On the float. It's pretty, there certainly are worse places to be. I can see the headlights of some of my fellows, stars everywhere. It's a common misconception of the ground pounders that space consists of endless darkness littered with uncountable very distant tiny lights, it's the opposite in reality. When your vision isn't hindered by some pesky atmosphere space is endless lights that forms beautiful colourful clouds with very tiny patches of dark somewhere in between that turn out to be not so dark after all if you look very closely. The host star of this system, EV lacertae, burning in a red orange light with its auroras visible to my quasi naked eyes, has our old rust bucket of a ship, the SV Golden Nori courtesy of Lithium Space Mining Limited, shoving its ugly silhouette in front of it. The entire sensation feels surreal, the O² in my VacS is getting lower and lower and the monitoring system is screaming and flashing red lights in my face, time is getting a more and more viscous quality to it, when I started my jump it was racing like mountain stream now it bears a striking similarity to sgt.Sniggers paste pressed out of a tube.
My target is coming up, fifteen meters. I can see it closing in every two seconds or so when my rotation lines my vision up. I wonder who it is. It's almost impossible to identify an individual in a bog standard VacS with a reflecting visor, one would have to know the marks and dings on its carbon ceramic pressure shell by heart to make an educated guess. Anyhow, my target is spinning as well, in a rotation counter to my own. I'm sure he/she must have made out that I'm coming for them. Ten Meters, the drums are picking up, not sure if it's my heart or the music put out by Nori but damn it's getting intense. Five meters, the jig is up, the guy is frantically weaving his arms now, looks like he, I'm sure he's a guy now, his VacS lacks the typical chest protrusions of the female variant one, thinks that I have come to comfort him in his last moments. Sorry mate but the truth isn't as sweet.
Nori is givin a countdown now, 5 …. 4 …. 3 …. 2 … 1 collision! YES! NO, my hands slip off, shit.
But Fortuna major the five star goddess of the floating monkeys smiles down on me. The idiot managed to grab hold of ME instead. Action time, can't give the guy the time to adjust to me being hostile. What ensues is not my proudest of moments but let me quote Jesus for you to get an idea of what's happening;
„You do some idiot crazy shit with me, pull a piece out on the lane? I'll snap it away from you, stick it up your ass and pull the fucking trigger... until it goes click."
„Jesus"
„You said it man, nobody fucks with se Jesus"
I ain't got no piece, but a desperate man with very little air to breath tugging and ripping on your breather pack very quickly turns the two of us into completely crazed and frenzied space monkeys. I can hear his screams through the vibration of his VacS touching mine. Good thing I managed to get behind him before he knew what was going on. So I disconnect his breather and hook it up to my VacS, AIR, Air is nice. Air is good. Breathing is good. The guy is like a turtle on it's back, his VacS doesn't allow him the freedom of movement to reach behind himself, and turning around just isn't how things work in space. So I hold on to him from behind for now, both hands tightly gripping the handlebar on his breather pack, and touch his helmet with mine. He is screaming in pure unabated panic. So Sorry mate, it's you or me and I d rather it's you any day of the week. Maybe I should try to console him a bit, but it feels wrong. So I just tell him to prepare himself for going balloon head and open up the emergency seal on his visor. The result is interesting.