The Myths of Twisted Felix Katt (Book 2)

(4) Laws are made to be broken

I'm for whatever gets you through the night - Frank Sinatra

It actually took me a whole freaking hour to cross the distance from where I had repaired part of Destiny, to where my airlock was. A distance that normally only took maybe ten minutes in the vacuum of space. I was soaked in sweat by that point in time for a whole plethora of reasons. For one thing it’s hard work to crawl through space, even with a bit of artificial gravity giving you a hand. A second reason I had entered the league of the overly sweaty, I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to pop the airlock seal when I couldn’t even see the entire door without standing a distance back. And finally I was Captain soggy butt because my air canister was reading in the red zone, meaning I had about twenty minutes of air left, tops. If that doesn’t light a fire under your ass, nothing will.

I’m not what you would call a religious fuzzy wuzzy type. There are those that get all praise Goddess, She is all mighty, yadda yadda. And then there are those that think there can’t be a Goddess because life is shit and they are unhappy. Or because of whatever reason strokes their fancy. I vacillate from agnosticism to belief and back again and pretty much just try to stay out of the way of Goddess, Murphy or whatever higher power might exist because my life is complicated enough as it is. But to be plainly honest, I was hoping that whatever higher power might be watching was playing on my side for a change, because I had no clue how I was going to get inside before I died gasping like a fish on land.

“How are you guys doing in there?” I asked through the com of my suit, glad that my voice sounded relatively normal. It would be embarrassing as all hell if the others knew just how uneasy I was feeling. It would ruin my carefully crafted hell hath no fury like Felix on a bender reputation I’d developed.

“I’m at the airlock on this side, trying to use leverage to get the wheel turning.” Rorick grunted back, and I could hear the strain in his voice.

My air lock door looked like it was take off of an old Earth submarine, and it operated under somewhat of the same principals. With the wheel turned in and locked, the seal was set and no air escaped. Turn the wheel enough and you break the seal and whoosh, there goes the air. That’s the manual override to my door. There’s a fancy electronic trigger that works too, problem was it was an electronic panel that was probably the equivalent of twenty feet high right now. I’m guessing that was just a wee bit out of Rorick’s current reach. Poor planning on my part I guess, just never thought I would need a door release button right around shin height before.

“You already managed to throw the lock open?” I asked, surprised that the wheel lock had been that easy to move for him.

“Actually we’re going to have to repair that later. I’ll explain once you’re safe inside.” Rorick grunted again, his deep voice laced with worry. He knew how much air these tanks held as well, so he knew how close to the line we were.

An image of Rorick bending metal to try and save me flashed through my head and I flushed, my brain going into detail of just exactly how his body would look doing that. Bad Felix, bad. Now was so not the time to be letting my mind play in the gutter. I tried to focus on the situation at hand and realized that maybe I had less air left than I thought, because I was getting daffy.

The tether that had held me to the ship was in between my size and that of the ship, an awkward stage of semi gignormously large and then narrowing to a thread. My brain immediately went Wiley E. Coyote on me and given the choice between potentially drifting off to space to die shortly, or staying on my ship to die shortly, I decided to give my crazy plan a chance. So I unclipped myself, trusting the artificial gravity of my Destiny to hold me in place (as long as I stayed close enough to the ship’s skin I theoretically was fine), and lassoed the tether over the wheel. A quasi quick scramble had me grabbing the tether as it went over the wheel and I pulled it to the turning side as much as possible.