The Orlando’s central module burst open, metal exploding into the darkness of space.
THERE WAS NO TIME to scream. The shockwave flung their shuttle away from Europa. Jesse’s neck snapped back in his seat. There were a few seconds of pure terror during which he was certain he was about to die. He pushed down hard in his seat to fight the blackness clouding his vision as all his blood was washed into his feet. For a moment, the acceleration was so great that the pressure on his chest and lungs meant that he could not take a breath. By the time Harry and Commander Sheppard had regained some degree of control over the Congreve and they began to slow, Jesse was nauseous and balancing on the dizzying fringe of consciousness.
‘Is everyone okay?’ Commander Sheppard asked. They had been plunged into darkness – the interior lights had gone out, and nothing but the buttons on the control panel and the ghostly light of Europa illuminated their vessel.
Poppy let out a gasp of pain, and Jesse opened his eyes to find that she had been thrown against one of the steel walls. She had unbuckled her belt to film the approach, he remembered – she must not have strapped herself back in. Her eyes were squeezed together, blood trickling from her nose.
‘What just happened?’ Jesse asked, working hard to catch his breath. His voice trembling.
Poppy crawled to her seat and pushed the button on her dashboard’s intercom.
‘Orlando?’ she called, throat thick with swallowed tears. ‘Orlando. Congreve. Comm check.’
When Jesse turned to Commander Sheppard, he noticed the eerie fact that Captain Omar Briggs, with his softly lined face, was still smiling out at them. Holding his rough hands up at the camera in a final thumbs-up before the frozen picture splintered into hissing static.
Commander Sheppard stared at the screen, then began stabbing the intercom. ‘Omar?’ he called. ‘Orlando – do you read?’
Jesse turned his gaze painfully to the window. He must have lost his bearings. He couldn’t find the station. But it had to be there.
‘Are you there?’ A voice crackled through his headphones. The Damocles.
‘Juno?’ he whispered.
‘Oh, thank God.’ Her voice was crackling, indistinct. ‘You’re alive. Orlando has exploded.’
‘I think we saw it.’
‘It looked like—’ Her voice cracked. ‘Jess, it’s just gone.’
‘Watch out!’ Poppy screamed behind him. Jesse whipped around, saw it long after it was too late to do anything, something careening towards them, reflecting light like a knife. If anything pierced the hull of their shuttle moving at a high speed, it could tear through it like a missile. The air would explode out and, in a few seconds, they would all be dead.
They were hit.
Jesse felt the force of it through his seat, thought he could smell the burn, the scorch of metal. The O2 alarm began to whine.
‘This is an emergency,’ Commander Sheppard said. ‘We need to get out of the moon’s orbit as fast as we can.’ The shattered space station was throwing off debris. Another hit could cripple the ship, or kill them, and if they wanted to avoid it they would have to get out of the range of the explosion.
‘Up, Harry,’ Sheppard cried. ‘Open it up; thrusters at full speed. Burn all the fuel you need to get us out of here.’
Poppy cried out again, and when Jesse lifted his head to look out the front window, he saw that another object was lancing towards them. A piece of machinery, unrecognizable after the explosion, something with sheer edges moving at terrible speed. Sheppard and Harry were ready this time, grabbing the controllers, they forced the shuttle out of its path.
Jesse’s head spun as the blood rushed down his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tilting wave of nausea, and when he opened them again he could see the space station – or what was left of it. What had moments ago been a majestic feat of design and engineering was now no more than rubble. It had been torn open like carrion; blackened truss, seared metal and hanging machinery all accelerating away from it at different speeds. It was a sickening sight – solar panels, switchboards and smashed components tore towards them, glittering in the light like shattered glass.
Commander Sheppard’s face was a mask of dread. ‘Okay…’ he said, shakily at first but his voice steadied as he continued. ‘Okay, Harrison, we’ll navigate through this together. Follow my instructions. We can get out of this debris field and maybe we can make it out of here with our lives.’
Harry’s face, reflected in the window, was chalk white. His eyes seemed fixed on a shadow in the distance. Jesse followed his gaze and realized it was a body: bloated and pumpkin-orange in a regulation flight suit. It spun through the wreckage, one half of it burnt black, chalky hints of charred bone glinting beneath a flayed skull. Bile rose in Jesse’s stomach. There was another body close by, missing an arm, drifting through the blackness, its helmet visor reflecting the gutted station below.
‘Harry?’ Sheppard said. Jesse had never seen Harry look so frightened. Commander Sheppard clicked his fingers, hoping to rouse the boy. ‘Harrison? Harrison, we need you.’
But perhaps Harry was thinking, Those are people we know. He’d blinked and they’d turned into corpses. Kennedy, perhaps, or James. Captain Briggs with his gentle voice and quiet, constant hope. People just like him, astronauts, vain souls who knew that space did not care for them – but hoped against hope that it would not be their burial ground. Jesse was thinking those things, certainly.
‘Out of the way!’ Solomon shouted – the kind of howl that shattered the nerves. Jesse saw something coming for them in the window, a gas tank, a huge boulder of metal. Harry lunged for the controls and, at the same time, Commander Sheppard leapt to protect him.
The impact they felt was so hard that Jesse’s skull slammed back against his headrest, stars exploding behind his eyelids. When he came to, four different pressure alarms were roaring and Harry’s gloved hands were covered in blood.
‘Shepp?’ Harry said. Their commander’s body was slumped forward in his seat, limp. ‘Commander Sheppard?’
‘What’s happened?’ Poppy asked. Harry twisted around in his seat to face them.
‘I think he hit his head, just now. Trying to save me.’ He shook the commander again, but Sheppard rolled across the dashboard. ‘He’s not conscious, I don’t think.’
‘Is he dead?’ Poppy asked.
‘Oh God. I don’t know.’
‘Check!’
‘We don’t have time,’ Jesse said. Consciousness was rolling back to him on waves of panic.
‘We’re dead,’ Poppy said, her breathing coming fast and irregular. ‘Dead.’
Jesse knew that it was true. It was as if they’d driven a car into an ocean and the sea was bursting in with constant and deadly force. Time was running out with the same speed.
His heart was thundering so hard that he was sure it would burst in his ribs. He was terrified, paralyzed. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to breathe, to work the problem as they had been taught in school, to think of a solution. And as he did, it began to resolve before him. Jesse had been here before. He had been on this ship a thousand times, looking out at a sky that blazed destruction. During the game, Jesse had piloted his virtual crew through dusty asteroid belts when they were running low on oxygen. He’d navigated his way through space junk and landed in deserts without his ship burning up like a firecracker in the atmosphere. At least – not every time.
Jesse saw, again, that his time had come. As adrenaline roared through his veins, he started to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘I can do it,’ he said, lunging forward, just as he had the night of Ara’s death. ‘I can get us through this, Harry.’