They all looked at her in confusion.

  “Hear what?” asked Dash.

  Odessa looked over toward the little alcove where their upright sleeping pods stood. There were no lights in the alcove. That was intentional to make it easier to sleep. She eyed the shadows looking for any sign of movement, but there was none. No sound either, apart from the constant humming and whirring of the electronics and other support systems.

  Slowly she floated toward the little corner.

  She poked her head around the edge half expecting an alien creature to leap out at her. Nothing did. She sighed. Probably just her imagination then. Watching Alien the night before launch had been a terrible idea.

  She shook her head and turned back to the rest of the group. “Nothing. Just my imagination. We should get that shelf fixed.”

  “And the payload doors?” Carmen asked.

  “Oh right.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Dash said. “You and Jade fix the shelf and CO2.”

  Athena followed Dash and Carmen back up to the top deck, while Odessa floated over to the shelf.

  “Well at least it’s easy to look at everything on the back now,” Odessa remarked. “Hold that shelf steady.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jade said with a grimace as she moved the shelf slightly so Odessa could get on the other side. “I forgot about the latch. I knew it was there but I thought Dash had already flicked it and it was just stuck.”

  Odessa nodded. She wasn’t too worried and right now she was more focused on how to fix the problems. She found the main processing unit and immediately she could see what the issue was.

  “That’s weird,” she remarked.

  “What?” asked Jade, who couldn’t see anything from where she was.

  “All the cables are out. Well not all but like several of them, including the CO2 sensors. I’m surprised we didn’t see more issues. I don’t know why they came out either. I tested these connectors in my kayak. They were sturdy as.”

  Her statement confused Jade. “You took the electronics kayaking?”

  “No, just the connectors. No electronics. I wanted to see how they would handle a lot of movement. Cat took them out in one of her track cars too. They shouldn’t have all come out like that. Not without being pulled out, and the launch forces are the wrong direction.” Odessa plugged them all back in one at a time. None of them seemed broken or anything. The whole thing was very perplexing.

  “Maybe I pulled them out when I moved the shelf?” Jade suggested.

  Odessa eyed the wiring. “No, I don’t think so, plus the CO2 was janky before you yanked the shelf out.”

  “Maybe someone forgot to plug them in?”

  “But we tested everything at Base before launch. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Gremlins?” Jade’s tone suggested even she didn’t believe that.

  Odessa shook her head. “We’d have noticed any gremlin activity on Earth before we left.” Odessa shook her head. “I don’t know. Let’s check what it’s reading now.”

  “Uhh...”

  Odessa started for the stairs before she realised that Jade was still holding the shelf. “Err, I’ll check, you stay there.”

  “Not like there’s anywhere I can go,” Jade replied.

  A David Bowie song was playing on the upper deck. Carmen was in one area leafing through one of several manuals that were now just floating around the cockpit. Meanwhile, Athena and Dash were over by the payload control panel singing lyrics at one another and doing what looked like dancing.

  “I’m gone five minutes,” Odessa quipped as she headed by them toward the life support readings. “And what is this song?”

  Dash stopped mid jiggle and looked at her. “You don’t know Space Oddity?!”

  “Of course I know Space Oddity, I just mean, first song we play in space and you pick something worldjumped. Besides, Rocketman is obviously the better choice.”

  Dash crossed his arms and attempted to kick himself back casually but accidentally sent himself into a backward spin instead. He continued on unperturbed by this string of events. “Rocketman is over played.”

  Odessa snorted. “You picked Space Oddity.”

  “Technically, Athena picked Space Oddity,” Dash pointed out. “And it was just while we were waiting for Carmen to look something up. There’s only one copy of that manual.”

  Athena smiled and gave an unapologetic shrug. “It’s a good song.”

  “That is beside the point,” Odessa replied as she glanced down at the CO2 reading.

  Athena nodded. “You wanted to be involved. I’m sorry.”

  “I did,” Odessa admitted. She wasn’t really that mad at them, just a little disappointed she’d missed the start of the first space song. She spun back to face them with a smile. “You’ll be pleased to hear that CO2 is back down around two and a half.”

  “Good,” replied Dash.

  Athena had stretched out sideways in the air like she was lounging on a bench. She shot Odessa with some finger guns. “And you’ll be pleased to know that the next song up is Rocketman.”

  Odessa hung herself over the copilot’s chair. “Oh, alright then.” She couldn’t keep the grin off her face. “Go ahead.”

  Soon, all three of them were belting out the words ‘I’m a rocketman!’ and Odessa had to admit that it sounded pretty good too. She’d have to get her camera out later and film a rendition of it.

