Trapped In Space
by Wendy Air
Wendy Air is an author who hopes one day to be self-published, and, despite what it says in the controversies section of her wikipedia article, has no current convictions.
A novel in progress.
Click a chapter number below to jump to that chapter.
Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Chapter 1
My name is Randi Wey. I am an astronautess. I always wanted to go to space, and I got my wish. I am in space. Trapped in space. Forever?
The ship that brought me here, to space, has gone home, and left me here. Not on purpose, you understand. It was all the result of an unfortunate incident. But even so, I am left, trapped in space.
The Uvula, the vessel that left me trapped in space, was state of the art. The first manned (and womanned) vessel to go beyond the Earth's gravitational sphere of influence.
The Hill Sphere - the maximum distance an object can orbit without being pulled out of that orbit by a more massive object (in this case the Sun) - is the Earth's back yard. Extending one and a half million kilometres in a shell around the tiny green and blue planet, beyond this point, the point of no return, I can't return. And that is where I am.
So how did I end up drifting in space with only my wits and a spacesuit to help me? It's a funny story. Not funny ha ha, and I'm certainly not in the mood for laughing, but funny nonetheless. I was doing a spacewalk on the outside of my ship - usually the wrong side of the hull, but a communications array required attention and I am the communications officer. Well, I was the communications officer. I don't have much of a way to communicate back to NASA now, so I guess technically this is some unscheduled time off. I was out on the hull with Leo, the Lead Engineering Officer (LEO), when the explosion happened.
What caused the explosion? I don't know - yet. My tether was tattered by flying debris and my fragile woman's body was flung into space. What happened to Leo? That I also don't know. What I do know is that I have 3 hours worth of oxygen left, and after that I'm dead...
Chapter 2
Of course, if I find a way of getting more oxygen, my suit will run out of power in 12 hours, and after that I'm dead.
If I can solve the suit-power problem, I die of thirst in 3 days.
Solve the water issue, and a few months later I die of hunger.
All that time I'm getting hit by high-energy particles from the Sun, so within a year, no matter what, I'm dead anyway.
And all I have at my disposal is this space suit I'm wearing.
Not a great situation to be in. I suppose I'm fortunate that the explosion, whatever caused it, only destroyed my tether. Having to cope with all of the above whilst also nursing a bloody stump or a lost tit would be even worse.
The Uvula might be in an even more grim situation. I saw its emergency return retro system automatically fire as I spun away into the spacey void. An attempt to take the remaining crew back home. She was venting gas and fluids from the tattered gash that was the section of hull I had been clinging to. I know how she felt, being reminded of a fistula I suffered during training. At least neither of us had been disgorging internal solids during our injuries.
I can only hope that the Uvula can take her remaining crew home, limping back to the small, fragile, wet and airy spheroid we call planet Earth. I guess that's something I'll never get to see again - the smallness, the fragility, the wet air, I may not have the time to miss it much more, but I miss it now that I'm trapped, trapped in space.
The oxygen light, the light that lets me know the state of my oxygen in this claustrophobic suit, blinks from green to a slightly less green colour of green. Not a good sign. I need to do something. If not now, then soon, before the light grows even less green.
I need to think the tits off this situation.
Chapter 3
NASA head office on Earth was in uproar. So were its other offices. Even its canteens were a bit crazy as news of the Uvula's accident spread like the expanding debris cloud of the accident itself.
In Main Mission Control, where the professionals were expected to do their job, the professionals, fortunately, were doing their jobs, although the atmosphere was tense. Heads were down, nearly twice as many eyes as people in the room darting across red flashing screens and alarming readouts. Information was being relayed with expert understanding of what needed to be said to whom and with when it will.
"Pressure stabilising in podule one..."
"Trajectory on emergency return nominal..."
"Adjusting numbers for less crew..."
"Main comm channels still down..."
"Nah Larry, it shit the bed..."
Edward Harrison, the Chief Flight Director of the Uvula's Deep Thrust mission pinched the bridge of his nose as his brain pulled in all the data that was being said around him. Tall, wiry, grey and by-the-book. And his book was the book of a hardass who took no crap, with pages that suffered no fools, and a spine of rigid bone. It worked well for him here, in mission control, controlling the mission, where he felt at home, but at home, his wife was less appreciative. Always an empty threat, he was sure, but was it normal for wives to talk about divorce so much?
Shawn Breen, the Second Chief Flight Director of Deep Thrust, stepped forward and slapped his hand on Ed's shoulder. He hardly needed an introduction.
