[Roger that, Lapetus. What about the girl?]
I can’t keep her above water anymore. Central, we’ll lose comms soon. I have to let her go. Dammit! She’s still holding on. Come on, girl! Let go!
All right, Central, she’s all alone in freezing water. You better get someone here fast. It’s a rough sea.
FILE NO. 2157
DEBRIEFING—COLONEL SMITH, US ARMY, AND CAPTAIN LUCAS NILSSON, SVENSKA MARINEN
Location: Musk? Naval Base. Near Stockholm, Sweden
—You are the captain of the HSwMS H?rn?sand, is that correct?
—Yes. Is Rear Admiral Bj?rkman going to join us?
—No. It’s just us.
—What is this? Is this an official inquiry?
—Call it what you want. We just want to know what happened.
—With all due respect—Colonel, is it?
—Yes.
—With all due respect, Colonel. You are an officer in the US Army. I am a captain of the Swedish Navy. I understand that our governments are … cooperating, but— —Captain, with all due respect, I am not asking. Let’s not waste any more time pretending you have a choice. You won’t like how this ends. Believe me, I have all the authority that I need.
—What do you want to know?
—I want to know why we have a nineteen-year-old in a coma.
—I believe her heart stopped, and she had to be revived.
—The H?rn?sand was less than five minutes away when she went in the water. She should be having cocoa right now, not lying unconscious in a hospital bed. What took you so long?
—I strongly believe I should be having this conversation with Rear Admiral Bj?rkman.
—Capt—
—He should at least be in the room.
—He was unavailable. Don’t make me ask again, Captain.
—Ask what? You said we were less than five minutes away. That’s how long it took us to get there: less than five minutes. We didn’t stop for snacks. It took us another five or six minutes to find the girl.
—Why?
—Why? You didn’t lose an aircraft carrier, you lost a tiny human in a really big sea.
—We didn’t lose anything.
—Well, your people had her, then they didn’t. You can draw your own conclusions. The waves were much bigger than she is. We were almost on top of her when we spotted her waving.
—That’s what? Ten minutes in the water.
—Freezing water. Water temperature was three degrees Celsius.
—Three degrees Celsius, that’s …
—More than two. Less than four.
—I would lose the attitude if I were you. You said she was waving at you. I take it she was still conscious.
—She was. We threw her a life buoy.
—You didn’t bring her on board?
—The H?rn?sand is a stealth corvette, not a dive boat. You can’t just hop on and off. We had to get a lifeboat down. Problem is, a Finnish attack helicopter showed up. They fired machine guns across our bows, right between us and the girl. She was almost hit. We assumed they’d rather kill her than let us have her, so we backed away. They moved closer. The helicopter was in a better position to extract her than we were. We asked for permission to engage. We were denied. We fired our guns fifty meters from the helicopter. They stopped moving towards the girl, but they stayed to make sure we didn’t either.
—There were jets under way.
—Two griffins, but they weren’t even in the air yet.
—Why weren’t they?
—You’ll have to ask them. All I know is there was a problem at the base. The first help we got was a rescue helicopter. One of yours if I’m not mistaken though it didn’t have any markings. The Finns fired in the water again when they tried to approach the girl. Your helo moved towards the Finnish helicopter, dangerously close to it. They were in between the Finns’ guns and the girl for a few seconds. We grabbed her with the lifeboat before they found a new vantage point. By then, she’d been in the water for a good thirty minutes. She was unconscious. Her heart had stopped. That’s why she’s in a coma.
— …
—Will that be all, sir?
FILE NO. EE254—PERSONAL FILE FROM ESAT EKT
Personal Journal Entry—Dr. Rose Franklin
Location: Assigned residence, Etyakt region
Eugene passed away last night.
I wasn’t there.
Vincent and Eva stayed with him until the end. I didn’t. I just lay in bed here.
There’s this tiny spot on my bedroom wall, top right corner, it lets a little bit of light in all the time. It doesn’t matter if I make the wall opaque or not, the outside is always showing through that spot. Last night, there was a star in the middle of it. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I kept waiting for it to move past the hole and fade into the wall, but it didn’t. It stayed right there, perfectly centered. When planets form, the gas they condense out of always has a small amount of angular momentum, and so they spin on themselves. The sky is always moving. I must have been looking at a ship or a satellite. It’s gone now. Someone turned it off two hours ago. I kept on staring, waiting for my star to come back, willing it to come back. Now the sun’s up and that spot on my wall is too bright to look at.
I spent two days arguing with regional officials about Eugene’s case, asking, begging them to save him. I didn’t get the reaction I was expecting. They didn’t brush me off. They walked with me all the way to the hospital. They introduced me to doctors. They showed me the medicine. I don’t know why. It seems obvious it would just make things worse, but they felt like they had to. There was no cruelty involved. They just wanted to prove that they could save him, as if somehow that showed their good intentions. It was touching in some way. They weren’t going to do anything—they truly believed it would have been wrong to do so—but they wanted to show me that vial. They had such warmth in their eyes when they handed it to me. “Hey, look! We know your pain is real. You can hold it in your hands.”
Yesterday, I went back and asked them if we could bury him somewhere. They don’t bury their dead. I could tell they were puzzled, probably a bit disgusted with the idea, but they wanted to make a gesture. They gave us a spot in fallow lands, somewhere. They said the land wouldn’t be used for years, but that they would need to get rid of the bones when it was time to plant again. It was hours away, even in a ship. They wouldn’t allow a decomposing body anywhere close to where people lived. It didn’t matter. I felt like I had accomplished something. I had found a way to honor my friend. Things made sense again. Yesterday, I found out Eugene had prepared a will, if you can call it that. Vincent took me outside and showed it to me. “I don’t want to be buried. I don’t want my ashes kept. I don’t want any piece of me left on this hellhole. If you ever make it back, tell my family I love them and that I thought of them in the end.” I started crying, shaking. I hit Vincent in the face. I went crazy, batshit, body-out-of-control crazy. I threw rocks at people passing by. I screamed and swung at things that didn’t exist until my whole body seized up and I could do nothing but curl up in a ball on the street. Vincent asked for help from passersby, and they carried me back home.
Eugene passed away last night.