Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

  “You’ve got it,” I say, my free hand dropping to my waistband, where the bills from O’Shea peek out next to a folded bounty flyer. “Good luck on your hunt.”

  I don’t really mean this last. In fact, I feel rather conflicted as the bounty hunter disappears and I work my slow way up the first ladder. It feels like the grav panels have gone on the fritz again, twisting me this way and that. Sometimes you want the good guys to get their man. Sometimes you can’t tell who the good guys are.

  Up the second ladder, into my living quarters, I silence the proximity alarm again. Then I head up the last ladder into the command pod, and my mind goes back to how bad things seem to come in threes. Three bounty hunters, arriving within moments of each other. Can I count them as three individual bad things and assume my day improves? I decide to.

  A voice interrupts my thoughts.

  “Those assholes gone?” someone says.

  I emerge up the ladder and turn to see a woman sitting in my command chair. She’s got a blaster in her hand and a frown splashed across her face.

  It’s the girl from the bounty flyer.

  I never thought I’d see her again.

  • 14 •

  “Jesus, Scarlett, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Are they gone?”

  “Yes, they’re gone. They’re out there looking for you. What’re you doing here?”

  I take a step toward her, and the blaster stiffens in her hand. She looks me up and down and smirks at my attire. The wounds across my body don’t seem to faze her. She’s seen me in worse condition than this. And in fewer clothes.

  “What am I doing here?” she asks. “Don’t be dense. I came to find you.”

  “Why? How? And you do realize you brought the badass brigade with you, right?” I nod toward the portholes. Scarlett doesn’t glance away from me. Instead, she shrugs.

  “I needed a ride,” she says.

  That’s when it hits me how she got here. She must’ve stowed away on one of their ships, then probably tipped them off that she was here. I reckon she had to’ve been on one of the first two ships, and got out when we were in Vlad’s cockpit. I’d wager O’Shea brought her here. Vlad’s ship was too neat for hiding.

  “Nice blaster,” I say, gesturing with my free hand. “I thought we were friends.”

  I should mention here that I really don’t like guns pointed at my head. Not unless I’m the one doing the pointing.

  “So you’re working for NASA,” Scarlett says, as if this answers my question. “Why?”

  I let out a sigh. Scarlett never could stand any government agency. Doesn’t matter what they do, they aren’t to be trusted.

  “I needed a job,” I say.

  “Tell me why you’re working for NASA,” Scarlett insists.

  “Money,” I say. “Pension. Job. Dinero.”

  She raises the blaster. Her voice as well. “Why are you working for NASA?”

  I scratch one of the bandages on my arm. They say the itch is a sign of healing. I’ve been healing for a long damn time.

  “I needed to be alone,” I whisper.

  The blaster wavers. I try to remember the last time I saw Scarlett. In a trench on Gturn, I think. Or one of its moons. A lot of those trenches looked the same.

  The blaster lowers a little. She believes me. She should. I told her the truth. I always do, eventually.

  “Now please tell me what you’re doing here,” I say. “How’d you find me?”

  Scarlett points the blaster toward one of the portholes. I turn to see the sparkle of debris out there like a billion new stars. And it makes sense. Sometimes bad things really do come in clusters, because one leads to the other. I think about the rock, which I wouldn’t have found were it not for the wreck. I think about the wreck I am, which Scarlett wouldn’t have found without the accident.

  “NASA has to file a report with the navy when there’s a wreck like that,” she says. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time. Your name finally popped up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been looking to not be found.” I turn back to her. “Can you put the blaster away? Please? I’m not a government stooge.”

  “If you’re working for their pension, you’re their stooge.”

  She says this, but the blaster goes away, back in her holster. In the porthole behind her, I see the flashing lights from one of the ships. “Shit,” I say. “I’ve got to transmit some stuff.”

