Cpl. Shishone sat at the flight terminal within the Eastern Flight Tower on Makemake. It was unusual for a corporal to be an air-traffic controller, especially somewhere with operations as delicate as the Kuiper Belt, but seeing as the amount of certified spaceport controllers, especially his past experience, was more rare than one might think, which had made him more than suitable as a candidate for the job. The tower’s vaulted reinforced glass encircled them all the way around, allowing for a visual on any incoming and departing ships. The great steel line that was the base on Makemake stretched out to his left, and the landing and launch pads were to his right. In front of and behind him was nothing but the soil of Makemake, save for great steel circles off in the distance. The purpose of these circles he’d questioned before, but it seemed that either nobody knew, or nobody was willing to tell him.
“This is NRT number Thirty-Three o’ One,” crackled a voice over his headset. “Requesting permissions for liftoff, over.”
Cpl. Shishone glanced at the flight records and patterns on the terminal. 3301 was the last ship of the day – his day, at least – and was cleared for takeoff just as soon as he got word from Ground Control. Into his microphone, he said, “Copy Thirty-Three o’ One, that’s a negative, still waiting on ground crew, over.”
“Copy.”
He sat back in his seat and rubbed his eyes. The dim light of the control tower always made him sleepy. It was blue, dark, as though a permanent night had overcome the tower, and he wanted nothing more than to go back to his bunk, to send Penelopi a message, and to go to sleep. But he couldn’t, not yet. He groaned; he still had to see this ship off.
Cpl. Yarns had met him this morning from the mess hall with a strange gleam in his eye. The kid had seemed a little out of it, as though he’d not slept well for a few nights in a row. There were bags under his eyes and a distance to them as well. Still, he’d smiled and eaten breakfast with Shishone, and all seemed normal otherwise. He thought of the kid now, feeling as tired as he had looked, and wondered if it was just a staple of Makemake, to be exhausted at all hours.
For a moment, he looked out the window, eyes glazed over. Outside, the NRT ship, large yet sleek, like a small tower that’d been shaved into a point, loomed over the launchpads. People, tiny specks in slender orange spacesuits, were doing their final checks of the systems and hoses and fueling couplers, and no doubt the ship would be ready to launch in minutes. Idly, Shishone turned from the floodlights and blackness to his terminal, and checked the manifest of the NRT ship.
It was the usual – empty fuel cells, filled storage crates, and personnel – and there wasn’t much to be said for it. He was bored and tired. But finally, finally, over his headset, he heard, “Control tower, this is Ground Crew Three, NRT Thirty Three o’ One is ready for liftoff.”
“Copy,” he said, switching channels. “Thirty Three o’ One, you’re cleared for takeoff. Safe flying, over.”
“Copy control,” he heard. “See you when we see you.”
The line cut, and Shishone turned his attention to the ship outside. Its thrusters lit up slowly, and, as the hoses and scaffolding peeled away, like a magician might levitate his subject, the ship began to float. It hovered there for a moment on the now empty launchpad, before its rear thrusters illuminated like little stars, and jets of flame shot out from them, blasting dust out from beneath them. The ship was mobile. It rocketed up through the thin atmosphere of Makemake and off into space. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds before it was just another twinkling star in a sea of them.
And there it went, his last ship of the day.
Sighing, he sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Beside him, other flight controllers – most of them officers – were also taking off their headsets, as the shift came to a close. Their replacements would be here soon, and so they began to chat with each other, as usual, as they waited.
Taking off his own headset, he listened for a moment. He wasn’t one to join their conversations, feeling much like an outcast here thanks to his rank, but he would listen.
A gruff man with a scarred jaw and cold eyes was talking warmly to a female officer near him, and he said, “Easy night, huh.”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Thankfully. Things have really been picking up lately.”
“You noticed it too.”
She nodded. “More incoming shipments than outgoing, which is normal I guess, but the amount is just… a lot.”
Shishone turned to listen better, staring out the window as though that was what held his attention.
She continued: “And the manifests are jammed, you’ve seen that right?”
