The Reclaimers

Chapter 1, Canned Air

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But what defines space?

“It’s the area that occupies the distance between your ears, and weighs heavily on your shoulders,” is what my dad would always hissss at me in his semi-Southern-but-also-Midwestern drawl.

Was that true? Was I really so dense that not even sound could find its way to that tiny orb that may or may not function as a brain inside my egg-shaped, definitely-harder-than-stone skull?

I’ve heard of airheadssss, but always associated that term with a chewy, balloon-shaped and very colorful sweet candy. Mmm candy.

Wait, I’m getting distracted again. Could it be that I really am a dumbasssss? Well, I am definitely the latter half of that term, but that sound, that hissing sound, it’s, it’s…

I slowly roused, blurry vision, dry mouth, “wha…?”

There was a red light blinking in front of my eyes. It was hazy, out of focus. “O” something? What was it? And where was I?

I blinked and squinted to try and clear my vision. Still fuzzy but slowly clearing. O2… WAR…

I raised my hand to rub the distortion from my eyes only to jarringly have my hand stopped before my fingers could bring sweet joy to my ocular sockets. That woke me up a little more and I realized then that I was in a dark glass bubble. No, not a bubble. A suit. A space suit.

As my consciousness sharpened, I was finally able to read the internal visor message. “O2 WARNING SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.”

That hiss, it must be a hole slowly bleeding air out of the suit, but where?

My mind, scrambled from my suit slowly asphyxiating me, fumbled for recollection of how I got to this current situation. I quickly checked the other suit monitors that showed me that total status of my enclosure. “FUEL 67%, WATER 28%, OXYGEN 10%, SUIT INTEGRITY 65%, RECYCLER OFFLINE.”

I read the functions off at a whisper to myself to reaffirm the situation. 10%, only 10%?

“How long have I been out?” I said in a low gravely dry-throated whisper as if I had been sleeping with my mouth open all night and woke up parched.

A slightly robotic response came as the suit’s AI gently and warmly stated, “You have been unconscious for 41 minutes and 34 seconds.”

“WHAT?!” I exclaimed loud enough to know that sound did travel very well inside my slightly decompressed environmental housing. Ears now ringing, head throbbing, I asked the AI, “Where is the suit compromised?”

“There is a small puncture on the left rear hip near the tether junction 2b,” the AI said as a glowing image of a suit appeared in my HUD marking the location.

“Unable to initiate self-repair, as the sealing foam canister is also damaged from catastrophic failure of the tether system.”

Catastrophic failure? What the hell happened?

My brain was still in a fog and I couldn’t remember anything.

“THIS SUCKS!” I yelled again, the sound reverberating around my helmet.

I winced. “Ugh, I have to stop yelling at myself.”

I took a shallow breath; the air was pretty thin and the dry taste of the Co2 was noticeable. I opened the external visor to get a visual reference to my situation. What a big mistake that was.

As the visor opened, I could tell that I was spinning rather quickly in a large debris field full of sharp metal bits and random components from what used to be, well, something that was once a whole, solid, constructed space thing. Using rocket science, I determined that one of these fragments is where the puncture in my suit came from. Jagged sections of some space craft or satellite were making their way in every direction away from me.

There was a moon nearby. There it goes. There it goes again. Wow I’m really spinning.

I instinctually flipped out the small thumb stick from my left wrist and moved it in the opposite direction of my spin. Small jets started to fire in my suit as the rate of my spin slowly started to dissipate.

“OXYGEN CRITICAL” displayed in my HUD as if I didn’t already know that I really needed oxygen.

Duh, stupid suit.

As I leveled out (it’s weird saying, “leveled out,” when you are in a place where there is no level place to base it on), I angled my body toward the moon so that I could see most of the debris field and try to get a sense of what I had to work with.

I was a slow learner in school when it came to math and some upper-level abstract science but I excelled at being able to take my sister’s vintage collection of barbie dolls apart and combine them with my cool robot action figures to make my own army of cyborgs as a child. That creative talent carried over to my now 23-year-old adult life and I was dam good at turning junk into something that most people still thought was junk albeit functional junk. Wow I am an adult. How did that happen?

“FOCUS!” I grunted to myself taking care not to scream again.

I looked at HUD and eye clicked on the sensor tab. This brought up a small array of onboard information systems that I hoped might help save my attention-lacking, ooh shinney thing, easily distracted butt.

I used a general scan over the debris for anything that I could use to patch the suit or give me additional oxygen. It wasn’t going well. There were a few larger pieces but most of the debris is useless, unless I needed another hole in my suit.

“Whatever happened here, it sure did tear this thing up. There isn’t much left of it,” I said.

The AI serenely confirmed, “Yes, the target has been 92% deconstructed.”

Deconstructed? Target? This was disturbing. Is my suit keeping something from me? Am I just a passenger in this possibly evil AI controlled exosuit?

Man, why can’t I remember recent events? It’s like that time that I forgot to pack underwear for a two-week trip to the Philippines and I didn’t realize it until I got the small dive boat we had rented. I totally thought that they confiscated it at the airport when they searched my bag during a “random check” but after realizing how dumb that would be, I mean think about it, why the hell would airport security want three thongs and five boxer briefs? I mean the thongs were a shimmery gold and really soft, like really, really soft, hard to find and highly desirable! But it made absolutely no sense, then I remembered that I totally did not actually put underwear in my suitcase. I spaced it. Packed socks and t-shirts, just no highly-valued underwear. I learned the term “going commando” during that trip.

“COMMANDO!”

I almost shouted the word in my excitement. My memory was slightly jogged at that thought and I felt a little surge of hope trickle into my mind.

I toggled the scanner to look specifically for O2 in any form and it locked on to a small tank attached to a twisted burned chunk of metal that used to be what looked like an orbital booster engine. It was about 25 meters to my right and down in this orientation.

Wasting no time, I engaged my thruster and gently nudged myself in that direction. If full, the container would hold enough O2 to refill my suit to about 35%. This would be great considering I was now down to around 6% and using it faster now that I was awake and exerting energy.

The suit puncture wasn’t leaking too bad and was definitely next on the fixit list, but having the suits recycler offline was also going to be a huge problem in the very near future. If I didn’t die screaming into the vacuum of space in the next few minutes, that is.