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The Right Script

Screamer, freezer or actor. Find out who you are in the dark of space.

By Catherine MoffatPublished 2 years ago 14 min read
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The Right Script
Photo by Aldebaran S on Unsplash

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But in less than two minutes I was about to find out. Unfortunately for my eardrums, it’s very possible to hear someone shrieking in the air lock of a cargo bay in the seconds before you’re about to be blasted off into starry blackness.

Screamers, freezers and actors. The three main ways people react to extreme stress, my old Space Captain told us in the first week of training. Everyone’s somewhere on that spectrum. Work out who you are and what you’re dealing with and you know how to manage your team.

The man beside me was a screamer. Long and loud and high pitched and irritating. I was tempted to push him out into space myself just to shut him up. The girl on my other side was a freezer. Her body had already closed down, shaking, eyes blank like a computer waiting for a hand to waive over the console to wake her up. Probably as good a strategy as any if you’re going to be tossed into the void. But that left me as the sole actor in this little group.

‘Warning; doors opening in T-minus 115 seconds.’ The voice over the speaker was almost, but not quite loud enough to drown out Mr Screamy.

There are physicists and techno-nerds who bang on about time being bendy and infinite universes and stuff. I never paid much attention to all that. As far as I can see no-one has been able to prove it in more than 200 years of space travel. Apparently somewhere in some parallel universe I was sitting at home eating a cheese sandwich. But as the voice over the intercom kept reminding me, what mattered right here right now was that I was about to be shot into space. Death by asphyxiation, if not worse. We’d all seen the training videos. Don’t hold your breath or your lungs will explode, just lie back, breathe or scream and wait for the darkness to take you.

The other thing people say, along with the piece about screaming in a vacuum, is that your whole life telescopes in front of you in the seconds before you die. Which may have been why I was concentrating on something from ten years ago. I was remembering the smile on my Captain’s face right after her little spiel about screamers and freezers.

‘Now before anyone starts congratulating themselves on not being a screamer or a freezer, remember I said actor not action.’

She stared out at our little team of newly recruited SpaceTech Ops. ‘I know you’re all sitting there imagining yourselves as big action heroes.’ It was true, I’d seen the odd smug smile and even given a sly digi-elbow poke to my mate Bazha. ‘But let me break down some brain science for you.’

Captain Angelos’ cheat sheet version went like this. Apparently it all came down to personality types and communication styles. Screamers were communicators and their brains were like dams. Whatever they were thinking on the surface came tumbling out over the slipway of their mouth. Sometimes the water was pretty shallow and sometimes they had hidden depths you couldn’t get to.

Freezers’ brains were like light boxes, or electrons or something. I wasn’t really paying as much attention as I should. One tiny ray of an idea would go in and bounce around and split and meet other thoughts and ideas and multiply until infinity or exhaustion, whichever came first. Freezers were thinkers. The world a fire hose of information they can’t process as fast as they’d like, but they’re damn sure going to try.

‘Then there are the actors.’ This is where most of the team sat forward, paying attention.

‘Actors are, well actors,’ said the Cap. ‘They follow a script – tough guy, scientist, bad girl, engineer, SpaceTech Ops, leader. Once they’ve chosen an identity it’s simple, all they have to do is follow the patterns set down over millennia.’

Captain Angelos smiled her wicked smile. ‘It frees up so much more brain power for concentration if you’re not wasting time thinking, but instead just focussing on the task at hand. The key to action and getting things done is to have good scripts. All of you are here today because you’re good at following direction.’

‘However,’ she held up her hand as we started to shift in our seats in a self-congratulatory way. ‘The secret to good leadership and to finding those great scripts is learning how to utilize the skills of non-actors – the screamers and freezers if you like. If you can’t learn to do that, you’re dead as a leader and chances are when you get in a tight spot you’re physically dead too.’

Well damn. Here I’d been concentrating on ways to get myself out of a fix and up pops old Cap from across time and space – or just in my suddenly hyper-wired memory if you prefer, to remind me every group is a team and I probably needed to get Screamy and Sleepy working together if we were going to escape.

‘And the other thing to know about leadership.’ she said, ‘Is to remember there’s a little bit of every personality style in everyone.’

