A click, then a roar. The internal door blasts out, knocking me to the ground.
The impossible has happened. Both airlock doors are open.
I try to drag myself back into the ship, but my gloved hands skid along the smooth floor while the great hand of the universe yanks on my collar, sprawling me out toward space.
I hold myself against the wall, clutching with all my strength, my sputtering brain trying to figure out what’s happened and what I can do to stop it.
A click, and my helmet rips off from the suit. I see, in the corner of my vision, Rover with its whirring hands.
Rover unfastened my helmet.
The roar is so deafening that I can’t hear it. The ship’s air has turned cold and soupy and sharp. The walls themselves scream as dust, polycarb wrappers, food containers all whirl past me, the same force that’s pulling on them pulling on me, cutting my skin as we’re dragged into space.
Flying debris slams my head against the airlock doorway again and again, my vision sparking with pain and my mouth filling with blood until I’m soaring through the opening, past an open stretch of metal and polycarb until I’m outside the ship, until I’m drowning in a vacuum. Until I’m in outer space.
I gasp and heave and struggle, but my lungs won’t fill. The void around my face is so cold it’s hot, pulling at my skin and at my lungs. Every membrane of my body trills. The ship spins away from me, sometimes in view and sometimes careening away to reveal the darkness and the starsthat spatter it. Saturn, impossibly massive, should be dancing agile circles around me, but I can’t even see it. Saturn is not there.
Saturn is not there.
How can I rescue my sister if Saturn is not there?
I will drown.
I will freeze.
I willburst.
My brain strobes light and dark and light and dark. As I continue to spin, I glimpse a last vision of a suited figure, arms and legs flailing. Kodiak will outlive me by hours, until he slowly goes cold in the gloom of space, until he’s dead like me.
My death is now.
My heart clenches and collapses, pulling my lungs down with it. My vision turns from white to red-black as my eyes freeze. I don’t feel pain, only shock. Beneath that explosion of sensation, my last thoughts are of Kodiak dying alone, of both of us dying alone.
I wish I could share dying with him.
Part Two
“191 DAYS UNTIL TITAN.”
Minerva’s voice turns urgent:You let me go alone. I need you. Save me, little brother!
The floor hums. An image returns: my parents, my brothers and sisters, frolicking on our Cusk-branded pink sand, Minerva splashing through waves of steaming seawater in her white racing suit, my mother yelling “Faster, Minerva, you can go faster,” my molten bronze fingers searching the scorching artificial grains for a seashell. My family’s spaceport is distant in the blue, radio arrays wheeling. Pleasure satellites haunt it.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
“OS, did Rover just poop?”
“In a way, it has,” OS says. “The microfauna of your intestines need to be replenished immediately to prevent any inflammatory autoimmune response. These organisms are selected to populate your tract with healthy proportions of bacteria.”
Rover refills the cup of water.
“Down the hatch,” my mother’s voice says.
There’s a pause. “That’s probably the first time you’ve heard this voice of mine say such a thing.”
It’s true. My mother would never say “down the hatch.” My surrogates would, but Mom’s more polished. She’s never been near a diaper. I barely even saw her for the first ten years of my life. A door, a knock, no answer. Minerva:As long as I’m alive, someone loves you.
I pop the pellet into my mouth and chase it with water. The agony of swallowing makes me roar. Eyes streaming tears, I fake a smile. “Please, ma’am, can I have some more?”