The man grunted. “Yeah, I have. Command must not want people to know what we’re intaking.”
“I just think that’s so odd,” she said. “We all have clearances up here.”
“Command is acting squirrely about it.”
Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she looked at him and said, “Do you think it has anything to do with Sedna?”
A quiet fell in the room when she mentioned this. Shishone’s ears perked.
The man leaned in and, in a hushed tone, said, “I’m not sure. But it’s definitely weird that we’ve been taking more in as Sedna gets closer. It’s possible, but there’s just not enough there for me to make any kind of conclusion.”
Now, Shishone spoke, turning his full attention to the female officer. “Sedna,” he said, as she turned to look at him with stark hazel eyes. “I’ve heard about it.”
“Newbie,” she said, “you don’t know about Sedna?”
He half shrugged.
She looked to the male officer, who swiveled around in his chair to look at Shishone with a darkling look. He said: “There’s an observatory on Sedna, and nobody’s heard from any of the people there in years.”
“I’ve heard something like that too, but I don’t really understand the implications” said Shishone.
The officer nodded, and scooted his chair over, so that Shishone, the female officer, and he made a small circle. “Sedna went dark and nobody has any clue why. Command won’t speak about it, won’t even say if they know why even. But since we lost contact with the observatory, the inbound shipments to Makemake have increased drastically. Nobody knows what’s in them, either, and it’s got people up here on edge.”
“I see,” Shishone said, thinking. “Do you think they’re weapons?”
“Maybe,” said the woman. “Makemake is a weapons platform after all. But why we would be importing so many weapons, and classified munitions at that, well… it’s a mystery to me.”
The man nodded. “Me as well. But I think, personally, it does has to do with Sedna. I think something very, very wrong has happened. I just don’t know what.”
Shishone felt a chill run down his spine, and he barely stifled a shiver. “Do you think they’re going to use these weapons on Sedna?”
The man shrugged. “Not sure. Command doesn’t like us talking about it though, so it’s probably best to leave it at that.”
Now, the woman spoke again, saying, “I will say this: Major Thobias is your commanding officer right?”
“Yes,” Shishone said.
“Don’t poke around too much then. The man is a psycho, and he’s made it clear to others that they’d best shut up.”
Shishone furrowed his eyebrows. “Why?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you. If I knew, I’d tell everyone. I don’t like this secrecy and I don’t understand it. It’s not normal.”
He chewed on that for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”
Just then, the doors hissed open, and the first of the new shift started shuffling into the control tower. Shishone stood, and offered his hand to his fellow traffic controllers, who took it and shook. The man said, “Listen, I know a little bit about you. Not much, but I know you were demoted. If you ever need anything, my name is Harman, this is Allyssa. Don’t think we’ve ever formally introduced ourselves. But you don’t talk much, do you?”
“Sometimes,” Shishone said with a shrug.
“Well,” said Allyssa, “if you ever need to talk, come find us.”
“Will do.”
She smiled. “Good. Now go get some rest, you look dog tired and I know adjusting to life on Makemake can be tough.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s the truth. Thanks.”
And with that, he departed the control tower, making his way down the winding stairs that would lead back to the depths of Makemake. He passed by the next shift on his way down, saying hello to a few of them, before he came upon the tram station at the base of the tower. Passing through the security checkpoint, he boarded the dole, bare car, and headed back to his bunk, skipping dinner in favor of sleep.
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“Five outbound!” Shishone called over the headset. He flipped switches to fire retro thrusters as they approached Ceres. The whole planetoid was alight with bombardment munitions, pocked with craters and littered with debris. The structures that dotted the surface smoldered with unearthly flames, and he could barely make out the ground rovers with their turrets engaging each other in combat.
Captain Marks came over the radio, saying, “We’re all set to drop back here.”
