Beacon 23: Part Two: Pet Rocks

Beacon 23
Part Two: Pet Rocks

by Hugh Howey

• 1 •

When a trans-orbital cargo ship traveling twenty times the speed of light bumps into large, stationary rocks, it makes quite a scene.

I can attest.

I am witness.

According to the labcoats at NASA, I might be the only soul to see such a spectacle with his own eyes and live to tell the tale. Besides the asshole pirates who caused the ruckus in the first place, I have to remind them.

Up in the business end of my beacon, where the gravity wave broadcaster helps ships avoid my asteroid field, there’s a photo of an old man standing in front of a lighthouse as it gets battered by heavy seas. Some former beacon resident must’ve seen an affinity between our two occupations. And now I find myself wondering if any of those old lighthouse keepers felt this empty, gnawing, hungry, depressed sensation after a ship was lost on their rocks. I wonder if they felt this helplessness, this dread, this sense of duty derelictioned—if that’s even a word. Did they watch for weeks as planks of wood and tangles of rope washed up on their shores? Did they feel as though they didn’t do quite enough? That the blood out there was on their hands?

I hope not. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, much as I crave the company, much as I wish I didn’t feel so alone. It’s a selfish craving, desiring a partner in misery. The brotherhood of war was a lot like this. You didn’t want your squadmates to be there, suffering with you, but you couldn’t have made it through without them. You wanted them home as badly as they wanted to be home, but only if you all got to go at once. I’m pretty sure every one of us was thinking:
Don’t leave a man behind
—
especially not me
.

It’s been seven days since the wreck, and I haven’t slept much. I have no appetite. I keep telling myself it was only six dead, which would’ve been a great day along the front, but maybe it’s the near-miss of the passenger liner that keeps me up at night and has me skipping my morning bowl of protein mix. Even though the passenger ship passed by without incident, I can somehow see five thousand bodies tumbling out there among the rocks. I can hear their families weeping. None of them know how close they came. But I do. I get the shakes when I think about it. I concentrate instead on the four men and two women who
did
die out there, and I run everything over and over in my head, wondering what I could’ve done differently.

NASA had some choice words, of course. No more trading with ships passing through the system. I am officially on quarantine. Protocols across all the beacons are being affected because of my dumb ass. I remember a morning in flight school when the entire platoon had to run thirty klicks because of some wisecrack I made. I’m still making trouble for everyone else. Before I can stop it, my mind jerks back to my last day in the war, with my squad dead, three platoons hunkered down, oblivion approaching . . .

I clamp down on those memories. I embrace fresher torments. But my shrink warned me about this, how anger and depression get misassigned, and how if I don’t work through shit it’ll keep resurfacing in ways I don’t expect. Maybe it’s not the six dead or the five thousand saved that have me feeling this way. And maybe taking this job was the worst way possible to wrestle down my demons. They’ve got me trapped here, in my beacon. And vastly outnumbered.

If my private torments aren’t going away anytime soon, at least the cosmos has a short memory. The armada of news ships with their channel stations painted across their hulls has come and gone. As well as the private yacht rubberneckers and souvenir-seekers and scavengers. The busted cargo ship was like a spilled can of soda. A swarm of ants and bees came, and now are gone.

NASA, bless them, can only concentrate on the fact that my rebooting the beacon erased the last few hours of recordings from the scanners, and so we have no vid of the disaster. They say I missed a prime opportunity to record just what happens when a ship collides with a meteor field in hyperspace. I might’ve saved five thousand lives, but the way my bosses are talking, it was too cheap an exchange for what might’ve been learned.

Funny, I thought I was getting away from such hard calculations when I left the army. I suppose half a klick won on some alien rock has a price about the same as a paragraph gained in the storehouse of human knowledge. Everyone’s gonna die anyway, right? Well, someone should explain to these clowns that borders aren’t forever either, and neither are their theories. It all goes. They can damn me all they like for choosing to save lives. Guess we each have our own stupid priorities.

•••

I sit with my back to the restored GWB to calm these thoughts. Whatever the dome does to the local gravity field to warn ships of danger, it does something just as useful to my head. I worry less when I’m up here. It’s like two fingers of whiskey that keeps tumbling through my veins, never stopping, never subsiding, never becoming too much.

Outside the porthole in front of me, a massive field of debris catches the starlight. The only NASA scanner that remembers what happened is my imperfect and bewildered brain, and it replays the impact in a loop. I see a flash of light, asteroids as big as moons bursting into clouds of bright powder, cargo that survived the impact scattering, the rear half of the massive ship popping out of hyperspace and exploding into countless pieces, and a vortex of bouncing mass and momentum and splintering steel and rock.

I described it all to the labcoats as best I could. I nodded at the animations they came up with. I watched them lumber around my beacon, going through all the panels and crannies, sniffing out the sabotaging little vermin that tormented me with their squeaks and clicks, everyone lecturing me on the new quarantine protocols. As shrapnel and rocks clinked and clanged off the beacon like hailstones, and men smarter than me frowned at whatever they were calculating in their noggins, I wondered if they’d send me home like the army had. But they packed up and went zipping back to Houston, leaving me in this funk.

The debris has kept on striking the beacon since they left, though the patter is becoming more sparse. Ignoring the labcoats’ reassurances, I’ve taken to sleeping in the lifeboat, just in case. I retrieved the walk suit from the airlock—the thing smelling of a decade of sweat and storage—and I wear it all the time now. I sleep with my helmet right in front of me. The first two nights, I slept with the helmet on, the visor closed, my exhalations fogging my vision.

