Today was not going to be a good day. To be honest Alan had not had a good day in quite a while. When he thought back Alan was not really sure when his life had gone wrong, but he was pretty sure it was all Bernie’s fault. His best friend since basic, Bernie was usually the cause of all his bad decisions. Or, as the late great Jimmy Buffet would say, maybe a woman’s to blame. Then again, if he was being honest, it’s probably his own damn fault. Oh well, Alan thought, at least the view is nice.

“Alan, what do you see?” came a voice from the console in front of him.

Broken out of his maudlin reverie he focused on the real world again. Below him the walls were covered in wires and pipes. In front of him were windows letting him gaze out into the universe. The most compelling sight was the earth looming above him. Currently he could see a section of the pacific ocean covered in a mass of clouds. His gaze lingered one more moment on that beautiful blue white swirl before turning and looking down over the hull. It was time to deal with the real issue. 

His eyes found the FGB. It had a longer Russian name, but it was basically the engine for the international space station. The first thing Alan noticed wasn’t actually the jagged hole in the side of the critical module, it was all of the glittering hull fragments lingering in the area. Most of the debris was blown clear of the station by the explosive decompression, but some of it was still floating out there, glinting in the sun like fireflies in space. The hole was big, and that module was pretty cramped with stuff that doesn’t play well with others. The fact that the whole station hadn’t exploded in fire and death was a miracle. This module was responsible for providing occasional burns to keep the station’s orbit from destabilizing so it contained thousands of kilos of propellant. Highly flammable propellant.

“Rick, It’s not good, there is definitely a hull breach on the module. It looks to be approximately a meter in diameter.” You would think Alan might be a little more upset that the space station, on which he was the only current crew member, had a large hole exposed to space. Or that the module whose job it was to keep that same station from deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere would be a critical concern. The thing is, burning it up was kinda the plan all along.

To be honest, the idea was to do it in a more controlled and responsible manner, but fire and doom were still on the menu. This was his sixth day on the station and the third day he was all alone. The other two astronauts who had already been on the station, and the two more who had come up with him, had left on the Dragon spacecraft that had been left docked on the station since the last crew rotation. Alan’s Soyuz capsule was here, but the plan had been for him to take that down in a little over a month. Now it looks like they might need to accelerate that schedule.

“Can you see any damage to the nearby modules?” asked Rick. Rick was the current man running CAPCOM back in Houston. He was an ok guy as far as Alan could tell and these people were former astronauts who were chosen because they were cool under pressure, at least he assumed that’s why they were chosen. He didn’t really know, the whole space thing was kinda new to him. However, there was a definite warble in Rick’s voice. He seemed to be holding it together, but the stress was coming through. For Alan, this was just another Tuesday, or was it Wednesday, honestly it was hard for him to keep track of up here. Alone in a fancy can surrounded by the void, the days kinda ran together. 

It should be mentioned that Alan was not actually an astronaut. He had been in a program that was training him to be one, but he never completed the training. Alan was originally part of a test group that some genius in the Space Force decided was necessary. Long range planners had decided that if America was ever going to put a base on the Moon, or eventually Mars, that they would need a security force to protect it from foreign interests. Rather than wait until either of those fantasies seemed likely, they decided to create a training doctrine now. Alan and the other volunteers were supposed to spend 8 months in an accelerated astronaut training program, then spend another year and a half coming up with the rest of what a space security force would need.

At the time this idea was first put forth Alan was a member of the 1st Special Forces Group. He was stationed in Okinawa, but was being transferred to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Alan would have said he was loving his job, they were doing good work and he had a life. But then his girlfriend, Jessica, decided that she liked Japan more than she loved Alan and dumped him in a rather dramatic fashion. Nothing physical, but there was an awful lot of shouting in front of an awful lot of random bar patrons. To make things worse, a few days later she hooked up with one of his teammates who was going to be staying in Okinawa. Jim was always an ass, but this was a new low for him. 

