The Filter Trap (37 page)

“A fry cook,” said one of the soldiers, moving his rifle tip up for another curious poke.

Jill put herself between the bear and the soldiers. “It’s unarmed, don’t hurt it.”

“Are you kidding?” a soldier asked. “After what they’ve done to us? After God knows what they’ve been doing to the lieutenant?”

“All of you, shut up,” Amanda interjected, then grabbed the alien by one of the thin arms. It hissed, but did nothing to stop her, dangling like a skinny king crab out of water.

“What were we going to do if we found the pilot anyway? Any of you know how to operate an alien spaceship? We’ve got a linguist, but I doubt Kam could decipher an alien control panel on the fly. Our only option would have been destruction and now we’ve got leverage.”

She dragged the bearantula onto one of the low benches and stood it in front of her. The soldiers surrounded it and put their rifles to its body.

“You know what these do, don’t you?”

The bearantula made a hissing scratchy noise filled with high squeaks.

“I say we shut him the fuck up before he calls the head chef!” a soldier said, poking it again with the rifle nozzle.

“I think it’s too late for that,” Kam said, pointing behind the group.

A mass of bearantulas, furred up and lasers ready, stood between the Marines and the entrance to the mess hall.

Prologue: West

He sipped from a bag of water and looked down in quiet awe on the Bering Strait, nearly invisible under night clouds, as it stretched for the pink and green-tinged horizon. Alaska and British Columbia, flecked with pale orange fireflies, trundled closer. He knew many of the children asleep there would celebrate Christmas soon, but he’d see sunrise before they did, and he already had his gift. Sunrise came every ninety minutes here, worth more than a lifetime of Christmases.

Funny that the Bering Strait separated only hours on the clock but put two weeks between the celebrations of the same holiday. The cosmonaut grew up celebrating Christmas on January 7
th
.

“Curious more Americans don’t vacation in Alaska,” an American astronaut said, carrying her own water packet into the cupola.

“They can’t stand the cold, we Ruskies are bred for it,” the cosmonaut smiled. “That’s why we got to space first,” he winked.

“You just wanted another excuse to drink vodka to warm up!” she joked.

“You’ve got vodka?” He feigned interest in her plastic drink sleeve as she crawled into the other edge of the small windowed cup on the underside of the space station.

She motioned to her water packet, sipping the first drops and rolling her eyes, pretending to be drunk before shaking her head.

“Alas . . . NASA tried to bring some sherry up to Skylab in the 70s, but little old church ladies put a stop to that.”

“You Americans ran from real religious persecution in England, only to let the Catholics run over you with imaginary threats later.”

“Protestants,” she corrected him and took another sip. “Not that I’d know the difference.”

“We brought cognac to the Mir; to hell with the Patriarch!” the cosmonaut gestured, then feigned fear, looking about. “He’s not up here, is he?”

“Who, God?” she asked.

“I’ll show you God,” he said, pointing back down at the continent rolling away ten times faster than a bullet. A dim Russia, gleaming Japan, and pinprick of light in Honolulu receded west to meet the Sun on the opposite side of the Earth. North America approached from the east and slid under the station, nearly invisible save for the lights trickling into a waterfall along the coast. They weren’t interested in those lights, though.

“Oh, it’s pink!” she exclaimed. “I’m going to miss auroras the most.”

“Not me?” he asked with a smile.

She cocked her head and smiled back, reaching over to give him a fake punch.

There were unauthorized space
experiments
he’d like to try with the strong American astronaut. So much like the girls back home, hardy and full of courage, but probably even smarter than he was. The only other woman on the mission, a cosmonaut, was a carbon copy of her with a different accent. However, after ten years of cosmonaut training at Star City, she felt like a sister. The American had to know how he felt, but once again ignored his subtle insinuations.

‘Better not scare her off,’ he thought. ‘This view is even better when shared.’

As if his segue off-topic hadn’t happened, he asked, “If God exists, he’s an artist, ya?”

“
She
’s an artist.”

He tipped his water straw toward hers. “To the best job in the world.”

