Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

  “Not a biologist,” Rocky says. “I’ve been studying under Professor Bockman for three years. He’s a philosopher.”

  Something clicks.

  Something funny.

  “Wait,” I say.

  “Don’t—” Rocky warns.

  “Are you telling me—?”

  “Ah, hell,” Rocky says.

  “You’re a philosopher’s stone?”

  •••

  It takes a solid minute or two to stop laughing. Lying on my side, curled up in a ball, I finally get my breath back and just stay there, gazing out at the stars, feeling contentment for the first time in . . . possibly forever. I think about the passenger liner that skated through unharmed, probably safe by no more than a few seconds of desperate struggle on my part, and how no one has asked me about that. How not a single labcoat asked me how that felt. How I sat right here, exhausted and crying, but feeling something like elation, like whatever the highest form of relief in the world is, that feeling after a bomb misses its target and you’ve still got all your fingers and toes, but that feeling times five thousand.

  “The army really fucked you up good, didn’t it?” Rocky asks.

  I don’t answer. Instead the world goes blurry with tears.

  “I’m sorry for that,” Rocky tells me, and I can hear that he’s sincere, and this starts the sobbing. I haven’t cried in front of anyone in the longest time. Not since that one session with that army shrink, which made me never want to sit in therapy again. But now I cry my fucking guts out, and it goes on forever, and Rocky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t judge me, just sits in his box where I can’t see him, and I know that he’s smarter than me, and wiser, and it’s not just the accent, but all that schooling, and that he somehow gets that I’m fucked up but that it isn’t my fault, and this feels really fucking amazing, to have someone think it’s not all my fault, and so I cry and cry while little pebbles and bits of steel bounce off my beacon and go tumbling like shed tears out into the cosmos.

  When I finally pull it together, Rocky asks me a question, one that stuns me into a long and thoughtful silence:

  “What hurt you?”

  This causes me to suck in a big gulp of air. I’d cry more if I hadn’t just cried myself out.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Maybe you do,” Rocky suggests, “but you’re scared to give it life.”

  I laugh. “You sound like my shrink.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck me, maybe I’m starting to care about you a little bit, and maybe he cared about you. I mean, I’m relying on you to water me, right? And I’m really hoping to hell you tell the supply ship about me and get me home, so it behooves me to be nice to you.”

  “You said behooves,” I say.

  “Is this how you avoid thinking about it? Whatever it was?”

  I sit up. I move across the space between the GWB and the outer wall of the pod and sit with my back to the porthole, looking at the dome and the smaller panes of glass that ring the small space.

  “I used to be a pilot,” I say.

  I take a deep breath, wondering where the hell I’m going with this.

  “I saw a lot of action in the Void War. We were . . . a bunch of people dying out in the middle of nowhere, you know? Not even a rock to claim. Nothing but lines on a star chart. Just pointless. Only made sense if you were drunk, you know? Like . . . how the deck of a ship seems to come to rest with a few rums, like it all balances out if you get the mixture just right, if the world is as tilted as you are.”

  Rocky listens. Is really listening.

  “Anyway, I lost my wings and got moved to the front. I was there for the Blitz, when we were going to end the war, be home by Christmas, all that bullshit. I was in my third tour with the army. Was a lieutenant in an A-squad, which is the people you call when no one else will pick up the goddamn phone, and really, I just kept getting promoted through attrition. Everyone above me got blown to bits, and they kept slotting me up, and no one cared that my breath could strip the camo paint from a field blaster, they just cared that we killed more than we lost, which we did in spades.”

  My mind drifts back to that last day. My last day fighting. The day I refused to fight anymore. And my hand settles on the wound across my belly.

  “I could’ve killed a shitload of ’em that day,” I say. “I guess I already had, but I could’ve taken out a hive, an entire nest of hives, and turned the tide. Would’ve meant wiping out three of our own platoons, and I’d already lost every man in my squad, but taking the whole place out was the right thing to do. And yet I didn’t. Then it turned out for the best. The Ryph pulled back because of my squad’s push right up into the swarm—and yeah, it was my squad that did all the hero-ing that day, and because I’m the one who woke up in a hospital, who didn’t die out there, my guts sewn back into my belly, they pinned a medal on me, and there were a bunch of parades that I saw from my hospital bed, and I still don’t know why the hell anyone cared that two armies decided they’d kill each other tomorrow instead of that afternoon, and I never asked.

  “My CO’s CO’s CO came to me with all his gold stars on his collar and asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, to name my posting.”

  I pause and think back to that day. To that old man. His beaming face. The pride he had in the injured soldier his army had made.

  “And what did you ask for?” Rocky said.

  “I told him I wanted to be alone.”

  I remember the old man’s smile fading, how the scars across his lips came back together, which let me know that he hadn’t been smiling when whatever caused those scars happened to him. He walked away, but he granted me my wish.

  “NASA is where the best of the best pilots end up,” I tell Rocky. “The very best fliers, with all their shit together, they end up in NASA. It’s always been like that. Until me.”

  We sit in silence a while.

  “I think you’re doing just fine,” Rocky says. “You rescued me, right?”

