Tales of the United States Space Force, page 19
Petrov frowned thoughtfully a long time, then let go of his handhold. “Keep me updated. I’m going to the hab to report in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stephanie felt stillness descend in Petrov’s wake, just she and Tim strapped into chairs. None of the various displays she could call up said anything different than they had two hours ago. She’d rerun the simulation for every combination of rock and ice and crystal the system knew how to model. Christa was in the pod on her way to the Moon, three hours out and three more to arrive.
“Okay, Kovacic, hit the rack.” The next shift technician poked her arm with a foot.
“Just a minute.” She flicked through all the screens again. She was exhausted, and she hated sitting there, knew she wasn’t accomplishing anything, but going to rest felt like giving up.
“I’d take your break if I could, drama queen,” the tech said, poking her again.
So she unhooked herself and pulled her way slowly to the hab. Stephanie drew her sleeping sack around herself, tying herself in, thinking about Christa, how she could be earnest, honest, love the science without feeling like a faker. How she had two kids at home. Stephanie had never done anything so big as bring a whole human into existence.
“You joke all the time because you’re afraid,” Christa had said, three days into their tour together, looking at her with that flat, calm sureness, so infuriatingly knowing, so infuriatingly right.
They were assembling their living pod, the head, specifically. Stephanie had made the vacuum poop hose “kiss” Christa, and then had mimed making out with it when that didn’t get a rise out of her.
“I’m not afraid,” Stephanie said, after too long a pause and with the wrong inflection. Christa swam down to the floor, screwing the hose in place.
“I’m not afraid to be here,” Stephanie clarified, louder and surer.
“I know.” Christa nodded at the hose in her hands, twisting hard. “You’re afraid to be seen.”
“Uh . . . you’ve all seen me naked because I do not go without washing everything.”
“You know what I mean.”
Seen. All the stuff inside that she covered up with humor and crassness. Something about that moment, this competence and calm from this slightly older woman, made Stephanie drop the act and confess. “I wanted to get into engineer training. The recruiter said I could . . . but I didn’t make the cut. I was always good with tools, with math. That was what I was, in high school. Now . . . I’m worried I’m not anything.”
And Christa looked up at her, a long, hard-to-read look, and then snorted. “Dude. Recruiters LIE.”
“Thanks. If they lied, it’s not that I wasn’t as good as they hoped, I was never good enough.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Christa frowned, giving her this serious look like she was about to impart the secret of the universe. “I mean they had a number of techs to fill and were never going to look at your scores. You don’t have to tell dumb jokes around me unless you really want to.”
To her own surprise, Stephanie felt . . . relieved. Let off the hook. It wasn’t the end of Stephanie making dumb jokes, of course it wasn’t, but later that week, when she figured out a way to get the microwave mounted when they’d been shipped three fewer screws than needed, Christa had said, rather pointedly, “Good with tools and math,” and patted her arm.
Stephanie was good with machines. She could do everything that comms station allowed and a few it didn’t. She could screw a bolt flush anywhere on Earth or in orbit. She’d turned seven screws into ten with two improvised braces.
So why did she feel like a waste of space?
The duty officer’s voice came over the general address, “Engineering crew to docking.”
Stephanie wriggled out of her sleeping sack. No way she was missing this.
She caught a handhold outside the docking airlock. “What’s going on?”
Commander Petrov was there, and the first engineer. “Chun got over half the colonists in the first run by stripping the secondary fuel tank and landing couches, but the change in weight and configuration made it list on docking. We’re not getting a seal.”
Stephanie stared at the comms station. How useless she would be there right now. The chatter in the room continued, going nowhere.
“Shuttle firing steering thruster four . . . no change.”
“Any other ideas?”
Stephanie thought about bending braces, turning two screws into nine. “Sir, I can go EVA.”
Petrov gave her a narrowed-eye look. “We’re not sure how to solve this.”
“Sir, I am confident I can get the lock to join.”
Stephanie held her breath. Was she? Did she really believe she could do this?
Petrov slowly nodded. “Okay, Technician. Move. We can’t keep them in there all night. They’re on stored oxygen, and it’s calibrated for a crew of sixteen maximum.”
Stephanie called Christa as soon as she had checked her radio and fastened her helmet liner. “How’s it going in there?”
“I never wanted to know how a sardine felt.”
Stephanie took the helmet from the crewman helping her dress and ducked into it. “Ah, I wish I was there. I’d unleash a long fart straight from the sulfurous pits of hell.”
From the aft airlock, Stephanie had to hand-over-hand along the top of the habitat module to get to the shuttle, which was itself a module. It was what they had lived in while building the habitat. It should have joined up the same way. She could see already that the shuttle was listing port.
She got around the top and saw that the joining assembly was smashed, having hit at an angle, too hard. “Jeez, Chun. What did this dock say to piss you off?”
“My elbow is in someone else’s spleen. Less joke; more get me out of here.”
Stephanie stared at the damage and felt, suddenly, stupid and alone. She hadn’t brought enough tools. She hadn’t considered not having the full ring at all. She lowered herself next to the damage and felt herself beginning to hyperventilate.
