The suit smelled of old rubber and white petroleum used to keep the joints supple. A familiar, yet nostalgic essence. Memories of his time in the Norwegian Space Academy, Bergen. A nineteen year old college dropout who had fallen into an unfathomable opportunity. He’d segued nimbly from bakery delivery driver to deep space frontiersman, all because he’d slept with the bakers wife, one of the academy’s recruiting agents. A homely, prurient forty something turning to fat. Fortunately, he’d shipped out on his voyage before his employer discovered his wife’s infidelity.
He’d not returned to Bergen since.
Sleeping around had afforded Tor a number of opportunities in life that better skilled, more rounded people would have deserved. He supposed it was fitting that this extensive chapter of his existence was drawing to a close being fucked by someone else.
“What does this fire? .22’s?” Tala had brazenly picked the rifle up and was inspecting it.
Remembering, Tor pulled the two eight round magazines Nilsen had given him -cached in a fake Artex panel – from his neoprene boxers waistband and tossed them to Tala. “Whatever these are.”
“Long rifles, standard velocity.” She said, rotating a round between her thumb and index finger. One eye closed as if appraising a precious stone.
“You know how to shoot?” Tor motioned for Peralta to do up the zip at the back of his suit.
“I do a little airsoft when I’m home,” Tala replied.
Tor felt the inner suit swaddle him as the zip closed, then the bizarre sensation of swelling which came from the outer suits encumbrance. Where his earlier movements had been fatigued, now his muscles fizzed. Tor tried to coordinate his movements, compensating for his new bulk, his skin buried under layers of rubber, aluminized Mylar, nylon and Teflon. Tor had forgotten how heavy the suits were, or had not realized how weak he’d grown with age and administrative inactivity. His paunch ground against the velveteen inner suit fabric. “If you know how to shoot, be my guest, take it.”
“To hell with that, I’ve been firing rifles since I was a kid,” Mihailov puffed out his chest and stood over the tiny Filipina. “Eighteen months a conscript in the Bulgarian Land Forces, Thirty-First Mechanized Infantry Battalion.”
Tala stood unfazed and unimpressed, her left hand on the rifle barrel, right on her hip. Mihailov dwarfed her by over a foot. “You shoot as well as you play cards?”
“Children, children,” Tor stepped unsteadily from the wardrobe, trying to address his balance. “With any luck, and with all probability, nobody will be shooting a damn thing, particularly if the environment over there is pressurized.
With that said, Tala, I want your hands free, because I damn well know you can look after yourself better than Mihailov here.”
Tala handed Mihailov the rifle, grinning. Mihailov sneered back, playfully.
Tor was glad of the exchange, they seemed oblivious to his doddering across the Evac Suite and falling into the benches.
“Are you okay, Captain?” Peralta asked discreetly, grabbing Tor’s arm and abating his descent.
“I will be, Bose, just been a while,” Tor replied. Peralta smiled knowingly in response and ushered Tala and Mihailov to the escape airlock.
Tor had always prided himself on his exploits, an ageless jack-the-lad. Now he felt suddenly old and feeble. Becoming a Master had put him behind a desk, had it been so long since he was a youthful gadabout? With the exception of Dr. Smith, when was the last time he’d not paid for sex with a younger woman?
He watched the ease of movement of his three crewmen and realized that even his nostalgia had grown old and fragile. The image he held of Tor Gjerde was based on cheques cashed a long time ago.
Tor sighed, surprised how impotent the EVA suit made him feel. It had been too long since he asserted himself, too long pushing pens. He pushed himself upright against the table, fingers bedding into soft padding and followed his recon party into the airlock.
The sensation of claustrophobia that overcame Tor as the bosun finished affixing his fishbowl helmet was overpowering. Metal couplings cinched together and his demand valve clicked open. Immediately, Tor was conscious of each individual breath he took. Erratic breathing gradually depleted his oxygen supply that would, unabated, be consumed much faster than the three recommended hours.
He tried to think of something else, anything else but as the water coolant system began to circulate within the membranes of his suit, Tor could only fixate on his need to piss.
Peralta tapped him on the helmet and gave him a thumbs up. Tor reciprocated with an additional pasted on smile. I’m going to suffocate to death, covered in my own piss. He kept that thought to himself as his visor fogged up.
The internal intercom fuzzed with white noise. Peralta’s voice sounded tinny and distant. “Activate your pressure regulators.”
Tor fumbled for the control on his breast, he’d just begun to reconcile his balance when Peralta had added the portable life support system to his back. Now 4.3 pounds per square inch of pressure stiffened the suit further. He felt as if he’d been cast in stone, his body overbalanced forward. He held his breath as the pressurization pushed against his chest.
“Any leaks, any signs of venting?” A shrill robotic voice crackled from his helmet mounted speaker. Mihailov.
“No.” Tor gasped, trying to focus on his pressure indicator as he fumbled between it and his oxygen gauge.
Tala and Peralta also confirmed to the negative. Tor tried to shuffle further onto the scuffed yellow and black striped deck markings. Peralta hit the control panel and Tor sensed the cast aluminium doors close behind him, the airlock became dim. Disorientation weakened his knees, his breathing ragged.
“Thirty seconds,” Peralta said, then hit the purge button.
Yellow warning beacons began strobbing, an alarm warbled as if underwater. Tor grasped at the high tensile buddy line that linked himself to Mihailov, resisting the inexplicable urge to pull all the hoses from his chest. He shouldn’t be here, not with Falmendikov missing. He was the ships commanding officer and his second-in-command was absent, what if something happened to him?
Tor watched the air pressure exhaust into space from the tiny viewport, beyond the silhouetted figures of his recon party. Little ice crystals began webbing the bottom corners of the glass. He tried to prepare himself as the airlock became a vacuum chamber, the weightlessness reached his stomach first and he fought down burning gulps of regurgitated aquavit.
“Everybody connected?” Peralta asked as the crew floated from the deck, bobbing like ducks on a pond.
Tor pushed against Mihailov’s life support backpack, recalling training from a lifetime ago. The others followed, wires tautened and slacked, they formed a discordant Newton’s Cradle in the dancing yellow light.
A green light indicated it was now clear to open the external door. Peralta peered into the viewport. “Clear.”
Tor swallowed hard as Peralta punched the external door control and Mihalov gathered his now weightless spool of steel guide rope, the end bolted to the airlocks padeye. Red starlight cast deep shadows against the bulkhead as the door released the party into the hard vacuum of space.
As Peralta pushed out of the airlock, securing his magnetic boots to the external plating of the Riyadh, Tor was overcome with awe. He no longer thought about his breathing nor the other troubles that burdened him.
He floated from the airlock and looked around, his head swivelling within his helmet. To his right the great supergiant bathed them in soft inconsistent heat and carmine light, he could imagine it crackling like a camp fire. Before him the great space station loomed, grey and dark. Somehow its scale seemed to multiply now his body had become dismembered from his ship. Arbitrary towers and aerial arrays jutted like metal tendrils from the great monolith, a cold Siberian city formed in azimuth. Beyond the station lay the consistency of stars, forever present and as distant now as when he watched them glimmer with grass beneath his feet. Beneath the station the Venus sized planet continued orbiting its decaying host star, its sickly coloured chlorine rich atmosphere roiling only a few thousand kilometres below.