A/N: Welcome back, fight fans! Occurs to me that, as usual, I forgot the disclaimer: Sunshine and its original characters are the property of Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and Fox Searchlight Pictures. Whitby and the other made-up folks are mine. I'm making no money off of this. That said, there's a big, weird world o' hurt on the horizon. Have at it- and, as always, thanks for the comments. They're very much appreciated!
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Two minutes before Capa saw the sky split, ship's time was coming up on oh-three-hundred, the doldrums of the nightshift, where energy levels found themselves mired in a post-lunch Sargasso sea of digestion and dinner and quitting time were faint promises on the featureless horizon.
Kaneda was on the flight deck, taking a turn at the controls. Trey was on the upper deck, at Navs, still trying to tune the sensors to see through the cloud of dust and rock that surrounded the ship. Mace was in the gym, doing military presses and wondering whether he should muster his powers of tact and compassion toward his crewmates and offer to trade places with Whitby, who was rattling about in the galley. It was her turn on dinner duty, and her cooking, putting it charitably, fell somewhere between "battery" and "attempted homicide."
In the galley, their lanky culinary felon was chopping a pile of the ship's ubiquitous carrots. Sullivan, in a t-shirt and lounging pants, walked in, lifted the lid on a saucepot as he passed the stove, took a sniff, flinched.
"Good God. Tell Mace and the others they have my deepest sympathies."
He continued to the refrigeration unit and rummaged himself a box of the add-water-stir-and-freeze glop that passed for vanilla ice cream. Whitby angled the tip of her knife his way.
"I catch you eating that out of the carton, Jimbo, and you'll be tonight's secret ingredient."
Sullivan grinned, went to the cupboard for a bowl. "For the sake of my crewmates, I'd almost be willing to make that sacrifice."
Whitby's expression remained as steely as the blade of the knife in her hand, but Sullivan saw a smile in her eyes as she went back to her chopping.
#####
Many of the crew had trouble sleeping. Ingrid Barring's theory was that, after so many months of tedium and isolation, few of them wanted to spend six to eight uninterrupted hours alone in their own heads.
The insomniacs all had different ways of coping. Moeller, for instance, watched chips of old films, or replayed her messages from her family on Earth. She refused to wear headphones; passing the smoked privacy glass of her cabin, you'd hear soft voices, music. Sullivan, like clockwork, made his way to the galley for a snack at oh-two-forty-five. Cassidy kept company with Capa, however loosely you cared to define the term. And Barring split up the interminable passage through the nightly rest period by saving her shower time for oh-two-thirty.
Just before oh-three-hundred, still toweling her hair as she emerged from the short corridor leading to the head and the showers, she nearly collided with Corazon, proceeding forward from the direction of the galley.
"Excuse me," Barring said.
She tried not to sound brusque; with anyone else, she might have succeeded.
"Hmph," Corazon replied, in a tone that suggested Barring might as well have been a rhinoceros set loose in the corridor.
Barring, seeing a napkin-wrapped packet in Corazon's hand, made a rare second attempt to be sociable. "Don't feed the second-string physicist," she said, with maybe a third of a wry smile.
Corazon frowned, passing, then smiled back. She gestured with the wrapped sandwich. "He certainly won't feed himself—"
There was a tremendous thud. A lung-compressing, encompassing, concussive whumph.
The entire corridor skewed sideways. And, that suddenly, the bulkhead next to Corazon disappeared. So did the up-corridor to the crew quarters.
The pieces— at least three meters across and two meters high, combined— ripped away from the ship like a giant lid being pulled off a tin.
Behind Corazon, they tumbled off into space.
Barring was thrown backwards, into the bulkhead behind her. The air slammed from her lungs. She staggered, tripped, hit her knees hard on the waffled decking.
From the deck to her left, Corazon turned toward the gaping hole in the opposite bulkhead. Barring froze, staring at the botanist and at the sudden blackness beyond her.
And then the air punched into both of them, from behind, from both sides, as the atmosphere rushed out into the void.
Aft, ahead of the access to the flight deck, and ahead, just short of Medical and Comms, the emergency bulkheads sealed the corridor. The decompression siren whooped—
— and went silent.
In the ten seconds of consciousness remaining to her, Barring wondered why.
