Endless Dark

Nobody can hear you scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

That’s probably a good thing in a way, since I screamed myself hoarse careening out of control into the depths of space when that airlock on the station burst. The sun and stars spun round and round so fast I had to shut my eyes to keep myself from getting dizzy in my space suit. With no leverage, I had no way to stop the spinning. More importantly, I had no way of stopping. All I had were my thoughts as the distance between me and the relative safety of the station increased with every second. There was no coming back from this. I was definitely going to die.

How does one come to terms with death while spinning out into the inky blackness in zero gravity? I couldn’t look out of my helmet for long without feeling sick, so I had no view of my surroundings or the very doom that awaited me. No flailing of my arms or legs, nor contortion of my body – to the extent my suite allowed me to move, anyway – shifted the momentum or spin. I was just going to fly out of control forever, with nothing I could do. Nothing to do but die…

Even as I spun out into space with no way to stop, all I could do is come to terms with the situation. I couldn’t scream anymore. The weird thing about being ejected into space like this is that while you can tell you are moving, you also don't feel it the same way you normally would. It was as if I was trapped in a body-shaped submarine moving quickly through the ocean. Yes, I was moving, but the terrestrial sensations common Earth-side were gone. There was to be no course correction.

All I had left to do was think over the next few hours as my air supply ran out. To think about all the decisions that led me to this moment of my soon-to-be-ended existence. Why did I join this stupid mission?

Money.

Borealis Corporation was paying peons like me a pretty penny, at least from my perspective, to go through some crap five-hour training session before boarding a rapid shuttle up to their ridiculously expensive space station and help make interior and exterior repairs. It seems odd to think about knobs like me jumping into doing space walks and acting like extraterrestrial mechanics and janitors. But highly qualified astronauts were very expensive, took a long time to train and were in desperately short supply, stretched as they were across the human Imperium between Earth and Mars. Besides, the work we needed to do seemed simple enough. The machines did most of the work, we just provided the muscle and put them where they needed to be to do the job. Afterward, the credits the corpos dished out would be enough to set myself up in a comfortable, mid-tier suite in some downtown metro sky tower, at least 400 stories up! What a view, with pink and blue neon lighting up the streets below and skies above. Wild sky parties with dancing and drinks on balconies high enough they needed air-retaining shields to keep the guests breathing. And the girls. They were crazy, sure, but still, girls. Yeah, that was what I wanted. At least enough money for a year-long lease. Finally, my time to live the high life…for a while. And they said in the training that it was completely safe – never had they ever lost a person on one of these missions. What did I have to lose?

Everything apparently. I mulled over that phrase. "What did I have to lose?" Such a stupid question. Of course, Borealis hired cheap, expendable labor to do their dangerous work. Of course, I was stupid enough to take them up on it, greedy as I was to just taste what it was like for at least the moderately elite. Now I have nothing. Nothing but oblivion. “I suppose I should count myself lucky,” I think bitterly. “Some don’t even have that.”

My mind raced from event to event in my life, tracing every misstep to this point. My childhood near the slag pits where I gazed longingly at the bright towers in the distance, wishing I could live there even then. “No, be content with what you have! Before you lose it all!” The time I set fire to one of the fuel tanks near the pits because I just wanted to cause trouble. “You got yourself barred from the highest education tracks. No higher finishing school. No cushy job. No money. So you just kept longing for the life you wanted because you couldn’t get it the normal way.” My one night in the city for a work trip let me get as close as ever to what I was missing, but only for a few hours. Close enough to drink in the atmosphere and lifestyle. Just a sip. “It wasn’t worth it. Just accept your mediocre life and die peacefully in your bed you idiot, not here in the endless dark. Idiot.” No good ever came from taking the shortcut to what you were never meant to have anyway.

Even though my eyes were closed, I felt myself slipping away. The suit started beeping while I was deep in thought. I didn’t need to see the indicator to know what was happening. Air was running out. Oxygen. The fanciest suits had onboard air recycling units. Infinite air so you could die of something else. How nice that might be! Borealis didn’t spring for such things for us. They were for the people that deserved to live. I was a bug writhing his way toward chump change. What did I matter in the grand scheme of their bottom line? What did I matter to anything or anyone? It wasn’t like I had social prospects. My friends were just work and bar friends. They might raise a glass to my death. Maybe. And there was certainly no special girl at home. Did my demise mean anything to anyone? So many emotions. Bitterness. Hate. Exasperation. With Borealis, humanity or with myself?

Why not all three?

Maybe it wasn’t so bad. A strange thought, yes, but true. At least this was peaceful. Yes, I was tumbling out of control into the depths of space. Yes, I was losing oxygen rapidly. Yet, even with all that, after hours of nothing to do but contemplate my situation, I started to feel fine with the onset of oblivion. Many people die in truly horrific ways which are painful and excruciating. A worker once fell into the acid pond when I was playing by the pits as a kid. He screamed in agony as he dissolved, knowing and feeling everything that was happening until there was nothing left. At least I wasn’t going like that. I felt more like a candle slowly burning out, just fizzling away. I may not have gotten much out of life but I was dying without much pain. Take the little things, the small victories. Wait, where did all this…peace...come from? How was I just suddenly ok with what was happening? Probably the lack of air affecting my brain. The slow CO2 poisoning. Yeah, that had to be it.

I slipped into and out of consciousness. Awake. Darkness. Awake. Darkness. This was it.

……………………………………….............................................................................

I jerked awake suddenly and with force. Air was filling my lungs. Fire. Fire in my lungs as I breathed, but I was breathing. Somehow.

Every muscle hurt. My head was throbbing. Somehow.

I felt like I was still moving but not spinning. I opened my eyes and it was true, I wasn’t spinning anymore. Somehow.

This made no sense. I had crossed the precipice of existence, tangoed with the reaper. Yet I was alive. No longer in a spin, I looked around and took in my surroundings. Below my feet, hundreds of meters away, was a ship. It was a junker, one of those ships that looked like cobbled-together trash metal with rear thrusters. I was near another one of these ships. Though I could only make out some of the antenna spires on the sides that stuck out into my field of view, they all had similar spires on the sides and tops. I slowly reached behind my back as far as I could, pushing through the pain in my muscle and bones, catching something. Some kind of tube or hose.

A junker had managed to link an external air hose to my suit and was dragging me along. I had been caught just as I was about to die. I was slowly drowning, only to be suddenly grabbed and brought to the surface. As I filled my lungs greedily, things slowly started to feel normal again. Burning pain in my lungs and muscles yielded to tingles all over. I started to be able to move my fingers and toes. Things were coming back.

As I floated, dumbstruck at how I could possibly still be alive given my embrace of death not long before, I felt a tugging on the hose behind me, dragging me toward the nearer junker ship. As more of the antenna spires and other features of the ship came into view, I started to notice the markings on the sides of the hull. To those unfamiliar, they look like poorly constructed graffiti symbols, yet they had become famous across the Imperium when the news started covering the horrific scenes of death and destruction along the numerous trade routes between Earth, Mars and the stations scattered between them. Great trade and passenger ships were reduced to smatterings of space debris. Ship parts, machines and goods floated in the nothingness. People too. Well, frozen corpses.

Great. I almost die, only to be rescued by the Excommunicates. Space pirates. Ugh. I was alive, but for how long?