Zombie

The problem with burial in space is anything orbiting comes back.

skull in spacesuit

“Sir, I request permission to shoot the body.”

Commander Winchell glared at his executive officer. “No. That’s desecrating a corpse. I won’t have it.”

“It’s becoming a morale issue, sir.” The exec, Captain Franklin, was as close to attention as he could manage in free fall, his feet tucked into the loops before the commander’s desk.

“It’s been a morale issue since Gardelle got himself killed. The fate of the remains is just a . . . reminder.”

Franklin’s mouth twitched, then clamped shut.

The commander said defensively, “We had to bury him in space. He requested it. He put it in his will, damn it.”

“Master Sergeant Gardelle’s will was a collection of jokes,” said Franklin flatly.

Franklin was career Space Force. Winchell had transferred in from the Navy. Franklin suspected the late Master Sergeant Gardelle only wrote the burial in space request to poke at the Navy tradition. The last update to the will was after Winchell took command of Polar Support Station One.

“Joke or no, it’s what he asked for, so we gave it to him. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for it to reenter. Yes, I admit, that’s taking longer than it should.”

“It’s becoming a danger.”

“Space Surveillance Center puts the odds of a collision at twenty thousand to one.”

Franklin refrained from pointing out that the odds had been zero, then a million to one. “Very well, sir.”

As the executive officer turned to leave, Commander Winchell asked, “How were you going to shoot it, anyway?”

“There’s a pistol in the escape capsule survival kit.”

“Oh, right, right.”

Franklin had missed lunch, so he went by the crew lounge for a sandwich. It was more crowded than usual for between meals. Half a dozen spacers were gathered in the observation dome.

“Thirty seconds,” said one.

Franklin turned from the sandwich cooler to see what they were waiting for.

“Ten seconds. Five.”

“There he is,” said another. “Right on time.”

“Can’t be Gardelle then. Son of a bitch was always early, looking for a chance to plant one of his surprises.”

“I’m amazed he managed to hold his gas in.”

“Have some respect.” The rebuke was from Technical Sergeant Castro. She was senior NCO on the space station since Gardelle skipped three items on his EVA checklist.

“I am being respectful, Sergeant. If it was you out there, Gardelle would be making fart jokes every time you went by.”

“If he was here, he would. But I’m here, so we’re going to be polite. You’ve had your look. Back to work.”

The spacers dispersed, a couple trading jokes, the rest solemn.

Franklin moved up into the empty dome. The glint of the tumbling space suit stood out against the black. “I hadn’t realized it was close enough to see.”

Castro nodded. “The last delta-V boosted his apogee enough to be visible. The orbit phasing only brings him close enough every three or four days.”

The burial at space had gone as expected for the first month. The space suited body was launched with enough force to lower its perigee. Drag pulled the orbit down. SSC predicted it would reenter in three to six months, depending on how solar activity heated the upper atmosphere.

A month after Gardelle’s death, putrefaction gasses began to escape the suit. This was foreseen. The pressure relief valve was mounted on the shoulder, far enough from the corpse’s center of gravity that the escaping gas torqued the body into a spin. The unintentional rocket thrust went in all directions, cancelling itself out. SSC tracked the spin by satellite observation and smugly proclaimed its predictions were accurate.

Then the vent stopped letting gas out. Presumably some gunk had blocked it. The suit kept drifting down, still spinning.

The first delta-V alarmed every observer. Space Force called in outside experts to figure it out. They concluded that gas building up in the suit ruptured a seam. Once the pressure was relieved, liquids boiled away in the gap, leaving a solid residue to seal it. Pressure would build up again until the process repeated.

Every spacer who knew Master Sergeant Gardelle insisted he would have wanted to fart his way through space.

Unlike the continuous venting from the relief valve, the ruptures imparted a noticeable velocity change to the corpse.

That didn’t worry the analysts at the Space Surveillance Center. The direction of such delta-V was completely random. A rupture was as likely to push the corpse toward an early reentry as to send it back toward the space station.

Analysts worked out the odds of multiple ruptures causing a collision between Gardelle’s body and Polar Support Station One. They were so unlikely that everyone relaxed.

Until a month later, when four of five ruptures had caused stationward delta-Vs, canceling out most of the drag the corpse had experienced. Now it was coming close enough to PSS1 to see with bare eyeballs.

The analysts were tired of superstitious explanations being offered for what was just a natural, if improbable, event.

Captain Franklin, watching Gardelle’s corpse pass by, was starting to feel the tug of superstition.

