The Myths of Twisted Felix Katt (Book 2)

(3) Murphy's Law Smackdown

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way -Carl Sandburg

There are a few tricks to fixing holes and dents in the exterior hull of a space ship. Many of these tricks depend on you being smart enough to use them while you have the advantages of breathable atmosphere to help, but I sure did love a challenge. I’m too cheap to hire a mechanic to work on Destiny, and besides that, I’ve made so many modifications to my ship that it would just be a waste of time and money for me to bring one on. I’d just have to train them how to take care of my baby anyways, and we all know I’d spend far too much time breathing down the back on the mechanic’s neck, just making sure she knew what she was doing. So instead I had spent the better part of my first year on Destiny teaching myself how to keep her flying. Poor Rorick often had to help bail my ass out of motor oil and tight spaces during that span of time, and the blood slave had learned a lot of the basic up keep of a space craft through osmosis. That and with no one else to talk to at the time, he was my sounding board for ideas. There were even a few modifications based on his suggestions, although no one else knows that.

That first year had made me very familiar with every inch of my Destiny, but that didn’t make what I was doing right now any easier. We had blasted off of the Creole Settlements about two hours after Van’s bombshell and once I got our metal keister on the right flight path, I left Van in charge of making sure we didn’t crash into anything obvious and I took a walk outside.

It’s a little less suicidal than you’d think. Mostly because I have a zero G suit on, making sure that I could still do things like breathe, move around, stay anchored to my ship and oh yeah, not die. Some of my survival was even a passing nod at the fact that I kind of knew what I was doing. A week or so ago Van and I had almost fallen off of Destiny while she was parked on the docks. Instead of going splat, I had rammed blade through the outer skin of the ship and stopped our rapid decent. Now I got to pay for that little act of heroism by fixing the gash in Destiny. It wasn’t a huge wound to the metal skin, but I have this rule about flying into outer space and through an asteroid field with holes in my ship. Don’t.

I also hadn’t flown through the pressures of atmosphere and into space with the tear left wide open like a festering sore either. I’d thrown a patch job over it, so currently I was peeling away the temporary layer so that I could apply a space weld to the hole.

“Felix, all systems are looking good in here. Air pressure is holding steady, flight path looks clear and none of the morons underfoot are causing a ruckus.” Van’s voice piped into my head com, reminding me that although I might be enjoying the solitude of space, I wasn’t actually alone.

Space is quite an experience. For one thing, the only thing between me and a quick, relatively painless but inglorious death was some titanium glass and Kevlar. The titanium glass is as strong as metal but translucent and the Kevlar can stop bullets, but it wouldn’t take much to kill me out here. But despite the overwhelming awareness of my own mortality while I floated around like a fetus in a uterus, I loved the sensation of being in space. I am swimming amongst the stars, free of gravity and temporarily free of politics. There was nothing more powerful and absolutely neutral than space. It simply did not care about anything, and thus it was the one place we could all be free. It also happens to be quite lovely. True darkness, the complete and utter absence of light, broken only by the most blinding spectrum of the opposite. And all of live was held in this deadly embrace.

“Felix, I take that back. There is definitely a rumpus going on in here. Though it’s nothing that the brute and I can’t handle. Keep your ass out there and fixing this ship up, I’m too pretty to die.” Van’s voice broke through my poetic reverie and reminded me that I have a job to be doing. I might sometimes want to smack their heads against each other in a modern mimicry of the Stooges, but there were moments like right now where I was simply glad to let them handle whatever was going on inside my ship. Besides, if it got too bad, I could always go in myself and crack some skulls.