SALVAGE

Disclaimer: This story requires further revision.

“Get up!” Judas’ voice calls into Sullivan’s room. “You need to get ready!”
Sullivan groans loudly enough for the comms to pick it up. “Get ready my ass,” he grumbles.
“We’re set to dock in four hours. That’s food, suiting up, and exercise, in four hours. And we can’t be late.”
Sullivan unbuckles himself from his bed and rolls out, stretching his sore back muscles. “Fuck,” he mutters, but it’s too quiet for the comms to transmit. He raises his voice. “Are we cruising?”
“Not yet. I’m turning cruise on then going for a nap. Can you come get me if I’m not up?”
“Fine.” Sullivan directs himself into the skiff’s disjointed hallway, navigating with his arms. The walls are covered in handholds and bars to push off of; walking in the gravity of the station will be a pain. The suit can relieve him of some of the pressure, but his body is accustomed to moving in free fall. He won’t be there long, he reminds himself; he’s only going to repair a minor malfunction that the station techs aren’t equipped to fix by themselves. It’s annoying, sure, but he’ll be fine at the end of it.
The food preparation room is at the other end of the hallway, by the control room. The skiff is set up more-or-less linearly, with the largest rooms at either end and smaller rooms stretching between them. Before Sullivan enters food prep, he peeks into the agriculture room across the hall. They had a harvest recently, and the plants appear to be healthy and growing since. The next harvest cycle will be soon, and they’ll have fresh vegetables again, but for now their small garden will need time to grow back. Sullivan wanders for a few minutes, inspecting the plants to make sure they’re growing properly, but they’re all doing well. He goes back to food prep, ready to eat a nutritious meal before he suits up.
They’ll need to order in a new shipment of ready-to-eat packets soon. Their shelves are getting increasingly bare. Sullivan picks out a pouch of vegetable broth with rehydrated dried vegetable flakes. The broth is more viscous than in gravity environments, but he likes it better this way, thick and comforting.
He takes the pouch with him into the suit room. Once drunk, the empty pouch can now be placed in the suit room’s waste disposal; it will later be brought onboard the station and sent to be cleaned and reused. For now, the waste disposal chemically sterilizes it, and Sullivan laboriously puts on the presuit, which has two underlayers—the ventilation layer and the temperature regulation layer. He already wears a radiation-and-debris-protection garment at all times, so there’s no need for a whole separate layer in the presuit. His legs are built to float in free fall, not to walk in gravity, so he makes sure to strap on his fitted leg braces. He’ll bring a cane with him when he boards the station, and he’s already resenting the surprised looks people give him, as if an off-colony tech needs to be able to walk in gravity like someone who lives there.
The actual suit itself is strapped down. He can tell which one is his because the hard-shell torsos allow for custom engraving work; Sullivan has spent hours and hours etching an elaborate natural design all around the entire shell. Judas’ features a simple design of woven grasses around the middle. Also, each one has a nametag attached to it for ease of communication. The presuit is designed to allow much flexibility in the fingers, so Sullivan can easily undo the straps and shake out the suit. It is composed of a soft layer, which he puts on first, and some outer hard shell parts to protect sensitive areas. The soft layer allows for a good amount of movement without the suit fighting back every time Sullivan tries to bend his elbow, which is particularly important in gravity because his body needs every ounce of support it can get.
The suit takes some time to climb into, but he manages it, and now it’s time for his two hours of exercises. He performs them in the suit to get used to the way he needs to move inside it, but also to retain some muscle mass so as to move relatively safely in gravity. This is the only exercise he gets, besides moving around in the skiff, and as annoying as it is, he knows it’s also necessary. He’ll never have the body of a gravity-dweller, but this is to help him get closer to that ideal of a body in space. Not one made to navigate in free fall, like most of those who live off-planet. But one close to those of colony habitants. Sullivan resents this, like much else. He doesn’t like colony habitants—they look at him with judging eyes and warn their children that one day they could end up like him if they don’t eat their vegetables and dutifully attend school. Sullivan did both those things, and he likes his job. He doesn’t like the people, no, but he likes fiddling with metal bits and solving problems. He likes that a lot better than talking to people.
He can hear Judas in his head—this is why you don’t have a girlfriend—which makes him chuckle. This is why he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but it’s not like he wants one. He chose this life knowing the downsides, and so did Judas. Either of them could have stayed on the colony instead of spending their days floating aimlessly in space and arguing about religion. Sullivan was raised off-colony, sure, but he didn’t have to stay here. Judas wasn’t. He just likes it.
