Hours passed as they worked, mostly in silence. Occasionally, Devi would reach out and request a tool from Sully’s belt, but there was no chatter between them. Devi was immersed, as she should be, and Sully was alert, as she should be. Everything was progressing as planned. And yet—something was not quite right. Sully took a gulp of water from the straw inside her suit and rolled her neck from side to side within the cramped confines of her helmet.
“Aether, time check, please,” she said.
“Six hours since EVA commenced,” Harper responded. “You’re doing great, guys.”
“Almost ready to connect,” Devi said. “Sully, could you bring the mast down to, say, four inches above the connection site?”
“Copy,” Sully said, and began to reel in the dish with the tethers. When she could reach it she grabbed the mast and let go of the tethers, tugging it down toward the hull of the ship and letting it hover just above the area Devi was working on.
“Perfect,” Devi said. “Now keep it right there while I hook it in.”
It was another hour before the electrical connection was established. By then Sully was beginning to feel antsy. Together the two women lowered the dish, Devi packing the wiring back into the aperture, Sully directing the movement of the mast, until finally the new system was in place and ready to be secured, bolted onto the hull of the ship. Nearly finished now. Sully took another sip of water and laid her oversized glove on Devi’s shoulder.
“Good work,” she said. Devi didn’t respond. She stayed motionless beneath Sully’s hand, and the cloud of apprehension that had been following Sully since they began the walk solidified, condensed into real fear. “Hey, are you okay?” Sully kept her voice steady, but inside her head she was repeating no, no, no over and over, like thumbing the beads of a rosary.
There was a blast of static over the ship’s frequency and a muffle of expletives, poorly disguised by a hand over the microphone.
“Devi? What’s the matter?” Sully maneuvered herself closer, still holding on to the mast of the dish, so that she could peer behind the mirror of Devi’s visor. There was that static again.
“We’ve got a carbon dioxide problem in Devi’s suit showing up here—Devi, are you feeling okay?” Thebes asked from inside the ship. “The oxygen level in your suit just took a nosedive.”
Sully looked past the reflection of the ship on Devi’s visor and knew that something was wrong. Devi seemed dazed, her eyes beginning to lose focus, to roll back in her head. She was already fighting to stay alert.
“Respond. What’s going on out there?”
The two women looked at each other for a long moment, Devi struggling to enunciate her words. “It’s the scrubber,” she whispered. “The lithium hydroxide cartridge failed. I didn’t notice, because—” She inhaled as deeply as she could, but there wasn’t enough oxygen to sate her lungs. She was suffocating inside her helmet. “I should’ve noticed.”
“Get back to the airlock,” Harper said, almost a shout.
“I don’t think there’s time,” Devi said. Her arms had begun to convulse, twitching and shivering, and Sully watched as the tool she had been holding fell from her thickly padded fingers and spun away from them, out into the emptiness. It was happening so quickly, Sully barely had time to react before Devi was unconscious, swaying against her tether like a tree following the whims of a breeze. Sully froze, her hands locked around the mast of the new comm. dish.
“Devi. Devi.”
Sully squinted past the reflections on Devi’s visor and saw her face, her features more relaxed than they’d been in months, as though she were asleep, having pleasant dreams. No more nightmares. No more fear, no more loneliness. Shocked silence from Aether as the rest of the crew checked her vitals. She knew it even before Thebes’s voice confirmed it in her ear.
“Sully—she’s gone. She was right, it’s too late. You couldn’t have…There’s nothing you could have done.”
She was only vaguely aware of the words that followed, anxious demands coming from within the ship, from Thebes, from Harper, but she couldn’t make sense of them. The words meant nothing to her. She stared into Devi’s helmet, watching her friend dream. She kept her hands locked onto the mast, instinctively keeping the dish secure, but there wasn’t room for anything else. Waves of shock rolled through her, pressed her thoughts down, muffled the voices, and by the time the undertow released her, the voices had ceased, she wasn’t sure how long ago. Minutes? Hours? And yet—there was still work to do. She had to finish.
“Aether,” she said.
“Sullivan,” Harper responded immediately.
“I need…” She stopped and swallowed. Took a sip of water. Swallowed again. “I need you to tell me what to do now.”
She could hear his measured exhale on the other end of the comm. and Thebes mumbling something she couldn’t make out.
“You have the drill?” Harper asked.
She checked her belt. “Yes, I have the drill.”
“And the bolts?”
She checked her utility pouch, patting it with her free hand.
“Yes, I have the bolts.”
“Just like we practiced. The first two will be tricky because you need to keep hold of the mast, but after that you can let it go and use both hands. Copy?”
She couldn’t move. “I think—” she began, but Harper interrupted her.
“No,” he said, “no thinking. Just one bolt at a time, Sully.”
She did exactly that, and when she was finished she detached Devi from her tether without asking Harper’s permission. She knew it was what her friend would have wanted—what any of them would want.
Sully stared after her as she drifted away, growing smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a star and then disappearing altogether. Would she drift forever? Or would she fall into the sun? A distant star? Sully thought of Voyager, breaching the solar system and embarking on an infinite sojourn. She hoped that Devi might follow—that she might remain intact, somehow, her lifeless body traversing the universe on an infinite, incomprehensible journey. Sully didn’t move for a long time, just looked out into the dark emptiness, silently asking the void to hold her friend close.
THE NEXT MORNING she woke up screaming. A terror more intense than anything she’d ever felt before. It clung to her long after she opened her eyes, humming in her bones. She watched Devi drift, a tiny speck of white in an endless black void, over and over. At first, she tried to reimagine it, envision a different ending to the story—conjuring scenes in which she rushed Devi back to the airlock just in time, in which she sensed that the CO2 scrubber was failing long before it became poisonous—but there was no solace in these reenactments. Devi was gone and Sully was still here. It seemed nonsensical, but it was the way things were.
She had done as Harper told her, put aside her thoughts and installed the bolts, one by one—an hour of work masquerading as a lifetime—then gotten herself back to the airlock. She had slipped out of her suit and into the ship, where the remaining four waited for her in silence. She’d propelled herself past them without a word, back to the centrifuge, back to her compartment, and drawn the curtain. She’d slept and not-slept. She’d thought and not-thought. The nightmare of the spacewalk followed her mind wherever it hid, unconscious, subconscious, conscious. She couldn’t escape it because it was literally all around her: the vacuum she had tumbled into just hours ago. The poisonous, frozen, boiling blackness that was their road, their sky, their horizon, surrounding Aether and everyone inside with violent indifference. They were not welcome here. They were not safe. After a while Sully stopped trying to escape the terror and let the throbbing ache of it align with her heartbeat, let it ebb and flow with her breath. It sank into her physiology and became part of her. She would never be safe again. She knew that now.