There is no such thing as summer on my world, so I learned to fly. Since boyhood, I had been seduced by miners’ tales of endless seasons spent basking in the warmth of a star as they split asteroids and drilled for precious metals. When I secured a shift-pilot gig aboard the mining rig Summer's Wind, I called it fate.
In a way, it was.
Summer’s Wind does not (usually) live up to her name. Mittens are mounted to her throttle and stick, and I am intimately familiar with the rusty space heater strapped beneath the front console. It hisses and wheezes with Summer's every pitch and yaw.
Every time I would complain (which was often), First-Pilot Nelson would stress that mining craft were meant to haul as much tonnage as their fat little thrusters could push. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“They are not meant to be taken for joy rides around stars,” he snapped this morning as he entered the cockpit. At the time, Solace, our local star, occupied a relatively small section of the viewport. I had made a minor course adjustment, altering our trajectory by no more than six hundred kilometers. Nelson removed me from the chair.
I assured him that Summer was well out of Solace’s corona and the internal temperature had only risen one degree Celsius. It was the warmest I’d ever felt.
He was staring at me when MINERVA sounded the impact alarm a heartbeat before the debris pierced the hull. Venting atmosphere sent Summer spinning like a top.
The force whips me over the chair and Nelson slams into my legs from behind. The auto-sealer goes to work on the hull, but Nelson has no such luck. The debris slices through him on its journey through Summer.
“Internal temperature rising," MINERVA says in her tin-can voice. Every surface is soaked in the red of the high-temperature warning lights. I lower Nelson’s body to the floor and crawl into the chair. The cracked leather crinkles beneath me.
We’re still spinning. Solace streaks by the viewport once every two seconds, growing with each rotation.
"Cockpit temperature exceeding forty-six degrees," MINERVA says.
I grip the controls. Some of Nelson must have spattered because the right mitten is damp. I pull back on the throttle and hammer down on the stick. Summer stays her course.
“Complete failure in primary, retro, lateral, dorsal, and ventral thrusters,” MINERVA reports. Her voice slows as she speaks.
I wipe my forehead and leave more sweat than I clear. It burns my eyes. The viewport polarizes and dims. The lights fade.
Solar flares sweep and curl along Solace's surface, blurring across my view like wisps of incandescent hair in the wind.
That’s why I say it was fate. In a way, spinning toward a star at two hundred meters per second, the ship finally lives up to her name. I got my summer.
DAVID OLSZOWY is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Creative Writing Program and his work can be seen in Hair Trigger 40 and The Lab Review. Most of his adult life has been spent working retail, so he figured writing couldn’t be that much worse.