Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  “But you understand what I’m looking at. I’m the guy who has to make decisions on resource allocation. Sierra spends a lot of money on Quill Marine. If he starts rotting, if he starts falling apart, then I can’t go the freak show route. That means I lose half of the revenue stream I’m ever gonna get outta here.”

  Harrison looked hard at Lloyd. Lloyd swallowed.

  “Yes, yes, of course, and, given that—as you no doubt observed in the chronological hologram display—given that the growth is receding at a rate of five thousand microns per year, given that rate of recession…”

  “How long before it runs out, Senior Man?”

  “I’d estimate at least another two years.” It came out of Lloyd’s mouth smoothly, unrushed, completely clinically.

  Haydon took it as bad news, which made it even better. He sighed with the sense of put-upon-ness that only the disgustingly rich can conjure.

  “Shit. All right, we’re gonna revisit this in a year, then. If I’m looking at half this amount of moss at that time? I’m cashing him in.” And he patted Moss on the skinny sloping shoulder.

  * * *

  I WAS the last one to squeeze back through the fissure and out of the ship. As I passed by, you said:

  “How’s powering through going?”

  “So far so good,” I replied.

  Instead of running around in circles giggling, I kept walking.

  9

  LIKE ALL dreadful things, at last the time arrived.

  A row of folding chairs, bookended by klieg lights on black metal stands, had been set up in front of the cube. It was about ten minutes before the Harp was expected to do its thing … and so, of course, Trip Haydon was on the phone.

  He was yelling at some guy named John. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the argument was about, but I heard the words “ballot measure” and “purchased land” and various other oligarchical dick measurements.

  So I stood there, fully ensconced in a sealed Lloyd Suit, sweating (God, were they this stuffy last time?), another suit for Haydon under my arm, waiting for him to hang up. Every minute that ticked by, inching closer to the inevitability of a Power-Up, the interior of my suit seemed to go up a degree.

  Finally I tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I’m sorry—sir?”

  He whipped around and promptly laughed in my bubble-helmeted face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said into the phone, “Neil Armstrong needs me.” Then at me: “Why are you standing here?”

  I held up the suit in my arms. “Purely a safety issue, sir, I need to help you put on this protective—”

  He went back to his phone call. “We’re gonna talk again while I’m in flight, John, and I better not hear the word ‘referendum’ come out of your mouth or I’m opening a window and throwing my phone away.” In one fluid motion, he hung up, stuffed his phone back in a pocket, and said to me: “The cube is treated with the same substance on that suit, yes?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s—”

  “Then what do I need that for?”

  “Just a redundant measure of—”

  “Right: redundant. Can we please just do the thing?”

  And the thing was, he wasn’t wrong. The cube was thoroughly coated with N5. Hell, I was wearing a Lloyd Suit mostly just so Haydon wouldn’t feel self-conscious wearing his. But now it was “Do I insist and lose my job, or do I risk the slightest chance that something goes wrong, Haydon gets hurt, and lose my job?” Over his shoulder I could see Shel and Vonn leading X—whose wrists were bound in front of her with thick black electronic cuffs, and who was now wearing a pinstriped skirt and blouse—to the cube and I figured, if I had to lose my job either way I’d just as soon get a dead or debilitated Trip Haydon out of the deal.

  “Yes, sir. We’ve brought chairs in for you and your—”

  “Rock and roll.”

  He sat. His assistant did the same.

  “Okay, Patty,” I radioed, “go ahead and winch up the cube, but make it fast; Haydon wouldn’t wear the suit.” I kept that last part as private as I could.

  “Understood,” she confirmed up in Bird’s Eye.

  The winch pulled the cube up several feet. I signaled to Shel and Vonn and they gently nudged the still-hooded figure in under the cube’s borders, next to the Harp.

  “X is in place, Patty, take her back down,” I murmured into the comm. Of course, I meant take the cube back down, but given the circumstances it almost sounded like a plea for clemency.

