Andrew Morgan - Vessel

‘Aleks,’ Mikhail said, ‘I’m getting — that normal?’

‘Negative copy, negative copy,’ Aleks responded. He could feel his chest becoming tight and constricted.

‘I’m — hallucinations — I don’t — if — awake…’

‘Mikhail, I’m losing signal, negative copy, please repeat, please repeat,’ Aleks said, his fingers jumping from dial to dial, adjusting settings as they went. All that came back was static, and then nothing. He called out to the ISS a couple more times, and when not even a distorted signal was being received back, he pulled off his headset and tossed it onto the desk with a clatter.

‘Shit!’ he growled.

Mikhail’s voice still rang discordant in his mind even hours later as he sat in one of the centre’s many boardrooms, waiting for Bales. On the opposite side of the long table sat Lev, whose usual aura of capability and authority had all but vanished. A clock ticked, each tick-tick-tick long, loud and clear. The atmosphere was thick, but the ticking clock cut right through it with utmost clarity.

When the door opened and Bales entered, striding through in his quiet way, Aleks realised that he’d slipped into a doze. He’d been mesmerised by the clock, the humidity and not least by his exhaustion. An invisible weight pressed down onto his weary shoulders, so he didn’t get up to pull his chair in as Bales squeezed past.

‘Gentlemen,’ Bales said, sitting at the head of the table and placing upon it a thin blue folder, ‘I’ve called this meeting because I need to know what happened in the brief conversation that took place between Mr Dezhurov and Major Romanenko at around zero five hundred hours this morning.’

Lev’s face contorted with frustration and annoyance. ‘We didn’t have enough time to—’

‘As you are aware,’ Bales interrupted, not looking up as he drew a pile of paper from the folder and sifted through it, ‘I specifically requested that any change in the situation be reported to me, particularly any conversation that you may have had with the crew of the ISS.’

He turned to Lev, his narrow eyes unblinking beneath his stark white eyebrows. He was obviously allowing Lev to speak, and Lev seized the opportunity, regardless of why Bales had let him take it.

‘The window was small and there wasn’t enough time to call you down to Mission Control. Hell, I didn’t even know where you’d gone.’

Bales still didn’t blink, but he broke eye contact with Lev for a moment as he placed the pile of paper on the table, pinching the corners together so they lay perfectly square.

‘Mr Ryumin,’ Bales said in a slow, deliberate way, ‘there was plenty of time between then and now for you to inform me.’

‘But you weren’t anywhere to be seen,’ protested Lev, who held his hands up in exasperation. ‘You would have been informed as soon as you’d returned from whatever it was you were doing.’

If Bales was as frustrated with Lev as Lev was with Bales, he didn’t show it.

‘Had there been another window for us to resume contact with the ISS,’ he continued in his deliberate way, ‘I would not have known all the facts and I would not have been able to instruct the crew in the best possible manner. It is imperative,’ he prodded the pile of paper, ‘that this kind of information be reported to me as soon as possible .’

He emphasised the last few words, looking hard at Lev, who glared at the opposite wall above Aleks’ head. Bales pulled his chair closer to the table, licked his index finger and flicked through the sheets of paper.

‘Before we continue,’ he said, as though the previous conversation hadn’t even taken place, ‘I want to clarify a few details from the conversation with the ISS this morning. I have read through the transcript and listened to the playback, so it would be good to utilise your professional opinions to find the distinction between what we think we heard and what was actually said.’

Bales had divided his pile of paper into three smaller piles of equal thickness, and he handed one to Lev and one to Aleks. It was the transcript from the conversation, documented like a script, with initials for the speakers and occasional commentary that allowed for context.

‘If you could look at page three,’ Bales asked. They all turned to page three. ‘You can see that Major Romanenko questions the duration of the mission. What would you say had happened here? Is the Major asking a legitimate and understandable question, or would you say he had forgotten what the date was?’

Aleks could see Bales looking at him from the corner of his eye.

‘Mr Dezhurov, would you say that Major Romanenko had forgotten what the date was? It’s a simple question.’

‘Well,’ Aleks said, looking to Lev for help, but not getting it, ‘I can’t say for sure. Keeping track of time can be difficu—’

‘That’s not what I asked,’ Bales said, clasping his hands together in front of him. ‘I just want to know if Major Romanenko was having trouble with his temporal orientation.’

Aleks sighed. He couldn’t dance around the question forever. ‘It seems that way, yes,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Good. Thank you,’ Bales said as he turned to the next page. ‘Could you continue to page four, please.’

He looked on until the other two had turned to page four, then his eyes returned to his own transcript.

‘Here, on the eighth line down, Major Romanenko makes a statement that is broken up by interference. I need a best estimate as to the subject and context of his statement, and an assumption as to what he means by it. He says, just getting a little, then there’s a section missing, before we hear him say, up here. ’

Bales read the text aloud without any shred of emotion. It sounded so strange read like that. The desperate words, haunting and unnatural, made his skin crawl.

‘It feels close, ’ Bales said. ‘What do you make of that, Mr Dezhurov?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Aleks. He could feel his words being led someplace he didn’t want them to go. ‘I wouldn’t want to assume what Mikhail meant.’

‘But you must be able to make an educated guess, surely?’

Bales wasn’t going to let Aleks get away with not answering this — or any other — question, that much was clear.

‘It seems,’ Aleks said, ‘at a purely hypothetical guess, that Mikhail is experiencing the symptoms of claustrophobia, an expected side effect of the—’

‘Thank you, Mr Dezhurov.’

‘—of the stresses of being in space during a period of loss of communication and confinement to the radiation protection compartment,’ Aleks finished through gritted teeth.

‘ Thank you , Mr Dezhurov,’ Bales repeated, his voice firm, but still calm. ‘Lastly,’ he continued, ‘at the bottom of page five.’

Aleks already knew which bit he meant.

‘ Hallucinations… ’

‘We don’t know the intensity, the duration or the frequency of his hallucinations,’ Aleks said, his face flushing with angry heat. ‘He could be seeing stars for all we know, a normal reaction to the increased radiation levels of the solar storm.’

‘Would Major Romanenko know that seeing stars was a normal reaction to the increased levels of radiation?’ Bales asked.

‘Well yes, but—’

‘So he wouldn’t feel it necessary to waste precious radio time telling you about it, then?’

Aleks had no answer, and that frustrated him even more. Bales gathered his papers together and slotted them back into the folder.

‘I think it likely,’ he said as he placed the folder on the table, ‘that what we heard this morning was nothing more than the symptoms of an anxiety disorder, perhaps induced by impaired cognitive reasoning though long-term and short-term stress. I believe we can expect more behaviour like this, perhaps to an even greater degree than we saw today, with the distinct possibility that Major Romanenko’s psychoses may even pose a threat to the safety of himself and the other two crewmen.’