Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  He lived with this fear.

  “Mr. Malone, we’re here to bring you back to your duty station,” said one.

  “What duty station? I was discharged.”

  “Your discharge ran against regulations on early release and terminal leave. You’re still obligated to serve out the rest of your term. Since you’ve been gone so long, this automatically rolls over into another full enlistment.”

  “Wait, what? I’m in college!”

  “Not anymore. Sorry,” said the other nameless man in uniform. He took Tanner’s arm while the woman in the other uniform did the same. “You’ll have to come with us.”

  In the blink of an eye, they hauled him out of bed. The boxer briefs he’d slept in suddenly became a full vac suit. The door exiting his apartment led straight out into the street. He sat in an Archangel Navy recon rover while his uniformed escorts flashed one holographic form after another in his face. All too many of them bore his own signature.

  “I don’t get to pack? I don’t even get to lock up my place?” he asked.

  “The Navy isn’t responsible for your personal belongings. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be here when you get back in five years.”

  They didn’t drive far. Not even miles. Certainly not across space and onto another planet. Yet when the doors opened, Tanner was on the flight line on Augustine again, facing the long, dagger-shaped profile of St. Jude.

  He couldn’t go to a post where he at least got along with people. He couldn’t go someplace new. He had to come back here. With these people. Nothing in the years since made any difference; no one moved on, nobody transferred. Nothing that had happened to them all was ever real. That was all a dream. This was the reality.

  “Boot, get your ass over to the cargo bay and grab the cleaning gear,” said Bo’sun Morales. He stomped past with the same air of disdain and ready-to-fly venom Tanner remembered. “We’re taking off in five minutes.”

  Tanner froze. Five minutes? He didn’t have his helmet for his vac suit! The roiling sensation in his stomach reminded him of another danger, too. How long had it been since he had to deal with the shaky artificial gravity systems on St. Jude? Or with being in zero-g? He was bound to get sick again. Really sick.

  He wasn’t qualified for this. He wasn’t ready. He’d been discharged.

  “Fuckin’ move, man,” grumbled Stumpy. Tanner’s fellow non-rate nudged him up the gangway into the ship. “We gotta go. Captain’s pissed you’re late. Freeman’s pissed, too. Everyone’s pissed.”

  “I got discharged,” Tanner tried to explain. “I had all my papers finished. I’m in college.”

  “College? The fuck you do that for? Wasted your money. You’re never gonna finish.”

  The trip to the forward crew berth took no time. Tanner found no helmet of his own, but the PA announced imminent take-off. He threw open another locker and grabbed someone else’s helmet. He’d have to explain later. Maybe at his captain’s mast.

  The ship was darker than he remembered. Quieter. The bulkheads were familiar, though, and the tension. At any minute, someone might go off on him. Somebody might have another shitty job for him to fuck up, landing him in hotter water. His stomach held together, but he felt like this was only the calm before the humiliating storm.

  “Boot! Get down into the cargo bay,” demanded Freeman’s voice on the PA.

  He only had to turn around to find himself there. Heifer and Stumpy joked about something in low tones but stopped as soon as they spotted Tanner. Laughter turned to annoyance.

  Tanner took in a deep breath. He could handle this. He was older now. More confident. He’d been through other stations, learned other things. That had to count for something, right?

  “Boot. Take this.” Morales appeared, shoving a scouring brush in his hands. The tool had a motor with three different settings, but still required an incredible amount of elbow grease—particularly when used in the void of space. Tanner’s heart sank. He knew what he’d hear when he looked up to Morales again. “We’re scrubbing the hull. Let’s get out there.”

  “Don’t puke,” added Stumpy.

  Tanner’s head spun as he passed through the airlock, forgetting when he’d put on a helmet or harness but remembering the disorientation like it was yesterday. His feet found the hull and held firm with magnetic relays. Tanner walked out onto St. Jude’s underbelly.

