Survival Tactics Read online

  He fell silent, and he drank, and Bob drained another glass. They were quiet for a long time.

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to talk to him,” Bob said at last.

  “He knows I’ve always hated the Corps. You’re qualified, and you’re one of them. That gives you more leverage than I’ve got.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to give him the this is how you go on when someone you love dies speech.”

  “Then don’t give him that speech.” Tom looked over at him. “Just…he needs to talk to someone, and he won’t talk to me. He might talk to you. Will you try?”

  Bob met Tom’s eyes, and for an instant the agony Tom saw there was so much a mirror of his own he thought he would collapse.

  “Everyone says he’s so much like Katie,” Bob said. “Not just how he looks. His ambitions. His temper. They’re wrong, you know. He’s just like you.”

  “That’s why I can’t get in.”

  At last, Bob nodded his head. “I’ll talk to him,” he promised. “I’ll try.”

  A breeze blew in over the lake, and Tom smelled that stagnant tang the water took on when they were overdue for rain. When he finally asked, “What happened, Bob?” he was almost sure he was ready to hear the answer.

  Bob’s reflexive bravado failed, and he became suddenly everything Tom felt himself: ancient, bewildered, lost and grieving. “The official story,” Bob said. “is that the drive blew when they tried to initiate the field.”

  “I heard the official story. I want to know what happened.”

  “All I have is rumor.”

  “What about the flight recorder?”

  “They haven’t got it.”

  Tom turned to stare at him. “You’re telling me an engine explosion is enough to destroy a Corps-manufactured flight recorder?”

  “Nope.”

  He studied the bottom of his glass, and Tom waited.

  “I get away with a lot of shit, you know,” Bob said. “Always have. Since I was a kid. Makes me an asshole, I think.” He put the glass down, and this time he didn’t signal the bartender for another. “Katie never let me get away with shit. Not once. Not from the day I met her.”

  Tom inhaled patience. “She trusted you,” he said. “Maybe five people in her whole life, including me, that she trusted.”

  “I should’ve taken that assignment.”

  “They didn’t offer it to you,” Tom pointed out. “And if she wasn’t going to give it up for her kids, why do you think she’d have given it up for you?” I don’t need you getting rootbound in your own guilt.

  “I loved her, you know.”

  “We’ve had this conversation. Now stop being a maudlin fucking drunk and tell me what happened to my wife.”

  Bob inhaled, then exhaled, then nodded to the bartender. “When I say it’s all rumor,” he said, “I don’t mean rumor we all know is truth rumor. I mean rumor. Rumor that’s honest to God no more than speculation. All I do know is that it wasn’t a fucking engine explosion, because that’s bullshit on its face.” He rubbed a hand through his hair. “Some people are saying Andy Kelso went crazy and blew the ship himself.”

  “I’ve heard that one.” Tom had dismissed it immediately. Kate would have known if her captain was that unstable.

  “There’s also the rumor of aliens.”

  Everyone wanted aliens to exist, and in nearly a thousand years of exploring the galaxy, no one had found a shred of evidence that they did. “They’ve sent probes into that wormhole for decades,” Tom said. “You’re telling me it took the Phoenix doing a fly-by to attract alien attention? Please.”

  “And then,” Bob said, “there’s the rumor that the wormhole spat something out.”

  Tom looked over, but Bob wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You think there’s something to that one.”

  Bob shrugged; as drunk as he was, the gesture was graceless. “You got me, Tom. They picked up all kinds of crazy readings after the explosion; but that place is going to be irradiated for forty years. Nothing they’re picking up is reliable yet. It’ll be five years at least before they can even verify the size of the blast.”

  “But you think that’s what happened.”

  This time it was Bob’s turn to be introspective. “I think,” he said at last, “that I don’t want it to be an accident. That I don’t want to have lost her to some bullshit engine overload glitch that should have been designed out of our starships twenty years ago. That I want there to be something to come out of it, some reason she didn’t die for nothing.”

