The Leak, Part II.

39 minutes.

Animal panic rose in Ingrid's throat the instant her feet left the chamber platform. The force of the airlock release sent her careening through blank space, spinning. She batted against the insulated walls of her suit, trying to swim.

She screamed, and screamed, and the tears ran down her face until her voice and her tear ducts and the strain in her head wouldn’t allow it anymore. Her brain decided for her that she must relax, and so she fell asleep.

Ingrid opened her eyes to black space. The moisture of her exhalation fogged the plate of her helmet and dissipated from it just as quickly. She heard the sound of her respiration from far away. In and out, life and death.

Breathing, she knew it was her only constant.

30 minutes.

In the blackness, without a single point of reference, it was impossible to determine her current movement. She tried to reason through it, to understand her position and direction upon release from the airlock, which was on the port side of the ship. Where were they when everything stopped? She tried to bring up the control panel on the back of her eyelids.

Ingrid had been sitting with Peter on Main Bridge adjusting their course, when they heard the alarm.

Peter was singing a melody with no words, the strains of his soft tenor voice bouncing around the metal walls. He stopped to speak.

“Let’s have a baby. Will you have my baby?”

Ingrid had smiled at this. It was the third time he’d asked that day, after bringing it up solemnly the night before. For Ingrid the request was amusingly redundant. But to him she said nothing, only smiled. She wanted to wait until they were naked in their bunk to tell him that she would, that she’d just found out she was. She wanted him to be able to kiss her stomach, express his joy directly in the presence of the little thing. Ingrid knew their little one would grow up well, with such a beginning.

She snapped out of the past and into her terrible present moment.

23 minutes.

And what of it all now. What of her child now. A life that ends with its beginning, no escape, no first bleating breath.

Keep breathing, she told herself. Go on for it a while longer.

21 minutes.

The blackness. Ingrid could feel her baby writhe within her womb.

20 minutes.

Impossible. She began to shake and wriggle, hitting her head hard against the faceplate, trying to pull her suit apart at the seams.

“Let me GO!” she screamed.

18 minutes.

Sweaty. Sweaty and exhausted. Ingrid decided to hyperventilate herself into unconsciousness.

10 minutes.

The air in her suit tasted thin.

8 minutes.

A beam of light in the distance. Ingrid saw her own hazel eyes in the reflection of her faceplate. A blood vessel in her right eye had popped.

What? Light? She held her hand up to shield her eyes and get a glimpse, but it bathed her and she was blinded.

6 minutes.

The light no longer shined on her, but Ingrid could see that a ship was approaching, another military vessel. She felt her true exhaustion at this moment.

4 minutes.

Her lungs gasped for the last of the oxygen, but her mind was silent and utterly fixated on the ship.

The ship floated by on her left side, just six or seven meters away from her extended fingertips. As it passed her, she saw inside the wide windows of the brightly lit canteen. A handful of men sat eating from trays. Ingrid recognized their orange uniforms. They were Fuel Men.

The Fuel Man closest to the window was the first to look up. After a second, he stood up suddenly to cup his hands around his face against the window and peer out.

His hair is on fire, she thought. Such nice blue eyes. Peter?