Then she realized: The air is gone.
A prickling, a burning, under her skin, in her eyes. In complete vacuum, she would have maybe ten seconds of consciousness. She remembered her training, forced herself to breathe out.
Nine seconds.
An emergency shelter three meters to her right. She threw herself toward it, grasped the door handle with fingers already going numb.
Eight seconds.
Motion behind her as Corazon tried to stand, tried to cross the corridor.
Seven seconds.
Barring's eyes felt as though they'd been filled with burning hydrogen. Her vision was going. She fought the urge to take a breath—
Six seconds.
— as she saw Corazon stumble again to her knees. Still gripping the door handle, Barring leaned across the corridor and reached for the botanist with fingers she could no longer feel—
Five seconds.
Her throat and chest felt as though they were filling with lead. The blood in her veins, the water in her body, in her eyes, were turning to gas. She didn't know if her feet were still on the deck.
Four seconds.
Her face twisting with effort, Corazon raised her arm and reached out, and Barring saw their fingers touch. The prickling under her skin was a fire now, an agony—
Three seconds.
There came a second impact.
The corridor lurched sideways. Tipped. The last thing Barring saw was Corazon falling into space from the gap in the bulkhead. Blind, Barring fell into the shelter and clawed the door shut. She heard the hiss of the emergency oxygen. She heard herself scream in pain and fear.
And then she blacked out.
#####
In the galley, the first impact threw Whitby and Sullivan off their feet. Things spilled, splashed. Whitby swore as her left arm caught a splatter of sauce. In the gym, the resistance bar was jolted out of Mace's hands. Falling, it nearly caught him in the head. The lights went out, revived as blue-tinged emergency illumination a heartbeat later. He was up a second after that, running for the flight deck.
#####
The first impact hit aft of the garden. The deck bucked violently beneath Capa's feet. He nearly fell. The mugs, half full, skittered off of table- and counter-tops and plummeted, splattering coffee. Cassie started awake, dropped her book. She pushed up out of the corner chair as the decompression alert went off in the main corridor. Capa stared at her in confusion. For a second, not quite fully aware, she stared back.
Then she grabbed his hand, hauled him through the privacy strips to the landing overlooking the garden. "Capa, come on—"
The soles of their shoes thudded together on the metal stairs. Halfway down, hearing the klaxon whooping in the passageway outside the garden, feeling the aftershocks jolting through the infrastructure of the ship, Capa realized where she was taking him: there was an emergency decompression shelter forward of the garden's double doors.
Which slid heavily shut when they reached the bottom step. Capa ran to the doors, hooked his fingers into the handle-indent on the right-side panel, and pulled.
"No— Capa, no." Cassie put her hand on his shoulder. He stopped pulling. She leaned in and up, looked out through the window in the left-side door panel. "There's a hull breach," she said. "This sector, maybe one over—"
"Icarus," Capa said, "verify location of hull breach."
Icarus didn't respond.
Another impact, directly overhead. They looked up. A body. A fucking body had hit the middle window. A skull shattered into a comet-tail of blood and bone against the thick glass. Then something huge and dark, an edge, a metallic corner, struck the window and tumbled away. A building-shadow raced across the garden and was gone.
"Oh, my God—" Cassie said.
Capa crossed to the wall-comm mounted outside Corazon's office, repeated: "Icarus, verify location of hull breach."
No response.
"First Officer Kaneda, respond."
Silence from the feed.
"Mace? Whitby?" Capa said. "Flight deck: respond, please."
From the window where the heavy tumbling something had struck came a sharp popping sound.
The lights flickered. Cassie brushed past Capa, heading for the workbench Corazon called her office.
"There's no decompression closet in here," she said. "But the whole room is designed to act as a radiation shelter. If there's any radiation, that is—"
Capa looked up at the damaged window. A crack was forming in the glass. "Can you close the shutters?"
He heard the grating overhead as the first crack spread, as a second and third sprung from it like tributaries.
At Corazon's workstation, Cassie typed a password, access codes, commands. Her eyes were intent on the flatscreen monitor. "Taking the radiation sensors offline now—"
Capa joined her. With luck, Icarus, blind to any threat from radiation, would have to trust the judgment of her human crewmates.
