planet, is blue and green. Some people take that Halcyon shit too seriously, as if the name hadn’t been plucked from the ether or some mythology textbook. Some even believe that the Halcyon home world is Heaven, and that these are dead people we’re fighting. I don’t buy it; I can’t see a “Heavenly” reward being to make war on your descendants (besides which, I think it’s more likely we’d discovered Narnia). But I say a little prayer to the god of engineering and whore-mongering and cold boot. There’s a pause, and it’s so quiet that for an instant I wonder if the hull seal burst and I’m slowly being enveloped by the nothing of space. Then my screen flashes on and the engine purrs (like a kitten kicked in the throat- but at this point, any purr is better than nothing).
I kiss the screen I punched not two minutes ago, and the ship rights itself. It remembers our plan of attack, and starts to circle for another pass. The largest moon has already shifted, and has the Daeva pincered between it and another moon, so I decide to go for the smallest tether rather than set the Daeva loose severing the middle.
Spear’s a little more sluggish on this pass, but the ballistics computer thinks it’ll still push through the second tendril. It isn’t until the moment before impact that I notice on the screen that I’m glowing, that there’s still electric charge all over the ship, and I wonder if that’ll make up more than the dampers can handle. And I get my answer immediately, as a spark leaps out of my console at my chest. It’s enough to melt the plastic suit into my skin, but it doesn’t stop my heart, so I don't swear too loudly.
Then I see it from the corner of my eye, one of the newer pilots piercing too close to my flight path, and then it gets infinitely worse as the Daeva manages a lucky shot that takes out that spear’s engines, and puts it on a collision course with me. At this speed I’m basically a shell on a trajectory, and I can’t really do a damned thing but watch as it comes at me- though that doesn’t keep me from firing thrusters. The ship’s sensors realize it a moment before impact, and the interior of the spear goes red and in the ship's monotone gets out, “incoming imp-” before the other spear smashes into me.
I’m lucky, in that the spear bounces off my hull- another foot down and I’d be a shish kebab. As my spear pulls around, I check the pilot’s vitals, even look at the interior camera; the shot grabbed him at such a velocity that he smashed his brains out on the display. Ship diagnostics say the engine’s beyond fried, so I stroke a few more keys and it auto-destructs.
My ship is spilling something warm that burns on contact with my leg; either that or I’m bleeding, but I don’t think I want to know which, since there’s fuck-all I can do about whichever it is. Several of the remaining ships have stabilized, and are floating in formation, as if they’re standing at attention, and I suddenly feel self-conscious. “Go. I’ll finish it, and be right behind you.” The ships that can peel off, enter formation for the wormhole; I don’t watch them go.
A full two thirds of the ships stay, and I flick my fingers over the touch screen, and sure enough, vitals are scrubbed on all of them- the suicide spear claiming its intended. I know command can do it remotely, but I enter the code to send them all back to home base, where pilot remains can be vacuumed out to make room for the next set of poor bastards. Three spear engines are FUBAR; I try a manual hail, but they’re comm silent and I have to assume the worst, so I set their destruct timers.
I set the engine to full impulse, and around me the destructing ships create a galaxy of metal and fire. That damned Daeva’s finally pried itself free from the two moons pinching it; looks like there’s enough wear on its hull, and I know a few of those spears are limping back to the hole- they’ll never make it without time. I shouldn’t chance it, mission over the men, but goddamn I’ve never been good at combat calculus.
The targeting computer sputters; mapping a course through the Daeva then through the last cord is taxing, but it gives me a bearing. Meantime, the Daeva seems to understand we’re the last ones standing, and all of its remaining batteries train on me. It gets off a couple of good shots along my hull, and I know I take at least a little burn damage, but at this point I’m not too worried about that.
On its side, most of its cannons still aren’t installed, and those that are aren’t functional- probably thanks to the moon sandwich, so it tries to swing around, but it’s an elephant trying to pirouette, and even with a half-crippled engine I could fly circles around it. As soon as the computer and that itching survival instinct at the back of my brain agree, I punch the throttle hard- I don’t care at this point if I have fuel enough to get anywhere after, because I honestly don’t expect to survive.
