Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘I didn’t trust myself.’ Eliot hit his head hard with a closed fist. ‘It’s my fault, I killed them. Like I killed her.’

‘Eliot Liston,’ Igor barked, ‘control yourself. Now is not the time.’ For the duration of the mission, while Sheppard was on the Congreve, Igor was their commander. ‘We’re not out of danger. The explosion means that the sky above Europa will be filled with debris. Some objects will be moving faster than bullets, fast enough to escape the moon’s gravity.’

‘No,’ Juno pleaded, ‘they’re in danger. Jesse, Commander Sheppard, Harry and Poppy. We can’t leave them. The further we travel, the more fuel they’ll have to burn trying to reach us… they might not make it.’ But, as she said it, the ground shuddered. Dropped from under her feet with a hard shockwave that felt like an earthquake. Juno had the sudden, sickening thought that this must have been what it felt like when the Titanic scraped against the keen edge of an iceberg. Everyone on the control deck froze.

Then the lights went out and the sirens began to howl.

Chapter 40 ASTRID

^{4.15 P.M.}

THE FIRST HIT CAME with a loud bang, as the air inside the ship exploded into the vacuum outside. There was a sudden loss of pressure, which made Astrid’s ears pop as they sometimes did in the first few minutes after a plane take-off.

Air was escaping through a crack in the porthole window between the equipment bay and the hatch that led to the service module, at the far end of the corridor where Astrid stood. The porthole was narrow, only a little larger than a splayed hand, and through it Europa’s silver light cut like a scythe. Astrid edged towards it, and as she did felt the thin but insistent suction of oxygen through the deadly crack in the borosilicate glass.

A micrometeoroid, Astrid supposed – they were too far from the explosion for debris to have reached them yet. It was just bad luck that this had happened at the same time. Micrometeoroid strikes were something they had been trained for. The ship’s tracking system was sophisticated enough to anticipate a hit from most medium and large asteroids, giving Harry or Commander Sheppard enough warning to perform a side-burn that took the Damocles out of the object’s path and out of danger. But micrometeoroids were smaller, scraps of metal or rock as old as the solar system speeding through space. Tiny particles small as a fleck of paint had been known to blast like a bullet through a window. A larger object could cause enough damage to result in decompression. In which event, Astrid might have as little as eighteen seconds of useful consciousness before her brain was starved of oxygen.

Her training came back to her at the moment of the hit, overriding her natural instincts to run for cover. She had been taught to respond methodically to disasters, to assess the situation and to come up with solutions. She listened to the pitch of the air escaping and deduced that their atmosphere was leaving the module slowly enough for her to attempt to patch the hole. Astrid examined the sliver of broken glass and pressed her palm against it. The hissing stopped instantly, suggesting that this was the only hole. On the other side of the window was space, and the suction felt like a knife slice along her palm as blood burst from the capillaries under her skin. Stepping back, Astrid looked around for something she could use to plug the hole. She grabbed a first aid kit from a wall fixture, tore it open and found a hydrocolloid wound dressing, the jelly-like plaster they were meant to apply to burns and stitches. It would do for now. A short-term measure before she could go to the engine room and find some proper sealant. Peeling the plastic backing away, she applied it to the crack in the window. For a moment she wasn’t sure if it would stick. She watched as crystals formed quickly in the gel as it was exposed to the vacuum outside. Then she registered the equalizing in pressure in her inner ear.

Success! Astrid thought, with a flush of joy. In her training she’d been taught that the big three disasters an astronaut could face were fire, ammonia leaks and decompression. She had stayed calm and fixed the problem on her own.

She would have to let Igor know immediately, so she headed away from the site of the accident and back up to the crew module. But, just as she reached up to open the hatch, the Damocles was hit again.

The impact threw Astrid off her feet and into the air. The lights shut off and, for a disorientating half-second, so did the gravity-dromes. Astrid’s stomach swooped upwards along with her entire body for a sickening moment of soaring weightlessness that felt like a cliff dive. Adrenaline poured through her like rocket fuel before the dromes sent the deck spinning again and she crashed to the ground. She shouted in pain and surprise, her knee bent awkwardly under her with a knife-twist of pain, and stars throbbed behind her eyes.