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qcatter · 1 year ago

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938 Seconds Per Second

(I had a short story idea. Enjoy :)!)

...

The first thing about Lieutenant Carson is that he’s a dickhead.

The second thing about Lieutenant Carson is that he’s a dickhead.

He gets to be a dickhead twice because we’re in a profession which attracts, near to its entirety, dickheads. To claim someone on this ship is a dickhead is to claim that some droplet of water is wet. Carson, though, is an anomaly. A true dickhead among dickheads, which would stand as two entire accomplishments if it were anything worth celebrating. More honestly, the only thing about Carson worth celebrating will be his funeral, assuming he has one, assuming he’s not simply shot out the airlock one day.

It’s not like he’s surprising. Of course this job attracts dickheads. It’s self-selecting for a job whose process involves trashing your application if you have anyone in your life who could be mistaken for a loved one. A wife or children, or a girlfriend, or even one living parent who’s not completely estranged and jettisoned from your life. What you end up with is an enlistment of 90% dickheads with every flavor of anti-social affliction, half of whom are criminals riding things out on this ship until anyone who could have pinned them to their crime is long dead. The remaining 10% are the cultural hermits preserving some kind of dying ethos, and guys like me who just didn’t have anything anchoring them down at home.

That’s probably wrong. I’m probably someone’s dickhead.

But Lieutenant Carson is everyone’s dickhead.

And most unfortunately, Lieutenant Carson is now my dickhead.

Mission details came through this morning, unwilling to spare me even the 5 minutes I wanted for my coffee to cool. Grating intercom, mess of unwashed bodies clustering the cafeteria. “New Assignment Orders: Travel begins after evening Lights-Out. Duration is 4 months In Frame. Listen closely for Buddy assignments.”

They didn’t tell us what we’re transporting. They never do. Some bastard on the ship would try to steal it if we knew.

“Woo! 4 months!” Dorian cheered from the far end of Table 3. Dorian was an absolute brick shithouse of a man, sloshing around a coffee mug filled to the brim with not coffee. He was about the only man whose drinking problem I considered a real problem, since it took three men’s worth of alcohol to get him drunk. And he was drunk, always. “300 more years to the hag!” he toasted, to himself. He’d toasted a good 1,800 years to the hag. He got happier with each toasting.

“Dorian McGee, your partner is Eric Sampson.”

Sampson made a curt little noise through his teeth. I was glad it wasn’t more than that, since I was seated beside Sampson, and Sampson’s breath stank like a dead rat before his morning coffee. It would still stink like a dead rat after the coffee—but the cut of coffee made a meaningful difference.

“A bit of a brutish man, isn’t he?” Sampson said, leaning in to conspire with me, and offering me a face-full of dead rat. I cut all breath from entering my nose, and nodded, and lifted my coffee to my face like hospital peppermint rub. Sampson was one of the ascetic cultural weirdos, whose company I preferred mostly because he was one of the few crew members not whittling something to a sharp point in secret. “At least he’s not—”

“—Mendoza, your partner is Garret Carson.”

“—Oh,” Sampson concluded, as I choked on my coffee. I kept the reaction off my face. I prayed for all the world that they would issue a correction, and partner me with the dead rat in Sampson’s esophagus instead.

They did not. Carson leered from the far end of Table 2, smiling shittily, in his deeply unserious manner. Carson could not be made serious, not by his superiors and not by a set of knuckles digging new holes between his teeth. Several shipmates had tried. Nothing could break his shitty spirit, and I can only be thankful no one’s grandmothers or pets die up here, since I’m positive Carson spent his life up until now laughing at funerals.

Carson and his shitty smile took my eye contact as invitation—not that he’s the kind to wait for invitation to do anything—and elbowed his wiry squirrely frame through men far bigger than him until he stood directly behind Sampson. He took Sampson’s untouched coffee, gulped down half of it in a single swig, and paid for it by offering Sampson the negative value of his shitty unserious smile. “Aw Sampsy, I love when you make me coffee.”

Sampson muttered a few things, which sounded mostly like disconnected stumbling thoughts too buried in rat breath to make out, and Sampson scooted himself away from the table. He looked around, until consigning himself to try to squeeze next to Dorian. Carson fell gaudily into Sampson’s open spot.

“I fucking hate that pussy. I wanna rip all his limbs off and shove them up his ass and call it modern art.” Carson tipped over what remained of Sampson’s coffee cup. Coffee dribbled to the floor. “But I like you Mendoza. I’d lube you up before I shove anything up your ass.”

Carson could fucking die. If for nothing other than the crime of cursing me to a coffee-less dick-cheese-smelling Sampson for the entire rest of the day.

