The Dead Man’s Switch - The Last Command

0530 UTC, T -30 minutes to Go/No-Go Check

Every morning, Commander Kellan Scott woke up knowing he could end the world.

Fingers shaking, he unzipped his sleeping bag, kicked off the wall, and glided to the viewport in his ISS quarters.

Earth was still there, still turning.

 South America. Atlantic Ocean. Africa. Asia. Pacific.  

 Over. And over. Again.

The shaking eased. The repetition calmed him.

He watched the Andes catch the gold of first light before fading into the blue expanse of the Atlantic.

 “Thirty minutes,” Sergei called, drifting around the frame of Kellan’s crew compartment.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Kellan said, nodding to his Russian counterpart in the Orbital Strategic Deterrence Initiative. An expansive bureaucratic mouthful to name a simple nuclear deterrent.

Two men in a steel bubble. The world’s nuclear arsenal a noose around their necks.

Twice a day they waited for the command “Go, or No-Go.”

The men who volunteered for the assignment were called The Dead Men— named for the Cold War’s final contingency, the dead man's switch. Kellan wasn’t sure which he dreaded more. The order to launch, or the potential silence from a dead world.

 “The absence of a command is a command.” He was told in training.

Failure to check in, meant the military and economic tension on the ground had reached a head. It meant mutually assured destruction.

“Did you dream last night?” Sergei asked, picking at a spot of chipped paint. “I thought I heard you—”

“No,” Kellan lied. “Just, couldn’t get comfortable.”

Sergei nodded, and drifted away like a ghost.

But he did dream. He dreamt he pushed the button and watched nuclear fire ignite the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. Imagined his wife look up, blink, and turn to ash in a wave of light and heat.

He shuddered and tasted soot.

 0554 UTC, T- 6 minutes to Go/No-Go Check

Kellan floated into the comms hub where Sergei thumbed through a worn paperback.

“The Remains of the Day?” Kellan asked, clipping into his seat.

“Is calming. Meditation on duty. I admire the British. Professionals.” He let the book float between them. “America can learn from professionals.”    

“Okay, Red.” Kellan placed his headphones on. His cold launch key pressed against his chest. He remembered how easily it snapped into place in his dream. Remembered the click as it turned.

The tremor crept in again, starting slowly in his fingertips. “You’ve got three minutes, Sergei.”

 “I’m done… You missed Aurora last night. Right after you closed your cabin. Beautiful. Bright red. Like mother Russia’s flag,” he winked. “Over Mexico…” Sergei paused “… too far south for that, no?”

“I’ve seen it before.” Kellan replied, flipping switches to power on the radio connecting him to Houston Command. “I took my family to--- JESUS! FFUU!”

A sharp squelch filled his ears.

He ripped the headset off, tossing it away.

“Are you okay, my friend?” Sergei asked, grabbing the rogue headphones and placing them to his ear. “Is static now, like bacon frying. You usually hear this?”

 He handed them back to Kellan who stretched his jaw, trying to work out the droning tinnitus. “No, its… always quiet before check in.”

 Sergei flipped a switch on his console and gestured towards his own headphones. “Try again?”

Kellan replaced the headphones and heard silence. “Yeah…. Weird. God, that hurt. Maybe Houston had their gain up?”

Sergei shrugged.

Below, the world continued to turn.  

 0600 UTC. T – 0 minutes to Go/No-Go

At 0600, both men adjusted their microphones.

“Roscosmos—”

“Houston—”

“This is ISS for—”

“0600 check-in.”

Silence.

At ten seconds, Kellan shifted in his chair.

At fifteen, their eyes met. “They’ve never taken this long,” he said, each word brittle.

At thirty, Sergei cleared his throat.

 “Roscosmos Command, Korolyov, come in.” He turned to Kellan. “What… do we do?”

Both men knew the answer. The dead man’s switch.

“We have to— this has to be a mistake.” Kellan’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “Are we sure it’s 0600? Ping the Galileo Satellite System. Verify it against the master clock.”

Faster than he’d ever moved, Sergei sent a data packet to the European Union’s GPS system,

Kellan tried again: Houston. Cape Canaveral. Vandenberg. NORAD.

Only crushing silence.

“Kellan, Galileo response. Time 0613 UTC, confir—” He stopped.

The red 0613 pulsed once, and held.

Sergei exhaled, launch key hovering just above his sternum.

“Sergei…. No. We don’t know.” His voice broke. “Eight billion people, Sergei.”

Kellan unstrapped. Launched himself toward the nearest porthole, “Maybe the antenna’s damaged… may—Maybe we missed something.”

 Below them, the world turned.

South America—Atlantic—Africa—Asia.

Kellan squinted through the porthole, desperately searching for the station’s antenna.

Instead, they saw a flame. A thin contrail of fire streaking upward.

“Kellan…” Serge pointed. “Is that... a launch?”

Kellan didn’t answer fast enough.

 Sergei pushed off the wall. Racing to the console, he ripped the lanyard from around his neck, fingers fumbling for the key.

“No—Sergei, wait!” Kellan shot after him, grasping for scraps of Sergei’s flight suit as the two collided.

They spun, limbs locking in desperate chaos. Elbows crashing against switches. An alarm blared, sharp and painful.

“IT’S. OUR. DUTY!” Sergei shouted punctuating each word with a fist, driving Kellan back

Sergei turned back to the console and jammed the key home. “God forgive me.” he cried.

South America—Atlantic—Africa—Asia… lit from above with raining hellfire.

The comm station came to life, a voice crackled through a hazy buzz of static.

“ISS—this is Joint Command. Please respond! It… --as… olar flare…  lost cont—.”

“They lost contact... The radio screech…” Kellan said breathless.

“The aurora…” Sergei whispered, eyes falling to the launch key.

The emergency shuttle drifted into view, finally overcoming the solar radiation that quietly broke the ISS’s communications.

Kellan looked down and watched it the red and white blooms erupt over earths surface. Like garden sprouts, he thought. "What the fuck have we done?"

Below him, the world burned.

South America. Africa. Asia.