Captain Gillory stood in front of the lab hatch in the gravity wheel, next to a large beer cooler with handle and rollers, stamped with everything from Bud to home brew decals. I looked at her quizzically.
“Made to withstand the heat of re-entry,” she said. “Seriously.”
I looked at it. Eyeballed some measurements. “I’ll check with the team.”
“There’s nothing else,”she said. “We’ve been wracking our brains over this problem. Rob made the ultimate sacrifice.”
“You won’t need it?” I wasn’t exactly leaping at the idea.
“Only use it for spacewalk barbecues.”
“C’mon.”
“Really.”
She opened the cooler. Dry ice mist spilled out. “Ready to go,” she said. We suited up in our decon gear. I contacted Brandy on the monitor in the lab.
“We have nothing else,” Gillory told him.
“The mother of invention,” Brando said. “I’m down with it. Make sure everything’s shut tight. Bex sent plenty of Petri Seal.”
The lab floor was industrial-grade rubber, so the big worry wasn’t breaking a Petri dish if you dropped it, but the lid flying off. We wrapped each dish with Petri Seal, a waterproof tape that prevents forward and backward contamination. We packed the sealed colonies into the cooler and wrapped its lid with Petri Seal, too. I looked forlornly at the brown-spotted colonies we were leaving behind. They had almost died out.
“Ready?” Gillory asked.
Decon suits still on (overly cautious, I know), we left the lab. I jumped when I saw Randi in the corridor.
“What are you doing out of the chaise?” Gillory asked.
“Do not touch her.” Mama, talking to Randi. “You are not to touch her.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“The only thing I wanna hear is why Randi is here and not in the chaise,” Gillory said.
The robot reached into his pockets, pulled out my stolen soaps, and threw them on the floor in front of us like a spoiled child.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Randi looked up with the beginnings of a scowl I knew to turn away from. Captain Gillory didn’t budge.
“Captain?” I grabbed her hand and tugged her out of the android’s sight line and she came around and we went through the corridor back toward the lab, pulling the cooler behind. Gillory seemed groggy, almost stuporous. She shook her head from side to side and rubbed it as we kept moving.
“He gave me a look,” she said. “Just for a second.”
“Bad news,” I said. “You know about that, right?”
“Heard something, but...why is he still here?”
We took the sealed cooler through the lab and out the rear hatch to the other side of the gravity wheel corridor. My legs felt heavier and the cooler harder to pull. Gillory was struggling. We kept going, but when her breathing sounded labored, I stopped. She was bent over, breathless.
“Gravity wheel’s been turned up,” she said. “If we don’t get outta here, it’ll pull our lungs out our asses.”
I looked around for a gravity dimmer switch.
“Gym,” Gillory said.
I was younger and maybe in better shape so I wasn’t feeling the drag as much.
“Here. Sit on the cooler.” I said.
“Huh?”
“Just sit. I’ll pull you.” She raised her tired eyes. “C’mon!” I said.
She sat on the cooler and I pulled and she pushed as much as she could with her legs. We struggled through two more hatches and made it to the gym. I dragged my leaden feet to the gravity controller and turned down the wheel’s speed. The effect was instantaneous.
“Ahh,” Gillory said. She took a deep breath, rested, then grabbed the cooler and we started moving again. We could exit into a zero G corridor now, or keep walking with gravity, which was faster than floating, and exit closer to the crew modules. We stayed the course. I heard the gym hatch open as we were leaving. Randi stepped through and headed for a weight rack. He picked up a dumbbell.
“Randi—put that down. Put it down now,” mama said.
“Some control you have over him,” I yelled. Gillory looked at me. “His operating system. I can hear it again.”
“That is so weird,” she said. “I can’t hear a thing.”
As we opened the exit hatch, a dumbbell flew over my head and hit the wall.
“Fucking A,” Gillory said.
“Randi!” mama said. “Your instructions are to let them go!”
Gillory put the cooler through the hatch. “Get in there, get in there,” she said.
“Not before you,” I said.
Randi threw another dumbbell.
“Time for weightless,” Gillory said. She cranked down the gravity dimmer next to the hatch. “Hang on.”
We started rising with the weights and any equipment not bolted to the floor. Randi lost his balance and started spinning.
“Re-rack your weights, asshole,” Gillory yelled at him.
Randi’s face turned painfully sour. We turned away, pulling ourselves through the hatch with the airborne cooler.
“We don’t have much time before he gets to that switch,” Gillory said.
We pulled the cooler, hanging onto anything we could grasp for fear of any minute hitting the floor. We were almost at the hatch door to a zero G corridor when I felt gravity getting stronger again. Something heavy and blunt hit my head hard. I saw the round, black thing drop. Gravity felt stronger than normal, so it was heavier than normal. My vision was blurred, I was faint, nauseous, and Randi was coming right at us.
“Noo!” I screamed. But Gillory turned off the gravity wheel at the corridor switch and Randi left the ground. She grabbed dizzy, disoriented me under my shoulders and pulled me into the zero G corridor, then reached back and pulled the cooler through. She shut the hatch tight behind us.
“What happened? You okay?”
“Kettlebell,” I said. I raised my hand to my head. She felt around it.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Thankfully, I have a hard head,” I said.
It sounded like a sonic boom hit the hatch door.
