"HQ SAR. Black Six. I'm hit," he relayed on battalion Mayday channel. "Control module damaged. Life support failure. Leaking air. Send immediate assistance. Out."
 Adrift with his back to the battle space, he ticked the seconds, impatient for an answer. A low hiss shrilled from his armor's flank. Unfamiliar constellations glared into the visor from the dead reaches of the void.
 "Copy, Trooper Wythe," an interference-razzed transmission replied. "SAR notified your situation and vector coordinates. Hold tight, help's inbound. HQ Battalion SAR out."
 His hand gripped the turtle shell armor's manual decant lever, ready to step out and wait for SAR. The platoon casualty survival lecture hammered on his mind, like he stood again before Sergeant

#2

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 "Mayday. Mayday. Black Six. I'm hit. Control processor damaged. Life support failure. Leaking air. Send Rescue. Out." The leak whistled from his flank.
 Unfamiliar constellations glared into his visor from the dead reaches of the void. Adrift with his back to the battle space, he ticked passing seconds on his fingertips.
 "Copy, Trooper Wythe." The reply warbled from his armor's speaker. "Rescue notified your situation and vector coordinates. Hold tight, help's inbound. Battalion Rescue out."
 His hand gripped the turtle shell armor's manual release, ready to step out and wait for Rescue. Casualty survival lecture hammered on his mind, like he stood again before Master Sergeant Molbry's verbal onslaught.

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quote:

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 "Blue Six to Battalion. Mayday. Mayday. Armor breached. Control processor damaged. Life support failure. Out." He ticked the passing seconds on his fingertips waiting for a reply.
 "Copy you, Trooper Wythe," the reply quavered from the armor's speaker. "Apprised your situation. Help's inbound. Battalion Rescue out."
 Like frost-laced spider webs twinkling in starlight, indifferent constellations gleamed into his visor.
 He gripped the turtle shell armor's manual release, prepared to step out and wait for rescue. Casualty survival briefing slammed into his foremind like he stood again before Master Sergeant Molbry's verbal onslaught.
 "Where you'll deploy there's no atmosphere. You don't open your

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 Indifferent constellations like frosted spiderwebs twinkling in starlight gleamed into her visor. A hiss from her turtle shell armor's flank disrupted her daze.
 "Blue Six to Battalion. Mayday. Mayday. Armor breached. Control processor damaged. Life support failure. Out." She clicked the passing seconds on her fingernails waiting for a reply.
 "Copy you, Trooper Wythe," the reply quavered from the armor's speaker. "Apprised your situation. Help's inbound. Battalion Rescue out."
 She gripped the armor's manual release handle, prepared to step out and wait for assistance as though she'd completed a routine simulation. Casualty survival briefing slammed into her foremind like she stood with her squad before Master Sergeant Molbry's

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 Frosted cobwebs of indifferent constellations gleamed into her visor. Bleeding air hissing out the turtle shell armor broke her daze.
 "Blue Six to Battalion," she said into the headset mic. "Mayday. Mayday. Shell breached. Control processor damaged. Life support failure. Out." She clicked passing seconds on her fingernails waiting for an answer.
 "Copy you, Trooper Wythe," the reply quavered from the speaker. "Apprised your situation. Help's inbound. Battalion Rescue out."
 Prepared to step out as though it was a training simulation, she gripped the shell's release handle. Casualty survival briefing slammed into her foremind. She stood again with her squad before Master Molbry's verbal onslaught.

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'he ticked the seconds' - ticked off the seconds? The seconds ticked by? 'ticked' on its own doesn't sound right to me.
'A low hiss shrilled' - I'm not sure a hiss can shrill.
'constellations glared into the visor' - I'd suggest 'across the visor', or something else at least. 'into' didn't seem right.
'dead reaches of the void' - tiny bit melodramatic for me. And besides, it's not a void, it's full of stars and space battle at the moment. Why not just 'dead reaches of space'?
'interference-razzed transmission' - I just personally didn't like 'razzed', nothing wrong with it.
'manual decant lever' - is there a better word than decant you could use? He's not wine.

It's not that I don't like it, I really think I would if it were a little clearer.

I think your first paragraph is a little too complicated.
First, how about taking out the “he relayed on battalion Mayday channel” – I think the reader can gather that without a wordy explanation.

Just start with the “mayday, mayday” Like in –

“Mayday, mayday! HQ. This is Black Six. I’m hit. Control module damaged. Life support failing. Leaking air. Send immediate assistance. Out."

It may be that what he’s calling IS HQ SAR, but while I know what HQ stands for, the SAR, I don’t and it’s a stumble there right at the very opening. Black Six may be the SAR he’s calling but it seems more likely he’d be giving out his ident right there at the start. Then the message and pertinent details. It is so obvious who this is you really don’t need the he-on-the-channel.

Second paragraph. Good place to give his name.

Adrift with his back to the battle space, John Carter ticked off the seconds….
Sorry -- Adrift with his back to the battle space, John Wythe ticked off the seconds….

