The last thing I remember is drowning.
Drowning is the best way to jump, next to riding waves.
I remember we made landfall on an exoplanet near the forty-eighth marker. Something must’ve gone wrong in the jump. My teeth tried to exit my head through the back of my throat. The yellow flash within my reconstitution pod precluded catastrophic failure. I remember my reflection in its glass—blood filling my eyes until all that remained of the universe was a red haze.
We’d been on our way home, so we’d already been stretched for fuel. Lobster lamented over that throughout the duration of the return trip, waxing about what could have been. He’d wanted to take a detour at the forty-third marker and show us the gas sheets on Omera—apparently the acid gas there was so heavy that it scoured rock and ran into pools like water. Which was an interesting image… But there was also a cantina on Omera that served a drink so strong that it caught fire at room temperature due to the pressure. The latter enticement had all of us Charlie droppers groaning with collective thirst.
We’d been in short-range cans and long-range orbitals for almost seven months, breaching and killing and looting, and we were all jagged along our edges. The promise of a drink just out of reach was almost too much to carry. Salamander was desperate enough to try making hooch again. And everyone but Hydrake and Lobster were desperate enough to try it.
I remember catching the giggles as we all traded spots in the latrine vacs like a game of belly-bugle musical chairs for three days. I was the only one who thought it was funny. Everyone else just wanted to kill Sal.
Lobster called for us to take our places and prepare for the final jump. All of us turned into Chatty Cathies now that we were on the home stretch. As our seconds strapped us in, Salamander asked Lobster, “You excited to see your wife, Cap?”
“Excited is the understatement of the century,” Lobby said over Kurage cursing his happy little wiggles.
“Anyone waiting for you on the surface, Hydrake?” Mayfly asked our intelligence officer as she keyed his suit into the panel next to his suspension rig.
As he lifted into the pod, he smiled wistfully. “Just my brother back home. Caldero’s cactus doesn’t cut itself.”
“Gotta admire a man who knows how to handle a machete,” Salamander said offhandedly. “Very primal.”
“Thirst-y,” Lobster coughed into his fist.
I quietly addressed our tactician with a smirk as he strapped me into my pod, “Hey, Nix.” He raised an eyebrow, rightfully expecting bullshit from me. But I asked, “Who’s on Caldero waiting for you? Really?” Phoenix was normally a secret on two legs, but even he was giddy with thoughts of home in his own way.
“Dustin,” he said gently.
“Your steady?” My partner was a married-to-his-job type. I tried to imagine what kind of person would put up with him, given all the bones in his body were too serious to do anything but provide basic biomechanical support.
“My dog.” A smile warmed his typically lifeless features.
Damn, I thought to myself, feeling a little like I had gotten away with stealing something. I need to buy a lottery ticket. Or a dog.
Lobster howled happily from his pod across from us and Kurage snapped at him to hold still for the last time. Our lead said, “My wife can’t wait to get rid of your kid, Nix! He’s been yacking her ear off nonstop since he heard we were on the way back.”
“Kid?” Kurage asked, glancing at Phoenix over her shoulder. “You got your dog an intel chip?”
“Had a chip when I got him. Military type. He’s six.”
“And he acts like it. He’s a spoiled brat,” Lobster said, his tone teasing. Then he grunted as Kurage pressed the slack button and his suspension straps slapped across chest. “Easy with the buckle! I’m old. I’m brittle.”
Kurage gave him a fond pat on the cheek. “Your ego, maybe, but you’re still only biologically twenty-five.”
“I feel twenty-five hundred,” he grumbled.
“Don’t we all?” Salamander, eighteen, sighed, which got everyone in the bay to gripe and curse at him since he was still barely legal on Caldero, and baby of the crew since he’d only ever been reco’d twice in his life—one of them being a painless fast-travel from surface to orbital over the radio.
“You feel old, Nix?” I asked my second. I knew he was biologically the eldest out of us, at around thirty, but he also had the most jumps and the most reco’s under his belt. Lobster might’ve been a veteran of three off-world wars, but Phoenix had been there when we’d first settled Caldero, almost two-hundred rotations ago. They threw him on ice and only thawed him out when there was fuckery afoot. We called old mercenaries like him daywalkers for a reason.
