📖 Stories

Sam Coe is a contradiction that mostly works.

He's the kind of man who quotes frontier law and then solves problems with a rifle, who wears his principles like a work jacket — practical, a bit worn, never coming off. His daughter Cora is eight years old and has opinions about everything and is not wrong about most of them. She told me within twenty minutes of meeting me that my ship's paint job was a classic. I don't think she meant it as a compliment. I told her I couldn't change it because that's the Mantis's Ship. She seemed to decide that was an acceptable answer and moved on to having opinions about something else.

Akila City is the capital of the Freestar Collective, which means it is, by definition, the largest concentration of people in the settled systems who have decided that the UC can mind its own business. The walls are not symbolic — there are things outside them that will kill you, and the city has learned to live with that fact the way frontier settlements learn to live with most facts: practically, without making too much of it. Inside the walls it feels like a place that built itself up from the ground rather than down from a plan. I liked it immediately.

The maps Sam needed were locked in a GalBank vault — part of the legacy of Solomon Coe, Sam's ancestor and the founding figure of the Freestar Collective. A Ranger. The kind of man who has statues. Literally, in fact, he has one in the middle of Akila city. Sam had the family name and, apparently, a claim to what Solomon had left behind.

Unfortunately this very Galbank was being robbed by a gang when we arrived.

Fortunately, it was a bunch of two-bit Shaw Gang members who I was able to convince to stand down before they made things any worse, so we didn't have to bloody up the bank. I am genuinely unsure how I managed to do it, I was sweating bullets the whole time. Thankfully we spoke through a sort of doorbell system on the outside so the gang members couldn't see it.

Once that was over, what we found in the vault instead of the maps was a message from Jacob Coe, Sam's father: come say it to my face.

Jacob and Sam look nothing alike at first. Jacob wears the Coe name like a title — the vault, the legacy, the praise of everyone in the one city he never steps foot outside of. Sam wears a rifle and a work jacket and hasn't been home in years. You'd think they'd disagreed about everything and gone separate directions.

Standing there watching them go at it, I started to think it was the other way around. Jacob has the statue. Sam has the life — out on the frontier, solving problems with his hands and his principles, answering to nobody. Solomon Coe didn't build the Freestar Collective by sitting at home. He built it the way Sam lives: moving, deciding, not waiting for permission.

Jacob doesn't want to give Sam the maps because Sam left. Sam left because he didn't want to be the descendant of a great man. He wanted to be a man. The argument they were having sounded like it was about the maps, but the longer it went on the more I realized it wasn't about the maps.

I talked Jacob around eventually. He's not unreasonable — just certain, and certain men respond to having their expectations met far better than to a counter-argument. I told him the sooner we got the maps, the sooner Sam would be out of his hair. He handed over the maps like it was his idea.

Back out in the dusty air of Akila City, Sam spread the maps. Solomon Coe had noted a scanning anomaly on his first arrival — the kind of thing you log and come back to. That anomaly was almost certainly the artifact. It was also, as it turned out, the current location of the Shaw Gang's base of operations.

The Shaw gang had set up outside the walls, in the cave system where the artifact was buried. They weren't there for the artifact specifically — from what I could piece together, they'd stumbled into the location and decided to make it their base because the artifact's field kept the local wildlife away. Practical, in its way.

They had numbers. Guns, robots, turrets — the full setup of people who expected to be left alone and had made arrangements accordingly. Only Sam was with me. We didn't discuss a plan so much as read the same situation and arrive at the same approach.

It took a while to get through. The cave ran deep, deeper than I'd expected, and they'd had time to layer things properly. By the end of it the place was quiet and we were at the bottom, where the artifact sat embedded in the rock like it had been there since before anyone thought to build walls against the wildlife.

Shaw herself was waiting on the way out. She looked furious, but cautious. If she had JUST been furious, it's likely her dozen or so men would have opened fire the moment we walked out. But this was already over and the only remaining question was how it ended for her specifically. After some exchange of words, She let us pass.

Unfortunately, the Ashta that came to scout out this now artifact-less encampment were not so big on words. I helped Shaw take out the beasts, for which she was grateful, and we finally made our way back to the starport.

He was at the bar when we got back to the starport.

Same suit. Same stillness. I recognized him before I’d fully registered why, the way you recognize a feeling before you name it. I sat down a few seats away and he turned toward me, or did whatever the suited equivalent of turning toward someone is, and we picked up roughly where we’d left off in New Atlantis — as though the conversation had been paused rather than ended.

He said something that I’ve been chewing on since. That everyone, always, was trying to implement their own vision of how the world ought to be. The Freestar Collective wanted freedom — and would kill to protect it. The UC wanted order, and had built a military to enforce it. Constellation wanted knowledge — and sent people into danger to get it. The difference between the honest ones and the rest was just whether they admitted what they were actually doing. Most people dressed it up. Called it duty. Called it the greater good. The honest version was simpler: “I want this. I’m willing to use force to have it.”

I didn’t push back the way I had in New Atlantis. I wasn’t sure I disagreed.

He left before Sam found me.

