Free Beacon 23: Part Two: Pet Rocks by Hugh Howey Page A

missed a prime opportunity to record just what happens when a ship collides with a meteor field in hyperspace. I might’ve saved five thousand lives, but the way my bosses are talking, it was too cheap an exchange for what might’ve been learned.
    Funny, I thought I was getting away from such hard calculations when I left the army. I suppose half a klick won on some alien rock has a price about the same as a paragraph gained in the storehouse of human knowledge. Everyone’s gonna die anyway, right? Well, someone should explain to these clowns that borders aren’t forever either, and neither are their theories. It all goes. They can damn me all they like for choosing to save lives. Guess we each have our own stupid priorities.
    •••
    I sit with my back to the restored GWB to calm these thoughts. Whatever the dome does to the local gravity field to warn ships of danger, it does something just as useful to my head. I worry less when I’m up here. It’s like two fingers of whiskey that keeps tumbling through my veins, never stopping, never subsiding, never becoming too much.
    Outside the porthole in front of me, a massive field of debris catches the starlight. The only NASA scanner that remembers what happened is my imperfect and bewildered brain, and it replays the impact in a loop. I see a flash of light, asteroids as big as moons bursting into clouds of bright powder, cargo that survived the impact scattering, the rear half of the massive ship popping out of hyperspace and exploding into countless pieces, and a vortex of bouncing mass and momentum and splintering steel and rock.
    I described it all to the labcoats as best I could. I nodded at the animations they came up with. I watched them lumber around my beacon, going through all the panels and crannies, sniffing out the sabotaging little vermin that tormented me with their squeaks and clicks, everyone lecturing me on the new quarantine protocols. As shrapnel and rocks clinked and clanged off the beacon like hailstones, and men smarter than me frowned at whatever they were calculating in their noggins, I wondered if they’d send me home like the army had. But they packed up and went zipping back to Houston, leaving me in this funk.
    The debris has kept on striking the beacon since they left, though the patter is becoming more sparse. Ignoring the labcoats’ reassurances, I’ve taken to sleeping in the lifeboat, just in case. I retrieved the walk suit from the airlock—the thing smelling of a decade of sweat and storage—and I wear it all the time now. I sleep with my helmet right in front of me. The first two nights, I slept with the helmet on, the visor closed, my exhalations fogging my vision.
    The sight of myself in the mirrored visor isn’t pretty, I have to admit. I look like a dead man. Gaunt. Unshaven. Older than my thirty-five years. But I keep the image of myself close at hand, my helmet within reach, just like in my army days. I long ago learned to embrace the illusion that a thin veneer over my skull might save me. No rock to hide under, so this will have to do.
    In the middle of the night last night, a whizzing hunk-of-something punched a neat hole in the upper solar array, waking me up and sending me scrambling for a damage assessment. An awful clatter followed as a small storm of debris peppered the hull—but the beacon never lost integrity. I’ve been keeping an eye on the atmo gauges ever since. The alarms should sound if something goes amiss, but I keep wondering what happens if the alarms are the first things damaged? Or if I’d even hear the alarms in the lifeboat at night. This is like living in the trenches again, just a different kind of bombardment. But there’s that nervous, anxious energy every second, that knowledge that your life could end before you have enough time to call out for your momma. Just a whistle, and then a cloud of red. Or in this case, a sharp bang, a hiss of vacuum equalizing, and then a cold, asphyxiating