Up Against It - M. J. Locke [26]
She shut off the autopilot and reeled her port tether in with the asteroid tumbling under her, her suit making the needed corrections, till she had circled the small asteroid, and touched down at the mooring station. She stumbled and braced herself on a boulder.
This was a tiny world: perpetually twilit on this side, with its pole of rotation pointed toward the sun. Its horizons were coarse and close, curving sharply away underfoot on all sides. It gave her a hell of a view of the wheeling, starry sky. They had claimed the stroid together, she and Xuan, back in ’72. Officially it had only a number, but they had dubbed it No-Moss.
Ordinarily she took a few moments to soak in the view, but today her thoughts coiled inward.
I killed eight. Eight dead, because I made it so.
Their families’ faces loomed in her thoughts as they had appeared when she had notified them: faces twisting into horror, or going blank with shock. She propped herself against the boulder for a moment to rest, with sweat cooling on her face and under her arms, looked out at the Big Empty, and let dread wash over her: dread for herself, and the fate of her people.
Hold it together, she told herself. You did what you had to, and there’s still work to be done. She stood.
From there it was a dozen steps home. Jane pulled herself along the handrails set into the rocks, overbalanced in the featherlight gravity by her pack. She took great care not to launch herself into orbit with too much spring in her step. Then she jumped down to the airlock in their crevasse, and anchored herself there, one-handed, while her port tether detached from the asteroid’s mooring station and reeled in. She zipped the airlock closed. The vents opened up, air rushed in, and the walls and outer hatch, made of pillowed nylon, quivered with the eager energy of a puppy. A sigh escaped between her lips.
“Hello, House,” she said, and removed her helmet. The all-clear sounded; underfoot, the inner hatch opened. Xuan floated there, two fingers on the handle, a smile ghosting his lips and worry ghosting his outsized eyes. “Hello, yourself.”
She smiled back, and chinned herself down into the habitat. Xuan moved aside and closed the inner lock. As her ears crackled with the pressure change, she drew in the smells and sounds and sights of home. The burnt-almond-cookie smell of space mingled with the habitat’s cool, moist air, which carried to her nostrils the scents of incense, pot herbs and chilis, must and dust and cleaners, twisted-hemp netting and molded-plastic fixtures, machine lubricants, and twenty-four years’ living. Home.
* * *
From the instant he had heard her voice, Xuan knew the toll the past day and a half had taken. He opened the airlock and she sank inside before him. Her sweat-soaked hair was plastered to her head. He took her helmet and she climbed stiffly out of her suit. At eighty-nine, at the apex of middle age, Jane prided herself on keeping fit. She took her antiaging meds; she ate well; she worked out almost daily. Her motions were normally swift and self-assured. It was the disaster, he realized, that had caused this stiffness.
The toll was written also on her face.