"Dammit, I know I'm a bit impulsive, and somewhat of a maverick, but I told you that sending her out there was a mistake. People might not like my abrasive attitude, but I get the job done and I do it well, and you know it, so why didn't you listen? I even banged my fist on the desk Ed, dammit," Shawn said, banging his fist on another desk. "!"
Ed raised his other hand to join the first in pinching his nose. Even two-handed pinching couldn't dispel the thought that Shawn might have been right. A deserved double fister.
Shawn shook his head abrasively at Ed and addressed the room. "Can somebody give me some ideas on what happened? I want to hear it from you, Dick," he barked, pointing at a man with receding hair and high blood pressure.
Dick Ransom was a person, it wasn't just Shawn being his usual abrasive self and calling someone a dick. His requests to be called 'Ransom' instead of 'Dick' to avoid just this confusion had been systematically ignored. Typical Shawn. Dick was the Mission Overview Person, which had suddenly become a rather taxing job, not good news for his blood pressure.
"It's not good news," Dick began, his sweat-beaded forehead reflecting the flashing red 'grievous emergency' signals from all the screens surrounding him. "There's been an explosion and we've got an astronaut..." he paused for effect. "..." the silence pregnant with the baby of tension. "...Trapped In Space!"
Chapter 4
If I'd known that all of that had been going on in Mission Control I'd have said that yes, that's right, and I was the astronaut in question, but I was blissfully unaware of the frantic and abrasive scenes playing out over one and a half gigametres* away, so I didn't. What I did do was try to remain calm. Oxygen is my number one priority and nothing uses up oxygen faster than a panicking spacewoman. Well, maybe fire, but I'm not on fire.
[*megakilometres^ to the lay person.]
[^kilokilokilometres to the layer person.]
I'd made a conscious effort to slow my breathing and relax, to not actively think of the predicament I was in. If I thought about being trapped out here, the small splinter of life-support that I once knew now a riven mess limping back home with hardly a hope of survival for myself or for my friends, I thought, it wouldn't help my attempts at calming at all. The terrible death that awaits me, I thought, is not the kind of thing I should be thinking about, staring out into the void, seeing the hopelessness of it all, the ultimate pointlessness of existence as a speck out here in an infinitely vast, infinitely ancient and infinitely apathetic cosmos.
As I relaxed and my heart-rate-indicator light inside my helmet showed an appropriately accurate colour - good old NASA engineers - I allowed my mind to think of the back-story of some of my, now former, crew mates on the Uvula as it seemed like an appropriate time to flesh them out a bit, in my thoughts.
The Captain of the Uvula, Belinda Carlisle (no relation), had been the top of her class at MIT - one of the main institutes of technology in Massachusetts. In fact, she was number one for all of technology in the whole of the coast that Massachusetts is on, whichever one that is. And she captained us all just as good. She's been a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor and a pilot, and now an astronaut. I never asked her why she couldn't seem to hold down a job, but I assumed it was something medical, you know, down there. I'll be sad if she doesn't make it back. Maybe as much as her husband and children, I don't know, I never met them.
Second in command was Chuck Le Bruther. He might still be second in command if the Uvula hasn't burst open like a flimsy sock with too large a foot being forced into it. Chuck was like a dad to most of us, having slept with the mothers of three other crew members as well as my own. He was of the old school, an astronaut from the Shuttle era, having racked up over a year in space prior to being chosen for the Uvula Deep Thrust Mission. He liked a drink and he liked a joke, but not in a way that would make you want to beat him to death after being stuck inside an inescapable spaceship with him. Not instantly at least. We've been in space for 4 months...
My spacesuit makes a pinging noise as the heart rate light reaches its greenest shade of green. Good. Maybe I could reminisce about some of the other characters later. Right now I need to use my calmness against this situation - my oxygen light a noticeably different green from my green heart rate light, a worse green, a worrying green.
Chapter 5
On board the ravaged Uvula, having not burst like a flimsy sock, the remaining crew would have liked that Randi Wey (the one who's trapped in space) was concerned about their wellbeing, but they all just assumed she was dead so it never even occurred to them. The smell of badly damaged spaceship hung heavy in the air, leaving no doubt that the spaceship had been damaged, badly. But that there was still air for the smell to hang heavy in meant that it wasn't as bad as it could be.
The four remaining crew of the original six were all hard at work, each one utilising their particular speciality to stop the Uvula from degrading further. It was heading back to Earth, sure, but that return journey would take 3 additional months. That might seem like a small number, 3, but it's a big number when it comes to months in a spaceship, in space, that just exploded once already.
