Roughnecks in Space

They say that nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space... but it isn't true. Ben’s scream set my heart racing when it came over the comms in my spacesuit. We were tasked to fix a faulty antenna, so we were working like we always do, shooting the shit, when a fucking mike tore through him. Oh, I should explain. A "mike" is short for micro-meteorite, it's like hypersonic bullet from a rail gun, traveling at over 20,000 mile per hour. And a "big mike" was anything larger than a speck of dust that could leave a hole in the hull. Or you. If it was really big, something with so much kinetic energy that it could destroy part of the station, someone would usually yell, "it's a fucking Tyson!" – after a boxer from a hundred years ago, who could flatten a guy with a single knock out punch. And then bite off his ear for a snack.

My brain didn't have time to process what was happening, because the puncture alarm went off in my helmet and I was the only guy outside. The hole was easy enough to find, it was right next to Ben’s convulsing body. My worksuit included a standard issue PURK - a puncture repair kit - to fix holes in the hull smaller than an inch in diameter. So I pulled it out, inserted it into the gaping hole, pulled the trigger and let physics do the rest. The chemical reaction inflated a ball of goo, which hardened rapidly once the escaping air pushed it against the hull. I pulled the second trigger, and it sealed it from the outside as well, hardening like epoxy. They even matched the hull coloring so the station didn’t look so beat up.

Sure, the station had a whipple shield, but that only stopped the smallest mikes, which pretty much sandblasted the outer casing of the station's hull. The suits back at corporate HQ back on Earth assured us that big mikes were rare, and the probability of one hitting you during a work detail was, what was the word they used in the orientation? Oh yeah… infinitesimal. In other words, don’t get your panties in a bunch, worker bee. Just do your job.

They pounded it into us during the training... first fix, then mourn. No time for shock. A hole as small as an inch in diameter could bleed off enough air in an hour to put the entire fucking crew at risk. So fix, then mourn. Inside the station, there were so many bulkheads, machines, and experiment racks that it was pretty near impossible to find a leak from the inside in time, but from the outside, it was easy as pie to find. A purk was standard issue on every worksuit, so whoever was outside on a work detail was immediately tasked to find the leak and seal it, pronto. Then mourn.

Damn, three of my buds were maimed by mikes and now Ben was dead. This wasn’t infinitesimal. This was more like… well, a fucking bummer. Like those suits lied to us. Like it's the 22nd century and they're still shitting on the little guy, the grunt, the dispensable worker bees. Like our lives didn't matter. Fortunately for Ben’s family, the spaceworkers union managed to get us a pretty decent standard settlement if we were maimed or killed during a work detail. And yeah, an extra bonus if you got skewered after fixing a puncture instead of running for shelter like any normal human being trying to avoid a rain of pure death and destruction.

When I finished up, I noticed Ben’s body was still floating nearby, tethered to the station like a sad pinata with blood streaming out of him like confetti. The coroner still hadn’t come out to retrieve his body, nor anyone to help me with the patch job. They were hiding inside the ship just in case that mike was part of a shower. But I couldn't blame them. As I was making my way to the airlock double time, all I could think was "come on, come one, let me make it through another day!"

When I re-entered the station, just outside the airlock bay, I collected a series of high fives for the patch job, and a series of condolences for losing my spacework partner. All the while I was thinking... man, if I lose another partner, people might think of me as jinxed! Anyway, the post event protocol was to go see the station's grief counselor to check in about my feelings. She was kind of cute, so I was looking forward to getting some sympathy from her...

[to be continued]