…

Mission buddies are also bunk mates. The one upside to having Carson as my bunk mate is that it puts me in the prime position to smother him in his sleep. It’s logistically possible. I have at least 50 pounds and 5 inches on the guy. I can picture him flailing like a wet noodle while I hold the pillow down. Anyone nearby would understand. I might get some high fives, maybe one of the smuggled e-cigs that turned to contraband after the meal-hall fire six In Frame months ago.

The downside to having Carson as my bunk mate is that it makes me the key suspect if Carson wakes up dead with a dozen synthetic feathers shoved down his throat.

So I just picture it. Fantasize about it. All the time. Really any time Carson opens his mouth to speak to me, which is constantly. Carson loves to hear himself talk. He loves to know he’s being heard. He loves anything that gets a reaction.

It’s been 2.5 In Frame months. More precisely it’s been exactly 76 days of hearing everything Garret Carson has to say as my buddy. I’ve heard everything he hates about everyone, which includes me. I’ve heard every nasty thing he’s said to the cafeteria staff, up to and including putting his hands on the staffer who ran out of keylime pie right before Carson reached him (“the only edible fucking thing” which he’s sort of right about). It won’t get Carson fired, even if I tattle, even if he hadn’t already told anyone with ears about it.

I’ve heard everything sexual Carson assures me he’d do to Major Chelsey Kensington if he were to ever catch her alone. It’s juvenile, and dimwitted and moronic, and everything he comes up with smacks of some stupid 13-year-old’s fantasy. He cranks his shaft from the top bunk while he talks, and he shakes the entire fucking bedframe. I never answer him, and I’ve considered taking up fake snoring to make him think he’s not keeping me awake. I know it wouldn’t work. The worst part about Garret Carson is he doesn’t even need an audience to be like this.

Carson sits with me at all mealtimes, as mission buddies are required to do, and his fork spends more time in my plate than on his. Sampson sits morosely with Dorian, whose conversation is the only one loud enough for me to hear. (“Do you know HOW old?” Dorian asks. “2,000 years, yes, you told me already.” “2,003. As of this morning! Then 2,004, in five minutes from now! Another shitty year for her shitty dead bones to go’round the shitty dying sun!” “You know, my own civilization’s sun is dying.” “And around and around and around and arou—“)

Carson is like a fungal infection. He’s like black mold in a cupboard. He’s like a pest problem the landlord won’t fix which keeps you from having any friends over. He’s like bedbugs, and I’m diseased until this mission is over. Until Dorian’s hag gets her whole 300 years.

“Ugh. Blugh. These peas are nasty.” Carson is smearing his fork on my plate, leaving a long trail of pea-guts raked through my potatoes. “They can’t fucking grow them right. They can’t fucking grow any shitty food on this shitty ship. If I crapped on your plate it would be an improvement.”

There’s a constant whir undercutting everything. It’s everywhere, and does not go away, and after the first 3 months of being driven fucking insane by it, you stop noticing it. I’ve been noticing it again, as it’s often one of the only alternatives to listening to Carson.

I forget the name of the thing making the whir, but it has “hyperspace” in it.

“Got us busting our asses transporting a fucking billion dollars of fuck-all-who-knows-what, but they can’t fucking feed us anything edible.”

The whir itself also has a name. Something to do with space shrinking, and infinite acceleration, and something else back when I cared enough to actually learn about the ship. I’ve since learned it doesn’t matter. In Frame time is all that matters, and getting paid every two weeks on the dot In Frame is all that matters. It’s good pay, have I mentioned? It’s really good pay.

“Hey Carson, what are you planning to do when you retire?” I ask, and for a brief glorious second Carson shuts the hell up. Probably out of surprise, because I’ve refused to address him directly until now.

“Oh, retire?”

“Where are you going to go?”

Carson thinks—or does the closest thing to thinking which his mushed pea brain is capable of. He cracks wide his unserious grin and I think of a million ways to remove all his teeth.

“I’m gonna find some place real tribal. You know like, Oonga Boonga. And use all my money to make them make me their sex god.”

A sex god with no teeth?

“If it’s some primitive tribe, why would they give a fuck about Entente money?”

“Because it’s money, and people love money,” Carson answers, like I’m an idiot. I resist the urge to explain literally anything to him about intergalactic politics, because if I tried then I would in fact be the idiot for trying.

“Sure, people love money.”

“What about you?”

I miss a beat answering. I admittedly wasn’t expecting him to ask the question back, but knowing Carson and knowing his tendency to weaponize whatever information his greasy hands can pry from you, I’m not so stupid as to answer.