The Uvula was mostly state of the art when she left Earth. The bit that wasn't had just exploded. So large, she was assembled in orbit using satellite robots with allen keys for arms. Needing to house half a dozen astronauts for extended periods, the Uvula was split into three sections. The habitation cylinder protruded from the front, a firm vanguard that penetrated space in the name of peaceful exploration*. At the base of the habitation cylinder were the two spherical utility spheres. One containing science labs, hydroponics bays and stuff, and the other, the life support systems, now somewhat less taxed thanks to the loss of two crew, providing a glimmer of silver lining. Sprouting from these spheroids was a wiry tangle of engines.
[*And military interests, but we're not allowed to talk about that.]
"A habitation vein burst, it must be," Chuck Le Bruther said, his usual drunk and jovial self, as mentioned in the back-story part, was forgotten in favour of his concerned astronaut trying not to die self.
"It's not that," Laura (but pronounced in that Lauw-oo-rah way) Flamenco, whose backstory we'll get to later, barked back.
"How do you know, Laura?" Captain Belinda Carlisle asked, floating her head in through a hatch, followed by the rest of her body as it was still attached.
"It's pronounced Laura, and the pressure sensors in the pumping shaft say we're fully engorged," the fiery Spanish astronaut woman said, twisting a control dial like a dominatrix taking out her frustrations on some poor sap's nutsack.
"But the dropping turgidity level..." Chuck started, his words cut off by Laura.
"Is because we vented a lot of atmosphere, it's already coming back up," she fierily replied, "and it's pronounced Laura."
Belinda nodded, "we've stabilised the situation, me and the other fourth astronaut who'll feature more later," she said, her reassuring tone masking some real concern about being in a broken spaceship in space. "It's a real mess up there," she pointed shaftwards. "Four sections blew out on one side. Chuck, one of them was your berth, sorry buddy."
'Well shit...' thought Chuck.
"Well shit..." he said.
"We've sealed off the affected parts. We can make it back to the sweet, wet Earth like this, but it won't be comfortable," Belinda said stoically.
Laura nodded brusquely, accepting the situation for what it was in her typical fiery European fashion. The man next to her who had just lost any hope of a spare pair of underpants for the rest of the journey didn't nod so much.
Chapter 6
I'm still here in space. One woman against a hostile universe - which might be a good tagline for a book about this sort of thing if someone wanted to write it, I think. I've been thinking a lot. Almost all the time actually, and I think the tits are starting to come off the situation*, metaphorically thinking. Here's what I think.
[*This is actually quite a clever callback to an earlier line.]
I know a bit of biology - I'm no expert mind you, but I paid attention in class - and I know that I breathe in oxygen to live more. That's the useful bit of the air. What I breathe out is carbon dioxide - CO2 - C to the double-0 - carby-diox. A deadly poison, and less frivolous than I made it sound just there. But the 'diox' of carby-diox, could it be that simple? Was the answer being breathed out of my face this whole time?
If my chemistry memories can still be trusted then carbon dioxide is made of a bit of carbon, like the middle of a pencil, and two bits of oxygen. Oxygen! The very thing that I need. And if every bit of carbon dioxide has two oxygen pieces, then I breathe out twice as much oxygen as I breathe in. All I have to do is find a way of snapping off the carbon to leave the undeadly part that is the oxygens. This sounded like a job for physics, the third of the 3 official sciences.
I wouldn't say I was bad at physics, despite not knowing much more about it than the normal amount you would expect an astronaut to know. But this problem is a tough one given, just to reiterate, that I am trapped in space with only a space suit and one-woman's wits - this woman I mean, me, Randi Wey.
If I could have the wits of another woman at the moment it would have to be Laura. She'd know how to snap off carbon given her back-story of being good at physics. She always looked like she knew what to do, especially when she didn't. I suppose that's the fiery European blood she has inside her. Maybe if I think more about her back-story I'll get a clue about what to do...
"...nounced Laura actually," I recalled Laura saying on our first meeting, "no, Laura, with a long 'a', listen." - Born in Spain to Spanish people, she went to University somewhere European and exotic, like Vienna, or Loughborough. She started in the European Space Agency as a front-desk receptionist and worked her way up to the top. Once she was the head of all European Space, the only natural next step was a job at NASA, in American space. Space positions had just come up, she applied, and after a montage of tests and exams, she was in, thanks to her being good at physics the most - I seem to remember from our fiery European chats. It's difficult to tell sometimes because of the accent.
