NEWMAN

Commander Juliana Newman floated, turned, and dragged herself into the cupola, where Frank Fuller was watching Earth go by outside.

The International Space Station’s Cupola, designed by the USA, and completed by the ESA, was a serious scientific tool for research.

It was also the place where the astronauts aboard the station went to relax outside of duties, except when they decided to stream antics down to Earth to show all that people could do the impossible in zero-G. The six windows offered a unique panorama over a rotating surface. Right now, the station was over the Pacific, heading northward on its regular ninety-minute orbit, so the view was mostly clouds and blue water.

“Houston says they’ve still not restored the station. Thankfully, the TDRS has reconnected to Guam, so we’re not losing com, but the way I hear the subtext, it was touch and go.”

Frank raised his tablet, briefly showing her the scrolling text.

“Social networks are now all over #WestCoastBlackout. You’d think there would be generators at the ground stations.”

She smiled.

“Maybe they do. And nobody put the local ISP on one.”

“Goddam infrastructure. What’s the use of securing yours if everyone else lets it lapse.”

Juliana shrugged.

“That’s why you get NASA. They might overspend, but what they build works. At least when it has to.”

“Yes. But to hear the networks, you’d think the coast had dropped into the ocean or something.”

“No chance, you’d get echoes of the earthquake all over the world in that case,” she replied.

“Well, we should be getting a view. The weather’s still relatively clear according to ground, and the orbit drift puts us closer than the previous pass.”

Juliana consulted the watch on her wrist.

“Got forty minutes until sleep. Might as well see if the coast is still there before heading to bed.”

“I was going to watch serials, but that outage makes it hard. And did they really push the Crew-7 Mission back ten days?” Frank switched abruptly.

“Mortimer – sorry, astronaut Blake – is coming out of the flu, and they want simply to do an extended quarantine rather than replace him,” she said. “Don’t you worry. It’s still not enough to get you in the top three durations in space for the States.”

“Goddam Russians, hoarding the time in space,” he smiled.

“That was their station, not the ISS.”

“Maybe you’ll have more luck.”

“We’ll see.”

She smiled, eyes far away.

“Anyway, it will be good getting back to full. Five people are too few. Sometimes, I think the ISS has been cursed for extending beyond 2020. That accident…” she said.

“Nobody could have known. And, well, it offered me a way to stay. I immediately volunteered,” he smiled. “Even if I can’t beat anyone.”

Frank was still smiling when Juliana started frowning.

“Frank… turn and tell me if you see that… shimmer?”

The man grabbed an edge and reoriented himself to look forward. He squinted a bit.

“Sort of? I see something, but that’s weird.”

Juliana whistled softly.

“I worried something was wrong.”

Frank braced himself and passed his hand over the silica glass of the pane, looking for residue.

“It’s not a smear. But what? That’s not any weather formation I’ve ever seen. It looks like the horizon is badly pixelized or something.”

Juliana hesitated. Then she grabbed her suit microphone and called out, “Shuko? Can you connect me to Houston?”

The Japanese astronaut monitoring the station’s heath acknowledged the request, and ten seconds later, called out “you’re on with Ops.”

“Ops, this is Newman.”

“Hear you, ISS.”

“So far,” she automatically joked about the TRDS troubles, before adding “we’re starting to get close to the west coast and we’re seeing a weird atmospheric distortion over the ocean.”

“Repeat, ISS?”

Juliana could hear the confusion in Ops’ voice – she recognized Byrne, from experience.

“There is a sort of weird shimmer in the atmosphere over the ocean further along the orbit. It’s faint, and I don’t know if the cameras can record it properly. You might have a satellite view of that?”

There was a slight pause as Ops probably passed the request.

“Sorry ISS, we don’t have a confirmation. We had problems with LEO IR an hour ago. That satellite crashed, and we’re still trying to bring it back to full operation. It should cover your position in half an hour, and if…”

The voice trailed, and Juliana could hear distant voices, indicating that Byrne had forgotten to cut her microphone, as usual when she got disturbed.

“What?” “The Pentagon?” “What’s that about our sats?” “They lost sats and are asking?” “Tell that colonel we’re good.”

The voice became clear again.

“Sorry ISS. Got distracted.”

“What was that?”

“Some Colonel Denvers at the Pentagon phoning and asking if we have off-line satellites or any other troubles. It seems they had a problem with some GPS ones, I think.”

“Well, looks like you have satellite trouble too. Had, rather,” Juliana replied.

“Not your problem. Is the shimmer stable or what?”

She looked again.

“Stable. It’s not some inside fog. And we’re getting closer, so it’s a bit clearer,” Frank answered loudly enough to be through the microphone.

“Sorry?”

Juliana repeated the report on the behalf of her crewmate.

“Noted, ISS. Too bad the LEO IR satellite software crashed. It was close to the west coast, and it lost all pictures it had recorded as it was coming over your current position.”

