Orbital Decay

by Malcolm Cross

  On the third preset, the satellites relayed up a slow stutter of gunfire in response to their call of, “Houston, do you read? Houston?”

  No answer, but they could hear gunfire over the link as someone triggered the transmitter.

  “Tom, are you still there?”

  “Y-yeah, Alvin.” Tom was breathing heavily, now. “We’re still here. It’s good to hear your voice. I thought we’d lost contact with you. Did someone bring the relay dishes back?”

  “Maybe. We rewired the Ku antennas and got the satellites pointed at a different ground station.”

  “Heh. Without us to help? Nice work.”

  “Tom. Is Houston still under attack?”

  “Yeah, we are. They broke into the building about twenty minutes ago.” Gunfire, again. A lower thump that fuzzed the transmission. “Security went down to barricade the doors, but we haven’t heard from them since. The National Guard are coming...”

  “That’s good. Who are the attackers?”

  A pause. That thirty second delay. Alvin smiled weakly, though only he got the joke, looking around at the other astronauts clustering around the communications panel. The delay ended about twenty seconds early.

  “I don’t know. They’ve been shouting something about the pandemic on bull horns. I think... I think they blame us for the quarantines.”

  “Why would they blame NASA?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom murmured. “That gunfire’s getting pretty close, now.”

  “I’m praying for you, Tom.”

  “Thanks. We’re all praying for you guys up there, too.”

  “I’m sure the National Guard is going to get there any time now,” Alvin said.

  Matvey looked sorrowful, staring at the microphone in Alvin’s hands. Krister had gone up to Zvezda, but Charlie was still there, fumbling the procedures manuals back into their rack.

  Alvin cleared his throat, spoke a little louder. “Hey Tom, I’m sure the National Guard’s going to get there real soon.” He waited a moment. “Over.”

  He waited a moment more, unwilling to let thirty seconds elapse before holding down the transmit key.

  “Tom?” Alvin exhaled slowly, waited. Waited, repeated his friend’s name, and at last let the microphone go, dragging his hands back through his hair. “God damn.”

  Matvey touched his shoulder. “I am sure it will be alright. I am also praying.”

  Alvin nodded uncomfortably. The taste of tin-foil was back. That deep, inner discomfort that left him feeling sick inside. Alvin wasn’t too sure about the power of prayer, but Tom believed in it. So all the same, Alvin prayed, staring at the radio.

  It remained resolutely silent. Checking on the computer systems, though, there was still a carrier signal—the station on the ground still had power, could still transmit, but nobody was transmitting.

  “We should double-check that we still have contact with Moscow,” Matvey said, after a few quiet minutes.

  Moscow was the Russian ground control centre. Their round-the-clock communications were routed through Houston’s systems; if Houston went down, Station would be limited to direct line of sight radio communications while over one of Moscow’s antennas. When they switched the communications panel over to channel two, they heard Krister and Yegor speaking with one of Moscow’s ground control officers.

  “—Ridiculous that you cannot check! Are there no copies of the American documentation there?” Krister barked.

  “Ordinarily we would use the hotline, but no one is picking up at the other end. We simply do not have the protocols for linking directly into satellite communications, there was never any need for it!”

  “Do not make excuses,” Yegor said. “Are you in touch with any of the Americans?”

  “We are in contact with Kennedy but they say they do not have their engineers in the facility yet. You must wait!”

  Charlie pointed at a blinking indicator on the panel. “Look! Someone’s talking on channel one.”

  Matvey switched it over.

  “Tom?” Alvin asked, taking the microphone from Matvey.

  There was no gunfire in the background. Just a long, drawn out hacking cough, voices in the background, and the unfamiliar twang of a Texan good ol’ boy’s accent. “Where’s the movie set?”

  “Houston, this is Station, please identify yourself. Over.”

  “I said, where’s the movie set? We found the pool, but none of y’all were in there. I’m speaking to the movie set, right?”

  Alvin looked to Charlie and Matvey for support, but they were both staring at him, wide-eyed. Frightened.

