Darkness. It’s always the first thing I see.

The edge of the airlock marks the end of my world and beyond it, the vast stretch of the abyss. Ahead of me are thick LED borders, black and yellow stripes and a sign that reads:

Danger! Do not open until the airlock has sealed behind you!

I gulp and breathe out, and the sound of it echoes within my helmet. To be sure, I check behind me. A solitary round light illuminates green around the quarantine lock: all clear.

Before I reach for the lever, I stop.

“Right…” I exhale, tapping down on my wrist. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Welcome,” a cold synthetic voice greets, “please complete your site preliminary report before leaving the ship.”

“Okay,” I begin. “My name is Ark’Onus of the Eridas Deck. Age: nineteen. Sex: male. I’m a designated repair tech, level 3 clearance. EV certified. Reason for EV: repair of the outer hull of the Nautilus-generation ship. We’re currently floating by the Perseus-Pisces Supercluster. Reason for repairs, uh… meteor impacts. Investigation ongoing.”

There’s a pause, and a faint luminous orange light blinks from my wrist.

“Form incomplete,” the voice in my helmet reminds me. “Please indicate the exact date.”

“Oh…” I reply. “It’s the fourteenth of Tyrras, 5034 CE… 1607 hours.”

A tiny blue flashing light blinks in the far right-hand corner of my visor. It reflects in my line of sight a distorted image of my misty dark cobalt-blue eyes and loose strands of my charcoal-brown hair.

As I move away from the hatch and closer to the release console, my reflection fades away.

My heart weighs heavy as I stare at the release console.

“Come on, damn it, quit stalling,” I whisper.

The echo of each breath I blow out gets louder. My cheeks burn hot, and while my arm steadily hovers over the lever that will open the maw out into space, my chest constricts tightly.

Oh, man. Okay…

My hand flips a red lever to my right, and for a second, the sound of a faint ‘pop’ erupts from outside the safety of my baggy spacesuit. The sliding door that lets in the vacuum of space seems to retract so quickly it looks like it just… disappears.

Up and over. Every second I waste is another second I have to spend out here…

Lifting one magnetised boot in front of the other, I step out over what appears like the edge into absolutely nothing… and then it happens. The artificial-grav from the ship lifts, and right after, I’m struck by a nauseating surge of vertigo.

Up and down have no more meaning, and the only thing anchoring me to my world is my magnetised boots. As I take one heavy step away from the exit, my stomach does a backflip. It’s hard to get my bearings back without throwing up my lunch.

My feet carry me toward a wrecked patch of hull that got torn up in the last meteor scattering. As I hold a normally very heavy drill with one hand, my sweaty palms worsen the sensation of the rough fabric inside my gloves.

The more I grip the handle of my drill, tensing my fingers, the more a raw itch spreads across my hands.

I try to breathe deeper, seeing a thin layer of condensation creep its way around the periphery of my visor. My chest tightens, and I frantically mash my fingers against the console on my forearm to heat the fog blocking my line of sight.

Calm down, Ark… it’s not the first time you’ve been outside, and it won’t be the last.

One foot up, one foot down.

Sealed.

Safe.

One foot up, one foot down.

Sealed.

Safe.

The crackle of the comms squawks in my ear, and it throws me off. It’s bad enough when the foreman gives a command and you can’t see him… but it’s nothing compared to the sinking sensation you get when there’s static.

Could it be solar interference from a nearby star? The last meteor shower must have done more damage than we thought… I mean, the last one dinged up the outer panels from marble-sized pellets. But the bridge’s report shows that the electrical wires are all torn to hell, and just short of the quadrant above the artificial-grav generator. A close call, no doubt about it.

I try to plant my left foot on the hull, there’s nothing underfoot. An icy-sharp pain wracks my chest as my body drifts away from the moving ship. I drop my drill, still tethered to a thick metal strap on my belt, and scramble for the lead anchoring me to the ship. For a second, there’s a slackness in the tether. My breaths become quicker and panicked.

“Uhhh!” I yelp. No one’s close enough to respond, and my heart beats faster and harder.

Like a rug being torn from under me, I hover above the ship as it speeds up below me. One second, two seconds, and then… I exhale deeply as my tether jerks as it tenses. Gods…

Sealed.

Safe… for now.

The harness on my suit catches the floating drill, dangling from my belt like the tail of a drifting comet…

“…and if we clear up by four, I won’t have to look at your ugly ass either!” a familiar voice barks.

The comm static clears, and through the small lighting on my helmet, it shines on the boots of one of my crew.

