NEWMAN

Everybody had moved to various parts of the station. Juliana had taken a spot at the Central, although there was little to do. She watched the dialogue between the ground and the station, with Frank reporting on the observations.

We met fewer aurora lights, seems to be random rather than continuous.

No, we couldn’t see what was happening in Seattle. My eyeballs don’t seem better than before, and that’s 150 yards per retina cell at the best resolution for Mark 1 ones.

No additional physical changes in further immersion, no.

She tuned him out as Yaytsev reported.

‟Looked at the charge. I can get the fans and some lighting if you can tolerate low light and turning one of them off five minutes before the end of the eclipse.”

‟Thanks, Scotty.”

‟Get me a sympathetic scriptwriter,” the Russian replied drily.

‟Make it so.”

The pseudo-answer did not quite fit into any category she could make, so she filed it as “snorting”.

She’d wondered how people facing catastrophe could even think of joking. Now, she knew. It filled the brain, preventing it from spiraling into lock-up.

She opened a separate chat channel.

Ops? Newman.

Yes?

So, what are the plans for evacuation?

We’re still making scenarios. We’ll get back to you ASAP.

So, they are delaying the bad news, she decided.

Yaytsev had the right to it. Even in the best conditions, the east coast would be impossible. Yet, they had to do it. The zone kept expanding – the updated models from Houston confirmed it – and the larger it was, the more shutdown and wiping of battery reserves they were going to face.

At one point, and possibly very soon, the ISS would no longer be operable in any way.

‟Yaytsev, we need a plan for low-charge re-entry.”

The Russian, back from wherever he was, replied immediately.

‟Give me a day or two, and I’ll have you something, maybe. Except we can’t afford the delay. And no, I’m not going to Scotty that.”

He stayed silent for a few seconds, before announcing, “New setup done. We will have some minimal lighting at Central, and fans to keep the CO2 at a minimum. The sooner, the better. On my way. Eclipse starts in five minutes.”

‟Everybody, fall back to Central.”

She tugged at her shirt, or rather the very tattered remnants of it. Most of the clothing was gone, probably digested.

I need to study the biological changes. That, at least, I can do.

Once again, the crew was being gathered in a single place, with nothing to do. Yaytsev had pronounced using the tablets “within margins”, so she tried to busy herself, not with managing the ISS but with checking over the Internet.

Which she found blocked. Someone at NASA had decided to cut the crew from outside access entirely, which, she realized, made sense. Someone was bound to ask about them, and they couldn’t very well explain what had happened.

‟We need alternative plans,” she finally said.

‟We need to discuss what happened to us,” Shuko countered.

She looked at him. It wasn’t hard, with four eyes, there was an almost 360° field, and she could look down or up easily. She realized the eyes operated independently, chameleon-style.

And she had not spoken of this with the ground. Not yet. Maybe later.

‟Whatever is happening changed us.”

‟True. But how. Why?” the Japanese asked.

‟You think we can find answers to that?”

‟This is planned. Can’t be anything else,” he insisted.

‟Shutting down electrical things and touching nothing else, you mean.”

‟All of physics is tied together. Push one thing, and the world breaks down completely, not just that part.”

‟It’s even worse,” Ivan injected.

If she had eyebrows, she’d have raised them.

The Russian pulled a small bag trailing from behind him and extracted a fat cylinder, which she had no difficulty recognizing.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

‟Batteries get emptied, we know,” she noted.

‟That’s the non-rechargeable version. Old Russian model, not even alkaline. And it’s empty.”

‟So?”

‟It’s not charged. It’s mixing two elements when you assemble it, and letting them react when you need electricity. To get it to empty, you have to complete the reactions. Very fast.”

‟And no other similar reactions.”

‟You’re the biologist,” the Russian said. ‟If electron exchange sped up, how would anything survive?”

‟Maybe that’s why we got changed?” Shuko injected.

‟We were in the zone first. We got changed only when we encountered the aurora plumes,” Juliana noted.

‟So that’s the point,” the Russian pursued, “It is extremely arbitrary. It is purposeful.”

The stress put on the word was unmistakable.

‟Whatever’s generating the Zone doesn’t want modern technology to work. At all, you mean,” Frank said.

‟Obviously.”

‟And our change was also purposeful,” Shuko added.

‟We are consistent,” Juliana said.

‟All of us are changed in the same ways. And we work out. We’re not some hodgepodge of mutations or something, even if we were all over the station when it happened. What’re the chances of that?”

The biologist in her couldn’t answer any other way.

‟As close to zero as computable.”

‟Aren’t we drifting from the immediate threat?” Frank, who’d stayed silent so far, finally said.

‟The station,” Ivan noted.

‟We’re getting a respite,” Juliana noted, trying her best to look straight at Yaytsev.

‟Positive charging. But for all the good it will do once we intersect the zone again.”

‟What’s the take from the ground,” Frank asked.

‟Well, they’re still drawing scenarios for an evacuation,” she said.

‟Meaning they do not have any,” Yaytsev replied. “I hoped I missed one. It takes too long to charge the Dragon for any workable options.”

‟What about the Soyuz?” she asked.

‟Can be done much easier,” he replied.

‟And Moscow wants us to use it,” Ivan injected.

