Death is an Anagram

Site 14 (Crash—Survivors: 0)

Lyemi eased her thumb off the accelerator, and let the Hornet coast to a stop. “Bell sludge and bristles,” she sputtered, undoing the clasp that held her helmet visor in place. “What a mess.”

The site was a smoldering wreck of a ship, the ground carved into a jagged scar where the vessel crashed. The hull of the craft was torn open in one spot, and four long gashes cut parallel lines across the blast shield. Inside the nav pit, Lyemi could see the pilot, or what was left of them. Must have burned to a crisp on entry, she thought.

Being the first to a site like this meant the first task was clean-up: look for survivors, then gather as many resources as she could find and sort them into discreet piles. Food, fuel, trade, scrap. There was supposed to be a fifth pile for weapons, but Lyemi’s guild had unspoken rules about not taking weapons from crash sites. Whether it was superstition, or practical caution when dealing with tech that might have trackers hidden in its circuits, the general practice was that if you found a blaster or something else that might be used for violence, you either destroyed it or buried it so that nobody else could find it.

The process of cleaning the site was a long one; the ship was full of hidden compartments, some containing items that Lyemi didn’t recognize and had to look up with her datapad. There wasn’t much food. Most of the fuel must have been destroyed on impact. Still, the hull of the ship was good scrap, and there were circuit boards and other components that somebody somewhere might be able to use, so she spend the afternoon taking the ship apart piece by piece. It was slow work but she was good at it, and by the time the sun started to set the ship had been disassembled and laid out into a tidy collection on the ground.

Everything but the nav pit.

Rules said you didn’t disturb the dead if you could help it, not until you could lay them to rest in a good way, and everybody’s good way was different. Different planets, different customs. Lyemi was licensed to perform burial rites on a dozen systems; the trick was knowing which one.

And this pilot was...well. It wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve. And she didn’t like thinking of them as a puzzle to begin with. So she left the nav pit alone while she organized the rest of the cache, until there was nothing left to be done but open the pit and see what she was working with.

She lifted the blast shield gingerly out of its frame, then scanned the interior of the pit for disease or other pathogens. Nothing. That set off an alarm somewhere in the back of her mind, but for the moment she ignored it, setting to work removing the console and arranging its components on a tarp.

“Sorry, friend,” she said to the dead pilot when she bumped into their chair trying to maneuver around them. The pit was small, too small really. Hard to imagine flying a ship like this, she thought as she worked.

Eventually it was just the seat and its silent passenger. Still no way to identify them or where they came from. The guild had guidance for that too, if the dead couldn’t be identified. It had been a while since she’d had to refer to that part of the guild handbook.

Off in the distance she heard the sound of another skiff approaching, and she set the book down to hail them.

“You work quick,” the interloper said, hopping off their vehicle’s seat and removing their helmet. “This thing was fresh this morning. Find anything good?”

“See for yourself,” Lyemi said, gesturing to the cache. “I’m about to do the burial rites though, so maybe give me a bit of space.”

“Sure thing,” said the stranger. “Just came by to offer my help, but it looks like you’ve got it under control. I’ll be back after supper with a hauler.”

“Appreciate it,” said Lyemi. The stranger left, and she picked up the book, holding it close to her chest and trying not to let her anxiety spike.

Hauler.

The guild didn’t approve the use of hauling equipment right away; if you couldn’t carry it, you weren’t allowed to take it. Haulers weren’t authorized for at least a month after the site was cleaned.

She plucked the comm tab from her collar and attached it to her ear. “Hey, Blisto? Think we might have a poacher on our hands here at Site 14. Might need some backup.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Blisto would know what to do.

Poachers would pick sites clean before anyone else had a chance to take necessities. Then they would take the entire cache and hoard it, sell it to people who need it for a heavy profit. Poachers were a blight on any system the guild protected, and their practices often extended beyond salvaged materials.

Lyemi didn’t like poachers.

She performed the burial rites quickly for the pilot, burying them in a plot marked with a piece of the ship’s hull. Then she walked back to her Hornet, and opened the storage container attached to its underside. She deliberated for a moment before drawing out a star-staff and a standard issue blaster pistol. She hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but if the interloper wasn’t just ignorant about guild regulations, she wanted to be ready to defend the site.

She walked back to the cache, found a nice rock to perch on, and waited.

The Poacher

The interloper’s name was Kress, she learned when he returned an hour later. He had a big sledge with him, ideal for hauling away massive piles of scrap metal. It could probably pick up the whole cache at once.

