ISS (12 page)

“Removing the strap will be the difficult part. If we simply cut it the strap might catch on some part of the spacecraft when we try to maneuver away and if it ripped a panel off it would be a disaster. It is also unclear if we will be able to start the main rocket engine. If we have to re-enter the atmosphere on thrusters alone it would take a long time and we would have no control over where and when we would re-enter or land,” he said.

Clearly they wanted to return to North America. The prospect of landing or more likely crash landing in some strange wilderness in a foreign country was not appealing. The spacesuits on the ISS were much better than the commercial pilot suits they wore on the way up. The suits held lots of extra equipment and power and a longer lasting air supply but the trade-off was that they were bulky and cumbersome in confined spaces. In theory they could wear them all the way back to earth and not run out of air. This might be necessary because the space ship was no longer pressurized and it was unclear if they could transfer enough from the ISS to re-pressurize the craft manually. This issue was important because he was concerned that hull integrity might depend on pressurization.

He kissed the top of her head as she slept in his arms and he wondered if they would make it back to earth and what life would be like if they did.

They awoke and held each other for a long time before donning the bulky ESA spacesuits. They spent the next few hours searching for and shuttling the few compressed oxygen tanks they’d found between ISS and Jericho One. Jack noticed after a few trips that Sara was getting good at using the jet-pac. She was a natural space jockey and she admitted to him that weightlessness was a lot of fun once you got used to the weirdness of it. After a few more trips she stayed on Jericho One to begin stowing the tanks. It would be a disaster if air tanks started flying around the cabin during re-entry. She used the wire they stripped from the seats and the four part passenger restraints to tie them into their seats. When she looked back at her handy work the single row of tanks looked like a group of weird alien tourists going on vacation.

Jack flew back to ISS to look for more tanks but this time when he passed through the airlock he heard a sound coming from one of the commercial sections they had not explored yet. He followed the sound to a group of modules and found a hand written sign above the entry portal which read ‘Corporate American’. Cautiously he glided down the section that appeared to be devoted to astro-tech and orbital mining corporations. He heard another bang, louder this time the sound sharp, like metal on metal, coming in regularly spaced intervals. He followed the sound to a closed off hatchway that bore a TimeForm Corporation Logo on it. There was a hand drawn sign above it that read ‘MARTY’. The banging was coming from within. Jack slapped his hand against the hatch and listened. The clanging stopped then started again this time with a more recognizable pattern.

dot dot dot

dash dash dash

dot dot dot.

S.O.S.

Someone is alive in there, he thought. He did not remember the Morse code alphabet but he recognized S.O.S. when he heard it. He tried yelling through the door to whoever was inside but there was no way anyone would hear him through all that steel. He saw what appeared to be an intercom on the overhead bulkhead.

“Can you hear me?” he said, holding the button.

There was a pause and then, “Hi I’m Marty.”

***

Back on Jericho One

“He can’t open the door. He will die like the others,” Jack said.

“We can’t leave him there. He will die for sure,” Sara said.

They were resting after another round of hauling stuff across from ISS.

“We can figure this out,” she said.

She was right they could not leave him behind but how would they get Marty off the ISS without him becoming infected?

“I don’t understand why he is not infected already maybe he is immune to the virus,” he said.

“The problem is the only way to find out will kill him if we’re wrong,” she said.

They were startled when their conversation was interrupted by a blast of static and then the eerie far off sound of Marty’s voice.

“Hi Guys, I found the Jericho One communications channel. Please save your energy I won’t be going back to the surface with you. There are things you do not understand about my situation here. I am unable to return to earth gravity, the trip would kill me,” he said.

“We can’t leave you here alone what will you do?” Sara said.

