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CHAPTER 33

January 11, 2091 (Earth timeline)

March 18, 2090 (Ship timeline)

approximately 6 light-months from Earth

3.64 light-years from Proxima

Roy sat in his quarters watching the latest videos that had been processed, correcting for the speed-of-light red shifting and other data error corrections. He was getting between two to five per day, depending on how long they were, how much post-processing was required, and how busy his wife must have been at the time with the newborn, who by Earth time now was almost eleven months old. He watched as the holographic projector rendered his daughter’s newest form. In the video, Roy estimated her to be about six months or so old and she was standing upright with one hand in the air, clearly holding on to something, probably her mother’s hand. She was trying to pull herself up and it looked like she was starting to scoot by herself. Roy wouldn’t have called it a crawl yet.

Samari’s red hair was getting curly like his had been as a young boy. She was wearing a onesie that was light pink with a large cartoonish Bengal tiger standing and nuzzling a little tiger cub. The words DADDY’S LITTLE TIGER curved over the top. Roy couldn’t help but smile and cry at the same time. He wondered what she must smell like and what her different crying and cooing voices must really sound like in person. The video was great quality sound, but a recreation of a person just wasn’t the same as the actual person. There was nothing tangible or warm about hugging a hologram.

Roy finished watching the last video that had been processed and then clicked it off. He looked out the porthole of his quarters that gave him a forward-looking view. He could not see much, just a few blue dots in the distance. From his view, he realized, he couldn’t see Proxima or Earth. He was stuck in the middle and couldn’t see where he was going or where he’d been. That was exactly how he felt. Roy tapped a few virtual icons and opened up the camera and set it to record.

“Hi, Chloe. Hi, baby doll! Hi, Samari! This is your daddy.” He wiped the tears from his eyes and smiled. “We’re about a year in for you at the time of this video. You’ll get it in another six months or so from now. I think our date is March seventeenth or . . . no . . . the eighteenth of 2090. My estimations are that Earth is sometime in January of the next year, 2091. I’m so sorry that Daddy missed your first Christmas and New Year’s. I can’t wait to see how Mommy and the grandparents spoiled you. Samari, you must be trying to crawl by now and maybe even jabbering a lot. I can’t wait to see those videos. You be really good for your mommy and let her get some rest every now and then. Know that I love you, sweetheart, in anything you do all your life. I may not be there on Earth with you physically, but I’m thinking of you every moment . . . ”

Roy paused briefly and sniffled a bit. His nose had gotten sore on the end and was slightly red and scabbed on one nostril from all the crying, sniffling, and rubbing his nose, to either clear it or cover up the fact that he’d been crying from the others in the crew. He took a long, deep breath and then let it out.

“ . . . Hi, Chloe. I miss you so much. I am getting a little better with the aching for you two. But I don’t think I’ll ever be right again. I miss you two so much. Please don’t ever stop sending me the updates. So, uh, today we have to fix the ship with a new navigation system. O’Hearn, as we knew him, messed up our nav systems so badly we’re pointed way off track. We correct and then within a few days we’re right back off track again. I hope they catch that guy and put him under a jail somewhere. Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m just so angry at that asshole. I love you. I said that already. I don’t know what else to say . . . 

“I, uh, was telling you about today. One of the flight crew engineering techs, Pankish Patel, and I are going outside for an extravehicular activity, or EVA as we call it in the business, LOL. This won’t be like any other EVA anybody has ever done ever. We have to stay tethered because the ship is accelerating so abruptly and at about eight-five percent of one Earth gravity. If we slip off the ship we’ll fall off and be left behind in the middle of deep space. It’s kind of like mountain climbing. We’ll have all sorts of safety gear, so it really isn’t as scary as it sounds. I’ll send you a message tomorrow and let you know how it went . . . ”

Roy paused again and swallowed the lump in his throat. There were so many thoughts going through his mind right at that moment. He’d even considered how hard it would be for him to just disconnect a carabiner and float away and die. Then Chloe wouldn’t be burdened with a long-lost husband that she’d never see again. He tried to put thoughts like that out of his mind, but every single time he thought about the burden on his wife and daughter because of him being where he was, he couldn’t help himself but to almost fall off into that pit of despair.

“Love you two. Give Mom and Dad and my sister my love for me.” Roy stopped the recorder and hit the send button. It was now streaming in bits across the void of space and would reach his wife and daughter sometime in about six months or so.

He sat there quiet for the next ten, or maybe it was thirty, minutes; he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He looked at the hologram of his growing little girl once again and then reached over and turned it off. Roy let out a long sigh as he rolled his head from side to side, stretching his neck. Slowly, he placed his hands on the forearms of his desk chair and rose. He unzipped his coveralls and tossed them aside. At eighty-five percent of one gravity, they draped across the bed and stayed put. He dropped his underwear to the floor and slid on the Excreted Fluids and Solids Compression Under Garment, or EFaSCUG (pronounced “ee-fa-scug”), It took him a moment to get his private anatomy in just the right comfortable position.

Carefully, he slipped on the Liquid-Cooled Ventilation and Compression Garment, or the LCVCG. The microfiber garment slipped over his body like a pair of spandex tights—very tight and form fitting! First, he slipped his legs through the zippered open-front torso of the suit, working his feet down into place. He had to carefully work each toe into the “toe-boots,” making sure not to miss one of the toe sockets in them. He slipped his heels into the heel cups and then worked the tight spandex-like carbon suit up past his ankles, over his knees, and then into place on his hips. He had to stand at that point and work the outflow tube from the EFaSCUG into the right port on the LCVCG and test it for good seal.

Once he got the tube into place he reached under his crotch and grabbed the fastener pull and zipped it up to his belly button. He stretched his shoulders back as far as he could, pulling the sleeves up over his shoulders while forcing his hands down through the armholes. Anyone who’s ever put on coveralls, especially very tight ones, Roy thought, knows how this must feel. He wiggled, squirmed, hopped up and down a couple times while puffing out his chest and flexing his shoulders until the garment felt in place. Roy worked the wrinkles out of the sleeves down to the wrists and then he zipped the suit up all the way to just below his neck, leaving it open for the neck seal on the helmet, which was down by the airlock.

“That’s tight,” he said aloud. “Nigel, handshake with the LCVCG.”

“Handshaking, Roy,” Nigel told him. He could feel the suit suddenly get warmer and then a display appeared in front of him via his contact lenses, saying the LCVCG was online and ready to connect to the EVA system. “I think you are good to go, auld boy.”

“Thank you, Nigel. Now do a EFaSCUG flow-tube check.” Roy waited nervously, bouncing up and down on the toe-boots, getting used to them.

“Flow-tube shows negative pressure to reservoir,” Nigel responded, which was exactly what the tube was supposed to do. There was a slight vacuum between the reservoir—the LCVCG capillaries—and the flow-tube so that any excreted materials would be sucked into the LCVCG and away from the body. Roy recalled that it was a lot like a suit that one character in one of his favorite twentieth-century science fiction novels wore—Fremen stillsuits, as he recalled—but they didn’t have toe-boots and they didn’t use them to walk in space.

“Good. Thank you, Nigel.” Roy cycled the door to his quarters open.

“You are quite welcome, chum. When you are scared . . . ” Nigel added the front part of an old Scottish friendship saying that Roy had programmed into him years ago. Nigel threw things like that into the conversation from time to time.

“I’ll shake the piss out of ye until you’re not,” Roy finished, almost laughing. “Well, let’s go walk in space at sixty-something percent the speed of light.”



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