Alan of course had a bit of an ego. You couldn’t be an operator without a healthy dose of confidence in yourself. Having to return to the states for a less involved position, then having what he thought was the love of his life dump him, followed by someone who he would have thought as a brother swooping in and hooking up with that fallen love had done a number on his mental health. He had been in a dark place. Not suicidal or anything, but the choices he was making tended to fall on the bad side of the spectrum. At what Alan thought was rock bottom, enter his best friend Bernie.

His name is actually Bernard and they met twelve years ago when they went through basic together. For some reason they had quickly hit it off and formed a bond that lasted through the years. It helped that they were occasionally stationed together, but Bernie was not a Green Beret so they mostly interacted outside of their duties. Shortly after being dumped by Jessica, Alan found himself drowning his sorrows with Bernie in a bar stateside. It was there Bernie told him about this new training group. It was a joint program between the Space Force and NASA. SSF, the creatively named Space Security Force, was looking for members of the military or federal agencies to join. Bernie had always dreamed of being an astronaut, and seeing how depressed his friend was he suggested they both apply.

Enough wool gathering, back to the station. “I can’t see anything from here, but there is a lot of debris floating around. Most of it looks like it is headed away from the other modules. The display says that the atmosphere in the rest of the station is holding.” Luckily the FGB had recently become known as a danger due to some persistent maintenance issues and NASA had taken to sealing it off from the rest of the station when not necessary to enter. The damage looked like more than what the eggheads had expected, but the hatch for the module must have held.

“That matches what we are seeing here. Are you up for a closer look?” asked Rick. While the station wasn’t losing any more atmosphere there were still some important functions that the FGB module was responsible for. They had to know how bad it was.

“Let me suit up and I’ll head over there.” Alan wasn’t going to go for a full on space walk, what with all the debris floating around that was a Bad Decision, but he also didn’t want to get any closer inside the station without some safeguards. The standard space suit is a marvel of engineering, and he meant that seriously. Unfortunately, it is also way too bulky to wear inside most modules and a bitch to get into by yourself. Luckily one of the bright ideas that came out of SSF was a more compact version designed for use inside of a nominally airtight facility that was surrounded by a vacuum. It was an upgraded version of a type of suit they came up with in the pre-Apollo days. It was not rated for prolonged use outside of an atmosphere, but it should allow the wearer to survive brief exposures to vacuum, long enough to seal a breach or move to a different compartment at least. That was the theory anyway. His was one of the first ten suits ever made.

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The suit itself felt a little like a onesie. The collar was uncomfortable but once he secured the helmet and attached the air hose it sat better. The suit came with ten minutes of breathable air, but he wasn’t using that at the moment. Whoever came up with this system designed it with an aperture in the front that let air flow through it normally. However, if the suit detected a sudden loss of pressure, or the wearer activated it manually, the aperture would close and the suit would start using the air in the tanks built into the suit. Alan had seen that part work in tests, but after trying out new gear over the years with his team he knew how reliable controlled tests usually were. It was still better than nothing.

“Making my way back now, Rick. I’ll let you know when I reach the hatch.” They could track his movements through their systems, but one thing you learn in the field is that clear communications can save lives. As he passed through the station he reflected on how lonely he was. Not just at the moment, floating through empty module after empty module, but in general. Bernie and Alan were both accepted to SSF, but after three weeks in the program Bernie was summoned to meet with the Major in charge. Alan found him in his bunk room shortly thereafter. He had never seen him look so pale. After being accepted they had to go through a battery of tests, physical, medical, and psychological. It took the original group of eighty down to thirty. Apparently there had been an issue with Bernie’s medical exams and they had done some extra testing. It was cancer. In his brain. The technical term is atypical meningioma occurring at the base of his skull where it intersects with the spinal column.

Alan was an unusual case for the green berets in that he was an active member who was also going through medical school. His CO thought that it would be useful to have a member who was a full fledged doctor during a deployment. Alan had only recently finished his residency program at US Naval Hospital Okinawa which is why he was being transferred back to the states. However his specialty was emergency medicine, not oncology. This meant he knew enough to know that Bernie’s diagnosis was bad, but that was it. Bernie was washed out of the program and went back to his hometown for treatment. Alan tried to keep in touch with him over the last six months but between the rushed training he was receiving, and Bernie’s increasingly fatalistic behavior, they had not talked much. This was one of Alan’s biggest regrets, he was his best friend and he should have been there for him.

