Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

“Fuck is a ‘field crush’?”

  “I heard it in my unit sometimes. Like someone who’s so shit-hot at the maneuvers you’d follow them anywhere. How many of those do you get in a career?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “But, I mean, there’s a big difference between a field chief and the real thing. I know when people work together. You guys work. I wanna serve under both of you. I don’t want to fuck that up.”

  Somewhere deep in the center of me, in the awful, awfulest part, I felt a thought crawl out: He sounds exactly that sincere when he’s talking to me. Doesn’t he?

  I tried to stuff that thought back down from where it came. I also slipped behind the door just in time for him to crack it open.

  “Anyway,” you apologized. “If you wanna head in I’m just gonna wait out here for Lloyd.”

  Silence. I held my breath. Maybe Patty was taking your measure. Maybe she simply glanced through the open door—I had no idea. But she didn’t enter the office. And the next thing I heard her say was, “When are you back on rotation?”

  “Half an hour. Less, actually.”

  She grunted. “Then don’t let Lloyd get going; it’s your ass if you’re late.”

  “Understood.”

  And Patty walked away. I heard her footsteps get fainter … and fainter … until, from the other side of the door:

  “All clear.”

  I hurried out into the hallway.

  “Holy shit,” I managed.

  “Yeah.” You were smiling your small, private smile, contradicted by your furrowed brow.

  “How did you know to work her like that?”

  You shrugged. “I just watch people. Don’t you?” I narrowed my eyes, trying to read you. “Is that—did I—?”

  “No. You were great,” I said, mostly meaning it. “You were perfect.”

  We were just standing around. We were being stupid.

  “Okay, get this into your car before rotation,” I said, handing him the drive. “I’ve got to go erase some surveillance.”

  “When’s the meet with the reporter?”

  “Four days.”

  “So we just have to make it four days.”

  Before I turned, I risked looking into your eyes. “Pretend I’m kissing you so hard it hurts.”

  “Pretend I’m kissing you so hard it hurts,” you replied.

  “Now move.”

  We peeled off in two different directions.

  15

  ONE OF the things you learn in an active combat situation is that the most dangerous time is often the period after the trauma. If you come through an attack, a firefight, a sudden explosion alive and mostly intact, it may feel like the worst part is over, but that’s when you’ve really got to keep an eye out for the shit. That’s when the adrenaline ebbs and you realize that trauma doesn’t actually go away, it shrinks down to the size of a pinball and starts ricocheting inside everyone involved, looking to chip away at things almost at random.

  The previous week was all trauma. Andy dying was a trauma. Losing Vonn and Shel was a trauma. Harrison’s announcement of our change of focus was a fucking trauma. The first sign things were about to fall apart was Lloyd.

  Lloyd, Lloyd, eminently Lloydian Lloyd. It was easy to forget there was a human being there sometimes, not just a collection of quirks coiled around some unfathomably, unrelatably brilliant mind. Easy to remember him freaking out in the conference room, him monologuing in broken and excitable fragments about whatever he was working on in the cockpit, and to look at him as more of an obstacle than anything else. Hell, we didn’t even think twice about using his flightiness as an excuse for your loitering outside his office—nor did anyone passing by think twice about making fun of him, however lovingly, behind his back.

  You and I were on shift inside the cockpit. And Lloyd was late.

  Of course, Lloyd was almost always late. But given his new obsession with spending all his time in Object E, his absence felt like some sudden, ominous silence after a continued barrage of noise. It felt like breath being held before letting out a scream.

  I mean, it went without saying, you and I were already on edge. It was the day after our successful boost of the copied footage. I had built in four days before we met with the reporter again, in case we needed a few more cracks at procuring everything, but now we were ahead of schedule … and the waiting was murder. The footage was just sitting there under my bed like an unexploded mine.

  Our already complicated relationship with small talk felt especially strained now. Knowing there was someone up in Bird’s Eye able to overhear our every word, we covered the weather, what kind of cars we like to drive, and whether either of us had ever owned a dog. I was about ready to ask you your opinions on the goddamn Kennedy assassination when, finally, we heard the scream it seemed like the world had drawn in breath to make.