“Copy that. We’ll observe and take pictures for you. Or rather, Frank will. I’ve got sleep coming up, and unlike him, I can do a decent eight-hour sleep up here.”

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“It looks like small hexagons,” Frank injected.

She took a look, before complaining, “Fighter Pilots. I’m jealous.”

“You’re still 20/20.”

“And you’re better. Shut up.”

“Sorry, ISS?” the voice from below came.

“Oops, I was talking to astronaut Fuller. Disregard.”

Noises came again from the connection, distant voices, and Byrne replied again.

“What does he mean, he’s losing GPS and observation satellites every time they go over the northwest? Not our problem…”

“Ops?” Juliana asked.

“Sorry, the Pentagon is asking where you are in orbit, and if you have problems. They say they have some of their satellites shut down over the northwest for some…”

The voice of Ops from Earth trailed down. But Juliana didn’t wait. She could add two GPS satellites being disabled and one NASA observation platform shutting down over the same area.

And the ISS was headed to the Northwest of the US, in its inexorable course. She toggled her microphone back to central.

“Shuko. Sound the alarm. Collision. Anything. We need to prepare for power…”

“The hexagons are almost under us,” Frank warned.

“Shuko! We’re going to lose all power. Sound the…”

Darkness.

No, Juliana Newman realized. Some light still came, reflections from Earth through the transparent panes of the cupola. But the entire ISS had blacked out.

And fallen silent.

The space station was never silent. Its fans were always running, distributing, and moving air around to avoid pockets of CO2 forming or any unequal distribution of oxygen. You learned early to ignore the background noise because it never stopped. Even during sleep, you needed earplugs and you had a special fan running close, to make sure you didn’t get a bubble of CO2 forming around your head while immobile.

“Frank!”

“I hear you.”

She spotted a brief movement, a black shape silhouetted over the cupola’s windows.

“Shuko,” she called out, but of course, the microphone did not appear to work either.

“Everything has shut down. Total power loss.”

“The tablet has batteries. It’s down too,” Frank confirmed, waving a dark rectangular shape.

“That’s what happened. To the other sats. They lost power.”

Frank didn’t answer her. Then he said, “Holy Mother of God.”

“What?”

She dragged herself back to the cupola and looked out.

The view would have been glorious in other circumstances, maybe. But combined with the complete power loss, it was horrifying.

There was an aurora of sorts. But in space. Blue lights reaching out from the surface to undefinable heights, far above the altitude of the ISS.

She’d seen her share of auroras from the cupola, of course. The ionized lights were confined by the earth’s upper atmosphere, a spectacle under their eyes. Greens and sometimes purple haze coming down from the poles.

There are not enough atoms up there to ionize for an aurora.

And besides, the blue light was not the normal color for auroras. It felt unnatural, even without the impossibility of a space aurora.

“Radiations?” she wondered.

Then she realized what it meant.

“Storm Shelter,” she ordered, referring to the protection against solar storms that the ISS included, despite its position under the Earth’s magnetic protection of the Van Allen belts.

“Is it even safe in a shutdown?” Frank wondered.

Despite his misgivings, he grabbed the edge of the cupola and started to haul himself out. Juliana also left.

“Do you remember how to get there? In the dark, it’s going to be a pain in…”

Frank did not finish his phrase.

Blue light entered the ISS. Blue lines swirling, ribbons that twisted. Juliana realized the lines didn’t light the interior of the station. But they moved, like some slow version of tesla coil lightning, and they started and stopped at the edges of the station’s corridor. She realized she could almost feel the geometry of the module and tunnels, by the end and start of the swirling lights. She raised one hand, realizing she could see the light through it, even if the strings stopped at the walls of the station. She could feel some heat, coming from somewhere she couldn’t guess.

“Too late,” Frank said. “wer fukt.”

She realized his words were slurring. She should have felt panic, but she already knew that whatever had befallen the ISS, it was too late for her – or anyone – to do anything.

Were the blue lights Cerenkov effects? High-energy particles piercing the walls of the ISS and slowing down because they exceeded the local lightspeed in the station’s atmosphere. That much light… If the radiation was already killing them, then they were dead, they just didn’t know it.

“rank? ere ou…”

Her mouth felt funny as if it was filling with stuff.

She tried to guess in the darkness, using the dancing lights. Try to hold on to Frank, to someone for one last moment, before their organs liquefied from radiation. There must be millions of rads to affect them so fast. She felt the heat more keenly, rising inside.

Is this how they felt in Chernobyl when the reactor leaked and they burned from inside?

She could see the heat pulsing slowly behind. In a long shape.

BYRNE

“Okay, the TRDS has no carrier link or anything, and we have only the last moment before this happened,” Ops – Kayleigh Byrne – was shouting over the din of the control room.

