NEWMAN

The light coming up was almost anticlimactic, Juliana thought. A blinking from deep announced the change, as the LED lighting turned itself back on. It was a dimmer version of the normally half-bright illumination that filled most of the ISS prior to sleep, but that was expected from emergency lighting, which she assumed was the case.

‟Power’s back,” Yaytsev announced from deeper, unnecessarily.

‟Let’s put this station back together,” she shouted back.

‟On it!”

‟Frank? News?”

The blubbery shape waved a tablet.

‟Not working or booting,” he answered.

‟Dammit.”

Frank grabbed a wire and extended it to one of the plugs on the Cupola. Like most modules, the Cupola had plenty of attach points for data and charge.

‟Getting a firmware logo. Its battery is just gone, empty… yes, shows 0%.”

‟Let it charge. I want…” she stopped herself.

She could feel the gaze of the others coming to her. The misshapen, blubbery shapes were now better visible with the emergency lighting than the distant Earthlight. The head might have almost no features, but it had eyes. Deep eyes, she realized. No whites. It looked more like a dog’s eyes, although dog eyes had whites.

Focus, Juliana. We’ll look into each other’s eyes later.

‟What’s our orbit?” she asked Shuko, or who she assumed was the JAXA astronaut.

The shape visibly startled, before thinking quickly.

‟This pass, we’re flat over the Northwest coast Canada, dropping back… we should be over the Alberta and North Dakota now.”

‟Next one…”

‟Shifted east 22 degrees longitude…”

‟We’re going to head straight into this zone again,” Frank immediately concluded.

‟Probably. It depends on where it is, exactly. It must be large, we were cut for, what seven… eight minutes? We need to talk to Control anyway. They’ll know.”

She extended a too-short arm, grabbed a handhold, and started hauling herself. The other three fell behind her without hesitation or prompting. Frank just grabbed his tethered tabled and snapped it to a Velcro pad before exiting the Cupola.

Central was deserted, obviously, since Shuko had joined them at the Cupola earlier. A pair of tablets floated in the zero-g and the Japanese wasted no time snatching them and plugging them back into chargers.

‟Status?” she asked.

‟Most computers are still booting,” he replied after a quick glance.

‟Yaytsev?” she said, not even shouting.

‟Core and attitude control back. More diagnostics are coming. Panels are trying to re-align, they stopped adjusting during the shutdown.”

The immense solar panel arrays that powered the station adjusted themselves to track the sun, maximizing the amount of electricity captured. The angle might be off, or even wildly off if they had moved in an uncontrolled manner.

‟Will… will we have enough to charge batteries for night flight?”

Yaytsev swore in Russian. It did sound vile, somehow. Juliana knew some Russian but didn’t have courses in it. She assumed Frank understood, though.

‟Depends. This shit is over daylight, it’s going to cut. I’ll have more answers in a few when I have data on batteries charge,” the Russian engineer finally admitted.

‟Shuko? Do we have communications?”

‟Not enough computers up to answer. I got diagnostic… it looks like… yes, there’s a carrier from a TRDS. It’s renegotiating protocols. We should have full data in maybe thirty seconds.”

She felt herself relax, a little bit.

‟Sounds like this end of a shift is a bit… wilder than expected.”

‟Question is, what do we say to the ground?” the last member of the crew, Ivan Radanovich, said.

Juliana froze.

‟We’re not looking good, are we?” the Russian added.

‟Literally and figuratively…” she admitted.

The four of them not only looked weird, but they looked like they’d been test dummies after an engineered car crash. She had not realized, but their clothes had rips and gashes. She did not remember crashing into anything, and besides, even if it was cluttered, it was hard to rip on the walls of the station. The designers made sure to minimize the risks.

She became aware of a small whistling sound. A tiny little noise.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

‟Anyone hears that?”

‟What? We don’t have ears…” Frank replied.

‟Tiny sound…”

‟I hear something,” Shuko confirmed.

The Japanese twisted, trying to “listen”, however that worked without ears. He moved around, carefully checking.

‟Tablet’s real faint. I get more from… the wifi base station.”

‟Wifi’s broken?” Ivan asked.

‟No, the tablet is online… I think we’re hearing the wifi itself, not the station’s electronic.”

‟What?”

‟I see magnetic field lines. Why can’t we hear electromagnetic waves?” Yaytsev’s voice came from deeper.

Juliana looked at the LED lights.

‟We still see in the normal spectrum, don’t we?”

Nobody answered the obvious.

‟Datalink is up and running,” Shuko announced abruptly.

‟Coms?” Juliana asked.

‟Soon, I think.”

‟We can’t show ourselves,” Ivan said again. ‟If they see us, they’re going to think aliens have attacked the station.”

That… was a plausible scenario, Juliana realized. Then reality asserted itself.

‟Can’t avoid that. Do you think we can hide? For how long? There is remote monitoring and control. The instant they try to turn on things, either they see, or they’ll know we’ve voluntarily turned those off.”

‟She’s right, Ivan,” the voice of Yaytsev came.

The other Russian seemed to hear them clearly, even though he did not look like it was anywhere near the Central.

‟Besides, it’s my job to handle the discussions with the ground. As I said, maybe they have answers.”

‟Or maybe we do,” Frank replied.