Battle space? What does that mean? Do you mean there’s this battle going on and he’s been hit and turned around heading out of the area?

Nit – do hisses shrill? I can imagine a shrill hiss but using shrill as a verb in this spot bothers me. Maybe it won’t bother anyone else. Maybe I’m the last person on earth who doesn’t know what SAR stands for either.

A shrill hiss came/sounded
A shrill hiss warned that his armor’s reservoir had been punctured (or, had ruptured. just a little more specific detail would be nice.)

Adrift with his back to the battle space, John Wythe ticked off the seconds, impatient for an answer. A low hiss shrilled from his armor's flank. This last sentence doesn’t fit here. It’s a total change of topic without any segue to it. That makes sense to you? Or am I totally off base with this? Unfamiliar constellations glared into the visor from the dead reaches of the void. He and the reader are focused on his ship and his predicament right now while the constellations is more a quiet, meditative topic as used here.

Paragraph three -- "Copy, Trooper Wythe," an interference-razzed  transmission replied. Why do this the hard way? Couldn’t you keep us in the moment instead? Like –

“Copy, Trooper Wythe. SA –“
“Repeat. I didn’t hear that. Too much interference.”
"SAR notified your situation and vector coordinates. Hold tight, help's inbound. HQ Battalion SAR out."

Okay, I surrender. What is SAR? Can you explain it somewhere before using it so much? Spell it out that first time maybe, somehow?

His hand gripped the turtle shell armor's manual decant lever, ready to step out and wait for SAR. The platoon casualty survival lecture hammered on his mind, like he stood again before Sergeant

Now we learn it’s turtle shell armor. Do we need to know this earlier? Maybe, maybe not. It might make things clearer but I’ve nit picked this almost to death. Sorry. It’s just it was not clear.

“gripped the turtle shell armor’s manual decant lever” whew that's a mouthful if read out loud – ready to step out and wait for SAR

I’m not getting a clear image of what’s going on. By thinking about it I see he’s in a spacesuit-type battle armor inside a ship (I presume?) So is he decanting from the turtle shell or is he decanting the whole turtle shell from the surrounding ship? Unclear.

I’m picturing some of that bulky armor the combatants wear in my daughter’s video games.
Am I anywhere near right?

Finally (I’m so sorry I’m having so much trouble picturing what you mean here. Others with more game experience will probably disagree and like it immensely. )

A thought just occurred to me. Why is he ticking off the seconds? Time for the message to reach HQ and their reply to come back to him? He's that far afield? Why not be clear on that if that's what he's doing?

He ticked off the seconds till he could expect a reply -- ???

I set a few challenges in the way, he can't move--wanted to get that static dramatic action tendency out of my system--he can't save himself, and I wanted to work with personal pronouns for their power in indirect address to resonate with readers' self-identification. A large portion of an auxilliary character point of view is in imperative second person. A supposed no-no in fiction that nonetheless 70 percent of readers found effectively applied. No absolutes!

The story has previous to posting its opening here enjoyed an overall approval of 90 percent among my readers. The crowded syntax and diction of the opening didn't sit well with ten percent. The ending didn't sit well with twenty percent, unsatisfying resolution. And the level of figurative meaning didn't sit well with five percent, all in the unsatisfying resolution camp. I recently revised the ending.

I'm not sure where I am on explaining why he's counting seconds, but yes, showing the passage of time without telling it is the main purpose of the second paragraph. Plus introducing setting and adding to a bit of the fantastical premise.

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"Mayday. Mayday. Black Six. I'm hit. Control processor damaged. Life support failure. Leaking air. Send Rescue. Out."

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This read like a laundry list. Cut everything after I'm hit.

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The leak whistled from his flank.

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Change 'The' to 'A'.

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Unfamiliar constellations glared into his visor from the dead reaches of the void. Adrift with his back to the battle space, he ticked passing seconds on his fingertips.

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A setting, good. Still overwritten. form the dead reaches of the void comes off as redundant. After all, where else would you find Unfamiliar constellations? In his bathroom perhaps?
The second sentence feels a bit off as well. he ticked passing seconds just sounds wrong to me. Was he counting the seconds on his fingertips? 'Ticked' I don't believe works the way you worded. Perhaps a 'the' is needed there.

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"Copy, Trooper Wythe." The reply warbled from his armor's speaker. "Rescue notified your situation and vector coordinates. Hold tight, help's inbound. Battalion Rescue out."

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Hmmmm, try adding an 'of' between 'notified your'. Cut last sentence. (sounds a bit GI Joe-ish)

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His hand gripped the turtle shell armor's manual release, ready to step out and wait for Rescue. Casualty survival lecture hammered on his mind, like he stood again before Master Sergeant Molbry's verbal onslaught.

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Fourth time you used 'Rescue'. I'd cut the modifier.
like he stood again before Master Sergeant Molbry's verbal onslaught comes out of left field. It's worded like a metaphor but reads as a flashback. I'd cut the entire sentence.

For a life or death, right in the middle of a space battle setting, this comes off as a bit boring, I am sorry to say. Maybe this will help.

