The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  He laughed. The bastard laughed at her joke. And for a split second, the barrel of his gun drifted and wasn’t pointing right at her.

  Jansen exploded upward from the ground. She felt something in her knee finally give way, felt a tendon tear apart, but it held just long enough. She got her shoulder down, and it collided with the fiberglass torso of Hawkins’s suit. It hurt—bad—but she put every ounce of strength she had into the hit.

  His feet danced on the bone platform as he tried to maintain his balance. In the gravity of Earth, it might have worked. The gravity here was closer to that of the moon, and his feet flew out from under him. He collapsed to the floor, his arms flailing out behind him. It seemed to take forever for him to land.

  When he did, his right hand struck the surface first. His fingers opened and his gun went spinning away, out of his reach.

  She collapsed on top of him. Both of them stared out into the dark, looking for the weapon. It had fallen somewhere in the deep shadows, invisible.

  Good enough. Jansen reared up and smashed her fist across his jaw. His head twisted over to the side, and his mouth flew open. She punched him again. She pulled her arm back for a third strike—but his hands flashed up and he grabbed her wrist, pushing her backward.

  Jansen snarled and twisted away, struggling to get to her feet. He had already climbed up into a fighting crouch, though, and he pounced before she could get up. He smacked her across the face, and lights burst behind her eyes. Then he jumped in the air and came down hard, falling slowly in the low gravity, but it didn’t matter.

  He brought his two boots down on her left leg. On her injured knee.

  This pain wasn’t like being stabbed. This was a tidal wave of nauseous filth washing over her. A sense of utter, final wrongness, and she knew her leg would never work again, that her kneecap had been reduced to shards of sharp bone. Then a new wave, this one of howling blackness, swept across her mind and then—then she was just gone, her conscious mind racing down into a deep cave to get away from the horror and the agony. Everything went dark.

  Hawkins grabbed her by the arms and started hauling her across the platform. It should have been easy in the low gravity, but her limp weight and friction made him grunt and puff as he moved her, centimeter by centimeter, toward the edge. He had to admit she’d gotten in a few good hits, as well—his jaw felt as if it had been knocked out of place.

  It didn’t matter. In a second she would be dead and he would be alone. He would find the gun and… No.

  No.

  He decided he’d earned a little reward. He wouldn’t shoot himself. Instead he would wait for General Kalitzakis to fire the impactor right through 2I’s brain. He would have a front row seat at the death of the alien.

  He had some idea of what it would look like. He’d studied the weapons system, and he knew how it functioned—similar to an anti-tank weapon. When the impactor struck the hull of 2I, it would be moving fast. Dozens of kilometers a second. At that speed, the outer hull and the inner drum might as well be made of wet tissue paper. The impactor would cut through them effortlessly, but in the process it would grow incredibly hot. The depleted uranium core would liquefy and turn into a jet of scalding metal that would burn its way right through 2I’s brain. It wouldn’t stop until it melted its way through the far side of the hull.

  Hurricane-force winds would howl out through the entry and exit wounds. The worms would choke and die as their atmosphere was torn out of their damned throats. 2I’s systems would shut down and then freeze as they were exposed to the cold vacuum of space.

  And Hawkins would be sitting there, observing it all. Maybe he would even put his helmet back on, and use one of the last remaining oxygen cartridges. Maybe he would sit for a while after it was all over, looking over what he had done. What he had destroyed. He would sit and witness the death throes and the long cold silence that followed. When his batteries died, when his lights went out—then he would remove the helmet again. Take one last breath of air and just… let go.

  He deserved that. He deserved a little glory.

  He had reached the end of the platform. On either side of him a colossal rib rose up into the gloom, so that he felt as if he were standing on a balcony above the swarming, ravening mass of the worms far below. A generalissimo standing on a castle wall looking down at a besieging army. He dragged Jansen right up to the edge and positioned her so with one good kick he could roll her over into the waiting maws below.

