Survival Tactics Read online

  right behind you

  His wife and son were half dragging him down the hallway toward the open exit door. He could hear the drones behind them—four, he could see on the overlay, and the red pulsing border was growing larger.

  Why was the exit door open?

  “Wait,” Ray said. He tried to slow down but found his feet were useless. “Wait! The door. It’s—“

  the door it’s

  They were outside, he and Cass, watching Ando run across the building’s dimly lit lawn, disappearing into the night, into safety, when the blast wave hit. Still under his arm she was lifted along with him. He tried to pull her in front of him, to shield her from the worst of the blast, but she was gone, abruptly, from his hands, and the red overlay filled his vision, blinding him.

  “Cass!” he shouted, as the red flared into white. “Cass!”

  And then there was nothing.

  He was on his back, unmoving, something roaring around him, deafening.

  “Cass? Ando?

  All he saw was white.

  It’s all right. That’s not how this ends.

  “Dad?”

  He’s safe. Even groggy, Ray felt relief surge through him. His eyes wouldn’t open, but he tried to speak. Something remotely resembling language came out of his mouth.

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Wait—this wasn’t Ando. This was the voice he’d heard earlier, the one he’d thought was his own. Some of Ray’s relief ebbed away.

  “Why can’t he talk?” the voice asked.

  “He’s readjusting.” A pleasant enough voice, but not deep and warm and husky. Not Cass, then. “His vitals are good. Give him a little time.”

  Ray felt fingers tuck themselves under his, and he slowly became aware of his body again. Weak, exhausted. His eye still hurt, but his hip ached less than he would have expected, what with having been blown to bits. His hand convulsed on the foreign fingers: they were long, thick, the skin dry and calloused. “Cass.’

  The hand gave his a squeeze. “She’s gone ahead,” the man said. Gentle, soothing. Not a tactic one expected from a government agent. Ray managed to force his eyes open.

  He was in a small space surrounded by medical equipment, illuminated by a bright light on the ceiling. An IV bag swung next to his bed. An ambulance, perhaps, though he had no sense of motion. The woman stood at his feet, staring at a screen displaying his vitals. Stout and dark-haired, she was dressed in a matching cotton shirt and pants: a doctor or a nurse.

  The man holding his hand, watching him with anxious eyes, had a salt-and-pepper mustache and a well-lined face that Ray could almost, but not quite, place. The hair on his head was black with flecks of silver: tight curls, neatly trimmed. The way Cass always kept her hair.

  Easy to look after, she always said. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever told her how much he loved it.

  “My family,” he said to the man, managing to tighten his fingers. So weak, his hand. “Is my family all right?”

  Another squeeze from the stranger. Such bright eyes this man had, and something familiar about them. That sharp tilt toward the inside, the way the left eyelid drooped, just a little. Ando had the same eyes. Maybe this man was a relative.

  “Your family is fine,” the man said.

  The voice sounded familiar and thick, but all Ray heard was the reassurance, and when the relief took him again, white and clean and silent, he allowed himself to fall asleep.

  * * *

  “It was the one you wrote for the 65th,” Ando told his mother.

  He sat on the grass, legs crossed, elbows on his knees. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand afterward—he’d had a knee replacement at 45—but he could see her better when he was seated. The ground beneath him was cool, but the afternoon sun warmed him even as the breeze chilled the dampness on his cheeks.

  “You made me out to be such a brat in that one, you know? But he always liked it. He got to be a hero.” Ando laughed. “And you got to ream me out for once. I always wondered why you never did in real life. Lord knows I earned it.”

  The breeze picked up, and a dried leaf tumbled across his lap.

  “For tomorrow, I was thinking of the rocket launch, the one you wrote when I went off to college. It’s shorter, but he always loved sitting on top of a ball of exploding fuel. I’ve been talking to the caseworker, and since it’s still a prototype, she thinks they might be able to get us an insurance exception. Maybe even for another two, which, at this point, may be enough. Nobody will say.” The words were coming harder now. “They know, but they won’t say.”

  Carefully, Ando unfolded his long limbs and pushed himself to his feet, feeling his spine crack as he rose. That’d be next: a lower lumbar replacement. They were getting better these days, but he hated surgery, no matter how quick the recovery. Still, he needed to be able to sit when he talked to his mother.

  “There’s so much I wish I could tell you, Mom. But maybe… maybe next time, I’ll just write it down.”

  He leaned down to press his lips against the headstone, just once, before he left her alone in the twilight.

  … 40%… 85%… 98%… Upload complete. Initiating connection.

  “Colonel? Ray! Are you napping?”

  Ray’s eyes snapped open at the sound of Cass’ voice, and he took a deep breath of the space shuttle’s generated oxygen. Before his eyes, the virtual instrument overlay glowed green.

  “Negative, CAPCOM,” he said. “Just making sure you’re paying attention.”

  The overlay updated the countdown: T-minus 30 seconds. Damn, he’d almost missed it. He lowered his helmet’s visor, and the hiss of the capsule’s environmental systems grew quieter.