“Dunno. Depends what places exist by then.”

…

Sampson has started avoiding me.

It’s probably not me he’s avoiding. It’s probably Carson, like everyone else with a brain and working feet has been doing since the assignments were given. But Sampson has been the last hold-out. He always seems to bumble into my space, and somehow always seems surprised once Carson rears his head and hurls whatever verbal harassment he’d been practicing in the mirror that morning. Sampson is kind of stupid, for a scholar, at least in a social way.

But it’s day 90 now, and Sampson has finally made himself scarce.

I catch sight of him in the cafeteria, and his eyes bug, and his neck jostles a little like a gobbling turkey before he turns away from me, all weird limb movements and discombobulation. He scoots up against Dorian in some weird parody of a chick ducking under its brooding mother for protection. Dorian notices nothing weird because he’s drunk, always.

I get in line. Carson’s breath is on my shoulder. It’s replaced quickly with a whisper about how he’s gonna fuck Major Kensington in her sleep when this mission is over. I grab my coffee and pasty oatmeal.

It’s day 93, and I no longer see Sampson in the cafeteria. This also means I don’t see Dorian in the cafeteria. Sampson, being the ascetic weirdo he is, I can see skipping meals. Dorian, I cannot.

It’s day 95, and Carson wakes me up. He does it by holding my nose, and I clock him in the face by pure, de-oxygenated instinct. I’m gasping for breath and spinning into consciousness as Carson rights himself standing at the side of my bed, nose dripping blood, smiling shittily in the low emergency lighting.

“I got us a special little present,” Carson announces, holding up something squarish, and indecipherable in the low light.

I sit up with half a mind to punch him again. He wipes the blood from his nose, then wipes it on my sheets, and sits himself down on my bed. He cracks open the squarish thing, and it’s a book.

“Are you fucking literate?” I ask, voice croaking.

“It’s Sampson’s dirty mags,” Carson says, answering a very different question from what I asked. I blink to adjust to the lighting, and can only make out the tight, tiny scrawl of black ink filling each page Carson flips through.

“What?”

“He was guarding them pretty tight. Got Dorian watching them too, but I bribed Dorian with all the alcohol they’ve been rationing me.” Carson doesn’t drink. He loves acting like this makes him a godly person, somehow, despite the literally everything else. “Slipped this baby out easy.”

Carson brandishes the book again, moreso in my direction. I look closer. Tight tight black ink, filling every page. I can’t read any of it.

“Is that fucking... Sampson’s cultural tomes?” I ask.

“One of ‘em,” Carson answers, delighted.

“Why the fuck do you have his cultural tomes?” I hate the bothered note in my voice. Because I don’t care, and I don’t want to be awake, and I don’t want to be engaging Garret Fucking Carson.

“I’m trying to educate myself. This is all that’s left of that poor poor culture that died 1,000 years ago.”

(Last year, In Frame.)

“Go the fuck back to sle--”

I hear a shearing sound. Loud, amplified by the ambient silence around us, undercut with the silent whir of the hyper-thing. ShhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHRRIIP. I look. The page is torn vertically, right down the middle. Carson holds the separated portion and rips it again, length-wise. SSshhhhhhiiriiipp.

Paper confetti rains. Carson flips the pages. “Boring fucking culture. Got like two million fucking pages in this thing but he didn’t think to preserve even one bit of porn. I don’t even know what the naked girls on his planet look like. Figures Sampson wouldn’t preserve any of that, considering he’s a fa--”

I kick Carson hard in the back, hard enough to boot him off the bed. There’s agitation in my veins, but I’m staring at Carson’s shitty unserious smile staring up gummily from the floor, and I can’t let him win. I can’t let him win.

“Do that somewhere else,” I say, and I roll over, dragging my covers over myself. “I’m going the fuck back to sleep.”

…

It’s day 96. Sampson appears in the cafeteria, and he moves like a meercat. Short bursts of agitated movement, all hand-wringing and buggy-eyes. He looks sleepless. He looks dog-tired. He looks my way, and wrings his hands more before turning away from me, away from the wide and deeply unserious smile of Garret Carson looming over my shoulder.

Dorian isn’t with him. Someone is supposed to yell at him for that, but it won’t be me.

It’s day 98, and Sampson can only dart around meercattishly for so long. His frantic eye-bugginess is morose. His hand-wringing is gray and tired. I’ve watched him, from a distance, upturn about every seat and tile in this ship—at least every one he can touch without getting yelled at, and a few he can’t. He makes the mistake of eye contact with me a few more times, and it lingers now. Like he wants to approach. That little flame of desire dies every time his eyes shift to Carson, ever the leech on my shoulder.