Sullivan does toe-touches (or as close as he can get) and tries to push all thoughts from his mind. He has a short list of things he’d change if he could, like he wants to be able to have a companion animal, and he’d like it if colony habitants would at least be judgy in quiet where he didn’t have to see it, but it’s so much better than living permanently on the colony. He likes the freedom of this, running around in a skiff, employed by nobody but themselves. Sullivan and Judas have been close for twenty years. Sullivan still remembers when they first decided to get a skiff and some suits and make off with it together, right after they’d finished their degrees. They’d just gotten their official certificates, and Sullivan already knew he wanted to leave the colony but didn’t know how he would find a job. There were only two colony stations off the planet, and they didn’t have any open placements. Then Judas suggested that they could go off by themselves, build a skiff from scratch and scavenge some old suits, and that was it. Being techs, they had access to the types of junkyards that most people could only dream of (although nobody ever checked their credentials) and scrounged up enough to construct a decent-sized skiff within a few years. In the meantime, Judas had found a job working at Neteisus Industries, which paid for a place to stay while Sullivan built a skiff so far out in the desert that the laws didn’t even apply anymore.
The skiff doesn’t go as fast as a Neteisus one does, but it does the job. Even though they’re not sponsored by the colony government or anything, they can get by. Before they left the planet forever, Judas managed to dig up enough engineered vegetable seeds for several lifetimes, and ready-to-eat meals are cheap as dirt if you get them from the right people. Colony residents will pay a premium for services that can arrive faster than the government ones, and so do off-colony residents. They’re not the only techs out here, but they just have to get there first.
The main problem is that neither of them is trained in fixing a spacesuit, even these ones they’ve cobbled together from scavenged and stolen materials. Sullivan never studied spacesuits at all. The skiff itself is relatively easy to repair, since he knows it inside and out, but if one of their spacesuits were ever to break, they’d need to contact someone else. It’s not been much of a problem yet, but spacesuit parts are horribly expensive. Judas had to replace the hard torso shell of his suit once, early on in their journey, and it set them back so far they weren’t able to replenish their food stocks for months. They rationed ready-to-eat pouches, of course, and cleaned out the emergency stock, too, but it was a difficult time.
“You there?” Judas’ voice echoes through the suitcomms.
“Yes,” Sullivan says abruptly, his thoughts interrupted.
“Oh, good. I woke up a bit earlier than intended. How’re the exercises going?”
“Fine. Just thinking.”
“Oh, I should’ve put on some music for you.”
“I don’t want to listen to the shit you like.”
Judas laughs. His laugh is high-pitched and resembles the screech of an emergency siren. Sullivan found it grating when he first met him, but now he’s gotten used to it and it’s almost comforting in its familiarity. “You’re so stuffy.”
“Well, forgive me for not liking extreme folk. It sounds like a tune-up session.”
“You like avant-garde jazz metal, so I feel like this point is moot.”
“Yeah, because it’s good.”
This is an argument they have had dozens of times before. Judas cuts it short, because there’s not long before he has to turn off cruising and dock the skiff.
“Do you want me to put on some music or not?”
Sullivan laughs. His laugh is quiet and doesn’t transmit well through the comms. “Oh, sure.”
“Hang on.” Judas is probably getting out of bed now. The skiff’s music player is located in the control room, although he could technically play music from the one near his bed. Sullivan puts on a soothing tune if he can’t sleep, which is often.
“Here we go,” Judas’ voice joins him again after a little while. “What d’you want me to play?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
Moments later, the discordant notes of Judas’ favourite song, “Asteroids” by Space Food, blasts through Sullivan’s comms.
Sullivan doesn’t like this song, but he did say it didn’t matter, so he sits through its seventeen minutes without complaining. Judas will be taking control of the ship’s nav system by the end of it.
“Can you play something I like now?” Sullivan asks, a bit pleadingly.
“Sure,” Judas responds. Sullivan knows he’s still muttering the lyrics under his breath, but now he’s too far away for the comms to pick it up.
“Twenty-five minutes ’til dock,” Judas says. Then “Three-Faced Cat” by Everything In-Between comes through the suitcomms, and Sullivan almost smiles. He likes this song, its truncated six minutes of notes, all discordant in the most perfect way. It has a really good beat. He knows all the lyrics, even though there aren’t as many as in most songs. He wishes it were longer, but at this length it’s still beautiful, so he isn’t too upset about it.
After it’s over, Judas plays a folk song called simply “Loon” and performed by The Scrapyard Band. Sullivan likes this song. Judas introduced him to it years ago, when the album was still fresh. The band released that one album and promptly disappeared, yet to resurface—the two of them sometimes spin ridiculous stories of what might have happened.
