DISASTER

6163 CE

Doug hung deep in ocean water, his lungs bursting and burning, his arms and legs trying to flail but not moving. He was paralyzed and drowned. His eyes and heart jerked, fluttered, and stilled. It was the Hole, again, but he was dissolving, and Wenrock laughed at him.

He had to be waking up. He had to wake up. His brain seemed to spread out through itself as he hung helpless; he gulped, coughed, spat, and spasmed, unable to control any movement at all. Something kept shouting at him, one word over and over, one word he could not recognize.

“Immersions. Emergings. Emergency. Emergency. Emergency…" The precise Sinese voice took on coherence. Doug stared straight ahead into a mass of plastic veils, through slime-filled eyes, and retched clear fluid. Had they arrived? It seemed like no time at all. His body began to settle, the muscles no longer twitching. He spat and coughed.

“I’m awake,” he said to the plastic. He rubbed both eyes clear.

“Please garble garble suit from garble garble.”

“What? Repeat, please.”

“Please garble a work suit from the ceiling panel.”

Doug twisted his head, reached up and pulled down a dusty packet of cloth that seemed to crumble in his hand.

“What’s this?” He unfolded the packet into a coverall-like garment of dark blue. Where it had been folded, the corners looked threadbare.

“This is the required underclothing for space repair, specially made of Hau Ren‘s TriSpan elastics with their twenty-millennium guarantee. Please open the sealed door, exit this refreezer, put the TriSpan suit on and await orders.”

Doug did as instructed. The stiff fabric abraded his puffy skin.

Many more commands followed; he secured the refreezer, found a space suit, tested it for leaks, and dressed. “Where is everybody?” he asked, pulling on gray-green outer layers of stiff fabric.

The Sinese voice said, “The year is 6163. Tompuso has been hit by a meteor-like object, and there has been major damage in the following sectors.” A list of identifiers followed. “You are to report to Post 110 for instructions, fully suited. Pressurization in that area is still at risk.”

“But aren’t we there yet?”

“We have completed thirty-seven percent of the planned flight.”

“Shit.”

“Have you attached the anal tube properly?”

“Ah, fuck you.” Doug‘s mind reeled. When this was done, he would have to go through all the sleep and reawakening again. The announcement of the year stood far off in his thoughts like a star in the sky.

“Fuck you acknowledged. Please report to Post 110 forward. We are in an emergency state, and speed is required to prevent further loss of ship integrity.”

Doug shrugged in his suit and kicked off toward Tompuso‘s prow. Bits of flex-skinned machinery, from the size of dust grains to one-meter repair droids to six-meter toolsnakes, floated lifeless in his path, their purposes or energies spent. He batted them aside; some of them caromed from the walls, their tentacles and probes drifting flaccid in the vacuum.

He didn’t have to search far for the post. Horns blared in his headset; he elbowed upstream through floating masses of chemical foam and netting. Wads of smoke hung dead in the thin beam of his suit light; he homed through them toward a scattering of distant sparks, opened a final windowed bulkhead door, and emerged abruptly into a nightmare.