Call Me
Just over one hundred fifty kilometers above a ruined Earth, the International Space Station hobbled through the thermosphere at barely five kilometers per second. Its orbital station-keeping had been compromised by a mad German who hijacked the remaining Soyuz, which hitherto had served as the station’s ad hoc remedy against the effects of atmospheric drag in low Earth orbit. The ISS fell leisurely to its death while Yorgi Sova played chess.
The German burned up in a panicked trajectory somewhere over the South China Sea, ironically quite near the spot where this road to ruin began just over four months ago. Following a unilateral US withdrawal from the United Nations and a campaign of “reconnaissance-in-force” (Operation Sovereign Resolve) near spits of sand in the middle of the ocean claimed by a half-dozen countries, a China Southern Airlines Airbus A320 en route to Indonesia disappeared near the declared “Bo Schembeckler Memorial Line of Control” enforced by the US Navy. After days of diplomatic stonewalling and adherence to “alternative facts” by the Americans, a herd of Chinese anti-ship missiles, probably DF-21Ds or DF-26s, cracked the USS Carl Vinson into three pieces and sent a goodly portion of Carrier Strike Group 1 to Davy Jones’ Locker.
Yorgi Sova and the German witnessed the ensuing horror from the Cupola observatory, a wart-like protrusion on the belly of the ISS. Telemetry feeds from RKA Mission Control Center in Moscow and Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen simultaneously disengaged. The station had just crossed over the terminator into night, a routine phenomenon which Yorgi eagerly observed as often as his schedule permitted. Although dusk happened roughly every ninety minutes, it was anything but pedestrian. The world looked like Christmas on the night side, strings of lights webbed out from major urban centers obscuring in brilliance the imaginary lines over which so many earthbound twats incessantly fought. When telemetry cut out, Yorgi and the German were hurtling over the central US at Mach 23. What was presumably the state of Colorado went dark after twin thermonuclear flashes punched angry, gaping holes in the stratosphere. Boulder and Denver were no more; Yorgi had never been there when he lived in the States, but those were the only major cities in that patch of geography he knew by name. The German vomited in microgravity, spraying the seven windows of the observation dome. The pair of them watched the strings of Christmas lights go out forever through little gaps in the sick, and billions died in just under forty minutes.
It was nearly two weeks later when the cosmonaut was jolted out of sleep, snug against a bulkhead, arms splayed out from his torso, unkempt graying hair haloed about from a sparse island on the top of his head. Alarm klaxons and a barrage of lights erupted in the Zvezda crew module. Yorgi Sova scrambled out of sleeping gear and cargo webbing, rubbing his eyes to discover the Pirs-1 docking module to the last Soyuz sealed for departure launch. The station groaned and shuddered in protest, sound penetrating only the last inhabited modules, all Russian. Working furiously to compensate for the sudden loss in mass on the ISS, Yorgi had no opportunity to respond to the mad German’s ravings on the 145MHz wavelength. He screamed for the eternal love of Jesus, plummeted to his death in a chaotic reentry vector, a fiery pebble skipping through the thermosphere, suddenly extinguished.
In the months that followed, Yorgi Sova was consumed by his routine in keeping the ISS aloft above the broiled, ink-dark Earth. A few weeks after the German died, the 2-meter FM band on the Lira antenna on the crackled to life, meekly illuminating Zvezda, dimmed to conserve power. Loose fistfuls of wires and fiber-optic cables skewed about in microgravity in concert with food wrappers and soiled hand towels, revealed by the radio console’s meager blue light. Yorgi had cannibalized the remaining pressurized lab modules for known good components as existing ones fried from the additional bombardment of radiation oozing out from Earth, and had fallen asleep in the tangle of his work. Through the thick of static, a tinny strain of barely intelligible syllables emerged as ISS limped over the remains of Central Asia, “Rook to e1, rook to e1, check. Rook to e1, rook to e1, check…”
Despite the mad German’s damage to the station’s orbital integrity, the Lira communications system, or at least its primary modules and accompanying Babel of software, appeared to be functional. As the ISS passed over Central Asia approximately sixteen times per day, the 2-meter FM band would occasionally receive messages from Marcel Karimov, the last man on Earth. He was an Uzbec aeronautical engineer haphazardly broadcasting from an outlying research facility near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Older than Yorgi by nearly a decade and just as determined to find someone left to talk to, Marcel had rigged up a wide-band FM transmitter/repeater to an old Zenit gantry assembly which had previously been reconstituted as a communications node for radio transmissions within the Cosmodrome. Marcel was a resourceful old devil, indeed.
