Expedition 63 Book 1: Dusk

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Static filled the communication line.

It was over the Zvezda compartment’s squawk box, from the old communication set up with Ground Control. It hadn’t been severed yet, not until the old wires were capped off. For now, the old speakers let him keep an ear out for any new orders, without a piece of foam rubber wedged in his ear.

John sighed and put down his tablet. It was standard to lose the ability to talk to anyone at Mission Control due to orbital mechanics and out of date satellite relays, but he was still required to go to Harmony and confirm the loss of signal.

The plain off-white storage cabinets stared at him. After nine months on the Space Station, John still loved his job, though this meticulous check of every little f**k-up drove him up the proverbial wall. When he was a little kid on Earth, and wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut, nobody bothered to tell him about the tedious bits. Once he was back on the ground, he’d have a long talk with his mom about it.

A soft push against the cabinets got him floating through the crowded science section. As he approached the passageway into the Zarya, John grinned and rolled right through the entry. That was so much fun. Weightlessness was one perk of the Station that just couldn’t be beat. Luck was with him, he noticed as he straightened out of the roll. No one was looking into the Zvezda. Such a childish impulse shouldn’t be witnessed by the crew he commanded.

John hit the T intersection and turned down the Unity module. Despite eight years of upgrades and a serious effort to declutter, Unity was still pretty cramped with the bits and bobs of science and John swallowed down the uncomfortable sensation of the walls being too close. It was a terrible issue, an astronaut with claustrophobia. People had asked him for years why he wanted to serve on the Station if he couldn’t stand the enclosed space, but it wasn’t so bad now. When the upgrades first started, two people had a hell of a time being in one passageway.

One thing he was absolutely grateful for, one that he’d have to mention when he got back dirt side, was the reroute of the communications to the Harmony hub. And the change to Columbus as the official crew quarters. Well, he was grateful for a lot of the modifications, including the ones his crew was assigned to carry out.

Saito was the first crewmate he came across on his way through Destiny and he patted the small man on the shoulder as he passed. Their agricultural expert had his nose stuck in some bin on the racks, so Saito didn’t do more than flap a hand at him as John passed, avoiding Saito’s careless hand with a quick dodge to starboard. John chuckled. That man was very diligent in his experiments, enough to forget the Station around him if the rest of the crew left Saito to his own devices.

When their small Japanese peer had walked into the first orientation class, John had been amazed. Saito was the standard Japanese man in looks, a tawny gold complexion and sharp about the face, especially those tilted onyx eyes, and his accent was thick enough that it rivaled Turlach’s Irish brogue. But Saito didn’t have the fiery temper John had expected once he learned of Saito’s samurai ancestors. He was calm, unfailingly polite, and lethal with his sarcasm. Saito didn’t need a sword when his words alone could make someone bleed.

Harmony opened up around him, the feel of the space bigger with all the essentials consolidated and streamlined into tablets, flat screens, and digital keyboards. It had a much sleeker feel, a huge improvement over the cramped hub he’d seen in the old 2016 pictures, ten years prior.

Turlach was perched midair in front of the communications console like some burly dwarf out of a fantasy book. Nobody knew it to look at the man, but their plucky Irishman, one of the crew trained by the European Space Agency, had the most ridiculous, curly cinnamon brown hair when it was allowed to grow out of the severe crew cut Turlach favored.

“What’s the good word, ‘Lach?” John asked as he came up to Turlach’s shoulder. “There was static over the line in Zvezda.”

“Aye, there was.” Turlach pointed up to one of the screens attached to the ceiling. “It’s strange, I grant, but I think a relay station on the ground went dark. We’ll have to wait for the next station to come in range before we can chatter at Control again.”

That brogue was wild. John grinned to hear its burr. “Anything else I should know about?”

“No, but someone’s snapping pictures,” Turlach said as he scowled. “Find out who it is, so I can embarrass the hell out of them later.”

John scrunched up his face. He didn’t see Saito with a camera, and he looked to the port side, into the Kibo where he was pretty sure Jason and Eli were supposed to be. Both the men were there, just as absorbed in what they were doing as Saito was. Yakecen was supposed to be in the Soyuz attached to Zvezda, running system checks as was scheduled, but he was probably daydreaming. Of them all, Yakecen was the one who got the most homesick. John understood it was a spiritual thing, a lost direct connection to the Earth, but they all knew what they signed up for.

