Sacrificial Gateway Station, Solis-Deturi binary system.
Laggan Year 246.
The worst part about killing someone was the wait.
A rebellious muscle seized in my back, and I squirmed in my space station’s command chair. Spin gravity always felt heavier on a Feeding day, the recycled air more metallic. I lifted Alana’s photo off the console—the only touch of humanity in this sterile, tech-laden room.
My daughter’s smile had faded—surely a match to her present reality. How could she understand the impossible choice I’d made? For six years of solitary duty, I’d wrestled with the consequences.
And Alana? She’d had six years to hate me.
A klaxon interrupted my reverie. My jab to silence the alarm jostled the touchscreen. Blasted computer! It was as intolerant of error as the man who’d sentenced me here. If the ship carrying this year’s sacrifice to the gods drifted off course…so what?
The black hole would always win.
And Alana was my only anchor against my own dark pit.
I kissed the photo. “Only two more years, sweetheart…” After my eighth Feeding, my debt to the regime would be paid. I could go home. With a final, sighing look at Alana’s likeness, I tucked it into my black jumpsuit’s sleeve pocket. Jerked the zipper closed. Call it superstition, but not even her image should be exposed to what came next.
I thrummed damp palms against my armrests. The holographic map pulled data through warped time and space to produce a blip—the location of the condemned. I never knew their identities, so I picked nicknames. Last year’s skinny redhead was Matchstick. Today’s icy-pale, lumbering guy was Glacier Man.
He’d been polite. Pious, even, from odd rituals I’d noticed before his send-off.
But soon he’d meet the god of infinite power at the Hole’s center—the singularity.
Like the prior sacrifices, I’d offered him the mercy of spiraling toward the Hole feet first. Gravity’s rage would rip blood downward from his brain—he’d pass out before much pain registered.
Not Glacier Man. He’d insisted on going head first. Stubborn zealot.
The console chimed. Five more lousy minutes. Then I could return to the shadowy blur of hours…days…months… A mindless, solo routine. Yes, where I didn’t have to think. That was worse than waiting. By the gods, what I’d give to skip this day of thinking. A trigger pull? Reflex. But this? The cruelty of a bullet in slow motion…
The hologram’s timer crawled down to four minutes.
I rubbed my smooth, mentholated cheeks. This morning, I’d taken up the razor again. It had felt unbalanced, its blade dull. Black clumps of beard had swirled down the drain like Glacier Man plummeting into the Hole. Had I resumed the habit to express reverence for my grim task? Or to fake my way through a moral inspection, as if a cleanshaven face could atone for strapping a misguided soul into the slender spaceship that was his coffin—
Blast me! Too…much…thinking…
Three minutes.
A restless fingertip brushed my left cheekbone. I winced at the stabbing sensation. Like a ghostly wingman, the phantom pain always joined my mission shortly before the condemned met their doom. I scratched at the battle scar that bisected my brow, seeing the blinding flash again even though that left eye was long gone. Its bionic replacement itched in its socket. It didn’t moisten quite the same, the tear duct also deformed by the war wound—as if I’d forgotten how to weep properly.
Just as well.
Another chime. Two minutes.
I swiped my scuffed guitar off the blinking console to my right and plucked a bone-colored string. Tightened it, its tone rising like a question. What tune could drown out the duty of the day?
The hologram’s flashing countdown—pulsing red like spurts of arterial blood—now announced that in 59 seconds the doomed vessel would cross the Boundary, the point of no return.
I swallowed hard. Why did this part make my pulse race? It wasn’t me destined for a black abyss. In a couple of years, I’d be on a trajectory back home, reuniting with Alana, free to start a new life.
Wouldn’t I?
Enough already! With a heavy thumb, I twanged the three-string guitar, fingers sliding to a greasy, dissonant chord. And I kept playing. Only the noise could silence my thoughts. Once, my calloused fingers had known lullabies, happier harmonies to soothe Alana. But no more. I swallowed hard. Lock it down and do your job. I was a tool of the state, a man on his very last chance, delivering the Inquisitor’s justice upon those who’d run out of chances.
Thirty seconds.
I banged out another minor-key progression. Melancholy. Manic.
Then, in an instant of weakness, I peeked to the side at the grainy video feed from Glacier Man’s ship. His bald head perched atop a thick neck—one that imminently would be stretched thin like my instrument’s. His lips moved, which wasn’t unusual. Everyone became a praying person as they sped toward the Hole. Except… Glacier Man’s mouth expanded grotesquely. Was there a pressure leak?