Sam shook my hand when we got back to Akila. Not the both-hands shake Barrett does — one hand, firm, the way you shake hands with someone you've decided is worth shaking hands with. He said he wanted to come along.

Cora, from somewhere behind him, announced that she had already packed.

I told them both to get aboard the Razorleaf.

We got back to the Lodge from the Scow to find Noel at the comm station, face tight, running the same hail on repeat.

She’d been trying to reach Vladimir on the Eye for twenty minutes. No response. I stood there and watched her try again and again, and then the line crackled and Vlad’s voice came through — strained, but steady. They’d been attacked. A Starborn, alone. Sam was hurt. Hurt bad. He’d gotten what he came for and left on his own terms, and now he was heading to the Lodge next. Vlad’s recommendation was clear: stay, defend the Lodge, protect the artifacts.

I stood there for a moment with that. I don't know why I felt like I was contemplating something while everyone else felt miles away even as Noel frantically packed up the artifacts six feet to my left.

In the end I stayed.

I heard Walter before I saw what was happening — something heavy moving on the upper level, a struggle. I went up.

He was there.

Full matte black suit. No markings. The helmet completely opaque. He had Walter from behind with a gun to his head and an arm around his neck, and I stood at the top of those stairs and understood two things at the same time: that I had sat two seats away from this man at a bar in New Atlantis and another one in Akila, and that everything he’d said to me in both of those places had been perfectly true.

Everyone implements their vision by force. The honest ones just admit it.

He let Walter go when he saw me. Not out of mercy — out of something more like reorientation. Walter wasn’t the point. I put myself between him and the others and bought whatever time I could while Noel got everyone moving through the basement. When I made an opening I took it and we ran — through the basement, up through the Well, through the streets and the starport... The man in the Suit followed us the whole way. For the first time in the weeks since I'd arrived in this... Since I woke up on Vectera... I was afraid. Afraid of losing the new bonds I'd created, afraid of dying. This was a battle unlike anything I'd ever fought. And one that I don't think I could have won on my own. Andreja got the Naginata first, got it running, and I had the ship moving before the ramp had fully closed.

He followed.

His ship came up alongside us in orbit and he opened a channel, and the voice that came through was not the voice of someone who had been in a fight. He said he was done hunting us. Just like that. The tone of it — unhurried, full of curiosity and wonder — was worse than anything else that had happened. He hadn’t been threatened. He hadn’t been stopped. He had simply decided he was finished, the way you set something down when you’re done with it.

Then he was gone.

We set course for the Eye.

Sam Coe had been at the Eye.

Sam Coe was dead.

I don’t know how to write Sam Coe. I knew him for a handful of weeks. He was straight-laced and rough around the edges and he raised his daughter alone in a universe that makes that harder than it has any right to be. He had a father he was complicated about and frontier principles he wasn’t complicated about at all. He thought things through and then said them, without decoration, and I’d come to realize I trusted his read on situations in a way that surprised me when I noticed it.

He was a good man. I don’t say that easily. I mean it in the plain sense: he was someone who tried to do right by the people in front of him, consistently, without needing credit for it.

Andreja had gone in ahead of me at the docking bay.

I came through the entrance behind her and stopped.

She was on the floor near the entrance, Sam’s body in her arms, and she was crying in a way I had never seen Andreja cry and hope to never see again. Cora was kneeling beside them, her hands on her father’s arm. Her face, I...

She looked up at me.

“No. Go Away!” “I kept telling him to hold on. That you were coming. That you’d save him.”

She was right. She was completely, entirely right, and I had nothing to offer her.

"I HATE You"

I chose the Lodge. Sam died at the Eye.

I failed him. I failed her.

I failed.

The Alpha Tirna system has ten planets and a number of moons. He had been to most of them now.

He went alone. Every time. When Muira raised an eyebrow at the first landing he told her they were explorers. That was the last conversation they had about it.

She stayed on the ship. Mostly. When he came back from his outing, she was often standing outside the airlock in her suit — not waiting, or not admitting to it. She found things to look at. Rock samples. Atmospheric readings on her scanner. She looked up when he approached, without a word, or sometimes with a dry remark about having to stop slacking off now that he was back.

There was more significance in what went unsaid between them.

The moons were not hospitable. That was fine.

Tirna II-a: no atmosphere, point-one-eight gravity, barren but silently beautiful. He took the rover out for two hours across iron-grey terrain that gave nothing back in any direction. The silence was total — no wind, no atmosphere to carry anything, just the sound of the vehicle and his own breathing. Helium-3 in the rock. Nothing else of note. He catalogued what there was and came back.

Muira was outside. She appeared to be very interested in the landing strut.

Tirna VI-b: frozen, thin CO2 atmosphere, no life of any kind. The rover crossed ground that was pale and featureless in the way of places that have never had anything growing on them and never will. Chemical water locked somewhere beneath the frost. Eight different resources in the rock — gold and Europium among them, which felt like a joke nobody was laughing at. He took his samples and left.

Tirna VIII: a gas giant, unbothered by the survey. He ran the orbital scans from the cockpit and moved on.

