Chapter Fourteen

Aaron

Aaron is still replaying what happened outside the shuttle in his mind while Vaun relays what happened to Sy down at base. He keeps picturing the numerous creepy pointed insect legs wriggling their way out through the holes in the netting. He remembers seeing the glossy camera eyes on the things strange small buggy face, looking at him, seeking its target, and trying to shoot him. When some minor buffeting turbulence on the shuttle catches his attention, he looks out the window.

He was expecting them to be coming down a little flatter, and for there to be some fire or something out there, but there isn’t any. After another ten minutes goes by, he starts to wonder what’s going on. He was expecting things to get a lot more intense by now.

“Hey, how come we’re still in the upper atmosphere? Shouldn’t we be, like, burning up or something by now?”

Vaun actually turns around in his seat to look back at him with a scowl. “No, we don’t very much like burning up, if we can help it. Can you see Becky’s screen at all, the one behind Vaun’s seat?”

He cranes his neck around the side of her to try seeing what he’s talking about. “Yeah, I see it. Is something following us? What is that?”

“We’re towing a… well, it’s kind of like a blimp I guess. It’s a really big, long, stretched out blimp, more-or-less. Basically, it lowers our perceived density, letting us drop most of our speed in the upper atmosphere instead of hitting it so hard in the lower. It keeps things nice’n soft’n cool.”

“Huh, that’s a neat trick. What if it pops?”

Becky grumpily turns around in her seat too. “Well let’s hope it doesn’t pop Aaron! Then things would get hot. Is that what you were hoping for?”

“No.” He knows they just don’t want him to jinx it.

Like he was expecting, even with the blimp behind them, things start to get a little more rocky as they drop into the thicker air. Rather than being crammed into their seats this time, they’re all finding it rather nice to have such large harnesses holding them back. Mikel has drool from his dip all over the front lens of his helmet and it is blocking wherever he tries to look. Becky is regretting looking at it, and is getting nauseous.

When things get a whole lot more bouncy, Don warns them all that they’re about to touch down. “Hold on to your butts, and keep your tongues behind your teeth back there!”

Since they don’t even have wheeled landing gear, it makes for a sharp bump when their skids land on the dry lakebed. Considering how fast they’re still going, it really isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. At least they didn’t bounce off the ground. That’s the thing he hates the most on a flight, if it happens. Despite having a rough go of it all, Mikel is still pretty impressed by how well everything went. He must’ve really been expecting to die or something.

From what he can see outside, it still looks like they’ve landed on a foreign planet. Feeling the excitement of it, he pretends they actually have. He realizes how awesome things might really get for him down the road, as long as he keeps going in the right direction. When Don finally opens the rear door, they all meander outside to give the shuttle a good look over. A few hundred feet behind them, the enormous red blimp they were dragging bobbles in the dusty breeze.

Off to his left, Vaun, Becky, and Don are all walking out towards what looks like the hole-flag from a golf course green. By the time he and Mikel catch up to them, they’ve picked up a couple folding chairs from out of the dust and are patting them off. Vaun high fives Don and then forks over what looks like a few bills. When he looks around himself, he notices there are numerous sets of tracks in the ground where they’ve been coming in on past missions. The three of them bring their chairs and the flag back to the shuttle and set them down on the shady side of it. They even brought sun glasses, and put them on when they sit down. He and Mikel look like a couple of noobs, standing there in the bright sunlight without chairs or glasses of their own. It’s probably another one of those space veteran things they lord over first-timers.

After a few more uneventful hours of standing there waiting, a long trail of dust starts appearing from far off on the horizon. The transport truck is coming for them. When the truck finally reaches them, it is nearly unrecognizable. He thought it might be a different truck altogether, with a winter camo paintjob or something, but it’s simply covered in white dust.

The driver pulls out ahead of the shuttle and stops in line with it so he can load it up. When he gets out of the cab to greet them, he tows a small red cooler on wheels along with him. He seemingly ignores both him and Mikel, as he parks the cooler next to the other three. The man pops the lid up and grabs a beer out of it for himself. It’s not his first either. There’s a good four cans already crushed up sitting on top of the others.

“Good to see you fine folks. Heard the run didn’t turn out to be a tourist trip after all.”

Vaun cracks his can open and replies without looking up. “No, it was not.” His voice is slow and deliberate. Something is on his mind. “It appears that we’re at a turning point, in a sense. Things are going to get a lot less civilized here, and real quick.”

The driver laughs. “You mean less civilized than the wild west, where you guys are the cowboys, and get to walk all over everyone.”

