Drift

A Story by MrPatrickCakes

This was a short story submission that didn't quite make the cut.

Gravity slows down everything, especially when there isn’t much left. Aster had to contend with a dining hall that only had enough power for one fifth of Earth’s gravity. Her bounding gait would have been playful, jovial even�"if only the fluorescent lights weren’t flickering and the air didn’t feel thinner than atop a mountain. All around her were the discarded remnants of an early crew breakfast; few plates had crashed to the floor. The plates that fell tumbled through the air for a moment and bumped the floor in an anticlimactic fashion, amplifying the desperation that Aster felt.

The dining hall fed into the crew chambers, a place she had only visited on the initial tour of the vessel and sparsely afterwards. However, between the two was a viewport which at any other time would be of no significance. Now it told a story, and as she looked out into the empty vacuum, and as the stars twinkled in the inky void, she saw the extent of the damage to the engineering deck. It was easy to analyze as the hull had been shredded, the luminescent blue that accented the hole confirmed the ship was leaking quite a bit of fuel. Lights would flare to life before sputtering out once more. This was not only unsalvageable, it was a tumor.

As the systems within engineering would fail, the ship’s internal autonomous computer would compensate and shift power from other systems to try and bring it back. That wasn’t a fault in the computer; it was merely standard procedure in an emergency. Should have been caught by an engineer, it’s what they’re there for. The ship was burning up its battery reserves and all because of a little line of code.

She stared out that viewport but her focus softened to the window itself, her wretched visage stared back. Where once had been golden locks, now were greasy tendrils, bound with sweat and grime. She had never been partial to beauty, but right now she looked especially wretched.

Something needed to be done. Aster turned around and leaned back against the metal hull, against the porthole which belayed a sense of foreboding. Thoughts were hard to come by as she paused in the middle of this catastrophe. Her brain did its best to marshal the relevant material but the panic would set in, the fear diluted any focus she had. Every idea was tempered with helplessness�"but she had to press on.

She pressed up from the wall and made the arduous trek to the emergency transportation shafts. Around the back of the dining hall she marched, the effort like walking through treacle. Down the corridor, she came to a latch on the floor and kicked it open. The entire panel popped open with little resistance. A long gaze upward into the shaft revealed not even the emergency lighting was working anymore. The entire tunnel up into the belly of the ship was pitch-black.

One deep breath was all she had time for, things could still get much worse. She climbed into a midnight tunnel, each hand and foot acted as propulsion and navigator, the sound of her moving from metal rung to metal rung echoed through the access shaft. Hands were invisible in front of her face; direction became relative as she ascended away from the gravity. In her mind, all kinds of creatures lurked in the darkness. No matter that the crew brought on not even a louse or that everything left with the emergency lifeboats; she felt distinctly un-alone. In this dark, she could have a flurry of owls in wait for the right moment to pluck an eyeball from her socket. Her next foothold could be a hellhound with agonizing hunger and an eagerness to hunt. Perhaps just a stowaway sat in wait, Aster alone and defenseless against the man in the dark. Or, it was just a dark and deserted ship that floated in the emptiness of space, quickly changing into a tomb.

The ship design worked against her. To simulate gravity, the living quarters and bridge were all built into a circular ring with a constant rotation, the centrifugal force able to simulate gravity and prevent muscle atrophy on the long journey. The entire craft couldn’t be a spinning wheel though, so the crew quarters circled what was essentially an enormous missile. All of the electronic suites, cargo, and engine components were housed here. This was fine for any typical flight because rarely did crew members need to venture down into the rocket, using the slim access corridors between the two. Now, Aster was challenged with navigating the darkness and the centrifugal forces that pushed her off balance and into the side of the tunnel.

In her head she tried to count the rungs of the ladder, perhaps judge the distance she had traveled. Despite her best estimates, the tunnel stretched in both directions to infinity. There was a gripping loneliness in the back of her mind, a pain that reached out and grabbed her by the throat. She was horse without having spoke. In this craft, these eighty meters of abandoned and cold titanium, she took little solace that she was the only element of chaos. No nightmares clung to the rafters and waited for unsuspecting prey, but the creak and yaw of straining metal was its own hellscape.