“Ark?” our foreman, Yan’s gruff voice calls. “What the hell are you doing?”

“L-lost my footing,” I manage, getting back to my feet again. His face isn’t visible, but his helmet cocks slightly to the right.

“Glad you’re safe. Now, if you’re done screwin’ around, we need your hands.”

“Aye, sir!”

As I reel in my drill, I can’t ignore the change in my foreman’s voice.

Yan contains his giant six-and-a-half-foot form and copper red hair within the confines of his baggy spacesuit. His gruff voice matches his no-bullshit demeanour: hands on his hips, helmet visor peering down at me. He’s always been firm but fair, and today is no exception. I can’t make out the details of his face when I look up, but I hear how pissed he is.

Of course…

With drill in hand, I carefully approach the damaged quadrant. The dossier report in my helmet’s tiny screen lists off electrical shorts and tile insulation damage. A quick job, but still dangerous.

My helmet illuminates the faded chrome panel ahead, and each screw I undo quickly floats right into my hand. The last one, however, is halfway stripped and refuses to budge.

“Come on…”

I hear a soft tink and see the screw prone against my visor. My left hand shakes as I reach for it, and as I do, I’m scanning my helmet for a crack. A small tear. Anything.

After the twentieth time I search, it all checks out. My breathing finally slows as my hand comes down. I’ve only been out here for a few minutes and nervous sweat already beads down my face. I crouch down. The drill doubles as a fabricator, re-stitching insulation fibres back together.

As I take my eyes off of my work site for a moment, Yan walks past my field of vision as he inspects the others’ work. Every once in a while, he reappears, stops, and peers out toward the lower aft of the ship. What’s he staring at?

I come back to the panel, and I seal up the wires with a smaller soldering tool.

Mission complete.

My hands shake with the vibrations of the drill, and the metal panel seals back up at my feet.

I hear the hurried inhale and muffled exhale of my breath. When I’m inside the ship, the sound of my tools, the surrounding people, and the chatter of other crew members are commonplace.

But out in the vacuum of space, it’s different.

The sounds of my instruments, normally very loud inside the ship, become nonexistent out here, and in the moments when no one is talking on the comms, the silence itself is deafening. It’s … eerie.

The vibrations of my drill stop; the sudden thud of my magnetic boots clings to the outer hull, and the echoes of the chatter from the comms jostle my eardrums, shocking them awake.

I scan my surroundings, and out of my peripheral vision, I see there are other people working on repairs to the same stretch of hull. Beyond that, I don’t see much from the lit tubing inside my visor. Only a small area of one square meter is visible on the ground. Now that the work is done, all the nerve endings in the back of my neck settle, and a welcome calm settles over me.

I’ve got time – and far more of it than the other repair techs.

I reach down to my wrist and press a small blue button, turning off my helmet light. The ground below me goes dark. As I look up, I catch my breath. That once black canvas gives way to a startling array of stars. Like someone drew an inspired brushstroke across the abyss, creating twinkling spheres and faraway galaxies. They reveal themselves in different shades of luminous colour, and the closest stars fly by quickly.

It’s a single moment of calm in a chaotic ocean fraught with peril.

“Report in!” Yan barks.

I gasp, snapping out of my trance and fumble to switch my helmet light back on, sinking the universe back into darkness.

“Lemme hear some good news,” he grumbles.

“Quadrant 4, complete.”

“Quadrant 2, complete.”

“Quadrant 3, c-complete,” I say, voice wavering.

“Ugh. Quadrant 1, in progress.”

Ohhh… no two words bring on nervous sweats more than ‘in progress’ when out on the hull.

“Gods, man, you taking a nap over there?” Priam jabs.

“Oh, yeah, dozed right off!” Kai says, crouched over Quadrant 1. “Just saw a mess of wires and thought ‘hey, now’s a great time to do fuck-all.’ The hell do you think I’ve been doing?! Take a look for yourself!”

Each section, or quadrant, is four meters by four meters, each next to one another in a square. My light, as well as everyone else’s, focuses on Quadrant 1.

And Kai wasn’t kidding. No wonder it’s still in progress: a giant charred hole bore the impact of a thousand tiny meteor fragments. Sure, the tiny pellets are a good source of pure mineral ore, but true to his words, there are dozens of frayed wires and two broken pipes below the thick metal of the hull. If the meteors had gone deeper, it’s what all of us techs would call a really bad day.

“Shit. It’s going to take another hour to get this patched…” Kai groans over the comms.

“Better than getting hit with another shower,” Yan barks. “Now batten down! All hands to Quadrant 1, on the double! Priam, get in there with some copper, and, Ark, you an’ Kai start soldering!”

