Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

He didn’t need to be told, though. He knew what he’d do, if he was them.

“Can I repressurise the ship?”

No.

“If I vent the air in the airlock, can I enter the ship?”

The computer went silent. It was thinking, like the genie of the lamp, whether or not to grant Johnson his wish.

Yes.

He resealed the suit, then switched on all the life support systems he’d just turned off. With the two second tap in his ears again, he pressed the button to cycle the outer door. He felt his suit expand and go stiff again.

Then came the moment when his plans could either be realised, or crushed like an empty can. He reached out to the internal door and gripped the release mechanism.

He felt the locks slip through his gloved hand, and the tell-tale turned from red to green.

He pushed the door aside, and eased himself into the ship. He didn’t have much room to manoeuvre. His suit’s torso was scarab-like, and his back fat with machinery. He knew he could make it through the bulkheads, because they’d been designed that way, but he had to be cautious and careful.

Johnson floated across the cabin to the ladder, which he caught one-handed. He turned himself so that he was head down along the axis.

He glided along the ladder’s length, broaching the bulkhead into the flight deck, which he could see into if he craned his neck just so.

Malinka had been strapped in, and she remained in her couch, but McMasters was floating free, as was his tablet, still playing the last recorded view the orbiter had of the aliens on Mars.

There wasn’t much blood in the cabin. Malinka’s nose was dewdropped with a frozen scab, but the few spots that glittered and spun like garnets were a poor signpost to the murder of the crew. The computer had killed them, slowly and painlessly. More or less. Her eyes were frozen open, irises of the clearest blue and sclera of the deepest red. Thread veins spidered across her puffy face.

Johnson pulled himself through and jumped for the pilot’s chair next to her. He straddled the seat awkwardly, trying not to lean back against his life support.

“I want to calculate an intercept course to Phobos. What delta v do we need?”

Four hundred metres per second.

“Okay. I need to do a burn of a third of a g for two minutes. We can finesse it as we go.”

“What’re you doing, son?”

Bradbury was in another spacesuit, hanging off the back of Johnson’s chair.

“Crashing the ship. We still have four live nukes on board, and I reckon I should put them out of harm’s way.”

“That’s smart thinking, but what if they try and stop you? What if they can fire up the rockets themselves and use the whole ship as a missile?”

“They’re over three hundred million kilometres away. By the time they know what I’m doing, it’ll be too late.” He started fetched out a fine stylus and started dabbing it at the astrogation screen.

“And what about you, Leroy? What happens to you?”

“Turns out I wrote myself into one of your stories after all, Mr Bradbury. This is how lots of them end, right? Bittersweet. I save the aliens from the crazy Earthmen, and die in the process.”

“You’re doing the right thing.” Bradbury leaned forward so that his helmet went tock against Johnson’s. “This is the moral choice.”

“You would say that. Since you’re me.”

“And you’re sure of that? Wouldn’t it be better to think that part of me is part of you? That everyone who’s ever read me makes me just a little bit alive?”

“Hold on, or whatever it is you do.” Johnson dabbed at the screen one last time. “Initiating burn. And make sure Abe doesn’t fall on you.”

The silent rocket motors rattled the ship, and McMasters’ body slipped stiffly down the wall to the floor. Johnson watched his crew mate settle on the rubber matting, all angles and bones. The tablet clattered next to him.

Bradbury shuffled over to the man on his hands and knees. “I wonder if he did get to talk to them. I wonder if they know what we’re doing.”

Johnson didn’t answer: he was watching the lines on the screen, the complex layers of planets and orbits, the natural and the artificial overlain, and his own progress amongst them. He was rising away from the surface, an arc of silver against the black, right into the path on onrushing Phobos.

His mouth was dry, and he took a sip of cold, chlorinated water from the straw in his helmet. He’d never been hit from behind by a quadrillion tonnes of moon. What would that feel like?

“Is there any way I can get out of this?” he asked.

Bradbury looked up from McMasters’ screen, reflecting the images from it on his curved faceplate. “You got the wrong guy, Leroy. If you wanted some kind of technical fix, you should have had Arthur. He was always doing that sort of thing. What was that one on the Moon?”

“A Fall of Moondust? ”

“No, the other one, where the guy bails out of his rocket and gets saved by orbital mechanics.” Bradbury tried to mime the scenario.

He knew it. “ Maelstrom .”

“That’s the one. Any chance of you doing something like that?”

“I’ve got about an hour’s air left in this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re a long way from home and there’s no one to rescue me.” Johnson watched the lines on the screen converge.

Bradbury clambered from the floor and shook him hard by the shoulders. “What do you mean, no one to rescue you? Who the hell is that down on Mars?”

“What makes you think they’ve even noticed us up here?” Johnson gestured at the screens around him. “They’ve never answered a single question we’ve put to them in two years. That’s pretty much how we got to be in this god-awful situation in the first place.”

“Maybe we were asking the wrong questions. I don’t know, Leroy. Isn’t it worth a shot?”

Johnson tried to scrub at his face, but his glove banged against his helmet. “I don’t know either.” His arms slumped down by his side, the weak gravity adding to the futility of his defeat.

Bradbury was suddenly in his face, helmets touching, the old man looking down at him through two thicknesses of clear plastic.

“You’re not giving up, Leroy. I won’t let you. Turn that big dish you’ve got up top and point it at them. Tell them you’re scuttling your ship and bailing out. See what they do. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

“I die quick or I die slow.”

“You get to look at Mars for another hour, son. Right up close.”

Johnson eased Bradbury aside and dabbed his way through the communications systems to turn the high-gain antenna at Mars. It wasn’t like he needed to be accurate with it, just aim it broadly in the right direction. When it had slewed around, he opened the microphone and said:

“My name is Commander Leroy Johnson of the space ship Pacific . My crew are dead and I am destroying my ship to prevent it from harming you. If you can hear me, I am abandoning ship. I will die shortly afterwards. If you want to pick me up, I’ll be right behind the big moon. If you’re longer than an hour, don’t bother.”

He pushed himself out of his seat and started back up the ladder, squeezing himself through the bulkhead. He bundled into the airlock, and Bradbury’s face appeared at the tiny window in the internal door.

“You’d better hurry. That moon’s coming up awful fast.”

Johnson slapped the external door switch with his hand. “This is not easy.”

The door swung open, and he gripped the edge of the airlock. He was facing Mars. Then he looked down the length of the ship, and there was Phobos.

If he thought Mars looked big, Phobos was bowel-emptyingly huge. Something the size of Delaware was about to ram the tiny, fragile Pacific and squash it like a summer bug on a windshield. His heart stopped and his fingers froze.