Entry 995
I've never been so scared as I was just about ten hours ago. It started when I was asleep. I mean I was sleeping so hard and deep I swear I was one slow heart beat away from dead. That was because of a marathon work session, start to finish the team and I disassembled then rebuilt five scout striders. Rebuilding one strider is hard enough but doing five at once and it was a must do now kind of thing. So that meant none of u could stop until they were completed. It took the addition of four other teams to get them out in less than twenty-eight hours start to finish.
I volunteered to go with the delivery team because it had been like, four standards since I've been off the ship and I was itching to see something new. The striders get loaded on the carrier and everyone boarding the carrier has to have on a emergency suit that will deploy from this sort of neck thing that wraps around your neck like a open fronted collar. Plus we need to have on hand our exposure helmets. They're precaution things I was told during training and drill. I never really thought I'd need it.
As we're going down Si'amen called out to done helmets and a second later boom. The cargo door blows out and I get ripped from my seat and heading right for open space. I barely have my helmet on before i exit the ship and I'm freaking out because I can feel my skin starting to burn and my breath being pulled right out of me. I didn't even notice my suit deploy. I'm not sure how long it was before I woke up, but I was spinning in space all by myself. I couldn't see the ship or anything and for a minute I seriously thought I was dead. I was dead and my soul was just drifting in space. I thought this is just great.
Then I actually looked at the corner of my vision to and as soon as I did my helmet pulled up a whole display right before my eyes. It told me my suit had deployed without issue, my helmet was sealed to the suit. My helmet had a built in rebreather system that was good for another six days before the cartridge would need replacing and I had one hotswap replacement cartridge. The moisture of my breath was being captured to fed back to me for liquids. It also told me it had been deployed for eighteen hours.
That made me start to flail and got me tumbling eve more oddly. Yes I panicked before I had to make myself calm down and remember the drill training for a explosive decompression and ejection. The biggest one I needed to do was spread my arms and legs to slow my tumble. The next was breathe slow and deliberate, my helmet and suit had everything I would need for the emergency I was in. My beacon had started automatically when I failed to tell it not to activate because I was unconscious. I also had a flashing strobe light on my head.
It was only after I made myself calm down and look at myself and where I was, that I noticed that my emergency suit was highly reflective and had patterns of high contrast colors all over it.. Me.
I had to think and ask myself why I had not yet been picked up after eighteen hours? Were they just going to leave me to hurtle through space for the rest of my life and then the rest of time? I actually started to curse my team and the rest of the crew because of it, I was seriously sure they'd left me to die. Spoiler alert, I was picked up and wrote this.
But that didn't stop me from thinking the worst. I couldn't do much while tumbling through space except not focus on any one thing or else I'd start getting dizzy. Being sick inside a helmet is a real recipe for disaster if you were wondering. A disaster worse than the one I was already in. I had up until then, always put off the advice I was given by a few team mates to get accustomed to my rescue helmet, learn all the features and controls in it that I can control by looking and hand motions. Since I was not able to do anything, I suddenly found myself with nothing but time to learn.
One of the first things I mastered was the shade so i wouldn't get distracted by distant stars, fixate and get dizzy. The next was the AFBR tuner menu, nothing like music to drift by. Another was the communications, as soon as I activated it I received a message that went kind of like this.
Ship: Are you tired of drifting yet?
Me: Yes, fuck.. Why the hell did you leave me out here like this?!
Ship: We kept you on scope and were waiting for you to activate your communications to inform us that you wanted to be picked up.
Me: I cold have been dying out here and you would have just let me!
Ship: We have your vitals under monitor, it is one of the auto systems of your helmet. You didn't set other functions to automatic much like some of our other more experienced crew. Now that we know, prepare for pickup, a ship is inbound.
Once back on-board I found out what had happened. Seven others had also been thrown out into space with three still outstanding. I was told that of the ones that got blown or sucked out, only the three Auflanders and myself had emergency suits and helmets. I don't like thinking about the rest because of just how close it could have been.
As for what caused it all was that the right side hatchway locks had failed to fully engage. That coupled with the pressure shift from the dock bay of the Horatio Twilight. We were like ten minutes out of the dock bay when boom, the door blows open. because the one door blew open it caused the other to shear it's bottom mount and swing and take out the drivers on one side of the ship. I didn't see that because I was already a few hundred feet out into space and out cold.
Why it happened was because the design was not meant for sudden shock differences of pressures like that. Going from a pressure to a vacuum and back was supposed to be done gradually so the lock adjusters could compensate. It's how all the human ships operate but not how the Auflander ships operate, theirs go from pressure to vacuum and back without any transition point or short windows of transition. Since the cargo carrier we were using was a human one, it couldn't handle the stress. Plus it was pushing more than two hundred twenty thousand flight hours when it should have been taken out of service at half that and rebuilt or scrapped.
It was really no one's fault, just a mechanical failure, which is why now I realize that they train for this sort of thing and drill for it on a near daily basis. so if such a thing does happen we'll know what to do and not die.
What have I learned from this? One that I really need to get acquainted with my rescue gear. Two that space travel is still dangerous even to a race that has been doing it for eons longer than we have. Three, the emergency rescue suit gets.. Personal when it deploys. What do i mean by that? Well, I'll leave it with I know what the term skin tight means very well now.
