by Hugh Howey
In fact, the wreck of my beacon comes into stark relief with the prospect of someone docking up. In addition to the stuff everywhere, I’ve got open access panels leading down into mechanical spaces and wires strung all over from my makeshift repairs. My walk suit is crumpled up in the middle of the docking module, and the door to the lifeboat is wide open. For a while there, I was wearing the suit all the time and sleeping in the lifeboat, but I stopped doing both those things after the shipwreck debris bombarding my beacon died down. Besides, I’m back to not sleeping much anyway.
I wait by the airlock for the pilot to secure his ship. Sniffing the air, I have this bad feeling that, despite the herculean effort from the air scrubbers and NASA’s PineFresh scenting system, the entire facility reeks of a college dorm room, midsummer, after an egg fight, with two dead skunks under a pile of soiled laundry. I breathe into my palm and sniff. Whatever olfactory sense I had died months ago. That’s good for me, bad for visitors.
A loud thump against the hull lets me know that the ship has arrived and that the pilot is a three on a scale of ten when it comes to jockeying a flight stick. If he’s making a living collecting bounties, that probably means he’s more of a terrestrial threat. More of a sleuth-and-taser kinda guy. This guess is vindicated once I’ve keyed my side of the airlock and he’s keyed his. The bounty hunter on the other side is straight out of one of those true-life holos where people repo your shit or haul you back to jail from some remote moon hideout.
His hair is in dreadlocks. His beard is long, and it’s knotted with bits of string so that it juts out in little clumps. There’s an unlit cigar between his teeth and mirrored shades wrapping his face. He’s got a bandana around his neck, another on his bicep, and one tied around each knee. His flightsuit is studded with bulging pockets, and even standing perfectly still, he jangles. I imagine he must keep the grav on his ship at a 0.7 to be able to stand all that nonsense. He has guns strapped everywhere, and an honest-to-goodness bandolier of large brass shells and grenades is draped across his chest like some warlord beauty contestant sash. What sounds vaguely like a dog yips somewhere from within the depths of his ship.
“Mitch,” the bounty hunter says, reaching out his hand with a jangle and clatter. “Mitch O’Shea.” We do that awkward arm-in-sling handshake where I extend my left hand, turn it sideways, and we go pinkie-to-thumb. He looks me up and down. “What happened to you?”
I realize I’m standing there in my boxers, barefoot, covered in bruises and duct tape. I dimly care.
“Gravity genset went on the fritz,” I say. “Started oscillating. Uncontrollably.”
The bounty hunter lowers his shades and narrows his eyes at me, almost like he has some truth-detecting superpower and is boring it into my brain. I glance up at the ceiling, and he glances with me. I glance down at the floor, and he does the same. We look up again. Then down.
“Yeah,” I say. “About like that.”
“No shit?”
I point to my slinged arm. “You ever hear it hurts worse to put a shoulder back in than it does to knock it out?”
He nods.
“Complete crap. Feels so good going back in. Like popping your knuckles. You should try it.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He glances at my arm, at my attire, and then pushes his glasses back over his eyes. When he fishes a tablet from a pouch in the back of his flightsuit, I see that the small talk is over. Down to business. He holds the tablet out to me; it has a warrant displayed on the screen. I study a blurry image of a woman with short-cropped hair and an angry scowl. There’s all kinds of small text about what the government wants done with her and how much they’ll pay, but I just see the image. The tablet is taken back before I’m ready to let go of it.
“Have you seen her?” O’Shea asks.
“Nope,” I say.
“You sure?” he asks.
“Positive.”
O’Shea lowers his glasses and narrows his eyes at me again. I widen mine on purpose, throwing the blinds open, letting him really stare inside. Somewhere in his ship, an animal whimpers. If this guy could really see my thoughts, he’d probably be whimpering too.
The glasses go back up. I fight the urge to laugh out loud at this guy. There’s a chance, I realize, that all his gear came from a surplus store and he’s really new at this. Impossible to tell. In the army, rookies spent a lot of time charring their gear over trench fires and smearing their helmets with mud to fit in. The vets, meanwhile, spent their time trying to keep their shit maintained in order to stay alive. I sniff the air, looking for a scent of gun oil or WD-60 to get a handle on which sort of person Mitch O’Shea is. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my living quarters, my olfactory sense is stunted.
