Best of Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  Targie’s shield exploded.

  Em cried out.

  Domino pulled the girl into an embrace, ignoring Targie’s freezing, dying body. She looked for telltale signs that her own suit had been compromised.

  Targie’s hand pressed against Em’s back.

  A whispering whine Domino hadn’t even noticed stopped. She put her own hand over the hole, taking Targie’s hand with her other. She refused to look at Targie, but she held tight as the crate was pulled toward the ship.

  Em and Domino slid to Targie’s side of the crate as the ship picked up speed. If they hit push speed with the crate still outside the ship, they wouldn’t make it. The pressure created by the velocity of the ship would liquefy them.

  Domino tried to ignore Targie’s body pressed against her and kept her hand over the hole in Em’s suit.

  Em stared at Domino, eyes blinking rapidly. Her lips quivered, but she didn’t shed a tear. She just gasped large breaths and held onto Targie’s cold, stiff hand.

  The crate hit something solid. A wall maybe, and then they were slapped with ship-reg g.

  Em slid to the bottom of the crate with a whimper, the gravity overwhelming her.

  Domino released Targie’s hand and beat on the wall of the crate near the hatch. She tried unlocking it, but Targie had done her job well and it wouldn’t unseal.

  Finally, the entire top panel was lifted off and a tall dark-skinned man was looking in at them.

  Domino rose to her feet, stumbling a little in the ship’s gravity and pulled off her flexible hood. “This girl needs a pressurization rig.”

  The man gave a sharp nod, his lips pursed. “And why would I help her?”

  “Would you‌—‌” Domino stopped herself. She’d been out of the black too long and had forgotten the rules the people lived by. Out here, people had their own code of honor. “She’s pusher born. Innocent.” Weaker than the rest through no fault of her own.

  “Says you.”

  Domino nodded. There was nothing she could say. Em would live or die according to the moral compass of this man.

  The gravity ground on Domino, and her heart raced to pump blood to her extremities.

  He shook his head and turned away. “Davix, take care of the girl.”

  Another man, tall, pale with blonde hair‌—‌had to be engineered because that was the only way to get those genes in the black‌—‌picked Em up and carried her away.

  Leaving the first man and Domino alone.

  “What do I do with you?”

  Frankly, she hadn’t thought they’d make it this far and didn’t have a ready answer. “I’m good security.”

  “Prisoner, then?”

  She nodded.

  He raised his chin. “Crime?”

  Anger rose in her chest. “Disobeying a direct order. Failing to kill a child.”

  A smile stretched his lips, a scar puckering a corner. “Good enough for me.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in.

  He offered his hand. “Captain Hale Reeves and this is Allorian.”

  She took his hand, not quite believing she’d been this lucky.

  “We’ll see how you work out. You and the little one.”

  Domino released a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She made it out.

  She’d escaped Push Station 16.

  But not a clean escape. Targie had died to get her here. Without her, they wouldn’t have made it.

  Now, Domino just had to survive long enough to get revenge on the man who’d put her there in the first place.

  A Word from S.M. Blooding

  Escape From Push Station 16 is from the Black System Legends Universe. It’s a collective of three authors, two of which are USA Today Bestselling Authors. We write individually and co-author as we explore a new universe.

  P.K. Tyler brings the heart to our stories. Her passion for politics and social equality bring an important element to our work. She believes love is the answer, and enjoys showing you people fighting who they are to become someone better. It only takes one person to change the Universe. Do you see that heart?

  K.S. King is my husband and he gives us the mechanics. Well, he is a mechanic who loves to play and tinker and blow stuff up. I would say “not literally,” but that would be a lie. Some of his experiments don’t go well. He keeps our universe real. He’s the first one to say, “It doesn’t work that way.” He’s also our fight-scene expert. I thought I was until he joined the crew and I found out differently.

  I’m the one who likes to take hard-to-understand people and bring readers into their head. I like showing you that the jerk you can’t stand is a human being with‌—‌okay. So, maybe he only has one feeler, but he has it. I also love action scenes. Remember? I had thought I was the expert? Though my favorite scenes are when characters are talking to each other around tables. I know. I know. Boring. I do keep those to a minimum.

  You can find out more about our universe at http://www.blacksystemlegends.com/

  War Stories

  by Samuel Peralta

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:

  mors et fugacem persequitur virum

  nec parcit inbellis iuventae

  poplitibus timidove tergo.

  — Horace, Odes

  SOME SAY YOU can’t go forward into the future without letting go of the past. Sometimes, it’s the past that won’t let go of you.

  Gravity will do that to you, too. You ride up to the starships in shuttles that burn against the g-forces, but gravity‌—‌it doesn’t let you go. Not easily. One gravity, two gravities, three gravities press you back into your inertial restraints, the memory of the last tour made tangible, pulling you back.

  You get past Saturn, past Jupiter, past Mars‌—‌you think you’re finally headed home. And suddenly all the weight you carry is there, a system-sized gravity well of life and death, of comrades lost or left behind, of half-truths and lies, of choices made; all these fill your bones, marrow-cold and heavy, weighing on you like a war story.

