All Anna Beck can see is stars.
There was no sound when the pod ejected. No roar of rocket engines. The airlock is designed to open completely in a fraction of a second, letting the vacuum shoot the pod away from the station. Anna’s heart has climbed up her throat and into her mouth–she’s struggling to breathe, as if she can’t push the air around its mass. The G-forces have welded her to the chair.
The touchscreen displays are alight, each one incomprehensible, as if the craft is daring her to take control. The pod is spinning, the stars give way to Outer Earth’s massive hull, moving from the top of the viewport to the bottom, vanishing before she can pick out any details. Three seconds later, it appears again, and Anna is sure she’s going to smash into it.
The feeling passes. Her hand is still locked tight around the joystick, and she makes herself push the top button. An engine bursts into life behind her, rumbling up into her spine. The pod tilts on its axis, the stars yawing to the right. A million tiny pinpricks, more than she could ever have imagined. The sun flashes into view, filling the cockpit with an awful glare.
Anna pulls the stick towards her–gently, almost tentatively. A different sensation this time, as boosters on the side of the pod fire. Dimly, Anna realises that she’s weightless. There’s a ripple of nausea in her stomach, and her sinuses feel strange, like they’re slowly filling with mucous.
With a tiny rasp of fabric, her beanie comes loose from her head. It was dislodged by the launch, and now gravity floats it above her eyeline, mocking her. She grabs it, pulling it back on.
“Fuck,” Anna says, the sound more of a breath than a word, horrifyingly loud in the silence.
Slowly, carefully, she stops the pod from moving. Outer Earth is no longer appearing in the cockpit viewport, and she has no idea where she is in space, but the stars have stopped moving. That’s good enough for now.
Tiny movements are best. Little flicks on the stick, no more. The two buttons control her thrust–the top one sends her forward, and the one on the front of the stick causes a burst of white smoke to shoot from a nozzle on the front of the craft, out of sight below the cockpit.
Outer Earth comes back into view. She nearly loses it, brings it back, and holds it.
For a few seconds she can’t tear her eyes away. Outer Earth is a monolith: a scarred, grey, ancient relic, hanging in the black void. The sun is behind the escape pod, and its light picks out the station perfectly.
The dock is easy to spot. It’s as if a giant monster locked its jaws around the station, and tore away a huge chunk. The wound is marked by a haze of debris, glittering in the vacuum.
Anna doesn’t know exactly where the tug will be–Dax didn’t tell her–but the dock’s her best bet. Pushing back the fear, she thumbs the thruster. The pod responds, and Outer Earth begins to get larger. It’s hard to control–the station keeps sliding away, only for Anna to overcorrect and send it veering in the other direction. How much fuel does she have? She doesn’t dare look down at the gauges to find out–if she does that, she feels like she’ll never be able to look away. The thought of being lost out here, trapped in the void forever, is enough to send her heart back into her mouth.
The hull looms in front of her, and she brings the pod around so that the nose is pointing towards the dock. It’s a little further along the station’s curve, but she can see the debris. Slowly, ever so slowly, she heads towards it, keeping a close eye on the nearby hull.
The debris takes shape. A crate here, a destroyed tug there. Half of the dock’s smashed airlock door. The mag rails that pulled the tugs inside the station are twisted and torn, spinning gently, as if they weighed no more than a human hair.
There’s an urgent beep, and one of the displays flashing a warning. PROXIMITY ALERT.
The hull. It’s too close, swallowing the right half of the viewport. She jerks the stick, and the pod drifts to the left, silencing the alarm.
There. She sees the other pods, just inside the destroyed dock. They’re widely spaced, rotating on their individual axes. Their doors are open–Anna can see inside one of them, right out of the viewport on the other side. Dax and the others have got their space suits on. They’ll be transferring to the tug, clambering aboard, getting ready to depart.
Anna thinks hard, picturing the dock as she remembers it. A huge hangar, packed with tugs and equipment. If she can manoeuvre her pod inside, if she can spot Dax’s tug, she can ram it. If it’s damaged, they won’t be able to use it, which means their only option will be to return to Outer Earth.
Except… shit. She’s not wearing a space suit. She didn’t even think to put one on yet. An awful image comes to her mind: the escape pod hitting the tug, cracking down the middle. She’s heard stories about what happens to a body in space–everybody on the station has.
There’s no time. She’s coming up on the debris. Anna pulls the stick, trying to steer her way through. Something scratches across the roof of the pod, and she yelps in fear.
She can see the tug. It’s hanging right in the middle of the dock, facing outwards. It dwarfs her escape pod: a bulbous, misshapen thing, with a prominent nose and small fins on the sides. There’s something on its underside, just out of view, something gold-coloured and thin. The heat shield.
Anna steers herself between two escape pods. Almost there, she thinks. Maybe she can come to a stop, let herself drift while she straps into a suit.
For a second time, the proximity alarm explodes to life. Anna’s head snaps to the side, expecting to see the wall of the dock creeping up on her. But there’s nothing–she’s through the pods, past the debris, so what—
She has half a second to register the man in the space suit, half a second to see the horrified expression on his face. Then he slams into the viewport with a bang that shakes the tiny escape pod.