Darker Space (3 page)

I shot a look at Lucy, but she was dozing against the window. “You’ve got a dirty mind, Cam.”

“You’re a bad influence on me.”

Yeah. Pretty sure that was the general consensus.

I showed him my middle finger, and he just grinned.

I shook Lucy awake as we got to our station. She was clumsy and drowsy with sleep. Cam and I held a hand each until we’d crossed the pedestrian overpass and taken the stairs out of the station onto the street. She’d woken up a little by the time we got to the park we used as a shortcut.

“Can we go on the swings?”

“It’s dark,” I told her. “We’ll come tomorrow after school.”

“Please, Brady!” She tugged at my hand. “I didn’t get to sleep over at Catherine and David’s like I wanted, and it’s my
birthday
!”

I looked at Cam.

“It’s her birthday,” he said with a shrug.

The lights in the playground area were on. They were bright enough to let us see our way, but not bright enough to swallow the starlight. I kept my eyes fixed on Lucy’s back as I pushed, fighting the tiny ripples of nausea that tickled at the edges of my mind whenever I glimpsed the stars.

Lucy squealed with laughter as she swung higher and higher into the night.

Then somehow we all ended up on the merry-go-round, Cam and Lucy sprawled in the middle while I sat on the side and pushed us slowly around. Cam had his arms folded behind his head. Lucy was resting her head on his stomach, lying crossways to him.

“The two bright ones,” Cam was saying, “are called the Pointers, because they point to the Southern Cross.”

“Which two ones? They’re all bright!”

Cam raised his hand. “Those two. See?”

Lucy craned her neck. She wasn’t scared to look at the stars, not like me. “Do you know all the stars, Cam?”

Cam’s eyes were dark in the gloom. He smiled slightly. “Not all of them.”

“Brady, do you know all of them?”

I pushed my heels against the ground, giving us another tiny burst of speed. “I don’t know any of them.”

I’d spent most of my life not looking at the night sky, and three years of it stuck on a Defender where I could feel it crawling at my back every minute of every day. I’d been scared of the black enough as a kid—every horror story I’d ever heard and nightmare I’d ever had came from there—but after coming back, it was even worse. I’d seen the Faceless now. I’d heard Kai-Ren’s voice in my head. I could still feel his fucking touch on my skin.

Cam reached and took my hand. He stroked it with his thumb. “Brady’s not a stargazer, Lucy.”

Lucy huffed at me.

“I don’t even like Jump the Moon,” I said.

“What’s that?” Cam asked.

After today, I was weirdly pleased to have found a party game I had to explain to him. “We used to play it back home. First, you get really smashed. Then you take a broomstick, and you hold it up at the moon. Then you spin around ten times, and then you put the broomstick down and try and jump over it.”

“You
do
that?”

I poked him in the ribs, making him flinch and Lucy giggle as her head got jostled. “Well, not anymore. I grew up and got cultured.”

“I’m not sure I’d agree with either of those,” Cam said, the smile evident in his voice.

“Faking it until I make it, LT.”

He laughed. “Okay. Good luck with that.”

We spun in slow, lazy circles for a while longer, Cam and Lucy staring at the sky while I watched their faces.

Lucy gasped suddenly. “Cam, look! Look! A shooting star!”

I twisted my neck before I could stop myself, and saw the flare of light across the field of stars. My heart stammered, and my breath caught in my throat.

“Make a wish!” Lucy crowed. “Make a wish!”

I wished I’d never fucking looked.

I don’t know how much time passed. The entire universe had contracted in that moment and left me small and terrified, nothing but a heartbeat, at its core. I was on Defender Three again, feeling the black at my back. I was on the Faceless ship again. I could hear his voice in my head—
“Bray-dee”
—and the prickling drag of a claw down my naked spine.

I was just a fucking bug to him, an insect.

He’d liked the panicked noises I made.

“Brady.” Cam’s hand on my shoulder startled me. “Let’s go. Let’s go home.”

Lucy was quiet as we left the park, and I felt like an asshole for ruining her fun. I didn’t feel guilty enough to insist we stay, though.

Cam held my hand the whole way home.

I had another nightmare that night.

