It Might Be Him

I miss the days when I’d be flying down the highway, twenty kilometers over the speed limit, and suddenly the windshield would be splattered with the bodies of an insect swarm. I’d click the wipers on and they’d smear the goop across the glass, cursing as my visibility disappeared for a moment while the washer fluid rinsed it away.

In space, there are no windshield wipers. Even if there were, they wouldn’t strong enough to brush away what has hit my hull.

Lucky for us, the body has bumped into the window where we can see it. I don’t have to ask the computer to tell me what shape it is, I can stare into the dark visor of the helmet with my own eyes and wonder. My pulse jumps.

“Nat!” I call out. “Come quick, there’s another one.”

I hear her sigh from down the corridor. She’s tired of this, I know. I don’t care.

There’s a clatter as whatever she was tinkering with is abandoned and she comes careening into the command module.

“Where are they from?” She says, almost casual.

I point excitedly, not quite hiding the tremble in my finger. “Yellow arm band. Must be Andromeda.”

Her eyes snap to mine and I utter the question I ask every time this happens.

“Is it him?”

She turns back to the astronaut outside with furrowed brows, scrutinizing. There’s a long tether attached to the EVA suit the body wears, and it’s that tether that has somehow snagged on one of the many hooks on our outer hull. Thank goodness, really, I still remember the headache it was to retrieve one that bounced off our hull and began to careen off into space. Nat has only just forgiven me for making her help me retrieve it.

“I can’t tell, honey.” She says grimly.

“We need to go get him.”

“You don’t know it’s him.”

“I don’t know it’s not.”

I can already see an argument forming in her mouth, the same one we have every time a body shows up on our guidance system. After months of tracking his crew, his ship, wasting valuable time and fuel for retrieval EVA’s, she knows by now that reasoning with me is useless.

Until he is in my arms, dead or alive, we will collect the bodies.

Nat spins herself around so that she’s upside down relative to me, hair bouncing around her face like a curly halo.

“Honey, we’re in an asteroid belt. You’ve seen what kind of damage that kind of debris can do to a human body.”

That familiar ache of desperation swells in my chest.

We’ve all seen those old space movies, we know what zero g looks like under the careful supervision of a special effects director in a perfectly lit film studio. But no one prepared me for how unnatural anxiety feels when it has no gravity.

It used to pool in my feet, freezing my toes, but now it just flows through my limbs, turning me into a jittery mess.

“There was a training session,” I point out. “Before the launch, remember?”

Nat shakes her head. “That was how to repair a hull section after an asteroid hit. Not how to navigate them bouncing off of you.”

I huff in frustration, willing my mind to shut up.

is it him is it him is it hi—

We were all scared when the evacuation order went out. We sat in the living room, clutching either, grieving the imminent loss of our home, when he’d pulled me close and brushed a kiss to my cheek.

“I guess we’re going to be astronauts then, hey?”

Only he could find a silver lining, space nerd that he was. Is.

But then I felt his fingers ripped from mine in the mass of bodies lurching towards the launch pads, felt unfamiliar hands haul me onto the ship and strap me in, ignoring my screams as I called for him. It’s alright, they said. He’s on another ship.

I watched his assigned ship from a high-Earth orbit and cried out in horror when a fuel tank exploded. Barely a moment later, his ship was swallowed by the darkness. Another moment passed and the tracking signal went dead, leaving nothing but a general direction and the smallest shred of hope to follow. He could be anywhere between our position there next to what remained of the moon, and Andromeda, the next galaxy over.

Nat snaps her fingers in front of my face and I blink. Her eyes are stern as she glares at me.

“You can’t be serious.” She says.

I throw up my hands and let them drift where they will.

“Of course I’m serious. You think I’m going to give up now? What if this is the one we decided to leave and it was him?”

“Then he’s dead, honey. I’m sorry, but he’s dead.”

I blink furiously. Lesson number one from the first week in zero g: crying is more trouble than it’s worth when you’re left swatting away globs of tears for the next few days, praying they don’t mess with the computers you wouldn’t know how to fix.

“Have the comms reconnected yet?” She asks, more gently now.

“No. The asteroid belt is messing with the guidance system.”

“Once we get a signal again we’ll get a passenger list from the colonies.”

I scoff. “It’s two light years away. Whatever list they may have sent won’t reach us for another eighteen months, at least.”

“But—”

“We can’t afford to wait, Nat.” I slap my hand against the wall next to me, sending me drifting away in slow spins. The lights on the control panel flash, and an automated voice echoes through the module.

Preparing to jettison oxygen tanks. Please confirm.

“No, cancel! Don’t do that,” I shout. Even as a civilian, I know better than that.

I take a long breath.

“Honey, we’ve pulled in fifty-two bodies in the last ten months.” Nat says. “Maybe he’s at the colonies already, just waiting for you.”

The thought is a nice one, for a moment. The colonies mean security. Safety. Someone who actually knows how to repair the life support system, not just me and my basic manual and even more basic training.

But if he’s not there, it means living out the rest of my days wondering if he died thinking I hadn’t cared enough to find him.

Through the window, the corpse tugs back and forth on the tether. Behind that visor will it be his face staring blankly up at me? Will I have to curl into his cold, dead arms and pretend I have him back, just for a second? Or will I have to let the adrenaline drain from my body for the fifty-third time, just to let it build up until the next body appears in the window?

It bounces soundlessly against the hull, beckoning to me, daring me to find out.

I shake my head.

“Nat, if there was a chance Lily was still alive, wouldn’t you do anything to find her?”

“Don’t.” Nat says sharply.

“No, no just listen. If you could have saved her, wouldn’t you have? Wouldn’t you give anything just for a second chance?”

