Space Debris

I'm going to die out here.

Lieutenant Claire Gaynor sat back in the dark cockpit of her lifeless, Jaguar-Class Interceptor, staring through her helmet's visor and a cracked canopy into the void of Proxima Centauri. The blackness of space sparked with the remnants of a massive battle, and shattered ships and debris caught light from the system's red dwarf star as they spun, forever stuck in the inertia of whatever impact or explosion had destroyed them.

Another small craft would occasionally drift past the slow rotation of her tiny ship, either another Jaguar or the enemy's equivalent: the Jiàn Scrambler. More often, it would be pieces of either and sometimes one of the bombers, gunships or battle cruisers of either faction would pass by her spinning view. The scale of the battle had kept the goriest aftermath out of view and there was hardly any reminder that each broken husk of a ship meant at least one person was dead.

Claire hadn't been paying attention at the start of the mission briefing, as was typical for her. It was the part when they explained whatever this particular battle's righteous justification was for the Alliance and why it was a cause worth dying for. There was an obvious formula to the ready room presentations that not many fellow pilots caught on to, but she had after the first few missions out of the Academy. It struck her as silly, attempting to inspire the troops as if they weren't already motivated every time they flew into battle by a desire to not die. There wasn't any real risk of pilots deserting when their small fighters could never make it back to a habitable planet or station under their own power. Space Force was a choice but leaving it before they were ready to let you go wasn't.

There was always a dramatic pause when they started discussing the real details of the mission and that's when she would start to pay attention. This battle was over a disputed, helium mining site and it must have been valuable to justify throwing away several divisions of the United Allied Space Force's best and brightest and so many of their expensive toys over it.

After her Interceptor had taken a direct hit that disabled all engine power and Comms, she'd spent the next hour watching the fight spin in and out of view. A United Alliance Interceptor would take out one of the Red's fighters and on the next revolution, a Red fighter would take out an Allied bomber. Attack Frigates of both sides were split into twos and threes or tens by torpedoes, far enough away so she couldn't see their crews being sucked out into the cold, darkness of space among the other debris.

In the end, it appeared to be a stalemate from her limited vantage. The battle died down, with only an occasional, stray ion bolt or an explosion in the distance. Eventually there was nothing left but remnants of ships, silence and the repeating view of the red dwarf star and the guilty planet they'd all killed each other for the right to plunder. It was possible =every last one of them had died, as apparently nobody had signaled for either fleet to come clean up the pieces.

Claire unbuckled her harness and floated out of a sculpted seat that hugged her almost as well as her void-certified, flight suit did. Twisting her torso to see around the inconvenient bulk of her breasts, she looked to her suit's Life-Support Control Monitor on the right side of her abdomen, below her bottom rib. The issue was non-existent for most female pilots but still, a system designed by men and for men.

Most prominently on the small, white box was the coupler where a messy braid of different-sized, black tubes and wires tethered her to the ship before flattening out into ribbons of tubes concealed in the weave of her suit. Most of them led down to the hub of her life support: poly-mesh underwear which were likely the most expensive boxer-briefs in the history of humankind. Universal Life-Preserving Undergarments was their official name but "iron undies" had become the informal nomenclature throughout Space Force rank-and file, a jab at their utilitarian lack-of-comfort. They were thick, a flattened out micro-factory that handled all the functions of keeping a soldier alive: on-board oxygenation of the blood, waste disposal and nanobot charging and servicing for health maintenance and trauma response.

There was enough slack in the braided cables and tubes to let her move about in the coffin-sized space but little more. The coupler could be simply detached from the suit with a twist but there'd be no need for that until she left the cockpit. That might not ever happen again.

She read the small, screen on the top of the box. Her suit's air scrubber and waste disposal were both functioning properly, though the clock was always ticking on oxygen. Water recycling was still working and there were a few days' worth of Calorie-Cap rations to be shot straight into her stomach via feeding tube. With some quick math, she determined the lack of oxygen would be what killed her, in about forty to forty-four hours.