  “Everybody dies for nothing,” Tom said.

  Tom knew Bob Hastings well enough to understand why the man started to laugh.

  “Say that again, son?”

  Greg straightened, his eyes shifting toward the wall. “I’m going to quit the Corps prep program.”

  Three weeks after his wife was killed, Tom Foster had been in his living room, scrolling through an inbox flooded with nightmarish condolences and bureaucratic nonsense around Kate’s death, when his children came home from school together. That in itself was suspicious; Meg, five years older than her brother, generally wanted nothing to do with Greg in public. What was even more suspicious was that she looked anxious, and a little pleased, and was hovering over Greg as if he were a much smaller child.

  And Greg was putting up with it.

  At her brother’s words, Meg met Tom’s eyes, and she looked so hopeful and hungry for approval that if he’d had any heart left it would have broken.

  I guess it’s time for me to start parenting again.

  “Meg, sweetheart,” he said, giving her a gentle smile, “can you let your brother and I talk for a bit?”

  “Of course.” She reached out and rubbed Greg’s arm, encouraging, approving, and headed up the stairs.

  Tom waited until he heard her door close.

  “This her idea?” Tom asked.

  Greg shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.”

  Tom suspected if he’d been eavesdropping more on his children he’d have found Meg working long and hard to plant the thought in her brother’s head. “Why do you want to quit?”

  At that Greg met Tom’s eyes, just for a moment, and Tom caught confusion and uncertainty. He thought I’d approve, Tom realized. He thought I’d jump at this. “It’s not the only thing there is,” Greg said.

  “So what do you think you’ll do?”

  Greg shifted from foot to foot. “I could teach. Like you do.”

  Definitely Meg’s idea. “You’d make a fine teacher, I’m sure,” Tom said, and he meant it. Greg had both charm and patience when he chose, and he seemed reasonably good at breaking down ideas into simpler components. “Why do you want to teach?”

  And with one shrug, Greg was a little boy again. “It’s a good job,” he said. “It’s important.”

  “Lot of things are important.”

  “It’s here,” Greg said. “I could, I don’t know. Stay close by.”

  Aha. “To take care of me.”

  “Why not?”

  There was an edge of resentment to Greg’s statement, the beginnings of a teenaged separation that Tom had long suspected was going to be hell on them both. Meg had led Greg to expect he’d be rewarded for this move, that he’d have Tom’s gratitude, that he could join his sister in becoming caretakers for their father, so abruptly all alone.

  Meg he’d have to deal with later, and there would be yelling and recriminations and her uncanny ability to slip a verbal dagger between his ribs. Her mother’s daughter, indeed. But before him was Greg, twelve going on forty, trying to figure out what his life of service was supposed to look like now that the Corps had killed his mother.

  It’s never been about the Corps, Tom wanted to say to him. Even for your mother, it was never about the Corps. It was about being out there, the wonder, the unknown. The adventure. Even helping people, even the catastrophic rescues—that all came second. She went out there because she had to, bec
ause it fed her soul like nothing else in her life, not me, not Meg, not you. You could have told her it would take her life someday. You could even have told her when and how. And she wouldn’t have stopped. Do you see it, son? If she couldn’t stay for you, she couldn’t stay. And you can’t stay for me.

  Tom leaned back on the sofa and looked up at his son. “If teaching is what you want, that’s one thing,” he said. “But if you give up your dream out of some misguided idea that it’s what I want, or what Meggie wants, or for any reason other than it’s stopped being your dream, I’ll put you out of this house and you can sacrifice all your hard work for someone else. You understand?”

  Greg grew very still, and Tom watched his face: irritation, then anger, then embarrassment. And finally, definitively, relief. He didn’t smile, but his eyes lit up in a way Tom hadn’t seen since the last time Kate was home.

  “What about Meg?” Greg asked.

  “You let me take care of your sister.”

  “She’s going to be mad at me.”

