He bent his elbows back to slide his arms through, and his shoulder muscles screamed in pain. “I don’t know about all this,” he said warily.
“The key is no sudden movements,” she said.
He spun on one heel as she twisted him back around. No sudden movements? Was this spacewalking or escaping from a predator?
She tightened the harness straps with a series of curt tugs. “A tiny bump can send you careening out of control.”
Careening. Careening …
“So, keep your movements slow and methodical. Or better yet, just let me drag you along. Don’t even participate.”
“Don’t participate. Copy, sir.” That, he could get behind.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about how agitated he’d felt when he’d done his depressurized walk in Novem Sector earlier. Gravity had made it seem far less real that nothing but a pitiless vacuum existed on the other side of that glass. It’d still been awful, but it’d been tolerable. He didn’t think this would be the same sensation.
Rake dropped his helmet onto his head, and it buzzed as it sealed itself shut.
The display flickered to life against the glass visor. His eyes darted across the information. His vitals sat on the left: heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, temperature. The suit and external temperatures were listed on the bottom along with a series of questionable numbers.
Text flashed across the center of his vision: “MMU attachment detected.” It vanished and a percentage counter appeared at the top, showing his emergency thruster fuel to be at a hundred percent.
Emergency? The heart-rate indicator blipped and switched from green to yellow.
Rake took his wrist and activated the nexus interface built into the arm of the suit. She pressed in a few commands and the display in the helmet disappeared.
“Comms are still on, but you don’t need all that HUD junk distracting you.” Rake pulled on her gloves, then secured her own helmet. “We’re clear here, Jack.”
“We are?” Cavalon croaked.
She picked up a tether from a winch on the front of her own harness and fastened it to the front of his. With a thunk, she patted his helmet, and he thought he saw a reassuring smile through the glass. “Yes, we are.”
Jackin replied through comms. “Copy, boss.”
A second later, the room depressurized and his feet lifted off the floor. The tether connecting them wound through the air, slithering like a weightless, slow-motion serpent. Rake moved into the open hatch and floated down until she disappeared from view. The slack left the tether, then tugged on his stomach.
“Cavalon?” Rake’s voice crackled through the comm link.
“Yes?”
“Ready?”
“Oh. Yes.”
He pressed against the wall beside him, then lightly pushed away and drifted feetfirst through the opening. He floated past Rake, who held onto a handle bar outside the hatch.
“Don’t look down,” Rake said. He half thought she was joking, but her tone came flat and deadly serious.
Of course, he immediately looked down. Or rather, past his feet, because down was no longer relevant.
And there it was. Nothing. Just infinite black nothing. But as he looked down even farther, he saw the beginnings of it—a faint gradient of stars that became denser and denser as they moved toward the center of the universe. Compared to the total abyss when facing outward, inward shone with an almost blinding luminance.
He couldn’t stop staring, and moments later he realized he’d tilted quite far forward—nearly parallel with the bottom of the ship.