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“Go!” Mark shouted. He shoved Sasha back down the hatch feetfirst, swinging the laptop toward Rafael to cover their escape. Plastic slammed into Rafael’s blood-drenched skull. Bone crunched, and his cheekbone and eye socket collapsed. His eye slithered out of its orbit, dangling down his cheek.
He bared his teeth and flew at Mark.
Sasha grabbed Mark’s leg and hauled him down the hatch and intoDestiny. Sarah struggled along the bulkhead, grimacing as she tried to help them. Like Sasha, she hefted one of the station handholds in her shaking hand.
Aluminum bars weren’t going to stop whatever Rafael had become.
Sasha grabbed Mark and Sarah and hauled them intoUnity, dragging them through the hatch as Rafael clambered down like a spider, crawling across the bulkheads as he followed them. He kept screaming, and Michaela joined in, a counterpoint to his horror.
Sasha slammed the airlock separatingUnityfromDestiny—andFreedom’shatch—behind them, kicking it closed with his feet before he dogged the handle and shoved his broken handhold through the wheel. Now that they were all trapped inUnity, Michaela’s howls seemed amplified, as if she was tapping into some kind of raw power she never had before. Her guttural groans and rasping barks sliced down Sasha’s spine.
Mark pulled Sarah out of her tumble as Rafael flew at the closed airlock. Pounding echoed throughUnity, mixed with Rafael’s hollow shrieks.
“What now?” Mark asked. He cradled Sarah’s jaw and checked her bite. Blood still oozed from her throat. Michaela had bitten into her jugular vein.
Sasha flattened himself to the bulkhead farthest from Michaela and crawled across the module, using the computer displays and switches like hand- and toeholds on a mountain climb. Michaela watched him, snarling and trying to lunge from her restraints, but she swiped at empty air. Finally, Sasha made it to theZaryatunnel, and he slipped inside, clinging to the ceiling.
“Sasha!” Mark bellowed. “Where are you going?”
He moved throughZaryaand into the gloom ofZvezda. He knewZvezdaas well as he knew his apartment, dreamed aboutZvezda, could navigate the simulator blindfolded with one hand. He propelled himself down the module, arms extended, hands ready to grasp—
The Soyuz module door.
He hauled the heavy door open. An old Orlan space suit tumbled out, along with Russian space program detritus a decade of ISS crews had shoved into the Soyuz, convinced they’d never need an escape craft and content to treat the old craft like a closet.
The junk was in his way now, and he threw it out in fistfuls, flinging the Orlan suit and an old cosmonaut helmet acrossZvezda, followed by broken tools, an old belt for the treadmill, the station’s vacuum cleaner. So much junk.
“Sasha!” he heard Mark bellow. “Donotlaunch the Soyuz!”
Mark thought he was running, cutting his losses and making a break for it. Dr. Worrell’s words came back to him.Can you be a relied-upon member of the crew, so much so that other people are willing to put their lives in your hands?
There it was. Sasha lunged half inside the Soyuz and ripped away the shielded paneling that hid one of the last secrets of the Russian space program. His hands wrapped around the TP-82, a combination shotgun and pistol his cosmonaut forebears had insisted on bringing into orbit when they realized their craft might land anywhere in Russia, and when it did, they were nothing but a brilliantly illuminated dinner for the polar bears and wolves roaming the vastness of Siberia or the Arctic.
Even after all these years, it was still locked and loaded, ready to go. Both slugs were in the double-barreled shotgun. He dropped the pistol magazine, checked the rounds, then slammed it back into place.
The Americans never brought weapons into space.
Mark’s bellows carried through the dark, echoing in waves through the empty station. He shouted for Sasha, cursing, ordering him not to launch the Soyuz.
Sasha tumbled forward, twisted, and pushed his boots off the Soyuz hatch, propelling him back throughZvezdaand into the pitch-blackZaryatunnel. He heard Michaela before he could see anything, her snarls and savage growls, the snap of her jaws. Beyond Michaela, beyond even Mark’s frantic shouts, Sasha heard a heavy metallic banging, something louder than Rafael’s pummeling of the airlock door. Metal on metal. And close. Too close.
“Sasha!” Mark hollered. “Get back here, now! We need you!”
He burst intoUnityand scampered across the high bulkhead, skittering away from Michaela’s reach. He spun, searching for Mark and Sarah.
Mark was shielding Sarah with his body, brandishing a broken laptop in one hand like a shield and holding his flashlight like a javelin in the other. Rafael hung before them both, suspended midstrike. Beyond him, the airlock door was open, the stack empty and dark all the way toHarmony. Crimson droplets danced through the stack, swimming towardUnity, toward them all.
Blood and saliva came off Rafael’s face in waves. He reached for Mark and Sarah, hands slicing the air as if he could carve his way closer. His legs kicked, boots finding purchase on a locker and a control stick and pushing him closer to them. Sarah had buried her face in Mark’s neck and clung to his back, screaming a mixture of agony and rage.
“Mark!” Sasha shouted. He unfolded from the high bulkhead, looping his feet through the tie-down straps and wrapping his arm around a bundled snake of cables leading to a dead command module. Upside down, from Mark’s perspective, Sasha hung nearly face-to-face with Rafael.
Rafael snarled, a mimicry of the rogue’s grin he’d greeted Sasha with days before. He tried to turn, to spin toward Sasha, clawing for his face as he shrieked.
Sasha raised the TP-82. “Hold on!”
Mark grabbed a handhold and wrapped his hand around Sarah’s waist.
Blood spattered out of Rafael’s open mouth, sliding off cracked teeth and splashing the bulkhead to the side of Sasha’s face.
