SECOND SUICIDE
by Hugh Howey
I wonder, sometimes, if this is not me. Holding a tentacle up in front of the mirror, turning my eyestalk and studying these webbed ears, these bright green eyes with their space-black slits, I become convinced they belong to some other. It is a morning contemplation that, much like the gas from breakfast, eventually passes by mid-afternoon. But when I rise, I feel it is in another’s body. My brain is discombobulated from sleep, and I sense some deep gap between my soul and my form. I think on this while on the toilet, until my bunkmate, Kur, slaps the bathroom door with his tentacle.
“Always in a rush to shit,” I shout through the door, “but never in a hurry to be first from bed.”
Kur pauses in his protestations, possibly to consider this contradiction. “It is your smelly ass that wakes me,” he finally explains.
I flush and pop the door. Somewhere, our spaceship home will turn my waste into a meal. I like to pretend it will all go to Kur. Outside, we jostle in the tight confines of our bunkroom as he takes my place in the crapper.
“What day is it?” he asks, farting. Most of our conversations are through this door. Once our shifts begin, we don’t see each other. Kur works in Gunnery, and I moved up to Intelligence ages ago, after the conquest of the Dupliene Empire. The new job came with a superiority complex, but, alas, not a larger bunk.
“It’s Second Monday,” I tell him. We are practicing our Native. Kur and I are both assigned to Sector 2 landfall. He will be shooting at the very crowds I have studied, and on this planet they have seven days to a cycle instead of twelve. Such confusions are likely why I awake feeling like some other. You settle in the skin of an alien race, and by the time you feel at home there, they are no more.
Kur flushes. “Not day of the week. What day ’til planetfall?”
I hear the sink run as he washes his tentacle. Kur’s personal hygiene makes up for much else.
“It’s eight days to planetfall,” I tell him. “Near enough that you should know.”
He cracks the door. His bottoms are still undone. “I dreamed today was the day,” he says. “Very confusing. I was mowing down the pink cunts when your foul emanations stirred me.” He screws his eyestalks together, suppressing a laugh or a bout of gas. “Explains the cannon fire in my dreams,” he says.
He laughs and farts and laughs some more.
I am reminded of my own nightmares. They usually come right after a conquest. In these dreams, it is suddenly the day of the next planetfall, and I don’t know my assignments. I don’t know the language or my targets or the geography. I haven’t had these dreams in a long time, though. I feel prepared. I know this planet Earth twice as well as I have any other. I am as ready for this invasion as I have ever been.
While Kur finishes dressing himself, I tap the grimy terminal on the wall. A light in the top corner is flashing, twice long and one short: a message for me.
To: Second Rank Intelligence Liaison Hyk
From: Sector 2 Supervisor Ter
Bad news, Hyk. Mil from Telecoms Sector 1 has killed herself again. As this is the second offense in a span of twelve sleeps, Mil has been reassigned to Gunner Crew 2, Squad 8. Due to some shuffling in landing parties, we need you to clean out your desk and report to Sector 1. We apologize for any inconvenience. See Supervisor Bix when you arrive.
-Ter
Do not reply to this message. All commands are my own and do not reflect the commands of my Supervisors. Planetfall in eight sleeps and counting. Have a happy invasion!
“Fuck me,” I say.
“Seriously?” Kur asks. He flashes his fangs and points to his bottoms. “I just got the last button done.”
“I’ve been reassigned.”
Kur’s joke hits my brainstump a moment later, too late for a retort. He shoulders me aside to study the terminal for himself.
“A new bunkmate,” he says. “A girl. Maybe this one will sex me.”
“I will miss you, too,” I say. It is a half-truth. But my feelings are raw that Kur seems not sad at all. Part of me expects him to grieve.
“I wonder if she’s cute,” Kur says. He is making his bunk before breakfast, a feat I have never witnessed. He says her name aloud: “Mil.” Almost as if he is tasting the sound of it. Tasting her.
“I think she must be deranged is what,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. How much do suicides cost these days?”
“Two thousand credits,” Kur says. “Squadmate of mine had to pay recently. Cut his neck shaving with a butcher’s knife. Swears up and down it was an accident.” He turns and shrugs his tentacle as if to say: No damn way it was an accident.
“Well, glad I’m not getting this roommate,” I say. “She’ll probably kill herself in the crapper while you sleep.”
Kur laughs. “You’re jealous. And I’m not the one with eight days to learn a Sector.”
This only now occurs to me. Sector 1. That’s the continent known as Asia in native. A large landmass, heavily populated. I pray the languages there are mere dialects of Sector 2’s. Hate to waste my vocab.
I also mull the four thousand credits this Mil from Telecoms now owes for the two suicides. That’s a lot of cred. All of that in a lump sum would be nice. It takes five thousand credits to buy a settlement slot these days. I could own a small plot of land on one of these worlds we conquer. Watch the fleet sail on without me.
Such are my thoughts as I pile my belongings onto my bed and knot the corners of the sheets. Everything I own can be lifted with two tentacles. Kur describes in lurid detail a girl he has yet to meet while I double-check that my locker is empty and I have everything. I find myself imagining this Mil dangling by her own tentacle from the overhead vent—and then I see Kur sexing her like this, and I need out of that room. Maybe he is right about me being jealous.
Opening the door and setting my sack in the hall, I turn to my mate of the last three invasions. Who knows when I’ll see him again?
Kur has a tentacle out. He is looking at me awkwardly and plaintively, as if this goodbye has come just as suddenly for him. I am overwhelmed by this unexpected display of affection, this need to touch before I leave the ship, this first and final embrace.
“Hey—” he says, his eyestalks moist. “About that fifty you owe me—”
The transfer shuttle is waiting for me. The pilot seems impatient and undocks before I get to my seat. As he pulls away from my home of a dozen lifetimes, I peer through the porthole and gaze longingly at the great hull of the ship, searching for familiar black streaks and pockmarks from our shared journey through space. This far from our target star, the hull is nearly as dark as the cosmos, her battle wounds impossible to find. My face is to the glass, and it is as though an old friend refuses to look back. Suddenly, it is not the shuttle peeling away from my ship. It is my ship withdrawing from me.
I remember when she was built. It was in orbit above Odeon, thousands of years ago during a resupply lull. It was the last time I was transferred. Those thousands of years now feel like hundreds. I try to remember a time before this ship, but those days are dulled by the vast expanse of time. It often seems as though we were born together—like the ship is my womb but the two of us share the same mother.
I brush the glass with a tentacle as I gaze at her, and I hunt for the marks of wear upon my own flesh. I search for reminders from my years as a Gunner—but those scars must be on another tentacle. It was so long ago. Or maybe I am remembering old scars that are gone now, washed clean when last I died. It is a shame to lose them. With them go my memories of how they occurred. Those reminders should be a part of me, just as I was part of that ship. But now its steel plates fall away and lose detail, until my old home is just a wedge of pale gray among hundreds of such wedges.