In the core module, Arkady hung in mid-air in a fetal position, turning over and over like a dead moon, orbited by constellations of loose and broken gear. He was unconscious, or worse. Ilya was an unknown quantity. Had he gone outside?
Whatever
Mir
was doing, they had to get back down to earth. They were sick, but not beyond help—he hoped. The satellite was still out there. The Spetznaz crew was still out there. He had to find Ilya and get Arkady into the Soyuz, and get the hell out of Dodge.
This isn't the damned Kremlin, it's one tiny space station. You can find one man. He willed himself to be calm, said a little prayer, and started looking.
Even with antifreeze in his eyes and Lord-knows-what clogging his nose, he found Ilya by following the smell.
Something assaulted his senses as he stuck his head into the Kvant 2 science module, a relatively unused portion of the station except for its EVA airlock, and the distinction of having
Mir
's only functioning toilet.
The toilet stall door swung open as he passed, the smell rolling out like ink in water, a palpable, rancid wave that sent him frantically kicking to the far end of the module.
His first thought was that the reclamation system had backed up, but he knew it was nothing so pleasant. It was a rotten smell, a death smell. He had a freezer filled with blood, tissue and urine samples in this module, maybe that could account for it. He had begun to notice a certain sour odor after processing Ilya's samples in recent weeks. Perhaps when the power failed, there had been some sort of chemical reaction…
As if to shut up his hopeful speculations, the door to the space toilet swung wide.
Ilya was deader than anything he'd ever seen in his life. He floated just above the solid waste collector, which old NASA salts lovingly called the "shitmitt," tethered in place by a catheter hose wound several times around his forearm. The arm had swollen up so much the hose had totally disappeared in the purple-gray folds.
Ilya's head bobbed forward as if the little flight engineer was trying to stand, but noisome pockets of gas shifting within his bloated abdomen were the cause. Hair drifted away from his bald scalp in sad, mud-brown clumps. His skin was translucent, and looked like an overstuffed sausage. Underneath, muscle, tendon, bones, and fat were reducing to a homogenous paste. On earth, he probably would have split open and soaked into the soil by now.
In his last moments, Ilya had torn open his "penguin suit," the bright red nylon coverall the cosmonauts wore to work. His chest and belly were swollen to three times their normal girth. The flesh throbbed and shifted as if something more than just gas struggled to get out of him.
Moxley let loose a scream and rolled, kicked the toilet door shut. It slammed on Ilya's head, swung back at him.
Moxley caught the door to shield himself from Ilya's body, which lolled out into the module like a gruesome, liquid-filled balloon. To close the door, he would have to touch it.
Ilya's scalp had ruptured where the door clipped it. Pulpy strands of liquid head waved in the fetid air. Do it, he ordered himself. One hand pushed Ilya in the chest, sank up to the second knuckle in mush where his rib cage should have been. He recoiled, kicking at the body, reaching for the door, when he saw the chrome mirror on the inside of it.
In the harsh fluorescent light, Ilya looked gray-green and bloated, hollowed-out and filled with rot. He looked like nothing so much as a bag of trash, except his eyes, though bloodshot and glazed, still looked back at him.
We're not going to make it. We're not—
WWJD, Sherman? Why don't you just PUSH?
Gingerly, lips sputtering out a chattering prayer, he sealed the toilet.
He was the sole survivor, but he didn't have much time. If what happened here was going to have any meaning at all, he had to get word to the ground.
He crawled back to Spektr module to clean himself up, when he chanced to peer into the eyepiece of the astronomical telescope. It was still set to the coordinates at which he'd last observed the terrible lightshow.
It was still going on.
He adjusted the magnification to bring the scene to maximum resolution, gazed at it until his eyes teared up.
The BOR hung in space, moving a few meters per second, if at all. The rail gun track and the starboard wing torn away, the dorsal loading doors flung wide open to reveal only streaming debris. The satellite hove into view and grappled the battered hulk, dragging it closer with an ever-thickening web of tentacles.