Chapter Two

The military was never going to let Cam go. Me neither, probably, except I wasn’t a valuable asset to intel so much as I was a dead end. I’d spent my captivity by the Faceless curled up in the fetal position, whimpering and panicking, in a dark room on Kai-Ren’s ship. So yeah, a dead end. But I didn’t care if I spent the rest of my life in fatigues and boots that didn’t fit right as long as I had the sun at my back. As long as I got to keep Cam and Lucy, I didn’t care how many ways the military had its claws in us, or how many floors I had to scrub.

Once upon a time, back on Defender Three, I’d been a trainee medic. Here, planetside, there were enough real doctors and nurses and medics that they didn’t need to scrape the bottom of the barrel for guys like me, so I was an orderly at the base hospital. I didn’t mind. It meant a lot of hours leaning on a mop, but there were worse jobs. And just like on Defender Three, I got to finish off the meals the patients couldn’t.

This one kid, Mike Marcello, had gotten hurt in a training exercise. He copped a face full of explosives, and now he could really only eat pudding and whatever had gone through a blender first. But he always asked for biscuits with his meals, and then gave them to me because I played cards with him in the afternoon and didn’t freak out about his face. So I guess I still had the bedside manner Doc had praised me for back when I was still a trainee medic, or at least I had a thing where I liked food more than I hated looking at the way Marcello’s jaw hung slack from his face with titanium staples and wires.

His good eye lit up when I walked in to visit him, and he gave me what was probably a smile but looked more like the grimace of a death’s head. “Ay, Arret.”

Hey, Garret.

His speech was pretty fucked up too.

“Hey, Marcello.” I pulled my cards out of my pocket. “What’s up?”

Because of the way he talked, he didn’t get many visitors. Most of his mates, the guys he’d been in training with, were orbiting the planet on Defenders now anyway, which at least saved him from having to find out the hard way they were assholes.

But I don’t know. Maybe they would have visited him.

His parents lived in Murray Bay. The military was going to ship him back there as soon as they gave him a jaw he could chew with and some more reconstructive surgery so that when he closed what was left of his mouth, there was enough skin to give him a cheek.

“Yor ate.”

Late? Every day it took a little while to attune my ear to the way Marcello spoke.

“Fuck off.” I pulled up a chair and dealt the cards. “You got any idea how these assholes are riding me?”

Marcello rolled his eyes, and I told him all about Lucy’s birthday party. Marcello was from a refugee township too. He didn’t know about Pass the Parcel either. We played cards for an hour before some nurse came looking for me to clean up a patch of vomit in the hall.

“See you, Marcello.”

“Ee you.”

I cleaned up the vomit and headed down to the basement to get a fresh mop and a cigarette.

My boss at the hospital was a dickhead of a lance corporal called Lingard. He didn’t like me much, and the feeling was absolutely mutual. He was a pinch-faced, petty-minded fucker who thought I was the one with the attitude problem, when what really got his goat, although he didn’t have the balls to admit it, was that I was twenty years younger than him, twice as smart, and had actually seen some service in the black that didn’t involve pushing a mop.

“Think you’re better than me, Garrett?”
he’d asked once, squaring up to me.

My smirk told him I knew I was.

I mean, what could he do to me, really? Make me clean up twice as much vomit?

The rest of the orderlies were okay. We didn’t talk much and usually only saw one another at the beginning and the end of every shift when we stowed our gear in the basement. Or maybe they talked to one another but not to me; I don’t know. Even though what had happened out in the black wasn’t public knowledge, this was the military, and gossip traveled fast. Everyone knew I was one of only two guys who’d been taken and then returned by the Faceless.

I was a horror story, probably.

Just like Marcello.

When I got to the basement, a few of the other guys were there too, hanging around.

“Hey.” Jones nodded at me as I passed him.

“Hey.”

He followed me into the locker room. “You hear anything about the Shitboxes?”

“Nope.” I opened my locker to grab my cigarettes. “What Shitboxes?”

“Three of them in the last week. Landing at night.” Jones tapped the side of his nose. “I’ve got a buddy in the motor pool. Says he got sent out each time to collect brass from the runway.”

