Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Right at the end, when his time was running out, he found he didn’t want to leave. He stalled, staring back at the Earth. The beauty of it cut him to the bone, but he was running out of time. His crewmates told him to turn away and hurry, that he was running out of oxygen. But what strength it took, to turn away from this gift he had been given – he, a mere mortal – gazing through the eyes of God. Mission control screamed at him to return, and when he finally did he said, ‘It’s the saddest moment of my life.’

^{6 A.M.}

ASTRID WOKE TO THE sound of the O₂ alarm, and her mind was jolted back into her body. She had fallen asleep in one of the large chairs on the flight deck and the readout on the dashboards showed that their oxygen levels were close to critical. They had about thirty hours left.

‘Astrid.’ Eliot turned to her, his eyes red with sleeplessness.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked. He glanced at his watch.

‘Our EVA’s in about forty minutes or so,’ he said.

‘Right.’ Astrid nodded. Her head was still full of sleep, but she stood up slowly. ‘Any news about Sheppard?”

‘No,’ said Eliot.

‘I’ll be watching all the time,’ Poppy said from the comms deck.

‘Right.’

‘Don’t be too nervous.’

‘It’s fine,’ Astrid assured her. ‘I’ve never done one before.’

It was true, there was a small thrill that came from being the first to do a spacewalk, even if it was only inside the ship. Astrid had spent more than 200 hours underwater in her bulky spacesuit in the Weightless Environment Training Facility at the space centre in London, so many days running through scripted procedures in the submerged mock-up of the ship that it was difficult to believe that finally she was going to do it for real.

She had always imagined that the day she donned a spacesuit it would be to step out into the darkness of space. But during this EVA she, Eliot and Commander Bovarin would only be stepping down into the vacuum of the lower deck to try to repair the damaged service module. Astrid’s stomach fluttered. If they were unable to fix it, they would not have enough oxygen or power left to perform a second EVA. Not only were her life and the lives of her crew dependent on their success, but if the mission was aborted it was possible that none of them would ever see the clear sky of Terra-Two, and the thought was too horrible to contemplate.

The ship was dark as the ocean floor. The emergency lights flared amber and red at intervals down the corridor, and the acrid smell of smoke clung to the fibres of her T-shirt. Astrid rubbed her arms – she was already beginning to feel the chill in the air. The Damocles was radiating heat into space. If they didn’t fix the temperature controls soon it was going to get a lot colder, and quickly.

Astrid climbed down the hatch and onto the middle deck, where she found their commander. ‘Dobroe utro,’ Commander Bovarin said. Good morning. He had already unpacked their spacesuits. ‘Ready to begin?’

DESCENDING INTO AN AIRLESS vacuum required a strict set of preparations. Astrid followed Igor’s lead, moving almost mechanically as they checked their EMU systems, held masks silently to their faces to pre-breathe. Then they donned their suits, a tedious process that took almost forty minutes, then more checks, examining the rubber seals in the spacesuits for leaks, then pre-breathing again. Although Astrid had long ago learned the entire process off by heart, she sometimes found herself hard pressed to remember exactly what every step was for. She knew that pre-breathing – which eliminated all the nitrogen from the body – was to avoid the bends. The bends happen when the nitrogen in an astronaut’s bloodstream does what the carbon dioxide in a shaken Coke can does after it’s opened. Only, inside her. The thought of bubbles itching and creeping under her skin made her shudder.

‘I can’t count how many hours of EVA I’ve logged during my years,’ Igor said. ‘But it’s always humbling to think that there’s only this—’ he pressed his fingers together – ‘a few millimetres of fabric and metal between you and nothing.’

‘Is it true what they say?’ Eliot asked, grabbing his helmet.

‘What do they say?’ Astrid asked.

‘That space smells like gunpowder?’

‘You’ll find out for yourself soon,’ Igor said, lacing up a boot. ‘When we come back.’

‘I’ve heard it leaves a smell on the suits,’ Eliot said, looking down. ‘A smell on our spacesuits and gloves. Like burning. Smoky. Sweet.’

Astrid pulled her visor down and said, ‘I’ve heard it’s because of all the combustion going on in the stars.’

Fifteen minutes later they were finally ready to leave, and headed down to the lower deck.

The darkness was unnerving. Astrid had only the lights of her helmet to penetrate the blackness. What lightbulbs there had been had broken, or blown.