Thermal Principles

My head hurt. I kept my eyes closed as I regained consciousness in hopes that the headache would abate. It didn’t. I opened my eyes and realized that we were spinning crazily. Stars whirled in a blur outside the viewports. Then it hit me. I couldn’t hear anything. Even moving my own mouth didn’t make noise. I snapped my fingers next to my ears, then tried rubbing them. No sound, but they both felt wet. It was blood. I couldn’t remember what had happened.

I reached out and grabbed ahold of the frame. The metal was hot to the touch. It was unusual for such a small pod to be so warm. I got closer to a viewport and realized why: I was entering atmosphere. I looked back towards the rest of the space station should have been. There was nothing there; where there should have been half a mile of scientific test pods, solar arrays, storage units and backup support systems, all I could see was dark space with a rotating blur of stars. I couldn’t see what was ahead of me, or what atmosphere I was falling into, but it kept getting warmer.

All the systems were down. Life support was non-electrical, so the chemical processes would keep converting CO2 into oxygen, but it wouldn’t matter. As the walls of the craft slowly climbed in temperature I would eventually boil in here. That would happen long before I hit the surface of whatever planet we had been over when I detached. I looked out the view port again and realized that I hadn’t detached. The whole station was raining down around me. I hadn’t seen them at first against the dark of space, but I caught glimpses of the wreckage now as friction increased and components started to burn up.

I wasn’t going to go out like this. I still had blood on my hands from my eardrums. My fingers left sticky red marks all over the machined aluminum as I unlocked an emergency landing suit from the locker. It was folded up impossibly small, and it took me a full two minutes to get it out and on. The trainers back home would have been appalled. I felt calm with the suit on. With no electricity I didn’t have to override anything to get the door open, but it was so hot that it burnt my hands. The door opened with a rush of fire and I was violently pulled up and out. I think it broke my leg, but it didn’t matter. I fell for a moment, slowed by the vacuum effect of my rapid exit, and then the burning began. I looked down through the friction flames and saw a vast blue planet below me. Somewhere down there it was ice cold.