“You left before I could give you a heads up,” she called out to him. “This site’s restricted, no haulers for at least the first month, guild regulations, you know how it is.” She leaned on her star-staff tiredly, as though she were really on Kress’s side in all this, wasn’t it a shame. “Sorry you came all this way.”

“I see,” said Kress, climbing down from the hauler. “I was hoping we could work something out.”

“It’s not my call,” said Lyemi, smiling her best just-doing-my-job smile. “Guild puts a lot of resources into making things fair for everybody. Everyone gets a shot at the site. Once folks get what they need, you can haul away the rest.”

Kress gave a deep, heaving sigh.

She knew what that meant. “Don’t make this hard,” she said, bringing more earnest concern into her voice. “The rules are there for a reason. You’ll get your payday at the end of the month. In the meantime folks need to eat.”

“If I waited for the end of the month every time a ship crashed on this blasted rock I’d never stay in business.” The blaster was in his hand, held steady, aimed lazily in her direction. Like it was nothing new. Like it was Tuesday.

“You’re gonna want to put that away,” Lyemi said. “Like I said, it’s not my call.” She gestured to the cache. “Look, the site is here. You can take whatever you can carry. That’s the rule. Don’t make me shoot you for not having common sense.”

Kress didn’t seem to like that. His eyes hardened, and he straightened his pistol arm to point it directly at her.

Then, pwif pwif, he was on the ground, dead, a pair of blaster holes in the chest of his jacket.

Lyemi walked over, checked his body for identification, flicked on her comm tag. “Scavenger’s name was Kress,” she said. “We had an altercation. What should I prepare for?”

“That was quick,” Blisto laughed in her ear. “Well, guild rules say if it’s a dispute over a cache, the cache goes to the family of the deceased. So we might have to let this one go.”

Lyemi looked at the carefully arranged site, a full day’s work, now forfeit to some aristocrat’s business empire. Still. “Worth it,” she said quietly. “If it stops them from scavenging sites for a while. Go ahead and notify the next of kin.”

She walked through the site one last time, taking stock of the resources that were about to be warehoused. There wasn’t much, she admitted. The pilot had been running on empty.

She did take one memento from the site: a small piece of low-power tech attached to a chain, like a necklace. The bauble gleamed in the fading sunlight, and every minute or so a light pulsed somewhere on its surface, like a satellite beacon waiting for someone to notice its existence.

Lyemi put the chain around her neck and tucked the bauble inside her shirt. Taking things from a forfeited cache wasn’t strictly _against _guild rules, but the less she flaunted her new trinket the better.

It was proper night before the poacher’s kin arrived with skiffs of their own, and an additional hauler. Lyemi directed them to the cache, explained to them what they were getting, what they weren’t allowed to take. Even an empty cache ought to leave something behind, she told them.

They were surprisingly efficient. Within minutes, the site was picked clean, not a word said about Kress or how he had died. His body remained unclaimed when the work was done.

“Are you gonna send someone back for the body?” She asked them.

One of them, a girl in an armored jacket, shook her head. “Poachers don’t get funerals,” she said. “We’ll take the spoils of his greed, but he’s relinquished any claim to a Heraldic burial. Do with him what you will.”

“Sounds like this isn’t the first site he’s scavenged,” said Lyemi.

“He disgraced himself after the last flood,” said the girl. “Turned a tidy profit on the suffering of those who lost everything. You ask me, he deserved exactly what he got.”

Lyemi decided it was best not to probe further. “What will you do with the cache?” She asked.

“Use what we can, sell what we can’t,” said the girl. “If Kress had waited for the end of the month we could have helped him clean up here. Everyone could have prospered.” She climbed up into her skiff. “Thank you for letting us have it. Sorry for the trouble it cost you.”

With a whirr and a thrum, the group of haulers and skiffs sped off into the distance, leaving Lyemi alone with her kill and the pilot’s grave.

“Blisto, what do I do with the poacher? Family didn’t want the body.”

“Leave it,” the voice came back over her comm tag. “We’ll send out a crew in the morning. Come on home.”

Star on a Chain

The Hornet sped across the plain, the wind ripping past her in a quiet roar that drowned out the rest of the night’s sounds. If she’d been in a better mood she might have stopped to look up at the stars, or to listen to the sounds of animals going about their evening business. Tonight, she just wanted to get back to her bunk and fall asleep.

