He opened one eye, and then the other. Grigory was still standing in front of him, still holding the gun inches from his face, but now it was reversed, pointing the other way. Grigory jiggled the weapon, making Sean’s insides squirm, but he realised that Grigory had done it in a, here, take this, kind of way. Sean lifted his hands, moving them towards the grip until his fingers met cool steel. As he took the gun, Grigory released the muzzle, and backed up next to Aleks. Now Sean was pointing the gun, which was shaking in his hands. He moved it to Aleks, whose eyes looked back deep into his, and then to Grigory. Neither of them spoke. Sean didn’t know why he did what he did next, but he did it anyway: he lowered the gun and put it down on the coffee table. Then he fainted. He didn’t know how long he was out for, but when he came round, it was because a shadow was hanging over his face.
‘Sean, are you okay?’
Pain smouldered in a pocket behind his eyeballs, and as he opened his eyes, it seared with vicious agony. ‘Eurghhh…’ he gurgled as he sat up, reaching for the source of the pain, the back of his head. When he looked at his hand, there was blood, but not much. ‘What happened…’ he groaned.
‘You fainted,’ Aleks said, helping him to stand. ‘You knocked your head on the table.’
Bit by bit it all came back to Sean. The knife, the gun… the fainting. Shit. But he was still alive.
Aleks helped him to the sofa and lowered him down. ‘I’ll clean you up and get you some pain killers,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look too bad. You’ll be fine.’
The pain in Sean’s head had begun to subside already, but in its place came nausea at the thought of what happened before he fainted. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Aleks, who had returned with a damp cloth. He mopped the back of Sean’s head with it. ‘I can understand your position. But I hope there will be no more knife waving from now on.’
Sean shook his head, which reinvigorated the pain, and he winced. Not that there was any point in threatening him with a knife — Grigory had plucked it from his hands without so much as a thank you.
The front door opened and Grigory himself walked in, carrying a bag of shopping. ‘Food for tonight,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to stab me over it, are you?’
An embarrassing stupidity burned on Sean’s cheeks. ‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ Aleks said, chuckling. ‘Here, take these.’
Sean took the pills and water and swallowed them down. He handed the empty glass back and shut his eyes to stop the room from spinning. ‘So, what next?’
‘I don’t know,’ Aleks replied from the darkness.
Sean didn’t know either. There were a few ideas floating around, but when he tried to think about them, it hurt his head. There would plenty of time to think about them tomorrow — but first, sleep.
It was strange being alone. Not that Sally was unused to being by herself, but isolation at this magnitude was a whole new experience. It wasn’t creepy, but it was… quiet. Even during her most sedentary times as a researcher, she’d still swapped the occasional hello with other staff. Here, she had no one. As the days passed, she noticed herself talking out loud, and although it was a concern at first, she began to embrace the sound of a human voice — even if it was her own. At one point, something she’d said aloud triggered a spore of a memory, and she’d realised she sounded just like her own mother. The thought had made her sad.
She busied herself with her research, and even found the time for more: those little experiments she had always wanted to do. Deep space radio waves, big bang evidence — the kind of things she really enjoyed. They were the sort of activities that helped keep her mind off the cold fact that she was over two hundred miles away from anyone, floating alone in lifeless space. She had even been down into the MLM on occasion to look at UV One, which still tracked behind the station as it had done since its arrival. Nothing strange happened, even when she stared at it. She began to believe that her previous experiences had been amplified by contagious hysteria. Space wasn’t the domain of the action hero — it was the working environment of the mentally accelerated, and that was bound to have consequences.
Shoulder elastics pulling each long stride into the treadmill, Sally wiped a towel across her sweaty face as she finished the last ten minutes of her two-hour fitness regime. As she warmed down, she thought about where she was going to take her experiments next. With no idea how long it would be until the next Soyuz came to collect her — and she presumed it would be soon since the ISS had been left manned by an astronaut with only three weeks’ training — she needed to make the most of the time she had.
‘I’ll probably finish the deep space pulses, then move on to a broad range scan of that neutron star, erm… what was it called?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘R X J one eight five six point five dash three seven five four. That’s it.’
Her memory was something she prided herself on, and she grinned at her achievement. Sometimes, it was the small things that made her happy. She slowed and stopped the treadmill, took a moment to catch her breath, unfastened the straps and dabbed herself with the towel. It had taken her a while, but she was getting used to the fitness routines, and she was even starting to enjoy them. A run and a wash left her feeling fresh and invigorated, ready to study.
‘How is he?’
Evgeny Novitskiy stood over the bed of Chris Williams, who was still sedated and had his entire head bandaged. A clutch of tubes poked out where his mouth should have been.
‘He’s not doing well I’m afraid,’ the nurse tending to him said with a sad smile. ‘He’s got damage to his trigeminal nerve, so he’s in a lot of pain. We can’t wake him — the agony would be too unbearable.’
‘And Gardner? Any change?’
The nurse shook her head.
‘Thank you.’
Novitskiy left Chris and the nurse be, and, walking stick in hand, took a stroll around the corridors. He was at a hospital in Moscow — where exactly he didn’t know — along with Chris and Gardner, having been flown in direct from Kazakhstan. He hadn’t seen Gardner since their arrival — he was in a closed room with the curtains drawn. The nurses kept him up-to-date with his progress, which was minimal.
It had taken Novitskiy a few days to gain the strength to walk again after the weightlessness of space, but now he was mobile — if a little unsteady — he had been restricted to his floor. All the other rooms were empty — it was just himself, Chris, Gardner and the staff occupying the whole level. Quarantine, perhaps? They wouldn’t tell him. They said it was an order from above, but wouldn’t say from who. He’d asked to talk to someone from NASA or the RFSA. The nurses kept telling him soon, but soon didn’t seem to be coming. He aimed himself for the ward desk and pottered on.
‘I hope you’re not thinking of escaping?’ the nurse at the desk said, giving him a warm smile.
‘No, sir.’ Novitskiy replied, hobbling over to him. ‘You don’t know when I’m going to be debriefed, do you? It’s really important I speak to someone.’