4: Space is big

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From the outside, the Stardancer was ugly.

I guess I’d grown up looking at spaceships in fiction, with the occasional video of a shuttle launched from Earth for good measure. But what space needed, apparently, was neither style nor aerodynamics. The Stardancer was a big fat cylinder with rounded ends, and out of those ends stuck long poles, perpendicular to the rest of the ship. There were four poles sticking out of each end, sandwiching the ship between two giant metal X’s, each pole about twice the width of the ship itself. They were rotating slowly, although I knew (from the lack of artificial gravity) that the middle of the ship wasn’t. This did not look like a good ship for ambushing people in space and demanding their cargo. It did not look like it should have ‘dancer’ anywhere in its name.

But I wasn’t inclined to reflect on that too much, because I didn’t want to spend any more time out in space than I had to.

The space suit wasn’t too bad. It was more comfortable than most of the ship, actually, largely because it was pressurised at a level that didn’t make me feel nauseous. Maybe I should just wear it whenever I was outside my own ring. It did not, contrary to my explanations, cling anywhere, even on the hands; a thin layer of air sat between me and the suit all the way around, provided I stayed completely still. It was a little unnerving to have something lightly brush any joint I bent as I pushed elbows, knees and fingers into the fabric, but that was surprisingly easy to get used to. I had explained to Glath just what I needed free to be able to breathe and see, and the mouthpiece I was gripping in my teeth was vaguely the right shape to be able to breathe through. The tank strapped to my front under my suit (not so much a tank as a pouch made of the same material as the suit, the only hard bit being what I assumed a system of fancy valves or something near the pipe to my mouth) seemed way too small, but Glath had insisted that it had enough air and explained something about inert gas recycling that I didn’t try all that hard to remember. The helmet was basically a big plastic fishbowl. The plastic was dark (there had been some confusion over just what light I could see with and what was deadly radiation to a human, not helped by the fact that I had no clue), an issue resolved by making sure that the light strapped to my forehead was really, really bright. It barely reflected off the inside of the helmet at all, a phenomenon I decided not to ask about in case Glath actually tried to explain. Even the belt of tools around my waist was reasonably comfortable, with everything secured so it wouldn’t flail about and tear my suit.

No, the suit was, although clearly designed by somebody who wasn’t human-shaped, generally fine. It was space itself that I had a problem with.

It’s really big, as it turns out.

There was no sun. We were far enough from any star that the sky was a dark blanket seeded with millions of bright points like dandruff on black felt, and the only light to see the ship by was the one strapped to my face, sweeping a wide, white band over the hull. There was the ship, and me, and nothing. So very, very much of nothing, and the only thing keeping me from it was a very short tether of the same material as my suit.

You might be wondering how, if I was tied closely to this giant spiky cylinder in space, I was able to observe its general shape so easily. This amazing privilege was courtesy of the position of the bent bar I needed to replace. The damaged ‘rocket’ was not conveniently stuck to the hull next to an airlock. No.

As it turned out, those big protruding poles were hollow. They were about three metres thick with the two metres inside being void. As in space. As in, not accessible from the inside of the ship.

Oh no, the only way to access the inside of these bars, and therefore the repair I needed to do, was to exit through an airlock at the end of the filter room, which took you outside one of the rounded ends of the ship. Then my tether had to be secured to a pole about the width of my arm to hold me near the hull as I made my way over the dome and up the 3 metre thick hollow bar, regularly untying and re-tying the tether every time I had to get it over a bracket securing the pole to the ship.

Oh, and of course the support pole didn’t extend over the lip of the tunnel I had to slip into. Oh no, it stopped a little way away, and a new one started a little way on the inside. Which meant that I had to wrap my body around the half-metre-thick lip, stretch down to untie the tether, and then very carefully inch inside backwards and catch the new rail with my foot. In the two-metre tunnel, I might be able to brace my hands and feet against the walls and stop myself from floating into space if it came to it… if I happened to float away at the right angle. It wasn’t something I wanted to try.

