Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  Then, at my request—my insistence—Patty tipped the box up, I eased a hand-truck underneath, and then brought the box outside myself. Patty insisted on joining me. She could see how unsteady I was on my feet.

  Everyone at the checkpoints knows what the big boxes are. What they mean. You still have to go through each station but the clearance process suddenly gets a lot more perfunctory. No one wants to look at them for long. The Gnome doesn’t bother stopping the elevator to scrutinize you. Even Rosh becomes a different person: no chit-chat, no script.

  The worst for them is it’ll be a while before they even know who it is. There’s no access to the Hangar security cameras anywhere other than in Bird’s Eye downstairs—that way only people who are cleared to go down to Hangar Eleven get to know what’s downstairs. Lauren, Rosh, the Gnome, everyone else upstairs just has to watch the big, bright box go by and wonder who we lost.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, A van with similar garish, harmless coloring (and a big old cartoon fish named Sammy Sculpin on the sides) was waiting at the front gate. The vans were like the boxes: jolly colors, smiling driver, no tinting on the glass. Nothing glum about moving “marine bio-samples” from lab to lab, right? The driver even made a crack about one box meaning it was a slow day, and I was just tired and focused enough to not even fantasize about breaking his nose.

  I was already starting to realize what had to happen next. Now that we were down a man.

  The box was loaded up, the driver tipped me a wink, and the van pulled away, out of sight.

  And thus did it end with Chatty Andy.

  * * *

  HARP CASUALTIES happen; Andy wasn’t the first, not by far.

  Back when Lloyd was just a junior science grunt here at Quill, Dr. Wendy Beritov, the head of the xenobiological division, had gotten it into her head that the Harp was dangerous because what it emitted affected the alkalinity of the blood of those nearby—that that was why there was some sort of hormonal suppressive effect and that it could be easily countermanded. She was convinced if she stood inside the engine room while breathing through a contraption that would essentially provoke acidosis, she’d make it through a Power-Up event intact, with just the symptoms of acidosis to deal with on the other side.

  It hadn’t worked. When the door had been reopened, she’d been just like Andy: sitting down, staring blankly, utterly disconnected. She’d been brought to the medics, examined thoroughly, and kept under observation for forty-eight hours. She refused to eat or drink the entire time—although perhaps “refused” is too active a word for it. She just … wouldn’t. And rather than hook her up to drips and tubes and force nutrients into her for God knows how long, keeping her alive without any “life-force,” devastating everyone who had worked alongside her, who were trying to continue her work, the decision was made. She was a battlefield casualty. She had to be put out of her misery.

  That’s when we got a real sense of just how devastating the Harp’s effects could be. That’s when we made sure we had a policy in place for its victims. A certain amount of Harp exposure and a person could bounce back. But there was a tipping point.

  Harp casualties happen. And Quill Marine casualties happen. Some people can’t handle Moss, the spaceship, what it all means cosmically. Some people can’t handle keeping the secrets. And that’s the thing about Quill Marine. You fuck up, you fall apart, whatever it is—we can’t just send you back to your life. Not knowing this.

  I didn’t do the math then, but later I tried to figure it out. Andy was the seventh person I’d had to kill at Quill Marine. The seventh Turndown. The seventh pickup service. I had wheeled each one up myself. Every single time.

  Sevens are lucky, right?

  You would have been my seventh if your first day had gone poorly.

  Lucky you.

  * * *

  BY THE time we made it through the checkpoints the Hangar had mostly filled back up. The thunder had rolled away and was replaced with the gentle murmur of life moving on. But if I really concentrated, I could still hear it reverberating. It clung to the walls like the smell of smoke after a fire.

  Straight off the elevator, I headed toward the bathrooms and Patty kept pace as I crossed the wide floor.

  “Chief, you look wiped. Maybe—”

  I stopped at the door to the bathroom, swaying on my feet just a little and hoping Patty didn’t notice. “We need to replace Andy on the special team for Haydon’s visit.”

