Monkey Suit

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A  lighthugger is a four kilometer spike of armour and ablative ice. That’s a lot of surface area to search for a lost crewman. Especially when the hull is a craggy, knotted labyrinth of jagged ornamentation and half-abandoned machinery, a place you could lose an army in, let alone a single hull-monkey.

My suit was the second best on Formantera Lady for hull operations, and it still took me three days to find Branco. We were a year out from Yellowstone and moving so close to the speed of light that the ship was flying through a storm of radiation and relativistic dust. I went out there time and again, only returning inside when the flux was on the point of frying either my suit or me. It was lonely, dangerous work. I could barely communicate with the rest of the crew, so for most of the time I was working with only stars and static for company. Having crawled my way back to the lock, I’d swap out as many of the damaged systems as I could before returning outside. The medichines in my body worked overtime dealing with the cumulative radiation exposure. Still I climbed back into the sweat-bucket of the suit and went outside again, over and over again.

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