Sunspots and Forever Dark Omnibus

by Gary Martin

  “Figured as much,” Kerry says. “John, I think we better suit up then.”

  Fucking hell fucking hell fucking hell.

  “I've never done a spacewalk in my life,” I say.

  “But you must have done the zero-gravity simulator in your basic training, right?”

  “No. My training was rushed. I only got a few days. I get the feeling they missed out a lot of the important stuff.”

  “You're telling me. Fucking hell John, is there anything you can actually do on this ship?”

  “… No, not really, no,” I say, lowering my head. Kerry just stares at me for a few seconds, and then looks me up and down.

  “Well, at least you're honest.”

  22

  We head back up to the rec deck, and open one of the storage lockers in the cargo bay. Kerry passes me an old white spacesuit, which looks pink in the emergency lighting.

  “Looks about your size, John, get in and I'll zip you up.”

  I put the suit on apprehensively and she tightens, straps and zips everything up for me. Robert limps into the cargo bay and does the same for Kerry. He then moves to the next locker along and gets out a helmet and starts to attach it to my suit. I hold my breath and the helmet locks into place. The suit is now completely airtight. He turns a valve and the air starts pumping through. I let myself breathe slowly, and notice the air has a horrible metallic taste to it. I feel very claustrophobic with the helmet on, but try and keep myself level-headed. When Robert is finished with Kerry, he limps back into the locker and grabs a four-metre-long tether and clips it to us, and points to the forward-most escape pod airlock.

  “John, if we're using the airlock without the escape pod, I’m gonna need you to type in the override code.” He sounds distant and weirdly compressed through the helmet. I turn and walk past the escape pods, and over to the panel and try to type in my code, but the gloves are too thick and I keep hitting two or three keys at once.

  “Can't do it, I've got fat fingers with the gloves on. You'll have to.”

  “What's the code then? Or is it a shift manager secret?” he asks.

  I really thought everyone had their own codes. Letting only the shift manager have the codes seems awfully dangerous and stupid to me. What if they went missing?

  “It's November, Charlie, Charlie, one, eight, six, four,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes, types it in and the round airlock door hisses open.

  “Once you two are out there, you're on your own. With communications down, there's no way to contact you until you're back. You will be able to talk to each other through the suit’s intercom, the on/off switch is on your chest. Honestly though, good luck you guys, hopefully you'll find some good news over there,” he says and pats our shoulders.

  Kerry looks over to me. I'm feeling tense, and she can see it. She holds out her hand. I grab it without a thought, and we walk to the airlock hand in hand.

  “John, you see the glowing little green square on your wrist?” she says through the suit’s intercom. I nod.

  “Well that lets you know how much solar radiation the suit, therefore you, have absorbed. Starts green, and then goes a nice amber.”

  “So … amber means dead, right?” I ask.

  “Nope. Red means fuckin' dead. Amber only means nearly fuckin' dead.”

  “Right. Thanks for clearing that up. How long before we're dead then?”

  “No idea this close to the Sun. For all I know it'll go red straight away. It should be fine though, there are jet-injectors in the hangar’s control room with some sort of fancy anti-radiation medicine that should stabilise us if we absorb an amber amount,” she says and smiles.

  “Very reassuring. Have you ever done this? I mean walked on the hull of the ship before?”

  “Once, about five years ago; it's a fuckin' doddle. There's a handrail along the side that goes all the way up to the front of the ship, well, hangar, and then you climb a ladder onto the top, and then you're at the other airlock. No big deal.”

  I let out a small sigh of relief. That didn't sound all that bad. At least there'll be something to hold on to the whole way.

