Seven Seconds

The station groaned at 0400. It was a thermal contraction, the titanium ribs of the hull shivering as Kalindi-4 passed into the shadow of the dead star it orbited. The sound wasn’t a creak; it was a deep, resonant boom that vibrated through the floor grates and up into the sleep restraints.

Vesper didn't wake up because of the noise. She woke up because the silence that followed was heavy enough to crush her.

She unbuckled the sleep webbing with fumbling fingers. Her hands were numb again—peripheral neuropathy, the medical database called it. Her fingers felt like they were wearing thick wool gloves, clumsy and distant. She pushed off the wall, drifting through the stale air of the crew quarters.

There were two bunks. Hers, a tangle of grey sheets, and the one opposite. That one was stripped bare, the mattress foam oxidizing slightly, turning a sickly yellow. Bennet’s bunk.

It had been three years since Bennet evacuated. Appendicitis that went septic, complicated by a bad reaction to the on-board antibiotics. The med-evac drone had taken him, and the replacement requisition form had gone into the administrative void of the United Coalition.

Budgetary realignment, the message had said. Mission parameters adjusted for solo operation.

"Solo operation," Vesper muttered, her voice cracking. It was the first sound she’d made in twelve hours. It sounded rusty.

She caught the doorframe of the mess hall and swung herself inside. The air smelled like ozone and recycled coffee grounds—a sharp, metallic tang that never went away. She moved to the hydration dispenser, pressed her thumb to the reader, and watched the nozzle spit out a sphere of water.

She caught it in her mouth, swallowing hard. It hurt. Her throat felt raw, lined with sandpaper. She ran her tongue over her gums and tasted copper.

Bleeding again.

She floated to the viewport. Outside, the universe was doing its best to look indifferent. The star, a cooling red dwarf, was a sullen eye in the dark. The rest was just vacuum and distance. Vesper pressed her forehead against the cold pane. Her reflection ghosted back at her—eyes sunken, skin the color of parchment, hair thinning in patches she tried not to look at in the mirror.

The radiation shielding in Sector 4 had failed six months ago. A micro-meteoroid strike, smaller than a marble, had compromised the lead lining. She’d fixed it. She’d patched the hull, run the sealant, repressurized the sector. But she’d been in the suit for four hours while the gamma rays poured in like invisible water.

She checked the chronometer. 08:59.

She pushed off the glass and drifted to the comms console. She didn't sit; she just anchored her boots into the floor loops and waited.

At 09:00:00, the light blinked green.

"Kalindi-4," she said. "Reading you."

She counted. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

"Morning, Vesper," Ishan said.

The relief was a physical thing. It loosened the knot in her chest. His voice was the only thing in her life that wasn't made of metal or plastic. It was warm, slightly grainy from the transmission compression, and distinctly human.

"You're late," she lied.

"I am precisely on time. Atomic clock, remember?" There was a rustle of paper on his end. Ishan was old-fashioned; he printed his reports. "How are the scrubbers?"

"Noisy. The bearing on Unit 3 is going. I can hear it grinding."

"I’ll walk you through a bypass later. How are you?"

"Fine," she said. The word came out too fast. "Tired. The settling boom woke me up early."

"Vesper."

"I'm fine, Ishan. Read me the numbers."

He sighed. It was a soft sound, fractured by the light-speed lag. "Okay. Telemetry looks stable. Oxygen saturation is at 96%. Power output from the solar array is down 2%—probably dust accumulation. You might need to cycle the wipers."

"Copy that. Cycling wipers." She flipped a switch she didn't need to flip, just to keep her hands busy. If she stopped moving, the shaking started.

"So," Ishan said, his voice shifting gears. "I saw a dog today."

Vesper paused. "A dog."

"Yeah. On the way to the uplink center. A Golden Retriever. It was wearing a little raincoat because of the monsoon."

"A raincoat?"

"Yellow. With a hood. It looked ridiculous and majestic."

Vesper closed her eyes. She tried to picture it. A wet street. Rain that wasn't recycled urine. A dog in a yellow coat. The image was slippery; her brain had trouble holding onto things that weren't grey or black.

"Did you pet it?" she asked.

"Obviously. I was late to the briefing because I was scratching it behind the ears. Commander Halloway was not impressed."

"Halloway has no soul."

"That is the working theory, yes."

They fell into silence. It wasn't an empty silence; it was a shared space. Over the last year, this had become the rhythm of her life. The seven-second delay was a third participant in the conversation. She would speak, and then she would wait, imagining his signal beaming up from the surface, bouncing off the relay satellites, piercing the atmosphere, crossing the cold void, and finding her.

"Ishan," she said suddenly.

"Yeah?"

"Is it raining hard?"

"Pouring. The gutters are overflowing. The whole city smells like wet concrete and jasmine."

"Jasmine," she whispered. She could almost smell it. Almost.

