Who By Fire

By Jeff Samson

THE LIFT DESCENDS, GRINDING and shuddering down the station’s spine. Through the smoky glass doors I watch the hangar names slide across my line of sight in thick, jet-black characters crosshatched with colors that change from level to level. They shift from cool purples and blues to warm greens and ambers to hot rusts and reds, their palette specified long ago by some methodical, color-minded engineer.

Each string of numbers and letters is more worn than the one before, the colors more washed out, the paint more blistered and flaking. Their state of decay reveals the ages of the dark, abandoned levels they name.

The lift slows, squeals and stops. It tips me slightly off balance as it rotates around the station’s axis with a deep hum and aligns with the appropriate spoke—one of scores radiating out from the central shaft in clusters of four joined in cruciform every hundred meters for miles, each turned a few degrees clockwise from the one before in a spiral staircase succession. My feet momentarily leave the floor as the lift jerks downward with a searing burst of air before steadily descending the spoke leading to the hangar. I feel the gravity intensify, returning me to my true weight.

The few old-timers still aboard this hunk of scrap say these hangars used to be where all the action was during The War. Everything from dart-like Aethon interceptors to planet-busting Aeos dreadnoughts coming and going by the thousands. Say there wasn’t a day that went by where some renowned admiral or hotshot fly boy wasn’t docking for repairs or refueling or rearming. And judging from the number of Rhodies who carry on about war hero grandfathers they never knew, making port also meant bedding locals and breaking hearts.

Now the same hangars rest silent at the terminus of these skeletal arms like hunks of meat impaled on fat, rusted spits. They sleep in the cold dark of a distant, time-trumped memory, in heavy shadows cast by things forgotten. Most have been sealed off from the rest of the station, silicon seals rotted, integrity breached, open to vacuum and not worth the time or effort to repair. Of the rest only a handful have working power. Their only light sources are the meager blood-red glows of directional signs and emergency shutoffs, softly pulsing like the ebbing hearts of dying embers.

It’s hard to imagine they used to call this relic the Colossus. In its current state it would have a hard time fending off a single enemy fighter. Some people on board still throw that puffed-up moniker around, but that’s Rhodies. If there’s one thing they don’t lack it’s pride, even if it’s derived from a part they played in a hard-won war that took place before most of them were born.

When the Republic finally gets around to ordering her decommissioning, it’ll go out with the name they christened it with. Rhodes I. And even that’ll be more than it deserves.

***

All the green and blue paradises under Republic rule—half a dozen Goldilocks along the Coreward Arm alone, half again as many beyond the Trailing Rift—and the old man brought us here. This floating tomb. In the quiet hours of the night you can practically hear the slurp and scream of souls drawn from tired bodies, smell the stench of rotting hopes.

But I know he was out of options.

There just isn’t much dirtside work these days, not for a broken-down boozer like him. But half-dead stations like Rhodes I were made for boozers, never short on work for people who can’t find it anywhere else. It isn’t always legal, and it’s rarely pretty. But it pays him enough to get sauced every night at the local watering holes, which is fine by me. The drunker he is, the happier he is, the less he whales on me. And with what I bring in working on station and ship repairs, the less the leg-breakers whale on him. Some weeks I’m even able to score an occasional pack of smokes to make life a little less unbearable.

Only six months we’re here. Yet with the speed the hours, days and weeks plod along I’d swear it’s been ten times that long since I caught my first glimpse of Rhodes I on our approach—a dark, distant blur against the crimson fury of Proxima Centauri, slow-turning on its three-mile-wide heat shield like a discarded umbrella floating upside-down upon an infernal sea.

It’s like time itself has slowed to match the station’s ineffectual clockwork turn. Like life has slowed. Like I’m a wayward insect trudging through a world of sap.

To think, had I not met Doria.

***

I rub the nick of newly-exposed flesh on my knuckle, where my fist caught her teeth. She’ll know something hit her when she wakes up. But then she’s no stranger to that brand of pain. Be hard-pressed to find a Rhodie chick on this tub who is. I know that shouldn’t make me feel any better about it. But it does. As if in some way it’ll make it easier for her to forgive me.