“There are no other options. Fully two thirds of my body was destroyed in a terrorist attack a decade ago. The doctors managed to save my life and almost put me back together but I lost my entire lower torso and I only have my right arm and vision in my right eye. At this point I am more ‘machine’ than man and as such I’ve been living on borrowed time for years. Zero gravity has allowed me to continue living but from the moment I arrived on ISS five years ago I knew that returning to earth’s gravity wasn’t an option. The pressure would crush my internal organs and kill me within minutes. So you see there is no choice as things stand right now I can only be disconnected from my life-support pod for short periods of time and those periods are becoming shorter all the time. I was lucky that I was in isolation when the crew began work on the virus sample you brought to them, being in my pod is what saved me from the virus.”

“How will you manage alone,” Jack said. There was a pause in the conversation as a blast of static disrupted communications.

“I will be okay there are enough provisions onboard for my lifetime and then some.”

He did not mention to them that his life expectancy was at best six months though, without the crews support, he would likely not live that long.

“I don’t understand something, “said Jack,” why would TimeForm risk your life by bringing you up here in that… condition? Weren’t they worried the flight would kill you?”

“The managers were worried but I wasn’t. While I was recovering from my surgeries I designed this life-support pod, and made it just small enough to fit inside the Chinese space shuttle. There are specialized devices in here that cooled my body down and immobilized me for transport and now it maintains my life-support systems. It all worked as designed. The reason the virus did not kill me is the pod is a completely self-contained living space separate from the ISS life support system. As for the reason TimeForm allowed me to come up here? I am, or perhaps I should say I
was,
the principal shareholder in TimeForm Corporation. Being an extremely wealthy man allowed me to use my money and influence to by-pass the regulatory hurdles and arrange for a lifetime pass on board the ISS.”

Jack looked at Sara and shrugged. It solved their dilemma, if what he was saying is true, there really was no alternative. Marty will not be traveling back to earth with them.

“We are planning to return to Earth as soon as we can. Is there anything you need us to do for you before we leave?” Jack asked.

There were a few moments of dead air in their helmets while Marty thought about that.

“I will need your help to put ISS into a higher orbit, one that will take longer to decay and, I know this will be difficult, but I need you to remove the crew’s bodies from the ISS. They have to be jettisoned soon because they will foul the air supply as they decompose. I know the time will come when I will need to leave this pod and I will need clean air to breath,” Marty said.

“We have already done that Marty. I released them and the science pod they were in a few hours ago,” Jack said.

There was another pause.

“Are you saying you jettisoned number eight science module?” Marty said. He sounded anxious at this news and somewhat breathless.

“Yes, I guess so, if that was the module they were working in; I never looked at the number.”

“Oh my God,” he said.

“What’s wrong Marty? Sara said.

“We need that lab…. to counter-act the virus, they were depending on me,” he said. There was a pause and Jack looked at Sara confused and said.

“Who was depending on you? Do you mean you were going to try and make an anti-virus after it killed everyone in your crew and everyone on earth, what would be the point?” said Jack.

“It is needed on earth for humanity to ….recover. There are people waiting for it, they’re on an island near Vancouver. They need the anti-virus to start the renewal.”

“The few people that are left on earth are not going to recover Marty. Those that aren’t dead soon will be,” Sara said.

“Not all of them will die,” he said, “out of eight billion there will be millions of people all over the planet who will survive just like you and Jack did but they will never be able to reproduce without the anti-virus.”

“What are you talking about? You haven’t had time to examine the samples we brought up let alone create an anti-virus?” said Jack. There was a longer pause and for a moment he thought they’d lost communications.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter now if tell you,” Marty said.

“Tell us what?” Jack said. He spoke softly, cautiously, he was getting a bad feeling about this.

“The pandemic plague was intentional. It was not accidently created in an attempt to eliminate excess CO2 as reported on the news. That was a cover story we planted; the plague was created specifically to reset the human population to a sustainable number.”

Jack and Sara looked at each other; both their faces held the same question, ‘what is going on here?’

“The atmosphere on earth was dying from the stress of too many people,” Marty said.

