One
Falling!
Ines woke with a start. Oh, it’s okay, she remembered; we’re just in orbit. Freefall. It makes you dream of flying, and drowning, and falling, until you get used to it.
Franck slept on, with his arms floating in front of his face. With a smile, Ines let him be; he looked exhausted. She propelled herself across the cabin, towards the small window; a short while earlier, every surface in this little craft had displayed an image of the stars outside, making the entire ship seem transparent. Now those systems were switched off, and if she wanted to see the planet below with its five moons, she would have to peek through this tiny porthole. When she reached the window, she bounced back, scrabbling to find a handhold. Eventually she hauled herself back, and pressed her face against the glass.
There was Rufus, brilliant blue and white, with a hint of desert yellow. The little red moon Rocky could be seen nearby; further away, pale and blotched, was Rory. The other moons were nowhere to be seen. Ines was not surprised; the view through this tiny window was so limited she was lucky to see anything.
Her head felt fuzzy; far too many hedonics, no doubt. Perhaps a shower might help clear it. Now where was the bathroom again? A thick hatch in one bulkhead wall looked promising. Even though there was no weight in orbit, Ines found the door difficult to open. Whenever she tried to pull on the handle, her body just flapped around uselessly like a flag, or she hit something with her knees or feet. Eventually she placed both feet on the wall, and opened the hatch like a trapdoor. Behind it was a smaller room, fitted out with zero gee washing facilities including a shower tube. The hatch closed behind her with a confident clunk.
Ines pulled the tube down from the ceiling/out of the floor, and stepped inside feet first. The loose end of the tube hooked over a fastening above her head, and a retractable hose came down to dispense lukewarm water. Quite proud of herself she shepherded the dollops of water up and down the tube, adding a little soap from a dispenser also above her head, A couple of times a large dollop hit her in the face and stuck there, causing a moment’s panic until she scraped it away.
The lumps of water with soap dissolved in them were softer and more clingy than the lumps without; over time the soap diffused into all of the water in the shower.
She began to enjoy the experience; her head cleared a little. Only a few drops of water escaped the tube at each end- trying to control them was like a new game, and she began to enjoy it.
Now, then, she thought; somewhere down near the foot of the tube is the extractor fan; I should have switched that on when I started; the water would be gently pulled towards her feet, and she could let some more, clean water in, to rinse herself. But she couldn’t find it. After a while she gave up, and crawled out of the tube sopping wet, grabbing a towel. The tube still had a few litres of water inside, slowly settling down into a few large dollops, then spreading itself evenly over the tube’s inside surface.
Ines dried herself off, then looked for the extractor control again. If she didn’t find it, she couldn’t pack the shower away again without spilling water all over the bathroom.
Great lumps of steaming krek! She thought. Why wasn’t anything labeled? Aha! Here was something. A yellow pull handle with something resembling the letter V and two dots printed on it. Perhaps that would activate the pump, She pulled the handle; it resisted, as if to say, no. Not this one. Don’t.
An oval section of the wall suddenly blew away, and she was blown by a terrific wind into space. The air was forced from her lungs, and her eyes stung, so she couldn’t see the stars and the moons that suddenly surrounded her. Her torso swelled up as the gases inside her tried to get out. The bright, unshielded light from Rufus’s star flashed into her unfocused eyes. The water from the shower sprayed our around her, and the last thing she felt was the cold spray as it evaporated on her skin. Generally you can rely on no more than fifteen seconds of consciousness in a vacuum; mercifully, Ines had less than five before she blacked out. Her naked body and her towel separated, and tumbled into the moon-filled black sky surrounded by rapidly freezing icy pellets of soapy water.
The enquiry later found no coherent reason for the fact that practically every safety system on the ship was not working, including the subturing ship’s brain. The survivor was unable to explain this state of affairs, despite lengthy questioning.
Franck Tomas felt the shudder as the secondary airlock opened inside the bathroom, but he did not come to complete wakefulness. The bathroom door did what it was designed to do, and closed hermetically, so that no more air escaped. An hour and a half later, when he woke up alone, he realised what had happened only when he tried to open that door and failed.
It took another hour before he caught up with the body, and several hours before he could carry it to the nearest medically equipped station in the Rolf Lagrange point. Ines had never believed in neural backup technology, and her central nervous system was too damaged for anything but the most approximate retrieval of her personality. After some consultations with her family, she was declared irretrievably dead. …
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DIVERSION TACTICS
This is a great first chapter. It has action and shows Ines’ reaction to events. Good story telling from the start. The scientific details of water in zero Gee and vacuum are accurate, so I immediately have confidence in the author. We see human beings I can relate to reacting to events, instead of being told about happenings by some distant impersonal voice. Unlike so many OA stories, the stress is on actions and feelings of people, not on machines trying to act human. I think I am going to like this story.