Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  As they drew closer, Marshall’s job was to monitor their target for any outside damage that might prevent docking. The image had been fuzzy in the distance, bouncing in the crosshairs as they shuddered under the OMS rocket’s thrust. When the first burn was finished and the image stabilized, Marshall began zooming in. “I’ve got visual.”

  It looked bigger than he expected from this distance—maybe his perspective was skewed? When he dialed back the magnification, its shape was still off. “Stand by,” he said. Something wasn’t right.

  His hesitation caught Chief Riley’s attention, who pulled up behind him. At normal magnification, their target slowly grew larger as they drifted closer. Riley said, “I think there’s more than the one vehicle out there, sir.”

  “Anything blocking our approach?” Wylie asked from up front.

  “Not that I can see, at least up until your final hold.” Riley gestured at the panel controls. “May I?”

  Marshall lifted his hands. “Have at it, Chief.”

  Riley zoomed back in slowly until the spacecraft was at the edge of resolution. He panned the image left, then right. “See that?” He pointed at a blocky shape just ahead of the cylindrical nose-mounted airlock. “That’s a comsat, standard Model 1400 frame. It’s gonna be in our way, for sure.” He zoomed in closer, right up to the point where the image threatened to blur out of usefulness. “But this is what I was really curious about.” He pointed out a figure floating nearby.

  Marshall leaned in closer. He felt a stab of dread, like an icicle in the gut. “Is that—?”

  Riley nodded somberly. “Afraid so, sir.” He turned back to face their small team. “Saddle up, gang. Looks like we’re going to earn our pay.”

  With a stray satellite and an unresponsive astronaut inside their maneuvering bubble, docking with Stardust was impossible. With a determination suitable for their grim task, the spacers took to it with quiet professionalism.

  “Watch your dosimeters,” Rosie admonished her team as they drifted clear of Specter, crossing space toward the stricken capsule.

  “Any debris out there?” Marshall asked from inside the bay, he and Riley both suited up to go outside if necessary.

  “Negative,” she said. “All clear except for, you know.” The crackling frequency hinted that here in GEO, closer to the outer Van Allen belts, electromagnetic and radiation spikes were still a risk. It was going to put a strict time limit on them.

  “Ahoy, Stardust,” she called over UHF 243.0, the universal emergency frequency. “We are a launch from the US orbital vessel Borman. What is your condition, over?”

  They eyed the spacewalker ahead and waited for any hint of a response. Even encased in a suit and maneuvering pack, whoever it was looked lifeless.

  Rosie waited a few seconds and repeated her call. “Ahoy, Stardust—”

  A faint voice cut through the static. “My name is Nick Lesko. I hear you. Please help.”

  “We’ve got a live one!” she said over their private channel, then switched back to the emergency freq. “Nick, my name is Ana Rosado. I’m with the Space Force orbit guard. We’re going to get you out, okay? Is that you we see outside, or are you inside the spacecraft?”

  “I’m inside,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion now instead of radio interference. “In the airlock. That’s Giselle outside. She’s . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Rosie said, and motioned to one of her team to retrieve Giselle’s lifeless form. “We’ll take care of you. Your manifest had four people listed on board. Are the others with you?”

  “No . . . I mean, negative. They’re in the control cabin. I haven’t heard from them since yesterday.”

  Rosie turned to signal her companions: Later. There was one person still left to save. “What is your condition, Nick?” she asked as they approached the airlock. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. A little shaky.”

  “Any nausea or vision problems?” She held out her hands. Almost there.

  “I saw a couple of flashes when the storm hit,” he said, his voice faltering. “It happened so fast. When Giselle got sick, I . . . I couldn’t—”

  “Couldn’t what?” With a quick burst from her suit thrusters, she stopped right in front of the hatch. It was closed and locked, with both outside indicators “barber-poled.”

  “—get her back,” he finished. “I couldn’t.”

  “It’s okay, Nick.” She reached out and grabbed the frame. “I’m here, okay? We’re gonna get you out of there. Are you sealed off from the cabin?”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, I am.”

