The Chill of Space

This is a story I wrote in the winter of 2023, as my first attempt at short fiction in quite a few years. After a few magazine rejections I took to reworking it, but after a few rounds of revising it didn’t strike me as especially saleable, although I still like the story and I think it accomplished what I set out to do. Maybe I’ll return to it one day, but for now here it is.

The title comes from a poem by Thomas Bergin. the first poem to be launched into space, which you can read (and read more about) here.

The first watership in nine years was due to arrive at Ruhoko Station, but the Splicer hadn’t been seen in eight. Kindi glanced over the trajectory traced in yellow on the dust-covered navigation screen. Twenty minutes to conjunction, but the craft was still too far off to be seen. Against the field of black outside the window there was only the distant half-circle of Earth, dappled blue and white and no bigger than his fingernail. Idly, he rubbed a smudge from the glass, for a moment wagging his index finger back and forth, making the planet flicker in and out of existence.

With a sigh he pushed himself up from the seat at the engineer’s station. A bit too hard, and his head bounced off the thin aluminum ceiling. What little gravity there had been when he’d been born had dwindled month by month, as oreships came and took away bits of Ruhoko’s platinum and palladium. At 30 he was a skeleton compared to an earthone, and weighed as much as a child. But for the asteroids he was hearty, as broad in the shoulder as anyone he had met. From adolescence to hardly a year ago he had climbed in and out of the deepest mines, a mile or more and back, six days out of seven.

But there would be no more mining, and no more oreships, he knew. The rock beneath them had been whittled away to barely a quarter of its former mass, and at best they would be given a lifetime of limited air and water to wither away inside the station, gradually shrinking like Ruhoko itself. The Chill Corporation had turned off the mining drones the year before, and soon this would become another among the dozens of abandoned company worlds littering the Lagrange points. There would be food and water for a generation, they had promised—but their grandparents’ mining contracts had left “generation” a conveniently indefinite length of time.

With a light push against the floor Kindi floated himself into the corridor joining the control module to the old greenhouses. From here he could get to any of the neighborhoods of the Historic District in half an hour or less. Once this area had been the bustling heart of Ruhoko Station. Now it was dark and cold, and the greenhouses stank of mildew and pot smoke. Transfer tubes to his left and right were closed off, bulkheads guarding the station’s atmosphere from sections that had crumbled into the vacuum decades ago. Pinpricks of LED light still shone here and there on the walls, but most had burned out, and the process of walking was more like skating in darkness.

He keyed the microphone at his ear. “Any sign of the Splicer, Darit?” He already knew the answer.

Static at the other end, then her voice: “Not here. Let’s hope he’s coming.”

Kindi swallowed on a dry throat. There was little hope left now, at least not for the Splicer. Hundreds of all-calls throughout the station had gone unanswered, and a room-by-room search of the hab modules had turned up nothing. Likely he was dead, or gone mental somewhere, off among the unemployeds and the Ceres refugees in the Southern Annex.

In any case, he wasn’t coming, and they’d have to figure out how to offload the hydrogen and oxygen themselves. Darit had suggested begging, even forcing, the watership pilots to help them feed the pumps. But Chill hadn’t sent crew to Ruhoko since they were children. The watership, like the new generation of drills, would be a drone.

The staleness of the air and the sight of what had once been the miners’ hatch brought a memory for Kindi. He had been very young then, a year or two before his father died. He was old enough to be trusted in a spacesuit, but too young to work in the mines, and once a month the children were allowed to come along and watch their parents at one of the northern digs. Though it was meant to be educational, Kindi found joy in the rare excuse to get outside the confines of the station, and supervision was in short supply. He and a few of the other kids had spent most of their time playing, making a mess of their suits in the powdery regolith at the dig’s perimeter. Maybe Darit had been there.

The other kids had gotten bored after an hour or so, and one of the subcaptains had dutifully taken them back to the station in one of the rovers. Kindi hung by the rim of the dig, kicking his feet over the edge. Bright spotlights illuminated the floor of the dig far below. The miners moved methodically under a thick cloud of dust, their helmeted heads breaching the surface periodically before vanishing again like moles. Not that he had ever seen a mole.

A transport drone veered into view from the darkness a meter from Kindi’s face, startling him with its silence in the vacuum. Not seeing him, it gave a puff of its thrusters and shot off in the direction of the station, trailing behind it a crate laden with raw ore. The hydrazine exhaust frosted his visor. He reached up to wipe it from his helmet, but a smudge of oily residue remained.

On the Moon or even Vesta the precipice would be dangerous, but on Ruhoko he couldn’t fall fast enough to be injured. Had he slipped he could have grabbed the rocky sides of the dig and swum upward with ease, maybe in a hundred-meter leap. That got him thinking.