Cap had disappeared three years ago somewhere out in the Trifid Nebula, but you can be real sure she was following what she called ‘the hero script’, when she did. She’d taken a job piloting asylum ships full of refugees out of the Sagittarius Arm when she left the academy, sick of all the administration and corporate bureaucracy that was slowing down any chance of change. Bazha and I had downed a few beers together when we heard the news that she hadn’t returned from her last mission.

I briefly wondered now if I did die whether I might meet up with Captain Angelos somewhere in the afterlife. I wasn’t a big believer but it made as much sense as parallel universes to me. Then I realized if I met the Captain, I was also certain to meet my father as well. Better not die then.

‘T-minus 110 seconds,’ said the voice.

I had to get moving.

The other thing the captain had told us about teamwork was that personality spectrums stretched in every direction. ‘Old thinking treated spectrums as linear – like a child’s drawing of a rainbow,’ she said. ‘The reality is we’re all on an infinite number of spectrums stretching in an infinite number of directions - more like a galaxy or a universe.’

‘T-minus 105 seconds.’

It didn’t really matter where Sleepy and Screamy and I were on any kind of spectrum at the moment. If we didn’t get moving we’d be dead. And that’s one spectrum I didn’t want to be on. Or if I was, I wanted to be on the definitely alive end.

I touched Screamy’s arm to get his attention. I know a swift slap is the traditional way to bring someone out of that kind of shock, but this worked just as well.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘We have to get moving.’

‘Where?’ He said, staring at me.

‘Over to those space suits in that corner.’ We were in luck. We were in the hands of a lazy crew. Even though they’d mustered the energy to stage a coup and kill the pilot and three officers and were now planning to toss the spacecraft’s paying customers (us) out into space, they clearly weren’t too fussed about sanitation drills.

Good crews took their space suits out of the airlock, into the equipment chamber and into the decontamination ray-baths after every EVA. Lazy crews left them swinging in the airlock on the hangers meant for emergency suits. The theory was depressurization would do a good enough job of cleaning the pathogens, and much like leaving your dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, someone else would eventually get around to doing the full clean-up for you.

‘No point,’ said Screamy. ‘The locks on the hangers aren’t rated to withstand the extra pressure of a person inside. They’ll break and we’ll go sailing out into space in the suits. It might take a while for the oxygen to run out, but I’d rather a quick death myself.’

Damn these people with spillway mouths always pointing out some uncomfortable truth.

‘Doors open in T-minus 100 seconds,’ said the voice.

But just then Sleepy woke up. ‘No, no, we could use the safety tethers to anchor ourselves to the door handle. That might not hold either but it gives us two points of contact and a much better chance.’

‘Let’s go!’ I shouted and the three of us raced across the room to the suits. It normally takes at least two minutes to get into a spacesuit – and that’s if you have help and know what you’re doing. Fast operators can get it down to around a minute. I know because I used to run bets with my team on who can do it fastest, and I once got it down to 48 seconds. But that was with my own gear and when I’d been practicing. We had approximately 95 seconds to suit up and get the tethers attached to the door handle. Correction, make that:

‘T-minus 90 seconds.’

I wriggled into the bottom of one of the suits unhooked a helmet and then grabbed for the tether that was looped from my belt. To my surprise Sleepy wasn’t far behind me. I reached for her cable and grabbed at the one on Screamy’s waist.

‘T-minus 55 seconds’ said the damned voice.

‘Put your helmet on,’ I said. ‘And help him, once you’re done,’ I pointed at Screamy who was struggling to get the legs of the suit untwisted. Getting the helmet on was the longest and most difficult part of suiting up, especially if attempted on your own.

‘I’ll take the tethers. There’s no point us all dying.’ Could I have said anything more cliched? Straight out of the hero’s playbook 101. Most of my brain was concentrating on the task at hand, but one small percentage was still trying to talk myself down.

I took off across the room towards the door dragging my helmet behind me and paying out the three tethers as I went. I tried not to get them tangled and prayed for speed. I was also praying that when I reached the door handle I’d be able to attach the tethers and that the door handle would be miraculously weighted to withstand the pressure of our bodies once the external doors opened.

