Orbital Decay

by Malcolm Cross

  Matvey and Yegor shared a glance. Matvey looked away first, and Yegor spoke. “I agree, Krister. Her judgement is no more suspect than mine, or Matvey’s, or even Alvin’s.” He gestured across at Alvin. “Your wife is also in quarantine, isn’t she?”

  “Her place of work is,” Alvin said.

  “I won’t pretend that my ‘personal situation’ isn’t clouding my judgement, but even if things are a little more difficult for me than they are for the rest of us,” Charlie said, “I don’t believe my judgement is any more suspect than yours. This situation is difficult for us all.”

  Alvin nodded. “She’s right. Krister, all of our opinions are being influenced by our personal situations. If we put it to a vote...”

  “We will not act on a vote,” Krister said, much too quickly. “But at least it would be helpful to make our opinions clear. Those in favour of an immediate evacuation?”

  Alvin put his hand up before checking on the others. The only two abstainers were Krister and Rolan.

  Krister looked at Rolan, blowing out a sigh. “And for staying aboard...”

  Rolan nodded, lifting his hand. Stared questioningly at Krister. “Isn’t that your ‘vote’ as well?”

  Krister hesitated, shook his head. “I am not sure what my opinion is. Charlie, I apologise for questioning your judgement.”

  “Apology accepted,” she said, blowing out a last, tense breath.

  “I do not agree with the evacuation of Space Station in the short term. We will wait to establish direct radio contact with Moscow. Our first chance at it should be”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“in ten hours, fifteen minutes. In the meanwhile we return to our schedules. Physical fitness training, systems maintenance on the station, sleep. We’ll ignore the science until we’re sure of what’s going on, and in the meanwhile, Yegor, running a check on the Soyuz capsules would not be unwise.”

  “Very well.”

  As the group began to draw apart to get back to their routines, Alvin saw a strange expression flicker over Charlie’s face. She stared at the back of Rolan’s head for a moment. “Krister, shouldn’t we have two people working on the capsules, one for each of them?”

  “There’s no urgency,” he replied. “Yegor can handle it alone.”

  “Okay,” she said, voice carefully neutral again, and looked away. For a moment, Alvin caught her eye. She shook her head, leaning back until her hair wafted around her head, hiding her expression, and she turned and sailed away from one module to the next.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE RUSSIAN RADIO station in Zvezda was better designed than the amateur radio set a few feet away. All Rolan and Yegor had to do, stonily silent with one another, was compute the path of their orbit, set it into the station’s controls, and the dials began to slowly turn themselves, compensating for Space Station’s speed and the radio signal’s Doppler shift.

  “Moscow, Station. Do you read? Over.”

  Rolan ignored Yegor and pulled himself closer to one of Zvezda’s small windows, staring out at the ground far below them with intense scrutiny.

  Yegor repeated himself. “Moscow, Station. Do you read? Over.”

  This was their fifth pass over Russia. Each orbit passed a little further east than the last one, and after this final window of contact, Space Station would be all alone again for almost a day, as long as it took their orbit’s alignment to come back into line of sight with Moscow’s antennas.

  During the first pass, things on the ground at Houston were still up in the air. Moscow hadn’t re-established contact with Houston, but they were in touch with what was left of NASA elsewhere. Kennedy Space Center was already trying to take over Houston’s role. The National Guard had surrounded the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, and had lain siege on the attackers who had overrun the Houston control buildings.

  The attackers were, as the Moscow controllers read to them from an internet news article, ‘Something of an ideological mix between Texas’s independence militias, survivalist conspiracy theorists, and the Ku Klux Klan.’ They’d been calling themselves the ‘True Patriots’ since shortly after the pandemic had come along, and were the unfortunate result of quarantines that had trapped domestic terrorists together with right wing maniacs and people too desperate to think straight.

  Or, as Charlie darkly murmured to Alvin after they’d heard that, people who couldn’t think straight anymore. People incubating the pandemic inside them, the disease mysteriously bubbling away in their guts and brains and blood.

