Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “Another two weeks and it will be,” I say. “Then just all those stars, till we’re practically on top of Mars.”

  He looks around; I think, To me this is just beautiful because it’s always here, safe, quiet, and alone, when I need it. To him, it’s what the world will look like, the last thing he’ll ever see if anything goes wrong. Great idea, Susan, draw his attention to that.

  But after a while, he says, “Inside the ship or outside, it’s all just one big jump into the dark, isn’t it?”

  I put my hand between his shoulder blades, where I can see so much tension you’d think he’d twang like a guitar string, and rub gently. I feel him relax under my touch. “With friends,” I say. “One big jump into the dark with friends.”

  16

  SO FAR FROM ANYTHING

  May 24, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 153 million kilometers from the sun, 119 million kilometers from Mars, 30 million kilometers from Earth.

  STACK ELECTS TO try the antenna installation during his watch, because he doesn’t trust Emerald and Derlock in the cockpit, and Glisters and I don’t go on watch until he’s about ready for bed. Wychee insists on handing the conn over to Glisters for it; he’s the only one we all trust with controlling the ship. He slaves the cockpit through his wristcomp; he wants to be right there with the rest of us while Stack is outside.

  Emerald and Derlock don’t even stick around; they head straight into the bunk room as soon as their watch is over. Everyone else gathers around the tail main dock, the group of airlocks near the center of the tail bulkhead, where the crew bubble used to attach.

  Stack gets a hug from each of us, and Marioschke startles him with a kiss. Suit-up takes about ten minutes as each piece has to go on right and attach where it’s supposed to, with all the backup seals and connections. “Do I have to hook up the, uh, you know, tube?” he asks Glisters.

  “All the practice runs took less than eight minutes,” Glisters points out, “but if anything goes wrong, and you’re out there for hours, you won’t be able to take a leak, and all the water for an evasuit comes out of the recycler. You could get pretty miserable out there.”

  “I don’t like how that tube feels.”

  “Obviously it’s your mission, your suit, and your dick,” Glisters says. “But I wouldn’t want to be stuck out there with no water and nowhere to pee.”

  Stack shrugs and closes up without putting the tube on. Part of me wants to order him to do it, but if he has to pee or gets thirsty while he’s out there, I guess it’ll teach him a lesson.

  He runs through the checklist with Glisters in a quick, businesslike way, waves at all of us, and climbs into the airlock.

  Over the radio he says, “On belay here, cycling air out.” We feel the vibration in the tail dock; the air has been pumped out of the lock and released in here. “Going out. Handgrips right where we planned. I’ve got the locker visually, and I can see the whole pathway to it. Climbing to the locker.”

  “Acknowledged,” Glisters says.

  He goes smoothly down the checklist: opens the locker, belays the antenna there, unclips it, brings it out, attaches it to his belt, heads for the mounting point. He tests the main, secondary, and far side clamps; they open and close. “All right, checking the belay between me and the antenna. It’s still good. Removing my belay to the airlock to clear access for—”

  The tail end dock vibrates, there’s a sensation of air flowing past us toward the tail and then back toward the rest of the ship like a bouncing ball, and all of us are tugged toward the tail bulkhead for just an instant. We’re all shouting and yelling, but Glisters shouts over us, “Shut up! I can’t hear Stack! Stack! Talk to me, I’m here, talk to me—”

  I hear Stack keening through the headphones. “Stack, Glisters knows what to do, just listen to Glisters—”

  Now he’s sobbing. “You were going to have the thrusters locked. You weren’t going to let a thruster fire.”

  Glisters says, “I swear I had them locked, and slaved to my wristcomp, but something in the cockpit overrode and fired that thruster. We’ll take care of you, Stack, we will, just tell me what’s going on. Did you lose the antenna?”