  I lean forward and put my face in my palms. I don’t say it, but I’m thinking it, wondering who rescued whom.

  It feels good, talking about this stuff. Not for the first time, I regret that I didn’t continue on with the shrink. I just wasn’t ready. Was too scared to face myself. It was too early to be seen.

  “Hey, Rocky?”

  I lift my head from my palms. Scoot over toward the box. Rocky is sitting in his little puddle, which looks about the same size as when I first made it.

  “Rock?”

  He looks up at me, I guess wondering what I’m about to say.

  I toy with one of the splinters from his box, bending it back and forth until it comes free. Bringing it up to my nose, I breathe in the scent of wood, admire how moist and green and fresh the wood is, like it just came out of the forest, this thing that was so recently alive. It smells like my childhood on Earth. It smells like the outdoors. Like crisp air and atmosphere.

  Rocky has fallen silent. I think I know why.

  “You made this hole, didn’t you?” I ask him.

  He stares at me guiltily.

  “You’re like . . . like a bullet in an abdomen.”

  Rocky looks slightly away.

  “You hurt this box, and it was still a little bit alive out there, and it was going to Professor Bockman at SAU on Oxford, and it was empty, just a box, and the wood died the rest of the way when you struck it, didn’t it?”

  Rocky says nothing.

  “I’m losing my fucking mind, aren’t I?”

  I think Rocky nods. I think he does. I wish he would say something. I wish he would talk to me. But he’s just a rock.

  A rock with a dark line that I wish was a mouth.

  A rock with spots that I wish were little blinking eyes.

  My OCD roommate looks up from the sofa in my mind with this sad expression, like he knew all along, like he’s the sane one.

  Yeah, he’s the sane one, who has to touch his tongue to one side of his mouth
twenty times, and then the other side twenty times, and then the top twenty times, and this keeps the mortars away. This makes the mortars hit further down the trench. Kills someone else.

  Yeah, he’s the sane one.

  I’m the one talking to a rock.

  This is the problem with illusions: They form easy enough, but once they fall apart, they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way.

  Hard enough to know if a thing is alive or dead. So hard sometimes.

  I smell that splinter of wood again, which still smells vaguely of the living, and I don’t know why, but my mind drifts to Alice Waters, whom I loved in high school, and whom I used to write in the army because I didn’t know whom else to write, and I wonder what she thought of all those batshit letters I sent, and if those letters smelled of someone who was alive and breathing and scared out of his fucking mind, or if maybe they just smelled of crazy and desperate and blood and thermite. Or if, like me, those old love letters just reeked to her of war.

  Part Three: Bounty

  • 12 •

  They say bad things come in threes, but I don’t think that’s true. I think bad things keep right on coming. They don’t stop. They’ll never stop. It’s just too depressing to keep counting, so we start over after the third bad thing. We hold our breath. We wait. We hope the universe will wait with us.

  But then something else bad happens, and with dread and short memories we utter to ourselves, “Okay, that’s one,” and we brace for what’s next.

  Something’s always next.

  I live in a tin can on the edge of sector eight, and my job is to keep bad things from happening. My track record so far is less than stellar. A screensaver on one of my monitors reads 18 Days Since Our Last Accident. It ticks up by one each morning, so that’s progress.

  Most ships pass through my sector at twenty times the speed of light, and they leave little more than a ripple on my grav scanner. But near on three weeks ago, some bastards took down my beacon, and a cargo bound for Vega splashed itself across the asteroid field in my back yard. Most of the wreck is still out there—what the pirates and scavengers and souvenir seekers didn’t cart off.

  I guess if we’re counting, that was the first bad thing. The second was a little incident I’d rather not mention, but it involved a talking rock. Okay, it involved me talking to a rock—I’m pretty sure the rock never talked back. Just in case, I drilled a hole straight through the guy and hung him around my neck on a lanyard. Not sure if I did this to make sure the rock was really dead or to keep him close to my ears in case he talks again. Told you I wasn’t proud.

  The third thing is the reason my body is covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes right now. It’s why my ankle is either sprained or broken and my arm is in a sling. Two days ago, my grav panels started oscillating uncontrollably. Really turns a man’s world upside down. And right-side up again. And upside down. And—well, you get the point.

  Now I’m a mess and my beacon’s a mess. Tools, food packs, spares, all went rattling around in their cubbies and cabinets until they burst forth like possessed demons. Hundreds of items are scattered all over the place, choosing to lie perfectly still now, like they’re all exhausted from the pounding they gave me. Taking naps. Waiting for me to tuck them all back in.

  Before I do that, I’m wiring up kill switches for the grav generator. I put big red buttons on the ceilings of every living module and run wires to breakers down in life support. Can’t step on the buttons by accident, but if my tin can gives me the old shake-and-bake again, I can hit one of these instead of trying to get down a ladder while gravity is rag-dolling me. Trying to get down the ladder the last time was what took my arm out of its socket.

  I could probably call the incident in and list my wounds, and it’d be enough for NASA to send me home. Problem is, I don’t have a home to go to. Some part of me knows I’m here for life. And the way things are going, I reckon that won’t be for very long.

