Beacon 23 Read online

  All of this is sensed at a distance. I’m too focused on my dark secret. My new conviction. I hobble toward the other airlock, where Scarlett disappeared. I key open the outer door, step inside the lock, and shut the door behind me. In the tight confines, I think I can smell her. She just passed through here. Was alive moments ago. Now is dead and gone. Her hope has been wiped from the universe.

  I wanted to tell her my dark secret. I was so close. More time together, and I would’ve confessed. I would’ve told her how I come here every night before I go to sleep, how I stand in one of these airlocks, how I close the door behind me, and how I think about the vacuum of space on the other side.

  Every night, I do this.

  Without fail.

  There’s an emergency override code that’ll open this door even if there’s no atmo on the other side. It’s for going on space walks. We’re supposed to do one every week. I never have. I only come in here with my suit off. To breathe my last. To end the nightmare.

  Leaning against the wall, I enter the first three digits of the override code.

  My finger hovers over the fourth.

  I’ve done this every day I’ve been here. Every single day. But this time I want it. I can’t go on.

  Three numbers sit on the little screen, waiting.

  I touch the fourth.

  I touch it, but I can’t press it.

  I never can.

  I sag to the ground, sobbing and broken, hugging my knees.

  Bad things come in threes—but then they stop.

  And start all over again.

  Part Four: Company

  • 18 •

  A billion stars in the night sky—and one of them is winking at me.

  Except this flashing light is not a star. A hundred or so klicks away, it belongs to what looks like another beacon, similar to mine. It appeared a month ago when a tug came out of hyperspace and parked it there. I wasn’t sure if it was going to stay or move on—sometimes these commercial tugs use my remote bit of space as a way station. But this morning, the beacon went operational. It seems I have a neighbor.

  I pinged NASA on the QT, but all they’ll say is that the cargo wreck a few months back signaled the need for some redundancies. It reminds me of an intersection in my hometown in Tennessee that got by just fine with stop signs until a chicken truck plowed into that young couple. Our first stoplight went up a few weeks later. That stoplight blinked yellow all night, in deference to the quiet, and the adults about town discussed with grave voices what this unwanted intrusion might mean.

  A hundred klicks away, a light blinks at me. I know what it means. It’s a cold reminder of my failure. Of wreckage spilled and lives lost. If stop signs could feel shame, I imagine that one in my hometown felt something like this. Standing there, frozen, watching in horror as that young couple got killed, feathers and dead chickens everywhere, all that squawking, until weeks later someone in an orange vest pulls that sign out of the ground and strings up the newfangled.

  My warthen nuzzles against me, probably because of these guilt-laden thoughts. Her name is Cricket. She’s like a cross between a Labrador and a leopard, with moods just as wild as those two extremes. There was a time when she wanted to kill me, but now she just follows me around like a puppy. I’m pretty sure warthens are empaths, that they pick up on moods and even some thoughts. When the bounty hunter who owned her died, she glommed onto me. That’s probably not a good thing, with thoughts as dark as mine.

  I’d love to know more about these creatures, but there’s scant information in the archives, and I can’t exactly send off a research request to Houston. Here’s how that conversation would go:

  Station Operator: “Sir, could you come here for a minute? I’ve got . . . well, let’s just say it’s an unusual re-rec from 23.”

  Chief of Ops: “Lemme see. Hmm. Wants to know about warthens, eh? Hey, isn’t this the guy with the pet rock?”

  SO: “Yessir. Same guy. I’ve also got this completely unrelated issue with his beacon. I mean, I’m sure these two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another, nothing whatsoever, but O2 consumption has gone up fifty percent throughout his beacon, and our boy is going through food packs twice as fast as usual.”

  CO: “And now he wants a feeding and care guide for a large alien quadruped known to be in the employ of bounty hunters?”

  SO: “That’s right, sir.”

  CO: “Didn’t this guy have a run-in with some bounty hunters recently?”

  SO: “I believe so, sir. He’s had quite a shift.”

  CO: “Any chance the O2 and food pack problem started right around the same time as the bounty hunter thingy?”

  SO: “You know, sir, now that you mention it, I do believe both issues started around the same time. Same day, in fact.”

  CO: “I see.”

  SO: “…”

  CO: “…”

  SO: “…”

  CO: “Yeah, I got nothing either. Send him whatever he wants.”

  Okay, that last bit is wishful thinking. And yeah, I have conversations like these in my head a lot. But at least I don’t have them out loud anymore. Not as much, anyway.

  Cricket rubs her nose against my arm, and I lift it so she can tuck her head against me. I point at the blinking light. “There,” I tell her. “Do you see it? What do you make of that?”

  The two of us watch as the black of space swallows the light, spits it out, then swallows it again. I stare at the beacon, mesmerized. Cricket paws at her reflection.

  So many questions. Is someone over there? Another operator? I’ve tried the HF twice, with no response. And NASA doesn’t like us to use the QT for non-emergencies, so I haven’t been pestering Houston every five seconds like I want to. Instead, I’ve been up here in the GWB, watching this solitary light flash on and off. I’ve been watching it for hours. How in the world did I pass the time before this intrusion into my routine? When the stars were all fixed, time slid by unnoticed. But now there’s a metronome out there, tick-tick-ticking the day ever so slowly away.