  “Do you have access to an EVA suit?”

  “I’m wearing it.”

  That was unexpected, but this Nick fellow didn’t sound like much of a spacer either. Maybe he’d just been afraid to take it off. “Good. Are you sealed up then, pressurized?”

  “I am,” he said. “I’ve been drawing air from the main cabin supply.”

  Also unexpected. She raised her eyebrows. So his suit bottles had run out and instead of letting the ’lock do its thing, he just plugged in to the cabin tanks?

  She shrugged it off. People did all kinds of dumb things under stress, especially greenhorn civilians. “Good. Nick, I’m going to vent your airlock so I can open it up from out here, okay?”

  “Okay. Please hurry.” His voice cracked.

  “Don’t worry, we’re on it. You just hang in there.” She tried to keep him talking as she hand-walked down the hull. “So where you from, Nick?”

  “Jersey.”

  “Which exit?” She stopped at the main hatch.

  “Funny,” he said weakly. “East Orange. Outside Newark.”

  “I know where it is.” Not really, but it kept him talking. She peered through a nearby window into the darkened cabin. “When’s the last time you heard from your crewmates?”

  He was silent.

  “Nick? You still with me?” She took a detachable lamp and positioned it against the hatch’s porthole, illuminating the cabin while she looked through the nearest window. A pair of legs floated lifelessly. She moved across to the window on the opposite side of the capsule.

  “Yeah. It’s been, I don’t know . . . a while? I can’t be sure,” he said, questioning his own recollection.

  She stopped at the next window and moved the light. As she cast its beam about, random bits of detritus fell under its dusty glow: An empty drink pouch, scraps of note paper, random globules of food . . . no, probably vomit. A lot of it. Ugh. This didn’t look good. “We got the mayday call from your operator yesterday. Can you remember?”

  “It’s all kind of a blur. Maybe a day.”

  “Okay. Thanks. That helps.” The radiation burst had hit them hard and fast, amplified by the magnetic fields. She looked down at her own dosimeter, then back through the window. A pale figure drifted into her beam—a face, contorted, staring back at her with glassy eyes. It might have been the light, but it looked pale. He was—had been—young, with an uneven beard and unkempt, curly hair. The oatmeal-like crust around his mouth and matching stains on his jumpsuit screamed “radiation sickness” to her.

  She dipped her head sadly. They would’ve moved through each stage quickly, though she suspected the latent stage—where symptoms seemed to disappear—would have passed almost unnoticed. They’d gotten real sick, real fast. “Did they say anything to you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” His voice was firm now.

  “Fair enough.” He’d been in the airlock, the others had been outside or in the cabin . . . had it really hit that hard, that they hadn’t tried to hunker down in the ’lock’s safe zone with him? That the woman outside hadn’t been able to get inside? Had he panicked and shut himself in?

  “I . . . couldn’t open the hatch,” he finally began to explain. “If they locked me in, then what does that mean?”

  It was either profoundly selfless or profoundly stupid, she thought. Those questions would have to wait. Her spacewalk partner po
inted at his dosimeter and circled a finger in a “hurry up” gesture. She answered him with a thumbs-up. Right. Let’s get on with it.

  They moved, hand over hand, back up the hull and came to a rest on opposite sides of the airlock. “Nick, I need you to sit tight. We’re coming in now.” Rosie motioned for her partner to open the airlock’s outflow valve. A cloud of ice crystals erupted behind them as the chamber vented its air into space. She cranked on the latch and the outer hatch opened easily.

  Peering down into the tunnel, a lone figure cowered—to such an extent possible in a pressure suit—by the inner hatch. She lifted her gold sun visor so he could see her face. “You must be Nick,” she said in a cheerful, no-worries voice. “Ready to get out of here?”

  The face inside the bubble helmet turned up to see her and squinted. He held up a hand to block the sudden burst of sunlight she’d let in. “Yes. Please.” He was back to sounding exhausted.