I ask myself for the hundredth time if I did the right thing. If there was any other way it could have gone down. But the answer hasn’t changed. She simply wasn’t gonna’ let me go and risk what he have. She’s too smart for that. She knows what she stands to lose. And more than anything, she knows what—and who—would be waiting for her if this were to go the wrong way.

And that left me no choice.

The lift spasms to a thunderous stop. The echoes decay into silence.

As the doors hiss open, the cool air rushes in, old, stale and acrid. It stings my nose as I take it in, even tickles my gag reflex. It always takes a few minutes to adjust, no matter how many times Doria and I have stolen away into these quiet depths. Feeling our way through pitch-black passageways. Slipping in and out of long shadows in yawning bays. Finding ourselves shuffling through the misty dark of ventilation ducts—our sweat-slicked bodies writhing together, slow and sinuous, attuned to every quickening breath and fluttering eye and feathery stroke of fingers on flesh. Our prison of fire and steel forgotten if only for a fleeting, blissful dance.

For a moment I think I sense something else in the air. Whispers of her perfume. Traces of the musky sweetness that plumed up and engulfed us when we made love, and lingered in the static air while we smoked and pillow-talked. But I know none of it’s real. That it’s just my thoughts of her working the magic they do.

I step out and into the inviting dark of the hangar. The doors hiss shut behind me.

***

Slowly my eyes adjust to the mix of shadow and low, pumping crimson lights. With each swell, they reveal a freshly disturbed swarm of dust motes spiraling in the air. And I know they’re here.

“Didn’t think you’d show, punk.”

His voice booms in the empty space. The cavernous hangar makes even his buzzsaw whine sound big, the walls repeating his tough guy words like a playground taunt.

I turn my head to find his signature silhouette standing by the launch bay. His narrow head rises from the sinister V of his collar, hair shooting up like twisting flames, held with enough grease to keep a gunship squeak-free. His hands are tucked almost gingerly in his pockets, legs clad in too-tight jeans, springing from the bulk of his leather jacket like stalks and dead-ending at a pair of thick-soled, steel-toed boots.

He’s not alone, of course. His HelioCats are clustered behind him, trying hard to carry themselves with the same air of bad. But they aren’t worth a damn, and they know it. Especially the ones whose cuts still haven’t healed from the last time they got up the nerve to take me on.

I turn away, press my palms tight against my head, slick back my hair, and pop my collar. I take the pack of smokes from my pocket, take my time packing them tight against my palm. I pop one between my lips so it hangs just right, and draw the match from behind my ear. It’s almost a shame I have to strike it with how hard they are to come by on this boat. But a smoke lit any other way just ain’t a smoke. I brush my thumbnail over its white on slate head, savor the sweet stink of sulfur and spent fire logs as it flares up in sickly yellow and green. I suck the flame into the tip and take a big drag, big as my lungs allow.

I drop the match, watch it fall like a tiny, guttering star. It drifts subtly to the right, anti-spinward, as if pushed by the slightest hint of a breeze—a neat little trick Doria taught me in case I ever lost my bearings in the station’s many darkened mazes of conduits and corridors.

The spent match lands next to my boot, fades, flares and winks out. A thin coil of sulfur-white ribbon rises. I pivot on my heels, square off with him. I look up. Exhale.

“Sure you did,” I say.

I walk towards them. Already I can see them shift and jitter, darting glances at one another. A few push their chests out and tip their heads back to thicken their necks. One slips his hands into his pockets, likely fumbling for whatever sorry blade he’s managed to scavenge. But we both know in his pocket is where it’s gonna stay.

I almost feel bad for them. They couldn’t pull off tough no matter how hard they might try. Even if they weren’t wearing matching jackets.

I make sure to brush shoulders with Shade as I walk past him and through his goons. They part like I’m royalty. And I strut down the hangar to where the ladies are waiting.

***

The Aethons have seen their share of action. Their hulls are a patchwork of scraps joined in crude seams. There isn’t a stretch of skin on them that isn’t pocked, gouged or scorched, that doesn’t tell a story of enemy fire, blown engines, botched landings and retiring hits.

They ain’t pretty. But I can’t help but fall in love. There’s something sexy in their roughness. A desperation in their ugliness.

