My Sweet Satan

by Peter Cawdron

  The lights in the shaft flickered and remained dim, so Jasmine reached up and turned on the penlight above the faceplate on her mask. Through the dark smoke, she could see Chuck in the distance.

  Pushing off from one of the handholds, she rushed headlong through the smoke toward him, not sure what she could do but feeling she had to do something to help.

  “Open the hatch to Science,” Chuck cried, floating before a glass window in the sealed hatch.

  “You know I can’t do that, commander. The core has it locked down.”

  Jason’s voice sounded cold.

  “Open the damn hatch, Jason!”

  “I’m getting internal temperature readings of over eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Even if I could override the core, going in there would be fatal.”

  “My wife is in there! Open the goddamn hatch!”

  “The core is not releasing control,” Jason answered with as much passion as Chuck. “You have to wait. The fire is waning. If we open the door now, the influx of fresh oxygen could cause the fire to flare up again. At eight hundred degrees the internal walls are already losing their structure. At twelve hundred, they’ll melt. We’ll lose the ship.”

  “DAMN YOU, JASON! OVERRIDE THE FUCKING CORE!”

  Chuck held onto the metal rail on the hatch with one hand and pounded the metal with his fist. His gas mask floated idly beside him. Tears drifted through the smoke.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Jason replied.

  Jasmine caught Chuck’s gas mask and handed it to him. Her eyes caught the heartbreak in his dark hazel eyes. Blobs of watery tears clumped on his face, sitting over his tear ducts, partially covering his eyelids. Chuck wiped them away, sniffing as he pushed the mask over his mouth. He breathed in the oxygen, struggling not to cough. For a moment, Jasmine thought he was going to throw up in his mask. He needed to breathe pure, fresh oxygen and yet he refused to pull the straps over his head. He must have still held hope for a rescue.

  Jasmine looked through the glass in the hatch. Dark, pungent smoke blocked her view. An amber glow shone through from one side. From what she could tell, it had to be at the back of the deck.

  “I’ve got suppression systems back online,” Jason called out. “Once active, the core will release control.”

  “Flood it,” Chuck replied. “And get us in there.”

  Before Chuck had finished his sentence, jets of clear air shot in from all sides within the science module. The jets stirred the murky smoke, but this couldn’t have been breathable air. This had to be some kind of inert gas, Jasmine thought, realizing it would suffocate both the flame and anyone that had survived inside. As the smoke cleared, a body drifted into view. At a distance of ten to fifteen feet, the charred, blackened body looked barely human, more like the mummified remains of some ancient Egyptian than an astronaut in the 21st century.

  “Open up,” Chuck cried.

  “It’s still too dangerous,” Jason replied. “Internal temperature is over six hundred. Any fresh oxygen will cause a flash fire.”

  “Damn you, Jason!” Chuck yelled. “Damn you to hell!”

  In the silence that followed, Jasmine heard a soft click.

  Jason spoke with resignation.

  “I’ve increased internal pressure to give you a fighting chance. It’ll lessen the back-flow of oxygen, but you’ll get hit with a wave of outgoing gas. Once the pressure equalizes, close the hatch behind you.”

  Chuck didn’t reply. He’d heard the lock release. He pushed over next to Jasmine, nudging her to one side away from the lock and pulled on the handle. The hatch flew open, startling Jasmine with how quickly it moved. Pungent black smoke billowed into the corridor. A wave of searing heat washed over her. She could feel the fine hairs on her arms wither as the radiant heat lashed at her skin. She felt as though they’d opened a blast furnace.

  Chuck pulled his arms slightly back inside his jumpsuit so he could avoid gripping anything within the science module with his bare hands. He held the thick cotton cuffs up over his palms and pushed off gently into the smoky darkness. Jasmine rolled her sleeves down and followed cautiously behind him. The intense heat stung the exposed skin on her forehead and neck.

  “Be careful,” Jason said as Chuck closed the hatch behind them.

  The vents within the devastated science module hissed as inert gases continued to flood the chamber.

  Jasmine was sweating. She fumbled with the switches on the side of her mask, trying to increase the strength of the penlight. Suddenly, the smoke lit up like fog. The light barely penetrated the haze more than a few feet.