‟Wait, how can we all fit in there?”

‟No. Moscow wants us to use it,” he said again, the stress on the word “audible”.

She would have gasped if she had the needed parts. Shuko made a sound that felt like laughter.

‟Not going to happen, of course. We’re all in this together, obviously. Unless people on the ground are Changed like us, there’s five of us.”

‟Tianlong,” Juliana said, remembering for the first time the Chinese station.

Facepalming was still a thing, even with the four eyes and shorter arms. As if to put an additional emphasis on it, the dimmed lights in Central increased.

‟End of the eclipse,” Yaytsev announced.

‟Okay, let’s check the station. I don’t want it breaking down on us. And remember what I asked. I want alternate plans, how to survive the next set of shutdowns, and how to reenter with low or zero battery. Let’s get this working, people,” Juliana said.

Maybe they would have time to think, instead to react, she hoped.

BYRNE

“Give me good news,” Kayleigh said.

The man shrugged, and she snapped, “then get out and get back later when you have.”

Most of the people around her studiously looked away.

“I feel like Gene Kranz,” she whispered. “How did he do it?”

“If you need rest…”

She turned to look at the Deputy Director of NASA behind her, before shaking her head.

“It happened in my watch, and I’ll do all I can before I have to call it quits… sir.”

“No offense. We need everyone at their best, and it’s up to you.”

“Thanks.”

She turned back to the console, before looking up at the main displays on the wall.

“How’s the orbit looking?”

“They will have nine full orbits, then they’ll dip back for maybe thirty seconds of shutdown. If the…”

“Don’t trust the model. If you run it backward, the shutdown had to begin over half an hour before people started noticing things. Maybe it’s reliable in the short term, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing shifted gears abruptly.”

“By the way, backup control in California for the satellites has failed. The Texas crew says they’re probably not going to control the satellite constellation much longer. The holes in the mesh are too hard to compensate for, and the real competent guys for it were all in Redmont.”

Kayleigh sighed.

“They also say they had people outside. They saw… hexagons forming in the sky, growing toward them.”

“So, it’s confirmed,” she said.

“Yes. Frank Fuller managed to take a picture just after the end of the shutdown, but apparently, they are also visible from the ground.”

“They are already on social media,” the voice of the Deputy Director came from behind. “The trending hashtag isn’t West Coast anymore, it’s now #DeathZone.”

“Why am I not surprised,” she said drily.

“Moscow on the line again,” someone said. “They really insist. It’s the Deputy Director of Roscosmos.”

“Let me handle that. Focus on the station, while we talk, Deputy Director to Deputy Director,” the DD said.

She nodded briefly, before looking at the summaries.

What’s the plan? Come on guys, I need options for my station.

DENVERS

“They have balls much larger than mine,” the Commander of the Marine Corps noted.

“Fighter pilots,” General Dominguez replied drily.

A flight of four jets had taken off earlier, heading to the border of the Zone. Even warned that, if they clipped the affected area by mistake, their plane would almost certainly be instantly disabled, and being able to eject was highly unlikely, there had been no lack of volunteers among the pilots on standby.

Colonel Denvers did not want to think of the civilian planes. FAA had been the first of the civilian agencies to really take note of the Zone, with an airport down, and airplanes dropping out of trackers. He suspected the planes had done a more literal “dropping” than just transponders being silent. The FAA was diverting and emergency landing as many planes as it could now, but that was the kind of unholy chaos that he did not wish to know about.

For now, he was listening to a stream of the audio with their controller, while an automated transcript of the session scrolled on a display on the situation wall. The generals had audio headphones as well, listening raptly.

“Pacing with the hexagons,” WALL-1 said.

“They grow fast. The border sprout and connect under a minute,” WALL-2 reported.

“Keep a safe distance,” WALL-CONTROL ordered.

“50 miles to what I assume to be hexagon limit, confirm,” WALL-1 replied.

“I want to try a missile,” WALL-4 said.

“Repeat, WALL-FOUR?”

“I have a dry missile on my left wing. I want to fire it into the Zone,” WALL-4 stated.

Five seconds later, WALL-CONTROL came back.

“Launch authorized.”

“Maneuvering to face the wall, fire, divert. Starting my run,” WALL-FOUR said.

“Much, much bigger balls,” General Sarton muttered behind Denvers.

“On run… Fox one, banking.”

“Missile is away, tracking,” WALL-1 announced.

They waited.

“Missile shutdown. I repeat, missile shutdown,” WALL-1 announced.

“The missile rocket engine failed,” WALL-4 confirmed.

“Aren’t those solid propellants?” Sarton asked.

“You’d need to ask Fleetwood, but I believe so. Electronic control down shouldn’t shut the rocket,” Dominguez answered him.

“It’s worse than just electronics then. It looks almost… purposeful,” Sarton said, unknowingly echoing Yaytsev Baranov’s comment from orbit.

“Speaking of which, Air Force One just landed,” Dominguez said.

“The President is back from that Europe tour then?”

“I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to return to that kind of problem. The Secret Service is already evacuating him to a ‘safe location’.”

Sarton startled.

“Fuck. If the Zone shuts down solid powder reaction…”

The two Joint Chiefs of Staff looked at each other, and Denvers made the connection at the same moment.

“Guns.”