“What are you talking about? Who would do something like that, what you’re saying makes no sense,” Sara said her voice held an incredulous quality to it. What he was suggesting was simply inconceivable. No one would kill billions of people, he must be insane. Her face was pale and her eyes wide with disbelief as she shook her head inside her helmet.

“We did,” Marty said,” a group of like-minded environmental scientists and forward thinking individuals from all over the planet. We created a plan, designed the virus, and used the members of the radical Earth-Fire environmental organization to carry it out. They readily agreed, though of course, they did not know what they were actually releasing to the population of India.

The virus was designed by Dr. Charles Regal, one of the senior members of our group. He worked on it in his lab at MIT, I financed the work, and MIT unwittingly supplied the facilities. It was supposed to be effective against all human DNA except for those people that we inoculated, and to a lesser extent, the worker classes who lived near selected industrial centers. We treated the public water system in those areas to give some immunity.

The best and brightest of humanity were supposed to be preserved. The genetically pure people we picked were to survive and their offspring would restore balance to the planet,” Marty said.

Sara looked at Jack with fear in her eyes. Clearly he has lost his mind, she thought, losing his crew and being unable to return to earth has pushed him over the edge. The silence dragged on for long moments.

“I know what you are thinking but you are wrong. I am not insane what I’m telling you is true. And more importantly we had to do it, there was simply no alternative. People the world over refused to change their habits. They continued to over-consume, burn dirty fuels, and pollute the air and oceans. Our group paid billions of dollars to elect or install people into positions of power in Governments all over the world and we were unable to stop the destruction of the bio-sphere.

We were right to do what we did but, it turns out, we were also wrong. It is ironic that we achieved our goal of reducing the earth’s population the only problem is, the elite we chose to survive were not supposed to be amongst those culled,” he said and laughed.

“We were so certain that the inoculations would work we never even considered a different possibility. Unfortunately for the human race almost all of the people destined to repopulate the planet have succumbed to the virus.” he said.

“You killed my father!” Sara said.

“We never considered specific damage only the overall good of the planet. Many members of my own family were sacrificed but it needed to be done. Humans were destroying the atmosphere faster than it could repair itself and within a few years no one would be able to breathe the air or drink the water. The atmosphere would die and humankind would die along with it. We tried to make it possible for a few select members of our species to survive.”

“What made you think that your friends were more deserving of life than anyone else?” Jack said holding his anger in check.

“The people we tried to preserve were the cream of civilization, genetically intact individuals that would have produced superior offspring.”

“Bullshit, you were trying to save yourselves!” Jack said losing control.

There was a long silence and Jack saw that Sara’s eyes were closed and she was weeping.

“We needed to rebalance the planet,” Marty said.

“By murdering nine billion people!” she screamed and the sound of her anguished voice distorted over Jacks head set.

Marty chuckled.

“One person, one million, one billion the number of dead is meaningless. No matter what moral or ethical stance you wish to take your point is moot. All human life on earth would be over by the end of the next decade anyway; something needed to be done we couldn’t wait for people and Governments to wake up. We tried to ensure that human civilization would continue and the gains made by humanity would not be lost.

We tried to make sure the deaths would be quick and humane. It is an ironic twist that you and Jack, by trying to save the crew of the ISS, may have caused the ultimate destruction of our species. The anti-virus that was in module eight was to be released twelve months after the population was… re-ordered. That was my part to play; I was to release the antidote.

The antidote you destroyed was designed to counter-act that part of the virus which kept human females from reproducing. We knew that the weak, infirm, and genetically compromised, if they survived the initial viral assault, would not survive beyond twelve months without the help of organized society. Winter would come and they would freeze or starve to death. We did not want any of
those
people to reproduce or impregnate any of the healthy breeding females. There were a number of things that we did not consider when we made our plan. One, obviously, was that someone would bring the plague up to the ISS. That alone would not have been a problem except for the other thing we did not consider.