Chapter 5 #23
I spy Kodiak at the center of the ship, hunched over the makeshift radio receiver he installed on the previous spacewalk. He attaches a small box to it, and as he manipulates it, his voice rattles back over the comm. “No sign of the signal yet, let me see if I—”
His signal garbles and cuts out, as surely as if he’d been slashed across the throat. “Kodiak?” I say. “Kodiak, I think I’ve lost you.”
Maybe he’s catching his breath.
He looks in my direction and taps the side of his helmet. Because of the reflective surface, I can’t see anything of his face. All he can tell me is what I already know: we’ve lost comm.
I keep saying his name as I stare out the window.
“Kodiak.”
He hitches his feet into the rungs on the ship’s surface. It looks like such a precarious way to stay connected to the ship, to stay near me. To stay alive.
“Kodiak.”
He faces my window. I think he can see my face, even though I can’t see his, so I send him a nervous smile. “Kodiak.”
He points to the antenna, then crosses his forearms so they make an X.
The antenna isn’t working. Got it.
Then he gestures into space, his finger pointing in the exact direction of Saturn.
Its surface fills a quarter of 06’s window.
The clouds are an even yellow, dusky with purples, the rings severe and perfect.
Kodiak’s pointing, not at the planet, but at one of its moons.
A tantalizingly green-blue orb, like a piece of the ocean at the Mari beach, molded into a sphere by a child’s hands. Titan.
He crosses his arms again.
“Kodiak, what are you trying to say?” I whisper, the words loud in my helmet.
He points at Titan and makes the emphatic X again.
Titan . . . isn’t there?
His arms still crossed, Kodiak faces up and down the ship.
The ship itself doesn’t exist?
I might not know what he’s trying to communicate, but I do know that the dread is back, mixed equally with fear. Blood pounds loudly through my veins. “Kodiak,” I say, even though he can’t hear me, “just come back inside. Right now. Do you hear me? Stop what you’re doing and come back in.”
I put my hands to my heart, and then gesture to the airlock entrance. Again and again.
Finally, Kodiak nods. He starts moving too quickly, and his feet miss the rungs.
His legs kick through empty space, then manage to catch the ladder.
Kodiak pauses before continuing toward the airlock, more carefully this time.
He keeps one hand always gripping the ship, taking no chances despite the backup tethers.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper to myself, hands clenched.
He stops. At the gray door. The one that’s blocking the last remaining secrets of the ship. “No, keep going to the airlock, Kodiak, I just want you home,” I say under my breath.
I’m about to leave 06 and head back to the airlock entrance when the Coordinated Endeavor rumbles. I thought I knew all the ship’s noises, but this one is new.
I race back to the window, the bulky suit pitching me forward so I fall against the view of Saturn. The ship has released a blast of air, right against Kodiak.
It yanks him free of his handholds. Jerking and flailing, his body sails into space. He reaches out, just managing to snag a finger around a rung.
Another blast. It knocks Kodiak off the ship’s hull again. His hand swings through space to grab back on but misses, slicing through the void.
He falls up toward Saturn, jerking to a stop when he reaches the end of the tether.
That slender line is all that’s keeping him from slipping into the expanse, from suffocating in space or burning as he tumbles through Saturn’s atmosphere.
Kodiak’s legs kick frantically while he reaches one hand and then the other around the tether, dragging himself back toward the Coordinated Endeavor.
Vision blurring with tears, I stagger toward my airlock. “OS, there’s been an accident!” I cry. “I’m mounting a rescue!”
“There hasn’t been an accident,” Mother’s voice says calmly.
“Yes there has,” I say, my voice choking.
While I yank at the airlock’s handle, I manage a glance through the window. Kodiak’s got the tether securely in his grip and is pulling himself back to the ship, narrowing the distance between himself and the hull.
He’s going to be okay.
Except something impossible is happening.
“I love you,” comes my mom’s voice. My heart seizes. This is really my mother’s voice, not the voice skin OS uses to simulate her. “My darling Ambrose, I love you.”
“What’s happening?” I yell while I jerk the airlock’s handle. “Stop. Everything stop!”
The ship shudders, followed by a horrible rending and slicing, car accident sounds. I watch in shock as Kodiak’s hands race faster and faster along the tether, but his body stops making any progress toward the ship.
His line has been cut.
Kodiak holds the snipped end up to his helmet in disbelief. He pedals and swims toward the spacecraft, but his movements do nothing to bring him closer. He’s drifting.
If I get out there soon enough, I can save him. I’ve got the airlock wheel open now and press my shoulder against it.
The ship rumbles again, and there’s another vent of air. It sets Kodiak spinning as he shoots outward, away from the ship, away from Saturn, away from Titan, into the distant mass of stars and light-years of cold and empty darkness.
“Kodiak, I’m coming!” I scream. I’m in the airlock now, and fight to close the interior door, so the chamber can decompress and I can go out.
As I push the door closed, I hear the external airlock door whir and shudder. “OS, I’m not ready. Don’t open the external door yet.”
“I love you,” my mother replies.
A click, then a roar. The internal door blasts out, knocking me to the ground.
The impossible has happened. Both airlock doors are open.
I try to drag myself back into the ship, but my gloved hands skid along the smooth floor while the great hand of the universe yanks on my collar, sprawling me out toward space.
I hold myself against the wall, clutching with all my strength, my sputtering brain trying to figure out what’s happened and what I can do to stop it.
A click, and my helmet rips off from the suit. I see, in the corner of my vision, Rover with its whirring hands.
Rover unfastened my helmet.
The roar is so deafening that I can’t hear it. The ship’s air has turned cold and soupy and sharp. The walls themselves scream as dust, polycarb wrappers, food containers all whirl past me, the same force that’s pulling on them pulling on me, cutting my skin as we’re dragged into space.
Flying debris slams my head against the airlock doorway again and again, my vision sparking with pain and my mouth filling with blood until I’m soaring through the opening, past an open stretch of metal and polycarb until I’m outside the ship, until I’m drowning in a vacuum. Until I’m in outer space.
I gasp and heave and struggle, but my lungs won’t fill.
The void around my face is so cold it’s hot, pulling at my skin and at my lungs.
Every membrane of my body trills. The ship spins away from me, sometimes in view and sometimes careening away to reveal the darkness and the stars that spatter it.
Saturn, impossibly massive, should be dancing agile circles around me, but I can’t even see it. Saturn is not there.
Saturn is not there.
How can I rescue my sister if Saturn is not there?
I will drown.
I will freeze.
I will burst.
My brain strobes light and dark and light and dark. As I continue to spin, I glimpse a last vision of a suited figure, arms and legs flailing. Kodiak will outlive me by hours, until he slowly goes cold in the gloom of space, until he’s dead like me.
My death is now.
My heart clenches and collapses, pulling my lungs down with it. My vision turns from white to red-black as my eyes freeze. I don’t feel pain, only shock. Beneath that explosion of sensation, my last thoughts are of Kodiak dying alone, of both of us dying alone.
I wish I could share dying with him.