Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

  Cricket bolts from my lap. The warthen growls and swipes at the porthole with her claws. Claire’s hand is digging into my arm. We are otherwise frozen, watching as the ship remains in view through the porthole. Remains in view because it’s coming straight for us.

  “Go, go,” I say, trying not to yell, trying to remain calm. I only got a glimpse of the ship that went nova, but it looked like a Navy Talon. Must’ve been a pursuit through hyperspace for them to come out on top of each other like that. The war is here. It’s really goddamn here. And we’re sitting ducks. No—we’re fish in a NASA-white barrel.

  Claire launches herself down the chute toward the command module. I make Cricket go in front of me, watching her tail swish the weightlessness and her paws swipe at the walls until she reaches gravity on the other side. I’m right behind them.

  “Lifeboat,” Claire says, rushing for the ladder.

  I run to the QT and send a quick message to NASA: undr attck. I leave out the vowels because we don’t have time, not because of regs. Then I chase after Claire, wondering how either of our lifeboats is better than the beacon. We don’t have a ship that can outrun a Reaper. I listen for the proximity alarm to signal more of our incoming fleet. Or their incoming fleet. The only thing that can save us is for the navy to get here. How are they not here?

  We take the ladders as fast as we can. The temptation to run to a porthole and get a visual on the Reaper is overwhelming. Without being able to see where it is, there’s a dread that our lives could end at any minute—a flash of plasma, and then our atoms are mingling in the void.

  Another ladder. Claire’s living quarters. The bed where we first made love. A handful of my things. Some clothes I keep over here, neatly folded next to hers. A swirl and dent in the middle of the bed made by Cricket. All these signs of a comfortable, happy life flash by in my peripheral. Things I’ll never see again. Things I’ll never feel again. I’m back at the front. Back in the trenches. Thinking about home. Aching to go home.

  I follow Cricket down the next ladder, taking in a slide what she spans in a leap. No weapon, no attack craft, no way of defending ourselves. But I’m forming a plan, one of those desperate plans, some way of making sure Claire and Cricket get out of here alive.

  Before I take the next ladder, I grab the largest of the adjustable wrenches from the tool locker. I take the last ladder more slowly, one hand on the rungs, the other handling the heft of the tool. I jump down the last five rungs. Claire is in her beacon’s lifeboat, yelling for me to get in. Cricket is standing in the airlock, looking at me over her shoulder, tail tucked between her legs, feeling our fear. All she knows is that her human companions are deathly afraid.

  “In,” I say, waving at Cricket.

  She hesitates. She knows what I’m thinking.

  I shove at Cricket’s rump. “Let’s go,” I tell her. I imagine myself getting in the lifeboat as well. I try to believe it. So Cricket will believe it.

  With me pushing and Claire tugging, we get Cricket through the airlock and into the lifeboat. I don’t even think to lean in for a last kiss. Too much racing through my head. Too many days of standing in an airlock just like this and thinking similar fates but never with so noble a purpose. I key the lifeboat’s outer door shut, then my airlock door, and then I disengage the ship from the lock collar. Wielding the adjustable wrench like a baseball bat, I take a mean swing at the control panel. There’s a crunch, and the hiss, sparkle, and smell of an electrical short. I catch a glimpse of Claire staring at me through the porthole as the lifeboat begins to drift away.

  Dropping the wrench, I run for my lifeboat. I know sound can’t travel through a vacuum. I know this. I know my pet and my lover—my two best friends in the cosmos—are drifting away. But I swear I can hear Cricket’s howling lament. I swear I can hear Claire asking me what in the hell I’m thinking. My warthen is an empath, so I can understand hearing her voice. As for Claire’s, it wouldn’t be the first time under duress that I started imagining things.

  •••

  At the helm of my lifeboat, I release from the beacon and pivot to scan the area. Reaching overhead, I flip the radio on. “Claire, you there?”

  “I’m here. What the fuck are you doing?”

  Her voice is a blast of static and anger. I hear the soldier in her, not the nav beacon tuner. Hard to believe what we once were and what we are now.