  The blaster comes right back out, but I ignore her. She isn’t here to shoot me. I start a wireless handshake with the three ships and then begin transmitting the scan logs and radio exchanges to the black ship first. I put in a five-minute delay to transmit to O’Shea, and a twenty-minute delay for Vlad. I message Vlad privately and warn him of bandwidth issues. Scarlett watches me the entire time. The procedure takes me longer than usual using one hand. Only now does she show some concern for my physical state.

  “Still beating yourself up, huh?”

  “Ha,” I say. “Grav panel issues.”

  She snorts like she doesn’t believe me. I fish the bounty flyer out of my waistband and hold it out it to her. “Fifty million creds,” I point out.

  Scarlett laughs and waves it away. “I got a copy. And I’m worth more than that. You’re worth more than that.”

  “I don’t want any part of this.”

  “You think you get to choose?” Scarlett laughs. And now I can’t remember if I liked her or hated her back in the day. It was my first tour on the ground. I’ve blocked a lot of that out.

  She laughs some more and shakes her head. “You don’t want any part of this. Tell your parents that. The day they screwed in the back seat of some car in Kentucky, they put you here. Right here.” She aims the blaster at the floor, like she’s indicating the beacon.

  I watch as one of the ships outside peels away toward the asteroid field.

  “Tennessee,” I say, correcting her.

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I do have a choice. I came out here to get away from the war—”

  “News flash,” Scarlett says, cutting me off. “The war’s coming to you, Bub. You’re on the front lines.”

  “This is not the front lines,” I say. She knows this isn’t the front lines. I don’t care what my dreams tell me, what the shakes mean, the things I see and hear when I’m alone. The war isn’t here. It can’t be. This is a different war on my beacon, between just me and my demons.

  “Every square inch of this galaxy is a front line,” Scarlett says. “It’s just a matter of when. But it doesn’t have to be like that—”

  Not this. I think I remember now that I mostly didn’t like Scarlett. It’s the narrow eyes. The way they think they see something that isn’t there. Conspiratorial eyes. But she stands up and moves like a cat across the module and stands close enough to me that I can smell how clean she is, this little pocket of freshness in the dank and dark, and I want to kiss her. I want to grab something beautiful and hold it and weep and smother it with affection so that maybe it won’t ever leave me. And that’s when I remember that I didn’t like Scarlett Mulhenry at all. And I didn’t hate her either. I think I loved her.

  “Why are you here?” I ask, and I feel like I have to shout it, but it comes out a whisper, like my nightmare voice.

  “I want you to end this war,” Scarlett says.

  Her eyes widen for a moment.

  I can see in them.

  I can see that she’s dead serious.

  • 15 •

  I remember kids who thought they could end wars. Hell, I remember being one of those kids. Neighborhoods have always been full of them, running around with plastic blasters and blowing the heads off Ryph, pretending we’re shooting the last shot in the war, bringing it all to a heroic end. When we’re young, every imaginary battle ends with heroics. Finales come with a bang. Then you get older, and you see that life ends in wrinkles and whimpers.

  Looking at Scarlett now, as she looks at me, and
her ridiculous words about ending wars hang in the air, I remember more than just the fact that I loved her once; I almost remember what it felt like. I almost feel it again. Love comes as fast as shrapnel in the trenches. It’s indiscriminate. It gets whoever’s closest. When it’s your time, it’s your time. They assign someone to the bunk beside you, and it’s like a grenade landing in your lap.

  I vaguely remember what I felt like before the war took my hope, and I vaguely remember what Scarlett was like before the war did something screwy with hers.

  “I don’t have room for your dreams,” I tell her. “You shouldn’t have come here. I don’t know how we’ll get you out, but I’ll help you do that. It’s a capital offense, but I’ll help you. Maybe the next trader—”

  “I’m not leaving here without you,” she says. “A friend will come for me. For us both. Someone you know—”

  I wave her silent and take a step back, like she really is a bomb that might go off. “Scarlett, I can’t leave here.” And then I say what I’ve known for a while but haven’t told anyone at NASA, haven’t even admitted to myself, not out loud. “I’m never leaving here,” I say. “It’s a two-year, but I’ll re-up. This is like the army, except I’ll last longer. This is where I belong.”

