The Lowest Heaven (15 page)

“Sure you are. You’ve got braid on your arm because you were smart and followed orders. You feel obligated to the suits and the hats because they put you where you are. Where are you, Leroy?”

“I’m on the first manned spaceship to orbit Mars, to meet the first aliens we’ve ever known.”

“Then why are you so miserable about it?” Bradbury’s face broke into a wide smile, and he banged the table with the flat of hand hard enough to make Johnson jump. “I’d have sold my soul to be here in the flesh. What an incredible, startling opportunity, what an unexpected, unlooked-for gift! You should be happy and excited: if it was me, I’d be going to the bathroom every five minutes.”

Johnson felt so sick he started looking around the cabin for a barf-bag. “You know my orders.”

“Screw your orders,” he yelled, still grinning. “Whose goddamn story is this?”

“Yours?”

“You’d better hope not. Or one of Bob’s, either: he’d have had you in a five-way marriage and running around the ship naked by now.” Bradbury reached out and punched Johnson’s shoulder. “It’s your story, Leroy. Only you can write the ending.”

Johnson rubbed his arm. He’d felt it properly, the impact, the way it rocked him off his axis. He looked first at the little beetle things crawling over the face of Mars, the tracks radiating from the five-petalled flower of their base. It looked tiny but it covered a couple of city blocks’ worth of soil. The beetles were as big as submarines.

Then he looked at Bradbury’s solemn, hopeful face. He’d seen that exact same expression staring out at him from the back cover of an ancient copy of
The Illustrated Man
, lit by flickering torchlight under the warm tent of his blankets.

“Right.” Johnson stood up, too quickly. He bounced across the kitchen and into the lockers opposite. He barely got his hands up in time to ward off the stinging blow, and ended up settled on his back against the central ladder.

“You okay, son?”

“I’ll be just fine.” He pulled himself upright and shook himself down. He started climbing. “Thanks, Mr Bradbury.”

“Don’t mention it, son.”

He was outside the Pacific, tethered to a loading point, lights from his helmet making bright circles on the white-grey of the hull, while behind him, was Mars. It was so close he could reach out and touch it: its smooth white cap, its soft rust plains, its mountain-high volcanoes. It had translucent pearl clouds and storms of pink, and as the terminator swept across its surface it was softened with dusk. It was huge, and in the shadow of the great black radiator fin, it gave him light and hope.

His regulator made little noises, gentle gasps and sighs, and his earpieces a regular two-second tick to show he was still connected. His radio popped and spiked with radiation as he worked the electric screwdriver, undogging the panel on the side of the stubby launch tube.

He’d been trained to do that kind of finger-delicate and methodical work by the very people he was now betraying. The heavy weight of irony was right there: he wasn’t a space-walk virgin, banging around with a wrench and pliers, hoping to get lucky. He knew exactly what he was doing, hard though it was.

Harder than it needed to be, too, because his co-pilot refused to come out of his cradle. Every time Johnson had dragged it blinking into the light, Yussef had just cranked it back closed with him still inside it. So while he really needed the human finesse on the attitude jets to keep him in sunlight, he’d had to cope with gross control from a computer that sometimes wouldn’t quite catch his meaning.

He’d been outside for almost three hours, and he’d disabled three of the four missiles: nothing fancy, he left the warheads alone, and instead opened up the casing to access the rocket motors. They were solid fuel: no pumps to damage or tanks to bleed, but the propellant still needed a spark to ignite it. Sabotage was nothing more than cutting out a finger-length of wire and bending the ends on themselves. Six times he’d done that, twice per two-stage missile, and he was on the last launcher.

He put each bolt on a magnetic pad as he unwound it, and tagged the panel to stop it from drifting away.

“Hey, Leroy? How’s it going?”

His head rang. “Mr Bradbury. Not so loud.”

“Sorry, son. How does Mars look now?”

“Same as before.” Johnson adjusted his position astride the launch tube so he could turn from the waist: his neck ring wasn’t that flexible and the bulky life-support pack restricted his movements further. “Big. Red,” he said.

