Shunted by the pain back into her body, Astrid grabbed a dripping shard of glass in her trembling hands and scrambled back to the bridge. Juno took it and worked immediately on the wires. The first one she cut filled the air with a lightning-bright shower of sparks and the sickly smell of electrical fire.
‘Careful,’ Eliot screamed. He had disconnected two of the plugs, and Juno severed a third. Together they kicked the snaking chords over the threshold, but discovered, to their horror, that the hatch still would not close.
The air was rushing out with such force that the internal mechanism had likely jammed, a safety precaution that prevented it from closing if someone was caught in it. It would close once the pressure on the inside and the outside equalized, but by then, of course, Eliot, Juno and Astrid would be dead.
Astrid slumped against the wall, waves of pain spasming through her, the saliva on her tongue fizzing as the pressure dropped and it began to boil. Soon the oxygen in her chest would split her lungs open and spill into her arteries, but, by then, her mind would have happily disconnected from her body. The brain was kind that way, sending dizzy waves of euphoria through the dying body in the seconds before oblivion.
Eliot, the only one who had grabbed a mask from the control room, still had the presence of mind to snatch at salvation. He yanked the medical officer badge from the lapel of Juno’s flight suit, his fingers stiff with cold, and jammed it into the hatch’s locking mechanism. With a hiss of hydraulics the hatch slammed closed and they collapsed on the bridge, shaking in the cold. The temperature felt as if it had dropped by about thirty degrees.
Astrid felt the change of pressure a second time, like a wind that had suddenly fallen dead. ‘Here you are.’ Fae’s silhouette came into focus by the door. She’d opened an oxygen canister and Juno was gasping, her eyes bright with tears. ‘That should help for the moment. But the ship’s been breached. It’s not safe here.’
‘Look,’ Eliot pointed to the door at the far end of the bridge. Through its porthole they could see the corridor, where the window that Astrid had patched a few minutes ago had exploded under the pressure. The module on the other side of the door had turned into a vacuum and the first aid kit, Juno’s shoe, the earpiece of a crew phone and everything not attached to the ground or the wall had been sucked out into the nothingness. ‘It could have been us,’ Eliot said.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Juno said. She’d changed colour, looked grey and waxy and was shaking violently.
‘We need to go to the radiation shelter,’ Fae said. ‘Now pull yourselves together and get up. You’ve trained for this.’
Astrid barely remembered the short journey into the radiation shelter. The pain in her ears came in keening waves and by the time she sat down on the bench, she noticed that the collar of her flight suit was wet with blood, although, between her frozen fingers, it felt like jelly.
Fae attached an oxygen mask to her face, and some of the pain subsided, giving way to an awareness of her aching body, the bloody space-hickey on her palm where she’d pressed it against the window. Astrid stared down at it in horror and disbelief.
For marooned sailors, the ocean might never be the same after they’d watched it devour another crew. It could come to seem like death personified, death with a will, death with splendid terrifying power. And so it was for Astrid, that day, as she looked down at her hand. Here was death, again, calling their names, and she had touched it.
Chapter 41
JUNO
6 P.M.
TRAPPED IN THE DIMLY lit radiation shelter, Juno was terrified. In the wake of the loss of Orlando, their own mission seemed like such vain folly. ‘What are we doing here?’ she asked the darkness, her head spinning with fatigue. ‘How did I get here?’ The air was thin, and she could feel it in the tightness in her chest. Her voice roused Astrid from sleep.
‘What?’ her sister asked.
‘Do you think they’re dead?’ Juno knew that Astrid would guess that she was talking about Harry and Poppy, Jesse and Commander Sheppard, the crew on the Congreve. It was likely that they’d been hit by flying debris. Juno imagined a solar array slicing like an axe through their shuttle. Explosive decompression, everyone inside dying with their eyes open.
Juno and Astrid were lying together on a bunk. Igor, Cai and Fae were on the beds opposite, silent, too cold to sleep, although Fae’s face was buried in the crook of her elbow and Juno could see her chest rising and falling slowly.
‘I don’t know,’ Astrid admitted. ‘But they were far enough away to escape. And Commander Sheppard’s a good pilot. If anyone can get them home safe…’
‘And then what?’ Juno asked.
‘We lick our wounds,’ Cai said, ‘and keep going.’ He kept glancing at the door. Juno knew that he was thinking about his garden, about the shattered spires and uprooted plants, mentally tallying the weeks of work it would take to repair.
‘And we were hit,’ Eliot said, rubbing his hands together to try to warm them, huffing out air on his frozen fingers. ‘We’ll have to repair the ship before Saturn.’
‘It might take an EVA or two to fix,’ Igor said.
‘But the thing we do right now,’ Fae told her, ‘is wait.’
Juno nodded, grateful for the body of her sister that she could curl into.
Two hours later, the sensors alerted them: the Congreve was on approach.
9.30 P.M.
WHEN JESSE AND HARRY climbed out of the airlock and back on board the Damocles, Juno realized that they looked oddly similar. Side by side, she noticed for the first time that they were the same height. Their faces twisted with the same desperate fear. For a moment, overwhelmed by their miraculous homecoming, Juno leapt forward and threw her arms around Jesse. ‘You’re safe,’ she gasped. But Jesse pushed her away, shaking his head.
‘No,’ he said, and raised his hands up to the light. Juno saw that they were smeared in blood, a livid red, almost too bright to belong to a human. ‘It’s not mine,’ he said before Juno could ask.
Harry nodded to the open door of the airlock and said, ‘It’s his.’
They all fell silent when they leant over the threshold and saw the body of their commander slumped against one of the walls, barely recognizable, blood soaking his flight suit, eyes white and rolled back in his head.
It seemed absurd to consider now, but Juno had never seen Solomon Sheppard sleep before. Fae she’d caught a couple of times, stretched out on the gurney in the infirmary, pillow etching crease-lines into the side of her face. And even Cai, whom Jesse had once spotted napping at his desk. But not Commander Sheppard. His heart was like the beating heart of their ship. There was something reassuring about the quiet vigil he seemed to keep in the control room.
‘How long has he been like this?’ Fae asked, already unbuckling the collar of his flight suit to check his pulse and breathing. Juno leaned in; she thought she could hear irregular gasps coming from his throat.
‘Hours,’ said Poppy. ‘As long as it took for us to get back here.’
‘He was answering to his name for a while,’ Jesse told them. ‘But now…’
‘What am I doing?’ Fae asked Juno, who blinked in confusion. But, then, her training came back to her.
‘An A to E assessment?’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Airways, then breathing.’
Fae had already finished checking both. ‘His airways are at risk,’ she said. ‘I need you to help me get him to the infirmary.’