  But you don’t really want to hear about war. You don’t want to know about how the machine gun fire from Warthog armor drowns out the screaming as you mow down the enemy, or how loud your heartbeat sounds when a hunter-killer drone shines a ranging laser on your position. You don’t want to know about the taste of ash and soot, the smell of blood, the scorching heat burning the small hairs on your body as a flash grenade detonates in the trenches.

  You want to hear about courage and honor. You want the medals, the bugles, the drums. You want to hear about starships on fire off Orion’s shoulder, plasma beams glittering as they slice through their inertial drives.

  I’m sorry.

  * * *

  We’re waiting at the pickup point, about fifty clicks from where the drop-ship let us off, eight months ago. It’s me and about half the crew I came to Titan with. That’s pretty par for the course. Sometimes, in the mess tents, we forget and set up plates for those who aren’t there anymore. We don’t forget again.

  We’re mingling with other squads, here from different missions, our only commonality that we nominally fight on the same side of this war.

  Two hours to departure. From here a shuttle will take us up to the starship Miyazaki, where we’ll go into hyper-sleep for the longest leg of the journey. For some of us, it’s to Europa, for others, to Deimos. Already, other ships are on their way here from those settlements, bringing our replacements.

  It’s my third tour. I’m one of the lucky ones.

  I scan the faces of the soldiers around me, but I don’t see Sharkey around.

  Sharkey and I aren’t from the same mission team. We’d met on the Aldrin station on Deimos. All the cubs were at the terminals, reading anything that was sent to them, sending out their messages home. I was passing by, finishing a Molson Canadian lager when a private got up without warning from their seat and ran into me, upsetting what was left of my drink.

  She was more distraught than I was over
it, but I’d let her buy me a replacement. Hey, however you can get it. On her station uniform, the stencilled patch spelled out A. CHERENKOV. Her name was Anya, but her crew called her Sharkey, so I did.

  We made a pact to see each other again, if we made it.

  I decide to circle around, see if I could find her, if she did.

  As I trudge through the encampment, I’m surrounded by snatches of stories from groups of soldiers, familiar and unfamiliar voices mingling like a congregation prayer.

  * * *

  A group is in a circle, cleaning their plasma rifles as I pass by.

  One of them is talking: “So we’re on Arwen Colles, by what looks like the dried up remains of a river. It’s quiet and there’s time, I duck into the trees for a piss. I’m done with my business and headed back through the brush and all of a sudden there’s the barrel of a plasma rifle poking right in my ribs. It’s this zook, except he’s as shocked as I am. He’s charging up his piece, but it malfuncks on him, and I zap him five‌—‌boom boom boom boom boom‌—‌before he can get the lead out. Alt history.”

  That gets a laugh from the company.

  * * *

  Sharkey and I had gotten to talking at the bar, and by the second lager she’d told me about how the last mail on her message list‌—‌and the reason for my spilled drink‌—‌had been from her Mars-based ex, suing for full custody of their daughter, who for the duration of the tour was with her parents.

  “He might as well shoot me,” she said.

  She bit her lip. I offered her a cig-cap, and she pinched it under her nose, inhaling in the vapors. I didn’t know really what to say, but I knew this was probably a good time to change the subject. What she’d said reminded me about Luther Myers, a guy I knew from my second tour, so I said, I’d been shot once, and memorably.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “See, there was this guy in my squad, Luther. First tour, didn’t know any better, not listening to anything you said. He was just a kid, right? We were on a march into the Ettenmoors, about a day’s travel across the plains from the drop point. Sarge called a break right at the edge of Eryn Vorn, heavy jungle with no sunlight, snakes, vines, quicksand, you name it. It would be slower going from here, you see, night vision, the works. While we were checking gear, Luther went off and started playing with an Aetna flaregun.”

  She cocked her head. “Aetna?”

  “They’re the ones that shoot re-usable flares. After you launched your flares, you track them to where they fell, pick them up when they’d cooled enough, and use them again. So Luther was standing maybe twenty feet away from me, holding an Aetna and zapping imaginary zooks in the jungle. And I told him, knock it off. He loaded, and fired the flare straight at me.”

  “Holy mack.”

  “Hit me square in the body armor. The goddamn heat through the chest plate insulation was just bearable, and I was cursing and tearing off my armor, and Luther stood there laughing as the flare sputtered and died.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “Cursed him out and said he’d better not sleep that night, or I’d shoot an Aetna up his ass.”

  It worked; she laughed. “For real?”

  I took a swig. “No, not really. There were zooks in that jungle, and Luther took a sniper hit to the temple.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then took a swig of her own.

  “War is hell,” she said.

  When hyper-sleep time came, Sharkey and I had chosen parallel sleep pods. After we woke, she told me that she wouldn’t mind hooking up again, after both our tours were over.

  * * *

  Another group I pass is cleaning out the last of their rations.

  “So Rizzo was driving us back to the base, we’re the lead in a convoy. I’m the guy behind the driver, right? What happened next is a blur. The guy riding shotgun, Johnson, yells ‘Truck right!’ and Rizzo swerves right, but there’s two bombs on the road, not just one, and we hit the second with a BOOM! The truck cartwheels and slams into the ground. Rizzo is dead, Johnson is dead, and I’m there with my goddamn arm blown off. Just because I’m the guy behind the driver.”