  “Yeah, she is. But she needs to follow her dreams, too, Greg. And it’s my job to make sure she feels she can do that.”

  A look of understanding passed between the two of them, and then Greg started bouncing on his toes. “Do I have time for a run before dinner?” he asked.

  “If you run fast.”

  At that, Greg flashed a grin, and he turned and dashed out the front door, all child once again.

  Four weeks after his wife died, Tom watched his son leave the house to visit Bob Hastings, Lieutenant Commander, Central Corps Medical, to talk about losing his mother.

  Tom pretended he didn’t know where Greg was going.

  Thinking Inside the Box

  “Power variance nominal,” says Bunny.

  I glance up at her face through the power room window. She’s bathed in light, that strange, nearly sub-visual shade of blue-violet some techie centuries ago decided should mean “nothing’s happening but nothing’s fucked up.” Her eyes are on the panel in front of her, and I relax a little. Bunny’s attention span isn’t a given, what with her being bugfuck insane, but most days she’s good enough at her job.

  I’m not allowed in the power room yet. I’ve only been on The Box Starstation three months, and I’m still stuck in Monitoring, this tiny room that’d feel a lot more comfortable without the floor-to-ceiling glass showing me unobstructed light years of star-studded pitch-black fuck-all. Bunny’s supposed to be training me, but she doesn’t really have an aptitude for teaching. Her instructions come in the form of handing me tech manuals at breakfast while she’s humming and swaying her way around the cramped kitchen, as if one of us isn’t real.

  Days I’m pretty sure it’s me.

  “Proceed to Contact,” I say, and Bunny slides her finger across the panel.

  Somewhere inside The Box, some bastard who spent too much damn money for a ticket is getting a fast-forward showing of the rest of his life.

  I know what you’re thinking: Nobody cares about The Box anymore. Most people think it’s over, a fad that died an ignominious death. I mean, that’s fair. A 30 percent rate of irreversible insanity is the kind of thing you could expect to kill an exotic tourist destination like The Box, and it nearly did. That’s why there’s only three of us staffing the starstation now—me, Bunny, and Godot, the supervisor—instead of the twenty-seven scientists and industry wankers who camped out here in the middle of Galactic Nowhere for the first fifteen years.

  Tourism has dropped off a cliff, for sure; but there are still shitbags stupid enough to believe that if they spend their life savings, The Box is going to tell them their future is full of sunshine and fucking roses.

  I thought the same of my future when I was sixteen, before one of my dumbass Lukos highs turned into felony murder. I didn’t even do the shooting, but Mattie handed me the gun while the metrodome cops were landing on the roof, and I took it. Lukos makes you fucking stupid. Pled guilty at the advice of my court-appointed advocate, who told me I’d be out young enough to start over; instead they locked me up for life. So maybe it wasn’t the Lukos after all.

  Prison sucks, no question, but to be honest it wasn’t a whole lot worse than pissing away my life robbing the local Smoke-n-Shoot to finance the next high. At least I got free food, and—after the first few years, at least—a reputation as the guy you leave the fuck alone. By forty years in, I was pretty comfortable with the routine. You’d told me a year ago I’d take work out at The Box, I’d’ve said you were high yourself.

  But since the riots on Iobe, the prisons have been overflowing, sometimes with real criminals. Before, I knew exactly how much hardware to roll up in my towel in case I got jumped heading to the showers. After, it turned into a fucking war zone.

  The warden and I weren’t friendly, but I was an easy prisoner from the start. Kept to myself. Not one to shake things up, me. Once or twice a year, the warden found a way to express gratitude for my temperament. This time, he offered me The Box.

  The proposal they give you is simple: A two-year stint on staff at The Box Starstation. Deep space, no visitors, no chatter with anyone but the tourist transports. Not even a fucking letter home. But if you get through your two with a clean record, you’re free, full stop. No money, no resources, but your record’s expunged, and you can try for paying work.

  Assuming you can find anything you can do after being inside. Prison’s never been much of a jobs program.