After an eternity in the dark, Aster was stopped by a metal door. She still lacked lights though, so her only recourse was to fumble around for a control panel, a latch, or in the very least a handle. Nothing availed itself to her groping hands. She scratched at the metal surface and her breathing grew heavy. No one had told her how to access maintenance, they had told the captain and he had scarpered off with the rest of the crew in the escape shuttles. Now it was her against this door and she hit it with her fists. The thumping of her hands broke free the door and it swung open into dimly, almost ethereally lit corridors. There was a cold wound at the bottom of her heart; the more she saw of the ship, the wider it became, more hallways and access tunnels and no sight of fixing the problem. She rolled into the structure with the quick realization that this was a completely different setup from the living quarters. There were no floors or ceiling because this part of the ship never carried the limitations of gravity�"a revelation that startled her stomach despite the previous low level of gravity.

Along the side was a small rail to guide through the circular hallway, all the sides were smooth metal so the rail was the only way around. She reached to the fire truck red bar and put hand over hand as she climbed her way around to the door way that lay ahead. With one last push, she jettisoned herself out of the circular hallway and drifted with accidental grace. Once out, she found herself in an enormous cathedral dedicated to the commandments of propulsion. It was an enormous, open cylinder; on either side were large doors�"large enough to drive a train through. Door after door, they all stretched down to the bottom. There, ahead of Aster as she floated through the enormous rocket, was a clear, protective shield that separated Aster and the rest of the rocket from the cold fusion reactor.

It was an impressive display. All of the energy was trapped within the engine itself so there wasn’t some colorful display of fireworks or halos of luminosity�"no, this was impressive because of the massiveness of this engineering marvel. The entire carapace that protected the spaceship from the intricies within the nuclear device gleamed, a robust apparatus that rivaled some geological features for size, it clearly took up more than half of the rocket. And upon inspection, to the relief of Aster, wasn’t damaged. The mechanism had a strange hypnotic quality to it, warmth radiated through the protective shield�"even at her distance from it, and the engine pulsed and vibrated. It wasn’t like a speaker, more like the building pulse of a wave against a pier.

Something from her childhood called out to her from within. There was an overwhelming urge to lie against the protective shield, allow the warmth and vibration to move through her, just curl up in the bottom of this rocket and forget the universe. It was an oddly comforting idea, failure. But she knew it wasn’t for her. If she were a quitter, she would have been the first one on the escape pod. “No,” she told herself as she pushed off towards the engineering door, “not now.”

Taking the escape pod hadn’t been a weakness for the other crew though. The simple math had made it abundantly clear to Aster that it wouldn’t be prudent. Their craft had already traveled half of the distance between the moon and Mars, it had taken them a little over two months, and they had been traveling at a pretty decent clip. What chance did they stand in the small life pods? Never mind fuel, which would barely last them if nothing unforeseen intercepted, those emergency rations were only rated to last three weeks. It’s one thing to say you will cut down on food, it is quite another to have completely depleted all the water and still be nowhere near home. No, Aster had made it abundantly clear to them, taking the escape pods was suicide, their choice not to listen wasn’t her fault or problem, for she had much bigger at this moment.

Her zero gravity acrobatics were serving as adequate transportation. She floated to the large door that serviced the engineering cabin. For a few moments she grasped impotently at the door or the emergency handle or anything that she could anchor herself to, the entire display reminding her once again how much control she really had. With one hand stretched as far as she could reach, she managed to catch her index finger on the emergency handle and once she was hooked it was easy to reel herself in and anchor herself to the wall. She hovered at the door panel; the electronic disengage at her fingertips. There was certainly a breach in the hull which meant engineering would have violent and dangerous decompression�"and the tear in her suit made it practically prohibitive to enter the room. However, she needed a multitude of, not only information readouts, but also vital functions. Aster needed to be in that room, there was no room for debate.

Protective glass slid in front of her face as she activated the suits environment helmet. She took a deep breath and pressed her hands against the doorway to steady them; her hands had begun to shake. As her heart pounded in every one of her extremities, Aster raised her hand to the panel, tightened her grip on the emergency handle, and opened the door.

Instant decompression yanked her body, wrenching her from the emergency handle. Instead of the gentle glide she had experienced earlier in zero gravity, this was a sadistic tornado of force that threw her body like a wet rag. Twists and turns in air, she somersaulted through a room illuminated by a mix of orange emergency blinkers and the bright starlight that flowed in like water to the Titanic. She was pulled and whipped in every direction, at times even against her own body; the whole time she could feel the sharp needles grating across her skin as her suit decompressed as well, the suit regulator fighting to maintain air. As she spun out of control, she hit a large section of metal gantry that had collapsed in the initial onslaught. Her body thrashed to the side and she grasped hold of the metal framework.