  “EVERYTHING MUST GOOOOOO!” Outside the ship and getting closer. It was Lloyd.

  You and I looked at each other, nervous, as Lloyd squeezed and stumbled into the cockpit. He was babbling and cooing, laughing and whirling. It seemed like he was drunk off his ass, except … neither one of us could smell anything on him.

  “Everything must go!” he kept cackling. “Final closeout sale! Put a tag on that!”

  We managed to sit him down onto the stool we kept in here for him, and he clocked who was in here with him.

  “Matt and the chief! Matt and the chief! Just who I wanted! Matt and the chief!” he sang. Then, “Wait, no! Did I bring my—?!” He started patting himself down.

  “Your measuring thing? It’s in your bag,” you said. The tool was poking out, perfectly visible.

  “Oh! Obviously, obviously—good, excellent—although—although—”

  “Lloyd, did you get a good night’s sleep last night?” I tried to ask, but his train of thought was already shoveling rocket fuel in its engine room.

  “Although how great would it be—how wonderful and ironic and timely would it be if this week we measured the opposite of a regression? Huh?”

  “A … progression?” you asked. “More moss?”

  Lloyd touched his own nose and started making beeping noises.

  “Sleep, Lloyd. Have you had any?” I demanded.

  He rolled his head over to me. “Well, of course, clearly, clearly I did at some point.”

  “How recent—”

  “You know how you can tell? I’m not psychotic!”

  “Okay—”

  “I’m not dead!” He stood, beat his chest, to prove his point.

  “Hey, hey, why don’t you stay sitting down, Lloyd?”

  “Oops, did I bring my device to—oh, you already told me.”

  “Yeah, Lloyd, it’s right here in your bag by your tablet, want me to—”

  “Tablet!” he shouted, a “Eureka!” dampened by the weird acoustics of the ship. “Thank you for reminding me!”

  “How ’bout this, Lloyd.” I tried to soothe him down while he went tearing through his bag. “How ’bout we help you do the measurements, then me and Matt’ll back off and let you have some quality time with—”

  “It’s on my tablet! What I wanted to show you! Both of you. That’s, that’s why I timed it out to arrive now, right after Guardshift. So I’d have time to talk to you guys. Specifically to you guys.”

  Our eyes met each other, instantly: what the hell could that mean? There’s no way he—

  But he was presenting us with his tablet, trying to press it into either’s hands so he could pace.

  “Can, can one of you hold—”

  You took the tablet and held it in both hands. It might have felt like we were about to look at vacation photos or a particularly funny viral video … were it not for the mania in Lloyd’s voice and eyes. It wasn’t the mania of excited discovery. It was the mania of a late-night phone call begging for one last chance before trying something stupid.

  Meanwhile, Lloyd hurriedly pulled out his measuring devices. “Just gonna get this under way and t
hen, then, then…,” he muttered.

  “Why don’t we do the measurements for you, Lloyd,” I tried, “and you can just sit and breathe?”

  He looked at me with desperate eyes. “No.” He almost whispered. “No. This might be the last time.”

  “‘The last time’? Come on, you don’t—”

  But the look on his face shut me up. The look said I knew better. And I did. Every time now could be the last time.

  “Let me have this,” he pleaded softly.

  I nodded. He set up his devices on and around Moss, initiated them, then whirled around for his tablet before remembering you were standing there holding it in your hands.

  “There it is! Good man! Right. We’ll see our, heh, progress in a moment!” He held up crossed fingers for luck, then took the tablet from you. “So, I’m sorry, we’ll have to crowd around me, no big screen in here. Wouldn’t want this on a big screen anyway.”

  “Um, what exactly are you about to show us, Lloyd?” I wanted to put him in some sort of hold, swaddle him until he calmed down.

  “Not porn!” He laughed shrilly. You and I exchanged worried glances. “I can promise it’s not porn! Here. Here.”

