Free Fall (Space Truckin' Book 1) Read online

  “Ahh, damn. Sucks man. Still got another six months. How ya doing with it?”

  “Just another day.”

  “Really? How long you been doing this?”

  “Six years now.” Six long years, and getting longer. This job wasn’t getting any easier.

  “Damn. I don't know if I could do this for six years. Though it’s gotta be nice. Hell, the mad pay… You gotta be rolling in the dough.”

  Will didn’t want to be the one to break it to the kid. When drivers headed out, nobody told them they had to pay for all the prepackaged food and stuff they sent off with them. When they got back after eight months, they deducted all those expenses, as well as anything he may have damaged in flight, and took that off the paycheck. It was another one of the ways they got a person out there, making it so he had to stay. Sure, he got four months off when he got home, but his cell phone would be turned off and he’d lose his apartment while he was out. It was hard to find places that supported renting to someone for just four months.

  He might make a decent paycheck, but it never seemed to add enough to get him out of the hole he always seemed to dig himself into.

  “Yeah, just keep raking it in. So, any word from the station? Any news?”

  “There’s talk. The Martians are all up in arms about the robots. They need new parts, but aren’t getting them from Earth. Plus, they’re all bitchin’ about their rotation being so damn long. Man, there is this one hot MILF there. Next time I get back, we’re going to-”

  When the radio started to hiss and break up, Will wasn’t too worried about it. The kid was probably on a trajectory farther out than Will had originally thought. It wasn’t the worst thing, though. The kid was somewhat annoying.

  Young pups… Why was the energy and excitement for things always wasted on the youth? Was he ever truly that young?

  He let his head fall back to the headrest, feeling a little moisture touching the edge of his eye. His chest had that little ache, and each breath was pulled in with effort.

  He already knew what was going to happen to the kid. He would get back to Earth, expecting to get some huge paycheck that would turn out to be a third of what he thought. He would say it was still more than he would have made if he continued to be a gear jammer back on Earth, and he could still have a lot of fun with four months off.

  Then the kid would get home and his parents would be older. If he had a girlfriend, she would have run off with someone else. Of course, he had been sending her messages. When she didn’t respond, he just thought she was really busy with work. If she did respond, her responses would be short and sporadic. He would go home, if he still had a home, and find all her stuff gone from the apartment. Or he would go to her place and the door would be locked, and when he knocked, a man would answer, asking who the hell he was.

  The kid was in for one hell of a shock when he got home. Will almost felt sorry for him, but it was the nature of the beast. If the kid was going to make it, he would have to learn that they were gone for eight months at a time and things didn’t wait around for them. Life moved on, and they were now just tourists to Earth.

  “Fly safe,” he said into the silence, knowing the kid would never hear it. With any luck, the kid would be okay.

  He made sure the timer was set to wake him an hour before the burn, then he keyed the lights and undid the safety harness before floating back to the sleeping compartment. As the timer on the light counted down, he made his way to the bed, then secured the safety net around him. When the timer hit “0”, everything other than a few emergency lights turned off.

  Tomorrow would be a new day, another day closer to getting home.

  . . . .

  “What in the Sam Hill?” Will grumbled, fighting against his restraints. Around him, alarms blared, lights flickering from red to orange and back to red. The ship itself, heavy by Earth standards, shook harder than what should have been possible. The harness strapping him onto the grav couch pinched him tightly as everything shook, causing the fabric to automatically tighten, which he thought was one hell of a flaw. He tried to undo it the damn thing so he could find out what in the hell was going on, but it wouldn’t release. The clasp was locked so tight that even when he found the release button, it wouldn’t budge. The catch was caught against whatever fasteners were in the mechanism and it wouldn’t let go. He was stuck in the damn bed as who knew what was going on in the ship.

  The alert klaxons raised in pitch around him. Another great design. If an alarm was ignored, it must need to be louder. He tried to figure out how the hell to get out of this damn grav couch, but he could barely think over those alarms. What happened if he couldn’t get up to turn them off? Would it get loud enough for his ears to bleed?

  He pushed and pulled on the release of his restraints while holding in the button. It still wouldn’t budge as his efforts grew more frantic. In his head, he could feel the strain wearing on him, the start of pain at the edge pushing in on his thoughts. If he didn’t change something soon, a migraine would attack him while he had to deal with that damn overbearing alarm.

  How…much…more…can…I…take?

  After a bunch of short tugs on the release, he gave it one long pull…and it opened. The straps holding him in place loosened and he was free, his body rising in the room.

  However, he was rising faster than normal. The sudden release should have bounced him up a little, but he was rising faster…and not straight up. He was moving at an angle. Something wasn’t right.

  He reached above his head to a handhold and grabbed it, twisting himself around. Not having the time to worry about putting on his uniform, he stayed in the one-piece undergarment he had been in and pulled himself out of the hatch.

  It didn’t take him long to reach the control room, what he always thought of as the cab of the “space truck”. Half of the console was flashing, and the touch screen that handled most of the automated systems was flickering. He could see part of an image that he thought was the main information screen, but then it would shake again, leaving him with a jumble of numbers and letters.

