by Jean Johnson
Shrugging, Maria handed it over. Brad snorted . . . and coughed, quickly covering his mouth to prevent droplets from spreading. He grimaced at his shirtsleeve afterward. “Ugh. Dammit. I can’t even change my shirt for another three and a half hours—don’t make me laugh again, dammit. I still can’t get the image out of my head of Robert trying to brush his teeth with your poi stuff, last week.”
“That’s what he gets for forgetting to replenish his own, then trying to root through my locker for more toothpaste. But I can be nice and fetch you a shirt before I put on my p-suit. After I eat,” Jackie offered, smothering a yawn. She carefully opened the resealable packet, mindful of the faint steam that streamed out and curled around, hovering in an odd way before it dispersed and faded. Pork and pineapple scent clung to the mouth of the packet, which meant she had to all but stick her nose in it for a sniff to be sure it smelled alright. It did. Sort of; it was hard to smell much, still. “It won’t delay the probe’s launch by that much more since we’re already delaying it for a midnight meal.”
Clipping her own pack to her station, still wrapped in the thermal cloth to keep it hot, Maria unzipped her coveralls and pulled out the other packets, also wrapped to keep their contents hot but easily handled. “Tonight’s selection of side dishes are peas and pasta in a thick crème sauce . . . brown and wild rice with molé sauce—that one is mine—and clam chowder.”
“You actually like the space molé?” Brad asked, skeptical. “And I want—”
“Chowder!” Jackie quickly interjected. “Dibs!”
“Dammit!” he swore, aiming a glare in her direction.
“You did claim the meat loaf for lunch,” Maria pointed out, juggling the unheated food packets she had brought along with the heated ones. “Each of us gets one dibs at a time. But if you like, you can have first crack at the dessert packet. Jackie, for cheeses, we have gouda . . . and two others, brie and . . . Colby-Jack.”
“Gouda.” She held out her hand, accepting the packet.
“Why should I even bother asking . . . Brie for you?” Marie asked Brad, adding a packet of mouth-sized crackers and a spoon for each of them to eat with. The solution to making crackers crumbless in space was to make them easily fit into a mouth whole. No outside-the-mouth bite, no problem in zero G.
“Please,” he agreed.
“Colby-Jack for myself . . . and now for dessert. Chocolate mousse, apple-pie innards, or fruit cocktail. Brad?”
“Fruit cocktail,” he said.
“Chocolate, Jackie?” Maria asked.
She shook her head, mouthful of pork in the way. Chewing quickly, she swallowed. “Not with this stuff. Apple, please.”
“Gracias, the mousse will go very well with my molé.”
Brad shook his head, muttering, “. . . Bootless.”
“Be nice to her,” Jackie countered mildly. As far as insults went, calling someone bootless wasn’t much. But still . . . “No calling her weird or cowardly. She’s our doctor, and can hide all the painkillers if something goes wrong.”
“Oh, and I thought you actually liked me,” Maria teased back. “See if I’ll dispense you any aspirin, for that.”
“Hey, even I know there’s no aspirin on board,” Brad countered. “It’s all non-blood-thinning stuff, to limit problems with cuts in space.”
“Eat your packets before they grow cold, amigos,” Maria ordered. “Leave the medical talk to me.”
Complying, Jackie chewed and swallowed. The barbecue pork was bland but chewable, the peas and pasta peppery but otherwise mushy. The chowder was rich and creamy, thick enough that it clung to the spoon and could almost be chewed, and the apple-pie innards—crust meant crumbs, and thus was not allowed—were actually good. She had plenty of water to drink at her station to wash it all down, but didn’t drink any since she was expected to climb into a pressure-suit for a good hour-plus. She wasn’t thirsty, so it was wise not to tempt her bladder.
Flattening the plexi packets when all three were through, Jackie took them with her back to the kitchen cabinets, where she placed them in the compactor. They would be extracted when the ship returned, boiled and pressure-washed to clean them—the sterilized, food-scrap-laden water would be cooled and shunted to the station’s aquaculture bays—and then the plexi would be treated with a special solvent that would collapse its polymer chains and allow them to be re-formed into new products in a near-endless loop of recyclability. Eventually, the polymer chains would break down, losing their molecular bonds, but even that could be reconstituted chemically into other things.