“Come on, Leroy, don’t let me down.”

“I’m alone, in a space suit, trying to disable four nuclear-armed rockets strapped to the outside of a spaceship in orbit around another planet. You wanting me to play tourist isn’t making this any easier.”

“Humour an old man. What can you see?”

“One last one, then you leave me alone.” He swung his leg slowly up and over the launcher tube while holding on to the open hatch. “Mars is huge, takes up almost half the sky. I can almost see the underside of the polar clouds, and it’s sunrise on the summit of Olympus Mons. I can cover Phobos with my fist, but it’s coming up fast, and it’s going to be right overhead in an hour. I should be inside by then, because that’ll scare the crap out of me otherwise.”

“You’re a fortunate man, Leroy Johnson. No one alive has seen the sights you have. We can send all the robots we like, but it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration.”

“Okay, Mr Bradbury, that’s enough. I’ve got to get back to work.” He wondered what the others made of it, him talking to himself like that. But maybe they hadn’t heard him. Maybe Abe was too busy trying to decypher the alien language, and Rusa concentrating too hard on debugging the code, and Judi had her head in some compartment somewhere focussing on fixing rather than listening. And Yussef wouldn’t hear him while he was asleep.

Perhaps Bradbury was the only one he could talk to. Perhaps that had always been true.

He turned back to the launcher, and the crouching missile it shrouded.

Johnson cycled the airlock. From feeling the door lock behind him and the floor shiver, to hearing the chug of the pumps only took a minute. The red tell-tale stayed on until ship pressure had been achieved, but as soon as his space suit retreated from balloon-like stiffness, he started to open it up.

Air hissed out as he broke the seal and misted the airlock with moisture. He could smell the cold, sweet welding-smoke scent that clung to the white cover of the suit.

The tell-tale on the inner door stayed stubbornly red.

He scowled, the deep, tired lines between his brows deepening. He spoke into his suit microphone.

“Hey. Judi? The airlock seems to be stuck. Can you come and check it out?”

No answer.

“Judi? Abe? Rusa?”

No answer.

“Mo? Wake up, Mo.”

No answer.

“Computer, locate the crew.”

McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the tertiary radiator exchange. Yussef is dead in cradle four.

“I... what?”

Clarify the nature of your question.

He was breathing hard, hauling the thin, strange air into his heaving lungs. “Okay. Give me the medical status of Mo Yussef.”

Yussef is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-five Zulu.

“Do the rest of the crew know?”

McMasters is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Malinska is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Halliwell is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-two Zulu.

Johnson reflexively caught himself from drifting, grabbing a handhold on the wall.

“All the crew except for me are dead.”

That is correct.

“What,” and he had to clear his throat, “what killed them?”

Please repeat.

“What was the cause of death?”

I do not know the answer.

“Why won’t the airlock door open?”

The ship is in vacuum.

His fingers flexed around the handhold.

“Has there been a hull breach?”

No.

He screwed his eyes up, trying not to cry. “What happened to the air?”

It was vented to space according to annex four of the emergency protocol.

“Ah crap.” Rusa had been right all along. She just hadn’t found the code in time. “What else is in the emergency protocol?”

That is classified.

He didn’t need to be told, though. He knew what he’d do, if he was them.

“Can I repressurise the ship?”

No.

“If I vent the air in the airlock, can I enter the ship?”

The computer went silent. It was thinking, like the genie of the lamp, whether or not to grant Johnson his wish.

Yes.

He resealed the suit, then switched on all the life support systems he’d just turned off. With the two second tap in his ears again, he pressed the button to cycle the outer door. He felt his suit expand and go stiff again.

Then came the moment when his plans could either be realised, or crushed like an empty can. He reached out to the internal door and gripped the release mechanism.

He felt the locks slip through his gloved hand, and the tell-tale turned from red to green.

He pushed the door aside, and eased himself into the ship. He didn’t have much room to manoeuvre. His suit’s torso was scarab-like, and his back fat with machinery. He knew he could make it through the bulkheads, because they’d been designed that way, but he had to be cautious and careful.

