The skin of the girl's thighs glowed under the sterile flourescent light - nearly jumping from the pages Tomas had unfolded.
In the still, quiet air of the station's night cycle, the plastic sheets were a window looking out on a nearly forgotten place - laid carefully on the console before him.
Somewhere warmer, somewhere open and free. Where the light of a real sun shone, and the sweet smell of the slim redhead's skin may have mingled with that of the living grass she lay on in the picture. A place that existed somewhere as surely as did the young woman and that cocksucker of a photographer that once got paid to spend hours taking her picture.
But to a young man, living in a metal can in the blackness of space - far enough out that the entire galaxy, and within it, the small section that man knew, could occasionally be seen as a disc shaped cloud through a porthole, the woman and the grass and the world where it grew may as well have been a pleasant dream. One barely touched through the foggy thoughts of what the station's chronometer said was early morning.
For the purpose of maintaining morale, the medical staff made sure Tomas and his hundred or so co-habitants had access to enough electronic porn to fill the station countless times over, were it ever to be printed out. But he liked keeping a magazine or two in his footlocker while he was deployed. Something he could hold in his hand and look at on a page. Something that he could have some physical connection to - even if it was just turning or smoothing a page.
It was real, to an extent, and he enjoyed the private process of unfolding the carefully tucked pages, smoothing them with his hands as his gaze slid over them...
This was a ritual he enjoyed often during the brief moments of privacy that station life afforded. One of the only perks of pulling night watch for a week was the guarantee that he would be the sole crew member in the command unit - an area that no one save the station Commandant could enter without his authorization as Officer of the Watch.
Needless to say, the Commandant worked days.
Tomas leaned forward to turn the page and as he did noticed something peculiar about the reclining redhead. A spot on her stomach, just above her navel had begun to flash red. Peeling back the page to reveal the gauges that he was supposed to be monitoring, the young Ensign noticed that an indicator labeled "Gyro 2" was flashing.
Folding the magazine gently and placing it under his seat with his right hand, he used his left to call up a status report for the malfunctioning unit with his right. He moved without any real urgency - even a serious malfunction involving one of the station's 20 gyroscopic stabilizers wouldn't affect the crew at all, and might not even be repaired unless two or three others failed in the future. It appeared, in this case, that the offending unit had become unbalanced for some reason, and had shut itself off - following the protocols set by the station's master computer.
He pressed another button and a monochrome waterfall of numbers began cascading down the display screen on the far wall.
Just as he was entering the malfunction into the next day's maintenance log, another red light on the board in front of him winked into life, and another, and another seconds after that. Tomas was reaching to call the engineering deck when he felt something unprecedented.
The station moved.
It started as a low rumble he barely felt through the soles of his boots, but soon became a teeth-jarring rattle that knocked him to his feet. It subsided for a moment
....and then was back stronger than before. His head hit the console on his way to the deck. Then, just as suddenly as the shaking began Tomas felt something new...in the pit of his stomach...he was lifting from the floor...
Orange overhead lights pulsed now, and a klaxon was sounding.
From somewhere else in the station, he heard a violent sound, a distinctive sound, a moaning that spacers dread. The wail spread quickly through the station to the walls of the command unit. It was the sound of metal bending, buckling, of something big tearing away as the station's superstructure screamed in protest.
Tomas couldn't believe his eyes. Both he, and the compartment he was in were, for lack of a better term ... growing. The nearest bulkhead, which once appeared just a few feet away, almost in reach, now looked to be more than 20. Even more surprising was that he still felt like he could come close to touching it...His body, like the room around it, appeared to be stretching and warping outward.
The effect was, quite simply put, nauseating. Accordingly, Tomas vomited.
One by one, the hard plastic faces of the control consoles around the room began to crack - then shatter. It wasn't clear at first, but after Tomas heard something whiz by his ear he realized that the rivets in the bulkhead, put under pressure by the swiftly and inexplicably shifting geometry of the station, had begun to squirt violently from their slots between the plates of the exterior walls.
Damage reports from other parts of the station crackled through the loudspeakers in the console....stated in the calm but firm female voice of the station's computer.
UNIT 7 HULL BREACH ... HULL BREACH UNIT 3 .... FAILURE PRIMARY COMMUNICATION ARRAY .... FAILURE POWER GENERATOR ONE .... DEPLOY RADIATION TEAMS FORTHWITH....
Clinging to the lip underneath the command console - floating in formation with the tiny spheres of weightless blood from his gashed forehead - Tomas did the only thing he could think to do. A testament to his humanity, if not his acumen as a junior military officer, he keyed the com link to Headquarters on Earth
- and called home.
TRANSMISSION BEGINS
[The grainy, green video shows the face of a young man with a close-cropped haircut and a large gash over one eye - sparks intermittently illuminate chaos, wires, scattered equipment in the background. His face is framed by tiny spheres, weightless drops of blood]
hello...HELLO!...Oh God.......this is...this is DeepStar.....DeepStar calling....do you hear me?........Christ Jesus God........UH.....something's happening....something...I don't know......we hadn't moved or anything since...uh... ever.......Jeezus 7 months... 7 months I've been up here.....something happened........The instruments....crazy...I don't know...I wasn't looking, OH GOD, I did this, I'm sorry if I did.........
what?...what....is.....[picture drops].........ITS GETTING BIGGER, EVERYTHING, WHY IS IT BIGGER? WHA......
TRANSMISSION ENDS.