Christa’s voice crackled in her ear. “Hey, sorry for making you save the stupid science tube.”
Stephanie closed her eyes and gripped the ring through one thick glove. “I fucking love this stupid science tube.”
She pictured the parts and miscellaneous leftover junk in the assembly prep area. The bits that hadn’t fit and waited. Then she opened her eyes. “Command, I need some parts moved into the service airlock.”
“Standing by,” Tim said.
Stephanie clipped her tether closer and floated even with the crumpled side of the dock. She slid her glove between the capsule, measuring the width in glove breadths, the point at which it got wider. She had to do this perfectly, or at least perfectly enough the shuttle could undock again and go get the last twenty colonists. So mashing the metal to fit wasn’t an option.
Christa spoke, her voice strained, “You’re good with tools and math. You can do this.”
Stephanie counted handspans and did some quick calculations. About two and a half spare struts should do it. Her lip curled into a grin. “Girl, I can make this dock stand on its ear and bark.”
Exhausted, it took longer to get out of the EVA suit than it had to get into it, and Stephanie only heard the bustle of settling the evacuees temporarily in the laser tunnels. She then had to go over the improvised rigging she’d done with the chief engineer, and participate in a long, annoyingly time-lagged, discussion with mission control about what materials would be needed to make proper repairs once the rescue ship came.
So, it was hours before she got a chance to check on the evacuees herself. Tim was already on his way back with the second group.
The evacuees were rolled up in silver heat blankets which they’d torn and tied to the wall support struts to keep themselves in place as they slept along the Vertical Tube, which was an empty cylinder, lacking the minimal run of equipment they’d started in Lateral Tubes A and B.
And then there was a plaintive howl, and Stephanie rushed to find a guilty-looking man holding a little orange kitten.
“That’s not allowed,” Stephanie said.
Christa floated over from distributing tubes of food. “Could you have told him to leave it?”
“I would have. Death to kitten.”
“Right,” Christa said, and bumped her shoulder.
They both knew she was lying. “Can I hold him?” The man curled the kitten tighter to him, glaring at her.
“The death thing was a joke. I was joking. I joke too much. It’s an insecurity thing.”
Slowly, he nodded, and Stephanie gently helped unhook the catching little claws. She lifted the kitten and stroked the soft little throat, feeling a purr that went right through her. She cleared her throat. “I don’t know if anyone told you all about the place you’re sheltering. When gravity waves hit this structure, they’ll stretch or compress it, and we’ll measure the difference in the distance with light beams.” Stephanie smiled and met Christa’s eyes. She was smiling too. They were united, in love for their science tube. “We’ll be able to detect subtle, tiny things. Like a kitten’s purr near Alpha Centauri.”
2023 Nebula Award Nominee Marie Vibbert has sold over seventy short stories to top magazines including Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, and Clarkesworld. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long-listed for the British Science Fiction Award. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.
Zombie
Karl K. Gallagher
“Sir, I request permission to shoot the body.”
Commander Winchell glared at his executive officer. “No. That’s desecrating a corpse. I won’t have it.”
“It’s becoming a morale issue, sir.” The exec, Captain Franklin, was as close to attention as he could manage in free fall, his feet tucked into the loops before the commander’s desk.
“It’s been a morale issue since Gardelle got himself killed. The fate of the remains is just a . . . reminder.”
Franklin’s mouth twitched, then clamped shut.
The commander said defensively, “We had to bury him in space. He requested it. He put it in his will, damn it.”
“Master Sergeant Gardelle’s will was a collection of jokes,” said Franklin flatly.
Franklin was career Space Force. Winchell had transferred in from the Navy. Franklin suspected the late Master Sergeant Gardelle only wrote the burial in space request to poke at the Navy tradition. The last update to the will was after Winchell took command of Polar Support Station One.
“Joke or no, it’s what he asked for, so we gave it to him. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for it to reenter. Yes, I admit, that’s taking longer than it should.”
“It’s becoming a danger.”
“Space Surveillance Center puts the odds of a collision at twenty thousand to one.”
Franklin refrained from pointing out that the odds had been zero, then a million to one. “Very well, sir.”
As the executive officer turned to leave, Commander Winchell asked, “How were you going to shoot it, anyway?”
“There’s a pistol in the escape capsule survival kit.”
“Oh, right, right.”
Franklin had missed lunch, so he went by the crew lounge for a sandwich. It was more crowded than usual for between meals. Half a dozen spacers were gathered in the observation dome.
“Thirty seconds,” said one.
Franklin turned from the sandwich cooler to see what they were waiting for.
“Ten seconds. Five.”
“There he is,” said another. “Right on time.”
“Can’t be Gardelle then. Son of a bitch was always early, looking for a chance to plant one of his surprises.”
“I’m amazed he managed to hold his gas in.”
“Have some respect.” The rebuke was from Technical Sergeant Castro. She was senior NCO on the space station since Gardelle skipped three items on his EVA checklist.
“I am being respectful, Sergeant. If it was you out there, Gardelle would be making fart jokes every time you went by.”