“Uh, I don’t see anyone with a camera, ‘Lach. You sure it was a camera flash?” John scratched his head and Turlach swiveled around, a perfect mimic of the sinister office chair turn. How did he do that?

“What else would it be?” Turlach asked. He narrowed his eyes at John. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“Honest, I don’t think anyone’s been using a camera. You’d have heard the thing.” John frowned as Turlach’s face went from an annoyed pinch to a deep furrow.

Turlach faced the monitors again and his fingers clattered rapid fire against the smooth surface. For a moment, John watched his crewman with absolute confusion. When he looked up at the screens, reams of data flew by almost too fast for John to get a handle on. A couple of code lines he recognized whizzed by and his eyebrows rose of their own volition. “Diagnostics?”

“Well, yeah, John,” Turlach sounded reasonable as he responded, but there was a high note at the end that told him his feisty friend was exasperated. “I didn’t dream up that flash of light, you numpty.”

There was a courtesy he had to do, so John left Turlach to it. The Kibo module was pretty spacious, all things considered, and he was happy to enter it. At first, neither his second in command and mechanical expert, Jason Weiss, and his biologist Eli Palamo, noticed he was with them. That was quite all right. He loved to watch them work.

Eli was Samoan by birth, and except for his size, he showed it. The traditional wrist tattoos contrasted beautifully against Eli’s rosy-brown skin. The biologist wasn’t near as dark as John’s deep brown, but they both had that thick black hair, almost shaved to the skin. It was better that way. He’d hate to have to deal with locks or a fro in zero gravity, unlike Yakecen’s long oxblood braid that slapped against everything.

But the other man, Jason, he was a work of art. Moon pale and sandy blond, with the most striking moss green eyes, he was of the personal opinion that his second was the pinnacle of male perfection. Maybe John was biased, but he’d own that in a heartbeat, especially when Jason looked up, eyes wide with surprise. The smile Jason gave him made his heart leap.

“John, what’s up?” That California surfer accent in a deep alto didn’t help either. Jason fluttered a hand in an arc. “Space to John, come in John.”

The smitten grin settled on his face like an old friend. It had been that way forever, it seemed, since that first day they met at Candidate Orientation. “I just wanted to let you guys know, there was a hiccup with our signal and we’ve lost contact with the ground again. Turlach will have it sorted out soon.”

Eli’s attention shifted from the tablet in his hand to John. When his nose wrinkled in distaste, John’s grin widened to painful levels. Somehow, that usually happy, round face looked ridiculously adorable when Eli expressed any type of annoyance.

“s**t, really? I needed to update the biology department on the microbials in these soil samples.” Eli pointed a finger at John’s face, as if it would help. “It has to be done at the same time, every day. And don’t give me that ‘well, just write it down’ nonsense. That’s not how I do things up here.”

John held up his hands in surrender. He wasn’t a scientist, he was a pilot and glorified repairman, and he would never presume to tell Eli how to run or document his experiments. There was nothing he could do about the loss of contact though. “How long until you need to report your current numbers?”

Eli glanced at his tablet and started to mouth words to himself. John shared another smile with Jason while he waited for Eli to figure out his timetable. He had nowhere else to be, and time with Jason was always welcome.

Jason waved him over when John locked eyes with him. His second was up to his elbows in the stringy guts of the module; John saw that at a glance. It was some deeper bit of work, a reroute of power if he remembered Jason’s duty assignment right.

“How’s it going?” John took a moment to examine the exposed wires in the wall, interested. Just because he didn’t understand the technical aspects of Jason’s assignment didn’t mean he wanted to stay ignorant of the job. Specializations were good, but John thought they should go back to all the crew knowing everyone’s job. “What are you up to, this time?”

“I’m transferring power cables from the outdated batteries, so the Station is only on solar power.” Jason chased a purple wire with his fingertip until it disappeared behind the old panels.

It was a wonder, what Jason did. Two expeditions ago, the 61 crew had installed upgraded solar arrays to the Station, big and beautiful and more than capable of powering their temporary home as it was, with room on the circuits for more modules to be added later. It was so awesome, in the truest sense of the word. The new agricultural pod was scheduled for installation at the end of their stint in space. John and his crew were supposed to help set it up.

“How much more do you have to rewire?” John asked.