  The thought of ticking reminds me to check the time. It’s 2228 local. There’s an army troop transport, bound for the front lines, due to pass through soon. A ship full of guns and the men and women to fire them. Rows and rows of heroes. I remember wearing my fatigues and boarding commercial ships to get back to my company from R&R, how people would thank me and pat me on the back and how good it felt to board a plane before first class. Respect. Only because they had no idea what I did out there. If they did, they would’ve been clutching their children, not sending them over to thank me.

  I also remember catching the eye of the few conscientious objectors in the terminal, the people opposed to the war but afraid to speak up. There was no hate in their eyes, only pity. Sadness. Knowledge that I might be necessary, but that we shouldn’t be proud that I was necessary. That’s how I saw myself and my company by the end of my second tour. I didn’t hate what we did so much as hate the need for it all. No one should applaud this. We should bow our heads not in thanks but in sadness.

  I give the lighthouse keeper in the photograph a nod, my colleague from a different era. Then I stick my head into the long chute leading to the beacon proper. With a single pull from the edge of the tube, I launch myself down.

  Or across.

  Or up.

  Direction loses meaning for the few seconds it takes to reach gravity on the other side. I twist in the air, pull my feet under me, bend my legs, fall through into the command module, and land in a crouch—precisely the type of hotshot maneuver the labcoats warned me never to try. Which gave me the idea in the first place.

  I get out of the way quickly before Cricket lands right where I was standing. She shakes her head and grunts. Still hates the vertigo, but hates being away from me even more. Hates it enough that she’s learned how to scramble up and down the ladders, and even figured out how to paw her way through the weightless chute.

  I have to admit, having her around is
nice. That’s probably why I hid her up in the GWB when the navy came to haul off the bounty hunter’s ship and the bounty hunter’s lifeless corpse. After they left, I found her acting loopy up there, which must mean the GWB messes with her head just like it does mine. For all I know, it’s worse for her. She can pick up on thoughts, or pheromones, or something. Maybe her brain is just more sensitive. All I know is that NASA still has me on quarantine, and here I am taking in aliens.

  Like I said, I’m not very good at this job.

  The debris across the asteroid belt attests to that.

  Makes me wonder if NASA’s putting this new beacon in not for mechanical backup but for personnel redundancy. Maybe my being a great big war hero makes it difficult for them to recall me. Maybe they hope this’ll be my outpost for life, somewhere out of the way. Maybe this beacon is my pension plan. My forced retirement. Where they put heroes who have nothing left to give.

  Cricket growls at me for thinking these things, and I force away the shadowy thoughts. That’s the good thing about having a warthen around. It’s why I’ve stopped thinking about jumping out the airlock with no helmet on. The last time I sat in front of the airlock door and keyed in the first three digits of the override code was the day I adopted this strange creature. The next time I even thought about going down there, Cricket acted like she was going to maul me. Paced around the ladder hissing and growling and swiping at me if I approached her. Maybe this is the ideal remedy for depression: a gun that can read your mind and is forever pointed at your head. Gives you some good practice in bottling up those dark wishes.

  Of course, bottling shit up doesn’t fix what’s ailing you at the core. But I’ve given up on the idea that anything can fix what ails me.

  I check the scanners and readouts across the command dash, then glance at the time again. The troop transport is due. I wait, standing at attention. My old company is on this ship, some of the brothers and sisters I bled with, the few who are still alive, still serving, still have all their limbs. As soon as I see the faint ripple across the grav scanner, I salute them. The ones I let down. The ones I betrayed. And all the ones who can’t be on that ship anymore.

  I told Scarlett the truth of my heroism right before she died. I told her that I could’ve taken out a hive of alien buggers with the press of a button. I could’ve killed billions of them. The blast would’ve taken out me and two companies of troopers as well, but companies have died for far less. I might’ve turned the tide in sector six. Eight planets have fallen since then, and the war is pushing through sector seven and heading this way right now. The Ryph are on the offensive.

  But for one day, we saw them in retreat. The day I won my medal. The day I did nothing. All I did was wimp out when I could’ve killed all those unborn monsters. It just seemed to me, in that moment, that the hive was full of little buggers who hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

  Guess I’m not very good at the big picture stuff. I can barely maintain this little tin can that’s become my world. I’m nothing more than a washed-up soldier from a small town in a backwoods corner of an old planet who managed to become a beacon operator.

  And not a very good one.

  • 19 •

  Cricket whines and turns in circles, and at first I think it’s from me being hard on myself, but I’ve never seen her act quite like this. I notice as she turns that she keeps glancing at one of the portholes. Maybe she can feel the troop transport passing by, that carrier filled to the brim with dark thoughts. I go to the porthole and peer out, craning my neck to look down the length of the asteroid field.

  At first I don’t notice it. It’s not until the long flashes come that I realize the beacon isn’t so much winking anymore as palpitating. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot.

  S.O.S.

  Cricket mews.

  “I see it,” I tell her.