"Entering radiation-shield override," Cassie said.
The screen at Corazon's workstation flickered, then froze. Capa rested his hand on Cassie's shoulder as the two of them held their breath—
— possibly, he thought, for a very, very long time—
Radiation protocol initiated. Shields closing. A pre-recorded message. Not Icarus' "live" voice. Jolting, not only because of the implication— that the mainframe had been damaged— but because of how easy it was to tell.
Cassie straightened away from Corazon's workstation. She and Capa watched the articulated lead-gray shutters unfold and slide up and over the garden windows.
"I'm not sure if the seal will be air-tight," she said. "If it isn't—"
"Cassie—"
"— the last of the oxygen is yours. You know that. You're vital to the mission. I'm not."
Capa couldn't meet her eyes. "Let's have another look at the corridor, try to get the doors open."
#####
With comms down, those aft of the breach, like Mace, made their way to the designated meet-up point at the flight deck. There, joining Trey and Kaneda, Mace, Whitby, and Sullivan witnessed a horrifying vista through the forward windows: the crew quarters tumbling away from the ship, amid shattered shards of one of the rotating communications towers.
A dead hiss from the comm feeds. Static and scrambling from the monitors, as Icarus re-routed her functions. Whitby broke away, ran for the corridor heading forward. "Dan—!"
Mace and the others followed her a second later. Whitby was clawing at the horizontal midseam of the emergency bulkhead that blocked the passageway, ramming the heavy alloy top-panel with her shoulder. It was the only time Mace had ever seen her lose control.
"We can't get through," she said. "Mace, it's sealed. We have to get it open—"
"Loinnir, no. No." Mace grasped her upper arm. She swung on him, stopped just short of hitting him. He met her panicked eyes. "You saw. We all did. There's a hull breach. The living quarters are gone."
#####
Methodically, they called for responses from the comm links. Nothing from Searle, Corazon, Harvey, or Capa. Nor from Pinbacker, Barring, Cassidy, Kirbuk, Moeller, or Reyes.
Mace nodded toward Whitby. "Try me."
"Mace, respond," Whitby said. No sound came from his tag.
"Icarus," Mace said, "how many crew are on board?"
Unable to specify at this time.
"Icarus, where is Captain Pinbacker?"
Unable to locate at this time.
"Icarus," said Kaneda, "give me a list of crew currently registering pulse and respiration."
Unable to specify at this time.
"Identify speaker, Icarus," Kaneda continued.
First Officer Akira Kaneda.
Kaneda nodded at Mace.
"Identify speaker, Icarus," Mace said.
Unable to identify at this time.
"Verify pulse and respiration for Whitby, Icarus."
Unable to verify at this time.
"She can't tell whether we're alive or dead," Trey said.
"She's lost the em-names on up." Whitby looked at Mace. "At least. That's top-level mainframe function."
Kaneda nodded. "There could be a coolant leak. Or worse. Mace, Trey: get on it. Whitby, Sullivan: head out with patching. We need to seal the hull—"
Sullivan was looking numbly at the emergency bulkhead. "There could be survivors on the other side right now, sir—"
"If anyone reached the emergency shelter, they will have air enough to wait. If we cut through the bulkhead without knowing what is beyond it, we risk further depressurization."
"Wasting time," Whitby said. "C'mon, Jim." She patted his shoulder, ran for the aft airlock. Sullivan followed.
#####
Before she sealed her helmet, she took a deep breath and wiped the tears from her eyes.
#####
In less than five minutes, she and Sullivan were suited up and leaving the aft airlock. They shared a tether line at waist level; in addition, they had tethered to their wrists bags of cutting tools and bound sheets of bond-patch. They hauled themselves forward along the hull on inch-thick maintenance cable. Once they reached the main break, Whitby glanced inside. No sign of bodies. Sealed pressure doors three meters forward, two meters aft. A green light on the decompression locker across the way. Someone was alive, awaiting rescue. No time to gawk at the size of the hole in the bulkhead, which was three and a half meters across if it was a finger's-width: she started cutting the first piece of sheeting, signaled for Sullivan to stand by with the smaller pieces of glue-sheet that would knit themselves to the bond-sheeting and set on contact. With luck, they'd have the breached sector re-sealed in under ten minutes.