“Me and Yakecen have to walk, so we can rerun the circuits in Zarya to the new central board. That’ll give us independent control of the orbital adjusters, and we don’t have to refuel the Delta V ever again once the new boosters get up here.” Jason smiled for John, sweet and happy. “Without all the fuel to haul up, we’ll have room for all sorts of other stuff.”

“Good,” John said, praised really because if he remembered the timetables right, Jason was ahead of schedule by almost a week. Too bad the new adjusters wouldn’t be installed until the end of the next mission. He wanted to see them in action.

“I think so. Maybe we can get a pet up here the next time we come up, now that we have the space and energy for it,” Jason said, a mischievous smile coming across his face. “I think a little bird, like a finch or something, would be great. Imagine learning about avian flight dynamics in zero gravity.”

John couldn’t help it, he laughed. “You just miss having birds around.”

“Yeah.” Jason turned his face away for a moment, a blush staining his high cheekbones. “It’s about the only thing I really miss about Earth. And fish. I miss having a fish tank. Everything else I could ever need or want is up here.”

It was a fact that Jason loved space more than the rest of them, bemoaning their short time on the Station more than any other. The rest of them were happy to be there, though they missed home a lot. It was luck that none of them left spouses or lovers on Earth, but parents and siblings and friends were missed just as much. The only one John really wanted to see again was his mom; otherwise, John was in complete agreement with Jason. There wasn’t anything dirt side he needed that he didn’t have in space already.

“I know what you mean,” John confided to his second. He cleared his throat to dislodge that intimate tone in his voice. Now wasn’t the time. “Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you guys know we’re out of contact with Earth at the moment, so any reports you need to send will have to wait until later.”

“Still not happy about it,” Eli said, loud enough that the petulant grumble was plain.

“Still not anything I can do about it,” John shot back.

Jason laughed at them both. Of course, Eli shot him the most exasperated pout John had ever seen, and Jason smiled back at Eli with that sunny nature of his, sarcasm skirting the edges of his lips. With a scowl, Eli turned to his samples and Jason stuck his tongue out at their crewmate’s back.

“That’s not nice,” John scolded, the involuntary quirk to his mouth a neon sign that he didn’t mean it.

Jason shrugged, though he retracted that little pink muscle. “He’s pissy because his experiment took a wrong turn somewhere.”

“Did not,” Eli corrected with a loud huff. “Science doesn’t take wrong turns.”

“You’re still pissy about it,” Jason shot back.

“Okay, guys!” John broke in before it devolved into a squabble.

Jason glanced at John for a moment, and then nodded before he stuck his head back into the exposed inside of the panel he was working on. “Go tell Yakecen what’s going on,” Jason told him, voice a little hollow because of the wall.

Yeah, it was a good idea to do that, but he wanted to stay. Not an option, he knew. There was a crew to manage and he couldn’t keep all his attention on one member despite his desire to do just that.

John twirled around and pushed his way back to Harmony. Turlach was still neck deep in diagnostics, so John hurried astern of the Station, patting Saito on his shoulder as he went. It was only polite. It was also reflex from the start of their mission, when the Station was a little more cramped and run-ins were more common. Once he got through Unity, he went perpendicular to the rest of the modules and to the little Rassvet section.

At first, he didn’t see Yakecen in the Soyuz. Not a surprise at all, because the damned trash portion was in the way. He threaded through the junk until he poked his head into the crew compartment. “Yakecen?”

“What?” Yakecen’s surly bark came from the right side of the Soyuz, but John didn’t notice him until his head popped up from between two of the reentry seats.

“Just wanted to let you know about the signal loss from Earth,” John told him. As a Native American, Yakecen took being in space the hardest. John had learned over their time together that it was because of a spiritual connection his crewman had with their world and it felt sort of wrong to be on the Station. John didn’t question it. The potential for a lot of conflict if he misstepped in the discussion was immense.

“s**t,” Yakecen muttered. “I need to get these readings back down. They called for a double check three hours ago and I’m behind schedule with it as it is.”

“Nobody’s going to be angry if you literally can’t get a hold of them,” John tried to placate him. The wrinkled nose on his cool bronze face didn’t reassure him that Yakecen would let it go, but he had to try. His prickly friend was going to blow a gasket one day and John hated the thought.

Yakecen confirmed his fear with a shake of his head, simple crow black braid swishing against the interior panels like an agitated cat’s tail. “I don’t want to get dressed down again. The last time, the asshole on the other end of the line said she’d put a reprimand in my file if I couldn’t stay on schedule.”

