Introduction

During 2035 there were 12 incidents in which a spacecraft was impacted by free-floating man-made materials in space, generally classified as “space junk.” This was a record number of such impacts, and everybody agreed a solution was needed, but what? 2036 managed to avoid breaking the record again only due to companies shying away from launches.

In 2037, Karl Greene proposed a solution. He formed a company called SpaceFab that would be responsible for the removal of space junk around the Earth. It would be funded by all space-faring nations and by private companies launching or maintaining objects in orbit, effectively a UN-administered tax. In the absence of any competing proposals, after some dickering over the price, the plan was approved.

In the first part of the solution, nations and companies were required to register the items they have orbiting the Earth. UN Space Command, which collects data from all spacefaring nations and companies, would keep SpaceFab informed of all launch and landing activity and non-orbiting objects traveling within the low Earth orbit (LEO) zone. Astronomical organizations would inform them about the rare, naturally occurring objects within this zone, such as meteorites, to the extent possible. Separately, SpaceFab launched a set of satellites to detect and catalog all the items found in LEO and their orbits. The goal would then be to remove any unregistered items. Where possible, the unregistered items were identified from catalogs of items known to have been launched into space but which had been abandoned, failed, or otherwise ceased to be used but were not able to be deorbited. There were found to be approximately 170,000 such items ranging from disused satellites to collision debris, about half of which were able to be at least partially identified.

Now it’s 2042. SpaceFab has a permanent station in orbit, officially called SpaceFab-1 but often derogatorily referred to as the space junkyard. Rather than deorbit the objects, SpaceFab collects most of them and offers them for sale to anyone looking to build or repair objects in orbit. It costs thousands of dollars per kilogram to launch objects into LEO, so all of this material that SpaceFab is being paid to remove is potentially valuable. That said, so far few customers other than SpaceFab employees themselves have actually used the collected space junk for anything.

SpaceFab-1 has two ships for collecting space junk. They dock at the station when not in use, but since SpaceFab commenced operations, there has almost always been one in use. They go out on 10-day missions, numbered from STM-1 (the abbreviation is for Space Trash Mission). These are demanding missions, so a separate crew comes up from Earth to the station to run each mission.

Each crew consists of 11 people. Within the 11, there are three sub-crews of three people each designated for removing the space junk. During STM-1 and STM-2 they experimented with different shift lengths, but since then they have usually used 5-hour shifts. This means each sub-crew is active for 5 hours and inactive for 10 hours at a time. Usually, each sub-crew mostly just eats and sleeps during every second inactive period. During the other inactive periods, they take only a short nap, allowing them to participate in other activities such as cleaning and recreation.

Each sub-crew consists of three roles. One is a pilot, whose job is to move the ship near each piece of space debris to be collected and to match speed with it. Automatic systems help alert the pilot to any objects that may be on crossing orbits and need to be avoided. The second role is the arm operator. His primary job is to extend the collection arm to within 3 meter proximity of the space debris, and he works with the pilot in case the ship is too far away to achieve this. He also acts as a monitoring officer during flight movements, double-checking the pilot’s actions to help avoid collisions.

The third role is the retriever. He sits in a cockpit located at the end of the collection arm. He has at his disposal a large maneuverable secondary arm for collecting whole satellites. There is a small secondary arm, just as long but more slender, for collecting objects on smaller scales, things roughly the size baseballs; an electromagnet on this arm helps pull in smaller items too difficult to grab. Finally, there is an energy gun for vaporizing debris too small and not metallic enough for the small arm to collect. It’s technically not a laser gun, because for safety it’s designed to defocus the energy within 10 meters of the target to avoid damage from missed shots hitting Earth or other spacecraft, but it closely resembles one. Aim, fire, and a beam comes out and blasts stuff. The energy is focused in specific frequencies designed to break the bonds of organic molecules, so these objects are converted into their constituent atoms or small molecules that will not re-condense and continue to cause trouble.

Two other men round out the crew. The medic is in charge of handling any injuries or ailments the crew suffers during their 10-day mission. The backup is trained in all three crew roles and is there to fill in for anybody who can no longer perform their duty, avoiding the need to abort the mission if one crewman is incapacitated. Each of the 11 crewmen are paid one million dollars on the completion of a mission, even the backup and even if he did nothing. While the crew roles are more demanding, the medic and backup roles require greater training.

At the end of the 10 days, the ship returns to SpaceFab-1 and unloads the material they collected. Workers on the station sort it various ways, separating chemical and radiation hazards from items that can be sorted and stored or disassembled by hand. Hundreds of bins on the station contain such sorted material.

At first, STM crews were all male because there were only male volunteers. Maria Idzhikova was the first female volunteer, and she asked for the condition that she have at least one other woman on the crew with her, not looking forward to being in space for a week and a half with ten men. Mr. Greene not only accepted her request but went a step further. “You’re not going to go on a mission until we get a full crew of 11 women. I’m not paying people to join the hundred-mile-high club!”