  At the last moment, though, he flinched. He looked down into Jansen’s unconscious face. Wondering what Roy McAllister had ever seen in this old woman. She’d failed. She’d failed to go to Mars—she had personally lost the second space race for America. She’d killed Blaine Wilson and Sunny Stevens. She had fought him every step of the way after he took over command of the mission.

  But she was still a human being. She didn’t deserve to die like this, torn to shreds by the rotating teeth of an alien worm.

  He turned and looked around the platform. Channarong’s light painted a broad yellow triangle across the bone. His own suit lights illuminated a smaller, paler patch. He searched for his sidearm, and after a while he saw it, the square angle of its grip just at the edge of Channarong’s light. He walked over to it and started to bend down to pick it up. It looked so tiny compared to other handguns he’d owned and shot. The barrel had been filed down to almost nothing, and the trigger guard had been cut away so he could handle it even through the thick gloves of a space suit. In the interest of saving weight, the grip had been skeletonized, cut down to a hollow frame in the shape of a normal pistol grip. It had been designed to be hidden inside a pocket of his space suit, put there without NASA’s ever being the wiser. Roy McAllister had insisted that Orion 7 not carry any weapons—he felt that would send the wrong message to the aliens. What a fool. The space force had refused to send their man into a hostile situation unarmed, and this tiny weapon was the compromise.

  He wrapped his fingers around the grip. The magazine was partially exposed, and he could see there were still two bullets inside. More than he needed now.

  He stood up, his knees creaking just a little. He felt suddenly very tired and sore. He was turning into an old pile of wreckage like Jansen. The idea made him laugh a little. Well, he would never have to worry about old age.

  One bullet. He would make sure Jansen died quickly. Painlessly. It was the least she deserved. He started walking back toward where she lay, at the edge of the platform. She hadn’t moved. He stepped through Channarong’s discarded light, then back into the shadows.

  Where someone was waiting for him.

  He could just make out the shape of a space suit. A helmet with what looked like a bloodshot eye in the middle of its faceplate. Fear bubbled through his blood—no, not fear, he’d just been startled. “Rao?” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to kill you. It was just an accident. You were never exposed to 2I. You could have gone home, I think. Maybe.”

  A ghost. He was talking to a ghost. Huh, he thought. Maybe he had gone crazy. He wondered how he would know for sure.

  Then the ghost lifted Channarong’s multi-tool, with its three-inch blade, and slashed his throat wide open.

  Rao could barely see through the blood inside her faceplate. She had caught only a glimpse of Hawkins before she attacked. For the first time in her life she hadn’t thought about what she was doing. She’d just—just—

  It was suddenly desperately important to get her helmet off. She tried to twist it off, and it wouldn’t budge until she remembered the two catches. Then it screwed off just fine, clicking right before it released. She hauled it off her head and then tossed it away from her, horrified suddenly by the blood.

  She dropped to her knees and tried very hard to throw up. Her stomach was empty, so she just gagged for a while. What she’d done, what she had—just—

  She scrubbed at her face and then her mouth with the cloth patch on the back of her sleeve. There was a mirror there, too. She lifte
d it carefully, as if looking at her own face was what would finally kill her. As if she were already dead but still moving until she actually saw.

  Her reflection, in the dim light, was mostly intact. There was a deep gouge in her cheek, a trench where the bullet had passed along the curve of her cheekbone. She palpated the wound very carefully and found that while it was pretty messy, it hadn’t done any significant damage. Even the nerves there seemed intact.

  Hawkins had shot her right in the face. He was—had been—an excellent shot, and he would have killed her reflexively. Except that the thick polycarbonate of her faceplate had changed the trajectory of the bullet as it traveled toward the bridge of her nose. Just enough to save her life.

  She would be OK. She would—she—

  She was breathing the air of 2I, for the first time. She remembered Jansen mentioning the strange smell, and now she got to experience it for herself. It made her think of the hermit crab she used to keep in a fish tank in her bedroom, back in high school. When the hermit crab got sick and died, the tank had smelled a little like this. A little.

