agentblack

The Vikings sent their dead out to sea with their sword and their possessions alongside them. Their horses, dogs, slaves and women next to them in a long boat, put out to sea with provisions for the journey.

The ship would sail out of sight, burning into the night.

I can't help but feel some connection.

This far from home, the Earth isn't even a speck of sand. I know the rough area of sky it should be in. If I had magnification or nav-assist still running, I'd be able to pinpoint it, but as it is, I just have an... area. I can stare at it if I want, try to remember my loved ones, the friends I left back at mission control.

But I feel nothing when I look there, except a little biut foolish, attempting something so obviously sentimental. For no good reason I think of the girl I saw back in high school.
She was never impressed with my athletic performance, or my test score, the bright future I had ahead of me. She'd always snort, everytime I went to her with some fresh achievement to boast about, so derisive.

I think of her now, arms crossed, leaning against the airlock (failed to seal, electrics blown), mocking me for being so corny.

"You think anyone really cares?" She'd say, glancing sideways, just the once, at the test paper or medal I'd show her.

I hear her say it now, so close I swear that she's with me now. I even catch the hot wool smell of her favourite sweater. But she's not there.

I'm drifting. Behind me there's a train of ionised gas and plasma that stretches back twice as long as the gulf stream, and four times as thick.

According to the last transmission I recieved, It was glowing, reflecting sunlight. Visible on earth, even during daylight, a tiny bright scar of light against the sky, low down on the horizon.

The rupture occured three days ago. A noise so loud is shook my eyes in my skull, screaming through the cabin as loud and as close as the end of the world.

I swore and wept and tried to salvage something whilst I watched every system die. It took me five hours of rewiring coupled with moaning and empty praying to start the air scrubbers working. It was two days before I managed to reset the radio, everything else burnt out and fused by the rupture, the static electricity of a million cubic tonnes of superheated plasma screaming from the craft like steam escaping a holed boiler, generating a charge large enough to kill God.

I spent my time after that listening to the news from home grow worse and worse. No chance of rescue; The religious right calling it divine judgement - Once they banned the teaching of evolution, they started in on astrophysics. They called this mission the invasion of "God's Kingdom".

The president won't back another craft being launched, he needs the support of the evangelicals too much, re election in two years, got to keep the jesus freaks sweet. Apparently it's not enough that he's got the FBI busy chasing down commited atheists.

The Chinese would love to help, they dig the propaganda coup, but they've got no viable craft to launch until October, The nearest inbound craft they've got is just starting the return leg from Mars, even with a committed refit and turn around it'd be march by the time it reaches me.

So I keep busy. I clean up the vomit I spewed, screaming, as that banshee wail scream shook me rigid.
I write a final letter, that I will re-read in an hour and erase, disgusted at the pomposity of it all. I can't help being a poster boy for wholesome american values - all that Vain Glorious Patriotic bullshit.

Right now, if a Chinese vessel docked, I would renounce all that gung ho Team USA bullshit on the spot. I would suck chinese dick all the way back to Beijing, learn mandarin and get a tattoo of Chairman Mao wiping his ass on the Red, White and Blue.

Instead I sit here breathing in the stink of my own bile and the smell of burnt solder, listening to the clicking of th air scrubbers as they slowly degrade; and I stare at the sun.

It's huge. You can't grasp how huge. It is beyond any words we have to describe size.

I read once that words for colour enter languages very slowly. Every language has a word for Black, and for White.
Any other colour is described in terms of brightness.
If there is a third colour, it is always Red.
Eventually, the colours trickle into the language, the las is generally always Grey.

I think it's the same for size. We don't have the words yet, to describe how big the sun is, hear, at this distance.
But maybe in a thousand years, we'll have a word for how big the sun looks right now. But now, there are no words.

It doesn't just look big, it feels it too. It seems to vibrate at the edges of your perception. With your back to it, you can feel the weight, the pressure of it's presence.

I can hear it too. Beyond the dull tinnitus whine - the last aftershock of the rupture - I can imagine a near silnet hum, the sound of something of that that titanic size just distorting space around it, like the noise of a balloon creaking as it overfills with air, but on a cosmic scale.

The clicking gets worse. It's the air scrubbers. The clicking sounds rythmic, probably one of the fans starting to wear down. When the fans break, there'll be no air current forcing my tiny personal atmosphere around the chemical and enzymatic reactions that'll purify and recharge my air. I'll slowly suffocate in my own bad breath.

I start weeping again. I barely notice now. Every had a good cry in zero gravity? It's beautiful. Each tear slowly detaches and floats away from your face as surface tension gives way. Cry for long enough, or hard enough, and you're surrounded by a tiny contellation of wobbling crystal balls, tiny and salt perfect.

But now I just get one. It was inevitable that I was going to die soon. I had clung to the idea I'd have longer.
I go back to staring at the sun. Even behind the shielding, it glows a bright , almost painful golden colour. The greeks used to believe that Apollo drove the sky across the sky as a chariot.

I think about that idea for a while - A perfect golden god, living inside the sun, charged and energised by the endless boiling fury of fusion within.

The clicking increases. It sounds as though it's coming from opposite ends of what's left, my broken little capsule left adrift, a scorched hourglass shape of ceramic and plastic.
It sounds as though it's coming from outside.

And suddenly, I know how I'm going to die.

The outer shell has cracked. The heat of the rupture warped it, the vacuum coldness distorted it further as it cooled too fast, and unevenly. Stress fractures would form, microscopic, not even hair line, but enough to weaken the shell as they start to lengthen and join up.

This clicking sound I hear, that moves around the ouside of the hull, It's the ceramics and dense plastics begining to crack under the pressure of the atmosphere inside pushing out, and the black sucking pressure of the vacuum outside pulling at it.

Any second now, the craft will explode outward.
Shattering into countless pieces of shrapnel that'll fling themselves outward into space, propelled by the expanding cloud of gas that'll dissapate endlessly as it tries in vain to fill the vacuum. And I'll die in a bloodly mass, my blood vessels exploding as I decompress violently. There will be nothing for the Chinese to find. Even if the air scrubbers had packed, there would still be a corpse to fine, something to take home and bury.

But instead they'll find a freeze dried mist of haemoblobin and muscle fibre clinging to bone fragments.

For a brief painful second, the clicking stops. I imagine what it'll feel like. A brief scream of wind, a terrible cold so sharp it makes my eyes freeze and crack even as they're sucked from my skull, my lungs tearing, collapsing and ripping as the air is wrenched from them...

And then the cabin floods with a spill of light. I scream and flinch, ducking and throwing my hands around my head, trying to keep my eyes in.

But nothing comes. JUst the clicking, closer now, and more occasional.
In the warm mammal darkness behind my hands, I hear words.

"The Two reporting to The One. Subject is found, Subject is safe, within parameters decreed by doctrine. Awaiting further instruction by The One. The Two Awaits - The Two Is Patient, Prepared."