Sullivan hesitated, wrangling the glue-sheets. His helmet was facing forward along the hull. Whitby turned, looked where he was looking.
A body was caught up in the infrastructure ahead of the comms-tower assembly. Whitby focused hard, trying to see what Sullivan was seeing, through the obfuscating dust.
It was Therese Moeller. Her dark skin was rimed gray; she was hanging over one of the alloy beams like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a spar. Only no current stirred her limbs. She was absolutely still.
Terry— Sullivan said. Whitby heard; the localized inter-suit radio feeds were functional, even if the ship's mainframe-driven comms weren't.
She saw him reach for the hook on his end of the waist-tether. "No, Sully."
He ignored her. He unhooked his tether, fired his suit thrusters, and flew toward the infrastructure. When he was even with the comms-tower assembly, the remaining arm spun suddenly into view, out of the dust. It hit Sullivan like a ten-meter-long baseball bat. Over her suit-feed, Whitby heard him grunt in pain, watched in horror as he was knocked head over heels toward the outer edge of the shadow trailing the solar shield. Whitby tethered the repair kit to the Icarus, oriented herself, fired her thrusters, and leaped after him. The rough rule was that you had an eight-count, at speed or in free-fall, before you left the protection of the shield and the sun vaporized you. She caught Sullivan at "four."
And at that moment, upside-down, with the perfect clarity of adrenaline, she saw something. Through a break in the dust cloud surrounding the ship, at a distance of nearly a mile, she could see the wreckage of the crew quarters caught— at approximately eleven o' clock, piloting orientation— in the gridwork of beams supporting the edge of the solar shield.
No time for staring, though. No time at all. She fired her left-hand suit-thrusters to turn herself and Sullivan back toward the ship, the right-hand thrusters to trim their angle. "Jim, thrusters. Now—!"
She didn't know if he was conscious, let alone alive. To her relief, his thrusters fired. They hurtled back toward the Icarus.
Now, however, she had to wonder how much velocity they'd lost relative to the ship. The chalk-white hull was slipping by as they approached. Whitby unclipped her cable gun, fired a hook. If she missed, or if the hook failed to penetrate the hull, she and Sullivan would be left behind. If they hooked in too far aft, they could be dragged into the plasma wash from the ship's engines.
She grunted as the hook caught, as roughly fifteen meters of cable went rigid between herself and the hull. She triggered the cable retrieval and held on tight as she and Sullivan were reeled back to the ship.
With one hand still on his suit, she re-hooked their tethers to the maintenance cable running the length of the hull. She turned him so that she could see through his visor.
"Sullivan," she said. "Jim, are you ready to work now?"
He was wincing, in pain or shock or both. She saw him nod. Y—yes. I'm sorry, Whitby— I'm— Thank you f-for—
"No problem. C'mon, let's get at it."
#####
The mainframe room was aft, between the flight deck and engineering, and dark. Trey walked in first, slipped, and fell flat on his back. The deck was wet. He yelled when his trousers and the back of his shirt soaked through; he yelled louder when he put his hands on the deck to push himself up.
For a second, Mace ignored him. He knew that the liquid on the floor was coolant; he knew that touching it was like being sprayed with Freon. He moved slowly into the room, his eyes fixed on the two-meter-high tank that housed the ship's mainframe.
It was intact. No warping in the alloy framing. No obvious cracks in the thick Plexiglas sides.
"Don't be a baby, Trey," he said. He reached down, caught Trey's arm, helped him up.
"Fuck—" Trey grimaced as he wiped his hands on his shirt. "That shit burns."
"Don't I know it. You can wash it off later." Still careful of his footing, Mace approached the tank. The clear blue liquid stood roughly six feet deep. The upper edge of the top motherboard was exposed to a height of roughly six inches. "Looks like we had a slosh, not a leak. Check the stats: I'm thinking Icarus had time to reconfigure when this board was exposed. The loss of signal from the comm links probably has more to do with us losing that tower."
Trey moved, stiff-kneed, cautiously, to the ops panel on the wall behind the tank. "I think you're right," he said, scanning the monitors, the mostly green array of go-lights. "Now what?"
