Without a Tether, by Jonathan Olfert

Trailing ruin, the extraction platform Sigurd whirled around the Yellowpit: a concave storm a hundred klicks deep, a thousand wide. The facility shuddered, rivets popping from every patch in sight. The final evac boats clawed their way free a heartbeat before a flareup that rivaled the last storms of Old Earth.

Dainy Merced didn’t blame them for leaving her behind.

There’d be tears and recrimination enough on the boats once Mom and Dad realized. Or maybe they’d known and the launch captain pushed the button anyway, waited as long as he could. The horrific accident or the terrible choice—as she crouched in her ruined room, fingers moving restlessly through a checklist, she wondered which way would have hurt more, or how long they’d stay hurting if she didn’t find a way off the Sigurd.

Engines down, nose up, the Sigurd ached to break the grasp of WASP-47c. But ninety years in the whirlwind had left the platform too weak for escape velocity, let alone interstellar flight—half a derelict even before they gutted out whatever valuables the boats could lift.

The checklist gave Dainy control despite the groaning hull. Verify she had it all: multitool, access pass, meal card, breath mask, autotether, atmospheric antidotes. The same loadout she carried every day, each piece lethal to forget when you lived above an endless fall.

At six they’d found her sobbing, carving nonsense words in her foam mattress, terrified of things she couldn’t put to words.

They’d comforted her with unhesitating joy and told her she was just like them.

That’s why Mom prays on her knees in every washroom on the Sigurd, they said. That’s why Dad has to beep the door lock twice. You’re special.

Multitool. Pass. Meal card. Mask. Autotether. Antidotes.

Her fingers skimmed from point to point as she walked the groaning halls through the detritus of evacuation.

Each touch reassured her, gaming her brain. She needed that urgent calm to think through this.

The Sigurd housed no support craft, not even a sailer left. The evac boats had taken the interstellar comms core, but the basic sublight comm had enough range to chat with orbit. Planet C, a jewel-ringed gas giant, sat squarely in the WASP-47 system’s human-habitable zone. Someone out there could answer. This didn’t need to get desperate, she told the fear bubbling deep in her belly. A call could work.

When she found the comm suite half-crushed between warping bulkheads, her fingers blurred over her jumpsuit, increasingly frantic. But she’d overdone the stim, the compulsion, and something burned out in her skull. There was no relief. She found herself scratching at her scalp, nervous that the twisting halls had dropped some fleck of rust that could work its way into her skin. Scratch, scratch—

Find a checklist. Be a checklist. Work through it, right? Power through, keep yourself useful (always the underlying mantra of the spacer working poor). Be the good kind of counter, the kind that doesn’t frighten people.

Those talks, the ugly furtive ones, happened once she was old enough to understand them. For long years before that, and as often as possible afterward, Mom and Dad made being a counter a happy thing.

Be proud, Dainy ordered herself—

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

—only a counter can get out of this.

Like Mom and Dad and plenty of other spacers, Dainy was obsessive-compulsive, a powerful toolkit if trained and managed right. Time after time Dainy’s terror drove her down into blubbering horrified guilty secrecy, and every time Mom and Dad dug her up and helped her reclaim balance. There were old family recipes to take the edge off, things passed down through generations of counters since, oh, ancient times—since before the first seeds planted at Proxima Centauri.

The training linked essential checklists to important anxieties. Where most people used hard-copy checklists to don a suit, run preflight, or service the fifty machines that kept you alive on gas giant WASP-47c, a good counter was a checklist, deep in her gut.

The lists gave her control, but being obsessive-compulsive had another benefit: desensitization to normal levels of fear. Little could scare her worse than her own mind, though the long fall outside came very close sometimes.

The key—she told herself, age twelve and alone—was to know when she was about to spiral. Then ride out the breakdown like a torn-off collector sail whipping up over the edge of the megastorm, a glimmer against the stars.

The manual was too large for hard copy—too much lift mass—and the five tablets she found had a total of three hours’ remaining battery life. That meant rigging a charging system, both for them and the sublight comm. Fortunately she’d unearthed eight kinds of utility power supply and could service them all without shocks or hesitation.

Chewing stale ration bars, she read the manual three times. It became a scrawled branching if-then checklist across four walls, written perfectly in lipstick and crayon and grease pencil.

But to know it deep, to need every line of it, it had to become a desperate compulsion. It had to be her one way out.

Dainy gave herself to the terror. For the first time in days she let herself feel abandoned. She duct-taped her fingertips to keep from scratching her bloody scalp, to keep from giving herself relief. She took her antidotes, put on her mask, unhooked her tether, and stood above the yawning Yellowpit on a shaking gantry until she wet herself.

She even let herself ask why they hadn’t come back.

At the height of her fear, shuddering, panting for escape, she lurched back inside and wrote a perfect algorithmic list on seven walls.

Sixteen days after home went dark, the broken comm choked itself to life, blaring, distress-flagged, and well in range of passing traffic.”

“Mayday, mayday—” There was triumph in that raw little voice, victory punching through the static. “—this is the refinery ship Sigurd—”

This story originally appeared in Hexagon’s Myriad zine in January 2023.

Jonathan Olfert

Jonathan Olfert writes paleofiction and lesser genres. His stories have found homes in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Old Moon, Radon Journal, and Lightspeed. He lives in Atlantic Canada.

• Website: https://jonathan-olfert.carrd.co/
• Bluesky: jonolfert.bsky.social