Beacon 23: Part 3: Bounty (Kindle Single) by Hugh Howey

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    They say bad things come in threes, but I don’t think that’s true. I think bad things keep right on coming. They don’t stop. They’ll never stop. It’s just too depressing to keep counting, so we start over after the third bad thing. We hold our breath. We wait. We hope the universe will wait with us.
    But then something else bad happens, and with dread and short memories we utter to ourselves, “Okay, that’s one,” and we brace for what’s next.
    Something’s always next.
    I live in a tin can on the edge of sector eight, and my job is to keep bad things from happening. My track record so far is less than stellar. A screensaver on one of my monitors reads 18 Days Since Our Last Accident . It ticks up by one each morning, so that’s progress.
    Most ships pass through my sector at twenty times the speed of light, and they leave little more than a ripple on my grav scanner. But near on three weeks ago, some bastards took down my beacon, and a cargo bound for Vega splashed itself across the asteroid field in my back yard. Most of the wreck is still out there—what the pirates and scavengers and souvenir seekers didn’t cart off.
    I guess if we’re counting, that was the first bad thing. The second was a little incident I’d rather not mention, but it involved a talking rock. Okay, it involved me talking to a rock—I’m pretty sure the rock never talked back. Just in case, I drilled a hole straight through the guy and hung him around my neck on a lanyard. Not sure if I did this to make sure the rock was really dead or to keep him close to my ears in case he talks again. Told you I wasn’t proud.
    The third thing is the reason my body is covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes right now. It’s why my ankle is either sprained or broken and my arm is in a sling. Two days ago, my grav panels started oscillating uncontrollably. Really turns a man’s world upside down. And right-side up again. And upside down. And—well, you get the point.
    Now I’m a mess and my beacon’s a mess. Tools, food packs, spares, all went rattling around in their cubbies and cabinets until they burst forth like possessed demons. Hundreds of items are scattered all over the place, choosing to lie perfectly still now, like they’re all exhausted from the pounding they gave me. Taking naps. Waiting for me to tuck them all back in.
    Before I do that, I’m wiring up kill switches for the grav generator. I put big red buttons on the ceilings of every living module and ran wires to breakers down in life support. Can’t step on the buttons by accident, but if my tin can gives me the old shake-and-bake again, I can hit one of these instead of trying to get down a ladder while gravity is rag-dolling me. Trying to get down the ladder the last time is what took my arm out of its socket.
    I could probably call the incident in and list my wounds, and it’d be enough for NASA to send me home. Problem is, I don’t have a home to go to. Some part of me knows I’m here for life. And the way things are going, I reckon that won’t be for very long.
    I finish the last wire splice on the new kill switches. Even with the floor grates up for access, I have to wiggle back under some of the pipes and conduits to reach the grav generator. Wrapping electrical tape around the splice, I laugh to see the same tape wrapped around one of my fingers. I ran out of bandages, so I resorted to taping up my cuts. The same stuff holds us together, me and my beacon. Hell, most of this place is a modification some previous operator made. It’s like a human body at age thirty-five, when not a single original cell is left. All that remains are the memories—the one damn thing we wish we could amputate.
    Funny how that works. And funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that’s a survival mechanism. We’re not here to be happy; we’re just here to be here. I spend a lot of time wishing I wasn’t—but that’s