Inside the tunnel, the gravity didn’t bother me so much. It was basically like being in the tunnel of the central axle of the ship, if I was careful not to glance out into space, and the support pole seemed secure enough. I forced myself to calm down and keep my eyes on that pole as made my leisurely way in. The rocket I was looking for was supposed to be about five metres in, and it was going to be pretty much directly above or below the support pole, depending on how I’d oriented myself coming in.

I found it without too much trouble. It took up a good half of the tunnel. It looked pretty much like I expected a rocket to look, a cylinder with one rounded end. The other end was covered in a metal grille.

The bar I needed to replace was securing some kind of balancing mechanism to the back of the rocket. It looked vaguely like one of those ball-knocking physics toys, crossed with a gyroscope. At least I think so. I don’t see many gyroscopes. It was frozen, the bent bar stopping it from moving.

Very gently, I unscrewed a cap holding the bar in place and pulled it out. Everything stayed vaguely in the right place – good. I took the replacement bar from my belt.

And that’s when everything went to shit, because that’s when I happened to glance up.

I’d sort of forgotten about the previous engineer, the one who had been crushed by some sort of rotary arm. I remembered him rather suddenly when my light glanced off the mess of pale blue chitin and yellow blood jumbled with ripped space suit fabric about two feet from my face.

Now, the thing about suddenly confronting a mashed-up alien you’d forgotten about in a confined space is, your first thought isn’t ‘oh, it’s a harmless corpse, how sad.’ Your first thought is ‘Aaah fuck that nightmare monster is attacking me!’, which is why I screamed and raised my arms, reflexively, to hit it.

Both metal bars slipped out of my gloved hands. They dinged off the currently motionless giant fan the poor engineer was caught in and sailed away over my shoulder, down the tunnel. By the time I realised what was happening, they were out in space.

Well fuck.

I tried to ignore the corpse and focus on the problem at hand. This, by the way, is a very difficult thing to do. He had clearly been one of the praying mantis people, his colour and height (as best I could tell) about identical to the one who had given me my suit. There were streaks of sticky blood on his suit, where he’d struggled, and on the inside of his transparent fishbowl helmet. It clung to the fan blades, and big streaks of it made a rough ring around the tunnel that the fan completely took up; he must have been dragged around the walls until he’d finally jammed something up. Poor bastard. Whatever blood wasn’t stuck to a surface must have drifted into space a while ago, because I couldn’t see any of it. (But then, why hadn’t I noticed any on my way in? Had it drifted deeper into the ship instead? Ew.) Some of his limbs had been broken at the joints, and two of his forelegs (or forearms?) were completely torn off.

He wasn’t my problem right now, though. The weird physics thing was. I’d only brought one bar, and now it was off in space, beyond reach.

I made a mental note for future repairs: bring spare everything.

What could I do here, though? Could I go back and get another? No; I had a feeling that the parts of the physics thing, which were already drifting slowly out of place (I lined them up again so I wouldn’t lose track of what went where) would drift all over the place by the time I got back. We’d lose some deeper in the tunnel, and some into space, I just knew it.

Could I carry it back with me? No; it was too bulky and in too many pieces. Not a chance. I glanced at the dead engineer. In extremis, I reflected, a corpse could be a lot of things. A spiritual anchor, in most societies. A food source, to people starving. And to someone in my situation, a torn pace suit was essentially a giant pocket.

“Say, buddy,” I mumbled around by breathing apparatus in a voice only I could hear, “can you hold something for me?” I took a photo of the physics thing with my phone so I could reference where all the parts went, and pulled the engineer forward, looking for a tear big enough to stash the parts inside.

I was partway through this operation when I realised that if I dislodged whatever part of him was jamming the fans, there would be two half-pulped engineer corpses in this tunnel.

