by Max Barry
He was beautiful. There was the jaw, the eyes, the way that when he looked at you, he seemed to be asking, Who are you? and the answer could be anything you wanted. You somehow became a better, more relevant person in the spotlight of his gaze. It felt that primal. And when the stories began, they only increased his allure. Here was a Paul Anders story: One day, a nice girl, usually a Life candidate, was minding her own business, waiting for a shuttle, alone, not betraying any hint of the monumental pressure she was under every single waking minute, and Paul Anders happened to sit nearby. They got to talking, and the girl discovered to her surprise that behind Paul Anders’s soul-piercing eyes and unlikely bone structure was a careful thinker, not at all the shallow, narcissistic maniac you might have heard, so she allowed herself to continue to talk to him, and then they met up later—not a date, you understand, it actually didn’t really fit a label—and they had the most amazing conversation, where he revealed his incredible vulnerability, like the things he’d gone through, you couldn’t imagine, and she realized something: She didn’t allow herself to have fun anymore, or else she was only here because her mother had such impossible expectations, or else she was stronger than she’d thought, whatever it was, one of those, and then, not to make a big deal out of this because it wasn’t really the point, but they had sex. It was, let’s say, how to put this, because she didn’t want to sound conceited, but it did redefine her whole reality. Like it made it really clear that most people were completely out of touch with what really mattered in life. Not you specifically. She wasn’t criticizing you for staying in to study interpersonal stress dynamics while she was out with Paul Anders, experiencing life. She was just saying, people should just, like, not assume things about other people. They shouldn’t think they knew what was real just because of what they saw on the surface.
Then Paul Anders never spoke to the girl again and she sat on her bunk and cried into the arms of her girlfriends, who said she would be okay, he was such an asshole, how could she have known, and glance at each other, and roll their eyes, and secretly wonder if/when they might be in a Paul Anders story.
Talia didn’t want to be too judgey, since this was exactly what everyone said before they fell into a Paul Anders story, but really: How stupid were these women? They were supposed to be Life candidates.
To be fair, that was part of the problem: You went into Life because you were open to people. You wanted to believe there was more to a person than anyone thought, and tease it out, and then, possibly, turn to an audience and take a bow. The thing about being Life was you were always asking other people to suckerpunch you.
One other thing about Paul Anders stories. Sometimes the girls were quiet. Twice, when she had hugged them after their Paul Anders story, they had seemed to wince. Once, a girl was absent from class for two days, and when she came back, there was a fading bruise beneath her eye. You could believe, if you wanted, that this was part of that reality-defining sex. But she didn’t. Talia didn’t believe that.
She assumed he’d never make crew. Even when it emerged that the selection process favored what you might charitably call media presence and less charitably call attractiveness, she couldn’t imagine he would be deployed on a Providence. The process was guided by AI, but not even software could be that perverse. “Can you imagine,” a girl had said, “being Life on a ship with him?” The girl wrinkled her nose but also inhaled through parted lips in a way that told Talia she was definitely imagining it, wielding nominal authority over crazy, sexy Paul Anders in a confined space for four years.
But it would never happen. Surely.
He ate like a slob. When they dined together (social! bonding!), he threw food in the general direction of his face. If something spilled, he left it, like a child. Sometimes he would pretend he hadn’t heard her. She would ask him a question and he would sit there chewing and staring at nothing until she repeated herself twice, three times, then he would turn and grin at her. It was so stupid she wanted to claw out her eyes.
She had found him choking to death in his cabin in the eleventh month, writhing on the floor, his lips blue, his eyes rolled back. She’d been coming to see him to check on a deterioration in his vitals and halfway there his numbers plummeted and she broke into a run. She used her override to access his cabin and rolled him onto his side and stuck her fingers down his throat and dragged out a thick, goopy protein cookie. He gasped and retched and lay in her lap, panting. When his color returned, he smiled at her like a moron. His breath stunk of hydrexalin, a smell like rusty roadkill. He said, “I like the way your face is arranged.”
“You idiot,” she had said. “You could have died.”
She thought about that comment later: I like the way your face is arranged. At first, she’d thought he was saying she was pretty. But on reflection, she changed her mind. He meant: I like the way you’re looking at me. When he was on the floor. When she was worried he was about to die.
* * *
—
Next engagement, there was Anders, but no hostiles. They checked in and ran through their basic checks as the ship approached two small hives. “Movement,” Gilly said. “Lots of workers. But no soldiers.” There was curiosity in his voice, which she liked. Gilly needed a good mystery.
“You want I should park us here?” Jackson said.
He hesitated. “No, let the ship do its thing.”
“There are no soldiers?” Anders said.
“Maybe we’re reading it wrong,” Jackson said. “Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.”
“When was that?” Gilly said, and at station, Talia smacked her forehead, because how could he not recognize the Fornina Sirius reference?
“What are the workers doing?” she said, before Jackson could begin having flashbacks.
“Just shuttling between the hives. Building, I guess.”