  They didn’t get to the end of the song though. Halfway through Carmen suddenly stood up from where she’d been floating cross-legged near the floor. “Found the procedure.”

  “Oh shit! Jade!” Odessa said as she suddenly remembered that she’d left Jade holding the shelf.

  Dash chuckled as Odessa kicked off toward the other side of the room where they kept the spare parts.

  Jade gave Odessa a narrow-eyed look when she returned to the lower deck.

  “Sorry. Got distracted,” Odessa apologised.

  “Yeah I noticed. I’m nearly about to drop this thing,” Jade replied.

  “Wait, really?” Odessa asked. “Shit, I mean you can probably just put it down, at least for now.”

  “No I was just kidding. This is nothing.” Jade replied in the same jovial tone she used for nearly everything. Odessa always had trouble telling when Jade was being serious and when she was joking.

  Odessa ducked underneath it to take a look at the damage, trusting Jade not to drop it. The roller and latch had snapped and the railing itself was bent but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

  “How heavy’s the shelf?” Odessa.

  “I’m fine,” Jade reported. “I could hold this all day.”

  “No, I mean do you think the others could hold it? I might want you to rebend something.”

  Jade just looked at her until Odessa finally clicked.

  “Oh right, we’re in microgravity.” Odessa groaned, rolled her eyes at herself, and then went to grab one of the others.

  Jade was still sniggering when Odessa got back with Dash.

  “Did you get the payload doors open?” Jade asked Dash.

  “Not yet,” Dash replied. “Carmen’s working through some options.

  Dash held the shelf while Jade and Odessa did the repairs.

  “So what was wrong with the CO2?” Dash asked as they worked away.

  “Cable was unplugged,” Odessa replied.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “It pull out?”

  “Nah, I don’t think so, but I mean I guess it must have. Jade thought maybe gremlins,” Odessa told him.

  Jade shrugged. “It’s either that or... I have no idea.”

  “Were they chewed?” Dash asked.

  Odessa shook her head.

  “Then it can’t be gremlins. Or rats or cockatoos,” Dash replied.

  Odessa peered out from under the shelf. “Cockatoos?”

  “Yeah, I had one get into the cockpit wiring of a plane I was flying once and pull some wires out.” Dash spoke of the incident very casually.

  “While you were flying?” Odessa asked skeptically.

  “Nah, beforehand, but I didn’t find out about it until we were flying.”

  “He had to crash the plane in the river,” Jade explained.

  “I didn’t crash it. I landed it,” Dash corrected. “Also it was a float plane so you know... everything was fine.”

  “Were you flying in dragon territory?” Odessa asked.

  “Nah. Rainforest, extremely flat rainforest. You ever heard of the Iskala Jungle?”

  Odessa froze. She had indeed heard of the Iskala Jungle. “Yeah.”

  There must have been something in her tone or expression because Jade raised her eyebrows and gave her a curious look.

  Dash peered around the edge of the shelf, surprise plain to see on his features. “You been there?”

  “Yeah,” Odessa said again but all she could think were two words, ‘Chaser’s fault.’ Those two words just kept running around and around her head and had been ever since Dash had mentioned the Iskala Jungle. Before they could ask she explained, “I err... I went to find some friends that I thought had gone missing there.”

  “You thought?” Dash asked catching on quick to her word choice.

  Odessa didn’t look at him, or at Jade. She kept her eyes down on the shelf. “Yeah, but it turns out they weren’t there.”

  “Well, it is a place where people tend to go missing a lot,” remarked Jade.

  Odessa felt she had to explain more. “Someone... a friend... told me they had gone there... but he lied.” Chaser had done more than just lie though, much more.

  “That jungle is cursed,” said Jade, dancing around the obvious questions, perhaps thinking that Odessa didn’t want to talk about it.

  But the more Odessa said, the less she was sure about what she wanted. She’d never been one to beat around the bush or play coy or pretend she was okay when she wasn’t. Her friends on Earth were though. Odessa’s openness was another thing Amanda had said she liked about her. Cat hid behind snark. Indi hid behind excessive optimism. And Amanda just got drunk. Sometimes it made Odessa feel like she should restrain her tongue a little more. But these guys were a different group and talking was cathartic.

  Dash was more direct “Why’d he lie?”

  The problem was, Odessa wasn’t really sure where to start.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “To protect me I guess.”

  “Where were they really?” Dash asked. He was still straining his neck around the edge of the shelf.

