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
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.
To be continued...