Finally, Fae stepped forward and took charge, pulling the duvet covers up over Commander Sheppard’s head and ushering everyone out.
Juno found herself in Jesse’s arms, barely able to stand in the corridor, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ he said, softly, wiping a thumb across the tears in her eyes.
‘I feel like such an idiot,’ she said, swallowing, still shaking.
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t realize until it was too late. It took me by surprise. I keep thinking about what I said to him – I feel so stupid.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I don’t know, I just said the first thing that came into my head. That he was really good with us and really good at his job. I don’t know.’ She swallowed back another sob.
‘Those sound like good things.’ Jesse said. ‘Those were good, kind things to say.’
‘Really?’
‘You know something my mother once told me?’ he said. ‘She was thinking about what it’s like just before you’re born. Babies can hear their mother’s voices, they get distressed, they feel pain, even in their mother’s stomach. They turn towards the light, like all of us. The womb, though, is the only world they have ever known. They can see all of it, the beginning and the end, and of course, they think there is nothing else. Can’t even conceive of it.
‘So, being born, being dragged out into the cold, into the searing lights and all the noise, must feel like dying – like their whole world disappearing along with every single thing they ever knew. Maybe dying is like that too; none of us know what’s out there. But we’ve experienced something a little like it already. Being born was the best thing that ever happened to us. The world is bigger and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined and on the other side of it there were people we’d never met who already love us. They’ve been excited. They’ve been waiting.’
Chapter 48
ASTRID
15.02.13
TEMPERATURE: 5°C
O2: 79% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
THEY HAD ALLOWED HER to leave the infirmary only once, after the commander died. They held a memorial for him by the airlock, wrapped him in sheets and jettisoned his body into space. It was quick. No one wanted to talk much. ‘Plenus annis abiit, plenus honoribus,’ Poppy said. ‘He is gone from us, full of years and full of honours.’
Afterwards, they gathered in the kitchen, silently counting everything that they had lost. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’ Harry asked. Astrid had never seen him in such a state – unshaven and raking fingers through his greasy hair. ‘With this mission? With what’s left of our fucking lives?’
‘Don’t say that,’ Juno said. She and Jesse sat at the far end of the room, her head in his lap. As their situation grew more dire, the two of them had folded in on themselves, in the eternal conspiracy of lovers.
‘He’s right though,’ Eliot said, lingering by the window as if he was distracted by something outside. ‘You know they’re talking about suspending the Europa Project?’
‘Who?’ Astrid asked.
‘NASA.’ Poppy nodded in confirmation. ‘There were funding cuts after the 2008 recession. They never properly recovered and now, after this…’ She glanced out the window too, as if she could see the station there. ‘It’s pretty much guaranteed to happen.’
Astrid shuddered. ‘Do you think that the Off-World Colonization Project would be suspended if we fail?’
‘Maybe,’ Poppy said.
There had been dissenters in the UK even before their launch. Astrid remembered that a few talk show hosts and columnists had called space academies such as Dalton ‘a travesty’. Astrid had watched a video of a famous human rights activist on a politics programme saying, ‘These children are too young to give their consent. They’re trained from age thirteen, fourteen… brainwashed, essentially. We talk about radicalization, but it is happening right here in these schools.’
‘Crew.’ Igor entered the kitchen, looming large in the doorway, Fae behind him.
‘Commander Bovarin.’ Jesse looked up and nodded in acknowledgement.
Igor took a deep breath. ‘We lost a friend on Wednesday. Commander Sheppard.’ At the sound of his name Juno stifled a sob, and Jesse stroked her cheek. ‘And before that the crew of Orlando.’ Eliot turned to the window and bit his knuckles, his face clenched with pain. ‘All of them surrendered their lives for their mission and, unfortunately, most of their work will be lost with them. What are those achievements worth when weighed against a life? Captain Omar Briggs, Dr Sie-Yan and their young crew – Cal, James, Kennedy. Commander Solomon Sheppard. A father, a husband, a friend. I hear you ask, what should we do now?’
Astrid flinched at the fresh cut of pain in his voice. Igor came to stand at the head of the table. ‘When I, myself, chose to take part in this mission, people were shocked. “What about your children and grandchildren?” they asked me. “What about the things you will miss?” But, like Captain Briggs and Commander Sheppard, I pretended to laugh it off, then. Would they now? If they knew that this would be their end, long before their time, in a moment of fire and nothingness?
‘For a long time I’ve wrestled with these questions. I think that we can find the answer in the lives they led. In their love for their work. Their hunger for discovery. Commander Sheppard was hoping that Terra-Two could be a place for his son and family to follow after him, a place where they would be safe from war and global warming. A second chance for humanity. And, in a different way, that is what Captain Briggs and Sie Yan were doing too. They knew the risks. I think they would have said, now, exactly the same thing they said then. When they were asked, “Will you embark on this journey?” they would have smiled, and they would have said “Yes!” I would say “Yes” again, too.’
AFTER THAT, THE LAST vestiges of her dream finally evaporated for Astrid. She felt as if, with Sheppard, every good thing had gone away.
She and Eliot were confined to the infirmary for what felt like a lifetime. Long enough for the regret to set in, and the guilt. Astrid realized a few days later what a desperate situation she had sentenced them to. The fuel cells provided them with the oxygen they needed but, despite their efforts at conserving heat, the temperature dropped every day. A week after the accident, Astrid curled under her duvet and the cold hacked at her bones, chilling her right to the marrow. She felt as if she had never been warm and fought to remember hot baths of the kind she used to take at home, water so hot that when she lifted her arm steam curled off her skin. She and Eliot composed fantasy menus: boiling porridge and roast chicken with skin that cracked like leather, her mother’s shepherd’s pie, apple crumble with the saccharine custard they were served at Dalton. Many of the plants in the greenhouse had died. One night Poppy brought Astrid and Eliot their ration of food with a dessert bowl of canned peaches that had crystallized in the cupboard.
Already, the partial pressure of the oxygen on the ship was decreasing, the air growing thin. It was as if they were ascending a mountain at higher and higher altitudes. The manual listed a range of symptoms for them to look forward to: headaches, nausea, gradual loss of consciousness, high-altitude cerebral oedema, paralysis, coma. Death. Which, since they were unable to fix the oxygen tank, would likely occur within a few weeks, if not sooner.
Hallucinations were also amongst the symptoms; Astrid witnessed this one night when she woke to see Eliot in his bed opposite, fevered glitter in his eye, talking to his shadow. ‘Get away from me,’ he told it.