  She reached in and grasped his hand, pulling him up and out of the chamber until his umbilical hose went taut. The first thing she did was check the dosimeter clipped to his chest: Yellow with a hint of orange, so no immediate risk of radiation sickness. Good. “Let’s get you unhooked. We’re going to buddy breathe, okay?” His suit was one of the sleeker lightweight models, not nearly as cumbersome as her government-issued garment. This was partly because it wasn’t as rad-hardened, so she worked quickly. She closed his intake valve, unplugged his hose from the environment panel, and plugged it into the emergency port on her chest pack. “And there you go,” she said. “We’re breathing the same air. Hope you haven’t been eating anything too funky.”

  The face behind the bubble smiled weakly. “Nothing but water and protein shakes since yesterday.”

  She made an exaggerated grimace. “That’ll do a number on your digestive tract. Let’s make this quick. C’mon.” She grasped his arms and pulled him out, clipping a pair of carabiners to his waist to keep him firmly secured in front of her.

  She folded out the control arms for her maneuvering pack and gave the translation controller a push. With a puff of cold gas jets, they were headed back to the nearby shuttle where another spacer hovered outside.

  “Hector,” she called, “head back to Stardust and help Mikey with the others. Be prepared to force the latch.” She made a slashing motion across her neck, signaling him that they’d be recovering bodies but not wanting to say so in front of their survivor. “I’ll be back as soon as we get Nick here settled aboard.”

  Hector patted a pair of dark, heavy pouches clipped to his utility harness—he’d already figured as much. “You’ll have to make it fast, Rosie. We’re already bumping up against our limit.”

  She looked down at her dosimeter. Damn. She was already at the edge of the orange band. By the time she got this kid aboard and back over to the Stardust . . . “Roger that. I’ll stand by here, then.”

  “No sweat, boss. We got this.”

  “Madre de Dios.”

  Hector recoiled after tentatively poking his head into the cabin. No matter how realistic, no amount of training drills or virtual-reality simulations could prepare them for confronting the real thing for the first time. He was grateful to be encased in their suits, as he didn’t want to imagine what the smell would be like otherwise.

  Not especially roomy to begin with, the Stardust crew cabin was a tangle of floating debris and human waste. Hector made his way inside, pushing aside random bits and pieces, flinching in disgust when blobs of what he hoped was only vomit attached to his suit. Surface tension became the dominant force in fluids under no gravity, so when a random globule of any liquid touched any surface, it attached itself fully. By the time he gave Mikey the all clear, he was covered in it.

  “Damn, bro, you’re a sight,” Mikey said as he followed Hector inside. “Thanks for cleaning up for me.”

  “Very funny. There’s gonna be more where this came from.” Though from the looks of the two remaining crewmen, there’d be no more added to the already frightful mess.

  “Should’ve vented the cabin before entry,” Mikey thought out loud. “That would’ve at least sucked the liquids into the vents.”

  “Can’t go changing protocols for our convenience,” Hector reminded him. “If someone had been alive and unresponsive . . .”

  “I know, I know.” The spacer wiped at a glob of something foul that had just attached itself to his chest pace, his face a mask of disgust. “Aw hell. It’s all over my control pack. That’s gonna be a bitch to clean.”

  “Save it for the debrief,” Hector said, and meant it. There would be a lot of lessons to pass on to the others after this. “Let’s remember why we’re here.”

  They’d allowed the cloud of detritus to obscure what they had come here for. This was no longer a rescue—it had become a recovery operation, the bland euphemism for the grisly act of clearing out dead bodies. There would be time to deal with the remains of this mess once they were safely back inside their own spacecraft.

  Hector pushed aside a stray laptop floating in front of him to reach the first victim. He began reciting what he saw for the event record now streaming from his helmet camera. “Caucasian, middle-aged male. Brown hair, brown eyes. Average height, estimate mass about ninety kilos.” He looked down at the nametape on the man’s jumpsuit. “Name ‘C. Whitman’ matches the pilot listed on the manifest.”

  “I have the other one,” Mikey said. “Young guy, also Caucasian, maybe midtwenties. Neckbeard. Nametape only says ‘Xenos’.”

