by Hugh Howey
Before I joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is really eating at me becomes clear:
I do not dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am used to making planetfall with the last of the landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have already been turned beneath the soil.
So this I dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this as well.
The scanner records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more permanent, silent state.
And with this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the next Gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a Liaison Officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt. And he relents.
The date is near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden away.
I fish the locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning, that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.
#
It is planetfall, and as our attack craft soars down through the atmosphere toward this green and blue and white target of ours, my thoughts drift to a heat-tech I met once. I don’t remember his name, it was so long ago. He came to the bunkroom Kur and I shared when the thermostat was out. It was so cold in our room that our piss froze and crinkled before it hit the toilet. While he was working to fix the unit, the heat-tech complained that he was always cold, which I had never thought of before. Strange to think of a person who fixes heaters never being warm. But of course. He only works where the heat is broken. He must be cold all the time.
I am thinking this on the day of planetfall, because lately I have only seen our conquests in ruin. The planets are already smoking from the orbital bombardment and the armies of Gunners by the time we Liaisons ever get mud on our boots. The power grids are out; satellites blown to bolts; fires raging. Others stay behind and build an empire; they will see the place whole. But not me. I am like the heat-tech, forever cold. I am the conqueror who never glimpses what he has won. I only see these worlds in their cultural writings from deep space, and then I see them battered and broken.
These are my thoughts as the shuttle touches down and sways on its struts. The Gunners around me loosen their harnesses as the rear hatch lowers. There is gunfire from a squad that got here first. There is the scream of something heavy plummeting through thick atmosphere. Sergeant Tul yells for us to “move, move,” and we do.
I am third off the ship, and my tentacles are moist with fear. My GAW13 kicks as I fire. Tanks rumble and drones and fighter craft swirl overhead, a maelstrom of missiles exploding, fountains of dirt erupting, my first glimpse of real-life humans taking shelter, taking aim.
I have studied them so long that they feel intimate and familiar. I know them. I launch a volley into a small squad, and one of the humans is ripped in two. Our shuttle is taking fire and screams as it pulls away, lifting up to gather more bodies as they spill from orbiting vats. The resistance is stiffer than we were promised. A grenade takes out Urj, and one of his dismembered tentacles tangles around my ankle. Sergeant Tul is yelling at us to take cover. There is a mound of metal nearby, some kind of bunker half-covered with dirt that a few Gunners huddle behind. Bullets pepper its side. I fire into the humans until my gun overheats and then dive into the bunker. The last thing I see overhead is the flash of a new sun, a blinding ball of light, as one of our warships and all of its vats wink out of existence.
There is much yelling. Radios bark back and forth. I check my gun and my tentacles, make sure all is in place, and then I see what I am hiding inside of, this makeshift bunker. It is familiar. It is the ruin of one of our ships, a troop shuttle, but something is not right—
Bullets ping off the hull, and I can hear the natives of Sector 1 yelling and coordinating. A Gunner from another squad has taken shelter with us. Her radio barks, and she yells at Tul, “War Two is down!”
I think of Kur. Our home. Our bunkroom. Now that ship is a hailstorm of bolts plummeting through the high clouds and scattering across this ball of mud.
Inside the busted troop shuttle where we’ve taken shelter, tall grasses are swaying, waving at me, trying to signal some warning. Rov stands by the gaping hole in the shuttle’s skin, scanning the sky, her armored bulk blotting out my view of the carnage beyond. I am going to die a cowardly, expensive death, I realize.
“War One has taken a hit!” Rov shouts.
Flashes of light stab in around her, another brightening of the sky. A moment later, there is a deep grumble that I feel in my bones, a noise like the belly growl of a hungry god.
Closer by, a bomb explodes, a sharp crack followed by the howls of my kin. I hear alien craft buzzing overhead, filling the sky with the piercing shrieks of their passing, and with the whistle of loosed munitions.
All is background noise. I am watching the tall grasses wave and wave. Their feathery blades are growing up through the destroyed hull of one of our ships. There is rust here and there, cables chewed by local varmints, all the signs of that universal destroyer: Time. The scars he leaves are everywhere I look.
I hold a tentacle in front of my visor and study it. Where are my scars? Where are the physical artifacts of wounds I remember suffering? Has it really been so long? I search for an old injury that I have been hunting for and have been unable to find for a cycle now. The last thing I remember is waking in my bunk, feeling like someone else. I remember a last glimpse of my ship, dimmed and showing no pockmark, no wear of war.
Another bomb erupts in the distance. More of my people dying. And I think of the stress I witnessed among High Command on my warship. I think of the way things have been falling apart—so many people thrown to Gunner. There is a girl who will not stop killing herself, a girl who knows something, a fragment of a report about a missing signal from another ship.
There is a helmet by my feet, half-buried in the dirt of planet Earth. Tul is yelling for us to fight, and I am trying to remember a poem I once knew. The words are not with me. All around us are the signs of an invasion that did not succeed. And I know a sudden truth with all the fierceness of a hot blast—I know this as bullets zing by my helmet and bombs rage closer and closer:
We are the second fleet.
We are the reserve.
All that’s left.
And hell has come for us at last.