It is easier to think about someone else’s welfare instead of her own. She wraps the baby in towels. He cries. She comforts him. She eats two portions of everything for the first five days, reducing her intake only when she can feel her strength returning. She cannot bear to eat the placenta, not yet at any rate, so she freezes it. There are more supplies now that everyone is dead.
The bodies of Mikal and Arvind are decomposing. She drags them into the corridor and seals it. She is living in a single room now.
She watches nature films. If there are no human beings it no longer causes her pain. It is just a beautiful planet far away. Gelada monkeys eating grass in the Ethiopian highlands. Marine iguanas. A pride of lions bringing down a female elephant. When the baby will not be comforted she holds him and walks in circles until he sleeps. He looks into her eyes and holds her finger and something like a smile passes over his face. She remembers that Mikal is his father. She remembers how they ran through the beech wood below the sawmill, the bluebells coming up through the dead leaves. It seems like such a long time ago. She knows that this will not last forever. If the power fails, if the oxygen fails there is nothing she can do. There is a blister pack of Moxin on the shelf.
Two grad students in Seattle solve the mystery. It was a freak surge of solar wind which knocked out the oxygen sensors on the Halcyon. They run a simulation and run it again and run it again. Fitting a shield takes two weeks. The Sparrowhawk is launched a month later. Serendipitously it has to spend only thirty-six hours in orbit waiting for the best slingshot opportunity of the past two years. The journey is estimated to take fourteen months.
The launch happens only two months after the sandstorm takes out the station’s transmitters.
There are six astronauts on board — Mina Lawler, Vijay Singh, Giulia Ferretti, “Bear” Jonson, Mary D. Eversley and Taylor Paul. Two months into their journey there is still no communication from Endurance. It is assumed that everyone is dead. The best-case scenario is that the station lost power and they will have to bury the bodies, clean up and fix whatever is broken. The worst-case scenario is that those bodies have been sitting inside a warm, functioning station for fifteen months.
They monitor the surges in the solar wind with some trepidation but there is no recurrence of the previous problem. Only during descent does the mission skirt the edge of disaster when one of the parachutes fails. The landing is uncomfortable but the lander remains intact.
They overshoot the station by twelve hundred metres. It is not important. They are in no rush to perform six funerals. When everything else is up and running, when they’ve carried out a few shorter EVAs, they will head over and take a look.
She is woken by a tremor passing through the rock below the station. She wonders if it is a seismic shift, or simply a hallucination. It is getting progressively harder to tell whether events are happening inside or outside her head.
In the morning there is no doubt. Through the sand-scratched window, in spite of her failing eyesight she recognises the shape instantly. She looks into the baby’s face and says, “We’re going to be saved.” She is unable to stop herself weeping.
But no one comes, not on the first day, not on the second, not on the third. She wonders if something terrible has happened, if there is no one alive in the lander. She can think of no way of signalling to them, either physically or electronically. Ten days go by. She and the baby are weak and getting weaker. Previously he cried when she couldn’t feed him enough. Now he is silent. She is looking through a milky fog that will not clear. Her joints hurt.
It is the last thing she does. She gathers the remaining solid state light sticks. She waits for darkness to fall and tapes them to the window. She can do no more. She lies down with Michael on the mattress and pulls the blanket over the two of them.
They run the tape again. Is it lens glare? Reflected sunlight? They wait an hour. It is still there, visible through both windows. Vijay thinks he can see a shape but it is fading in the growing daylight. They take a photograph, increase the contrast and blow it up. Mina says, “Dear God in heaven.” The words HELP ME are spelled out in broken light sticks in the triangular window. Light sticks shine for two days max. Someone is alive in there.
Taylor asks Geneva to override protocol. This will be their first EVA. Bear Jonson and Mina Lawler volunteer. It takes nine hours to prepare. Before the EVA begins Bear and Mina sleep for two hours. Vijay prepares his own suit in case there is an emergency. They have three hours of daylight left.
The terrain is smooth. It takes them only thirty minutes to reach the old base. To the right they can see the rocky barrow under which Dr. Jon Forrester is buried, to the left the raking sun glinting off the titanium poles of the uncompleted Long Array. They circle the chunky double spider of units. In a recess at the rear lies a body so fiercely abraded by the sandstorm that it is now a skeleton. Taylor, Giulia, Vijay and Mary watch all of this on the headcam feeds.
Most of the windows in the base are dark and a temperature reading indicates that these units have been sealed off and depressurised. Only one unit seems to be in use. There is a low light in the window to which the now-dead glow-sticks remain attached but the sand which scoured the corpse has scoured the glass, too, and they can see very little through it. There is something which might be a body on the infrared. Afterwards both Bear and Mina will confess to an irrational conviction that whoever — or whatever — is inside is not one of the six original crew, perhaps not even human.
They return to an adjacent unit. As on all the doors there is a central crank for last-resort use. They try to turn it with the steel rod they have brought for the purpose, first Bear then Mina, but they are wary of slipping and falling or, worse, ripping one of the EVA suits. After twenty fruitless minutes Taylor says, “Just hit the thing with a damn rock.” Bear does this and they hear the dull chime of the whole structure ringing. He bangs it again. The crank gives a little. He bangs it a third time, puts the rock down and they are now able to turn it with their gloved hands alone. Finally the door swings open and they step inside.
There is a body on the floor, gaunt, leathery, mummified. It is tiny with thick black hair and must therefore be Suki Camino. They close the door behind them and seal it. They power up and the overhead lights come on, so the generators are working. They check the internal pressure. They start to pump the CO2 out and let the air in from the rest of the station. There has been no response whatsoever to their grandstand entrance. If there is anyone still alive on the far side of the second door they must be either unconscious or remaining deliberately silent. Might this be a trap of some kind?
A soft pop and the door opens.
Clare Hogg and the baby are lying on a soiled mattress. The baby is not moving, Clare is barely conscious. There was no simulation which included this scenario.
Over the intercom Taylor says, “Oh, Jesus.”
Giulia says, “People, do something, OK?”
Mina ignores Taylor’s instructions and removes her helmet. The air smells of urine and sweat and something dense and sugary she doesn’t recognise. She takes her gloves off and picks the baby up. It is limp but warm. It is covered in its own shit and has sores and rashes all over its body. It is a boy. Bear keeps his helmet and gloves on. He rolls the woman into the recovery position. Her hair is knotty and rat-tailed. She appears unable to see clearly or understand what is being said to her. She cannot talk. She claws the air vaguely in search of her baby. There is an unopened blister pack of two Moxin on the floor, a couple of arm’s lengths away from the mattress. Mina wraps the baby in a clean blanket and holds it close.