Her eyes were dark, mostly because of the smoky safety glasses with high UV protection she often wore. Despite being a space nerd, she had that fiery European sense of style. I remember her telling me that she had them specially made for her by 'Vestiti Pergliocchi', one of the big Italian fashion houses...
"...not difficult to get right if you just listen. But as I was saying," I recall Laura saying as she's halfway through saying it, "The UV protection is almost as good as they put on that film they have on the glassy bits on the front of a space helmet. Without it the UV from the sun could break down carbon-oxygen bonds in my eyes."
I had nodded and agreed that that sounded bad and was probably for the best that she avoid it. But if only she was here, maybe she could find a stylish solution to my oxygen problem. But she isn't here. I am here, in space. One woman against a hostile...
...My oxygen light clunks from green to orange. It breaks me out of my exposition before it got repetitive.
Orange is not a good colour to have happening on the inside of my helmet. Not as bad as red, sure, but worse that green. I really need to focus on the problem now. My new problem of breaking carbon-oxygen bonds like Laura didn't want to have happen in her eyes, which was why she protected them from UV from the sun, like my space helmet does. There has to be a way.
Wait a minute! That might be it!!
I'm slowly piecing it together, but if I'm right, then the carby-diox building up in my helmet can be broken to bits by the sun. The sun! Which even if you're in space, is right there, sometimes even closer depending where in space you are. The only thing standing between me and fresh, glorious, life-giving oxygen is the UV filter stuck in front of my face. I try to cross my fingers that this will work, but the space gloves I am wearing as part of the astronaut costume makes it difficult.
I pick off the UV film from the glassy bit on the front of my space helmet - which is not easy because of the aforementioned space gloves I'm wearing that mean I can't use my fingernails - and wait, keeping my eyes fixed on the orange light.
Chapter 7
"Dammit," Shawn Breen, the Second Chief Flight Director if you recall, shouted, fisting a desk, "I need communications established with these people, Dick!" Shawn's ire was directed at the man on the desk marked 'communications'. He wasn't called Richard, it was just Shawn calling him a dick. Typical Shawn.
"I can't help with that, Shawn," said Dick Ransom from the previous scene in Mission Control, thinking Shawn was referring to him.
"I wasn't talking to you, Dick," Shawn barked, meaning Dick as in a name this time, not just calling him a dick, "I was talking to this Dick on communications." Shawn pointed his desk-banging fist at the person he was talking about.
"My name's Gordon," said Gordon, who was the man Shawn was calling a dick, "not Dick."
"Dammit I know that," Shawn had thought it was Greg, but no matter. "Now get me an open line to my damn crew!"
A fleck of emphatic spittle arced out of Shawn's mouth at the 'ooh' bit at the end of saying 'crew'. This next bit is best imagined in slow motion - As the spittle's ballistic trajectory carried it on its inevitable journey from Shawn's white-flecked lips to strike Gordon's left bifocal a figure stepped up. A rough-hewn hand, calloused from decades of hard-assed flight directing with a slightly tarnished wedding ring on its ring finger shot out, so fast that it looked like a normal speed if you were imagining it all happening in slow motion like you were advised. The meaty fingers snatched the gobbet of sputum and, at normal speed again, crumpled it up and threw it in a handily positioned waste paper bin.
First Chief Flight Director Edward Harrison put his non-spitty hand on Shawn's shoulder and said, "You mean our crew," his voice taking on an almost fatherly tone, but with a hard-assed tone underlying it.
"Yes," said Shawn, feeling duly chastised, adding a whispered, "dammit."
"But despite his unconventional ways, Shawn is right," Edward said, backing up his colleague in the way that course HR had sent him on after some, admittedly excessive, hard-assery had advised. "We need to be able to talk to our people up there. What have you got for us Greg?"
"It's not good news I'm afraid," Gordon said apologetically.
"No," mused Edward, "there's not been much of that today," he added wryly, encouraging some slow nods of appreciation for his clever and true words from the people around him.
"Well, I've got not more of it," confirmed Gordon. "We're still getting some telemetry data coming down, unfortunately the only data channel that isn't garbled is the damage-report channel. And I'm sorry to say..."
"Not good news?" Edward asked, just as wryly as before but not getting as many nodding heads because he'd sort of blown his load the previous time.
"The only good news is you're right. Which isn't good news when you think about it," said Gordon.
Edward thought about it. The man was right, no matter how much Edward wanted the good news to not be bad news, it was, so it wasn't.
"I want that damage report, dammit," Shawn shouted in the direction of the Damage Report desk.