For now, packaging had to be as light and flat as possible. Spoons were reusable titanium, wiped clean with sanitation towelettes that went into a different compactor, and the spoons were tucked back into their carrying drawers, where they fit under elastic bands to hold them in place. As for personal cleanup . . . that meant using the bathroom facilities. The suction-cup thing hadn’t changed much in over two hundred years, but that was the trial and the trouble of weightlessness. At least cleanup was easy, and being vacuum, it eliminated the end result of drinking very easily. The other side of things . . . it worked awkwardly, but it worked. Thankfully, that wasn’t a problem this time.
But that did remind her of her duty to replace the fluids she had eliminated. The air of the ship was low in humidity, as was their base space station. Rehydration was an imperative. Drinks . . . well, the other two had drunk water at their stations. So had she, and so would she, when she was done with the hyperrelay launch. After wiping her hands clean and compacting those sanitation cloths, Jackie picked up a couple extra packets to replace the ones they had been using and ducked into the main crew cabin since she had one more thing to get before she could return.
Lars snorted and woke a little. He blinked at her in the dim lighting, mumbled a greeting, and relaxed back into sleep again. Robert and Ayinda kept sleeping, her thin dreadlocks and both sets of their arms drifting outward from head and shoulders.
Using her telekinetic abilities to dodge around them without brushing against either, Jackie found Brad’s locker and opened it, fetching out a clean bundle from the shirts compartment. She knew he wouldn’t particularly like her touching his things, but since everyone was packing their cabinets to military specifications, she didn’t have to rummage all over the place to find exactly what was needed. Every single locker was arranged the exact same way; only the sizes of garments and the rare few personal items, such as hairpins and ties, varied . . . but they were all kept in the same bins, position-wise.
Juggling his shirt and the collapsible water packs, she “dove” back the way she had come. Entering the cockpit, she passed the water bags and the shirt to Maria to distribute—knowing Colvers would feel more psychologically comfortable accepting it secondhand from the doctor—and received Brad’s used shirt in return from her fellow female. Garment in hand, she reversed course, this time to the side opposite the kitchen cabinets at the back of the crew quarters. As she left, she realized she hadn’t given Brad’s bared chest a second thought. Their conversation from that first trip to Barnard’s Star drifted through her mind.
Half-naked men—unless they had hang-ups or were only interested in other men—were often curious to know if a female thought they looked good. Particularly if they exercised enough to have good musculature. It was only Human nature; females liked to know the same thing. However, she had no interest in any part of Brad Colvers’ hide. He had nice muscles from an aesthetic point of view, but . . . like so many other males in Jackie’s life, he just wasn’t interesting beyond an aesthetic view.
Same with women. It wasn’t their fault; Jackie did find many males and even a few females attractive-looking. Aesthetically pleasing. Even arousing to look at. It was touching their thoughts that distracted and dismayed her . . . particularly that one idiot—she couldn’t even remember his name anymore—when she was a teenager, the one who had been thinking about making out with another girl while busy kissing and fondling her. Not exactl
y something she cared to repeat. Stuffing the shirt into a duffel meant for their dirty clothes, she started stripping out of her own garments, not entirely the easiest of tasks without gravity, oddly enough.
Emptying her pockets first, she put the pens and pocket tools into a mesh bag, along with her watch, trying not to move too much because it just felt too weird. Zero G did weird things to naked breasts, weirder even than floating weightless in a lagoon without a swimsuit, but she didn’t have a choice. The modern Space-Force-issued space suit was a pressure-suit. Not the kind with compressed air, bulky and awkward to move in, but rather, the moment it was exposed to vacuum, the thick, stretchy material swelled up and put pressure on every inch of one’s skin.
