"Alright, Strauss," The female voice resonated in his helmet, "use your chin to press the thrusters' activation button."
Alan Strauss floated in space in what was essentially a kevlar-backed diving suit with carbon fiber hard points nailed to it, attached to the International Space Station by an altogether too thin wire clasped to his belt. These were the only things on the engineer's mind at that moment and he made the quite clear over the radio.
"The Exo-Suit zero point two is the most advanced EVA hardware available, Strauss, it's been in development for half a century…" Commander Bane trailed off, then spoke up again, a hint of malice in her voice this time, "The radiation-proofing isn't quite up to par with our current suits, though, so you might want to get this test over quickly."
"I read the manual and checked the schematics, ma'am," He called back, his arms floating in front of him as he watched Rio de Janeiro, lit up like a Christmas tree, "and I still say it's a piece of shit."
"Just hit the switch, Iron Man." Came a third voice, older and rougher, with a slight Russian accent.
"Firing thrusters..." Sighed the engineer, pressing the activation key with his chin. The shoulder thrusters would follow the motions of his arms and the boots ones would adjust their thrust based on the orientation of the hands…
In theory. In practice, Strauss rocketed like a missile so fast the cable securing him to the ISS snapped without a sound and curled up like a giant question mark before Alan could even adjust his course. He spun his hands backwards and cursed as the world around him turned to a blur, the Earth, Luna and the ISS fusing into a rapidly revolving hamster wheel, with the sun somewhere to his left.
"Too much pressure!" Someone called, three voices joining into a cacophony of panicked exclamations and frenzied advices until Bane boomed "Clear coms!" Alan, tried orienting his hands forward, but only managed to spin sideways, "Strauss!" the Commander began, now the only voice on coms, "release pressure on the activation key."
He did as instructed, his jaw clenched, vibrations from the suit's powerful thrusters causing his teeth to clatter. The spinning did not slow down, but the shaking did subside a bit.
"Now you need to fire thrusters sporadically in the opposite direction… Just stop spinning, you know how to do that, right?"
He did. One hand pointing forward, the other backward and his legs positioned like he had just taken a running leap, he nudged the smooth brass knob in his helmet, firing thrusters by short bursts, each of which gradually slowed the world down.
About three minutes later, Strauss was once again idle in space and struggling to keep his breakfast down, as the suit's helmet lacked the ample space of the modern ones and vomiting now would cause him to drown in his own bodily fluid.
"Check your batteries, Strauss, what's your power at?"
He flicked the Kevlar cover off his wrist mounted PDA and brought up the suit's readings. "Seventy percent and charging at five percent per minutes. 3E cells are all green."
"Damn… Can you make your way back here?" Bane was not concerned for her crew member, but she seemed very impressed by the EXO suit. Strauss, though this was his first mission in space, had spent a whole decade as a NASA engineer, and he'd never seen such a blatant disregard for safety procedures… Then again, he'd never met anyone who could get results quite like Bane could, so when the cigar choppers asked him to explain what had gone wrong and who was to blame for this incident, he would keep his mouth shut.
Two months before this mission, one of Bane's team mates, the resident tech expert, had gotten into a fight with Strauss over the latter's alleged sloppy work, almost costing the engineer his job. Strauss had angrily taken apart the rocket engine he'd just spent hours fine tuning, checked every parts for any evidence that would support the other man's accusations and, finding none, had re-assembled the engine in record time and chased the astronaut, an ex-marine pilot, out of the hangar in an equally impressively short amount of time.
It had taken a lot of blackmail and favor calling, but Bane had eventually managed to have Strauss cleared for the mission.
"I'm way out in the sticks." He noted, the ISS growing more distant every second, "But I should be fine, just don't expect me for diner."
"Roger that."
This time, using only twenty five percent power, he was able to get linear propulsion and steer himself towards the station, arms and legs spread like he was a ragdoll being pulled by its hips.
Tentatively, he leaned forward, transferring more and more power to his boots, as the station kept growing smaller. He had to correct his course multiple times, as he steadily increased his velocity, but soon reached a hundred percent power output and was soaring through space like a missile.
Even as a kid, when he'd decided he wanted to be an astronaut, he had not dreamed he could one day come this close to actual flight. Untethered by gravity, without a massive backpack or fuel reserves to drag around.
This suit might be the most dangerous thing he'd ever worn, its controls counter-intuitive and its aesthetics ripped straight off from a popular video game or TV show, Strauss would still vouch for it and pray they end up being standard issue within his lifetime.
He was smiling like a child on Christmas eve when he finally caught up with the station. The massive structure, though it seemed to be sitting still, was actually in a constant state of free fall and Alan, still feeling the effects of acceleration, felt like he was chasing a massive piece of plumbing down a bottomless pit.
He angled himself slightly to the right and gave his thrusters one last shove, flying straight into an open airlock and landing lightly on the inner door, the velocity difference between him and the station recreating a semblance of gravity for a short instant.
