Conflagration

Working for a Living

Lyssa had worked in EVA suits many times, but never like this.

Normally, whenever she was in an EVA suit, it was to do a repair on a plane or on a ship while in the vacuum of space. Lyssa was comfortable in space. She was a creature of the vacuum. Lyssa had been born on a space station. She was more than comfortable in space; she was at home there.

Until today, she'd never been on a planet in her life. She'd never felt natural gravity before...it felt different in some ineffable way. She'd never seen an actual sky and she'd never seen so much water in one place. There was so much water here it boggled her mind to think about. On Ciudad Estrella, the great fountain in Forum Square was reputed to hold 400 liters of water. But here, on SHP 242 (or "Sanctuary" as the pirates called it), there was more water than Lyssa's mind could conceptualize. And she, a spacer who couldn't even swim, was under this massive lake's surface.

Even protected from drowning by the EVA suit, it had been scary enough stepping off the dock and into the water. It had been scary enough floating in her EVA suit on the surface. But now, she was a few meters beneath the surface and underneath the belly of the hardpointer. The rational part of her mind knew that the suit's rebreather would keep her supplied with air and that the suit's buoyancy would keep her from sinking. The irrational, instinctive part of her mind was screaming at her, YOU CAN'T SWIM! The bottom of this lake was more than a kilometer below her. Her legs dangled over a dark and mysterious abyss. She felt like she was going to fall into it at any moment. She felt like something was going to rise up out of it at any moment.

Lyssa struggled to ignore that part of her mind and focus on the job at hand: assessing the damage done to the hardpointer's belly when five of the eight thrusters had failed during atmo entry. The damage was significant, but not unrepairable. All eight thrusters would need to be replaced eventually, even the three that were still more or less functional. But that would require a maintenance hanger. What Lyssa was mainly concerned with was the integrity of the plane's belly skin which served as the outer pressure hull as well as being an important aerodynamic surface. She found several places where the skin was cracked and torn, including one place which was slowly leaking fuel from the belly tank right next to one of the blown thrusters. How the shit did that not blow us up? We should be dead. Then, a thought occurred to her: Maybe we are dead. This planet ain't too far from Hell, in my book.

From the tool belt she wore over the EVA suit, Lyssa grabbed a tube of thick, brown sealing dope and gobbed it into the crack in the plane's skin. She'd never applied sealing dope underwater before, but the instructions on the tube swore it would stick to metal, even in water. Lyssa found it stuck to everything else (including her gloves) much better than it stuck to the plane's metal. It took a lot of effort, but by the time she was done, she had a temporary seal over the leak and an EVA suit covered in brown sealing dope. The fix was just temporary and would never hold up in flight, but at least the plane wasn't bleeding its precious fuel out into the lake. With the planet being blockaded by the same pirates who had shot her and Erin down that morning, it's not like a fuel shipment was expected anytime soon.

After she got the sealing dope mostly off of her gloves, Lyssa made some notes on her data pad. She would need to check the fuel in the belly tank for water contamination, find some way to pump the fuel into another tank (probably via some kind of manual pump⁠—the electric crossfeed pumps wouldn't work without the control card plugged in to the main computer). Once the belly tank was empty, she'd be able to patch the crack itself. The task seemed daunting. And that's just one small crack.

She sighed. The sound echoed loudly inside the EVA suit's helmet. Then, suddenly, she felt very vulnerable here in the water underneath the floating hardpointer. She became very aware of the abyssal darkness beneath her. Anything could be down there. The back of her neck started to tingle. She felt watched. Her every instinct told her that she was, in fact, being watched. Her rational mind told her that she was just being paranoid.