  I grab the HF and key the mic. “Unknown beacon operator, this is beacon 23, is everything okay over there? Over.”

  I wait. The QT is still showing the last message from NASA. I key in: SOS w neighbr, then hit “Send,” “Confirm,” and “Yes I’m goddamn sure.”

  I wait.

  I watch the light.

  Two or three seconds go by.

  I could pace in circles and wait for NASA to tell me to check it out, but you don’t need orders when there’s a distress call in space. I served in the navy before I was forced groundside. If anyone hails for help, you help them. None of us could survive out here without a system like this in place.

  So by the time my operator in Houston is seeing my message and setting down his coffee and wiping his ridiculous mustache, my feet are already hitting the living module deck one level down, my palms burning from the fast slide. The next ladder drops me into the life support module, then one more ladder takes me to the lock collars. I grab my walk suit and helmet from their hangers and dash inside the lifeboat. Before I can key the door closed, Cricket bounds down from the module above, landing on the grating like a large cat.

  “Stay,” I tell her, holding out my palm. “Stay.”

  Cricket tilts her head and cries. She takes a step toward the lifeboat.

  “No,” I say. “You stay.”

  Normally she does whatever I ask, or whatever I really concentrate on her doing. But this is one need she seems to always put before mine: the need to follow me. Before I can give her another order, or lock her out, she dashes through the open airlock door, brushing against my leg, nearly knocking me over. By the time I get the airlock secured and get up to the cockpit, she’s sitting in the navigator’s seat, peering through the canopy like she knows we’re going somewhere, like she’s done this a thousand times. Or maybe like she knows what happens next.

  •••

  I wiggle into my walk suit while the autopilot steers us toward the beacon. The throttle is at max, which ain’t much in this bucket. And maybe now’s a good time to admit that I haven’t been in a very good state lately. But this is progress, I think, to realize I’m going a bit mad. The dangerous phase is when that’s happening and you can’t see it. When you think you’re sane, so the crazy is all invisible. The reason I wear a rock around my neck is to be reminded of my propensity to lose my grip on reality. Rocky hasn’t uttered a peep in a while. I’m getting better, I swear.

  I glance over at Cricket, and another thought occurs. What if I’m overstating the whole mind-reading thing? What if I’m making up a pattern of when she nuzzles me and when she doesn’t? And here’s the truly fun part about going a little crazy: even the obviously sane things you do can be called into question. Is that beacon in front of me real? Did Scarlett really come back into my life, tell me I could help her win the war, and then disappear again? There’s a faint stain on the deck by lock collar Charlie, and I can’t tell if it’s rust or her blood.

  I reach over and pet the warthen. There’s no doubting this, at least. This is real. And the beacon ahead of me looks pretty damn real. I leave the thrust at full to close the distance, and my mind drifts back to my army days. I can feel the wake of the troop ship that passed through, all those boys and girls heading for the front to be dumped into a trench. I feel the recoil of my rifle as it takes a life. Geysers of soil explode into the air and fill our nostrils. There’s the metallic odor of blood as soldiers with hope cry for a medic, soldiers without hope cry for their mommas, and soldiers with guns bring tears to the other side.

  I wonder what Scarlett meant by us ending this war. Wars like this don’t end until one side is ground to dust. It’s crazy to me that naïve people like Scarlett even exist, that they can live in this galaxy, see what we all see, and cling to foolish notions like they do. And yet there are legions of them. Protestors. Picketers. Alien-lovers. Conscientious objectors. Traitors.

  Yeah, I’m a traitor. But I’m the worst kind. I don’t believe like the rest of them do. I just got tired of it all. I couldn’t fight anymore. You fight because your squad needs you to. When the last man standing beside you goes
down, you don’t need a bullet to take out your knees; the depression does that for you. I’ve seen the biggest troopers felled by the heavy darkness. I’ve watched them curl up in the mud and just stop moving. I remember hoping that’d never be me. And here I am.

  There’s a number on the side of the beacon. I can read the large blocky digits as I close to within a couple klicks: 1529.

  Damn.

  When I see that number, I don’t think of how many beacons there are out there. I don’t do the dollar math and think of the poor taxpayers. I don’t get all cosmic and think of how big this galaxy is and how much we’re spreading out into it. No, I think of how many people are out there, living alone like me.

  Too many.

  Approaching within a klick of the beacon, which is still flashing its SOS, I can’t see anything obviously wrong with it. There’s no atmosphere jetting from an impact hit. No orange glow across any of the portholes from a fire inside. In fact, the beacon is obscenely pristine. There’s not a char mark on her. Just unblemished, beautiful steel painted NASA white with neat rows of rivets and gleaming solar panels that probably run at 100% efficiency compared to my beacon’s 48%.

  But my beacon isn’t the one with the distress signal. Closing to within a hundred meters, I grab the stick and turn the lifeboat sideways while still carrying all that forward momentum. It’s a crazy maneuver in a bucket like this. No idea if the side thrusters can even halt my current velocity. I put them on full and eyeball the distance to the lock collar, guiding the approach until I bang into the beacon and hook the magnet with a three out of ten on the pilot-o-meter.

  Cricket growls at me like she thinks I’m being generous.