It’s day 111. I have 9 more days of Carson, and I have not seen Sampson in a week. Dorian shuffles through the cafeteria alone sometimes, and he does get yelled at for appearing separate from his assigned buddy. But Dorian is drunk, and is an entire refrigerator of a man, and so there is little people can do about him.

Sampson’s tome has long since turned to pulp in Carson’s corner of our room, and Carson is bored again. I can see it in his eyes.

…

It’s day 112. They tell us something in the morning about running behind schedule, and a pit stop for a very particular kind of hyper-fuel, and an ultra-hyper-hyper-something-or-other for the remaining week. I only pay attention to the “remaining week” part of it, because it reminds me that I will be free of Garret Carson in a week’s time.

That’s a slight lie. I’ll still be on the ship with him. But importantly I will be entirely within my right to stay the hell away from him. I can get a coffee without him, and piss without him, and that alone sounds like heaven.

The announcement continues. We’ve gotten another mission booked back-to-back, set to start the moment our current one ends. This elicits a few murmurs, mostly from the people who are more sensitive than me to the hyper-whatever and were banking on a little un-hyper downtime. I don’t care about them. I only hear the next part.

5 months In Frame mission. Buddy assignments are to stay the same.

I feel frozen. My heart jumps at what was surely a mistake, a bad dream, something I can blink myself away from and find myself lying in bed with Carson snoring above me.

I feel Carson’s breath on my shoulder. His deeply shitty smile is boring into me. I won’t look at him, but he is real. He is entirely real.

“Woohoo!” Dorian toasts, to no one. “Another 400 years to the hag!”

…

It’s the evening of day 112, and we’ve touched down on an anchor planet to refuel. It’s our version of an evening, anyway, since this planet is drifting in a starless system and the In Frame clocks have declared it lights-out. It’s weird to know we’re hunkered down to something. It’s weird to share a Frame with a planet. It’s weird to hear the new whir of fuel glugging into the ship.

It’s too weird, and I can’t sleep.

I’m still awake when Carson drops down from his top bunk and slips out the door.

I should really view this as a blessing, to be given some unknown number of minutes without Garret Carson’s presence, at a time when I could believably feign ignorance of the entire thing. But it’s about as restful as losing sight of the spider on your ceiling.

So I slip out of bed. I put on my shoes and I ease our creaky door open. There’s no bathroom to check, since the shitter is in our shared room, but I prod open the shower room on the off-chance Carson was possessed with the desire for some kind of 3am (In Frame) scrub-down.

The shower room is empty.

I check the cafeteria. I check the rec lounge. I check the library, not that Garret Carson has ever once set foot in there. I turn back, and shuffle through a few more halls, and even consider waking up Major Kensington to report my partner missing and then go the hell back to bed.

There’s a strip of yellow light wrapping the edge of a cracked-open door.

I curse under my breath, as I was just growing attached to the idea of never finding Carson.

I approach it, and my rotten hunch is correct. It’s the door leading to the suit locker room, containing all the suits custom-tailored to crew members with outer ship maintenance as an assignable duty. Both Carson and I have the training, which largely consists of being the monkey with a toolbox, sent out into deep space on a rope, while an engineer in your earpiece instructs you step by step what to do. (The engineer is too valuable to send out as the monkey on the rope.)

But I know with utmost certainty Carson has not been assigned to outer ship duty, because I have not been assigned to outer ship duty. I hiss through my teeth, and I step forward, and I place my hand on the door.

Some airy breathy noise sounds out from behind me. It makes my neck hair stand on end. I would almost consider being relieved, on the possibility that it’s Carson, back from pissing in Sampson’s closet, and that the cracked-open door was mere coincidence.

The rat-breath smell hits me next, and I know it’s not Carson.

I turn, eye to eye in the low light with Sampson, who looks far more ghoulish bottom-lit. He’s sleepless and gray and doing a very good job of passing for a ghost haunting the ship.

“Sampson,” I say.

“Mendoza! I um--! I thought I heard something,” Sampson says quickly, and stinkily, as if he were the one who had just been caught with his hand on the locker room door.

“Same. I think Carson snuck outside. I’m dragging his ass back in.”

“Oh... Oh!” Sampson says, as though taking a moment to process what was said. “We should... You shouldn’t... I’ll alert Major Kensington, and she will--”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Kensington’ll probably just yell at me for losing track of my buddy and send me outside to grab him.” That’s a lie. Garret Carson is outside the ship. It’s a world different from losing track of your buddy in the cafeteria.