  This system was supposed to be able to run by itself and was never supposed to be like this. This was something out of one of his first nightmares when he had been a first-year. Being in space had been a very upsetting experience, and there had been quite a few video messages sent home of him freaking out. Sometimes, he would be a crying mess after just a warning message would appear, sure that the whole system was going to go dark and he would be left adrift out there, never to see his wife and daughter again.

  This shouldn’t ever be like this. Not unless something really bad was happening. Not unless the system was lost in… What had the techs called it? There was something... Some kind of cycling.

  He tried to think about what the techs had said. They had told him something he could try. One of them had laughed about it, joking that it was the solution to almost all tech problems. Whenever something happened, it was the tried-and-true fix.

  Damn it! What the hell was it?!

  He racked his brain, but he just couldn’t think. That noise erupting around him, the edge of sleep still not fading away, his brain still fuzzy. Dreams sticking at the edge, calling for him to come back to them, lay back down. Just turn off that alarm and go back to sleep.

  Turn that alarm off! It was so loud; he just couldn’t think over it. He needed to turn it…

  Turn the system off. Restart it. That was it. He needed to reboot the system. He needed to cycle it all down by removing the side panel and finding the processing core.

  It sounded so complicated, something a tech should be doing, but they had shown him how to do it multiple times. It was just a simple button he had to hold down for ten seconds, powering everything down. Then he’d wait thirty seconds before pressing the button again. They said it was no different from his computer at home, although he hadn’t admitted to them that he didn’t have a computer at home. All he had was his phone and his tablet to play games on. It did
n’t matter. He remembered where the button was.

  The system made a few beeping sounds as it restarted, then there was a long squeal. He wasn’t sure if it was actually coming back to life or if he had just screwed the whole damn thing up. Just what was it supposed to sound like? Was the screen supposed to flicker like that? It flashed some damn logo, then went back to a black screen. Was that normal?

  A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek before it lifted into the space around him. He felt warm. Was the ship’s thermometer screwed up? If it had quit, the ship should be cooling down, not getting warm, especially since he was traveling away from the sun. To him, that meant the ship’s systems were out of whack.

  And how the hell would you know that? Even your basic knowledge of trucks is rudimentary. Even with the slightest problem, you always had to call on-road to come out and fix it. Remember that one time you ran out of antifreeze and had to wait for five hours just so someone could come out there and put water in your radiator? How would you know if it’s the thermometer, rather than something more serious?

  He could just be nervous. His stomach had knotted, and he could feel the taste of last night’s food working its way back up. It had been a long time since he had vomited in zero gravity, but he never wanted to repeat it. Just the thought had him remembering the stench he had lived with for four months. The smell had been cycled from the air immediately after the mess had been contained, but psychologically, he smelled it the whole remaining trip.

  Now he smelled it again.

  The screen flickered a few more times before he saw the familiar logo, then the icons he was used to. Everything looked normal. Maybe it had just been a computer glitch.

  Yeah, one hell of a computer glitch.

  Then a large “danger” symbol flashed on the screen, everything tinted red. The icons blurred in the background as the danger symbol kept flashing.

  What the hell did that mean? Well, he knew what it meant, but what was he supposed to do about it?

  Taking a stab in the dark, he pressed the “danger” symbol. A box appeared, containing a message.

  Hull has been breached. Propulsion is being released. Please exit the vehicle and repair.

  Below the message was a button.

  Click here for directions.

  Feeling like an idiot, he clicked the button, not really sure what they expected him to do. Sure, he had the minimal training on how to do some of the crap that might need to be done, but no one ever seemed like they expected him to actually do any of it.

  Another box appeared with what looked like the EVA gear. Beside it stood a person. The screen then started to go through an animation, walking him through what they expected him to do.

  The acidic feeling in his stomach turned to a large lump of clay. This didn’t look like something he was going to be able to do. He was in way over his head.

  Why in the hell did they choose him for this crap if they knew he was no good at it?

  Because he was one of the few idiots willing to do it. There weren’t a lot of candidates, and the turnover rate was terrible because most hotshots lasted one or two trips before they quit. Too many lost themselves to cabin fever.

  They didn’t care if he knew how to handle this. They lose a load, or him, it was just a write-off. He was just a write-off.

  Everything on the cheap. Yeah, but how cheap was that EVA suit going to be when he got into it? How well-made was it going to be? Could he even fit into the damn thing?

  When the animation ended, there was the option to replay it. He pressed the button, trying to pay more attention on what he was about to do.

  . . . . .

  It felt odd, definitely not like anything he had expected a spacewalk to be, and nothing like he had ever seen on television. Not that he was into all that science fiction garbage. He didn’t think it was all that realistic, but that was before they had started doing these space trucks. Lightsabers? Really? Who would use such a thing? How was that even practical?

  It wasn’t.