She clinked her plastic tip in return. Loose globs of water fused together and floated away. He stared into her eyes; she held his gaze then looked up nervously. A quarter-sized water droplet spun in place, echoing the spinning planet that used to be 250 miles below.

Used to be?

“Shit!” she screamed, looking down no longer at a swirling aurora over a sparkling amethyst ball, but more stars, one brighter than the rest.

“We must have flipped!” he said, pushing off the cupola, through the hole and up into the space station’s main canal of cream-colored wire-covered walls.

“I didn’t feel anything, though!” she yelled back, shooting off into the opposite direction to find the rest of the crew.

“Depends on relative velocity,” he said, unsure if she heard.

“Hey!” She grabbed the wall and reversed course. “If we flipped why did we see the Sun in the same spot?” She poured herself back into the little cupola to be sure. “We’re pointed the same direction . . . but, how?”

More shouting, echoing in from all points in the 425 cubic meter space station, commenced as the other four crew members noticed the dilemma.

“We’re off course!” the French spationaut shouted.

“Did you feel anything?” the other cosmonaut shouted.

“Houston unresponsive!” the German astronaut yelled.

“ESOC silent!” the Japanese astronaut confirmed.

“
ЦУП? . . . ЦУП! . . . TsUP is dead,” the cosmonaut reported.

“Jesus! TsUP’s the only other active control room. Even if we get back into orbit we won’t be able to get home if we can’t talk to them,” the cosmonaut’s female counterpart whispered loudly.

“I don’t think we have a home anymore
,” the Japanese astronaut stated.

“He’s right,” the German confirmed. “I don’t know how, but he’s right. There’s nothing on the scopes, no visual of the Earth. No radio emissions, and a casual observation of astrogation with the Sun says we’re already way out of orbit.”

“Calm down, this has to be an instrument failure because of whatever put us off course,” the spationaut stated with cold confidence.

“Commander, with respect, what instruments? My eyes?” the cosmonaut asked. “I can see you perfectly, so why can’t I see Earth out there?” He pointed at one of the thirteen windows in the Russian section. “Can you see anything from the WORF?” he yelled to the German in the Window Observational Research Facility.

“At the nadir I should be staring at the night lights of the sunset strip,” the German yelled back after crawling to the umbrella-sized single window. “But the only bright light is the Sun.”

“Clearly ground and AF tracking missed something up here that struck us,” the spationaut assumed.

“It’s happened before,” the female cosmonaut backed him up. “Remember when Hadfield found that ‘bullet hole’ rip in the solar array?”

“Check pressure manually on every section until we find the leak,” the spationaut ordered.

“Doesn’t make sense, Commander,” the Japanese astronaut said cautiously. “Anything taking this long to activate the RDE or the American depressurization alert wouldn’t be large enough to push us so far off course to change view of the Earth. If that happened we’d be dead long before we realized the Earth was in the wrong spot.”

“Unless we spun to the other side,” the American suggested.

“But we didn’t. The Sun is right there!” the German protested, looking out the WORF’s window again. “No amount of spin would take us to the other side of the Earth; that’s an orbital change correction, not a rotation, and we’d still see the Earth anyway if we rotated. An orbital correction perpendicular to our previous—er—present orbit would smash us against the walls, wouldn’t it?”

“He’s right, Commander,” the American said. “Not to mention after we were smashed we’d still have to accelerate quite a bit to come out on the other side of the Earth, and even then we’d still be facing the wrong way-the cupola would still be angled toward the planet.”

“We’re off course, then,” the spationaut suggested. “Pushed into a much higher orbit.”

“We’d have to be farther off course than the Moon to lose visual confirmation of the Earth, but equipment would still see it anyway.” the cosmonaut countered. “It would take longer for Houston or Korolyov
to talk to us but they would have radioed by now. We could be a hundred times farther than the Moon and they still would have called us. I’ve got nothing. Do any of you?”

“As I said,” the Japanese astronaut calmly stated, “we didn’t move, Earth did.”

“Capcom, TsUP and ESOC are all gone, nothing on any other radio frequency on scan showing up,” the American confirmed.

“No alarms are going off so we’re structurally secure except for any small leaks,” the spationaut said, before turning to the German. “You said you eyeballed our course; get us a real reading. The rest of us should check redundant systems and pressure in the meantime.”

