03 - The Extractors
By Saïd
Translated from the French by Miguel Jacq
“OK, operator, we’re beginning the capture.”
“Roger.”
Between Omega’s hands, the controls vibrated with more and more intensity. From the other side of the cockpit, the stars watched the astronaut manoeuvre like a billion curious eyes. She slowly brought the ship closer to a misshapen metallic mass. Under the floor, she felt the shaking of the immense arms that deployed to seize the waste. She saw the pincers slowly appear in her field of vision.
“Everything ok, Alpha?”, she asked.
“Everything ok”, responded a male voice into the microphone.
In the other room, the astronaut Alpha was sweating in his outfit. By extracting waste, as a pair, they had done twenty per day for almost a year. She piloted, he caught the debris with the arms and gave them the thrust necessary to make them leave Earth’s orbit.
He asked: “Omega, what do think that is?”
Strapped to her seat, the pilot squinted, trying to identify the nature of the debris.
“From here, I would’ve said the remains of a Chinese satellite, or Russian perhaps. Meteorological… but hard to say.”
“I don’t see any characters on the hull, it’s completely burned. But I think you’re right.”
Under Alpha’s commands, a pincer opened wide into space, barely a few metres from the engine, or what was left of it.
“Try not to send it to the moon, that one”, Omega said.
“I’m telling you, if you stay on course, everything should be fine.”
The pincer closed in silence, crushing the metal.
“There we go, I have it.”
Omega couldn’t help but let out a sigh. Even after all their extractions, she couldn’t take it lightly. She veered to the left to correctly orient the ship and allow Alpha to proceed to releasing.
In the micro, she said: “Launch trajectory initiated in 3… 2…”
A significant shock interrupted her. On board, the lights went out for a brief second, before coming back on one at a time from the back of the ship.
The belts had cut the astronaut’s breath. Once she finished coughing, she realised that Alpha was shouting into the microphone. She didn’t listen to him straight away. She saw that the ship’s retro rockets had activated. She craned her neck to see what was happening outside.
“This thing is going to blow up in our faces!” her colleague hurled.
What they had taken for being satellite debris was now pulling on the mechanical arm with all the strength granted to it by its propulsion system. The extractors’ ship was losing fuel to compensate.
“A missile…” murmured Omega.
She gathered her wits and asked: “Is the load still inside?”
“No idea, but if I let go now, it’ll go straight into the sun!”
Instinctively, she turned her view to the immense planet that blocked their field of vision, on the right.
“Hang on!”
Omega launched a brutal manoeuvre. The ship lurched, suddenly flinging Alpha who did everything he could from his commands to keep the pincer closed around the potentially explosive debris. But he knew what his colleague intended to do: put them off Earth’s axis to release the intercontinental missile straight into space.
“Omega, I think that if I open the pincer now, this thing is going to take the arm with it, and tear the hull! What do we do?”
“We release the arm!” she cried.
The modular architecture of the vessel allowed the separation of different components from the interior. If they separated themselves from the articulated arm attached to the ship rather than let it ripped off by the missile, the machine wouldn’t be damaged. You still had to reach the emergency handle to do it.
“Are you holding on?” she asked.
He responded with an affirmative. She detached herself from her seat, placed both feet on the dashboard as she started to gently lift herself up with the effect of weightlessness, and propelled herself through the ship with all her strength. She progressed through the air in a straight line and at a constant speed, collided with the ceiling and tore a pleated sheet of synthetic material which protected some components, without causing any serious damage. She grabbed on wherever she could to reach a hatch which opened onto a narrow conduit, which she crossed through. Finally, she passed through a final module filled with cables and instruments, to arrive at the control room.
Grabbing a sealed red handle, she said into the microphone:
“Releasing in 3… 2… 1…”.
The arm flew away, carried off by the missile. The ship was spared, as was Earth. The retro rockets shut down.
In her helmet, Omega heard Alpha sigh with relief. They had cut it fine.
After a few seconds, her colleague arrived floating up to her. He was drenched, droplets of sweat detaching from his skin one after the other.
“Why is it that our last cleanup has to be the worst of all, can you tell me that?”
“We really were unlucky”, she admitted. “But fortunate that the release of the arm happened on the last mission, and not the first.”
“It would’ve been a lot less practical, indeed!”
Alpha hurried back to the control room. He contacted the scientists on the ground to explain what had just happened.
“Glad that you managed the situation. You’ll soon be able to return, as planned.”
The colleagues smiled at each other.
“We’re going to see our friends, our families again, it’s going to be great.”
Omega glanced at her daughter’s drawings, stuck to the dashboard.
“Give us a dozen hours, in order to validate the number of extractions, and you can start the descent procedure.”
“OK, roger that, operator!”
Their zone was totally cleaned, they knew it. The return was imminent.