“Got a record of what she was doing on internal coms. She was calling for Shuko – astronaut Aozora – to sound the alarm. Something about collision and loss of power?” someone said.

“She must have realized something was coming before it happened.”

Someone next to Kayleigh whispered, “all the satellites.”

The repeated calls from the Pentagon, she realized.

“Is that colonel from the Pentagon still on the line?”

“No, but I can call back.”

“Do so. Tell him ISS… just lost com. Probably got disabled.”

“No,” the colonel – Wesley Denvers, she remembered – said, “it’s temporary. But we have a second failure on one of the NRO low-earth birds. Again, when it crossed over the northwest coast area. All the satellites lose all power while over there. And the entire northwest is offline, even through GEO sats links. We can’t get anyone. We had a brief contact there but lost it. I… assume that power is off, everywhere, and can’t be turned on.”

She briefly wondered how the man could even stay calm in the face of the physically impossible.

“Batteries?”

“Drained. One had a minuscule charge somehow, but all sats restarted from their solar panels, as it’s still daylight over the affected area.”

“Then the ISS…”

“Should restart. As soon as it moves out of the affected area. Your guys should be safe unless the lack of power affects pressurization.”

“It shouldn’t. It’s designed so that lack of power locks, not opens. That’d be stupid,” Kayleigh.

“Oops, General Markus just arrived. I have to brief him. Good luck, NASA.”

“Thanks.”

The beep of disconnect hit her, and she pulled back her headset, hitting the general channel.

“Okay, everyone. Here’s the situation. The ISS has lost all internal power. And by all, I mean even batteries. They’re completely black. The good news is that it’s temporary, and once they’re out of the… affected zone, they’ll get power from the solar panels again.”

She could see relief painted on the faces turned toward her.

“The zone is limited, so we should face maybe eight-ten minutes maximum of orbit… meaning it can restart at any time in the next five minutes. I want everyone to figure out how to restart the essentials of the station from scratch as fast as possible once we get uplink again.”

She breathed deeply, and then added, “And start drawing plans for the next orbit. Can they evacuate? Orbit the Dragon or the Soyuz far enough not to be in the affected volume on the next pass? I need answers in… as soon as you can get them. Go!”

I know it must be terrifying up there in the dark, but it’s going to end. Stay the course, Juliana.

The next seven minutes were the most stressful ones in Kayleigh’s history. Up until Coms announced, “TRDS has a link. Protocol tunnels being negotiated with the station.”

A massive shout resonated across the entire control room, as cheering people jumped up.

“Quiet. Any telemetry?” she asked.

“Nope. Trying to run status…”

Then Com laughed, “looks like only the Russian core has restarted. Damn Russians, their computers turn on and off instantly.”

The old Russian modules, notably the core, were not designed two decades ago, but they were even “rugged” for their era. When there were none of their partners for the station around, people joked it probably used sets of ferrite toroids as storage.

“Get me voice with the station as soon as possible.”

“Data. Pressure is still nominal, gases ratio not available yet.”

“Should be okay. They must be worried silly. Get me that voice.”

“Solar is low, the panels must not be in an optimal position.”

More data started pouring as various parts of the distant ISS rebooted. The big computers would be slow to come back, but the various systems vital for the station would be almost instantly up.

Up in the corner of the control room panel, a counter displayed 73 minutes.

The current estimate until the orbit of the station would bring it back over the Northwest. If the unpowered zone was not expanding too fast – Kayleigh had now a dedicated operator trying to monitor how large it was from whatever source he could find – that might be the last orbit to do so for a while, as the earth turned, and the next pass would be too far east to cover the current affected area.

She just had to prepare the station for the next shutdown, and then enact a plan to evacuate in emergency mode.

“Com? That voice channel?”

“Nothing yet. Full bandwidth is available again, but most internal systems are still rebooting.”

She waited a full minute before bugging the hapless Com operator again. The guy was doing his job to the best of his limited capacities from here on Earth.

“Com?”

“It should be up. But I get no one on vocal. It’s… buzzing. If astronaut Aozora hasn’t moved, he should be picking up.”

Kayleigh repressed the impulse to swear out loud.

“Text,” Com said.

She raised her head, as the console routed the display on the large set of flat panels.

Houston? Coms are back up here.

More cheers erupted, and Kayleigh had to wave everyone down.

“Com? That voice?”

“Nobody picks up.”

She brought a keyboard, called the text com application, and started typing.

Houston here. Your voice should be up. Can you check?

She waited a few seconds, then text started to appear.

Maybe. I can’t be sure.

You can’t be sure? What? Kayleigh thought as she frowned, and waited for elaboration.

Trying camera. You need to see.

“Video active,” Com announced as the channel automatically added itself to the main displays.

She instantly recognized the corridors of the station. The light was dimmer, as the station would be in reduced power mode.

Then something moved into the camera’s view and the entire room gasped.