With a sigh, Claire turned and reached around behind her seat then to fetch an emergency flare signal beacon. In the unlikely event of a second attack wave or rescue mission in that small window, she might need to signal them manually, as the distress beacons of the Jaguar Interceptors were foolishly connected to the rest of the comm system, which meant they were as dead as the rest of the ship. The advanced scout and rescue ships had thermal sensors to scan for life-signs but their lowest-bidder quality was a poorly-kept secret among Space Force personnel. It wasn't the kind of technology to trust your life to.

Flare in hand, she pushed against the cracked canopy at the metal frame to push back down into her seat. She buckled her harness again then waited to die.

* * *

Twelve hours passed with no sleep and with heavy eyes, Claire flicked through pictures on her datapad, which she'd plugged into her suit's comm to listen to a calming piano concerto. Her attention lingered on a childhood photo of her class at the Space Force School on Proxima: thirty-two, six year olds trained to live and breath the life of Space Force, including a young and bright-eyed, dirty blonde-haired, bob-cut Claire Gaynor. Another photo, dated four years later had the same group, now only twenty-three of them who'd passed all the flight training simulations. The others had been transferred to other military specialties that weren't so reliant on quick thinking, reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but she never saw any of them again.

A third class photo had an eighteen-year-old Claire in a graduation gown and cap, surrounded by the same group but now with fifteen strong. The rest had been removed for subversive ideologies, training accidents, suicides and two had just disappeared, including Claire's first boyfriend, Kevin. That was the last picture she had from Space Force School, before the lot of them were sent off-planet to one of the three Space Force Academies, where she would become a pilot and an officer. It was the last time she'd seen most of them.

The next set were pictures she snapped when she'd first arrived at the Academy Space Station. The bold, neon sign was strikingly un-militaristic and would be more appropriate for a Casino and the statues of various, long-dead Generals and Presidents were lined up out front. There were pictures from the Academy Hanger of cutting edge ships she'd never seen back on Proxima: her first up-close look at the venerable Eagle Fighter that had hung on her bedroom wall, the famous Humpback Torpedo Bombers and her favorite, the-then prototype, ultra sleek F-118 Jaguar Fighter Interceptor. It was in much better shape than hers was now.

The next picture was a selfie: a smiling Claire in front of the first "Upright" she'd ever seen: a six-foot two, regal German Shepherd, standing upright like a man, with broad shoulders and a tail tucked behind him. He wore a Military Police armband over green camouflage and carried a rifle, straight-faced, eyes-forward and scowling.

Uprights were animals genetically modified and hybridized to have human characteristics in addition to their animal ones. Home-grown, cheap labor, always kept very separate from humans. She'd never seen one on Proxima B but at the Academy, the dog-men were the posted guards of the highest security areas. In the two years that followed, she'd seen several breeds known for their strength and obedience, all standing like men and carrying guns.

Uprights were capable of speech, but they were never in any role permitting communication with humans. She had not heard one talk and it was strictly forbidden to initiate a conversation. Of course, that hadn't stopped some of her classmates from teasing them when they had the chance but the Upright canines were too disciplined to show any reaction beyond the focus of their sharp eyes. The only way they were allowed to interact with anyone outside of their Commanding Officer was a loud boot stomp of a deterrent, aiming their rifles in warning and shooting anyone who failed to heed the previous two.

The Upright canines were used for their strength, speed, sense of smell but in particular, their obedience. There were said to be entire infantry divisions of them in the United Alliance Army and Marine Corp but some of the most vicious stories were from them being used as Riot police on Earth, crushing uprisings and other civil disobedience without question.

In the years since the Academy, the MP dog-men were the only ones she'd seen but had heard of other species of purpose-bred Upright laborers, particularly in colonies, mines and more hostile planets. Some worked aboard the same space carriers she'd deployed from as ordinance loaders but their decks were the lowest of the ships and completely separated. The rules remained the same everywhere in United Alliance Space for Uprights: complete and total segregation from humans.