  “Moscow, Station. Do you read? Over.”

  “Yes! Moscow reads you, Station!” It was still a relief to hear those enthusiastic words, even for the fifth time.

  Yegor smiled at them before settling in to business. Reporting the situation on Station, the current air mix, the few vital statistics that Mission Control could use to try and diagnose potential problems before they became anything to worry about.

  Then Moscow shared its news. “The siege at Houston was concluded forty minutes ago. The American Army’s Delta Force assaulted the True Patriots as planned and have secured the grounds and main buildings.”

  They all wanted to ask questions about that, but in the limited time they had to communicate, there was a little more business to get through first. The standard details about Station’s operations, not just the essentials. What part of life support was acting up, reporting and confirming what they’d achieved in the time since last contact—Alvin had gone through the checklists to ensure none of Station’s systems that could be remotely controlled from Houston had been acting up, or been sabotaged, and he took the microphone to read that out, until they’d gotten through enough that they had time to ask a few personal questions.

  Matvey asked about their families. All their families. The answers were brisk, and painful, for some of them.

  “Matvey, your children have been notified. They are fine, Liliya wants to tell you that the dog is behaving.

  “Rolan, there are no messages”—Rolan gritted his teeth, not looking at any of the crew—“but your siblings and parents have been notified.

  “Yegor, your eldest daughters could not be reached, but your wife has been contacted and says they are travelling, and all is well.

  “Krister, your wife has been notified, she sends your family’s warm wishes.

  “Alvin, Charlie, we have been unable to contact your spouses or families. Kennedy were unable to provide their contact information but are attempting to make contact.

  “Are there any short messages the crew wish to send home?”

  Yegor looked around the crowded space of Zvezda, from face to face. He almost offered the microphone to Alvin and Charlie, but hesitated. At last he asked, voice as gentle as the rough old man could ever make it, “Just our love and reassurances?”

  “Yes,” Krister said.

  Charlie nodded mutely.

  Alvin stared at her, as if for support. Surely she’d want to say something, anything? He wanted to tell Marla everything would be alright, that he’d be home soon, that he hoped she was safe... He bit down on everything he wanted to say, and nodded weakly. “Yes,” he whispered. “That sounds good, Yegor.”

  “The crew send our families and friends our love, and reassurances that all is well with us, and that we are safe. That is all for the moment, Moscow.”

  “Good. We have a few minutes left for the radio window. Are there any questions?”

  Of course there were. Yegor held out the microphone, first to Matvey, who looked pointedly in Charlie’s direction. Yegor nodded, and held the microphone out to her, instead.

  She leaned forward, and cleared her throat before speaking in careful Russian. “Are there any news reports about the Houston quarantine?”

  A pause. “We will research this for you, but there are no changes we are aware of.”

  She hesitated, about to speak again... but then glanced at Alvin. Ushered him forward to Yegor, thinking he’d want similar news.

  But instead Alvin asked,
“Was anything said about the staff at Houston? Are they safe?”

  There was a nagging pause. Slow, and heavy. Almost like speaking with Tom about the pandemic, a thirty-second wait that dragged on and on, until at last Moscow responded.

  “The True Patriots executed their hostages in the main buildings before the assault began. I am so sorry.”

  Praying hadn’t been enough.

  “THIS IS BE-SIXTY-SIX-KL. Is IG-Twelve-TK out there and listening? Over.” Alvin clung to the amateur radio set like an anchor. It had been two days. Two awful, awful days.

  Charlie had been right about the pandemic’s mortality rate. The first night after the assault the tally had gone up to an estimated hundred and sixty thousand. The second night it edged up to the nice round number of four hundred thousand. Tomorrow it would be eight hundred thousand, the day afterward, one million six hundred thousand. And every day after that... Alvin didn’t want to think about.

