K. Ball - Flotsam

“We’ve got to get her out of that damned suit!” Jill said.

Her words were brittle and her voice too loud. Zoe’s hands slipped from her leg as Jill pulled at her. Fat deep-red globules pumped from a dark spot on the left thigh of the mission suit and swirled through the air to splatter against Jill’s face and upper torso.

“God damn it!” Jill said. Her voice rattled Quin’s headset. “Help me!”

“Me first, Jill,” Quin said, working to keep his own voice calm. “Get me out first.”

Jill stared at him, her eyes unblinking. Then she nodded, as if they just had met, and she pushed herself forward, reaching for his helmet ring. She worked with furious purpose. Only the nine-millimeter-thick toughness of the suit prevented her from destroying it. Soon Quin kicked free of the last piece and the scattered segments drifted about the module, to be dealt with later.

Together, they attacked Zoe’s suit. Jill ripped at the clasps of the life-support pack while Quin worked the ringed system that held the helmet in place. There was a sigh of air when the seal broke. That was a good sign. With the helmet off, Quin tugged Zoe’s snoopy cap and communications gear clear and then touched fingertips to her throat, feeling for a pulse.

It was there, weak and thready, but there.

“I’m getting a pulse,” he said.

Jill didn’t respond. She had moved on to the gloves, going after them with the same intensity she had applied to undressing Quin. Zoe moaned when Quin touched her again. Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked up at him. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

“I can’t feel my leg.” She sounded as if she had just awakened from a nap.

“You’re going to be all right, Zoe,” Quin said. “I got you back inside.”

“Pay attention, Quin,” Jill had said. “So you can get your asses back inside.”

Quin ignored her. He activated the automatic inertial attitude lock and reached back to the IMU frame for one of the collecting-foam cans tethered there. He fumbled the first attempt, and Zoe waited, not saying a word, as he juggled the can into place. At last, he rolled the red arrow stenciled on the yellow can’s side into line with an identical mark on the can she held.

“Mary Shelley,” Zoe said. “We’re setting the cans.”

The cans touched and both arrows faded to yellow, signaling a successful link. The science behind it was more than Quin cared to ponder, and explanations involving self-bonding polymers and shifting absorption spectra just made it sound like magic. All he cared about was that the cans stuck to each other or to adhesive from the pressurized dispenser stashed in an insulated mission suit pocket. He had been told that the bond would never fail, short of total destruction.

Jill called it “better living through chemistry.” She collected ancient advertising slogans like that, the way other folks accumulated political campaign buttons or china dolls. Her hand-made signs were plastered upon every free surface within the Mary Shelley crew quarters.

“We have adhesion,” Zoe said. “Push the button.”

A dot glowed red on each can and neon-orange bubbles popped into being at the trailing faces. The thermosetting- polymer foam bubbles swelled until they touched and flowed together, forming a globe a meter across. Zoe touched her joystick and began to drift away. Quin followed suit.

“We are clear, Mary Shelley,” Zoe said.

Solid-fuel rocket cells on each can flared, and the debris field gained upon the bubble. The gap closed and the leading debris fragment sank into the foam. Second by second, piece by piece, the field was absorbed into the still-reactive plastic mass.

“That’s a sweep,” Jill said at last. “The screen is green.”

Working in tandem, Zoe and Quin set two larger degradable solid-fuel rocket cells into place. Jill did her little timing speech, the new cells flared, and the bubble fell away. The change in its velocity would hurry orbital decay and it would soon plummet to Earth.

Station Manager Marg Dierker claimed Cayley’s vacuum smelting operation would be operating by year’s end and collection teams would be required then to ferry collected debris to the station so that the scrap could be salvaged and refined.

“Just more corporate bullshit,” Jill had said, the first time Quin mentioned it. “Word is that station managers have been saying the same thing since the station opened. Six years, Zoe?”

“No,” Zoe said. “Five years. March 5, 2024.”

“Hell, junior,” Jill continued. “AshCor can’t meet a schedule any better than the other big boys. Me and Zoe will be living on Rising Sea, sipping Hatuey beer and watching launches off the coast of French Guiana, before anyone hauls this stuff in.”

Rising Sea was the forty-two-foot Hunter sailing yacht Jill and Zoe were paying for with their high-risk salaries. Jill called that a-good-chance-of-dying pay . Within a week, Quin was calling it that too. Truth was, it was business as usual, even if they were in orbit. The hardened bubbles of orange collecting-foam would continue to burn to cinder as they tumbled through the atmosphere and what was left would disappear into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Almost an hour gone by since the collision, and Quin spent every second of it outside examining the Mary Shelley systems module. Whatever hit them had been small, not even the size of the pieces in the debris cloud he and Zoe had collected earlier. Even so, damage was extensive.

Both nearside solar arrays had been pulverized in passing, and the outer skin of the equipment module was shredded from initial impact, leaving a hole big enough for Quin to crawl through, even wrapped in the cumbersome layers of the mission suit. From outside, he could see the twisted guts of the ion propulsion units beneath the gaping wound.

There had been an explosion within the equipment module, as well, large enough to blow out the away side of the cylinder and send bits of metal and plastic shrapnel spewing into space. The other two solar arrays on the far side of Mary Shelley were chewed to pieces by that new debris, and a piece of it had struck Zoe.

When Quin returned from his inspection, Jill handed over a plastic sample tube. The aluminum bead she had found floated inside. It was melted by the impact and formed by the absence of gravity into a perfect little sphere not much larger than a pinhead.

“Had to cut her suit apart,” Jill said. “Found the damned thing wedged in the Kevlar layer of her insulated undersuit.”

“Is that all it was?”

“It’s enough.”

The salty copper scent of blood filled the crew compartment of Mary Shelley, and dulled red splotches mottled every surface. Zoe was strapped into her bunk, nodding in and out of consciousness. Jill had cleaned the wound as best limited medical supplies aboard Mary Shelley would allow and sheathed Zoe’s left leg from knee to hip in compression bandages.

She lingered now beside the bunk, pushing a squeeze bottle at Zoe from time to time, forcing her to take liquids. Across the compartment, Quin settled upon a saddle stool and tucked his toes behind restraint bars. He watched the two of them for a time.

“It could have been worse,” he said at last. It didn’t seem as if Jill even heard him.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” Jill said. “And all I can manage here is first aid. We’ve got to get her to Cayley’s sick bay soon or she may die.”

“How do you figure to do that?” Quin asked.

Jill turned to him and Quin was certain for a moment that she would launch herself across the compartment to tear him to pieces.