Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

  Grant swallowed. “That the moment I became aware of such conduct I unhesitatingly—”

  I wanted to grab him by the shirt and headbutt him in the fucking mouth. I wanted to feel his teeth fold in against my skull and watch as his mouth filled up with blood. I settled for taking a step into his personal space. “Okay, do you wanna let me protect you and everyone else in this base by moving an unstable extraterrestrial object or do you wanna stand around polishing your dick?”

  Grant stiffened.

  “Chief,” he said. He turned and walked off, his head high.

  I radioed to Bird’s Eye. “Nagouchi, you there?”

  Nagouchi responded: “Yes, Chief.”

  “You know how to work the winch?”

  “I … I can figure it out.”

  “Great. Pull the cube up.”

  “Copy that. Director Harrison is here, Chief. He says he wants a debrief as soon as you’re done.”

  Great. “Will do. Gimme fifteen.”

  A few minutes later, the winch growled to life and the cube lifted.

  You and I were getting good at suiting up. Efficient. Only this time there was no sense of flirtation, no sense of enjoyment—it was purely utilitarian. I sealed you perfunctorily, not making eye contact. You caught my vibe and did the same.

  Then we lifted the Harp into the N5-bag and began carrying it toward the tent like pallbearers. It was amazing—now that we knew we could wear the insulating gloves, there was almost no sense of dread. The Harp began to Power-Up in protest after we’d walked a few feet, but it already felt more like an annoyance than the apocalypse it had been before.

  “Keep walking,” I said to you. “Let’s just—” And I stopped talking before the words “power through” could come out of my mouth.

  The Harp had almost reached full Power-Up as we lowered it back into its base inside the engine room. I grabbed the pins, which had been laid neatly to the side of the base, and slid them in. Just like that, the Harp was where it had always been. Like nothing, like X, like everything before and after, had never occurred.

  It’s going to be exactly like that.

  I waited until the Harp hit its peak and the whole station went dead. Then I finally looked at you.

  “Don’t contact me. Don’t speak to me outside Quill Marine. It’s over.”

  You blinked. Then nodded. “Yeah.”

  * * *

  WHAT DO you do when all you wanna do is break things? If you’re an adult, you decidedly don’t break things. You simply hope the breaking-things-energy doesn’t reroute somewhere where it will cause permanent damage.

  I remembered my deliciously half-formed fantasies of you and I, together on the floor of the cockpit during a Power-Up while the station, the world, belonged to nothingness. Even then my mind had wandered, as it often did, to darker things: what if we opened the engine-room door during the blast? What if we took it, entirely unprotected?

  I bet it feels something like this, I thought, as I squeezed out of the ship and prepared to unseal myself.

  * * *

  THE WHOLE process of putting the Harp back had gone almost absurdly quick. I’d told Harrison I’d be up in fifteen and I could have made it in ten. Instead I purposefully took my time in the bathroom and arrived five minutes late. I knew walking in late was going to raise eyebrows—I’m never late—but it put off any chance of my having to be alone with Patty.

  When I stepped off the elevator leading into Bird’s Eye, Harrison was there, looking mildly bewildered.

  “Sorry, Director,” I said, and took a seat in front of him.

  “Well, you don’t have to be sorry because I know it won’t happen again for the rest of time itself, correct?”

  “Correct, Director.”

  Patty sat nearby, munching on an energy bar.

  The debrief wound up being pretty perfunctory. Harrison was, if not half-lidded, then maybe a quarter. Not so bad that you could smell anything on him, but just far gone enough that, if you knew him at his full working capacity, you’d notice something was off. Dampened.

  But, at least this time, I couldn’t say I blamed him for needing a drink.

  The ostensible reason Harrison hadn’t joined us for the interrogations was a conference call with D.C. He wouldn’t tell us what was said beyond an ominous, “Something’s brewing there. New orders are coming, I’m just not sure what they are yet.” But he seemed as shaken up by the call as he’d been by the events of the past couple days.

  I made sure to say, in my recap, that Patty had done an exemplary job handling her first interrogation. I meant it sincerely. I was also giving her the opportunity to say that I had not fared so well but she took the compliment with characteristic Pattyness and shrugged before opening a sprig of beef jerky.

  “No one ever promised me a rose garden. I understand what’s incumbent on a leadership position.”

  It’s just, while she said it she looked at me with concern.

  Harrison didn’t notice, though; he was too busy staring off into the middle distance.

  “Jesus,” Harrison sighed. “This week, huh? Even by this place’s standards.” A thought occurred to him. “How short does this leave us?”

  That was an excellent goddamn question.

  “We can keep Guardshift rolling, hit our daily marks,” I mused. “Just not always with top people.”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess we’re not looking at a Special Guest situation like that for a while. If there are B-teamers in the mix no one higher than me’ll notice.”

  “We should still put in a request to look around,” I grumbled. “Now the precedent’s set where we’re getting forty-eight hours’ notice for things.”

  “Fair point. I’ll put in a request.” He didn’t sound too confident, though.

  “Would it help to include a request to knock off the forty-eight hours’ notice crap?” Patty grumbled.