  “Listen closely,” I say. I’m watching the Reaper approach. It’s still heading for the beacon. I engage the thrust and race out toward it. “I want you to head toward the nearest big asteroid you can find. Grab hold of it with the pinchers and shut your boat down. Wait for the navy. Stay off the radio. Do you read?”

  “What’re you doing?” Claire asks. And I realize that’s not static behind her voice. It’s Cricket. Hissing and growling.

  “Go now,” I tell her. “Before any more of the Ryph get here. Please. Just go.”

  Tears stream down my cheeks at the thought of anything happening to her or Cricket. The attack ship adjusts course toward the lifeboats. I don’t have the thrusters or control jets to outmaneuver it. I don’t have any weapon other than my desperation. I keep a steady hand on the control stick, ready to dodge incoming fire, but the enemy ship knows I’m no threat. It just races onward. I race to intercept. On my scanner, I can see that Claire has her boat going at full tilt as well. She’s heading toward the rocks. A good soldier. Can see there’s no stopping me, and that this isn’t going to be a holo where the hero and the girl profess their love while the bad guys wait patiently to make it a climactic finale. This isn’t going to be a holo where anyone has time to sit, frozen in place. This isn’t even going to be a holo with a hero. Just two people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I adjust course to make it look like I’m trying to slide by the Reaper and escape. It’s all about giving Claire time. An extra target. I know what the Ryph are here to do; I’ve been on these runs from the other side. They’ll take out one of the beacons and rig the other to blow. Or rig them both to blow. But they’ll hold at least one so they control this airspace. It’s the same tactic used in the old wars when bridges were both lusted after and strung with blast charges. No way through this sector without a beacon. The Ryph must’ve cracked our GWB frequency, just like we cracked theirs. I’m thinking like a soldier, piloting like a flyboy, forming tactics like a man in love.

  The Reaper races my way. No shots fired yet. Claire is halfway to the asteroid field. Moments before we pass, I throw my ship to the side, attempting to ram the Reaper. The Ryph pilot is fast; he flits to the side and out of the way, but I’m spinning sideways, rotating as I barrel forward, and I extend the sampling arm tucked under the nose of the boat, reaching out, making my craft as long as possible, just want to touch, to make contact at full speed, to let this beast know that I pose a threat, for him to concentrate on me—

  There’s a clang as the sampling arm hits the Reaper’s trailing wing. A racket. I slam against the side canopy, the crappy NASA restraints giving way, not meant for this. Stars flash in my vision. And then a hiss. An alarm as the cabin begins to lose pressure. Cold leaks in. A hull rupture. The constellations become a blur as the lifeboat spins in space, and I have one brief moment of lucidity left in which to wonder if I did more damage to my enemy than to myself. Just that angry hope before a bulkhead gives way in my lifeboat, and all that pressurized air rushes out, taking me with it.

  As I cartwheel through the ruptured hull and out among the lonely and quiet stars, my lungs begin to burn. They say you can survive in the cold vacuum of space for nearly a minute if you hold your breath. Icy tears glaze my vision, and I wonder why anyone would even bother.

  • 31 •

  Every morning is an afterlife. Every evening, I die anew in the trenches amid nightmares of artillery finding their target. To wake each morning is a surprise. To rise a miracle. To breathe another breath some gift foisted upon me and beyond my control.

  My eyes flutter open and settle
on an old man standing before a lighthouse, a great wave crashing all around him. I know what that feels like. The man seems unaware of what’s coming, but I think maybe he knows. I think maybe he’s numb to it all. I don’t think that’s ignorance on his bearded and weathered face; I believe that’s resignation.

  A Ryph Lord moves before me and blocks the view of the picture. They say I’m one of the few who have ever been this close to a Lord and lived to tell the tale. Here I am again. Life appears to be full of coincidences like this, until you learn how it all pieces together.

  “You’re awake,” someone says.

  I recognize the voice. It’s Rocky. I try to lift my arms to touch the rock on its lanyard, this little piece of asteroid that I found among the debris of the wrecked cargo, but my arms are bound. I look down at my wrists, seized together and tied to my knees, which are bound together as well. I can’t move.

