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What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 2)

by Aimee Ogden

Quiet is a rare commodity in the habitat. Hob takes a moment to bask in it after he’s shucked his suit into the first empty locker. A friendly electronic hum—from the air circulation fans, the water recycling system, the pair of cleaning drones—takes the edge off the silence. As does the occasional scuffle from the ever-expanding family of field mice that’s made a home under the northwest solar array. Hob really does need to take care of that too, at some point: another little undesired exorcism.

A few kinks linger in his back, all the muscles that clenched up in anticipation of his fall, which haven’t figured out yet that they can let go. While he massages the sore spot over his hips as best as he can reach it, he pulls up the latest download packet from HQ and flicks through it. Blink, a pay stub deposited in his account. Blink, the smiling faces of the latest set of new hires, terraformers and exorcists alike. Blink, a sample serving of news headlines. A blurb about rapid changes in Zethari weather patterns careens past him, and he double-blinks to dismiss the rest of the packet before the news has another chance to leave a mark.

After a series of stretches and matching grunts (his toes are farther away than they used to be), he shoves his feet into his module shoes and stands back up. “I’m going to warm up a mealmix,” he says, and hesitates. “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. This situation sucks for both of us—but mostly for you.” He scratches the back of his head as if he’s speculating on the fly. “Are there…do you have people somewhere? Someone you’d want to send a posthumous message to?”
Ozzi trips over his own insubstantial feet, which is quite an accomplishment when you think about it. “A message?” he repeats, following Hob into the galley. “To let them know where I—how I—oh.” His eyes narrow. “Oh, nice try, though. I thought maybe you’d start by offering me some holographic injera and doro wat.”

“They’re not holograms. They’re illusions. We tap into the same source that any thaumaturgist does. Exorcists, terraformers, cosmological augurs.” Someone (Maseley) has left the pantry door ajar; Hob replaces the mealmix boxes into neater rows as he rummages around for the shrimp-flavored packages that no one else likes. Jaara complains that they don’t actually taste like shrimp, which is one hundred percent correct, but whatever they do taste like is delicious. “I’m not trying to sneak one past you. I already explained how it works.” He’s been told he has a reassuring voice. That’s why he’s mission boss, probably. You need someone who can say whatever shit you need him to say and make it sound true. “I mean, if you think you can keep yourself calm, you can dictate a message saying whatever you want, and I’ll send it to whoever you want.”

Add water, add extra salt and pepper and a packet of chili sauce, put it in the heater, wait. Ozzi phases in and out of his sight a few times while Hob waits, tapping a fork against the countertop. The heater dings; Hob opens the door and gingerly removes the hot mealmix, peeling back the lid to let eau de not-quite-shrimp waft out into the otherwise empty galley.

He’s picked his way through about half of the mealmix when Ozzi drifts back into quasi-existence opposite him at the table. “No,” he says slowly, as if he wasn’t sure what he was going to say until he opened his mouth. “No, I don’t have people. No one who wouldn’t be more upset to hear from me again than not to.”

Hob swallows a mouthful of room-temperature printed protein. “Sounds complicated.”

“It is.” Ozzi’s head tilts, and he swipes a finger through the soggy vegetables dangling from Hob’s fork. The finger passes through un-shrimped, and he makes a weird face that Hob can’t interpret. With CFMs and battle slugs, he doesn’t have to scrutinize the expression beneath the ghostlight glow to guess how the beasties are feeling. “How about you? Do you have people?”

“Nah.” Hob anoints a wad of noodles with the last sauce puddled in the corner of the mealmix packet. “Not anymore.” 

“Sounds complicated.” 

“About as simple as it gets, actually.” In Ozzi’s patience silence, Hob’s chewing sounds obnoxiously loud. He pushes the noodles into his cheek to say around them: “My parents were old. No siblings. Not married, not seeing anyone—they wouldn’t see much of me anyway, if I was. I don’t really keep in touch with the folks from my old job, and they don’t keep in touch with me.” He drops his spoon into his empty-enough mealmix and stands. “Except Jaara, I guess. We weren’t on the same squad back then. And she’s stuck here with me anyway.”