The trick was to ensure it was skin, not clothing; in true vacuum, pores and hair follicles tried to invert themselves, leaving an astronaut with an awkward, growing, uncomfortable prickling sensation. The highly advanced, foam-like material of the suit’s innermost layer filled in all those dimples first, as soon as the pressure dropped to one-quarter sea level on Earth. It then started firming in place in those pores at one-eighth. That meant being naked was the most comfortable way to go. It also meant, in the event of a pressure drop, one had to hurry to get into the things or suffer that prickly pore inversion until enough atmosphere could be regained to soften the foam.
Once her clothes were added to the laundry bag, Jackie opened the locker with the p-suits and pulled out one that was approximately her size. It came with an inverted-T-shaped piece that fitted around her breasts, filling in the space between and underneath for a more secure fit—if a man wanted to use the suit, he simply pulled the piece out, but hers had been custom-fitted for her. As the official communications officer for the crew, she was the one who had to be in a pressureless bay a couple times each system, to ensure the probes were activated and launched properly.
There were plans for larger, longer ships that could launch the probes via machinery yet still fit through a hyperrift tunnel, but for now, the Space Force had chosen the cheaper method of launching each one by hand. They were still trying to figure out how to get a better seal on the suits than they currently had, one that wouldn’t require quite so much huffing and puffing, tugging and grunting. Jackie kept thinking she was going to tear the semistretchy material if she pulled too hard, but a solid, long tug was needed to get her feet into the leggings and the leggings up into place.
By the time that was done, she had somersaulted twice and bumped off bulkheads and cabinet handles three times, until she gave up and used telekinesis to stabilize herself. Wiggling her hips into place, she pulled up the peach-lined, silvery-coated fabric. Jackie worked it up over her shoulders, first the right one, then the left, the one with her tattoo. The center of it was of the Psi League’s symbol of the Radiant Eye, surrounded by a trio of jacaranda blossoms, the flowers rendered in violet blue and the rest tattooed in black around her deltoid, including the three rows of outward-facing shark’s teeth surrounding the flower-draped Eye. Tattoos weren’t usually found on civil servants, but she was proud of the three Grey-thwarting missions each row represented. Covering it up was a necessity, however.
To do so, she had to tug her arms into the sleeves with yet more grunting, then adjusted the T-pad, and worked on pulling the edges together. Not because the suit didn’t fit—it did, unlike her uniform back at the beginning of the month—but because it was simply that tight a fit. The exterior was coated in a less-than-stretchy emulsion of powdered ceristeel, the same ferroceramic compound that coated the exterior of their ship.
It would protect her from overly hot starlight, zipping gas particles, and even allow her to retain body heat in the frigid depths of space for two-plus hours before endangering her vitals. It wouldn’t fare as well against a solar flare or an ion storm—a confluence of ejected stellar matter meeting up with an agitated planetary magnetic field—but beggars couldn’t be choosers. If she ever found herself in such dire straits, she might survive if she found shelter behind something, like a cargo-bay door . . . though ideally she wouldn’t take a spacewalk at all while a flare was passing through.
That gray layer was the final layer in a good six different materials, each of which had to be overlapped just so, and the belly-button nodule fitted into place just right. All of it fitted to cover her like a second skin, if a padded second skin. The research scientists kept promising improvements in the p-suit materials, things that would make it faster and easier to don, but Jackie wasn’t going to hold her breath—gravity would actually help in donning the awkward things, but nobody had yet figured out how to make it artificially, outside of giant spinning wheels.
Pressing hard to seal each layer of the seams, she sealed the suit to the O-ring section at the top of the garment, made sure all the connections were tight, then pulled out the rebreather pack and connected its hoses to her helm. One-way valves delivered oxygen-laden air to the bubble, and accepted carbon-dioxide-soaked air for scrubbing and recycling.
There was only a small pack of water with a thin sipping straw in the helm, just enough to wet the mouth once in a while, because this wasn’t a suit designed for long-term use. For those, they had the more bulky air-pressurized suits, which came with water, emergency food, cooling units, and so forth. Frankly, Jackie had been told over and over during her first round in the military that the p-suits were for light labor use and emergencies that could be fixed within minutes. Hard labor was handled either by drones or hardsuit repair pods that could be lived in for hours, even a day or two. Anything in between could be handled by spacing out the repairs . . . and anything that needed longer than that, they were as good as dead.
