by Isaac Hooke
She frowned. A smile definitely suited her face better.
“Okay, let’s make it easier,” she said. “Tell me the third worst thing that happened to you.”
I felt my jaw tighten. “You really want to know, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Third worst thing that ever happened to me?” I didn’t even have to think about it. “Killing a woman while on duty. Happened just the last mission.”
Those words gave her pause. She stopped twirling her hair. There was a momentary flash of emotion in her eyes. Doubt and fear, mingled with . . . excitement?
“What was it like?” she said.
“As I said, one of the worst things that ever happened to me. A really bad feeling, right in the pit of my stomach. Like I’d just done something inconceivably wrong. She was so beautiful. She could have been a model. And I took her life. I took her whole future away from her.” I couldn’t believe I was telling Misty this. I’d never really talked about the privateer woman’s death with anyone. I couldn’t bring it up with my platoon brothers. It was just too painful. I preferred to wear a mask of toughness, no matter how fake it might be. Tahoe was the closest to sensing my real emotions, and even he usually kept his distance, though that night had been an exception.
“She deserved it?” Misty said.
I sighed. “No one ever deserves to die. Well, unless we’re talking war criminals. But she was shooting at my platoon brothers. I had no choice. So I took the shot.”
Neither of us spoke for a long moment. The distant music from the cantina band played on in the background.
“So what was the worst thing that ever happened to you, then?” Misty finally said.
Maybe I should have been insulted at this invasion of privacy, offended that this stranger would dare ask such personal questions. But instead I answered right away. No hesitation. No pussyfooting around. I guess revealing the other bit had allowed me to open the floodgates, and to be honest I was glad to have someone outside the platoon I could finally talk to this about.
“The worst thing was losing the two people in this galaxy who meant more to me than anything else,” I said. “A man who was more than a brother to me. And a woman who was my world. My universe.”
She stared into my eyes for a long moment. She must have seen the grief there, because she began blinking rapidly, like she was on the verge of tears. “What happened?”
“The woman sacrificed herself for my ship, staying behind so we could get away, while my brother gave his life for me on a planet when we were under attack. That’s what it really means to serve, you know. You’re not giving up your life for your country, or some ideal. You’re giving it up for those who fight by your side. For your brothers in battle. You wouldn’t let them down, not for a heartbeat. You’d die for them. And that’s what these two did for me.”
She was silent, just looking into my eyes, pondering what she saw there, I guess.
“You said this woman stayed behind,” Misty said, eventually. “Why didn’t you go back for her, when all was said and done?”
“You don’t understand. There was no way to go back for her. The Gate leading to her region of space was dismantled. The Gate was hidden deep in hostile territory in the first place, so to go back for her would’ve required the coordinated efforts of multiple military branches, at a cost upward of tens of billions of bitcoins. There was just no way.”
I said it like I was trying to convince her, when in reality I was trying to convince myself.
I should have found a way to go back for her. I should have.
Now she’s dead.
“You blame yourself,” Misty said.
I didn’t answer.
She pulled away slightly. “I’m going to tell you something, and you’re probably not going to like it. But it needs to be said.”
I felt one of my eyebrows rise. “Oh?”
“Because you’re a MOTH, because of your training, and the missions you undertake, you believe the safety of those closest to you is your personal responsibility. Whenever something bad happens to someone close to you, it’s your fault. You missed something. You overlooked some possibility or outcome that could’ve saved them. You should have saved them. But you didn’t.
“Well I’m here to tell you that it’s not your fault. It can’t be. It never was. You can’t view the world as a MOTH, not in this, not if you want to get over their deaths. Your friends made their own choices. They chose to give their lives for you. And who are you to take that sacrifice away from them, and place the blame for their deaths on your own shoulders, when they’re the ones who made the choice? They wanted you to live. Don’t cheapen their sacrifice by blaming yourself. Don’t you dare.”
I regarded her in a new light. “And you claim to be a dancer? You’re more like a counselor, bartender, and therapist rolled into one.”
She laughed. “That basically sums up my job description.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re dancing to put yourself through school?”
“Hardly. I dance for the money. Quite a lot of lonely guys out here on the colony worlds. But I do read a lot of books, I admit. Psychology, mostly. And philosophy. Helps me talk to men about their relationship issues.”
“Well that’s a relief,” I said. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to tell me you were an Artificial.”
“I am an Artificial,” she said with a completely straight face. Then she shoved me. “Just messing with you.”
It was my turn to laugh. “A dancer who reads philosophy on the side. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Never believe in stereotypes. Nine times out of ten they’re wrong.” She extended her hand. “My real name is Claire.” She’d finally dropped the stripper mask and all the pretenses that went along with it.
I shook her hand. “You don’t look like a Claire. ‘Misty’ kind of suits you better. What with the tattoos and makeup you wear . . .”
She grinned widely. “They’re temporary. So what’s your real name?”
I hesitated, and almost wasn’t going to answer, but I relented. “Rade.”