The sight of myself in the mirrored visor isn’t pretty, I have to admit. I look like a dead man. Gaunt. Unshaven. Older than my thirty-five years. But I keep the image of myself close at hand, my helmet within reach, just like in my army days. I long ago learned to embrace the illusion that a thin veneer over my skull might save me. No rock to hide under, so this will have to do.

In the middle of the night last night, a whizzing hunk-of-something punched a neat hole in the upper solar array, waking me up and sending me scrambling for a damage assessment. An awful clatter followed as a small storm of debris peppered the hull—but the beacon never lost integrity. I’ve been keeping an eye on the atmo gauges ever since. The alarms should sound if something goes amiss, but I keep wondering what happens if the alarms are the first things damaged? Or if I’d even hear the alarms in the lifeboat at night. This is like living in the trenches again, just a different kind of bombardment. But there’s that nervous, anxious energy every second, that knowledge that your life could end before you have enough time to call out for your momma. Just a whistle, and then a cloud of red. Or in this case, a sharp bang, a hiss of vacuum equalizing, and then a cold, asphyxiating death.

To keep my mind off things, I go over the scans I managed to get of the aftermath. I caught a lot of the debris expanding and ricocheting, and I got great vid of the two scavenger ships that caused the wreck in the first place. Grabbed their signatures and hull IDs before they could zip off into the FTL yonder. I’m sure the sigs are bogus, but it made me feel useful. And with the full zoom on the viz scanner, I can sit and watch the little bastards in their spacesuits as they sift through the drifting cargo, getting what they can, stuffing their holds, then leaving.

Somewhere out there, six crewmembers are dead and drifting—unless the navy found the bodies or one of the rubberneckers thought a corpse would suffice as a souvenir. Somewhere out there, a bunch of TVs are switching over to news of the war, and how it’s edging into sector seven right now, and which planet might fall next. Pretty much everywhere but here, six dead is old news. Nothing to see. Guess you’ve got to be pretty lonely to care about the loss of a handful of strangers.

And I suppose my view is shaped by the portholes around me. Six people probably died from slipping in their showers in the time it took me to have this thought right here of them slipping in their showers. But it’s more than the deaths I saw; it’s the
destruction
. The noise with which we go seems to make it count for more. I think of my buddies who checked out via hand grenade versus those who died from MRSA back in the VA. We barely notice the latter. They’re statistics. Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a
name
.

I never wanted to be a name. I think of how I nearly went out, with the rest of my squad. I think of the people who want to make a movie out of that last stand. The publishers with their book deals. The ghostwriters who clamor to write of ghosts.

Everyone wants me to relive that. I just want to get lost. I asked for a post somewhere where no one would find me, where no one would know my name.

So they gave me a number. 23. My little beacon.

But then the bright flash came for me anyway, and a squad drifts dead in space, and the war is creeping closer.

I can’t sleep at night.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

• 2 •

An alarm is going off up in the command station, four flights away from the airlock wing. I’ve truly crawled into a hole. Now I climb out to see what in the world is beeping. With the walk suit on, the ladder is a bitch. I climb with one hand, my helmet in the other, which thumps up the rungs by my hip. This is me losing my shit. This is NASA’s investment in me gone to waste.

I crawl through the power and life support pod, through my old living quarters, and up into what I like to think of as my office. One of the scanners is flashing. I’m lumbering that way when the QT beeps with a message. I decide to check that first, knowing it’ll be a message from NASA, probably asking me to check whatever’s beeping on the scanner. These little messages from Houston are the only company I have. The contact is nice. Too bad Houston is full of assholes and taskmasters. Maybe prisoners in isolation feel what I feel: they hate their guards, but a beating now and then is at least some human contact.

I check the readout. I am their trained monkey.

Picking up life sig

This seems so unlikely that I assume the station is still glitching from the reboot. A second message beeps through before I can even turn to check the scanner:

Check scanner

“I am,” I say. “Jeez.”

Sometimes I wish the QT weren’t quite so instantaneous.

Letting out a sigh, I cross the command room to check the bio scanner. It’s one of the more sensitive instruments on the beacon, and that’s saying something. If lichen or viruses start collecting on the outside of the hull, the scanner sounds an alarm, like it’s doing right now. I acknowledge the alarm to shut it off, but the light keeps flashing to let me know the reading is still active.

The eggheads in Houston joke that the bio scanner can hear a protein folding in the vacuum of space five hundred klicks away. They think that’s funny, because sound doesn’t travel through space. At least, I think that’s the joke. NASA is weird about the things they fear. They get really nervous about unknown life forms, and yet it’s all they talk about. They’re like teenage boys with sex in this way.

I study the blip, wishing it would vanish. It’s been a week since the crash. Is there any chance one of the crew survived the impact in a stasis pod? Or did a load of produce just now break open when its case smashed into something else?

The signal is definitely out there amid the debris. And a solid target, not a dispersal blip like you might see if a container was leaking biofuels. Something is alive. Or the beacon’s scanners are wrecked. I reckon the latter is more likely. I watch the blip and count to ten, waiting for whatever it is to die in the vacuum of space. If the thing were sealed in a suit or a ship, the scanner wouldn’t pick up jack. Even with all the activity in the sector lately, the scanner has only gone off briefly, when someone pumps their shitter, and that’s just for a flash.