One Earth Week

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I knew it well enough- Confederated Logistics and Defense didn't waste its time hiring spacecrew without at least a couple semesters of university physics to their name. But cartwheeling there in the belly of nothing, a million impossibly distant stars spiraling across my splintering visor, I screamed all the same. It was the kind of unfiltered, instinctual scream that reveals you for the dumb, panicky animal you and your arboreal ancestors have always been. I knew no one could hear me, not even through my comms, whose delicate circuits some twerps at CLAD’s R&D labs had cleverly integrated into my now-fractured helmet visor. I knew, but the screams just kept coming, consuming whole gulps of my finite oxygen reserves, and my oh-so-developed primate brain didn't seem to care one bit that it was only killing me faster.

The Scylla, to which my carbon-composite tether had been securely anchored just seconds before, was shrinking off into the black, smaller and smaller each time it spun into view. It wasn't just leaving me, it was accelerating to flank speed. Within five sickening rotations of my body, it was gone, white-hot thruster tips completely out of sight. Someone had initiated an all-core engine burn with me still out there clambering on the hull, and now the Scylla was simply gone.

If my system hadn't been flooded with hormones designed to make me stupid in the event of an emergency, I might have realized how fortunate I was to still be alive at all. When the burn had begun, I had been squatting atop engine #3, replacing a burned-out injector assembly, and the whole unit had been isolated from the primary flow loop for the repair. The sudden rush of unresisted current through the loop must have instantly boiled the residual drops in the coolant jackets under my feet, blasting me, and the fragment of panel I was tethered to, a healthy hundred meters clear of the Scylla. A split second later, the engines had booted the ship away with bone-snapping thrust. If my unbreakable tether had still been secured to the hull when that happened, well, I wouldn't have had time to scream.

As it was, I had minutes at best. My air tanks were rated for at least an hour, but they would be pumping much of their bounty out into space through my compromised visor, which was held together now only by a leaky film of shatterproof polymer. None of this occurred to me yet, of course. The physical shock was barely subsiding, and I couldn't even tell if I was in pain. The only sensation in existence other than terror was a deep, crushing nausea. A few more seconds of this tumbling and it would squeeze my lunch all over what was left of the inside of my helmet.

And in that awful instant, when my screaming reached a crescendo, as the actuality of what had just happened began to crystallize in my logic processing centers, it occurred to me just how badly I didn't want to die covered in my own vomit. As that thought broke through the hurricane of my autonomic nervous response, it brought along a companion thought for company: You've had training for this.

And I had. Not for this, specifically- nothing like this was ever supposed to happen- but to keep my head in a general crisis. CLAD didn't waste its time on spacecrew who couldn't.

You're probably hyperventilating, I reminded myself. Sure enough, my screams had devolved into an alternating rhythm of pathetic squawks and gulps, like the cackling of some demented tropical bird. It definitely wasn’t helping with the nausea, either.

“Shut that horseshit down before you even think about trying to accomplish anything else!” The wisdom of Major Abel Crandall, the Scylla’s chief Safety and Compliance officer, came to me like the gravelly voice of heaven’s crankiest angel. I could see his perennially disappointed moustache bob and ripple with every word. His training sessions, somber and preachy, had never been my favorite obligation on the ship, but the man was nothing if not competent, and better still, seemed to genuinely give a damn about the safety of his people.

Well, so much for all that. I could only hope he'd find the sonofabitch who'd punched those thruster controls and beat them to within an inch of a viable compensation claim. Either way, Crandall was right. I shut my eyes to block out the useless distraction of deep space and I shut that horseshit down, one breath at a time, each rattling slightly less than the last. Next, I had to stop the universe from spinning. By the grace of God, the suit's thruster controls were not routed through my visor, and as soon as I was able to remind my icy fingers that I outranked them, I set them to work forming the gestures that would translate into countering my body's brutal angular velocity.

As I slowed, the blood returned to its rightful distribution in my extremities, and I was relieved to hear no more screams bouncing around in my helmet. When I opened my eyes, the stars were mostly still. The only other thing to see was my tether, undulating from the sturdy swivel link on my hip out a couple dozen meters. The far end still gripped a jagged-edged section of hull about the size of a doormat. The debris wasn't moving much in any direction, relative to me, so it wouldn’t be dragging me along anywhere. I'd even avoided getting the merciless composite tether wrapped around one of my squishy human limbs. Good. Next, I mentally reviewed my body for injuries, starting with the most vital areas and working my way out. There was no significant pain in my head, despite whatever impact had befallen my helmet, nor any in my chest or abdomen. My right knee, though, there was something wrong there. I still couldn't feel much of anything, but I knew enough to tell it needed expert attention when help became available. It was nothing catastrophic, however, so it was on to the next phase of survival.