  Odessa didn’t think he could possibly be comfortable so she focused back on fixing the new roller as fast as possible. She talked while she worked, still not sure how to explain it, and also not wanting to throw Chaser under the bus. Despite what he’d done, she found herself wanting to defend him. “They were dead in a different jungle. Well, most of them.”

  The others went quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dash eventually.

  Odessa wanted them to ask more questions and at the same time she didn’t. She wanted to tell the story and she didn’t know how to do it without making Chaser look like a real arse. Did that mean she’d forgiven him? “I mean we’ve all lost people right?” Odessa said. As she said it she realised that lost didn’t have to just apply to the dead either. She’d lost her best friend too.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Sorry, that brought the mood down, didn’t it?” Odessa apologised.

  “Nah, you’re right,” said Dash in a light but gentle tone. The one he used for more serious things.

  “At least you weren’t there with them,” Jade said in an attempt to find some positive.

  Unfortunately it was exactly the wrong thing to say, because the truth of it was Odessa had been there.

  Odessa couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It was a laugh with a slightly bitter flavour to it, and for a moment she hated Chaser again. “Actually I was. I just forgot.”

  “What?” asked Dash, with genuine confusion in his tone.

  “It’s complicated,” Odessa repeated, deciding she wasn’t ready to explain it after all.

  Dash seemed better able to pick up on her actual desires than Jade because he swiftly changed the topic, giving Jade a light tap with his foot and a shake of his head when she opened her mouth to ask another question. Odessa pretended not to notice.

  By the time they’d fixed the shelf it was almost time for their next check in with Earth. Carmen and Athena still hadn’t managed to get the payload doors open.

  They all gathered in the top deck.

  “We should have line of sight to the LEO sat for the next ten minutes or so,” Dash remarked. He pushed a button to send a message. “Base, this is... *cough* ... unicorn. Do you read us?”

  Nothing.

  He tried again. “Base, this is Unicorn. Do you copy?”

  This time he was met in reply with some static and a bunch of unintelligible sounds.

  Odessa flipped the switch on the automatic transcriber but all that printed on the screen was,

  ‘ ,,ljn o nk ,,,,,,,,,,,,nnn j

  m.kkkkkkkkkkkkkkoooooooooooop.’

  “Hmm, I think we could have done a better job with the programming on that thing,” Odessa remarked.

  “Base?”

  “Hi! This is Indi,” Indi said with an abundance of enthusiasm. “Um, do I need a callsign?”

  “If you like,” replied Dash. “Otherwise we’ll just call you base.”

  In front of him the autoscriber printed Indi’s “words.”

  ‘Hello, this has been, I’m not a coal round.’

  Odessa frowned at it. It was supposed to aid communication in case they had trouble hearing what was said, but right now it was easier to just hear and talk. Odessa didn’t hold out much hope for it for when the comms were actually bad.

  “Ok, I will be Cave Sloth,” Indi declared.

  Once more the autoscriber did its best.

  ‘Of course. And then an coach drop.’

  Odessa reached around Dash to flick the VOX switch on and the autotranscribe off. “Indi, this autoscribe is doing a shit job.”

  “Oh, that was bought through a third party I think. There weren’t many options. Can you hear me okay?” Indi asked.

  “Yeah, we can hear you,” Odessa replied.

  “Okay good. We’ve got about 10 minutes before comms cut off again and I can see you tried to open the payload doors yeah?”

  “Yeah but they’re stuck,” Odessa replied.

  “Yup, yup, I was hoping that wouldn’t happen. That was the bug I hadn’t quite figured out yet. It had about a one in three chance of happening. I’m not really sure what causes it. It’s totally random. At first I thought it was-”

  Dash leaned forward with a sigh and interrupted. “Alright Indi, is there a way to fix it?”

  “You’ve got to hard reset the payload bay control module,” Indi said.

  Dash put a hand to his forehead with a groan.

  A silence settled upon the room. The control module was in the payload bay.

  Everyone was silent for a moment then Dash cleared his throat. “That means an EVA.”

  “Yup,” Indi agreed.

  They all looked at one another.

  “Dibs!” Odessa made for one of two EVA suits as fast as she could.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Jade took off toward the other one.

  “Now wait just a minute,” called Dash.

  Athena looked at them all in surprise. “Everybody wants to go into space huh?”

  Carmen raised a hand and then started speaking. “I think we should draw straws, or you know, maybe send somebody sensible, which would be me ideally.”

  Dash clapped his hands. “Alright, alright, let’s draw straws.”

  Odessa and Jade groaned and both stepped out of the suits they’d been halfway into.

