Death of Freya

It was just the two of us, and I hated him so much.

We were down to our last couple of cans of store brand SPAM knockoff, but he wouldn't quit whining about how hungry he was. I couldn't take it any more, so I yelled at him, just your basic shit like, "I'm hungry too, asshole, now shut up and let me think." And now he's getting upset, you know how assholes can be; they're the only ones allowed to be angry, and don't you dare get angry at them because they demand that you know that they've got a bigger dick than you, and on and on and on. You know what I'm talking about. It's always the same people who listen to "whatever's on the radio" and talk mostly in cliches, or always wanted to be a lawyer because they "like to argue." I know, right? Where do these people even come from?

It's like they don't actually have anything to say, but they feel the need to make noises from their mouth, because that's what they see everybody else doing, and that's what they're going to do. While I'm trying to figure out what the fuck we're going to do for food, he's over there freaking out like it's Night Of The Living Dead over there, trying to channel every Stone Cold Hardass movie hero he's ever watched, like he's in Saving Private Apocalypse Hard III: Return of Hardigan. I catch maybe every five words. He's actually getting red in the face, which is bad because when he stresses out like this it reminds us both how hungry we are, and now we're both looking at the damn food again. Which is the reason we started this whole thing.

I really want to tell him that yelling isn't helping and that we should probably try and stay still and save the food in our bellies but, again, he'd get mad at that, too. So I say nothing, which probably is going to make him madder, but fuck him. I don't give two shits what he's mad about, because we're both going to die here and I am sick and tired of listening to what he has to say.

The worst part is that even if I left, I'd have to come back. He's got the food, and he's not going to move it, because this is the only place that has working life support. There's nowhere we can go, and nothing we can do. We're stuck on the derelict mining rig Freya, and there isn't shit we can do about it.

When it was working, Freya was alright, I guess. I was temporary only, part of a three man replacement maintenance crew that was going to replace the old maintenance crew. We came with an empty cargo ship, and we'd be leaving with an empty cargo ship, hauling whatever the hell was on this asteroid to wherever the hell it was ultimately destined. I didn't pay much attention, because I had other things on my mind. Usually it was my girlfriend- when I was home, the two of us would make love frantically for a week or so, then frequently for the next month or two, and then it'd dwindle down to sporadically until it was time for me to ship out again. When the two of us were worn out, or one or the other of us were sleeping, I'd bang out a few sentences on the side (I was an aspiring journalist- I know it's stupid, but it is what it is), check out a couple of episodes of whatever the hell I could catch, and maybe catch up on my reading backlog. So naturally when you take her out of the equation and don't give me enough room to bring anything other than a couple of books, yeah, I'm a little out there. Who wouldn't be?

The job itself was always decent enough. We'd bring in a couple of things that they were running low on- usually food, or replacement parts for something that'd been broken. We'd get our work out of the way, shoot the shit with the permanents, and then ship off in a couple of weeks once we'd had everything fixed up and done. Since I was with the company, we'd cycle through all the mining rigs in a year or so. Since they didn't all need the same stuff every time, sometimes they'd send more guys in, and sometimes less. Usually it was between three to five- you had an electrician or two, a plumber (no, before you ask, you don't just send your turds into deep space- it's all recycled and when that breaks down it gets ugly), maybe a structural guy, maybe a mechanic. You'd send the guy with his tools, parts, some munchies, and you'd pick 'em up when the next load of cargo went out. Like clockwork.

Obviously not this last time, or I'd be somewhere else, right? So it went wrong this time.

See, part of the reason that it takes a couple of weeks to cycle out a mining load is that Home Base is always pretty far out there. The damn cargo ships aren't very fast, and there's a limit to how fast you can go, anyways. Some of these damn things are far enough out that it can take a couple of months even if they sent one as soon as you told them to send you one. So, naturally, there's a schedule way in advance. You know how you can capitalize something when you're talking? That's how The Schedule was. It was never written like that, but everybody knew that The Schedule was what you went by. It was your ass if you did something that made them miss The Schedule. I'd heard that people got fired for it. If you had work to do that meant that you were behind The Schedule, well, looks like you're staying there until the next cargo comes in. Hope you like it where you are.