“Take your pick,” says Shade.

I shake my head. If the bum knew the first thing about ships he’d know it isn’t my pick at all. That it’s always the ship that picks its pilot.

I shift my gaze between the two, waiting for one to speak to me, tell me she’s mine. But they don’t want anything to do with me, and I can’t say I blame them. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just like all the other guys. Just another brutish, love-struck Rhodie, hell-bent on proving his worth. To these battle-hardened babes, I’m not worthy of their past. Being resurrected only to die a final death in a sun-run is as disgraceful a fate as these chariots of the ether could fathom.

I step to the ship at my right. I run my fingers along a crudely welded seam, blistered and bleeding ragged from the ships back to its belly.

“She’ll do,” I say without turning around.

I hear Shade’s heavy boots clacking towards me. Then the mutter of his boys falling in step behind him. I turn to face him.

“They’re stripped down to the bones,” he says. “No navs, no comms, no maneuvering ... and no stopping. They do one thing, and one thing only.”

He steps forward bringing his face to within inches of mine. His lips draw thin over his teeth.

“Go forward,” he sneers. “Really fast.”

I nod, blow smoke out the side of my mouth.

“Really fast works,” I say. “And the ejectors?”

He contorts his face in a mocking pout.

“Oh, boys, tough guy wants to know about the ejectors,” he whimpers.

His boys laugh, coo and make like they’re crying. The one with the blackened eyes and the heap of bandages over the bridge of his nose calls me a sissy to his jiggering friend. I shoot him a look to let him know I know it was him that said it. His sudden silence and sunken face tell me it registers in his fat, empty head.

Shade smiles wide, raises his eyebrows high on his forehead.

“All you have to do is yank the black and yellow handle. Ship spits you out. Suit takes you home.”

I take another drag. I look down the long, deep dark of the hangar, past the dozens of defunct machines and decaying ships skulking at the fringes of the launch bay under dust-covered tarps like mammoth ghosts. From the shadows at the far end, twin red lights recessed in the massive blast doors softly burn, a pair of smoldering irises glaring from the orbits of a giant skull. Their glow barely illuminates the vertical seam between.

“You sure you want to do this,” I ask, knowing the answer.

He leans in closer, hissing his words from between his teeth.

“Want?” he says. “Want has nothing to do with it. This ... is what we do.”

I suck the last bit of life from my smoke and drop it at our feet. I grind it out with the ball of my boot.

“Right,” I say, “The whole ... code thing.”

His eyes go wide. His nostrils flare.

“That’s right.” He raises a finger to my face. “And you will honor it, you hear. You punch out so much as a nanosecond before me, you putt-putt on back here, and you walk away. You walk away and don’t look back. You got—”

“Yeah, guy, I got you,” I say.

I shift my face out of his finger’s line of fire.

“You should watch where you point that.”

***

The suits are as old and used-up as everything else down here, their fabric scuffed, mottled and creased like a pair of kicks you can’t bare to part with. The rubber seals are riddled with dry rot. And the outer glass of the visors are spider-webbed with more cracks than any sane person would be comfortable with. But they’ll do.

I turn to him.

“You know, guy ...” I start.

“What?” he says, anger flickering in his eyes.

“Say I do punch out first. And you win, and I walk away and don’t look back. You’ll get what you want, all right. But will she?”

He sneers at me.

“There you go again with that word—want.”

“Ah, that’s right,” I say. “Want has nothing to do with it.”

He steps closer.

“Like I said, this is what we do. She has no more choice in the matter than me.”

What we do, I muse. The Helio Code. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so damn tragic. But in a way, I understand. If this is all they have—if their whole world doesn’t extend beyond a few square miles of stark rooms and cold corridors—eventually they’re gonna’ need something to believe in. Something that provides a sense of purpose. Doesn’t matter how primitive and thuggish and absurd it is. If it means something to them, that’s all that matters.

“Don’t worry,” he says, feigning concern. “She loved me before you showed up. She can learn to love me again.”

“Love?” I say. “Is that what that was?”

