K. Ball: Flotsam

Quin and Zoe had swept away the orbiting debris field and were almost back to the Mary Shelley airlock when Jill broadcast her warning over the corporation’s open radio band.

“Heads up out there! We’ve got incoming.”

Zoe canceled her momentum right away. Quin slid past her, managing to stop his own progress just three meters from the lock. He spied a streak of light beyond the leading edge of Mary Shelley, movement against the matte black of space that could be nothing else but sunlight thrown back from a fast-moving object, and the thirty-meter-long extended-range work vehicle shuddered as if it was a great bone caught up by some invisible Brobdingnagian mutt. Everything was still for one long instant and then vapor and debris spewed into space at the edge of Quin’s vision.

It was from the life support and propulsion module.

“We are hit, Cayley Station.”

Jill’s transmitted voice was dead calm now, and at the sound of it a chill skittered down Quin’s spine. He sucked in a deep breath of pure, cool oxygen.

“I repeat,” Jill said. “We are hit but still in one piece. I am evaluating damage.”

In the next instant, she switched to the team’s private band.

“Zoe, are you all right?”

There was no reply. Jill tried again.

“Zoe?”

Quin thumbed the propulsion joystick and gaseous nitrogen jetted from nozzles along the frame of his independent maneuvering unit. He began to rotate away from Mary Shelley and spotted Zoe hanging against the blackness ten meters away. Quin tapped the joystick again and began to glide toward her.

“I see her, Jill,” he said.

Her back was to him and she was turned one hundred eighty degrees off his orienting line. Her figure was contorted, bent at the waist to the limits of the suit, with both hands clasped upon her left thigh. Quin called to her this time.

“Zoe?”

“I’m here,” she replied. Her voice was weak, reedy.

“Zoe, what’s wrong?” Jill asked. Her words were hesitant now, worried.

“Something hit me, punched straight through my thigh, I think. I can’t make it back inside on my own.”

“Damn it, Quin!” Jill said. “Help her.”

The measured pace of his progress was maddening, and Jill’s goading itched like an old scab. Even so, now was not the time to lose focus and follow his emotions, as he so often did, to rush forward without thought. He drew another deep breath and reached for that calm center the yoga instructor at Sonny Carter Training Center had encouraged.

Breathing is involuntary, an essential part of life. You can’t control whether or not you breathe, but you can control the way that you breathe. Inhale on a four-count and exhale on a four-count. Match the rate for both. Control can save your life.

As his respiration slowed, he forced himself to think the situation through. He had to be analytical. It was what Zoe would do if the situation were reversed.

One humid Wednesday at Sonny Carter, Quin had scrawled faster than a speeding bullet in his notebook after the instructor had told them an object maintaining orbital velocity at a crossing orbit would travel at multiples of the velocity of sound.

So if Zoe had been hit, and Quin was certain she wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t so, it had to be debris from Mary Shelle y. If it were the object that had hammered the work vehicle or a traveling companion of that object, the systemic shock of the impact alone would have killed her. And whatever hit Zoe had to be tiny, because even debris as small and thin as a potato chip would have blown her leg away.

Quin remembered something else from that Wednesday lecture too. In the event of a small puncture, your secondary oxygen pack is designed to maintain pressure in your mission suit long enough for you to get inside to safety . So there had to be time to rescue her. No, that was the wrong way to approach this. There would be time to save her. He would do everything just right. He could do this.

He tapped the joystick and came to rest next to Zoe. Just on the mark.

“I’ve got you, Zoe,” he said.

“Good,” she said, almost whispering. “I want to go home.”

Home had set there, two hundred miles below Quin Torres, forever turning against the deep black curtain of space. He was convinced that Earth was God’s masterpiece of performance art played out just for him to the metered sigh of oxygen and framed within the polished plastic faceplate of his helmet in all the sweet colors of life.

“Are you ready, Quin?” Zoe Fraser asked, over the team’s band.

Quin flinched. He had been caught gawking again.

He glanced to where Zoe floated, waiting for him. Her white mission suit glistened, as if it were a beacon he could never reach. Quin envied Zoe. She was always focused, always ready and able to handle any situation. She never let passions get in the way of what needed to be done. That was why she wore red chevrons on her mission suit, identifying her as team leader, while Quin wore the green slashes that marked him as a newbie.

He took a slow, cleansing breath. It was time to focus, to get to work.

“I’m moving into place now, Mary Shelley,” he said.

“About time, Junior , ” Jill Papadopoulos said.

Jill was the team’s pilot. She was Zoe’s opposite, boisterous and profane. Always ready to laugh at the world around her or to poke fun. But in her own way she was just as competent as Zoe, and it seemed to Quin that she delighted in pointing out his low status and his incompetence. Still, every word out of her might be some sort of jape aimed at him, but Zoe’s quiet disdain stung even worse.

Quin thumbed the joystick and began to glide toward Zoe, who was already in position a meter ahead of the debris that was today’s prize. It had taken hours, riding the slow pulse of Mary Shelley’s fuel-efficient ion engines, to match orbit with the loose field of aluminum bits.

The field was the size of a misshapen beach ball, and each piece within the field tumbled in its own eccentric way, all moving along an ever-curving path, together in a complicated orbital dance. A file in some distant data bank kept track of what the debris had been. Perhaps a panel from a defunct satellite or a section of discarded solar array.

Quin itched to know its history, but that didn’t seem to matter to Jill and Zoe. To them it was just one more thing the corporation paid to have swept up and thrown away. Three days after boarding Mary Shelley, during a meal break, Quin had tried to express the excitement he felt working in space for the first time. Jill had laughed.

“Hell,” she said. “We aren’t anything but trash haulers, plain and simple.”

“Well-paid trash haulers, though,” Zoe added.

Jill laughed again and ran her fingertip across the knuckles of Zoe’s hand.

“Amen to that, babe,” Jill said.

Gossip was a game that everybody played at Cayley Station, so Quin knew Jill and Zoe were a couple when he accepted assignment to the Mary Shelley team, but he hadn’t expected that they would tease him with their coupling. From the first second they met him at the airlock, holding hands, it seemed to him they were saying that he didn’t belong and never would.

Zoe tried to help pull them into the airlock, but her movements were feeble and erratic.

For one awful moment, Quin was certain that his efforts wouldn’t be good enough, but then Zoe’s shoulders popped through the open maw and the next instant they were both within the lock. Quin punched the control sequence, the gauges turned green, and Jill was there, taking Zoe into her arms.