Selected Short Stories Featuring New Corpse Smell

by Nicolas Wilson

  “I must admit, I lied, earlier, or misled, maybe. I didn’t do anything to your heart. That was all you. The cost of drowning your conscience. Your other doctor was either a hack, or, more likely, he recognized you. General Prasith. You were a Brigadier, right? I can never keep track, though I guess I’m more interested in your time as a Lieutenant Colonel, anyway.”

  “It was years after the Vietnamese kicked you the hell out of power, but like a tick dug into a dog’s ass, you refused to be chased out, determined to kill the host as soon as be burned off. You couldn’t win militarily. The monstrous things you’d done in power ensured no one would ever willingly give you control again. And you knew that even the UN couldn’t turn a blind eye to your horrors forever. But still you could have pulled a Mengele, run off to South America to die peacefully on beaches you didn’t deserve. Instead you and your kind stayed, and mined the countryside. And really, that’s all of your biography that’s relevant. Pardon the slapdash suture- but as I see it there’s no point in wasting the effort on a cadaver.”

  “I was, I was granted amnesty by, by King Sihanouk himself.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry, I must have used too little gas. Let me just adjust that, now, if you could, say all the letters in the alphabet backwards. The last letter of the alphabet is not “A,” and no, no, it isn’t “J” either. So you can’t. That’s good. Means you’ve got just enough. To test it, I’m going to lean in real close, close enough you could reach up and choke the life out of me, and tell you: you’re going to die. I’ve killed you already. Hmm. Got a wiggle out of the left pinky.”

  “Now, one last thing, another dose of the isoflurane. Once you’ve breathed this in, you’ll go to sleep, then I’ll shut off the supply. You and the rest of the staff will wake up slowly to find the work already done. I’m taking the heart back to a friend at the University of Health Sciences, to give to someone who might deserve it. At this point all that’s left is to breathe in, deep. Really? You’re going to hold your breath like a petulant child? I can stand here for quite some time- we have the OR reserved for another three hours, and you can only hold your breath until you pass out, at which point your body will breathe in anyway. You can count backwards from ten, or I’ll do it for you. Ten, nine, there you go, nice deep, gasp, eight, seven, six… five…"

  Table of Contents

  Failure Cascade

  My dad was a failed spy, who became a lousy spymaster, who eventually found his way to failed Vice Presidential candidate. I was a failure in school so I got into ROTC, and to keep me from fatal failure in Afghanistan, dad got me time guarding the Gulf of Mexico from a boat. But I was a failure at that, too, so I got involved in some of the family’s businesses, and failed there, as well. But my daddy wanted me to be less of a failure than him- to at least fail at trying to be President, so he used the clout he had left to get me a slot in the space program.

  Of course, the space program hasn’t been the same since they retired the Shuttle. The Russians promised to keep the Soyuz open to us, but then there was a fracas in some former Soviet Bloc country or another and we sided against them, and they told us exactly where we could stick their rocket. Our replacement, Orion, got scuttled because it was used by Republicans as an example of Democrat overspending, so neither party could justify keeping it alive.

  So we spent more than the cost of Orion on a space elevator, instead, and since neither party wanted to be the ones who abandoned space to the Russians, everyone kept their mouths shut about it this time. It wasn’t an elevator in the traditional sense (the fact that I remembered an elevator in the traditional sense meant I was older- by far- than my fellow astronauts), but a long tower built from carbon nanotubes, basically artificial diamond rope, that could carry several times more weight for its mass than any metal. The tether, as it was called, wasn’t rigid, but was held in place by the pull of the space station at the end, like how a morning star’s chain is kept taut by the weight of the flail. And you didn’t ride in a car attached to a cable, but in a climber, which most people called widowspiders- because of how they looked and how many people they’d killed before the engineers got the bugs out of them.

  Daddy must have had more juice than I realized, because I wasn’t just on the mission- I was mission commander. Most of the others were scientists and engineers- only me and Bill were real airmen, and even though he was more experienced, I got the feeling that something had happened with him a long time ago, something nobody wanted to talk about, that kept him from the job.

