The supply drop, when it’d come, had been a surprise even to him. He’d been in the mess with the pilots for a time, jaw working, words coming out. Then he’d been in the machine shop where McElroy had been hunched before the lathe, slowly turning out the axle bore of a fourteen-inch wheel hub in order to make it fit the larger post of a Spad mounting. They’d chatted briefly, he and McElroy. Ted had seen him before with Vic, the chief mechanic—the two of them goofing around like kids, laughing. There’d been some kind of edge there, though. Ted had seen it. A lingering like weak magnetism, and Ted had been concerned.
“So,” he’d said. “Vic, huh?”
McElroy had nodded his head. He still had his goggles on. It was impossible to see his eyes. “She’s good. Great mechanic, ’specially with these old machines.”
“Right.” Ted had nodded. “Right… You fucking her?”
Willy had whitened. Ted had seen it in his jaw and along the back of his neck. He’d stood up from the bench.
“Just asking, son.”
McElroy’s mouth had been a bloodless line. He still had the wheel hub in his hand, and it’d looked to Ted like he might brain him with it. Throw it maybe. He was a small man, but his blood was up.
“Man to man,” Ted said.
“No.”
“No, you’re not fucking her?”
“No, I ain’t interested in your man-to-man.”
“Then just answer the question.”
“No.”
“No, you won’t answer?”
“No, I’m not… fucking her. She’s my friend. I have a wife. Back home.”
“Back home,” Ted repeated.
“Yes.”
“Far from home, boy. Just a question.”
“And I answered it.”
“Hmm.”
And that had been that. Personnel issues always bothered Ted. They were not his strong suit. But he was saved from having to pursue this particular issue any further by Eddie Lucas, a company lawyer and lord of the tight-beam relay; a man in regular, high-level contact with London and sent in to do boonie time as mission manager and corporate communications liaison. He’d found Ted in the machine shop with Willy McElroy, walking straight into the middle of their conversation at the point where it’d petered out into a lopsided staring contest.
“Commander,” Eddie had said. “A minute of your time?”
Ted had been convinced enough that Willy McElroy wasn’t lying to him (not telling the truth, necessarily, but not lying either), so had nodded and turned away. He agreed to follow Eddie back to comms at his request and, going out the door, Ted had heard McElroy finally throw that wheel hub he’d been holding—the clatter of it going into the side of a toolbox with some force was unmistakable—so he supposed he had Eddie to thank for that. Another minute and it might’ve been his head.
Outside, Eddie had hurried—trotting as though afflicted with a wicked case of the shits and a long way from comfort. Ted hadn’t bothered trying to keep up until, in the air above them, he’d heard the dull, thudding booms of frantic deceleration. Of a ship making orbital translation with no notion of sticking around. The sound was like hitting a hollow plastic bucket with a hammer, only vast and echoing and distant in a way that only those who live in the sky might understand. And when Ted looked up, he saw the comet’s tail arc of something hot and fast carving its way through the upper strata.
“Supply!” Eddie had called out from the door of the comms tent, pointing skyward, then gesturing for Ted to come inside.
“What?” Ted had yelled back. They’d gotten their last supply drop months ago, dead on the schedule detailed in the corporate ops plan, and weren’t due for a re-up for some weeks yet, at right about the time they would run out of everything altogether, which was also precisely according to plan. Forced austerity was a foundational tenet of the company, worshipped like a psalm by its distant bookkeepers. Do more with less. The alternative: Die.
Now Ted broke into a jog, one eye on the sky—looking for the black-among-blackness of the insertion containers, the floating ghosts of tear-away drag chutes—and felt something in his belly twist up like cold fingers curling into a fist. This is it, he’d thought. This is when it all goes bad.
When he reached the door, Eddie was holding it for him. “We aren’t scheduled for another supply drop, Eddie,” Ted said. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing, Commander. I thought maybe you were keeping something from me.”
And Ted had known then for sure—the true knowledge of distant powers deciding his fate from very far away. He’d shrugged because, really, there was nothing else to do. The two of them, Eddie and Ted, stood in the doorway of the comms tent looking up silently into the nothingness of the night, the gleaming fire trail of the smuggler’s ship already just a purple stain in their eyes, fading like a memory, like a scar in fast-forward. They gawped like primitives waiting on lightning, on forces beyond their reckoning. He’d been too high, Ted had decided. If Eddie was right, if this really was an unscheduled resupply coming in hot, the pilot would have to loop out over the distant ocean, come back again to make his drop. That would take some time. Ted fought down the urge to crouch, to buckle under the weight of night and the unknown and go to ground like he was under fire. He shook off the instinct to run, kept his mouth clamped shut and slapped a hand onto the back of his own neck to keep the hairs down. It’d been Eddie who’d finally broken the strange, quiet hoodoo of the moment.