She sees the infinite black void ahead of her and her foot gets stuck in the parachute. It becomes tangled in the strings and fabric, slowing her down. Ryan is panting, her face covered in sweat. She turns back and sees Matt rolling, drifting in her direction. She stretches out her arm. Matt�s arm is also outstretched. Ryan stretches farther. Matt�s hand comes closer to hers. The tips of their fingers are almost touching. The very tips of their fingers touch but they miss. As the parachute tenses, she stops.
The tether attached to Matt�s suit passes two feet away from her and Ryan grabs the tether. It slides through her closed fist, until her grip tightens and the tether stops. Matt�s momentum is now pulling Ryan, dragging her loose from the parachute. Matt realizes the ropes are too loose, he's pulling her with him, and they will both die if she doesn't let go. She refuses to let go. Her leg slides through the loose rope and she floats further out, being snagged at the last minute by a tether around her foot.
Despite her protests, Matt insists it's the only way and begins to unharness the tether. She pleads with him. Matt has unhooked the tether and is holding it in his hand, "You�re going to make it Ryan." He opens his hand, letting go of the tether, and begins to float away. Relieved of Matt�s pull, the parachute begins to retrieve, pulling Ryan closer to the Station. Matt drifts away from the Station into the empty space. Ryan bumps against the station, pulled by the parachute, and she twists and turns before finally grabbing hold of a rail.
Ryan's CO2 alarm goes off, she's losing focus because she's breathing CO2. She takes one deep breath as she opens her eyes widely. Matt instructs her she needs to board the station via the airlock. She turns, looking for the Station�s Airlock and locates it. The transmission becomes weaker, filled with static. Kowalski explains to her that the second Soyuz is too damaged for re-entry but she can fly it to the Chinese Station, which has a Shenzou lifeboat and her limited training will get her home safely.
She's still determined to retrieve Matt using the Soyuz, but he makes it clear that ship has already sailed. Ryan stares at Matt�s tiny figure in the distance. As she makes her way to the airlock, Matt spends his last moments flirting with her. She looks at Matt�s figure receding. He finishes his transmission boasting he will break Anatoly�s record and seeing the sun on the Ganges. Ryan starts to respond, then falters, watching Matt�s figure grow ever smaller. The sad crooning of Hank Williams crackles through the dying radio. Only static hisses.
Matt falls deeper into the distance, becoming lost in a sea of white specks and the transmission ends. She sees Matt, nothing more than a dot. She stretches her hand toward him, as if trying to touch him with the tips of her fingers. But the dot has already vanished into never-ending darkness. Everything is blurred. Ryan is dizzy, sweating, and having trouble focusing. Her C02 alarm blares. Her eyes flutter. Ryan blinks, and begins climbing over a module of the Station. Ryan pulls herself forward, reaching for a handle on the Soyuz.
She grabs it and reaches for another, climbing her way toward the Station�s airlock. But she�s losing focus. As her right hand is reaching for a handle, everything becomes a blur, and she misses. Her brain is shutting down from lack of oxygen. She struggles to open her eyes and mumbles words that are unintelligible. She reaches up again, almost blindly. Her hand grips the handle, and with one huge effort she sprints across the Docking Module, swinging from handle to handle, in one continual push, until she reaches the airlock.
She stops, takes one deep breath and she turns the latch and opens the re-entry hatch. The hatch blows open as the air inside the cabin escapes into the vacuum, almost throwing Ryan back into space, but she holds tightly onto the latch. She hangs outside, trying to gasp the last breath of oxygen inside her life system.
She sees her feet dangling against the emptiness of space and with one last effort, she pulls herself into the airlock. As she enters she does a 180-degree flip. As soon as her legs are in, she grabs onto the latch, and closes the hatch.
She turns the latch and the cabin is sealed off. The ISS has been damaged but still has breathable air. Inside the helmet, Ryan is suffocating. With very little oxygen and her body intoxicated by the nitrogen in her blood, her breathing is coarse and painful. She can hardly keep her eyes open, and she pushes herself through the cabin, an empty cylinder lit by two circular mercury lights. She reaches the control panel, a small computer that monitors the atmospheric and temperature levels inside the airlock.
She presses a button on the panel and the cabin begins to pressurize. A low hissing sound can be heard as the tanks in the Station begin pumping pure oxygen into the airlock. The control panel�s monitor shows the atmospheric levels slowly rising. Ryan gasps for air, but there is none. She stares at the read-out on the control panel showing the atmospheric levels. Her pupils begin to dilate as sound begins to surface. In the vacuum of space there was nothing to carry sound waves, but now sound begins to travel through the oxygen that slowly fills the cabin.
The sounds are muffled, like the sounds of the outside world heard from within the womb. A beeping sound intermittently penetrates the airlock, anxious and halting. The Control System�s graph read-out moves from red to orange. The cabin is still not fully pressurized. But that will have to do. With one sharp motion, she takes off her helmet and And pushes it from her head. She gasps for air and coughs. She contorts and shakes, fighting to breath in the thin atmosphere of the airlock.
