PART THREE
Chapter 39
JUNO
07. 02.13
4 P.M.
‘OH, THANK GOD. YOU’RE alive. Orlando has exploded,’ she said to Jesse over the CAPCOM. Juno had seen it with her own eyes, a splinter of light in Europa’s dark perimeter, then a supernova.
‘I -hink… saw it…’ came Jesse’s distorted voice over the headset.
‘It looked like—’ Juno felt her voice crack. ‘Jess, it’s just gone.’
‘Jesse—’ Juno cried out, but then there was a scream in the background. It sounded like Poppy’s voice. ‘Watch out!’ she shouted before a howl of static poured through the headset, loud enough to tear Juno’s eardrums. She yanked her headset off and looked up to find that all readouts had dissolved from the screens on the communication deck, where Fae was frantically stabbing at buttons and pulling dials.
‘Damocles, Congreve, comm check,’ Astrid shouted down her mic.
Silence. Juno couldn’t breathe.
‘Congreve? Congreve? Commander Sheppard…? Harry? Poppy? Jesse?’ Astrid pulled off her headset and stood up. ‘It could be us. A problem with our transceiver. Maybe we’re not receiving their response.’ Juno saw the desperate hope in her sister’s eyes.
‘You go check,’ Fae commanded, and Astrid shot out of the control room.
‘There’s no point,’ Eliot said, pulling away from the display where both the Congreve and Orlando had disappeared. He raked trembling fingers through the greasy strings of his hair. ‘I knew this was going to happen.’
‘You what?’ Juno looked up at his face, the reflected light of a star chart making silver freckles along his jaw. Igor too, leant over from the commander’s chair on the raised platform of the control deck.
‘A hydrazine leak,’ said Eliot. Hydrazine was the highly explosive fuel found inside Orlando’s auxiliary power units. Juno knew that APUs were extra engines used for functions other than propulsion. On Orlando, the APUs provided the energy to kick-start the engines that boosted the station into a higher orbit, pushing it further away from Europa and in this case allowing it to more easily dock with the Congreve.
‘The crew on Orlando reported a lower than expected tank pressure a couple of days ago,’ Eliot said. Juno remembered that. Because hydrazine was so dangerous – highly flammable and toxic to humans – the news of a possible leak, almost a month ago, had been alarming.
‘But no leak was detected,’ Igor reminded him. ‘It was a machine error.’
‘Happens all the time,’ Fae said.
‘Then what caused this explosion?’ Juno cried, her voice hysterical to her own ears, pointing out the window to the blurred mass of metal where, a few minutes ago, there had been a space station.
‘I have a theory,’ Eliot said, biting his lip, Orion’s Belt projected by the computer across the bridge of his nose. ‘The melting point of hydrazine is minus two degrees, and the surface temperature around Europa is more than one hundred times lower than that, so…’
‘You think the hydrazine leaked and then froze, blocking the hole. Of course.’ Igor’s face fell.
Eliot nodded. ‘Fuel leak, maybe it happened a while ago, weeks or months or years. Sometime between now and the last time they used the APU. The lower pressure is registered during a routine check, they shut it down and examine it but don’t detect any hydrazine because it has frozen, blocking the hole. We get the all clear, the Congreve moves to dock with it. The APU is used to perform an orbital boost, and during the engine burn –’
‘– hydrazine melts, the leak begins again –’ Igor continued.
‘– spills maybe, on a hot surface and –’
‘Bang.’ Igor said it loud enough to startle Juno.
‘I mean, hydrazine’s highly flammable and the atmosphere on Europa is basically pure oxygen.’
‘The worst-case scenario,’ said Fae.
Eliot’s words rolled over Juno in a sickening blur of white noise. She was still having trouble absorbing the implications. ‘Everyone on Orlando is…?’
‘Dead,’ said Eliot. ‘Most likely.’ The blood rushed from Juno’s head and she sat down again, heavily. ‘I saw this coming.’
‘What?’ Juno frowned. ‘When?’
‘Just after the Congreve left it occurred to me but—’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Okay,’ said Igor, throwing his hands up. ‘Now is not the time for a post-mortem. It wasn’t Eliot’s job to recognize a fault. It was the MMACs’ and the senior engineers’. Aberrant machine readings happen often, so it’s a conclusion that mission control are often too quick to jump to. It’s called “normalization of deviance”, and sometimes it takes a pair of fresh eyes, like Eliot’s, to spot the problem.’
‘But if Eliot knew—’ Juno began, anger bubbling inside her.
‘He didn’t know,’ Fae said. ‘He had a hunch.’
‘He should have said.’
‘I didn’t trust myself.’ Eliot hit his head hard with a closed fist. ‘It’s my fault, I killed them. Like I killed her.’
‘Eliot Liston,’ Igor barked, ‘control yourself. Now is not the time.’ For the duration of the mission, while Sheppard was on the Congreve, Igor was their commander. ‘We’re not out of danger. The explosion means that the sky above Europa will be filled with debris. Some objects will be moving faster than bullets, fast enough to escape the moon’s gravity.’
‘No,’ Juno pleaded, ‘they’re in danger. Jesse, Commander Sheppard, Harry and Poppy. We can’t leave them. The further we travel, the more fuel they’ll have to burn trying to reach us… they might not make it.’ But, as she said it, the ground shuddered. Dropped from under her feet with a hard shockwave that felt like an earthquake. Juno had the sudden, sickening thought that this must have been what it felt like when the Titanic scraped against the keen edge of an iceberg. Everyone on the control deck froze.
Then the lights went out and the sirens began to howl.
Chapter 40
ASTRID
4.15 P.M.
THE FIRST HIT CAME with a loud bang, as the air inside the ship exploded into the vacuum outside. There was a sudden loss of pressure, which made Astrid’s ears pop as they sometimes did in the first few minutes after a plane take-off.
Air was escaping through a crack in the porthole window between the equipment bay and the hatch that led to the service module, at the far end of the corridor where Astrid stood. The porthole was narrow, only a little larger than a splayed hand, and through it Europa’s silver light cut like a scythe. Astrid edged towards it, and as she did felt the thin but insistent suction of oxygen through the deadly crack in the borosilicate glass.
A micrometeoroid, Astrid supposed – they were too far from the explosion for debris to have reached them yet. It was just bad luck that this had happened at the same time. Micrometeoroid strikes were something they had been trained for. The ship’s tracking system was sophisticated enough to anticipate a hit from most medium and large asteroids, giving Harry or Commander Sheppard enough warning to perform a side-burn that took the Damocles out of the object’s path and out of danger. But micrometeoroids were smaller, scraps of metal or rock as old as the solar system speeding through space. Tiny particles small as a fleck of paint had been known to blast like a bullet through a window. A larger object could cause enough damage to result in decompression. In which event, Astrid might have as little as eighteen seconds of useful consciousness before her brain was starved of oxygen.