Due to the impacts and explosions of too many satellites, Earth’s orbit had become an impenetrable envelope for slow or large ships. It was therefore impossible to leave Earth, for whatever reason. You had to get used to living without GPS, without weather forecasts other than those taken on the ground, in the dirty air and the polluted, irradiated soil… until a private company decided to evacuate the thousands of debris. It had constructed a fleet of extractor ships, resistant to significant impacts. On top of that, each of them consisted in itself of a satellite relay making it possible to transmit some of the lost communications. The volunteer pilots, in exchange for a very good wage, had accepted to go and recuperate a maximum of debris in order to send it as far away as possible, out of orbit. Omega and Alpha had been among them.
Aboard the extractor vessel, the light switched into night mode. The two astronauts shared their final meal in space. A chef of international renown had come up with suitable dishes which they could take with them. After a year in orbit, it seemed delicious to them.
“What scares you the most, about returning to Earth?” Alpha asked, in between mouthfuls.
Omega reflected on it for a second, then she replied: “Reeducation. After a year in zero gravity, our muscles must’ve taken a serious hit.”
“We passed the physical tests, all the same, and we exercised every day. It should be okay.”
“Apparently in an emergency, recruitment is no longer as strict in terms of physical condition than it used to be”.
Alpha seemed astonished. She continued: “When the first satellites were destroyed, it caused such a commotion, so the companies were more lax. That’s what I was told, anyway.”
“Lax? With the physical tests or the psychological ones?”
Her colleague’s question seemed strange, but she ignored it. She took another bite. He continued: “Me, what I fear the most, it’s the pollution. After having lived here, with this air guaranteed to be free of pollutants, and germ-free, rediscovering Earth air doesn’t excite me too much…”
“The advantage”, she remarked, “is our priority position for leaving the planet for good, given our work here.”
“That’s for sure.. apparently in the cheapest seats, people have to wait twenty years before hoping to leave. Some will have paid and will die in the meantime.”
“It’s thanks to them, by the way, that the tickets don’t cost more.”
The astronauts finished their meal and detached themselves. As they floated around the module, he asked: “Anyway, since the mission’s finished, we can dispense with protocol, can’t we?”
“The one that consists of making sure the extractors never fall in love?”
“That’s not where we’re at, but… what if we gave each other our real names? I’ve called you Omega for so long…”
An alarm sounded, preventing them from continuing the conversation. The astronauts hurried to get to the command post to figure out what was going on. The lighting, which switched to red intermittently, was not particularly reassuring.
Omega got to the post first. All the indicators were blinking, all the sirens beeping. The screens were incessantly throwing emergency messages. Then, all of a sudden, nothing. Return to normality.
“What’s going on?” asked Alpha, who just arrived.
“I have no idea”, confessed Omega.
The troubled voice of a ground agent suddenly sounded: “Operator 45 here. We detected an anomaly, what’s going on?”
“To tell you the truth”, Omega replied, “we were hoping you could tell us!”
“I’m running a scan, it’s going to take a few minutes.”
The astronauts waited anxiously.
“While it runs, I can answer your question”, Omega said. “My name is Eve”.
“Are you kidding?”
“No, why?”
“You’re not going to believe me”, said Alpha. “My name’s Liam. Liam Adam. Isn’t that funny?”
The operator took to the comms again. “I can’t detect anything.”
“What do you mean, you can’t detect anything?” replied Omega, incredulous.
“Either nothing happened…”
“Something happened, for god’s sake, all the indicators were lit up red!”
“.. or else a fault was triggered from inside”.
Silence on board. The operator continued: “We can’t take the risk of letting you land without having determined the nature of the fault.”
“I hope you’re joking?”
Omega’s voice had changed.
“Not at all. We don’t have you clean orbit just to risk destroying another ship on the way back. Try to figure out what happened, that’s all I can say to you. Until then, you’re staying in orbit.”
The communication cut off.
Omega swallowed. She could feel her heart pounding through her ribs.
“Eve?”
She jumped. He tried to approach her, she recoiled, pressing against the console.
“Don’t touch me!”
He sighed.
“Listen, I think this connection between us…”
What connection is this sicko on about?
“… and I can’t blame you for wanting to trap us here”, he continued. “But if you damaged the system, you need to tell me, Eve.”
Omega backed away even further, without moving her legs – they were paralysed. She continued to push herself backwards with her arm, floating in the shuttle.
Eve… he called me Eve… how dare he? Do I really know him? He deliberately damaged the system, he claims his name’s Adam.. but who is this man, really?
“I know what you did!”, she said.
“What?”
“That’s right, act the innocent! You… you had fun travelling with me, so everything’s been fine up til this point. But now that the mission’s ending, you want us to stay trapped!”
“Is that what you really think? After everything we’ve been through together.”
He touched her arm. It was too much. Screaming, she slapped him and propelled herself through the ship. He cried out in pain and surprise, and launched himself in pursuit of her.
