Second Suicide: A Short Story (Kindle Single) (3 page)

“So what’s
this world like?”
Rov
asks. “If you were a Liaison Officer,
you must’ve done a lot of reading up on the natives. You fluent?”

“Not for our
landing sector,” I admit.

Rov
looks disappointed.

“But I know
quite a bit about the planet in general. From studying Sector 2.”

Urj squares
his cards and rests them by his remaining credits. A chair squeaks as the
player to my right settles back. All eyestalks are looking at me, and I realize
these Gunners aren’t curious so much as worried. We’ve had a few All-Tentacle
raids in the past. Last time, Warship 5 was lost in orbit, taking all the vats
onboard with it. A replacement ship had to be called up from the trailing
fleet. Until everyone could be sorted and new bodies grown, there were men and
women walking around on their last sets of lives.

“They write
about us a lot,” I tell my
squadmates
. I can see
their tentacles stiffen. Except for
Bek
, who ties
three of his limbs into knots of worry. “I don’t mean
us
, exactly. I
mean . . . their culture is full of doomsday musings. Raids from space are a
particularly popular trope.”

“All races
are full of doomsday musings,”
Bek
says. He looks to
the others, is trying to comfort them more than himself. “We have our own
stories of all this coming to an end. It’s fear of final death.”

“This is
worse than most,” I say. “I can only really speak for Sector 2, but they think
on little else. They spend more of their money on warfare than any other thing.
We submitted a report to the Command Committee about this a while back—”

“Must be
your report that has me back in Gunner,”
Rov
says,
her accusation flying across the table.

“And him
too, don’t forget,”
Bek
points out, waving a tentacle
at me.

“Hey, what’s
wrong with Gunner?” asks Urj, who has obviously never been anything but.

“Pipe down,”
someone shouts from a bunk room down the hall. Sounds like the sergeant. A hush
settles, and eyestalks swivel guiltily toward the door. Someone makes a move at
a pile of credits, but a tentacle slaps the thievery away.

“
Tul
heard from High Command that the Warships are to be
kept in low
atmo
,” Urj says quietly. He is Squad
Commander, and to report out of chain is a great sin. Somehow, the hush
deepens. The game is forgotten, even the thirty-five that I’m in the hole.

“Reboot and
reload?”
Gha
, a Gunner, asks.

Urj nods.

“What’s that
mean?”
Bek
asks, and I am thankful. I grow tiresome
of admitting my ignorance on these things.

“It means
there are more of us in the vats, and those bodies may be needed as well.”

“Fast as
they can grow us,”
Gha
says, “they’ll send us down.”

Everyone
looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been
ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that
we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been
worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these
that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many
types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.

#

Instead of
spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going
over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before
planetfall
reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is
what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just
not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the
dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate,
Lum
.
I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of
Lum
sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below
me.

Mil’s files
are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for
myself or for
Kur
. Lots of messages are
gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped.
Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.

Quite a few
messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports
are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however.
There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I
wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these
ships that all my
intel
came. Does Earth have warning
of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles
and the consternation among the higher-ups.

I think of
the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had
taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we
raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they
stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much
not-good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed
skills, but their state of readiness.

Maybe I’m
reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into
Gunner, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into
boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High
Command is having none of such talk from a radio tech. Perhaps they deleted her
suggestions in case she turns out to be right.

But why the
suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive, it’s that the chances of
offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is
not likely to be present when they are brought back.

When my new
bunkmate
Lum
returns from her station duties, I set
the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.

“Hey,
Lum
,” I say.

My bunkmate
is eating a
gurd
. With her mouth full, she raises her
stalks questioningly.

“Did you . .
. notice anything strange about Mil before she . . . well, before either of her
suicides?”

“Mmm,”
Lum
says. She swallows and starts taking off her work
clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my
tentacles that she isn’t.

“Yeah,” she says.
“She was very different the days before. Both times.”

“How so?” I
ask.

Lum
throws her clothes into the
chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she
says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering
after
Lum’s
lava blasts.

“You mean,
she wasn’t usually calm?”

“Her normal
state was to raise hell,”
Lum
says. She sticks her
head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of
the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the shower. “The
reason
Lum
offed herself was because of her
demotions. She was in High Command a few raids ago. Got bumped down, and she’s
been getting bumped down ever since. Causes too much trouble.”
Lum
screws up her eyestalks. “
Speaks her mind
,” she
says, as if this is a great sin.

“Seems
weird,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. Taking on that much debt.”

Lum
eyes the shower. The steam
is, blessedly, cloaking her lower half.

“You ever
done it?” I ask. “Ever . . . you know.”

“No,” she
says, smiling. She looks down at herself. “I’m all original. And I’m wasting
water. You wanna come in? I can tell you about my crazy ex-bunkmate and you can
scrub the barnacles off my back.”

“I’m good,” I
say. “Just curious is all.”

Lum
seems, if anything,
relieved. I can’t get a bead on her. “Suit yourself.” She starts to pull the
door shut, then sticks her head out one last time. Considers something. I’m
waiting.

“You were in
Intelligence,” she says.

“Still am,”
I say. “Gunner is just this one time.”

“And other
races, they do it too? Off themselves?”

“A lot,” I
say.

“But it’s
final death for them,”
Lum
says.

“Yeah.
That’s the point,” I say. “They do it when they get depressed.” Here, I’m
drawing more from my own experiences than any of my studies. I remember feeling
like I wanted to sleep for a long time. Forever, if I could.

The steam is
filling our bunkroom. I feel sweat gathering on my back.
Lum
studies me for a painfully long while.

“I don’t
think Mil was depressed,” she finally says. “I think she was . . . satisfied.
Content, maybe. Or resigned. Or maybe . . .”

“Maybe
what?”

“Or maybe
she was scared out of her senses, and she couldn’t get anyone to pay attention.
So she finally gave up.”

#

The next morning,
I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my
mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an
ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear
the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.

All the
springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a
lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data
drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t
think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used
these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but
it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone
else.

One mystery
is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to
some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some
reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering
it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some
memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is
being sexed by
Kur
.

The only
problem with my brilliant theory is that
Kur
says
she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing!
I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell
Kur
that
one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell
him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him,
saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.

Why does my
heart go out to her? Why am I not disturbed? And what if she kills herself yet
again and they are out of bodies for her in the vats here? They might bring her
back as a man, and now it is too late and I already love her.

Listen to
me. A cycle ago, I was dreaming of saving enough for a plot of land and a
settlement pass, of making a permanent home on some ball of mud. Now I am
worried over a woman with a career of demotions and a pile of debt.

I study the
locked drive, this lone token of hers. It was sewn into the top of the
mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it
was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.

Two days to
planetfall
, and a radio tech’s madness consumes me. I
should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill
afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a Liaison Officer. I am trained to dig
and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself
curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.

#

It is
download day, one day before
planetfall
. After mess,
we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight
confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but
they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research
terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray
thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.

Will I wake
up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my
rebirth,
please don’t let me die tomorrow?
What a strange life. It is
only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final
death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until
it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do
we
do? We grow bored of it.

Before I
joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we
are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How
many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording
these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is
really eating at me becomes clear: