The minutes bled away. Her oxygen gauge dropped: thirty minutes. Twenty. Fifteen. Sweat beaded inside her helmet, ran down her nose. Her arms ached from fighting the stiffness of her suit’s joints. But she didn’t stop. Pass after pass, she built the weld up: root, hot, fill, cap.
“Elias,” she said, “the patch is moving. I’ve got maybe three more passes before it blows.” 2g position
“No,” he said. “In zero gravity, there is no ‘horizontal.’ There’s no ‘groove.’ There’s just you and the metal. You just invented a new position.” The minutes bled away
She pushed off from the airlock and drifted toward the gash. The stars behind her were absolute—no twinkle, just hard, cold pinpricks of light. Jupiter loomed to her left, a swirling bruise of orange and red. She ignored it. Her world had shrunk to a sixty-centimeter scar in a metal plate. Fifteen