  Kennedy had re-established contact. Given them the Ku band satellites and given them time to call their families, read the news, read and respond to e-mail, stare at the photographs of bodies piled like cordwood outside a hospital crematorium in London, a man in yellow hazmat gear torching the bodies with a flamethrower, because the crematorium would be just too damn slow. And, of course, read about the rioting as what was left of the True Patriots rampaged through suburban Houston, burning down power and phone lines.

  Marla’s cellphone had stopped ringing the day before—just out of charge, Alvin prayed—but it left her out of contact, and the quarantines had been extended to their part of Houston.

  “This is BE-Sixty-Six-KL. Is IG-Twelve-TK out there and listening? Over.” Alvin stared at the set, and dared hope. He didn’t use the station’s amateur radio call sign, NA-One-SS. Even on a night like tonight, with the streets burning in a dozen cities across the United States, as people who thought the True Patriots had the right idea screamed and rose up against the government, Space Station’s call letters drove the ham radio operators down there into a frenzy trying to make contact.

  At last, the signal buzzing, Alvin heard an unfamiliar voice call back to him. “BE-Sixty-Six-KL, this is MT-Seven-One-LW. I have a message to relay for you from IG-Twelve-TK. Do you read? Over.”

  Alvin’s core went frozen, his heart not quite stopped as he bit down on the side of his tongue, fighting the nervous crackling ache of tin-foil at the back of his throat. “I read. Go ahead, over.”

  No thirty second pause, just the brief delay of someone reading a note out loud. “IG-Twelve-TK relays to BE-Sixty-Six-KL: Neighbourhood has no power, Lenny sick but will keep trying to transmit. Marla yelled message over fence, she is not sick yet, loves Alvin very much. End of message. Over.”

  Tears brimmed over the corners of Alvin’s eyes and built up, thicker and thicker until they wobbled like jello over his eyelids when he blinked, left him just about blinded and unable to do more than pull up his shirt and wipe them dry, only for the tears to build all over again.

  He sobbed, spluttered. Shook his head.

  Leonard was a saint. An ex-astronaut in a suburban neighbourhood full of them, a good neighbour, an amateur radio buff, and a saint.

  There wasn’t time to cry, though. He had no idea who or where MT-Seven-One-LW was, and the transmission windows between Station and the ground for amateur sets were fifteen minutes long at best. “Thank you, MT-Seven-One-LW. Can you relay a message back?”

  “I can try. Go ahead.”

  “Thanks to Lenny. To Marla, Alvin loves Marla back, and will come home as soon as he can.” He held his shirt’s hem against his eyes and, for a moment, let himself cry. “Promise.”

  CHARLIE WAS STAGING a strike.

  Until the ground staff at Kennedy and the Air Force got her family out of their quarantine in Houston, she was refusing to work. No lab experiments, no repairs, no checking on her bone density, nothing. She’d asked Alvin to join her, get more of the crew behind it until they got Marla out too.

  He was tempted. Matvey was, too. His daughters may have been safe, but they could have been safer. Russia hadn’t reacted peacefully to the news that the pandemic was worsening. But in the end, Alvin had chosen to stick to his schedule and trust that NASA would do what it could for Marla.

  This was Alvin’s first expedition, his first flight. He had decades left, and if Yegor was still in space while chasing sixty, Alvin didn’t want to give up the possibility that he could be part of future expeditions to Space Station. Maybe the hoped-for mission to Mars...

  “There isn’t going to be a mission to anywhere ever again, Alvin.” Charlie sucked her soup through a straw, before glaring at him. “The space program is over, everything’s over, we need to be ready to pick up the pieces back on Earth.”

  “When the crew of Skylab mutinied for a day, well. None of those guys ever flew again. Not one of them. It didn’t matter that they were right about being overworked, they never got another mission.”

  “We’re not going to fly again, Alvin. And even if we were, we’re going to do more good on the ground. It’s not going to be about pushing the boundaries of science after the pandemic’s over, it’s going to be about practical engineering—rebuilding society. Dealing with new problems.”