More time out in space means only one thing: the chance of something going wrong goes up.

Anything from running out of oxygen to a tool that breaks or the spike in adrenaline that can make you do something real stupid. The list goes on… and it sucks for the entire team. Everyone’s affected, not just the one tech, and it’s why every second counts.

“We’ll need the fabricator on the bottom left. Insulation’s all torn to shit.” An unfamiliar feminine voice adds. They must be a new transfer.

Their voices are muffled, and I can’t make out each tech’s face. The only three that stand out are Kai, crouched over a gas main; Priam, with a wheel of copper wire; and Yan, standing by over the site. As I take a knee and lend Kai my fabricator, Yan’s luminous helmet scans over our work, and he motions back toward a fixed point in the sky. Again, what’s caught his attention seems far afield from the stretch of the ship, and as much as I want to ask, I know better. It falls in line with the two commandments of the crew:

You don’t question the chain of command, and

If you take care of the ship, it will take care of you.

“Damn it!” Kai groans. “The drill bit’s stuck! Anyone got a wedge?”

“Hang on, you can use—” I say as a sudden tremor quakes beneath me. I peer down, and there’s a two-by-two-metre divot in a panel outside the quadrant.

Then another tremor. Then another.

“Meteors!” Yan cries, leap-running in what would look like slow-motion inside the ship. “Shields up!”

I hit my right wrist as hard as I can, activating my Vinár-class multi-tool and stinging the bones underneath. Metal unfurls from my wrist, fanning out into a circular shield. It covers me completely as I stare at the ground. My left arm trembles and shakes against the coming debris, and all I can hear is static again.

The comms are dead.

I spin my head; my neck jerks as the dread thud of space rocks collides with the outer hull and rattles my bones. The rest of my crew cower below their shields, same as me.

In front of me, Kai inches toward the open gas main, trying to protect it from getting hit.

Too late.

A meteor strikes two meters from my position and collides with the gas main, and all of it appears like it’s happening in slow motion. Much like Yan’s sprint across the hull.

The impact.

Followed by a brief yet powerful explosion.

Kai shoots like a missile into the abyss. The pressurized gas sends him flying, his tether extends into the void, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

Seconds painfully stretch to minutes. I don’t look away… because if I do, I’m afraid I’ll lose him forever. And in this last fleeting moment, from what I see, Kai has only a few moments left before his frayed tether snaps.

I have to do something.

“Man overboard!” I cry over the comms as time speeds up again.

No reply.

Only static.

I leap up and dash toward Kai’s anchor, and I attach my tether to his lead.

Gods, I’m dumb…

I switch off the shield on my wrist, hook the drill to the hull, and disengage the magnetism from my boots. I spring down in a squat and ready myself to jump.

It’s now or never!

“Aaah!” I shout, springboarding myself upward.

The ship continues moving, so instead of jumping vertically, both he and I are banking at forty-five degrees.

Suddenly, it happens.

His tether snaps.

My hands clumsily grapple his lead as it sputters away, and as I do, Kai stops.

My right arm jerks, and the loose motion of my ball joint makes me think that it’s torn out of its socket. Like thousands of knives have pierced my shoulder, a sharp radiating pain almost takes the wind out of me. Like before, my stomach quickly flips.

“Ugh…!” I groan.

Wide-eyed, I feel tears stream down my face as my mouth hangs open. Kai’s suspended in the abyss, his arms outstretched.

He’s not floating away. I made it in time… thank the gods…

“…Ark!” Priam cries in the chamber of my helmet. “Ark! Where the hell are you?!”

“Holy shit!” another voice cries out. It sounds like Kai.

“Hey,” I say between gasps, my mouth dry and chest burning, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

I tie his tether to mine, right arm in searing agony… but I ensure my words aren’t an empty promise.

“Ark! W-what the hell happened?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’re getting you down. Just hold on tight…”

As the words leave my mouth, they sound serenely calm… but everything in my head has gone to shit. But I can’t let him know. That’ll mess with his head, and right now, we need to get back down.

“Do. Not. Move,” Yan cautions. “We’re reeling ya both in.”

I take a moment and realise Kai and I are being drawn back to the ship. As we inch lower, I seriously struggle to keep my arm at my side. When it drifts off into the nothingness of space, it twists at the socket in my shoulder… like if it were being crushed in a vice. While I can shift it a little, every time is hellish…

“Aye, sir.” The words tumble out of my mouth.

At last, my feet touch the metal panels of the hull.

Secure.

Safe.