On its next orbit PSS1 was far enough ahead of the corpse’s orbit that its apogee was out of sight. Franklin and Castro focused on their top priority, enforcing checklist discipline. Master Sergeant Gardelle, when not springing practical jokes, had pushed the troops for speed and efficiency.

He’d set a record for changing out a solar array bushing, up to where an electrical arc opened his oxygen line and an unchecked retaining valve jammed on some grit.

Now spacers checked each other’s gear as well as their own. Full inspections were done on airlocks before an EVA, even if the last use had been only hours before. Discolored parts were replaced and sent to Maintenance for examination, instead of being accepted as “only a cosmetic issue.”

All the checks doubled the average time for a recon or service robot to be recovered, overhauled, and sent on another mission. Headquarters didn’t complain. They’d been thrilled with Gardelle’s rapid turnarounds. There weren’t any complaints about the new approach from above.

Crew complained. The extra work cut into their free time. Crew rest regulations protected their sleep time, but personal time was reduced to meals and hygiene.

Mutters calling them ‘tyrant’ or ‘dictator’ didn’t bother Castro and Franklin. They’d rather hear that than talk of Gardelle as a zombie creeping up on the station.

The officers discussed banning the crew from watching the corpse fly-bys. Commander Winchell decided against it. There were more ways to see out than the observation dome. Making it forbidden would cause even more discussion.

For the next pass, there were more spacers wanting to watch than could fit in the observation dome. One asked, “Did you hear? Gardelle ripped off a big one!”

“Glad I don’t have to smell it. What’s the vector?”

“SSC hasn’t said yet. Still collecting data.”

“Let’s hope he’s early.”

If the rupture lowered the corpse’s orbit it would travel faster by the laws of orbital mechanics. Arriving ahead of the scheduled close approach meant the rupture lowered its orbit. Arriving late meant it had been boosted up. Again.

“Not early,” muttered a spacer.

The predicted time passed. Two spacers cursed.

“There he is. Twenty-eight seconds late. Crap.”

One of the junior spacers said, “This is like that movie Gardelle would show us. With the shamblers. They’re slow, but they won’t stop. You can’t escape because there’s nowhere to go. Just like we don’t have anywhere to go. Ow!”

He twisted to look at the hypodermic the station medic had stuck in his arm. “What did you do that for?”

“You need a rest, son.” The medic turned to Captain Franklin, hovering by the sandwich cooler. “Sir, I’m taking Johnson off duty until further notice.”

Franklin answered, “Very well, Doc.”

He brooded as the medic towed his patient out. The medic was authorized to take action in emergencies. Was Johnson freaking out, or just spouting off harmlessly? Either way, how would the rest of the crew react if he’d kept going? He decided to trust the medic’s judgement and pray for the next rupture to lower the corpse’s orbit.

The prayers weren’t granted. He was summoned to Commander Winchell’s office at mid-shift.

The commander belted it straight out. “There’s been another rupture. It’s coming close enough SSC is giving us one in four hundred odds of a collision. I’m activating the station keeping thrusters to reduce that. You are directed to use any means necessary to ventilate that space suit and prevent further collision danger.”

“Yes, sir.” Franklin saluted, rocking sideways as the momentum of the gesture pulled in the slack in the foot loops.

Technical Sergeant Castro found him practicing with the pistol in the wardroom. Franklin wore a pair of space suit gloves. The pistol was intended to fight off bears or sharks after an emergency landing in the wilderness. The trigger guard was too small to let a finger of the space suit glove fit in.

Franklin aimed the pistol with his right hand. His left hand held a screwdriver. He pulled the shaft against the trigger, making the hammer snap down on the unloaded chamber.

He looked up to see Castro watching. “It works, but I’m jerking it too hard. I’ll have to shoot at point-blank range.”

“I’m more worried about the aiming, sir.”

“Oh, that’s fine. The suits have enough range of motion to line the sights up with my eye. Takes some effort from the shoulder muscles, but I can do it.”

“More specifically, the direction you aim, sir. I’d like to request that you not fire normal to our orbit plane.” Castro brought up an orbit diagram on the wardroom’s screen. PSS1’s orbit was a green circle running north-south around the Earth.

“If you do, the bullet will be in our orbit with a plane change.” She added a slightly rotated red circle, intersecting the green one at two points 180 degrees apart.

Franklin studied it. “It’ll come back in fifty minutes, at the same speed I fired it. What if I get above it and fire toward Earth?”