Since that first day, she'd been curious what they might be like and just how human these animal people really were. What would they have to say? Would they slur and pause like some slow children? Their orders were simple after all. Yet they were given weapons and others were trusted to load dangerous munitions correctly into fighter and bomber craft. The canine guards acted with a discipline so strict it was almost robotic and must require some intelligence. What were their lives like off-duty? What would they talk about over a beer?

Claire flipped pictures faster than with an impatient sigh. Bases, capital ships, space stations and sometimes a shot of a new galaxy or planet from afar. No trees. No deserts. No beaches. She was part of Space Force and Space Force stayed in space. All "shore leave" was taken in Virtual Reality simulations in the budget-conscious vastness of space.

There were no people in her life outside of her Division beyond a couple of confidants from School plus a handful of casual friends and shallow relationships. Nobody was going to cry for her like they did in the datapad movies, when they read off her name among the hundreds or thousands that had died today.

Thirty-one years of life to become an elite fighter pilot only to die fighting over a rock full of helium. Would suffocating in space even count as dying in battle?

A noise broke her train of thought: a dull thud of impact.

Something had hit the hull, echoing through the space-frame, small but a direct hit. That was nothing unusual in the drifting wreckage of a battle until she lurched forward against her harness and dropped her datapad at her feet, unplugging it and silencing the music. Her view stabilized and the ship was no longer spinning. She was being towed.

"Oh fuck."

Claire was awake now with a surge of adrenaline. She fumbled around the cockpit, the flare falling out of her lap and to her feet before she drew her pistol from a holster on her left thigh then slipped its tether around her wrist, a necessity of zero gravity. With the muscle memory of practice, she checked the magazine and chambered a round before pulling the weapon in against her chest, breathing deeply to steady her nerves. "Nobody takes prisoners in space" was what her teachers had always told her but there had always been whispers around the class that space pirates would take people alive as slaves: a far worse fate from what she had heard. All of Space Force were trained to fight til the death if ever captured by the enemy regardless and that's what she intended to do.

The canopy's view of space was framed by a well-lit overhang above her before it blocked the light of Promixa's star. The sides of a ship's hull came into view next and was between them. In her head, she ran through all the different spacecraft she'd studied but even as her dead Interceptor stopped and left her looking at the inside of a small cargo bay, it didn't click. No Space Force or People's Republic ship was laid out like this. Which meant it was a civilian ship: either junkers or space pirates.

The magnetism of the cargo bay floor faded up in intensity until her dead spacecraft drifted to the floor. A nervous shiver reminded her of the weight of her life-support tether, and she reached down with her right hand to blindly disconnect and toss it. She unbuckled her safety harness then and shrugged it off before replacing her hands on the pistol, lowered it into her lap and out of sight from the canopy glass.

The cargo bay doors crept closed in front of her and when they met, the room was in total blackness for a long moment before lights were switched on, flooding the space with a harsh, bluish white, LED array. She waited, frozen in her seat for far too long before the silence was broken by the hard footsteps of electromagnetic boots approaching in the slow, menacingly cadence of a deliberate walk.

There was only one set of footsteps. Good. They were approaching from her starboard side and she leaned forward enough to see a little more, out to the short wing of her Interceptor, right as a huge form stepped around it.

Fighter pilot space suits like hers were fitted, prioritizing mobility and the need to fit in all manner of cockpits and cabs. They were made from advanced synthetic weaves that were notoriously expensive and it was easy to tell the build of a person in a Space Force pilot suit. That was less true for support crew and their suits were bulky and generic, with just a few sizes meant to be shared across builds, heights and genders with polarized, black bubbles for heads. The silver foil figure that stepped into view made the support crew suits look positively svelte.

It was as if a regular suit had been inflated like a balloon, bulky in a way that couldn't have afforded much range of motion at all, as if the entire thing had been made of stacked tires of various sizes. Legs were undefined and the torso was almost spherical, with bulky arms which couldn't fall anywhere near perpendicular to the floor. The reflective glass, bubble head of the suit was cartoonish in proportion and four of them standing would reach the wearer's full height. Only the gloves of the suit appeared capable of any amount of dexterity. Whoever it was, was unarmed and in the shapelessness of the suit, quite anonymous but she had a gun and it didn't. A surge of relief followed.