When he heads to the galley to throw away the packet and toss his spoon into the wash bin, Ozzi follows him—albeit through the wall instead of the doorway. “Sounds pretty fucking depressing if you ask me,” he says seriously, while the bottom half of his face is occupied by a shelf of beverage pods.

“That hits hard coming from a dead guy.”

Ozzi makes a deflating sound, sort of like a belly laugh that got roundhouse-kicked halfway through. “Jatya!” he swears (or at least it sounds like a swear to Hob, who has a working vocabulary of swear words that borrows from five or six different localects and languages). “I thought we were having a moment here.” A ginger attempt at a slap passes harmlessly through the side of Hob’s head. “Then you had to go bring up the whole dead-guy thing again.”

“Damn.” Hob dumps the rest of his mealmix unceremoniously into the biocomposter and leans his arms on top of it. “I guess that means we’re still a ways out from acceptance.”

They swap half-hearted smiles, and Ozzi dissipates like morning fog. Hob hangs on to the smile for a moment, staring into the empty space. Then he dusts his hands off on his pants and pulls up a side-tab for the compendium in his visual overlay. With the images and notes as a guide, he starts putting together a new illusion, from the bones up. This one has to walk the walk more convincingly than his poor battle slug carcass.

Every now and then, he flicks over to Jaara’s metric files. Orange, yellow, 250 kilometers per day, yellow, 87% first-attempt clearance rate, orange. The colors don’t change, of course, nor do the numbers underneath. But he can’t stop checking anyway.

---

The next morning, Hob stands alone in the shadow of his own personal module detachment, waving. No sign of the ghost yet today, which means he can claim this spare moment to see off the rest of the crew—and the rest of the habitat. Dozens of smaller modules school around the big central unit as it trundles over the open plain along the meridian. “Let us know if you need anything, boss,” says Yettal’s voice, in Hob’s ear. “Or if you think you’re starting to go crazy being out here with only haunts for company.”

“Dumbass,” hollers Maseley, “how’s he gonna know if he’s going crazy?”

A crackle of static precedes Jaara’s appropriate-volume command to keep the comm clear. They’re her problem now, and Hob only manages to work up a little guilt over that. 

When he turns back to his module, a little yellow notification circle starts blinking in the bottom left corner of his overlay. One of his recon drones has identified a site as worth investigating. 

“It’s not going to investigate itself,” he says, to no one, which is also who he has to convince that his illusion mock-up work-in-progress can wait. On foot, foregoing his protective suit in favor of a little extra mobility, he sets out into a pastel yellow morning.

The site is a few kilometers off the meridian, down a ravine that slouches through a section of the forest where the chestnut trees are gradually overtaken by some other species, slim white-trunked trees with dozens of eye-shaped black patches: silent watchers tracking Hob’s progress. They’re so spooky-looking that he has to wonder if they’re actually an Earth tree and not a remarkably staunch haunt—which should be impossible anywhere other than along the meridian. But it wouldn’t be the first impossible thing to happen to him this week, so he double-checks his compendium. “Birch?” he reads incredulously. In the localect he grew up speaking, the word is an egregious insult: a leech, a saboteur, someone who acts in selfish interest to the detriment of the habitat.

“Are you talking to me?” The haunt—Ozzi—falls into step alongside Hob without missing a beat. “Or yourself? Or another, secret, third person?”

Ozzi’s…wispier than usual, a clot of mist that vaguely suggests a person. An ex-person. “You look like shit,” observes Hob, “even for a dead guy.”

“Well, we’re pretty far off the, what do you call it, meridian.” Ozzi pulses, the shape of a shrug. “But I didn’t want you to get lonely.”

It’s not uncommon for a haunt to attach itself to an exorcist, follow it around until it can be safely dismissed, but usually exorcists hang pretty close to the meridian themselves. Such an activity might loosen Ozzi’s tentative grip on the afterlife; Hob weighs whether or not he should bring that up and finds staying silent to be the heavier option. 

“So?” Ozzi prompts, for want of a response from Hob. “What’s the deal? Taking a day off? Mental health walk in the woods?”