Keep

"Mayday. Mayday. Black Six. I'm hit.

and

His hand gripped the turtle shell armor's manual release, ready to step out and wait for Rescue.

The opening is lot more interesting with just this. You could throw out the rest and start here.

I mostly agree with snapper but I might take it one step further. I wonder if you're starting a few moments too early. I don't know if we need to hear the mayday call at all. Maybe start with his reaction to the situation and just mention that he had already sent the distress signal. I'm assuming the story is about this character so I would like to have something more to connect with. I can't connect with procedure.

The story takes a sharp turn right after the introductions. Not ideal for openings, I know. The empathy quotient in the opening is low, too low in isolation. One or two critical readers who read it all commented on that, suggested the emotional meaning of the introductions didn't engage them as early as they prefered.

But the opening is barely a minute, if that, in real-time reading. The story starts moving in the next sentence. That's one of my unachieved goals in that exercise, starting dramatic motion immediately through empathy with a focal character's complication. Which is what at first inspired the story's premises.

Wythe's survival situation by itself apparently isn't sufficient to engage readers in the will he or won't survive question posed, suspense's immersion influence, the other identity of tension beside empathy.

Another aspect, I shared the story exercise for audience testing. That's what I see as workshopping's core purpose, audience testing by conscious, critically thinking readers. My audience testers, though, are a broad range of readers, in reading comprehension skills, in reading sentiments and genre preferences, and in time they allot for reading entertainments.

What if you began the story with a series of stock characters who quickly bite the [star]dust? Everyone will probably hate this idea, but after Jim Smith's ship explodes, and Bill Jones's com unit suddenly goes deadly silent, Trooper Whythe immediately becomes the focal character and a sympathetic one, understood to be in imminent peril.

1) Pet peeve: Name the MC. You have the opportunity in the first line. You use the gender pronoun "he" multiple times in the coming paragraphs. Just name him once. Then I won't be peeved.
2) I think...but I'm terrible on this kind of grammar thing and I know you're quite adept with it...but i think you might benefit from more active phrasing, particularly in the second para. Maybe active is the wrong way of saying it, but the sentence structure strikes me as backwards. Constellations glared into MC's visor. Adrift, he was. In that last phrase you right it - he ticked seconds off (but per previous posters, you could benefit from dropping one or two more words to hint at why he ticked seconds. "He ticked passing seconds on his fingertips, waiting for a reply."
3) Similar concern about last sentence - casualty survival lecture hammered? I had trouble parsing this, had to read it several times. Is the agreement off? Lectures hammered...A lecture hammers?

The placement of words in the sentences caused me to have to work hard to understand your meaning. I think the action is interesting, the mc's somewhat dire situation compelling, and I'd like to read more, but don't want to have to re-read passages to understand where you're trying to take us.

The wordsmithing is smooth and efficient and were it not for the fact that military SF isn't my genre, I'd read on.

This audience testing exceeded my expectations. I had a hypothesis and it's been confirmed. "Survival By the Numbers" opening was a perfect test subject for it. Not a perfect story opening, a perfect test subject.

I've been working on the difficulties of incorporating figurative meaning for it's power to engage readers' imaginations, contradicted by a fantastical genre resistance to figurative meaning akin to that found in literary genre. There's a balance in there somewhere that accomplished authors realize.

The reading public's got active imaginations in abundance and in abundant varieties. Writer-reader-critiquers hyperacute focuses don't engage openly, consciously unquestioningly imaginatively like readers do. Presupposing the critique process fosters fault finding with a writer's creative vision rather than fostering engaging though a nominative reader's creative vision, I determined to see if that was so. I concluded it is. But from testing that hypothesis, I've seen a way over the cusp-straddling mechanically intact but stale, passionless stories I've written.

That's my purpose of this testing. I expect forging onward will depend on appealing to the imaginative creative vision that readers bring to a story. Thanks for helping me in my endeavors to unravel the writer/critiquer/reader paradox.

The thing is that the more material you read as a writer/critiquer, the more you tend to read everything that way. And that makes it harder to enjoy work that has too many problems.

One way I can tell that a writer has written a great story (for me) is when I hear others complain about that writer's wordsmithing, and I realize that I never even noticed it. But if the story is not engaging enough, I can't read it as a "regular" reader would--I keep stumbling over problems.

(Lately, I have noticed signs of sloppy editing in my local newspaper--misspelled words that no one caught, numbers and dates that don't add up or make sense--and I find myself extremely irritated by it.)

I submit that the more you know about writing and editing, the harder it is for other writers to get you to read their work as if you were a regular reader.

It's taken me months just to frame the impasse in a way I could approach it effectively.

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That's my purpose of this testing. I expect forging onward will depend on appealing to the imaginative creative vision that readers bring to a story. Thanks for helping me in my endeavors to unravel the writer/critiquer/reader paradox.

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So what were you testing? This was to see how we (as critiquers) would react to a particular approach compared to ordinary readers? Not rather how an idea for a story you had appeals to the rest of us?

Shouldn't we at least get a piece of cheese or something?