That probably wasn’t going to change any time soon though. Two months ago sensors on the ISS, and on satellites across the globe had picked up increasing amounts of radiation inside of the Van Allen belts. These belts help act to shield the Earth from radiation, and scientists were at a loss to explain the phenomenon. It wasn’t yet at a point where it was a threat to life, but if the rate of increase kept up that could be a concern in another two months. At that point the atmosphere itself would still protect people on the surface, but anyone in space would be severely at risk. The Chinese had temporarily brought back the astronauts from their station while further tests were run.

It was decided that since the ISS was near the end of its planned mission life anyway and the radiation would soon become harmful to those onboard, that it would be decommissioned and deorbited in a safe manner. This meant setting small charges throughout the station (who thought bombs in space was a good idea?) to break it up into many smaller pieces as it was burning up in the atmosphere. The idea was to prevent a debris cloud in space which would put other satellites in danger and to make sure nothing would make it to the surface. This meant they needed someone who had astronaut training, experience with explosives, and a willingness to work alone. They didn’t want any more people up there with the growing radiation and the now abundant supply of potential catastrophic hull breach devices, aka demolition charges.

Not many traditional astronauts have even the limited experience Alan did with explosives, so it was decided this would be a good way to test what the SSF was capable of. He was currently the highest rated trainee and had the skills required, so he was paired with a couple of experienced astronauts for the flight up. They were also invaluable in giving him some real life practice with the station’s controls and features.

You might be wondering why they didn’t just plan on deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean like usually happens. It took me some digging to find that out too. While eco-activists hadn’t yet managed to solve global warming, they had managed to convince the world that dropping hunks of space junk into the ocean was not cool. The station probably wouldn’t have left much to fall into the ocean if they let it do a nosedive into the atmosphere, but you know, optics. So instead Alan was there and ready to blow stuff up. He wasn’t sure how that looked better, but it was his mission and Alan would get the job done.

He was only a module away from the hatch and could almost see through the window port on it. “Approaching the FGB, everything seems normal out here.”

There was no response from Rick. That was odd, they normally took comms very seriously. “CAPCOM, do you copy?” There was still no answer. Suddenly Alan heard a voice, but not through his helmet. The suit should muffle most outside noises that weren’t piped through the speakers but this came through loud and clear.

Integration Initiating

“Rick, is that you?” He asked in confusion.

Standby…

Congratulations, you are eligible for the tutorial. Would you like to be tested? 

The voice sounded male, but Alan could tell now that it was definitely not Rick or anyone else he recognized from mission control.

“Umm…tested?” He asked in confusion.

Great! Scanning…identifying environment…your test will begin in ten seconds.

“Wait! I meant what does testing mean?” But apparently he was too late, he could hear a countdown from that same disembodied voice. Alan tried to prepare himself for anything, but when it hit zero nothing happened. Was this some kind of joke they played on the new guy? But then he felt it. A large tremor was coming from the FGB. He floated closer to the hatch just in time to see a tentacle slither through the opening in the hull. He had seen some crazy things in his twelve year career, but this was brown pants level terrifying. The tentacle was a slimy black with what looked like suction cups on one side. It also had small barbs scattered over the surface and was at least 30 centimeters across. Then another tentacle came through. They latched onto some of the panels in the module and he could see them start to strain. Whatever those things belonged to was pulling itself inside. 

“Rick, please come in. There is something coming into the station…Rick?”

His vision was then partially blocked by faint words that seemed to be floating in front of his eyes. He tried to focus on them to see what they said and they suddenly became clearer.

New Quest: Do you have what it takes?

[You have been chosen as one of the first candidates for the Solarian integration. Prove your mettle by slaying the octospatium.]

“What’s an octospatium?”