"Vesper, talk to me about the bio-readings."

The shift was abrupt. He did this sometimes—lulled her with Earth stories and then tried to catch her off guard.

"I told you, the sensors are glitchy. I need to recalibrate the wrist unit."

"The unit is fine. The readings aren't." His voice was tighter now. "Your white cell count is through the floor. Your heart rate variability is erratic. And the thermal scans show inflammation in your..." He stopped. He couldn't say the words.

"In my lungs," she finished for him. "And my liver. And probably my marrow, if we’re being thorough."

Seven seconds.

"Why didn't you tell me it was getting worse?"

"Because there's no point," she said, staring at a blinking amber light on the dash. "You can't send a ship. I can't leave. We did the math, Ishan. Even if I evacuated today, I’d die in transit. I’d rather die here than in a cryo-pod."

"Don't say that."

"It's the truth. Physics doesn't care about our feelings."

"I care," he said.

The raw vulnerability in his voice made her throat close up. She coughed, a wet, hacking sound she couldn't suppress. She covered the mic, but she knew he heard it. When she pulled her hand away, there was blood on her palm. Bright, oxygenated red.

"I have to go," she rasped. "Alarm on the... on the hydroponics deck."

"Vesper, wait—"

She cut the feed.

The rest of the day was a blur of maintenance and pain management.

She moved through the station like a ghost haunting her own house. She replaced the bearing on Scrubber Unit 3, her hands shaking so badly she dropped the wrench three times. It floated away, mocking her, until she snagged it with a magnetic tether.

She ate a nutrient pack that tasted like chalk and vomit. She threw it up ten minutes later, her body rejecting the calories.

By 18:00, the fatigue was a physical weight, dragging her down despite the microgravity. She floated into the observation blister, a small bubble of glass protruding from the hull. It was the only place on the station where you could see the stars without craning your neck.

She strapped herself into the single chair and watched the galaxy turn.

She thought about Ishan.

They had never met. Not really. He was just a voice assigned to her sector when the previous handler retired. At first, it had been strictly protocol. Check the O2 levels. Confirm trajectory. Sign off on the logs.

Then came the night the gyroscope failed. They had stayed on the line for fourteen hours straight, him walking her through the manual rebuild of the stabilizer, her cursing at the stripped bolts. They had been too tired for protocol. They had started talking about real things.

He told her about his ex-wife, who left him because he worked too much. She told him about running away from home at sixteen to join the Academy. He told her he loved jazz; she told him she hated it because it felt anxious.

He became her anchor. When the isolation sickness started: the hallucinations, the voices in the ventilation shafts, he talked her down. He read her news articles. He described meals he was eating in excruciating detail.

He fell in love with a dying woman, and she fell in love with a voice in her ear. It was the stupidest, most tragic thing she could imagine.

"Computer," she said. "Record audio log."

The system chimed.

"To... solely for the attention of Ishan Patel. Nataraj Station Control."

She paused. What do you say?

"I'm sorry I hung up," she said. "I didn't want you to hear me cough. Vanity, I guess. Even at the end of the world, a girl wants to be pretty."

She looked at her hands. The veins were dark webs under the skin.

"I want you to know," she continued, her voice gaining a little strength. "You kept me sane. I know I'm just a job, or maybe a case study now, but... you were the only thing that felt real up here. The silence is so loud, Ishan. It eats everything. But when you talk, the station stops creaking. The stars stop looking so cold."

She took a breath that rattled deep in her chest.

"Don't feel bad about the rescue mission. I know you tried to get authorization. I know they said no. It's okay. I'm not scared. Well, I am. But not as much as I thought I'd be."

She stopped. She wiped her eyes.

"Computer. Delete recording."

The system chimed again. Recording deleted.

She couldn't do that to him. It felt too cruel. It made it final. As long as they were just talking, just lagging seven seconds apart, she was still alive.

The end didn't come with a bang. It came with a fever.

Two days later, Vesper woke up burning. Her skin felt like it was on fire, but she was shivering so hard her teeth rattled in her head. The station was spinning, or maybe her inner ear had finally dissolved.

She tried to unbuckle the sleep restraint, but her fingers wouldn't work. They were stiff claws. She had to gnaw at the strap with her teeth until the buckle popped.

She pushed out of the bunk and immediately crashed into the opposite wall. No coordination left. Her legs trailed behind her like useless streamers.

Water, she thought. Need water.

She dragged herself along the handrail, hand over hand, panting. The corridor stretched out like a telescope, elongating, twisting. The lights were too bright. Halos flared around every LED.

She made it to the comms console. She didn't have the strength to get to the mess hall.

She slumped against the panel, hitting the keys with her elbow.

"Kalindi-4," she whispered.

Seven seconds.

"Vesper?" Ishan’s voice was sharp, immediate. He must have been sitting right there. "I've been hailing you for four hours. Where have you been?"