My first two prayers seemed to work. I was able to get the tethers through the handle and there was room for all three of them to attach. As to the whether they’d hold, well we were about to find out. Mine was the most precarious situation – with the tethers attached to the door the others now had two points of connection because their suits were still tethered back into the rack, whereas I only had the door to depend on. If I didn’t hurry and get my helmet on it was going to be all academic anyway.

‘T-minus twenty seconds.’

I wrenched the helmet up and over my head, reaching behind me to click the connections into place as I did. The voice began the final countdown as I struggled to get the last two catches into place.

‘Doors opening in T-minus, ten, nine, eight, seven…’

I snapped the last connection into place with two seconds to spare. Before I had time to congratulate myself or worry whether the tether was going to hold, the doors opened and the three of us were suddenly dangling in space.

When you’re tucked up inside a spaceship it’s sometimes easy to forget just how big space is, and how beautiful. I stared out across a great expanse of dark, punctuated by the glow of stars and distant planets. Behind me the ship waited like some huge dark bird of prey.

‘Woo hoo! We made it.’ Screamy’s voice sounded excruciatingly loud over the suit intercom and I jumped. He pumped his arm up and down, but this being space and because he was wearing a space suit, it just looked like a long slow wave.

The noise brought me back to the moment.

‘Get back to the ship.’ Sleepy shouted at us and began pulling at the rope, reeling herself back into the air lock like a climber going hand over hand up a mountain.

Of course. Air lock emptied, trash expelled, job done. The crew would be closing the doors again.

I hoped the people who’d taken over the ship would take time to high five and congratulate one another on getting rid of us – the last surviving witnesses to their insurrection, before they hit that button, but instead that stupid voice started up again – this time advertising that it was ‘T-minus thirty seconds to doors closing’.

I twisted on the end of my tether and managed to give Screamy a kick that started him off in the general direction of the ship and the open air lock. Sleepy was making good progress. I was the one who was in most danger. Without the double tether of the door plus the anchor back to the suit locks, that the others had, I’d floated furthest from the ship. Of course, kicking Screamy didn’t help either as it had sent me spiraling in the other direction. On the plus side, I judged myself stronger and fitter than either of the other two. I began winding myself in as fast as possible, but I was still too far away.

The ten second count-down had started and was down to seven by the time Sleepy made it to the lip of the door. Another second until she was inside. She slid an arm into the handholds at the side of the door and reached out to grab Screamy. Three seconds. There wasn’t time to get me in, I wasn’t going to make it.

I’d almost resigned myself to my fate when I thought I heard a different voice. I wasn’t sure if it was Sleepy or Captain Angelos coming back from the dead, but someone was shouting at me.

‘Move your sorry ass, soldier.’

I made one final effort and dived for the door like an Olympic swimmer. As I did, Screamy and Sleepy hauled on the rope and I was jerked inside. The doors slammed shut with enough force to sever a piece of tether that had been left outside.

I slumped to the ground and waited as the air inside returned to some kind of gravity.

‘Thanks gang. I couldn’t have done it without you. Time for some introductions.’ I couldn’t keep calling them Sleepy and Screamy, even in my own head. ‘I’m…’

Screamy cut me off before I could say my name. ‘We know who you are.’

Interesting. I couldn’t see his face through his opaque helmet, but it sounded like a definite eye roll accompanied his words.

Sleepy grabbed my arm and made the universal sign for ‘Shut the Funk Up.’ This was followed by the gathering circle sign for crew and then a circle eye-patch for pirate and a hand behind the ear for hearing.

I signed an okay back at her. Sleepy was right. The crew thought we’d been chucked out of the airlock. We couldn’t use the suit comms to communicate or sooner or later someone would pay attention and they’d know we were still alive.

We’d survived the first round, but there was much more to come. Somehow we had to get ourselves out of the airlock again – this time into the ship and not out. Once we were there we had to take over the ship or at least convince them we were worth keeping alive.

I wasn’t sure how we were going to achieve this, but with my new team and a little help from the ghost of Captain Angelos there was the slimmest of chances we might make it. I heaved a sigh of relief, but just as I began to relax a new voice burst out over the intercom.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Catherine Moffat

Australian short story writer. Likes to experiment and write across a range of genres. Sometimes dips a toe into the non-fiction and essay writing pool or writes the odd bit of microlit.

Website: https://cathwrite.com/

Twitter: @catemoff

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