  I hear the door shut behind us and tense up again. Suddenly a loud hissing noise fills the little room and I find myself leaving the deck as the artificial gravity dissipates. My feet start moving upwards, and my head starts moving backwards. I squeeze Kerry's hand tightly in panic, and she manages to stop me from turning upside down. The outer doors then slowly open and, for the first time ever, I get to see the stars and cosmos with my own eyes. Or at least as close as it's possible to without exploding. For a split second, I'm in complete awe at the majesty of it. But the stars are spinning in a circular motion anti-clockwise, round and round, and the motion starts to turn my stomach. The awe quickly turns to nausea, and the feeling is ruined. The last thing I want is little chunks of sick floating around in my helmet, so I look down at the deck and hope the feeling goes away.

  “Okay, John. Follow me.” Kerry’s voice inside my helmet makes me jump; I hadn’t noticed that it had become so silent.

  She lets go of my hand, grabs the right-side handrail and moves herself towards the outer door. She puts her left arm outside the ship, moves it upward, then swings herself out. I float there, helpless and unable to move. I try to reach the rail, but have no way of propelling myself forward. The tether between us gets tighter and I get pulled out towards the spinning stars. Once out of the door I try and grab the handrail above it but miss and start floating away from the ship.

  “I've missed the handrail, Kerry! Shit, hold on tight or I'll pull you off too,” I say.

  “No worries, John, I won't let go.”

  The tether gets to its full length and, with a hard jolt that feels like it may rip through my spacesuit, I stop dead. I just float there for a few seconds. I then slowly start to pull myself in. I unwisely venture a look at the hull. Oh, fucking hell. Kerry is next to a four or five metre gap between the main hull and the hangar, caused by the crash and the bent housing. I hope Kerry has a plan to cross it. I then look down the rest of the hangar and visually try to follow the line of the handrail to the front of the ship. It goes on for about around ten to fifteen metres before it gets cut off by the first of hundreds of different shaped solar panels that cover the entire ship.

  “Kerry … when you did this before, was it before or after the solar panels started getting installed?”

  “Why's that?” she asks and looks down the hull. “Oh my fucking God … I'd say before, then.”

  This wasn't going to be a doddle. It was now a seventy-metre weightless assault course full of jagged pieces of metal, with no handholds on a ship that is trying its best to spin us off it.

  “Any bright ideas?” I ask.

  “Only this one: hold on tightly.”

  She pushes herself off the handrail and heads across the gap towards the rail on the hangar, but she judges it wrong and starts moving upwards and above me as the ship spins. The tether jolts her as it reaches its limit.

  “Oh, fuck it,” she mutters. She ends up behind me and grabs the rail.

  “Your turn,” she grins. “When you push off, aim below the rail.”

  I look at her, then look across the gap, and just push myself off and do what she says, aiming low. If I'd stopped to think about what I was doing I would have frozen up. I float past the gap and the rail is ahead but above me. The angle feels right and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to grab it with no trouble. The tether starts to feel like it's tightening, and for a second I think that maybe it's not long enough, but it loosens and I grab the rail with ease.

  “John, hold on tight,” Kerry shouts, and I look back towards her. She's off the hull and floating out into space. I hold on tightly as the tether once again reaches its limit and she pulls herself in.

  “That was a bit scary,” she says.

  “Did you let go before I'd grabbed the rail?” I ask.

  “Had to, I realised the tether wasn't long enough. You look
ed like you were going to make it, but not if the tether pulled you back, so I pushed out too.”

  “Fucking hell, that was risky. I'm glad you didn't say anything.” I look down the hull, and then back at Kerry. “I guess we should proceed?” I say.

  We move forward down the port side of the ship until we get to the first solar panel. It's about half a metre off the hull, on metal legs that fortunately for us are on its edges, so they're easy to use as handholds, and we make quick work of it. The next one isn't going to be so easy. It's flat against the hull, and whatever company decided to put it there also decided to cut the handrail to put it in place. There's no obvious way to cross it. It's about ten metre square, and a lot longer than the tether. I look up, and see that the panel above us is raised, but I can't see above that as the port side of the hull then banks off at a forty-five-degree angle for about fifteen metres before it flattens out for the top.

  “I think the only way is up, there's no way we're crossing that panel.” I say.