I hold his stare as his eyes flare, his face flushes, and a fat vein bulges in his forehead. I imagine Doria staring at that same face those times she didn’t play her part as a tamed piece of arm candy—didn’t laugh when she should have, sighed at his big fat talk, gave him lip in front of his goons. Those times he pinned her down and blackened her eyes. The time he drove his thumbs into her throat and swore he’d kill her and the bastard in her belly if she didn’t take care of it herself.

I shake the thought from my head, force the blood from my face, swallow the acid on my tongue.

I look again at the twin lights at the far end of the hangar. They seem to call to me. Taunt me.

I look back at him, square into his face, half expecting my words to melt it off.

“Let’s do this.”

***

It’s a chore getting into the suits. The years have made them stiff and unyielding. The inside reeks with the pungent sting of mold and mildew, of hundred-year-old pit sweat and rank breath, stubbornly waiting around for a pair of nostrils to offend. My hot breath turns the dust motes swirling within the helmet into a dirty mist that cakes on the inside of the visor. The hardened kinks and crinkles at the suit’s joints pinch at the soft flesh in the creases of my arm and nip at the skin behind my knees.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Shade punching a finger into the control unit on his wrist. There’s a faint hum as the suit comes to life. The power source at the chest glows a dull red, swells to orange, then to a vibrant white. Light erupts from the core in a shimmering starburst, spilling into rivers that bleed across the torso, coil around the extremities and shoot into the hands and feet. A series of lights lining the mouth of his helmet wink on as the internal dehumidifiers and wipers clear the mist of soiled breath from the glass.

He gives me a smile. The vocal amplifiers color his voice tinny and distant.

“You might wanna’ give yours a go too. Wouldn’t wanna’ first find out it’s a dud in vacuum.”

He punches a few keys on the opposite wrist. There’s a series of hisses as each propulsion jet spits out a burst of air, causing the suit to shudder around him.

My suit fires up with a few pops and flutters, and the faint smell of burning plastic. But it lights up and gives me a steady hum to let me know there’s life in it yet. I check the jets. They fire and hiss and jerk me every which way, nearly knocking me off balance.

Two fail. Two that are gonna’ make turning a total pain. I look up at Shade and see that he realizes the problem. He quickly looks away.

“You wouldn’t stoop so low to tamper with my suit,” I say. “Would you, guy?”

He turns back to me, glowering.

“As if I need to play dirty to beat you, punk,” he grunts. “We can try to find you another suit,” his lips draw thin, “if you’re scared.”

I smile back at him.

“This’ll do just fine.”

***

My girl’s as busted on the inside as she is on the outside. There isn’t an inch of metal that isn’t marred by rust, tarnish or patina. The screens and gauges are coated in a rime of dust, bristling like mold on rotten fruit. Corroded tangles of multi-color wiring peek through missing panels like stretches of rainbow through scattered clouds. The soot-black rubber coating on the control column nearly crumbles away completely in my grasp.

I glance over at Shade climbing into his ship. He sinks into his seat. And turns to meet my gaze.

He shoots me a smirk and raises a fist to his goons. They take his cue, and shuffle over and into the hangar’s control room. The tallest of the bunch, the one they call Stretch, starts punching away at the panel.

Suddenly the long black of the launch bay is illuminated by concentric squares of light that blink into existence one after the next, beginning just behind where our two ships sit and ending at the bay doors. There is a series of deep, metallic thunks. A resounding bang. And a low, underwater groan as the massive bay doors, eyes blinking, slide open.

The vacuum shield that remains in the wake of the great doors is all but invisible against the black of space. The only indication it’s there at all is the subtle tint of green it imparts on the distant stars and the emerald veins that bridge the void in erratic, crackling arcs. It’s less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick, and the only thing that’s keeping us and everything else in this hangar from tumbling out into space.

I keep my eye on the widening gap as the bay doors grind into the slots in their walls. Outside the stars appear to be falling, synchronized in quiet descent like snowflakes at midnight. It isn’t long before the edge of the vast heat shield that keeps Rhodes I alive comes into view, its long, slow curve of impenetrable black rimmed crimson in Proxima Centauri’s irresistible gaze.