“Okay, well, I’ll need all ship scans for the last couple weeks,” O’Shea says. “Plus all radio logs.”
“Not many places to hide out here,” I say.
Mitch stares at me. At least, I assume he’s staring at me behind those glasses.
“There’s good reason to suspect this fugitive came through here,” he says. “I’ll also need to do some scans of my own, poke around a bit, but I want to warn you that this person is very dangerous—“
I say, “Ding-Dong,” cutting O’Shea off.
Well, a recording of my voice from two weeks ago does that. There’s another ship arriving in-system. I glance up the ladders, dreading the three-flight climb. It’s fifty-six rungs to the command level. Yes, I’ve been counting.
“Was that someone saying ‘ding-dong’?” O’Shea asks. He points his unlit cigar at the ceiling.
I clear my throat. Beacons aren’t meant for co-habitating. It feels like the NASA techs just left, and now I’ve got this guy seeing me in my briefs, nosing my dirty laundry, and hearing what I do to pass the time.
“You mind if I look out your canopy?” I ask. “Just to see who that is. It’s a long climb up with a busted wing.” I indicate the sling.
Mitch hesitates. Then he stands aside with a jingle and a jangle. “Don’t touch anything,” he says. “Cockpit’s this way.”
Yeah, toward the front of the ship, I nearly say sarcastically. From the bump he gave the locking collar, I’m pretty sure I’ve got more flight time than this bounty hunter does. But I keep it to myself and follow him toward the cockpit. We pass through what looks like a holding pen—gray bars run from floor to ceiling. There’s an animal in one of the pens, drinking out of a toilet.
“Cricket, stop that. No. Bad girl.”
The animal pulls its head out and turns to look at its master, water dribbling from its jowls. Looks like a cross between a dog and a leopard. Probably not even a little bit of either. Definitely alien. The animal goes back to slurping.
“Hardened criminal?” I ask, jabbing my thumb at the cell.
O’Shea laughs. “Cricket? Naw, I just put her away so she don’t maul you.”
I look back at the animal. She’s the size of the cougars we’d see now and then in the backwoods of Tennessee. Might be deadly, but I doubt it. Seems like a pushover, drinking out of that toilet and looking at us with that blank expression.
I follow O’Shea through a narrow hall. There’s an open door to a bunkroom with an unmade bed; just beyond that are some grated lockers with guns inside and big padlocks on the latches. We squeeze past these into the tight cockpit, and O’Shea pulls up his system scanner. I peer out the porthole to see another dark-hulled ship approaching the beacon.
“Goddamn,” O’Shea says.
“You got an ID on that?” I ask. The ship looks vaguely military. I don’t like things that look vaguely military. I hate the things that look really military. With me, it’s like a sliding scale of hate versus appearance with some direct correlation.
“Don’t need an ID,” he says, disgust dripping from his voice. He reaches across me for the HF mic. Squeezing the transmit button, he glares plasma rounds up through the canopy. “You know putting hull trackers on a bounty ship is a federal violation, right, asshole?”
The radio hisses a response: “You think I need a hull tracker to sniff you down, you filthy runt of a raped pig?”
I’m beginning to suspect these two know each other. I watch this new ship expel little volcano blasts of air as it orients itself to face us.
“He’s not going to shoot us, is he?” I ask.
“Nah, Vlad here is a chickenshit.”
I notice O’Shea squeezes the mic and raises his voice as he says this last bit.
“What did he mean by a ‘raped pig’?” I ask.
O’Shea shrugs. “He’s not so bright. Stay away from him.”
I look Mitch O’Shea up and down and consider what it might mean for this guy to label someone else “not bright.” Thoughts of black holes come to mind.
The HF squawks again. I adjust the squelch, since Mitch doesn’t seem to care to. Or maybe doesn’t know how. “Beacon 23, this is Vladimir Bostokov on federal marshal duty. Requesting docking procedures. I have a warrant. Over.”
