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A shorn aorta and a formless, liquid mush was all they saw.
“Definitely acceleration trauma. I see shredded lungs,” Rafael said. “But what was he doing inside that satellite to begin with?”
“Do you see that?” Michaela pointed to the ultrasound and to a dark mass in the center of the mush. More black spots appeared, fluctuating in and out of the image as she pushed and prodded the corpse’s squishy chest. Rib bones cracked like twigs, like old paper crumbling to dust. “Shit. There’s something on the left lung…”
She pressed harder with the wand, trying for a clear image. Phillipa leaned forward, staring at the ultrasound display, trying to make out what Michaela had found. Fist sized, it looked like a black hole. “Looks like it could be a massive cardiac tamponade—”
Michaela dug in with the wand, and the cosmonaut’s fragile skin gave out. With a hiss, his chest tore, like old leather splitting, and a stream of blackened blood and putrefaction escaped into the module.
Screaming, Michaela, Phillipa, and Rafael reared back. Black fluid slammed into Phillipa’s face, coating her mask and sliding over her goggles and into her hair. A gelatinous orb of black and burnt crimson burst apart on Michaela's cheek, and a shower of nearly translucent droplets sprayed over Rafael’s face.
Jim slammed the caution panel at the module’s airlock, and the station instantly shut down circulation of oxygen into and out ofColumbus. He closed the hatch behind him, sealingColumbusoff from the rest of the station. At his feet, a biosafety locker held four filter masks and rebreathers equipped with canisters of personal oxygen. He slapped on one and tossed three down the lab. Phillipa grabbed hers through a veil of putrescence, rot and blackened blood shimmering in the fluorescent lights.
Michaela and Rafael scrubbed at their faces with their shirts and grabbed the oxygen masks. Ooze seeped from the corpse’s chest, an oily, slithering mass that seemed to writhe and wiggle in zero g. One globule slammed into a bulkhead, staining the white surface with a dark iridescent sheen.
Jim grabbed a biohazard bag and pushed forward, swimming toward the stream of decomposition. He swooped the bag over and down, toeing off the bulkhead and toward the corpse, which was deflating now as the pressure of putrefaction escaped from its chest cavity. He landed on the corpse with both hands and pressed the bag around its torn skin.
A wet burp erupted from the corpse’s chest. A burble of crimson-black ooze escaped the side of the biohazard bag and snaked up Jim’s arm, then continued upward until it slid across his face, slithering under the edge of the mask and washing over his lips, his cheeks, his eyes. It smelled like death, like rot. Jim gagged.
“Alpha, what’s happening?”Dr. Worrell shouted over the radio.“Alpha!”
“Biohazard spill,” Jim shouted, his voice muffled through the rebreathing mask. “The Soviet corpse blew a leak! We’ve got blood all overColumbus.”
“Blood?”Dr. Worrell’s voice went tight.“The corpse should not have warmed up enough to reach a liquid state, not after decades exposed to the vacuum of space.”
“Well, Doc, we’re swimming in his guts right now, so I don’t know what to tell you.”
Phillipa grabbed the medical kit from the back ofColumbusand swam to the others. She wiped her exposed skin with alcohol swabs from the kit, then wiped liquefied corpse from Michaela’s and Rafael’s faces as Jim continued to hold the biohazard bag over the leak. Some blackened blood was caught on their skin beneath the oxygen masks, but they couldn’t do anything about that yet. “Keep holding your mask tight,” Phillipa told Michaela. “You’ve got blood between the seal and your skin.”
Once Rafael’s face was clean, he grabbed the suction machine and chased down each globule, every floating mass of quivering decay. While he worked, Phillipa taped Jim’s biohazard bag to the corpse, and then they dragged a body bag out from the very back of the medical locker. It was the first time in the history of the American space program one had been needed.
She worked with Michaela to shove the cosmonaut’s distended, mush-filled corpse into the body bag and zip it up. It spun in a lazy orbit in the middle of the lab. The corpse apparently kept oozing putrefaction inside, giving the bulging bag inertia and movement along a lazy Y-axis yaw.
“Tape the zipper,” Phillipa said, anchoring one end of the tape at the bottom of the zipper and tossing the roll to Michaela. The sound of the silvered tape unspooling was overly loud in the silent, isolated lab.
Jim floated by the bulkhead, his legs tucked up and both hands held over his face. “Some of that filth got in my eye,” he hissed. “Fuck, it burns.”
“Let me see.” Phillipa gently moved Jim’s hand away.
His left cornea burned bloodred, as bright as the sun.
* * *
21
Siberia, Russia
“Finally, a warmer Siberia.”Pete shed his outer jacket but kept his zip-up hoodie on as they climbed out of the creaking Russian plane that had ferried them from Krasnoyarsk to Tomsk. Tomsk, in southwestern Siberia, sat at the same latitude as the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and was a balmy fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Thirty degrees warmer than Uchami.
Jack shot Pete a quick grin before leading the group through the small Bogashevo Airport. Taxis queued for fares, drivers in ratty T-shirts smoking cigarettes as they leaned against the hoods of their ancient Lada sedans. They eyed Jack and his group, taking in their Western outfits, their expedition gear, calculating the price tags. Before Jack could blink, the drivers were barking at them, each gesturing for them to pick his taxi.
He pushed on, following the signs to the car hire as Welby, bringing up the rear, waved the taxi drivers away. Ethan stayed at Jack’s elbow, glued to his side. Pete and Blake bitched as they stripped off their jackets and beanies and tried to fluff out their hat hair.
An extra hundred dollars sped up the car hire process and made the paperwork disappear. The older woman manning the booth sucked down her cigarette as she passed Jack a set of keys and pointed to the end of a long line of Russian SUVs.
“Where should I return it?” Jack asked in Russian.
She shrugged, sliding the hundred into her pocket and looking past Jack as if he wasn’t even there.