  The cube groaned its way back down, trapping the woman named X and the Harp together. I gave the room a quick scan … which is when I saw the little look Vonn and Shel were giving each other. It didn’t even take a second, and maybe I wouldn’t have even spotted it if I weren’t so hyperaware of similar matters.

  They shared a look like a caress.

  Goddammit. This must be what Grant was—

  “Chief … what was it again?” Now it was Haydon’s turn to surprise me. I didn’t jump or spin around—I simply smiled tightly and looked him in the eyes. He was still sitting, leaning over his knees like a bored teenager.

  “Prentiss, sir.”

  “Is this thing happening or not?”

  “Are you set with how this is going to go down?”

  He spun a finger as if he could fast-forward all this. “It gets weird and loud and the power goes out.”

  “Just to make clear that the power outage is temporary and we don’t anticipate any—”

  “I’m not scared of a blackout, Chief Prentiss. Can we get started?”

  I came over and stood by the tiny little audience seating.

  “We’re ready for lights, Patty,” I radioed. The klieg lights popped on, illuminating the cube with unforgiving harshness. The rest of the lights in the Hangar dimmed.

  “I feel like there should be some sort of music or something,” Haydon smirked to Needledick. “Something triumphant and fucking—” He made a fist and pumped it.

  We sat in silence for a few seconds.

  “The Harp is a little unpredictable in terms of exact start time—” I began and Haydon waved me off.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Uncuff her.”

  “Now?”

  “I’da said ‘later’ if that’s what I meant.”

  I radioed to Patty to disengage X’s cuffs. She copied and a second later, after a quiet, almost polite, beep, the cuffs—another fine Sierra product, the 2027s, complete with transponder, global positioning, and remote control—clattered to the floor. We had placed microphones inside the cube and when the cuffs landed they sounded like they’d been made of titanium.

  With her hands free, X pulled the hood from her head. She noticed she had an audience right away but going from the hood to the lights had momentarily blinded her and she took a second to adjust.

  She was a woman in her forties. The light allowed me to see more details of her clothes: they were smart and fashionable but they showed unmistakable signs of distress. I realized: these must have been the clothes she’d been arrested in. Her graying brown hair was pulled back and it frizzed madly at the edges. When she spoke, her voice was amplified by the microphones inside.

  “Whoa, that was rough.” The amplification and the resonant space accentuated the frantic, brittle edge to her voice. It was palpable—her panic, her rage, and most especially her ruthless desire to hide all of it behind a mask of prim cheeriness—I could feel it in my teeth. “Um, let’s see, I’m … Is that a harp? Okay, weird. Okay.” She looked around at the Hangar. “Windowless room, nothing new, but big windowless room is new. Actually—shit—really big windowless room. I think this is bigger than the outdoors. I almost wanna run laps or—”

  She walked right into the front wall of the cube with a heavy thud.

  “Shit! Ow. Shit. All right. All right, lesson learned, I’m not actually in a giant room, I’m in a see-through box inside a giant room. Ha. I must look like a really great mime to you guys, like I’m pretending to walk into walls. So
is someone gonna tell me what we’re doing here, or…”

  Silence. We all just watched. And waited.

  “Or not. You’re not going to. So I talk? Is that the idea? I do the talking? It makes sense, that’s how I got the gig in the first place. They came to my cell, they’re like, ‘Do this thing and it’s five years shaved off,’ get out while I still have some brown hairs, and I’m like, ‘Why now? I’ve been on the waitlist forever. Why am I finally getting a shot?’ You know what they said? ‘Because you’re chatty.’”

  I heard Harrison murmur under his breath, “Jesus.” I could feel his desire for a drink radiating off of him—even my Lloyd Suit didn’t block it out.

  “Patty, I’m not crazy,” I whispered into my comm, “but we are at a hundred hours, right?”

  “Past it,” Patty radioed back, equally quiet, equally perturbed. What the hell was happening, Harp? Performance anxiety?

