Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  I thought fish laid eggs, the girl exclaims. Not all of them, the father replies, and begins rattling off a list of names.

  This is a miracle, the girl thinks. She thinks this without any reverence—it’s as much a statement of fact as her father’s listing of the various brands of lines they could have been using. Even at the point of death, new life emerges.

  She feels like there’s a lesson here, something to help her look at the world with fresh eyes. But as she puzzles this out she also watches as her father tosses the body of the adult fish into their bucket, throws only a few of the newly delivered fish back into the water, and then works on spearing the remaining babies onto the hooks at the end of his and her lines. Only alive for a few heartbeats before being used as bait.

  Now we can catch something really big, he’s saying. This was lucky.

  What remains after death but more life, and what is life if not food for more death? Life and death walk hand in hand. And they’re both motherfuckers.

  How do I get to be one of the fish he threw back, she wonders.

  The water laps against the piles of the pier beneath them as the girl and her father stand in silence. Some ten minutes later, a line goes taut again.

  8

  THE RUSTLE of sheets.

  It was dark. I don’t usually like to fuck in the dark—my mind can wander without direct visual stimulation—but this time it was the furthest thing from an issue. Somewhere internally, I knew that if I allowed myself to have really vibrant memories of this moment, I’d never be able to think about anything else. Better to maintain at least a little obfuscation, if only from myself.

  Even so, our eyes had adjusted, like cats’, and it felt like I could see every minute detail in the room. It was as if Moss were in here with us, giving us his impossible glow.

  We’re on the floor of the cockpit during a Power-Up, my mind whispered at one point. The world belongs to nothingness.

  Now we were talking, our voices as soft as the conversation of bedclothes around us.

  “One versus zero?”

  “What?”

  “What’d they teach you in training? If you’re down to the choice, one hour of sleep versus zero, what do you do? What do they say in the SEALs?”

  “I guess different people said different things. Most of the field guys said power through. But a couple said grab whatever you can.”

  I couldn’t get over it. How long and thin you were. From your neck, your chest, yours arms, down to your legs, like you’d been stretched as a kid. There was no end to you; I could keep running my hands over your smooth, perfect skin until the world came to a stop. And the thing was, your skin was far from smooth and perfect—there were places of roughness, of callus and hair, not to mention the cragged grace notes of scar tissue throughout, mountain ranges on a relief map—but all of it seemed so right, all of it seemed so necessary and perfect and just begging for my hand to find its way over it, continuing down the slender, graceful, never-ending track of your body. There were no impediments; if anything each imperfection propelled my hands further as surely as if you had been made of silk. And if I’d turned the light on, I bet I could have seen your heart beating under your rib cage again. That heart I didn’t have to stop. Feeling proprietary already—my heart.

  “What’d they say in the Rangers?”

  “There was like … this ‘official recommendation’ that some is better than none, but…”

  “Pssh. Official recommendations.”

  “Exactly. Everybody knows that shit goes out the window when you’re In It.”

  “So, power through?”

  “I had this one CSM who was always like singing the gospel of the forty-minute nap. He was obsessed with the forty-minute nap. Like, forty-one minutes, you’re a zombie, but forty on the dot, and you wake up like a Terminator.”

  “Did you try it?”

  “Couple times. Never could quite hit whatever forty minutes was for me.”

  “You know what, I forgot, we had a thing like that but it was different, it was tech.”

  “Tech?”

  “Hooked it up to us. Inside the field apparel. Supposed to wake us up the minute we were at just the right part of the … whatever-cycle.”

  “Did it work?”

  “We never really tested it. It was another thing to lug, so…”

  “I hear that.”

  “Commander nixed it, we just went back to—”

  “Powering through.”

  “Powering through.”

  Men talk about running their hands over somebody’s curves. I couldn’t stop running my hands over your straight lines.

  “It’s um … 4:04.”

  “We have to be there at oh-six-hundred.”

  “And the drive from here takes twenty,”

  “Big day.”

  “Yep.”

  “So…?”

  “So…”

  “You know what else they taught me in training?” Inching in toward my shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  “They taught me leaders…” You leaned even farther in and started kissing my neck. You bastard. You cheat. I don’t even know if what you said next was out loud or just the whisper of linen as your hand made its way down past my navel. “… have to make judgment calls.”

  “I’ll make a judgment call,” I whispered back, turning into you. “We’ll power through.”

  * * *

  I LEFT with twenty-five to spare.

  “Wait the full five minutes before even starting your car,” I told you as I finished pulling on my coveralls. “If I see you in my rearview you’re a dead man.”

  As I drove, I watched the sun come up over the treeline. I thought of Patty and the conversation we had in the parking lot what seemed like months ago (another life) already. How interchangeable the dawn and dusk can be. Like a word that takes on an entirely different meaning in context. Like the bottom of the ocean and deepest space.

  At the front gate, I gave Parker my ID and the life stats of a woman no longer with us.

  Date of birth: January 12, 19alonglongtimeago

  Middle name: none

  Parker handed the ID back and said, “Big day today, huh?”

  Parker, you have no fucking idea.

