“Dang it!” Samson breathed.

“What?” I asked, concerned. I paid the line some slack and carefully placed my magnetic boots so that I could see him better.

Samson pointed away from the ship. “I lost the wrench.”

I gazed out, but looking for the wrench was useless; it was gone now, a lone, lost speck amongst the distorted stars.

Due to our great velocity, they appeared in a ring around the ship, parallel to the way we were heading, redshifting or blueshifting accordingly. For a lone person, it was easy to lose oneself in the great relativistic light show—but that’s why we worked in teams. A fatality from that wasn’t going to happen—not out here, at least.

I sighed.

“Sorry,” Samson said.

I moved to him and patted him on the shoulder of his suit. “Don’t sweat it. It’s just a wrench. It’s not like we don’t have a thousand other ones in the supply. Besides, we’ve got less mass now, so we can move a bit faster. It was only a wrench.”

“Yeah,” Samson remarked as he looked out, “a wrench traveling at .87 c.”