by Bobby Adair
“What’d you do?”
“I didn’t know where to put it. I thought I’d already found the best place. So I fed it to the pigs.”
“And you went hungry?”
“Nothing new for us,” says Brice. “I didn’t want my parents hanged in the square. So, like everybody I knew, I grew up starving surrounded by piles of food. I was kicked out of school after sixth grade like everybody else, and I went to work on the farm, twelve hours a day. By the time I turned seventeen, the Grays were siphoning every able body they could fit into an orange suit, and sending them to build that goddamn stupid giant wheel in space, floating forever at LaGrange Point One. When finished, it would have been a thousand miles across, three hundred wide. There were supposed to be two million square miles of happy Gray habitat inside when we were done. After that, the Grays were supposed to leave us alone on earth. They’d have their place, and we’d have ours. All that work for all those years. All those lives. You can’t even measure it. And it was the first goddamn thing the Trogs destroyed when they attacked.”
“Second.” That just slipped out.
“Yeah,” admits Brice. “They did attack the moon colonies first, yet the moon survived. We still own that.”
Feeling my political hackles rise, I ask, “Nobody really believed the Grays would stop at one ring, did they? If we’d ever finished that one, they’d have made us build another and another and another. We’re their slaves, and as long as they’re alive in this solar system, it’s always going to be that way.”
“I don’t need to hear your rebel recruitment pitch,” Brice grouses. “Look at me, I’m already sold. I fragged my company captain. I’m complicit in a mutiny. I’m a rebel, and now I’ll always be, whether I like it or not. I’m committed.”
“Sorry.” Not about Brice’s choice to come to my side, but for me slipping a foot onto my favorite soapbox. “Sometimes it just happens. I hate the Grays even more than I hate the Trogs.”
“Turns out they’re the same people,” laughs Brice. “Same management, anyway.”
“Yeah.” Looking for something else to talk about, I try another subject. “Did you like working in space?”
“At first, yeah, of course.” Brice sounds suddenly nostalgic. “There’s the novelty of it. Who wouldn’t love it? Working construction in space is a lot harder than you think it should be. You still sweat. Sometimes so much you think you’re going to die of heat stroke, or you freeze for days on end because you’re suit’s thermostat won’t calibrate right. Or it gets the O2 mix wrong, and you run around high as a kite, or your cal mix runs lean, and you lose twenty pounds over your three-week in-suit rotation, and you don’t even know it because you never see yourself in the mirror, never step on a scale. You never even put on pants and figure out they’re loose, because you’re in the suit for the weeks-long stretch.”
“Was that the deal?” I ask. “Three weeks in, and what, three days off?”
“Five off,” says Brice. “The Grays were generous with us up there. You could get to the moon a couple of times a year, back to earth once every twelve months or so. If you were lucky. Mostly we spent our time off in the dorms on the site. Slums really, with stacks of bunks ten tall in warehouses for a thousand off-duty slugs just like you. Sounds shitty, and it was, but it was something. You were out of your suit. You could eat real food, for a couple of days anyway, before you were back on the colon cleanse to empty your system and prep for being back in the suit. At least you had artificial gravity and had a chance to feel another human’s touch.”
“Sounds like there’s more to it than just that,” I observe.
“There was a girl,” admits Brice. “I was young. She was, too.” He laughs. “Of course, there was a girl.”
I chuckle because I’m a guy and I know, the girl always comes up. “Pretty?”
“You bet,” says Brice. He laughs some more. “With every day that goes by, the girls in your memory grow prettier, or they turn meaner.”
“Or both.”
Brice finds that exceptionally funny.
I think of how Claire’s flaws seemed to have evaporated in the years after she took in the hatchling, not in real life, but in my memory. In my mind, the real Claire died the day she embraced that Gray, and the woman I married was replaced by a withering facsimile.
I wonder whether she’s still alive.
I feel suddenly like I’ve been away from the earth for months, yet I know it’s only been days.
