The Wreckage of Hestia
We made love under the mercury-vapour lamps of the dining hall. They cast a greenish pall over Henry’s skin that made him appear sickly, but we laughed and came together in a few sweat-soaked moments that made us forget the rest. Only when we lie together on the table afterwards did the oppressive solitude creep back.
Henry drifted off for a nap as I listened to the soft hum of the survival systems. Oxygen, depressurization, electricity. Yet beyond the hum, each room echoed with emptiness, every motion I made came back to me tenfold. This encampment on Hestia was supposed to fit thousands of refugees from the water wars, but after that first accident up here, all the colonists had fled back home.
They hadn’t built this place with living in mind, just surviving. It turned out surviving wasn’t enough. They’d rather take their chances with the dying Earth.
I could almost hear their voices embedded in the walls.
Henry murmured in his sleep and pulled me towards him, so I cuddled in. We weren’t partners, just two lost souls who could come together in romance or whatever else and come apart just as easily. Two people who enjoyed the convenience of another warm body. We’d both had the same amount of nothing waiting for us back on Earth—me with a dead partner, dead family, dead-end job—so we’d volunteered to stay on to maintain the encampment. A skeleton crew for the skeletal encampment, on the chance that others would return and fill it with something resembling life again.
I knew better. They wouldn’t be back.
A muffled thud came from outside the room. I bolted upright, but Henry only shifted.
“You okay, Sophia?” He opened his groggy, sated eyes.
“Did you hear that?”
His gaze sharpened and he fumbled for his station-issued boxer briefs. “No?”
“Maybe something fell?” In most other places, that might not matter. Here, where damage to the structure might take our oxygen with it, it could be a disaster.
We pulled on our clothes, me worrying my bottom lip as Henry quieted into his usual cool focus. We each grabbed our oxygen helmets by the door, but avoided the bulky spacesuits. If decompression had started, we’d have felt the effects.
“Split up?” His fingers tap-tapped on the helmet.
Dread coursed through me. To think, back on Earth, I used to love the chance to be alone. “I’ll go counter-clockwise,” I said.
I started with town square, the massive and ironically circular central area of empty storefronts and dead trees covered with a thick glass dome. It had been a wonder and a marvel when they built it, and even now it seemed the integrity of the glass would never fail. I checked it anyway; it held fast. As always, looking out at the darkness of Hestia’s night that lasted sixteen Earth days gave me a tickling feeling up my spine.
Like I was being watched.
I turned from the dome, ignoring the creeping sensation, and set out toward D Wing. Ten identical wings radiated from town square like spokes on a wheel. I started down the first corridor, fluorescent lights turning on as I did. Toward the berths, there was a soft rustle like fabric against a wall, as if someone was walking just ahead.
My gaze snapped down that hall. It was dark, and I couldn’t bring myself to step into it to activate the lighting. There was nothing down there. There couldn’t be.
The fine hairs on my arms lifted. I squinted into the darkness, but nothing moved, nothing shifted.
The radio inside my helmet crackled.
I jumped, and then felt sheepish. “Henry?”
“You were right about the thud,” he said, ignoring all radio protocol. Not that it mattered with just the two of us. “We lost a piece of the roof in G Wing.”
“Are we destabilized?” There was a long silence. I could hear my own heart beating.
“No,” he said. “But I think we’ll have to shut down the wing.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, embarrassed to find that my eyes were damp. As maintainers, this was failure. The encampment had the systems to keep thousands of people alive for decades. We should be able to keep it whole.
“I’ll come help.”
The next crackle of the radio signalled Henry’s agreement.
I began to go, to join him, but the allure of finding the source of that soft rustle pulled at me. I’d been too long in near isolation. Was this it, the point where I finally cracked? Started hearing things? Lost it for good? The psychiatrist who’d cleared me for this role couldn’t have known how it would be. The pressure of an entire empty planet, with only one other living soul on it.
I took a deep breath and strode across town square toward Henry.
He stood outside G Wing, his hands on his hips, his back to me.
As I neared, he turned towards me and pointed one thumb behind his back. Through the door, I could see that there was a tiny shadow in the ceiling, visible only as a darker void on the slate grey metal. A hole.
I inhaled sharply, picturing the whole encampment crumpling like a tin can. I shifted this way and that, viewing the little gap through the thick glass of the G Wing door.
“We could try repairing it…but, yeah, maybe we have to shut the airlock,” I said.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his wrist with two fingers, a gesture I’d seen him doing more and more lately. “That’s what I thought, but I wanted your opinion.”
He didn’t take his eyes off the hole as he spoke. The tiny blot that could wipe us out entirely.
And yet. Cutting off a wing was like cutting off a limb. It wasn’t something to do lightly.