“Yeah, pretty much. If they want to start using drones and shit up there, it’s gonna be hell from here on out. It changes things. We can’t be risking our bacon up there if these creepy robot things start crawling around all over everything up there.”

When Mikel gives him a specific look, he figures he might as well answer the call. It still feels like he’s tooting his own horn though. “Sure, but you guys won’t have to put your actual lives on the line for shit like this if you send me up. I can learn to fly. I’m no grunt. That was the idea right? Besides. I already kicked the shit outta one of those things on my first go.”

Vaun looks at Don and Becky, and tosses them a couple cans from out of the cooler. A worried look crosses his face. “Shit. I bet Smekov got a good look of you while you were punching that thing’s ticket twenty times over. I knew we shoulda had you wear a damn suit.”

Don lifts an eyebrow at him, absolutely pleased with himself. “Hehe, they’re probably freakin out about right now.” He holds his hand out and pretends it’s a plane making a hard dive. “Mreeowwww. Smekov stocks be divin tonight!”

Mikel, of course, has to say it. “And the world learns why they don’t buy Russian garbage yet again.”

Before Vaun has a chance to snap at Mikel for not cutting the damn rope fast enough, he interrupts. “Eh, that thing wasn’t exactly garbage. They really stepped up their game this time. Probably would’ve piddled in my suit if I still had a bladder. We were lucky as hell it got all hung up in our net before it had a chance to use that cannon it had on us. I know my ass aint cheap, but all I’m sayin, is the best way to beat a robot, is with a robot that can think like a person.”

Vaun smiles and grabs a beer for him. When Vaun fake tosses it to him, he instinctively reacts to catch it, looking like a nerd. “Ha Ha. Come on Aaron, you can’t have beer!” Everyone laughs.

He doesn’t think it was that funny. He could drink it if he wanted, and he actually does feel pretty dang thirsty right now. The last time he drank beer when he overheated after killing a bunch of rioters. He had to get something on his heat exchanger, or he would’ve cooked. It was the only thing there, and it was cold. Valerie sure got mad at him later. He can hear her in the back of his mind now. “You’re gonna get your heat exchanger sticky.”

With a little bit of attitude, he goes over to the cooler himself and digs in it for a water. He can feel how rubbery his eyes and mouth are when they’re this dry.

While he and Mikel stand back and watch, the driver methodically winches the shuttle up onto the back ramps of the truck. It makes sense now why the skids on the bottom of the shuttle were curved around the back end a little. At about the same time the others finish off all the beer, the driver has the shuttle loaded, and even the blimp all wound back into its canister. As if the others should know better, he bangs on the side of the truck as he gets in. “I didn’t bring ya samiches for a picnic too fellas, lets go!”

The others toss the three chairs back down on the ground where Vaun is staking the flag back into the ground. Becky reads out the coordinates to Don for the next time. As she walks around to the other side of the truck, she calls back to him “Get the cooler Aaron. Hey, and I got shotgun!”

As they all load up, the driver crawls into the small bunk behind the rear bench seat and stuffs a pillow under his head. He’s been pushing hard since the moment they launched and isn’t going to be the one driving them back. Again, Becky volunteers him to drive. “Aaron did such a good job, I definitely think he should drive again. Hell, he don’t even look tired.”

As annoying as it is, he already knew this would be coming. He can only hope that they’re only razzing him for now, and don’t actually think of him as a piece of equipment. He’ll play along for his first mission, but they should all know by now that he doesn’t take shit like this more than once. It won’t be long before they’ll all looking up to him for everything.

It’s a damn long drive back to SSS. If he had known there was going to be five hundred miles of shitty road between landing and home base, he might’ve considered leaping to his death off the ship when he had the chance. While he not so patiently drives, everyone else conks right out, leaving nothing but his own wretched busy thoughts to keep him company. He wonders what Valerie and Sy have been talking about while he’s been gone.

While in a sour mood, he feels like telling her what a shitty friend she’s been for giving up on him like she did. As the drive starts to wear him down in the dark hours of the night, he does start to calm down some. He knows he did his own part in running her off. It wouldn’t matter if he apologized now. The damage is clearly already done. She’ll never be able to take back what she said, and he’ll never be able to take back what he’s done either. He was head over heels for her, but she isn’t the same man anymore, and she isn’t the same woman either.

Trying to keep himself from staying worked up for so long, he tries a bit harder to take his mind off of her. Dwelling on it is only bound to make things worse. In a nice change of thought, Arma and Five pop into his mind. It would’ve been really neat if they could’ve all experienced space together. It makes him feel a little bad for Arma. He could tell that she wanted to go. Maybe now she might take things a little more seriously.