  “Kind of. It pulled me off the ship, all that weight all of a sudden, and it was belayed to me—”

  “You’re still belayed to it, though, just climb back up the line to the antenna, then up the antenna line to the ship—”

  “I can’t!” I have never heard a voice so ashamed before. “When it pulled me off I panicked and I punched the clip release. I’m floating away from it, it’s not even ten meters away, I can see every dimple on it, but I can’t do anything to move toward it, I can’t airswim in a vacuum—”

  I yank one of the evasuit lockers open and start suiting up. I’ve been external three times on tours, and figuring Glisters has to stay inside to keep things working, I’ve got to be the one to go.

  “Glisters,” I say, “find me line, now, something I can throw.”

  “I”—he stares at his wristcomp in horror—“the cockpit has me locked completely, I can’t even change my screen—”

  I keep suiting up. “Then go to the cockpit. Tell me where there’s a line or a long cable in an external locker by the time I get through the airlock.” I run suit check as fast as I can, everything by the book, following the directions posted on the bulkhead. The catheter feels like holy hell going in, and as I wince from the pain, I notice that there was a tube of lubricant in the same sealed package. Oh, well.

  By the time I climb into the airlock, Glisters, Wychee, and F.B. have raced off toward the cockpit.

  I click on my suit radio. “Stack, tell me real calmly, how fast are you drifting away?” My faceplate display shows I’ve taken seven minutes putting on the suit. I start the airlock cycle as my hands fumble, stab, and grope through the rest of suit-up.

  He sighs. “I think I’ve gone about another ten meters. It’s so slow and it just feels like if I could find a way to move—”

  “Tools on your belt,” I say. “Throw them away from the ship, for reaction. Away, that’s important, not toward the ship, away from it. It’ll slow you down and it might even help you catch up. Anything you can throw, throw it away from the ship—”

  “Okay, I’m — sheeyeffinit!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I threw and it helped, but now I’m tumbling—”

  The airlock light and all the indicators on my faceplate display are green. I yank the inner door open, crawl in, speed cycle the lock. “I’m on my way out, now, as soon—”

  “Susan, come back in here, you are under arrest.” Emerald’s voice cuts through my headphones.

  I’m so startled to hear her voice that it takes me a moment to realize what she has said. “Under arrest for what? Never mind, we can talk after I bring Stack in. We only have a couple minutes till he drifts out of range.”

  “I’m charging you with gross negligence in letting this happen, and especially not watching Glisters—firing off that thruster burst is probably attempted murder. Now get back in here, that’s an order.”

  I hit the OPEN button. The outer door swings open. I clip my belay into the slot at the head of the airlock and climb out toward the wheeling stars. “Commander, I’m not going to let Stack die while you play whatever stupid game Derlock told you to play.”

  The antenna is at the end of its stretched belay, slowly moving outward as the ship rotates. Less than 15 meters beyond it, Stack is tumbling like a top, spun faster with every tool he has managed to throw.

  “Put Glisters on. I sent him to find a belay line,” I say.

  “He’s under arrest. As soon as you come back in, Derlock will go out to get Stack.”

  “There isn’t time,” I say, and then realize Stack’s voice has echoed mine; sheeyeffinit, it’s open channel.

  There’s a pause that I hope means she’s understanding the situation, but then she says, “Come back in and we’ll discuss it.”

  I look
around; Stack’s main belay, still clipped here by the airlock and clipped at the mounting post, will reach right now, so I go to private channel with Stack, locking out Em and the others, and say, “Stack, try to push things out from your center like passing a beach ball, that way it won’t spin you. I’m going to try to get a line I can throw to you.” I grab handholds and clamber as fast as I dare toward the mounting point.

  Stack is keening, a low frustrated whine. I keep saying, soothingly, that I’m going to be there in just a second, I’m almost there—and then I am, and I undo the belay from where he had it temporarily clipped. Now all I have to do is get it to him, and hope it will reach.

  There’s no time at all. I start coiling the loose end of his belay on one arm; it pulls me back toward the airlock, where the other end is attached. I count on my own belay to hold me, letting myself swoop three meters out into space.

  I just need enough of a coil to throw, but Stack is moving farther and farther away. I will have it in just another moment, I’m actually almost at the airlock and I’ll plant my feet there and—

  Midship thrusters fire. I see the flickering white streaks, bright as a welding torch, for a moment all the way around; Stack and I are safely inside the protected space at the tail, but the hot plasma flares around the antenna.

