The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago...

...but the computer insists their life signs are still stable

When Ben died, he made very little noise. It was the computers that alerted me. Shrill alarms and flashing lights. I hadn’t even gotten out of my sleeping bag before my smart watch had lit up with half a dozen messages about system failures.

Astronaut 1 - Heart rate monitor failure

Astronaut 1 - Skin conductance monitor failure

Astronaut 1 - VO2 monitor failure

The situation didn’t sink in until I was shaking an unresponsive Ben. White eyes rolling back into his skull. Blood pooling in his ears like red jelly. Viscosity. Mass. No gravity. It made me nauseous to look at. HQ would later say Ben died from an aneurysm. One in a million. A freak death that just happened to occur in low Earth orbit.

So what now? I asked after all the panic had died down and the reality of my situation finally settled in.

HQ sent me a rarely used or discussed document that outlined what I’d have to do. Bodies pose a unique threat in microgravity, it explained. All that order becomes disordered. What is solid turns to liquid. What is liquid turns to gas. First thing I needed to do was to put Ben’s body somewhere that had no oxygen and was freezing cold. Somewhere he would pose no danger to himself or me. Isolated, but easily retrievable. The conclusion was obvious. I knew what they’d suggest before I even reached that part of the booklet. It happened so fast that Ben was still warm when I put him in the special bag designed to endure the vacuum of space. I kept expecting him to protest as I pulled at stiffening limbs and manipulated swelling joints. Every step of the process. Every zip. Every bit of velcro. I had to remind myself he wasn’t going to complain. It felt intimate but it wasn’t. Intimacy requires two people. By that point Ben was just meat.

The space walk itself was something else. The bag that surrounded Ben’s body inflated in the vacuum and I instinctively felt the urge to undo what I’d done. There was a body in there, and bodies aren’t meant to have so little between them and outer space. When I touched the bag, I could still feel him beneath the paper thin material. The crease of an elbow. The bump of his nose. By the time I reached my destination, his body already felt brittle. Attaching him to the station was easy enough, on a technical level. Leaving him there went against every instinct I had.

After that there was no pretending he was coming back. A day later and I began to pack his things away. There was a catharsis in it that I found calming. I catalogued his belongings with thin detachment. Most of his things were dry and uninteresting. Photos of him with a dog. A copy of a Michael Shea book. A certificate of excellence from NASA that he received when he was ten. He discovered a comet, he’d told me during our first meeting. Backyard with a telescope. NASA let him name it and everything. That was how he knew he wanted to be an astronaut. Described it as a calling. Ben was like that. A real life boy scout. In life he’d had no edges.

You’d think given our history we’d be close. Two men selected based on extensive psychological profiling. Together we had simulated multiple missions to Mars. Two on the ground. One in space. All of them highly secretive. An official mission to Mars was meant to be next, at which point the whole project would be made public. But the key to having two people work together, alone, for nearly an entire year isn’t to find two guys who are best friends forever. It’s finding people who won’t grate on one another. Neither hate nor love. Two men who enjoy their own company, but don’t mind one another. Ben and I had become acquainted over all that time together, but it wasn’t like we were brothers in arms. We worked so well precisely because there was no meat to the friendship. No stakes. Nothing to argue over. To me, Ben was a nice guy, but that was all. I figured he was plain and simple all the way down. No dark secrets. No real problems to speak of.

The journal changed that.

It was taped to the inside of a panel of a computer at his workstation. He must have hidden it close to his things, somewhere out of sight but easily retrievable. Frayed leaves and yellowed pages, like some ancient artefact. Last thing I expected to find in a space station. I almost mistook its leather cover for some sort of personal bible, the sort of well worn tome held up by a preacher making exclamations about the devil, but its insides were handwritten, and hardly in keeping with a bible.

