My Sweet Satan Read online

  “You’d better get down there quick,” he said as Jasmine worked herself back into her blue NASA jumpsuit.

  She pushed off the wall and soared through the air. Previously, the main corridor had felt like a well, almost like an open elevator shaft, but now it had no sense of direction. She could have been moving up or down. Her mind could see the shaft from either perspective, but she naturally settled on thinking of the shaft as a horizontal tunnel, something she found strangely counterintuitive and yet satisfying.

  Rather than plunging down toward engineering, Jasmine felt she was drifting across to the distant hatch, flying through the air with what was unnatural ease. Although she understood she was in space, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the laws of physics had somehow been suspended, and she kept expecting gravity to kick in again at some point and send her tumbling to the floor.

  Jasmine could hear voices as she drifted through the vast medical chamber. The hatch was slightly ajar, and she slipped through into Engineering.

  Unlike the rest of the Copernicus, Engineering was a mass of confusion. Pipes wound their way over the walls like snakes in a pit. Bundles of wires ran in strands beside the pipes. Some of the larger pipes were colored and marked with various terms: green for oxygen, blue for coolant, red for fuel, yellow for waste, white for something called return/recycle.

  The corridor was cramped, making it impossible to soar as freely as she had in the main cabin. Instead, Jasmine picked her way hand over hand, trying to avoid grabbing anything that looked flimsy or important.

  “—flush him into goddamn space!” Mei cried in a burst of emotion.

  To one side, Jasmine could see Mike’s face up next to a glass porthole. She quickly recognized the airlock hatch. The others must have sealed him in there, she thought.

  “You need to do something,” Mei insisted, yelling at Chuck. “He murdered Nadir!”

  Anastasia turned. She seemed to be the first person to realize Jasmine had come through into Engineering.

  “Jazz,” Chuck said, turning in response to Anastasia’s silent glance back at him.

  “You!” Mei cried. She sailed over to Jasmine with barely any effort, almost as though she were mounted on rails, and slapped Jasmine across the face. “You bitch!”

  Jasmine was completely unprepared for the strike. She was stunned by how forcefully Mei hit her. In a weightless environment, she’d assumed all motion had to be soft and slow, but the deliberate motion of the astronauts had always been out of restraint. Now, Mei moved with unrestrained anger.

  Jasmine’s face reeled to one side. She felt her body twist with the blow. Mei recoiled slightly in the weightless environment. The violent surge of pain shocked Jasmine. She grabbed at her face, stunned by what had happened.

  “You let him die! You were right there! You were supposed to be his backup! You should have helped him!”

  Chuck held Mei back, preventing her from striking Jasmine again.

  “Hey,” he cried. “There was nothing she could do.”

  “You killed him,” Mei screamed, ignoring Chuck and trying to wrestle free to attack Jasmine again. “Just as surely as Mike did. You murdered my poor Nadir!”

  Anastasia helped Chuck pull Mei away from Jasmine.

  “There was nothing anyone could have done,” Anastasia said, grabbing Mei’s head with both hands and turning her so she could look her in the eye. “Nothing.”

  “No!” Mei cried. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. “No. I don’t believe you.”

  Chuck struggled to contain Mei, calling out, “Descent time down the side of the Copernicus was at least five minutes. Jazz would have never made it!”

  “No!” Mei pleaded. Her body went limp and both Chuck and Anastasia backed off, leaving her floating in an almost fetal position against a series of gauges on a control panel opposite the airlock. She mumbled, “No, no. no.”

  Jasmine could feel the outline of Mei’s fingers still stinging her cheek. Her jaw ached.

  She held onto a railing on what she assumed was the ceiling and asked, “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Tell her,” Chuck said, and for a moment, Jasmine wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

  Mei wiped her eyes. Chuck put his arm gently around her shoulder.

  Jason replied.