  I only glimpse that; all my attention is on my own trajectory away from the ship and toward Stack. I toss the coil at him and shout, “Stack, grab it!”

  But the ship has already accelerated, and Stack, not being attached to it, hasn’t. The gap that almost, sort of, maybe, we could have bridged, has opened too wide, and his belaying line cracks like a whip, two meters too short. He’s moving away much faster now, because of the thrust; the line that didn’t quite reach drifts out toward the rim, as the antenna did.

  He is close to me; if he weren’t in an evasuit, I would be able to see his facial expressions easily. But he’s tumbling fast, and now he whispers, softly, “Susan, it didn’t reach. You don’t have another one, do you? And now the ship’s moving away faster—” He sighs. “I’m getting so dizzy, tumbling like this.”

  The open channel is full of noise from some mike in the cockpit. Derlock is screaming that the thrusters just fired themselves, Glisters is shouting and maybe crying, and Emerald wants everyone to arrest everyone else.

  Beyond the rim, the antenna is a tiny dot; the thruster exhaust must have cut the line, and the antenna was very likely cooked anyway. It’s gone.

  I go back to private channel. “Stack?”

  He’s crying. “I’m scared. You can’t do anything, can you?”

  “No. I wish I could.”

  He’s still a distance that, on Earth, I could run in seconds. Inside the ship, I could airswim it in less than a minute; but here in the vacuum, so far from anything, he might as well be circling Alpha Centauri for all the good I can do him.

  “Can you stay on the radio with me for a while?”

  “I will. As long as I can still hear you. The transmitters for the outside private channels aren’t very powerful, so probably we’ll fade out before”—I think before you die—“before our tanks are out of air.” (Which means the same thing as “before you die,” you idiot! I scream at myself in my head.)

  “Okay.” I watch him tumble slowly away. After a moment he says, “I wish I’d hooked that tube up. I’m starting to have to go, and I’m kind of thirsty.”

  “The moisture recovery system that picks up your sweat and tears and stuff will work on your urine,” I tell him, “just not as fast as if you were putting urine directly into it. But it’ll pick up the liquid from the inside of your suit, and dry you, and then after a while it will have some water for you. So you probably won’t like it, but you should, um…”

  “Just go in my pants?”

  “Well, you sure can’t take them off.”

  He starts laughing. “All right, I wish Glisters was still on the line. I’d like to report it to him like all the other steps in an eva. Now squeezing bladder… now thinking relaxing thoughts…”

  Definitely TMI. “Hey, let’s talk, okay? Any subject you want. Just so you know you have a friend.”

  We talk about our favorite toys and stories when we were little, and music and meeds now. He says he’s wet and cold in his suit, but it’s better than holding it. “Susan?”

  “Right here. I’ll stay right here till I’m sure you’re”—Dead. Shut up!—“out of radio range.” He’s so tiny now I can’t quite make out his human shape; it’s been an hour since he fell.

  “Susan, this is important. You know it wasn’t Glisters’s fault. He’d never fuck up, and he’d never have done this to hurt me. Even though I used to beat him up. He’s just not the type. He’d never do that, would he?”

  “Never.”

  “And Emerald showed up as soon as the thruster fired the first time; so someone told her. It has to have been Derlock, doesn’t it? Hey, you and Glisters, you watch out. He hates you, too. So you watch out. And don’t let him get away with it. Please don’t let him get away with it.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “I know.” There’s a long pause and I can hear brief interruptions as groups of packets fail to make it through the distance, leaving holes in the message. “Susan, I’m so scared. And I feel so stupid. I threw the first aid kit while I was trying to get back to the ship. I bet it had morphine. I could’ve used that to sleep through the end, or even go out with an OD. That’s another stupid way I screwed up. I could’ve practiced swinging away with the antenna on belay, too, and then I’d’ve done the right thing when it went wrong. I could’ve done a lot of things.”