It did not last long, but was enough for the accumulated heat in his boots to sear off the pure white painting on the bulkhead. Sensing an impact in his back as the shoulder thrusters retracted, he checked the power levels again; thirty percent and filling up at a rate of ten percent per minute. His air recycling system reported another half-hour before its efficiency became compromised.
The air scrubbers had a fifty minutes guaranteed efficiency, an hour and a half could be squeezed out of them, if you liked living dangerously.
Looking up, Strauss cursed and looked back down quickly. Looking at the sun without a UV faceplate could leave you blind within a second, so it came as a surprise to Alan when all he saw was a dark spot dancing before his eyes, as if he'd glanced at a lightbulb.
The world around him seemed much darker, however, and he blinked multiple times, before the automated solar visor rose out of the way on its own, settling back on top of the EXO suit's helmet.
One of the suit's feature, which Alan had not paid much attention to, was a high level of automation, the suit detected harmful UVs, inbound micro asteroid, lack of breathable atmosphere or any spike in the user's biosignes and was programmed to respond by deploying the helmet and any countermeasures it contained before injuries could occur.
Of course, most people did not forget to put their helmets on before going EVA and Alan did not think the feature was overly useful until now.
He looked up again, trying to out-speed the visor, but it slammed over his eyes before the muscles of his neck had even began moving his skull upward.
An entry into the SpaceX program, for which one of the main requirement had been that the suit look "badass", the EXO suit was originally intended for deep sea operations without the need of a remote controlled submarine. It had performed well in the Marianas' trench, but this outer-space variant had yet to prove itself.
He reached up and closed the airlock's outer door, twisting the lever shut with a grunt.
This suit hugged his skin tightly, to the point he felt almost naked, he could have sworn he felt every bumps in the bright red metal handle. "Alright, pressurize airlock five, I'm hungry."
He could see inside the station through the ALON porthole, but there was no one on the other side.
"Guys?" He checked his PDA again. Twenty three minutes had passed since the test's beginning, ten minutes since last communication. "HAL, open the pod bay door."
The joke earned him no response. They rarely did; astronauts were such serious fellows, a lot of the team thought Alan to be too juvenile and exuberant, they saw him as nothing more than a glorified mechanic… But the man seriously doubted they would just strand him in an airlock to make a point.
He reached for his belt, but remembered he had not brought any tools for this test flight. The airlock contained only an extinguisher and crowbar, locked behind an emergency glass.
"Well this is a shit idea…" He muttered, eyeing the Kevlar/Nano-cellulose polymer making up the space suit's lower layer. Could a shard of glass pierce it? The manual guaranteed you could not die from hypoxia using this suit, as it maintained the body's shape using memory gel instead of an oxygen cushion, but he was not eager to try.
"Guys, this is Strauss; it's not funny, open the door or I'm opening it myself."
Static screamed in his ears, Bane's voice echoing in the background, "…Trauss! What a… in?"
"Airlock five!" He yelled over the distorted signal. It sounded like Bane was talking to him from a plane with all windows open or something.
"Can…Way? Ma…" The high-pitched whine in the background became so loud it seemed to be coming from inside Strauss' skull. "…function!"
"Fuck that." He cursed, shutting off the radio. For a moment, he enjoyed the silence, then got to work.
Pushing himself off the opposite wall, he slammed shoulder-first into the emergency glass, shards drifting off in every directions, but none piercing the suit's resilient outer layer.
Strauss caught a thin and sharp fragment with one hand, the crowbar with the other and drifted to the inner airlock.
Built into the door, a finger's length to the left of where the handle would be on the other side, was a rectangular plaque with yellow stripes painted on it, bolted to the door with special star-shaped screws. With his tools, removing the plaque would have been a matter of seconds, but now he had to shove the glass shard's tip into the top right screw and push until the tip splintered to adopt the same rough shape as the screw's head. Strauss managed to get three full rotations before the shard shattered fully.
At this point, the screw was poking out of the plaque by a few millimeters, enough for him to pry it off with the crowbar. He had to brace himself against the floor to get any leverage and when he smacked the plaque with his crowbar the kinetic energy almost threw him backward.
The airlock's inner bulkhead had been build to withstand micro-meteorites and extreme conditions, not a tungsten crowbar swung by a thirty-seven manual worker in a hurry.
The plate gave in somewhat, denting just enough for Strauss to squeeze his crowbar under its edge and pry it off fully.
There was no override or safety system in there, only the door's inner mechanisms; gears and a H shaped set of titanium bars.
Using the crowbar, he pulled the right side bar down and shoved the left one up with his bare hand. The bulkhead gave in, shoved lightly by the pressure difference. Letting go, Strauss took a step back and watch the door slide open lazily. He knew it would not be an explosive decompression, as oxygen actually trickled in vacuum, but it was still underwhelming.