  Kerry looks along the hull, then up.

  “There's not really any other option then, is there?” she replies.

  I'm holding onto the edge of the panel we've just crossed. Kerry pushes herself up and grabs hold of the panel above. When it looks like she's got a firm grip, I do the same, leap-frogging over her and grabbing hold of the far edge of the panel. She pulls herself to my position and we can see over the edge.

  All the panels on the forty-five seem to be raised, and it looks like there are plenty of handholds. But that's only for the fifteen metres before it banks again.

  We continue to leap-frog each other, grabbing anything to hold us steady, and slowly make our way to the next edge. Once we get there, we look onto the vastness that is the top of the hangar. I see it from the bridge pretty much every day, but had never considered that one day I’d be spacewalking on it. It looks like more of the same: solar panels of all different shapes, sizes and heights, seemingly put there at random. We should be able to cross it without too much difficulty, I reckon, if we continue doing what we've been doing.

  “John, can you have a look at your radiation monitor for me?” Kerry asks, so I look at my left wrist.

  “Yeah, it's a sort of a green-brown at the moment; I guess that means it's moving into amber. We're about quarter of the way there, so I think that seems about right, probably.”

  “Mine’s bright orange,” she says. A cold chill goes through my body. “There's no way I'm going to make it.”

  “Maybe the light's not working properly?”

  “No John. It's working fine,” she says, far too calmly.

  “But we're wearing the same sort of suit, how can the exposure be different?” I ask.

  “I put yours on, and Robert put mine on. I should have double-checked everything. I'm not going to make it John, the light is almost red. I'll be dead in minutes. You'll have to go on without me.”

  I stare at her, eyes wide. I'm trying my best to stop myself breaking down. I'm beginning to well up when a terribly stupid idea pops into my head.

  “Follow me.” I shout. “I'm not letting you die out here. I'm getting you inside the hangar before that thing turns red. It's time to do something a little bit reckless.”

  23

  I climb on to the first solar panel I come to on top of the hangar, and work my way around the edge until I'm holding on just in front of it, facing the bow of the ship. Kerry moves beside me.

  “Now hold my hand,” I tell her. She puts her right hand in my left. “When I say go, use your legs and push off the edge of the panel as hard as you can.”

  “Are you fucking mental? The bow of the ship will disappear underneath us as it spins round, and we'll be left floating …”

  She stops and then looks at me with a shocked expression, and I can see she understands what I'm planning. I finish her sentence.

  “… Left floating until the ship spins a full one eighty back to us. By that point we should be far enough ahead to grab on underneath the bow. In theory, anyway.”

  “You're a fucking idiot, this won't work,” she says, “but thank you.”

  I wait until the Sun comes up directly ahead of us, and use it as a giant target so we don’t shoot off in the wrong direction.

  “Go!”

  We both push off with as much force as we can, and move forward steadily above the hangar, narrowly missing a solar panel. The hull below us quickly starts moving downward and then out of our view. For about ten seconds it feels like we're the only ones out here, alone in space and hurtling towards the Sun at around one hundred and forty thousand kilometres per hour. With nothing small enough ahead to use as a reference point, it feels like we're not moving at all.

  Suddenly the bridge and crew area at the stern start to overtake, barely ten metres below us. It spins forward and around and we can see the three huge boosters, now cold and dark, and then the whole underside of the ship.

  “When the bow comes back around, try and grab a hold of whatever you can. There are four refuelling tubes on the front of the housing, so there should be stuff everywhere to grab on to. Hopefully we'll be okay. If I remember correctly, and I know that doesn't bode well, there should be a load of handholds either side of the giant space door at the bow that should lead up somewhere close to the airlock. We're also gonna have to turn around, or we won't be able to see anything to grab onto,” I say.

  She squeezes my hand lightly in acknowledgement, and I can see that she's looking very pale. With my left arm, I pull her towards me until we're facing each other.