“Fuck him,” Mitch says, with all the disgust of a man with a shitload of debt who feels very close to a large pile of credits and sees another man eyeing that same pile.
“I’ve got to let him,” I say, waving Mitch for the mic.
“You could claim a section 12b, extenuating circumstances related to injury in the line of duty.” He nods at my sling, all the bandages over my little cuts and scrapes, and the array of purple splotches.
“Now you tell me,” I say. I key the mic to radio this Vlad character. “This is the operator of beacon 23. Locking collar Bravo. I’m under quarantine, so please stay aboard. Over.”
“Copy,” Vlad says.
And beside me, Mitch O’Shea rattles in annoyance.
• 13 •
“Look, I don’t really want either of you on my beacon,” I tell O’Shea as we wait by airlock Bravo. “You’ve both got warrants for scans, so you’ll both get them. Then you’ll get the hell off my station.”
“I’m telling you, this guy’s an asshole,” O’Shea warns.
The light above the airlock goes green, signaling the second bounty hunter’s ship has a good magnetic seal and that the atmo on the other side is clean. I didn’t even hear the hull make contact, the landing was so soft. I glance at O’Shea, but he’s fuming and oblivious. Vlad might be an asshole, I want to say, but he’s a damn good pilot.
I key open the airlock. A bewildering sight awaits. There’s a man in a tuxedo on the other side of the door.
“Vladimir Morrow Bostokov,” the man says, extending his hand to me.
I accept his hand with my inverted left. Before I can introduce myself, Vlad shoots his colleague a nasty look. “Mitchell,” he says, in his thick accent.
O’Shea says nothing in return.
Vlad reaches inside his jacket pocket and pulls out a printed sheet of paper. He unfolds it, and I can see it’s the same bounty O’Shea showed me.
“What do to your arm?” Vlad says, leaving out a non-vital word in there somewhere.
“Grav panel issues,” I say. He looks me up and down in my boxers and bandages, seems to be waiting for more than this. “Fluctuations,” I tell him. “Polarity issues. Went for a bounce or two.”
Vlad shrugs. I gesture toward the printed flyer. “And no, I’ve never seen her.”
“Here,” Vlad says, handing me the flyer anyway. “Keep for you.”
Perhaps too eagerly, I accept the flyer and fold it back up, sticking it in the waistband of my boxers.
“Ding-Dong,” I hear myself say.
“What now?” I ask.
The two bounty hunters stare at one another.
“You mind?” I point into Vlad’s ship. He shrugs, and I step past him and enter what looks more like a swanky hotel than a star cruiser. Everything is large clean slabs in that pre-post-second-modern style. Some black and white photos hang on the walls, mostly alien portraits either staring right at the camera or off to the side. They almost look like mug shots, but artfully done. A wet bar in one corner gleams with shiny bottles of all shapes, most of them half-full of a myriad shades of amber.
Vlad waves me forward, leading us past transparent doors that look in on small posh rooms. In one of these rooms, a young man looks up from a bunk, his hands shackled in iron fists. I realize these rooms are cells. I’d kill to live in one. They look amazing.
Behind us, I hear O’Shea jangling and following along. He grumbles enviously about something or other. Vlad tells him to not touch that.
I duck my head and enter a meticulously kept cockpit. You can smell the leather. The place is so nice that even my nose is perking up. O’Shea and Vlad crowd in beside me, and all three of us peer out the canopy.
“I don’t like this,” O’Shea says.
“Me either,” says Vlad.
In the distance, my voice whispers, “Ding-Dong.”
“Look, it’s not my favorite day this week,” I tell the two bounty hunters. “And yesterday, I cleaned the shitter.”
It takes me a moment to find the new arrival, to see what the bounty hunters are seeing. This third ship is matte black. It can be picked out only by the background stars it gobbles and shits out as it moves across the constellations. A dim red and green light glows at each wingtip, but probably below legal illumination levels. A white light flashes from the nose of the ship, directed toward my beacon. Pulses of long and short.
I locate the HF on Vlad’s dash and pick up the mic without asking. Legally, with the ships docked to my beacon, they’re under my command. Warrant or no.