  The Ryph Lord hovers over me. My throat burns, maybe from dying out there among the stars. I try to focus my thoughts on Claire and Cricket, knowing I should remember something, a vision coalescing of them heading for safety, but I can’t remember if they made it. All I care about in that moment is whether they’re alive. I want my navy to come and rescue them. I lock down on this thought, trying to ignore the voices of my insanity. I try to see my love and my beloved animal safe and in some faraway place, some place where war will never reach—

  “Yo, asshole, I’m talking to you.”

  “Shaddup, Rocky.”

  My voice is a rasp. I should be dead. I wish I were dead. I should’ve been dead a thousand times over. Unable to move, I feel my heart racing, despite my head being so close to the GWB. So it’s not the sitting still that calms; it’s the sitting still voluntarily. A soul can’t be pinned and made to heal. It has to be talked into stillness and quietude. It has to want it.

  “I’d say this is rather important,” Rocky says. His voice seems to float up from my necklace, but I know it’s all in my head. I hear voices in my dreams. Don’t we all? Our brains can fool us. Mine makes a fool out of me.

  The Ryph Lord shifts his great bulk from one leg to the other. The Ryph are bipedal, like all the sentient races we know, with skin like a shark’s beneath their flight and combat suits. A face split by a vertical rift reveals rows of sharp teeth. Eyes lie to either side, and they bore into my skull. Two three-clawed hands are balled into fists. Muscles like steel. The biggest and baddest of the Ryph, Lords are never taken alive, rarely taken whole. I don’t understand what this one is waiting for. Kill me, already. Or untie me so I can do it myself.

  “Stop ignoring me,” my pet rock says.

  “Not now, Rocky.”

  “Yeah right, not now. Like I’m happy with any of this. I need this guy looking at us like I needed the hole you put in my head. And hey, what was up with that?”

  “You aren’t real.”

  “Let’s table that. This guy has a favor he wants to ask. So open your ears and give a listen. Give a listen, and I’ll shut up.”

  I stare at the Ryph Lord. My mind is clearing a little. It occurs to me that every moment delayed like this is good for Claire, Cricket, and the navy. Maybe my death can be put off for a moment or two. Maybe these last few minutes can serve some larger purpose.

  “I’m listening,” I say.

  “Listen harder,” Rocky tells me.

  I wait. I can feel a thrum in the deck from distant machinery somewhere in the beacon. I can hear the whirring of a pump way down in the living modules. I can hear Rocky breathing, as if rocks can do such a thing. And then I hear the whisper, a hoarse voice launched across the cosmos like a dandelion seed on a breeze, a hiss beyond the vacuum, a single word below the senses, too dull to register, coming like an ache in my bones, like neutrinos dancing across the surface of my skull—

  hello

  It is fainter than my imaginary voices, and yet somehow more real. Able to be believed. I hear Rocky holding his breath. I feel the welcomed numbness of the GWB leach into my mood.

  “Hello,” I whisper back, the word held in my mouth, uttered inside my throat, not passing between my lips. A word of thought.

  remember me

  It’s not a question but a command. A desperate plea. Like how the dead wish to be remembered. Like great-great-grandfathers would have others know their names. Not the war heroes with the medals, but the obscure, those who didn’t fight. Those who died quietly with loved ones around and who were lowered into fathom-deep trenches rather than scraped out of kilometer-long ones.

  The Ryph Lord moves, comes at me with his fist uncurled, those fearsome claws sharp as razors, and reaches past my bound arms. The alien grabs my shirt and yanks it up to my neck, handling me roughly, but almost as if arms so powerful have no choice.

  Alien skin touches my flesh, my gnarled and ropey scars, the Ryph’s palm placed flat against my skin. I look down. The Lord’s hand covers the three gouges that lead into my surgically repaired knots of flesh. It covers the gouges perfectly.

  remember me

  “I remember you,” I say, the words trapped in my throat. I know that I am dead and that none of this is real, but nightmares aren’t escaped so easily. Dreams are where men are free, not nightmares. I can escape no more easily than I can slip my bonds. I am back on Yata, beneath the grand Ryph hive, the last one of my squad alive, sitting in front of the bomb we’d carried across hellish klicks. But I don’t set off the bomb. And then a Ryph Lord opens me up. It’s the last thing I remember.

