In Space No One Can Hear You Squeak

I was repairing a minor imperfection outside the passenger ship Onyx-4. I had been working as a technician on it for the past four years. It was a normal day on a flight from Mars to Titan. The ship had stopped on Jupiter’s orbit so the passengers could have a nice look at the planet’s storms.

I enjoyed the job. In space everything seems to be in peace. There’s no racket of vehicles, there’s no screaming of people, there’s no deafening noise coming from the engines. It is silent. A silence unlike any other you can find on any surface.

My eyes were fixed on the small crack on the ship’s outer hull, when I was suddenly pushed back by it with tremendous force. The only sound I heard was the ship’s exterior wall hit my helmet. I was immediately pulled back by the tether on my suite and I watched as the ship exploded into a million pieces. Its enormous elongated body had been split into five or six larger parts and people were spilling out from the inside.

I was floating away from it into a lower orbit when I saw the Julian ships in the distance. The ones responsible for the death of the many innocent lives on the Onyx-4, and as I did I saw two spinning objects approach me. I couldn’t make out what they were against the chaotic backdrop of the desintegrating ship, until the first struck my helmet. It was the arm of a child, maybe eight or seven years old, floating frozen along the voids of space.

I remember I screamed something, but I don’t remember what. After deflecting the frozen small arm, the second object closed in on me. It was a rubber duck, floating towards me, looking for a familiar face amidst the horrifying destruction of our ship.

I reached for it and held it in my hand. I squeezed it several times. It was intact, just as I was. I knew the passengers were suffering even though I could not see them. I was screaming even though no one could hear me. And as I looked at the deforming duck in my hands, I knew that it was squeaking even though I drifted in silence among the wreckage. Among the corpses. Amongst death.

Audio recording by Levenstein