Steal the Stars Read online

  “Now, obviously, obviously, there’s no reason we can’t have a little fun while we work, is there?” he asked as he set everything up.

  “Wanna quiz me?” Andy bounced back.

  Work here on the security team long enough and you learn the exact interaction setting you wanna hit when you’re on Object E detail with one of the various specialists. Some need you to not look at them. Some are blessedly low maintenance. Mostly, though, the rules you start to suss out have to do with how you interact with the scientists, not how the scientists interact with you. The other xenobiologists and xenobotanists and physicists and mathematicians just take our word for it when we say, “Treat us like furniture.” But Lloyd …

  Lloyd wanted to interact.

  Lloyd missed the lecture hall.

  Lloyd thought the people with the automatic weapons and the stone faces were actually undergrads all lobbying to be his next TA.

  He wasn’t so wrong about Andy. Andy was one of the youngest members of the security team. He’d been working with us for about five months now. He was good—ex-Marine with crazy fast reflexes and a keen desire to help however he could. When Andy had first met Moss, he had leaned all the way in to smell him. Not in a creepy way (not a purposefully creepy way, at least), but he was just so curious he needed all the information he could get. “It looks a little like the kudzu root from back home!” he’d explained. “I just wondered if it smelled the same.” I think he fancied himself a scientist in the making, were it not for the fact that he was actually kind of dumb. And I don’t mean that as a judgment; he knew he was dumb—dumbness can actually work well in a scientific setting. Gives the not-dumb people someone to effectively bounce off of.

  “All right,” Lloyd muttered, “measurements running. Let’s have a pop quiz!”

  “Yes!”

  “What is … the Harp?” Lloyd gestured at the closed door to the other chamber of the ship.

  Andy fired back like a soldier at drill. “The Harp is the power-source of Object E.”

  Lloyd made a high whining noise. “Not quiiiiiiite—”

  “No, no, no, wait!” Andy put a hand to his forehead, summoning the more proper response. “Our, our best theory is that the Harp is the power-source of Object E!”

  “There you go!” Lloyd clapped.

  The thing is, you couldn’t just flat out ignore Lloyd. We tried going full Buckingham Palace on him and it creeped him out; he couldn’t forget we were there. You had to learn to answer Lloyd’s questions once every, let’s say, seven minutes. Just often enough to reassure him that he’s the kind of stand-up guy who’s nice to janitors, but not often enough to be buddies.

  “Now,” he continued, “we know the Harp isn’t connected by any hard cable to Object E’s engines—or what we think are Object E’s engines—so what data is there in support of the idea that the Harp is Object E’s power-source?”

  “Um. Okay. In support. In support, the main thing I’d say is … it steals energy from stuff around it to power the engines.”

  “Well, all right, ‘steals’ is—obviously I would prefer value-neutral terminology, but—”

  “It draws energy from stuff around it.”

  Andy did not have the rules of interacting with Lloyd down at all. Or he didn’t care to observe them. Andy answered everything. Andy probably talked to cab drivers the whole way.

  Don’t think about driving, Dak. Don’t think about last night.

  I was not thinking about last night. I was listening to the Lloyd and Andy Show.

  “Excellent adjustment, Andy.” Lloyd sounded like he might even cry with pride. “What stuff?”

  Nothing happened last night. I’m not thinking about driving.

  “Well, like during Power-Up it drains all the electricity from the whole base for a couple minutes.”

  “And if it can draw energy out without a hard cable…”

  “Maybe it can, like, give energy, too?”

  “Precisely! Bravo, Andy!”

  I’d talked to Andy about this. Patty’d talked to him about it—at a certain point we knew we might have to have a talk among ourselves. At a certain point, Andy’s eagerness to indulge in distracting dialogue might become an actual liability. He was a good kid who just wanted to follow orders, and since, again, at Quill Marine the scientists do outrank us, it was difficult for him to not do whatever they want, but still. For the time being, though, the red flags stayed at about half staff. Just high enough to flick us in the face depending on the breeze.