Sampson probably knows this is a lie, because he’s smart. But he doesn’t know what to say back to me, because he’s dumb. His gray knuckles wring together.

“Did um... is um... Sorry, speaking of Carson— I was wondering—Did Lieutenant Carson—since you share a room—if you’ve seen—At any point in the last few weeks did Lieutenant Carson--”

“He took your tome, yeah. He shredded it.”

The convincing ghost of Eric Sampson manages to lose an extra shade of color from his face. “Shredded?”

“Go back to bed, okay.”

I step inside, and close the door on Sampson’s face.

…

The suit fits less snug than the last time I wore it for ship maintenance. It’s disconcerting. Every inch of skin not touching suit feels like a nakedness doomed to shred up in the vacuum of space. That’s dramatic. These suits maintain a constant pressure, and they scream like hell at the first detection of a leak. The planet outside has an atmosphere. It’s way less dangerous than outer ship maintenance. It’s just been a while since I wore this suit, and I’m tired, and I hate Garret Carson.

So I do hesitate, I guess, and my hand is clammy, I guess, once I’ve entered the exit code, and scanned my badge, and ensured the airlock door back into the ship is vacuum-shut behind me. There’s only out, now. And there’s only me.

I open the door, and the pneumatic hiss is deafening (I did not miss that part of the job). There’s a ladder, already dropped, which vanishes outside the little emergency sphere of light that emanates from the exit door. It’s at least 30 feet down, judging by where the shadows drop off. It would not be extended if there were not already a shipmate down there.

I drop down with the ladder. I ballpark it at 35 feet until my soles touch down.

There’s a wind that whips by, and nearly sweeps my footing from under me before I’ve gotten my bearings. So I anchor myself to the ladder once more, and breathe, and wait out the roar of wind whistling past my helmet.

Atmosphere. What a fucking concept.

I step, and in the dim ship lighting I see what might perhaps be footprints, or what might be the idle artistic musings of the wind. But if I were both Carson and an idiot, it feels like the direction I would go.

“Carson!” I call. If there’s atmosphere, there’s probably sound travel.

I walk, and I walk. I’ve left the dim light of the ship, yet the ambient glow around my feet never quite vanishes. There’s something ever so slightly luminous in the soil. A planet without a system star which has found its own means of producing light, reddish and subtle, but present none the less. The ship falls farther away, but I don’t let it entirely out of sight.

There are twirling tendrils of plant life, meaty and thick, which crawl and creep along the soil. They don’t go up, as there’s no sun worth reaching toward. Instead they ooze into the soil, tying themselves with whatever feeds the glow. Perhaps they are more fungus than plants. Perhaps the distinction is meaningless here. There is a rustle here, a skitter there, an occasional pivot or bounce in the shape of the soil which suggests a sort of animal life. It’s not cold here. The planet’s core is molten, and near enough the surface to radiate heat upward like a hot spring. The crust is thin, and what isn’t molten is rich with oil. The planet is not populated. It’s a refueling pitstop for deep space journeys, once in an eon.

“Carson!”

It’s quiet here. There’s no whir of the ship.

Something presses my neckline. It hits fast, locks into precise pressure points—press, shove, tug, turn. I gasp—or maybe I yelp—and shoot away. My mind goes haywire with the instant panic response of recognizing the detachment protocol which separates my helmet from my suit. My hand flies to cover my mouth

And bonks right into my still-attached helmet.

The helmet can’t be detached like that, because it needs to be myself doing the detachment. The pressure points on the suit only respond if pressed alongside buttons within my own glove. But it felt real. The panic was sure as hell real. Like being shoved from behind while on a tightrope.

The adrenaline has already flashed through my bloodstream, and I’m trembling.

Carson is laughing.

I take a swipe at him, and he ducks my clumsy aim, still laughing, still heaving with his own mirth.

“Relax, dickhead, it’s breathable.”

I still myself, though breath still fogs my helmet and my hands still shake. Carson is standing in front of me. His eyes are like iridescent beetles in the luminance of the soil. His helmet is gone, and he’s breathing.

“I saw the fuel guy take his helmet off out here,” Carson says. “It’s oxygen out here. It’s like, extra oxygen. I feel kinda high. You should try too, Mendoza.”

I don’t.

“Come the hell back to the ship.”

“Aw, did you miss me?”

“Get back on the ship before--”

“Before what? Who’s gonna do anything?”

I stare him down, and I stare down his shitty smile and the red glint in his eyes.

“You left the fucking ship to get high on oxygen? If the ship leaves--”

��Oh better. So much better. Mendoza you’re gonna shit yourself once you know what I know.” Carson bobs and he steps. He gets in close to me, lit red from beneath. The whipping winds sweep his straw hair back and forth. “D’you know what we’re transporting?”