  Alvin cleared his throat. “Who is this, and who do you think you’re speaking to? Over.”

  The good ol’ boy laughed knowingly. “I’m Jerry L. Brentford, one of the sumbitches who busted in on your sorry ass to tear down your factory of lies. Now if you get out of that movie set where you film the Space Station hoax, and get on your knees in the corridor, we’ll arrest y’all like good citizens and ain’t none of you gonna get shot. Now how’s that sound to you?”

  Charlie whimpered. “Oh, Fuck.”

  “What is he talking about?” Matvey looked away from her, shot Alvin a desperate glance. “I don’t understand. What is this?”

  “Jerry seems to think we’re a hoax.”

  “What?”

  The radio crackled. “Y’all making up your minds? I ain’t a patient man. You coming out and cooperating, or not?”

  They all stared at the panel.

  Finally, Alvin cleared his throat. “He thinks the ISS is faked.”

  “But what is this! That is mad,” Matvey stammered. “You can point a telescope up and see us, who is he, how can he be that stupid?”

  Alvin licked his lips nervously. “Go get Krister.”

  “What?”

  “Go get Krister!” Alvin spun, tearing Matvey from his perch and throwing him up the station, toward Zvezda. “Just get Krister, damnit!”

  Reeling drunkenly, Matvey caught himself against a wall. Blinked with frightened betrayal at Alvin, then turned to pull himself into a single long soaring glide up Station.

  Alvin drifted backward in a slow tumble. Equal and opposite reactions. Newton’s third law. He clutched at his head, twisting away.

  “Look, I ain’t in the mood for games,” Jerry told them across an audio background of men screaming at each other. “If you don’t come out of whatever hideyhole you got yourselves dug into, I’m going to have to start killing your friends over here. Now you’ve got to the count of ten to start talking. One, two—”

  “Alvin!” Charlie screeched.

  He grabbed at the nearest bar and yanked himself back to the communications panel. She fumbled the microphone at him as if it was an adder, and he grabbed it tight.

  “Five... Six...”

  “Jerry you’ve gotta believe me, please. We’re not at Houston, we’re real far away.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  Looking at Charlie for help got him nowhere. She was staring at him, scared.

  Alvin was scared, too. “I can’t tell him we’re up here,” he whispered. “He’ll shoot Tom.”

  Charlie bit her lip raw. “Russia. Tell him we’re in Russia.”

  Alvin held down the transmit key. “Jerry. You there?”

  “And fuckin’ waiting, boy.”

  “We’re at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Star City, in Russia. It’s—it’s where they launch the Soyuz from.”

  “Huh. Makes sense to keep it remote and out of the country, I guess.”

  “Jerry, please—please don’t hurt anyone, okay? It’s real important you don’t hurt anyone.”

  The man snorted. “Real important I don’t hurt anyone? How about it’s real important you don’t hurt anyone? That’s rich, that’s fucking rich. You ain’t got no room to speak, boy, not when you and yours have been spreading the Cull!”

  While Jerry continued his ranting, Krister caught Alvin’s eye from the hatch. The Russians were with him. Silently th
ey climbed and floated down to listen. And the longer the crew listened, the worse it got.

  “We know you government bastards been pumping the Cull into our homes, it’s cuz of you our kids are getting sick, putting that shit in drinking water and spreading it in chemtrails after planes, using satellites to rain the Cull down on us! And why? Just so’s you can control us? Make us line up for vaccinations and get the mark of the beast slung on us or die? That ain’t no way to live! God damn you faggots!” He punctuated his statement with a gunshot. And another.

  It was the first time Alvin had heard the pandemic called ‘the Cull.’

  “This ain’t God’s retribution upon man! It’s man’s retribution against man! And we will not take the deaths of our sons and daughters laying down, we’ll fight and put these bastards in the ground—”

  Gunfire, and the transmission went dead. Alvin prayed that all Jerry had struck down in his anger had been the communications console, but after fifteen minutes of panicky consultation with Russia, they lost all signals entirely. Every ground station the Ku band satellites knew about was down.