  “I’m here, Stack, listening. Say whatever you want. But I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “I know. I’m afraid to go into the dark alone, but your signal is starting to have big—in it—can’t—much longer, so thanks for—”

  “Stack, if you can hear me, I’ll never forget you, and you did great, and you tried so hard, and nobody could’ve done better.” I don’t believe it, but with all my heart I want him to be able to think that I believe it. “Stack?”

  Nothing.

  I stay outside hailing him for another twenty minutes. No reply.

  In case he can hear me, I tell him he was my friend, and a great guy, and I’ll never forget him. Then I start cranking that belay line around my arm. I feel n-nillion tonnes hanging from my heart, even though I’m weightless.

  I wind up my belaying line; it pulls me into the airlock. I grasp the handholds, clamber to the manual controls, push the CLOSE OUTSIDE. The outside door shumps shut.

  No click of vents opening.

  No rush of air.

  The pale red screen has one gray message:

  LOCK SEALED FOR QUARANTINE. NO ACCESS.

  17

  “YOU’RE THE COMMANDER, COMMANDER”

  May 24, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 153 million kilometers from the sun, 119 million kilometers from Mars, 30 million kilometers from Earth.

  THE QUARANTINE SCREEN lets me get as far as requesting an override, but then it wants a password that I don’t have and can’t guess. With my suit radio on scan and autorequest, I should automatically connect to anyone with an open mike. Nothing.

  Faceplate display shows fifty minutes of air left. Figuring I was about half an hour behind Stack, he has around twenty. He’s out there by himself, just the spinning stars around him. Maybe by now his suit has recovered enough liquid so he can have a drink of water. When Virgo whirls through his field of view, it’s probably still bigger than his hand at the end of his arm; it must seem so close.

  Minutes creep by. I float back and forth in the metal can of the airlock; I can just reach across it with my outspread arms.

  I think about Stack, crying, afraid, ashamed of his failure. It’s getting close to the time when he’ll run out of air and die; no, looking at my faceplate, it’s past then. Probably he just passed out a little while ago, while I was feeling sorry
for him.

  I hope the recycler scavenged enough for him to drink, so he wasn’t thirsty. As the CO2 built up… I try not to imagine him hot and panting, gasping and miserable, before he passed out, but it’s all I can think about.

  I can’t get the sound of his crying out of my mind.

  Fifteen minutes left on my air. Stack’s surely gone by now. Everything must have seemed close enough to touch, and everything was far enough away to die, when his eyes closed on the swiftly tumbling stars. I wish there’d been a hand for him to hold, or a voice for him to hear.

  Meanwhile, I’m still alive, but the green bar indicating my air is down to ten minutes, and I am in this steel box.

  Nothing to lose. I suppose it’s just possible that there is someone in there who would help me if they could, but they don’t know where I am. I flip over and kick both boots against the inner door, clutching a handhold above my head so that I impact harder.

  I kick, I kick, I kick… nothing. I keep it up. I can do this till I run out of air, anyway.

  Glisters’s voice in my earphone is strangely mushy and slurred. “Susan, grab a handhold—”

  After a month together on Virgo, it’s so automatic to do what he says that I have a tight grip when the door pops under my feet and air slams into the lock, trying to fling me backward for an instant. Then the pressure equalizes and something huge and pink, a tentacle or a snake, wriggles into the airlock, wraps around my ankles, and pulls me off my handhold and into the ship.

  Fwuffy’s trunk. Of course. Wychee’s here, now, fumbling at my locking collar, popping off my helmet.

  I suck in fresh, clean air.

  “I was afwaid fuh you, Susan!”

  “I was afraid myself,” I say to Fwuffy. I turn to Wychee; her face is swollen and red on one side and her hair looks like someone grabbed it and yanked a few times. “Stack?” she asks.

  “The line almost reached him,” I say, “then the thrusters fired—and—” The feelings and the sudden availability of all that air get to me, and I start to sob. Wychee and Marioschke converge on me, helping me out of the evasuit and back into the coverall I left on the floor. Now that I’m inside and safe—and Stack is gone—there’s time for it to hit us all.