"We top off the tank, check the frame and the mooring, and give that board a chance to cool back down. If it's cooked, we can swap it out later. We can recover the spilled coolant, too."
"Okay."
The main parts locker was positioned between the mainframe room and engineering. Mace keyed his lock-code at the hatch, went in, came out with two twenty-liter box-bottles of coolant.
"We're gonna need at least eight more of these," he told Trey. He set the bottles on the deck by the tank, climbed the ladder to the maintenance gantry above the mainframe. "Here. Pass one up."
#####
Outside, Whitby continued her repairs after Sullivan signaled to her that he was going in. He didn't have to say a word: she could see globules of blood floating in his helmet.
"Sully, tell Kaneda we're good to repressurize," she said. Sullivan answered with a weary thumbs-up, hooked his end of the waist-tether to the maintenance cable, and hauled himself toward the airlock. Whitby went back to reinforcing the patch over the hull breach.
Minutes later, another form in a bulky golden suit approached from the direction of the aft airlock: Mace, armed with a patch kit of his own. He passed Whitby, continued forward to the Oxygen Garden. When Whitby finished with the hull, she joined him in fixing a potentially deadly branching of cracks in the central greenhouse window.
Before they went in, they retrieved Moeller's body.
#####
Two hours later, Mace and Whitby were back inside. They went to the Oxygen Garden, pulled off each other's counter-pressure vests, and lay side by side on their backs in the fern stand, just breathing the pure cool air.
#####
The two of them learned about Harvey at the first crew meeting called by their newly designated captain. Kaneda and Trey had discovered Searle, unconscious, on the deck just inside the entrance to sickbay. He had a broken right humerus and a bleeding gash in his forehead.
Harvey was dead.
He was still lying on his cot in Medical, and he looked to be asleep. There'd been an air bubble in his IV line. Or, possibly, a spike in his sedative when the power fluxed. Without an autopsy, it would be impossible to know.
He and Moeller were their two known deceased. Among the missing, presumed dead, were Captain Pinbacker, Doctor Corazon, Doctor Reyes, Chief Mechanic Cho, and Doctor Kirbuk. Kaneda and Trey had found Capa and Cassie, shaken but largely unharmed, in the Oxygen Garden.
"No other bodies near the ship, in the breached sector," Whitby said. Her tone was flat. She felt very tired. "What about the crew quarters?"
"No one could be alive out there," Mace said.
"There's a chance that—"
Kaneda cut her off. "We tend to the known survivors," he said. "We save our resources for repair and focus on the mission. Salvage can wait."
#####
All of them bore scrapes or bruises. In addition to Searle's broken arm, which Kaneda set with the help of Icarus' holographic auto-doc program, Sullivan had two cracked ribs. Barring, having overstayed her mere seconds' welcome in complete vacuum, was the most badly hurt of the injured. Under Searle's supervision, Kaneda and Trey had placed her, unconscious and sedated, in the one-cot hyperbaric chamber in Medical. Now, hours after she'd been taken from the depressurization shelter opposite the hull breach, her extremities were badly swollen; her face was nearly unrecognizable. Her blue eyes were masses of bloody hematoma.
"I've given her a dose of painkiller," Searle told the gathered survivors. "The swelling should subside within eight hours, though she's apt to experience scarring. Right now, she's blind. But neither of her retinas detached; if the liquid in her eyes doesn't turn septic, she'll get her vision back in a day or two."
"And if it does turn septic?" Cassie asked.
"Gangrene," Mace said. He looked at Searle. "Right?"
Searle nodded. "She loses both eyes."
"Oh, God," Cassie whispered.
She wrapped her arms across her chest, huddled near Capa. She and the physicist were practically sharing a small-animal fugue-state shudder. Mace frowned. He was thinking of Gavrila Kirbuk, and he could feel tears crowding against the backs of his eyes. He turned on Searle. "Tell me you were in Medical when it happened. Tell me you weren't jerking off up in the forward lounge when we were hit."
"I was right here. I was knocked out—"
"Oh, really—?"
"Mace—" Kaneda said.
"Harvey is dead for no reason. Barring is—"
"What was I supposed to do?" Searle frowned at him incredulously. "Break down the pressure door while the hull was still breached?"