  Space Station was off the air.

  “BUT THERE IS no procedure for this emergency. No one thought Houston could just vanish. We have to start preparing the Soyuz capsules to go down!” Charlie stumbled over the words, rushing to get them out before catching her thumbnail between her teeth, gnawing, ready to rip it right out.

  “I agree,” Yegor said in slow, careful English. “We should start running the checks on the Soyuz capsules.”

  “We are not evacuating,” Krister growled. As far as he was concerned, as Crew Commander, this was the closest thing Space Station could have to mutiny. “We are not in any immediate danger and can safely continue the mission. Communications have been lost before, this is nothing to be unduly concerned about.”

  “I didn’t say evacuate, I said run the start up checks.” Yegor glared at Krister. Yegor was scheduled to take command of the next leg of the expedition, when Krister, Alvin and Matvey returned to Earth in two weeks. If they returned. “I am not suggesting we get into our suits. But if the emergency escalates, we must be ready.”

  “It already has escalated! We need to evacuate, without Houston the mission is over!” Tears were starting to glob up around Charlie’s eyes. Not falling, just clinging to the corners of her eyes in the freefall. She wiped at her face with her sleeve. “We can’t do this without a connection to the ground.”

  Krister gritted his teeth. “There have been blackouts before.”

  “We need the engineering help.” Alvin grabbed the bar behind him to keep from floating into the centre of the group. He didn’t want too much of the spotlight. “We need the teams on the ground to help us keep this thing in orbit. We’re up here, but there are hundreds of technicians down there, and... and now they’re not there.”

  “I am sure that ground control can be transferred to Moscow if the situation demands it,” Matvey pointed out. “We also have flight engineers and expertise, they can be briefed by NASA—”

  “They can’t!” Charlie yelled, as though raising her voice would put more force behind her argument, make up for her panicky worry. “Don’t you get it? Those crazies who attacked... they’re infected with the Cull. They’re talking about their children dying, they’re infected! They’ve broken every quarantine between wherever they started from and Houston, the entire Johnson Space Center is infected, the American half of this effort is dead.”

  “The Cull—the pandemic,” Alvin corrected himself, “isn’t that lethal. Millions have been infected but only forty thousand or so have died—that’s less than one percent.”

  “Seventy-six thousand,” Yegor grunted. “It was forty thousand this morning. Seventy-six was the last official number I saw, just after dinner.”

  “Still, though...”

  “It’s not a normal virus down there!” Charlie held her arms against her face, eyes squeezed shut, damp tears spreading. “A week ago it was no more than six hundred. Three days ago it hadn’t broken ten thousand! The number of dead are almost doubling every day, Alvin. Doubling. The infection is spreading even faster than that, and in another week the number of dead will be in the millions.”

  They were all staring at her. Even Alvin. She whipped her head around, meeting their gazes in turn, tears flicking off the edges of her eyelashes and into stilled raindrops in front of her eyes. “Almost no one clears this infection after they catch it, and once it’s got you it always gets worse. They’re all going to die. All of them!”

  Silence met her, until Krister hesitantly spoke. “We... we don’t know that.”

  “We don’t, but my husband and child are caught in a fucking quarantine and now I can’t even fucking call home to check they’re okay!” She started shaking with sobs, whirling away from the rest of them to grind her eyes into her shoulder.

  After a moment, Matvey said, “My children are safe, but I am worried about them, too. Perhaps Charlie is right.”

  “We all have people back home we’re real concerned for,” Alvin said. “I haven’t heard from my wife in a day or so. Our families are important to us, but the mission’s important too. I agree that we need to evacuate, get home, but let’s do it safely, huh? We need to get Station’s systems shut down and remote control established at Moscow—”

  “Those are not our orders,” Krister pointed out.

  Yegor stared him down. “It is true those aren’t our orders, but I agree that we need to be ready to leave if the situation deteriorates. Thankfully it has not deteriorated yet.”