“When you’re through loading your diaper,” grumbled the surly moustache, “and if you have no dire need to torniquet a stump or anything, take a pause to sort your priorities. What can you do in the next minute, next ten minutes, next hour, to stay ahead of the situation? What needs done right very immediately, so that you’ll be in a position to execute the rest later? What tools do you have to make that happen?”

Then followed the longest, quietest moment of my life. The confidence of training sputtered and sizzled out. Now that I could see and think and breathe, the animalistic terror scooted over to make room for a much bleaker, more mature variety, the kind that only a logical mind capable of abstract thought is cursed with. If I had been but a little more ignorant, I might have been spared the understanding of how thoroughly screwed I was. The facts were these: I was farther from help than my suit’s thrusters could carry me if I lived another hundred thousand years. My only means of communication with the Scylla were obliterated. Even if I had access to the kind of sealant that could patch my visor, I'd be buying myself less than an hour, and then? The only thing left was to wait. I was powerless, as trapped out in infinite space as I would be in a coffin.

I thought I was going to start screaming again, but even worse, I started to laugh. Just like that, one minute I was doing my job, wondering about my shift swap request, guessing what nutrient -dense abomination would be on the dinner menu, and in an instant, it was all over. There had been no Safety and Compliance training for realizing you're already dead. What would be the point? How could I have possibly prepared for someone to fire up the engines while I was out on them? It should all have been impossible, all the lockouts checked and double checked. Someone had to have really shit the bed for this to happen. And I would die out here and never even get to know who or why. Another horror story for Crandall's lectures.

Was it possible the Scylla would return for me? Maybe. But why should I expect her to? If the engine burn was initiated deliberately, someone at the controls already either didn't care or didn't know that a crew member had been out on a maintenance walk. And it was unthinkable that they didn't know. Scylla had been holding position in the middle of nowhere, space, specifically for this repair; it's not as though she didn't have anywhere to be, what with 80,000 tonnes of remote-outpost resupply in tow. All her spacecrew understood the situation. No, someone had pulled the trigger of a gun knowing full well the muzzle was to my head. Whatever that person’s motivation, they would have had to assume their actions would result in my instant death. No reason for them to bother coming around for whatever was left of me, even if it had been a total accident.

The wait would be unbearable, I could already tell. The miniscule but nonzero chance of a rescue, and the knowledge that there was nothing at all I could do to improve that chance, would eat at me until my final breath. Out here, there was nothing else, except for my tether and my useless souvenir from the Scylla. It drifted lazily out beyond me, the little anchor ring in the middle mocking me and my illusions of safety. No one was coming. There was no more protocol to follow. The training had failed, and all that was left was to become a statistic.

"It's a bitch, isn't it?"

I started screaming in space again, this time that kind of shriek you uncork when you thought you were alone in a room and then someone mutters some bullshit in your ear. The words had come from my immediate right, clear as daylight, without a hint of radio distortion. It was as if the voice were in the helmet’s atmosphere with me.

Hallucinations, that didn’t take long. Maybe this will be over faster than I thought. I clammed myself up once more, gritting my molars together. Just because my death was going to be lonely and meaningless didn't mean it had to be undignified.

"Would you like a chance to survive and find out who did it to you?"

This time I looked around. My field of view was limited by the spiderweb of cracks, so I feathered my thrusters to rotate me towards the voice’s source. What I saw made me sure I had already bought the farm.

Floating there, close enough to touch and oriented exactly to be eye to eye with me, was a man, mid-forties maybe, wearing nothing but an expertly tailored business suit. Cold vacuum all around him, he hovered with his arms crossed, slowly shaking his slickly groomed head. He studied me with something like pity from behind a stylish pair of black-rimmed glasses, which reflected back my own short-circuited face against a background of galactic splendor.

"Oh..." was all I could think to say. There had been no safety and compliance training for this, either.

"You are Benton, Ilana, technical sergeant, engineering division, senior grade," he informed me. I couldn't argue with him about it.

"My name, such as you’d understand it, is Nerideveth," he continued. "I’d offer you my card, but your suit doesn’t seem to have any pockets. I came because I heard you screaming."

I don't know why that was the final straw, all things considered, but I'd already swallowed a heap of nonsense in a very short interval, and I simply couldn’t stomach another bite.

"No, you didn't." I spat back. "Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space."

Nerideveth blinked. "So why are you bothering to talk back to me then, if you believe I can't hear you out here?"

Once again, I couldn't argue. It was starting to get annoying.