  She looks me up and down. Frowns. Her eyes glisten. “This isn’t you,” she says.

  “It is,” I tell her. And I nearly tell her my secret. My dark one. She always got the truth out of me in the past, but never without a fight. I change the subject in a hurry. Any kind of crazy is better than my kind. “So how do you think you can end this war?”

  Scarlett adjusts the small pack slung over her shoulder. She pulls out a weathered paperback. Holds it up so I can see the cover.

  “You’ve read this?” she asks.

  The book is Salaman’s Battle. It’s part of the Frontier Saga by T.W. Rudolf. Of course I’ve read it. It’s trench pulp, and practically required reading for grunts. We passed these novels around like VD. I read the entire series until the pages turned to mud and the spines fell apart.

  “Sure,” I say. I smile. “Are we going to take out the Lord hive with a planet buster like Corporal Charlie Sikes does in book twelve?” I say this with the lilt and enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old planning the next stage of the neighborhood invasion from behind Mrs. Wilkerson’s petunias.

  “How much do you know about Rudolf?” Scarlett asks, clearly not amused.

  I shrug my one good shoulder. “I probably scanned the back of a book or two.” Even before she turns the tattered paperback around, I can already see T.W.’s bald head, the fatigues he’s always wearing, and that angry I-served-in-the-military-so-buy-my-book-I’ve-seen-the-real-shit scowl.

  “There’s no such person,” Scarlett says. “He’s as much a fiction as his stories.”

  I raise my hand like I’m in class. “So we expose the conspiracy, and the war ends!”

  “The person behind T.W. Rudolf is a former marine intelligence officer named Porter Mencius. Porter was the numero uno translator for the armed forces during the Orion Offensive.”

  “I’m still not getting it—”

  “These are repurposed Ryph novels, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  This takes my brain a few moments. Scarlett waits patiently.

  “Bullshit,” I say, when I realize what she’s suggesting. “You’re saying someone translated Ryph novels, and that’s what we’ve been reading? But we kick the Ryph’s asses in those books. In the end, I mean. Right after it looks hopeless and all.”

  Scarlett does a dogfighting maneuver in the air, twisting one hand after the book. “They switch everything around,” she says. “We become them. They become us.” Now the book is chasing her hand. “He changed a few other details, of course. What happened is, Porter fell in love with the original stories in translation, even fell for the Ryph a little, and he figured he could make a quick buck. What were the Ryph going to do, sue him? They were already trying to kill us all. He just had to change the names and which side was which.”

  I think back on some of those books, many of which I read half a dozen times. Something is trying to fit together in my mind when Scarlett gives me a nudge.

  “Don’t you see? We’re the alien horde.”

  She gives me a moment to let this sink in. It doesn’t quite.

  “When someone told me who the author was, and where these books came from, I went and checked a few other races we’ve made contact with. The Hoko, the Tryndians, the Capricorns. Guess what? They all have a long and rich popular culture dealing with alien invasions. Every one of them. And it all starts about the time each race put something into orbit for the first time.”

  “Okay,” I say, seeing this point at least. “That makes sense. We’re all scared shitless out here. It’s a scary place.”

  “It’s worse than that. Don’t you see? We fear what we know we’ll become. As soon as we can go out, we start worrying about something heading our way. To the Ryph, we’re everything they thought we’d be. And we think the same of them.”

  “But they are. Look at what happened on Delphi.”

  “And they say look what happened on Arcturus. And we say Delphi happened first. And they say Arcturus was worse. And both sides are run by fear. You know why?”

  I nod. “Sure. Because fear is how you hedge your bets. If you’re wrong, you wiped out some friendlies. Oops. But if you’re right, you saved your ass and all of humanity’s.”