“Roger,” Shishone said. The dropship looked like a bird, in a way, a flying wing meant for low-range space travel and atmospheric entering. Its sleek black outside blended with the dark of space, its thrusters the only giveaway that it was even there. Beside his dropship, dubbed the Calypso, were two other dropships, one to his left, the other to his right. The plan was for them to peel off at three minutes out from the drop, and scatter the shock troops on the Occator Crater, where several landing pads were sprawled out like the toes of a frog, or lily pads on water, and this was where their assault was to take place. They would be supplementing the strike force that already had boots on the ground and was assaulting the landing center. An easy, if stressful, mission.
“T-Minus three!” Shishone called out.
With that, the dropships on either side of the Calypso peeled off and went in for their approach. Massive AA guns on the crater’s surface hailed bullets at them, but this wasn’t Shishone’s first rodeo – he’d been there for the Battle of Pallas, after all, and that was a bloody fight if ever there was one – and he deftly dodged the incoming fire.
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Twisting this way and that, sweating lightly, he pulled on the flight stick to ready the ship for the drop. Two minutes out from the drop zone. Two minutes to die, he thought.
“Get ready to drop!”
“Ready!” Captain Marks said over the radio.
“Countdown, one minute thirty!”
“Roger!”
He brought the ship down low, the AA guns lashing wave after wave of ballistic munitions at them. He’d never been hit before, and he wasn’t about to be hit now.
“One minute!”
“Roger!”
Closer and closer he flew to Ceres, and it grew larger and larger in his window. Radar was picking up friendlies on the ground now, as well as the location of the guns. It looked to be hell on the ground, with burnt rovers and smoking buildings littering the crater.
“Thirty!”
“Thirty!” he heard back.
Just then, the Calypso buckled, and jerked Shishone in his crash couch, knocking the wind out of him. He checked the status screen, and it showed the right wing in blinking crimson.
“We’re hit!” he called out. Hit, but stable. “Twenty to drop!”
“Keep us going!” Captain Marks called back.
“Fifteen!”
The ship buckled again, and he knew he’d been hit once more. Only this time, the right thrusters were completely burnt and non-responsive. A shell had ripped right through them. “Fuck!” he cried as the ship began to spin. “Fuck fuck fuck!”
The ship rattled, taking on more flak. He reached for the flight stick, but it was jammed thanks to the spin of the ship. He gave it a hard tug, but found it to be lodged firmly to the left.
At that moment, the wing blew.
The explosion rocked the ship, throwing Shishone’s head back against his couch, slamming it and disorienting him. Suddenly everything was hazy, gray, muffled. He could hardly breathe. They’d been hit. More than that, he couldn’t right the ship. Suddenly, everything seemed far away. Ceres was right upon them, and they upon her, spinning like a top. Someone shouted something over the radio, but he couldn’t hear it. He couldn’t do anything.
Nothing at all.
They were going to die.
And when Shishone awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat and shaking violently, the first thing he did was roll from his bunk and vomit in a small trash can.
The nightmares were getting worse.
He wretched for a while, longer than usual he noticed, barely able to breathe. When he could finally think again, when he could take a breath, he sat back in his bunk, but found it to be soaked through with a chilly cold. He shivered.
There would be no more sleep tonight. Not that there was much night left, he discovered as he looked at the clock.
Standing up, he shook off the rust, and gathered his things. Then, he headed for the latrine, where he would take a long, scalding hot shower that would leave him red and marked. It still didn’t make him feel clean. He wondered if anything ever could.
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That morning, if one could call it that, Cpl. Shishone sat eating breakfast with Cpl. Yarns in the mess hall. The two were swapping stories from their workplaces, mundane stuff, incoming and outbound ships Shishone had seen, the strange and quirky people Yarns had checked through security. Breakfast today was the usual: mushroom protein mulch flavored to taste like breakfast sausage, with a side of vegetables and rice. Shishone had to admit that, as disgusting as it looked, some piece of him liked it. It reminded him of his time on the Portentia.
As they ate, people came and went around them, the first shift eating breakfast, the third, dinner. It was becoming routine at this point, and as he sat there chatting, Shishone found that he was coming to enjoy Yarns’s personality. The kid had a spunk to him, some life that Shishone found himself taking a liking to. Maybe the kid was going somewhere.