  “Catch you on the far side,” I said, and drove through the opened gate.

  * * *

  AS I made my way through the security checkpoints, I made sure Rosh and Lauren were both clear on how today would proceed: Haydon and his associates would be skipping all procedures and heading straight through.

  Rosh was baffled but accommodating. “He shall be a stranger … but not a stranger!” he intoned. And … sure, whatever helped.

  Lauren took the news about as well as I expected. Which is to say she almost snapped in half from the stress.

  “This doesn’t—no, this isn’t supposed to happen!” She insisted from behind the window of her booth. She looked like someone unjustly imprisoned, begging for help from a visiting relative.

  “Lauren. Lauren. You need to understand something.” I remained calm and patient. “Haydon might decide to take Moss with him when he goes. Cash in, start a freak show. That’s his right, Moss is his property. He might walk up to your station and give you the wrong answer, except with him, there are no wrong answers. Do you understand?” She considered what I was saying. “When they come through here, you let them walk on by. That’s a direct order.”

  She nodded, looking as if she’d aged a decade.

  Wonder when was the last time you got laid, Lauren, I thought ungenerously. Might do you some good. God, I was already doing that thing, that “What the world needs now” shit like so many other giggly, heartsmug fools before me who thought they’d discovered some profound secret to living. I’d have to watch that impulse, I told myself … and even then I thought of how you felt against me and had to repress a smile. Repressing that smile took work. Like closing an overstuffed suitcase.

  One last person I
had to make sure knew the score: the Gnome. True to form, I was eager to get down to the Hangar and start this monster of a day, and halfway down, the elevator jounced to a stop and the red light flicked on.

  “I’m only gonna say this once, Gnome,” I barked. “Do this again today and I’ll make sure Haydon knows who you are. I’ll make sure he moves you to the most public post we have to offer, with nothing to fucking hide behind and nowhere to run. Maybe he’ll stick you up at reception with Trippi, where you can answer phones every—”

  The lights switched back to normal and the elevator resumed its journey.

  * * *

  WHEN I reached the Hangar level, the doors slid open and there was Patty, waiting for me.

  “Chief!” she blurted, like a tackle. The team was assembling on the floor and she turned to them. “Okay, people, anyone complaining about losing their weekend, look who’s back on the clock thirty hours after taking an ass-whupping from the Harp!”

  Everyone within earshot clapped and cheered and I felt myself go red.

  The Harp sat right where we’d left it, in the center of the Hangar inside its N5-treated see-through cube. I hadn’t even noticed when we’d placed it there that it was lying on its side. It looked as exhausted as the rest of us.

  “Did you sleep?” Patty was asking me. I shrugged.

  “Yeah, I slept over there.” I pointed in the direction of the cots, where the medical team had kept me under observation.

  “Okay, but did you sleep more?”

  “I’m powering through. What’s the ETA on our guests?”

  “Tower says they’re gonna be on time.”

  “Dicks.”

  “Right?”

  “Any number yet?”

  “Yeah. Haydon and ‘a handful’ of assistants. That’s all they’ll tell us.”

  That tracked with the earlier Trip visits I’d staffed back in the day. He liked people uninformed and scrambling. Whether this was a conscious tactic or just another aspect of his well-documented love of endangered big game hunting, I didn’t know.

  “Plus…”

  “Oh, God, plus what?”

  “The test subject. Also identified on the manifest. As ‘X.’”

  “Wait—Jesus, he’s got the subject on the plane with him?”

  She nodded deliberately, scandalously. “Supposedly picked out whoever it is himself.”

  We gave ourselves a collective moment to take that little plot twist in. Then I remembered:

  “Oh, shit, how about—?”

  “The lunch? Way ahead of you. Had three former marksmen assigned to it like two hours ago and they’re probably still muttering curses about me. But it’s a spread that would charm the panties off a nun.”

  “Yeah, word of advice: try not to piss off former marksmen.”

  “I don’t know what Harrison expected—it’s not like we coulda just ordered in!”

  I had to smile at that thought. “Where are we? Can I get everybody in one place?”

  “We’re just waiting on one more—oh, there he is.”

  The elevator opened. There you were.

  Good Lord, I would never have guessed the man stepping onto the Hangar floor had been up all night. You looked as neatly put together and ready for action as if it were your first day back after a three-week vacation.

  We made eye contact so brief yet so tangible it might as well have been a physical caress, and then you joined the team on the floor.

  * * *

  THE HAYDON team assembled in Hangar Eleven, chatting in low voices. That’s the way we operated here at Quill: in teams. The Harp team, the Moss team, the Object E team, and so on. The scientists and researchers were given one specific aspect of our little secret to focus on and start to merge an identity with, but it was unusual for me to have such a specified team—normally we’re just “security.” But here we were.

  Everybody not on the Haydon team was given the order to clear upstairs by 1 p.m. and stay there for the rest of the day. Once again, I had the detested assignment of addressing a group, but this time I didn’t mind so much—these were my people. I adored everyone who had made it onto this team. Well, almost everybody; there was also Grant. Plus, I was powering through. In fact, powering through was working out great. It reminded me of humping fifty pounds of gear through thirty-hour treks. I almost missed it. There was only one problem … and it wasn’t fatigue.