  Rosie’s voice cut in on their channel. “Stand by.” There was a pause as she went off-freq. “Yeah, Nick here says that was the kid’s gamer handle. He insisted on using it.”

  “Let’s start getting these guys out of here.” Hector unsnapped the pouch from his utility belt and handed it to Mikey, motioning for him to move back into the airlock. “Keep it open over the hatchway. I’ll push them up to you one at a time, you bag and tag.” It was a grisly task and being the senior man on site, he’d decided to take on the worst part for himself. His partner nodded his assent and pushed off into the tunnel.

  They worked quickly once the path was cleared of trash. It was only when the two crewmen were gone did Hector begin to notice what they’d left behind: a jungle of conduits, cables, and laptops. It looked like a perfectly horrible work environment.

  He was used to Poole running a tight ship, and knowing they might want to dock this thing to Borman when it swung back by here tomorrow, he’d reflexively begun stowing loose gear when Rosie interrupted him.

  “Hector, what’s your exposure?”

  He checked the dosimeter clipped to his chest and cursed at his carelessness. She probably already knew the answer from her own meter. He was well into the orange band. “Yeah, I’m about medium-well here. Tell the chief they’ll need to come over here to clean up.”

  Marshall’s first live spacewalk was not what he’d expected it to be. They’d jetted over from the shuttle so quickly that he could focus on nothing but his closing rate with the spacecraft ahead as he followed Riley’s lead. No time to look back at Earth behind them, certainly no time to contemplate the depthless black surrounding them. It was all just background, there but not there.

  And as Hector had warned them, the spacecraft was a wreck inside. As they shone their helmet lamps down the tunnel, the cabin was a cloud of floating garbage. A stray bit would occasionally bounce off the sidewall and into the tunnel. Riley caught one as it floated toward them; it looked to be someone’s notepad. It occurred to Marshall that as much as he’d wanted to avoid “garbage duty” in a satellite control room, he was getting it good and hard up here in orbit.

  “I’ve got an idea to make this a little more palatable, sir.”

  Marshall reached in and caught another piece of loose gear before it could float into space. “Cycle the cabin pressure?”

  Riley smiled. “Roger that. Let the air returns do the messy work.”

  They moved quickly, Marshall first pushing him
self into the airlock and waiting for Riley to come in behind. “I’m at the ECS panel,” he said. “Ready when you are.”

  Riley dogged down the hatch. “Sealed.”

  Marshall stabbed at the panel. “Pressurizing.” The environmental panel was childishly simple: A small touchscreen with a green button to pressurize, a red button to depressurize, and a rotary dial above to manually control it if either failed.

  He heard a dull hiss of air through his helmet as the pressure climbed. The cloud of trash swirled on fresh air currents. He watched digits on the panel climb quickly until the counter leveled off at a little over six pounds per square inch. “Six point two psi,” Riley noted. “That’s low.”

  “They don’t normally take these all the way to GEO,” Marshall said. He watched the gas mixture ratios on screen. “They kept a mostly pure oxygen environment to save mass. It’s maybe ten percent nitrogen.”

  “Just enough to keep everything from spontaneously combusting,” Riley noted. “But it still makes me nervous.”

  “Me too. Good thing we’re dumping it.” Marshall tapped the “depress” button on screen. The clouds of floating waste spiraled away, following the escaping air currents to attach themselves to the nearest circulation grate. It had the effect of pulling the messier stuff aside.

  “There,” Riley said with satisfaction. “Now we can get to work.”

  Marshall gripped the rim of the tunnel and pulled up with his fingers to slowly float into the cabin. Mostly clear of debris, it was deceptively spacious. He reached out for a passing binder, with several pages dog-eared while others were more carefully marked with flags of colored tape. “Some kind of reference manual,” he said, “but not for the spacecraft.”

  “Looks bulky,” Riley observed as he drifted down behind him. If they were saving mass to get here, it was an odd thing to bring along. “Must have been important.”

  Marshall tried flipping through its pages but his thick gloves made such finesse impossible. He ended up pawing at a few at random. “Satellite specs. Schematics. Lots of handwritten notes.”