This might be manipulation, but desperate times, right?

I’ve got her, I can see the way her eyes unfocus. She’s watching Lily die again. She’s seeing her hand reach out, too late to do anything but watch the life drain away.

“I’m just so tired,” she whispers. I take her hand and squeeze it gently.

“I’m sorry, Nat.”

Before she can stop me, I throw myself down the shaft to the airlock, ignoring the protests that follow. I brush off her attempts to swat the EVA suit out of my hands as I shimmy in and start up the life support system, relying on a vague memory of a fifteen minute training video they released a month before the evacuation to tell me which buttons to push. I follow the simple diagrams on the wall to open the airlock and step in, clipping on my tether and triple checking it’s secure.

Before the airlock door shuts behind me, I feel Nat’s hand grip my shoulder through the thick material of the suit. She turns me around to face her.

“Promise me,” she says, eyes rimmed with red. “Promise me this is the last one.”

I want to. So badly, I want to.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat, the only thing I can force myself to say.

She releases her grip on me and drifts back into the relative safety of the ship. The airlock door seals between us but her eyes stay locked on mine through the small window.

I bob in place, turning now so I face the outer airlock door. After countless spacewalks, I still feel sick to my stomach every time I hear the hiss of the airlock depressurizing. One of these times I’m sure I’ll forget to connect a valve in my EVA suit and just like that, my mission will be over. I focus on calming my breathing as the atmosphere disappears along with most audio input other than the crackle of the comms in my helmet.

The airlock opens in front of me, my suit holds just as it should. This is going well. Now I just need to go out on the hull and—

The blackness of sheer nothing yawns beneath me and I’m suddenly frozen in place.

I was never meant to be here.

I was never meant to be this close to floating away into the inky darkness of nothingness, surrounded by a pure and unyielding void, just my tiny insignificant existence reduced to a body in a suit.

A star cluster blinks at me from far away, reminding me to breathe. I gasp as I let air into my lungs, my grip on the rail at the edge of the door unrelenting.

“Everything okay?” Nat’s voice comes through the radio.

“Yeah.” I force out. “I’m just feeling… small.”

The void of space leers at me and another jolt of terror shoots to my fingers. They’ve gone cold.

We’re currently in a slow drift in an effort to conserve both momentum and fuel. While I’m sure there would be an army of astrophysicists that would tell us why that won’t work, it’s just me and Nat, two civilians with no more training than a high school physics class, making a call based on logical reasoning. What it means for me right now is that the ship is moving at a slow but steady pace. Anything could pull the body away, should the tether slip or an asteroid hit, it could be gone at any moment.

Is it him?

The question spurs me into action.

Keeping my eyes focused on the hull and my mind on the image of his face, I back out of the airlock and crawl along the hull of the ship. I’m already dizzy.

There is no end to the space behind me but mercifully my way is illuminated by the sun, although I’m not sure which one. The dead astronaut floats some twenty feet ahead of me. So close.

I scramble to guide my tether along behind me, the answer to my question looming ever nearer.

And then the suit is right in front of me. I take the astronaut’s hand and turn them towards me. Everything seems to slow as the light from the sun penetrates the visor.

I let out a sob.

“It’s not him! Oh my god, Nat!”

“That’s great,” Nat says. “Leave them, okay? I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Look, the unit number on her patch is the same as his, we’re getting closer!”

“Yeah, that’s great, now will you please come in?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Doesn’t she understand what this means? We are now one body closer to finding him, we just have to look a little further—

The wind is knocked out of me as something collides with my lower body. The ship spins in my vision and I’m vaguely aware of the astronaut’s body careening away from me, lost to the void of space thanks to it’s own inertia.

I hear my own voice, intertwined with Nat’s.

We’re both screaming.

White hot agony explodes through my lower body as I hurtle away from the ship, scrabbling for any sort of hold. But I just spin and spin and spin until finally there’s a sickening lurch as my tether goes slack, and I snap against it.

“Hang on!” I hear Nat screech. The edges of my vision have begun to blur from the pulsing wave of pain rolling through me from my upper leg.

It would be so easy to let myself give into the darkness, but his face appears in front of me again, his soft smile encouraging me to hold on, to go find him.

There’s a tug on my tether and the universe moves around me, the ship dragging nearer. Nat’s bulky figure waits anxiously in the airlock.

I’m vaguely aware of a small hissing from the inside of my suit, my breath becoming shallow as my lungs scrape the atmosphere for oxygen.

I cry out in pain as Nat’s arms close around me and she hauls me into the airlock. It pressurizes and she pushes me into the ship, immediately setting to work on my suit.

“You idiot,” she snaps at me, fumbling with the many buckles. “I told you it wasn’t safe, I told you we were in an asteroid belt, what did you think was going to happen?”

“I’m sorry,” I grit out through sobs. My tears dance around us. “I’m so sorry Nat,”

“You damn fool. Your leg is shattered.”

I let out a scream as I look down. She’s pulled me out of my suit, and I can see the full damage from the impact of the asteroid. My blood floats up in a grotesque string of bubbles and I hide my face in my hands.

“I just wanted to find him.” I whisper.

Nat’s arms lace around me from behind and hold me gently.

“I know, honey.”

The command module is full of blood and tears by the time Nat finishes bandaging my leg. I prod it gingerly.

It will heal. In the meantime, being in zero g means I won’t be able to put any weight on it, so I should be good to do another spacewalk in a few days.

Just as the thought occurs to me, a white flash appears at the window. Nat notices at the same time.

“No.” She says. “You promised.”

I wince.

In space, there are no windshield wipers. Even if there were, they wouldn’t strong enough to brush away what has hit my hull.

Lucky for us, the body has bumped into the window.