After a while of watching the miners below, Kindi came to realize he had been forgotten, or as good as forgotten. Forty meters down their focus would be on their work, and it would be for the next six hours. Even if they could manage an upward glance through the dust, they’d hardly be able to see him, and the rover would take another half-hour to get back at least. Did the subcaptain know he wasn’t on board? Kindi’s stomach tingled with the thrill of something he shouldn’t do.

In a blink he leapt up and shot himself into the air, heading south across the open plain leading away from the main road. Huge clouds of dust followed in his wake as he ran in long bounds. He made it high enough to see the dimpled depressions of other digs kilometers away. If he’d had the muscles and skeleton of an earthboy he might have shot off into orbit, and despite the impossibility the adults warned the children of this constantly during their early suit years.

He half-ran, half-flew for what seemed like hours, careful to keep the refinery’s iridescent chimney plume in sight. From high up, the surface of Ruhoko lost its pale grey sameness and became a mottled lump of whites, blacks, greys, and browns. He knew, of course, that while Earth was a sphere—more or less—Ruhoko was not massive enough to be so. The elongated shape and even the colors reminded him of the redshank eggs he’d found along the edge of the terrarium’s pond a few weeks earlier. And from the cracks and holes in its surface, the asteroid might be hatching too.

By the time he decided to turn back, the clock in his helmet told him it had been barely twenty minutes. But the fear of earning a scolding got the better of him. Reluctantly, he began bounding toward the steep wall of rocky hills to his west, the embankment made of gravel and tailings surrounding Ruhoko Station. He pirouetted over Gillis crater, catching sight of the sun just over the hills. He felt for a moment like a whale, breaching the surface before plunging again into unknown darkness. Then, with his greatest rebound yet, Kindi went sailing over the hills into the precincts of the Station. He had planned the traverse almost perfectly, using the terrain to conceal himself and his dusty wake from the mining traffic.

Even at that age, he’d had no illusions about the course of his life. He had been born on Ruhoko, and likely he would die on Ruhoko. If not here, then on Psyche or Vesta—or at best, after many years of muscle conditioning, the Moon. He appreciated that, unlike many other children of the third generation, his parents had never lied to him about this, never given him false hope. His frail body would never be able to stand as much as half a G, and such a trip would never be profitable anyway. Not for Chill or any other corporation, or for himself. He would never see a whale.

There was no one on the road leading to the airlock, and though the glare made it hard to see through the windows, he hoped no one was watching from inside either. Then he stopped. Perched in the dark on either side of the hatch, waiting for him, were two eagles, sidelit by the sun and utterly lifelike. He’d forgotten they were stone eagles, made by some Earth artist whose name no one remembered.

Kindi grinned. “Knock-knock,” he said, and his voice echoed inside his helmet. He turned the decompress handle and stepped inside.

Kindi crept along the floor of the outermost greenhouse, frustrated as always at the low ceilings that kept him from moving along at a full pace. The farmbeds around him hadn’t been tended in years, and their intended crops had long ago surrendered to strands of ivy and clumps of mushrooms. He wound his way to the eastern end of the farm complex, down to where the old segments of the station gave way to what, even forty years later, they called the new spaceport. He tried to walk gently. Stir up too much of the dust here and soon he’d be breathing it in, not to mention the slow-settling cloud that would obscure his vision.

He was nearing the tube that would take him to the nodes now. He figured it had been about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. And then, as if on cue, he heard a loud clunk followed by the hydraulic whir of the docking clamps. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in nine years, but it was unmistakable. The watership had arrived. He and Darit would go over the docking checklist again, probably for the last time. They would open the valves, and then...

He didn’t want to consider the then. Not yet. Not until they’d found the Splicer.

There was a cough up ahead, and a rustling in the darkness. The greenhouse fed into another transfer tube, a tall hemispherical hallway leading to the spaceport. A figure a little shorter than him stood near the threshold, facing out the transparent greenhouse wall into space.

“Kindi?” He thought it was a woman’s voice.

“Darit?”

“Kindi.” No, it was a boy’s voice. He approached. It was Manny’s kid, Peter, twelve or thirteen. He shouldn’t be out alone at this hour. The boy was pale. He looked hungry.

“Where’s your father?” Kindi asked, trying his best not to sound accusative.

The boy gave him a cold look, and a tear floated into the space between them. “He went outside and cut his air tubes yesterday,” he said with a tremble. “I didn’t see it, but my sister did. He says there’s no hope anymore. He says the Splicer is dead and there won’t be any air or any water without Chill here.”

“That’s not true,” Kindi said softly, more for himself than for the boy. His thoughts were a jumble. He hated that, amid the fear and anxiety of these past weeks, there was nothing in him that had room to cry for Manny. “There’s a watership here now. That sound you just heard. The Splicer isn’t dead. We would know about it. There would have been a funeral. Chill would have sent us another one.” The words echoed through the tube as if to underscore their hollowness. “And even if he is dead, we have plenty of engineers who can do what he does, no problem.”