  The pop quiz continued while Lloyd began to smooth out the suit on the floor.

  “And Power-Up happens how often?”

  Andy had this answer down pat; we all did. “Almost every hundred hours, but not always exactly.”

  “And why?”

  Ooo. A curveball. Andy’s mouth popped open to answer before his brain realized he had none.

  “Um … do we know?”

  “Good question! See, that’s thinking like a scientist, Andrew! No, we do not know. We have no idea! Running theory is the Harp is attempting to restore full capacity, perhaps in preparation for a takeoff, but again: no observable data to support that. Now … where else?”

  “Where else…?”

  “From where else does the Harp draw energy?”

  “Oh! Right! From people!”

  “From people how?”

  “I mean, not as long as that door’s closed, if the door’s closed it just steals—it just draws power.”

  “But if it’s open?”

  “It … draws power from people.”

  “Draws power from people h—”

  He was going to ask “how?” in his professorially prompting way, but then Lloyd’s measuring device chimed dully in the thick, sound-deadening atmosphere. It had completed its assessment. Lloyd absently leaned over to check the results and his face fell.

  “Oh.”

  And here was another reason why you shouldn’t be friendly with Lloyd: that look on his face right now.

  When I first started working here, the moss covering Moss wasn’t full and lush by any stretch, but it was noticeably denser. It covered roughly the same area of the alien’s body but the patchiness was far less apparent. Day to day it wasn’t always easy to notice the change, but over any given period of time the conclusion was undeniable: the moss was receding. Since day one, when our study of the big gray guy began. As for what that meant, there was no firm consensus, but we all had a gut instinct. Moss’s bizarre body warmth kept us from assuming (and acting like) he was dead, or fully dead if that’s a thing with his species, but the thinner and smaller the green coverage on his skin became, the more it began to feel like we were watching something slowly turning off. Decomposing. It was the only change we could register and it was not pointing in a promising direction.

  Lloyd measured the moss every day, and every day it got a tiny bit smaller. Every day it made Lloyd flinch in disappointment and fear. He knew: if the moss eventually receded too much, the folks in D.C. who own our fair establishment might give Quill an order Lloyd wouldn’t like, be it complete dissection or, worse (and far more likely given Sierra’s perpetual profit motives), licensing the rights to showcase Moss to the highest bidder and then dissection. And if it seems odd a xenobiologist would be hesitant to roll up his sleeves and really dig into the world’s first verified alien carcass, the reason was simple: Lloyd had grown too attached. Quill protocol effectively outlawed in-house love affairs, but somehow Lloyd and Moss’s love affair had eluded prohibition. And like any other affair, it was probably going to end messily. At which point my security team would have to compel the issue. Which is a lot harder to do with a “friend.”

  Don’t think about affairs—

  I shook the thought. So, apparently, did Lloyd, who turned back to Andy with a mostly sincere smile. The lesson could resume for now.

  “Draws power from people how?”

  “Um, like their life-force, right?”

  Life-force …


  We’d had our share of accidents regarding the Harp. We’d seen what it did to a person’s “life-force” when caught in its ripple. Not many, thankfully, but enough. (Hell, Lloyd’s predecessor, Dr. Beritov, had been one of our most unfortunate case studies.) I tried not to think about those, either—and now I was trying not to think of too many things at once.

  You haven’t done anything wrong. You were just in your car.

  Just be practical.

  “And what is ‘life-force,’ exactly?”

  “Oh, crap, do you mean like chemically?”

  Where’s my life-force?

  “I do.”

  You’re going through something—a phase—don’t make it worse by obsessing over it.

  “Aw, maaaaan, I know we talked about this … ummmmm—”

  “I’m sorry, Andy, I’m afraid it’s a B-plus today!”

  And whatever you do

  “Dammit! Maaaaaan, I was so close! Well I guess a B-plus is better than any real grade I ever got.”

  “Okay, then, remember this for next time: ‘Inconclusive testing’—remember that part—”

  “‘Inconclusive,’ I’m with you.”

  Don’t think about driving.