  * * *

  When I find Sharkey, she’s with a group sitting by the temporary comm station. She was talking, so I hang back, listening in.

  “It was about halfway through my tour,” she was saying, “We were out on a rescue mission in Chusuk Planitia for an advance patrol that hadn’t reported in. We were headed east on our first pass when out of nowhere we were hit by gunfire. We lost control of the spinner, hit the surface at speed. It was twisted metal everywhere, the smell of burning. I was shouting ‘Get out, get out!’ but my leg couldn’t move, and I had to drag myself out when suddenly I was hauled up. I looked up, and I was in between two zooks, and there were more of them, all around, kicking at my crew.

  “Well they tried to stand me up but I couldn’t, my left leg was bad off, and when I fell back down again they started shouting at me, and one of them jammed their handgun to the back of my head and I thought, here it is, I’m going to die. He pulled my helmet off and that’s when they realized I was a woman.

  “They tore off my weapons belt, examined my medical vest, and then they started shouting. Not at me, but at each other. It kept going for a little while, but then the guy with the handgun put it away. I think they realized this had been a medical mission, and that pretty much saved my life, I guess. They tied up my leg, threw me on a truck, and three of them took me to a hospital in the nearest zook town.”

  She took a whiff off of a cig-cap.

  “Anyway, on the truck on the way to the hospital, that was when it happened. I was in the back, on the floor because I couldn’t sit right. And there’s the guy with the handgun on the side bench, guarding me, and he’s looking at me like he still can’t believe I’m a woman. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular. I was thinking, I’m alive, and were my crew still alive, was anyone else still alive. And then this zook lowers himself from the bench to the ground, and he starts to kiss me.”

  Someone says, “Damn.”

  “I know,” says Sharkey. “I mean, there I am, cut up and bloody, with my leg in a tourniquet and sitting in a pool of blood and dirt, and this is all he can think about? And before I know it, he’s tearing at my uniform and starting to paw me. At that time I’m not doing anything, I’m thinking if I do something, am I going to die? And here he is groping me, pushing me to the ground, pulling the zip down to my pants.”

  “So what did you do?”

  She inhaled another vape.

  “I grabbed his hand, put it on my crotch, then snapped it back and broke his wrist.”

  “He screamed, of course. The truck stopped. I zipped up my suit, the others came running and when they saw him, cursed and switched him to the front of the truck, and we continued on. But no one ever touched me again.”

  * * *

  That’s when she sees me. She gets up, crosses the group, and hugs, saying nothing.

  “Sharkey,” I say, hugging her back. “Sharkey. I missed you.”

  She nods, and although she wasn’t before, she is suddenly crying.

  What we both know, in that moment that we are holding each other, that we didn’t know a moment before, was that we are, the two of us, alive. It’s a gift.

  Someone else in her group starts telling a story‌—‌but just then the shuttle breaks through the clouds above us, looming like the hand of God.

  Through the roar of the retro-rockets I shout to her that I have to get back to my squad, that we’d meet up again on the Miyazaki.

  She nods, but it’s a long time before she lets go.

  “Thank God,” she says.

  * * *

  Funny thing, that.

  On our final mission before tour end, our squad receives orders to move in on a specific set of coordinates on Titan. We mobilize and head out, all we know is that the enemy had taken the target, and that we had to take it back.

 
It turns out to be this church in Echoriath Montes. There’s even a goddamn cross on the top of the tower, and a bell in that tower. The guys hesitate for a second, and I know what they are thinking, we’re going to hell for this.

  Still, we’ve got orders.

  We surround the place, cover all the exits. We train our howitzers on the windows, and then we hit them with everything we’ve got, plasma charges spitting out smoke like there’s no tomorrow. We’re raining fire on that church like God’s own wrath.

  When the zooks pour out we let go with the Weyman J77 machine rifles, yelling obscenities, shells spraying all over the place like they’re fireworks, firing until there’s nothing moving.

  Sarge waves us forward, and we close in.

  As we cross the threshold I remember, and here’s the kicker, I remember that this is a place of worship, and for some reason I remember my Nana, who used to take me to church; I make the sign of the cross.

  * * *

  Thank God.

  But does God have anything to do with it?

  The odds were always against me surviving for a fourth tour. War is like Russian roulette; you pull the trigger, and if that chamber is a blank, it only means that the next time you pull the trigger, the odds have shifted considerably against you.

  On my first tour, I was brought to the trauma centre at Faramir Colles, which was nothing more than three trailers at the base of a hill.

  An hour earlier I’d been sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with my regiment, when suddenly a spinner crashed through the perimeter. The sentries opened fire as everyone dived for cover, but it was too late. It turned out the spinner was loaded with explosives, primed to go within a minute after it had crossed the gates. Jack Eastbrook stood his ground, coolly firing at its tires. He hit one, the spinner veered away, but not enough‌—‌then it went off.