This is part one of SOS, a short story initially written in French by Albert Aribaud, and first published in 2000 in the n. 00 edition of the Gamète fanzine (whose editor Claude Dumont has since passed away). On this blog, SOS is published in English. The initial translation was made by Gersande La Flèche; the story was later revised and in part rewritten. The SOS story is shared under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (attribution required, no commercial use, no modifications). For any use of this story not covered by the license (including publishing it in installments as it is on this blog), please contact the author. The license requires that you keep this paragraph just before or just after the title of the story. The story can be shared using any non-restricted file format.

SOS

The Locust may not look like much, but Val and I keep her in good shape. When your livelihood depends on every bolt in your spaceship, you treat her well. Company pilots, now... These guys could drop a thruster right in the middle of a liftoff and not bother about it.

All that to say: we take care of the Locust as much as we can. Which makes it all the weirder that, as I was taking some R&R, Val suddenly pulled her down from hypervelocity into regular space without warning, then in one smooth action, ran the port-side thrusters full-on to turn around, then switched to the starboard-side thrusters to cut the yaw, and for a finish, let out one huge overboost to reverse direction before settling the engines back to cruising speed.

Without antigees, that kind of manoeuvre will turn a ship’s crew to splatters. But Val had turned them on before treating us to her surprise rollercoaster, so all I had to deal with was getting thrown down from my bunk, and a serious need to empty my stomach. Which was par for the course, given the situation.

I decided to wait until my sense of direction would pull itself together.

“Are you alright, Sam? Not too shaken?”

Usually I find Val’s gift for euphemisms funny.

“Could do better. For instance, we could still be flying at 50 eq-cees toward Epsilon Eridani rather than from it. I’m assuming there’s a good reason we’ve doubled back out of the blue?”

She let out a little laugh.

“Take a look at the long-range fore scanner.”

I got up, went to the screen and looked. Over the greenish background of the void dust we were plowing through, there was a light green stain: Hawking’s star, and then, in the middle of an even lighter halo, a bright, blinking spot.

“A conventional radio signal?”

“It would appear to be. Hawking's probably hid it until we flew by. It’s in the emergency frequency bands, but it’s just a beep, not an actual distress message. I’ve a weird feeling about it.”

I laughed — that’s a good method to find out if you’ve got a broken rib, by the way. I had none.

“A weird feeling? And do you also feel that we should go there and say hello?”

“We don’t have much of a choice. It might be a case of Duty to Rescue. We’ll be on location in fifteen hours if we can maintain this velocity.”

“And I just bet when we get there, I am the one who’s going to go meet them, right?”

“You wouldn't want me to go out there, now, would you? Oh, and since you’ve got time, get a check-up done, in case you’re actually more hurt than you already look.”

I gave in, unfolded the medical seat, and sat. While the contraption complained about my excess mass, I mulled over the situation. Basically, three possible outcomes: business as usual, bad luck, and incredible luck.

Let’s get rid of business as usual first: the ship hits something right out of hypervelocity. High residual speed means high kinetic energy means kaboom. When you get there, assuming you find out where there is, all you will see is very small debris scattered over a cubic parsec. Or rather, you won’t see any, because a cubic parsec is huge.

Then there’s bad luck: the ship mostly stays in one piece but sustains critical damage, like the atmosphere controllers go on the fritz, for instance. Everyone in the ship will die in a matter of minutes, hours at most. Now when you get there, all you can do is whip out the notebook and pencil, and write down the names. But you gotta do it though, because there’s someone, somewhere, who needs to know what happened.

Last: incredible luck. That’s when the ship’s got a major malfunction but is at least partly intact, or more to the point, still has some survivors inside after a few hours. Then your duty is to make sure they stay alive. Depending on how many there are, and on the state of the ship, either you set up camp and help them get by until professional help comes around, or you take them in and drop them at the nearest safe place. That’s the true Duty to Rescue.

But it’s incredible luck for a reason, which is: it almost never happens. So you have to go there – There’s even a federal decree that states you have to – but you don’t want to, because you know it’s useless. To the point that, between pilots, we shorten the term to DuRes. Pilots have a very questionable sense of humour.

Still, if it had been me instead of Val, I’d have done exactly the same. To bona fide pilots, Duty to Rescue is not just a federal decree: it’s a guarantee that the day you hit hard and survive, there will be someone willing to go out of their way to lend a hand, no matter the cost. That’s why it’s part of the job.

So there probably was a ship, so damaged that it couldn’t send a proper distress call, which meant there were near zero chance of finding any survivors; but there we were, getting ready to go out and scour it as long as it would take to make sure no one was left alone.

Apart from that, it was only normal that I would be the one doing the spacewalking and not Val. After all, I was the man, wasn’t I?

Continue to part two