“Loon” stretches to almost twenty minutes and has few moments where words aren’t spoken over the top. It’s an epic tale of the deity Loon and her misadventures, peppered with rambling tangents about side characters. The rest of the album follows a similar formula, continuing the story for hours. The both of them adore it. The old art of spinning yarns has mostly fallen out of favour, besides the occasional special colony broadcast or obscure album. But Sullivan used to love it, even on the planet, sitting next to an old man and listening rapturously as he wove a wonderful tapestry of folklore. And it’s even better when it’s about the off-colony folklore he’s so entwined with, like the Scrapyard Band album is. He doesn’t know all the lyrics, and he doesn’t recognize all the side stories, but he knows the big players—Loon, and Soul, and the Blood King, and Sullivan (of course). He’s spent many hours explaining all this to Judas, who didn’t grow up immersed in the off-colony culture, who’s named for the colony’s mythical heroic alchemist. Sullivan knows those stories too, what Judas told him, the story of Judas’ betrayal of the colony’s early tyrant, his subsequent adventures travelling and defeating monsters the whole world round.
Sullivan was once in a band that played music like The Scrapyard Band. Off-colony improvised instruments, made of scraps and debris, loud clashing noises, lyrics telling folktales or celebrating life without gravity. He used to scrape two pieces of junk metal against each other to form the basis for all the songs, the backbeat. There were two other members: one played a makeshift horn and a half-rotted bellows, while the other played a sort of washboard and a twangy string instrument she’d made from used food pouches and her own hair. They’d all sing, if any of their songs had lyrics, though they mostly didn’t. Sullivan used to like the out-of-tune screaming and yowling they’d all do, wild renditions of traditional off-colony songs. He still does that sometimes, in his residence where the comms can be turned off if he wants so Judas can’t hear him very well. It’s a small catharsis.
The song ends, and Judas immediately announces, “We’re docking.”
“Thank you,” Sullivan says reflexively. Soon he’ll be clambering through the airlock and onto the station. He reaches for his cane, which is secured to the wall. There’s a loop on the belt of his suit for it, where he lets it rest when he signs to the station’s head engineer, who he’ll need to defer to for this operation. His lip curls slightly. Judas told him that Prospect got rid of the last head engineer after what they said to him, but he knows that it’s only because it was on the record.
Sullivan hooks the cane onto his belt, and the skiff comes to a gentle stop.
“The airlock doors will open shortly,” Judas says.
“Acknowledged,” Sullivan responds.
The airlock doors slide open slowly. Sullivan waits until they’re finished opening before he steps through, into the station airlock. The new head engineer is waiting for him. They have a little nametag that reads Head Engineer Barlen.
Barlen signs a polite greeting. Sullivan returns a deferential one. He must remember that he’s in their jurisdiction now, and he should act like it.
You know [what to do], Barlen signs, and Sullivan signs an affirmative response. Barlen visibly nods and smiles. Sullivan doesn’t smile back.
Good luck, they sign. Sullivan nods. There’s an exit from the airlock that will allow him to leave the station on a tether and bring himself to the repair that must be made. He walks over to it and ties the tether around the belt loop that was made for it. Barlen takes his cane without asking, which Sullivan chooses to ignore even though it’s terrible, rude, and inappropriate.
“How do they stand all this walking?” he mutters into the suitcomms.
“You just do,” Judas replies. “You’re used to it.”
“Well, it sucks.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t suck. It’s just how it is when you live in gravity.”
Sullivan wedges himself through the open door and into space. Part of Prospect’s agricultural module has been damaged by a collision with debris; all he has to do is patch it up. It’s quite far from the airlock, which is why the station’s techs can’t be sent. They’re trained in internal repairs, not navigating without gravity. Luckily, Sullivan has been doing this for most of his life.
The agricultural module is labelled in a Prospect cipher. Sullivan has already made sure that he knows exactly where the breach is, so the fact that he can’t read the cipher is irrelevant. The station’s exterior is covered in handholds so he can swing himself there.
There is a repair kit clipped to the belt of his spacesuit. Inside the kit is a roll of space tape, a drill, a backup tether, a laser torch, a mini gas analyzer, and several sheets of durable patching materials. Somebody has already performed an emergency patch to prevent the life support systems from destabilizing too much, but most of the damage is on the outside of the module so oxygen escape is not the biggest concern.
Sullivan spots the obvious crater in the outside of the module. It must be twenty centimetres long and ten centimetres wide at its widest point. As he approaches, he can see the emergency patch applied from the inside, which is a notably different colour. The hole has a maximum diameter of maybe two centimetres, so Sullivan hooks his foot around the nearest handhold for stabilization and pulls out the gas analyzer on a mini-tether. He checks to make sure that no gases are escaping from the breach, and since there aren’t, he can safely perform the procedure.
It’s simple. He applies the patch sheet, then uses his laser torch to weld it to the side of the module. Now the breach is neutralized. It’s an easy fix but a long-lasting one. The difficulty mostly comes from navigating out and back.