“Son of a bitch,” Gillory said. Another boom dented the door. We started for the crew modules, looking behind us all the way. We tethered the cooler in my module—our designated escape vehicle— and Gillory felt my head again.
“Gotta get a bandage for that.” She went back into the corridor. I stowed gear, pulled out flight seats, went through a pre-flight checklist. A guttural, heart-wrenching scream stopped me.
“Captain Gillory?”
I followed her voice. She burst into the corridor outside a storage module that doubled as sick bay.
“Rob’s hurt,” she yelled.
Rob Hightower was bleeding from the side near his stomach, hovering unconscious near an unwrapped, un-spooled bandage and floating red droplets. I felt for a pulse.
“He’s alive,” I said. I listened for breath. “Breathing. We gotta stop this bleeding.” Taking care of Brian kept me on forever CPR alert. Gillory looked like she might need CPR. “He’ll be okay,” I said.
She roused herself and grabbed the floating bandage. “Too small,” she said. “Need something we can cut into a tourniquet.”
I rustled up some clean crew pajamas and we started cutting, her with Swiss Army knife scissors (which actually worked—they usually don’t) and me with regular scissors I grabbed off a work station.
“Help me get his clothes off,” she said.
Tourniquet strips ready, I cut into Hightower’s flight suit and as we pulled it away, a large globule of blood floated out of the wound, little globules in tow. I wrapped a tourniquet strip around the wound and his midsection.
“Wait.” She stopped my hand. “Gotta figure out what we have.” She peered at the wound, felt and pressed around it. “Arteries spurt; veins ooze. Tighten the tourniquet.”
I did.
“Looks like we got both.” Gillory grabbed a bottle of fine aged whiskey off a storage shelf. “Rob’s gonna kill me.”
I soaked another jammy strip in the whiskey and holding the tourniquet tight above the wound, cleaned it as best I could. Crimsy securely stowed, bacterial contamination up here was probably a non-starter. But we didn’t want to risk anything, including contamination from either of us. As it got cleaner, it became clear the wound was intentionally inflicted.
“That piece of shit is history,” Gillory said. She gathered herself and peered down at the clean wound, still oozing but less spurting. We pulled our whiskey-soaked, multi-layered tourniquet tighter and added another strip.
“I’m worried about that,” she said. “I may have to suture it.”
“You suture?” I said.
“Another life,” she said. “Keep the pressure on.”
She went through some drawers, found a suture kit, and sewed up Hightower through spurts and oozes. We re-wrapped the tourniquet looser to reduce stress on the sutures.
“That reminds me,” she said. She took my cheek and turned my head. “I should scrub and bandage this,” she said, palpating my head.
“I’m okay,” I said. I felt her fingers pressing apart my blood-matted hair.
“Hmm. You’re not bleeding, at least. I don’t even see a scratch.”
“I’ll for sure have a souvenir knot,” I said.
She looked at Hightower. “He’s gonna have to go back,” she said. “With you.”
“We should all go back. Take the Space Chaise and blow doors.”
“And leave that thing up here to wreak havoc?”
“Space Chaise is toast,” Hightower croaked.
“Rob?” Gillory was at his side immediately. “What happened?”
“Asshole sabotaged it,” he whispered. “Thirsty—”
I got a water bottle and held it to his lips.
“Pain meds, pain meds,” Gillory said. She found a packet in a locked drawer with a familiar-looking pill.
“What is that?” I asked.
She looked at the packet. “APAP Hydrocone.”
“Vicodin. Nothing else?” I asked.
She took out other packets. “Naproxen sodium,” aka Aleve.
“Better,” I said. As in non-narcotic.
Hightower took both pills and a second Vicodin from her hand. “Compromise,” he said. He swallowed a Naproxen and a Vicodin with the water.
“You’re going back with Jen,” Gillory said. “We stopped the bleeding, but you gotta get back.”
“In this?”
“Remember the splashdown sim?” she said.
“Shit,” he said. “Where’s my whiskey?”
“You’re wearing it.”
In air gurney formation, we transported Hightower to my module. Sans helmet, we suited him with full flight gear, a pain in the ass in such confined quarters. We suited me up, a lesser pain since I was able to help. Then we buckled him into one of the transport seats. He swallowed another squeeze of water and tried to smile. I gazed out the window at a beauty: Earth, Sun at her back, solar wind in her hair.
“Calling all hands.” It was Ryong on the module’s intercom.
“Shit,” Gillory said. “You okay?”
“Just fine. About to ask the same thing.”
“Rob’s injured. We’re sending him back.”
“What? What happened?”
“Got stuck like a pig,” Hightower said.
“How?” Ryong asked.
“How do you think?”
“I’m patching someone through,” Ryong said.
Dr. Cooper’s voice was next. I felt all the hairs stand up on the top of my neck. I thought they were going to jump off my neck when he told me the “weather window” was ready for our re-entry.
“Ryong has been a superstar,” Cooper said. “Everything’s set.”
“Where are we splashing down?” I asked.
Cooper said nothing.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said.
“We can’t say,” Ryong interrupted. “But ground crews will be standing by.”
I shot a worried look at Hightower.
“He’s the best flight engineer on the planet,” he said. “Commander Miracle.”
“I’m blushing,” Ryong replied.