eight
"Talk to me, Finch."
"Talking uses air, you know."
Finch never used sarcasm and his tone rarely sharpened with bitterness. Even now, adrift from what remained of the ship, floating in vacuum with only ten minutes of viable air in his tank, he sounded only sad. Not angry, not mean. Raging against the machine would use valuable oxygen, she supposed. Kat would have done it, though. She'd have gone out screaming.
"I'm sorry," she said around the lump in her throat.
"S'okay, Sunshine. A minute here or there isn't going to matter, is it? I'd rather talk to you than watch the oxygen gauge."
His words where slow and careful, as if the air in his helmet had already thinned. Inside her bubble, her precious damned bubble that continued to provide something for her suit to recycle, Kat nodded. Then she breathed, a shallow gasp that left her lungs aching for more. Seemed unfair to breathe more deeply.
A tickle rolled down her cheek and hovered at her top lip. Pressing her lips together sandwiched the tear, spread it over dry, cracked skin. It didn't sting, despite the soft taste of salt.
"You're not crying over there, are you?"
"You kidding? I don't cry, Finch. Ever."
"Talk to me, then."
"I don't want to waste your air."
"Like I said, another minute isn't going to matter. Keep me company."
She was Saturn and the debris of the Bataille circled her like a ring. Inside her bubble, Kat spun slowly, independent movement long ago abandoned. She looked out at the wreckage and sniffed. She tried to think of something to say that didn't sound mournful or too cheerful or just plain stupid.
"What's your first memory, Finch?"
The soft crackle of static filled her ears a moment and then Finch sighed, or breathed. "Dunno," he replied, his voice rendered thoughtful by circumstance. "I'll tell you something that stuck with me always, though. The first time I watched the sun rise. I was about six, I suppose. Maybe younger." Kat could imagine his big shoulders lifting in a nonchalant shrug. "Dad took me out on an overnight hike to Wright's Peak. Was damned cold, I remember that."
He paused for a moment and Kat let the seconds drift by. Urgency cramped her belly, but she just didn't have it in her to rush a dying man. And Finch was dying…and there was nothing she could do about it. Closing her eyes, she let her head rock back into the cushion of the barrier, and sucked in air that felt foul and wrong, as if she'd robbed it from someone more deserving. She swallowed her sobs. Finch shouldn't hear her crying in what probably amounted to self-pity.
"I'd probably seen the stars before that. We all look at stars, don't we? I still do, even though I've been pushing through them for fifty some years. The wonder never fades, or it shouldn't."
Kat let him wander. She didn't care if he never finished the story.
"You still there, Kat?"
"I'm here. Tell me about the sunrise."
So, he needed a soft prompt.
"Most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The sky was grey and then it sort of shifted through this spectrum. I remember thinking that if I blinked, I'd miss it and my eyes watered I looked so hard. Then I blinked and the sky seemed a bit lighter. Then lighter. The sun shimmered on the horizon and then it sort of just eased up, slow and steady. The sky got brighter, the colours…" He paused to breathe in soft, slow gasps. "They don't have names for all those greys and oranges and yellows. Then I blinked again and the sun was suddenly all there. I felt like I'd missed something. When I said that to my dad, he said I hadn't missed it, the sun always did that. Like it was magic."
He huffed, the connection hissing. Kat's stomach squeezed and fat tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Magic," she whispered.
"I don't believe in magic," Finch replied, his voice taking on a stretched quality.
"Neither do I."
"But some things just are."
"Yep." Seemed easier to agree.
"I'm going now."
God. Kat squeezed her eyes shut, swallowed over the sobs piling up in her chest, pushing them back down her throat. It hurt, like she'd shoved an apple down there. Her cracked lips parted. "I'll miss you, Finch."
"I'll miss you, too, Sunshine."
One more thing, she had to tell him one more thing. "Gonna keep that name. I like it."
He didn't answer right away and Kat thought he might be gone. Then the connection hissed. "Good," he said. Then he was gone.
She thrashed. Kicked uselessly at the walls, feet slowed and stalled by invisible mud, and pounded her fists with bruising force against a material that sucked all the power from her strikes. Not being able to bloody her knuckles and stub her toes angered her; she raged against the dumb machine.
It's not fair!
Grief turned her into a child, one that hadn't been taken on a special overnight hike, one who didn't have a friend to call her Sunshine and make her smile and feel special. Interesting. Warm and safe. Kat threw herself back and forth against the small confines of her prison and she wept, cried with gut-wrenching sobs that scoured her throat and left her nose blocked and her head pounding.
Finally, exhausted by fear and sorrow, she subsided against the forgiving barrier and wept quietly until her bruised self sought the sanctuary of sleep.
When she woke, the stink of sweat and vomit assailed her nostrils, forgotten and refreshed. The salt of her tears still pulled lightly at her cheeks. Her heart ached. She hadn't been in love with Finch, but she had loved him in a way. He'd been her friend and he'd been a good and decent man. And she hadn't even seen him die, had only heard his last gasp as his scrubber gave out and his suit became a quiet tomb. She hadn't been able to hold his hand.
Not fair.
Life wasn't fucking fair. None of it. She knew that.
Though sour, the air inside her helmet continued to sustain her, and her suit reported no lack of quality or quantity. Her cheeks itched. Her ear did not. The invisible bubble around her was… Fuck, it was alive. Had to be. Nothing else could explain how the air inside remained viable after six hours.
Why hadn't Finch had a bubble?
"Can you hear me?"
Something brushed her cheek. Shit, had the heat exchanger started to fritz? Was the warm caress on her cheek a breath of hot air that spelled the beginning of the end? Again? Panic nudged aside stiff grief, not making her more pliable, but able to function in a jerky, automatic sort of way. Suit diagnostics became a tool in her new religion. She cycled through report after report—her health, containment, oxygen, function, trajectory—and let the readouts streaming across the HUD absorb her. Calm her. She existed in an agony of aggrieved silence until she thought of another diagnostic routine.
Then, another caress against her cheek. Surely she imagined it.
"Can you talk?"
She'd seen a vid once, about a woman who got stranded on a planet. The crash of her ship had been pretty spectacular, the fact of her survival requiring some serious suspension of disbelief. The story that unfolded afterwards, though, her tracking down the packages that rained across the planet's surface and using each found object as an innovative tool for survival, had been inspiring. Her only friend had been a limited VI she retrieved from the ship's computer and installed on her omni-tool.
The porn version of the vid—every good vid spawned cheap knock-offs and pornos—had been pretty funny.
Now, though, Kat couldn't even manage the ghost of a smile. Her cheeks felt both stiff and numb as she talked to her bubble. It had some rudimentary intelligence, probably dumb, and so became her only companion. She figured being somewhat insane by the time she died (or got rescued) was a given, so why not try and talk to the insane bubble that had saved her, only to imprison her in a virtual graveyard?
"Can we move?"
She rolled to the side and tried to fall against the side of the bubble. Space pock-marked with the detritus of her career wheeled overhead in a slow and graceful arc. She floated into the forgiving material of the barrier, only a hair's breadth of panic now as she seemingly fell toward nothing and landed against something. The bubble didn't move.
Kat appealed to its logic, knowing she probably spoke for her own benefit. "Why save me only to let me die?" Makes no fucking sense. She looked down at the small blob of asteroid hung in space below her. "I'm so fucked."
Too tired and sad to fight her own fate, Kat leaned against the forgiving skin of nothing and stared out at nothing.