That comment was wrong in so many ways. Most significantly was that because of the danger level while going out to intentionally encounter space junk, we wore space suits continuously during the 10-day missions, with a catheter-based system to deal with bodily waste. Even during off-duty hours, we were monitored. Stripping out of the suits to the extent needed to perform any sort of sex would have set off alarms. The only part we were allowed to remove during flight was the helmet.

The comment was also wrong because gay men and lesbians could join their own version of that club. And it also ignored activity on SpaceFab-1 itself, where men and women were stationed for longer periods of time, together, and weren’t expected to wear space suits all the time. I knew for a fact that sex had occurred on the space station, and quite likely before Maria’s first flight. It was true, though, they they didn’t get our high hazard pay. But he used the statement as a recruiting push for women, and for STM-15 and STM-27 he indeed used all-female crews.

STM-35 was my third mission. I planned for it to be my last; 3 mill would make enough for me to retire on. And it was going well. On my last turn in the retriever’s chair, we picked up an old, nonfunctional Soviet satellite and a piece of junk from a private satellite from the 2010s that had suffered a collision. Our third target was one of the “unknown” objects we sometimes came across; we would have photos and size data but usually no other data about these. This one appeared to be a small intact satellite of some sort, but nobody had claimed it, so it was scheduled for removal along with all rest of the junk.

Everything went fine until I grabbed it with the small arm. Then it shot out some sort of pink beam and I blacked out.

Awakening

I awoke some time later, lying on a medical-style bed. I could see other people beside me on other beds in close proximity. I was restrained only in the casual way used in space medical facilities, intended to ensure I didn’t fall out of the bed during maneuvers or float out in zero gravity, with grips holding my upper arms and mid-thighs to the bed, but allowing some movement. I could tell we weren’t then in zero gravity; I could feel the pull of gravity, separately from the restraints, holding me down to the bed like I hadn’t felt in 10 days.

“Rise and shine, ladies!” said a man who I looked up to see.

Ladies, I wondered? But as I looked down the length of my bed toward the man, I also saw that my body had two lumps I didn’t expect to see. The other people beside me seemed similarly confused.

“I’m Zachary Quill, M.D., medic on SpaceFab-1. An incident happened during your mission. When you seemed incapacitated and could not be reached over comms, we sent someone out to bring your ship back in. We were surprised to see a female crew aboard since we recorded your crew as male when you left.”

There was a lot of shouting from my crewmates, high-pitched shouting in some cases, since none of them expected to wake up female, either. A fair bit of it was cursing.

“Relax, please. Your insurance clause about returning with all organs intact has been activated, and you’ll get triple pay. Also, we apologize for the close quarters, and the decor. Our sick bay wasn’t designed to hold a whole crew at once; we had to improvise facilities in the morgue. The beds are replicas of the standard medical one, though; you can press a button under each side of the bed near where your hands fall to release the restraints.”

There was another pause as everyone did so.

“We don’t know how it happened, but we are certain it was related to the last object you picked up. The first tug we sent out to get you also failed, the pilot feeling sick as he neared, but he veered away and reported radiation coming from the object your ship held in the retrieval arm. We were able to remotely release that object, and once your ship was sufficiently far from it, a second tug was sent out to pick you up.”

He paused for a moment because we were all occupied checking out the extent of the changes in our bodies. I did too, and confirmed they were complete, at least externally. We were only dressed in those stupid paper medical gowns, so it wasn’t difficult for us to check between our legs. We were plugged in, but I could tell how the urinary catheter went into a flat part of my body and not a penis, and I likewise felt the extra hole I had before reaching the other catheter.

“We found you all unconscious, and not fitting in your suits well. When we got you here we removed the suits to perform medical tests, but the problem we have now is that you don’t fit into them properly for returning to Earth. Your undersuits were all ruined by bodily discharges as well, but we have new ones you can wear.”

He held up a full-body undersuit much like the ones we put on under the space suits before we went out on our mission.

“This is the female version of the suit. It will be tight zipping up, but when you do so, the top will act like a sports bra. Some of you definitely need that.”

Next he held up what were unmistakably panties. Plain, opaque white panties, but panties all the same.

“These open in the same direction as the suits, so you can open both garments to use the toilet without wriggling all the way out of your suits.”

He didn’t really need to say that. We’d all worn the men’s versions of both garments with the same bathroom features before.

His so-far silent assistant picked up a big stack of clothes and the two walked along our row of beds. For each of us, the doc removed an IV from one arm and two catheters between our legs, wiping each of us briefly where they were pulled out and depositing the paper in a bag hanging from his waist.