Scribbles. Shapes. Phrases repeated and dissected. Some of it was even in binary. It seemed like the ravings of a child or a lunatic. I thought it was maybe a mindfulness exercise. Empty headed doodling to help him get his head straight during stressful moments. But that didn’t explain why he’d hidden it, and why the numbers and pages seemed strangely organised. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. Except to say there was the vague impression that it meant something to the person who’d made it. Every last gram on a shuttle is accounted for. What you bring up with you, it can’t be some random crap you want last minute. Ben would have had to clear the journal. I’m assuming he kept the contents secret. One look at what he’d been writing and NASA would have had him in psych eval before the end of the day. But the book’s size and weight would have had to be logged and accounted for. It could not have gotten on the station by accident, so I knew immediately that Ben had wanted it for something. I studied it for over an hour trying to figure out what that was. Flicking from one page to the next, glaring at rows of numbers, strange fractals, something that looked like a cross between an eye and a textbook drawing of an atom. Given the way his writing and art skills developed throughout the book, I began to suspect he’d been adding to it since his childhood, which was just another layer to the growing mystery.

I thought I was never going to get any insight into the book until, about three-quarters of the way through, I came across yet another page filled with rows and rows of numbers. Only this time one of the strings was underlined and a single word had been scratched ragged and angry next to it. The only bit of English, or any human language, in all those pages. The only thing written in a way that could make sense to a living human. The word itself made me stop dead in my tracks. Made my blood run cold.

170318042636 Aneurysm.

The suspicion that came over me felt like a kind of madness. I told myself I had to be nuts when I checked the data from Ben’s biomonitor, that I had to be crazy to even entertain the notion, but the information recorded by several different machines confirmed it. Ben’s exact time of death was the 17th March 2018 0426 hours and 36 seconds.

I don’t think I moved for a good fifteen minutes after that. Just stared at the data as my mind worked its way around a giant, impossible, realisation.

Ben knew he was going to die.

Of course I tried to rationalise this. Anyone would. I came up with half-a-dozen reasons he’d written what he’d written. None of them were comforting, although they at least fit in with a more rational worldview. Take, for example, the idea that Ben had killed himself at that exact moment in time to meet some sort of prophecy he’d scrawled days or even hours before. Was that a good thing? What did it mean for me? Ignore the logistical issues (what poison can be timed to the second?). Let’s just say that’s what he did. That left the hair-raising question of why? And there was no comfortable answer that I could see. Of course I went through that book with a fine tooth comb looking for any more clues. I wish I hadn’t. I eventually found another word, this one closer to the very end of the journal. Another date and timestamp, one that lay six weeks in the future, and another word scratched painfully into the paper by a clumsy fist.

Immolation.

-

Permission denied.

I bit my lip and took a deep breath.

What about the station’s integrity? I asked

No sign of any issue from external cameras, they replied.

I can hear something banging on the hull, I told them.

Nothing is visible on the cameras.

That’s why I need to go take a look, I wrote.

It’s hard to argue with a computer. You can’t shoot it a death-glare. HQ could have easily arranged video calls. But really they wanted the distance. Made it easier to say no.

Solo space walk is incredibly dangerous, they quickly wrote back. Microphones in station hull are reporting nothing of concern. Usual impact from debris. Nothing that corroborates reports of external tapping. Permission for space walk is denied.

I made no further response but instead closed the screen and wondered if they were being entirely truthful. The tapping sound, coming and going over the last few days, was unmistakable even over all those whirring machines and motors. Space stations are loud. They even give us ear plugs to handle it. But whatever was out there was somehow louder. Or perhaps, given the circumstances, I was just sensitive to the thought of something, anything, out there. There was no denying it annoyed me. Just one of those sounds I found impossible to block out, like water dripping in a bathtub at 3am. Tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap. Tap tap. Tap. No sense of order, not on the surface level, but something, maybe. Underneath. Some sense or reason. Some kind of regularity that the brain detects and can’t let go of.

How could the microphones possibly miss it?