I can always tell when she’s about to flare. The thin vertical horizon of fire deepens, scarlet to cherry, cherry to burgundy, burgundy to wine-dark. It’s as if she’s going cold. But it’s just the huff and puff of a big, bad cosmic wolf. A breath of calm before the heat shield’s edge comes to life in a tell-tale shimmer, and she blows.

It levels me every time, each as intense and mesmerizing as the first, when Doria led me through a bewildering tangle of corridors to an abandoned traffic control station. She wouldn’t tell me why. She just hushed me with a finger on my lips and said, “Just wait.” And we watched through a blister of glass as the shield’s edge ignited. Watched silently as great sheets of translucent mist wickered and swirled in a cylindrical patchwork wall of formless amber and jade, topaz and golden sapphire. Witnessed her glory unfurl in incorporeal banners rippling along the invisible palisade of magnetic field lines that stands between tenuous life and the terrible energies without.

Now the rim of fire thins, diminishes to a blood red razor’s edge. There isn’t much time.

I look back to Shade.

We hold each other’s stare a long time, our faces mirror images of ice-cold resolve. After a time he narrows his eyes, runs his tongue over his lips.

“You ready?” he mouths.

I nod.

Still holding my gaze, he raises his fist, and opens his hand.

We both turn to the control room to see Stretch pull a pack of smokes from his inside jacket pocket and pop one in his mouth. He fumbles in his side pocket, and pulls out a silvery-smooth, rectangular box.

He holds it up between his first two fingers and thumb, as if showing it off. With a flick of his fingers and a twist of his wrist, the top springs open on its hinge, revealing a soot-caked perforated cage and bone-colored wick. There’s a bright spark as he grinds the rough wheel into the flint. And the wick is engulfed in a silken flame.

He lights his smoke. And it’s our turn to take a cue.

I punch in the power up sequence and the old gal shows her first signs of life in half a century. Her gauges and displays slowly well up from the depths of dormancy, their muted lights pulsing and flitting beneath a coat of dust and grime.

I punch another panel and the canopy slides into place. I wipe away the dust from the inside glass to see that Shade has done the same.

Again we look to our lanky master of ceremonies.

Stretch takes a drag. He holds it for a moment, glancing between me and Shade to make sure we’re both watching him. He tips his head back, curls his lips, and breathes a hoop of milky smoke into the air, where it hovers like a drunken halo.

Again, we take our cue.

I let the possibility of being consumed in a ball of fire wash over me a moment. And light her up.

She lets loose with a noise that starts at a grumble and revs up to a piercing whine. There’s a sound like waves crashing on rocks, an explosion of light from behind me, and the deafening roar of white noise.

An instant later, I sense the light and hear the howl of Shade’s engines firing up alongside mine.

I take a moment to look out to the fading edge of the heat shield.

Ten seconds. That’s all the time it’ll take to reach it. And I’ll have even less time to eject. Wait too long and the thrusters on my suit won’t be able to overcome my momentum, not at the speed I’ll be going. Wait too long and I’ll sail past the cusp of the shield and into Proxima’s scorching reveal. I’ll flare up like the head on a match and be scattered across the galaxy in a billion imperceptible pieces of ash.

But bail out too soon and I lose the one girl I ever loved and who ever loved me. To me, that’s a fate infinitely worse.

I flex my hand on the throttle and look back in time to see Stretch take his last drag. He exhales slowly through his mouth, sucking some of the escaping smoke back through his nose. He raises the simmering butt in front of him. His eyes shift from Shade to me. Then back to Shade. And back to me. He smiles.

And lets it drop.

***

I wait a few seconds to open my eyes. When I do, it’s as if the launch bay’s been overtaken by a swarm of angry fireflies.

All around, flaming debris whips through the air. Scraps of paper and gossamer sheets of dust twist and turn, corkscrew and tumble. The heavy tarps ripple and billow as if the hulking crafts and machines beneath them have awakened from their long slumber.

It takes another few seconds for the debris to burn out. And still another few for the roiling smoke to dissipate enough for me to see out into the space beyond the open bay doors.

I peer into the distance, barely make out the dwindling glow of Shade’s ship mere seconds away from his crossing the threshold of the heat shield, right about the time he’s realized our race isn’t a race at all. And that his ejector’s been tampered with.