Johnson floated across the cabin to the ladder, which he caught one-handed. He turned himself so that he was head down along the axis.

He glided along the ladder’s length, broaching the bulkhead into the flight deck, which he could see into if he craned his neck just so.

Malinka had been strapped in, and she remained in her couch, but McMasters was floating free, as was his tablet, still playing the last recorded view the orbiter had of the aliens on Mars.

There wasn’t much blood in the cabin. Malinka’s nose was dewdropped with a frozen scab, but the few spots that glittered and spun like garnets were a poor signpost to the murder of the crew. The computer had killed them, slowly and painlessly. More or less. Her eyes were frozen open, irises of the clearest blue and sclera of the deepest red. Thread veins spidered across her puffy face.

Johnson pulled himself through and jumped for the pilot’s chair next to her. He straddled the seat awkwardly, trying not to lean back against his life support.

“I want to calculate an intercept course to Phobos. What delta v do we need?”

Four hundred metres per second.

“Okay. I need to do a burn of a third of a g for two minutes. We can finesse it as we go.”

“What’re you doing, son?”

Bradbury was in another spacesuit, hanging off the back of Johnson’s chair.

“Crashing the ship. We still have four live nukes on board, and I reckon I should put them out of harm’s way.”

“That’s smart thinking, but what if they try and stop you? What if they can fire up the rockets themselves and use the whole ship as a missile?”

“They’re over three hundred million kilometres away. By the time they know what I’m doing, it’ll be too late.” He started fetched out a fine stylus and started dabbing it at the astrogation screen.

“And what about you, Leroy? What happens to you?”

“Turns out I wrote myself into one of your stories after all, Mr Bradbury. This is how lots of them end, right? Bittersweet. I save the aliens from the crazy Earthmen, and die in the process.”

“You’re doing the right thing.” Bradbury leaned forward so that his helmet went tock against Johnson’s. “This is the moral choice.”

“You would say that. Since you’re me.”

“And you’re sure of that? Wouldn’t it be better to think that part of me is part of you? That everyone who’s ever read me makes me just a little bit alive?”

“Hold on, or whatever it is you do.” Johnson dabbed at the screen one last time. “Initiating burn. And make sure Abe doesn’t fall on you.”

The silent rocket motors rattled the ship, and McMasters’ body slipped stiffly down the wall to the floor. Johnson watched his crew mate settle on the rubber matting, all angles and bones. The tablet clattered next to him.

Bradbury shuffled over to the man on his hands and knees. “I wonder if he did get to talk to them. I wonder if they know what we’re doing.”

Johnson didn’t answer: he was watching the lines on the screen, the complex layers of planets and orbits, the natural and the artificial overlain, and his own progress amongst them. He was rising away from the surface, an arc of silver against the black, right into the path on onrushing Phobos.

His mouth was dry, and he took a sip of cold, chlorinated water from the straw in his helmet. He’d never been hit from behind by a quadrillion tonnes of moon. What would that feel like?

“Is there any way I can get out of this?” he asked.

Bradbury looked up from McMasters’ screen, reflecting the images from it on his curved faceplate. “You got the wrong guy, Leroy. If you wanted some kind of technical fix, you should have had Arthur. He was always doing that sort of thing. What was that one on the Moon?”

“A Fall of Moondust?
”

“No, the other one, where the guy bails out of his rocket and gets saved by orbital mechanics.” Bradbury tried to mime the scenario.

He knew it. “
Maelstrom
.”

“That’s the one. Any chance of you doing something like that?”

“I’ve got about an hour’s air left in this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re a long way from home and there’s no one to rescue me.” Johnson watched the lines on the screen converge.

Bradbury clambered from the floor and shook him hard by the shoulders. “What do you mean, no one to rescue you? Who the hell is that down on Mars?”

“What makes you think they’ve even noticed us up here?” Johnson gestured at the screens around him. “They’ve never answered a single question we’ve put to them in two years. That’s pretty much how we got to be in this god-awful situation in the first place.”