  He pulled up a video and, with a trembling hand, pressed play.

  Distant sirens.

  Choppers in the background.

  People yelling indecipherably into walkie-talkies.

  The sound of ocean.

  “Okay, helmet-cam is live, and we are effecting entry.” A voice, seemingly directly under the images.

  Directly ahead, captured by a camera teetering on some constantly unsteady y-axis, incongruous amid the broken trees and trampled grass near the border between woods and beach, growing larger as the camera approached, perfectly lit by an irrepressibly bright moon yet still somehow an inscrutable shadow … a giant walnut.

  No. Fucking. Way.

  “You can see there’s a … I guess sort of a fissure in the side of the object, and we are going to attempt to enter via that aperture,” the too-close voice says, then sighs. “Jesus Christ, I guess we’re doing this.”

  Squeezing, jostling through tight, oppressive darkness … then emerging on the other side in a diffuse, bluish glow. Indecipherable shapes, low-light camera noise.

  “Okay, I had to drop most of my equipment to squeeze through but I am inside the object now … there’s some kind of lighting, but it’s very … I’m gonna switch to night vision, and my camera should do the same—” The picture goes from color to a grainy green-and-black. “Okay, we’re definitely looking at some kind of—oh my God. Oh my GOD. Oh my GOD, Staging, please tell me you’re seeing this too.”

  Another voice, from far away, compressed twice over by distance and alien acoustics. “We’re seeing it, Sergeant.”

  Sitting in front of what appeared to be an astonishingly simple control console. Tall. Thin. Utterly motionless. Shaggy with growth.

  The pilot.

  Moss.

  Unsteady swaying. A torturously slow spin in a circle. “I’m just gonna get some footage. I’m just gonna get some footage. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Okay, but stay sharp, Sergeant, we don’t know what its … status is.”

  The controlled, whistling breathing of a person confronted with the end of comprehension.

  Inside the ship now, our own voices were tumbling, awed. We’d all seen footage of the impact, of the ship burning through our atmosphere and thudding gracelessly down, captured by various third parties from various distances. But this footage—

  “Okay, is this actually—?”

  “The initial entry? Object E woulda been on the ground, what—?”

  “Three hours and three minutes,” Lloyd provided absently. My voice and your voice continued tumbling over each other.

  “We’re looking at the first time a human ever saw an alien!”

  “I mean, at least that we know of.”

  “Look how much moss there was on him then!”

  “So much more,” Lloyd sighed. Just like that, Manic Lloyd had vanished. This new Lloyd, sober and somber, looked like he had just taken a full blast from the Harp.

  Decomposition, I thought.

  “Now … Matt … Chief … what do you notice?” Sober Lloyd said, nodding toward the footage.

  I gasped in understanding almost immediately. You were still peering, trying to suss it out.

  “What would you notice if this was you walking into Object E on a normal day?” I asked you.

  “On a normal day?” Your brow was knit, seeing it but not seeing it. “I’d freak out.”

  “Why?”

  “The engine-room door’s open. You can even kinda see the Harp.”

  “You didn’t know about this, Dak?” Sober Lloyd asked me, legitimately surprised in a muted, fuzzy kind of way.

  I shrugged, shaking my head. I had never seen this footage, nor had I ever seen an initial entry report. “Guess they didn’t figure it for need-to-know.”

  “The speculation entered into the official report … obviously one of those offhand things someone randomly posits that becomes gospel over time … is that the door was forced open by the crash landing.”

  “But…,” you started, seeing the flaw in that already. I was right there with you.

  “Doesn’t sound right to you, does it?” Lloyd led.

  “I mean, you have to stick half your body up that thing to reach the switch.”

  Lloyd was nodding. “An effect so difficult to achieve on purpose that it’s impossible to imagine it happening by accident.”

  Now it was my turn to see it without seeing it. “But that’s stupid, why would Moss want the door open? The Harp would fry him.”

  Lloyd gave me the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen. Warm with understanding and frigid with loneliness. “You know … I envy how easily you ask that question, Dak.”

