Company

• 4 •

Cricket pounces on me as I enter the lifeboat. She holds me against the deck, massive paws on my chest, and growls and growls. Clamping down on my arm with her mouth, she squeezes like she wants to bite me. But she just holds me there, making threatening noises in her throat.

I let her have it out and scratch her neck. Relenting, she lets go, mews at me, then licks my face through my open visor.

“I know, I know,” I tell her, stroking her head, trying to calm her down. “I’m sorry. Everything’s okay. I’m sorry.”

I exude these thoughts. Cricket lowers her weight against me, as if we’re going to lie just outside the airlock and take a nap.

“Up,” I say. “We gotta go. Can’t abandon our station. Everything’s okay here.”

Better than okay. But I can’t stay. After an hour of watching Claire work, sweating in my walksuit, feeling useless and awkward, I had to beg my leave. Despite every craving in every cell of my body, I had to beg my leave.

Cricket and I head back to our beacon at half-thrust. I leave one of the displays set to the rear camera, and I watch the unblemished and new recede as I crawl across empty space toward my rundown home. Cricket is passed out on the seat beside me, her body sprawled over the armrest so that her head can reach my arm, pinning it to my seat with the weight of her exhaustion. Must’ve worn herself out pacing and fretting while I was gone. When I need to adjust the throttle, I lean across and use my left hand so I don’t disturb her. What the hell am I doing? Aiding and abetting a fugitive, and now harboring an alien. This is what happens when they give you medals for breaking the rules—you forget the rules apply to you.

Opening the airlock to my home, I smell the tiredness of the place. The clean atmo in the other beacon cleared my nostrils, and now I can smell that the air I live in isn’t foul so much as stale. The scrubbers are doing their job more admirably than I thought. Hell, they’re doing their job more admirably than I am.

Shedding the walksuit, I head toward the ladder. Cricket seems to read my mind and leaps for it first. She wraps her paws around a rung halfway up, lunges again, and grabs the lip. Elbows jut down as she scrambles, rear legs wheeling, tail corkscrewing. Every time she goes up a ladder, it looks like she might not make it, but she always does. I’m already climbing up behind her, the air cool on my sweaty skin, just my sleep shorts on. Cricket takes advantage of my hands being occupied at the top of the ladder and gets in a lick on my head and one on my cheek before I can ward her away.

“No lick,” I tell her, wiping my cheek. I’ve tried to train this out of her. “Never lick me again,” I say, shaking a finger at her. She sits and cocks her head to the side. “Last time. Never again. No licking. I mean it.”

Her tail swishes the steel grating. I pat her head. I swear she can read my mind, and yet somehow she doesn’t seem to hear a word I say. I scratch behind her ears and ask, “These are just for decoration, aren’t they?”

She licks my hand. I don’t know why I even try.

Up another ladder, I start the shower pod. I let it steam up inside, the water recycling over and over. When it looks like one of those cig smoking rooms in a spaceport, I crack the door and step through the fog and into the scalding hot. The death and tiredness boils off my skin. I scrub the old cells away, getting at the new me beneath. Soap and lather. I fumble for my razor and run it under the shower head before rolling it across my face. Little patches of hair elude me. I wash my hair, then turn my back to the jet and just let the heat pound into my spine. Water so damn hot. I pee while standing there, remembering Hank from B Company who used to get angry when anyone did this. One whiff of pee in the showers, and Hank’d go ballistic, looking everywhere for the yellow stream. We’d accuse him of using this as an excuse to go around studying our dicks.

Hank was my best friend in the company—for all of the two weeks he was alive with us in the trenches. It was a long two weeks. There aren’t any rules about how long you gotta know someone to know you love them. The army taught me that. You can hate the moment you line up your barrel, and you can love the second you lower it. Back and forth like that. Oscillating grav panels. There’s no up or down to the cosmos, just a whole bunch of fucking sideways. Just people loving and hating. And no rules on how long it takes.

I turn off the shower as the heat starts to die down from boiling to mere scalding. My flesh is red. Steam rises off me as I leave the pod. Cricket is fast asleep on my bed; she wakes long enough to glance at me, make sure she isn’t missing anything, then goes back to sleep.

I rifle through my clothes, sniffing everything. All the same degree of mildly clean. It’s only now that I see the amber light flashing over my bunk. Damn. Message on the QT. I go up the ladder two rungs at a time and check the display. Three messages from NASA asking me to report back in about the SOS.

I key in the number 55. Then I press through three screens of warnings before the entangled particles tickle their entangled twins back in Houston. Five by five is what someone used to say back in some other time to mean that everything is okay. Not sure why this is any more efficient than just saying OK. It probably has something to do with the state of Oklahoma. All their fault. Just like it’s Germany’s fault we have to say the number nine as “niner.” Everyone causes trouble. It’s not just me.

I turn the message alarm off and walk a big circle around the command module. Then another circle. Cricket wakes up below, realizes I’m gone, and arrives at the command module with two leaps, a grunt, and some kicking. She curls up on the blanket I leave under the dash for her and watches me pace.

I shake my arms like they’re still wet, like there’s something in them I need to get out, like those nerves a soldier feels before a big push out of the trenches. What the hell is wrong with me? A trickle of water runs down my breastbone, leaking from the porous rock I wear around my neck. I wipe this away, cross to the porthole, and watch the flashing light for a while. I turn to the HF, wondering what I would say if I picked it up. I turn back to the light.

This is worse than being completely alone.