“I don’t care.”

“Cuz I’m gonna steal it.”

I miss a beat.

“No you’re not. Get back on the ship and I’ll pretend I never heard that.”

“Oh but you did hear that. Cuz I told you. I was actually coming back to get you, but like a good mission buddy you came and found me.”

“I found you to throw you the fuck back on the ship,” I answer. My patience is beyond thin. “I’m not risking my payday because you--”

“Oh this is a HUGE payday. More than you’ll make in a million Frame years on that disgusting fucking ship.” Carson is moving in that squirrely way, or perhaps more like a collie, circling me and yet pulling me closer. “But I need to loosen one of the escape pods to do it, and they fixed the busted shackle I found during last maintenance so actually I can’t get it out on my own. The pod’s on a safety lock.”

Carson’s shitty smile persists. He’s too close now.

“So you want me to be the second badge.”

“It’s gotta be you. The second thumb-and-badge needs Kensington’s girl scout do-gooder merit badge. You got that for licking her clit didn’t you?”

“Why do you think I’m gonna help you?”

“Cuz we’re friends.”

I turn my heel on Carson. I only care about the ship winking in the distance.

“And because I’m gonna give you half.”

I pause, now. My boot sinks into the glowing sand.

“Half of what?”

“The treasure we’re transporting. I know what it is. I know where we’re keeping it. I know how to escape with it.”

I keep walking. “I’m going to bed.”

“It’s the remains of Sampson’s culture,” Carson barks after me. “Literally a civilization worth of wealth compacted into what fits on a ship. Sampson’s a stupid fucker and he said too much to me one day, and his fucking book confirmed it. A civilization of wealth, Mendoza, and all of them are fucking dead. We can just take it.”

“No, we can’t, because someone’s expecting it.”

“Oh boo hoo, you think the king of Fuckshit World living in a galaxy 300 lightyears away from Sampson’s stupid dead people actually deserves it? Instead of us who’ve been busting our asses transporting it?”

I pause. The glimmer in Carson’s eyes is stronger.

“We lost 300 years on this stupid journey. Transporting this shit. Your fucking childhood home is 300 years more rotted into the dirt. Because cushy fuckers who would never dare leave their own fucking Acceleration Frame hire us to do it. This trip cost US. Not them. WE deserve that shit.”

“I signed up for this job because I don’t give a fuck how rotted my childhood home is or how extra-dead my grandmother will be. If you didn’t know that going into this then that’s on you.”

“50% split. And once we’re gone from here, you never have to see me again.” Carson’s stupid shitty unserious smile has vanished. And this admittedly shuts me up for at least a second. It’s weird to see him like this. It’s uncomfortable.

“You fucking hate me, right?” Carson continues. “If we go back to that ship, it’s another fucking half a year of you and me being besties. So steal this shit with me, and then never ever see me again.”

I hesitate. I flex my fingers in my gloves. Another half-year of Carson sounds like a prison sentence, like a vice clamp around my throat, like a fate worse than hell.

“How do I know you’ll actually give me half?” I ask.

“Because you can wrestle it from me if you want. You’d fuck me over in a fight. You could take more than half if you want. Not like I could stop you.”

“You could have a gun.”

“Pat me down, Mission Buddy.”

He spreads his arms. The space suit spreads with him. The luminescence lights him like phoenix wings.

I stare at him, and I hate Lieutenant Carson all over again, because I’ve decided he’s being serious. And I hate him even more than before, because there’s a part of me. A part of me. Which thinks he’s right.

It would be so nice to get off the ship.

It would be nice to settle somewhere that has plantlife, and water, and atmosphere. Wildlife. A sun that rises and sets. I wouldn’t even care how long or short that sun-tracked day lasts, if it means never saying In Frame again.

It would be nice to experience time, again.

“...Fine then,” I tell him, and Carson’s face lights up like Christmas.

“I knew you’d get it! I love you Mendoza. I could kiss you.”

“Don’t.”

“I won’t. I’m not Sampson.”

And the mention of Sampson’s name jolts something just slightly beneath my skin. All gray-faced and ghost-like and pathetic. Sampson has never been good at the ship. He’s not like me who doesn’t care about time spinning away on my home planet, or Dorian who loves every year deader his ex-wife gets.

“I know which cargo lock the haul is in. The fuel is near it and I slipped a shim under the lock when the maintenance guy went in to hook up the refueler. We only need badge access to get back there and then if I loosen the shim we can--”

“We should do that part last, right?”

“Huh?” Carson asks.