Priam’s separates me from Kai, and he scans me over with a medical wand. I’m close enough to his visor to make out the details of his face… and he looks like he’s seen a ghost.

“Y-you saved him!” he says, the medic’s wand wobbling in his outstretched hand, “How the hell’d you do that?! How’d your arm not rip off?!”

“I… uh…” My words tumble out.

I struggle to stand as a sharp pang of guilt hits my chest.

“Luck,” I lie, shrugging. “Can’t be anything else.”

He doesn’t answer… but instead, his helmet shifts to the side. As I get back more blood flow to my feet and hands, the pain gets worse.

“What… what were you thinking?” Priam asks me, breathless and questioning my sanity.

“I couldn’t just let him die!” I finally say, frantic and defensive. “I-I mean, you’d do the same for me, right?!”

“No, I wouldn’t have…” he said with a faint sigh of resignation.

The hell? Did he really say that?

It might’ve been too faint for the untrained ear, but not for someone jacked up on adrenaline. Like when I trained on the mats inside the ship, all of my senses heighten as my heart beats faster. I wished I heard differently, but the way Priam’s helmet lowered gave it away. I think it must have slipped, but the damage is already done. My eyes sting thinking about it…

Yan drags me to the side, startling me as he grips the loose fabric of my suit, pulling me away from Priam. And as I’m drawn in, the rest of the crew tend to Kai.

“You crazy, stupid, arrogant asshole!” he says. “Do you realise what you just did?!”

I shake my head, wordless and shaky. Pissed. All I can do, in my simple state of mind, is point upward with my left hand. All of it crashes down on my head: the pain, Kai, Priam, and now Yan… my whole body shakes, and a creeping cold spreads through my hands.

“That’s right,” Yan stresses, “you saved his ass from oblivion! Recklessly! You jumped off the bloody ship like a maniac! What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Tether.”

“Right…” he begins. “Get yourself looked at… an’ like I said, I’m glad you’re okay.”

His words carry like a father’s or older brother’s might, and as they reach my ears, I blink hard and let go of my breath. One that I didn’t realise I was holding. His words, normally like sandpaper, were more soothing than I was expecting.

“Team, how is he?” Yan asks the group surrounding Kai.

“He’s got a few small tears in his suit that we’ve patched,” someone pipes up, “and a minor O2 leak in the gauge, but nothing serious to report. He should be able to make it back to the ship.”

“Good! Ark,” he says, turning back to me, “Priam will get you and Kai to the med bay. You’ve got the rest of the day off, both of you.”

Oooh, fun, an entire day? Great…

I nod, holding my arm as it gets heavier and more useless.

“And, Ark?” Yan says. “Today, you took care of the ship. I personally don’t care how you did it, but you did it. The captain’ll be informed of it.”

Gods… wait, did I hear that right? The captain?! The words send a shiver down my spine and butterflies into my stomach… but I still might need to hurl from before.

“Hey,” Priam says, “can you walk?”

My nostrils flare as Priam approaches. Wordless, I give him a thumbs-up with my good arm and point toward Kai. From what I’ve seen, he’s barely moved an inch since our feet made landfall. I’m uneasy about his condition, but the on-staff medic cleared him.

When Priam approaches, he’s already carrying a folded cloth out from his first-aid kit. He points at my arm, and I nod for him to secure my bum arm into a sling.

“I’m… I didn’t…” Priam says, woeful.

“Forget it,” I say, shaking my head quickly. “I’ve already forgotten about it.”

But I haven’t. Priam has always looked out for the team, for the crew at large, and I always thought he’d have my back. That’s why I assumed he’d save me in similar circumstances.

“Yeah?” Priam asks.

“Yeah,” I lie.

Would he really let me die…? I don’t want to think about it… if I do, all the hurt and anger bottled up inside of me is going to go off on Priam.

And Kai doesn’t need that right now.

Priam hands me a grappling gun, one that shoots magnetic tethers to far-flung panels of the ship. Considering the wreckage of our previous safety net, a clear shot to the airlock makes the most sense.

As my hand visibly shakes, I take a shot. Gas escapes both sides of the barrel, and a rippling thread of fabric flies like a bullet toward the airlock. Well, technically, it lands on the post of a comms antenna. If it didn’t, the lead attached to the gun would extend out and hit me in the helmet with the recoil. Not fun. I’ve seen it happen. And with everything else that has happened on the job today, I take my sweet-ass time.

“Bull’s-eye!” Priam proclaims.

I get he’s trying to make nice, but what he said hurt. Badly. It’s going to take more than that.