  Dirt and grime permeated the ship’s hull. The thing somehow attracted dust in space. Tanner also saw one of the dents he’d put in the ship while learning the helm. Oh shit, he thought. Do I remember how to run the helm? Do I even remember any of this shit?

  “What the hell did you go to college for, anyway?” Morales asked.

  “And why’d you join the Navy? Isn’t there anything you’re good at?” put in Stumpy.

  Tanner sank to his knees with the scrubber. He placed the friction-action head against the hull and pushed hard, hitting the activator button with his thumb. While it made no noise in space, the vibrations still traveled up through his arm and in his suit. On a planet’s surface, the tool could make an ear-splitting racket. In space, he had it all to himself.

  “I don’t see anything coming clean yet,” complained Morales. “I haven’t seen you at the gym on base. You been working out?”

  “Yeah, I just haven’t been there while you’ve been there,” said Tanner.

  “Oh? Why not? You avoiding me?”

  Trying, Tanner thought.

  “It ain’t like he ever goes out. Fuckin’ afraid of dating or some shit,” said Stumpy.

  “God, you know he’s a virgin,” chuckled Heifer.

  Tanner felt that like a blow to the gut. He wasn’t any of those things, but the commentary brought a realization: Lynette. She wouldn’t know. God, she wanted to get away from the Navy, too. Would she even want to keep seeing him?

  The stars were swirling again. They did that a lot. His head reacted badly to the sight, but not as badly as his stomach.

  “Why are we doing this now?” Tanner asked. He kept pushing the scrubber. The reflective metallurgy of the hull helped deflect and diminish laser blasts. Tanner understood the need for this chore, but it didn’t need to be done this often. Larger ships like Los Angeles only conducted hull scrubs once every couple of months. St. Jude did this for the captain’s vanity. “We just took off. Don’t we do this on our way back to port?”

  “Fuck, are you gonna whine about everything?” asked Stumpy.

  “You’re not even getting anything done. Are you pressing hard enough?” said Heifer.

  “Why the hell did you join the Navy?” Stumpy prodded.

  “Do you have anything you’re good at?”

  “Hey, you’re not upset, are you?”

  “When we scrub isn’t your call to make, boot,” Morales grunted. “You do what you’re told.”

  Tanner frowned. No matter what job the Navy gave him, even if they stuffed him back on his first ship like this, he wasn’t a boot anymore. He had years in service. Hell, he’d been promoted. He had a rating. This shit was never okay to begin with. It wasn’t okay now. He turned around to say something.

  He stood on a twisted wreck. Half the ship was gone.

  His helmet was gone, too. Morales didn’t have one, either. The bo’sun floated backward out into the void. Tanner choked, unable to breathe, feeling his eyes strain to keep open in a world without air. He reached for Morales, but his shipmate kept drifting. The silent void offered no sign of what had happened, no explanation to be heard. Nothing but wreckage.

  His heart pounded in panic. He didn’t have time for it. Didn’t have time for anything but the lack of air and his shipmate flying out helplessly into space.

  A helmet floated into reach. Tanner could go for it, but Morales would keep going. One or the other. He couldn’t have both. If he turned from Morales, the other man would die. If he left the helmet behind, they’d both die.

  He had no choice. That’s what he told himself, at least. Tanner shoved helmet down on hi
s head and hit the seals. The oxygen system engaged, giving him a breath and fogging the lenses of the faceplate. Tanner crawled out onto the remains of the hull, reaching for Morales as far as he dared, but the bo’sun was already beyond that.

  His whole body should’ve hurt. He remembered it hurting. Panic probably staved off the worst, letting the pain lie in wait to crash down on him later. He felt properly cold, at least, but wet, too. He kept reaching.

  Morales looked back with bulging, bloodshot eyes. No words came from his open mouth. He drifted farther away.

  Tanner waved his arms to catch him, kept flailing, fighting the blankets in a panic. He thrashed his way right out of the cot and onto the floor. Bare feet kicked along the insulated surface.

  “Hey, are you alright?”