“And you certainly don’t look like a Rade.”
I felt my brows draw together. “What’s that supposed to mean? Who do I look like, then?”
“A Pete, maybe. Or a Frank.”
“Frank? I look nothing like a Frank.”
“How would you know?” she said. “Have you ever met a Frank?”
“Yeah, in fact I have. This guy in MOTH training. Skinny like you wouldn’t believe. Toothpick arms and legs. Dropped-On-Request the first week.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. He didn’t deserve to be there.”
She cocked her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. “Time’s up.” She gave me her vid conferencing number. “Vid me if you’re ever looking for a girlfriend.”
She walked away in that sexy G-string of hers, hips swinging suggestively with each step.
I couldn’t help but stare.
“I might just do that,” I said quietly.
Liberty ended prematurely: the next day the Lieutenant Commander recalled the platoon to the ship bright and early, with an order to report to the briefing room at 0700 for an “important announcement.”
Most of us slept right through the shuttle ride. When we arrived, we stumbled aboard the Royal Fortune, and stopped by the galley for coffee. From the drooping eyelids and jerky movements around me, it was obvious that most of us were still slightly hung over. I myself had a splitting headache.
“What do you think this important announcement is going to be?” Manic said to no one in particular as he grabbed a steaming cup of coffee from the vending machine.
“Dunno,” Trace said, moving forward, zombielike. “Must— have—coffee.”
“Maybe Braggs is ann
ouncing he’s finally decommissioning your sorry ass,” Bender told Manic.
“You know, that’s almost funny,” Manic said, smiling sardonically. “The word is discharging, by the way, not decommissioning. You decommission a warship. You discharge a soldier.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t human, dude, so you get to be decommissioned.”
“Whatever.”
Fret plugged an ancient-looking device into the ship’s power system via a wide-brimmed adapter. Then he slipped two pieces of bread into the device’s cooking slots.
Bender stared at Fret like he was crazy.
Fret shrugged off the look. “Burnt toast. Best hangover cure there is.”
“Where in the hell did you get a museum piece like that?” Bender said.
“Manic’s house.”
Manic looked up from his coffee. “You stole my toaster?”
Fret ignored him.
“Hey, you stole my toaster? My mom gave me that.”
Bender pantomimed wiping a tear away. “Aw, Mommy going to cry now?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Are you sure you have the power adapter set properly, Fret? Smells like you’re charring the bread. Probably should take it out.”
Flames burst from the two slots in the device.
Fret unplugged the device and fanned the top with his hands. Wasn’t helping.
“Blimey!” Facehopper said. “Put it out before the SAFFiR comes in with its extinguisher grenades!” SAFFiR stood for Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot.
Facehopper grabbed a nearby extinguisher and discharged fire-retardant foam all over the device.
“I didn’t think the Royal Fortune had a SAFFiR,” Fret said.
“Oh, she does.” Facehopper said. “Fleet installed one. Cause a false alarm, and the Brass will dock the response costs of the SAFFiR from your salary.”
Manic came forward and cradled the foam-covered remains of his bread device. “My toaster. You ruined my toaster.”
Facehopper’s eyes defocused. I thought he was checking the time. “Drink your coffees and down your aspirins, mates. The briefing is in ten minutes. You’re lucky, because otherwise I’d make you hungover blokes all drop and do PT. In fact, hell with it, we got a minute to spare. Drop!”
Groans were heard all around, but we dropped.
“Come on!” Facehopper said. “You’re MOTHs. Push ’em. Push ’em! Hump the floor! Hump! We work through hangovers. We’ve been through hell and back again. This is nothing. A little headache, a little dehydration, is minuscule compared to what we’ve been through. Come on you pussies—push ’em, push ’em, push ’em!”
The galley staff regarded us with amusement.
We completed precisely two minutes of hangover-busting pushups. Gotta love PT (Physical Training).
Then we downed our coffee, took our aspirins, and rushed to the briefing room, arriving five minutes early. I felt wide-awake now. I still had a headache, but it wasn’t so bad. Amazing what pumping the blood can do for you.
Lieutenant Commander Braggs arrived at 0700 on the dot.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the news,” the Lieutenant Commander said, after he’d assumed the podium. “You’re all extremely well connected, after all.”
I exchanged uncertain glances with my platoon brothers.
“Sir,” Fret said. “Respectfully, the only news we’ve heard is from the girls we took home last night.”
The Lieutenant Commander was an easygoing kind of guy, and normally a comment like that would have elicited a laugh. But his face remained dead serious. Maybe he was still upset about the near-failure of our last mission.
No way! Tahoe sent on his Implant, via the platoon-level channel. Check the main news feed!
You’d think one of us would’ve bothered to check the news before now. But seriously, the last thing on our hungover minds was news.
I reluctantly pulled up my news feed. My eyes felt really scratchy, and focusing on the icons overlaying my vision only made the headache worse. Thankfully the Lieutenant Commander spoke before I got too far.