“If he was here, he would. But I’m here, so we’re going to be polite. You’ve had your look. Back to work.”
The spacers dispersed, a couple trading jokes, the rest solemn.
Franklin moved up into the empty dome. The glint of the tumbling space suit stood out against the black. “I hadn’t realized it was close enough to see.”
Castro nodded. “The last delta-V boosted his apogee enough to be visible. The orbit phasing only brings him close enough every three or four days.”
The burial at space had gone as expected for the first month. The space-suited body was launched with enough force to lower its perigee. Drag pulled the orbit down. SSC predicted it would reenter in three to six months, depending on how solar activity heated the upper atmosphere.
A month after Gardelle’s death, putrefaction gasses began to escape the suit. This was foreseen. The suit’s pressure relief valve had been mounted on the shoulder, far enough from the corpse’s center of gravity that the escaping gas torqued the body into a spin. The unintentional rocket thrust went in all directions, canceling itself out. SSC tracked the spin by satellite observation and smugly proclaimed its predictions were accurate.
Then the vent stopped letting gas out. Presumably some gunk had blocked it. The suit kept drifting down, still spinning.
The first delta-V alarmed every observer. Space Force called in outside experts to figure it out. They concluded that gas building up in the suit ruptured a seam. Once the pressure was relieved, liquids boiled away in the gap, leaving a solid residue to seal it. Pressure would build up again until the process repeated.
Every spacer who knew Master Sergeant Gardelle insisted he would have wanted to fart his way through space.
Unlike the continuous venting from the relief valve, the ruptures imparted a noticeable velocity change to the corpse.
That didn’t worry the analysts at the Space Surveillance Center. The direction of such delta-V was completely random. A rupture was as likely to push the corpse toward an early reentry as to send it back toward the space station.
Analysts worked out the odds of multiple ruptures causing a collision between Gardelle’s body and Polar Support Station One. They were so unlikely that everyone relaxed.
Until a month later, when four of five ruptures had caused stationward delta-Vs, canceling out most of the drag the corpse had experienced. Now it was coming close enough to PSS1 to see with bare eyeballs.
The analysts were tired of superstitious explanations being offered for what was just a natural, if improbable, event.
Captain Franklin, watching Gardelle’s corpse pass by, was starting to feel the tug of superstition.
On its next orbit PSS1 was far enough ahead of the corpse’s orbit that its apogee was out of sight. Franklin and Castro focused on their top priority, enforcing checklist discipline. Master Sergeant Gardelle, when not springing practical jokes, had pushed the troops for speed and efficiency.
He’d set a record for changing out a solar array bushing, up to where an electrical arc opened his oxygen line and an unchecked retaining valve jammed on some grit.
Now spacers checked each other’s gear as well as their own. Full inspections were done on airlocks before an EVA, even if the last use had been only hours before. Discolored parts were replaced and sent to maintenance for examination, instead of being accepted as “only a cosmetic issue.”
All the checks doubled the average time for a recon or service robot to be recovered, overhauled, and sent on another mission. Headquarters didn’t complain. They’d been thrilled with Gardelle’s rapid turnarounds. There weren’t any complaints about the new approach from above.
Crew complained. The extra work cut into their free time. Crew rest regulations protected their sleep time, but personal time was reduced to meals and hygiene.
Mutters calling them “tyrant” or “dictator” didn’t bother Castro and Franklin. They’d rather hear that than talk of Gardelle as a zombie creeping up on the station.
The officers discussed banning the crew from watching the corpse flybys. Commander Winchell decided against it. There were more ways to see out than the observation dome. Making it forbidden would cause even more discussion.
For the next pass, there were more spacers wanting to watch than could fit in the observation dome. One asked, “Did you hear? Gardelle ripped off a big one!”
“Glad I don’t have to smell it. What’s the vector?”
“SSC hasn’t said yet. Still collecting data.”
“Let’s hope he’s early.”
If the rupture lowered the corpse’s orbit, by the laws of orbital mechanics, it would travel faster. Therefore, arriving ahead of the scheduled close approach meant the rupture had lowered its orbit. Arriving late meant it had been boosted up. Again.
“Not early,” muttered a spacer.
The predicted time passed. Two spacers cursed.
“There he is. Twenty-eight seconds late. Crap.”
One of the junior spacers said, “This is like that movie Gardelle would show us. With the shamblers. They’re slow, but they won’t stop. You can’t escape because there’s nowhere to go. Just like we don’t have anywhere to go. Ow!”
He twisted to look at the hypodermic the station medic had stuck in his arm. “What did you do that for?”
“You need a rest, son.” The medic turned to Captain Franklin, hovering by the sandwich cooler. “Sir, I’m taking Johnson off duty until further notice.”
Franklin answered, “Very well, Doc.”
He brooded as the medic towed his patient out. The medic was authorized to take action in emergencies. Was Johnson freaking out, or just spouting off harmlessly? Either way, how would the rest of the crew react if he’d kept going? He decided to trust the medic’s judgment and pray for the next rupture to lower the corpse’s orbit.
