Secondhand Spaceman by Rachel Aukes

Author:Rachel Aukes [Aukes, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Waypoint Books
Published: 2024-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Guess what?

I learned how to run the damn thing. Six full days passed with no hint of Fetch or ship power, which gave me a lot of time to become 1) paranoid, and 2) intimately familiar with my hab-suit. I now knew how to shake my head back just right to sort of slide my glasses up my nose. I also figured out how the privy system worked and how to eject waste using the wall system next to the suit’s locker.

I even figured out how to eat and drink. I discovered a long, flexible straw that retracted into the helmet. When I pulled it out, a straw popped out inside my helmet as well. Mealtime took a full thirty minutes each time since sucking goop through a straw takes effort, and I had to take breaks or else I’d get lightheaded. As long as I drank my food, I could live indefinitely in the suit. But man, I missed cheeseburgers and pizza… and pretty much every food imaginable back on Earth. Shoot, by day four, I was missing the glop that the ship’s food machine made. Man was not made for a liquid diet.

When I wasn’t sucking down my meals or ejecting my waste, I stayed busy with random busyness. I could tell you what was tucked in every drawer and in every nook and cranny across the ship. I’d been searching for an operator’s manual (didn’t find one) but found plenty of other interesting things. I even found an honest-to-god blaster hidden in a small wall cabinet. I knew it was a blaster because it was sitting on a charging pad, and regular guns didn’t need that. The belt and holster fit, though I had to add a notch to the belt to make it tight enough. My dad had clearly cultivated a beer gut. I wore the blaster around the ship for a few hours, practicing drawing, before growing bored with even that, and putting it back on its charger. With my luck, I’d accidentally shoot a hole through the hull, making my problems even worse.

Why my dad had a blaster, I had no idea. Maybe he had one because he thought people in space posed more danger than space itself, though I had a hard time believing there was stuff worse than dark matter clumps out there. Maybe he had one because he was American, and it’s in our DNA to have guns. Or maybe he had one because he’d found it on one of his repo jobs. Fetch had said that most of his gear and supplies came from ships he’d repoed rather than actually buying anything. Evidently, if you take something from a ship you’re repossessing, it’s not considered stealing.

And Dad had more stuff stowed across the ship than I’d realized. Evidently, he had a fear of going hungry because he had food packets stashed everywhere. Since I was going through a particular situation that involved the food machine not working, I was pretty dang appreciative of his stash.

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