Chapter 42
“They organize the work crews into pods of six,” says Brice. “Like the Grays do with things, everything is six-this and six-that. Six pods of six workers made up a crew. She was in another pod in my crew, all on the same rotation. I don’t even remember how we met. I think we bumped into each other in a chow line on one of our five-day breaks. She talked about going to the moon because she’d never been. Neither had I. We were both new then. She started sending me messages when we were out in the void, and we started hooking up during our downtime. We explored the ring we were building. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of it were finished by then. Lots more were in some state of completion. We used to sit out on the framework of an unfinished section and look at all the orange suits crawling over the structure, millions of ants busy at work with countless shuttles coming and going, dumping materials brought up from earth. It was mesmerizing. Eventually, we grew comfortable with silence. We often sat with our legs dangling over a trillion miles of nothing, thinking what-if thoughts, and watching the universe slide by.
“We messaged a lot when we were on duty. We slept together during our rotations back to the slum. Funny thing is, by that time, I’d had my fill of space and so had she. We dreamed about going back to earth when our ten-year term was up. We talked about maybe getting a farm, can you believe it? At the time, we still believed once the stations were finished, life would be better on earth. We’d raise some kids, listen to the birds tweet, sit in the shade of a tree—a tree—you wouldn’t believe how much you miss trees once the shine wears off the whole space thing.
“Maybe we’d go rogue, run up to Canada, hide in the mountains off the grid, and wait for all the shit to blow over.” Brice’s unexpected laugh comes out mean and hard, and I can feel he’s carrying a lot of bitterness. I dread where the story is heading.
“We just wanted to be together in love,” he continues, “and not have to hide in silence between the blankets of a single bunk with a hundred other workers in earshot, half of them knowing what you’re up to and wanking to the sounds they can hear. It’s perverse, but it’s life up there. You get three weeks of isolation in your suit with only the sound of each other’s voices to make you feel human, or you get five days of zero privacy.
“It’s easy to get used to it because you realize every day you have less value than you thought you had the day before. You’re a commodity, one of a billion copies from a planet that keeps making more just like you. The lifts keep bringing new ones up from the surface and hauling empty suits back down.”
“The dead?” I guess.
“People die all the time,” confirms Brice. “Anything will do it—space trash, accident, inadequate shielding. If you get lucky, if you get good, and you spend enough time out there, the solar radiation eats you up. You’re brain goes first. You make mistakes. You get stupid. Your coordination goes to shit.
“The trick to staying alive is being picky about where you work. I learned that early on. If they were sending rivet teams inside or outside, you always took inside. You didn’t have much shielding there, but you got a little, and over time, it makes a difference. Think of it like being an albino on earth and always avoiding the sun. It was kinda like that. You always wanted the thickest walls of whatever between you and the void. However, you can’t do it forever. Hell, we were building a giant fucking donut in space. You couldn’t avoid the outside.
“Worse thing, solar radiation is insidious. You don’t know which are your high
-risk days. It doesn’t care, it kills you just the same.”
Brice stops talking, and we float along in silence for ten, maybe twenty minutes before he picks the story up again. “I first noticed she developed a stutter. It happened occasionally, but enough. I tried to do what I could to have her rotated back to earth, inside workstations, something. She wouldn’t have it. She was a real daredevil. She came to space for the thrill. She always took the most dangerous jobs.
“Maybe six months after the stutter became worse, she was in the wrong place when a newbie lift driver was bringing in a load of fill-dirt from moon-side. She saw it at the last moment. Well, maybe she missed the last moment by two or three. By the time she did see it coming, it was too late for her to dodge out of the way.”
