Story Hook Thursday

My buddies, they told me about this.  They called it spacer sickness, but this wasn’t what I expected.  I feel like the emptiness between the stars outside the frosted glass of my cockpit is somehow aware, perhaps even intrigued.  I dunno why it feels that way, but I swear on a stack of Bibles it does.

And I swear It’s calling me.

Andy clicked off the toggle switch on his recorder.  He shook his head, a little embarrassed, and closed the device carefully, so he wouldn’t blow any of the precious remaining vacuum tubes.  It was damned easy in this cold.

He slid the war-green metal recorder into the stiff leather satchel and reached up to rub away the ever-encroaching frost.  Through the thick glass lay nothing at all but the distant pinpoints of stars.  The way his plane was lazily tumbling, it would be another hour before the somewhat brighter, somewhat closer star he hoped was the sun would warm the cockpit enough that he could take off his gloves for a few minutes without worrying about frostbite.  Time enough to pee, maybe eat some K-rations.

Andy didn’t dare open the door leading to the cargo hold.  The seals had held so far, and the filters were still keeping his air from going stale.  He had power in the cockpit, but a short would deprive him of the tiny bit of residual heat from the electrics and more importantly, wipe out his radio set, so he kept almost everything switched off unless he needed it.

A stutter in the crackle from his radio headset caught his attention, like it always did, but as he hiked up the gain on his radio receiver, the stutter was gone, leaving only the endless sibilant background hiss of a jillion stars.

Not for the first time, he glanced around the cockpit, looking for something…no, really anything with which he could improve his situation.  The floating tumble of piss-bricks held by netting on the other side of the copilot’s seat, the succession of K-ration cans ready to thaw inside his clothing after he ate next, a couple girlie and Popular Mechanics magazines, manuals about the starplane and pilot procedure.  The copilot’s seat was stripped to its wire frame, the padding and leather cover now part of Andy’s nest.  The remains of several large chemical warming pads were also tucked around him; after every calorie of heat had been wrung from them they made good insulators between his body and the frame.  He was wearing Edgar’s flight coat, and he hoped again that Edgar didn’t need it.

He must have dozed, because he suddenly noticed the frost on the inside of the cockpit glass was brighter.  He rubbed away the space he tried to keep clear of ice and squinted past the surrounding glare.

The bright star wasn’t there.  He couldn’t spot the brighter stars, nor the Galactic Band.  Then, a glint of twice-reflected light illuminated a slim edge and the tiny crescents of a handful of distant rivets.

He cranked up the radio, switching on main power as it groaned to life.  The hiss in his ears got louder, and as he fiddled with the tuner, he yelled into the microphone.

“Mayday!  Mayday!  Unidentified plane, this is Andrew Williams aboard the Lady’s Grace, do you read?  Mayday!  Mayday!  I have been adrift for several days, repeat, the Lady’s Grace is disabled!  This is Andy Williams!”

He frantically shouted into the microphone, sliding through frequencies as quickly as he dared, straining to hear any sign of a response.  His mittened hands were clumsy on the dial, and he felt panic well up in his throat as the light over his canopy faded.

“Mayday!  Mayday!  Can anyone hear me?”

There was an impact, a sickening lurch, and Andy felt the plane move.

“Mayday!  Mayday!  This is not a derelict plane!  Repeat, there is at least one survivor on the Lady’s Grace, do you copy?  The cockpit is pressurized and there is a survivor on board, I repeat, a survivor on board!”

As the starplane swung lazily, Andy swore.  He held the microphone as well as he could as he struggled out of his warm nest and desperately scrabbled at the impossibly stiff voidsuit.  If anyone breached the cockpit, that’d be it, no air, no warmth, no nothing.  He had seen a man in void without a suit, and the man had lived fifteen whole seconds as he simultaneously suffocated and froze to death.

Not the way Andy wanted to go, that was for damn sure.

The rings around the right shoulder creaked ominously as he tried to shove his arm through the sleeve.  The suit had been flattened and frozen for over a week, and it was not giving up its reposed posture without a fight, but Andy maybe only had moments before a scavenging crew would pop the seals and blow the whole cockpit into void.  He flailed his arms about, trying to find the button on his microphone so he could keep sending strangled yells over the radio waves.

He heard the heavy steps of magnetized boots through the steel of the frame.  Zipping the frosted zipper in a puff of icy motes he sent himself bouncing against the ceiling, grabbing at the helmet.  The suit was not rated for any real length of time in void, but it gave a man more than fifteen seconds.  The helmet went on backwards, but Andy could feel footsteps closing, so he locked the seals down.  He cranked open valves in a panic, feeling the icy hiss of canned air fill his suit as he turned the suit’s radio crank hard to juice it up.  He clicked a dial on his helmet after remembering it was on the other side.

“Mayday!  Mayday!  There is a survivor aboard the Lady’s Grace!  My name is Andrew Williams!  Please don’t…”

Air buffeted him, knocking him toward the door of the cargo bay as it fled into void.  Andy tried to turn around to see who had opened it, but of course he couldn’t.  Dammit.

A thick hand felt thicker on his shoulder through the frozen layers of canvas, leather and rubber.  He was turned, gently, hands patting him down.  He grabbed for an arm, and the radio speaker in his helmet sizzled to life.

“Hello, Mr. Williams.  Please do not fight me.  Your helmet seems to be on backwards.”

Something about the voice made Andy stop.  There was something odd about the words, even and almost metered.  He let himself be pulled backwards, toward the cargo bay.  Another pair of hands helped steady him, and he felt the metallic clink of a safety tether being attached to his belt.  He drifted along, tugged slightly this way and that, feeling the cold of outer space like claws finding every thin spot in the suit, sucking away what little body heat he had left. He reached up to crank the air valve all the way open to offset the alarming leakage he could feel somewhere near one ankle, found another hand already there adjusting it for him. 

Before too many minutes the inside of his helmet brightened and he felt his hand being guided to a hand hold of some sort.  He gripped it and it pulled him upward.  When it stopped, he was aware of the suit’s increasing suppleness. Wherever he was, it was warmer than anywhere he’d been in weeks. 

He tried to crane his neck around, but all he saw was a sliver of glare coming through the tiny viewport in the front of the helmet.

And then hands were on his shoulders, on his neck!  He panicked, swinging wildly at his invisible assailants, hyperventilating from terror and in an effort to flood his body with extra oxygen.  Hands, then more hands, pinned his arms to a wall, then more hands pinned his legs, and he couldn’t do anything but keep hyperventilating until his vision swam.

The helmet turned, and Andy blew out his breath, screwing his eyes almost entirely shut as it was lifted up and off.

His face did not freeze, nor were the last tattered bits of his breath being wrenched from his body.  He slowly relaxed his eyes, and when his lungs could no longer take it, he sucked in a huge breath.

Of clean, warm air.

He gulped another lungful, then another, gasping as several men in voidsuits released his arms and legs to hang weightless in the whitewashed chamber.  Andy could do nothing but gulp down air as his eyes adjusted to the brightness.  Before long, a canvas pouch with a drinking tube was held up to him.  He took a sip, sputtering when hot coffee coated the inside of his mouth and throat.

He chuckled along with his rescuers as he took another sip, this time prepared.  “Thanks,” he croaked.

“You are quite welcome,” came the reply, in that same metered voice.  He turned slowly, sucking down the coffee.

She was a beauty, this one, that was for sure.  Long black hair like the void itself which shimmered blue with reflected light, heavy lids and lips that promised and denied at the same time, generous figure made even more interesting in zero-G, clad in a creased black suit.

Accessorized by a red armband emblazoned with the broken Nazi cross.