific chemical environments inside the target’s cells. It’s extraordinarily rare to find a virus that can cross the species barrier, even between two organisms within class Mammalia. Organisms that evolved on different worlds from each other would have basic differences of body chemistry, different types of tissues and cellular apparatus. A virus that could infect both a human and an alien—it would be like sneezing on a tulip and expecting it to catch your cold.

  “You need to listen to me,” Rao said, over Jansen’s radio. “I’m the flight surgeon of this mission, damn it, and the only biologist you’ve got. I know what I’m talking about! Look at his vitals! Stevens needs immediate help if he’s going to survive. If you’re not going to let him inside Orion, what exactly is your plan?”

  Jansen stared Hawkins in the eye. She could see he wasn’t going to back down.

  And what if he was right?

  They needed to quarantine Stevens. They needed to keep him separate, someplace where they could give him medical attention without exposing Orion to anything hazardous. They were about eight million kilometers from the nearest medical center. But there was one place they could take him.

  One that even had a medical robot on board.

  “Wanderer,” she said.

  “Wanderer,” Hawkins said, nodding inside his helmet.

  PARMINDER RAO: Stevens was in circulatory shock, which can lead to low end-organ perfusion, loss of cellular function, and hypoxemia. Untreated, it can lead to organ failure. Shock is one the leading causes of death in people suffering traumatic injuries or critical illnesses. We needed to move fast.

  He kept blipping in and out. He kept—

  Stevens’s eyes snapped open. “Wait,” he said. “Where are—”

  Darkness, darkness all around him. Was he back inside 2I? In the dark, in the giant dark, in the place with the tendrils the place the place with ropes the place with ice with—

  Something beeped in his ear, loud enough to hurt. He snarled and tried to roll over, tried to go back to sleep. He was inside an airlock, but that didn’t make any sense, he didn’t want to be in an airlock. He wanted to curl up in a sleepsac, maybe with—the thought made him smile, maybe with Parminder and—

  He heard her voice. “How’s his breathing doing? Is it too fast, too slow? Is it ragged? Give me something to work with!”

  Stevens saw Jansen’s face looming over him. She looked worried. That scared him for some reason, as if he was—as if he—oh, right, he was—

  “Cut it off! You have to,” Rao shouted. Cut what off? Cut what? He felt something tear through him, tear him open, and he screamed, but then when he looked down he saw they had gotten his suit off and now they were cutting through his thermal onesie, they were stripping him naked. Hey, now, guys, he said, except he couldn’t talk, his mouth didn’t work.

  He felt a horrible, crushing pain in his chest. Everything went red.

  He woke up looking into a robot’s face. A GRAM robot, he knew about those. KSpace built those. General robotic assistants and medics. Why was he looking at a GRAM? That didn’t make any sense, there weren’t any GRAMs on Orion. “Where are we?” he asked. “Where are we?”

  KARLA UTZ, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER: Even when they took him out of his suit, we could still monitor Dr. Stevens’s vital statistics through a bio-monitor cuff strapped around his ankle. From millions of kilometers away we could see, for instance, that his blood oxygen saturation had dropped to about seventy-nine. Normal levels in a human being range from ninety to one hundred.

  Getting Stevens into Wanderer without making his injuries worse took some work. Getting him out of his suit was a nightmare. Jansen looked down and saw a splash of blood across the front of her own suit. This would be so much easier if they could take off their suits and work with their bare hands, but that wasn’t… that wasn’t a great idea.

  Exhaustion and fear threatened to drag her down. She was sweating and she felt weak, but she knew she had to focus.

  “Help him, you idiot,” she said, grabbing the robot and shaking it.

  “He needs fluids,” Rao said. Rao, who was still back on Orion. Overseeing this process via virtual reality.

  Hawkins had Stevens pressed against the wall of Wanderer’s orbital module, holding him in place as his limbs twitched and jerked. He was going into a seizure.

  “Help him!” she shouted at the robot.

  “I’m sorry, I’m only authorized to treat KSpace employees,” the robot said. The hexagon on its chest shifted from glowing purple to glowing green.

  “God damn it, he’s dying,” Jansen said, grabbing the robot by one spindly arm. She felt as if she could rip that arm off if she tried. It was tempting. “If you don’t help him—”

  “Wait!” Hawkins said. “He is a KSpace employee—or he was.”

  Jansen nodded. Yes—yes! Maybe they could trick the robot into helping. “His name is Sunny Stevens—”

  “Without a KSpace Employee Identifier or some other proof of employment, I’m afraid I can’t help,” GRAM said. “I’m very sorry.”

  Jansen growled. She felt her hands curling into fists.

  But then Stevens’s eyes snapped open. He must have heard what they were saying, even if he was only half-conscious. “Stevens, Sunny,” he said. “My employee number is… K6235… DA1.”

  “Welcome aboard, Dr. Stevens,” GRAM said.