The crew had dinner ready. Model G had started placing the food and retreating without being asked, which was appreciated more than was acknowledged. VASCO asked how it went every time. Fine, he said. Muira didn't ask. She ate and read something on her datapad.

He was a striking figure on the surface of Tirna IV, if there had been anyone to see it. The suit was deep red, the kind of red that had no business on a geological survey — a full-body shell of articulated plates, sealed at every joint, built for situations considerably more violent than sample collection. It caught the pale light of Alpha Tirna and gave nothing back. Even with his face obscured, he looked like a man broken into pieces and hastily glued back together.

He simply stood and listened.

Tirna IV had a sonorous lithosphere. The rock resonated — mineral composition, internal structure, something — and when the wind crossed the surface formations at the right angle the planet made sound. Low. Sustained. Felt in the chest before it reached the ears.

He stood there longer than the survey required. One hand flat against a rock formation, feeling it hum under the plating of his glove.

There was a thought nearby that wouldn't come into focus. The shape of something he'd been carefully not-thinking for weeks. He was almost at it when the comm crackled.

Noel's voice. Sam's funeral was tomorrow. She wanted to know if he was coming.

He looked at his hand on the rock. The planet kept humming.

"Yes."

The Lodge was quiet.

He arrived just before it began. The common room had been arranged — chairs, people standing at the edges, the particular stillness of a gathering that has not yet found its shape. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the room, his mind and body in agreement that he should not be here, but his last shred of humanity urging him to enter.

Jacob Coe was in the corner.

He recognized him immediately. The last time he'd seen the two of them together, in Jacob's office in Akila, the air between father and son had the quality of something long compressed — not an argument, exactly, but the residue of years of arguments bottled and remembered.

There was a raging voice in his chest demanding that he confront Jacob, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here, and where he got the nerve.

"Did... Did you ever patch things up in the end?"

Jacob was quiet for a moment. He said that all he had ever wanted was to protect his son. That his son had been out the door the moment he was old enough — away from him, from his mother, from everything they had built. That all he ever did was love his boy. That it should be him in the ground, not his son. He said it without anger. That was the part that was hard to listen to. The love and sorrow in it was plain and it had nowhere to go.

"I'm sorry for your loss..."

Cora was on the upper balcony, looking down. Beside her stood a woman he didn't recognize — composed, watchful, with Cora's same quality of taking stock of a room without appearing to.

She introduced herself when he reached them. Cora's mother. She said that Cora would be coming to stay with her for a while. It was probably for the best, after all, that she get away from all the reminders of her dead father.

He looked at Cora.

She looked back at him. The last time she had looked at him her face had been something he couldn't remember without a deep pain welling up in his chest. This was different. The rage was gone. What had replaced it was harder to name — a flatness, a kind of settled emptiness, as though she had arrived somewhere and found nothing waiting.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey" he replied.

She asked what the point of this was. Whether it was supposed to make anything better. He said something about keeping living. About how you had to. He heard himself saying it and knew it wasn't enough even as he said it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"Don't you get it?" she said. "Every single day is just going to be worse from now on."

He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer for it.

Below them, Noel was beginning to speak.

He made his way back down. He stood at the edge of the gathering and listened to Noel speak — about what they had lost, what Constellation had lost... She spoke well, even as she struggled to choke back tears.

When she finished, she asked if anyone had anything they'd like to say.

Every head in the room turned toward him. All of them, at once. He could see it in their faces — the way they’d been watching him since he walked in, the way this universe had been watching him since Vectera, The artifact, the pirates... The Starborn. And...

He walked to the lectern. He felt the weight and the pressure of everyone around him, the new family he'd found since waking up in this world, the people who had trusted him, the people who he had become a sort of defacto leader for...

The weight of their broken expectations.

His eyes glazed over and his focus blurred as they looked back and forth, going through the motions of "making eye contact" without truly seeing anybody. Walter. Mateo. Sarah. Barret. Vasco. Andreja...

There was a lamp on the corner table near a book shelf. The light flickered a moment.

He opened his mouth.

“Sam—”

The air in the room felt stale. The silence, oppressive.

He stood at the lectern for a long time after that. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Eventually, He apologized. It was unclear who this apology was for... Was it to Constellation, for failing them? Was it to Noel for failing to give a speech? Was it to Cora, for failing to save her father? Or was it to the one person not in the room with them?

He wasn’t sure how long he was up there. His body felt like something he was carrying. He breathed slowly. He stepped back from the lectern and moved through the room and did not look at any of them. He walked past a silent gathering of Constellation members. He walked past Vasco whirring quietly in the corner. He walked past the lamp, its light flickering like morse code trying to reach him. He walked down the steps and through the door and out into the cold air of New Atlantis. He walked toward the spaceport.

The ship was where he had left it. Inside there was only silence as Muira sat at a table contemplating some Chunks before her.

She didn't say anything. Neither of them did.

The Lodge was behind him now, Constellation was behind him now, but Cora's words were not behind him at all.

Every single day is just going to be worse from now on.

He sat in the pilot's seat for a long time before he started the engines. When he did, he already knew where he was going.