Second Suicide: A Short Story (Kindle Single) (4 page)

I do not
dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my
own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am
used to making
planetfall
with the last of the
landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and
relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have
already been turned beneath the soil.

So this I
dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death
becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the
next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there
will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this
as well.

The scanner
records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls
still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more
permanent, silent state.

And with
this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel
like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the
next Gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something
up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a Liaison
Officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last
routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt.
And he relents.

The date is
near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull
up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing
messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look
bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no
bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden
away.

I fish the
locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had
another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it
all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning,
that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.

#

It is
planetfall
, and as our attack craft soars down through the
atmosphere toward this green and blue and white target of ours, my thoughts
drift to a heat-tech I met once. I don’t remember his name, it was so long ago.
He came to the bunkroom
Kur
and I shared when the thermostat
was out. It was so cold in our room that our piss froze and crinkled before it
hit the toilet. While he was working to fix the unit, the heat-tech complained that
he was always cold, which I had never thought of before. Strange to think of a
person who fixes heaters never being warm. But of course. He only works where
the heat is broken. He must be cold all the time.

I am
thinking this on the day of
planetfall
, because
lately I have only seen our conquests in ruin. The planets are already smoking from
the orbital bombardment and the armies of Gunners by the time we Liaisons ever get
mud on our boots. The power grids are out; satellites blown to bolts; fires
raging. Others stay behind and build an empire; they will see the place whole.
But not me. I am like the heat-tech, forever cold. I am the conqueror who never
glimpses what he has won. I only see these worlds in their cultural writings
from deep space, and then I see them battered and broken.

These are my
thoughts as the shuttle touches down and sways on its struts. The Gunners
around me loosen their harnesses as the rear hatch lowers. There is gunfire
from a squad that got here first. There is the scream of something heavy
plummeting through thick atmosphere. Sergeant
Tul
yells for us to “
move, move,
” and we do.

I am third
off the ship, and my tentacles are moist with fear. My GAW13 kicks as I fire.
Tanks rumble and drones and fighter craft swirl overhead, a maelstrom of
missiles exploding, fountains of dirt erupting, my first glimpse of real-life
humans taking shelter, taking aim.

I have
studied them so long that they feel intimate and familiar. I know them. I
launch a volley into a small squad, and one of the humans is ripped in two. Our
shuttle is taking fire and screams as it pulls away, lifting up to gather more
bodies as they spill from orbiting vats. The resistance is stiffer than we were
promised. A grenade takes out Urj, and one of his dismembered tentacles tangles
around my ankle. Sergeant
Tul
is yelling at us to
take cover. There is a mound of metal nearby, some kind of bunker half-covered
with dirt that a few Gunners huddle behind. Bullets pepper its side. I fire
into the humans until my gun overheats and then dive into the bunker. The last
thing I see overhead is the flash of a new sun, a blinding ball of light, as
one of our warships and all of its vats wink out of existence.

There is
much yelling. Radios bark back and forth. I check my gun and my tentacles, make
sure all is in place, and then I see what I am hiding inside of, this makeshift
bunker. It is familiar. It is the ruin of one of our ships, a troop shuttle,
but something is not right—

Bullets ping
off the hull, and I can hear the natives of Sector 1 yelling and coordinating.
A Gunner from another squad has taken shelter with us. Her radio barks, and she
yells at
Tul
, “War Two is down!”

I think of
Kur
. Our home. Our bunkroom. Now that ship is a hailstorm
of bolts plummeting through the high clouds and scattering across this ball of
mud.

Inside the
busted troop shuttle where we’ve taken shelter, tall grasses are swaying,
waving at me, trying to signal some warning.
Rov
stands by the gaping hole in the shuttle’s skin, scanning the sky, her armored
bulk blotting out my view of the carnage beyond. I am going to die a cowardly,
expensive death, I realize.

“War One has
taken a hit!”
Rov
shouts.

Flashes of
light stab in around her, another brightening of the sky. A moment later, there
is a deep grumble that I feel in my bones, a noise like the belly growl of a
hungry god.

Closer by, a
bomb explodes, a sharp crack followed by the howls of my kin. I hear alien
craft buzzing overhead, filling the sky with the piercing shrieks of their
passing, and with the whistle of loosed munitions.

All is
background noise. I am watching the tall grasses wave and wave. Their feathery blades
are growing up through the destroyed hull of one of our ships. There is rust
here and there, cables chewed by local varmints, all the signs of that
universal destroyer: Time. The scars he leaves are everywhere I look.

I hold a
tentacle in front of my visor and study it. Where are my scars? Where are the
physical artifacts of wounds I remember suffering? Has it really been so long?
I search for an old injury that I have been hunting for and have been unable to
find for a cycle now. The last thing I remember is waking in my bunk, feeling
like someone else. I remember a last glimpse of my ship, dimmed and showing no
pockmark, no wear of war.

Another bomb
erupts in the distance. More of my people dying. And I think of the stress I
witnessed among High Command on my warship. I think of the way things have been
falling apart—so many people thrown to Gunner. There is a girl who will
not stop killing herself, a girl who knows something, a fragment of a report
about a missing signal from another ship.

There is a
helmet by my feet, half-buried in the dirt of planet Earth.
Tul
is yelling for us to fight, and I am trying to remember a poem I once knew. The
words are not with me. All around us are the signs of an invasion that did not
succeed. And I know a sudden truth with all the fierceness of a hot
blast—I know this as bullets zing by my helmet and bombs rage closer and
closer:

We are the
second fleet
.

We are the
reserve.

All that’s
left.

And hell has
come for us at last.