Castro tapped a few keys. The red circle lined up with the green one then stretched out, first passing under the green one, then above it for the other half of its circuit.

“Still back in fifty minutes. Okay, we launched the body against our velocity vector, how does that work for a bullet?”

This time the red circle shrank, one side still touching the green one. “Lowering the perigee changes the period, so by the time it comes back to our altitude we’ll have moved on. But the orbits still intersect, so if it ever passes through the intersection when we’re there . . .”

“Right,” said Franklin. “Wasn’t an issue for the body because drag pulled it down enough to be clear of us. But a bullet is too dense to be slowed much by drag.”

He shoved the pistol into its storage case. “What would you suggest instead?”

“If you’ll come with me, sir?”

PSS1’s machine shop was the domain of Specialist-4 Turro, a short, fierce machinist. She gave Franklin a nod as he came in, which was as much respect as he could hope for.

“What do you have for us?” demanded Castro.

Turro pulled out some aluminum rods. “You have to understand, I’m improvising here. What you really want for this job is a glaive-guisarme, but best I can do is a poleaxe.”

She snapped the ends of the rods together. “Off the shelf connectors. Squeeze both sides to release them. That’ll let you fit them into the airlock.”

Separated, they were each six feet long. One had a metal triangle bolted to its end. “Be damn careful handling this. Sir. It’s steel, so it’ll hold the edge. This side and both corners are sharp. The way Gardelle is spinning, you should be able to just hold it out and let him brush against it.”

“Thank you, Specialist,” said Franklin.

“The other end has a bracket with twenty meters of cord attached, so you can chuck it like a spear and reel it back in.” Turro folded some thick plastic sheeting around the blade. “I can’t make a real sheath for it, but this should keep it from causing too much damage.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Good hunting, sir,” said Turro as she ushered them out.

In the corridor, Castro asked, “Good enough, sir?”

“Yes. I’ll take a Manned Maneuvering Unit out on the next close approach.”

“With your permission, I’ll be your back up.”

He nodded.

Franklin returned the pistol to the survival kit. He took the knife from it, as a back up to Turro’s monstrosity.

There wasn’t a ‘zombie fighter’ version of the EVA checklist, but the ‘Mission Specific Equipment’ portion of the standard checklist covered the weapons adequately.

Castro read off, “MSE secured for airlock.”

Knife in belt sheath. Pole in two pieces, held together by twisted wires. Blade covered.

“Check,” answered Franklin.

“MSE lanyard secure.”

The coil of cord sent one end to the base of a pole, the other to a D-ring on Franklin’s left hip. A four-foot cord went from the right hip to the haft of the knife.

“Check.”

When the EVA Preparation checklist was done, they moved on to the Airlock Egress checklist. Franklin, mindful of Turro’s warning, watched the triangular blade. With a little force behind it the plastic cover would only slow it down. It could rip a hole in the wall of the airlock as easily as a spacesuit.

Once outside the station they went through the Manned Maneuvering Unit checklist, once for each of them.

The MMUs were oversized backpacks, sprouting frames which went around the wearer like a basket. Castro tugged on the five-point harness to ensure Franklin was secure. When she donned hers, he couldn’t return the favor. With both of them in MMUs, he couldn’t reach her without the frames colliding.

The plan said Castro would wait on the hull of the space station until it was over. But if things went according to plan, they wouldn’t be doing this.

Gardelle’s body flew into sight at the time the SSC predicted. The intercept course was programmed into the MMU. Franklin watched the countdown on his HUD. At zero it shoved him off to meet Gardelle.

The programmed course left him forty meters from his target, far too away even for the pistol. It let him see how the corpse was moving.

The body should be in a flat spin, limbs outstretched. The last rupture must have given it a kick on another axis, because it was spinning head over heels. The unstable mass distribution made it flip front to back every few minutes. The arms were waving, stretching up as the spin pulled them out, then back down as the springiness of the joints reached their limit.

Trying for the torso didn’t look like a good idea. He’d have to make cuts on the limbs. He closed on his target.

Five meters was the most he could reach with the pole, and that required holding it by the end. Poking it toward the body made contact for an instant, knocking the pole from his grasp. He grabbed the cord and pulled it back to him.

He’d penetrated the suit. A streak of crystals glittered before him, ice frozen from the venting gas. Dark droplets were mixed in with them, barely reflecting the direct sunlight.

It was a short streak—the cut he’d made was already sealed by vacuum frozen liquid.

He needed to make bigger cuts. A few taps on the MMU controls nudged him a meter and a half closer.