Jaden Fort from Damage Report stood up. So far he'd had precious little to do with the Uvula's Deep Thrust. A loose turd from the space toilet had been the worst problem that spattered across his desk this mission. It wasn't that he wanted anything bad to happen to the Uvula or the astronauts, he would tell people, but that wasn't exactly true. He'd done an undergraduate degree in damage reporting, and he was starting to feel like his master's degree in advanced damage reporting had been a waste of his time and money. At night he would drink heavily and fantasise about the spaceship he was responsible for damage-reporting on reporting some damage. His quick thinking and wits in relaying the information to someone important would be the thing that would, not only solve the problem, but save lives too somehow, and maybe even the world? The entirety of NASA would hear his report, understand his heroism and they would applaud him.
'This is it, this is my moment,' thought Jaden Fort from Damage Report. He stood up again, just to be sure. "The Lead Engineering Officer (LEO), Leo Evan Orlando, is dead. We've got breaches in four compartments along the port shaft. A lot of the air that was inside the ship is now outside, which is the last place we wanted it to be. We've lost a lot of fuel for the Parabolic Underslung Booster Engines (PUBEs) and at the rate we're losing it there must still be leaks along the shaft veins. Main power has been cut off to the ship's left epididymis lines, possibly a blown out vas deferens, but it's still working on battery backups right now. The balls have taken one hell of a bruising and the string from the furry dice in the cockpit tip has snapped. But worst of all..." Jaden Fort from Damage Report, seeing the attention he'd caught, despite what he'd been taught, that the things of most import aught to be brought up at the staught, paused. Standard operating procedures are one thing, but dramatic tension makes different demands on an author. "...We've got an astronaut - Trapped In Space."
Jaden was breathing heavily after such a powerful delivery of great dialogue. Main Mission Control was silent. You could have heard even the quietest of farts sneaking out. Dick Ransom, having been the first that day to dramatically say that an astronaut was trapped in space, back in chapter 3, stood up from his desk. He was also the first to begin the applause.
Chapter 8
It's working. I can smell the fresh oxygen being smashed free by the sun. Thanks Laura, I think, my mind pronouncing it the right way probably. Actually, all of this is thought, so just take that as given. As if to confirm my thought assessment, the oxygen light in my suit blinks to green. It's nice to get the confirmation, but the sweet smell of fresh oxygen is unmistakable, just ask anyone with severe lung trauma. Actually, don't do that, it might start a coughing fit.
As I float, trapped in all this space, I can't help but have a strange feeling of freedom, despite being trapped. It's ironic really, like all those spoons in that song. Talking of songs, I looked in my suit's radio settings. It's all mostly broken from the explosion, but the mp3 files that Captain Belinda Carlisle brought with her are intact. If ever I need to listen to music then I've got that I suppose.
If my ordeal is ever made into a film for some reason it would be good to have a consistent soundtrack. But just to be clear, I would be more than happy to sell the film rights to this story, if I ever miraculously solve all of my problems and find a way home and then publish my novel bit by bit on the internet, say, in a bold and fresh experimental format.
I just hope they pick something better than the happy hardcore that Belinda seems to have been collecting since the early 90s. I arbitrarily dislike happy hardcore, so it might be a while before I put some on. Maybe I'll keep it for a montage.
Yes, a montage of me fixing my suit's communications systems would be handy right now. The radio lights in my helmet are all red (bad) - except the soundtrack channel which taunts me with its greenness (also bad). I don't know how far my suit's radio could transmit even when it hadn't had a spaceship explode on it, but I suppose at least that's a technological limitation I don't have to be concerned about until a chapter when I do, if that happens.
I have gone back to thinking about the feeling of freedom I mentioned further up before going on about music. If I wasn't in danger of dying soon I might be enjoying it more. I can reach out with the space-arm of my space-suit and know I won't knock into anything because all that it could knock into was space, which you can't knock into anyway. The same applies to my space-leg too. I can shout and nobody will hear me, like a tree falling in space with nobody to hear it.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
I just shouted that. But like the space tree, if my radio is broken, did I even shout a noise? I'm not a philosopher, well, no more of a philosopher than you would expect an astronaut to be what with my character being an astronaut. Despite that, I'm thinking, so I must still be 'am', like Descartes once said. That's good, because if I wasn't 'am' I'd probably be dead right now, and if I was dead I couldn't survive being trapped in space.
*bleep*
I just heard a beeping noise, my eyes scan the inside of my helmet and try to find the source.
*bleep*
Actually, it's more of a bleeping noise than a beeping noise now I hear it again. What did my space training say about this? My eyes still search, and then fall on a newly lit orange light. It's one I've never had to pay much attention to before, but...