Shitboxes were shuttles. They were mostly used to ferry men and supplies between Defenders, but they could break atmo as well. Well, hit it like a fucking brick wall first. If Shitboxes were landing, they were coming in from the black, not from planetside.

I slammed my locker door shut. “Why the hell would I know anything about it?”

Jones scowled at me and showed me his palms. “I was just asking!”

“Yeah, just asking because if something weird’s going on, it’s gotta have something to do with me, right?” I pulled a cigarette out of the pack. “Fuck you.”

He rolled his eyes. “Whatever, asshole.”

“Yeah. What-the-fuck-ever.” I hadn’t even guessed before Jones had started talking that I was wound up tight enough to be itching for a fight. Jones didn’t give me the satisfaction, though. Just shook his head and walked away.

I don’t know.

Maybe he wasn’t making anything of it except conversation, but I’d only look like a dick if I asked, so I didn’t say anything. Just let him walk away.

“Garrett!” Lingard shuffled into the locker room. He looked to be in a foul mood. Fouler than usual, which, considering he’d been born an asshole of the highest order, was really saying something.

“Where the fuck are the syringes? The med director is all over me because there are no fucking syringes, and they ordered them three weeks ago!”

I leaned on my locker and watched his face turn red. I was fairly certain that nobody, not even the med director, would be all over Lingard without a hazmat suit and at least ten shots of vodka behind him. He was ugly as sin on the outside and twice as ugly on the inside. He was married too. I once heard one of the guys say his wife must’ve lost a bet.

“Get over to logistics and find out what the fuck happened to those syringes!”

“Right now?”

“No, for fucking Christmas, what do you reckon?”

I shoved my cigarettes in my pocket, threw a sloppy salute in Lingard’s direction, and bit down a grin. Logistics? Lingard never would have sent me if he’d known he was doing me a favor.

I stopped at the med director’s office on the way, to get a copy of the work order for the syringes. I’d been in the military long enough to know that they wouldn’t believe you had ten fingers and ten toes if you didn’t have the paperwork to prove it. The clerk on duty was a decent guy and didn’t give me any shit over it. Just made a copy of the order, which I folded up and shoved in my pocket.

A legitimate excuse to visit logistics. I hadn’t had one of those in a while. And hopefully, if I was argumentative enough, I’d get referred up the line until I was shown into the office of a particularly hot lieutenant, where I’d immediately forget what I’d been so belligerent about a few minutes before. Pretty sure I’d be open to all sorts of interdepartmental negotiations.

I headed out across the base.

Back when I’d been a recruit and done my basic training here, I’d known where my barracks and the mess hall were, and not much else. But I’d only been here for a couple of weeks before getting loaded onto a Shitbox and sent into the black. Now I knew the base a lot better. I knew the names of the buildings. I knew which shortcuts to use to avoid running into officers. And I knew that slipping some cash to the enlisted guys who worked at the Q-Store meant you’d get boots that didn’t cripple you.

Logistics was in the secondary administration building toward the center of the base. It was crawling with officers. Cam always laughed when I started ranting about how much quicker everything would get done in the military if only the poor bastards at the bottom of the food chain didn’t have to stop every second and salute some guy with stripes.

There was a queue at the front office at logistics. I was third in line. I stared at the clock on the wall, sighed loudly, and took the work order out of my pocket to read it. The guy in front of me had grease-stained hands. Mechanic, probably, or motor pool. The guy in front of him was talking with the scrawny clerk behind the counter and, by the sounds of it, getting nowhere.

I folded the work order into a plane. I thought about sending it sailing over the clerk’s head, then unfolded it instead.

I watched the stammering second hand of the clock for a while.

“Lucky I’m not here for a medical emergency or anything,” I announced.

The guy in front of me huffed and shuffled his boots on the floor.

The clerk and the guy at the counter ignored me.

“Seriously,” I said. “I was being sarcastic. This is actually an emergency. The hospital’s syringes never got delivered.”

That got the clerk’s attention. “See the line? You’re in it.”

“Yeah, I see the line. And I’m betting syringes are a hell of a lot more important than whatever you’re dealing with right now.” I caught the mechanic’s gaze. “Logistics. Couldn’t organize a fuck in a brothel, right?”

He grinned.

The clerk stalked away.