Right. Solve that first. He’d clearly been dragged around the tunnel several times, from the delightful blood painting, and the corpse seemed pretty loosely attached to the machinery. What was jamming it? Nothing at the edges. I examined the central axle and found my answer.

He’d tried to grab at the middle of the fan for stability. There were multiple layers of fan, it seemed; at least two. His forearm had been torn off, and went between both sets of blades, jamming them.

I couldn’t help but notice that the blades were probably pretty powerful, but that arm had held them for the time it took the Stardancer crew to abduct me and get me out here.

I also couldn’t help but notice that, the arm was both pretty uniformly round, and about the width of the metal bar I needed.

I pulled the bulk of the corpse out, tucked a couple of stray limbs under the tether support bar to hold him in place, and inspected him. His limbs were broken, leaking what little blood he still had. His wings were pulp, a mix of bug blood and fragments of gossamer like the world’s most poorly maintained windshield in mosquito country. Several of his eyes had ruptured, beaten against the inside of the helmet. But all of the external damage seemed to be in these vulnerable areas; wings, eyes, joints. Nothing made of blue alien chitin was even cracked.

Good enough.

Making sure my tether was secure, I reached up to the part of alien arm sticking out of the fan, ground my teeth on my breather, and yanked sideways and out as quickly and powerfully as I could.

The fans knocked the arm in my hands back, pushing me away, and I flew to the end of my tether before I could get a grip on anything. I managed to keep a grip on the arm and braced myself to face the sudden onrushing gust of the fan… only to realise that there wasn’t any. Oh, right. No air. The fan blades whirred silently, smoothly, in the vacuum. So long as I didn’t touch them, they might as well not be there.

So what were they for, then?

I put all the physics bits where my photo said they should go and slid the arm between them. I had to break the mantis claw off the end to fit the cap back on, and it wasn’t exactly a pretty repair – it seemed a little loose, for one thing – but it fit, and it stayed, and the parts moved in ways that looked intentional.

It would do, until I had to make this journey all over again with another damn bar.

I used torn, empty bits of the ex-engineer’s space suit to tie him to my back. “Let’s go home, buddy,” I mumbled. “You deserve it. You just saved the ship.”

—————————————————-

Charlie dropped through the airlock, fell through the filter room, and did not stop until they reached me in the centre axle. As it approached, I noticed that it had rather more bulk than when it left. Was this an unknown human trait? The suit was not designed to handle such drastic changes in volume!

But then I saw the blood, and Charlie untied the lifeless Kakrt from its back. It spat the breather from its mouth and tried to pull its helmet off, and there was a tense moment where I tried frantically to explain without sound (which would be very difficult to hear through the suit) that Charlie would probably cause a lot of physical damage to itself if it suddenly went from a high-pressure suit to a lower-pressure environment. I do not know if my message got through, but I managed to persuade Charlie to keep the helmet on until reaching their own ring of the ship.

When it was finally safe to do so, Charlie removed the helmet with excessive force, spat out the rebreather, and contracted multiple muscles around its mouth and nose.

“I probably have to go back out there,” it said. “I lost the bar I needed. It’s in space somewhere.”

“And the stabilising aperture?” I asked.

“Seems to be working for now. I used the arm of that… of the previous mechanic.” Its face became paler.

“I do not yet know your body language. Are you experiencing a problem?”

Charlie swept its head in a half-circle a few times, which did nothing to aid my understanding. “I just… haven’t seen a body before,” it said.

“You are a carnivore,” I pointed out.

“An omnivore, yeah, but animals are different. I haven’t seen a dead person.”

Of course. Charlie was not a warrior. I realised that bringing an unaccompanied engineer on board might not have been fair. We knew so little of how human castes worked; what if it could not adapt?

“He did not die in battle,” I reassured Charlie. “His death does not indicate increased danger for you.”

“Not really the point, but good to know. I brought him back so you guys could… I don’t know, do whatever aliens do for funerals.” Charlie bunched its upper face muscles and looked at me. “Did you drag him on board against his will, too?”

