Hugh Howey: Company

Cricket growls at me for thinking these things, and I force away the shadowy thoughts. That’s the good thing about having a warthen around. It’s why I’ve stopped thinking about jumping out the airlock with no helmet on. The last time I sat in front of the airlock door and keyed in the first three digits of the override code was the day I adopted this strange creature. The next time I even thought about going down there, Cricket acted like she was going to maul me. Paced around the ladder hissing and growling and swiping at me if I approached her. Maybe this is the ideal remedy for depression: a gun that can read your mind and is forever pointed at your head. Gives you some good practice in bottling up those dark wishes.

Of course, bottling shit up doesn’t fix what’s ailing you at the core. But I’ve given up on the idea that anything can fix what ails me.

I check the scanners and readouts across the command dash, then glance at the time again. The troop transport is due. I wait, standing at attention. My old company is on this ship, some of the brothers and sisters I bled with, the few who are still alive, still serving, still have all their limbs. As soon as I see the faint ripple across the grav scanner, I salute them. The ones I let down. The ones I betrayed. And all the ones who can’t be on that ship anymore.

I told Scarlett, an old war fling of mine, the truth of my heroism right before she died. Right before she died here on this beacon. I told her that I could’ve taken out a hive of alien buggers with the press of a button. I could’ve killed a trillion of them. The blast would’ve taken out me and two companies of troopers as well, but companies have died for far less. I might’ve turned the tide in sector six. Eight planets have fallen since then, and the war is pushing through sector seven and heading this way right now. The Ryph are on the offensive.

But for one day, we saw them in retreat. The day I won my medal. The day I did nothing. All I did was wimp out when I could’ve killed all those unborn monsters. It just seemed to me, in that moment, that the hive was full of little buggers who hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

Guess I’m not very good at the big picture stuff. I can barely maintain this little tin can that’s become my world. I’m nothing more than a washed-up soldier from a small town in a backwoods corner of an old planet. And now I’m just a beacon operator.

Just not a very good one.

Cricket whines and turns in circles, and at first I think it’s from me being hard on myself, but I’ve never seen her act quite like this. I notice as she turns that she keeps glancing at one of the portholes. Maybe she can feel the troop transport passing by, that carrier filled to the brim with dark thoughts. I go to the porthole and peer out, craning my neck to look down the length of the asteroid field.

At first I don’t notice it. It’s not until the long flashes come that I realize the beacon isn’t so much winking anymore as palpitating. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot.

S.O.S.

Cricket mews.

“I see it,” I tell her.

I grab the HF and key the mic. “Unknown beacon operator, this is Beacon 23, is everything okay over there? Over.”

I wait. The QT is still showing the last message from NASA. I key in: SOS w neighbr , then hit “Send,” “Confirm,” and “Yes I’m goddamn sure.”

I wait.

I watch the light.

Two or three seconds go by.

I could pace in circles and wait for NASA to tell me to check it out, but you don’t need orders when there’s a distress call in space. I served in the navy before I was forced groundside. If anyone hails for help, you help them. None of us could survive out here without a system like this in place.

So by the time my operator in Houston is seeing my message and setting down his coffee and wiping his ridiculous mustache, my feet are already hitting the living module deck one level down, my palms burning from the fast slide. The next ladder drops me into the life support module, then one more ladder takes me to the lock collars. I grab my walk suit and helmet from their hangers and dash inside the lifeboat. Before I can key the door closed, Cricket bounds down from the module above, landing on the grating like a large cat.

“Stay,” I tell her, holding out my palm. “Stay.”

Cricket tilts her head and cries. She takes a step toward the lifeboat.

“No,” I say. “You stay.”

Normally she does whatever I ask, or whatever I really concentrate on her doing. But this is one need she seems to always put before mine: the need to follow me. Before I can give her another order, or lock her out, she dashes through the open airlock door, brushing against my leg, nearly knocking me over. By the time I get the airlock secured and get up to the cockpit, she’s sitting in the navigator’s seat, peering through the canopy like she knows we’re going somewhere, like she’s done this a thousand times. Or maybe like she knows what happens next.

I wiggle into my walksuit while the autopilot steers us toward the beacon. The throttle is at max, which ain’t much in this bucket. And maybe now’s a good time to admit that I haven’t been in a very good state lately. But this is progress, I think, to realize I’m going a bit mad. The dangerous phase is when that’s happening and you can’t see it. When you think you’re sane, so the crazy is all invisible. As a reminder of my propensity to lose my grip on reality, I wear a rock on a lanyard around my neck. For a time there, I thought the rock was talking to me. I’m getting better, I swear.

Glancing over at Cricket, another thought occurs. What if I’m overstating the whole mind-reading thing? What if I’m making up a pattern of when she nuzzles me and when she doesn’t? And here’s the truly fun part about going a little crazy: even the obviously sane things you do can be called into question. Is that beacon in front of me real? Did Scarlett really come back into my life, tell me I could help her win the war, and then disappear again? There’s a faint stain on the deck by lock collar Charlie, and I can’t tell if it’s rust or her blood.

I reach over and pet the warthen. There’s no doubting this, at least. This is real. And the beacon ahead of me looks pretty damn real. I leave the thrust at full to close the distance, and my mind drifts back to my army days. I can feel the wake of the troop ship that passed through, all those boys and girls heading for the front to be dumped into a trench. I feel the recoil of my rifle as it takes a life. Geysers of soil explode into the air and fill our nostrils. There’s the metallic odor of blood as soldiers with hope cry for a medic, soldiers without hope cry for their mommas, and soldiers with guns bring tears to the other side.

I wonder what Scarlett meant by us ending this war. Wars like this don’t end until one side is ground to dust. It’s crazy to me that naïve people like Scarlett even exist, that they can live in this galaxy, see what we all see, and cling to foolish notions like they do. And yet there are legions of them. Protestors. Picketers. Alien-lovers. Conscientious objectors. Traitors.

Yeah, I’m a traitor. But I’m the worst kind. I don’t believe like the rest of them do. I just got tired of it all. I couldn’t fight anymore. You fight because your squad needs you to. When the last man standing beside you goes down, you don’t need a bullet to take out your knees; the depression does that for you. I’ve seen the biggest troopers felled by the heavy darkness. I’ve watched them curl up in the mud and just stop moving. I remember hoping that’d never be me. And here I am.

There’s a number on the side of the beacon. I can read the large blocky digits as I close to within a couple klicks: 1529.