"I don't know. You could have— There must have been something—"
"Hate to tell you this, Mace, but medicine's a little more complicated than patching holes and filling dents."
Mace took a swing at him. Whitby blocked his arm; she and Kaneda bowled into Mace, grabbed him.
#####
In the hours that followed, Mace focused stonily on the punchlist.
He checked the repairs to the Oxygen Garden window and to the hull. He fortified the repairs from inside the ship; he rerouted conduits and wiring. Their air and water recyclers were online and functioning; the non-emergency lighting had reset itself when the emergency bulkheads retracted.
With Trey's help, he verified that the mainframe's exposed motherboard was, in fact, undamaged.
He and Whitby and Trey worked to reroute and restore the communications functions that were lost when the comms tower broke away.
And, seeing the damage to the ship, working his way through the pattern of repairs, he pieced together a picture of what had happened: a meteorite had struck the crew quarters, and then the quarters themselves or a second meteorite hit the comms tower.
He imagined they'd never know for sure.
#####
The hours Mace spent on the punchlist and on speculation, Capa spent in the payload. The cavernous silence. A gray world unto itself. He realized, verifying density, mass, stability, radiation levels, numbers upon numbers upon numbers, that it was too easy for him to focus on the task at hand. He was too removed from the tragedy they'd suffered. He told himself he was experiencing shock, but he knew he had never really been connected to the world as other people were.
Gavrila was gone. He'd known her for ten years. She'd always been kind to him; her genius had always been tempered with patience and generosity, a rare thing in a scientist of her caliber. He thought of her now and felt nothing.
Daniel Pinbacker, the sharp-eyed warrior chosen to save the world, had treated him, gruffly, absolutely, sincerely, like a son. He had been a good, creative chess player. He would have done anything to keep Capa safe, to guard the payload, to preserve the mission. Capa thought of him and felt nothing.
The others, with whom he'd shared the interior of Earth's one true starship for over a year: stable Reyes, Moeller with her humor, her smile, Cho a welcome even-tempered buffer between the crew and Mace. Corazon, slender and sharp as a wasp, working hard against type by perpetually trying to make sure Capa kept himself fed. He thought of them and felt in himself his surroundings in miniature, in mind-size. Perfectly gray. Perfectly calm.
Perfectly empty of emotion.
#####
When Cassie came to check on him, in the payload's control room, he was glad.
#####
Capa?
The one word, through the wall-comm mounted by the door. The comm tags hanging against his chest still weren't working.
"Come in, Cass."
He reached over, keyed the lock code. Cassie pushed in through the heavy gangway door.
"How's it going?" She was trying to look less exhausted, more certain, than she actually felt. He could tell.
"Well." He offered her a quiet smile. "We're in good shape on this end."
She smiled back, just a trace. "Ninety-six hours," she said, looking at the countdown timer. "After all these months, where did the time go?"
"It's all relative, Cass. Past and future. Before and after." He saved his work on his touchpad, joined her at the control panel. "The question is, we make it to the launch point, we deliver the payload: then what?"
"Then we stick with the plan. We go home."
That simple. While he held few doubts about the soundness of the science behind the mission— the numbers were there, and either they described reality or, through his error, they didn't— sometimes, rarely, he indulged in the belief that they as a crew might make it home again after they delivered the payload to the sun. Sometimes, even more rarely, and, he realized, a little selfishly, he indulged in the hope that Cassie had humanity enough for two. "You don't have to be brave for me, Cass."
"Yeah." She looked at him directly, and her eyes were sad but affectionate. "I kinda think I do."
#####
They fell as a group into a funk of exhaustion, disbelief, and shock. Seeking security in community, or simply being afraid, for now, to be alone, people took to bunking in the mess. Having verified that the payload was intact and stable, Capa rested in his usual corner. Mace, staggering in after finishing a marathon of repairs and systems checks, found him and Cassie curled up together like puppies, fitfully napping; the mechanic simply collapsed on the bench across from them and slept. Kaneda was on the flight deck, alone, piloting. Searle tended to Barring in sickbay.
