Travelling

by Pil Lee

Sometimes one has no choice but to give up. Nadia’s words seemed to reverberate around the airlock as her body hurtled away towards epihelion. Paul made to follow her, as he always did, when suddenly he felt the whiff of freedom for the first time in four years.

“Well fuck that,” he said out loud as he ripped off his helmet and raced back to the engine room. He knew there was no way they could reach Central Station with the damage they’d sustained, but for the first time he found himself wondering why they couldn’t choose another destination. Heady with the thought of making his own decisions, he overrode Nadia’s shutdown and reprogrammed their course.

Three months later, he climbed out of deep sleep with a shocking headache and scanned the old space station floating Point Two KKs away.

“Unidentified yacht, please identify,” came the broadcast.

Paul grinned. OK, so maybe the repair crews might be a bit shoddy, and there was no salon for Nadia’s ridiculous hairdo, but Mission Control operators were the same boring Trouser Men the galaxy over.

“Unidentified yacht identifying itself,” he radioed back. “My identity is identified as Tango Tango Four Private.”

“Roger that, dock at Bay 4,” came the terse reply.

“Yo, Bay 4 identified,” said Paul.

“Fucking dickhead,” came the distant reply as Control cut the comm.

Paul’s grin just got wider. Time to party!

The first thing that he noticed when he stepped onto the station was the rank smell of too many people and not enough resources to waste on air scrubbers. The second thing was the three security police waiting for him.

“Paul Tate, you are under arrest for the theft of this space yacht.” The leader waved his other two men into the embarkation tube. “Check it out.”

Paul opened his mouth to protest just as he felt the shock of the judgement dart on his arm.

Two years later he woke from Comatec Detention with a shocking headache to find the same security policeman waiting beside him. Paul pressed his thumb to the release tablet and the officer marched swiftly away. Paul tried to finish his protest that the yacht was his wife’s and he didn’t see how it could be called stealing when he realised, hey, the moment had passed, and he went to check out the employment board at the docks.

The list was short and consisted mostly of requests for cleaners and prostitutes.

“Well fuck that,” he said as he made his way down to Bay 4.

Nadia’s yacht was still impounded and Paul hummed a little tune as he keyed himself in.

“Bless you Trouser Men,” he said as he hit Emergency Detach and vented two year old sewage into the bay. He checked the old damage in the engine room, figured out a destination he thought he could make at slow speed and punched in the new course.

Six years later e shot out of deep sleep with a shocking headache, a burnt lung and an arm full of liquid shrapnel as the yacht veered much too close to a binary sun. he raced to the bridge and spent the next five minutes trying to shut down the warning klaxon before his addled brain suggested that moving away from the sun might be a higher priority. The engine room offered no hope and he worked feverishly on navigation, hoping to find a trajectory which would slingshot him round the star and back into the coldness of space.

He finally realised that there was enough trajectory to fling off a small weight, about the size of his own body, using the mass of the yacht as ballast.

He was already suited up and in the airlock when he heard his wife’s voice echoing back to him. Sometimes one has no choice but to give up.

Paul bowed his head in acknowledgement. It had only taken him two hours – or was it nearly seven years?

He considered how short a distance he’d come.

“Well fuck that,” he said as he ripped off his helmet and raced back to the engine room.