  “Christ, do you wanna be thinking about that now? You should—”

  “It’s Monday. There’s no time to waste.”

  “Okay. I can get you a list of candidates pronto. It’s gotta be someone smart and reliable, who can stay on fucking script.”

  There’s nothing.

  It’s nothing.

  “You know who keeps cool?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The new guy, skinny guy, what’s his name.”

  “You mean New Fish? He’s only been here, like, a week.”

  “He plays it low, keeps his shit together.”

  “It’s just—I mean, Dak—”

  “His name’s Matt Salem,” I said, my head spinning. “I think he can hack it.”

  She shrugged. “Then we’ll rearrange his schedule. Again.”

  “Great.”

  And I went to the bathroom and threw up.

  6

  DID I ever tell you about the time my dad took me fishing when I was ten? I honestly can’t remember. It was one of those formative moments when I realized what life and death actually meant.

  * * *

  THE NEXT morning I was feeling mostly recovered. I’d flopped onto my bed that night, still in my clothes, and slept for ten hours on top of the covers. The Harp was a real motherfucker. But as I pulled into my parking space, stopped the car, and began walking toward the building, it hit me: “Matt’s already been on four hours. He’ll have seen his new orders. He’ll know we’re back on rotation together.” As Practical Dak and Adamant Dak began haggling over how to handle this information, Lloyd fell in step beside me.

  “Dak.”

  Which one do you want?

  “Oh—morning, Lloyd.”

  “Yeah,” Lloyd grunted. A bad sign. Shit’s bad when Lloyd’s monosyllabic.

  Then he spoke: “The, uh … the young man yesterday…”

  “Squared away.”

  “Right, right, um … if, um, there’s anything with, with his family—”

  “Lloyd: end of subject.”

  We walked.

  “I just thought a successful test … the suit, the N5 coating … would feel different.”

  * * *

  SOME THIRTY minutes or so later, Patty assembled everyone on the Hangar floor.

  “Security chief on deck!” she called out, silencing the casual chatter. She was leaning on the ship. I came up and stood next to her.

  Yesterday damaged me badly—and I’d be hard-pressed to say if the Harp hurt me more than taking care of Andy. I’ve known people who could have carried out that sort of task with no problem—with glee, even—but I’m not one of them. That being said, if you were to ask me if I’d prefer today’s task of addressing the entire goddamn staff about next week’s nightmare, I’d probably jump into one of those brightly colored boxes myself. I hate speaking in front of groups like this. But, as with yesterday’s duty, I got through this one in the same manner: committing whole fucking hog. Making eye contact with every person in front of me. Not showing a goddamn atom of weakness.

  “Okay, everybody. Look. We’re all from different corners of the armed forces but we all learned some version of ‘Bad situations make good soldiers,’ am I right? This is a bad situation. Full stop. We just had to lose a guy in the worst way right on top of finding out that the man who pays all our salaries moved his visit up a week and will now be here in—how many days, Patty?”

  “Five.”

  “And bear in mind, Mr. Haydon and his team—however big or small that te
am may be—will be trained in exactly none of the Moss protocol or Object E protocol or Harp protocol that’s standard for anyone else admitted to this Hangar. I’m sure they are all very good at whatever it is they do, but they also do not know shit about shit.” That drew some chuckles. Ragging on the elite always works. “Our job is to protect these people from our assets and protect our assets from these people. That’s gonna take precision handling, firm but courteous. All of you are here”—that’s when my eyes flicked to you. You were listening. Staring—“because you keep cool and you stay on your patch. That’s gonna be key to making sure Haydon and Moss get through Monday in one piece. Patty and I are gonna get back to you with more targeted assignments by EOD, then Saturday and Sunday we run drills.”

  No one groaned, no one voiced any displeasure, not a peep. The kind of people who get pissy about losing a weekend don’t tend to wash up here. I caught movement behind the group: Harrison signaling me. Lloyd stood right behind him.

  “All right,” I said to the group, “hit your shifts, but do not leave without picking up your detail in the staff room. We’ll reassemble at the time indicated. Now go work for a living.”