  “I suspect,” Harrison replied, sucking on his teeth, “… it would not.”

  “Even for the crazy-dangerous things like removing a fucking alien death engine?”

  Harrison sighed. “You guys have only seen Haydon here,” he said. “I see him every time I go to D.C. Chaos is his comfort zone. Natural habitat. Meetings rescheduled an hour before. One vendor dumped in favor of another, no reason. He likes people off balance. Uncertain, ready to fight each other for a good spot in his sight. If we’re in his crosshairs now…”

  He trailed off, but we got the gist. Haydon could come back any time now. He had the taste for it.

  “Still,” he said finally. “I’ll put in the request. Anything else?”

  “Main takeaways, I’d say: the suits work. Even partial insulation’s better than none, the whole bullshit glove thing proves that. But total insulation works across the board.”

  “And based on that power outage we just enjoyed…?”

  “Looks like it’s safe to say if we move the Harp, we should expect it to go off.”

  He grunted. “Then we should prep for that. I suspect we’ll be moving it quite a lot.” He stood up after a smart slap of his thighs. So did we. “Thank you both. Dak. This has all been a lot—are you getting rest?”

  “Grabbed a forty-minute power nap,” I lied. “I swear by ’em.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” he said absently. “Forget where.” He headed toward the elevator.

  Then it was just me and Patty. I kinda wished I was one of those animals with the defense mechanisms like soiling themselves or vomiting on command. Something to make this moment even less palatable and give me an excuse to leave. Instead, I sat back down, feeling heavy and dreadful.

  Maybe Patty wouldn’t say anyth—

  “So, Chief…”

  “First things first,” I ventured, a preemptive change of subject, “we need to put together a whole new set of drills.” I could feel her trying to interject so I steamrolled. “And I’m talking base-wide drills. Based on scenarios wh
ere the Harp is on the move—”

  “What if we picked a few days?”

  “For what? For drills?”

  Patty surprised me by sitting down next to me. It was an intimate move, one I was very much not expecting nor excited about.

  “For you.”

  “What?”

  “I’d never float this to Harrison without running it by you first…”

  “Float what?”

  Patty seemed suddenly fascinated with the chair on which she was sitting: how did it feel under her fingertips, how strong were its joints. “Like. If we identified a few days in a row that we knew for a fact would be completely routine…”

  “Uh-huh…?”

  She gave up the coy business and looked at me. “… Maybe you could, like … chill somewhere?”

  There was a pause.

  “Patty…,” I warned.

  “Not like—this isn’t like—I’m talking a few boring-ass, by-the-numbers days where we don’t expect—”

  There was my anger again. Hello, friend. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m just saying, the way things went in the room with Shel—and I’m not, I’m not—I only know how you told me to be, but—”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not gunning for your spot, Chief! If that’s what—I would never.” She was looking as deeply into my eyes as she could, really trying to convince me. “I mean that. There’s nobody like you, you were born for this, I’m just saying … just to watch some TV, get hammered, get some surfer to eat you out like twelve times. After the shit you’ve done, in, what, the last hundred hours?”

  I had another urge to do something violent—only this time it was more than an urge, it was a certifiable spasm. I saw myself doing it like it was a memory that hadn’t happened yet. I could feel the sensations, I could hear the sounds, I could clearly summon the sensation of self-control evaporating and yielding to action. I had to stand up and take a step back, just to prevent myself from doing something incredibly stupid.

  “Do you have anything else—anything else—you wanna say about my conduct in the position of Security Chief of Quill Marine, a division of Sierra Industries?” I asked, calmer than I felt.

  She seemed suitably chastened, but it wasn’t enough for me. “No, Chief. I’m sorry.”

  “When are you off?”

  “Nine.”

  “I’m off seven. Do we need to go over anything or are you on it?” Deep, degrading poison in my voice.

  “I’m on it.”

  “I’m in the cockpit for thirty. You need me, I’m there.”

  I left her to think and made my way to the Hangar, to the Tent, to Object E, to the cockpit, without managing to look at or talk to anybody.

  * * *

  IT WAS a relief to get thirty minutes without Patty, without Lloyd, without Harrison, without you. I could just look at Moss’s black eyes in his gray-white skin and think about what, if anything, was there. A younger guard I hadn’t seen in a while was there too. His name was Slade.

  “I haven’t been on days in a long time,” he said, after reminding me of his name. And I grunted.

  The moss on Moss seemed to have receded another millimeter. It could have just been my imagination, but if I could have placed a wager, I’d put fifty on Lloyd’s next measurement resulting in a mumbled, “Receded another millimeter.”

  I wondered what Slade would think if I said, “Hey so Moss, are you dying? Like dying, present tense, not a foregone conclusion? If I were a decent person, would I be hitting you with defibs every hour to try to make you gasp and wake up?”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, you called me.

  * * *

  I HAD finally gotten comfortable. Sitting on my bed, on top of the covers. The news was babbling unobtrusively in the background—another senator being pressured to recuse himself due to the amount of campaign donations he’d received from Sierra—and I was drinking a glass and a half of water for every whiskey, hoping somehow I’d manage to both fall asleep and avoid a hangover.

