“I went with safety lines running through rings welded to the bulkhead because that’s how I grew up. Some traders wear magnetic gloves so they can stick anywhere in a steel ship, and of course, everybody has magnetic cleats for their boots. I only use those on board when I work in the cargo hold.”
“The chandler sold me a pair but I put them away with my food. You know what? I think I’m hungry.”
“Start with the water,” Larry advised her. “Actually, start with removing your safety restraints or you aren’t going anywhere.”
“Right.” Georgia unbuckled the four-point harness that kept her strapped into the padded acceleration chair and then took a deep breath. “Here I go.” A few seconds later, she slammed into the lockers but managed to grab one of the safety lines to keep from drifting off.
“So what did you do wrong?” Larry asked in a calm voice.
“Why did I hit so hard? I barely pushed off at all.”
“You started with your knees bent and then you extended until your legs were straight. It doesn’t feel like a lot of work because you’re weightless, but your mass is the same as it would be on Earth or Union Station. Next time, try pushing off with just your toes. Good job taking the force on your arms, though. For a second there I was worried you were going to hit your head.”
“I’m not uncoordinated, I was just surprised.” Georgia opened her food locker and got out a box of Union Station Springs water. “Do you want one?”
“I’m set with recycled supply, and just so you know, it’s considered rude to offer water from your own stock in trader circles. It means you think that the person you’re with is too incompetent to plan for their own survival.”
“Sounds like you have a lot of rules. How does this work?”
“Pull the straw off the side, jab it through the seal, and then you can suck the water out. We only had squeeze tubes when I was a kid, but the boxes are better because you’d really have to work at it to cause an accident.”
“Nothing is coming out,” she reported after some fruitless sucking.
“Make sure your hand isn’t covering the vent holes on the bottom. If the air can’t get in to fill the space between the box and the bladder, it’s like trying to create a vacuum.” He pedaled on in silence for almost a minute before asking, “Is it alright now?”
“Finished,” Georgia declared, and crushed the empty box for emphasis. “I’ll put it in the garbage.”
“That goes into recycling, the yellow bag. I keep it in the same locker as the garbage bag because we don’t generate much of either.”
“How can you tell what’s recycling and what’s garbage?”
“Okay, I called it garbage because I don’t know how squeamish you are, but the real deal is that the blue bag is biological waste and the yellow bag is everything else.”
“You have a whole bag dedicated to vomit?”
“Maybe we should save this discussion for after you’ve eaten,” Larry suggested.
“I’m all better now, really, and I’m the least squeamish person I know. Just tell me.”
“If you’re sure,” he said, clicking the tension setting on the exercise bike up a notch and dropping his pedaling speed. “Have you ever used a Zero-G toilet?”
“No, but what does that have to do with it?”
“Like I said, we can’t dump anything in space. On a small ship like this, the waste reprocessing system is limited to recovering the water, which is relatively easy. The stuff that’s left over, the solids, get baked into briquettes by the toilet and vacuum-sealed in disposable pouches. I empty them into the biological waste bag every few days to keep the receptacle from overfilling.”
“So when you said you’re set with recycled water, you mean that you drink…”
“We’re in space, Georgia. Everybody drinks recycled wastewater, the only question is whether it’s distilled with minerals added, like what I get back from the toilet, or whether it’s gone through some kind of natural filtration process, like the water you bought on Union Station. I’m sure the only reason the chandler sold you so many water boxes was because you told him it was your first time on a small ship. We’ve all heard stories about Earthers getting dehydrated because they refuse to drink recycled water. That and it doesn’t hurt to have a backup supply in case something goes wrong.”
“I thought you said we’d drink the shower water if something went wrong.”
“I said some traders have resorted to that, but only if the toilet recycling system fails and they don’t have any other supply.” He increased the tension setting again and his breath began to come harder. “Not sleepy yet?”
“Should I be? I’m really kind of hungry. Do you want to eat?”
“You go ahead. I’m going to get in at least two more hours of exercise first. I showed you the small microwave if you need to heat something up, but that’s the only kitchen equipment we can use in Zero-G.”
“Hey, I’m stuck!”
Larry craned his neck around to look at his passenger and chuckled. “You’re not stuck, you’re unstuck. You must have let go of the rope while you were drinking and accidentally pushed off just enough to drift out of reach of the safety line.”
“What should I do? I read somewhere if you’re adrift in space you can move by throwing something. I could throw my empty water box.”
“It doesn’t have enough mass and I’d rather you didn’t start throwing things on the bridge. I’ll get the bot to rescue you,” he concluded, and called, “Genie?”
“Who? What bot?”
“Genie, my cargo bot. She’s in her charging bay in the hold so it will take a minute for her to get here. I paid for an upgrade to my