  “Crew loss occurred with seven minutes, fifteen seconds burn remaining. That gives the incident a delta-v of two and a half thousand meters per second. At this point, Specialist Indiri is at a minimum distance of four thousand kilometers, or roughly the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Given the sheer-sideways motion imparted to him by the exhaust of the Copernicus it is impossible to calculate the orbital difference between us and him.”

  “You should have stopped,” Mei sobbed. Chuck was holding her as she pounded softly on his chest, burying her head into his shoulder and saying, “You should have killed the burn.”

  Jason replied on behalf of Chuck, and Jasmine could see the two men were being as kind as they could be given the circumstance. Two men? Yes, she thought, in that moment, Jasmine saw Jason as human. He spoke softly.

  “The probability that Specialist Nadir survived the exhaust bloom is less than one percent. Even if his suit retained its structural integrity, the heat would have overcome him.”

  Overcome was clearly a euphemism, and Jasmine was again taken by Jason’s sensitivity to human emotions. His tone of voice suggested he hated what he had to say as much as Mei must have hated listening to such a factual description.

  “You should have…” Mei continued, her voice barely a whisper.

  Anastasia floated beside them. With one hand on the bulkhead, she rubbed Mei’s shoulders with the other. Touch was a distinctly human response to grief, and Jasmine’s isolation from the other three astronauts felt damning.

  Mike was still staring through the porthole. She assumed he could hear what was going on. She and Mike were the outsiders, but none of this was her doing. She felt unfairly grouped with Mike. What had happened to him? Had he snapped? He had gone crazy.

  “You could have…” Mei repeated softly as Chuck soothed her, holding her tight.

  Jason continued softly, but with clinical precision.

  “Even with the docking radar active, we’d need to be within two thousand meters to detect Specialist Indiri. Our response time, performing an emergency shut down, realigning the craft and backtracking, would take a minimum of eighty seconds. By that time, we’d be almost twenty thousand meters distant. The unspecified sideways motion imparted by the exhaust would make it impossible to find him. I’m sorry.”

  Jason had repeated the term Specialist Indiri on three occasions. Was that to depersonalize what had happened? Was that out of respect? Whatever Jason’s motive, his words carried unquestionable authority.

  Mei sobbed.

  Jasmine couldn’t help but feel Chuck had been heartless not attempting a rescue. Well, she thought, recovery rather than rescue. Regardless, Chuck had pressed on with the mission, which to her felt wrong.

  “Come,” Anastasia said, talking to Chuck. “Let’s get Mei up to Medical and give her a sedative.”

  “No, no,” Mei mumbled. “I’m fine.”

  In the close confines of Engineering, Anastasia pushed past Jasmine. Chuck nudged Mei ahead of him. As Mei drifted past, Jasmine mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

  Mei’s face was expressionless. Her bloodshot eyes spoke of anguish and grief. She seemed to stare through Jasmine, barely acknowledging her as she floated on. Anastasia helped her through the hatch.

  Chuck sailed past, his chest, waist, loins, and legs streaming by just inches from Jasmine’s face. He called out, saying, “Jason. Under no circumstances is that airlock to be opened.”

  “No circumstances?” Jason asked.

  “None. Not without my express permission. Is that understood?”

  A sullen Jason replied, “Yes.”

  Jasmine watched as Chuck disappeared through the hatch, closin
g it but not latching it as he moved into the bright lights of Medical.

  Jasmine rubbed the welt on her check, catching a brief glimpse of a nasty red mark in the reflection of a polished steel cabinet. Just as she had when she first awoke, she felt as though her world was an illusion as crazy and distorted as the image staring back at her. Picasso couldn’t have captured the insanity of the moment any better.

  There was tapping on the glass behind her.

  She turned.

  Mike was pointing at a button below a small speaker beside the cramped hatch. Reluctantly, she pushed the button.

  “Jazz. You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  Jasmine shook her head.

  “No. No. I’m not doing that. No.”

  Even if she’d wanted to, she had no way of knowing how to override Jason’s control on the hatch.