“Building what?”
“The hives. Making them bigger. They basically vomit up material and spread it around.”
“So hives are barf balls,” Anders said. “Floating balls of barf.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it,” Jackson said. “Where are the soldiers?”
“These have been encountered before,” said Gilly. “The theory is they’re constructed by workers first, then populated by soldiers later.”
“I know the theory,” Jackson said.
“Poor little workers,” Talia said, to change the subject. Jackson was testy today, for some reason.
“Pardon me?”
“I just mean they’re noncombatants.”
She listened to Jackson choking on her own tongue for a few moments. “No salamander is a noncombatant. They’re all the enemy.”
“What’s your opinion, Intel?” Talia said. She suspected she could put him and Jackson on the same side here. “Shooting workers: yes or no?”
“Of course. It’s not even a question.”
“Even the civilian gets it,” Jackson said. “Every salamander deserves to die.”
“Wel-l-l-l,” said Gilly. “I wouldn’t frame it quite that way. We’re in a war and one species is going to win. We have to make sure it’s us. It doesn’t really matter whether they deserve it.”
“Trust me, they deserve it,” Jackson said.
“I’m just saying, that’s not relevant to the question of whether we should be killing them.”
“If you want, I can point you to a whole bunch of file footage on what they did to us at Fornina Sirius,” Jackson said. “Or Moniris Outer. Or Coral Beach. If you need some help figuring out who the bad guys are.”
“Right . . .” Gilly said, and Talia could hear him struggling against his desire to force his point through Jackson’s skull. “But—”
“Desats are dipping,” Talia said. They were not. “Do you see that, Intel?”
“Uh . . . not really.”
“Pul
se in five,” Anders said. “Four, three, two. Pulsing.”
“Scanning,” Jackson said. “Confirmed, all hostiles down. Hives destroyed.”
“Thrilling,” Anders said. “Can we go?”
“It’s not over,” Gilly warned. “We’ll get closer and pulse again to destroy any chemical residue that could be functioning as a memory store.”
“Well, excuse me if I don’t stick around for that part.”
“Stay put, Weapons,” said Jackson. “Engagement is ongoing.”
“But there are no hostiles.”
“Do I need to repeat myself?” There was silence. “Weapons?” They could all see that Anders had gone dark on ping. “Okey-dokey,” Jackson said, after a long pause. Talia felt the weight of her disappointment as a physical force.
“Anyway, to return to what we were talking about,” said Gilly, “it doesn’t matter whether they’re workers. It wouldn’t matter if they were children. They’re essentially all component parts of a single life-form that wants to destroy us.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” Jackson said. “Life, if you want to close out, that’s fine by me. I don’t know how long this part will take.”
This meant: Go find Anders. “Roger that,” she said.
* * *
—
She didn’t find him that day, or the next, and the engagement after that Anders didn’t turn up at all. She sent him a message, LAST CHANCE, to which he didn’t respond. She was literally on her way to find Gilly to have him force Anders out of dark when Anders started gasping in her ear. It was just her and Anders, a private channel.
“Beanfield,” he said. “I fucked up.”
He was two decks down, almost directly below. She came off a ladder and found him curled in a ball in a corridor. “What’s happening?” There was blood everywhere: on his hands, his shirt, the floor. A short distance away, a crab shifted back and forth like it wanted them to move so it could clean all this up. Anders’s hands were pressed to his thigh. “What did you do?” Then she noticed the star, the stupid fucking ninja star, lying on the deck, bright and slick with blood. “You stabbed yourself?”
“It bounced.”
Yes, she could see that: Anders practicing, hurling stars at the walls. Walking to collect them. Maybe one came back at him and he ducked and thought for a minute and then kept doing it. “Goddamn it.” The walls turned orange and the klaxon howled. Her film began painting helpful arrows on the floor to show the direction to her station. “Goddamn it.”
“Don’t tell Jackson.”
She stared. She had to get him to Medical. “Can you stand?”
He tried and failed. She put out her arms to help, but he jerked away, his teeth pulling back like a wounded dog.
“What the hell?” she said.
“I’m good.”
“Do you want my help or not?”
“Life, Weapons,” said Jackson over comms. “Will you be joining us?”
“One moment,” she replied, and went mute again. “Tell me where you go when you’re dark on ping.”
“I need Medical.”
“I’ll get you to Medical if you’re straight with me. Deal?” He said nothing, which she decided to take as assent. She opened the public channel. “Anders is sick. I’m taking him to medical.”
There was a second of silence. Then, Jackson: “Acknowledge.”
It was nice that Jackson chose not to be a dick about this. Talia appreciated that. Every now and then there were these delightful instances, like rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds, that Jackson trusted her to perform her job to a standard of basic competence. She offered her arm to Anders and he levered himself up. They began to hobble along the corridor. Their movement had a weird cadence, and it wasn’t just the close quarters: He was trying to keep a distance between them. Like he couldn’t stand to touch her. It was amazing to her that after all this time, Anders could still have so many mysteries. What would she have done without him? He was her puzzle.