It was the comical proportions that threw off her perception of its size until it walked past the wing, giving her a relative height. The faceless, balloon person was enormous, seemingly above seven feet tall, a size suggesting it was likely not human and her alertness raised again. It was getting closer to the ship and would see her at any moment.

Lurching forward, she brought the pistol to aim in the tight confines of the cockpit, her left elbow against the canopy and her right, mashing into her breast. The wearer jumped in surprise at the sight of her and the gun. At least it tried to but one electromagnetic boot kept it attached to the ground. Puffy arms flew out to its sides and huge hands splayed, presented empty.

Without her harness on, she started to drift out of her seat but stopped herself by pushing out her feet and elbows to half secure her. The formless person slowly moved one hand to point to the short-range radio antenna on the side of its helmet. Her helmet had one too but was built in, with technology about seventy years newer.

The hand of the figure came upright then, signaling numbers to her. One. Three. Claire glanced down to her right forearm where the suit's short-range radio controls lived and tuned it to channel thirteen, without taking her eyes off them.

"Who are you?" she barked.

"My name is Sam," a deep, male voice replied. "I'm just a junker. I swear I had no idea anyone was alive in here. Your ship is intact and your power core is still hot. It's worth a penny."

"Comms and drive are all down. I've been spinning for hours."

"Maybe they just hit your controls? Your drive still looks good on the scanners. Everything else out there is basically obliterated and only good for scrap. You got lucky." He had a slight drawl to the way he spoke, like cowboys did in the movies. She said nothing for a moment so he spoke again. "What's your name?"

"Lieutenant Claire Gaynor, UASF."

She heard a breath of a chuckle before he replied. "Well Lieutenant Gaynor, what do you want me to do here? I'm no threat, I promise. Maybe I can give drop you off somewhere?"

"A Space Force Station?"

"That's not really safe for me. But I can get you to where you can get a ride."

"Okay, deal."

"You want to come in? Or you got enough oxygen to ride back here?"

Claire paused before she holstered the pistol and pulled the emergency release of the canopy, triggered several tiny explosions that spider=webbed the thick glass more. She slouched in her seat and brought her knees up to donkey kick the canopy forward and clear of the cockpit before she started to drift up and clear of it.

"Whoa," Sam said quietly as Claire emerged but the radio, old as it was good enough to pick it up.

"Whoa what?"

Claire glanced back before she pushed off the ceiling, descending toward the floor beside her ship, her own electromagnetic boots engaging. His height was much more evident now.

"Ummmmm... your flight suit," he said, his deep voice abruptly more nervous than before. "I've never seen one so... tight. These older suits make me look like the Michelin Man."

"What's that?"

"Never mind. Come on," he turned his back and beckoned her to the airlock, a smallish room that would be claustrophobic with two of him in it, bringing them into close proximity. There was an empty, glass-door cabinet, presumably to hang the bulky suit when not in use.

She followed but kept her back to the wall, facing him, a hand hanging near the gun still. When she was clear of the door, he pressed the button to re-pressurize, a big button like a toy version of the sleek, military designs she was used to. It matched his ridiculous suit. The bulkhead door to the hold closed and red sirens flashed before oxygen hissed into the room, obscuring their vision in mist. The gravity drive slowly started to pull on them, normalizing to Earth gravity as was the standard for space-faring craft.

"So. How'd the battle go? Did you win?"

"I don't know. Kind of looks like nobody won."

"That's what they usually look like when I show up. Nothing's moving out there."

As the mist cleared, she watched him and in their closeness, saw her own reflection and her face beyond the glass. The canopy of a space fighter was already polarized so the visors of the space suits weren't so he could surely see her face from behind his helmet. "Well, I'm alive and I'm not going to suffocate in my ship so there's that. Thank you, Sam. Please don't make me use this gun."