The air tank.
In an ordinary suit, I could at any given moment check to see how much air I had remaining, down almost to a single lungful. Spacewalkers tend to be obsessive about this sort of thing, and for this reason the instruments are perhaps even more redundant and refined than is needful. A mere glance would inform me how much air I had remaining by almost any conceivable measure; time remaining, pressure, volume, you name it. In this cobbled-up nightmare I could only guess, however. I wasn’t even carrying a chronometer; that was built into the helmet too!
The improvised suit had held up so well that I wasn’t particularly worried about leaks any more, or more likely I had ceased to find such worrying to be productive. There were plenty of other dangers clamoring for my immediate attention, however, and air was first and foremost among them. In truth I had no idea how much breathing time I had left, and I wasn’t particularly eager to waste any as propellant.
On the other hand, I didn’t particularly care to drift away into free orbit, either. And I could probably maneuver with an air jet better than via throwing tools; I could place the air jet at something resembling my center of mass, whereas throwing things would naturally put me into a far more rapid spin than that which I was already experiencing.
For a long minute or two I thought things over, watching two more stars slide behind Aphrodite, and another emerge from the far side. My cross-drift was eyeball-apparent now, and I was perhaps half a click out.
I tried to think things through one last time. Unless I missed my guess, things would soon be happening very fast and this would be the last opportunity I had to really work things out. The further out I made my corrections, the less gas I would use in making them. On the other hand, the earlier I disconnected my tank, the longer I would have to survive on just what air was in the suit. There was a wild card in the deck as well. How much air exactly did I still have? In truth, I knew, any breath could be my last; I’d been through far too much already to even be able to pretend to know how much time had elapsed since the girls had sealed me into my slave hood-cum-helmet.
In the end, I decided that I simply had to have more information. There was a direct pressure gauge on the air bottle, I knew, though I had to dismount the thing totally in order to read it. Carefully I shrugged myself out of the standard harness and twisted myself around with a kick and spin. Sure enough, the bottle’s gauge was working perfectly. In fact, I tapped it several times with my fingertip in order to make absolutely certain.
It read dead empty.
Suddenly I was breathing hard again, and it took a major act of will to calm myself down. There was still air in the bottle, I told myself, there had to be. I’d just been breathing out of it a moment before, after all. It might be very low, but there was still pressure.
The tank’s nozzle was bent ninety-degrees away from the device’s long axis in order to make the thing easier to hook up to standard suit hardware. Most of the time this was a welcome engineering feature, but just now it was major headache. It would not be possible to simply aim and point the tank like a reaction pistol; instead I would once more have to guesstimate my center of mass and try to line things up on it.
My first attempt was a terrible hash; the air jet was plenty powerful, but I had it aligned wrong and the thrust mostly served to whip me into a spin. I was just barely able to retain control of the tank, and if I’d not tied the parasol to my leg I’d have lost it entirely. There wasn’t anything to do but waste a second spurt of gas in an effort to cancel out the damage of the first, and finally I did just exactly that. When I was finished, I was stable, all right.
And the Aphrodite was sliding off to one side faster than ever!
Finally I lined things up one last time- I didn’t think that the bottle would give me more than one final spurt, judging by how quickly it was fading away. Carefully I cradled the bottle in my arms and lined up the spout just below and to the right of my breastbone, and waited, waited, waited until I spun into just the right position.
Then I cracked the valve, and left it open until the air was utterly spent.
Naturally I could not see where I was going, since I had to face away in order to point the jet in the right direction. When I spun around again, however, my pod loomed huge in front of me…
…and was clearly going to slide past just out of reach!
Reflexively I shoved the empty tank away from me just as hard as I possibly could, and then sent the parasol after; I would run out of air now long before I had time to cook. It was still not enough, however, and the ship was almost by! It was by in fact; I was passing the nose now, just out of reach of the tangled wreckage that had once been the Henhouse’s docking station! I was gone, gone, gone…
…until I felt hard eyes glaring at me from behind a black leather hood not unlike the one I was now wearing. “You insignificant little worm!” a cold voice screamed in rage. “You’ve failed us all. You’ve failed at everything you’ve ever touched, and betrayed everything you’ve ever hoped to be. You deserve to float around forever in a pink sexsuit, you piece of filth! You deserve it!”
“No!” I screamed aloud. “No! I can’t fail!”
Then suddenly I was grasping the Dragon’s whip in my right hand, spinning it bolo-fashion. I had one chance, maybe, as my ship floated away. One chance, if I moved quickly and didn’t bother too much about aiming. At the very last second I released the whip-handle…
…and then felt the most welcome tug in the world as it lodged firmly in the wreckage and caught, jerking me to a sudden halt.
For just one second I luxuriated in my victory, breathing in and out, in and out. Then, moving slowly so as not to dislodge my precarious toehold despite the fact that my air was beginning to grow noticeably stale, I made my way hand-over-hand down to the wrecked docking area and looked around to see what was wrong. I’d originally planned to enter Aphrodite through the EVA airlock, but I’d never have time to travel that far now. My lenses were rapidly fogging over again on top of everything else; soon I’d be blind once more. I’d either find a way in through the docking ring, or I’d die trying. It seemed to be the day for that sort of thing.
Everything was an absolute wreck, everything! At first I couldn’t even recognize much of what I was looking at, but then once I realized that not everything that I was seeing was part of the Henhouse things began to make sense. Part of Lagrange itself had hit and lodged here, I could see, including a taxi and its most unfortunate occupants. There was a severed human arm floating free in front of the airlock proper; I snatched it out of the way and tossed it unceremoniously over my shoulder. There simply wasn’t time for delicacy! The main docking dogs had separated themselves, I could see, but the ring itself was still holding everything together. There was a hand wheel for that, and I fell upon it desperately. Carefully I anchored myself against a shock-warped support beam and tugged on it with all of my might.
It would not budge. Not a millimeter!
Angrily, desperately, I tried again until I saw spots before my eyes. Still it would not give, and now there was another hissing noise in my ears; I’d sprung another leak! It didn’t matter I decided; the air in my suit wasn’t much good for anything anyway.