Drifter

“Travis! Wake up, Marine!”

The voice reverberating through his spacesuit drug him slowly from the blackness, only to have the shriek of the suit’s internal alarm assaulting his ears snap him back into reality. His eyes struggled to focus on the tumbling void marred by pinpricks of light, and that sensation stilled the heart in his chest.
Reflexively, Travis flexed his arms and legs, hoping he was wrong. But when he failed to find the solid metal of the Eclipse Glider‘s hull under his feet, Travis let out a panicked wail of realization. “Oh fuck…”

“Travis! Are you all right?!” His radio demanded of him. In his mind, Travis could picture his commanding officer, steel-eyed and strong, gripping the transmitter with all her might as if to force more power from it. He’d never known Sarah to voice anything but resolve, be it brutish or calm. To hear the alarm in her voice now dropped his heart to his boots.

“I’m…I’m alive, Commander. But I’m stuck in a spin! I don’t have a thruster pack to stop the rotation. I don’t have visual on the Glider.”

“Focus, Travis! Suit diagnostic!” Sarah ordered.

“You can’t…” he began to question, before the real gravity of the moment hit home. No, they can’t pull my suit readout…because I’m too far away. “Standby one, Commander.”

Now focused on a specific task, the calm clarity forged by thousands of hours of training seeped back into his blood, cooling his pulse and steeling his nerves. Bringing up his wrist control, the push of a button sent a dozen lines of text past his vision as fast as he could read it, most of it red. It was then Travis noticed something else in his vision, barely visible against the insignificant lights mounted to his shoulders and palms. Glinting flicks of metal spun with him, forming a ring of unwanted dance partners in zero-gee. With nothing to pull them away, Travis had to wonder if they came with him from the Glider, or elsewhere.

Reaching his free hand behind him, Travis felt along the life-support unit until he hit something metal and definitely foreign. Once his hand reached a notable ball joint in the mechanical appendage, Travis let grim realization wash over him. “Repair drone malfunctioned, must’ve hit me hard to knock me out…”

“Cory saw it when he was coming to help you with the long-range radio array. Little shit hit you on full thrust.” Sarah relayed, though her voice dropped several notches of intensity. “What about your air, Marine?”

“Pack’s intact, Commander. I’ve got about five hours for you to come pick me up.” Travis noted, double checking his own math. “Looks like my beacon is out, though. Fucker must’ve hit the battery.”

A long pause answered him, telling Travis as much as the spinning starfield did. “How far out am I, Commander?”

“Eighteen klicks down and still fading…” Sarah responded at last. “I’ve got Matt and Maddie calculating for course change and full burn now.”

But you don’t know if you can risk the fuel loss to slow down, divert course, and then get the Glider back on course. Travis finished Sarah’s thought from afar. “Can you contact the drone I’ve got stuck to me? Have it drag me back?”

“It’s dead, no signal from its beacon either.” Sarah admitted. “Cory wanted to chain the rest of our drones together into a missile and shoot them your way.”

“But they’d never have the fuel to pull me back in like that.” Nice thinking kid, but that’s a plan built on hope, not math. Travis noted, biting back the bile in his throat. Mentally, he checked over every pocket and belt loop he could reach. Hull sealant patch, collapsible wrench, Ohm gauge, spare connector hose…none of this is useful. But the Glider was full of colony start-up gear…

“Is there anything in the hold?” Travis asked, hoping his mental inventory missed something.

“Bunch of hydroponics and an earth-mover. Nothing with a hard-vacuum engine.” Sarah snorted. “And no, we can’t just dump the fertilizer in the fuel tank for an extra kick.”

Travis had to laugh at that, “Not with that attitude, Commander. I bet I could make it work if you give me a few hours.

“Smartass.” Sarah retorted, before a second voice, hushed and rushed, quickly got her attention away from him.

In the silence, Travis rested his head against the back of his helmet, and felt something scratch the back of his scalp. Whatever it was, he couldn’t see, but reaching over the top of his helmet, Travis caught something uneven and broken sticking out the back of his gear. The realization was immediate. The drone had impaled his helmet with one of its many spidery arms, but his suit had sealed the breach before space had sucked him out through the jagged hole. Now, the only thing keeping Travis alive besides the mutli-layered glass before his eyes was a small ring of globbed sealant and the titanium mandible behind his skull.

In that moment, a new, fatal thought crossed his mind. They won’t lose any time if they don’t have to turn around… “Commander?”

No response. Travis had partly expected that, as the Glider was probably a madhouse of activity and frustration at the moment. He could picture them all, gathered in the main docking bay, trying to draw out the myriad of schemes they could plan to retrieve him while still completing the delivery. The thought wanted to warm him, to reassure him there was a way out of this. But the silence remained the omnipresent cloak wrapped around him.

“Commander?”

Still nothing. Only his own breathing in his helmet and and the shaking in his voice as he began to lose the Marine-forged sense of calm under pressure. Travis couldn’t be sure anymore how long he could wait before he tried once more, so the name escaped his lips quickly.

“Sarah?”

Silence still. Now his palms began to quake as Travis re-summoned the diagnostic report. There were more red lines now, but only one mattered to him now.

INTEGRATED COMMUNICATIONS RELAY – FAILURE: POWER SUPPLY DEPLETED

“So this is it, then?” Travis said to no one. “This is how the first human dies in space? After all the hours training and all the sims, I get taken out by a faulty fucking drone and some bad luck? Fuck…”

He swore again and again, growing louder and louder each time until the word erupted from his throat like an undechipherable roar. Travis screamed and screamed again until his ears pulsed in pain and his throat was raw. When he could yell no more, Travis felt the numbness creep across his body as his very soul was exhausted.

For a long moment after that, there was only the spin. Again, Travis tried to focus his eyes on the closest object that wasn’t himself, hoping to see the bulbous bow of the Eclipse Glider creeping towards him. Travis tried to count his rotations, but trying to get a fix on an exact set of stars proved annoyingly difficult. He then quietly sang a few rounds of the Marine Corps’ Hymn, but soon the sound of his own voice isolated inside the spacesuit began to grind on his nerves. He tried to shut his eyes, to let his mind abandon the grim reality for the false hope of a dream. But Travis couldn’t shut off his own mind, couldn’t block the creeping spectre of Death creeping into his vision.

“Sarah,” He started knowing full well she would never hear him now. “I was to thank you for choosing me for this mission. It was an honor to fly with you.”
After a somber beat, he couldn’t help but add, “Oh, and yours may be the finest ass I’ve ever seen in cammie shorts.”

He smiled a bit at his confession, his last mortal sin in this body, and reached up for the obstruction in his helmet once more. He tugged gently at it at first, waiting to see if it would give any under his grip. When he felt the wiggle gently rock his helmet, Travis took the mandible in both hands and pulled as hard as he could. For a brief second, there was the unholy wail of sealant giving way to vacuum, and the back of his skull felt like it was on fire.

Then the spinning stopped, and Travis became aware that two of the infinitely distant stars followed his eyes wherever he moved them, as if the universe itself were staring into his soul.

**********

A new submission for the latest IronAge Media prompt. A lot of castaway stories have a glimmer of hope to them, as there’s typically something in the environment that the stranded can use for assistance. So I’ve always wondered what one does when you take away every semblance of hope?

I hope you all enjoy.