At that moment, I broke my cardinal rule: never listen to the audio.
Pausing my strumming, I cranked the volume. Craned toward the console.
Singing? Some heretical nonsense in a gravelly baritone…
I shook my head and returned to my riffs, focused on the fingering, not the video. If the vessel’s transmitter survived that long, I didn’t want to see Glacier Man’s eyeballs explode.
Beep-beep. “Boundary reached.”
A glance at the hologram confirmed the computer’s announcement. Finally! In seconds, my unpleasant vigil would be over.
With a burn in my wrist, I strummed harder, faster, choking squeals from the instrument.
Come on…
Sweat dangled with salty stubbornness from my nostril.
The throaty melody of the condemned clashed with my tortured song.
Then…a clipped shriek.
My body stiffened—and my mind raced to Alana’s bedroom, years ago. She’d bolted awake, screaming. I hugged her in her damp pajamas, wishing I could make it all better.
But she wasn’t here. And the only squeeze I felt was the vise clamped around my chest.
I stuttered an exhale, the guitar sagging in my hands. After a hard blink, I refocused on the hologram and its depiction of my homeworld, Lagga, in its distant orbit. I’d left Alana there, enduring a different nightmare—one I’d set in motion. Disappointment was my specialty. I hadn’t made things better. Could she accept my embrace again?
Glacier Man’s agony had just issued its damning verdict: never.
As I reached to kill the dead audio feed, blood dripped from my thumb.
Within the hour, my nauseous reaction to the Inquisitor’s congratulatory message—with all his stern platitudes about purity and loyalty and victory—made one thing clear.
I’d broken more than a guitar string.
I slumped in my austere cabin’s padded chair, jumpsuit unzipped to my navel, head heavy against the seatback, fingernails scraping at the ashen-gray, textured cushion. After any other Feeding, I’d be running myself to exhaustion around the station’s single ring. Today, just shuffling to my quarters had drained me.
I barely had the strength to hold the tumbler I’d filled at the beverage replicator. The ethers of imitation whiskey wafted around me, but I couldn’t lift the drink to my lips. Each time I tried, my hand shook so badly that liquid splattered on my lap.
In my imagination, it was blood.
Again and again, the yellow-orange glow of the black hole’s accretion disk skimmed across my cabin’s window, seemingly getting brighter with every rotation of the station. It was as if those mythical fires of Hel were being stoked hotter for me.
“Darken window.” The computer complied with my mumbled command. “Play most recent message.”
A wall screen came alive, at first pixelated in shades of gray. Then blotches of color sharpened into an image of my wife, dressed in a lime gown, a purple bandana neatly secured around her hairless head. Nadine’s eyes were sunken but bright; her cheeks drawn yet stretched with a smile. It took a few seconds for the movement of her lips to sync up with her voice that crackled from the overhead speaker.
“Hi, honey,” she said, her tone brittle. “Sorry it’s been a while. I tried to get into town a few days ago, but the truck broke down. That stuff always happens while you’re gone, right?” Her grin reached her eyes. “But don’t worry about me. About us. Alana is doing well in school. She has a new teacher. Kind…and very smart—”
“Nadine, I’m so sorry…” I forced the words through a lump in my throat.
“—won some contest and she got to fly. Can you believe that? Of course you can. That’s your blood in her. At least I can teach her to cook. And bake, of course. How’s that space-food treating you? I hope you’re not losing weight—”
“I…I thought this would work…” The bottom of the tumbler bounced against my quaking thigh.
“—thinking of planting marigolds like we had at our old house. Maybe even on the sod roof. Wouldn’t that be something? An orange roof?” She hacked. Sipped water. Coughed again.
Pressing up against the giant hand that seemed to hold me down, I reached toward the screen, my arm wavering like tattered laundry in the wind. “I should’ve…I didn’t know…”
“—all for now, honey. Take care of yourself.” Her eyes glistened. “I really wish I could. Miss you.” She kissed her fingertips and extended them toward the camera. “I love you.”
I stretched out quivering fingers, mouthing the words I couldn’t voice, wishing for an incantation that could turn back the clock. But, as always, the video faded to a deep, consuming black, the only bright part the timestamp in the lower left corner.
Four years ago.
My arm dropped, my chin sank, and the tumbler clanked against the hard, unforgiving floor.
With soiled hands pressed to my naked face, all I smelled for the next hour was fake whiskey and the salt of my tears.
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