We stood in silence for a moment in a sort of mourning. For the wing, certainly. But also for the people that had once been here and had given up. For the Earth that they’d fled to that might not make it. For us too, trapped alone.
Then Henry spoke with his voice thick. “Let’s do it.”
★
We both held the wheel of the airlock together, as if this way neither of us could be to blame. The door shut with a pressurized hiss and light clank.
G Wing was closed. And then there were nine.
“I guess we head to bed for the night.” The hole might be closed off, but he still didn’t face me, didn’t look in my eyes.
A sharp pang ripped through me. I didn’t want to go to bed alone, not tonight. Our berths may be beside each other, but we didn’t share. Most of the time that was fine. Tonight I wished that wasn’t the case.
But I said nothing. I didn’t want to interrupt our easy balance. Even more, I didn’t want to infect him with my baseless fear.
I went back to my room where I thrashed through the night. Did I want to go back to Earth? I could, if I requested it. They didn’t want people who were losing their minds being the ones left up here. But what had Earth held for me? Nothing but death.
My sister Olivia died before everything went bad, back when we were still kids. Mangled beneath the wheels of a car while I stood there and watched, useless, my feet rooted in place. My mother was dead for twenty long years now, slaughtered in her walk-up apartment in the brutal inner-city battles as people fought for water. My partner, who ironically died drowning on dry land as the white plague filled their lungs. They just missed being able to join me on Hestia. It was supposed to be our new life.
The encampment might be haunted and isolated, but it wasn’t any worse than home.
★
I awoke hours later covered in dried sweat to what sounded like distant voices. It wasn’t morning as I once knew it; not for the equivalent of another ten Earth days. But I sprang out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. I rushed to Henry’s and prayed he was still up, watching something on his video screen. But his room was silent.
I knocked.
“Come in.” His voice was muffled through the door.
I entered to find him standing in his underwear, scratching his bare skin.
“Did you hear that?” I said.
“Another issue?” His gaze sharpened and his chin snapped up, instantly alert. I hated him a little for how confident and together he always seemed. “Are we losing something else? Maybe we need to do some repairs.”
“No, no.” Now I felt silly. I had to be imagining the sound. “Did you leave a screen playing?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t been near a screen since the night before last. We were a bit occupied last night. What with the wing and…” he gave a wry grin, “…what came before.”
I chuckled without any humour.
“We should split up and search again,” he said.
Coldness filled me. Alone, again. “It’s probably nothing.” I tried to force casualness into my voice, but he gave me a narrowed-eye glance.
“No, I trust your instincts. Let’s check.”
His logic had me heading back to my room to grab my things. Of all the little sounds that this encampment could make, I couldn’t have heard voices. Unless…an idea popped into my head and I ducked back into Henry’s room.
“Maybe something’s up with the radios to Mission Control. I’ll start with the control room.”
“Sounds good. Then you’ll head counter-clockwise as usual?” He started walking down the hall the opposite way already.
“Yep,” I said.
The radios would be an easy fix. They could easily explain what I’d heard. But discomfort still hovered in my gut.
I walked down the corridor to the control room, my footsteps click-clacking on the linoleum, the sound bouncing off the walls.
It was a moment before I noticed the darkness behind me. The fluorescent lights were supposed to stay on for fifteen minutes after motion, but the ones at the end of the hall were out.
My heart pounded and fear threatened to explode out of me, send me spiralling into incoherency. I forced it down.
This was a maintenance thing, it had to be. I’d deal with this later. So I turned toward the control room once more and walked.
The next furthest light went out.
My heart thumped harder, but I kept going. The darkness followed. I sped up and the wave of darkness did too. I sprinted down the corridor, the darkness getting ever closer, closer, closer like a predator nipping at my heels.
I hit the door of the control room and burst inside, slamming the door behind me and leaning against it, panting. My hot breath fogged the glass of the helmet, leaving me with the scent of my own rancid breath. A blurry rainbow of buttons in red, green, blue, and yellow blinked cheerfully from the full-wall control panels. I fought to regain composure.
A sharp crackle nearly made me hit the roof, until I realized it was my headset radio.
“Everything good over there?” Henry’s voice was calm and normal.
I forced normalcy into my own voice. “Yes, fine,” I lied. “Though we should check the lighting in the corridor to the control room.”
Check the lighting. A harsh laugh wedged its way out of my mouth as Henry spoke, but it’s not like I could tell him I was hearing things and afraid of the dark.
“Affirmative,” he said. “Nothing in F Wing either. I’m continuing the circle.”
My breathing near steady, I walked to the controls. “Houston, this is Planet Base Hestia, requesting connection.”
The line was empty. No hiss. No crackle. No response.
I took another deep, shaky breath, hung up the receiver, and then tried again.
Dead.
