Brad Torgersen: Outbound

Then the orange decompression shield slipped out of its compartment on the headrest of my couch and dropped down over me like a shroud, sealing at the edges.

I screamed Irenka’s name and fought to undo the chest buckle on my harness, watching through the shield’s small window while the cabin became a nightmare of flashing red lights and debris exploding from the floor. My little sister and I were able to exchange one final look, her little mouth shrieking, Mirek! Then the world tilted over and I was crushed into my couch, the decompression shield flapping and billowing.

When I came to, I was numb to the core. My ears hurt a lot and my nose had bled all over the front of my shirt. I didn’t care. For the longest time I just sat and kept my eyes closed tight, re-watching the image of my little sister noiselessly screaming my name.

Eventually I felt the rumbling of a terrible cry struggle up in my chest. Once it broke the surface, I howled for many minutes, snot and tears and blood caking my face and hands. By the time I went silent I was so spent physically and emotionally, I could only muster a few last sniffles, and then I was back to simply feeling nothing much at all.

Hours passed. I didn’t move until my bowels complained, and I used the small LCD in the armrest of the couch to read the emergency instructions. The decompression shield had snapped taut as a balloon, affording me some elbow room. So I unlatched myself from the harness and, per direction, pulled the seat cushion up to reveal the orifice for an emergency zero-gee toilet, which I used. Then I simply sat and stared out the shield’s window, watching the blackness of space and the stars beyond roll slowly past.

I figured I’d been blown free of the wreck during the decompression, or the couch was designed to eject in an emergency. It didn’t matter, really. Irenka had died five meters from me, and all I’d been able to do was watch.

I’d failed Irenka. And I’d failed Papa, who’d told me to take care of her.

I wished very much that I could cease to exist.

Another cry rumbled, but I didn’t have anything left for it.

I fell back asleep.

I came awake with a start.

The decompression shield was slowly deflating around me.

I hurriedly punched at the LCD on the armrest, wondering why the system hadn’t sounded an emergency alarm, only to find the decompression shield lifting back up into the headrest on its motors.

I flinched for an instant, expecting the vacuum of space, but instead found the illuminated, metal-ribbed interior of… another ship?

There were no people present in the high-ceilinged, rectangular space. It dwarfed the passenger cabin of the ship Irenka and I had originally escaped on.

Irenka. A wave of sudden depression washed over me and I brought my useless knees to my chest, burying my face. The repeating images of her frantic death began to replay across my mind, and I slowly beat my forehead on my kneecaps, unable to make the horror stop. Would it be like this forever? Always seeing Irenka, dying a million deaths, with me unable to help her?

There was a clanking sound from across the large compartment, and I snapped my head up. I saw a circular hatch swing open.

My heart began to beat rapidly in my chest. I stayed put on the couch, watching a small figure in white, flowing, pajama-like clothes float through and attach to the deck with grip shoes.

To my surprise, it was an old woman.

Her skin was wrinkled and coal-black, and her eyes were wide with dark irises.

She looked at me, unblinking. Then she quickly walked rip-rip-rip across the deck.

“Boy’s a mess, Howard,” the old woman said, but not to me. Her speech was American English, but heavily accented in a way I’d never heard except on television. When she drew near I noticed the tiny device in her ear—a headset. I just looked at her while she knelt down slowly near the couch and examined my face, the dried blood on my shirt, and the way my balled fists gently trembled while I hugged them over my knees.

“You got a name, son?”

“Miroslaw,” I said, the dried mucus and blood in my nostrils making it sound as if I had a bad cold.

“That’s… Russian?”

“Polish.”

“Well, you can thank the Lord that your little lifeboat here crossed our path, Miroslaw from Poland. The killsats didn’t leave much when they hit Jupiter. Howard and I kept the observatory dark until the killsats moved on. Then we did a slingshot burn, and now we’re away.”

“What does that mean?”

“Everything has gone on automatic. The military doesn’t exist anymore, but their machines do. To the killsats, everyone has become a target. So Howard and I decided it would be best to cut loose and go.”

“Where?”

“The Kuiper Belt, boy. Only place left. We’re going to find the Outbound.”

Outbound. There had been stories about them in school: privately-funded deep space missions that had been sent to determine if the space beyond Neptune provided fertile ground for colonization. None of them had ever sent back any data, once they passed the orbit of Pluto. Common sense said the Outbound had perished.

But had they really?

As long as Irenka’s death was foremost in my mind, the Outbound didn’t matter to me. I kept hugging my knees and stared past the old woman, looking at nothing.

“I’m Tabitha,” the old woman said, sticking out her hand.

“Thank you for finding me,” I said, weakly shaking it.

“You don’t seem too happy about it, Miroslaw.”

“Mirek. My sister called me Mirek. She’s… She’s…”

I couldn’t say it, but it didn’t seem like I needed to. Tabitha just put a gnarled old finger to my lips.

“Hush, child. You’ve survived the Devil’s Day. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

I let her grab my arm and pull me up off the couch. Using the grip shoes, she towed me back to the hatch she’d used to enter the large bay.

She noticed that my legs trailed behind me, and I used only my arms to maneuver through the hatch on its hand rails.

“Can’t walk?” Tabitha asked.

I nodded. She immediately flipped me over to check for injury, but I pushed her hands away. “Not hurt. Paralyzed. Since I was born.”

“Mercy,” Tabitha breathed. “Well, Mirek, we’ll just have to do the best we can, you and I.”

“What about Howard?” I said.

“He’s my husband. You’ll meet him soon enough.”

Howard and Tabitha Marshall were originally from Virginia. Assigned to one of Jupiter’s six original Humason-series mobile space telescope platforms, they’d served as technicians when they were young, and moved up to take over their observatory when older.

We talked while Tabitha helped pull my shirt off and began washing my face.

“NASA told us the telescope was too old and ought to be decommissioned, but Howard and I liked it out here so much, where we could be close to God’s quiet grandeur, when the astronomers and other staff packed up and left, we stayed. In protest at first, but eventually NASA gave up and let us keep working. We sent data back right up until the war.”

Howard, I’d learned, had actually died a few years earlier, but they’d recorded him into the computer, and now he ran the observatory as its brain. I’d heard of that being done for some of the very long deep space missions, using volunteer pilots who’d grown too old or sick to fly. It was an experimental thing, and lots of people back on Earth still hadn’t been too sure about it. Talking to Howard was a little like talking to an imaginary friend, since he seemed to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The observatory itself was a sprawling complex built into the side of a tiny piece of ore-rich rock that had been blasted off one of Jupiter’s trailing Trojan asteroids. When the hunter-killer satellites from the inner system had reached and attacked the Jovian settlements, Howard had turned off every piece of active equipment he could, going “dark” in the hope that he and Tabitha wouldn’t be detected.