  “First I thought he meant the whole whistle-blowing thing,” X was continuing in her sharp, needly voice, “but now I’m thinking he actually just meant my everyday demeanor. I’m chatty. I’m a motormouth. I talk. Don’t know why, just always do. Hey, how come there’s one person in, like, a space suit and no one else? Where are we?! You really are just gonna stare at me, is that the thing? Maybe I should just stare back, total silence, see who blinks fir—okay let’s be honest, I’m not gonna do that, plus someone has to talk about the elephant in the room, right? Did you guys seriously lock me up with a harp?”

  She went over to the Harp. Nudged it. Even plucked at its strings, which yielded a flat, muddy, barely audible twunk.

  God. No one’s ever done that before. It sounded so wrong.

  “Correction: a really shitty harp. Did you want a little concert? Or am I an angel now?”

  She was chuckling—close to hysterics—and waving her arms in small, bizarre, snakelike undulations. Her impression of an angel, I guess. But the expression on her face was barely bridled fury.

  Meanwhile, the Harp did nothing.

  “All right, Mike, this is actually starting to get—” Haydon sighed, still smiling his all-teeth-no-eyes smile.

  “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no way to control…,” Harrison replied.

  At the sound of their voices, X had frozen like a deer, eyes wide.

  “Control? Control what? Control what, Mike?” she snarled. No answer. “You, talking-guy, you sound … I know you…” After a moment with no answer, she scooped up the Harp and began walking the perimeter of her box, plucking the strings, waving it around, while she spoke. “Yeah. ’Cause see”—twunk—“that’s the only thing I could think—and I had a looooot of time to think in that box—is that if they wanted me for this ’cause I’m chatty…’cause I know it’s not what I’m chatty about.” Twunk. “None of you want me to keep chatting about the Sierra-designed voting machines, right? Right?!”

  “Chief, should we maybe get her to put that down?” Patty’s nervous, quiet voice in my ear. I had been thinking the same thing … but something had occurred to me.

  “No,” I whispered back. “Let her do her thing.”

  “So maybe”—twunk—“it’s not the content, maybe it’s just the chattiness, in and of itself, which leads me to think…”—twunk—“you all wanna try something on me to see if it makes me stop being chatty. Is that it? Huh? I mean, you can’t have an after without a before.”

  “This is awful,” I heard a voice whisper nearby. I turned to look. It was Shel.

  Haydon had also turned to see who’d just made that little editorial, but before he could spit whatever venom I knew was brewing in his throat … the Harp began to hum.

  “Oh, thank Christ,” Harrison actually muttered.

  “I figured it out, didn’t I?” X was saying. Shouting, really. “Wait. What am I hearing?”

  The Harp intensified. It dropped to the ground, the hand holding it suddenly too weak to bear it up. I had a moment of worry—maybe the Harp was as fragile as it was light—but it seemed undaunted by the fall. X began to sag. She dropped onto her knees.

  “Is, is this normal?” Needledick gulped.

  “Hey.” The groggy, amplified voice from inside the cube began to fade in and out, a radio station in the mountains. “… Is that … lemme guess: this isn’t a real har—”

  The Harp reached its culminating, penetrative peak. All the power in Quill Marine cut off. Just as the klieg lights went out, I saw her fall. Wilt.

  Total darkness. Total silence, except for the Harp coming down from its crescendo.

  “I’m sorry, are the lights gonna come on, or—” Needledick sounded positively terrified.

  “Yes, sir, momentarily,” I said, gamely concealing my disgust.

  “I want total fucking silence in this room right now,” Haydon said. The sound of his voice in the complete darkness was like a hand under the bed gripping your ankle.

  “Hear that?” he asked.

  What we heard was X not talking.

  The sound from the Harp began to recede. The power and lights began to come back on. Needledick ululated with relief.

  She was lying on her side, eyes open, staring … Except—no, that sounds too active, like it was something she was doing for a purpose. More like her eyes were just open and we happened to be in the direction they were facing.

  “Okay, so—” Harrison began.

  Haydon was already up on his feet. “Wait.”