The next part is hard for Brice to say. I think he still loves her. “It was the kind of crash that looked like it should have killed her. That would have been a mercy on all of us.” Brice pauses again. I’m not sure if he’s silently crying or suffering while trying not to. “What we did to that driver... We didn’t kill him. Maybe. I don’t know. We beat the fuck out of him three times over. When we stopped, you couldn’t see anything but blood inside his faceplate. He wasn’t responding, but his d-pad said he was alive. Somebody gave him a shove and sent him off into space. Last we saw of him.
“My girl, she had one leg crushed halfway up the thigh, the other halfway down the shin. Her suit never punctured, so she avoided the mercy of a quick death. Her legs though, were beyond repair. Everybody saw that. They were like jelly inside her suit. We knew death would come for her, if not in a few minutes, then by the end of the day, whatever the hell that means in space where the sun shines all the fucking unmerciful time. Our MSS supervisor had her put in the discard bin.”
“Discard bin?” I’ve never heard of that before.
Brice’s mean laugh comes back, and I realize it’s a kind of protection he armors his heart with when the shit of life weighs too heavy on his memories. “It’s a warehouse, a garbage bin, literally, for people who are expected to die. The MSS doesn’t waste infirmary beds on the terminal cases, and they don’t want them taking up a bunk in the slum, sucking up real food and bringing down morale. Morale? What a fucking joke.
“Problem is, she didn’t die. She suffered in the discard bin for weeks, stealing cal packs and H from others the MSS tossed in who eventually died. Why gangrene or blood loss or shock didn’t kill her, no one knows.
“The MSS finally fished her out of the discard bin, sent her back to earth, and paraded her as a hero in the propaganda vids to demonstrate the courage of the orange suits serving humanity’s partnership with our Gray brothers.
“It twisted her rotten inside.
“Our relationship didn’t end, so much as sublimate into the vacuum, until one day it didn’t bother me at all that I hadn’t heard from her in weeks, and in fact dreaded the next message. It never came.
“We, us, whatever mythical thing people conjure in their minds to make themselves believe the bond of their infatuation is more than just chemical needs and engorged erections, that died. It suffered long and slow, just like her. In the end, it was a relief.
“Some time later, I earned a favor from an MSS supervisor with a kink for strapping young Americans. She took a liking too me.” Brice laughs again, and this time it’s the familiar voice of his dark soul I hear. “She rode me like a man-whore and I didn’t care. She eventually grew tired of me, and called in a favor to have me invited to join the SDF. I ended up in the moon garrison, which was great—fucking great—until the war started.”
Chapter 43
Two days zipping through the void, though for all I can tell, we might as well have been drifting in the same spot. The sun still shines harsh and unforgiving, anchored to its throne at the center of the solar system. Jupiter still dominates the sky behind us. Our position relative to both of them seems not to have changed. Only the absence of the little asteroid we escaped from gives us any hint that we moved.
Or did our acceleration away from the asteroid only serve to negate the speed we’d built up moving in the other direction? We have no navigational equipment, no way to gauge our speed against any of a dozen easily visible objects in the sky, all of which are so far from us and so large we’ll never know whether we’re moving or not.
“I’ve accepted it,” says Brice after hours of silence.
“What’s that?” I ask as I scan the sky in front of us, confounded by the disappearance of our gray-brown smudge.
“Death.”
“You’re giving up?” I ask curiously.
“No.”
I turn to look at him. It’s a nice change for my straining eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not okay with it,” he tells me. “I’m not quitting. I’m not going to cry and whine. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m not sure I see the difference.”
“Sure you do,” he argues. “It’s how I face every fight with those Neanderthal Trog bastards, I accept I’m already dead. It makes the rest easy. You don’t panic. You don’t try to save your ass at the expense of anyone’s life. You do your job. This ridiculous flying field trip through the solar system is like that. I just had to accept it.”
“Huh.” I laugh as I try to figure out my thinking on the subject. “I’m not sure I do the same. I think I wear a cloak of invincibility. It’s a lie. I know it is. A useful lie.”
“I’m going to make you an offer,” says Brice, deeply serious.
“This already sounds bad.”