  Lights were still out in their shelter. Antonio and Nigel looked down at him. He was covered in sweat, breathing heavily but remembering where he was. He’d been on Minos for two days now. They’d spent the first day setting up and conducting a field walk, and the second doing it all over again after resetting all their grid markers. Today was day three.

  St. Jude was gone. Morales was gone. That part of his life was over.

  “You okay?” Antonio tried again.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Bad dreams. Sorry.”

  “Who’s Morales?”

  Tanner opened his mouth to speak but caught himself. He was awake enough for old habits to reassert themselves. Neither of these guys needed to hear the truth about Morales. Nobody did. Not when it might get back to people who still mourned and missed him. They didn’t need to know the man Tanner remembered. That wouldn’t do anyone any good now.

  “Somebody I used to know,” Tanner croaked. “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost dawn,” said Antonio. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Same,” said Nigel. He turned back to his cot.

  Tanner picked himself up off the floor. His blanket was soaked with his sweat. He threw it onto the cot and shuffled into the little bathroom attached to their shelter. Once behind the door, the others wouldn’t see him put his face in his hands. They wouldn’t ask any more awkward questions.

  It was easier to shake off this time. Having people around and an entirely new environment probably helped. He wasn’t sure. Ultimately, he’d hoped to shake this stupid dream entirely, but it kept coming back with only minor variations. Sometimes it ended with Morales. Other times he’d drift through the same fears about being stuck back in the Navy until the dream faded into something new, yet still leaving him with all the same stressful memories when he woke up.

  He figured he’d have more dreams about combat. More dreams about losing people he cared about. More dreams about being hurt or dying. After a lot of conversation with his therapists, they told him no, this made sense. It was grim, but it made sense. In combat, he felt empowered. He knew how to handle combat. He hadn’t known how to handle his first ship.

  Tanner looked in the mirror, twenty-three years old and a civilian again. A civilian for life, as far as he was concerned. Hopefully someday he’d figure out how to handle it.

  * * *

  “Oh, we’ve definitely found something significant here,” said the professor. “Right where the peregrine pinged an anomaly, too, isn’t it? Yes, you’re doing fine. Excellent work.”

  It was the first approval Tanner had heard from him. They knelt on the bluff overlooking the canyon, close enough to see the edge but out of sight from the main camp. The morning sun was well over the horizon. Until now, Tanner had thought Vandenberg sent him up here to get him away from the other students. The professor’s interest in the flat, dark circle uncovered in the packed earth dispelled that notion. The guy wasn’t so petty after all.

  Tanner had cleared the dust and dirt from his find carefully, digging more with his brush than his trowel, let alone anything more advanced. The last thing he wanted to do was put new scrapes on a find.

  His professor rapped on the circular shape with the edge of his trowel. Tanner swallowed his gut reaction. He thought people were supposed to be gentler with alien artifacts.

  “Hear that?” Vandenberg grinned. “Sounds like there’s some space under there, doesn’t it? Some trapped air, or maybe the artifact is hollow.”

  “You think it’s bigger than this? I figured it was another of those plates.”

  “No, no, no, you’re still digging around the edges here, you see? You haven’t hit the bottom of the edge. There’s no telling how far down this goes.”

  “So you think this is something new?” Tanner asked. His hope and excitement rose.

  “I suspect it’s a piece of ancient Minoan pottery, like the kind found at the Sutherland and Aoki sites. Grace and Jishen pulled a partial example out of the stream bed before I came up.”

  That put a check on his hopes. Discovering anything out here was significant, but a duplicate of something already discovered in two different places was less momentous. Other potsherds had already turned up down in the canyon floor, too. Vandenberg’s tone wasn’t as animated now. His interest ran from eager to mild in seconds.

  “So do we mark it and move on?” There weren’t many other hits on the peregrine’s scanners up here, but Tanner had plenty to do back down in the canyon.

