Morning Star

We rip through the broken viewport into vacuum at eighty kilometers an hour. Silence swallows our howling. A shock hits my body, like I’ve fallen into cold water. My body twitches. The oxygen expands in my blood, forcing my mouth to hiccup for air that isn’t there. Lungs don’t inflate. They’re collapsed fibrous sacks. My body jerks, desperate for oxygen. But as the seconds tick by and I see the inhuman metal of Phobos’s skyscrapers, and watch my friends linked together in the darkness, held together by hands and bits of wire, a stillness settles over me. The same stillness that came in the snows with Mustang, that came when the Howlers and I hunkered tight in the gulches of the Institute to roast goat meat and listen to Quinn tell her stories. I sink slowly into another memory. Not of Lykos, or Eo or Mustang. But of the cold Academy hangar bay where Victra, Tactus, Roque, and I first learned from a pale Blue professor what space does to a man’s body.

“Ebulism, or the formation of bubbles in body fluids due to reduced ambient pressure, is the most severe component of vacuum exposure. Water in the tissues of your body will vaporize, causing gross swelling….”

“My darling airhead, I’m well accustomed to gross swelling. Just ask your mother. And your father. And your sister.” I hear Tactus say in the memory. And I remember Roque’s laugh. How his cheeks blushed at the crudeness of the joke, which makes me wonder why he stood so close to Tactus. Why he cared so much about our bawdy friend’s drug use and then wept by Tactus’s bedside when he lay dead. The teacher continues….

“…and multiplicative increase in body volume in ten seconds, followed by circulatory failure…”

I feel sleepy even as pressure builds in my eyes, warping my vision and distending the tissue there. Pressure builds in my freezing fingers and aching, popped eardrums. My tongue is huge and cold, like an ice serpent slithering through my mouth into my belly as liquid evaporates. Skin stretches, inflating. My fingers are plantains. Gas in my stomach ballooning my gut. Darkness coming to claim me. I glimpse Sevro beside me. His face is freakish, swollen to twice its normal size. Legs still wrapped around him, Victra looks a monster. She’s awake and staring at him with cartoonish, bloodshot eyes, hiccupping for oxygen like a fish out of water. Their hands tighten around each other’s.

“Water and dissolved gas in the blood forms bubbles in your major veins, which travel throughout the circulatory system, obstructing blood flow and delivering unconsciousness in fifteen seconds….”

My body fades. Seconds becoming an eternal twilight, everything slowed, everything so pointless and poignant as I see how ridiculous our human strength is in the end. Take us from our bubbles of life, and what are we? The metal towers around us look carved of ice. The lights and flashing HC screens like the scales of dragons frozen inside them.

Mars is over our heads, consuming and omnipotent. But in Phobos’s fast rotation, we’re already nearing a place on the planet where dawn comes and light carves a crescent into the darkness. Molten wounds still glow where the two nuclear bombs detonated. And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.

—

I’m blind.

I wake on metal. Feel plastic against my face. Gasping around me. Bodies moving. The coldness of a shuttle engine rumbling under the deck. My body seizes and shivers. I suck down the oxygen. It feels like my head has caved in. The pain is everywhere and fading with each pulse of my heart. My fingers are their normal size. I rub them together, trying to orient myself. I’m shivering, but there’s a thermal blanket on me, unsentimental hands rubbing me to promote circulation. To my left, I hear Pebble calling for Clown. We’ll all be blind for several minutes as our optic nerves recalibrate. He answers her groggily and she nearly breaks down crying.

“Victra!” Sevro’s slurring. “Wake up. Wake up.” Gear rattles as he shakes her. “Wake up!” He slaps her face. She wakes with a gasp.

“…the hell. Did you just hit me?”

“I thought…”

She slaps him back.

“Who is that?” I ask the hands that rub my shoulders through the blanket.

“Holiday, sir. We scooped you popsicles up four minutes ago.”

“How long…How long were we out there?”

“ ’Bout two minutes, thirty seconds. It was a shitshow. We had to empty the cargo bay and have the pilot fly backward into you, then pressurize it on the fly. These carrots can’t soldier, but they can damn well steer garbage ships. Still, if you hadn’t been linked, most of you would be dead as lead. There’s rubble and corpses floating around the sector now. HC crews crawling everywhere.”

“Ragnar?” I ask fearfully, not having heard him yet.

“I am here, my friend. The Abyss will not claim us yet.” He begins to laugh. “Not just yet.”