Not a cheerful thing to hear, but that was the Space Force, bluntly honest about the risks. After one got in. Shrugging into the rebreather pack, she buckled it between her legs, over her shoulders, and around her waist. A careful adjustment of the helm socketed it in place, and a firm twist aligned the faceplate with her front-looking view, sealing helm to suit. The back was covered in ceristeel to help reduce unseen impacts and stellar radiation, and the front had a tinted shield that could be kept down for more protection, or raised if face-to-face communication or nontinted inspection was needed.
The helmet contained not only the water pack, visor, and air hoses, it also contained a miniature computer that inflated the helmet, then tested it for leaks. Seeing her heads-up display blinking green, Jackie nodded. With the pickups that monitored her face, she blink-coded the comm system on. “Jackie to the cockpit, can you hear me?”
“We can hear you,” Maria responded. “Suit telemetry is online, all systems looking green.”
“Confirmed,” Jackie agreed. She closed the door to the p-suit locker—and yelped as the ship jerked, struck by something. “What the . . . ?”
The three sleeping in the next cabin down the passage snorted awake. The ship jolted again, and Jackie found herself tugged portward. Her fingers didn’t have a good grip on the handle, and she tumbled free. Instinct tightened her telekinesis around her in a bubble, bouncing her off the far cabinets twice before she could extend invisible braces. The others were still caught up in their sleeping bags, dangling sideways by momentum but otherwise unharmed thanks to the positional bungees.
“All hands on deck!” Brad snapped. “All hands on deck! I have no idea how this happened, but there’s another ship out there, and it’s huge! It’s grappled us with cables and is reeling us in!”
“Get me a visual!” Jackie ordered. “Brad, get me a visual!”
“Dammit!” he swore over the intercom. “I can’t fire the thrusters; one of the grapples latched onto the nose cone! We try to pull out of it, it’ll damage the OTL, and we won’t be able to get anywhere.”
“What’s the configuration on that ship?” Robert called out, crawling out of his sleeping bag faster than the other two. Clad in undershorts, a tee shirt, and socks, he should have looked ridiculous floating through the cabin, but somehow he didn’t. Palming the intercom, h
e repeated himself. “Lieutenant, report—what is the configuration of that ship? Is it the Greys?”
“Negative, it’s no ship I’ve ever seen before. Five lobes, orange running lights, odd beige hull . . .”
“Could I please get a visual on my heads-up display?” Jackie asserted, aggravated. Robert bumped into one of her force lines, blinked in shock, and gripped the solidified air for a moment, using it to push himself toward the cockpit. Belatedly, she released the field with a flex of her mind and pushed off the port wall. They still had relative zero gravity, but the ship was being hauled sideways around them, which meant navigating by floating had suddenly turned a bit tricky.
“I have it!” she heard Maria reply. Her HUD flashed, projecting a field of stars and a very strange ship, very non-Grey in its architecture. Five lobes was right, but they poked in different directions like a caltrop, rather than like a flat star, with no hint of aerodynamic aesthetics.
“That’s definitely not Grey,” Jackie asserted over the link.
Blink-coding her helmet to release its locks, she reached up and twisted it free, shutting off the rebreather pack to conserve power and oxygen. Since her helmet was now powered off, she rolled onto her side, oriented herself, and pushed off into the main crew cabin to look for a spare over-the-ear headset. Lars had two in his hands and passed her one as soon as she slowed to a stop in front of him. Nodding in thanks, she twisted hers on and waved Lars past her.
With the helmet dangling off her back, she was not the most graceful of crew members right now, even counting Robert in his socks. “Confirmed, that is not a Grey ship.”
“Are you sure?” Brad challenged her over the earpiece.
“I’ve faced down three of them and chased them off, two of them from a very close and personal distance. That’s why I have the three rings of shark’s teeth guarding my Radiant Eye and its jacaranda flowers,” she explained. “Three times, I’ve defended the Sol System from those buggers, and that’s definitely not them.”
