Limitless Sky

Looking up Dorian saw the stars, filling his vision in every which way. This was when his job was worthwhile. It wasn't an easy job, or a safe job but nobody else got to see nothing but stars. Only the EMTs. of course, Dorian could feel the hull of the OA under his feet, the super-mag boots holding him safe. And he knew that if he looked down he'd see the planet shrouded in dark, angry clouds; what had once been a beautiful, diverse world. The cradle of humanity and literally millions of other species was now an ugly broiling globe of dirty smog. The change had been unstoppable. People still argued over whether it was a natural or a manmade cause. It didn't really matter now. Generations ago the world's space agencies had constructed the Orbital Ark, an interconnecting network of space stations that now encircled the dead planet. There was even a section above the north pole in which as many species had been deemed appropriate had been cryogenically frozen. It was a distant, vague hope that some day in the hazy future the Earth would be habitable again and it could be repopulated to its former glory. That, of course, was assuming that while humanity passed the aeons on the Orbital Ark another species didn't evolve to survive the harsh atmosphere and become the dominant species on humans' homeworld. It was debatable whether humanity would survive indefinitely on the OA. It had been necessarily built quickly and the work of the Exterior Maintenance Technicians increased all the time. Even now there weren't enough of them, they worked too hard and were forced to ignore safety considerations. The EMTs were bright, brave men and women. Dorian was an actual rocket scientist, an all round genius. He would have liked to spend his time trying to construct a second ark, one which could transport the surviving human race to a new world that they could try not to screw up. But the Orbital Ark needed fixing by men as intelligent as Dorian and so Dorian and those like him fixed it. In the old days such space walks were rare and the astronauts were tethered to mechanical arms. Not now. The EMTs worked without a safety net. Their super-mag boots held them to the OAs hull, but they were by no means reliable and were difficult to master. Each EMT had a thruster pack but they weren't powerful and the fuel ran out quickly. They weren't good for much more than assisting in a jump from one place to another. It was a common occurrence for an EMT to be lost. A solar flare disrupted the boots, or the technician tripped or for one of a myriad other reasons was knocked off the OA. Falling one way was certain, fiery death. The thruster packs were no match for Earth's gravity once it had grabbed you and the outcome was always a very final journey through the atmosphere. Falling the other way was another matter. Death was by no means a certainty. The EMTs had CO2 recyc packs on their suits, meaning a theoretically limitless supply of oxygen assuming it didn't pack up. The suits were space proof so a technician could survive for an extremely long time in the cold vacuum of space. One of Dorian's nightmare fears was finding himself tumbling away from the OA, unable to fire his thrusters in the right direction and ending up floating through space for the rest of his life, alone and helpless. A part of him thought that being surrounded by nothing but limitless sky would be exhilarating. But a few EMTs had somehow made it back to the OA after floating through space for sometimes months at a time. They were never what you'd call sane. The screaming silence, the emptiness and loneliness could do nothing but drive you crazy. Some EMTs had been known to risk asphyxiation by flaring off their oxgyen supply as well as their thrusters in a desperate attempt to get back to the OA before it was too late. And all the EMTs looked up at the fantastic sky above them as they worked and wondered if they'd do the same if they found themselves soaring to the stars. The one, wonderful perk of the EMTs job also reminded them of the terrible fate they risked.