He stepped in the station and, his helmet detecting breathable air, its tiny engines whirred in Strauss' ears until the whole head piece collapsed down into a high-tech turtleneck, the helmet's internal structure looking like Alan wore ski goggles and headphones.
The mic was strapped to his throat still, so he thumbed the on button once more, "Strauss here, I'm in, what's going on?"
Bane answered, but was drowned in static and Alan heard only something about toasts.
"Roger that, I'm on my way."
He debated taking the suit off, but decided being EVA ready was not a bad thing, at least until he understood what was going on. He couldn't wait to get the catheter and colonic probe out, though.
"If you'd told me a week ago I'd have to shove tubes up my ass and my dick to fly, I would have been very skeptical…" His snide remark went unanswered, as he was alone in this section. Last time he'd seen everyone, they were on the observation deck, supervising the test flight, so he decided to start there.
The crowbar in hand, he silently challenged every bulkhead he came across to try and stop him, but the fully analogue pieces of engineering all acted as intended and he found Bane alone on the observation deck, also wearing an EXO suit and peeking down a small telescope.
She looked up for an instant, her traits frozen in a constant frown. If she was relieved to see Alan alive, she must've forgotten to tell her face.
Bane was barely in her forties and looked in her mid-twenties, her short brown hairs and athletic build giving away a military background.
A second later, she was once again leaning on the telescope. Oddly enough, the thing was not pointed towards the limitless mysteries of outer space, but down towards… Connecticut?
"What's going on?"
"Solar flare; half our systems went offline, including life support."
He looked up and saw that, indeed, the neons lining every room were much dimmer than usual, though not alarmingly so.
He thought of asking about the risks of death by radiation poisoning, but decided he'd rather not think about that, "What are you looking at?" He then spoke, turning his eyes back to the earth. Rio was still in sight, but no longer lit up as it had been earlier, though it still shone orange against the dark blue background that was South-America.
"Solar flare usually means power outage, but we spotted bright lights all over the planet for a whole minute, then it all went dark."
"Explosions?"
Bane's head shook slowly, "Even nukes don't shine this bright for this long… It looked like storms, but without pause between lightning."
A hatch hissed open over their heads, a living stereotype of the Russian cosmonaut drifting into the room with a smile. Mikail Hornick was actually of Czech origin, but had grown up in Austin, Texas. He retained a slight Slovak accent, but people usually knew better than to point it out. "It was real pretty, I tell you; the whole planet was lit up like it were day time! I hope I never see something like that again."
"You mean you hope you see it again?" Strauss corrected, wondering to himself how he could have missed something this impressive.
"Hell no! Something this pretty, it's bound to try and kill you! Look the shit it's got us in!" Mike drifted up to the wide sheet of translucent ceramic and took a quick look at the earth, before turning his eyes back to Strauss. "Houston's not responding, our navigation computers are out and we need to evacuate the station now, before it's completely out of power."
It was Alan's turn to look down, a solid lump forming in his throat. "Wait, how are we going to… We can't re-enter the atmosphere without calculating an entry vector!"
"Hey, lucky I'm here, eh?" Mike scoffed with a wink. "I'll get us home, old guy, don't you worry about that!"
Bane nodded and turned to the two men, "You have five minutes to grab your things and join us in the shuttle. I can't see any lights where Houston's supposed to be; they're likely suffering power outages from the flare."
Strauss re-checked his wrist mounted PDA. "If I was out there, with no EM shielding, during a solar flare, this thing would be fried…" He presented it to them, multiple system diagnostics scrolling over the screen, all reading nominal.
Bane only shrugged and Mike was already on his way out, not looking like he'd even understood Strauss. "Why are you guys so casual about this? There might have been a nuclear war down on earth or something!" Mike ignored him yet again and Bane went back to the telescope.
After almost a minute of being stared at intently by Strauss, she finally spoke again, cold and calm, as though she was reading a rehearsed speech "Look, I'll let it slip because you were not trained as extensively as you should have been, but up here, if you lose your cool for even a second, people die, so get your shit together and go make sure this shuttle doesn't fall apart on re-entry."
Strauss felt his cheeks burn in a mix of anger and shame. Of course they seemed unfazed by the situation; they could not afford to be fazed, and neither could he. "Sorry, stressful evening." He muttered, rubbing the back of his head and looking at the floor in a contrite manner.
Bane actually snickered at that, "Is it that much different?"
He gave her a blank stare for a moment, "From fixing shuttles on the ground?"
"No," she replied, serious again, "from serving in a submarine."
"The royal navy never asked us to take an Astute through the atmosphere." Was all he replied as he followed Mike through the door. He still heard Bane snickering again. Bane always acted all-business, especially in crisis operations, these cracks, the nervous laugh, were somewhat worrying; signs that she was stressed far beyond what she allowed herself to show.
Whatever Bane was seeing through that telescope of hers, it was not doing her nerves any good…