“We’re being called back into action, men,” Braggs said gravely. “Something has suddenly become a whole lot more important than tracking down privateers. In fact, the SK government has just outlawed privateering, so it’s not even a problem anymore.”
“A truce has been struck between the United Countries and the Sino-Koreans,” Tahoe announced. “They’re opening up their space to one another, for a select number of vessels.”
That was indeed news.
“Correct,” the Lieutenant Commander said. “But you haven’t heard the why. There’s a news lockdown. Won’t last long, though. You can’t hide something like this. Though speculation in the general public is running rampant. Some vids have already leaked out.” He slid a hand through his thick, brown hair. A trembling hand. The Lieutenant Commander never trembled. Something was very wrong. “We all knew this would happen one day. I guess we just hoped it would come further down the road, well beyond our lifetimes. Not now, not when we were so blatantly unprepared.”
He left the podium and walked down into our midst.
“Men. My men. Our greatest trial awaits.” He looked at each and every one of our faces, as if he wanted to remember us in this moment, while we were still innocent and naive, while we still held on to our youthful idealism by however small a thread. As if he wanted to burn our features into his mind one by one, before he told us what had happened and changed our lives forever. As if he believed that only a short time from now, there might not be very many of us left alive to look at.
“Do you remember the alien vessel we encountered at Geronimo?” Braggs said. “The big one that looked like a giant skull?”
“How could we forget, sir?” Fret said.
“It’s finally arrived in human space.”
CHAPTER TWO
Shaw
So this was what prison was like.
Isolation from the world you once knew. Isolation from your favorite foods, your favorite places. Isolation from the friends, family, and loved ones you once spent time with.
Isolation from the very air of the world, living apart from it, inside a thin shell of multilayered fabric.
I wasn’t the first person in the galaxy to experience such things. Many people lived in prisons. A lot of the times, those prisons were of their own making.
As mine was.
Yet, for all that I named this life a prison, at the same time I was free.
There was no one holding me back. No guard to check that I stayed in my cell. No watchman to wake me in the morning. No sentry to call for lights-out at night.
I was free to roam the vast empty spaces of this dying world.
Free to discover what I would, when I would.
Free to kill.
I was getting rather good at it.
I had criticized Rade for taking life in battle. But I understood now what he did and why he did it. When it became a necessity, when it became kill or be killed, that’s when morality went out the window.
Rade was a warrior.
I had become one, too.
I had to.
When the will to live, the burning fight inside you, was stronger than anything else, especially those who wanted to kill you, then you’d ascended to the level of warrior. That was all there was to it.
Accepting the warrior mentality was what separated those who survived from those who did not.
And I would survive.
I’d sworn I would.
Queequeg and I were on the hunt. My faithful companion had sprinted far ahead, having picked up the scent of our wounded prey. Inside my pressurized suit, all I could smell was the musty scent of recycled air—not that I’d be able to match Queequeg’s sense of smell even if I could breathe the atmosphere. I simply followed alon
g behind him, keeping to the path of misplaced shale and trusting to Queequeg’s nose. There wasn’t any blood I could track, because all liquids boiled away when exposed to the atmosphere of this inhospitable world.
Queequeg was a hybear—a bear with a hyena’s head and an uncharacteristically long tail, bioengineered by the SKs to survive the hostile environment of Geronium. But to me he was just a very big, very loveable dog.
I glanced at the map overlaying my helmet lens. My Implant was deactivated, of course. I had turned it off months ago as a safety precaution (the alien mists of this world could use it to scramble my vision and hearing), and I relied solely on the aReal built into my helmet.
On the map I confirmed I wasn’t deviating too far from the original path I’d plotted. I should still be able to make the Forma pipe by tomorrow afternoon. That would leave me around eight hours of oxygen.
Assuming everything went well.
I pushed the very real possibility of running out of O2 from my mind: I was starving and had to eat. When a meal presented itself on Geronimo, you embraced the opportunity with open arms.
Today, hybear was on the menu.
Queequeg topped a rise ahead and vanished from view.
I sometimes worried that eating the flesh of his own kind would do Queequeg psychological harm. I supposed it helped that he thought of himself as human, and probably didn’t count the act as cannibalism. Still, it didn’t change the fact that it was cannibalism.
I topped the rise shortly thereafter and spotted our prey. It was a stroke of luck to find a hybear alone; the things usually attacked in packs.
It limped along in the valley below, trying to run, an act of extreme will made difficult by the fact it had only three legs. Earlier, when the starving animal had attacked, I’d cut its forelimb off with my rifle-scythe, a weapon I had cobbled together from a standard-issue rifle and the long, sharp mandible of one of the beasts. I could see the slight green steam of blood wafting from the severed end of the limb even now.
Queequeg was already far down the incline, running at full-tilt and eager for the kill.
By the time I reached the bottom, my faithful companion was shaking the last dregs of life from the prey, his jaws wrapped firmly around its neck.