Such was his shock and dismay with the universe, that he could finally see what was happening for what it was. Increasingly, the images seemed to translate into another titanic natural battle which no one had ever witnessed, but which left its mark on the ocean as a harbinger of what unspeakable things lay beneath the sea. For did the black Soviet BOR space-plane not look like a sperm whale in mortal combat with its most formidable prey, the giant squid, in the light-less depths of the ocean? But the whales usually won…the tentacles—things of flesh, of nature, perverted into some mockery of the most mysterious dweller in the seas— pried the space-plane open wider, wriggling greedily into the pressurized spaces inside.
Something came out fighting. A humanoid figure in a bulky Orlan spacesuit tumbled out of the smashed fuselage and fired something into the satellite's huge black body, and then it all disappeared in a white glow. The vast crystalline rose of the lens array shattered, spilling curdled scalar light across the heavens, and all too quickly, it was only darkness, again, the space-plane and the satellite both swallowed up by nothingness.
"Yes, everything is changing, is it not, Sherman?"
He jumped. Ilya hovered in the mouth of the hatch like a ghost— white as a sheet, and damp, reeking of death and something that lay underneath death. "My stomach—it was cancer, you know? It is all better, now."
"Ilya," Moxley gobbled, "I thought you—that I was all alone—"
"Oh, you
are
all alone, Sherman," Ilya rasped. "Everything is changing, my stupid American friend. Now you are the sick one, and we are the strong. Think of Sergei Krikalev, who went up in '91 a Soviet, and returned to find there was no USSR. No more Union. Nothing compared to the changes that are coming."
The flight engineer ducked back into the node, and Moxley followed, because he was sure he was hallucinating, and wanted to see the phantasm disappear.
"There will be a Union again, Sherman. We were right all along, but we did not go far enough."
Moxley blinked and rubbed his burning eyes, and prayed some more, but there it was, wearing Ilya's face and body, but it
wasn't
Ilya.
Ilya's short, reedy torso was slightly elongated, but his arms and legs bent and twisted bonelessly, like snakes. His hands were nearly as long as his forearms, fingers like a spider lobster's legs, spears of multi-jointed bone with pads of flesh on the tips. His feet had opposable thumbs. He moved over the tangled, cluttered walls of the module like something that had been living and evolving in zero-gravity for millions of years. His eyes glowed the same silvery gray light that had killed him and Arkady.
The adapted cosmonaut swam into Kvant 2, turned and faced him just inside the hatch. Moxley paused in the node, unable to look directly at the thing, but striving with all his might not to look at the yawning mouth of the Soyuz capsule.
Ilya tore a panel off the wall with one bare hand. The more reliable of
Mir
's two Elektron oxygen generators lay exposed, a snarl of coolant hoses spilling out like intestines into Ilya's face.
"Look at all of this," Ilya said, and Moxley was most startled by, of all things, his voice, for it was an older man, speaking unaccented English. "Look at all the machines you need, to keep you alive. Look at how clumsy your body is, up here, Sherman. How fragile."
Moxley dove away from Ilya and into the nearest hatch, into the Soyuz. No, he'd gotten turned around. He was back in Spektr. Shit!
He turned and tried to duck back out, but Ilya swarmed around the node like a spider monkey, all arms and legs and laughing like a lunatic, and swung in front of the hatch to trap him.
Moxley hovered just in front of him, paralyzed.
"You Americans never understand long-term space habitation, Sherman. You never learn. Not like Russian cosmonauts. We know that to survive up here, you must be flexible. You must adapt."
Moxley slammed the hatch shut.
For about an hour, it was quiet. Moxley changed his shorts and treated himself to a moist towelette bath, then drank a bottle of water and wolfed down some Fig Newtons from his snack stash. He almost immediately threw it all up.
He felt weak, he could see weird ghosts fluttering around on the fringes of his vision, he wanted to curl up and go to sleep, and maybe never wake up. But he had something to do. The world had to know.
He warmed up the ham radio and leafed through his notebook for the frequencies he could try. He had no idea where they were, or what time it was, and his vision was too blurry to read his own handwriting in the damned book. There were two Russian receivers at Baikonur and in Siberia, and another in Germany. NASA had two radar stations tracking for them, but even during optimum comm pass slots, the signal was shaky at best, and good for little more than sending e-mail packets in short bursts. His chances of fishing blindly and finding something were next to nil, but he had to do something, if only to stay awake.