Sleep was getting progressively difficult. At times I thought the station under some kind of hidden stress. Materials freezing and warming in irregular ways. No atmosphere, no conduction of heat. Things get hot in the sun’s rays. Objects warm and cool to both extremes. This is routine stuff for anything up in space, of course. But it didn’t stop me thinking about all the ways the station was just a pile of metal that could come undone. Could break and tear. Bend and stretch. Like watching the wing of your plane wobble during turbulence, it’s an uncomfortable reminder that you’re just a monkey in a fancy toy.

And what if something had come loose? Something. Oh haha! At first I stuck to this notion strictly, asking myself what if some antenna or strap or bit of metal had gotten loose and was banging against the hull? That would be bad. But of course, that wasn’t really what I was thinking. It’s what I wrote to HQ about. Over and over and over. But what was really on my mind was the thought that maybe, somehow, he had gotten loose. And of course that’s not so silly, right? The specially designed bag he was in, the one that would vent any gases produced by decomposition while maintaining his body’s integrity, was brand-spanking new. Know how many times it had been tested? Never. Never ever. Ben was the first. So of course it might come loose. Just because it’s space age technology doesn’t mean it’s sophisticated. He was strapped to the outside like a Christmas tree to the family sedan. Maybe, I wondered, one of the straps had broken and now he was thumping against the side every now and again. Never mind that there wasn’t anything out there to prompt that kind of buffeting. No air. No wind. If he’d come loose he’d just float a little farther away. But something was making that noise, and I worried almost constantly that it was him.

Only problem was I had cameras. Lots. And all of them, every single time, showed the same thing. The bag, barely changed from when I last saw it in person, strapped firmly and securely to the station’s hull. This should have reassured me. Should have, but it didn’t. Something was out there, tapping at the hull. On and off. No pattern. No reason. No correlation. It came and it went, seemingly choosing its moments to bother me the most.

Sleep was difficult for multiple reasons. The tapping was bad enough, but lately my nightmares had taken a strange turn. Black. Cold. In them I was trapped in a suffocating film. Freezing cold. Non-stop agony, fighting furiously to free myself was this black void of a nightmare. Like all deeply terrible dreams, it coloured my thoughts for the rest of the day, and each time I had it, it got harder to shake. I tried to endure. Compartmentalise. Take my mental turmoil and put it in a box, write unhinged across the lid, and sit rocking back and forth waiting for my rescue. And that was an option. A good one. But there was one little word that stopped me going the route of hunkering down and ignoring my own madness.

Immolation.

When HQ told me the date of the shuttle would reach me, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if this wasn’t just some big experiment. The sheer coincidence of it all. The magnitude of it. They’d sent me the message and the subject line had three exclamation points, like the communications officer on the other side couldn’t wait to deliver good news for once. Let their professionalism slip. They’d finally arranged a shuttle to retrieve me after it was done dropping some guys off at the ISS. It was lucky it’d come so soon. A stroke of logistical genius allowed them to sneak Ben and me back without it being too conspicuous. I should be very thankful, they told me.

But I was just stunned. The date matched the one Ben had written out. Factoring in travel time, I’d be entering Earth’s atmosphere at the exact time the prophesied moment would come and go. Ripe for an error, a misplaced heat pad, a mistimed thruster… something, anything, to go wrong and leave me plunging to my death in a burning metal tube.

Ripe for immolation.

If it wasn’t Ben out there tapping away, I wanted to know. I needed to know. I was a rational man. A sceptic. I did not believe the natural world would produce a man that could predict his death down to the minute, or the second. Nor did I believe he could predict mine. But I am only an animal. I am made of meat. Vulnerable. A raw nerve in a world of jagged rocks. And I am risk averse. That word. Immolation. Not random. Not chance. Up in the void surrounded by pure oxygen, fire was a constant risk. Ben’s little numbers loomed large in my mind. I had to make sure everything was in place. Had to make sure there were no errors. If it was a prediction, which I refused to accept at face value, then maybe I could take heart from it. What could Ben do in the face of an aneurysm? Nothing! But immolation. Fire. An accident. That sort of thing could be avoided. Just so long as everything was in working order. Just so long as everything was where it was meant to be.