Spreading his hands apart for leverage, Franklin swung the blade against a passing leg. He held it against the recoil. The MMU hissed as it countered the spin he’d stolen from the body.

Gas sprayed from the cut on the suit’s shin. It kept spraying.

Good. Now to do more of it. He cut at the other leg, then went for an arm. The waving arms were harder targets.

As one arm flopped up, he saw a chance to cut the torso. A jab punctured it. A spray of—stuff—came out, shifting the body’s spin axis. The arm on the other side came around, hooking over the pole. He yanked back. The back corner of the blade dug into the suit’s arm. The body kept turning, pulling the pole out of Franklin’s grip.

“Shit.”

The retention cord slid out of its coil, following the pole. Cord wrapped around the spinning body. It caught the arms and tied them to the torso. Conservation of angular momentum increased the spin as the arms were pulled in.

He cursed again. The cord pulled taut. The corpse spun along the cord, wrapping up the few meters stretched between them.

Franklin held up his hands. If he could force it to bounce off, the cord should unwrap as it spun away.

The body slammed into him. A leg wedged between his leg and the MMU frame, jamming them together.

Vertigo hammered Franklin as the corpse’s spin twirled him with it. The MMU hissed and popped as its thrusters tried to stabilize them.

The corpse’s helmet lay beside his. Through the spatters on the inside of the faceplate Franklin could see Gardelle’s face. It was still recognizably him. With the dried lips pulled back from the teeth, it looked like the braying laugh he’d let loose for his own practical jokes.

“Yeah, you’d love this, you son of a bitch,” snarled Franklin.

He shook his head, trying to get the blood back where it should be. The fuel alarm went off. He slapped the thrust cut off button. The MMU needed a better moment arm to fight this spin.

The poleaxe was useless like this. Franklin pulled out the survival knife from his belt. He slashed it across Gardelle’s chest. It took three cuts to open it to the inner lining. It bulged through the gap.

He shifted his grip on the knife. A cut the other way started an ‘X’ on the torso. The lining burst, spraying gunk onto Franklin’s suit. He took deep breaths to control his stomach. It was already upset from the spin. Seeing that . . . spray . . . wasn’t helping.

He had enough problems without throwing up in his helmet.

Worst of all, his imagination was suggesting what it must smell like.

Damn it, Space Force wasn’t supposed to deal with this. Everything in space was dry and sterile. If he’d wanted muck and goo and bad smells, he’d’ve joined the Army.

As the spray died down, he went back to cutting the second stroke of the X. When he finished four flaps folded back from the torso.

That wasn’t going to reseal.

More knife cuts opened the thighs and upper arms. Shifting the corpse to the right angle made the head bob back and forth, the way Gardelle laughed when he’d really gotten someone.

He’d laughed that way the time he’d drawn an eight-inch spider on the polarized visor of Franklin’s suit. It had been Franklin’s first EVA on PSS1. He’d nearly pissed himself when he pulled the visor down to cut the sun’s glare. It sounded like Gardelle nearly pissed himself laughing over it.

The suit was as ventilated as it could be without cutting it to ribbons. Franklin pried it out of the frame and kicked it away. Hard.

The corpse spun away, unwinding the cord. The poleaxe held fast, stuck deep into the right arm.

As it receded, the spin slowed. Earth was no longer flashing past his faceplate. Head and stomach felt easier.

He turned the MMU thrusters back on. They took the last of the spin off. The ‘LOW FUEL’ warning flashed in his HUD.

“Need a lift, sir?” Technical Sergeant Castro’s voice came across the radio.

“I’ll take one.”

She brought her MMU up next to his. “That looked exciting.”

“You could call it that. I’m going to have to ask the crew to clean this suit.”

He could see her face moving up and down as she studied the mess. “We’ll try, sir. May have to scrap it.”

“I won’t argue.”

“Toss me that cord?”

He unhooked the carabiner at the end and tossed it to her. He would have had to cut it loose in a few minutes anyway. The corpse was almost done unwinding it. He didn’t want the cord going taut and pulling it back.

Castro produced a roll of Kapton sheeting and vacctaped the cord to the end of it. She tossed the sheeting to start it unrolling.

“What’s that for?”

“A sail. The more drag, the faster he reenters. Wanted to do that the first time, but I was told it would make him too visible.”

Franklin laughed. No one would make that objection this time.

“Want to say any last words, sir?”

He eyed the receding body. “Rest in peace, jackass.”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.