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Michaela took it a second time. “Confirmed, Surgeon.”
“I don’t like it,” Dr. Worrell said. “He’s warmed too fast.”
“Then if we don’t move quickly, we’ll lose any information he might be able to give us,” Rafael said. “Decomposition will take over before we can get him back to Earth, at this rate.”
“Are you prepared to conduct a preliminary autopsy on the ISS?” Dr. Worrell’s voice was heavy with skepticism.
“We’ll make do, Doc,” Michaela said, sharing a long look with Rafael.
“We’ll start with the helmet.” Rafael reached for the latches and twisted, breaking the forty-year seal on the Sokol suit. A hiss sounded, air rushing into and out of the suit and mingling with the atmosphere in the lab.
A putrid stench wafted from the corpse, a tendril of death weaving outward.
Phillipa turned her head away, her eyes watering. “Houston, there’s a powerful odor coming out of the corpse.”
“Probably decomposition,” Dr. Worrell said. “The corpse has been frozen for forty years, but now he’s heated up enough to begin the decay process. His gut decomp must have created a miniature atmosphere overnight. When you’re finished, we will need to return him to as low a temperature as possible until we can transport the remains back to Earth.”
Michaela blinked over her mask, shaking her head, and slowly twisted the helmet off the cosmonaut’s skull. Rafael cradled the corpse’s neck and laid the head back.
Shoulder-length hair, longer than a Soviet military pilot’s ever would be, rubbed against Rafael’s fingers. It was brittle but thick, and a deep, rich brown, almost black.
“Are they female?” Phillipa asked.
“I’m not sure.” Michaela leaned in close, examining the face.
Stretched skin over arched cheekbones revealed a wide face with flat features. The skin was a warm, tawny brown. Decomposition had definitely begun. The skin was desiccated but starting to bubble now that the bitter cold of space had been swapped for the temperature-regulated seventy degrees of the ISS. “The eyes are missing,” Michaela said. “And there’s deep bruising around the eye sockets.”
“Not surprised about the eyes. They might have disintegrated in vacuum. In the Sokol suit, integrity would have been compromised after this long in orbit. Is there anything behind the ears?” Dr. Worrell asked.
Michaela turned the corpse’s head gently. “Yes. Bilateral Battle’s sign.” Postauricular ecchymosis, bruises behind the ear on the mastoid process of the skull.
“Basilar skull fracture, then. And intracranial bleeding.”
“I’d be surprised if therewasn’ta skull fracture,” Rafael said. “Launching into orbit strapped like they were.”
“I think we’re going to see a lot more trauma.” Michaela reached for the Sokol’s suit fastenings. “We’re removing the flight suit now, Houston.”
Michaela and Rafael worked together, lifting the limbs gently, unzipping the closures around the shoulders, down the chest, and between the legs, and undoing the complicated pattern of snaps and zippers and buckles. By design, the suits were too thick to cut through, made of layers of canvas and Kevlar.
Rafael passed each piece of the suit to Phillipa, who stuffed them into a stowage bag, until the dead man lay naked and exposed on the examination table.
“Biologically male,” Michaela said. His arms were shriveled and curled inward toward his chest. Both femurs were fractured, the bones wrenched out of alignment. The mummification process of space had created a near-perfect snapshot of his body as it must have looked the day he’d died, along with all the traumas he’d endured. His skin was flash-frozen and wrinkled, but a night inIndependencehad started to rehydrate the corpse. “Pass me the ultrasound.”
Rafael floated to the unit and powered on the machine, then passed the wand to Michaela.
“Houston, beginning at the aortic arch.”
“I see your transmission. Looking good.”
Rafael and Michaela stared at the display, watching the grainy black-and-white images appear. Phillipa floated closer, frowning. “Looks like major internal trauma.”
“Acceleration trauma,” Michaela said. “It’s not like our guy was strapped into any protective restraints.”
Astronaut’s internal organs, like everyone else’s, floated free inside their chest, suspended in a complex web of arteries and veins and tendons and tissues. At NASA, years of research and complex mathematics had perfected safe acceleration and deceleration, from throttling down at max q during launch to descent vectors that looped around the globe and slowed reentry for the astronauts as gently as possible.
During unmanned launches, those considerations didn’t apply. Rockets launched hard and fast, punching the sky and breaking into space at speeds no human could survive. If a human tried to ride one of those rockets, their internal organs would slam against their spines and shatter, shred across the razorblades of their ribs, and liquefy inside their chest.
The ultrasound wand moved down over the aortic arch and the pleural cavity, where the heart should have been.