Her vision blurred and pooled for a moment, it took a minute before she saw the little gauge that had illuminated in the corner of her helmet. The icon was the elemental symbol for oxygen with a tiny bar that was decreasing in size rapidly. At the rate it was going, the suit only had two and a half minutes of air left. With her heart racing, she attempted to slow her breath and refocus on the room around her. A quick examination yielded a computer console on the nearby wall. Between Aster and the computer was an entire room that wanted nothing more than to wash her out into the far reaches of space.

It took quite a bit of effort, but Aster was able to spin herself around so she was climbing around the gantry on her belly. She put one hand over the other and wedged her feet in between the wobbly and twisted metal. The force of the decompression made movement almost impossible; it would have been easier to climb up the inside of an hour glass. She made considerable effort to lift her feet and climb up the holds, each hand mimicking each foot and she steadily climbed the side of the room. Step after step, the monitor in her helmet would chime in, each time she would feel the beads of sweat form thicker and thicker. She progressed but painfully slow, each foot she moved up, the more the opaque light from space faded, and was replaced by the burning orange light from the warning sirens.

Lifting her hand was starting to feel like she was lifting a dumbbell and the ache from the climb was taking its toll. She had less control over her body, almost as if she were a scrap of paper stuck in a chain link fence. With a glance up, she was able to see the computer console just ahead but it was blocked by a break in the gantry. The separation couldn’t have been more than a metre but with the current predicament and Aster’s muscles quaking from the strain, the obstacle was almost insurmountable. She looked down to the corner of her visor as the gauge ticked�"it had taken more than a minute and most of her energy to get here. The exertion had taken most of her focus but, with the momentary respite, she realized her head was swimming�"light and unsteady, she clenched her eyes shut for a moment before looking back to the task at hand.

Aster maneuvered herself into position, entangling her left arm in the sharp detritus she had just traversed, then pushing her body up against the torrent of air that was still being sucked from the ship. The ledge was just centimetres from her fingertips�"millimeters but she could feel the muscles in her core wrenching against themselves in the effort to stay attached. She grunted and strained, her fingertips brushing the nearest handhold. The gauge beeped at her again, one minute and ten seconds.

Her mighty scream echoed through her helmet and Aster jumped with the strength of an Olympian, fighting the force of decompression, she rocketed at the handhold. In a mad dash, her hands slapped at the handhold, scrambling for a hold. The right hand hit open air, the left skid off the metal hold without any purchase, the right had swung back around and only just caught the lip with her fingertips before slipping free, her left arm�"without much hope and in a desperate gamble�"extended farther than had ever been physically possible, and this showed. When her left hand snagged hold of that metal outcropping, her arm was wrenched in its socket and she could feel the ligaments protest in burning pain all the way down to her scapula.

Neurons fired message after message to her lungs to scream in pain but they were under duress, without the air necessary to live, they had rationed away what they could of Aster’s oxygen and she was forced to dangle in the air, slack jawed and eyes fogged with sweat and tears. Her lightheadedness was almost debilitating now, the environment was shifting around her… but that gauge stayed ever vigilant in the corner of her eye.

It took tremendous will power and focus, but she swung her right arm around and gasped hold of the handhold. She wanted to make it, she wanted to succeed, but there was a voice that had been there from the beginning. A tiny voice at first, now it was an insufferable din, a voice that said, “I don’t think this will get any better.” She used just as much resolve to suppress that voice now as it did to lever her body up and over the ledge she held. Her arms trembled and her spine had absolutely given up as she leveraged her dead weight legs up, high enough to wobble her back end over the ledge and press herself down against it, using the little alcove as a barrier against the prolonged ruin around her.

Aster blinked out the blur from her eyes and shook her head, wanting desperately to wipe her eyes with her hands, she was at the computer. Breathing became difficult, her chest heaving to suck in as much air as she could but still she felt starved. She tried to ignore the indicator gauge; she could feel her air running out. The computer keyboard lay tantalizingly at her fingertips. Menu options blazed across the screen as she interfaced. Warning screens and “Fatal Error” notices flooded the display�"apparently there was something wrong with the ship. She dismissed the cautions and went straight to diagnostics. The damage report wasn’t surprising, what was surprising was the course of action.