Supported under his arm is Kai, who is moving home at a decent pace. His helmet meets mine. I can barely see his face from the lights within our visors, but we exchange something between the two of us.

What it is, I don’t know.

Gratitude?

Probably.

***

It doesn’t take us long to follow along the tether back to the airlock. All three of us step over the ledge and onto the other side of the ship. With my good hand, I release the airlock and disable the magnetism from my boots. We climb down into the ship, helping Kai along, and the manufactured gravity of the ship anchors us to the ladder.

Priam goes down first, next goes Kai, and I follow behind. I climb down, one rung at a time, with one arm jimmy-rigged to my suit. The pain’s getting better, now that it’s bound to my chest and not flopping about in space. And I haven’t lost my lunch. That’s a plus.

As we descend, the door above me automatically seals shut. The tunnel leading down makes my suit more visible, its keyhole lights aligning every foot or so toward the bottom. The faint sound of a hiss escapes, mere feet below, and Priam’s hand moves away from the release console.

The locker’s only a couple of rungs below.

My left arm and feet carry the weight of me and my suit, and I hobble down one last rung. I’m trying not to make the radiating pain in my arm any worse, so I shimmy down carefully until the last sealing doors shut above my helmet.

The locker room is stark white because of the side panelling and the floodlights on the ceiling. It must be hell to clean, but it works really well to determine if anyone is tracking space debris or blood into the ship.

I hop down from the ladder, and Priam’s helping Kai with his helmet and gloves. As I take a few steps to the centre of the locker, I melt onto a nearby bench and unlatch my helmet with my free hand.

“I’m going to need your help in a sec,” I say as loud as I can, realizing how weak I sound.

The comms shut off once we set foot within the ship, so I sound like I’m talking underwater. My helmet starts fogging up from the humidity inside my helmet. We’ve been out for a while, and it gets hot quickly in these suits.

I follow Priam’s visor, and… good, he heard me.

“You got it.” Priam nods back at me.

I need two hands to remove the helmet, and I’m down to one. When Kai is finally out of his gear, Priam walks up to me, looks me over, and lifts my helmet up.

The glint of the overhead lights reflects off of my helmet, and as it catches my eye, my teal tattoo comes into sight. It interweaves lines of artistic knots that runs the length of my left cheekbone. I can also see my matted hair in my visor, like Kai’s. And the second the helmet’s off, the sensation of the circulating air from the upper vents is freeing.

Oh, gods… suddenly the smell of carbon and sulphur hits me. Like someone burned an animal carcass and rubbed it on my suit, the scent wafts everywhere.

“Ugh…!” I gag, smacking a gloved hand to my mouth.

Hey, if I throw up now, it’ll be way better than if I still had my helmet on… that happened once, and I really don’t want it to happen again! What stops me, though, is the smell of chlorine filtering in through the air ducts.

In the three-way battle between my nervous sweats, cosmic burnt steak, and the recycled air, the chlorine wins. Hands down. The barrage of scents is uncomfortable, but I’ve got it together.

***

As Priam smacks the main release panel, two heavy blast doors slowly retract into the walls. The first thing that invites me home is the overwhelming scent of flora. Trees, bushes, flowers, vegetables, and herbs flood the locker, and beyond it comes the chatter of our fellow crew passing by the exit.

We step out, and my lungs breathe in the thick air of our deck, and there’s a sweet aroma that stays with me. There are a couple of spice trees in the garden module, which leads up to three decks in height. Light creeps through the corridors ahead, and people come and go. The mezzanine comes into sight… and it instantly brings back happy memories of when I was a kid.

Once we’re actually on the floor of the deck, two guards on our left and right nod us both forward. And each of them wears light armour vests, tinted grey, and tote a medium-sized shotgun, in case of an invading force. Raiders and the odd pirate, mostly. Nothing we haven’t dealt with before. The rounds are non-lethal, loaded with rubber bullets and small electrical charges meant to immobilize.

Then, suddenly, we stop.

“Heh,” escapes my lips.

“Ha…” Kai adds, his arm slung over my good shoulder.

“Hehe,” Priam echoes.

“Ha!” I laugh.

We all share the same expression. They’re as nervously relieved as I am.

Holy shit, we actually survived!

We’re alive! I’m alive! Death showed up, and I punched it in the face!

“… I wouldn’t be laughin’ if I were you,” a voice breaks in between us.

Yan strolls past us, adorned in his spacesuit, minus the helmet. He gives the guards a nod, which they both return, and he glances in my direction, one eyebrow raised.

“Your mother’s gonna kill you,” he adds, reminding me how mortal I really am…