  I was ready to protest—the fuck did he mean, “easy question”—but then you spoke up and I understood.

  “You think it was open on purpose. That he was trying to … fry himself.” You met Lloyd’s gaze. Empathetic. Commiserating.

  Lloyd nodded. “What’s the biggest problem this vessel would have with long-distance travel? And I mean long-distance travel. Light-years.”

  “It’s small…,” I reasoned. “No equipment, no food…”

  “More than both of those: there’s only one occupant. Dak, what kind of mission could you imagine deploying with a personnel roster of one?”

  That was an excellent point. “No mission,” I said. “Ever.”

  Lloyd rewound the footage to the first moment the unnamed sergeant really saw him twenty-five years ago. A lone, lanky, knuckle-jointed creature sitting in front of a minimalistic console that appeared to consist of only a dead monitor and a steering apparatus. Hell, there didn’t even seem to be a way to communicate now that I really took it in.

  “Look at him. Look at Moss. Imagine. He took off from some unknown point of origin, alone and without supplies, in a ship about the size of two rooms in a house. And then he removed the one barrier protecting him from an engine that would leech the life-force right out of his body.”

  I found myself missing Manic Lloyd. This new Lloyd filled me with chilling unease. I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, but I was scared to even touch him, as if whatever he had was catching. It made me think of the way the scientists at the conference table broke all eye contact with him when he began ranting about the new Harp mandate. This has always been within him, I realized, and a part of my heart broke.

  “Lloyd, have you … ever put this in a report, or…?”

  “No.”

  “Ever told anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Why?” you asked.

  “Best way to make a colossal mistake in science? Project yourself onto the work.” Lloyd took the tablet away, looked at the image still frozen on screen for a moment before turning it off. “There are so many ways to read the pertinent facts of the crash lan
ding of Object E. Why am I speculating on just one? Because I’m simply projecting my struggles onto an entity that may share no cultural or biochemical context with me at all. I don’t have a fraction of the data I’d need to back up what I just proposed. I just believe … in the region we call ‘the heart’ as a useful shorthand … that it’s true. Just like I believe that even if we could? Even if we knew how? I wouldn’t want to save Moss. Because I don’t believe that’s what he wants.” He had calmly put the tablet back into his bag. He was no longer looking at either of us, so we were free to exchange concerned glances. “You’re my best listener, Matt. And, Dak, you’ve always watched out for me. Just … if I fall apart over all this—”

  “No one’s falling apart,” I offered, impotently.

  “I just wanted someone to know the truth. My truth.” He smiled, and his measuring devices beeped, having completed their analysis.

  Two thousand four hundred twelve microns of recession this time.

  So much for progress.

  * * *

  A FEW hours later, I found myself up in Bird’s Eye eating lunch next to Patty for the first time since I overheard your conversation outside of Lloyd’s office. I felt a little like I was seeing someone after having just caught them unclothed and unawares.

  Even so, the atmosphere from both of us was clinical and self-aware. Unnecessarily polite. As if we’d had no interactions up until this point. It was a real Exhibit A in why I’d always tried to avoid any sort of relationship with another person whenever I could. Still. I was only able to eat quietly for a few minutes before giving in to the urge to say something.

  “Have you … noticed anything off about Lloyd lately?”

  She chuffed. “Have I noticed anything on about him ever?”

  I tried to laugh, failed. I didn’t have the heart for ragging on him. “Just … keep an eye on him. If you can. I’m worried about all the shit in the air taking its toll.”

  “Okay,” she said. Looking at me a little too long before going back to unwrapping a second sprig of dried beef. “Yeah, you got it.” I knew she was good for it, I knew she wouldn’t take my observation lightly. But I also knew that dragging tone in her voice meant she was fighting the urge to say more. Maybe I was still shaken by Lloyd. Maybe I was totally projecting (Best way to make a colossal mistake in science). Maybe the tofu satay in my mouth was tasting like dirt no matter how much sriracha I poured over it so I needed to distract myself by talking more.