  The staff fanned out to their various positions throughout Hangar Eleven, and inside I breathed a gale’s worthy sigh of relief that that was over. Except—

  Immediately, the worst case scenario: you were walking straight at me.

  Patty was saying something but I couldn’t hear her. I was too busy scrambling, wondering which Dak was going to be handling this assault.

  “Hey, what, you need something?” I blurted.

  “Um … I’m … on cockpit duty?” you replied. Fuck me sideways, you were just walking past me to your first shift.

  “Yeah, okay, fine, do your thing,” I mumbled.

  “That was the plan,” and you slipped past me and into the ship.

  “What, is he bugging you now?” Patty snorted. “You asked for him.”

  Harrison approached, with Lloyd tailing right behind him.

  “Bird’s Eye, Director?” I asked. “Looks like you’ve got news.”

  Harrison grunted and said, “Let’s step inside the ship, Dak. We need to look at something together.”

  “In the ship?”

  Harrison nodded and I noticed how pale Lloyd looked. “We just got an interesting call from Sierra,” Harrison said. Then looked at me, straight-faced. “You’re gonna fucking love this.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, I stood in another scalding shower. I was distantly aware my skin was itching from the heat—I wasn’t really sure how long I’d been in there—but I had a lot to mull over.

  Are we really gonna go through with this?

  It appears so.

  I thought about how we all stood, crammed in the engine room of the ship, the Harp sitting in the middle of our little circle, staring at Harrison in disbelief as he told us about his conversation with Sierra.

  We looked at him like he’d just taken his dick out in church.

  “Chief Prentiss,” he’d said after a few moments of buffering, “you know, if anyone’s been here long enough to say, ‘You’re kidding me, right?’ it’s you.”

  He was inviting my outrage. But I had trouble finding my voice. After a second or two of me shaking my head with my mouth open, Patty offered: “Can I say it?”

  Harrison ignored her. “I’m as surprised as any of you. When I made the call to D.C., I fully expected to be talking about Lloyd’s successful N5-suit test the whole time. Instead, most of the phone call was about that unfortunate young man.”

  Now, standing there in the shower, I felt like I could hear the agitated, unfettered roar of the Harp in the pounding water. I shivered and made the water hotter.

  “All Haydon wanted to ask about was everything we’d learned about the Harp’s effect on unprotected human bodies. And then once he’d squeezed all that out of us … Tell them, Lloyd.”

  “He, ah, ah,” Lloyd stammered his way into the conversation, “he asked if the Harp was field-deployable.”

  Patty’s head titled. “As in…?”

  “As in ‘against hostiles,’” Harrison said. The thought landed like a physical weight.

  “Well, clearly, obviously, there’s a range of issues to consider,” Lloyd began. Harrison cut him off.

  “Can we move this thing or not?”

  “Can we move it, or can we move it safely?” I muttered, knowing Haydon’s only real concern was with the first one.

  I knelt at the base of the Harp, examining it, lightly moving my hands across it to see what gave. Lloyd hunkered down with me.

  “These pins,” he pointed. “Obviously—obviously, these would, uh, have to be pulled out.” It looked like the pins, two featureless oblongs made out of some dull, metallic substance, just passed through the Harp and its base. It looked like you could pull them out like the wooden dowels in cheap furniture. “And then, I suppose…” Lloyd made a lifting gesture.

  “But, we’re not—” Patty began and then shut herself up. Her face was sour, perturbed.

  “What, Patty?” I asked.

  “I just mean … this thing literally killed a guy yesterday, are we seriously—”

  “Yes,” Harrison shot back. “A weapon has to be two things: it has to hurt people and it has to be portable. Haydon was very specific on this point: we’re under direct orders to showcase the Harp’s effects outside this engine room.”

  Patty was unconvinced, but she held her tongue for the moment. We had more logistical fish to fry. For instance, how heavy the thing was and how many people we’d need to carry it. With the four of us in the room right now we could attest there was no way to really fit more people in, and the surface area of the Harp made it unlikely to accommodate more than a couple pairs of hands. So we decided to start with two.