  “Ma’am?” she said, crouching over Jansen’s unconscious form. “Sally?”

  Jansen’s face was creased with agony, and sweat had slicked her short blonde hair. Her eyes fluttered open, though, when Rao rolled her back from the edge of the platform. She let out a nasty little grunt of pain, a broken, warbling cry that barely sounded human.

  “Hawkins?” she managed to croak out.

  “No longer a problem,” Rao replied. Even to her own ears her voice sounded very far away. She forced herself to focus on her patient, poking and prodding to see just how badly Jansen was hurt.

  “Your pupils look good, and your breathing is… not great, but I think you’re going to live. Do you want some more of those NSAIDs from the medical kit? I doubt they’ll help very much with the pain, but the inflammation from your previous injury never really subsided, and I think it’s probably a good idea to—”

  “Rao,” Jansen whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Shut up.” Her eyelids fluttered as if she might pass out again. “And yes. Pills. And—”

  Rao leaned in close to hear what else Jansen had to say.

  “Thank you.”

  DESTRUCTIVE REENTRY

  ROY MCALLISTER: While it was all happening I could do nothing but watch it unfold. The world could have ended outside, but I would have refused to leave the neutrino telescope. It was not until much later that I noticed I’d received a message from General Kalitzakis. It was short but it required no context. It simply read, 17%.

  The bone platform shook. It was just a little tremor, but it sent a fresh rush of pain up Jansen’s leg into her hip. She looked around, but there was nothing to see. “What was that?” she asked.

  Rao had been checking on Foster and Channarong. Perhaps trying to decide if they were really dead. There was no need, but it gave her something to do. Now she came racing back to Jansen’s side. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I felt the ground shake earlier, but I thought I was just so scared I was shivering.”

  Jansen reached for the younger woman’s arm. “It wasn’t just you. Can you help me sit up? And then—”

  The next shock was stronger. It felt as if someone had kicked the platform underneath her. As if they’d given it a very hard kick.

  “Oh,” Rao said. “Oh. I think—oh.”

  Jansen took a deep breath. She saw where Rao was looking, so she took the helmet off her belt and pointed its single light in that direction. Toward the brain.

  At first it looked exactly as she remembered. An endless ring of hands with long, creepy fingers. Slightly blue in color. It took her far too long—she blamed the pain—to recognize what had changed.

  None of those hands were moving. They weren’t gripping each other’s wrists. The fingers weren’t even curled up. The brain was absolutely still and silent.

  The platform moved a good half meter, then swung back to its previous position. There was no question now that it was shaking, and Jansen had a bad feeling she knew why.

  “That motherfucker,” she said. She realized she wasn’t entirely sure whom she was talking about. Hawkins or maybe Foster. “He was linked to it, with no barriers, he said. They melted into each other. When he died—”

  “2I must have felt like it was dying, too,” Rao said.

  “And that’s the signal. The signal the worms were waiting for. They’ll eat the bones,” she said. The platform shook, and she reached out for anything to hold on to, but found nothing. The bone beneath her was smooth as ivory.

  She didn’t need to look over the edge to know what must be happening down there. The worms must have all gone crazy at once. Maybe the signal was a pheromone, or maybe it was some kind of radio pulse—it didn’t matter.

  How long would it take them to gnaw their way through the pylons? How many minutes left before the whole cage came crashing down into their waiting teeth?

  Probably not many.

  “What do we do?” Rao asked. “Jansen?”

  Jansen stared into the dark space in front of her, trying to think.

  “Commander?”

  Jansen looked up into Rao’s lights.

  “We get the hell out of here,” she said. “Help me up.”