"Sleeping," she slurred. "Overslept."

"Your bio-monitor is screaming, Vesper. Heart rate is 140. Body temp is 104. What’s happening?"

"Just a fever. Space flu."

"There is no flu in a sterile environment."

"Ishan," she said. She slumped sideways, her cheek pressing against the cold plastic of the keyboard. "Tell me the story."

"What? No. We need to stabilize you. Is the med-kit within reach? You need an anti-pyretic and a saline drip."

"I can't," she said. "I can't move my hands."

Silence. Then, a ragged exhale.

"Okay. Okay, Vesper. Listen to me. You have to try."

"Too tired. Please. The story. The balcony."

She could hear him typing furiously on his end. Probably trying to override the station's auto-doc, trying to trigger an injection remotely. But the auto-doc was in the med-bay, and she was on the bridge. Physics.

"Ishan," she said, and she put everything she had left into his name. "Please."

The typing stopped.

"The balcony," he said. His voice was trembling. "It was... it was in Mumbai. Fourth floor."

"Smelled like garlic," she whispered. Her vision was greying out at the edges, a vignette of darkness closing in.

"Garlic and diesel," he said. "And the rain. It was always raining. And the musicians..."

"The trio."

"The trio. Violin, accordion, drum. They played 'La Vie en Rose' but they played it wrong. Too fast. Like a march."

Vesper smiled. A drop of blood floated from her nose, hovering in front of her eye like a red ruby.

"And the end," she breathed.

"They would pack up," Ishan said. She could hear tears in his voice now. He wasn't hiding it anymore. "One by one. The violin first. Then the accordion. The drummer was always the last one. He’d tap out this little rhythm on the rim of the drum. Tap-tap-tap. And then he’d stop."

"And the silence," Vesper said. The darkness was almost total now. She couldn't feel her legs. She couldn't feel the station vibrating.

"The silence was the loudest thing," Ishan said. "Because you knew they were gone. You knew the magic was over."

"No," Vesper whispered. "No, that's not it."

"What is it?"

"The silence... it means you heard it. It means... you were there."

Her breath hitched. A sharp pain, sudden and massive, flared in her chest, and then vanished instantly.

"Vesper?"

She looked at the switch. The big red toggle that cut the power to the transmitter.

She didn't want him to hear the death rattle. She didn't want his last memory of her to be the sound of a body failing. She wanted to be the music.

She summoned the last spark of energy in her muscles. She lifted her hand. It felt heavy, like it was made of lead, gravity finally claiming her.

"Ishan," she said. "I’m standing on the balcony."

"Vesper, stay with me."

"It's beautiful," she lied. "The rain is beautiful."

"Vesper!"

She let her hand fall on the switch.

Click.

The green light died. The static cut. The hum of the universe vanished.

Vesper floated in the center of the bridge. The pain was gone. The cold was gone. There was just the dark, and the memory of a voice, and the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was listening for her.

She closed her eyes, and the station held her as she slept.

Seven seconds later, on Earth, the line went dead.

Ishan stared at the console. The silence in the control room was absolute. The air conditioning hummed, a low, indifferent drone. Outside, the monsoon rain hammered against the roof of the facility, a relentless drumming.

"Control," a technician called out from the back of the room. "We lost carrier wave on Kalindi-4. Signal is flat."

Ishan didn't move. He sat with his headset still on, pressing the ear cup against his head, straining.

"Sir? Should we attempt a reboot?"

Ishan raised a hand. "No."

He took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes, pressing hard until stars exploded behind his eyelids. He felt hollowed out. Scraped clean.

He looked at the screen. The jagged line of her heart rate was gone, replaced by a flat, green tone. Signal Lost.

He thought about the paperwork he would have to file. Casualty Report. Mission Failure. Asset Liquidation.

He thought about the Golden Retriever in the yellow raincoat. He thought about the coffee he had bought for her, the kind she said she missed, sitting in a vacuum-sealed bag in his desk drawer, waiting for a return trip that was never scheduled.

He reached out and keyed the microphone.

"Technician," he said. His voice was steady. "Leave the channel open."

"Sir? The signal is gone. There's nothing to receive."

"I know," Ishan said. "Leave it open anyway."

He leaned back in his chair. He watched the static on the monitor, the snow of cosmic radiation interfering with the receiver.

He waited.

He knew the physics. He knew that radio waves traveled at the speed of light, and that once the source was gone, the waves stopped.

But he also knew about echoes. He knew that sound didn't just disappear; it dissipated, spreading out thinner and thinner across the universe.

He sat in the dark room, surrounded by the machinery of communication, and he listened. He listened to the rain on the roof. He listened to the hum of the servers. He listened to the silence where her voice used to be.

It was a heavy silence. A tragic silence.

But she was right. It was proof.

She had been there. He had been there. For a moment, across the impossible dark, they had been there together.

Ishan closed his eyes and kept listening.