What did HQ know? Cameras and remote operators. Not enough. No one else was in that tin can except me. Why even have humans in space if you wouldn’t trust their instincts and judgements?

I needed to know what was making that noise.

I needed to get out there.

-

HQ caught on too late. I was inside the suit, the airlock cycling by the time they realised. I chose my timing well. Halfway through my maintenance shift. Told them I was taking a look at the suit, make sure everything was in order. Meant they were slow to catch on to what I was doing. Technically they could stop the process at any stage. They could do anything from their side. But I threatened to force a manual override that would shut them out from that part of the system. They told me they’d court martial on return, but that was a piss-weak threat. For me, the stakes were higher than a court martial. In the end they backed down. Know how hard it is to build a space station in secret? It came first. If the space walk went wrong and I died, the station would still be there. A billion dollar asset awaiting the next top secret mission.

It was my neck on the line, not theirs. I accepted it. Under time pressure HQ accepted it too. By the time the door finally opened and I was able to gently guide myself out and around the rim so that I was clinging onto the station’s exterior, they’d already tapped into the cameras and were guiding me along to my destination. But it was background noise to me at that point. Their voices and little pings. Constant readouts of suit temperatures and the distance to the station hull. Meaningless. All of it. What mattered was the sound. Tap tap tap.

I was anxious by this point. Or perhaps, if I’m honest, scared. Space is all extremes. Not just heat, but light too. The shadows cast are vast and strange. You move in and out of the Earth’s shadow like it’s a hand in front of a projector. And the ones cast by yourself and your surroundings are a special kind of black. The station, with its myriad of pipes and cables, was covered in abyssal shadows. Long warped things with ambiguous origins. Sometimes I looked at the darkness and wondered if there was anything there at all, or if the station was simply bisected by some kind of strange cosmic force. Like I might fall into it, somehow. Forever lost.

Normally I’d think it was beautiful. Space walks had for me, in the past, been an almost religious experience. This carried the same sense of weight, but for very different reasons. I felt watched. Something I tried to ignore but it got harder and harder. Kept looking over my shoulder. Kept overthinking every little bump and vibration I felt on the station’s hull. By the time I reached the place where I had strapped Ben’s body I was close to a panic attack. That whole part of the station was covered in darkness. The kind where I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was only HQ’s voice telling me I’d reached my destination that let me know Ben was lying just a few feet from me. Under their direction I found him, and when my light fell upon the bag itself I saw the metallic fabric glitter with ice. Touching it, I felt Ben’s frozen body inside. Hard as rock. I gave him a nudge and he didn’t move an inch. The straps holding him in place were still there, firm as ever.

“What else could be causing the sound?” I asked.

“There is one option.”

The nameless voice on the other end sounded reticent, but that had been the default since Ben died. HQ always sounded like they were holding something back.

“What’s that?”

“We are not a hundred percent certain how corpses would respond to the changing temperatures in vacuum. Obviously, parts of the body will freeze and expand. Fluids, in particular. Right now the bag has a lot of surface contact with the metallic hull. One theory is that blood may be freezing and sublimating as the surface beneath changes temperature.”

I looked at the bag and grimaced.

“How much… blood, exactly?”

“We cannot possibly say for certain how much would have left the body. Only that the bag’s job is to contain it until return. We are able to confirm using instruments in the station that the panel you are standing on is well below freezing. Everything should be in a… manageable state, so to speak. Solid, likely one large clump.” They replied, and then after a moment they added, “You wanted this. It would be a waste of resources now that you’re out here not to investigate further. You need to look inside.”

Of course I’d wanted this, hadn’t I? To satisfy my morbid curiosity? To address the rabid thoughts in my mind that had kept me awake, filling what little sleep I had with nightmares. Now that I was at the threshold, I found myself so afraid that even moving my hand took a kind of effort. And yet I had no choice. I had to see this through.