Alpha managed to catch her by the foot, she thrust her heel into his face. He cried out so hard this time that for a fraction of a second, she almost felt pity for him. She must’ve broken his nose. Between the fingers pressed against his face, blood escaped in smooth, round droplets. Omega grabbed onto the ceiling’s compartments, progressing like a gecko, advancing as fast as possible. She was locked up with a nutter. Behind her, driven now by anger, Alpha was trying to catch up to her, a red mask painted all over his face, leaving a bloody trail in his wake.
“I didn’t damage the system!” he shouted as they traversed the straightest conduit.
“So who did it, huh? Me, no doubt?” she retorted, disappearing down the hatch.
“I really want to believe in your honesty, still… but then, it’s you who has psychological problems.. you don’t remember what you did.”
They arrived in the dark room where the equipment was stored. Beads of sweat rose from Eve’s forehead and disappeared into the shadows. They were both out of breath. She said: “Are you kidding me? You dare speak to me about psychological problems when it yourself admitted that the tests were less reliable during recruitment?”
“It’s you who said -”
“Shut up!”
She detached a wrench that must’ve been fifty centimetres long.
“Think about it… you already told me about the dreams you had where you were in the shuttle”, he said in a voice that he hoped was calm. “You never dreamed of damaging the ship?”
“No, I…”
In the space of a second, she had a doubt. What if it was the case? What if she had really damaged the ship’s systems herself and no longer remembered? Scientifically speaking, shouldn’t she consider the possibility, even extremely unlikely, that she could have memory loss or have suffered from sleepwalking?
Just as she refocused her attention, he came straight at her. She avoided him at the last second. He slammed into the wall while she went in the opposite direction. He came after her again, returning to a larger and better lit module. She was caught once again. Alpha seized the wrench in both hands. The improvised weapon shook against both their movements. They began to turn around slowly, ending up upside down.
“Tell me what you did!” he shouted.
Eve rejected from her mind the idea that she could be the cause of their problems.
“Stop trying to confuse me!”
He gave her a kick to the stomach with his knee. She groaned, bent over in two, but she hadn’t let go of the wrench. She managed to kick him between the legs and it was he who let go. Mad with rage, trapped, she sent the wrench flying into Alpha’s jaw. She got splattered with blood. She struck again, over and over, sending the corpse spinning in circles with each hit, her legs kicking to try not to turn too much in the opposite direction, in vain.
Eve ended up letting go of the weapon, which spun through the module, bouncing once, then a second time against the walls. There was blood everywhere in the air around her. She was covered in it. Before her, upside down, floated the cadaver of the man who been her flying companion for a year, and who had ended up going mad. But she wasn’t out of the woods yet: she was going to have to inspect the ship to find the fault, and therefore be able to return to Earth. All the while with this floating body that she didn’t know what to do with…
She sent a few beads of tears to accompany the blood in the air.
Lips trembling, several hours later, Eve entered into communications with Earth.
“Operator, it’s the extractor Omega here.”
It took nearly one full minute before she received a response. With a lump in her throat, she explained the delirium of Alpha the extractor, his attempted attack, the way she had defended herself… until she arrived at the worst.
“He’s dead?” they asked.
“Yes”, she managed to articulate. “I know that I will have to stand trial, just tell me if I can come home now, even if it means I have to go to jail. I’m scared, so scared. His body’s here, with me. I’ve spent four hours searching for the fault, I can’t find it. Please, don’t tell me it was a mistake on your part, please.”
“It was not a mistake on our part, Omega.”
“Really? So I can return to Earth?”
“No.”
The ship shook. Eve didn’t understand. She looked outside, she saw the backdrop moving. The shuttle was in the process of spinning around, on its own.
“What’s going on?”
“Not everyone will be able to live on Earth, Omega. The selection is going to be a bit tough. We have to keep the best among us. The others will have to be abandoned. Alpha and you were subjected, like the other extractors, to an experiment. In stressful situations, some join forces. They get through it, are brought back to Earth and get a special place in the shuttles intended to save us. Others kill each other like rats, and aren’t worth being saved.”
“You caused the fault?”
“There wasn’t even a fault. Alpha was innocent, and you lost the plot. It doesn’t matter that he’s dead. He thought you were guilty, too."
Behind the glass, she saw the Earth slowly disappear.
“I’m begging you, let me come back!”
“A weak extractor is just one more bit of waste, Omega. You’ve shown your limits. You won’t be part of the next human adventure.”
The astronaut tried to take control of the system’s controls, in vain. None of them responded. She struck the console with all her strength, until her forearms bled. Nothing seemed to change the behaviour of the system.
“In the name of humanity, the cleaning agency Orbita thanks you for your services. In the 7-bis compartment, you will find the necessary material with which to commit suicide painlessly.”
The ship continued to creep away from Earth.
“Wait! Wait!”
The communication had already been cut.