The circuits warmed up and immediately, an American voice was saying his name.
"Dr. Moxley, if you can hear me, please pick up."
Delirium washed over him. It was like waking up from it all, even if he was still in it. Someone knew he was up here! Someone American knew he was up here. It had to be Houston. He had given up on the bastards, but he should've known they'd be keeping tabs on him.
"Oh thank God, Houston, I'm so damned glad to hear your voices! Those crazy damned Russians started a war up here with something—"
"We're aware of the situation," said the American voice, and let out a clipped, tired sigh before closing the channel.
"What, how is that, Houston? We've been out of radio contact since before—"
About three hours ago, when he woke up and saw it flying up to them, and thought he was going home.
"This isn't Houston."
"What? Say again—"
"This is not Houston. Now, the entire station has been irradiated, is that correct?"
Moxley shook his head, trying to make everything fall in place. They wanted to know the facts, but they already knew the facts, more than he did, and Ilya—
On the other side of the hatch, he could hear Ilya talking to him, but he couldn't make out the words.
"Please verify that the satellite was destroyed, Dr. Moxley. Can you verify?"
"What? You mean the—" The thing had only looked like a satellite, but inside— "Yes, it's—the Russians blew it up, but they—I think they're all dead, but—it—it's gone, I think—"
"Now, are you the only survivor, Sherman?"
"Um—no…I mean, Arkady is probably dead, and I feel pretty sick, but I inhaled some coolant, so I could be okay, but—"
"That's a lot of uncertainties, son," said the American voice. "What about the flight engineer? Ilya Lyubov? What's his status?"
"He's—nearby. I mean, he—"
Go ahead. You're a scientist. You were sent up here at enormous taxpayer expense to explain an anomalous event. Explain this.
"Go ahead, Sherman. What's wrong with him?"
"Well, he said—he always said his gut hurt, you know? But he hid it from the doctors, so they couldn't ground him. And then, when the light hit us, he crawled off to die, and I saw his body, it was—"
"And now?" "He's, changed…how the hell do you know about any of this? Who the hell are you?"
Something scraped against the other side of the hatch, Sharpened steel, heavy. That'd be the cable cutters, monster pruning shears which the cosmonauts called the Guillotine.
"We're here to help you, Sherman. Taking time to explain would only lessen the possibility of getting you out of there."
"Getting me out?" Moxley suddenly came alive.
"That's what we want to help you do, if you don't want to die."
"Okay, I don't want to die—"
"Good, now, you're sure you're in Spektr module, the one the Russians call O module?"
"Damn it, I've lived here six weeks, I think I know—"
"Good. The Russians have a few pieces of gear they never told NASA about, and you're right on top of one of them. Go to the far end of the module with a flat-head screwdriver."
He grabbed one from a folded canvas tool caddy and swam through the maze of instruments. The Guillotine slammed into the hatch again, making him flinch in mid-flight and crash into the KFA, a massive camera crammed into the back of the module. It formed the back wall of his sleeping niche, a nylon bag velcroed to the wall beside the porthole, and a net hammock stuffed with books, notes and miscellaneous space crap.
He looked at the floor, shifting junk out of the way until he found a corner of a floor plate and a badly corroded, but still-effective screw. He got it out and searched for the second one.
"Are you still there?" he asked the headset.
"Yes, we're standing by. Have you got it open?"
"No, I'm looking for the other edges. But just so I have at least a few seconds' forewarning, what the hell am I going to find down here, and what do you expect me to do with it?"
The anonymous ground controller snorted at him. "That'll be pretty self-explanatory when you get it open. Now move!"
He waited until just after Ilya smashed the hatch with the Guillotine before he opened it and came out. In his fevered, adrenalized brain, he thought the little flight engineer would be spent and hyperextended, and the Guillotine down. Ilya was not Ilya, but he was still some kind of man, and he would respond to what he had in his hand the way all men did, when you used it.