He recalls the kiss she gave him before leaving. He can almost still feel her lips on his. He wonders if Valerie, or even Five, know anything about this side of her. While everyone else may take her for some kind of stray, he knows that she’s not. She has a kind of loyalty and ability to bond which few will probably ever understand. There’s a soft, caring, and exciting side to her too. He lets out a big sigh and shakes his head. “What the hell am I gonna do with myself?” He starts to consider the reality that she’s bound to have her way with him sooner or later.

When his thoughts wander back to the space flight, he starts to grin again, despite how scary it got there for a moment. It finally sinks in that he just took down some kind of crazy robot bug thing, in space, and he didn’t even have a suit on. It makes him think of how Mikel must’ve felt. He looks back at him, passed out against his door. One little screw up and he wouldn’t have made it back home to Clarice, or ever have gotten to see his child be born.

It was always Sy’s plan for him to replace the use of guards in space, but it sounded like it was going to be a rather slow transition. He still has to train to become a shuttle pilot and all that. Now that there’s a pretty significant new threat up there, it’s going to be changing things a lot more drastically. He’s probably going to be looking at a whole lot of space work now, likely a lot more than he bargained for. He could see being stuck up there for months at a time, with no need to return between contracts. They’d save a lot of money that way.

The truck rocks a bit under the weight of the shuttle when they go over a small overpass. Vaun is the only one to wake up though. He can see the whites of his eyes when a passing street light flashes over him for a second. The truck is actually quieter inside now, without his snoring.

After Vaun stretches his arms up to the ceiling, and his feet out till they hit the bottom of his seat. He climbs up front to sit in the middle of the seat between him and Becky. He pours two cups of coffee, one for himself and the other he sets in another cup holder for whoever wakes up to the smell of it. It’s likely going to be Don.

Before he bothers starting any conversation, he turns the brightness down on the center console and peers at it up close to see where they’re at. “Hey man, I just wanted to say thanks for driving, and ya know, handling yourself up there. We really should’ve known better. If it were just me and Don, we would’ve probably had it in the headlights and the cannons already pointed at it before we ever let it approach us. It was stupid. I don’t know what we were thinking. It was small and we didn’t take it seriously. It won’t happen again.”

“Sy made it sound like things have been pretty slow these days. No one’s been keeping you on your toes?”

“Yeah, I guess. People’ve been gunning for us for so long, and then… nothing. It’s been pretty quiet for a while now.”

He didn’t want to bring it up, but he’s been replaying Sy and Valerie’s drunken conversation in his head for a while. “I overheard Sy saying the he shelled out a whole bunch of money on me. What was he talking about? You guys building me some kind of combat body or something?”

Vaun twists his mouth and holds his chin, considering how good of an idea that sounds. “Tempting, but no. It’s supposed to be a surprise, but what the heck. The kit should be arriving pretty shortly anyway. For how simple it turned out, not needing life support systems n’all, the delivery time is already weeks ahead of schedule.”

“You’re building a shuttle for me?”

“Eh, kind of. We’ve been designing this fast long-reach vessel for a while now. Honestly, it would’ve been a fucking coffin for a real person, but for you, it’ll be perfect.”

He’s surprised, but a little too apprehensive to sound excited about it. It doesn’t sound very pleasant, the way Vaun said it. “Wow. So, what’s it like? Other than being a…coffin.”

Vaun scoots back in his seat a little and then hunches over his coffee, holding it in both hands. “No, it’s not a coffin, I was just thinking of that pessimistically. I guess I’ve been doing this a while. But yeah, it’s gonna be a pretty savage little craft. It’ll have super fast airlocks, well… they’re basically just doors. Gonna be tidy as all hell, and did I say it’ll be fast. All the weight savings will allow you to bring extra engines and shit with you. I don’t know how many G’s you can take, but this thing will be able to deliver em.”

“It still has all the radiation shielding though right? I’m not immune to getting fried.”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely. It’s basically a giant block of bullet proof polyethylene, same as all the others. You’ll have a special suit too, to keep you safe, but more tactical, since it doesn’t exactly need to keep you alive, and so you can use coms too.

The radiation part is one thing he’ll have to be careful with. Unlike a person, who can heal from small amounts, all of the radiation he sees, mild or not, will be accumulative. Eventually, with enough ionizing radiation exposure, the polymers in his body would eventually degrade. It’d take a lot of exposure, but he’ll likely be seeing a lot. If it gets to his brain, he could start experiencing anything from dementia to dangerous psychosis.