  “Kerry, with your left hand, grab hold of my right hand, and then let go with your right.” Sluggishly, she moves her left hand. When I feel it touch mine, I grab hold of it tightly and let go with my left hand. We move apart and are now facing the opposite way, and the underside of the rapidly approaching bow.

  “Are you ready?” I ask, but I don't get a reply. I notice that her hand has gone limp, and I'm now the only one holding on. I look down at her radiation monitor and my heart sinks. It's bright red.

  There's no time to think about it as the bow gets closer and closer, so I let go of her as it bears down on us. I hold my arms out and try to grab on to something, anything. But I miss everything as it passes by. The handholds next to the space door are less than a metre away from my grasping hands as they speed past. I can then see the top of the hangar deck again as the last rung passes by out of my reach. I know that was the only chance I had. The next time the ship spins back to this position we'll probably be ten to fifteen metres ahead of it with no hope of getting back on board. Fuck.

  Suddenly my tether starts to get tight and the ship doesn't seem to be moving downwards anymore. I look down, and see that by a miracle Kerry has managed to grab hold of one of the last handholds. Thank fuck. I realise that she probably had to use her last bit of strength to do it, so I pull myself towards her as quickly as I can before she lets go. I grab hold, and look at her pale face.

  “I knew you'd fuck that up,” she whispers, forcing a half-smile. She closes her eyes and I know I have no time to lose. I climb up to the edge and onto the top of the hangar. The handholds carry on flat across it up to the airlock's hatch. I look back and see that Kerry has let go and is floating unconscious behind me.

  Rung by rung I pull myself towards the hatch, knowing that it's too late for her, knowing that there's no way to save her now, but I'm still clinging on to a small sliver of hope that the jet-injectors will save her.

  I get to the hatch and pump the handle a few times and then turn the wheel on top of it one-handed. It opens without a sound, and I climb down into the airlock. Once I'm in, I carefully pull Kerry down through the hatch and then close it behind her. I move down to the control panel by the door and type in the code to turn air and gravity back on. Luckily with this control panel, someone has had the foresight to make the buttons big enough to use with chunky gloves on. I move Kerry down onto the deck plate so when the gravity generator starts up she doesn't drop
and smash the glass on her helmet, not that that really matters now, I guess. There's a quiet humming noise and I start to feel myself slowly move downwards until my feet are back on the deck. We've only been outside for about twenty minutes, but everything feels so much heavier than it did when we set out. I can barely stand up and hold the weight of my spacesuit. I'm expecting the green light to come on, so we can get on board the hangar, but it stays red. I look at the display on the panel, and it says no oxygen is being pumped through. Can anything else go wrong, for fuck’s sake? Without the pressure being equalised, the door will never open and we'll be stuck in this tiny shitty airlock. But then, as I'm beginning to think the worst, the light turns green and the door does open. I look at the display again, and it still reads no oxygen. Oh, fuck it. The reason the door has opened is because the pressure was already equalised. There is no air on board the hangar. The crash must have knackered the tanks somehow. This is going to make things much more difficult.

  With a lot of effort, I manage to drag Kerry out of the airlock and on to the upper gangway. I untether myself from her, and awkwardly try and run to the thruster control room, which is quite difficult in a spacesuit.

  Once in, I look around for a first-aid box or something that would hold the injectors, but with the flickering emergency lighting it's hard to see anything. There's nothing in here and I turn to leave and look somewhere else when I spot a lit-up red box on the same wall as the door. I open it up and tip the contents onto the console and spot what I'm looking for. A smaller rectangular box that has a radiation symbol with a cross running through it printed on the side. I grab it, and run back to where I left Kerry. My hands are shaking as I open the box and remove one of the jet-injectors. I quickly glance at the instructions printed on the inside and click the safety catch off. I press it to her arm, and notice that she doesn't seem to be breathing anymore. I pull the trigger, and with a quiet hiss it administers the dose. I pray it's powerful enough to get through all the layers of a spacesuit. I wait a minute or so, and nothing.