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“Jim, this is Houston.” CAPCOM took over. “How are you doing, buddy?”
“Hit my head…” Jim mumbled. “Fuck...”
“How’d you hit your head, Jim?”
“On my Goddamn helmet, how else do you think?” Jim grumbled. “I fucking flew backward. Smashed my radio into the locking ring.”
“Jim, this is Alpha,” Phillipa said. “Michaela’s gotIndependencebeneath you, so you just turn around and head on back. Sarah’s got what she needs for her EVA. Come home. Let’s take a look at your head.”
“Negative, Alpha.” Jim fired the jets on his SAFER, pulling himself slowly out of his tumble.
“Jim, if you’re bleeding, we need to get a pressure bandage on that right away. Just a little bit of fluid in your suit can suffocate you if it flows forward over your head.”
Spinning, Jim maneuvered back across the void to the starboard side of the bell. “I’m coming,” he grumbled. “But I’m not coming back alone. I just got the shock of my fucking life up here. Wait until you see it, too.”
His helmet lights whispered up the satellite girders and traced the interlocking aluminum upward, higher, until the beam of light landed on a leg, wreathed in white nylon-canvas, a blue cord running up the side.
“Oh my God,” Mark breathed.
“Houston,” Jim said, his breath crackling over the radio, shaky and thin. “This satellite wasmanned.”
Washed in the beam of Jim’s lights, Sasha, the ISS crew, and all of Houston’s Mission Control saw the cosmonaut in a Sokol space suit strapped to one of the launch harnesses.
A layer of ice had formed on his space suit and over his visored helmet.
He’d been there for decades—forty years.
“Is he alive?” CAPCOM asked.
“Obviously not, Houston,” Jim said. “This looks like a late-1980s Sokol. Made for entry and reentry only. He would have had maybe an hour of oxygen when this thing went up.”
“To even survive the ascent would be a miracle,” Sarah said. “That bird had to have been heavily shielded in multiple stages. Otherwise he would have burned to a crisp.”
“Why is he in there at all? There’s no habitable area on that satellite. There was no way for him to survive once it made orbit.” Phillipa shook her head, staring at Mark.
Jim’s camera zoomed in on the suited corpse as he floated closer. Cargo straps crisscrossed the cosmonaut's chest, an X that bound his shoulders and hips and tied his hands to his sides. He’d been forced onto the launch harness behind him. “I don’t think he had a choice about taking this trip.”
You don’t know the Soviets, Sasha. Soviet ghosts need to stay dead.“He was murdered.”
“How’s his radiation level?” Phillipa asked. “Has he been cooking for forty years?”
“Low,” Jim said. “Surprisingly low. Ten rems. Did this nuke just turn on?”
Silence over the radio, fromIndependenceto Houston and back. Phillipa and Mark stared at each other. Sarah’s eyes darted up from her schematics on the nuclear missile. Joey and Rafael floated at the end of the module, monitoring the mission.
“The malfunction could have armed the nuke,” Sarah said. “It might not have been hot for four decades.”
“Well, we can’t just leave him there,” Phillipa finally said. “Jim, can you cut him free?”
“It would take me about ten minutes.”
“How’s your oxygen?”
“Good to go.”
“And are you bleeding?”
“Not enough to cause a problem.”