We were familiar with the catheters since the space suits we had worn during the entire space flight were equipped with them. Because getting in and out of them was such a chore, and nobody wanted “one of the crewmen is in the bathroom” to ever be a reason for a launch to be delayed, using the catheters was standard protocol if you were using the space suits, and time was built into launch prep to hook everyone up. They fed our wastes into containers within the suits that could be dumped, or more like vacuumed once a day into into a container on the ship that kept the sewage sealed up tight. It was part of our training to learn how to insert and remove the catheters on our own, when needed, but if they were around, we let medical staff do that. The removal felt a bit weird to me, though. Maybe that was just the lack of a penis.

We were usually filthy when we came out of the suits, with 10 days’ worth of skin flakes stuck to our skin and/or the undersuits. But they’d washed what the doc called bodily discharges off of us, so they cleaned that up, too.

When the doc finished unplugging each of us, the assistant checked our names on the paper tag around our left wrist, ripped the tag off, and handed us clothes like what we’d been shown.

When they finished with the last of us, the doctor said, “We will leave for a moment so you can get dressed.”

Both men left, leaving the 11 of my crew from the garbage ship alone. Some of my crewmates were a bit hesitant, but after realizing the rest of us had similar body shapes to their own, everybody got up off their beds, stripped off the paper gowns, put on the panties, and started squeezing into the undersuits. This process was somewhat familiar, since we’d gotten into the same garments before putting on the space suits. The female versions, though, are smaller at the waist and larger at the hips and bust, and so present slightly different challenges. The back of the neck opens up down beyond the waist to allow entry into the undersuits. Pulling them up our bodies took some effort. When we had them all the way on, the zipper from butt to neck kept them in place, and I have to admit, despite the tightness, it was comfortable when I got it on.

We couldn’t help looking around a bit. This didn’t even look like my crew, apart from us all being female. We had completely new bodies. There wasn’t one that looked over 25; we looked like a sorority rather than a space junk crew. If my sense of proportion was right, though, most of us were large women, though proportionately built. We must have still had the mass and approximate body sizes we had before. So maybe more of a women’s athletic team of some sort.

I recognized some of the mannerisms and verbal responses of the others. In particular, a “what the flying fuck” identified my arm operator Gardner. He’d said that three times this mission when we came up to a particularly odd-looking piece of space junk. That reassured me that I was really among my crew and not 10 strangers.

About 10 minutes after the doctor and his assistant had left, we had all managed to cover ourselves, and one of us, due to our changed bodies I am not even sure who, opened the door and let the two men back in.

“I hope you find these suits bearable. At least they cover you.”

One of my crewmates who now had a voice that sounded like that of a little girl asked, “How female are we?”

“As female as if you’d been born that way, right down to the chromosomes. We expect you’ll menstruate, and we have the supplies for that, too.”

This was met with several groans.

“Can you turn us back?” someone else asked.

“We don’t even know how it was done in the first place. The only possibility is if we can recover that thing and there’s a way to make it turn you back. Since we can’t even get close to it, we don’t even have a plan for that. So you should prepare to stay like you are now.”

A different one asked, “So we’re just supposed to go down and start new lives as women?”

“Your governments will all help with that. They know, and they’re scared shitless that there’s something out here that can do what this thing just did to you all. They will not hesitate to give you new names and fix your gender on all records, or create entirely new identities for you. Counseling will be available, several different kinds of counseling.”

There were murmurs among the group, a general sense of agreement despite the strangeness of it all.

“We are out of IVs after keeping you fed for 3 days, so you’re going to have to eat the station food. We have a supply ship on the way that is bringing more food and suits that will fit you. For now, follow me.”

The first place he took us had our comm units with our names on them lined up in alphabetical order on a table, sitting on chargers, and each of us picked ours up in turn and affixed it with the usual Velcro to the spot on our suit above the left breast. Thoughtfully, in these female suits, the Velcro was actually above the breast, on what was a flat part for most of us. If it had been where it was on the male suits, it would have been on the top slope of my breast.

Quill introduced the man who had helped him hand out suits. “This here’s Jagermeister, or at least, he lets us call him that because his actual name’s too difficult and doesn’t even fit on the name patch.”

The indicated man had JAGERMSTR written on the strip attached to his comm badge since even Jagermeister was too long. I wondered what his actual name was.

“He’s the station’s quartermaster, who we didn’t expect you to need, but you’re going to be here at least a couple days until we get those suits, so he’s going to assign you some bunks to sleep on, and he’s also going to update all your voice prints in the system. Please confirm for me by raising hands to indicate that everyone has found the comms with their own name printed on it.”

All 11 of us raised our hands.

“Hands down. After Jagermeister finishes with you, he’ll lead you to the mess hall.”