“Because of the alarms,” I elaborate. “Once we open the treasure hold, it’s gonna trigger the alarms.”

“Yeah, and we fill our bags and run.”

“And the escape pod.”

“What about it?”

“It’ll still be locked up.”

Carson pauses at this. His unserious grin splits wide again, right back in place. “See this is why I love you Mendoza. Brains of the operation. So we get the pod ready first, then pocket all the treasure we can, then dip.”

Carson pivots off track just slightly, to the rear hull of the ship.

“I knew you were smart. If Sampson’s people chose you as their scholar maybe they wouldn’t have fucking perished.”

“Like hell. I’d rather dig graves than live as some kind of encyclopedia monk.”

Eric Sampson is part of the cargo haul, I realize in almost an offhand way. Our cargo is all the preserved culture that remains of his people and Sampson is a relic right alongside it all. It’s not new for dying cultures to do this. Sampson isn’t even the first shipmate we’ve had whose job is simply to outlive the death of a people for as long as possible, keeping alive customs and knowledge and memories like the last breathing ember of a doused flame.

But Sampson stands out to me maybe because he’s been the worst at it. Sloppy and forgetful, a manic studier of cultural information that seems to slip through his brain like water. Too often I’ve watched him stumble over facts and mix up dates and work himself into a panic over a forgotten monarch’s name.

Maybe it’s because most of the other cultural hermits were second or third generation, tasked to memorize a culture they’d never seen. Sampson left while his culture was still bleeding. It died overnight, sometime last year, and had been dead a few good years before Sampson even woke up. I’ve never quite seen him recover.

“Fucking Sampson of all people. What an absolute fucker,” Carson continues, almost singsong. “I hate him. He’s a cunt. My only regret is leaving before I ever got to punt him in the balls.”

Carson sets his badge to the pod lock. It’s a solid, unbroken section of external ship hull, with only thin fissures in the body betraying the notion that something opens, that something reveals. The little shimmer of light remains yellow.

“Oh, right,” Carson says. He lifts his free hand and sets his gloved thumb to the sensor beside his badge. It’s a double-safety measure: thumb for biometrics, to guard against a stolen badge, and a badge, to guard against a stolen corpse.

Carson’s thumb is read though his glove, and a green light clicks to life under Carson’s touch. The twin sensor waits for mine.

“Did the tome say what’s in the cargo hold, exactly?” I ask.

“Oh just you know, literally everything of value to his people. Before the last of them bit it, they gathered it all up. Like emptied out their museums and banks and shit. Sent it off with Sampson. It’s all shrunk down into cargo pills so a wheel palette should be enough to nab them and run. We’ll need to find a planet with a Depacker but most galaxies have had those for literally like 500 years, so like since the last 6 months. Pros of being on this shitty ship.”

“So Sampson knows about the cargo.”

“Absolutely. Sure does.”

“And when we’re gone in the morning, he’ll know what happened?”

“100%. Ah!” Carson kicks his legs in a little dance of mirth, a little tick of uncontained joy. “Ah!! Actually I have TWO regrets, and the second one is that I won’t be able to see Sampson’s face when he wakes up tomorrow and learns what we ransacked. Oh he’ll kill himself. He’ll definitely kill himself. I wish I could see it. Dorian’s not gonna stop him when he kicks his chair and starts dangling from the ceiling tiles.”

Carson nods once more toward the hull.

“Come on, give it your badge.”

I press my thumb to the sensor. I pat my suit with my free hand, and I pat the front pocket, and the back pocket, and my breast and neckline.

“My badge is still in the ship,” I say.

Carson clicks his tongue, agitated. “Right after I called you the brains, Mendoza.”

“I came out here to haul your ass back inside. I wasn’t expecting to have to open anything under badge-lock. I’m still in my fucking pajamas under this suit.”

“Well you can buy a million sets of whatever the hell clothes you want once we have this cargo. Go inside and get your badge. Be fast. I’m getting sand in my eyes.”

I ease my hand off the scanner. I round the ship, the steady crunch and hiss of sand compacting and shifting beneath my boot. I reach the ladder, and methodically, almost puppet like, I climb it. I hardly feel like I’m the one climbing. I feel like a witness. I feel like time isn’t passing around me.

I get to the top. I pop open the door to the airlock.

I pat my pocket with my badge inside.

I look through the coupled door, the ones which open back into the ship when the pressure has equalized, and through the circular window I almost expect to see Eric Sampson’s shitty gray sad face.

There is no one there. There is no one awake. The hiss of the refueling has ceased.

I make no sound.

I haul the ladder back up behind me.