  He stared at his bag of tea, trying not to dwell on the fact that Leonard was sick. Right next door to Marla.

  “Problems like what?” he asked.

  She sipped up her soup quietly. “Like stopping the inmates from taking over the asylum.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been reading up on the pandemic research from the ground. There’s talk about neurological damage, psychosis, it’s... not pretty.”

  Alvin bit his lip. “Could you do me a favour?”

  “What? Now that I’m on strike and don’t have anything to do, you mean?” She smirked at him.

  He didn’t feel her levity. “That thing with the mice is still bugging me, and I don’t have the time to look into anything...”

  “THE PANDEMIC IS following a pattern,” she told them all as they gathered at the end of the day in Unity. Even if it wasn’t the pleasant feast of previous nights, the crew still gathered to eat, and Charlie was still part of that crew, even on strike. “It’s getting worse the longer it goes on.”

  She held up one of the laptops. She’d been reading research from the ground on the pandemic’s viral agent, and used the snippets she’d copied out like a crude slideshow for them. “The first deaths were in the young. Children. Fevers, mostly. But it didn’t kill the elderly like that; the elderly victims first fell to cardiac problems. These were the outliers, incidental deaths, people who were already vulnerable. But a viral strain analysis showed that the virus had been around a lot longer than that.

  “By comparing lineages, taking into account how fast the virus changes and mutates, the Galveston National Laboratory estimated that the two most widely divergent strains they could find, from southern Spain and California, had split off from each other anywhere between three to six months ago. The first news reports referring to it are from two months ago, weeks before the first death.”

  “Which means we might have it,” Krister grimly pointed out. “Your launch to Station was a little less than three months ago.”

  “I don’t think so. None of us have shown any symptoms.” Her response earned raised eyebrows, so Charlie went on. “Exposure to the early pandemic strains resulted in an initially mild case of infection, fevers and fatigue, and in some cases a heavy course of antivirals cleared it. Not all cases, but some of them. Since then, nobody’s cleared an infection without being O-negative. And honestly, it doesn’t sound like that many people with O-negative blood were infected long enough to develop symptoms. Most never contracted it in the first place.”

  She looked around. “Judging by the pattern on the ground, if the virus were on Station we’d either all be sick by now, or dead. We’re not O-neg. Even if the virus was spreading bef
ore we launched, we haven’t picked it up.”

  “Mmmn,” Yegor grunted. “Okay. And this pattern?”

  She snapped her fingers, pointing at him. “Right. Back on track. Okay, so the longer the pandemic’s been active, the longer it’s infected a population, the more lethal it gets.” She looked around at them expectantly, but none of them had her background. She had to explain. “This isn’t how viruses work, it’s not how they evolve.

  “The faster a virus spreads, usually, the faster a natural equilibrium emerges, so the virus can spread through a population without killing. It wants to spread in a population of healthy hosts—particularly lethal diseases are generally new to human populations. After they’ve been around in us a few hundred years, they settle down, become benign. The pandemic’s doing it backwards.

  “By the time we found out it existed, it was so mild that it’d spread globally without anyone noticing. By the time we found out it could be lethal, by the time we started quarantines, it’d gone airborne and had been mixing in the global population for weeks.” She looked at them expectantly, and this time got worried understanding for her efforts. “And all of these individual strains, no matter where they were, all independently started turning lethal. It wasn’t that a single strain somewhere had turned lethal and spread; no, in every afflicted population the virus did it spontaneously.

  “Worse still, the symptoms leading to death are getting progressively worse. From the blood pressure spikes that killed the elderly, it went to haemorrhage in the lungs, that bloody coughing that’s been on the news. But a freak case in Arkansas early last week was worse still, a patient named Nicholas Boone’s internal organs began to suffer runaway liquefactive necrosis—he almost literally shat out his guts. The same thing’s happened in Ohio and Oklahoma, with no possibility of cross infection. The pandemic developed new strains with the same effects, in locations hundreds of miles away from each other.”