We all waited patiently while he had each of us dictate into a microphone the standard text, which included all the common sounds in English, followed by our surname as we expected to be addressed. When that was done, we moved to another area, where he handed us keys with room assignments, double rooms except one leftover single, and we each got a tote bag into which he put another 2 of the undersuits, 2 panties, and a bundle of what I discovered, when it was my turn, included a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and feminine supplies. He led us to the indicated rooms, which were all in a row. They were already supplied with bedding, and our other limited personal items had already been removed from our ship and placed in our rooms. Everybody confirmed their keys locked and unlocked their doors, and then as promised he led us to the mess hall.

As a crew for STMs, we never got a chance to eat here; we arrived on a transport, went straight into mission prep, and were put on board the garbage ship. So when we arrived at the mess hall, Quill was there and explained the food briefly.

“We’re not quite vegetarian here, but largely so, because we grow as much of our food as is possible in a hydroponics bay on the station.”

It was different from what we were used to in flight, but because there is real food, it was better than the rations we took with us on the garbage ship. Another nice touch was that, since this part of the ship rotated to provide artificial gravity, we could eat mostly in the way we did on the ground.

There was nobody but our group using the cafeteria, and after we were done eating, a woman named Dunn arrived and spoke with us briefly. She explained she wasn’t medical staff in any way, but she was here just to give us some hygiene lessons we may not have gotten as men. This included demonstrations of how the tampons were supposed to work, using a Fleshlight, not her own female parts; I wondered who had given up their toy for the lesson.

After this, Quill led us to a room where we were debriefed by a group of the station’s officers. This didn’t actually last very long because nobody knew much. My testimony was perhaps most relevant, that seizing the object with the arm seemed to activate it, and knocked me out before I could release it or call for help. The others perhaps were affected less quickly, and one of them was able to send out a distress signal that alerted the station more quickly than they might otherwise have realized that we were in trouble. However, we were all knocked out before we could say anything over comms. I don’t think the debrief gave them anything they didn’t already have from recordings, but it corroborated what we knew.

At the end of this debrief we were told we had no further duties until the resupply ship arrived, but that we’d get more lessons tomorrow, and that they were looking for volunteers to help in retrieving this object. One theory was that it only affects men, and with our changes complete, we’d be able to approach it in a way that the men could not, and hopefully turn it off. And of course, that counted as a new mission and we’d be paid for it, though they hadn’t quite worked out the details yet. Neither I nor anyone else volunteered at this time.

We went back to our rooms. They had simply put us in alphabetical order, leaving Zimmerman alone in the last room. I, Curt Robinson, was next door to Zim and sharing with Sputterman, one of the pilots.

“How are we going to do this, Robs? Er, maybe Robin is more appropriate now, given your hair.”

My roommate was the slenderest of the crew, and her female version was still skinny, but one part of her did not come out small. The result was someone I was having to resist trying to make out with.

“Sputty, have you taken a look at yourself? You are going to have to beat off the men!”

She saw that there was a mirror on the wall, though like all space mirrors it was a piece of heavily polished metal, rather than glass. She stared at it a moment, perhaps trying to confirm that she was really looking at herself.

“Oh my God! I’ve turned into my own wet dream! They’re going to be calling me Slutty instead of Sputty.”

I chuckled, but suppressed it, not wanting it to seem like I was laughing at her body. Instead, I said, “You’re only as slutty as you let yourself be, though I agree that your shape lets you do that much more than I could.”

I looked at myself. I understood his comment about Robin now, as I had a big frizzy mess of red hair, exactly the color of a robin’s red breast. If you only looked at my face, you might think I was cute. The body, though... I had been the opposite extreme on the crew to Sputty, just barely under the height and weight limits for astronauts. And I hadn’t gotten any smaller, only differently shaped. I outweighed Sputty by perhaps 80 pounds, none of it fat. I was five inches taller than her, though she wasn’t short, and I was more muscular. I think my breasts were actually smaller than Sputty’s if measured by volume. Despite being big, they looked pretty normal on my body. You might actually think my whole body was cute, if you were 6’ 9” and 300 pounds.

After a moment of looking at us both in the mirror, Sputty turned to me and grabbed onto one of my arms.

“Protect me if any men come after me, Robin, please!”

I told her, “OK, but you might need protecting from me.”

“You’re OK. You don’t have a dick anymore. That’s what I’m afraid of. What you do to me is OK if you keep the men off.”

Her look of fear moments ago had changed to something else. Was she making a pass at me? I was having trouble reading her expression. But she’d given me permission for something, so I bent down and gave her a big kiss, the kind of kiss a man gives his date. I’d never treated Sputty in any way other than as a colleague before, but Sputty was never a super-hot woman before, nor had Sputty ever come on to me. And Sputty did not shy away from it. She was, after all, getting to kiss a woman, too, though a woman built more like a linebacker than a supermodel.

Out of respect for what I perceived as the intent rather than the literal words of Sputty’s request, I didn’t go further with her, and we slept in our separate beds.