The other spears did enough damage to the Daeva that its power core is all but exposed, and it seems to run on a contained fusion-type reactor. I glance off the shielding, just enough to crack it, and blue flame immediately smashes through, grasping at my spear as I pass. But the glance was too much, and I’m spinning.
The ship and I have been through this enough times we've learned to work together- and don’t even bother with the spin. We just make sure the spear is still pointed where it’s going, and mercifully it hits the tendril about a third off from center- but it tears away in our wake. Then everything is blue fire and I'm sure I'm in hell until I remember it's just the Daeva's core depleting itself, and the flames are already receding back into its burnt out husk. There’s a moment there where I can’t help but stare at the planet below, and think I must be dead and this must be heaven, because there’s no way I pulled that off.
Then reality comes back, and I tell the computer to turn us back around and head for the wormhole. But the computer’s silent, and then shuts down. I turn off all the power, and try for another cold boot. Nothing happens. I’m floating dead in space, just enough velocity left to listlessly drift away from the wreckage orbiting Halcyon.
I have a day’s ration of food and water, and I know I’m dead already. How’d that old song go? Suicide is painless? I don’t suppose starvation will be. I could always refuse to drink my own urine, and just die of dehydration instead, though I don’t know if that would solve anything. Of course, I’ve been a spear pilot long enough to know better than to think this ended any better, and I’ve got a flask beneath my seat. Should be just enough whiskey to drift away to Margaritaville (I know, it should be tequila, but I refuse to have the last thing I taste be cactus piss in my liquor).
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Hang Around
1887
I always hated wearing neckties, or buttoning my shirt the whole way to the top; it weren’t only that it made me feel like a prick, but it was constraining. I don’t think there’s a man alive, though, who wouldn’t exchange a bolo for the rope around my throat. It's not tight- not yet, and every time I move my head it rubs raw against my skin. But I can’t stop moving and looking around, because I know it’s the last chance I’ll get to.
She’s there, near the back, Charlotte, with our little Robert. She’s holding his head into her skirt, so he doesn’t watch, and her eyes are leaking more water than you’d find in the rest of this whole dry county.
And then I see red, because her no accounting brother Bill’s standing behind her; his arm’s bandaged from where I shot him, and that makes me even more pissed, because the doc didn’t saw it off. He’s got his other hand around his sister, but he’s glaring at me the way he’s always glared at me- with the sole exception of last week.
Last week that two-faced son of a bitch came crawling on his belly to me. One last score, he said, even though I’d been clean all these years. He owed bad men large bills, and there wasn’t no other way clear through it but this. He acted all apologetic, like he knew he’d been a donkey’s ass all this time, since he was a lousy outlaw and I hadn’t been.
But he sold my ass out. That train car was full of more tin stars than bankers, and I knew the moment I laid a boot on it, what he’d done, and he knew I knew it, I could tell by the way he went yellow. I turned and shot him as he ran, and
all them tin men fired at me.
A surgeon pulled lead out of each of my limbs, and there’s a ball he couldn’t get to in my guts, but he said that don’t matter, since I wouldn’t live long enough to get surgical fever. He was dead stinking drunk, too; “Why waste my best work on a goddamn corpse?” he asked me. At the time I hadn’t much of a rejoinder for him.
“It’s time, son,” somebody says, though I can’t be sure if it’s the sheriff, the mayor or the priest because I ain’t been listening to any of the three prattling on. The rope goes taut, and I hear a hand, gentle as an angel’s, alight on the wooden lever to the trap door beneath my feet. I beg the lord not to let me shit myself in front of my wife and boy- but I know that son of a bitch ain’t answering prayers today.
I fall and there’s a crack, a sharp pain in my neck, but I don’t die right off. I can hear the gurgle of my breath barely scraping out of my torn throat. I’m swinging in the wind, now, like a stud horse’s balls in the heat, and each time I reach the end of the rope’s swing that twinge in my neck feels like I’m getting shot again. I don’t know how long that goes, cause I’m drunk from the pain of it, but I get
Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust Page 19