“Afraid not.” They emerge from the birches at the top of the ravine on Hob’s map. Below, a scabby black line cuts diagonally across the creek at the bottom of the slope. Dark wings flare to either side, a pattern of leafless once-white trunks that have burnt to a dark, ashy gray. At the terminus point of the line lies a hunk of wreckage, blackened at one end and stained metal at the other. A ship. Or the haunt of one, maybe. “Look familiar?”

“Oh—no.” A breeze sends ripples through Ozzi, and Hob loses sight of him altogether for a moment. “I remember it better before it was on fire.”

They make their way down the side of the ravine: Hob picking his way carefully over dew-slick rocks and steep leaf-littered slopes, Ozzi glittering vaguely in his wake. At the bottom, Hob walks a wide circle around the wreck itself. He can make out the last few digits of the ship’s registration number, which he subvocalizes to record in his notes. Whatever the ship’s name was, the paint there has peeled unreadably away in the heat from the fire. 

“Small,” he says. “Couldn’t have been more than four or five of you on board. So that rules out one of my theories.”

Ozzi, no longer beholden to the same laws of gravity as Hob, floats upward without responding. The sunlight that breaks through the canopy refracts at the suggestion of his misty shape, and Hob has to squint to see him. For want of a better idea, he keeps expanding on those defunct theories. “My first thought was a squatter ship. Dump in a load of your own colonists before anyone’s paying attention, claim a chunk of freshly terraformed land, hope no one notices until you can get some sympathetic news coverage.”

He speaks louder as Ozzi drifts around the curve of the ship’s hull. “Then again, I thought, maybe a thrill-seeker. We get a heads-up from HQ about those, once in a while. How close can we fly to the terraforming origin without getting wiped out of existence, ooh isn’t that fun; let’s race the meridians to the secondary nexus, this is a very good idea that has definitely never gotten anyone killed.”

Ozzi hasn’t made it back around the hull yet, so Hob follows in the direction he went. The haunt is, well, haunting the part of the ship where—Hob thinks—the cockpit would have been. “But you don’t fit the profile for that,” he goes on. Ozzi twitches, shrinking by a few centimeters. “Usually they’re either dumb kids or dumb old people who have outlived all the fucks they had to give. Which really only leaves one possibility.”

“Oh yeah?” says Ozzi. “And what’s that?”

“You and your crew were symps.”

A laugh ripples Ozzi’s outline. “Symps.”

“Exo-sympathizers,” Hob amends, and racks his brain. There are half a dozen groups, each with its own self-aggrandizing title for itself. “You’re with Sparrowfall, or the Hundred Thousand Suns, or—”

“You should just stick with symps.” Ozzi’s voice has lost its usual coat of cheerfulness. What’s underneath slices ice-cold into Hob. There are tender points even a protective suit wouldn’t cover. “It’s more honest. Excuse me a second.”

The ship’s hull shimmers once as Ozzi slides through it. Through the pitted wounds in the hull, Hob can hear him muttering to himself. He can’t make much out—the distance aside, Ozzi doesn’t seem to be speaking Spanglorin—but curse words have a certain texture that transcends language barriers.

While he waits for Ozzi to peter out, he picks his way around the wreck for a second, closer look. The front is in pretty bad shape, but the top looks more or less intact. Well. In a better state than he’d honestly expected. If he had the right safety equipment, he could probably get in through the wounds in the front of the ship and check out the rest.

A ferocious clang echoes inside the ship, scaring away the rest of his coherent thoughts. It’s followed up by Ozzi’s shout: a distinct Spanglorin “Fuck!”

Hob waits. It’s another couple minutes before Ozzi coalesces beside him; might be he lost his ability to hold on to his haunt-self after he failed at whatever it was he was doing in the ship. “Anything I can help with?” Hob asks mildly. “Being in possession of actual physical hands as I am.”

“No.”

They stand (and float) in contemplative silence. When Hob risks sidelong scrutiny of Ozzi’s expression, there’s not much there to see. Drifting, detached. Grief wakes an anger in some people, gets their fists up, starts them swinging. With others, grief books them a one-way ticket to a destination far from the immediacy of pain. With what he’s seen of Ozzi so far, Hob would have marked him as the first type, but both fight and flight tend to dig down to a deeper level than what most people display on the home screen of their personality. 