  “Goodness, no,” Vandenberg chuckled. “You’ll have to dig it out right now.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s your discovery. You’ve had all the training. Keep at it. Take your time. Let me know when you have it free. I’ll come up for the final pull from the ground.” Vandenberg brushed himself off. “Be careful. Don’t be surprised if it’s cracked or in pieces, but do the best you can to keep it all intact. Take lots of video. You can grab one of the survey pieces and record all your work from start to finish if you want.”

  “Wait, it has to be done right now?” Tanner asked. He’d only been up here since breakfast. The team had bigger plans than this for the day.

  “Ah. Yes, it’ll have to be now. You’ve already exposed it, you see. While it was buried, it was in a protected state. Frozen in time, essentially. Now it’s vulnerable to the elements. If we want to protect it, we have to do it ourselves. This is your project now. Whatever tools you need, come down and get them, but you’ll need to stay with this until you’re finished.”

  Vandenberg walked away looking pleased with himself. Tanner watched him disappear down the path to the canyon floor. The professor said nothing about anyone else coming to help. This one was all on Tanner.

  He looked at the path, then to his surroundings. Dunes stretched as far as the eye could see in three directions. In the fourth, on the far side of the canyon, the dunes were limited only by the mountains. Tanner was all alone up here.

  His excitement dimmed. His suspicions returned. Everyone else was working together on the camp and the site survey. He was on his own digging up an old pot for what might be hours. It was only day three.

  “Well, fuck.”

  * * *

  Tanner spent most of the morning on his knees. He dug around the obsidian jug, assuming that’s what it was, carefully brushing away ash and earth a centimeter at a time. He shifted from his knees to sitting on his hip, then back to his knees when that became more uncomfortable. At the discovery of every little rock pressed up against the jug, he had to stop and take a picture and scan to make sure it really was a rock and not something else before he could clear it away. Every little thing turned out to be a new task.

  He knew the professor was right about sticking with it. He couldn’t walk away until the job was done. It wasn’t exactly a thrilling way to spend his day.

  Once upon a time, this sort of work offered shelter. A long and tedious task back on St. Jude could let him keep his head down without anyone criticizing or flinging their venom at him. That was years ago, though. He’d moved past all-day projects of scraping out gunk from the shower corners like some savage without ultrasonic tools. He’d gotten out of the social doghouse, too.

 
; Or at least he was out for a little while.

  Down in the canyon were a dozen college students like him. They generally got along, and if many of them were still distant or leery—especially after their rough and violent arrival—no one harassed him. They could work together.

  Tanner was up here alone, surrounded by wastelands, digging through ashes and dirt for a bit of someone else’s wreckage. He wondered if there was a metaphor in that for his own life.

  Oh God, how fucking morbid are you gonna get? He shoved the metaphors aside. This was why he never tried his hand at poetry.

  His stomach rumbled, prompting thoughts of lunch and a break from the tedium. Tanner gave himself permission to stand up and stretch. With his arms over his head and hands together as he bent back as far as he could, he saw the glint of metal in the sky.

  Two glints. As they grew bigger, Tanner recognized them as the Vanguard transports used by Precision Solutions. Weapons jutted from the wings that held their antigrav engines. With the optics systems on those things, the pilots could probably count his eyelashes from here. The aircraft didn’t behave in any tactical manner he recognized, suggesting this wasn’t a threat.

  Tanner sighed. They’d only been excavating for a day and already the local mercenary junta was coming out for a visit. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He sank back down, took up his trowel and brush, and got back to work.

  * * *

  Tactical Recon Specialist Clint Stockton leaned forward in his chair with a deep scowl on his square-jawed face. He glared at the video screen on the cockpit dashboard, then twisted in his seat to look back at the rest of the tactical recon team. Everyone was dressed much the same, loaded with weapons and armor and sporting tight, menacing military haircuts.

  “Did that little fucker roll his eyes at us?” Stockton asked.

  Seated beside him, Major Dylan sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “Looks like he did. Martinez, land us down there by the vehicles,” Dylan instructed the pilot. “We don’t need to worry about sweeping around the canyon. The guy we’re here to talk to is right in front of us.”