‘Who?’
‘Commander Sheppard.’ Harry swallowed. There were bloody smears on the wall-panelling behind him. ‘It could have been me. It should have been.’
Juno was startled by this show of emotion. She reached out to put her hand on his arm, but he pushed her away, ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said, then jabbed a finger at the door of the infirmary. ‘You better do everything you can.’
‘I will.’
‘You better not let him die.’
‘I won’t,’ said Juno foolishly. ‘I promise.’
IGOR AND ELIOT SAT on the control deck while Astrid paced. Poppy was jabbing at buttons on the communications panel, tear stains making dirty tracks under her tired eyes. All over the room monitors were flashing with warnings and error messages. On the dashboard, instrument gauges were spinning. They barely noticed Juno as she entered.
‘Umm… hi.’ Her voice was soft.
Astrid spun around. ‘How is he doing?’
‘Badly,’ Juno said. ‘Fae did what she could but he’s probably bleeding into his brain. He’s stable now. Sort of. We might just have to wait and see if he wakes up. There’s not much we can do. It’s not like there’s a neurosurgeon on board.’
‘Neurosurgeon?’ Astrid’s voice was weak with horror.
Juno stepped further onto the flight deck. ‘So, the lights aren’t back on.’
‘No.’ Poppy shook her head. ‘We’re asking Ground for their recommendation but – as you know – past Europa, communication’s pretty patchy. Our telemetry systems constantly broadcast information about the Damocles back to mission control, so by now I’m sure they know something’s wrong with the ship. Though they might not know the extent of the damage.’
‘And what is it?’ Juno asked. ‘The extent.’
‘We’re looking at a real four-point failure,’ Igor said. ‘We were hardest hit in quadrant three. That whole area is depressurized, which means we’ve lost access to – amongst other things – the equipment bay. There was a collision in the service module as well.’ Fear ripped through Juno’s stomach. The service modules were the uninhabited modules that contained most of their life support equipment, the fuel cells and oxygen storage tanks, the main computer, the thermal control systems.
‘There’s been quite extensive damage to the greenhouse and the breathing equipment too.’ Juno thought about the shattered spires and the algae sloshing across the ground. Igor said it all slowly. ‘Until we find a way to fix the fuel cells, we’ll be relying on storage batteries.’
‘Which will last how long?’ Juno asked.
‘Two days,’ Astrid replied. ‘Two and a half maybe.’
‘Why can’t we just hurry up and fix the broken fuel cells?’ Juno asked.
‘That’s the plan. It’s not so simple, though,’ Astrid said. ‘There’s a hole in the hull. Both those quadrants have depressurized. To go in to fix it we’d have to do a full EVA.’ Juno tried to imagine Eliot and Igor outside the ship, struggling to fix the broken fuel cells with the clumsy gloves of their spacesuits.
‘Should Igor perform a spacewalk?’ Juno asked. She wanted to add in his condition, but the rest of the crew guessed her meaning.
‘We’d need another pair of hands,’ Igor agreed. ‘Harry’s injured. So Astrid, probably.’
‘So, we’ll fix the fuel cells and everything will be okay,’ Juno said. ‘I mean, we’ll get back on track?’
Igor lowered his gaze. ‘As Commander Sheppard would say, insh’allah. We’ll try tomorrow. Get some sleep tonight.’
‘How can we sleep?’ Poppy asked, the static on the monitor shining a grey light on her pale skin. ‘We sent out a distress signal hours ago. But I’m not getting a response.’
‘Give it some time,’ Igor said.
‘We don’t have time,’ Poppy muttered. Juno knew that Poppy was thinking about the fifty hours of power they had left, or the thirty hours of oxygen. Juno was, too.
‘Waiting here and worrying won’t get us a response any faster.’ Igor’s voice was firm now. ‘I want you to all go to bed.’ He climbed with wincing effort out of the commander’s chair. ‘Besides,’ he added as if on second thought, ‘Sleep will save oxygen.’
JUNO WANDERED THE SHIP dazed as a sleepwalker. Everything looked different in the dim illumination of the emergency LEDs. She reached out an arm to get her bearings as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. But the walls of the middle deck were so cold already that tendrils of pain shot up to her knuckles and she recoiled.
They were running out of air.
Her mind reversed back over the same anxious tracks. It had been easy – it had been essential – to forget that the Damocles was delicate as a bubble, that she had ventured into the arid vacuum of space with nothing but a few metres of mylar and aluminium to protect her. She’d never forget again.
Both the Beta’s cabins were empty. Poppy’s radio crackled under her bed, spitting out a few bars of music, the limpid rise of a melody audible for just a moment before being consumed by static. She was not in her bed and neither was Astrid.
Juno headed to the greenhouse, and when she opened the hatch the sound of her footsteps echoed in the gloom. It was like a darkened cathedral. Through the vaulted glass ceiling she could see the spinning rings of the other decks and, beyond them, the stars cast a cold constant light.
They were running out of air.
Bright splinters of pain had begun to burst behind her temples. When mountain climbers ventured too high into the upper atmosphere, and altitude sickness set in, it felt like a hangover, then like carbon-monoxide poisoning. If they continued to climb, the partial pressure of oxygen in their lungs would decrease. They experienced fatigue, dizziness, headaches, a gradual loss of consciousness, and then…
‘Jesse?’ Juno’s voice reverberated off the shattered spires. The temperature had already dropped so low that her breath misted on the air. Frozen branches of trees were like twisted fingers, catching at loose strands of her hair. Every now and then a halogen lamp would flicker on and light would spear through the icy foliage, making the leaves knife-edged and the creeping undergrowth a steely silver.
When she found Jesse, he was crying. He was lying on his back on a grassy platform near the radiation shelter, on the little mound of pillows and bedsheets he’d gathered there a few weeks ago in order to sleep in the garden. It was quite beautiful, Juno realized now, a bamboo skeleton of a roof above, hung with fairy-lights and wind chimes. They tinkled as she approached.
‘Jesse?’ Juno flicked on a little pen-light she’d found in a first aid kit. It gave her his face in tiny snatches, flashed off his retinas and his lips, which were blue as bruises. His skin was frozen. Juno bit back a scream. She had been surprised to tumble over the still weight of his body and for a horrible instant she thought that he was dead.
But the sound roused him and he opened his dark eyes.
‘Juno,’ he said, his breath like smoke.
‘You’re crying,’ she said, and he nodded. The side of his face was covered in dirt, and glass glittered in his hair.
Juno wasn’t sure if he was crying because of the shock, because of all that he had endured, or out of fear and grief or because – in the greenhouse – he could see that his months of work had come to almost nothing. His seedlings torn from the ground in a quick blast, their oxygen system crippled.