Apologies From Saturn

by E. F. Broker

I woke from a dream I very quickly forgot. It never got easier to dream about home, come to think of it, I never did really dream of space. I crawled out of my pod, the weightlessness of my body still tended to make me sick, but my duties were set. We still did them, the research we were sent out here to do. It was the only thing we still did consistently. You skipped meals, couldn’t sleep through the night, didn’t talk to anyone for days, but you did your work.

That day was different, however, and we didn’t even know it yet. I made my way to the communal area we called the dining room, Darwin was already there and Alexei came in close behind me. I didn’t know where Pieter was, nor did I particularly care. Every day, we gathered there to receive our assignments, information about our situation and any notable news from Earth. (We found out about the latest election outcome this way, about the birth of Pieter’s son and my wife’s filing for divorce. All received with varying levels of dismay.) Today it was much the same, for a sweet while at least.

My colleagues were never truly my friends, I’m afraid, we were co-workers and our roles were strictly defined. But after, they became something else entirely. Fellow inmates. The submarine effect where you begin to resent those you spend so much time around didn’t even begin to capture my feelings. It is a human concept and those cannot be applied to this, this place that was never meant for humans to witness. The submarine suspended in hell, I remember thinking.

The first of my companions whom I met and ironically the first one to sour was Pieter Adamov, our technician. He was good at his job, I admit, but he was so arrogant and for this exact reason, any attempt at a meaningful conversation with him ended in an argument which he refused to lose.

Alexei Rudenko was our so-called leader, but even if on paper he led the group, I don’t think he found any pleasure in it. Not to say he was bad at his job, quite the contrary, he knew how to break up fights between me and Pieter like no one else, but you could tell he resented his position. A leader who hates his people is doomed to fail, simple as that. And I think we blamed him, perhaps too unfairly, for our fate. Who else was there to be the target of our despair, after all?

Darwin Perrault was perhaps the strangest member of our company. Intelligent, yes, but weak-minded to a degree that worried me. There was an unpredictability to him that made me question the competence of our superiors when it comes to choosing recruits. Pieter called him insane once, and I wasn’t far from agreeing. There was no doubt in my mind he would be the first to go, one way or another, and it brought me a certain sense of guilty comfort.

The sterile hellscape of the space shuttle was hard to escape, even if you resorted to the most gruesome of ends. So how did Alexei Rudenko kill himself? Brilliantly, I would say, just as he was in life. A small part of me wanted to follow him as the leader he was and take this way out over my slow decay. I didn’t, for my cowardice, perhaps. So very quickly he became a martyr of sorts to me, an inspiring figure, really. If by some miracle our words reach Earth once again, I hope that’s how he’s remembered, mentioned in history books, at least for a sentence. He’d deserve that.

When we found him, we reported his death per protocol to a central we weren’t sure could hear us. I hoped they would, just for the sake of his family getting closure, getting the relief that his death wasn’t drawn out and pointless. I always hated uncertainty.

Then came the makeshift burial. Death in space is tricky but something you still have to train for, and so even here we had a handy protocol to follow. In the unlikely scenario that someone passes during a space exploration trip, you would usually preserve the body until you return to Earth or send a specialized shuttle containing it back home. We didn’t have such luxuries.

“We can always send him out there, you know.” Pieter was quick to suggest.

It didn’t sit right with me, but really he had a point. That almost infuriated me more.

“It doesn’t make sense to keep him here, no one will come for him anyway.”

“You don’t know that.” Darwin of course stood in opposition, and I was surprised to find myself completely apathetic to the whole matter.

Pieter laughed. “Do you really think there’s a chance someone will come? That they’re scrambling to organize a rescue mission as we speak? Don’t act fucking stupid, even you know that’s not true.”

And that was the end of Darwin’s objections, as he disappeared somewhere into the bowels of the ship.

“I can’t fucking believe him.” Pieter mumbled again and turned his attention to me. “So what, you also want to keep him in the fridge until we all lose our minds here?”

I thought for a moment, not even really considering the question. For a moment I wanted to turn to Alexei, ask him to decide. I meant every word about his abilities as a leader, and I think everyone in Saturn’s rings would agree with me. His absence was felt, a palpable void in the already empty coldness of space.

“Let’s put him outside.”

It was up to me and Pieter to get the job done, Darwin simply sulked elsewhere. I was surprised by my colleague's somber nature as we placed Alexei in the body bag. This was meant to be followed by being strapped into a cooling chamber that would preserve the body until our eventual descent into the atmosphere. Instead, we put on our space suits and prepared for opening the shuttle doors.

One thing I was truly grateful to Alexei for was his considerate nature. We found him in his space suit, the inside of which was devoid of oxygen, as we later discovered. He cut his air supply and instead attached himself to the carbon monoxide valve that came from our fuel engines. As we lit our halls and heated our food, we added to the mass that slowly killed our captain. But for him, this must’ve been easy. He went to sleep.

All this combined meant two things. One, disposing of the body was very easy compared to possible alternatives. And two, I never quite shed the guilt of what we indirectly did. The zipper growled as we sealed the bag, encasing him in a glistening silver tomb. Then we marched in silence, but upon reaching the door I hesitated. The palm that gripped the bag felt on fire, sweat pooled between the wrinkles in my skin.

“Ready?” Pieter looked back at me.

“Positive.”

There was a point in time where Alexei became just a body, devoid of the person he once was. We pushed the bag outside, enough force to let it get swept away in the aimless stream of low gravity space. I wondered where it might end up. Pulled to Saturn’s surface or perhaps lost in the darkness, encased and preserved, a lonely journey we might eventually join him on. The space shuttle felt barren without another pair of hands and feet, Darwin didn’t speak to us for two days. That made two.

Just me and Adamov, and I couldn’t even find it in me to accept his offers of combat. I stared at the uncooked rations in front of me, at the heater and the lights.

On Earth, many view suicide as a horrid, sinful act - one that cannot be forgiven and that would be punished if possible. Many nations criminalized it, in fact, for various reasons. Religion, moral convictions, societal views, none of which I necessarily shared nor cared about. But faced with the real possibility of it easing my suffering up here, I found myself considering these questions. Were we right to blame Rudenko for his demise? After all, his decision affected us all greatly while he escaped into comfortable oblivion. On the other hand, were we just foolish for not taking the same route when he did? What did we stay here for? If you were to ask me now, reader, I would decline to answer. For Perrault, it might’ve been the hope of salvation or pure foolishness. For Adamov, spite and personal conviction. He was too proud to stoop so low, to be a mere follower of Rudenko. No, that wouldn’t be honorable enough. Adamov would go out thrashing and screaming, no other option. And me? That’s a question I still ask myself.