As they spoke, the topic shifted abruptly when Yarns swallowed a bite of food, looked Shishone dead in the eyes, and asked, “Do you ever dream?”
He felt his heart drop. Palms growing sweaty, Shishone swallowed his own food and bit his tongue lightly. “What do you mean?”
Yarns shrugged. “Well like, of better things. Like for instance, my dream? I wanna own some land someday, on Earth. Have a little farm, a husband, some kids. Y’know? It’s simple, but I like simple. What about you?”
A wave of relief passed over Shishone and he stifled a cathartic laugh. “Yeah, I dream I guess,” he said. “I dream of going back to my wife and kid and sending my girl to university on Earth. I guess I just dream of a better life for my family. Maybe a farm on Earth, like you said.”
“Ah,” said Yarns, a wry gleam in his eye. “You don’t really know what you want.”
“No, not really. I guess I already have it. Wife, kid, like I said.”
“Do you ever dream of chasing rank?” asked Yarns.
Shishone blinked, and sat back on the bench. “Yes, I guess,” he said, casting a suspicious squint at Yarns. “Why?”
“I dunno. Just figured I would too if I were in your shoes.”
Sighing, Cpl. Shishone dusted down his green and black jumpsuit and said, “Kid, the day’s starting. We should get going.”
“Awh.” Yarns puffed out his bottom lip in a mock pout. “You’re right though, I guess.”
Shishone grinned at him as they stood. “You said you want a husband? Got someone in mind?”
Now it was Yarns’s turn to panic, and Shishone reveled in the blush. “Ah, no. Not yet.”
“You’ll find someone, kid,” said Shishone, picking up his tray. “C’mon. We really ought to get going. On for dinner?”
“Yep,” said Yarns. Then, cocking his head, he added: “Where were you last night?”
“Dog ass tired.”
“Makes sense,” Yarns said, nodding.
With that, the two split, and Shishone, after dumping his tray in the slot by the kitchen, headed to the tram, and was, within moments, back at the foot of the staircase that led up to the control tower. He could’ve taken the elevator, but some piece of him wanted the punishment of a hundred stairs like one might want the punishment of deep black coffee in the morning. Taking a deep breath, he began the ascent.
After a time, as he stepped into the tower, he noticed that most of his shift was already there, including Allyssa and Harman. He took his seat next to them, and put on his headset. From the windows, he could see that the port looked mostly dormant today; one ship was refueling in the distance, but other than that, it was mostly bare. He cast a gaze toward his two new compatriots, but found that Harman was chatting to another colleague and Allyssa was playing solitaire of all things.
Deciding that he needed to idle himself as well, he entered his password into the terminal and started flipping through ship manifests from the shift prior. Mostly, it was the same. Of the three ships that had gone outbound, two were carrying ice, and one was a personnel ship. Four had come in, one carrying people, one food, one was classified – another oddity – but the fourth one caught his attention sharply.
The top of the manifest had classification markings. Specifically, they were TC-ATS marked and, even more importantly, unencrypted. It wasn’t usual for flight controllers to go poking around the manifests – it was just something he did to kill time – so likely this was missed by the previous shift. At least, it wouldn’t surprise him, but even if someone had found it, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at.
It read:
//TC-ATS//MS-SYTM//PII//For Official Use Only//
QTY ITEM
2...........................................................................Alt RFeul
14.........................................................................Decouplers
3...........................................................................Thruma
3...........................................................................FUSN
50.........................................................................5.56 Crate
200.......................................................................RFuel
7...........................................................................DS-Sonar
20.........................................................................Personnel
66.........................................................................Coolant
//TC-ATS//MS-SYTM//PII//For Official Use Only//
He read it again to be sure he wasn’t misunderstanding. The word Thruma stood out to him the most. To anybody else on Makemake, he thought, this would be nonsense, just another jumbled military acronym in a sea of them. But he had worked on a Thruma carrier. Thrumas were bombardment munitions. Specifically, they were heavy duty, rapid strike engines that oftentimes carried plasma warheads. The damage they could do was immense. When the plasma hit the target, it poured out like lava, devouring everything in its path, melting it into a plasmatic goop that was horrific to watch.