  Wasn’t thinking about money when I said yes, though. Was thinking about being out. Sunshine. Maybe fresh air. Fuck it, I’d live under a fucking skylane and freeze to death the first night if it meant breathing something non-generated again.

  “Contact complete,” Bunny says, and she turns to meet my eyes and smiles. It’s the smile of a kid ready to clap to show she believes in fairies. Seems Bunny’s having one of her bad days.

  One of the perks of working at The Box is you can make Contact for free. Often as you want. It’s in the contract. Thought about it, on that four-month trip out here, working for passage in the ship’s data dungeon. How bad could it be, to see what the rest of my life was going to be like? Can’t be any fucking worse than what’s come before, right?

  I asked Godot, that first night, what the deal was with Bunny. He looked at me and said, “She tried it.”

  Decided mystery wasn’t so bad after all.

  The lights in the power room turn back to ordinary prison-shower yellow, and Bunny opens the door. She’s pretty, or at least I think she is; at my age anyone under forty years old is fucking Aphrodite. She’s tall, but small-boned and thin, and she has this sort of tawny skin that goes all gold in the crappy light. Back when I thought about girls, I’d have let myself go stupid over her, but now I mostly want to be her fucking dad and make sure she eats properly and goes to bed on time.

  I wish a lot I’d met Bunny before Contact. I don’t think my Bunny is much like the person she was before The Box.

  “You had dinner?” I ask her. Behind us, on the other side of the power room, I can hear Godot talking to the client in that low, modulated voice of his that I’m pretty sure is the only reason he’s employed here. It’s the same crap every time, about disorientation and perspective and how we don’t really know for sure that everything The Box shows us is real, so maybe don’t panic if it said your life is going to end fucking horribly or fucking soon.

  Bunny’s already humming, but she answers me. “I ate before.” She turns around and walks backward, still next to me, her eyes on the open door to the power room, toward Godot and the client. “That one won’t go mad,” she tells me, and because Bunny almost never tells me shit, I’m curious.

  “How do you know?”

  “Godot likes him,” she says.

  After three months, I’m starting to be able to decode some of Bunny’s shorthand. “You mean he’s really fucking rich.” When she nods, I ask, “Does that make a difference?”

  Her hum turns into an affirmative noise. “They think the
y can change it.”

  I don’t need to understand shorthand for that. Rich people never think life is ever going to fuck them, no matter what. “Which ones go mad?”

  She’s still walking backward, but she stops humming, and when she looks me in the eye she looks sane enough to make me nervous. “The ones who realize they can’t.”

  Then she smiles, sanity forgotten, and part of me expects her to start clapping her hands.

  * * *

  I was already inside when The Box was discovered. Even with restricted news we heard about it: a chunk of abandoned alien technology, found by a seriously dumbass scientist who thought he’d just hook himself up to it. Four days afterward he did nothing but write, all longhand, without sleeping. Turned out to be just a part of what The Box had shown him: detailed events of the next three years of his life. Week by week the news reported a tally of what The Box had right, and at first it was exciting, like a game of chance. We bet on it, because we were so bored we’d gamble on clipping our fucking toenails, but after the first week folks started getting spooked and dropping out.

  The Box was never wrong, not about a single thing that scientist wrote down.

  I didn’t think much about it, what with still resenting the fuck out of the fundamental injustice of my situation, but I kept on gambling until news on The Box went dark, nearly three years after that scientist first published his results. Learned months later he’d deleted all his papers, transferred his property to some random warehouse worker he’d never met, and took a walk off a skyscraper.

  At that point we all started gambling on how long it’d take them to clean up the stain the guy left behind, pulverized bone and organs spread over a forty-meter radius, but I remember this one kid, younger than me even, who wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He was hard, all knots and cynicism, and a month later he was transferred to maximum; but that day he was real quiet until dinner when he interrupted our tasteless fucking jokes by saying, “We’re not meant to know.”