He hesitates, and then starts. “We may have enough H here to last a month, maybe two. Hell, maybe a year. I don’t know. What I do know is it’ll last one of us twice as long as both of us.”
“Hero suicide shit?” I don’t believe it, and my surprise is obvious in my tone.
“No,” Brice tells me. “I think finding a safe place for us to land our feet is a one-in-a-billion shot. I’m offering to give you my lottery ticket and double your chances. All I have to do is disconnect from this beat-up wire cage and zip off toward Jupiter. All the hydro is yours.”
“Two times zero is still zero,” I argue. “If I’m going to die, then I’d rather spend the rest of my time with someone to talk to. Twice as much time by myself sounds like a shitty trade.” I catch myself. “Wait, you’re not expecting me to make the same offer, are you?”
“No,” Brice laughs. “You’re the invincible one, right? I’m the dead one.”
I laugh, too, and decide staring at the black sky is something I need a break from. I reorient myself so I can watch Jupiter imperceptibly recede behind us. “It’s a beautiful view when you look this way.”
Brice turns himself around. “I’m tired of looking at fucking stars anyway.”
“I wonder how far we are.”
“Maybe ask somebody when we get back to the Potato.”
“Yeah,” I chuckle. “I’ll do that.” I spot one of Jupiter’s moons, tiny and crisp, a perfect sphere hanging in the sky as it slowly spins through its orbit. “Look, you can see Ganymede, I think.” I point. “Right there.”
“Yeah,” says Brice, a smile in his voice. “I see it.” He points, too. “Look, down there. Another one.”
“Yeah.” I see it, different in color, a bit smaller in diameter.
“How many moons does Jupiter have?”
“Sixty some, I think.”
“That many?” Brice muses. “Almost hard to believe.”
We both watch the Jovian giant for a while, pointing out moons as we find them orbiting slowly over the swirling surface.
“Look at that one,” says Brice, pointing. “Just above that rusty band, in the gray.”
“Where?”
“See the big spot?”
“Yeah.”
“Follow the rusty stripe below it to the left, back, almost to the horizon.”
I see it, but it’s not well-defined. “I don’t think tha
t’s—”
I can’t believe it.
“What?” Not understanding the cause for my surprise, Brice is ready to pounce.
“I think that’s the Potato.”
“No.” Brice is leaning forward. Habit.
I am too. I’m squinting. Anything to help. “It’s got to be. We must have passed it. Shit. We must have missed it yesterday, or a few hours after we left.”
“If that’s it,” says Brice, “I think we didn’t start off on the right vector.”
He might be right. He might not be. He might be accusing me. He might not. I don’t care. “We have a bunch of H here. I say we burn through some bottles and speed this kiddy ride up. I’m tired of drifting.”
“Spark it, buddy. Let’s go home.”
Chapter 44
Eight hours. Six canisters of H burned dry. I accelerated hard, guessed at a midpoint, and decelerated just as hard. We were nearly obliterated a dozen times by high-speed collisions with bits of stone and metal expanding in a deadly plume out from battles around the Potato’s dirty smudge.
As harrowing as those close calls were, Brice and I are in good spirits, the best since we first rocketed away from the small asteroid we were marooned on. The Potato, still engulfed in a haze of dust with untold numbers of Trogs on the surface and in the subterranean complex, looks like an oasis to us.
I make a guess. “Less than a hundred miles, I’ll bet.”
“Do we have a plan?” asks Brice.
I chuckle, maybe from fatigue. I know I’ve slept in the past few days of our journey. I’m not sure how much. It’s easy to lose track of your anchors in time and place when you’re drifting in the void. “Since we started our burn, I’ve been pretty focused on driving.” Translated as ‘avoiding skewering space trash.’
Misunderstanding my weariness for irritation, Brice apologizes.
Our relationship is evolving. We’re learning how to bicker our way around our moods.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “I’m just tired.”