Yorgi snatched a dirty towel in freefall and wiped his smudged, sweat-streamed face and neck. Absentmindedly released from his grip, it drifted back into the miniature cyclone of trash in cramped Zvesda. Strapped into a collapsible chair barely one hundred fifty kilometers above the sender, he listened for Marcel, his gaze fixed on the wide band output glowing in the pale blue of the console. An iPad tumbled in front of him, displaying a chess app. The parched remains of the sparse Aral Sea were barely discernable in Cupola through the curdled murk of every urban center on Earth simultaneously ablaze. Yorgi felt a quivering through his seat that reverberated throughout the crew module as the distressed superstructure of the ISS protested against the physics of a decaying LEO. Despite the station’s dire circumstances, Lira piped Marcel’s croaking tenor through a single crew module intercom speaker, “Rook to e1, rook to e1, check. Rook to e1, rook to e1, check…”
“King to d8. Nice try, Marcel!”
“Knight to e3. Tell me what it looks like now.” Static from lingering electromagnetic interference in the violated atmosphere punctuated Marcel’s usual request.
The cosmonaut’s voice was pained with frustration, “Knight to dc4. Same as yesterday, same as four months ago.”
Marcel’s familiar hacking cough flooded the channel before he resumed, “Ab5. Tell me. The observation dugout must be covered by debris, it is still all dark last time I climbed up there. About killed myself in the attempt.”
“Ab5”, Yorgi countered. “Everything is still on fire. Oceans and poles mostly covered in soot. Colloid circulations appear to have penetrated the mesosphere near Kamchatka and the Pacific Northwest.” Only silence and radio warbles in response. “Ab5? Baykonur, do you copy?”
He recognized the defeat in Marcel’s voice. “Bishop to f5. We are the dead.”
The burning world slithered between them for the space of a few moments, Marcel in his tomb at Baikonur and Yorgi’s sarcophagus in the sky. Its orbit atrophied, the ISS reeled like a drunken Anacreon. The trickle of remaining power in Zvezda fluttered as attitude alerts illumined from random panels that stubbornly possessed some functionality.
“Knight to e3, fucker”, Yorgi scoffed. He did not stifle the laughter which immediately followed, the grim hilarity of their situation consumed him. “The dead man act is just to distract me. I know you, Marcel.”
Sheepishly, the engineer replied, “Bishop to d7. Touché.”
“Knight to d1. Do you have any cigarettes left?” Yorgi stared up at a bulkhead, angry warning lights appearing in his periphery. He reverently confessed, “I miss cigarettes. I miss the Sevastopol girls that taught me how to smoke them. Not even the goddamned beach do I miss as much as those girls.”
His opponent’s response betrayed a sudden excitement building in his tone through the increasing static, “Bishop to d5. Forget cigarettes, Yorgi! We have some more new arrivals. A deep-ground Army train from Oral, they brought nearly sixty…”
The vibration in the bones of the ISS had become a shivering sensation that Yorgi felt in his own. The Lira array remained true throughout the ordeal, even as the oxygen alarms began to howl. Through the thickening interference, Marcel repeated his announcement, shouting until the cosmonaut responded. “Bishop to d6. How bad?”
“Rook to d1, check. Maybe twenty that they took in might live, the rest were sent back down the tunnels. The damage had already been done, soaked up too many rems wandering around until the Army found them. But listen! I think your mother’s sister is here.”
The interference gained in intensity with the increasing emptiness Yorgi felt in his seared lungs. He stammered to make himself heard over the shuddering bulkheads. “King… King, uh, king to c7. Did not copy, Baykonur.” The iPad drifted away.
Marcel was frantic, but his words seemingly cut through irradiated layers of atmosphere on a silvery ribbon of the electromagnetic spectrum. The engineer’s voice enveloped the tremulous interior of Zvezda. “Knight to d2. Oksana Alan, works at Utemisov State University is your auntie, no? Married to that American geologist attached to Gazprom? Oksana Alan?”
A Christmas of warning indicators bathed Yorgi in their feeblish glow. “Auntie Oksana?” He recovered from his smile and coughed until stars burst. “Bishop to d6. How many rems did she take? Tell me what she looks like now!”
Yorgi shook off his blurred vision in the intensifying heat, and for an indeterminate moment he could see the portals near the crew quarters in Zvezda illuminate with the zenith of Earth, then dark with the empty space, again and again. He was suddenly conscious of his own smell, stale with fear and the tang of urine.
Marcel’s thunderous whisper drowned out the alarm klaxons, “Same as yesterday, same as four months ago…”
Enraged there was suddenly no air to satisfy his screaming insides, the cosmonaut hammered soundlessly at the Lira console until it winked out. His hands were burned.
The disembodied voice of Marcel continued through the stark silence of the plunging, rolling, shattered ISS. “Her little Pomeranian is here with us too. You loved Mishka! Come hold him again, he misses your cuddles the most…”
An iPad hurtled over on its x and y axes in Yorgi’s vision. Chessmen darkened. Bulkheads ignited.
“Rook to d1, check. Rook to d1, check…”