  Rolan shook his head slowly. “There is another problem. None of us are O-negative.”

  “What?” Yegor asked.

  “Alvin’s mice, the NASA astronauts pulled to their air base. It is all connecting together, isn’t it? You said very few are beating the infection, yes?” Rolan tugged at Charlie’s shoulder until she faced him, her eyes raw red, tears building again. “It’s the O-negatives, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think that’s being investigated. Fuck, if I could just read the medical papers from the ground...”

  “None of us are O-negative,” Rolan repeated. “And we do not even know if that gives immunity. When we return to Earth, what then? We will be infected like everyone else. Up on Station we are, at least, quarantined from Earth.”

  “That’s fine for you, Rolan,” Alvin snapped, “but I’m scheduled to go home with Krister and Matvey in another two weeks anyway. I’m not quarantined from anything for long.”

  “Then stay. We should all stay on Space Station until the situation resolves,” Rolan said.

  Alvin stared at him. “You... You don’t have anyone to go back to, do you?”

  “Yes, I am the only one of us unmarried.” Rolan’s expression hardened. “So what?”

  “So you don’t care if you get home or not, do you?” Alvin looked at the others. “All of the rest of us have wives and kids and family to go back to, people we love, people in danger, but Rolan Petrov is too good for—”

  “I have family!” Rolan howled, face scarlet, snarling as he lunged out at Alvin, restraining himself from actually striking, body shaking with the effort of only letting himself scream in Russian. “You shit-eating bastard! I have my family and my nephews and nieces and just because my career came before marriage does not make me heartless!”

  Alvin recoiled away in fear, spattered by the droplets of spittle hanging in the air, tumbling toward him from Rolan’s lips.

  Yegor didn’t quite hold his comrade back, but the older Russian did edge himself between them, glaring at Rolan judgementally.

  “The mission. Is more important. Than the six of us,” Rolan growled out in brutally accented English, past Yegor’s shoulder.

  Alvin covered his mouth with his hands for a moment, staring at Rolan, the pair of them both breathing hard. At last he said, “I’m sorry I said that.” He sucked down a long breath, and made himself say the words slowly. “I’m angry an
d I want to see my wife. I’m worried and I don’t see how we can do our jobs without Houston. I spoke without thinking, I’m sorry.”

  Rolan grimaced at him. Shook his head, still red in the face. “Fucking American conflict resolution.” He laughed mirthlessly. Waved his hand at Alvin. “Da, da. Is fine. We are all unhappy.”

  Charlie edged back up to the conversation. She’d dried her eyes. “Alvin’s right. We can’t do this without Houston. We’re going to have to go home sooner or later, and I want that to be sooner.” Her voice was hoarse. “We all know they can keep Station flying from the ground if they have to. There are procedures for safely evacuating and leaving Station prepared for control by ground crews.”

  Rolan held up his hands, taking a breath, thinking before speaking. “I disagree. I think that Houston’s functions can be taken up by Moscow, and that the mission can continue. We are here for the mission, the mission must continue.”

  “What mission? We are at the cutting edge of science, theoretical physics and microgravity research, but there are much bigger problems on the ground,” Matvey snapped.

  He was rewarded with silence, the time to shake his head and silently back down, before Charlie spoke up.

  “You don’t know that Moscow can take over,” she said.

  Rolan folded his arms, considering that. “This is true. But I am confident it is an option.”

  “Evacuation is another option.”

  Krister, mostly content to watch, eyes flashing judgement at them all, shifted his accusing gaze from Rolan to Charlie. He cleared his throat. “Is your opinion influenced by your personal situation?”

  She stared back at him icily. “You mean because I’m a mother?”

  “Yes.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I may be a woman,” she said evenly, “but I’m also the only one here whose family is directly quarantined. Matvey and Yegor’s kids are safe.” She looked at them, face carefully neutral. “Don’t you two tell me that you wouldn’t share my concerns if your children were stuck in a house two doors down from people sick with the pandemic and willing to break quarantine.”