The High Five

Class Five

Milo entered the Nest loaded for bear. "This has got to stop, Bobby. Whatever personal shit you're dealing with—game addiction, porn, drugs, whatever—it's not important right now. We have a crisis on our hands, and we need everyone to pull their weight. Do you hear me?"

"Can we do this another time?" Bobby said in a faint voice. He was scrunched up in his spindle with only his crabby hands poking out like some kind of insect hatching from its egg sac.

"No, we can't fucking do this another time!" Milo exploded. "It's time you started giving a damn and acted like a member of this crew. Or so help me God, I'll pull the plug on your playtime and have you locked in a cell until we're back at the station and your ass can be shipped down to Earth."

When Bobby swung around to face him, Milo was stopped short. The comms engineer, who looked skeletally gaunt on a good day, had come to resemble a fresh cadaver. His lips were cracked and bleeding with reddish spittle pooling at the corners. His nose was splotchy from staunching nosebleeds, and there were scab tracks along his arms and neck where he had been scratching at patches of irritated skin. His thin, greasy hair clung to his forehead, and his bony face was covered in a sheen of sweat. He opened his mouth to speak, but then he just cast his bloodshot eyes down and shrugged as if to say, What's the use?

Milo's anger instantly evaporated. "Oh my God, Bobby. What happened to you?" But his mind was already making the leap. Radiation sickness. None of the rest of the crew had shone symptoms—or at least none had mentioned any—but Bobby's underdeveloped bones and prior history of CT scans made him particularly vulnerable. "We need to get you to med bay."

"Already been. Where do you think I got these?" Bobby pulled a bottle of radiation pills from his pocket. "Nothing more the auto-doc can do for me. But don't worry, it's probably not fatal. I know how much you hate filling out incident reports."

"Shouldn't you be lying down? Does it hurt?"

"Of course it hurts! I feel like I've been run through a rock tumbler and dragged naked over a field of Velcro." More than pain was evident in his eyes. Behind the bravado, he was scared. He quickly looked away, scratching at the side of his neck. "Listen, your concern is touching and all, but we have bigger problems."

What could be bigger than one of the crew having a life-threatening condition? Milo looked up at the panels. They were filled with ship schematics and course trajectories. He had assumed they were just more decoys. "Is something wrong with the ship?"

"Depends how you look at it. There was nothing wrong with the Titanic until an iceberg rammed into her."

"The CME," Milo concluded. "But we'll be safely inside the bunker."

"Safe is a relative term."

Milo took the empty spindle next to Bobby's and strapped himself in. This conversation seemed like one he should brace himself for. "Okay, lay it out for me."

Bobby shivered despite his sweating. He unscrewed the cap from the bottle and popped a radiation pill. "CMEs, or sun-burps, come in all sizes and intensities. The rating system is pretty loose. There's everything from speed tan to melt your eyeballs."

"And this one is a Class Five, the highest, so..."

"Without adequate shielding, your porn watching days will definitely be over."

"What qualifies as adequate?"

"That's the ten-million-dollar question, isn't it? It's all about the quality and amount of shielding. Earth's shields are the lowest quality. A weak magnetic field, which is more like a deflector really, and air. Neither are very effective at stopping subatomic bullets. But the magnetic field is humongous, and the atmosphere is a hundred miles deep. Together, they do a pretty decent job of protecting the twelve billion morons down on the surface. Still, it's not a good time to climb Mount Everest or go on a polar expedition.