There’s a flash of pale blue as he passes beyond the safe shadow of the shield, through the dancing magnetic aurora, and into the unfettered, flaring heat of the red dwarf.

Then nothing.

***

She’s rigged to fire up and stay lit. So I pop the panels below the main console and put my know-how to work. Her displays flicker and wink out, her thrusters sputter as their flames go cold, her engine dies in a descending whistle peppered with ticks and clangs.

I open the canopy manually and hoist myself from the cockpit and onto the scorched floor, still burning hot in Shade’s wake.

I take a moment with the ship, stroking her scarred hull.

“Sorry about the tease,” I say.

I turn back to find Shade’s crew standing just outside the control room. Their eyes are wide, their jaws hanging near to the floor. Two of their chests are pumping with quick, panicked breaths. Another’s cheeks are streaked with slicks of tears. They all shoot looks at one another, as if expecting one of them to step up and take the lead, give the order to pounce. Or run.

I lumber towards them, wrangling out of the suit, and shedding it completely a few feet in front of them. I take another step forward and they all lurch back at once, as if linked by a common sense of self-preservation.

I take my time lighting up a smoke, shifting my gaze from one goon to the next. Some of them look like they have something to say, stuttering out fragments of words they can’t seem to fully form. I give them a moment to collect their thoughts and take a few big, deep drags while I’m at it. But they take too long. And I’ve got places to be.

I lock eyes with the only one who’s holding his ground, the one they’re all looking up at, silently anointing their new leader.

“We understand each other, Stretch?” I say.

He stares at me a while. He tries to stay tough, puffing up his chest, tipping his head back and jutting out his lower lip. But he knows that won’t get him anywhere.

Finally, he nods.

I toss my cigarette on the floor, grind it out with the ball of my boot. I release the smoke in my lungs into his face.

“Good,” I say.

I slip my hands into my pockets, pivot on my heels, and make for the lift. I’m halfway there when Stretch finds his nerve.

“You got no honor!” he shouts.

I don’t bother turning around.

“You hear me? You got no honor! And around here you got no honor, you got nothing!”

I just keep walking.

“There ain’t no way she’s gonna’ want you now!”

***

I watch the dust erupt from my steps in little, roiling plumes. It makes me think of rain clouds. Of the ocean just before dawn. Of the entrancing, iridescent blue-grey of Doria’s eyes.

I know that when she wakes, I’ll have to look into those almond-shaped beauties and explain myself. Explain why her lower lip is twice its normal size. Why her old boyfriend is now ashes scattering into the big empty. And why she’s drifting through space in a ramshackle ship with no course plotted and no clear destination to speak of.

I know it might be a long time before she understands there was no other way this could go. That there could never have been a place for us here. That had I left Shade alive he’d have spent the rest of his days scouring the galaxy for her. Because I’d have done the same.

I know it will be an even longer time before she can forgive me. But what else do we have besides time? And with a ship and a thousand stars to steer by, what more can we ask for?

The lift doors hiss open. I step inside and pause as my thoughts drift to my old man. I picture him crawling out of his whiskey coma, fumbling for a fresh bottle on the nightstand to drown out the thrumming pain in his head, and finding instead my note and a fat wad of cash. I imagine him reading it through sad but understanding eyes. I even pretend he uses the money to buy a seat on the next outbound ship to a half-decent world. But I know he'll just tear up and scatter my words in a blind, drunken rage and blow the cash on cheap booze and bad bets before the pieces can fall to the floor.

I punch the keys for a hangar half a mile farther down the spine. The same hangar where I used to spend my nights restoring the discarded Phaeton Gunship, left by chance, it seemed, just for me. Where she would come to get away, to cry and scream and belt out sweet songs about broken heroes and reckless love. Where we’d first met, and kissed, and made love, and dreamed.

The doors hiss shut. The lift lurches, grinds in protest, and shivers nearly to a halt. But she quickly breaks free of the rust and rot and ascends, carrying me to where my girl, and her chariot, await. 

Jeff Samson brews Irish stout when he’s not writing science fiction and often drinks it when he is. His previous work has appeared in Nature Magazine, Lore, Daily Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction and Brain Harvest, and is forthcoming in Jabberwocky. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and baby girl, and no cats.