Abstract: Flight Engineer Meghan Rafferty joins an off-world mining shaft crew working in the asteroid belt, but no one told her about her real job.
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"Why the hell does my spacesuit have high heels?" asked rookie Flight Engineer Meghan Rafferty.
The din of alarms prevented nearby Asteroid Miner Technician Lori Brower from understanding the question. The technician yelled back as her visor locked into place, "Get your helmet on! We might have a breach!" Half of what she had yelled was audible across the room until her visor closed. The remaining half came through the comm system screaming from Meghan's own helmet held in the rookie's hands.
Meghan took a deep breath. Patches of sweat made her shear silky bodysuit undergarment cling to her skin around her chest and back. She set the helmet down, finished getting her hips into the bottom of the questionably rigged spacesuit then reached down inside the front to make certain her bodysuit's rubber crotch access point lined-up with her spacesuit's connectors. Quickly she raised the hard front panel of her oddly slender spacesuit and covered her torso and chest. She snapped on the locking back-to-front shoulder flaps and felt the suit motorize and squeeze around her body.
It was then she noticed the suit was tighter than any another spacesuit she ever wore.
Damn it! Was it the wrong size? There were no other spacesuits and if she couldn't fit in the thing, she was screwed. It was too late to run back into the shuttle. The pilots were probably prepping for an emergency separation.
She tried to peer over the metal ring surrounding her neck. The shiny ring served as an interface to join her suit to the bottom of her helmet, but right now it only blocked her view. She tugged down on the ring with her gloved hands, all standard procedure to visually check that a suit had properly closed. The tightness of this suit certainly concerned her. She pulled again. The neck ring was smaller than normal. It wouldn't budge. She couldn't see over the obstruction like any normal spacesuit.
"Fuck!"
Higher pitched alarms sounded. The room shook again from another asteroid quake.
Looking at a semi-clear reflection in a polymer glass airlock door behind her, she did a visual check of her suit. What the hell? The view was blurry, but the damn suit had breast forms. She had been in such a rush, she hadn't noticed the hard domes encasing her boobs and it wasn't a smaller neck ring preventing her from looking down, it was a stiff collar that the front and back panels had formed around her neck. Normal spacesuits had a wide neck ring resting on the shoulders to interface with a large spherical helmet.
What was this thing?
She looked around and saw that the other asteroid miners had all left. The prep room to the airlock was empty now and there just wasn't anymore time.
A computer voice began detailing issues between alarm bursts. She didn't have time to listen to the words. No mater what the cause, she had to don a suit now.
The only technical issue with her suit's design was its thinner more form-fitting construction. It wasn't regulation with its thin hard shell and certainly not as rugged as the typical spacesuits she had trained in. But she was wearing it now, she did fit inside, and it did seem to have properly sealed. There was no choice. She had to get going.
"Damn it!" yelled Meghan as she pushed the snug helmet around her head. It snapped tight around her cheekbones, pressed her ears down and finally clicked onto the metal neck ring. She breathed in forcing the click of the air regulator. Air flowed. Inside pressure increased. The articulated joints powered up. And thankfully, the alarm noise now resonated at a fainter volume through the closed helmet.
She could finally think.
"Where's the rookie?" said Commander Ann Bruno's voice from Meghan's helmet speaker.
"She's bitching about her suit," said Lori, sounding out of breath from a fast sprint.
"I'm coming," radioed in Meghan wanting to rush out into the mineshaft. Another quake hit. She knew that the shuttle had to break contact with the asteroid and at that point the pilots would follow standard procedure and just leave if the mining base could quickly resolve the problem. Such alerts either got fixed in minutes or never, requiring a total evacuation. Asteroid miners had to be tough. There was no coddling out here in space.
She took a step and almost fell. Luckily she grabbed a wall. It was hard to look and see, but lifting her right foot up in front of her and pressing the bottom sole against the wall, she could quickly make out the narrow solid heel. She had noticed odd heels a few seconds ago, but these were even taller than she had thought, at a minimum four inches high! What the hell did she encase herself inside? Who designs something like this?
"It's just a bad sensor," yelled Commander Ann. "Reset the alarms." Another quake hit. "We're OK here. The shuttle can go."