A loss of time, of sense of shift: Mace woke when he smelled cooking. Capa was up, scrambling vegetables and tofu. The physicist rounded up the others; save for Barring, they all sat together and ate. Mace watched Cassie staring at the glass beside her plate and found himself thinking, as their chief pilot had to be thinking, of one thing for which they could be thankful: At least there's clean water.
A day passed. All of the able-bodied crew worked, ate, and slept in staggered stages. Even after Trey and Whitby restored internal comms late on the afternoon of the day following the collision, there was very little chatter over the ship's internal feeds. Kaneda helped Searle to tend to Harvey's and Moeller's remains. Therese had little choice in her disposition at this point: replacing the gasified blood in her veins with embalming solution was impossible. She'd have no long ride home in the mortuary freezer. But Moeller, as Sullivan was quick to remind them, had loved the sun; she wouldn't mind being committed to the light: cremation beyond the solar shield's outer edge. Harvey's directives, on the other hand, clearly specified interment on Earth, if at all possible. He'd wanted to go home from day one; there'd be no burial in the void for him.
That evening, Kaneda called a crew meeting. He did most of the talking, with an emphasis more on status than on morale: They were now a crew of nine, but the payload was intact, they had water, heat, and atmosphere, the recyclers were functioning, and they had navigational capability. In short, the mission was still on.
They were three days from launch.
#####
That evening, with Mace's help, Trey continued his attempt to restore their communications with Lunar Control, some ninety million miles in their wake. Finally, after an hour of working in complete silence, Mace asked, his tone bone-dry: "When we get this thing up and running, if we were to ask for one, how long would it be until we could expect a rescue team?"
"Bet the IndoRuss alliance could have a salvage crew here in three days," Trey replied. "Of course, they'd claim the ship— and sell the payload."
"I'd love to see Capa's reaction to that."
Trey stripped all the expression from his face. "'Puh-please duh-duh-don't tuh-touch my buh-buh-buh-bomb.'"
"'Unless you're Cassie,' of course," Mace added. "'Thuh-then you can tuh-tuh-touch my damn buh-bomb all you wah-wah-want.'" He smirked at Trey; they shared a chuckle.
#####
A bit later than that, Whitby was taking her turn at the ship's controls. Their chief pilot, having surrendered the joystick, was off following their junior physicist. Since the accident, when Cassie wasn't on the flight deck, or sitting with Barring, who was barely conscious and only beginning to regain her sight, she had appointed herself Capa's unofficial guardian. Under less-grim circumstances, Whitby might have found a joke in that: it was not unlike a Cavalier King Charles spaniel essaying the role of spike-collared mastiff. As it was, in the dark quiet of the flight deck, the mission's second pilot was subconsciously appreciating the shocked mind's ability to slice grief and hopelessness into bite-sized pieces. Whitby felt the loss of Daniel Pinbacker like a woman freshly cut, sometimes watching dumbly as the blood started to flow, sometimes feeling the sting. She stared at nothing, then at the monitors, in turn, as mechanically as a security camera. The forward view through the windows: the spindle-length of the ship, the immensity of the shield, the distant twisted wreckage of the crew quarters, the dull golden glow of the dust cloud that still surrounded them. The displays showing their course, their speed, their telemetry. Ten lines on the master bio-stats screen. Ten sets of numbers. Pulse, temperature, and respiration: the readouts from the comm tags of their ten survivors—
Ten.
Not nine.
Whitby sat forward, her eyes locked on that tenth line. A pulse-rate of fifty-seven. Respiration: ten breaths per minute. Core temperature well below norm. All as if the owner were comatose. The signal itself was spotty.
"Icarus, identify signal source, bio-stats line ten."
Unable to identify at this time, Whitby.
Whitby called over the general feed: "Captain Pin— Captain Kaneda, all available personnel to the flight deck, please."
#####
All of them save for Barring were gathered around the pilot's station, staring at that tenth line of bio-data.
"Whoever it is," Searle said, "they're in bad shape. Numbers like those— that's practically comatose."
"It's not an echo from the ship, is it?" Capa asked.
"No. I've cleaned up the signal; I've checked and cross-checked it." Trey, standing behind Whitby's chair, nodded toward the forward window, the dark wreckage of the crew quarters snagged in the gridwork at the upper edge of the solar shield. "Someone is alive out there."
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