  “Jansen,” Stevens said. His eyes were wide, and he was suddenly very much awake. “Jansen, what did you do to me—”

  Panels opened across GRAM’s narrow chest. A needle on an extendible arm plunged into Stevens’s arm, and yellow fluid flowed through a plastic tube into his bloodstream. Stevens gasped in pain.

  “Check his abdomen,” Rao said. “I need you to look at it—I can only see what your suit cameras see. Look for an entry wound.”

  Jansen pulled the last remnants of Stevens’s liquid cooling and ventilation garment away from his stomach. Thick drops of blood had collected on the inside, forming perfect red hemispheres in the absence of gravity. She couldn’t see anything on his skin from all the dried blood matted into his body hair.

  “Allow me,” GRAM said. It sprayed water across the wound, clearing away some of the crusted blood. It extended a suction hose to draw the water and blood away. As fast as it cleared th
e wound, though, fresh red blood welled up from a trench dug through Stevens’s skin.

  “Oh shit,” Rao said.

  “What’s going on?” Hawkins asked. He was upside down from Jansen’s perspective, still holding Stevens’s arms.

  “I’m going to raise the temperature in here,” GRAM said, “to counteract hypothermia. Please don’t be alarmed.” Ventilation fans in the orbital module started to roar, and the shreds of Stevens’s LCVG flapped in a strong breeze. Inside her suit Jansen couldn’t feel it, only hear it.

  “There’s going to be internal bleeding,” Rao said. “GRAM, can you close that wound? That’s the first thing we need to do.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” GRAM said. Two more spindly arms extended from its chest and started digging around inside Stevens’s body.

  “Oh fuck, oh Jesus!” Stevens screamed. “Oh God, that hurts! It hurts!”

  “I’m administering a mild sedative,” GRAM said.

  “Jansen!” Stevens screamed. “Jansen, you—you left me alone down there, you left me—you were so fucking desperate to find—to—”

  “Try not to talk,” Rao said. “Save your strength. GRAM, do you have a close-field spectrometer for rapid tox screening? We need to start looking for foreign objects or chemicals he might have been exposed to—”

  “No! Fuck this,” Stevens said. His head reared forward and he glared at Jansen. Hawkins gently grabbed his forehead and pushed it back down. Stevens didn’t seem to have the strength to resist.

  “This is on you,” he said. He wouldn’t look away from Jansen’s face. “This is on you. You’re cursed! Nobody is safe around you. You killed Blaine Wilson. And now you’ve fucking killed me!”

  PARMINDER RAO: All I wanted was to be with him. To hold his hand. They wouldn’t even let me leave Orion. I… Never mind. His core temperature got down to about thirty-one Celsius, which was bad. His heart rate spiked at 124. Also bad. For an hour I watched the numbers, knowing he could go into respiratory arrest at any moment, knowing he could just die without much warning. But things turned around. GRAM stabilized him. We stopped his internal bleeding. The immediate crisis passed.

  Hawkins left Wanderer and was on the way back to Orion. Jansen had chosen to stay behind. She’d moved Stevens, taking him back to Wanderer’s reentry module, where she could strap him into one of the spacecraft’s crew seats. He would at least be more comfortable there than he would be braced up against the wall of the orbital module.

  Rao looked over the scans and X-rays GRAM had provided, trying to make sense of what had happened to Stevens.

  “This… tendril? That’s what we’re calling it? It cut right into his liver,” she said. “The scans show a clear incision, about ten centimeters long.”

  “Jesus,” Jansen said, over the radio.

  “No, that’s actually good. Or at least it could have been a lot worse. If it punctured one of his lungs or hit a major artery, he would have died before you got him back.” She sighed and wiped at her face. She’d been sweating profusely and maybe crying a little. She was glad she was alone in Orion, so no one had seen how frantic she’d become, how desperate while she waited to see if Stevens was going to live or die.

  “You can lose a lot of liver tissue and be OK,” she said, moving on with her prognosis. “You can live with, like, ten percent of a liver. He’s not out of the woods yet, but… assuming we don’t find anything else, he might be OK. That’s probably the best we can hope for.”

  “OK,” Jansen said. Not as if she were acknowledging what Rao had said. More as if she was just repeating it.

  She sounded faint and distant. Rao had access to Jansen’s biodata as well, and nothing she saw there was encouraging.

  “You should try to get some sleep. Come back here and take a nap, at the very least,” she said. She was responsible for the health of all of Orion’s crew, not just Stevens. “You’re showing classic signs of extreme fatigue.”

  “I’ll be fine. I want to stay with him.”

  “Just promise me you’ll take it easy,” Rao said.

  There was no reply.

  “Jansen,” she said, “when you were over there—inside 2I. What did you see? What was it like?”

  Jansen took a long time answering.

  “Horrible,” she said.

