Second Suicide: A Short Story (Kindle Single) Read Online Free

says, “they’ll send us down.”
    Everyone
looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been
ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that
we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been
worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these
that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many
types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.
    #
    Instead of
spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going
over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before planetfall reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is
what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just
not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the
dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate, Lum .
I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of Lum sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below
me.
    Mil’s files
are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for
myself or for Kur . Lots of messages are
gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped.
Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.
    Quite a few
messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports
are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however.
There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I
wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these
ships that all my intel came. Does Earth have warning
of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles
and the consternation among the higher-ups.
    I think of
the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had
taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we
raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they
stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much
not-good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed
skills, but their state of readiness.
    Maybe I’m
reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into
Gunner, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into
boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High
Command is having none of such talk from a radio tech. Perhaps they deleted her
suggestions in case she turns out to be right.
    But why the
suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive, it’s that the chances of
offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is
not likely to be present when they are brought back.
    When my new
bunkmate Lum returns from her station duties, I set
the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.
    “Hey, Lum ,” I say.
    My bunkmate
is eating a gurd . With her mouth full, she raises her
stalks questioningly.
    “Did you . .
. notice anything strange about Mil before she . . . well, before either of her
suicides?”
    “Mmm,” Lum says. She swallows and starts taking off her work
clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my
tentacles that she isn’t.
    “Yeah,” she says.
“She was very different the days before. Both times.”
    “How so?” I
ask.
    Lum throws her clothes into the
chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she
says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering
after Lum’s lava blasts.
    “You mean,
she wasn’t usually calm?”
    “Her normal
state was to raise hell,” Lum says. She sticks her
head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of
the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the