There are so many things I should say
that I should have said
but it all comes down to one
Tablet in hand again, his fingers shake as he taps out the words.
Next time I see you, you’re mine.
You’remineyou’remineyou’remine
He closes his eyes against the blur. Doesn’t even know if it’s all gibberish.
He sends it anyway.
Then he collapses on the bed, thinking of her.
Lana.
He’s still tripping, hard, the Zag coming on in a black wave, leveling everything in its path. He’s got his cock in his hand, hard… then soft. He jerks himself off, tries, but he’s still too high to get there. He can never get to her anyway. She’s too far away.
It’s always like this.
Until he gets the knife…
He digs under his mattress for it, and when he finds it, when he drags the blade across the flesh of his upper, inner arm, that soft, tender flesh where it hurts the most, he can feel her again. He can smell her vanilla scent. He can practically taste her skin. She’s here with him, so vivid… and he comes harder than he has in weeks, his skull splitting down the middle.
Then he’s sucked back down, into the undertow of black.
When he wakes again, the tablet is vibrating next to him. A message has come in.
He sits up and grabs for the tablet, fumbling, swiping the screen to wake it from standby. But it’s the same message he always gets when he coms Lana.
Pain, jagged and fresh, claws its way up inside his chest as he reads the familiar words, as he struggles to find his breath.
Message undeliverable.
He collapses on the bed, clenching his teeth in a silent scream.
Every day.
Every day, he’s sent her a com. Every single fucking day since she left. One hundred and twenty-six days. Sometimes twice a day, sometimes ten fucking times. And every day, the same result.
Message undeliverable.
He hurls the tablet across the room. It hits the wall. He doesn’t look to see if it’s broken. He doesn’t give one fuck.
She’s gone.
Lana’s fucking gone, and she’s never coming back.
An alarm is sounding, shrill and all-pervading. It’s in Catch’s skull, behind his eyes, in the marrow of his bones, ringing.
He pulls the pillow over his head and ignores it.
Then the voices start. Moments later, or hours. He doesn’t know which. But he knows those voices.
He rolls over, pushing away the pillow, his body aching. His lips sting, dry and cracked. His arm itches where he cut it last night.
He’s naked and there are men in his cube.
He looks up at them with one cracked eye, the light overhead stabbing deep into the back of his brain.
It’s Hilt and… First?
“Turn off the goddamn light…” His voice is so dry, so weak, he doesn’t know if they hear him. They’re still talking, making too much noise. Their voices come in and out as Catch blinks his disorientation away, squinting, wincing into the light.
“… like I told you,” Hilt is saying. They both have their hands on their hips as they look down at Catch like a couple of disapproving grannies.
“How long has it been…?”
“… got written up last week…”
“First?” Catch croaks, blinking at his best friend. He struggles to sit up.
But First isn’t here.
This is Station Seven. Catch and Hilt are on Station Seven. First is out in the deep, all three of them reassigned this quarter.
First can’t be here.
Which means…
“Fuck… I’m so fucked up…”
The First hallucination gets in his face. “Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?” Then Catch’s arms are seized by a pair of giant hands and yanked upward, and his body follows, wobbly and weak, as the First-who-is-not-First drags him from his bed and across the room.
Hilt stands back, hands still on his hips, his service cap pulled low over his eyes, watching. And suddenly Catch’s cube comes into focus around them. He perceives it, and himself, the way anyone else would—with distaste.
The disarray. The broken tablet on the floor. The stale must of sex and sweat and unwashed clothes.
The thin cuts on his arm, dried with scabby blood.
He’s hauled into the tiny bathroom and tossed into an ice-cold shower. He doesn’t have the strength or the will—or the gross motor skills—to put up much of a protest. The officer standing over him slaps his face, hard. “Get your shit the fuck together, Trist.”
Trist.
Only one person ever calls him that.
“Nuh… no… it can’t be you…” Catch’s tongue feels too big, his mouth too dry as he struggles to make words, to swallow.
“It can, and it is. Flew in this morning, along with half the fucking fleet. Did you not hear that siren? It’s not a drill. Every operable Crasher on Six and Seven is being mobilized. Seven’s taking on a shitload of personnel from ships in the area that are being called in. Civilians, too. Cruisers, research ships, whatever the hell is out there, it’s coming in.”
“Civilians aren’t allowed on Seven,” Catch says stupidly, struggling to keep up.
First just tosses him a towel with a snort of disgust and strides out of the bathroom.
Catch follows as fast as he can, dripping wet, blinking, trying to see straight as he wraps the towel around his hips. “The Crashers? They’re sending out all the Starcrashers?” Catch swipes a fistful of his dirty clothes from Hilt’s hand and starts getting dressed, vaguely registering that Hilt’s been trying to tidy his cube. “Are you going? If you’re going, I’m going.”
First and Hilt exchange a look Catch can’t even begin to comprehend in his current state. His thoughts are too slow, his edges dulled, his vision still fuzzy around the edges.
“No one’s been cleared to fly since eleven hundred,” Hilt informs him. “Special Forces only. Rangers will be deployed soon.”
Rangers.
That hits a raw, festering nerve. Catch was once a Ranger. Still is, technically, just not on active duty.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t call him up.
He picks up his tablet, but it’s dead, the screen badly cracked. He looks at the clock on his wall; almost fifteen hundred.
He slept all