  I finish the last wire splice on the new kill switches. Even with the floor grates up for access, I have to wiggle back under some of the pipes and conduits to reach the grav generator. Wrapping electrical tape around the splice, I laugh to see the same tape wrapped around one of my fingers. I ran out of bandages, so I resorted to taping up my cuts. The same stuff holds us together, me and my beacon. Hell, most of this place is a modification some previous operator made. It’s like a human body at age thirty-five, when not a single original cell is left. All that remains are the memories—the one damn thing we wish we could amputate.

  Funny how that works. And funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that’s a survival mechanism. We’re not here to be happy; we’re just here to be here. I spend a lot of time wishing I wasn’t—but that’s my dark secret, and not something I’m going to tell you. I don’t even whisper that to my rock.

  Three bad things. They come like this, in little clusters for the counting. They’re coming for me now.

  Ding-Dong.

  The first of them arrives with the sound of a door chime.

  •••

  Okay, it’s not quite a door chime; it’s actually a hull proximity alert. But if you ask me, the old alert sounded too much like an air raid siren. Which ain’t so bad when it’s occasional, but with all the traffic after the cargo crash, it started jangling my nerves. It’s the waiting for it to go off that kills me. It’s the silent anticipation. Your whole body is tense, lying awake in your sleep sack, eyes wide open, seeing a buddy yell INCOMING! before a cloud of red mist blooms where a human once stood. Yeah, it’s not the sound of the siren that gets you. It’s the lying there, waiting. Listening to the silence. Counting.

  I did some digging, figured out where the sound file for the alert was stored, and replaced it with a door chime. Of course, I couldn’t find a door chime in the archives, so I had to record my own. And yeah, I could’ve made a decent chiming sound with a wrench and some sheet steel, but I got lazy and just said Ding-Dong into the mic. Now, when I get a visitor, that’s what I hear. Gives me a chuckle. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta laugh. You just gotta hug your shins, rock back and forth, and laugh.

  I wiggle my way out of the crawlspace, scooting along on my shoulder blades, rolling from one to the other, and pushing with my good foot.

  Ding-Dong.

  That’s me.

  Ding-Dong.

  I’m coming.

  I pull myself out of the crawlspace and limp my way through the scattered debris. The climb up the ladder is slow with one hand and a sprained ankle. In the living quarters, I silence the alert using the switch by my sleep sack, then go up another flight into the command module. There’s a blast of static from the high frequency radio before a voice cuts in with a transmission.

  “—con 23, this is Sanity’s Edge, over.”

  I lift the mic with my free hand and wince as a stab of pain shoots across my ribs. Glancing out the nearest porthole, I see a ship hovering three or four klicks away, red and green lights blinking on each wingtip. Long pods with glimmering gold tips hang beneath the wings. Lasers. Pointing at me.

  “Beacon 23,” I say. “Go ahead, Sanity.”

  Checking the scanners, I see she’s registered to a Delphi corporation. The Delphi system is a tax-free zone; a lot of privately owned vessels hail from there, even if they’ve never touched atmo in Delphi. They just do the bill of sale in orbit and scoot.

  “Permission to dock,” the pilot radios. “Official US marshal business.”

  I glance back out the porthole. That ain’t no marshal boat out there. If she’s privately owned, and she’s really on marshal business, and she’s legally armed, then it can only be one thing: a bounty hunter. Looks like a whiff of excitement has drifted into old sector eight. I squeeze the mic.

  “Beacons are NASA-oversight neutral territory,” I remind the captain. “By colregs, no arms are allowed on any beacon, nor are military or private security craft allowed to dock without
warrant or express permission.”

  Which is true and all, but what I’m really thinking is that the beacon’s a wreck, as am I, and I really don’t want visitors. I’m in my white NASA boxer briefs, and putting on a shirt with a bad shoulder is a pain in the ass. Well, not the ass, exactly, but you know what I mean.

  “Beaming the warrant to you now,” the radio hisses.

  I check my comm screen as the transmission comes through. After a brief scan, my systems tell me the document’s legit. There’s a twinge in my ribs as I take a deep breath.

  “Docking collar Charlie,” I say. I reach over and flip on the homing light and energize the locking collar. Then I think of a little white lie. “Uh . . . Captain, I’m under strict quarantine, so please stay aboard. I’ll come to you.”

  There’s a pause on the other side.

  “Quarantine?” the pilot asks.

  “No longer communicable,” I assure him—and I feel like I can hear him exhale in relief.

  If he checks the colreg logs, he’ll see that I’m not exactly lying. I am under quarantine. What the logs won’t say is that it was a computer virus, and that the victim was my beacon. Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.

  •••

  I head down three sets of ladders to the lock hub, the sling over my arm making the trip take longer than usual. Any weight on the ball of my left foot makes my ankle cry out, so I try to get my heel deep on the rungs, which just means repeatedly banging my shin. I considered going without gravity for a while, but one look at all the crap strewn everywhere and I imagine it floating and bouncing around. No thanks.