I took some time to assemble my sentences in a clear way that would not provoke further questions. “He was of the original crew,” I explained. “He… helped to plan our mission out into space, beyond the law.”

“To be pirates.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck him with the rest of you, then.”

“Charlie, do you need to eat?”

“Hmm? Yeah, probably. I’m hungry, but I don’t feel like it after that.”

Hungry, and yet not wanting to eat? I ignored this puzzling inconsistency for now. “What nutrients do you require?”

“Fucked it I know. Why would I have an answer to that? Told you, you should have taken the biologist.”

“We needed an engineer.”

“Ah, yes; I’m sure the task of replacing a simple bar would blow a biologist’s mind. We need, you know; sugars, fats, vitamins.”

I checked for a translation of these terms. The translation did not give me the context I needed. “It is very important that we find out – ”

“Okay, you know what, Glath? Why don’t you go find the most delicious thing you have, and I’ll eat it, and if I die, we’ll know that was the wrong thing. Hmm?” It bared its teeth at me, eyes flared and cheek muscles stiff. “I mean, it seems to me that this is the sort of thing you should work out before you abduct someone, but what do I know? I’m just some dumb disposable engineer, aren’t I?”

“No member of the crew is – ”

“No? Then tell me this, Glath – how did you guys know what needed doing out there? How did you know how that other poor bastard had died?”

“I do not understand.”

“Really? Then let me break it down for you. This suit you’ve got for me here doesn’t have any kind of way to communicate with the ship in it. No radio or nothing. Given that your guys were able to whip it up in no time and it’s got this nice fancy bubble helmet, which I notice is different to the previous engineer’s helmet since I could easily see through that glass, I’m going to go ahead and guess this isn’t a matter of difficulty or a resource problem. So I’m guessing that that kind of equipment just isn’t part of your standard setup for space suits, right?”

“I do not know of any space suits with such a feature.”

“Sound weird and inefficient, but okay, I’m sure that makes alien sense. So you send me out there and say ‘this bar, in this spot, is busted’, and tell me how to fix it. You tell me that the previous engineer got caught in a ‘rotary arm’. But you don’t tell me that I’m going to run straight into his fucking corpse out there, or that there’s a fan thing that needs to be unjammed – I did that too by the way – and I’m guessing that fan thing was important or it wouldn’t be there. So, I’m thinking, why wouldn’t you tell me about that shit? You didn’t know, did you? And yet, you had so much information about this repair? When you knew how that engineer died?” Charlie stepped toward me, lips still pulled back to bare teeth, gloves still coated in its predecessor’s blood. I pulled back.

“I didn’t see anything like a camera out there,” Charlie continued, its voice lowering significantly in volume. “I admit I don’t know what your cameras would look like, but everything in front of the rocket thing was smooth metal and everything behind would be blocked by the fan and very obvious alien corpse complete with horror-game blood splatter. So how did you know how they died, Glath, and how did you know about the repair, if you didn’t know about the other stuff?” Charlie stepped forward again. “There was a witness, wasn’t there? A second engineer? See, I can’t help but notice that the part where you have to untie from the outside tether rail and slip inside to retie would be so much easier with a tethered buddy to hold onto. It’s a two-person job, isn’t it?”

“Tyzyth tried to pull Kakrt from the rotary arms,” I explained. “It was impossible. He was forced to withdraw. I assume he did so before Kakrt became stuck; we assumed he would be flung into space.”

Charlie bobbed its head down. Its eyes had started leaking fluid, and when it spoke, its voice increased dramatically in volume. “Then why the fuck,” it said through bared teeth under a scrunched nose, “would you send me, some random alien who has never been in space before, out there to do it alone without this Tizzy… this other engineer for backup? You clearly weren’t going to send them out alone, you had to rope me into it. See what I mean? Disposable.”