The station went from the polite chaos of emergency speculation to utter silence as all crewmembers drifted through the station to do their new jobs.

Twenty minutes later, the German came back after inputting all data into the computer.

“Commander, sorry this took so long but without the Earth or the Moon as a starting point I had to use the Sun, constellations, Mars and Venus to get a proper reading.”

“Why not the Moon?” the spationaut asked. “We can see the Moon is still there.”

“You’re not gonna like this.”

“Not a lot to like in the last half hour anyway, so spill it.”

The others heard the conversation and convened in the Russian Orbital Section, eager for good news.

“As crazy as it sounds, the Earth
is
gone. When I ran that scenario, it checked out with our current course. We’re still in ‘orbit,’ but around the Sun, as is the Moon. We’re eccentric now without the Earth’s gravity, so we’re heading farther out, but if I’m correct we should still see the Earth if it
was
there. But we don’t. And that’s the
good
news.”

“That’s the
good
news!” they gasped.

“What’s the bad news?” the American asked with trepidation.

“Remember how low Earth orbit kept us safe from all that space junk?”

“Piiiiz'dets, blyaaaa!” the cosmonaut whispered harshly.

“Fucked up is right. But there’s something else in orbit up there that’ll fuck us up even worse.”

“I know where this is going,” the Japanese astronaut moaned.

“Without the Earth, the Moon is getting pulled into an eccentric orbit around the Sun as well,” the German explained. “Unfortunately, we’re heading out while the Moon is heading in. About three weeks from now we’re going to be Apollo 21, but we’ll only get one very short EVA, I’m afraid.”

“If we survive the minefield of space junk on the way,” the American added.

“The Earth can’t just disappear, it has to be some illusion!” the female cosmonaut protested, holding out hope.

“That also tricks gravity?”

“How long can we survive?” the spationaut asked.

“Maybe five or six months, with rationing, if we can somehow get out of a collision course with the Moon,” the Japanese astronaut answered coolly.

“What about the thrusters on the Zvezda?” the American asked.

“We could use that for a few days to maneuver around the debris,” the cosmonaut answered. “
If
we knew where they would be ahead of time, but we rely on Houston and your Air Force satellites for that. Tracking from up here is hopeless; we’d never see it coming.”

The German sighed and wagged his index finger. “Even if we could, the smaller particles, the dust that wouldn’t cut the hull, would still accumulate on the solar panels, killing the water cyclers and oxygen exchangers in a few days. Every EVA to clean them off would be extremely dangerous in that debris. Our suits are twenty times thinner than the hull. It would be a suicide mission every time.”

The American put her head in her hands, ashamed of the tears pooling and sticking to her eyelids. “It’s the Rapture.”

“Can we override the recyclers, push more nitrogen into the mix?” the spationaut asked, putting his big hand on the American’s back.

“Probably, but why?” she asked.

The spationaut mission commander “stood” and straightened his shirt, lifting her with him, urging her to strengthen. “We’re in a tin can hurtling toward the Moon. Before we get there, tens of thousands of debris, large enough to punch a hole, will get in our way. It doesn’t matter what happened to the Earth anymore; even if it is down there, nothing can catch up to us in time. We all know there’s nothing built that could fuel up, take off, fly fast enough to rescue and turn around without running out of time, fuel, or food.”

They realized where the commander was going and held hands.

He continued, “There’s nothing cowardly about taking the easy way out if there’s nobody to prove your bravery to. Space kills. We all knew that when we signed up. We’re all gonna die up here together, might as well do it before this place becomes a punching bag for what’s left of the Tianjin.”

The Japanese astronaut moved away, heading to the oxygen recycler controls, rejoining them after increasing the nitrogen content of the air in the station. They all naturally headed to the cupola, to spend their remaining moments looking out at the universe which had created them.

“Here’s to dying doing what you love,” the German emoted.

“I still wish we had some vodka,” the cosmonaut joked while choking back tears.

The American laughed quietly and took his hand.

The crew of the International Space Station took softer and softer breaths, the Sun’s warmth touching them through the glass one last time.