  “Please, I didn’t kill Nadir. It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me. Check the footage from all angles. Listen to the audio. I was trying to save him. I was—”

  Jasmine reached out and pushed the intercom button, cutting Mike off. She couldn’t entertain such madness.

  “I don’t know you,” she said, looking at him through the glass, unsure if he could hear her. Tears blocked her vision. “I don’t know who you are. You’re not my Mike. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not the Mike I once loved.”

  Her lips quivered. She wiped her eyes.

  Mike gestured to the intercom again. He was talking, but his words were muffled and muted.

  Jasmine shook her head, responding in the same manner, with non-verbal communication.

  “Please,” Mike mouthed silently.

  Impulsively, Jasmine pushed the button, surprising herself with the vigor of her movement and inadvertently pushing herself away from the hatch with that motion.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Why the hell were you out there?”

  “For you,” Mike replied in barely a whisper. “For you and everyone on Earth. To do nothing would be to support this madness. This is First Contact, Honey. We can’t screw this up. We can’t afford to act out of fear. We will not get a second chance at this. I—I can’t stand idly by and watch a disaster unfold when it is in the power of my hand to change things.”

  He sighed. Jasmine was shaking, but not from the cool air.

  “It’s always toughest in the moment,” he continued. “But history will be my judge—not Chuck, not Mei, not Ana, not Houston, not the President of the United States. None of them. My actions will be judged by a thousand generations to come.”

  Jasmine couldn’t help herself. She blurted out, “You sabotaged the ship! You could have damned us all to die out here!”

  “Don’t you understand?” Mike pleaded. “Think about it. They woke the crew remotely. They did it from back there—by remote control. If they can do that, they can detonate the core remotely. I had to cut off that option.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jasmine replied, her hands folded defiantly across her chest. “You don’t even know that there is a bomb. You have no proof.”

  Mike ignored her.

  “You think I’ve betrayed Chuck? On the contrary, I’ve made sure Chuck is the only one that can detonate, and by God I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I’m not going to sit idly by while someone in Washington decides my fate with the push of a goddamn button. Politics or science? Which is it going to be? I choose science. I won’t have them decide our fate for us. I may not agree with Chuck, but I’m not going to have my life sacrificed by some fat-cat armchair-quarterback a billion miles away.”

  “You’re insane,” she cried. “You know that, don’t you? You’ve constructed some kind of fantasy paranoid delusion that everyone’s out to get us. Listen to yourself. You don’t trust anyone. You can’t. You think everyone’s out to kill us.”

  “You’ve got to see this for what it is, Jazz,” Mike replied. “Posturing. Everyone’s positioning themselves for the end game. Think about it. Why didn’t Chuck abort the burn?”

  Jasmine went silent.

  “Nadir could have survived. We don’t know that the blast killed him. You heard Jason. He could have conducted a contingency abort in 80 seconds. That’s less than a minute and a half. In less time than we’ve been talking, he could have shut down the engines, swung the Copernicus around, and headed back for Nadir, but Chuck wouldn’t let him. Why?”

  Jasmine felt her lips clench in defiance.

  “Because like everyone else, he’s moving chess pieces around the board, setting up for checkmate. If it comes to it, he’ll detonate. I’m sure of it. He’s Captain Ahab chasing the white whale, Babe. We’ve got to be ready to stop him before he steps over the line.”

  “You’re crazy,” Jasmine replied, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Look at Chuck’s behavior during the accident. How could Chuck be so cold and heartless to Nadir?”

  “He was dead anyway,” Jasmine replied, surprising herself with how harsh those words sounded.

  “You don’t know that,” Mike insisted. “I’ve seen the assumptions Jason was using. He assumed Nadir was facing the engine blast, assuming his visor took the full force of the exhaust. But with his back to the plume, Nadir’s life support system would have taken the brunt of the heat. The backpack would have insulated him. His limbs would have been horribly burned, but not his core. He could have survived. And in under 90 seconds we could have been on an intercept course to recover him.”