  But this thing he was in now was a damn box with arms. It looked more like what some kid would put together in his or her garage while playing with Dad’s tools. It was bright white, and the outside felt like some kind of soft plastic over a hard exterior. It wasn’t something he could really explain, other than it felt almost like touching skin.

  Once he was in it, it felt like a coffin. There was some kind of gel substance he had lowered himself into, then the lid closed over him. Tubes ran in for him to breathe into, and he assumed the tubes down below were supposed to take care of his bodily fluids. He didn’t want to know what happened to it.

  When the ship “launched” him out of the undercarriage, he knew the box he was in shook. He could see it in the screen showing him an outside view, but he didn’t feel it. The gel must have been some kind of shock absorber.

  He tried to take a deep breath, but the maintained air filtering in wouldn’t allow him to. The flow was steady and consistent, and he let out a silent curse through clenched teeth. Why was this damn machine keeping him from taking a deep, calming breath if he wanted to?

  Don’t waste oxygen, you idiot. That’s what the machine is trying to tell you. Listen to it. Get the job done and get back in.

  That annoying little voice in the back of his mind was right. He knew what he needed to do, or so he hoped. He had watched the animation five times, saw where the propulsion breach was and the quick fix the computer had recommended. It sounded simple enough…if he didn’t think too much about the spacewalk aspect of it. He would just head out to where the gas was leaking, then apply the super strong duct tape to the hole. It really wasn’t duct tape, but the roll of sticky material had that feel to it. It was that “fix everything” solution engineers and mechanics loved to use. Duct tape and WD-40, the solution to everything. He had to give it to the space guys for coming up with a space version of it.

  His little coffin briefly fired a thruster, shifting him around. It was automatically doing everything. He just had to use the glove things near his hands. They were odd little gloves that he fit his hands into, allowing him to move the arms outside. He would use the arms to adhere the space tape, then he would be on his way again.

  It all seemed so simple, he wondered if a robot could do the job. It had to be almost like what the robots did on Mars. They used robots for almost all the terraforming work. The people in the Mars station were only there as computer monkeys, typing all day on their machines.

  Yeah, and none of them risked their lives to go out and fix a hole in their station. They would just tell their robots to do it. Or maybe the robots would fix the hole without being told.

  He didn’t have a robot in his little space truck. It probably cost too much. Life was cheap, but robots cost money. We couldn’t risk one of those now, could we?

  Maybe the coffin was automated, but he’d still have to be in it to work the controls, which he prepared for by putting his hands in the gloves. The material seemed to tighten around them, and he had a brief moment of panic that he wouldn’t be able to get his hands back out. Just to make sure, he pulled his hands, yanking them free.

  See, there is nothing to worry about. You are not going to lose yourself to some damn machine. It still needs you, you need it, and everything is going to be fine. Now, quit freaking out about every little damn thing and get this fixed. The longer you take, the more off course you’ll get and the harder the burn will be to set everything right. The animation said so.

  “Forty below and I don’t give a f-. Got a heater in the truck, and I’m off to the rodeo,” he sang to himself, remembering the old trucker’s song he used to listen to back on Earth. When shit was going bad, he always found humming a few verses seemed to put some calm back into him.

  He opened his eyes, putting his hands back in the gloves as he practiced working the arms. Then he closed them again to keep from looking out at the large black expanse of nothing he could see through the little visor in the suit.

&
nbsp; “Eighteen wheels and a dozen roses,” he sang, changing to a more positive tune, although it made him think a little more of home. While he wasn’t itching to see his ex anytime soon, it really wouldn’t be the worst thing. He had loved her once, and maybe she hadn’t kept his little girl from him on purpose. Maybe it had been an accident. He would be home soon, then he would see them both. He would hug his little girl, getting lost in that smile.

  How long ago had it been…years maybe, when he had come home from being out on the road. He had been away for too long and had come home to see a large gap in the front of her mouth. She had lost several teeth that summer, and he made sure the tooth fairy got back pay for all those missing teeth he hadn’t been home for.

  The jets turned him around again so he was now facing the ship. He could see the little hole, gas leaking out in a white mist. He couldn’t believe that little hole was causing him all that trouble. Had he not been so close, he wouldn’t have been able to even see it. It was the size of a pinhole, maybe smaller.

  He hoped it hadn’t gotten him too far off course. The accelerated burn of the reverse thrust might not be so bad.

  He reached out and fastened his safety line to the side of the ship, the magnetic clamp firmly grasping the metal. It was a small, thin cable designed to keep him from falling behind the ship. Once the line clasped into place, the magnetics sent a signal to his suit, confirming the lock, and the suit’s thrusters quit their burn.

  The ship was still in a state of acceleration. If he were to let go, he would stay at his relative speed while the ship continued to accelerate past him. It was so strange. He didn’t feel like he was accelerating, the motion having a constant pull against him, but that was how it was out there. He just always lived with that feeling in the back of his stomach, as if something wasn’t right.

  That was why so many new space jockeys got nauseated so much at first. It took a while to get used to the feeling.