Steven McDonald - Steven E. McDonald

The outer door locked.

The count in Miller’s head told him five seconds had elapsed since the door had opened.

The airlock began to repressurize quickly. That might do more damage to Justin, but that was a chance they had to take. Miller despised the lack of options, but he was not about to abandon hope.

He reached out again and slapped the control that triggered the artificial gravity, cradling Justin as he slowly dropped to the deck. Through the window in the hatch he could see the anxious faces of Peters, Starck and DJ.

A green light. Miller reached out, hit the switch to open the inner door, then flattened against the wall as Peters and DJ rushed in.

“Oh God, Justin…” Peters said.

DJ went to one knee, his medkit open already. Peters knelt on the other side, taking Justin’s wrist. DJ got Justin’s mouth open, slipped in a tube.

There was the hiss of oxygen.

“I’ve got a pulse,” Peters said. “He’s alive.” She reached out, pulled an instrument from DJ’s medkit, unrolling a blood pressure cuff, slipping it over Justin’s bicep.

“Pressure?” DJ said.

Peters looked terrified. “Forty over twenty and falling.”

“He’s crashing,” DJ said, flatly.

Blood suddenly bubbled from Justin’s mouth and nose. He gasped desperately, choked, and then screamed hoarsely. Blood sprayed the airlock, spattered DJ, Peters, Miller.

“He can breathe,” DJ said, his tone ironic. “That’s good. Let’s get him to Medical, go, go!”

All three of them bent to pick up Justin, Miller not even stopping to get his helmet off.

Weir sat at the gravity drive console on the bridge, listening to voices in the air and watching a phantom spin on the display in front of him. He had tried to watch Neptune, but he could not focus on the planet for very long. He could have turned his attention to scanning for the rings of debris, or trying to locate the Neptunian moons, but he had no heart for that.

Voices in the air.

DJ saying, “Intubate, pure oxygen feed, get the nitrogen out of his blood.”

Then Peters, almost frantic: “His peritoneum has ruptured.”

Miller had managed quite a rescue, it seemed, but that was what he was good at.

It was too late, Weir thought, too late in the day. He doubted that Miller was as brilliant a rescuer as they would all need. They were drowning and no one realized it.

DJ again: “One thing at a time, let’s keep him breathing. Start the drip, 15ccs fibrinogen…”

The computer model of the gateway swelled on the display before him, rendered out now, showing the hotspots and the magnetic flow. It was a live thing, breathing energy in and out, flowing from the Core at the heart of the ship.

I am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, dismayed by the explosion of one tiny atomic device… what would he have said to a power source that involved the inescapable energies of a collapsed star? The physicists have known sin, Oppenheimer had said later, only to be pilloried by a world that wanted the destructive forces without the moral boundaries.

Peters, frightened but holding that professional edge: “Christ, he’s bleeding out, pressure’s still dropping… he’s going into arrhythmia—”

They were losing one. In times past, everyone had been lost, all hands down with the ship. What was the point of fighting back, fighting to survive? The darkness swallowed everyone eventually, no matter how much they might be loved, no matter how valuable they were. In the end, the only way to deal with the darkness was on its own terms, at a dead run, giving in to that one last plunge into the unknown.

DJ, urgent: “We have to defib… clear!”

The bang of the defibrillator, the sound of a body convulsing under the power of electricity. In the end, medicine had not progressed far. The galvanic force was as much a going concern now as it had been when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had written Frankenstein. He with the most electron-volts wins the game.

The diagram drew him in, seeping into the empty places where his soul had once lived. A live thing, it shifted before his eyes, compelling.

Gently, a lover’s caress, he touched a switch. He felt the surge of power, the changes within the heart of the ship.

The screen cleared. Pristine text flashed up in place of the embedding diagram: Commencing gravity drive initialization process. Gravity drive will be primed for ignition in two hours.

Cooper and Smith had remained outside, working as fast as possible on the Lewis and Clark. The rest, Weir included, had congregated in the Gravity Couch Bay of the Event Horizon. DJ and Peters had managed to save Justin in the finish, but it had been close.

Miller was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life.

Justin was now floating in one of the Gravity Couches, suspended in a bilious green gel. He had become a patchwork man, his body damaged as much by the work that had saved him as by the original trauma.

“We were able to stabilize him,” DJ was saying, “enough to get him into a tank. He’ll live, if we ever make it back.”

“We’ll make it,” Miller said, firmly. “Good work.” He looked at Starck.

“How long?”

“CO2 levels will become toxic in four hours,” Starck said. She looked as though she was ready to fall down at any second. He figured they all were in shock over Justin… except for Weir. Weir seemed incapable of that sort of emotional investment.

Peters was standing in front of Justin’s Gravity Couch, her face a mask of grief. Almost losing Justin was as bad for her as almost losing her son.

Miller walked over to her, slowly, hating to do this to her now, hating the fact that he could not avoid it. If they were to survive, he needed everything he could possibly accumulate.

“Peters,” he said, keeping his voice gentle, soft. She looked around at him, her eyes big, red-rimmed, still close to tears. Medical detachment could go only so far, he realized. “We need to know what happened to the last crew.

Before it happens to us.”

“I’ll get back to the log,” she said, her voice weak. She looked away from him, off into her own personal distance. She was getting the thousand-meter stare. “But on the bridge. I won’t go back into Medical.”

“Fine,” Miller said.

Peters walked away from him, leaving the Gravity Couch Bay. He wished there was something he could do for her. At the moment he was not certain that he could do anything for any of them.

Weir watched Peters leave, wondering what mission Miller had sent her on this time. He knew she had been very attached to Justin, had tended to mother the crew. It must be very difficult for her right now.

Starck, standing next to him, said, “Justin said something about ‘the dark inside me.’ What does that mean?”

Weir looked up at the tank. Justin had been interesting to contemplate from an engineering point of view, just in terms of how much damage a human body could sustain and still keep on functioning.

It was not Justin in the tank.

It was Claire, his wife. She was naked, her hair streaming around her face, dark trails flowing from her hands.

He stared, perplexed.

Without thinking, he said, “I don’t think it means anything.”

He blinked.

Justin floated in the Gravity Couch, unmoving. “You weren’t there,” Starck said.

Miller had walked over to them. Weir looked at him, suddenly uncomfortable.

“That’s right,” Miller said, looking down at Weir, unwavering. “Where were you?”

“I was on the bridge,” Weir said. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.