She almost hollered right in his ear, anything for a response…except she’d learned the hard way that such pranks only deepened his silence.
Ruth jaunted toward the bike. Passing over it, she caught hold by jamming the toes of one foot under the cushioned seat, then used her other foot like a pincher and pulled herself down. Momentum twisted her hips, however, and she whacked her butt on the backrest, ruining what might have been an excellent stunt.
She would miss flying, somersaulting. It was a simple joy laced with many shades of guilt, frolicking during the apocalypse — and she would pay for it. Back on Earth she might be wheelchair-bound for a time. Muscle and bone degeneration were very real threats in zero gravity, and even special diets and nonstop exercise regimens could only slow that process.
She glanced after Wallace before strapping herself down, an uneasy reflex. Silly. He would never hurt her, if only because he’d been ordered to regard her as his superior. All of the astronauts took as much pride in their discipline as she did in her work.
Wallace had actually been among the crew members who volunteered to vacate the station, hoping to rejoin their families, but Control had deemed him too essential to long-term operations. That wasn’t the problem. No higher compliment could be paid to a man such as Wallace, and his wife and daughter had been crammed aboard a Florida National Guard plane along with other VIPs and made it to Pikes Peak in Colorado, 14,000 feet above sea level. They were presumed dead in the holocaust that swept the makeshift fuel depots last spring, yet had still been given a better chance than most.
It was a packet of carrot juice that turned him against her. The whole thing was incredibly dumb, but they’d all been packed into this small hell for too long. Ruth could count more personality conflicts than there were personalities. Astronaut A didn’t like the way Astronauts B or C reorganized supplies, while B had gotten weird about singing country songs and argued with A, D, and E each time he disturbed them, and C thought D smelled especially bad and resented A calling him an idiot, et cetera.
Their day-to-day existence was one of grim stagnation and Ruth had rigged two juice packets to burst in hope of lightening the mood, if only for a moment. Planning the trick had been a delight. Too bad Wallace got both of them. She hadn’t realized carrot was his favorite but he took it personally, and after they vacuumed up the second sticky cloud he’d ripped into her about safety violations and the possibility of damaged electronics.
Ruth flinched suddenly when a low thump sounded close to her and then another, hands or feet against the walls. The heart monitor blipped in alarm and she twisted, bound by the bike’s Velcro straps.
Derek Mills, Endeavour’s pilot, neatly stopped his approach by jamming himself in the passageway with one outstretched hand and one outstretched foot.
Mills should have been good-looking. His brow and jaw were strong and smooth. But she didn’t like his carefully neutral expression or the way that he stole glances at her white cotton undershirt. Ruth managed to hide her chest with her elbow as she wiped at her forehead. “What?”
Mills had thought the juice bombs were a riot. He’d flashed his perfect teeth at all of her jokes, chatting her up at every chance. He’d even stashed his share of the tubes of chocolate pudding and brought out these treasures in random moments for just the two of them — an odd, forced intimacy, taking turns pressing their lips to the same small plastic opening.
He quit being friendly because he was a true believer in the space program, like most of the crew, and Ruth insisted now on grounding them, maybe forever.
“Radio,” he said, then turned his back on her.
* * * *
She passed through a dark, chill section of the ISS and was suddenly aware of an aching throughout her body, a deficiency as real as scurvy. Mills thought this shell was their final glory. Ruth just wanted to see trees and sky again.
* * * *
Communications was a mess, a nest. Slips of paper torn from logbooks and packaging had been affixed to the walls in uneven groups, inked with names and frequencies and locations from all over the globe. It was a living record of the plague year. Many bits of information had been X’d out, and most of the rest had been altered at least once — and yet no slip of paper was ever taken down.
Ruth squeezed in. Ulinov ordered this passageway cleared almost weekly and had even removed the offending supply cases himself many times, but the blockade always rematerialized. There was just too much extra gear aboard.
She found Gus listening to bursts of static, so loud she didn’t say anything. He fingered his control panel with one hand and rubbed at his bald spot with the other, as if he were his own good-luck charm. Then he saw Ruth and waved and shut off the white noise. Apparently he’d been walking through channel after empty channel.
“There you are,” he said. “Pop on this headset for me, we’re gonna set you up hush-hush, big news maybe, let me get ya dialed in through a satellite relay.”
“Hi, Gus.”
Communications Officer Gustavo Proano, left aboard to appease the Europeans, was the only crew member who’d grown more free with his thoughts during their endless wait. Force of habit. Trilingual, with a smattering of Farsi and Portuguese and learning more, Gustavo had more friends than anyone else alive, friends all over the world.
Ruth still hadn’t figured out his habit of blockading himself in. He was the most gregarious person aboard. Maybe subconsciously he was trying to protect his radios.
He waved again, hurrying her, and jabbered into a microphone too fast for anyone to answer. His English had a pronounced New York accent, but the blabbermouth personality came through in any language, even those where hello and how are you were his entire repertoire. “Leadville, this is the ISS. Leadville, come back, I gotcha contact waiting.”
Ruth clipped on the earpiece and realized her hair was growing long again, starting to curl. Good. An astronaut’s buzz cut made her look like a monkey.
“Leadville,” Gus said. “Leadville, Leadville…”
During the late 1800s, at the height of the Gold Rush, Leadville had been a boomtown of thirty thousand frontiersmen attracted to central Colorado’s rich silver mines. In the twenty-first century, shrunk to just 3,000 residents, the modern claim to fame had been that at 10,150 feet elevation it was the highest incorporated “city” in the United States.
Now it was the U.S. capital, and a rough census put the area’s population at 650,000.
NORAD command shelters under Cheyenne Mountain had originally housed the president, the surviving members of Congress, and the most prominent men and women in nanotech. The subterranean base sat far below the barrier but was equipped with a self-contained air system to protect against radiation or biowarfare, and most of Ruth’s communications had been with NORAD until the locust got loose from a laboratory inside the complex.
“ISS, this is Leadville,” drawled an unfamiliar voice, calm in her ear. “Stand by.”
Gustavo chattered, “Roger that. You wanna power down?”
“Stand by.”
The partial evacuation of the NORAD base had reduced their working capacity by a full order of magnitude, just as the original plague had done. Once there had been more than a thousand researchers nationwide, then hundreds, finally mere dozens — and aside from India and a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, no one else was even trying. Across the Alps, the Germans, French, Italians, and Swiss were embroiled in war with starving refugee populations and each other, lost like the Russians, and the Brazilian scientists in the Andes had stopped broadcasting before the end of the first winter.
Ruth reached for the lists of contacts plastered over the nearest wall but stopped short of disturbing them. So many names and places had been crossed out, she wondered how Gus could stand the constant reminder. Gruesome. Yet clearly something in him was satisfied by surrounding himself with data, and with physical barriers.