Hanging Around

It all went to hell. It went bad like you wouldn’t believe. Murphy’s Law came crashing down on us like a hungry lion on a wounded gazelle. Not even the worst-case scenarios discussed came close to this ridiculous mess, and that’s saying something. And the result of all this is that I am most likely going to die a painful death.

I’m hovering above the Great Red Spot in a suit that was designed for short-term space walks, millions of kilometers from the closest breathable air and the suit’s supply is dwindling quickly. Fuck.

The sweat on my face - and the inability to wipe it - is very distracting. On some meta-level I acknowledge the strange and powerful will to remain alive - to find a solution to this problem, even if it’s hopeless. If the radiation doesn’t grant me a painful death, I will have the pleasure of experiencing suffocation and death. It’s not a way I would have chosen, but maybe relatively peaceful suffocation is preferable to radiation poisoning. Lucky for me I can just close the O2 valve before my hypothalamus soaks up too much radiation and does permanent damage to my nervous system. From where I’m standing, chances don’t look good.

I don’t really know how it happened, though. The main cause was a surprise micrometeoroid shower just as we were entering orbit around Jupiter, just three hours ago. One minute we were happily flying around, busy doing our assigned duties, and the next we were jostled around like shrimp in a can rolling down a hill. That’s not a fun experience, I can tell you.

I didn’t count, but there were a lot of micrometeoroids that just tore the water storage tanks apart like their walls were made of thin sheets of paper. I happened to look outside as they impacted the engines, which in turn exploded with bright flashes of light. There were too many holes for the automated containment system to patch, and more holes appeared each millisecond.

Pressure quickly dropped as my colleagues and I tried to get to the escape pods, only to find ourselves cut off by a missing access port - and hence an entire section that lost atmosphere.

The only option was to try to get to the suits that were stored for external manual repair work, and those suits weren’t built for comfort, trust me. Two of my friends didn’t make it and were sucked out into space, one of them only half in his suit. I was lucky to have a few seconds more, before I too was blown out of the hole-filled airlock. I remember thinking I was very lucky one of those rocks of death didn’t go through me as I was pulled out of the craft by the vacuum of space. I didn’t even know if the automated distress signal was sent before the communications array was ripped to shreds.

I’m pretty sure I hit my head somewhere. Earlier there was so much norepinephrine in my blood I wouldn’t have felt it if an elephant sat on me. But now the effects start to wear off, the throbbing above my left eye is getting more noticeable. There’s so much sweat on my face I can’t even tell if it’s bleeding or not. But, considering the circumstances, I suppose I should be glad to only have bumped my head.

I try to look around, but the visor restricts my field of view considerably. I have no idea where the two others—those that did make it--are, and I can’t see them. They don’t respond on short-range radio either, I tried.

This isn’t at all what I expected. I was never a dare-devil. I was never an adrenaline junkie, nor an explorer of dangerous realms. I didn’t spend my free time paragliding, base-jumping, high-altitude jumping, or any of that stuff. I was just a bony, nerdy scientist that got one too many wedgies in high school. If I were spiritual, this would be a good time to wonder what I did to deserve this.

I must confess I don’t know that to do now. It would be so easy just to close the oxygen valve and drift into unconsciousness, never to wake up again. Or maybe one of those micro-bastards would just splice open my head and get it over with - that would be quite painless and fast, I would imagine.