*bleep*
Yes, all right, I've heard it. And I remember now, it's the carbon-monoxide alarm, like the one I have in my kitchen back home on Earth, only less loud because it's in a helmet and not in a kitchen. But why is my helmet filling up with that?
*bleep bleep*
Two bleeps is worse than one, and the orange light is oranger. My situation is deteriorating, and it wasn't a great situation to begin with. Carbon-monoxide - CO - C to the 0 - carby-mono. However you say it, it's even more poisonous that carby-diox. According to a Reddit post it strongly binds to haemoglobin and that makes it really bad to breathe in, even in little bits apparently. But where is it coming from? According to some sources I remember looking up on the internet it's caused by incomplete combustion, but I said in Chapter 4 that I wasn't on fire, and that remains true.
Great, another problem that if I don't solve it quickly will kill me. I add it to my mind's list, but right up near the top because it's one of the more urgent ones I need to solve. Actually, it's more like two problems. One is figuring out where the carby-mono is coming from and the second is finding a way to stop it and then get rid of what remains in my helmet. So maybe three more problems if you consider getting rid of it as another one.
I rotate gently in the void and think three times as hard as I would for a single problem. Time is my biggest enemy, so I start to think quicker. Laura helped with the carby-diox problem, but with this carby-mono problem I'm on my own - in two more ways than one.
Chapter 9
The applause for Jaden Fort of Damage Report was just dying down when the double doors of Main Mission Control, pushed open with force, slammed to the limits of those things that make doors close more slowly than they normally would that you find in offices. Framed in the frame of the door was Harriet Shipman, Chief Doctor of NASA. Her white doctor's coat with that logo of snakes coiled round a stick on the back and a stethoscope draped around her neck leaving nobody in any doubt that she was a doctor.
"What in the name of Hippocrates is this?" Harriet bellowed, her exclamations being appropriate to her being a doctor.
She had heard that there had been a terrible accident and that one of the astronauts that her job was to keep healthy might be dead - the opposite of healthy. And now, as she damaged the doors to Main Mission Control, the heaving room of sweating and beshirted people were applauding as if they were trying to force an encore at the theatre. Certainly not an appropriate reaction to the loss of an astronaut, and possibly a whole mission.
Edward Harrison, First Chief Flight Director winced. Those door closing mechanisms weren't cheap. He was quick to explain Jaden Fort's contribution to the gruff doctor. Edward respected her gruffness, something that he saw in himself during some of his hard-assed outbursts. When Harriet heard why the room had been clapping she understood, smoothing her beard down - an action she used often to calm her gruffness when she realised it might not have been the right time.
"I see," she saw. "But now I'm here, what's the medical situation with my crew?"
"Our crew," corrected Shawn, "dammit."
Harriet ignored Shawn's correction. In her mind the lives of the crew was her responsibility, and so the crew was hers. Everything else was to do with the Uvula spaceship, for which she didn't give much of a shit. Pushing her way to the Chief Medical Officer's desk, which she was for the Deep Thrust mission, as well as being Chief Doctor of NASA at the same time so it's not a contradiction, she stared at the screen with incredulity. It was worse than she thought, and she had already thought it was worse than she thought, so even worse than that.
"This is worse than worse than I thought," Harriet gruffed. "Is somebody going to tell me what's going on here?" She demanded, pointing at her screen, the red lines tracing their way across the vision area.
"It's the screensaver," an unnamed person on the desk beside her said, knocking her mouse so that the screen would show information about the crew's health - or lack of it with respect to the dead one.
Harriet nodded gruffly and reassessed the information before her. 3D pipes were no longer being traced around her screen, but what had replaced it was just as concerning. Four heart-traces spooled across the screen, each one doing that up and down blippy thing you see on heart monitors in hospital dramas, only faster than you'd think is normal because of the stress. A fifth line wasn't doing the blippy thing at all - the heart rate of Leo Orlando, the dead one.
Harriet took a deep breath. It was uncommon for an astronaut to be properly killed in space. Given those odds Harriet wondered, "Leo's heart monitor thing could have come off. Are we sure he's..." she paused dramatically, "dead?"
Nobody in the room really knew who she was addressing that to because she'd said it just staring at her screen, but Edward Harrison stepped forward, sensing the need for some flight direction and taking that responsibility. "Tell her, Shawn," he urged.
"We're sure dammit," Shawn barked, out of reach of a desk, but giving a little fisting motion to show if he had been, he'd have hit it.