Most governmental militaries outright ban the use of soldiers with more than five violent reconstitutions, but our band didn’t have those kinds of restrictions. If you passed a psych eval, you were golden for as many reco’s as your mind could handle.
My second was as stable as a fable: immutable, tried, and true. His life would probably have a moral at the end of it. Still, when I asked him if he felt old, his placid expression fell off his face like it’d been hit with a degreaser. He hit my slack button without a word. I let out a breath at the same time to prevent the buckle from slapping me in the sternum.
“I don’t mean anything by it,” I told him.
He turned to his own pod, slipping into his pre-prepped rigging. “You never do,” he said tiredly.
Across from me, Lobster was grinning, evidently waiting for the exchange to be over. “Alright. You’re strapped in—and we’re not goin’ anywhere until you finally tell us: boyfriend or girlfriend, Hornet? Single? Ready to mingle?”
I laughed. For the last seven months, Lobster had been trying to figure out which way everyone swung so that he could hook them up with one of his many brothers and sisters-in-law. “If we’re not all related by year’s end, I’ll eat my trainers,” he’d promised. I was the last holdout. I wanted him eating shoe ala mode after we made landfall; penance for all his snoring and twenty minute showers.
“Nobody’s waiting for me,” I lied with a chuckle. “You guys are all I’ve got and all I need in the universe.”
That of course got all the reactions I wanted to hear: everything from dramatic boos to accusations of bullshit. But after the cacophony died down, Phoenix was the one to say seriously, “After we’ve turned over the guns, let me take you out, Hornet.”
That generated a roll call of whistles and hoots. Hydrake groaned as Salamander screeched across the bay, “He shot his shot before we jumped! You owe me!”
“Oh, go fuck yourself!” Hydrake replied with feeling.
“Prepare for jump!” Kurage called out as the pod doors slid over us, sealing us into our own little worlds.
Now strictly over comms, our party chatter was silenced, and Mayfly’s voice was all we heard as she relayed our status to the rest of our four-by cruiser. “This is Charlie crew on drop ship two. Ready for jump, over.”
A calm female voice replied, “This is Alpha crew on drop ship niner. Received, Charlie. Break. How’s the strap-in coming, Romeo crew? Delta?"
There was silence in my pod for a moment before a harried male voice said, “This is Romeo. We’ve got a pod stoppage. We’re troubleshooting right now. Getwell is ten-mike, copy?”
Alpha said, “We’ll stand by for five, Romeo. We’re already in the yellow for fuel. We wait any longer and we’ll miss our window.”
A male voice cut in after Alpha clicked off, “This is Delta crew to Romeo. If you don’t hurry your asses up, we’ll vote to jettison your drop. I’m not missing the world series because you didn’t triple-check your fucking seatbelts before last take-off.”
There was silence over the comms for a breath before Alpha said, “Better make it three tics, Romeo.”
“Copy,” Romeo answered morosely.
Three tense minutes past and Delta, true to their word, chimed in over the comms, saying, “Delta here. I think I speak for everyone when I say no one wants to be in cryo for a month waiting on a damn refueler. Report good news only, Romeo.”
Romeo came over the comms hot and bothered, “For fucksake Sloth, we’re jobbing on fumes in here! Calm the fuck down! You’re not gonna miss your stupid sports ball! Break, break. Alpha, we’re ready to jet when you are.”
Alpha was jubilant. “Good to hear, Romeo. Break. All, this is Alpha. You know the drill. Hold fast.”
Along with everyone else, we braced our feet and hands in the stirrups and echoed, “Hold fast!” as our pods were tilted onto their bellies and filled with oxygenated amniotic fluid.
The last thing I heard before we shot through the G-fold was Phoenix's voice coming over our private line. “You didn’t answer me, Hornet.”
“I know I didn’t,” I said, a smile on my lips. Then the warm liquid enveloped my face and I took a deep breath in, fighting against the instinct to cough and choke.
The eponymic They poetically say faster-than-light travel is kind of like being born in reverse.
It’s more like drowning in forward.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
