Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

On the other side of the hatch, Juno screamed. There was a sound like a thunderclap as the air inside the greenhouse bulldozed through the bridge. Glass spires near the service module ruptured and chlorella burst out, clumps of algae suspended in acid green slime. Astrid cried out as splinters flew at her face, though she only realized she’d been cut when she felt the blood dripping down her cheek.

Shunted by the pain back into her body, Astrid grabbed a dripping shard of glass in her trembling hands and scrambled back to the bridge. Juno took it and worked immediately on the wires. The first one she cut filled the air with a lightning-bright shower of sparks and the sickly smell of electrical fire.

‘Careful,’ Eliot screamed. He had disconnected two of the plugs, and Juno severed a third. Together they kicked the snaking chords over the threshold, but discovered, to their horror, that the hatch still would not close.

The air was rushing out with such force that the internal mechanism had likely jammed, a safety precaution that prevented it from closing if someone was caught in it. It would close once the pressure on the inside and the outside equalized, but by then, of course, Eliot, Juno and Astrid would be dead.

Astrid slumped against the wall, waves of pain spasming through her, the saliva on her tongue fizzing as the pressure dropped and it began to boil. Soon the oxygen in her chest would split her lungs open and spill into her arteries, but, by then, her mind would have happily disconnected from her body. The brain was kind that way, sending dizzy waves of euphoria through the dying body in the seconds before oblivion.

Eliot, the only one who had grabbed a mask from the control room, still had the presence of mind to snatch at salvation. He yanked the medical officer badge from the lapel of Juno’s flight suit, his fingers stiff with cold, and jammed it into the hatch’s locking mechanism. With a hiss of hydraulics the hatch slammed closed and they collapsed on the bridge, shaking in the cold. The temperature felt as if it had dropped by about thirty degrees.

Astrid felt the change of pressure a second time, like a wind that had suddenly fallen dead. ‘Here you are.’ Fae’s silhouette came into focus by the door. She’d opened an oxygen canister and Juno was gasping, her eyes bright with tears. ‘That should help for the moment. But the ship’s been breached. It’s not safe here.’

‘Look,’ Eliot pointed to the door at the far end of the bridge. Through its porthole they could see the corridor, where the window that Astrid had patched a few minutes ago had exploded under the pressure. The module on the other side of the door had turned into a vacuum and the first aid kit, Juno’s shoe, the earpiece of a crew phone and everything not attached to the ground or the wall had been sucked out into the nothingness. ‘It could have been us,’ Eliot said.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Juno said. She’d changed colour, looked grey and waxy and was shaking violently.

‘We need to go to the radiation shelter,’ Fae said. ‘Now pull yourselves together and get up. You’ve trained for this.’

Astrid barely remembered the short journey into the radiation shelter. The pain in her ears came in keening waves and by the time she sat down on the bench, she noticed that the collar of her flight suit was wet with blood, although, between her frozen fingers, it felt like jelly.

Fae attached an oxygen mask to her face, and some of the pain subsided, giving way to an awareness of her aching body, the bloody space-hickey on her palm where she’d pressed it against the window. Astrid stared down at it in horror and disbelief.

For marooned sailors, the ocean might never be the same after they’d watched it devour another crew. It could come to seem like death personified, death with a will, death with splendid terrifying power. And so it was for Astrid, that day, as she looked down at her hand. Here was death, again, calling their names, and she had touched it.

Chapter 41 JUNO

^{6 P.M.}

TRAPPED IN THE DIMLY lit radiation shelter, Juno was terrified. In the wake of the loss of Orlando, their own mission seemed like such vain folly. ‘What are we doing here?’ she asked the darkness, her head spinning with fatigue. ‘How did I get here?’ The air was thin, and she could feel it in the tightness in her chest. Her voice roused Astrid from sleep.

‘What?’ her sister asked.

‘Do you think they’re dead?’ Juno knew that Astrid would guess that she was talking about Harry and Poppy, Jesse and Commander Sheppard, the crew on the Congreve. It was likely that they’d been hit by flying debris. Juno imagined a solar array slicing like an axe through their shuttle. Explosive decompression, everyone inside dying with their eyes open.