He had cobbled together enough fuel cells to hold for almost a year, and careful rationing would give enough food and water for nine months. After that, he would starve, freeze, or suffocate. It didn’t really matter, any way he cut it, he was dead if he didn’t make some kind of movement.

Rhysling's Rue
Chapter 3
By Theide
 

---

 
Exhaustion and near starvation were obvious in the youngster’s face, in every line of his emaciated body. He clung desperately to his improvised command console, wedged into a corner of the little habitat fragment he had managed to outfit as a makeshift ship, hoping desperately that no one had noticed his departure. His thin frame shook as he recalled the horror of the assault, watching almost everyone he knew be butchered while he hid in the crawlspaces and ventilation systems, escaping into the next space and sealing emergency bulkheads behind him just in time to escape being killed by decompression.

It had been almost six months since the desperate message from his father had reached him, telling him to hide. There would have been more to the message, but it cut off suddenly as the entire yard rang like a bell with what he now knew were the opening volleys of the assault on the facility. After that, everything had deteriorated into a nightmarish confusion of weapons fire and mad scrambling to find a compartment that wasn’t venting atmosphere.

He had finally gotten trapped in a storage area, locked off on all sides by vacuum, unable to leave or make contact. The saving grace for him had been the very fact that it was a storage area. A careful search found enough resources to build a CO2 scrubber, oxygen to replenish what he breathed, and some food. Given those things, and the miraculous fact that power from the station was somehow still available, he had been able to eke out continued existence, bare and bleak though it was.

He had cobbled together enough fuel cells to hold for almost a year, and careful rationing would give enough food and water for nine months. After that, he would starve, freeze, or suffocate. It didn’t really matter, any way he cut it, he was dead if he didn’t make some kind of movement. After many careful calculations, he had decided to cut loose from the tattered remnants of the yard and head for one of the smaller retrograde moons. He would be able to land there, barely.

There were enough volatiles to be harvested for fuel and the mass of the moon was low enough to enable him to take off again and plot a course for Saturn, where hopefully he would be able to find a way to attract the attention of one of the ice miners and gain some measure of safety.

There was an emergency spacesuit in the compartment and he had been able to use that to attach makeshift thrusters to the outside of his compartment. Not much, and definitely not pretty, but enough to do the job, enough to get him where he wanted to go. Then that huge ship had shown up and the station’s framework shuddered to the tempo of spacesuited, booted feet. He knew they were searching through the wreckage, and the thought of being found by Earthers made his blood run icy in his veins. So he hid again, turned his power draw down to a trickle, and made ready to sneak away.

The moment had finally come. Traffic from the ship had dwindled to a few small craft at rare intervals and it seemed like it might just be possible to depart unobserved, so with a tremor of trepidation, he cut his last connection to the power feed and cast off.
 

---