“Charlie, your eyes are compromised.”

“There is nothing wrong with my eyes!” Charlie rubbed a blood-free part of its forearm across its eyes, clearing most of the fluid. “You want to know what I eat, Glath? Take some of my blood – anything in that is probably fine. Our blood takes food and stuff to our cells, so… wait, I’m pretty sure it takes garbage away, too… fuck, I shouldn’t have dropped out of high school. Fuck it. We’ll figure it out later. Right now, I’m going to take a shower, and then go to sleep, and you’re going to leave me the fuck alone for about ten hours unless there’s another engineering emergency that your other engineer can’t, for some reason, do. Like if that arm I stuck in there breaks or something. If not, putting a real bar in is just going to have to fucking wait.”

There were a lot of unfamiliar words in Charlie’s speech. I started to translate. Charlie pulled its eyelids close together. “Just go away, Glath,” it said loudly. “Is that fucking simple enough for you?”

I went away.

I had to present Kakrt to the Princess.

—————————

As much as I wanted to tear the space suit off immediately, I took the time to wash the alien blood off it first. I didn’t want that stuff spreading all through my clothes or sticking to my skin. The hygiene facilities weren’t exactly set up for somebody human-shaped, but that was something to fix later; for now, I figured out how to turn on and combine the very hot water and the quite cold water in a combination that didn’t hurt, and stood under it.

I’d calmed down a little while taking the space suit off. Breathing on the seam to release it took quite a while when you had a whole suit to take off. My clothes underneath were, apart from a little sweat, the same condition they’d been in when I went in. Apart from a couple of small bloodstains from where I’d slammed my face into things, they mostly carried the evidence of my time on Earth. They smelled of dirt and crushed grass where I’d knelt to adjust my cameras. I put them carefully aside. I was going to have to wash them eventually, but not yet.

There was no soap. I didn’t care. I rubbed steaming water into my skin, closed my eyes, and sighed.

Okay. I needed to calm the fuck down. I needed to get a handle on the situation. I couldn’t let a little thing like being graphically confronted with my predecessor’s violent death unseat me. I was in an unstable situation, and I needed to get out of it. I needed to get a fucking grip. I needed to figure out how the ship worked, find where Earth was, and get home.

I needed to figure out how to not starve or poison myself, too. Were vitamins and proteins the same over or were they an evolution thing? Would every planet with life, say, a vitamin A, or were there just too many possible vitamins that could exist? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how complicated vitamins were.

I also didn’t know how restricted water use was on a spaceship, I realised, after I’d been standing motionless in my makeshift shower for several minutes. I sighed, stepped out, and used my shirt to dry myself.

I’d probably need towels and clothes and stuff, too, I realised. The crew had previously been using my ring as storage to random goods, and there were a lot of big cubic containers lying around; they might contain something. But that could wait.

For now, I went and sat in my car.

And I opened my laptop.

I knew I shouldn’t be using my electronics so much. They were going to run out of charge at some point, and while I could charge my phone from my car, that too was going to run out. And then I’d be stranded, electronically. I didn’t think there were too many car batteries and Australian power points on the Stardancer. But for now, fuck it. I put the laptop on my knees, sat back…

And realised that I didn’t have an internet connection. Of course. What else did I have on it? Some movies, I supposed. Probably some music. I clicked around my downloads, and froze. I reflected briefly that exorbitant textbook prices had very probably save my life.

Because a couple of months ago, I’d been very annoyed about the apparently compulsory and very important textbook that I needed to buy for uni, and turned to the less property-respecting part of the internet for help. And while I hadn’t found the textbook I needed, I had, in the way you do, found a few other interesting torrents. Which was why my laptop contained a folder names 1001.high.school.and.college.textbooks[pdf-king] .

I had a look. Physics, biology, engineering, and a smattering or other disciplines. All high school year levels and beyond.

I grinned. “Hooray for piracy,” I muttered.

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