A day’s work lost, and nothing to show for it. She was fortunate; she was still in the care of the guild, which meant she didn’t have to worry about food or shelter. If she ever wanted to leave the system, though, she’d also have to leave behind the guild’s protections, too. And not every planet followed the guild’s rules.

Tonight could have gone way worse, she thought. If Kress’s family had decided the cache wasn’t enough, if they’d wanted blood… She blinked the thought away, and flipped a switch in her helmet, flooding her ears with music. Driving with music wasn’t safe, but driving with dark thoughts was even more perilous.

Blisto was still up and waiting for her when she got to the checkpoint. “You okay?” he said when she took off her helmet.

“Been better,” she said. “A little shaken. Mostly tired. And hungry.”

“Come on,” said Blisto, leading her to the cantina. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

While she ate they talked through the day’s events, what could have gone wrong and why it didn’t, why it was better to kill the poacher than let him take everything, even if it meant losing the cache anyway.

“You never go into a fight looking to kill somebody,” said Blisto. “But if it comes down to it, putting them in the dirt is better than letting them take what should belong to the people who are trying to survive out there.”

“But if the cache gets taken by their family, the people of the wasteland don’t get any of it anyway,” said Lyemi.

“True,” said Blisto. “But then, he was gonna shoot you if you didn’t shoot him first, right?”

“Right,” said Lyemi. “I don’t know. I guess I just feel like the guild ethics don’t factor into it. Or shouldn’t. If the rules say it’s okay for us to kill somebody, we might as well be cops.”

Blisto leaned back in his chair. “There’s a difference,” he said. “But it’s late, and I’m not finding the right words to say what it is. But we’re not cops. Cops kill because they can get away with it. We kill poachers because they hurt people who are trying to survive. And this poacher was going to hurt you too. Soon as you knew he was coming back with a hauler, you knew he was gonna try and fight you for the cache. Right?”

“I mean, you never know for sure,” she hedged. “But yeah. He was either gonna try and bribe me or kill me, but he wasn’t gonna leave without it.”

“So when that happens, what do you call first priority? The sanctity of the site, or your own safety?” Blisto shook his head. “The guild can’t make that call for you. When it’s dangerous, you’ve got to decide for yourself. But the guild rules are there to tell you that when the chips are down, if you have to take a stand to protect people, you’ve got the guild’s backing.”

Lyemi rubbed her eyes. “Still feels like cops to me,” she said with a yawn.

“Nothing’s black and white,” Blisto said. “But okay, I think I’ve got it. Cops would’ve been on Kress’s side, and tried to bury your body so nobody would find out. That make it easier?”

Lyemi laughed. “Yeah, a bit.”

Blisto nodded. “Good.”

“But the people still lost a cache tonight,” she said.

“Yep,” said Blisto. “And maybe the Best Right Thing would have been to not hand it over to Kress’s people. Maybe when it comes to poachers the guild should have harsher rules. But let me ask you this: would you have felt safe guarding that site against an army of angry poachers, if it went that way?”

Lyemi frowned. “So it’s a compromise.”

“It’s a compromise. And maybe it’s not a perfect one. But it’s what we’ve got right now.”

Lyemi nodded. “Thanks, Blisto,” she said. “I think I’m gonna turn in.”

“You did good work today,” Blisto said as she got up from the table and headed to the door. “Sucks that it went to filling a warehouse instead of building shelter. But it was good work nevertheless.”

Lyemi threw a wave over her shoulder and stepped out into the night to make her way toward bed.

It’s not a perfect one, she reflected. And something still didn’t sit right. She lay in her bunk, staring at the bauble she’d nicked from the site, watching its light pulse. The scavengers still won today, she thought. Sorry we killed your friend, anyway here’s everything he was trying to steal from people who need it.

It didn’t seem right.

The bauble’s light pulsed in her hands.

“You’re lucky,” she said to the tiny thing. “You don’t have to find all the answers to the universe. You can just blink, blink, blink.”

Blink, blink, blink. The bauble pulsed three times.

Lyemi sat up suddenly. It had never done that before. “Blink, blink, blink,” she whispered.

Blink, blink, blink.

She looked around the room, as thought the darkness might offer some insight. “Are you listening to me? Blink twice if you are.”

Blink, blink.

She dropped the necklace onto the mattress, got up, backed away from it.

The bauble pulsed once, then settled into a steady, dim light.

As though it were watching her.

Waiting for someone to listen.