And he would know, having been there for Ceres.
Frowning, he briefly pondered if he should say something to his cohorts. They likely wouldn’t understand the gravity of this, however, nor would they understand what thrumas even were. This was ATS clearance material, and even he shouldn’t have known, if he was being honest. The only reason he did, even while aboard the Portentia, was because of Jefferys, his loose-lipped ATS-cleared missile operator friend. Long deceased, he remembered, a sense of melancholy settling within him.
There was something else within him though. Some unease. If TerraGov was stationing thrumas here, that meant that Makemake wasn’t just a defensive weapons platform – it was offensive in nature. At least in part, anyway. He chewed on his lip for a moment, thinking, before he switched off of the manifest, and just in time too, as a hand landed on his shoulder, nearly making him jump out of his own skin.
“What’cha looking at?” Harman asked, leaning in.
Shishone took a deep, shaky breath, his mind racing, and said, “Just some shipping manifests.”
“Anything interesting in there?” asked Harman, grinning. “Sometimes I poke around the manifests too. Not really supposed to but they’re there so…”
“Ah, yeah,” Cpl. Shishone said with a nervous laugh. “Not really anything interesting, just people and ice.”
Harman shrugged. “As usual, I guess.”
Nodding slowly, an idea dawned on Shishone. “Hey Lieutenant, can I ask you something?”
“Sure thing,” Harman said. “Ask away.”
“What is the purpose of having a weapons platform out here, this deep into space? And two of them at that?”
Harman blinked, seemingly thinking, before he tilted his head a bit and said, “Well, I suppose to defend the research we’re doing out here.”
He pulled up a chair and sat in it with the back facing forward, leaning on its back. “Why?”
Shishone forced a smile. “Well I guess I was just wondering. I mean they pull in a lot of anti-air munitions and ground based weaponry, I get that. But suppose they were pulling in heavy arms? What would you think of that?”
Lt. Harman squinted at him, inspecting him, staring into him and through him. “You did see something in the manifests, didn’t you? What was it? Heavy arms?”
Shishone squirmed. “Thrumas.”
“What?”
“They’re importing thrumas,” he said quietly.
Lt. Harman cast him an inquisitive glance, before leaning forward, picking up on Shishone’s hushed tone that this was something to be kept quiet.
“Thrumas,” Shishone said, “are bombardment munitions. Serious stuff too.”
Harman’s face fell into a grave disposition, taut lips, hard eyes, and he said, “You saw that in the manifests?”
“I shouldn't have. But the encryption wasn’t scrambled. It’s just there to see.”
Harman looked around to see if anyone was listening in and, satisfied that nobody was, leaned in and whispered, “I don’t think you should poke around through the manifests anymore. Tell nobody. Especially not Major Thobias. You’ll get on his shit list real quick. Keep it to yourself and keep your head down. You’re here for four years, right? Stick to your duties and you’ll go home like the rest of us.”
A wave of shock, confusion, and repulsion washed through Shishone. He frowned, eyebrows furrowed, and said, “You know something.”
Harman bit his upper lip. “Listen, the last guy who went poking around the flight manifests found some sketch shit too. Told me about it, and I told him to tell Thobias. He had two years left on his tour. Vanished within the week. Replaced like a cog in a machine, and life kept moving. Don’t. Be. Stupid.”
Eyes wide, Shishone blinked and slowly nodded. “I see.”
Harman nodded back. “I hope you do. I didn’t hear anything. You didn’t see anything. We both have families we want to return to, at least I assume. Let’s make sure we make it back to them.”
With that, the Lt. stood and pushed the chair back to his desk, where he sat and threw on his headset. The day was about to begin, and from the windows of the tower, Shishone could see the first of the NRT ships settling in for a landing. Unease flowed like ice through his veins, but he pushed it down, thinking of Penelopi and Tay, and he settled in for a long, unnerving day.