…

Dawn breaks with no sun. The whir of the ship is back, and it’s louder than before. It trembles the frame of the ship in a way I’ve never felt before. It’s in hyper-hyper-something mode, and we are fighting to make up time that doesn’t really exist this way for anyone but us.

I do not go to get coffee. I phone in to the office that I’m sick, and that I’m quarantining. They mark my chart as such, and all that really means is they bring my meals to me, and they don’t count my head at morning count. And also that, if I DO show my face before getting medical clearance, they might punt my ass into solitary. Sickness doesn’t contain well on a ship like this, so the best they can do is contain you well.

They send two meals, every mealtime. My fork spends as much time in Carson’s plate as it does in mine.

The days slip by slowly. On day 120, the whir of the hyper-hyper-thing vanishes. It vanishes all together. We’ve set down somewhere. They tell me over the intercom that a doctor is being sent to my room. When I open it, he is no one from the ship. He’s garbed strangely, and accompanied by Major Kensington who keeps her distance several paces back.

The doctor speaks, and he speaks through a translator mask.

“I’m Doctor Zhhghghgbebrgh,” the translator mouth-piece chokes. “You are not feeling well. You are Lieutenant Mendoza and Lieutenant Carson?”

I cock my head. “Well, yeah usually Lieutenant Carson is in this room. But he’s been staying elsewhere because I’m sick.”

I force myself to keep my focus on the doctor. But it’s Kensington I watch through my peripheral vision. She stiffens, instantly.

“What?”

…

It’s a mix-up. It’s an oversight. It’s clearly a case of broken protocol. The ship has been searched more thoroughly than Sampson was ever allowed to do for his missing tome. I’m sitting in Kensington’s office, as are a few sergeants, and the doctor, and just about every shipmate who ever breathed the same air as Garret Carson. (“I’ve been given medical clearance,” I tell each of them, one after the other, at the stink eye they offer me when ordered to pack themselves into the office with me.)

Kensington is pacing. Kensington is pulling at the patch of hair she pulls whenever she’s stressed. It’s worried into a slight bald spot.

“No one saw Garret Carson that night?” Kensington asks, again, like the answer might change.

“I went to bed with a fever already. Thought maybe it was atmosphere sickness but I was zonked out of my mind by the next morning. So no, I really don’t know what time Carson left the room.”

Kensington is worrying her thumb through documents I’ve already seen, pulled records from that night. There’s a single ping matching Carson’s badge ID against the escape pod sensor at 3:12am In Frame.

There are a few thousand additional pings matching Carson’s badge ID against the escape pod sensor, ranging from 3:31am to 4:47am, at which point the ship engaged liftoff.

“No one... else?” Kensington asks. Ship cameras are useless. The hyper-hyper thing amps up the magnetic field so strongly it fries even the best tapes.

She’s running numbers in her head. It’s been eight In Frame days since Carson vanished. It would take another eight to double back, and that’s only if we could muscle through hyper-hyper-speed, and it doesn’t matter at all, actually. Because no matter how much we move faster, in reality it’s just the time dilation getting worse. From the resting planet’s frame, there’s nothing we can do to get there faster. The limit of lightspeed is a bitch.

I’ve run the numbers in my head as well. At our normal hyper-cadence, we move 938 seconds per second. Even if Carson were only 8 days away at that cadence, even if he were only a 16-day round trip away, he’s nowhere close to that.

He’s not In Frame. And 16 days to rescue Garret Carson is 41 years.

And whether it were 16, or 8, or 4, there was never any turning back for Garret Carson. Because sacrificing 41 years of resting revenue, or 20 or 10, was never going to be the company’s decision.

Kensington pulls on her hair more. I wonder if I ought to tell her about Carson’s graphic sexual fantasies. If it might make her feel better.

“Lieutenant Sampson,” she says. There’s a rock and shuffle of the ship. Depacked cargo unloading. A culture’s worth of treasure being unloaded for the king of FuckShit World, or whoever exactly Sampson’s people had bequeathed it to in their last will and testament. “Lieutenant Sampson, you’d said you thought you heard Lieutenant Carson that night?”

I glance to Sampson. Some of the color has returned to his face, a man only half the ghost of the person I’d seen in front of the air lock that night.

“Oh. Um, yes, Ma’am! I did um, I did maybe, I think. I heard something that night. But. I mean. I only walked down the hall. I was having trouble sleeping and I walked down the hall but, that was it.”

“So you never saw Lieutenant Carson?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t see anyone else?”

“No,” Sampson says, and I’m afraid for a moment he might look at me. He doesn’t. His face is rigid. It gives nothing away. “I didn’t see a single soul that night.”

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