  CREW EXCHANGE

  ROY MCALLISTER: We had a hard decision to make, regarding removing Jansen from her command. I consulted with General Kalitzakis, and he agreed with me—maybe a little too readily. I know he had never been comfortable with civilians running the show. It was a foregone conclusion, anyway. I believed in Sally Jansen, I thought she was the best person for this mission. But we couldn’t ignore the fact she’d put her people in danger.

  In the end she did sleep, a little. It wasn’t as if she had much of a choice—her body had been running on adrenaline for hours, and adrenaline always comes with a price tag.

  She stirred four hours later, still groggy, to the sound of beeping medical equipment and the gentle roar of a ventilator fan.

  She realized just how badly she’d abused herself. Her back was one solid, fused column of vertebrae, and her leg was dead all the way up to her hip. Microgravity could work wonders on sore muscles, though. It hurt only when she moved. As long as she lay still she was OK.

  God, how she hated being old. She remembered what it was like having a hangover when she was twenty. You rolled out of bed with a headache, but one greasy breakfast later and you were back in action, ready to party. The thought made her grin, memories of long-ago spring breaks. Until she remembered where she was.

  She had strapped herself into the pilot’s seat in Wanderer’s reentry module. Stevens was resting quietly in the far seat. The module wasn’t as big as Orion’s CM, and with GRAM moving around inside, constantly fussing over Stevens’s vitals, it felt pretty cramped. She had no intention of leaving anytime soon, though.

  What he’d said to her, in his brief moment of lucidity before they started stitching him up…

  She closed her eyes and let her face burn with shame for a while. She let herself feel her own failure for a couple of minutes. She finally had time to spare for a little self-hate.

  People had believed in her. Roy McAllister had trusted her to do this right, to keep her people safe. And she had failed. She’d put Stevens in danger for a fool’s errand, a rescue attempt nobody else thought had a point.

  Stevens—Sunny—had been right.

  She was cursed.

  All she’d ever wanted in her life was to go to Mars. She’d trained for it, she’d fought to get a place in the astronaut corps. She’d spent years getting ready to walk on red soil. Then Blaine Wilson died, and the rug was yanked out from under her feet.

  In the years since then, she’d just assumed that life was like that. You dreamed and you worked hard and then—something bad happened, and it was over. For twenty-one years she’d known her life wasn’t about exploration or science or discovery—it was always going to be about atonement and guilt. Then Roy had given her this second chance.

  And look what she’d done with it. She looked over at Stevens, at his sleeping body.

  She had done this to him. It was like Blaine Wilson all over again. She went over every decision she’d made in her head, over and over again, questioning what she’d gotten wrong, where she’d failed to notice something or make the right call.

  She knew that she would keep replaying the same events in her head for the rest of her life. She knew it for a certainty, because she’d been doing it for twenty-one years.

  Now she had two astronauts on her conscience. She didn’t know if she could learn to bear that weight.

  All she could think was that she had failed. She should never have been given a second chance.

  Eventually she opened her eyes again and looked over at Stevens. GRAM was mopping his face with a sponge. The robot looked up at her when it noticed she was observing it. “Can I help you with anything, Commander Jansen?” it asked.
<
br />   “No, no, I…” She shook her head.

  God she was tired. God she hurt. God everything, everything was wrong.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be here.”

  She didn’t even realize she was speaking until the words were out of her. Floating in front of her in microgravity, as if they were printed on the air.

  She blinked, hard, trying to clear her head.

  “I’m sorry, Commander Jansen, I don’t understand,” the robot said.

  She stared at it in frustration. “He wasn’t supposed to be an astronaut. He had to extort his way onto Orion,” she said. “But damn it, I can’t dodge this. I can’t pretend this isn’t my fault. I’m his MC. Everything that happens on this mission is my responsibility. He got hurt because I let him get hurt.”

  “It sounds like you’re attempting to file a formal complaint,” the robot chirped. “I can help with that.”

  Jansen sighed and waved one hand at it, a gesture of dismissal. There were moments when the robot seemed intelligent, self-aware, but that was just fancy programming. The thing was about as smart as the average sheep.

  She lifted her hands, thinking she would rub at her eyes, but of course she couldn’t do that. She was still wearing her helmet.

  She wanted to laugh at the stupidity of it all. At the cosmic joke of her life, at the idea that maybe things could have been different this time.

  She brought her hands back down, and one of them struck the side of her suit, and it made a sound she hadn’t expected. There was something in one of her pockets, something she’d forgotten.

  She shoved her gloved hand into the pocket and pulled out a bedraggled orange flag and memory stick.

  The prize. The thing she’d been so intent on finding that she’d ignored Stevens’s cry for help. If she had just let it go, if she’d focused on him instead…

  But she hadn’t. Instead she’d risked everything for a little memory stick, a tiny piece of plastic with a shiny metal plug on one end. It couldn’t possibly make up for Stevens’s life.