That was news to him. “Who told you this?”

“Some drone in Control. I don’t remember,” he told John, the discomfort in his whole body clear as day. Yakecen wasn’t a people person on his good days and when someone had a problem with his work, it made him dig his heels in.

John sighed and ran his index finger down the bridge of his nose. It didn’t help the headache that brewed right behind his eyes. “I’ll get it straightened out. People can’t expect everything to go perfectly all the time and they shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“Thanks, John.” Yakecen meant it, John saw it in the earnest way he thanked him. John was happy to be the buffer for his crew, especially for Yakecen, but f**k, he hoped someone would take up the duty once they were back on the ground. John had plans and he couldn’t do that job full time.

John nodded and started to back out of the capsule. “So, yeah, comms are down. Just sit tight, okay?”

“Sure thing.” Yakecen ducked out of sight between the seats. “And tell whoever has the camera to knock off with the flash. It’s so bright, going off in here, that it almost gave me a headache.”

John paused. A camera flash wasn’t anywhere near that strong and the interior wasn’t that dark. And someone would’ve made a lot of racket getting past the garbage container over his head. “You see who it was?”

“No,” was the muffled answer, but his crewmember popped up again and gave John a strange look. “I didn’t see anyone when I checked. Although, how any of our guys avoided me seeing them, I’ll never know. Saito even has a problem getting in here.”

Saito was the smallest of them all, barely five feet in his socks.

“Huh.” That was peculiar. “You know, Turlach was saying the same thing. Maybe Saito knows something about it. He’s been in Destiny for a few hours now.”

“It was annoying as fuck.” Yakecen pointed a finger at John. He hated that finger, because Yakecen always managed to have a disapproving look that matched John’s mother’s so perfectly, he thought they were clones for a second. “I don’t have a problem with the candid shots, but not while I’m working in here. It’s too dark for it.”

“Understood,” John assured him. Another part of his job that he liked, but didn’t. He had to take six people, and his crew were very different from each other in a lot of ways, and help them work together as a cohesive unit. This expedition was a scientific mission in more ways than physical samples. One of the experiments was the astronauts themselves. Sociologists wanted to find out how well people from absolutely different backgrounds worked together when it came to survival of the group as preparation for Mars. The Station was a tame place for such an experiment, but it was a good baseline.

Yakecen disappeared once more into the bowels of the Soyuz, and John left him to it. The only crewman left to enlighten about their issue was Saito, so he headed back the way he came. No doubt, Saito already knew what was going on. He and Turlach were thick as thieves, John noticed, and with Saito being the closest one to their com specialist when the line went dark, it made sense.

But that camera. If it wasn’t the three on the port side, Saito was the last one who could have used a camera without drawing attention from Yakecen or Turlach. With a laugh at himself, because Sherlock Holmes he was not by any stretch of the imagination, John finally stopped off to Saito’s right side. He knew better than to wait behind his friend. Last time, the only time, he’d almost lost an eye.

“So, I’m assuming you know what’s going on?” John asked.

Saito glanced at him, onyx eyes still a shock to see after all the time they’d spent as coworkers, and then back at his tray of samples hung on the rack. “Of course I do. I could hear you and ‘Lach talking clearly from here. And before you ask, no, I know nothing about a camera.”

“How’d you know I would ask about it?” John grinned, though Saito was too absorbed in his work to see it.

“Process of elimination,” Saito replied with that soft voice that made John feel calm sink into his bones. He liked that about Saito. Whenever things got too tense onboard, Saito would launch into a story from his culture with that exact tone and the whole crew just dissolved right down into agreeable humans again, instead of rats trapped in a big tin can.

“So tell me, oh perceptive one, what was the flash about?” John teased with a gentle humor. No one got brash with Saito. Hell, no one used his first name. It was unwise, to say the least.

Saito was silent as he thought it over, the narrowed eyes on the wall a dead giveaway. John had no problem with the wait while the scientist ruminated on John’s question. Until they could talk to Mission Control again, there wasn’t anything else for him to do.

Finally, Saito looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps the flash was not from a picture taken.”

John pursed his lips. “But there’s nothing on the Station that flashes like that. What else would it be?”

“That I don’t know.” Saito shrugged and turned back to his work. “Might I suggest you check on the exterior of the Station, to verify that nothing shorted out? It’s possible an arc from an electrical panel caused the light both Yakecen and ‘Lach saw.”

