Beacon 23: The Complete Novel (15 page)

• 29 •

“On or off?” Claire asks.

It’s after dinner, and Claire and I are up by the gravity wave broadcaster, which is the business end of the nav beacon. I sit still and concentrate before I answer. How am I feeling? Stressed out? Depressed? Mellow? Content? I want to get it right. I’m trying to prove a point here. I’ve been trying to prove it for over a week.

I rest my head against the dome of the GWB, which has always relaxed me in the past. I’m supposed to guess if Claire has the power to the dome on or off (and yeah, we only do this when there’s no traffic passing through). She keeps the results tallied, won’t tell me how I’ve fared thus far, doesn’t want me to have any feedback. Claire contends that I’m imagining the effects of the GWB on my brain, says she doesn’t feel anything when she sits in the same spot. But I know I do.

“The power is . . . on,” I say, giving her my answer. “I think. I’m pretty sure.”

“How sure?” She makes a note on her tablet.

“It’s . . . there are confounding variables.”

“Like?”

“You,” I tell her. And it’s true. Just being around her, I can feel my pulse race less, my breathing grow deeper and more relaxed, my limbs feel free of the trembles and shakes.

Claire leans over and kisses my cheek. “I think that’s enough for today,” she says.

“So how’d I do?”

She laughs at me for asking. Like I should know better. Cricket burrows her head into my hand, reminding me that I’ve stopped scratching her. I resume. “I swear I can feel the difference,” I say. “I can tell when it’s on. It feels so soothing.”

Claire puts the tablet away. She takes a deep breath, like she’s contemplating something. Then she turns to me, her guise suddenly serious. “I believe you,” she says. “I do. I’m starting to believe you. I’m just curious if it’s really the GWB or something else.”

“Like . . . you think it’s all in my head?” I touch the rock dangling from my neck. Ever since that cargo out of Orion splashed into a trillion pieces across my asteroid field, I’ve had a pretty loose grip on reality. Looser than normal, I guess I should say.

“I don’t know.” Claire bites her lower lip. “I guess I just know the spectrum the gwib works on, and they’ve been tested like hell to make sure they don’t have any biological effects, otherwise we wouldn’t let you all come up here while they’re running and even get
close
to them—”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with
me
,” I say.

Claire nods. “Maybe.” Somehow she misses the very loud and obvious cast from my rod as I go fishing for a compliment, or for reassurances. Or hell—I’d be happy with a little bit of a pause before acknowledging that, indeed, there might be something wrong with my head.

And then it hits me like a frag grenade with its fuse delay set to max. I finally get that she’s sharing with me the results of our tests, that she’s admitting I’ve been getting them mostly right.

“So I’ve been scoring pretty good?” I ask. Otherwise, why would she be worried about me?

Claire bites her lip.

“How good? Have I gotten many wrong?”

Claire glances at her tablet. She’s back to biting her lip. There’s no way she’d worry something was wrong with me unless I’m nailing it better than chance would dictate. Something statistically significant. I reach for the tablet. “Can I see? Please. C’mon, Claire.”

And she can see that it’s important to me. Cricket licks my arm as I lean over and take the tablet from her. Claire lets it go. There’s a spreadsheet on the screen. I scroll up, seeing all the check marks from our past dinner dates, and it takes a moment to see where the Xs would even go. Because there aren’t any. I’ve been right every time.

I feel an immense sense of relief. I might be crazy, but I wasn’t wrong. I’ve always known the GWB messes with my head, and I’ve always assumed it messes with everyone’s head, but Claire really had me going there for a while. She really had me thinking it was just the act of sitting quietly and
thinking
it was working that was calming me.

“Maybe it’s something you came into contact with in the trenches. A toxin, perhaps—”

I nod, thinking this is likely. Lord knows, I’ve sucked in enough alien atmo and bioblasts. No telling what’s been in my lungs. I never got Nile teeth syndrome or the blue cough like a lot of soldiers, but perhaps I got something the docs missed.

“Or maybe it’s neurological,” Claire offers. She’s puzzling through this the way she tunes beacons, getting them ready for service. Looking back at the tablet in my hand—which she uses to get these nav beacons sorted—I wonder how much of my appeal to her is that I’m broken. I wonder what she’s doing here. Why she stayed. How NASA would’ve allowed a tuner to become an operator.

“Neurological how?” I ask.

“Well, it’s just that . . . maybe it’s more of an experienced trauma, rather than a foreign body. You have all the signs of . . . you know—”

“Trench rot,” I say. “Blast shock. War weariness. Soldier syndrome—”

“Post traumatic stress disorder,” Claire says, opting for the clinical rather than the descriptive. Lots of dirty truths hide in those clean syllables.

“What would that have to do with this?”

Claire shrugs. “I probably know as much about how the gwibs work as the people who invented them, and nothing I know accounts for why you would feel anything from what they do.”

“Should I be worried?” I feel like I should be worried. Claire is a whole lot smarter than me, and she looks worried. She places her hand on my arm, and I see a brave smile on her face, the one she keeps plastered over her concern for me.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” she says. “We’ll figure this out, you and me. Everything’s going to be perfectly fine.”

But I know she’s wrong. I heard it from the man who sold me the flowers and the chocolate and the cheese. I know something bad is coming. I know it’s near. There are rumors of two fleets amassing on either side of this galactic arm, rumors of the navy collecting all its ships, and of the Ryph stockpiling all
their
ships, and no one knows whether these rumors are true, but we tend to spread and believe the worst of what we hear. It’s so much easier to believe the worst.

I don’t know what I believe. I’ve learned to doubt my mind. I need evidence. Facts. Like the sound from the proximity alarm, which begins to emit its soft blare, which in Claire’s beacon sounds similar to the old air raid sirens the army uses. We have a visitor. And it’s no great coincidence that bad things arrive while I’m thinking about them. No coincidence at all. Because I’ve been thinking about this for over a year now. I’ve known that this was coming for longer than I’ve worked here in sector eight. I’ve known it because there’s no escaping it. War is always coming—it’s only ever a matter of time. And right now, beyond our porthole, the time comes.

• 30 •

Almost as soon as the ships arrive, one of them is destroyed. It happens so fast, I assume at first that it’s an impact death, that some ship not on our schedule tried to pass through here at twenty times the speed of light and met a disastrous end among the asteroids. There’s even a twinge of guilt that maybe Claire’s beacon was down for our little experiment—except that I’d sensed the beacon was on, and my beacon is also up and running, so it can’t be that.

This and more spins through my mind in the handful of moments it takes for all the combustibles aboard the ship to glow and expand in an orange ball and then fall perfectly still.

What’s left is a Ryph Reaper, one of the bigger enemy cruisers, its forward-swept arms studded with laser pods and missile hardpoints. The terror of the cosmos. The only ship that ever got the best of me. The shit of nightmares.
My
nightmares.

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.