  Most of the others didn't know the full intent of our mission. The Russians had gone back to the Moon, and every indication was that they wanted to put a permanent base there- and a missile defense system to keep other nations from landing. So we were going to beat them to that punch.

  The red lights of the alert system began to flash, and I knew what it meant; I’d been reading my manual all day before we left, trying to make sure I kept all my procedures in mind. The alarm meant we were entering the inner Van Allen belt, and the climber was about to be pelted with radiation. I got onto the intercom and hesitated a moment to collect myself before I spoke, “We’re approaching inner VA. All crew report to your seats.”

  There were fourteen of us, and I did a headcount to be sure, though we didn’t really need to, since they’d only bolted in enough seats for the crew, and they were all filled. To shield us from the radiation, the crew compartment was in the middle of the storage bay, lined with all of the supplies that were coming with us up to the station. Everyone was buckled into their seats; half of them had been up before, and those that hadn’t seemed to be talking to the ones with experience to calm their nerves, and for a moment I worried I didn’t have the authority to say what I should, “It’s going to be fine, people. Strictly routine.”

  As if to contradict me, there was a loud squeal, like what I’d imagined banshees sounded like when my mother first told me about them on Halloween when I was nine. The climber shook, first like it was being buffeted by the wind, then as if we should have bought tickets for the ride. There was a crunch, and we all froze, because it wasn’t the metallic sound of a damaged climber we’d all prepared to respond to- this was harder, harsher- like the sound rocks make when you’re a kid and bash them together, only amplified a hundred times.

  We waited, two words on the tips of our tongues: failure cascade. It was probably a fiction, but one too terrifying to ignore. A failure cascade was what happened when the tether's nanotubes snapped, and fired off diamond shrapnel faster than rifle rounds in all directions, striking other parts of the elevator and dominoing in a destructive chain-reaction.

  It was a moment before I realized that the climber had stopped, and another moment before I was certain that another break wasn’t pending. The red warning LEDs flicked green, and I tapped into the control console to retrieve the incoming message.

  Diane and Nathan shared a look from their seats a row apart, only the moment he realized it, he looked away, and when she remembered why, so did she, turning red and looking sad. I remembered an inkling from training, where I thought they’d been seeing each other, until a few weeks later when Nathan got engaged to one of the ground engineers instead. I put it out of my mind, there were things that needed me. I read the message onscreen from Mission Control, and spoke loud, clear. “Spider’s finished examining the damage. It’s more than our climber can fix on its own, they’ll have to send up something more specialized in our wake. They’re pretty sure, you know, 90th percentile, that if we keep going up the elevator will hold just fine. Of course, in that small window of error, there’s the possibility of catastrophic failure and horrible reentry death. Since it’s our safety in the balance, it’s our call: so do we act like astronauts and fly by the seat of our jumpsuits, or do we pull the chute and give up our chance to live in the sky?”

  Damn.- I hadn’t meant to bias it like that, but after all, these were astronauts, and for some of us, maybe all of us, this might have been our one
and only chance at leaving orbit, and- I hadn't finished berating myself by the time everyone had pointed towards space. I pressed the send button on the radio, “Mission Control, we're going up.” There was a brief pause, just the slightest hesitation as the laser signal relayed from our geosynched satellite, then theirs back to us.

  “Copy, you are go for climb.” A cheer went through the crew as the widowspider resumed its ascent. But there was something gnawing at me, and I didn't know why, but I looked to Diane, and there was a cloud over her. She noticed me looking in her direction, and her eyes became wide; I flashed a modest smile and nodded, and she seemed to relax.

  After a while, the red light flicked off. “That’s the safe zone, people, from one and a half to three radii, between Van Allens. If you want something to eat, drink, need to use the restroom with some privacy, to take a nap not in a flight chair- now's your last opportunity until we reach the station.” There was a moment before anybody moved, then Bill unbuckled and strode off, and he caused a cascade of movement as the rest followed suit.

  I remained in my seat behind the console, staring absently at the three