  “I remember,” I whisper. I little more than think the words. This is the same Ryph Lord. He came back to finish what he started.

  look

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at. The Lord moves his open hand up and presses it against my face. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see anything. Rocky gives me some advice:

  “Close your eyes, asshole.”

  I smile. I feel drunk from the GWB. And Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise. Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?

  When I shut my eyes, I see the Ryph Lord standing in front of me, just as he is, but with his hands to his side. And yet I can still feel his hand over my face. My mind relaxes. I am no longer fighting life. This is what we fight. Not death. We fight life. I let go of that, and I can hear Rocky smile.

  Your war-mate, who came here on our behalf, she is gone.

  Clearer now, I hear the Lord talking. And I see visions beyond him of Scarlett, my old love from the trenches, who came to my beacon and spoke nonsense, who died in my arms, whose lifeless body was carted off by a bounty hunter in all black who never uttered a word.

  I think all of this, and by thinking it, I say it. I say Scarlett’s name.

  War is coming, the Lord says.

  “I know,” I say. “It’s always coming. But you could stop. You don’t have to come for us.”

  Both have to stop. Only we can stop this. Only you can stop this.

  I think Scarlett’s insanity has leaked into my thoughts. Her nonsense is mixing in with the rest.

  A great fleet moves to crush another great fleet. It will pass through here. You will not allow it.

  I sense more than just the Ryph’s words; I sense his thoughts. His vision. I see ships beyond number. They’ve been gathering on every moon and every planet, set off in staggered precision, all to meet at once, a million weak lasers concentrated on a single cancer, poised to slice it free.

  I see secrets laid bare, secrets the enemy knows. A mass invasion that will fool no one. I see why no ship came to protect us—because it would tip off our enemy. I see why the Ryph want to destroy my beacon. I see why NASA sent a second beacon, because the invasion was too important. I see my being stationed here not to get rid of me but to deploy me. I don’t know what to believe.

  You and I are the same, the Ryph Lord thinks to me. You and I and your war-mate and many others. Those who do not wish to
fight. Who spare lives. Who hate war. The sad soldiers.

  “Who are you?” I ask. I no longer pretend to be talking. I’m thinking. I feel a deep connection like the one I have with Cricket, and more revelations hit me, more questions. Who is the empath? Maybe it’s me.

  There are those like me among my people who wish peace. Not enough to take charge. But poised to strike. We made plans with your war-mate. A sudden de-escalation of war. A sudden deceleration of warships.

  Deceleration. Bring the war to a sudden stop. Even though I’m seeing the Ryph, I can still feel his palm against my face, the back of my head pressed against the GWB. Knowing I’m already dead fills me with calm. Claire and Cricket are okay. Claire and Cricket are out among the rocks, hiding.

  Claire and Cricket are there in the GWB with me.

  I can see them, because the Ryph Lord knows about them. They are behind me, bound and gagged, on the other side of the dome, with another Ryph Lord standing guard over them.

  I know they are there.

  I hear their thoughts, their trembling minds, their terror and fear.

  None of us are safe.

  I weep into the palm of my enemy.

  • 32 •

  “Let them go,” I silently scream. I think-shout the words. I think-shout them again: “Let them go, you motherfucker!”

  Only you can end this.

  I open my eyes and twist my face left and right, trying to get free of the Ryph’s hand. The claws are pulled away. I try to wiggle around and see if Claire is really there. I feel her like one might feel a presence in a dark room. My hallucinations are creeping into the world of sight and sound. The other Ryph comes into view. The two aliens stare at one another. They are thinking between them. I hear the hiss of a language unknown. I catch only shapes of meanings, the things they visualize. They are arguing. One is afraid. The other has an aura of hope. I feel Cricket there, in my mind. Is she the one we’re speaking through? Conduits of conduits. The GWB and my warthen and my pet rock and something Claire opened in my too-tight chest.