My hand on the receiver was slick, and I realized I’d been standing frozen for several minutes, holding the useless thing in my hands. Our communications were gone. The immensity of the solitude struck me all at once.
Forget considering leaving. We were entirely alone up here now. So I did the only thing I could and turned the helmet radio back on.
“Henry, our comms are down. I can’t make the check-in to Earth.” It was a wonder how level my voice sounded with the panic thrumming in my chest like a trapped bird trying to pound its way out.
“That was probably what you heard then. The last crackle of the radios, whatever took the radios down. Solar flare or the like. We’ll get it back up.”
I gripped both hands into fists as if I could absorb his pragmatism. And his optimism. But the bird in my chest kept fluttering.
“Right,” I said instead. “Let’s regroup.” I needed to see a live person.
“Affirm – ” his voice ended in a hissing crackle, the radio still on but no sound from him.
“Henry?” Something felt very wrong, but radios weren’t perfect. My hallucinations couldn’t hurt Henry. It was all in my head.
But everyone I’d ever cared for was dead. What was the common denominator?
After a couple minutes, his voice crackled to life again and relief coursed through me. “Sophia, I need. . .” He trailed off into static.
“Henry? What’s going on?” My voice was getting more and more frantic, not the perfect cool I wanted to convey.
He screamed once and fear for him battled with relief that he was still around to make the scream at all.
The scream cut off abruptly and ended in a gargle that made me think of my dead partner choking on their own lungs.
“Henry!”
There was nothing on the line but static.
“I’m coming, just wait. I’m coming!” I said.
Where had he been? He said he’d just checked F Wing, which meant he was working his way around and would hit G next. But that was the locked off wing.
I pushed open the control room door to the hallway, only half lit. The darkness gave me pause as my heart thudded in my mouth. But I had to get through it, for Henry. I charged down the darkened hall. The blackness stayed in its place this time, and I made it out into town square.
As I ran between the wings, I stopped short at F. How long ago was it that Henry had called saying he was here? It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Yet the lights were out.
Even with my fear for Henry, the horror of it struck me.
What if I was alone in the dark?
A sharp hiss of static from Henry’s radio reminded me I had to keep going.
He had to be just a bit further ahead. He had to be okay. I couldn’t be on my own up here, cut off from anyone or anything. I wouldn’t make it with my mind intact; I was already halfway there.
A childlike giggle echoed from the berths.
I let out a sob. I knew that laugh. It was Olivia. My long-dead sister Olivia. It couldn’t be, but it was.
Another giggle from that familiar voice was soothed by a feminine murmur with words I couldn’t catch. But the voice I knew as well as my own. It was the one that soothed my restless childhood nights with lullabies, that corrected my recipes on long-distance video calls, that admitted she struggled to understand my life choices but did her best. My mother.
I sobbed against my helmet, the atmosphere inside becoming thick and wet. I couldn’t stay here with my ghosts. Henry needed me. I ran from the voices and the memories.
I slowed as I neared G Wing. I couldn’t stop myself from looking through the small, thick window of the airlock door.
A figure walked past, blocking my view with darker shadow for an instant and I pulled away, heart pounding.
“Henry?” I cried through it.
But the airlock door was still sealed from this side. He couldn’t be in there. No one could be. This was my mind cracking once again.
But where was Henry?
I turned and ran to the next wing, the final place where Henry could have been when he called.
But it was empty, dark.
Yet a soft whisper slithered out.
I pulled my helmet off so I could hear it better, but it wasn’t Henry’s voice.
It was my mother and Olivia. And if I strained, I could pick up the voice of my partner murmuring in the background. I used to hear them on video calls when we’d worked from home on the days we couldn’t safely leave the house. I smiled against the tears. It had been too long.
Then, could it be? That group of friends, more like found family, that whole household who’d never been found after the tsunami that hit California.
All dead, all lost to me.
The whispers emanated from the darkness, building over each other, and bouncing off the walls, an ever increasing and mind-numbing crescendo. I couldn’t bear what I might see if the lights turned on—and suddenly I couldn’t decide what would be worse: if they were all there, or if they weren’t.
I ran.
Through the broken and silent encampment, through the darkness that didn’t end, and right back to the control room where I’d had the smallest measure of comfort.
The coloured lights gave me no comfort now.
I couldn’t bear it anymore. I started flipping switches wildly, even the ones I was absolutely not meant to turn.
Everything went dark. The background hum that accompanied everything we did finally shifted to blessed silence. Then I slid down the wall of dead switches and curled myself in a ball, sitting and rocking with my arms gripping my knees like when I’d had nightmares as a child.
I could almost hear my mom’s voice singing lullabies. Or perhaps I did hear it. Right outside the control room door.
Alone in the dark, I strained to hear their voices and waited for the end.