  “That’s some bug that we took off without knowing about, Indi,” Odessa said as they returned to the control panel.”

  “Yeah well Stella didn’t think it was too bad since there was a workaround. And you have about a two out of three chance of it not happening.”

  “Is that going to be an issue closing it too?” Dash asked.

  “Shouldn’t be,” Indi replied.

  “Okay, so who holds the straws?” Odessa asked.,

  Dash looked at Athena.

  “Oh, me?” said Athena. She figured out the answer without anyone replying. “Okay, gimme a sec. I have an idea.” She kicked off from the wall and disappeared down into the hatch on the floor.

  “We do want to try and get this open while we still have comms,” Dash called after.

  “Don’t worry,” Athena called back. “Just grabbing something.”

  She returned a moment later holding something in her hands.

  “Are those actual straws?” asked Odessa.

  Athena nodded. “Figured it would be fitting. I’ve made one shorter. Short straw gets to go outside.”

  “Why do we have actual straws?” Dash asked.

  Athena looked him dead in the eye and, with a slight smirk, replied, “Cocktails, obviously.”

  Dash raised an amused eyebrow. “Mmm, obviously.”

  Athena held out the straws toward him.

  Dash selected one with a smile. He looked at it but it was impossible to tell if it was the shortest one until someone else took one.

  “We could have used paper you know,” Odessa said, even though she did like the idea of using real straws.

  “What paper?” asked Dash looking around.

  Jade took a straw.

  They did have paper downstairs but Odessa couldn’t help herself when she saw all the floating manuals. “From the manuals,” she replied. “We could have ripped out some pages we don’t need.”

  Carmen’s eyes bulged. “But we don’t know what we might need yet.”

  Odessa reached for a straw, simultaneously trying to see how long Jade’s one was. Jade’s looked short but she couldn’t be sure given the angle Jade was holding it at. “We always could have taped it back together.”

  Carmen frowned then took her own straw. She held it up.

  Odessa held hers up next to it. They were the same size.

  They both looked across to Jade who was holding up a much shorter one and grinning.

  “We have two spacesuits,” Odessa pointed out.

  Dash shook his head. “No point taking more risk than we need to.”

  ‘She's takin' her time

  Making up the reasons.’

  “Oh man! I love that song,” Indi said over the comms in response to music suddenly filling the cabin.

  Everyone else looked at Athena who was holding the little hand held music player. “What?”

  “Interesting song selection,” remarked Dash. “I’m not sure it suits the mood. Suits the flight but we’re about to step outside.”

  Athena gave a small laugh and a shrug. “It’s just the next one on the playlist.”

  “Did you just fill that with space songs?” Odessa asked. She tried to ignore the jealousy she felt as she half-watched Jade get ready for this world’s first ever space walk.

  “Maybe.” Athena grinned proudly.

  “Are they all human songs from the old world?” Odessa asked, hoping there were at least a couple from this side of the splice. The music industry hadn’t bloomed in this world as much as it had in the old world but there were still enough good bands out there, if you knew where to look.

  Athena shook her head. “Not all of them.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Odessa pouted. By the time Jade was ready, Odessa had gotten herself in a good mood again and was just excited that anyone was going into space at all.

  The airlock was at the back of the top deck. It consisted of two plug doors, one between the airlock and the inside of the main shuttle and one between the airlock and the payload bay. Right now the payload bay was pressurised so there was no need to depressurise the airlock itself. Once Jade was in the payload bay they would depressurise that area and then open the payload door. Finally the airlock would need to be depressurised and then repressurised before Jade could come all the way back through.

  They got started on suit checks. They were almost done when Indi spoke over the comms, “Hey guys, I think we should lose comms soon. Should be back in about 30 minutes though, so I’ll just say good luck and catch you on the other side. Cave Sloth out!.”

  They said goodbye and Odessa flicked the VOX off, checking life support and altitude readings while she was by the control panel. Everything looked good. Even the CO2 was holding well.

  Finally Jade was ready to step into the air lock.

  “Break a leg!” Odessa said.

  “I thought that expression was for theatre?” Jade replied with a nervous grin.

  Odessa shrugged. “All the world’s a stage.”

  “We’re not on the Earth anymore,” quipped Dash. “The world is now below us.”

  Jade took a deep breath. Then she stepped through the first door.

  The atmosphere in the room changed almost instantly from joking to serious. Jade reported her status to them as they all watched her point of view on a screen that showed a live recording from a tiny camera in the helmet of her space suit.

  Two other screens gave a view of the inside of the airlock and the payload bay.

  Jade stepped through the second door, closing the airlock behind herself.