Sullivan knows how to do that. It can be slow, but he’s used to wearing spacesuits. Maybe the cushy station techs don’t want to ruin their pretty fingernails. This makes him snort. He doesn’t even have any fingernails. The suit’s gloves have hard fingertips, and the friction between those and the fingernails can cause them to fall off. Sullivan has had his fingernails permanently removed. He just wears a couple layers of gauze wrapped around his fingertips when he works with his hands.
Head Engineer Barlen signs something at him as he climbs back into the airlock, but he’s too busy watching his own hands to see exactly what was said. Once he’s recuperated his cane and stumbled to his feet, he signs a negative confirmation (I didn’t hear that) and a request for repetition.
Barlen complies. Welcome [back].
Sullivan signs back, Finished. Barlen smiles and nods their acknowledgement.
“Did they pay you while I was gone?” Sullivan asks Judas.
“No.”
Payment, Sullivan signs with a politeness modifier (please).
Barlen shrugs and gestures towards the airlock door, leading deeper into the station.
Sullivan hesitates. “They want me to go into the station,” he says.
“Sure,” Judas replies. Then he adds, “Unless you don’t want to. Just tell them that you’ll accept it here.”
“I don’t know what we want.”
“Food!”
“Oh.” Sullivan signs a negative, then the sign for food.
Barlen looks frustrated and signs a command to follow them.
Sullivan signs another negative followed by a deference modifier. Then he repeats, Food.
Barlen shrugs again and signs back, Food. Then they leave the airlock.
“They just left me here,” Sullivan says helplessly. “Should I follow them?”
“Maybe wait a bit and see if they come back?”
“Good idea.” Sullivan leans against the airlock wall to take some of the pressure off his legs.
“Were you rude?” Judas asks delicately.
“No. I used all the modifiers.”
“I hope you didn’t use all the modifiers.”
“You know what I mean.”
Judas laughs. “D’you wanna listen to music?”
“Put on something short.”
Almost instantaneously, “Three-Faced Cat” blasts through the suitcomms again. Sullivan wiggles to the beat as best he can in the restrictive suit.
Barlen returns before the song is over. They’re carrying a large box in their arms, which they put down in front of Sullivan. They sign their gratitude.
Sullivan signs a phatic response and indicates that he can’t pick up the box. Barlen looks conflicted.
Sullivan signs a request to have Barlen give him the box. The head engineer complies.
Sullivan nods and says, “Judas, can you open the airlock doors?”
The doors slide open, and Barlen signs a farewell as Sullivan steps back through and the doors slide closed behind him.
“Did you get the food?”
“A box full,” Sullivan answers. “Can you come get it? I have to desuit.”
“Coming!” Judas sing-songs. It will take him a few moments to come down the hallway, so Sullivan puts down the box and starts getting desuited himself. It’s easier if Judas helps him, but he can at least get started.
Judas barges in once Sullivan has wiggled out of the hard-shell torso. Help, he signs with an interrogatory modifier, and Sullivan signs back an affirmative.
It’s not uncommon for Judas to start signing inside of talking when he wants to communicate fast. Sign language is his first language, albeit a version different from the space signs Sullivan knows so well.
Judas helps detach the life support pack from Sullivan’s shoulders and holds the fabric of the suit’s outer layer still so Sullivan can recuperate his limbs. The problem is that the outer layer is the easy part; the presuit is the issue that presents itself now, since it’s tighter on the skin. Judas keeps a firm grip on the fabric so that Sullivan can manoeuvre more easily. In free fall, there’s nothing to stop the suit from flying around wildly every time Sullivan moves, besides Judas.
Sullivan reflexively signs his gratitude as he pulls his legs up and out of the presuit, propelling himself across the room towards the open hallway door. Judas smiles and nods in acknowledgement, his arms already full of box and his legs pushing himself past Sullivan and into the hallway.
Sullivan wrestles with the suit, trying to wrangle it into folding up nicely so he can strap it back down. He’s done this countless times before, but it doesn’t matter. It won’t get any more predictable. But he can always manage it somehow. After enough time and effort, the suit will fold up eventually and then it’s just a simple matter of putting it where it goes and securing the straps over top. Sullivan scoots into the hallway and back to his room. Engaging with colony people is bad enough, but being in gravity takes its toll on his muscles.
He’ll need to wash off later, but he doesn’t have the time to do that right now. What he needs first is a reinvigorating sleep.
“How are you doing?” Judas asks over the comms.
“I’m going to bed,” Sullivan replies, tucking himself in.
“Okay, have a good sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up, probably.”
Sullivan murmurs as he gets comfortably settled down—he’s so worn out from the exertion of having to engage with people that he could just go right to sleep…