Optimistically, Vaun starts laying out the big picture they’ve thought up for him. “You know, regular people will never make it past Mars. I mean, we already got to Mars, but we all know how that went, right.” There’s a moment of silence between them. “Anyway, think of what all you could do out there. We can hardly do much with our best robots out there. Signal delay and all that. Those things just don’t have minds of their own, you know, like what we need.”

“Yeah, and I don’t think AI will ever be what we wish for, not for a long time at least.” He smiles at Vaun. “You know, when I first met Five, I was so excited about her. I thought she was the real deal. I felt so embarrassed when we learned that she was a person the whole time. The things I told her about humans, and what makes us tick and all that...”

“Ha, yeah, I like her a lot though. She’s turned out to be quite something. Valerie explained that she and Arma started out as completely blank slates. That’s crazy. She said they had to relearn everything, like babies, how to lift their heads up, crawl, speak, all of it. They must be like family to her.”

“Yeah they are, but just like with any family, they can be a little contentious too.”

The more he thinks about long distance missions, the more he thinks about his place in the world, and who he cares most about. It’s not the possibility of being gone months that he’s worried about, he could lose years to such endeavors. Having the ability to reach farther into space sounds great and all, but actually doing it does not. He can hardly stand himself sometimes, let alone be able to handle solitary confinement for those serious lengths of time. He wonders if he would develop suicidal tendencies if left alone like that. The way his new mind seems to work, all it would take is a seed of the thought. If he nursed it enough, it’d become an ever growing possibility.

Since he started thinking to himself again, he hadn’t noticed that he’s been toning Vaun out until he completely stops talking. Vaun is looking at him as if he’s waiting for him to answer a question. Luckily, before it looks like he really has been ignoring him the whole time, Vaun is sidetracked by their arriving out front of the pitch black SSS home base building. Vaun didn’t even realize they had arrived until he started pulling the truck to a stop.

Strangely, he’s never been outside of the place at night. The building is completely invisible in the dark. The only thing around that’s recognizable are the dashed markings on the pavement leading to the main hanger door. For some reason, he finds himself missing the feeling of being tired. He wishes he could go right to bed like the others, and wake up to a new day. Now, it’s like his life has become one giant run-on sentence that never even pauses. There’s no difference between sun up and sun down anymore, especially underground. At least there’s always other people up and about around the clock. If he didn’t recognize who was on night or day shift, he wouldn’t even notice the weeks go by.

He opens the hanger door with the remote and backs the truck in exactly like it was parked before. Someone in the back mentions that it is three-o-clock in the morning. There’s no one there to see them in, no Sy, no Valerie, or anyone else. It’s kind of nice. Now that he’s staring down the double doors going back inside, he kind of wishes they could’ve been gone longer. Instead of sticking around with the others, he plainly walks away from the truck. He just wants to lay down somewhere quiet for a while. He did his part in driving. The least the others can do is handle the damn shuttle.

He’s been so deep in thought about everything else, the thought of Valerie doesn’t actually cross his mind until he’s already laying on his bed and the lights are out. He hates the things he imagines her doing when she’s not there with him at night. He sits up in a wretched mood, considering going and finding her, wherever the hell she is. He feels like tearing the spine right out the back of some motherfucker now. He can’t try falling asleep now, not with her missing like this.

When he looks at the dim red digits floating in the darkness across the room, only fifteen minutes have gone by since he laid down. At this rate, spending months in a tin can will surely drive him insane. Space travel is starting to look more like a living nightmare. When he sits up, he grabs the edge of the mattress as tight as his hands can. He feels like tearing the thing apart like a bad dog. That’d teach her for leaving him alone like this.

As much as he’s avoided drawing on his anger lately, it only takes a split second for it to come back in full swing. Like he’s high on PCP, he soaks in the permeating power of the feeling. He takes as deep of a breath as he can and holds it for a moment. When he stands up, he flexes his entire body till his artificial nerves warn him that it’s enough.

With the flood of rage still saturating him, the urge to grab something and smash it refuses to go away. He has grown to like it now, but it’s something he has to still learn to control. After pacing around the small apartment for a minute, he decides to just take a walk, like he used to do. One thing is for sure, he can’t sit still. He’ll end up tearing the artificial flesh right off his own bones if he does.

As much as he feels like climbing the walls like a rabid chimp, he decides he’ll take a walk on down to the training floor and let off some steam like a man is supposed to. He promises himself that he can do whatever he wants once he’s down there, but by god, he’s going to reign himself in and walk there in a civilized manner. When he grabs the door handle, he imagines launching himself over the railing and down forty feet to the floor. He wonders what it’d be like to hurt himself like that.