John nodded, even though Saito didn’t acknowledge him after that. The best place to view the outside of the Station, without having to go EVA, was from the Cupola.

The best part about the Station, in John’s opinion, was how easy it was to reach another portion. A ground facility would have had a bunch of closets and unnecessary rooms, but up in space, it took a turn and down into the little observation pod he went.

Earth hung like a white and blue sphere of sodalite, the clouds over their current position obscuring any trace of the great land masses scattered like broken china plates. John wished he was down there, absolutely, but there was something magical about their planet spinning like a top in the black silence of the cosmos.

He swung his eyes up to the silver hull of the Station. Most of it was seen with a little effort. Meter after meter of bright metal was examined with careful scrutiny, John on the lookout for any telltale sign of soot. Fire on the exterior was a remote possibility, because oxygen was needed to sustain it, but a short would still scorch the edges around the panel where a damaged wire was concealed.

Nothing was apparent on just his visual inspection, but he couldn’t see the mating adapter and Shuttle dock or the zenith of the Station and if it was in the shadow of the massive trusses, it would take weeks to search for it. Maybe, if it was a major circuit, Turlach might be able to find it on the diagnostics or with the exterior video feeds. Better yet, maybe it was the reason they lost communication with the ground. Kill two birds with one stone? John was okay with that.

John backed up to where he started on his inspection and went at a slower pace the second time around. The magnificent creation they were on showed no more signs of an issue than the first time. With a sigh of relief, or maybe it was annoyance because a short would have been the simplest solution to both the signal problem and the mysterious flash, John let his gaze drift to the unbelievable spray of stars that peaked between the slats on the giant solar panels.

The view was amazing; no matter how many times he’d seen it. Stars were so much more vivid out in space and he could see so many that he stopped trying to count them after a week. Sometimes he wondered if there were others out there looking back at the Earth, from their own Stations, trying to find others like themselves. Probably, if someone went by the numbers. It was a thought that made him smile.

A speck of whiteness caught his attention from the corner of his eye and John shifted his gaze down to the great blue jewel under his feet. From his view, John completely understood the ancient impulse to consider their home a divine being. It was beautiful and made him feel like his chest and throat had swollen past the point of pain from the starkness of it.

It was almost impossible to guess where they were in relation to the continents on Earth; the clouds were too thick for it. Chances were better than good they floated in serene silence over an ocean. John frowned. The clouds were spread damned far across the atmosphere. He’d never seen it that overcast. Fingers wandered to automatically key the squawk box attached to one of the window frames before he remembered the thing wasn’t working at the moment.

One section of clouds sparked like a flashlight held under a bed sheet. It was fast and a strange gray-green tint colored the fluffy whiteness all of a sudden. What the hell was going on there? John didn’t even know what was under that part of the world.

They spun in a silent waltz with the Earth, moving in a few minutes what would take days on the ground. Brown-green became visible through the atmosphere.

There was something strange about the ground though, little dark pockmarks scattered in a shallow arc. John couldn’t see a definite line of a coast, so he had no way to identify where they flew past. Another massive cloud formation came over the land like a tidal wave.

A second spark showed under that one too, and a third after that, a little higher and to the right. It reminded him of the poppers he used to throw on the sidewalk outside his San Diego childhood apartment. One of the sparks caused a ripple through the cloud cover.

There was fire when the whiteness broke apart. A great dome of fire and smoke.

John’s breath hitched. Horror overtook him in a prickle of ice through his veins. It froze him to the spot, floating in absolute stillness. f**k, what was he seeing?

More flashes peppered the newly exposed ground and ballooned in some awful death flower of painful orange and gray-black. He needed to tell his crew. He needed to sort out protocol. Contact had to be made.

They were gonna die up here.

John kicked the Cupola window frames and shot out into the Tranquility, careening off the hatchway. He scrabbled at the walls and split his hands on something, the pain a sharp but distant concern. That chill seized his voice in an eternal tomb of ice.

As he passed Saito, oblivious to the worst nightmare John had ever had, his crewman glance up from his tablet and frowned. “Are you all right, John? I swear if your hair was longer, it would be standing up straight.”

Yeah, that was a good way to put it. But it was about to get so much worse. John wanted to say something, his mouth had opened to do exactly that. The ice hadn’t thawed in the least and all he could do was wave his hand, hope that Saito took the hint and would follow John.