"But how?" Harriet demanded, spinning and locking eyes with Shawn, one eyebrow cocked to an alarming degree. She was like a dog with a sausage, and she wasn't going to let go. But Shawn was not prepared to let her have his sausage. The two colleagues stood firm. An impasse.
Edward stepped between them. "We have a strong signal from the communications system in Leo's helmet," Edward explained, "and a strong signal from his suit's chest communication system too," Edward added.
"But it could be wrong," the Chief Medical Officer implored. "The monitor thing could have just fallen off, like I said before. What you've just said doesn't invalidate that, and it seems more likely for the thing to have fallen off than for Leo to be properly dead."
Edward nodded. "That's true, Harry," he admitted, "but those two signals are now three thousand kilometres apart, and you know as well as I do that Leo's neck isn't that long."
Harriet's shoulders dropped. She had performed thorough examinations on all of the astronauts under her care before they left for space and she had to admit that Edward was right. Leo's neck was unremarkable in both length and girth.
"And these other lines?" Harriet said jabbing at her screen.
That's the screensaver again," Edward said. "Try jiggling the mouse a bit."
Harriet did and the heart rates returned. It was then she noticed the sixth line. It was all question marks.
"But this can't be right," she said, her fingers loosening the tie that was starting to feel constrictive around her neck. "According to these readings we've got an astronaut..." she paused again, more dramatically even than before, "trapped in space."
Chapter 10
Not only am I trapped in space, but so is all of this carbon monoxide. When I see my big round woman's face reflected in the curve of the glass bit on the front of my helmet - deformed so I look like the one with the big forehead out of Ant and Dec - I can see I'm going redder in the face. A classic sign of carbon monoxide poisoning if you check the NHS website, actually, so that's very realistic.
My red face could be something to do with the red carby-mono alarm lights as well, but that's also a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning, really. I might think that was funnier if I wasn't being poisoned to death by invisible gas right in front of my face. And I turned the alarm off because I was sick of typing beep at regular intervals in case you were wondering why it's not going beep all the time.
My space-suited body is still spinning slowly from being proper hoofed off the spaceship by that explosion. Half the time I'm looking back at the sweet, earthy planet I called home, though it's quite small from here in space. Just a pale-blue dot like in that photo taken by the Star Trek Voyager probe, but not as small because I'm a bit closer than it was.
It feels strange to be thinking that everyone in the world is over there. Well, everyone except me because I'm over here. And I'm not in the world. But all the other people out there are right in front of me... Now on my left... Now behind me... Now on my right. It's like the world is revolving around me - but literally, not meaning like I'm up my own arse or anything. That's quite profound, and maybe worth a literary prize? But I guess that also applies to someone rolling around of the ground, so maybe not as deep as I first thought.
As the pale blue dot swings round in front of me again I can't help but wonder what the people all the way over there are doing as I'm trapped out here in space. Probably making their dinner, walking in a park, hugging a loved one, doing a poo - not all at the same time though. I bet most of them aren't being poisoned by carbon monoxide. But not none of them.
Knowing I'm not alone in being poisoned in the solar system is little comfort. The people being poisoned on Earth are probably the result of poor seals in heating systems, or a malfunctioning cooking appliance, or that thing with a hosepipe in a car exhaust. Those are all reasonable explanations, but what is the explanation of my poisoning? Come on Randi, think!
This spacesuit doesn't have gas heating. It's all electric for obvious reasons I really shouldn't have to explain, so it can't be that. A malfunctioning cooker is even less likely, and I wouldn't even know where to get a hosepipe from, so none of those options.
A waft of oxygen drifts into my nose as my carbon dioxidey breath is probed by the sun. The rotation I'm experiencing is a blessing. Without it I might be facing mostly back at the Earth, which is nice to look at and philosophise about in a typical astronaut way, but any reflected sunlight from it is hardly going to be strong enough to break off oxygen. facing sunwardly half the time is...
Wait a minute, that's it! If I'm only facing the sun half of the time, then only half of the oxygen is going to be broken off the carbon dioxide. That's where the carbon monoxide is coming from. CO2 minus an O is CO. That's carbon monoxide 101.
Just as I think that the carbon monoxide light goes the reddest it can. Of course it does. Every time I face the sun I get a little more. If I hadn't muted it the beeping would probably be really bad. The solution is simple. I don't even need to think about the back story of other characters to solve this. I just need to slow my spinning down so every time I face the sun I do it for twice as long!
