Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Read Free Page A

corridor into the airlock up to his neck,” he looked around, his face grave. “I think we’ve all learned that massive trauma and blood-loss were the real monsters here today.”
    “Oesophageal.”
    “Indeed,” Doctor Cratch mused. “In deed ,” he paused for a time, giving this the deep consideration it deserved. Then he bent, picked up a pulped hand for the third time, looked down at it in silent reflection for a moment before depositing it back in the middle of the heap, and carrying on brightly, “I would say, if I had to speculate about the specific cause of death – which I don’t, because that’s a job for Sally and Waffa – I would suggest that these injuries were caused by a combination of technical and eejit error. Viz ,” he tambourined his red hands briefly for emphasis, “the airlock access panel jammed up and the safeties shorted, our inestimable colleague Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 pressed on a whole lot of buttons over and over again trying to get it to work,” Cratch jabbed his fingers in a frustrated pantomime, “then the system un -jammed and all the commands played out in rapid sequence. Which under no account should ever happen, but nevertheless … specifically this meant the outer door cracking open enough to start him on his outward journey, the inner door opening and closing six or seven times to cause this chewing effect as he went on through, and then both doors lodging partway open – perhaps due to another circuit glitch or a maintenance override shortcut caused by Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 mashing the buttons randomly,” here Cratch performed another little pantomime, before concluding, “…so he could be sucked out to his ultimate placement, before both doors finally closed and locked down,” he stepped back and posed, as Oræl Rides To War reached its bittersweet crescendo. “Elementary, my dear Wingus.”
    Doctor Cratch was about to begin cataloguing the organs and tissues that would not be worth salvaging for medical reasons due to excessive damage – this wasn’t likely to take long, because it was all of them except Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s scalp, and nobody on board needed new hair – when the Tramp ’s proximity alarm started sounding.
     

WAFFA
    When the external sensors spotted an inbound object on a trajectory that would result in hull impact, they sent a notification to workstation 19, which was … well, it was wherever Waffa happened to be at that moment, because workstation 19 was his wristwatch. It was Waffa’s job, as Chief of Security and Operations, to decide which of the multitude of notifications, impact or otherwise, warranted escalation to alarms. And to then log the alarms. And then to figure out what to do about the alarms. And then to do that thing he just figured out. And then to turn off the alarms. And then to explain to everyone why the noise had happened, what he’d done, and why the noise had stopped.
    In many ways, The Accident had been a real kick in the balls for Waffa’s spare time. “The buck starts here,” as he always liked to say. In his brain. In his brain, it was in fact his catchphrase, although in reality it would be more accurate to say his catchphrase was “damn it.”
    Today, the inbound object notification caught him on the toilet.
    He studied the readings, muttering the first syllable of the key ones out loud because nobody has time to read every syllable of a technical data dump. “Imp traj … mass … small cross-sec … oh come on, it’s a bloody rock,” he concluded, with no idea of the cosmic humorousness of his choice of words.
    With impacts, there was a time element because no amount of dicking around with the sensors was going to change the fact that there was a piece of high-speed frozen whatever barrelling towards the ship. Since it was incoming at speed, Waffa confirmed the telemetry – because that sounded like the sort of thing he should do – and then set off the alarm and