Dangers of the Unknown

"Come on, Mark, just a bit closer.”

He heard Sammie’s voice in his memories. It seemed like an eternity ago when he was traveling to the stars with other humans, exploring, fixing. But it seemed so real now. He saw her hand, stretching out of the airlock, waiting for his touch. She was outside and waiting for him. Waiting for his secure return. Mark focused on her, and didn't look at the flying debris all around him, at space rocks the size of his head dangerously passing with high speed nearby. No, just on her.

They were so close already, just a few feet away, and then he would be able to come back to the ship. Write a report. Most likely get yelled at for carelessness, then he would have been assigned the same crappy job like he always did. A week later nobody would remember the near **** experience, and he would laugh at it.

“Yep... Almost there...”

He managed to agree through the gritted teeth and kept pulling himself closer and closer.

Finally, when he was almost in reach, he extended his own hand towards Sammie so she could pull him over to the semi opened air lock. But she didn't.

“Oh my God...” She whispered into comms instead.

Mark managed to turn around and saw a massive black hole forming just behind them. It was sucking in everything, distorting and devouring the light, the debris and he knew it would eventually come for them.

"We gotta get out of here, hurry!" Mark heard the her through his comms and immediately began pulling himself with Sammie's help towards the air lock.

The ship suddenly shook and began to change course, going into the black hole. Looser fragments of it were already breaking off and flying ahead towards the great void. Veers lost his footing and once more was doing everything he could to just hold on to the wire connecting him to the ship.

But Sammie didn’t.

“Aaarrghh!”

She screamed suddenly when the handle she was holding on to suddenly broke away. With his free hand, Mark reached to her, and grabbed her by the leg of her space suit. He pulled her in, and then kept her in a tight hug, while desperately trying to somehow not fall into the black hole himself.

“Please don’t let go, don’t let me go, Mark.”

He tried. He really, really tried.

And as long as he was conscious, he didn’t let her go. He kept holding on to her, looking into her scared eyes. He saw in the reflection of her space helmet that the ship was breaking in half. That the wire he was holding on to wasn’t attached to anything anymore. That their space crew members were dying in space without wearing any space suit or other protections from the cold, airless void.

The black hole was pulling them in.

And that’s when he went through the O-gate for the very first time.