Well, what the hell; he decides to take a chance. “I could’ve respected squatters,” he says, and heaves a sigh. “The survivors of Caloteru IV, or the folks left behind in the Trei Belt after the iridium interests dug everything dry? There’s no one looking out for those people.”

Ozzi’s expression solidifies into incredulity. “No one’s looking out for exos, either. Not the ones that got mowed under to make room for New Bania, or Syfonica—certainly not the ones you casually deleted to make room for Zetharin—oh.” His voice, which had been gaining in volume and intensity, returns to conversational tones as he takes in Hob’s poorly hidden smirk. “Was that the laziest ever attempt to exorcise me the fuck out of your life?”

“Pfft. No. I could have kept egging you on way longer if I was trying to get rid of you.” Hob nods his head toward the wrecked ship. “Seriously. Is there anything you want me to look for in there?” He hesitates. “Or anyone?”

“Still no.” Ozzi’s eyes lift to the hole in the cockpit, then slide past, to the sky-spangled green canopy beyond. A bird calls quizzically in the distance, and another answers with the same curious chirp. “I don’t suppose they’ll just let it stay here.”

Even though he already knows the answer, Hob calls up his visual overlay. “We’re standing right in the middle of the lumber preserve for a planned settlement,” he says apologetically. He calls up a minor illusion, replicating the map in the air between them for Ozzi’s benefit. “See? They’ll probably haul it off to a dump. Maybe back up to space, if the settlers, the uh, refugees, make a big enough deal about having it here.”

“Well.” Ozzi puts a hand up as if to pat the blackened metal. He keeps his hand as close to the hull as he can without letting it pass through, so that it almost looks like he’s really touching it. Just for a moment, his arm is solid enough that Hob can barely see the trees through it. “All orbits decay in time. Shall we go?”

---

The walk back is either boring, exhausting, or both: Ozzi bleeds out of existence about a kilometer in. He doesn’t reappear until after Hob has gotten back to the module, scraped lunch out of a mealmix packet, put the last few finishing touches on his new illusion, and shoved his feet back into his still-sweaty boots. 

“No rest for the wicked,” Ozzi says cheerfully, as if this morning never happened, as if the crashed spaceship is still just a curious blip flagged by the recon drone. “Where are we off to this time?”

“‘No rest for the wicked’ is a funny thing for a ghost to say.” Although the lemon-yellow afternoon suggests heat, the air is cool on Hob’s face and arms when he steps outside. He sets out toward the CFM’s grove, noticing that he’s starting to wear a track through the grass in this direction. He knows the spells that would call new grass up from nothing and cover the scuffed dirt, of course. Ground cover is a basic incantation, one that every two-bit thaumaturgist knows. But he smooths over that corner of his thoughts and leaves the spell uncast. “Don’t you have anywhere better to be? Like, I don’t know, the afterlife?”

“I wouldn’t leave you to go alone. It can get dicey out there. Last time, you fell out of a tree!”

Hob snorts. “I think that was because I wasn’t alone.” The conversation is easy enough for him to run out of the background of his thoughts, banter operating on autopilot; most of his brain is occupied with watching out for CFM tracks, listening for the telltale crack of branches. “What did you call them?” he says, cultivating an air of absence. “The CFMs, I mean. Did you have a name for those?”

“Naming species was a little outside our scope. Temrethalin was our only biologist, and she was busy enough with other—” Ozzi cuts himself off, and Hob politely lets the name slide past as if he hasn’t heard it. “We all had better things to do,” Ozzi concludes instead. When he lifts a hand to flick a drooping chestnut branch, his fingers pass straight through.

“What do symps get up to? Was there an Adopt-a-Battle-Slug campaign in the works? That ship didn’t seem big enough to whisk away a whole herd to greener pastures.” The terrain is starting to look familiar; they’re not far from the tree where he had his first close encounter with the CFM. He slows down, listening, looking. The spell that usually helps him locate a haunt is useless right now—when he opens the source and thinks the right words in the right cadence, his thoughts light up with neon red arrows pointing right at Ozzi. “If you wanted to get up close with real exos, get your graduate degree in CFM-ology or whatever, you could apply to one of the affiliated research institutions.”