The bag opened with a specially designed zipper. No sound, but I could feel the click-click-click of the specialised teeth opening up. It’s stupid, but as I unfurled the flap I could’ve sworn a terrible foetid stench passed over me. It lasted no more than a few seconds but was so vivid I turned and snapped my eyes shut as they watered. Power of suggestion, I told myself as I reopened them. That was all. Nothing more. No air. No sound. No smell. I took a few deep breaths, tried not to let the incident unsettle me further, and looked inside the bag.

Multiple people watching my video feed gasped while I made a fairly unflattering noise somewhere between a moan and a cry. I’d expected something… God at worst I’d expected something ghoulish. Blue skin. Icicles collecting around the eyelashes. Like a body found in the Arctic. But Ben… Ben had transformed. Great jagged shards of frozen blood had erupted from the eyes and ears and mouth, his jaw dislocated to an unnatural angle as an icicle the size of my forearm forced its way out. His neck was broken, his torso shredded with strips of flesh hanging off in ribbons, and his hands were clawing at his face with bizarre yellow nails. They’d even left grooves in his skin

“What the fuck is this?” I asked no one in particular, only to realise that HQ had been talking amongst themselves the whole time.

“A malfunction in the bag…”

“Unexpected pressure…”

“Temperature changes…”

“No no, this isn’t normal. Let’s not pretend this is normal!”

“Guys!” I shouted, splitting the chatter and leaving silence. “Why are his arms like that?”

“Uh, muscle spasms, possibly caused by… well whatever caused the unusual reaction in his circulatory system. Maybe that caused his arms to curl up towards his face?”

“There are scratch marks on his cheeks,” I replied. “Skin under his nails. Are we sure he was dead when I brought him out here?”

A dozen urgent, alarmed voices–all desperate to avoid even the slightest hint of responsibility–told me no, that was not possible. But looking down at Ben’s tortured face, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of doubt. I was about to ask what I ought to do next when the sun rose across the station. Unlike Earth, this wasn’t a gentle morning. It flipped like a light switch. Thankfully the suit reacted before it had a chance to blind me, but the temperature began to rapidly climb. I watched as something beneath Ben’s skin began to writhe in the new warmth.

“That’s definitely not normal.”

“We can offer no further insight into the situation as of this moment. The footage you’re sending us is under review by a panel of experts,” HQ told me, somewhat urgently and robotically, like the person on the other end was stifling panic. “Current orders are to take samples, reseal the bag, and return to the station.”

“You sure I should be taking this stuff inside?”

There was some mumbling before the same operator replied.

“Forget samples. Seal the bag. Return to the station.”

“Gladly,” I replied, before pulling the zipper shut.

I was keen to leave and made the journey back faster than I should have. That crawling sensation you feel when being watched, it was all over me. Made me clumsy and I knocked myself more than once on the way back, like I was suddenly unused to the suit’s controls. I just couldn’t escape the notion that everywhere I looked someone or something had darted back just out of view. Of course that was impossible, so I told myself. What could survive out in space? But it only made it that much worse to imagine something slinking into the shadows. Tapping on the hull. Stalking me every step of the way back. When I finally reached the door, the tension inside me rose. If something was going to happen, it would happen now with my back turned on infinity. I had never felt so vulnerable.

“Uh, Reynolds.”

The sound made me jump. I’d been so focused on my surroundings I’d forgotten I was being supervised by a room full of people a thousand of miles away.

“What is it?”

“Reynolds, we’re uh… we’re seeing something here we’re not sure of. Being told you should hold off on returning.”

Something about the voice on the other end made my stomach sink. They didn’t just sound confused, and make no mistake when you’re clinging to the side of a station all on your own confused would have been bad enough. But no, there was something else.

Fear.

