The Heartless Void

6: Satanic Mills

To Starbuck's front was the hard and unyielding hull of the Pequod and to his back was an endless scope of nothingness. He obsessively followed the mantra that had been drilled into him since a youth on his first spacewalk at Nantucket Station: three points of contact with the vessel at all times. It was slow and ponderous, simultaneously like climbing through syrup and the thinnest of air. One step would feel as though he was floating, the other would drag him squarely back to the ship.

Or perhaps that strangeness came from inside of himself. He had performed countless spacewalks, some in far more dangerous situations than this – but they had always been with external peril, one he could understand and see and plan for. This danger was darker, cloaked in terms he could not fully decipher.

Ideally, Starbuck knew he should not be alone for an EVA. Protocol dictated that, where possible, two trained astronauts should make the dangerous walk. Starbuck's partner was often Queequeg, the man he trusted more than anyone else on the Pequod. But, as he had sharply told him, Queequeg was already above his radiation quota – and there was no one else Starbuck wished to tell about his mission. Better to ask forgiveness than permission from Ahab, Starbuck thought.

He tried to scrub his mind of the captain as he pain-stakingly unhooked one clip and re-attached it to the next point. The handholds he grasped rose up the curving shell of the Pequod's hull, each direction marked with a different painted colour. The central spine he climbed on now was a vivid gold, but aft to the thrusters was red, forward to the nose cone was blue and his pathway – the one to the bulky, discordant comms array – was green. The hues had dulled over time, despite the assurances of the owners that it would never rot or chip off. Everything in space had its danger multiplied by one thousand: the simplest fleck of paint could rupture a spacesuit or window in the speeds the Pequod travelled, even outside of her FTL phases.

Starbuck was thinking of danger again. He pushed it down and spoke into his internal microphone pack, connected to the Pequod's cockpit. At least that communication worked. "One hundred and fifty feet to go," he said. "All systems are nominal."

"Copy that," Queequeg's voice said.

"I can't see any damage to the comms array from here," Starbuck continued. "No external asteroid damage or wear."

He had not expected to. The Pequod, in her age, would let the crew know if she had been hit. Alarms would blare and the alerts would not clear until they had done something about it. Starbuck knew this ship from her thrusters to her forward heat shield. Nothing had collided with her.

He approached the fork in the road to the green handholds. Above him, the shadow of the comms array sat squatly on the Pequod's outer deck. Her old design meant that she carried relics from ancient years, and her array looked far too big for her. Starbuck's path took him out and over the edge of what they still termed the crow's nest. He had to navigate the stomach-turning shrouds before reaching the very top.

"Any success with the internal line?" he asked hopefully.

"That's a negative, Lieutenant. We're still not connecting any further than the intranet. I've got all sorts of troubleshooting running, but they all say the same thing."

Starbuck nodded, then realised Queequeg could not see him, other than through the external cameras positioned along the Pequod's hull – none of them close enough to show him as more than a tiny, dark form. "Right," he said.

Keeping his eyes fixed to the handholds, Starbuck neared the edge of the array. Too soon the gargantuan block loomed over his head. From here he would have to lean backwards to attach himself to each of the tether-points. Inside his gloves, his palms began to sweat, as always. He fought to control the reaction, knowing the sensors of his spacesuit would rocket otherwise. He could not admit to any of the crew that he was scared; one of them had to keep their head.