Her helmet bounces around the walls of the cabin, floating. The beeping sound has become clearer and recognizable - it is an alarm ringing out across the Station. Her lungs begin to absorb the oxygen and her breath becomes more even. Her body floats, relaxed in the confined space of the airlock. She floats. Ryan brings her hands together and removes one glove. And then the other.
Desperately, she begins to unscrew the lock near her waist. She squirms under the suit and pushes off the upper half. Then she throws off the lower half, squirming out of it as if shedding her old skin, desperate to free herself from the claustrophobia of the suit.
Wearing only underwear and a t-shirt, she floats in mid-air, relieved and exhausted. The hum of the Space Station surrounds her. Then, slowly, she pulls her knees to her chest and enfolds them in her arms, floating in a fetal position. For a moment, Ryan simply hangs in suspension, a fly in amber, surrendering to the poetry of the planets, rotating slowly in the cabin�s womb.
Zvezda Module: The module is like a wide corridor filled with cabinets, a small eating area and a small gym. A hum reverberates across the station. At the end of the module there is an open circular hatch leading into Unity Node One: A spherical space with three hatches, each leading into different modules. Ryan floats in. She stops at the center and holds onto a handle. She looks in all directions and launches to her right, towards the Zarya Module. All kinds of personal objects float in chaos around the module.
It�s clear that someone left in a hurry. She dives into Unity Node Two. Without stopping, she goes through one of the open hatches into the Zvezda Module. The walls are filled with electrical equipment and wires as she floats by them, not noticing a small fire is igniting in the hardware. Without slowing down her momentum, she floats to the Main Console. A large deck which houses all of the communication and navigational systems. There's also a porthole revealing the Earth. She begins to push buttons.
Computers come to life and Ryan puts on a communications headset. Static crackles. She begins calling for Matt. . . Nothing... only static. She repeats her call, drifting along the module, listening intently through the headset. No voices. Just static. She repeats her call, desperation rises in her tone. Ryan asks about Mardi Gras and the hairy guy. Waiting for him to respond, and in a softer voice, she's completely resigned. The signal cuts in and out, but remains indecipherable. There is something unnerving about it.
She drops her head, drifting toward the porthole, listening as the static sputters. Ryan glances out the porthole. The Earth glimmers brightly. Her face reflected in the glass is superimposed over the Earth. Her eyes glisten briefly, but she fights it back. Then she pulls herself together, and begins reporting to Houston in the blind. The way Matt would have done it. She reports who she is and that she is the sole survivor. Ryan hovers by the porthole, looking hopeless. All is silent save for the radio static and the hum of the Space Station.
Suddenly an alarm chirps, red lights flickering across the module. Ryan twists, swimming back to the control panel, studying a flashing grid of LEDS indicate the Japanese Module is on fire. And then the Destiny Lab begins blinking. The fire is expanding. She pushes herself toward the hatch, swimming through the floating debris as she exits into Unity Node One. The alarm's staccato is blasting in synchrony with the emergency lights blinking across the station. Smooth flames ribbon eerily across the skin of the Destiny Lab.
They are spreading, expanding with a dense cloud of smoke. Ryan enters and snatches a fire extinguisher on the wall of the module, points the nozzle at the fire, and sprays. With no gravity to hold her down, the force of the spray sends her flying back and she crashes against a wall.
The fire extinguisher bangs against her face and cuts her cheek. The impact is so strong that it momentarily knocks her out. Her eyes open and she reacts. There�s no time to lose. She fastens her feet to a strap on the floor, and sprays the extinguisher at the fire.
But the extinguisher is no match for the fire, which has gathered in a gigantic smooth ball and is expanding, coming at her. Ryan makes a fast turn and launches herself in the opposite direction into the Unity Node. Dashing straight into the Zarya Modules, she darts across the module. Behind her, The expanding fire ball has swallowed the Unity Node and is making its way towards her, chasing her into Unity Node Two, where she makes a quick turn and darts down into the docking module just in time.
Above her, the flames cross the Node as they spread into the rest of the Station. They quickly spread downward, into the Docking Module. Ryan, the flames caressing her feet, dives through a hatch into the Soyuz airlock. She turns to close the hatch. The fire is spreading outside in the module, sucking the oxygen out of the Soyuz. Ryan, faster than fire, closes the hatch. The Soyuz is sealed off. She closes a second hatch, and the Soyuz is safe. She exhales in relief. A rumble in the Station makes the Soyuz quake.
Ryan darts toward the Soyuz Control Cabin. There is just enough space for three astronauts to sit surrounded by the Control Panel that navigates the vessel. She sits down in the command chair and looks around, trying to recognize the different buttons on the panel, which are all labeled in Russian. She moves her finger across the different buttons, searching. Her finger stops on a button, which is labeled, "BKN. She presses on it and the Control Panel turns on. All the buttons light up and with a hum, the Soyuz�s systems start to run.
Ryan reaches to the right, where next to the panel, there are several binders, she takes out a red binder. It�s all written in Cyrillic. She turns the pages until she sees a graphic representing the undocking procedure. She presses button on the panel, then another button, and on the screen, a countdown - 4:30... 4:29... 4:28. Another rumble in the Station. She doesn't have four minutes to spare and needs to go manual. She flips through the binder to another page. She looks at a diagram and hits two more buttons that activates the manual override.
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