She looked at him quizzically, before trying to figure out if the mannerism translated into their new bodies.

‟The #WestCoastShutdown. That’s the same thing, isn’t it? Those hexagons, they cover the affected area.”

She tried to nod, but her spine – assuming she had one – did not entirely cooperate.

‟At least on the media, before we lost power, nobody had any clue of what was wrong with the coast. We may be the only ones to have entered… and left the zone.”

What came from Shuko translated into a gasp, despite not being a proper gasping sound.

‟Do you think people down there are… getting Changed?”

No one replied for a while.

‟All coms are up. Houston is calling already. What do I do?” Shuko asked.

‟Can’t use voice, obviously. We don’t talk, and we can’t hear,” Frank offered.

She would have drummed her fingers somewhere if she had enough of them left. Briefly, she wondered why they seemed to have four eyes now, but still only two arms and two legs. That seemed wrong to her biologist sensitivities, somehow.

‟Text? Can we use text?”

‟It’s for detailed instructions rather than talk, but sure. The channel is always up.”

‟Good. Give me a tablet,” she confirmed.

BYRNE

The shape in the video feed looked wrong. The visible bit was blubbery, leathery, a substance that Kayleigh had no name for. There was an elongated shape, a head, over a too-wide neck.

Tattered bits of what she recognized as a NASA-issue T-shirt hung, floating in the zero-G.

The thing pulled a tablet into view, and she noted that there seemed to be only three far too large digits grasping. The weird humanoid started pecking at the tablet, and text started to display.

Can you see me?

Kayleigh remained frozen, disbelieving.

Ops? the thing typed.

She grabbed her own keyboard and typed.

Who are you?

The alien figure on the camera paused and started typing again.

Commander Newman.

Then after a short pause.

I think you’ll have to trust me on this.

Then another figure moved into view. It looked almost the same, and Kayleigh noted the wide eyes, that looked like somebody extended the iris all the way through the ocular globe, while the pupils seemed a bit overlarge, even in the dim light.

And the other?

That’s Shuko. Astronaut Aozora. Frank Fuller and Ivan Radanovich are there too. Yaytsev Baranov is checking the station status.

Two more figures moved partially in view, one waving with a too-short arm, also with three digits only.

The silence in the control room was absolute.

What happened? Kayleigh typed.

Light. Light reached at us. And changed us.

People were starting to arrive in the room, and Kayleigh waved them away, whispering “keep room clear”, before focusing on the view from the ISS.

I should get green and muscles all over from radiation, not this.

She blinked as someone next to her said, “did she just make a Hulk joke?”

Kayleigh noticed flashing lights on her panel, indicators of incoming calls. She almost dismissed them before she realized what they were.

The other control centers.

Houston had managed the shutdown and restart, but the rest of the multiple partners in the ISS probably had a crew. It would be nighttime already for Europe and Russia, but Japan might have someone monitoring.

The feeds were duplicated in all centers. Everyone was seeing the alien figures crowding into the center of the ISS.

Too late, she realized, fighting her impulse to try to shut down the replicated feeds.

Report on the station? She typed, as a way to give her some delay before having to engage in discussion with the alien that might be Commander Newman.

Then she picked up the first call.

“No, we’re seeing this. We’re a bit busy. Send text messages. You do have replicated feeds? Good. No, I can’t explain. I’m going to try to ask.”

She answered a few variants of that same dialogue. Even Huntsville was butting in, and unlike the rest, they could complain and act quickly. So she placated them as best as she could, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be missing on anything, and please, could they send suggestions by text rather than force her to pick up the phone, thanks a lot.

Her eyes drifted to the counter. 65 minutes till the next orbital pass. Assuming everything stayed the same.

Nav? Is the orbit stable? She quickly shot, before bringing up the ISS text interface again.

While she was doing diversion, the alien Newman had typed more information.

Most of everything is still rebooting, but nothing seems to have been damaged.

I can feel the fans pushing air, that’s also working.

Someone had inserted a question, and Kayleigh felt irritation. She was supposed to be the only one handling communications with the ISS during any form of emergency, and that one obviously qualified.

No, we don’t hear them. Actually, we can’t hear anything. Or even speak. All our external orifices are fused shut. No ear, no mouth, no nose, nothing.

She blinked at the text.

You can breathe, though?

The alien typed slowly.

We don’t have problems yet. Maybe we breathe through the skin.

You don’t know? Kayleigh thought.

Maybe if they were really the ISS crew… they wouldn’t even know how their bodies functioned. That was hard to swallow, but then, either was the idea that aliens had hijacked the space station.

She fired another message at monitoring, can you track actives inside?

At least it might tell her if there were more than five presences on board. Or less than five.

Okay, let’s start from the beginning. We lost com in the upper Pacific. What happened?

The shimmer that Frank reported was some kind of grid over the atmosphere, the person replied.

The report was something Kayleigh Byrne, ground Ops for the ISS, never had expected to read.

We also think the ground effect is related, Kayleigh typed. But those aurora lights?

99% they’re the source of our changes. Our worst fears are that it affects the ground as well. They’re not all over the grid, but there are lots of them.

“Get me Denvers at the Pentagon,” Kayleigh yelled. “We may have the only orbital data on that zone!”