“We… there’s an anomaly,” they added. “No one down here knows how to proceed. We’re currently seeking input from higher ups. This is unprecedented.”

“What’s going on?”

“It began with, well… signals from some of the biomonitors. Specifically Ben’s.”

That last word hit like a truck.

“What!?”

“Yes. And the cameras are… at first we thought they were malfunctioning. It appeared as if Ben’s bag was empty. And then… Reynolds we… we noticed something. Something else.”

“Guys what’s going on here?”

“I’m being told I can’t say more. Just… just wait.”

I tightened my grip on the railing, my heart pounding. Finally the door cycled open and I was ready to disregard all orders when the man speaking to me from HQ practically screamed in my ear.

“Don’t enter! Reynolds. Do. Not. Enter the station! What we’re seeing on the cameras, you can’t let that in!”

“If something’s out here I’m getting to safety before it reaches me!”

Tap tap tap.

I stopped. My brain processed.

I’d heard that. I’d heard something in the vacuum of space. I looked around at my hands, my feet. That couldn’t be possible. Not unless…

Tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap.

Without moving my head I turned my eyes towards the very edge of my helmet’s vision and watched as a single yellow fingernail tapped gently on the glass.

The man in HQ spoke in a terrifying whisper.

“He’s on your suit.”

The terror that shot through me was electric. White fire coursing through my veins. Without even thinking I reacted like I’d just found out there was a grenade strapped to my back. All instinct. No rationality. I cried out and swung around, trying to knock Ben off my back but all I accomplished was setting off some alarms as I damaged my suit.

“Get it off!” I screamed at no one in particular. “Get it off me!”

I thrashed desperately and felt something shuffling around the exterior of the bulky suit. Finally, my eyes fell on something useful. The jet controls. I fumbled my hands into place and immediately blasted myself into the open pressure chamber, turning at the last minute so that the back of the suit smashed into the thick secondary door. I only hoped that whatever was clinging to the back of me was destroyed by the impact, but when I looked up Ben was still out there gawping at me with a mouth full of frozen blood.

Slowly, his movement packed with the eerie confidence of a predator, he prepared to enter the station.

“Reynolds get away from the door! We’re initiating an emergency shutdown.”

Ben had one hand inside when the door slammed shut and cut it off. Even in space with the bulkhead between us, I could’ve sworn I heard him scream.

-

There was no ignoring Ben or the sounds he made. Not anymore. Terrible thumps that battered the station, their location changing seemingly at random. This drove the people on the ground insane. Oh I’d heard my fair share of rationalisation over the last few hours. Been sent book’s worth of written material from every type of expert you could imagine.Ever since my colleague’s death I’d been wrestling with all sorts of bizarre thoughts, but after the space walk it was like they’d spilled out of my head and were now terrorising other like-minded sceptics. Try as they might, no one in HQ could make sense of it.

But they didn’t have the journal.

After what happened during my space walk, it became a priority for me to figure out what the fuck was going on. Those numbers Ben had recorded weren’t gibberish. I’d sort of known that from the start. To read them was to feel like you were reading another language. Something secret and hidden. And while I never cracked the code, not even now after all this time, I did figure out where Ben had found it.

Light.

The trick was to dig deeper into Ben’s research. Specifically a pet project of his he’d spent nearly his entire life chasing. A little comet, a ball of ice, way out in the Kepler belt close to where the solar system abates and the great cosmic void begins. Something small and insignificant that rotated and shifted and occasionally caught the sun, bouncing photons right back at us. A glittering snowball so faint as to be invisible unless you happened to look at the right place at the right time.

Like Ben did, when he was just ten and playing with hobbyist Dad’s backyard telescope.

A light in the darkness. A light that spoke to a few instruments Ben had adjusted to record each little emission. Flash on. Flash off. Flash on. Flash off. Flash on.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Binary to hexadecimal and from there… God, something else. Something that spoke to him.

Something out there had spoken to him.