“Won’t need that,” O’Shea says, squinting up at the ship.
I ignore him and squeeze the mic. “Vessel inbound at beacon 23, state your intentions.”
“Won’t work,” Vlad says. “She no talk.”
“Who is that?” I ask the two bounty hunters, who both seem to know something about this ship. “Another friend of yours?”
“I’ve crossed paths with her once or twice,” O’Shea says. And I note the lack of ire in his voice. Maybe even something like respect. “Don’t know her name, but she makes the quiet type sound like an afterbooster in atmo.”
“Well, surely she listens,” I say. I watch the flashes. My Morse is rusty, but the context helps; I get the marshal business bit of her spiel.
“Well, looks like she wants to board. Seeing as I’ve only got the three lock collars, and my lifeboat ain’t moving, you two should clear out. I’ll beam all the scans and logs I have to the lot of you, and to anyone else who shows up.”
Vlad shrugs. He seems to be okay with this. O’Shea grimaces at me. As we pass back through the ship, O’Shea pulls me aside. He’s holding a few bills of Federation money out to me. “Give me a thirty-minute head start,” he whispers.
I turn to study him. He adds: “For getting here first. And saving you a trip to your radio.”
I take the money and pocket it. O’Shea smiles. The boy in the cell is watching us through his long black bangs, but he returns his gaze to the floor when I glare at him. We follow Vlad back to the beacon, where the two colleagues exchange thin frowns and disappear into their respective ships. Using the keypads by the doors, I close the airlocks on both of them.
••••
After the two bounty hunters decouple and pull away, I watch through the porthole as the black hull of the third craft comes into view. There’s no seeing inside it, as its canopy and all its portholes are tinted. The ship quickly fills my porthole, and the pilot docks with a very capable nine on the bump-o-meter. I wait for the light to go green, key open the airlock, and find a ninja standing on the other side.
A bit of a derail here to say what a huge fan I was of Urban Ninja Detroit growing up. All I ever wanted to be was an urban ninja. My parents got me a costume for Halloween when I was seven or eight, and I kept wearing that getup until the split-toe shoes would barely squeeze onto my feet and the pants rode up above my calves. Because of me, everything in my neighborhood was peppered with holes from throwing stars
and blowdarts. Hell, I probably joined the military instead of going to college because of the overdeveloped sense of honor that damn TV show gave me. I’ll also say here that I like to pretend Urban Ninja L.A. never existed. Urban Ninja Chicago wasn’t so bad. But I digress.
“Lemme guess,” I say to the ninja. “Looking for a certain fugitive?”
The bounty hunter, who is dressed from head to toe in all black, with cowl and goggles and everything, nods. I see that most of the black attire is a mix and match of official navy reg gear. I recognize much of it, and even know the decade some of it was in service and the field of action in which it was assigned. Someone hit up the surplus store and found a sale.
“Haven’t seen her,” I say.
The bounty hunter pulls out a small tablet and keys something in, I assume to show me the text or to make the tablet speak out loud. I’m sensing that this person can’t speak, rather than that she chooses not to.
“You want the scans,” I say.
She nods and wipes the screen with the side of her hand. Starts writing something else.
“And radio logs.”
Another nod. And I think I can tell from the movement of shadows across her cowled cheeks that she’s smiling.
“No problem,” I say. “I’ve got a quarantine situation here from NASA, so you’ve got to stay on your ship. I’ll beam you the data. You need anything else?”
For some reason, I’ve always felt the urge to go out of my way for those who ask for the least, rather than those who ask the loudest. But she shakes her head.
“Okay. If you’ll pull away, I’ll go up and get you and your two buddies what you need.” I say this, even though I kinda don’t want her to go. But I’m embarrassed about how I look and how the beacon looks. My life is all about miserable timing.
Instead of turning back to her ship, the bounty hunter hesitates, like there’s something else.
I hazard a guess: “You want a head start, don’t you?”
She nods.
I think of all those mornings sitting in front of my TV watching masterless warriors scale glass towers and fight back the hordes of shoguns sent by the evil Tao-Lin Corporation. I have a soft spot for ladies in all black. Probably the real reason I joined the navy.