J Mauldin - Final Solution

Much thanks to my friends and family who have supported me as I’ve tackled new worlds, and to those who have critiqued my work, listened to me prattle on about esoteric topics, and slogged through my early drafts. Thanks to my wife for not murdering me when asking her to read something I just finished and was very excited about. A great debt of gratitude goes to Julie Hutchings who has edited many of my works and given me a fresh perspective on writing from the human angle. And of course, thanks to my parents for believing in me even when I didn’t. You’ve all stuck with me through my manic highs and lows and made a better person for it. I cannot thank you enough.

Suffocation has to be the worst way to die. One can survive for weeks without food, days without water, hours without sleep, and decades without sex, but only two minutes without air. Precious oxygen is life itself, the act of breathing, a God-given pleasure, a mechanical wonder, our bodies’ systems working in concert to keep consciousness alive. Though if you’re forced into a place without it, so empty it has no true temperature, and yet so dark that even the stars cannot penetrate its veil, you’ve arrived in the place of short-lived nightmares with which I’ve become all too familiar. I’d welcome you out of courtesy, but you’d be the next to go.

I can’t carry that kind of guilt any longer.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that the great expanse of space is unforgiving, impartial. It’s more treacherous than a stormy ocean, more unnatural than flying, and more dangerous than strapping your ass to a skimmer only to hurtle yourself four hundred kilometers an hour over a rocky Martian plain. It’s the single most inhospitable environment humanity has ever been so brazen as to invade, yet here we are sporting our smug grins. There’s plenty of ways for it to kill you. Radiation poisoning. Extremes of cold and heat. A lack of pressure that makes blood boil in moments. Isolation madness. And yes, of course, the weapons of The Axis, our rival faction. But if you reflect long enough you’ll realize one thing, suffocation is the worst. No matter how well-engineered your vehicle, a terrible death awaits only a few feet, a few seconds away. Every moment you persist in this formless hell, heart thundering like a drum in your brittle chest, life grants you another golden opportunity to spit in the glaring eye of the reaper.

While it’s bad enough watching anyone struggle to breathe—the shocked wide eyes, lips shading to blue, the agonizing process of hypoxia as oxygen escapes the blood through the skin—it’s even worse when it’s someone you know, someone you’ve served with, slipping between your fingers only to be swallowed up by the cold nothing. The scales will never again be balanced. Her life, their lives, all on my hands, invisible blood and empty families, my soul brought before the divine justice of existence and found wanting. There will be no resurrection in the Cold Well. I will not persist.

Alarms are flashing, screaming, but with no atmosphere to conduct their cries. A gaping hole is in the side of our ship, The Vindicator . I watch her float away. Her slack tether had not snapped, it wasn’t even clipped. She tumbles end over end. The mask of her soft suit is cracked, exploding, shards of glass glimmering in the light reflected off the red world. Her brain draws the many threads of fate together in one final thought. She struggles frantically against inevitability. It looks as if someone has wrapped their arm around her neck and is applying slow pressure in order to crush her windpipe. Her hands are grasping at her throat where silent screams are trapped. She’s kicking her legs like a drowning swimmer fallen in deep waters, attempting to push herself back to the shore. There’s nothing but a few atoms for her to push against. I hope not to carry this memory into old age.

“I’m sorry,” I say, my gloved hand reaching into vacuum, but the gulf is too great.

I tried. I promise. I really did. Is this what the past five months have come to? These final moments holding not only The Vindicator’s fate, but the fate of everyone else in my hands? If I had seen this outcome could I have changed a thing?

Her body goes limp. My heart stops. She’s quit fighting.

Not much longer and it’ll all be over.

Let’s get this regulation shit out of the way. My name’s David Goddard, master engineer of this leaking space can, The Vindicator, one of only two active warships in SOL. I was one of the lucky few, bold enough, brave enough, to see service in space. Back in the early 21st century, millions would have envied me for this position; the opportunity to spend months at a time traveling between Saturn and Mars, Ceres and the asteroid belt, conducting scientific and defense work for The Brethren faction. A few years earlier, I would have envied myself as well. The pay is good but the hours are lousy. Life has a funny way of putting things into perspective. You never quite know what you have until it’s gone. One brand of hard times can be missed when replaced by another. I didn’t have much choice.

Of all the things I missed from my birthplace in the Arsia Mons colony on Mars—comfort foods, the freedom to walk about, the occasional new person to interact with—there was one thought I subconsciously agonized over again and again. Despite our tiny Coke can smelling profusely of chlorine, bow to stern, cupola to nuclear storage, we had exactly zero swimming pools. Every turn I took, every module I crossed, if I closed my eyes hard enough, I swore I’d find one.

It was February 2nd, 2072. I sucked in a sharp breath and could taste chemicals in the back of my throat. Hot damn, my body was slick with sweat. My muscles were burning with effort.

The air scrubbers were back on, second cycle, sucking away all the loose, microscopic flecks of skin cast off by ordinary human molting. I wasn’t sure why, but I only noticed this chemical sting when I was jogging particularly hard during my strict PT regimen, taking full advantage of a pressurized cabin. Maybe it’s all the oxygen I guiltlessly hoovered up in order to keep my body pumping the way God intended, and some tiny particles being misinterpreted by my olfactory nerves. But being an engineer, I knew for a fact, that in the air scrubbers’ system, it used not one drop of chlorine. Yet that harsh odor, that bitter tang was plastered in every nook and cranny of my sinuses. It had to be a mental thing, and I welcomed it. It transported me to the great swimming pools of Arsia Mon’s middle levels, images of scantily clad colonists relaxing in warm waters under a pale sky.

Come to think of it, when was the last time I’d been submerged in water? It was back on Mars, certainly. That’s right. I’d been unconscious and nude—and in public. Not my proudest moment. The start of the end.

My boots pounded The Vindicator’s deck. Port hallway. Green markers. Heart rate 142. Target 150. Time to push harder. According to Doc, I got my best cardio at 155. It’s too bad I left my headphones on my bunk; a little Motley Crue or Alice Cooper might just have made up the difference.

It might be odd an Exo-Gen guy like me, those born or having lived mostly away from Earth their entire lives, would be into music a hundred years old; but I grew up on this shit. It’s all dad listened to, and all grandpa talked about. I even took a class in the ninth grade titled, “The Making of Classic Rock”, which was a hell of a lot more interesting than the other option, “Dub – Trap – and Moomba Vibes”. Riding the Crazy Train made me feel a little more at home.