Not only were the backup batteries being depleted in an attempt to revive this compartment, but since the engineering cabin had been compromised, any messages the computer sent out were immediately received as errors. And errors must be corrected. With every nanosecond, the computer sent out a hundred different commands, all polluted with garbage signal. The navigation drive interpreted this as either magnetic interference or proximity warning, it was hard to tell from the bare lines of code, but that didn’t matter. After each one of these messages were sent out the ship made a miniscule course correction: a small turn starboard, a miniature yaw adjustment, a degree of pitch tuning. Left to its own devices, this ship would wobble straight out of this galaxy like a squash dropped down a grassy knoll.

This computer was a continuous poison to this ship. Every time Aster tried to correct the junk messages the computer would immediately revert back to error and send the messages once more. It was frustrating but worse yet it took vital seconds. She wanted to slam her fists into the keyboard but found she hardly had the strength to lift them. Instead, she queried answers. This was just as helpful. Every possible option required the engineering cabin, which would then resume the junk code, and then the ship would drop off course.

The sharpness of her mind was waning. She sat and felt her heart thump, counting away the seconds. A sniffle forced its way from her throat. It was impossible, she had thought herself super human and her hubris would send her adrift with the ship. She allowed her vision to drift and pool out the enormous hole, which continued to suck everything out of ship, out to the gentle blaze of stars. Plasma burned one billion light years away and came to her now, in her last minute. That voice could now drown out a cataclysm. But that voice was never the only voice, and by far it was never the loudest.

“Not now.”

Something stirred within her chest, and though she sucked at every breath, though she felt the icy tingle from oxygen deprivation spreading to her limbs, she roused and blinked away the sweat once more.

“Not now”

She sat up and brought her fingertips to the keyboard.

“Not now.”

Her voice cracked, a parched lakebed shaken by an earthquake. A spark ignited in her mind and her fingers blazed to life. All of the systems didn’t run through engineering, they convened�"and it would be easy to cut out the engineering bay if she cut out the location where the signals met. And Aster knew, all of the systems, be they engine control or environment control, met at the bridge. There they were monitored by engineering.

Quick scans of the cargo manifest reassured her. Checks of the environment status, plus some quick math, reaffirmed her. The function menu popped up on screen and she scrolled down to the living chambers submenu. After a few options she selected the option to disconnect the living quarters. Little time lingered for her to wrestle with this decision so she clicked select and felt the entire craft shutter. After a quick check for successful separation, she completely shut down the engineering suite so no more power would be wasted. With little pomp or ceremony, the display blinked off.

That was her cue to leave. Even though her body felt life a stretched and fettered piece of fabric, she reached her arms up and hoisted herself beyond the computer. Her exit was only fifteen feet away, but with an accidental look at her oxygen meter, she saw only twenty eight seconds remaining. Asters legs burned and faded alternately but she leapt upwards, into the front corner of the room, sheltering herself from the torrent of air rushing from the ship. In this haven, she steeled herself for the leap and grab she would have to make, less than fifteen seconds left. Her boots pressed against the wall and she coiled her muscles, ready to pounce.

“Not now.”

She pushed down with all her might and stretched out her arms to catch the side of the doorway. A quick twist in the gravity-less air and she glided straight into the doorway, where she was nearly blown right back into outer space. The force of the air was so harsh that when she grabbed that doorway with all her might, her body was thrashed back towards the room whence she came. Slack muscles whipped round in the onslaught, but she pressed all her remaining might into her arms, pulling against the force of a rushing river. Still, her body lifted her up into the gap, her top half just within the doorway. She trembled and grit her teeth, nine seconds left.

A scream erupted in her suit and she rolled forward, into the belly of the rocket. Instantly she skittered back as the decompression took hold of her. The emergency handle stuck out next to the door and she grabbed hold of that with every last ounce of energy she had. Six seconds left.

In front of her was the panel to close the door. She could reach it but it took all of her might just to hold on. Four. Her hand almost touched it. Three. Her finger just clipped the edge when her body slipped back. Two. Her chest heaved; she released the handle and launched herself at the button. In a mad scramble, she slapped at the control panel, not even sure if she hit it. With the last bit of strength left in her body, she disengaged her helmet.

Sounds happened around her and the universe did what it would with her body but a moment later, her breathing returned as did her vision. She was completely conscious, she was alive and the problem had been fixed. The new issue was that nothing was coordinating the systems anymore. For the remainder of the trip she would have to go from engine, to navigation, to star charts�"each with their own computer console. This meant constant regulation and course correction, all performed by her. She would only be allowed brief naps, no sleep and limited rations. But that seemed easy. She wasn’t going to die. Not now.