  “Okay, everybody, stand tall and shut up,” Patty told the team as I stepped forward. The chattering ceased and they all looked to me. You were there, toward the front, and I mean, let’s have it said outright. The problem was horny. My body wasn’t screaming, “Sleep,” it was screaming, “There are cots past the lockers.” It was screaming, “You gave me a taste of something and I am not remotely done with it.”

  Power through.

  I gave the team a quick rundown of what we were looking at today: a situation, I confessed, with more unknowns than knowns. Hell, if this had been a field op I might have called it off, it was so murky. They kept their reactions private, but we all shared them. We bristled at the fact that we still didn’t know how many associates Haydon was bringing along with him. We cringed at the need-to-know nature of X. Most of all, we hoped everything rolled out as smoothly as the itinerary made it sound: guests estimated to arrive at 11, then lunch, followed by Lloyd giving a briefing with holograms in Conference Hall, and then we would gather in front of the large, clear cube in the middle of the Hangar to watch the Power-Up that was estimated to occur at 2:35 p.m.

  “Only we’re not hoping it goes smoothly, are we, team? Hoping’s what you do when you’ve got no control over a situation. We’re going to make it happen.”

  “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!” they barked at me. They were nervous, reverting back to old behaviors. That was okay; I’d let them be soldiers today.

  Remember how he felt on top of y—

  There were a few more specifics to go over. Lloyd’s hologram presentation was sensitive enough that no other security personnel besides myself were to be in the room: the rest of the team would wait outside until it was time to move on. And then there were the logistics of … X.

  All they needed to know at this point was Haydon’s people were to hand X off upon arrival and X would be kept in the Slammer under guard until 2 p.m. At that point, Patty and I would take over.

  Once I was done with the rundown, I confirmed with Patty that assignments had been handed out and opened the floor for any final questions.

  Two hands went up. One of them was Grant’s. Fuck Grant. Let him wait.

  “Yeah, Shel,” I called on the other raised hand. I liked Shel. Tiny but never intimidated, with jet-black hair bobbed smartly, she somehow came through her service with her smile and her teen acne intact.

  “The test subject, X…,” she said, choosing her words carefully and darting her eyes to the cube on the floor (A little sanctioned murder, I remembered Patty snarling). “Are we allowed to know any basics? Gender? Age? Reason for incarceration?”

  “No,” I said patiently. “Whatever it’s worth, I don’t know either.”

  Another soldier, Vonn, spoke up: “Are we at all concerned about another possible unscheduled Power-Up?”

  That was a surprise: Vonn was usually a no-drama order-taker. The kind of guy I could forget was even there sometimes, despite the fact that he was the size and density of a stone statue.

  Patty stepped in. “Folks, let’s see some hands raised before we shoot off our mouths.”

  That’s not a problem for Grant, who has literally been keeping his hand raised through all of this. Jesus, that guy.

  “Vonn. Shel. Guys. You don’t have to figure out how to make this okay for yourselves. It’s not okay. It’s an organizational clusterfuck. Shel, X might be an armadillo for all the advance info we’ve received. Vonn, Lloyd’s analysis of the Power-Up we experienced Saturday night was that it was some sort of reflex or countermeasure against being moved. We won’t attempt to put the Harp bac
k until tomorrow, when Haydon’s safely on the other side of the continent. That said, Patty is going to be running evac drills with you guys for the next hour. Okay, any other questions? Time’s a-wasting.”

  “My hand is up,” Grant said.

  “Grant?” I sighed at last, unable to put it off any longer. “I believe you had a question.”

  He smiled, a prissy, ungrateful smile. The weirdest thing about Grant was that he was actually rather handsome, on paper at least. A proportional, symmetrical face, strong enough features, even a fine head of ash-blond hair. But he had a habit of making the most viscerally unpleasant expressions: sneers, scowls, and most of all, stony, utterly humorless stares. Any attempt over the years to crack a joke or share a laugh with him was met with that goddamn stare, until one just stopped trying. Which was all the same, since when it came down to it, Grant was eminently, effortlessly unlikable.

  “Thank you, Chief. Chief, may I speak with you privately following this briefing?”

  Also, he was the sort of guy who did things like that. He could have just spoken to me privately. Instead he wanted to make sure everyone knew he wanted to speak to me privately.

  I threw up my hands, maybe a bit more aggressively than I should have. “If you can squeeze it into thirty seconds. We’ve got shit to do.” I turned to the rest of the team. “Okay, everybody hit their marks, we’re gonna start running drills in five.”

  “You heard her, people, fall out!” Patty echoed. They complied.

  Meanwhile, there was Grant. I took him aside. “Is there any way this can wait?”

  “I want to report an instance of fraternization,” he said, squarely.

  It was like a Harp blast. I swallowed, hoping the novelty of the accusation covered my shock.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fraternization. Among members of this select team.”

  The panic was like someone switched on a gas burner in my gut.

  “Fraternization.”

  “Of a romantic and sexual nature. I’ve witnessed it.”