ISS

“Sergie, Sergei. Stop slamming the box closed. My fingers are still in it. Sergei. Shit man, what’s wrong with you?” Clare extracted her fingers from the case that Sergei had been forcefully closing on them. She lifted them up to the light to get a better look at them, sure that she would have some bruises already. When she was satisfied that her fingers were intact, she looked over at Sergei, ready to berate him, but the words died on her lips when she looked out the window beyond him.

She pushed him over to get a better look. The Earth passed below them so quickly, but not so fast they could mistake what they saw. Flash after flash, all with the telltale mushroom cloud. They watched in silence as the Earth finally annihilated itself.

“What just happened?” Clare’s voice was barely above a whisper when she could finally talk again. She looked over at Sergei when he didn’t answer her to see he was silently crying. Her vision blurred, she raised her hands to rub her eyes to find she was crying as well.

Reaching over, she toggled the loudspeaker controller. “All crew to the Control Module immediately. I repeat, we need all crew to the Control Module immediately”. She pushed off from the bench, using it to float her way through the room and out into the corridor, heading for the heart of the Space Station and, most importantly right now, the communications link to Earth.

“Houston, I repeat, Houston can you hear me?” She left the radio channel open, but there was nothing apart from static. She intermittently repeated her message, hoping they would answer and tell her what she had just seen wasn’t real.

She could hear Sergei and Ivan on the other radio desperately trying to contact their mission control in Korolyov.

Their voices were drowned out by the phrase “nuclear war” spinning round and round her head.

They sat in the Control Module for the rest of the day, but they never got a reply.

They had debated all their options, spending most time discussing if it was possible for them to make it back to Earth alive and if there was anything left. The Americans had said no, but the Russians had wanted to try.

The ISS had lost contact with Sergei and Ivan as they entered the Earth's Atmosphere and never heard from them again.

Clare sat looking out of the window, staring at the darkness. It was something she’d never seen before, there was no light anywhere on the continent below her, no sign that man had ever had electricity. She watched for days, barely sleeping, barely eating, not talking to any of the other crew as she had nothing left to say.

The days turned into weeks, and the next two scheduled resupply ships didn’t come, not that she had expected them to.

She spent her time writing down everything that she had ever wanted to tell her family, then she wrote about her life, leaving a record of who she was and what had motivated her. When she finally had nothing more to say, she took a last look around the place that had been her home for the last five months and headed for the airlock.

She put her extravehicular mobility unit on and opened the external airlock. She looked out into the depth of space. She’d always wanted to be an astronaut to get closer to the stars. With a grunt of effort, she pushed herself out of the hatch and away from the ISS, smiling to herself as she floated towards the stars she’d always so desperately wanted to touch.