Peter’s gaze remained fixed out the window at the planet beyond. There were no tears after the first one, and Kindi thought of Manny’s practicality, always bristling at any waste of air or water or food. Practical to the end, he and his son.

“My partner and I, we’re going to find him and open the watership, and after that we’ll have the tanks filled within a week.”

“You’re lying,” the child said matter-of-factly. “You’re lying to make me feel better.” There was no anger, Kindi thought, only acceptance. He would have preferred anger.

The part about engineers, at least, had been a lie. Some of the older miners could repair a drill if needed, or service the crawlers, but anyone who knew anything about the newer tech would have been ferried off years ago. They’d be dig captains on Vesta or Ceres by now. “I know it’s no help, but I’m sorry about your father.” Silence.

“I’ll be back soon,” he told the boy. “Hopefully with good news.”

He turned away with a sigh and continued toward the spaceport. He’d pored over childhood memories of his engineering classes too many times. Steam electrolysis, the separation of water into hydrogen and breathable oxygen. The Sabatier reaction, making water and methane out of their waste CO2, enough to repeat the process and give them breath for the decade or so between watership deliveries. In theory he understood it all, and maybe—maybe even probably—he'd be able to work it out. But he hadn’t been trained to be a splicer. None of them had. There was one per mining colony, always a company man born on Earth, stouter and stronger than the miners by a magnitude. That was how Chill liked to keep it.

He sailed through the last tube into the spaceport with a bit too much force, giving Peter a faceful of dust. Kindi muttered an apology and reached out to halt his momentum with the spaceport door. He found it open, and when he floated inside he saw the Splicer.

A low-frequency hum permeated the cabin. A man Kindi recognized stood hunched over the docking controls, his long grey beard nearly touching the console. His hair was long and unkempt, and he smelled of garlic and ammonia. Pale fingers flicked over the screen. They had met once before, when Kindi was eleven. The Splicer had been a strong young man then, twice Kindi’s height and twice his weight. He was a thin, brittle-looking shell now, thin skin stretched over soft bones. His eyes were sunken, his skin a dull white-yellow, the color of sunlight through dust. Then Kindi saw Darit.

She was slumped in the corner, eyes shut, half-standing in the middle of a slow fall toward the ground. Her hair pooled like blood on the wall behind her. Kindi’s body went stiff, and relief gave way to rage. In an instant the accumulated tension of months found release. He grabbed the threshold with both hands and flung himself at the Splicer, hands reaching for the other man’s neck. Without looking up, the Splicer swatted him away with surprising force. Kindi’s body went flying, bouncing off the wall and tumbling into the corner beneath Darit. He had bit his tongue, and his mouth began to bleed. He reached out to grab Darit’s ankle. There was a pulse, strong and steady.

“She’ll live,” the Splicer snapped. “As long as any of us will.”

Kindi tried to speak and broke out coughing. He was sure he had broken a rib. Finally, he managed a wheezed “Why are you doing this?”

The Splicer looked up from the console for the first time, silent, his eyes distant. Kindi tried to raise himself to his feet, but everywhere he grabbed his hands slipped over a thick surface of dust.

“Because Chill has done enough for us, and it’s past time we paid them back.” There was a gleam in his eye of something mischievous, something malevolent. He turned back to the console and flipped a series of switches. Kindi heard the groaning of pipes and a hiss of pressure being released somewhere in the station, though he couldn’t place where. It was a sound he had never heard before, not even during the other watership deliveries, and it brought the months of dread to a crescendo in his stomach.

The module shook, and there was a deep rumble that seemed to echo through the hollowed core of the asteroid. There was a slight lateral pull, the unmistakable feel of acceleration. Dust began to pour from the walls in a horizontal snow. Darit, still limp, drifted into Kindi’s back. He closed his eyes and spat, fumbling for a grip on the wall.

“We can breathe it, or we can burn it,” the Splicer said. “We won’t be breathing for very long either way.” Instantly, Kindi understood. The bastard had lit the station’s engines, and they were falling out of orbit.

“You can’t do this,” he yelled over the taste of blood. “This is our home.”

The Splicer shook his head. “We never had a home, that’s the thing.” With a sense of finality, the old man pressed himself down into the pilot’s chair at the docking station. “You must have known we were going to die anyway. At least this way... At least this way, we take some of them with us.” The face was blank as he spoke the words, but Kindi felt a disturbing honesty behind them. Maybe, after all, it would be better this way.

Kindi coughed up blood. He wondered how long it would take, and how quick it would be. He reached down and grabbed Darit’s hand.