  “But let’s make enough for four,” I said.

  “Four what?” Patty asked.

  “Lloyd Suits,” I responded absently. Then, immediately upon realizing no one else was calling them that in their heads, “Or whatever they are, N5 suits. We’ll try lifting with two people, and we’ll keep two other people on backup if that’s not enough.”

  “I do like ‘Lloyd Suits,’” Harrison mumbled supportively under his breath.

  “How long to make at least three more?”

  Lloyd’s considerable eyebrows drew down. “Well, obviously—obviously, the seals alone take … and then you have to run tests … We’re talking about, conservatively, two weeks? Though, I’d prefer—”

  “We need them by Saturday.”

  He gaped at me like a fish in a tank.

  “That’s insane,” he managed to belch once his voice started working again.

  “We need at least a day between the test and Haydon’s arrival to rework logistics based on what we learn, Lloyd. That’s the most wiggle-room I can give you.”

  His mouth continued opening and closing.

  Dead fish and living fish, a small voice intoned somewhere.

  “But, Chief,” Patty added, “it’s not just the suits, it’s not just the people carrying the Harp—it’s—this room is the only thing protecting the whole base! Shit, maybe all of California! The minute we carry this thing outside—”

  Something in Harrison’s sagging eyes clicked into focus. “But what is a room? A room is just a big container. Can we treat smaller containers with N5?”

  “Right,” I nodded, “one to carry it out, one to store it in. That’s doable, right, Lloyd?”

  Lloyd was still gaping, practically flopping. “What?!”

  “But I don’t get it,” Patty continued. “Who are we even running Haydon’s test on? Is someone here supposed to volunteer to get Harp-nuked? Cuz I’d rather—”

  “My understanding is that Haydon’s team … will be bringing a subject with them.” Harrison spoke softly, like one ashamed.

  “Like … a person subject?”

  Harrison looked at her as if to say, “You know better than to e
ven ask otherwise.”

  For a moment, we all became Lloyd: dumbly staring with mouths propped slightly open. Like we’d forgotten how to breathe.

  Finally Patty spoke.

  “Okay. So we just need two volunteers to risk their lives moving the Harp and the whole team to be cool with watching a little sanctioned murder.”

  “Patty.” Harrison glared.

  Practical Dak took over while the rest of me processed the information. “How can Haydon watch that test without being Harp-nuked himself?”

  “I guess … we’d need a see-through version of the engine room,” Harrison mused.

  I looked at Lloyd. “Can we make that happen too?”

  Finally, Lloyd’s stasis started to splinter. “I—I—I don’t understand—what’s being asked of me—!”

  “This all seems very achievable to me,” Harrison stated kindly.

  “Achievable?”

  Lloyd’s splintering could get out of hand. We’d seen it a couple of times before when he gets pushed over an edge. Nothing dangerous, but nothing pleasant. He was already making very small loops with his body, spinning his hips like he was pacing around the room but without moving his feet. This whole time I had been at least vaguely aware that you were here, listening, so I called to the cockpit.

  “Salem?”

  You came to the doorway. “Yeah, Chief?”

  “Can you walk Lloyd? He just needs a little break.”

  “I—it’s—to use the word ‘achiev—’”

  “May I make a request first?” you asked. I felt my face flush in annoyance.

  “No, you can carry out my order.”

  “You said you need two people carrying the Harp. I’d like to volunteer to be one.”

  I don’t think I realized just how dangerous this mission might be until I noticed the reaction I was having internally. I wanted to lie down and take a deep breath. But, of course, that wasn’t gonna happen.

  What the fuck are you doing?!

  Harrison wasn’t having it either. “Well, that seems strange to me, Salem. Why would you do that?”

  “Because I don’t want to be the New Fish anymore. I want to graduate.” You were looking at him straight, standing tall, not giving any airs. I’m not going to lie, either—it was startlingly attractive.