Chapter Text
Falin Toudin tucked the electric welding torch between her helmet and chest as she delicately pried the carbon-carbon panel off the nose of the spaceship. She made sure it was still connected at the hinge, then grabbed the torch and started examining the exposed electronics for the disconnected linkage. It didn’t take her long to find it; she may have been a surgeon before this, but in concept, circuits weren’t that different from circulatory systems, so she just looked for where the bleeding would be.
As she began joining up the ultra-high-voltage wires (already disconnected from the craft’s nuclear battery, of course), she heard the voice of the ship’s other engineer over her radio. “Get back inside,” Marcille Donato pleaded. “Toshiro says we’re approaching the gravitational anomaly. We don’t know what it is, so it’s way too dangerous to be doing spacewalks without a tether. There are drones for this sort of repair.”
“Drones aren’t the best choice for this delicate work,” Falin insisted. “Any radiated heat that the backboard absorbs will dissipate slowly. I need to be very careful with the angle of approach to not melt something else while I’m doing this repair. It takes a surgeon’s touch.”
“Then don’t bother at all. We won’t need the hyperdrive calibrators fully functional until we turn the ship around.”
“Like you said, we don’t know anything about the anomaly. We might need the hyperdrive just to navigate in its vicinity, or it might be impossible for even the drones to make these repairs while in its gravity well. Just trust me, okay?”
“You know I do,” Marcille replied, then cut off.
Falin returned her focus to her work. This wire was back together, but she still needed to address why it had snapped in the first place. Putting the welding torch on her spacesuit’s magnetic belt, she retrieved in its place a halogen penlight and shone it into the cavity of the fuselage.
Her radio buzzed again. This time the voice was that of her brother Laios. “Toshiro says we’re approaching the gravitational anomaly,” he said. “Are you experiencing anything anomalous? Gravitationally speaking?”
“Not yet,” Falin responded, poking her head inside as best she could and seeping the beam around. Ah — one of the screws for the redundant gamma shield had come loose, probably when they rammed into that high-density dust cloud. In combination with the overpressure event when the argon tank ruptured, there must have been some mechanical shear that weakened it, and then it got magnetized by the current through the wire despite its insulation and yanked it out. “I mean, I can feel my organs rising up my chest cavity, but that’s normal for zero-gee.”
“Do you think if we were born in space without artificial gravity, our bodies would have adapted to that, and then gravity would feel weird?”
“We might be psychologically used to it, but there are still parts of our bodies, especially our heart and digestive tract, that evolved in tandem with gravity to take advantage of our upright posture. It would probably take many generations of deliberate genetic engineering to design a human population that functions optimally in zero-gee environments.”
“Yeah, but lots of mammals work perfectly fine horizontally. Clearly it can’t be that hard to pull off, from a biological perspective.”
“That’s a good point.” Falin reattached the screw, paused, then reached back to her belt to retrieve the most important tool in her possession, in order to ensure the screw didn’t budge any more. She tore off a square of duct tape and flattened it over the screw, wrapping it around the corner of the shielding plate. “I suppose there’s really only one way to find out.”
“You know you’re on the public channel, right?” That was the voice of their nosy payload specialist, Chilchuck Tims.
“Of course,” replied Laios. “If anyone elses has any thoughts on this, I want them to be able to jump in. What’s your opinion?”
“My opinion is that Namari is prepping the drone for deployment and wants to be sure Marcille will be done with her spacewalk so she can use the airlock. I’m still running analysis on the preliminary EM readings from the anomaly, so in the interest of excessive caution we should assume you have to finish up what you’re doing sooner rather than later.”
Taking one last look around to be sure she didnt miss anything, Falin removed her head from the guts of the ship, careful not to bump her helmet against anything. “Marcille said something very similar,” she remarked, the way one might note a microasteroid with an unusually but not strangely spherical shape.
“It’s true regardless. Get back quickly.”
“Of course.” She lowered the shielding back onto the hole, then took the welding torch out again and ran it around the edge to electrically seal it. The gap between panels filled in remarkably quickly as the metal sublimated from solid to gas and then condensed right back into solid in the space of seconds; it was a fascinating, still poorly-understood process that she’d spent her whole previous space mission studying. Latching onto the hull of the ship with the magnetic fingertips on one hand, she rapped against the metal with the other, paying close attention to the reverberating vibrations in her gauntlet. “I just want to make sure the seal is vacuum-tight before I head back.”
“The pressure monitor on the argon release valve will do that just as well as you can. Get back.”
“I just don’t want to have to come back out later, you know?” She dug around her belt, looking for the helium tracer. “This wont take long; Ive done it hundreds of times.”
“That’s not the point.” Huh; that was Laios this time. “If the seal needs redoing, that’s something a drone is easily capable of. Please, just get back to the airlock.”
“And when you do, come over to my lab,” added Chilchuck. “The analysis is nearly complete, and I think you’ll want to take a look at this.”
Curiosity was the way to a scientist’s heart. “Okay, I’ll be there. Laios, prep the airlock.”
He took a moment to respond. Falin went to put the helium tracer back; it slipped from her fingers, so she reached out to grab it and just barely caught it with a single magnetized finger. Disaster avoided.
The tracer pulled away from her finger. Laios still hadn’t responded. Falin turned her head and looked back at the ship, which was further away than the length of her arm, and getting more so.
Falin broadcast one last message to the void. “Uh-oh.”
***
Namari pushed open the door to the navigation bay, clipboard in hand. “Captain Nakamoto, sir,” she said, then shook her head. “Sorry for the formality. I mean, Toshiro. We’re approaching visual range of the anomaly. Can I see it? To get some context for when I launch the drone, that is. Its cameras aren’t as good as the ship’s.” She paused after each sentence, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. Then she leaned over and examined the screen in front of him, on which was dispplayed an amorphous, undulating black blob. “Is that it? Captain?”
He turned to look at her, sunken horror on his face. “It ate her.”
“What what who? What are you talking about?”
“We lost contact. She started accelerating toward it, then it reached out a tendril and completely enveloped her. It’s still half an astronomical unit away, but it… there’s no other way to describe it. The anomaly, whatever it is, it just ate Falin!”
Namari dropped her clipboard to the floor with a clatter. “Uh-oh.”