  He walked over to the glass cube and knelt down as close to X as he could get across the barrier. Then, softly, gently rapped on the glass with a knuckle.

  “Hey,” he whispered. “What do you want to say?”

  Her voice came over the amplification, flat and robotic—although the dejection it conveyed was nothing if not human, the sound of giving up. “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?” Haydon asked. I expected devilish glee, but his brow was knit. Serious. Sympathetic. This was all just another puzzle.

  “Yeah,” X sighed.

  “But you’re a whistle-blower. You made important secrets public. Don’t you want—”

  “Pointless.”

  “Pointless?”

  “Worthless.”

  “You have a lover. You and your lover have a child. Are they—?”

  “Worthless.”

  “Your family is worthless?”

  “No point.”

  The assistant gasped. “Wowww…”

  “No point to what?” Haydon demanded—still gentle.

  “Anything,” X said quietly, assuredly. “They always win. You always win.”

  “Sure, but … you know, I’m in charge. I could release you. Right now, if I wanted to. Do you want me to?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To lie here.”

  “What else?”

  “To lie here.”

  Haydon rose from where he was kneeling. He looked at me.

  “This happens every hundred hours?”

  “Well, not always exactly—”

  “Or if you move it, right?”

  “That’s only happened the once so far, but—”

  “What was it just now? Was it the timing or because she was screwing with it?”

  Actually, that’s a good question.

  “I’m, I’m sure the Harp Team will provide a detailed—”

  Haydon called out. “Mike!”

  Harrison rose.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Trip Haydon said, buttoning his jacket. “Very, very soon. Thanks for a great lunch. Who can show me out?”

  * * *

  SHEL ESCORTED them back up and out. As soon as Parker confirmed their cars were gone, I ordered Patty to raise the cube again and to call for Turndown Service. Once I could, I walked over to the woman whose only name I knew was X.

  “Ma’am,” I said.

  “Mm.”

  “Do you wanna say anything?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said as I dragged her out of the perimete
r of the cube and then put two bullets in her head.

  Thunder, rolling across the world. But more distant than before.

  This time there was no need, no impulse, for reflection. This was a job, not an accident. This was as it should be—and we still had more work to do.

  I looked at the Harp. No blood had sprayed in that direction so Patty was able to lower the cube back over it right away. We still had to put the fucker back where it belonged, but for the time being it was fine where it was. We all deserved a break—and besides, Turndown Service would be here any minute. I called out to whomever was nearby:

  “Who wants to help me get out of this fucking suit?”

  And there you were, hands already undoing the seals. You looked at me, so close, with the most beautiful smile I think I’d ever seen. A living snapshot of a moment I wasn’t expecting to be so perfect.

  “Oh, I love you,” I sighed, grateful, utterly sincere … totally fucking out loud.

  Uh …

  I had just a moment to contemplate my chosen form of suicide before everyone in the room burst out in long, ragging laughter.

  “Smooth, man. James Bond!” Vonn clapped.

  “Right?” Patty cackled over the comm. “That’s the kinda man I want, where I’m like, ‘Do this thing!’ and he’s like, ‘I’m already doing it, ma’am.’”

  You shrugged, blushing. “What can I say? I aim to please.”

  And, for not the first time, you helped me out of what I was wearing.

  10

  I HATE parties. I mean, I get their purpose, I don’t deny that they can be good for morale or whatever, but, goddamn do I ever feel like they’re a drag. To attend, to sit through, to wait for them to be over. And it always seems like things find a way to take a turn for the worst whenever everyone’s gathered together during moments of unabashed mirth—like the universe looks at every party as a dare.

  Given what ended up happening, I took no delight in being proven right this time around.

  But Harrison’s logic was sound: it had been a long fucking week and the team needed this. Also, three aggrieved marksmen had made some crazy good food and desserts that had to get eaten somehow. No alcohol was allowed—making it something more like an elementary school dance than a real grown-up party—but given the relief, given the sleep deprivation, we were all basically hammered anyway.