  The glass lens on her mask began to fog up. She wanted to pull the mask off and wipe the lens, but knew that would be a mistake. With reduced visibility, she quickly lost sight of Chuck. The only other light drifting through the module came from the tiny glass window in the hatch behind them, casting soft shadows through the haze.

  The burned-out shell of a cleaner drifted inert to one side, its plastic housing melted and blackened. The robotic device seemed to have borne the full brunt of the flames at some point, as one whole side of the machine was gone. It must have tried to fight the fire.

  Soot marred the walls. Burn marks stretched along the benches. Plastic containers had melted and formed grotesque shapes floating in the smoke. There were no flames. Some of the surfaces were smoldering, giving off a steady stream of smoke.

  “Ana? Mei?”

  Jasmine’s heart sank at Chuck’s cry. No one could have survived the inferno.

  Jets of gas brought cool relief, darting out of the fire suppression system and slowly lowering the temperature in the chamber.

  Something dark loomed ahead. Jasmine didn’t want to approach, but she had to. She already knew what she was looking at before the form became apparent. In the soft, smoky half-light, a body came into view, just the head and arms drifting through the haze in front of her. Black cinders hung in the air. Ash floated around her like the murky sediment at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

  Dark burns disfigured the body, making it almost impossible to recognize. From behind her thick rubber mask, listening to the wheezing sound of her own breathing and the hiss of oxygen coming from the cylinder in her hand, Jasmine felt as inhuman as the grotesque statue before her. She didn’t want to know who it was. She didn’t want to think of this as Anastasia or Mei. She felt cruel, heartless, but the thought that this was someone she cared for was devastating. Barely five minutes ago, this charred body had been a living, breathing person. The harsh reality of such a horrific death in space terrified Jasmine.

  The charred body tumbled slowly before her, propelled by the inflow of inert gas. As the face came into view, Jasmine could see the charred remnants of hair, hollow empty eye sockets, blackened stretched skin, exposed teeth.

  “Mei,” she said softly, her voice breaking. Jasmine trembled uncontrollably. She reached out to touch the body, but her fingers stopped short, just inches from Mei’s blackened shoulder.

  Another dark shape loomed beyond the corpse. A face appeared behind a soot-stained gas mask. Chuck reached out over the body, wrapping a paper thin foil sheet over the remains. He moved with reverence, gently wrapping the foil blanket and clipping opposing clasps together to hold the blanket in place.

  The sight of Chuck wearing his gas mask was unnerving. For Jasmine, this was a nightmare. Dark glass circles hid his eyes. His penlight struggled to penetrate the smoke. The blackened plastic faceplate covering his nose and mouth made him look inhuman, as though he were nothing more than a robot.

  “Is it?” he asked, and Jasmine realized he didn’t know who this was. He hadn’t seen the face. Like Jasmine, Chuck was shaking. His trembling hands continued to gently wrap the body, but he hadn’t looked at the face. He was avoiding any identification. Jasmine might not have been able to see much through the gloom, but she could see Chuck couldn’t bring himself to look in case it was Anastasia.

  Jasmine couldn’t speak. Instead, she shook her head sof
tly.

  Chuck didn’t reply. He repositioned himself in the weightless environment, pushing gently on an overhead cabinet so he could move the body to one side. With the body wrapped, he turned to Jasmine as though he was going to say something but he never spoke. Their heads were misaligned, with his head almost at a right angle to hers, and in the darkness Jasmine struggled with the concept of up and down. Such distinctions were meaningless, but she couldn’t help but think of her orientation as correct.

  “You OK?” she asked as she watched him adjust the flashlight on his helmet into a fine, thin beam.

  Chuck didn’t answer, and Jasmine realized she hadn’t pressed the transmit button. She reached up, touched at the side of her throat and said, “Are you OK to continue?”

  Chuck nodded. His oxygen bottle drifted beside his shoulder. His light lit up the ash suspended in the air. Her light diffused in the smoke, barely piercing the darkness. Chuck reached up and adjusted the focus, giving her more depth but over a narrower field.

  Jasmine nodded rather than saying thanks. Thanks seemed grossly out of place in the dark, silent misery of the gutted science module.