  When I heard the phone ring, I didn’t even have to look at the screen. There was no question. It was my burner phone. The one I got for exactly one reason.

  It continued ringing.

  Now, the dilemma couldn’t have been simpler. All I had to do—the only thing I had to do in the entire world for the next six hours—was just … not … answer that phone.

  But I did. Of course I did.

  We breathed together. Out of one, into the other. Out of the other, into one.

  Finally, I said, “Get here,” and hung up.

  * * *

  IT WAS dark where I told you to jump the back fence. You could only see someone there if you knew to look.

  I knew to look so I watched. The way you moved—the speed, the quiet—I knew two things: one, you were beautiful, and two, you were sent on some bad runs. A person who moved the way you moved was used. A person who moved the way you moved was sent to do things.

  When I opened the door and pulled you in, you were whispering, “Just to talk, okay, I promise, it’s just to talk—” But I silenced that bullshit with my mouth, hungry and furious on yours, as we crashed into my kitchen.

  “Get me on the counter,” I ordered, I pleaded. “And get these off. Come on. Come on.”

  Your pants clattered to the floor. Mine were thrown off somewhere. You lifted me up like I was made of breath and were inside me before I even knew where I was.

  “Oh…”

  “Fuck…”

  “Please let me say a stupid thing that doesn’t mean anything,” I whispered into your hair as you buried your face into my neck.

  “Say it,” you begged.

  You continued thrusting into me and I cried out in a voice so small and desperate I barely recognized it as my own.

  “I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.”

  * * *

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later I was on the floor, naked, rooting through a backpack.

  I kept a desk, full of bills and other grown-up crap, but the most important stuff in my life was stashed in the pack. It was the pack I lugged around on my last two tours. It was a stupid superstition, I know, but I never lost anything I put in there. It was better than a lockbox or a filing cabinet any day of the week.

  It’s where I kept my contracts.

  My mind was on fire. Oh my God, this is so stupid, so stupid, like this is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever done in my life, nothing’s ever been this bad—

  “Hey.” Your voice, behind me. I jumped. “Sorry,” you said.

  “I thought you were—”

  “I was. Then I heard you wake up.”

  “Go back to sleep, I’m just … I don’t know, figuring something out.”

  “Well … I don’t think I can go back to sleep, but I can get back in bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or … I don’t know … I can also leave, if that’s the … right thing to do here.”

  “I don’t know what’s right here,” I said, not looking at you anymore.

  What did I want to tell you in this moment?

  That this was a slow-motion disaster somehow moving too quickly?

  That I was furious with you for coming over?

  That this was all so pathetically obvious as to be suspect on both our parts? It was no small thing—this all fell way too neatly into a pathological, observable narrative. You knew that I was older, that I was in charge; you probably recognized, maybe consciously, maybe not, that I was like a mommy for you. One look at you and I could see your life: you were a fucking faun, you showed up places gorgeous and helpless, and everybody tripped over themselves to take care of you. That’s something you got used to. So, of course: you wanted me. And of course: I wanted you. Not only did you catch me on a bad day the day we met, when I was feeling guilt and shame, but … your want fueled mine. To be wanted by you? Jesus, usually only big guys went for me—big husky guys with beards, looking for a hearty gal with b
irthing hips to split logs with. And that was fine, it was always enough to hold me over, but I’d always wanted to try a long thin boy, some long thin boy like you, my opposite, who could make me feel like a different person for a little while. You were a carnival oddity, a freak show, an escape. And that I could perform this analysis in a split second, looking at the two of us? That’s how clear it was. It was fine, it was obvious, it was novel, and it was precisely why we shouldn’t believe any of this!

  Yes, all of that! I wanted to say all of that.

  But I just stared at you, trying to put it all into words, and you went and fucking said, “You’re looking at your contract, aren’t you?” and something in me snapped.

  “Get the fuck out of my house,” the words out of my mouth before I even thought to say them, bubbling with rage. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Okay,” you said. “I just need to get my … where did I…?”

  I was suddenly filled with sulfurous hate. I was very aware of being naked, vulnerable, and wanting to hurt you twice as bad as you could ever hurt me.

  “Kitchen. Your pants are in the kitchen,” I snapped as you went to find them. “Jesus. You must’ve been a real prize on incursions with a memory like that.”

  “Never took off my pants on incursions,” you said from the other room.

  “Put them on and leave!”

  When you came back in, you were holding the pants in your hand.

  “You … were looking at your contract,” you said, even and direct. “With Sierra. To see if there was any kind of—”

  “Put your fucking pants on and get out of my house.” I was starting to feel frantic. Ready to do anything to change this situation—for better, for worse, didn’t matter, so long as it changed.

  You didn’t put your pants on. You pulled out a stack of papers stashed in a pack looped into your belt. I knew what it was before your pants fell back to the floor and the papers were presented to me.

  “Here’s how I know,” you were saying, your voice cracking with sincerity. You held your own contract, the one you must have also been poring over, out to me. “Here’s how I know.”

  But I had already grabbed your contract and thrown it behind me, so you could put both of your hands on me where I wanted them to go.