But without anything to push off, how am I going to spin slower? If only I was a talented author who can come up with amazing solutions that nobody else would think of. Maybe I'll figure it out in the next chapter I'm in? Probably using science.
Chapter 11
On board the Uvula things had gone from bad to worse to slightly less bad but still quite bad, to worse. The lights in the small space-kitchen were flickering and a soft alarm had gone off making a sound like Windows XP shutting down repeatedly. Laura Flamenco was trying to microwave some of her Spanish food in the space-microwave, but in zero gravity the little glass plate would just float around instead of spinning round, producing unevenly heated paella.
"Estoy fuera de la oficina en este momento," Laura mumbled under her breath, in her fiery European way, which meant "stupid microwave ruining my meal," but in Spanish.
Scooping the floating, spicy rice pieces from the interior of the microwave and into a bag was a messy business, but nobody had ever said that space-travel was going to be easy or clean. Laura heard Chuck Le Bruther pulling himself hand over hand into the cramped space-kitchen.
"Something smells nice," Chuck said jovially as he glided next to Laura.
"Por favor envíe los documentos para traducir al departamento de idiomas," Laura said, in Spanish.
"It's a good thing I can speak proper Spanish so I know that you just said that, on the list of all the other problems with the ship, you're going to have to add a broken space-microwave," Chuck explained.
"Yes Chuck, I did, though I should speak English from now on," Laura explained, sucking a mouthful of paella out of the bag, not just because English was the official language of NASA, but also because translation services are very slow to reply to emails.
Chuck opened one of the space-cupboards and took out a small paper packet. Carefully unwrapping the item within revealed a cheeseburger. It had been freeze-dried to survive the harsh environment of a space-cupboard for six months.
"The Captain ordered me to get something to eat," Chuck explained between crunchy mouthfuls of bun and meat. "I've been working on that list of problems you just mentioned in Spanish for the last 6 hours without a break."
"Keeping your mind off losing all of your stuff into space?" Laura asked, her tongue chasing a loose bit of yellow rice that had escaped her fiery European mouth as she spoke.
Chuck looked at that piece of rice, blown from Laura's mouth like all his stuff had been blown out of the spaceship, and he nodded. He had been trying to ignore that his stuff was gone, and that his bed was now just a rope to tie him to the wall of the habitation segment's hall with a sheet wrapped round him, and that they might not make it back to Earth, and that two of his fellow astronauts had been lost, one dead and one trapped, and that he suspected his daughter was gay but she didn't feel comfortable telling him even though he'd be absolutely fine with it really, it's not a big deal these days and anyway if she saw his internet search history she'd realise he was all for that sort of thing.
"The Captain, she did the same with me," Laura said, holding her hand in front of her mouth to stop any more paella being spat about the space-kitchen. "She said she would send the fourth crew member that hasn't featured yet along when we were finished. I hope they don't want anything heated through thoroughly, like the instructions on food usually say, because this space-microwave is jodida."
Chuck internally translated Laura's expletive as he crunched some cheese between his teeth. That was definitely not official NASA language, what with it being both Spanish and a swear.
"That reminds me," Chuck began.
"What reminds you what of what?" Laura asked past a cloud of rice bits.
"The next thing on my list is to service the space toilet. Captain Carlisle pointed out that despite there being a third less of us here, given everything that's happened our space toilet has taken a hell of a beating in the last few hours. Guts turning to water isn't just an expression you know?" Chuck asked rhetorically.
Laura nodded, "I know," she answered rhetorically, deciding that it might not be the right time for the chocolate mousse she'd been eyeing up as a dessert.
"Personally, I've wiped myself raw. And the more we eat the more we're going to..."
"Yes, I know," Laura interrupted, even more forcefully rhetorical this time.
"We just have to be aware of how we're stressing the systems unduly," Chuck mumbled humbly through a mouthful of meat crumbles.
Laura wasn't sure why she needed to be aware of how Chuck was unduly stressing the sanitary systems specifically, but now she was. She put the half-consumed bag of paella into the space fridge for later. Cold leftovers were unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as being made to picture Chuck's proctological ablutions.
"What's next on your list?" Chuck asked, trying to lighten the mood as Laura drifted towards the exit hole out into the main shaft of the Uvula. He hoped that the awkwardness of the last couple of minutes needn't be prolonged, and swiftly changing the subject would do the job.
"A magazine from your decompressed berth is wedged in the forward radar array and I need to find a way of getting it out," Laura said. "A publication featuring 'Fiery Spanish MILFs Laid Bare' I think," she added as she drifted out of sight.
"Oh." Prolonged it is.
To be continued...