  Slowly, Chuck disappeared back into the shadows like a deep sea diver fading into the depths. Occasionally, she’d get a glimpse of him as his flashlight moved around, but most of the time it was obscured by his bulky frame and the heavy soot hanging in the air. She could hear him opening cabinets, struggling to pull the warped steel doors to one side.

  Jasmine moved back to the hatch. She couldn’t bear the thought of finding Anastasia in the same condition as Mei. She wanted to get out of the terrifying darkness. She rubbed the glass, peering through to the corridor beyond the hatch. Jason must have restored power and sucked out the smoke as the corridor appeared brightly lit. The white surfaces looked pristine, and that seemed wrong. The ship should mourn its losses with something more than the burnt out remains of the science module, it should not continue on as though nothing had happened, thought Jasmine. There should at least be stains, scars. Life was too precious to count for nothing.

  As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t leave Chuck. She desperately wanted to twist the handle and push on the hatch, but she knew she had to stay. Jasmine turned around and the beam of her flashlight glanced over the inside of the science lab. Jason must have been cycling the air and filtering out the smoke, as the thick ash was clearing.

  Burnt fingers stuck out from a small gap in a sliding panel covering a storage unit. In the darkness, neither she nor Chuck had noticed them when they’d first entered the module. Jasmine felt her heart beating in her throat. She pushed off and drifted a few feet over to the panel. Slowly, she forced the panel back to expose the body of Anastasia. She expected to see charred remains like those of Mei, but Ana was clothed. She was wearing a gas mask. Her hair was singed and her arms burnt, but she looked intact. Jasmine fought with the panel, shining her flashlight into the storage unit, trying to get a better look. She couldn’t tell if Anastasia was alive, but she hadn’t been burned as badly as Mei.

  “Chuck,” Jasmine cried, stabbing at the microphone button on her mask. She turned and peered through the haze, yelling, “Chuck. Quick! Over here by the hatch!”

  Like so many of the scorched panels in the science module, the sliding door had warped and wouldn’t move on its frame. Being weightless, Jasmine found it almost impossible to wrestle with a jammed door. She jimmied the panel open far enough that she could grab Anastasia by the shoulders and drag her through the gap. With her feet anchored against the hull, she pulled, struggling to maneuver Anastasia’s limp body out through the opening. Chuck bumped into her, coming down from above. He grabbed at the blackened jumpsuit Anastasia was wearing and helped pull her into the module.

  “Ana. Ana,” he cried over and over, his voice muted by his gas mask.

  Once she was free, Jasmine left Anastasia with Chuck and twisted the handle on the entry hatch, pushing it open so they could escape the darkness. Clouds of smoke followed them into the corridor. Jasmine sealed the hatch behind them as Chuck ripped the gas mask from his wife’s head. Her neck moved as though it were rubbery, reacting to his motion, but she showing no signs of life.

  “Oh, Ana, please,” Chuck cried, tearing his own mask from his face. He tapped at her cheeks and then held his fingers against her jugular and checked for a pulse. Chuck cradled her head in his arms. Pinching her nose, he began resuscitation breaths, inflating her lungs with short, rapid breaths.

  “Get her to Medical,” Jason said, snapping Jasmine out of her daze. She pulled the gas mask from her face and let it drift to one side.

  Chuck pushed with his legs, using one hand to avoid bumping into the curving wall of the corridor as they sailed into Medical.

  “Jazz,” Jason said. “You’re going to need to prep the defibrillator. Cabinet with the green cross on it. Hook up the defib. It will let me see if she’s got a heartbeat. Stick the paddles on her chest, one high, one low, on either side of the sternum, and prep two milligrams of atropine.”

  “Right,” Jasmine said, stirred into action by Jason’s sense of urgency.

  She tore open the defibrillator cabinet. The plastic panel was designed to come away easily in an emergency and sailed across medical, banging into the far cabinets.

  “Hurry,” Chuck cried, strapping Anastasia to a medical bed with Velcro. He continued with resuscitation breaths as Jasmine grabbed at the defibrillator. Plastic bottles and vials floated free, liberated by the motion she imparted as she frantically grabbed at items she thought were needed. In a panic, she pushed off and found herself somersaulting out of control. She had to let something go in order to arrest her motion, and the needleless injection gun with the atropine drifted from her grasp.

  “Oxygen,” Jason said.

