Late entry

Though it is too late for the contest, I just received an entry from Mr. Matthew Shepherd.

Here it is, for your enjoyment.

It wasn't seeing the blood in the vacuum that bothered Rodriguez.

It actually looked kind of pretty, there in the void; maroon on black, breaking into tiny perfect spheroids, each reflecting its own star.

Every blood cell in his body was a star, Rodriguez realized in that moment, turning there in the big empty like a fat forgotten top. But the universe was spinning around him and he was perfectly still in the absence of gravity. Feeling a bit dizzy, watching creation rotate around him and his body, every second a little less plump with galaxy.

It was not the blood that bothered Rodriguez.

It was the damned whistling.

Slake had gotten him somewhere in the back of the neck, the stiletto biting deep enough to hit a vein or an artery, somewhere where Rodriguez couldn't reach back to plug the hole in the bulk of the suit. He'd flailed at it for a minute, but stopped because it was obviously impossible and felt stupid to boot. So his blood was shooting out of him into the darkness of space, accompanied by a fweeeee noise that sounded like when he'd taught his seven-year-old cousin to fart, if that cousin had never stopped and had been farting for twenty-three years and would keep farting until Rodriguez was a bloodless satellite.

Vein or artery: one was for blood travelling to the heart, the other for blood leaving it. Which one was which? It was academic, of course: the wound was too deep, too much air was gone from the suit, and the shuttle was gone besides, taken by Fleiss who had shut the door behind him and hit the retro-rockets as soon as he saw Slake pull the knife. Rodriguez had already been pulling the crowbar from the toolkit when Slake struck, and both of them had been thrown off-balance by the tug of the departing shuttle breaching their safety lines, so Rodriguez had managed to snap a good one off Slake's helmet, cracking it and knocking Slake a few inches back after the first stab.

They'd taken some self-defense during training, but nobody had ever really covered fighting in zero g's after your shuttle has taken off without you. As it turns out, once you're about six inches apart from arm's reach, you might as well be a mile away. There's nothing you can do to move closer to the other guy. All you can do is sort of flail and glare while momentum, working at a snail's pace, pulls you further and further apart.

Momentum could afford to do that. When you've got eternity ahead of you, a snail's pace is relatively brisk.

They do tricky stuff in the movies like steering with your air supply but really, that doesn't do crap. You just float there, with nothing to hold onto or push off of, your blood misting around you in a million perfect drops.

Blood moving to the heart, or from the heart, interrupted to spend a short forever in space.

Rodriguez would never return to his heart, he knew that. He looked at Slake, bobbing somewhere ahead of him, no longer even waving. They were satellites now, bodies in orbit, never coming home and somehow forever part of it all.