I don’t know what scared me more. The sound of a reanimated Ben pounding away at the station, an imminent all-too-near threat. Or the thought of something in the void whispering unknown secrets to a man for the last two decades. An idea that occasionally rose over me like the tide, swallowing me whole if I dwelt on it for more than a few moments. I never did figure out what the transmission was saying, but I was transfixed nonetheless. Not just by Ben’s little journal that contained hundreds, thousands, of handwritten records. But the live transmission he had set up on his computer, the one he’d converted into a sound. It was like an earworm on steroids. Like white noise made of acid, a flood of alien ideas that left me confused and drooling if I listened for too long. All told I spent no more than a few days with access to that transmission and by the end I felt like I was on the verge of melting away. But Ben… Ben had been exposed to that thing since his childhood. Spent years and years listening and recording and waiting, working towards something none of us could really hope to understand. I had to assume that transmission was responsible for his death, and even worse, what had happened to him afterwards. Had it always been the reason for his coming to space?

Had the Ben I’d known just been a sham?

The sound… the light coming from out there. It felt wrong. It wasn’t a gentle lull or a siren’s pull. It was dark and overpowering. Why had he given into it? Why had he done everything it wanted? How much of his life had been lived because of its needs and wants?

One thing I could be sure of as I spent days listening to Ben’s furious rampage on the exterior of the station, whatever had spoken to him…

It was hostile, and it couldn’t be allowed to come back with me.

-

“Reynolds I’m being told this is going to be a bit of unconventional pickup.”

I scoffed as I finished suiting up. That was an understatement.

“What did they tell you?” I asked as I pulled the helmet down and initiated the door’s opening sequence.

“There are concerns about contamination,” the pilot told me. “Not sure what that means. Didn’t say if it was biological or chemical. All sounds a little weird if you ask me. But we’re meant to pick you up mid-space walk. Is that right?”

“Yup,” I replied.

“Huh. You up for that? We’re told we can come about 200 metres away, but you’ll have to close the rest with the suit’s thrusters. Gonna be something else for you. Untethered journey from one vehicle to the next. It’s never been done before”

“I’m well aware of the risks,” I said. “Just keep your eyes peeled.”

This time it was his turn to scoff.

“For what?” He cried.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

-

I made the journey with my back to the shuttle, floating in the wrong direction at a slow but consistent speed. My eyes glued to the station, looking for some signs of Ben. There was the occasional flash of something red, a slight shimmer of movement often obscured by some of the station’s panels and antennae, that let me know he was still on the exterior, skulking around somewhere. So long as he stayed there, I knew I’d be okay. But the entire time I kept waiting for the other foot to drop. For the tension to finally explode into that life threatening danger I knew was waiting for me. It came as a surprise when I finally approached the shuttle without incident. Pilot told me I was a few metres away and it was time to turn around, so I did, drifting around as gently as a diver returning to the surface.

I had my back to the station no more than a few seconds when the pilot grunted.

“Huh. That’s odd.”

He sounded nonchalant, but the object that hit me was anything but minor. Ben, uninterested in making the journey safely, had launched himself off the station as fast as he could. And with no way of slowing down he hit me at full speed, slamming me up against part of the door frame and sending us both tumbling out into the void before anyone had even had the time to register his attack.

This time he was not letting me get a door between us. He scrambled over my suit like a deranged insect, one that I desperately tried to swat away as the great void spun around us both. Stars turned to lines, the shuttle swooping past my helmet’s field of view in almost random directions. It was sickening and terrifying, and I hoped to God I’d be able to correct the spin before it got out of control but all of that came second to the monster who was clinging to my suit. At some point he crawled around in such a way that I got a good look at him, the first in a few days. It was up close. Personal. Even with the helmet’s glass between us I could make out such stark and startling detail that I momentarily froze in terror, aware only vaguely of the pilot’s panicked transmissions.

