Free Grants Pass by Ed Greenwood, Cherie Priest, Jay Lake, Carole Johnstone

slumping against.
    I hold my hands up to him, seeing
the blooms of hemorrhages under the skin and down my arms, blood pooling
beneath the thin layer in broad swirls and strokes, a red and blue
finger-painting. “Wait…” I croak, though I don’t expect him to.
    He does. He looks at me.
    “ I can’t
leave, Valya,” I tell him again. “But I know you have to. I understand now. I
understand.”
    He nods. He asks me something, but I
can’t hear him; my head is filled with ringing, like I’ve been to a rock
concert. But I can see his lips well enough; I know what he’s saying. “What do
we do?”
    I tell him.
     
    ****
     
    From four hundred kilometers up,
the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift across the curved faceplate
of my helmet, distorted by the thick polycarbonate fishbowl that’s keeping the
cold emptiness at bay. Or, at least, the cold emptiness that’s outside my spacesuit.
    “ Pasha? How
are you doing?” Valentin’s voice is tinny but loud in my ears. It makes me jump
a little.
     “ How do you
think I’m doing?” I nudge my thruster controls and rotate to face the station.
I’m surprised how far I’ve travelled already; the ISS is large in my view, but
not as large as I expected. From here, maybe two hundred meters out, it looks
like some kind of robotic insect, with its golden solar panel wings and spindly
body. It’s beautiful as well, much more beautiful from outside than from
within.
    Of course, my eyesight isn’t what it
once was. My right eye has almost returned to normal, its vision focused and
clear enough. The left is still just a blur, though, from the damage it
sustained. My hearing is still shot too, a maddening, relentless tinnitus
filling my ears. Valentin told me my eardrums had nearly burst, that I’m lucky
I’m not entirely deaf. At any rate, adjusting the volume on the radio in my
suit did the trick.
    “ I’m going
to activate the boosters in a minute,” Valentin tells me. “Run them dry.”
    “ Do you
really think you can break orbit, Valya?” I ask. I’m no physicist, but his
scheme doesn’t really strike me as practical.
    “ Of course,”
he replies, but there’s hesitation in his voice. I know him well enough to
recognize when he’s lying.
    “ Well, with
only you on board, the food and water supplies should last much longer,” I
point out.
    “ Not that
much longer,” his voice crackles in my ears. “But long enough to finally become
a true cosmonaut. My father would have been pleased at last.”
    “ I’m sure he
already was,” I told him, thinking of my boy, my Niki. My chest hurts.
    Valentin chuckles at that. “Well, I
suppose I’ll find out, when I see him in hell.”
    I smile. “You do know you’re insane,
don’t you?”
    “ You can
talk, tovarisch . I’m not the one attempting to walk home from outer
space.”
    That makes me laugh out loud. “Hey,
it’s only four hundred kilometers. Piece of cake.”
    Valentin laughs as well, for a
moment, but falls silent. For a long moment, the only sound is my breathing
within the suit.
    Then he speaks again. “ Do
svidaniya , Pasha,” he says seriously. “It’s been an honor working with
you.”
    “ And with
you. God speed.”
    I imagine the face he would have
made at the religious reference, but he says nothing, which I appreciate.
    Bright light flares on the station’s
attitude and altitude control boosters. There is no sound, not here in airless
space. Nothing seems to happen at first, but slowly the station begins to draw
away from me, its orbiting speed increased bit by laborious bit. It grows smaller
in my helmet’s visor, becoming little more than an insect itself, then a bright
star. Finally it vanishes altogether, hurtling around the curvature of the
Earth. I know that, if I remain facing this way, it will come back into sight
eventually, overtaking me as it speeds around the earth even faster than me,
faster than twenty five thousand miles an hour. But I don’t want to see