  “On it,” Chuck replied, pulling a transparent medical mask from beside the flat bed and strapping it over Anastasia’s mouth. Oxygen began flowing automatically through the thin green tube.

  Jasmine had never used a defibrillator before, but she’d been on the receiving end. Her pectoral muscles were still sore and bruised from when Mike had shocked her back to life. She tore the flat paddles open as Chuck cut the front of his wife’s jumpsuit and singlet open, exposing her chest and breasts. The dry underside of the paddles had a sticky texture. Jasmine slapped one on Anastasia’s upper chest, just below her collarbone, and the other down beneath her breast, pushing it hard against her lower ribcage.

  “I’m getting a beat,” Jason said as soon as the first paddle touched. “Irregular, low pressure. Stunted arrhythmia. She’s barely holding on. You need to shock the heart.”

  “Get clear,” Jasmine said to Chuck. She may not have known much about medicine or life in space, but she knew what the big red button in the middle of the defibrillation control would do. She watched as Chuck let go of his wife, lifting his hands out to the side like wings. On Earth, he would have fallen flat against her, but in orbit around Saturn, he hung there suspended, inches above her chest.

  Jasmine slammed her hand into the button, not that force would do anything more to help Anastasia, but the urgency of the moment seemed to demand more from her. Anastasia’s body arched backwards under the Velcro straps and then went limp.

  “Again?” Jasmine asked.

  “No,” Jason replied. “I’m getting a clean, rhythmic beat. Just hold off for now.”

  Chuck closed his eyes for a moment.

  Vapor formed on the inside of the oxygen mask as Anastasia breathed on her own.

  Jason said, “Her heart rate is fluctuating. Go ahead and give her the atropine.”

  Jasmine disconnected the defibrillator, leaving the panels stuck to Anastasia’s chest but pulling the clip from the back of the device. She left the yellow defibrillation unit with its big red button floating in the air above Anastasia with the loose wire drifting aimlessly in the air and pushed off to look for the atropine.

  The atropine was in a needleless syringe that looked vaguely like
a gun. The device was intuitive to use, with a touchscreen wrapping around the cylinder. There were multiple drug options and dosage indicators.

  “Two milligrams, right?”

  “Make it one,” Jason said. “And fifty micrograms of Fentanyl.”

  Chuck was a mess. He held Anastasia’s hand, gently patting the back of her wrist and mumbling something in what sounded like Russian.

  Jasmine fumbled with the exotic syringe.

  Jason spoke with more than a hint of concern in his voice. “It’s mg for milligram and mcg for microgram. Be careful with the dose selection. There’s a world of difference between the two. Fifty micrograms is 5% of one milligram. You don’t want to—”

  “I’ve got it,” Jasmine snapped, trying to compose herself.

  “Administer both shots into her upper thigh.”

  The scissors Chuck had used to expose Anastasia’s upper torso were floating with a myriad of junk near the table. Jasmine grabbed the scissors and cut carefully past Anastasia’s waist and down the center of her right thigh, exposing dark red welts and blisters. There was just enough leg exposed to press the syringe gun against a pale patch of pink skin. In pressing the gun against Anastasia’s thigh, Jasmine inevitably pushed herself away from the table. She had to reposition herself and hold onto one of the Velcro straps before she felt confident enough to administer the atropine. She paused, mentally recounting what she’d done selecting atropine and the dose of one mg, not one mcg, and squeezed the broad, flat trigger. A pneumatic sound signaled the injection of the drug through the pores in Anastasia’s skin.

  “And the—”

  “Got it,” Jasmine replied. She didn’t need to be lectured. She needed to concentrate. She looked at the settings and adjusted the drug to Fentanyl and the dosage to fifty micrograms, paying close attention to the change from mg to mcg. She breathed deeply as she pushed the gun against the same spot and squeezed the trigger.

  “You’re going to have to get her out of those clothes and clean her with a sponge bath,” Jason said. “Cut away what you can, but if any of the clothing is stuck, leave it in place. You’ll find antiseptic wash in the cabinet marked surgical prep. There’s antibiotic lotion in the next cabinet, be sure to use the one marked topical painkiller. Once she’s wiped down, you’re going to want to use non-stick bandages from the dressings cabinet. Apply a liberal amount of lotion before setting the bandage with a compression strip.”