Moses T Ma

Roughnecks in Space

They say that nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space... but it isn't true. Ben’s scream set my heart racing when it came over the comms in my spacesuit. We were tasked to fix a faulty antenna, so we were working like we always do, shooting the shit, when a fucking mike tore through him. Oh, I should explain. A "mike" is short for micro-meteorite, it's like hypersonic bullet from a rail gun, traveling at over 20,000 mile per hour. And a "big mike" was anything larger than a speck of dust that could leave a hole in the hull. Or you. If it was really big, something with so much kinetic energy that it could destroy part of the station, someone would usually yell, "it's a fucking Tyson!" – after a boxer from a hundred years ago, who could flatten a guy with a single knock out punch. And then bite off his ear for a snack.