  “‘Inconclusive testing’ suggests the Harp redirects the body’s adenosine triphosphate energy production for its own use—” The clarion denoting the great Guardshift do-si-do rang out over the Hangar. Lloyd didn’t skip a beat: “—in the process massively inhibiting its ability to generate dopamine, serotonin, and key endorphins.”

  Tune in next time for the Lloyd and Andy Show.

  “Guardshift, guys,” I chuffed.

  Oh fuck what day is it?

  “Okay, hate to say, I am definitely not gonna remember all that.”

  “I suppose it is easier to say ‘life-force,’” Lloyd conceded.

  “Guys. Guardshift.”

  Oh fuck

  “Aw, man, I’m so bummed I won’t see the suit!”

  “A week into testing you’ll be sick at the sight of it,” I heard myself snap. “Now get moving.”

  “Next time, Lloyd!” He held out a fist for Lloyd to bump.

  “Next time indeed!”

  Andy squeezed his way out of the ship’s fissure. He was to move on to the front of the Hangar. One of the team from the front of the Hangar was to move into the Tent, and one of the guys from in front of the Tent was to join me here.

  Don’t panic.

  And that guy …

  “Afternoon, guys. Dr. Simon,” you said, after squeezing into the ship, already like an expert.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  In my not-thinking-of-things I’d managed to forget what day it was. The first day when our rotating schedules finally lined up. A total eclipse of awfulness. You’d had evenings and overnights so far—this would be your last shift for the day and my last one before lunch, both in the same spot. The security staff was just large enough that I was able to avoid you for a couple days, but now …

  But you didn’t really forget, did you, Dak? You don’t forget things like that. Just like you can’t forget driving to—

  You know what? You know what I suddenly realized? This was fucking bullshit.

  I’m a grown fucking woman. I have been trained in numerous disciplines. I have been fully capable and independent my entire goddamn life and here I am breaking out into a cold sweat over an idea, a notion, a possibility, a fucking impulse!

  I didn’t even know this fucking guy.

  Guardshift, indeed. Practical Dak took a break and Adamant Dak took over.

  * * *

  I STOOD and stewed. Hating you, hating this, hating everything. Worst of all, hating how the air seemed so much more breathable with you here.

  I didn’t even know if I should be looking at you. If I looked at you, would I be able to stop? Which was weirder: staring or decidedly not looking? I knew security team member Grant would be up in Bird’s Eye now. He was a meddlesome little shit who was always looking for something to complain about—he’d be scrutinizing the closed-circuit video feed of the cockpit looking for any sort of angle, no doubt. I felt even more self-conscious. I felt even more resentful.

  Lloyd was beaming. “Good guy, Andy, good guy. Laudable energy. Might make a scientist of him yet, don’t you think?” He was still fidgeting with the suit and when he looked up he looked directly at you with hungry eyes.

  “Good guy,” you agreed, nodding dispassionately, not looking back. Scanning the environment like something could pop out and surprise us at any time.

  I had to smile a little at that, despite the belligerency roiling inside me. You nailed it right off the bat: agree with Lloyd, reinforce him, give him positive emotional feedback, but don’t give him a conversational hook to grab on to.

  But, of course, Lloyd was a curious feller, being a scientist and all. He continued looking at you, his forehead drawn into furrows under his graying hair, and held out a grasping hand.

  “Remind me again…?”

  “Matt Salem.” Even the sound of your name: like a loose tooth my tongue couldn’t stop pushing.

  “Matt Salem! Thank you. I’m terrible with names the first few times. Maybe because I’ve maxed out on data?” He tapped his temple indicatively, but there was actually no sense of performance there. It was a legitimate observation to him.

  “I’m new, it’s only our second shift together.”

  “Ah! Well. Obviously, clearly, we need to get better acquainted, then! Do you like quizzes?”

  Goddammit.

  * * *

  THIS PARTICULAR quiz was, for some reason, about the door to the engine room. Specifically, why should it stay closed? You’d, of course, been briefed on protocol; you knew (at least academically) about the dangers direct exposure to the Harp posed.

