Hugh Howey: Little Noises

First breaker makes contact, and the lights come on. Then the next. There’s a pause while the GWB warms up, then a series of pops and hisses as it fries everything nearby. No time for alarms. Darkness descends. A flickering, unsteady, then absolute darkness.

Back up the ladder now, this time with no lights. Nothing. Just my labored breaths, the slap of palms on the ladder, the ticking of an internal clock, the thought of all those people in that liner, and all the other people I couldn’t save. Corpses. Bones. Grinning skeletons. Friends and brothers in combat suits, that befuddled look on faces just before the lights go out inside, even though they know what’s happening, even though they’ve expected it for years since boot camp, even though they’ve seen it before with their buddies, but the last part that goes is the little sliver of hope that thought you’d get through this mess, that thought you’d live to see the other side, that it’d be your name on the war memoir, on the cover, not in the dedication.

I find the GWB by crawling around and groping in the pitch black. Find the wires. Yank them free. Then crawl back to the ladder to do it all again. Exhausted. Like PT. Forced marches. Don’t get enough exercise in this place. My stomach hurts, but it’s probably just a stabbing recollection. A painful memory. Nothing more.

I throw the breakers for what I hope is the last time. Another factory reset, all those chips rebuilding themselves, software going back to primitive states, power flickering on, the beeps and whirrings and hissings that are supposed to be there.

I wonder if the wreckers anticipated this, if their little bugs have self-healing CPUs. They do or they don’t. No time to waste dwelling on it. I’m back up the ladder, my arms quivering, my legs numb, wishing I’d killed the gravity before I started this. That would’ve been smart. A good soldier would’ve thought of that.

I grab the GWB and pull myself down the barrel. In the lighthouse, the porthole is still zoomed in on the debris. Motion and activity out there, the motherfuckers. I only tighten two of the bolts before I grab the wires. No time to go back and shut off the power while I juice it up, so I decide to splice it on hot. Negative first, careful not to touch the wires together or to the same metal surface. Then the positive, sparks flying right as they touch, but settling as I wind the copper ends tight to each other.

I sit back. Listen for the hum. Place a hand on the dome. Is it getting warm, or is that my heat? My sweaty palm?

There is no clock. But I know the time is short, and that the only way I’ll know if it didn’t work is a sudden bloom of light that fills the portholes, another great wreck to sift through, this time full of bodies and all their valuables. I think of the wreckers of old who sorted through wooden chests and gathered planks and coils of rope while corpses washed up on the beach. I see men in zero-gee pulling the boots off the drowned. Digging through pockets. Yanking gold chains from necks. Sucking on lifeless fingers to loosen rings.

Then I see a scared little soldier sitting in a muddy trench on an alien world, finger on the trigger, just needing to shoot. To shoot. The boys all around are shooting, and they’re ending up dead. The best thing I ever did in life was nothing, and I got a medal for it. I was a hero once. And if you look at my picture, that’s all I’ll ever be.

Minutes pass. Hours. I’m sobbing with relief. Nothing happened. Nothing. The unseen wake left by five thousand squirming souls as they pass me by at twenty times the speed of light. On they go, leaving me here, sobbing. Eighteen more months on this shift, alone, my back to the sea, tending to my little beacon with all its pretty little noises.