“Jesus Christ what the fuck is that thing? Reynolds you need to get yourself stabilised! Much further and we won’t be able to help. And whatever you do, you need to know, that fucking thing isn’t coming aboard this shuttle!”

I wanted to reply but I was busy trying to get an arm between me and Ben who was now a profusion of jagged red crystals of varying sizes. Some as big as kitchen knives, others like sewing needles. A space suit’s worst nightmare. A puncture wouldn’t lead to the immediate decompression you’re probably thinking of. Instead I’d have a few moments at most before the air enveloping the suit dissipated and after that my lungs would collapse, my blood would start to boil, and the water inside my eyes, nose, ears and other soft tissues would vaporise and try to escape. Like frostbite on fast-forward. But punctures weren’t my sole concern. I knew I had to stop Ben’s hands getting a grip on the helmet. I don’t know if whatever had animated him had access to all his memories, but Ben sure-as-shit knew how to remove a helmet from the exterior so all my focus went on keeping his nasty little fingers away from my neck. A puncture would still leave me enough time to return to the shuttle, but with no helmet I’d be doomed to a very painful death.

So I fought the best I could, knowing everything hinged on me pushing him away. But Ben was lithe and insectile, constantly slipping out of reach whenever I got close to giving him a good shove. His fingers could easily find purchase on the suit and its many little greebles, while I was basically wielding oven gloves that offered no dexterity. I had no hope of shaking him off the usual way, but I did have something on my side. Inertia. The whole time we’d been spinning furiously and that rotational force was just about the only thing trying to peel the two of us apart. So far I’d been fighting it, but why? I realised at the last moment I had one option left, so I jammed half thrusters on and decided to make the nearly-out-of-control spin much much worse.

Normally an uncontrolled spin is one of those nightmare scenarios any astronaut dreads. Humans are irregularly shaped, and once you start rotating along more than one axis, applying more force is likely just to make it worse. Correcting takes a huge amount of experience and insight, and even then there’s no guarantee you can stop it. More likely is that by the time you figure out what you need to do, the rotational forces will have you on the brink of unconsciousness. And from there death is just a stone’s throw away.

For me it was the only chance I had.

So I accelerated the spin, and kept accelerating, holding the button down until the forces at play pulled Ben further and further towards the front of the suit. That’s where inertia wanted us. Two objects in near symmetry, ready to break off in opposite directions at any moment. Ben held on for longer than I did. At some point my limbs went weak, my vision dark, and my arms fell to my side, no longer able to fight the monster off. But by then it took everything Ben had just to cling onto me and he could no longer attack or fumble at my helmet. Eventually, even he had to give in as the spin grew faster and faster and the forces trying to separate us grew too strong. It was like every rollercoaster I’d been on merged into one, and ramped up to eleven.

The last thing I remembered before I lost consciousness was the sight of Ben’s monstrous face being flung off into the void.

-

I came to aboard the shuttle, several men and women crowded around me.

“Jesus Christ you’re a lucky sonnofabitch.”

I groaned and made eyes towards the person who had spoken. It sounded like the pilot. Nice to put a face to the voice.

“I don’t feel lucky,” I gasped.

“You spun right towards us. We were already suited up and on our way. Timed up well. That suit was riddled with holes. Any later and we wouldn’t have been around to catch you and get you into safety. As it is pal, you’re going home. Medical check shows no real issues. I think you’re going to be okay.”

“Where’s… where’s Ben?”

The people around me shared a funny look before one of them realised.

“Benjamin Whateley? The other astronaut onboard. Is that what… who was attacking you?”

I nodded.

“Well he’s gone,” they replied. “If that really was your colleague we’re… well we’re sorry. I feel like there’s a story we’re missing.”

“I’ll catch you up when I’m feeling better,” I coughed.

“Well whatever happened to him, he’ll be reentering Earth’s atmosphere in the next hours,” the pilot replied.

“What then?” I asked.

The pilot thought for a second.

“Human body on reentry? He’ll go up in flames.

“Immolation.”