  “No, that’s not why. It’s because fear sells. It’s because war is sport. And it’s also very good business. We warred with ourselves until we found someone to war with together.”

  “Well, there you go,” I say, snapping my fingers. “There’s no stopping it. So why try? Look at me—” I wave my arm at the beacon. “I’m the hero because I checked out.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Scarlett says. “The problem is, you didn’t take the rest of us with you.”

  •••

  I have no idea what Scarlett means by this, but all the crazy talk has me thirsty. Or I just want something to occupy my free hand. I cross to the small sink by the lounge and pour Scarlett a water, then I drink from the tap. I hand her a food pack as well. I don’t have any appetite, but I grab one for myself. Tearing the pack open with my teeth, I squeeze some of the protein paste into my mouth. It tastes better heated up, but the army taught me not to care.

  “Tell me what you remember from that last day,” Scarlett says. I notice she’s eyeing the nasty knot of scars that peeks out from under my slinged arm. I haven’t seen her or talked to her in years. She shouldn’t know a damn thing about that day. Then I remember she tracked me here by hacking navy files. She knows the same bullshit story they know.

  “More than I care to,” I tell her, chewing the paste and fighting to swallow.

  “I want to hear about it. And not what’s in the reports. Tell me what really happened.”

  I turn away from her, finish the paste, and throw the packet in the recycler. Staring out the porthole, I can see one of the ships moving through the asteroid belt. There’s the second ship. No sign of the ninja, which makes me smile.

  “We pushed into the hive on Yata. Our platoon was pinned down. As was Echo company. Everyone in my squad ate it. That left me in charge. I was going to set off the nuke, wipe out the whole hive—”

  I stop right there. I’ve never told this next part to anyone. Why do I do this for her?

  “What happened?” she asks.

  I stare out the porthole.

  Scarlett takes a step toward me. I can hear her picking her way carefully through the debris scattered everywhere. She was always good at this, picking through the debris. When her hand lands on my good shoulder, I flinch, which feels like a knife slipping between my ribs.

  “I know what happened,” she whispers. “I just want you to admit it.”

  I look down at the floor. My eyes are watering. I blink that shit away.

  “I didn’t do it,” I say. “M
y finger was on the button, but I didn’t do it. Couldn’t do it.”

  “You didn’t set off the bomb,” she says. “And next thing you know, a Ryph Lord is standing over you.”

  I nod. My voice would crack if I tried to use it. I feel my hand trembling. Scarlett’s hand is still resting on my shoulder, burning me there.

  “And he opened you up,” she says. Her hand drifts down my bruised ribs and touches my stomach. My scars. I haven’t been touched in so long. I’d forgotten what it feels like. I nod.

  “And then you killed him, and their entire army fled the battlefield, and you saved the day.”

  “Yes,” I whisper, lying through my teeth, pretending my account of things was how they really were.

  “But you didn’t kill him, did you?”

  I shake my head. Tears roll down my cheeks.

  “You didn’t do shit.”

  I nod. I can feel her breasts pressing against my back.

  “Why didn’t you set off that bomb?” she asks me.

  I don’t say anything. I just concentrate on her hand. I place mine on the back of hers, holding it there.

  “Because of the company you would’ve lost?” she asks.

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Why, then?”

  I can’t say.

  “Tell me. C’mon, soldier, just spit it out. I know it’s right there. The truth is on the tip of your tongue.”

  I don’t want to say.

  “Tell me why you didn’t do it,” she commands.

  And my will shatters. Maybe because of her touch. So I tell her the truth.

  “Because of the hive,” I whisper, barely loud enough for anyone to hear. “I couldn’t do it because of the hive.”

  • 16 •

  The radio squawks. I can’t tell how long we’ve been standing there, in a fog of my admission, her arm wrapped around me, her hand on my flesh, my hand pressed against hers. Felt like forever. Wasn’t long enough.