  The overlay began counting down: T-minus 10, 9, 8…

  “Bring me some stardust, Colonel,” CAPCOM said, her voice clear in his ear.

  Ray grinned. “You got it, Cass.”

  The engine ignited with a deafening roar, slamming him back in his seat. But all Ray could hear was his heartbeat, turning the explosion into music, bright and hot and joyous.

  Single Point of Failure

  Mercury is going to kill me.

  * * *

  Jaceer was the first, and of course everyone thought it was suicide. She was in the industrial freezer with the meds and the etching solutions, stripped down to her underwear, the safety lock sabotaged from the inside. It’s not like the thing is soundproofed, either; if she’d yelled for help we’d have heard her, even in the middle of the goddamned night. Dr. Sofara didn’t even bother with an autopsy, just thawed her out, ashed her, and packed her in a box for the next drone home.

  I felt bad for her family, but really, she was kind of a bitch.

  Not that I let anybody know what I was thinking. Kellan knew it, because even with all the fucked-up shit we’ve done to each other over the last thirty years, he never stopped being able to read my mind. But in public? I had the big sad eyes and the platitudes, and I attended the Company-sponsored psychological refresher courses along with everybody else.

  We had to redistribute her work, of course. No new staff until the resupply ship was due—another 300 days. I have enough of a background in mechanics that I was able to pick up her shift moving the solar collector, but the others had to take over her janitorial tasks. So I wasn’t the first one who started trashing her memory out loud.

  I didn’t tell anybody about the dream.

  The dream where I was the one in the freezer, where I’d left my clothes folded neatly on the bed at Kellan’s feet. The dream where I stood, patient, waiting for cold to turn to pain to turn to numbness, until that final darkness swallowed all the sorrows of my life.

  The dream I had the night before we found her.

  * * *

  Mercury Station sees a lot of suicides, but Kellan and I figured we’d be immune. We’d worked every mine station in the solar system, including five years out by Jupiter and two years on an IndoAsian asteroid trawler. Close quarters like that, years a
t a time, you see it all: fighting and fucking and even mass murder. The Company writes off the losses and ships you off to the next assignment. Death is old hat at this point.

  But Mercury’s different. People who’ve never been here say it’s living on the poles, half-underground on a world that either wants to fry you or freeze you, but really it’s the weird-ass sense of time you get when everything goes retrograde. Relativity be damned—when objects you think you know start moving the wrong way, reality starts warping, and I’m not talking about wormholes and time dilation.

  Einstein was smart, but he didn’t know shit about psychology.

  * * *

  Tohan was next. Industrial accident. Cleaning out the dust filters on the primary solar collector, and forgot to put his thermal gloves back on after a break. Fused the fabric of the liners into his skin, and burned his hands down to the bone. Took him three days to die of sepsis, and even though we stuck him in the room furthest away from our sleeping quarters, we could hear him screaming the whole time.

  That time I’d dreamed of walking toward the collector in my indoor uniform, my eyes open to the burning sun, blinding me almost instantly before the furnace tore me apart.

  My dream was merciful. That’s something, I guess.

  * * *

  You sign a full indemnity release when you go to Mercury Station. All the mines require releases, but Mercury’s is special. The Company tells you Mercury has a higher incidence of accidents, and you pledge both to lower that incidence and absolve the Company of liability if you can’t.

  I heard rumors a few years back there were protests on Earth about it, but Kellan and I signed without hesitation. What the fuck did we care if we died on Mercury Station?

  Maybe that was just me.

  * * *

  Two hundred and forty-seven days to restaffing, and people started dying more regularly. Bogora: food poisoning. Caliente: overnight air leak in her quarters. Siobhan: injected herself with cleaning fluid instead of allergy meds. All suicides or dumbass accidents, only nobody believed that anymore, even if I was the only one who knew what was behind them.

  Dr. Sofara decided the place was haunted, and ended up panicking himself out an airlock. If he’d been on collector duty he’d have burned fast, but outside our polar habitat, he had to suffocate. At least it was quick, or quick enough; anyone who’s done any interplanetary travel has been trained not to hold their breath. I’m sure it was painless. More or less.

  I hadn’t dreamed about that one, so he was probably a legit suicide.

  Probably.

  * * *

  After we lost twelve, bringing our staffing down to thirty-six, I told Kellan about the dreams. Even after all these years, all the bitterness and hatred, I still thought he’d comfort me.

  He rolled his eyes. “The universe doesn’t fucking revolve around you, you know,” he said, and walked away.

  I knew, then, what I should have known years ago. And I knew what the dreams meant.

  Sometimes you stay together only because you said you would, because you made a promise. Because it’s the right thing to do. Loyalty. And then you’ve lived your whole life, and loyalty is hollow and starved and meaningless, and there’s nothing left for you at all.

  Kellan never understood. It was never the others, the ones he looked at the way he used to look at me–decades since I wanted to touch him, since I’d grieved the feeling I’d lost. It wasn’t even the acrimony that followed us to every new job, every new attempt to leave our corrosive history behind.