Behind them, the crab began scraping at the floor, sucking up blood. “Left,” she said, when Anders appeared to have forgotten where Medical was. She helped him onto a steel table and pulled down the scanning arm. In her ear, Jackson and Gilly began to step through the engagement. There was contact in ninety seconds, apparently. Four hives. One big.
“Anders,” she said. “Share diagnostics with me.” Once he’d looped her in, she scrolled down her film. Subdermal puncture. He’d nicked an artery. Nothing the ship couldn’t fix. She grabbed a flatpack, tore it open, and stuck it over the wound. From the outside, it was a bluish patch; on the inside, a miracle cocktail that would repair anything torn and tidy away whatever had leaked where it shouldn’t have.
“Hydrexalin,” Anders said.
She shook her head. In no universe was she was giving him that. If she did, the next time she found him in a corridor, his injury would be worse.
“Beanfield, I’m in pain.”
“Tell me what you do when you’re dark on ping.”
“Then will you give it to me?”
She shrugged, like Who knows?
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I have to show you. It only works during an engagement.”
In her ear, Jackson said, “Contact,” and began running through weapons, which Talia presumed she was managing via her command board. Talia was actually interested in how Jackson and Gilly would deal with this situation, just the two of them. It was a new dynamic. She would review it later.
“Okay, fine,” he said. He gingerly swung his legs off the table and hobbled from the room. She followed him through the corridor and every step was against the flow of a line of glowing arrows pointing back toward her station. He reached a hatch and slid down the ladder, landing like a sack of coconuts. They descended this way to R Deck, where it wasn’t even lit, because it wasn’t somewhere the crew normally needed to go. In the gloom, Anders’s face glowed beneath his film. He stopped before a hard door marked:
LASER BATTERY 4
HOT ROOM
DO NOT ENTER
“What?” she said. “No.”
Anders pressed the tactile panel. The door emitted two short blares.
“Anders. It’s a hot room. They’re dangerous during engagements.”
“They just say that, Beanfield.” He probed around the door with his fingers.
She thought they said it with good reason. But before she could argue, a panel beside the door popped out. Anders retracted it all the way. Another warning tone sounded. Anders yanked a newly revealed lever and the door split down the middle. Heat and light spilled out in such quantity that Talia’s film clamped down, plunging her into darkness. When it equalized to restore her vision, Anders was shouldering open the door and stepping inside.
“Follow me!” he said.
She breathed. Then she followed. Because she was committed to Anders; he was her job. She moved into the chamber and heat closed on her like a fist. She couldn’t get a sense of the room’s scale; it was too densely packed with thick cable bundles and treelike pipes. It might have been huge, a techno-jungle that went on forever. The air roared and shimmered and there was a rhythm to it, a tightening every few seconds. It felt biological, like being inside someone’s bowels.
“Don’t touch the pipes!” Anders shouted. “They’re hot as fuck!”
He clambered over a snarl of cable toward a beige tube taller than he was. As she drew closer, she made out the identifying markings of a burn feeder, part of the system that fed the long-range laser batteries. Anders touched it experimentally. Then he pressed his body against it like a hug, his arms spread, one up, one down.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. Sweat trickled down her back. “Did you not just say not to touch them!”
“The small ones! Touch this one!”
“Why?�
��
“Just do it!”
Jackson and Gilly burbled in her ear. Outside the ship, where she couldn’t see, salamanders were dying. She looked at Anders.
Fuck it. She pressed herself to the pipe. There was a tingling sensation, maybe? She didn’t know.
“If they get close, the ship deploys laser batteries!” Anders shouted. “You know how big those are?”
Pretty fucking big, she thought. Maybe she could feel something. That tingling sensation was building. The rhythmic tightening of the air, each time it lessened, it didn’t go back all the way. Anders had his face against the pipe. She didn’t want to do that.
Anders shouted, “What they put out, it comes through here!”
Jackson in her ear: “Contact in five.”
Talia began to pull away, because it sounded like Anders wanted her to hug a laser feed housing at the exact moment it gushed enough fire to erase an enemy at distance, and was that not the worst possible time? Was that not precisely why the door read DO NOT ENTER? But he was staring at her and this would decide something, she saw. It might be the moment she won or lost him.
She put her cheek to the housing. She felt it coming. There was an uncoiling, like a dragon waking from sleep, its tail rising, wings unfurling, its head coming up, and she hadn’t known it was so big. The air in the room thickened until she couldn’t speak. It pressed against her body and she couldn’t expand her lungs. She thought, Oh no, this was wrong, I’m dying. Then a colossal release of energy passed through her, a rush of starfire that dissolved her body.
Her legs didn’t work. She sprawled in a mess of cable, her head full of stars. Her legs were numb. Anders was on the floor beside her, laughing. In her ear, Jackson said, “Hostiles down. Area clear.”