Which is why, in my roundabout way, I'm telling you this. See, once it all went to shit, there wasn't anything that anybody could do. We radioed in, telling the boss that shit had gone crazy here, and when we got a message back, you could tell that he was really, really sorry, but there wasn't anything we could do.

Here's the thing- I don't actually know what was going on before I got there. All I know is that a couple of days before the cargo (and me, and that fuckhead I was talking about earlier) got there, the radio communication stopped. It wasn't a huge deal at the time, since docking is all done by our computer, not the rig's, and you know how cheap corporations get. They'd bring a replacement transmitter thing and hook it up, and that'd be that. Shit, I dunno- I'm the plumber, not the electronics guy. I'm the one who fixes and cleans the motors and the pipes. Far as I know, the transmitter's actually a tiny leprechaun on a big hamster wheel, and that's why it breaks so much. I don't know.

I do know that I was about ready to stay on the other side of the station from Fuckhead Frank. You know, the guy I was talking about earlier? I knew it was gonna be trouble when I ran into him at the dock station.

I'd just gotten off from my girlfriend again- we'd been talking for a while, you know, just about regular boring shit. How she was doing (lonely but well), how I was doing (bored), what she was gonna have for dinner (hadn't decided), what I'd had for dinner (some sort of protein bar from the vending machine). If you've never been on a space station, they're nice. They've got gravity and the kind of light bulbs that simulate sunshine, and they have plants out the ass and nice carpets, there's a garden or two, that sort of thing. It's a lot like being in a building that's also a condominium that's also a park that's also a dockyard. It's kind of exciting, and it's where you spend most of your time. My girlfriend had been back to visit her family, but usually she stayed at the station with the other families. I know, she's not technically family, but they don't really care, as long as you sign a big affidavit saying you know that you're basically stuck there until they can make room for you to go back, so you'd better not want to go back very much. But it was good. She liked staying home, and it's not like the place didn't have some alright night life anyways.

Anyways, she was away and we'd been talking, but I had to go get my ass ready to get to the ship. The dock wasn't far off, so I shouldered my burlap duffel bag and headed down to where I was supposed to have technically been fifteen minutes ago. You know how it is, though. They want you to be fifteen minutes early for being fifteen minutes early, and I really don't have time for that silly shit. I'd already been over what we were going to fix, and I knew that I didn't have anything special to pack. The tools would already have been loaded up in their own compartment, the standard replacement parts would be stowed away, and all I had to really bring was the overalls the company required us to bring and whatever other shit I wanted. I preferred a pipe and some good books, generally speaking. I didn't hardly smoke, except on trips, since my girlfriend didn't like it very much, but there's just something about deep space and nicotine that makes the trip more bearable. My girlfriend got me a couple of new books for the trip, and reading and smoking goes together like, well, I dunno, actually. Like something.

That's what I was thinking about as I walked down "sunlit" passages to go sit in a cheap, uncomfortable chair- and there he was. Sitting and fucking with some tiny electronic thing like it held the secret to life itself, until he saw me and then I could tell, he was like a puppy that found its new favorite toy. He walked over and was beside himself with happiness, talking about how he'd heard that this rig was pretty sweet, the food was gonna be good, that he just knew we'd have all kinds of shit to talk about, and there he was, off and going, so wrapped up in himself that I don't think he'd have noticed if I fell asleep in the chair. I experimented with closing my eyes, but he noticed, and now he's preaching to me about the benefits of getting a good night's sleep, and then he's on to times where he'd stayed up for days drinking with his idiot friends, and now it's stories about the predictably stupid things he'd done with them and I'm trapped in a web of idiocy and stories without an end like a ship in a whirlpool and no matter what I do, he's stuck on the most boring possible subject.

A dude from the crew comes back and tells us that it's time to pile on, so I grab my shit and move. Hopefully the change of scenery will make him shut up, or maybe he'll be able to tell from the fact that I am about running to get away from his conversation that I am not especially interested in hearing what he has to say.

I got up.