  It wasn’t Kellan that broke me. It was time. Everything’s relative, right?

  He should’ve left me. Why didn’t he leave me? If he’d left me, I’d’ve been free.

  And I wouldn’t have had to kill him.

  * * *

  Kellan’s skills always brought us the most profitable deployments. He had twenty-five years’ experience with solar collectors, with conditions much more hazardous than Mercury’s: hard vacuum, flimsy equipment, no back-up oxygen. He was obsessive about safety. He said that’s how he’d lived so long.

  So very, very long.

  He pounded on the airlock door, his eyes on mine, pissed off and terrified and realizing, at last, that I was done saving him, that all of our sins had come down to this moment, as our transport rolled placidly toward the solar collector and the daylight terminus and the unfiltered sunlight.

  “Open the fucking door!” he shouted, easy to hear, because I’d left him oxygen even as I’d sealed him in the airlock without his thermal protection. I could see in his eyes he couldn’t quite believe I’d do it, and I wondered how he could know me so well and still know me not at all. He may have been convinced, there at the end, but it happened too fast: his eyes sublimating in his head, just like my own in the dream, his oh-so-thin clothing turning to flame and ash in seconds, his skin blistering and boiling and turning to black before my eyes.

  I waited until there was nothing left of him but superheated dust.

  By the time the others called to ask why Kellan’s telemetry had been interrupted, I’d manufactured a convincing level of hysteria. They really seemed to think I was traumatized.

  That left us with twenty-three. And I believed it would finally stop.

  * * *

  Ninety-four days before it was due, the Company pulled the resupply ship. One final message: “The station is being abandoned. Your families will be contractually compensated.”

  You spend your life traveling through space, you know it’s big. You know it’s deadly. When that message came through, the seventeen of us left recognized, for the first time, how fucking isolated it was.

  Most of the others wrote messages telling the Company to go fuck itself in various creative ways. I wrote a message asking for my compensation to go to Kellan’s family. I had no one else.

  * * *

  So many ways to die on an alien world.

  Suffocation. Injury.

  Freezing, poison, bleeding out.

  Fighting. Stir-crazy, they used to call it. Manesh, Calla, and Adon all knifed each other to death, apparently over the last pack of frozen corn.

  We still worked shifts. How bullshit is that? The Company wouldn’t be coming for anything, at least not until long after we were all gone. But we needed the occupation.

  I dreamed of clawing out my own eyes, of cutting my wrists, of provoking someone until they took the initiative in my stead.

  In the morning it was never me.

  I began to be grateful.

  * * *

  Twelve of us left.

  I don’t sleep anymore. I don’t dream. For a few days, that helped, but it doesn’t matter now. It’s still happening. It’s independent, broken away from me, leaving nothing but this demon in my head, telling me I used to be in control.

  All demons are liars.

  It doesn’t take someone every day. I think it likes giving us hope.

  We’ve tried working in pairs, locking ourselves in one big room, chaining ourselves together. It doesn’t matter. It gets us anyway.

  It doesn’t even wait for night anymore.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I’ve been in this airlock. I brought food, but it’s gone now. For an hour. For a day. I don’t know.

  I can hear the others. Screaming, Crying. Dying? I can’t tell. Dying, living—in the end, it’s all the same.

  The demon still whispers to me, trying to make me sleep, but I don’t. I brought more stims than I did food. Enough stims to kill me long before I run out. I started out judicious with them, but I don’t remember when the last dose was, and it’s easier just to keep taking them. It’s the only way to be sure.

  I can’t save the others. They bang on the door, they beg me. They want in, or they want out—I don’t know. We all speak the same language, but I can’t make out their meaning anymore.

  I tried, for a while, to tell them there was something here, something that started in my dreams and came to life, inhabiting the h
alls, feeding off the close heat of the sun and Einstein’s madness.

  I don’t remember what it was like not to be empty. I don’t remember what it was like to think this was strange, or painful. I am hollow and hungry and endless, and this is what I have always been.

  They bang on the door and beg me, and it doesn’t matter. It’ll kill them, all of them. It’ll kill me, too, someday.

  But by God, it’ll kill me last.

  Unto Dust

  A Central Corps short

  The night after Tom Foster’s wife died, he lay in the bed they used to share and stared at the ceiling, the sporadic hum of late-night shuttle traffic brittle and unreal in his head.

  He did not sleep.

  The next morning, he listened to his children arguing for more than half an hour before it occurred to him he ought to get out of bed.

  He stood, still in the clothes he’d put on the previous morning, the dark trousers and close-fitting jacket that passed for casual teaching attire. He’d had them on less than an hour when the Corps Admiralty comms office had informed him there had been an accident, and he’d known the rest before they said it aloud. He’d worn them taking a shuttle to his daughter’s school, and then his son’s, to tell them their mother was not coming home this time.

  Meg had screamed and howled and beat at his chest, and he’d put his arms around her while she sobbed. Greg had blinked, and said “Are you sure?” as he stood, unmoving, across the room from his father.

  It had been so much easier to tell Meg.