"Look," he said, straightening his perfectly straight glasses, "you don't have much time left, so let's not waste it worrying about that sort of thing. I happened to be nearby, I heard you scream, I came to help. Someone's really cocked up your day, Benton, I can see that much. So, tell me something.” He leaned in closer, as if I couldn’t hear him well enough already. “What if you could get back on board Scylla right now? I bet there's a whole roster of asses you'd like to be kicking at the moment. Or maybe you'd be happy enough to just be back in a sealed bucket with an indefinite oxygen supply. Who knows? But to me, you look like the sort of person who'd want some justice, am I right?"

If this was death, I felt it was shaping up to be a real let-down. I was always particular about the company I kept in life, and I saw no reason to leave that policy behind in the mortal realm when I went, not on account of this joker anyway. But Nerideveth steamed on ahead.

"Alright, technical sergeant, I understand, you're in a stressful situation for a biological lifeform, so I'll make my pitch as plainly and quickly as possible. I heard you scream, I came to help you, and I can. Just like that."

He snapped his fingers.

"I can put you back on the Scylla right this second, and you'll survive. There’s nothing wrong with you the med wing can’t handle in their sleep. You know how relieved you are when you wake up from a nightmare that made you soak the bed? Well, it’ll be just like that, except your knee will still be borked, because all of this is really happening. How about it?"

I twitched my lips, a flimsy attempt at speech. How about it indeed? I had lost any hope of comprehending the situation but returning to Scylla sounded a hell of a lot better than not returning to it. I wanted to say yes, but I sincerely still couldn't believe that the business-suit-man in space would hear me through the vacuum.

"Well, before you answer- and I will let you answer shortly, I promise- you have to be made aware of the, ah, conditions. I will need something in return. A favor, of sorts."

Oh yes, I thought. Here it comes. Why not?

"What... What, uh..." I stammered.

"Before you ask, let me ask you something: does it matter, given your alternative?" He waved a flawless hand out at the boundless, lifeless cosmos. "This is no place for something like... You. I'm offering an impossible opportunity to right a wrong. I can promise you with total, physical certainty that if you decline, you will die. Right here. In about four minutes, you will be dead, and you will stay dead for all the minutes left in the life of the universe. And you would have, but I heard you screaming, and I came to help."

In my heart, I knew it didn't matter what I said. None of this was real, my suffocating neurons were simply easing me into the great beyond. But still, I hesitated. I don't give out favors lightly.

“What’s the condition, asshole?” I finally managed to croak.

Nerideveth nodded approvingly. “Good. Now this is a conversation. Being open-minded, that’s important. That’s smart.” He laced his fingers together and leaned closer still.

“So, to the favor. I’ll warn you first, because I want you to stay open-minded, that it’s probably going to feel like a pretty shocking ask. I’d advise you to sit down, but, given the circumstances… well, anyway.” He cleared his throat.

“Essentially, technical sergeant, what I need is a human agent to handle some errands for me. Just some business that needs doing. And then when you’re done, the next chapter in your species’ existence can begin, thanks to me, thanks to you. I’m talking about big changes, the sort only a lucky few ever see in their lifetimes. It would be a tragedy for you to die before you could witness them.” His voice fell to a whisper, but I could still make out every inflection as it hissed around in my helmet. “And they are coming, Brenton, eventually, no matter how you answer. You’re not the last poor human bastard who will ever scream out into the vacuum of space.”

Nerideveth finally leaned back away from me and began tapping his foot on nothing. After a few moments, he sighed and shook his head again.

"You know, you're right, this isn't really a fair time to ask. So how about this for an idea: a grace period, give you some time to think it over in a neutral environment? I'll send you back to the Scylla and you'll have seven Earth days to use however you want. Go get some vengeance. Get drunk. Take a shower. But really consider how much more you’re enjoying it on board than you are out here. Because when the days are spent, I'll be back for your answer. And if your answer is no, well..."

He waved once again out at the stars.

Then he smiled, a smile as dead and empty as the void we drifted through. Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes began to change. A raging glow like the surface of a sun consumed them.

“Best of luck back on board. I hope you find your culprit, I really mean that.”

The light in his eyes grew brighter and hotter. It saturated and overwhelmed the shielding on my dutiful, doomed visor, blinding me, rushing into my ears, shining through my flesh like it was paper, exposing my bones -

And then, with a tremendous cacophony and a litany of curses, I clattered down hard onto the unforgiving metal floor of an engineering access catwalk. Half a second later, my tether and its strip of hull plating caught up, slamming down into the railing just inches above my nose, lodging deep into the metal, reverberating like a gong.

My body had returned to me upon impact. The pain in my knee left no room for ambiguity, this was all very real. I knew that railing. I knew this catwalk. I had boot prints on it not twenty minutes old. I was actually here. I was back on the Scylla. I was battered, barely able to move, ready to start screaming all over again, but I was here and I was alive.

For now.