  The shaking didn’t let up. Rao tried to help Jansen up to her feet, but it was clear the older astronaut wasn’t walking anywhere. In the light gravity near the axis, Rao thought she could probably carry her—maybe if Jansen climbed up on her back—

  “The secondary airlock,” Jansen said. “It’s not far. It’s got to be just up there.” She pointed at the far end of the cage, on the other side of the quiescent brain. “Maybe a kilometer, maybe less. If we can get there before this thing collapses, we have a chance.”

  “We don’t even know if that airlock works,” Rao said. Then she closed her eyes and nodded. “Right. That thought wasn’t worth saying out loud.”

  Jansen didn’t contradict her. “We’ve got air, and we’ve got a little power. Maybe just enough to get back to Orion. Switch off your helmet lights. We’ll just use mine. It’s going to be hard to see, but… but…”

  Rao frowned. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Despite the obvious things, of course.

  “Your helmet. Where’s your helmet?”

  Rao reached up one hand and touched her hair. “I threw it away. It was broken, the faceplate was broken, and…”

  They wouldn’t get far—she wouldn’t get far—outside 2I without a helmet. She’d almost forgotten they were in deep space, in the cold vacuum between worlds.

  Jansen swung around in place, her light sweeping the platform. “It’s fine,” she said.

  “Commander—”

  “It’s going to be fine! We’ll find a way to patch it. I think I have some duct tape in one of my bags. Just help me find it.”

  Jansen’s light swiveled and turned and finally landed on the helmet, which lay about twenty meters away near the edge of the platform. The ruined faceplate stared back at them, the faceplate spattered with blood—and shattered. When the bullet passed through the polycarbonate it had left only a small hole, but there had been a spiderweb of cracks around that wound. In the time since then the cracks had spread and now the faceplate looked like a mouth full of broken, bloody teeth.

  It would have to do. Rao raced toward the helmet—then stopped and threw her arms out to her sides, dancing as the platform shook violently under her feet.

  Her stomach fell. Her mouth opened in the start of a scream, as the entire platform started to tilt over to one side. It wasn’t much of an incline, just a degree or two, but combined with the constant vibration it was enough. The helmet started to roll away from her, gaining speed as it hurtled toward the edge of the platform and out of sight.

  Jansen shouted something at her. Rao turned to look and Jansen shouted again, and this time Rao heard her.

  “Hawkins! Get Hawkins’s helmet!”

  But ev
erything was moving then. Everything was rolling past her, sliding down the slope. She saw Sandra Channarong’s flashlight bounce and jump, and then for a second it was flying over the edge and she saw—

  —countless teeth and scrabbling limbs, a million worms, throwing themselves at the pylons, smashing their whirling mouths into the bone, she saw the buttress start to crack, long, lightning bolt–shaped fractures running up and down its smooth length, saw the tendrils inside the bone rupture and spray black ichor—

  And then the light was gone, and she could see only darkness through the bars of the cage.

  She looked over at Jansen, who had collapsed to the platform, her arms spread wide as she tried to hold on through sheer friction. Jansen’s face was wild, her features contorted into a grimace of pure determination.

  Even as she started to slide, to slip across the sheer bone.

  Rao raced over and grabbed her arms. Her boots had just enough traction to hold on to the bone. She hauled and pulled and somehow managed to keep Jansen from slipping away.

  There was no chance of recovering Hawkins’s helmet. His body must have rolled off the platform like everything else. Rao was sure of it. Which meant they had one helmet between the two of them.

  “I think,” she said, trying to work up the courage to finish the thought, “I think that—”

  “Look,” Jansen said. She nodded at something behind Rao. “Look!”

  The brain was moving again.

  Not much. Jansen saw one hand reach out and feebly grab a wrist. Looking up and down the brain’s circumference, what she could see of it in their last working light, she saw a finger twitch here. A fist form there.

  It was still alive. There was still some small part of the brain clinging to life.

  The worms didn’t seem to care. The platform shook more violently all the time. The signal had been sent. Maybe there was some way to make the worms calm down again, to get them to stop chewing away at the cage’s supports, but the brain hadn’t managed it yet.