  “Don’t do this, Mike,” Jasmine insisted. “You’re not talking your way out of this. You killed him. Don’t you get that? It was you, Mike. You!”

  The intercom went silent.

  “Jazz, I—”

  “Don’t.”

  Mike pulled himself up to the hatch. His breath misted on the glass. His voice softened and he spoke more slowly, no longer rushing through his logic.

  “Do you remember life back in Atlanta?”

  Did she ever. Like it was yesterday, she thought. The look on her face must have signaled her recollection as Mike continued.

  “Do you remember sitting there at your folks' place on that old wooden swing?”

  Jasmine couldn’t suppress at least a partial smile at the irony of his question.

  “Do you remember me and old Zach running around the streets together?”

  Zach was Mike’s dog, a large German Shepherd with a heavy coat. He looked menacing, but he was as gentle as a kitten.

  Jasmine nodded. For Mike, this was a distant memory. For her, it was something he’d started doing during summer break between semesters at MIT. She’d moved away from home just after he returned to college, less than a year ago, but she loved watching him go blistering by. He’d go for a five mile run through the streets with Zach, always swinging by her place around the four mile mark. If she was sitting out on the swing reading, he’d stop and she’d give Zach some water. He never let his heart rate drop too far before continuing on, staying just long enough to give her a sweaty kiss on her cheek. Jasmine wasn’t that keen on the sweaty kiss, but she liked the attention.

  “Just around the corner from your place, there was that big old house up on the hill. The old geezer that lived there had two Doberman pinschers. Remember them?”

  Like it was yesterday, Jasmine thought, because to her it was. They’d bark at her whenever she walked past on the way to the bus stop. Jasmine had no idea where Mike was leading the conversation, but thoughts of home were a welcome relief from the insanity of being in orbit around Saturn and closing in on an alien spacecraft.

  “Every time I ran by, those dogs would bark. At first, they’d chase us along the fence-line, almost rabid in their determination to get at Zach. After a couple of months, they changed tactics. They started trying to ambush us. We’d come running past and there wouldn’t be any barking. Nothing. At first, I thought maybe the old man was keeping them inside. Then right when we passed the wrought-iron gate, they’d pounce. I swear, they got worse with each run. They’d explode from
out of nowhere, jaws reaching through the bars of the gate, snarling and barking, ready to tear us limb from limb.”

  The Dobermans hadn’t been that savage toward Jasmine, but she could imagine them getting stressed over big Zach running past.

  “Nothing ever changed,” Mike continued. His voice was soothing. His recollection of life in Atlanta was almost hypnotic. “A couple of times, I ran on another block to avoid going past them, but that added almost a mile to the run by the time I’d circled back around.

  “One day, I figured out what was happening. Like all dogs, they were territorial, but it was more than that. There was a subtext there. In their minds, they were repelling intruders. And that’s when I realized, they couldn’t learn. Every time we ran by, they saw the same thing: a threat. Every time we ran by, they scared us off, or so they thought. They could never see reality for what it was. They could never accept that we would just run past regardless, that we never posed a threat at all.

  “Don’t you see, Jazz. This is what we’re dealing with when it comes to Bestla. Chuck and Ana, Mei, they’re like those Dobermans. They’ve made up their minds that they need to protect Earth. They’ll do whatever it takes, including sacrificing us and the ship. They can’t see this any other way. They can’t see reality for what it is.”

  “Mike,” Jasmine said, reaching out and touching the glass with her fingers splayed. On the other side of the thick hatch, Mike reciprocated, pushing his hand on the glass. He waited. Jasmine hated herself, but she had to tell him. “Mike, I can’t deal with this. I’m sorry.”

  Mike looked sad.

  “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m so confused. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Don’t say that,” Mike replied.

  “I can’t help you, Mike.”

  Mike’s hand pulled back from the glass. Jasmine felt her own fingers sliding down the slick window glass. Unlike on Earth, it took a deliberate effort on both of their parts to break contact.