‘Tell me when to stop,’ he said, taking off his top. Juno gazed for a moment at his skin, at the muscles he’d formed over months of labour in the greenhouse, jet hair in baby curls around his temples. She leant forward, and then her body was a warm weight on top of his. She saw, then, what an uncomplicated thing this was.
When she rolled onto her back he was slow unzipping her flight suit because his hands were shaking. He found a bleached cotton vest underneath, the same as his, and when she pulled it over her head, her breasts were like sandalwood moons, nipples like black coins. He kissed her stomach in a way that made her muscles jolt. His breath was hot on the little downy hairs that sprang up around her navel and he ran his fingers in circles along her hipbones, then lower down. Under the lace-trimmed edge of her knickers, the private warmth between her legs. It was a shock to feel someone else there, but Juno didn’t tell him to stop. His fingers were like ice, but she stared up at him, and his familiar face was all she could see, circled by a dark nimbus of stars.
‘I love you,’ he said again, and then the rest was easy.
It was a strange mix of intuitive and utterly alien. After a little embarrassed fumbling, he was inside her and she closed her eyes. They stopped, then started, then smiled at each other. Each time she felt herself clench against him with anxiety, Jesse stroked her and told her it was okay, to relax, and finally her mind was centred in her own body, drawn back the way it was sometimes when she was running, and her flesh became a Roman candle, her nerves electric. After a few minutes, their breathing grew heavy and irregular. Finally, the jolt came. She bit down hard on her bottom lip. It happened, quickly, almost accidentally, like skidding down a sloping street of black ice, one moment of terrible wonderful weightlessness and then the slap of hitting ground she forgot was there. Jesse tumbled with her with a sigh of gladness, and as soon as they finished they remembered the cold. It descended upon them like a net, the sweat on the nape of Juno’s neck freezing. Jesse had already begun shivering again.
Everything washed back on a low tide of despair. Jesse’s hair still smelt of smoke, and there was a smattering of bruises spreading across the tight ridges of his stomach.
They were running out of air.
She wondered if they could try again, and if her body would welcome her back into oblivion.
The heavy material of her flight suit was cool as a tomb when she climbed back into it, and as she did up the zip again she could tell that Jesse was still staring at her.
‘Hey,’ he whispered, and Juno was glad that when she lay back beside him he couldn’t see her. ‘Are you okay?’
She examined herself for a moment. Here were the familiar pricklings of trepidation and embarrassment – as she had expected – but then, gazing up at the stars, she realized she could feel something else too, something kinder and new.
Chapter 42
ASTRID
08. 02.13
THE FIRST AMERICAN TO perform a spacewalk was Lieutenant Colonel Ed White, on a mission for Gemini IV. Unlike modern spacewalks, which could last for hours, he had only twenty minutes until he ran out of oxygen.
What had it been like? Astrid always wondered. The first American to behold his home from low earth orbit: the California coast, the unobscured sun. People said that those were the shortest twenty minutes of his whole life.
Right at the end, when his time was running out, he found he didn’t want to leave. He stalled, staring back at the Earth. The beauty of it cut him to the bone, but he was running out of time. His crewmates told him to turn away and hurry, that he was running out of oxygen. But what strength it took, to turn away from this gift he had been given – he, a mere mortal – gazing through the eyes of God. Mission control screamed at him to return, and when he finally did he said, ‘It’s the saddest moment of my life.’
6 A.M.
ASTRID WOKE TO THE sound of the O2 alarm, and her mind was jolted back into her body. She had fallen asleep in one of the large chairs on the flight deck and the readout on the dashboards showed that their oxygen levels were close to critical. They had about thirty hours left.
‘Astrid.’ Eliot turned to her, his eyes red with sleeplessness.
‘What’s the time?’ she asked. He glanced at his watch.
‘Our EVA’s in about forty minutes or so,’ he said.
‘Right.’ Astrid nodded. Her head was still full of sleep, but she stood up slowly. ‘Any news about Sheppard?”
‘No,’ said Eliot.
‘I’ll be watching all the time,’ Poppy said from the comms deck.
‘Right.’
‘Don’t be too nervous.’
‘It’s fine,’ Astrid assured her. ‘I’ve never done one before.’
It was true, there was a small thrill that came from being the first to do a spacewalk, even if it was only inside the ship. Astrid had spent more than 200 hours underwater in her bulky spacesuit in the Weightless Environment Training Facility at the space centre in London, so many days running through scripted procedures in the submerged mock-up of the ship that it was difficult to believe that finally she was going to do it for real.
She had always imagined that the day she donned a spacesuit it would be to step out into the darkness of space. But during this EVA she, Eliot and Commander Bovarin would only be stepping down into the vacuum of the lower deck to try to repair the damaged service module. Astrid’s stomach fluttered. If they were unable to fix it, they would not have enough oxygen or power left to perform a second EVA. Not only were her life and the lives of her crew dependent on their success, but if the mission was aborted it was possible that none of them would ever see the clear sky of Terra-Two, and the thought was too horrible to contemplate.
The ship was dark as the ocean floor. The emergency lights flared amber and red at intervals down the corridor, and the acrid smell of smoke clung to the fibres of her T-shirt. Astrid rubbed her arms – she was already beginning to feel the chill in the air. The Damocles was radiating heat into space. If they didn’t fix the temperature controls soon it was going to get a lot colder, and quickly.
Astrid climbed down the hatch and onto the middle deck, where she found their commander. ‘Dobroe utro,’ Commander Bovarin said. Good morning. He had already unpacked their spacesuits. ‘Ready to begin?’
DESCENDING INTO AN AIRLESS vacuum required a strict set of preparations. Astrid followed Igor’s lead, moving almost mechanically as they checked their EMU systems, held masks silently to their faces to pre-breathe. Then they donned their suits, a tedious process that took almost forty minutes, then more checks, examining the rubber seals in the spacesuits for leaks, then pre-breathing again. Although Astrid had long ago learned the entire process off by heart, she sometimes found herself hard pressed to remember exactly what every step was for. She knew that pre-breathing – which eliminated all the nitrogen from the body – was to avoid the bends. The bends happen when the nitrogen in an astronaut’s bloodstream does what the carbon dioxide in a shaken Coke can does after it’s opened. Only, inside her. The thought of bubbles itching and creeping under her skin made her shudder.
‘I can’t count how many hours of EVA I’ve logged during my years,’ Igor said. ‘But it’s always humbling to think that there’s only this—’ he pressed his fingers together – ‘a few millimetres of fabric and metal between you and nothing.’