  After a few leading questions, you finally looked at me. Because I spoke your language, whether I wanted to or not, I knew that exact look meant: “Am I supposed to keep answering these? Please help.”

  “You know what, Lloyd,” I jumped in, “maybe just focus on your suit. We’re wasting time here.” Suddenly I didn’t care how today’s practice session went, I didn’t care if Lloyd succeeded or failed, and whether or not he decided to actually be the test subject tomorrow. I just wanted to work. Lloyd had been standing over his suit and helmet long enough that I began to wonder if he even remembered it was there.

  “But I am focusing on the suit, Dak; that is precisely what I’m doing! Come on, guys: why doesn’t the Harp hurt us when the door is closed?”

  We both stared blankly at him.

  “Insulation!” He clapped. “A finely calibrated chemical insulation that protects our bodies—and obviously more intentionally Moss’s body—from the Harp’s energy-sapping effects.”

  We both nodded.

  “Now, having said that, what do you extrapolate that this suit is for?”

  * * *

  LLOYD HAD started on the idea of a suit about a year ago. As with all things Lloyd, the relatively simple idea emerged from a hedgemaze of winding digressions and concessions to the ever-winnowing filter that is the scientific method.

  Here’s part of an early memo from him, just for a taste:

  … But again, bear in mind, it is entirely possible that intuition loses its value at the biosphere’s edge. Our instincts are Earthbound, and very likely nontransferable to extra-solar environments. We take so many ideas for granted, down to the existence of concepts that seem so very fundamental to our physical understanding of the world around us, and forgetting that, as infants, even these concepts were learned, not innate, and thus cannot be assumed to apply to our guest—or, really, guests. Take, as a macro example, the moss’s growth on Moss’s skin. To us it is a mystery. Perhaps it would strike us in an entirely different way if we grew up on Moss’s planet, or a neighboring planet. Being Earthbound myself, of course, I share the following intuition I have heard articulated around our facility: even wearing no garment, Mo
ss gives off a remarkable sense of immaculate self-care and thus the moss itself looks wrong, even invasive. But, here is where I must remind myself: what even is “invasive” if not a concept derived from our own solipsistic perception of self? Would a creature with a more hive-like mind (i.e., a telepathic superstructure such as, for want of a better term, a honeycomb) even understand the concept of “invasion”? We take proprietary ownership of our own corporeality as a given. We think of Moss as an alien species, but we would do well to remind ourselves that we, too, are an alien species and our ways might be as wholly unfamiliar and unfathomable as his. Simply factoring in the existence of at least two alien species in one room, ourselves and our Moss, means, to borrow a gross colloquialism, all bets are off. That being said, however, we must begin somewhere and that is why …

  That was a memorandum just saying he was thinking of making a suit. It was close to five pages long. Ever since that one, Lloyd was required to include a one-sentence summary at the beginning of any written correspondence.

  But, so, we began to put his idea into practice. First came the bags of earthworms (unsuccessful). Then birds (unsuccessful, perhaps due to the subjects’ stress being in captivity), then some gerbils (unsuccessful, perhaps due to faulty seals). Finally we moved up to larger mammals like dogs.

  These sessions made for some of my least favorite experiences here at Quill.

  Shit like this is why I’m a vegetarian.

  * * *

  “LET’S JUST get you in the suit, okay, Lloyd? Class dismissed.” I needed to do something other than just stand here and watch you two. I needed to move.

  You held it up by the midsection and Lloyd stepped into the pants legs one at a time while bracing himself on your shoulder.

  “Now, imagine with me, Matt Salem,” he said as he worked his way into the suit, “if we determine that the engine room is coated with this protective insulation, what’s the smartest next step to t-aayyyyyy—” He started to topple backward as he lifted his second leg. I hustled over and caught him. But it’s like his mouth was barely aware of what his body was doing. The nanosecond he was out of any danger his monologue resumed. “Well, we’d want to make more of it, yes? Which raises the question: how do we make more of it? Determining the chemical composition of the insulation is key!”