“We didn’t care about the individual species—no, let me rephrase. Our focus wasn’t on the biology of any given flora or fauna or bacterium or—or cabbage-faced motherfucker.” Ozzi barks a laugh at his own joke, hard enough to send ripples through his vaporous body. “For us, it was more than the loss of biodiversity. It’s the inhumanity of the process.” 

“Yeah, obviously; exos aren’t humans.” The words slip out of Hob’s thoughts and into his mouth, only too late does he realize it’s obviously the wrong thing to say. Ozzi sheds a cascade of glittering sparks, and Hob doesn’t know either human haunts in general or Ozzi specifically well enough to know what that means—surprise, shock, outrage? He steps on the heels of his own ill-thought-out comment in his haste to leave it behind: “I think we’re getting close. I’m going to set everything up, and then we can make ourselves scarce.”

He puts his back to Ozzi as he closes his eyes and calls up the idea he’s created. More than a mere image, this is a not-living-but-breathing rendition of a CFM. It casts a shadow; it gives off a sweet, swampy reek. As it solidifies and separates from the source that Hob used to make it, it rolls in a looping, wandering arc around the small clearing. Its cabbage-y appendages ruffle, and if Hob hadn’t been the architect of those delicate movements, he would think it looked as if the CFM was feeling out the shape of its own surprising new existence. 

“Interesting tactic. I didn’t think they were social creatures.” Ozzi makes himself the opposite of scarce, reaching out to touch one fluttering appendage. Hob almost expects his hand to make contact, as if two things that weren’t quite real and physical must meet on some other plane than the one Hob’s life operates on. But of course his fingers slide right through, and the CFM continues past him. It wasn’t designed to react to the kind of stimulus presented by Ozzi. 

Even though it ended poorly last time, Hob finds a foothold to haul himself up onto a low tree branch again. It’ll be harder for Ozzi to surprise him this time around. “You stay down there if you want, but I’m getting out of the CFM smash zone.”

When he pulls himself another branch higher, Ozzi is waiting for him. “How many planets did you flip?” he asks conversationally. Like this is a job interview and he has some concerns about Hob’s work history. “As a terraformer.”

The easy lie catches in Hob’s throat. His instinct is to spit it out, but he knows, in the long run, it would only do more damage. 

Being honest with Ozzi means being honest with himself.

“One. Just one.”

A rumbling vibration spares him from Ozzi’s reaction. The CFM has arrived, and it’s headed straight for Hob’s illusion—as straight as its bizarre method of locomotion will allow. The frequency of the vibrations increases to a trill, and the cabbages bloom a darker color, purplish black, as it approaches the puppet-CFM. A query, or a request, perhaps, asked in color and sound.

And answered in kind. The illusion does exactly what Hob designed it to do, burning source as it flushes pinkish-purple, buzzing its encouragement. It everts the net of membranes tucked under a flap beneath the bulk of its body. The membrane shines wetly, the bluish veins within it pulsing, as it protrudes toward the haunt. The haunt everts a membrane sack of its own, from which spongy, branching tubes emerge, and—

“Oh, what the fuck,” says Ozzi in dismay. His indistinct form twists, head one way and torso the other, as if he’s not sure whether he’s supposed to avert his eyes. “Are you kidding me?”

The CFM—the dead one—continues to slide up the musical scale until its trilling becomes a full-on shriek. This isn’t a question, it’s an exclamation, and it’s roughly the same one Ozzi just made, translated into CFM-language. Its colors change again, dappling and then muting, as it gropes around its would-be mate. But there’s nothing there to grope, nothing real. Look, but don’t touch. The proboscis—penis-sponge-thing—flexes, spasms, recedes. The CFM wails once more, in confusion or anger or both or neither; Hob doesn’t care what emotion it’s feeling as long as it’s feeling a lot of it. 

Then it shrivels in on itself, and dissolves. The illusory CFM remains, still presenting its ripe membrane sac. Hob resents that he knows the phrase “ripe membrane sac,” let alone that his eye for detail spent so much time familiarizing itself with the concept. He lets the illusion go, unspent energy sliding back into the source’s fathomless reserves.

“Was that it?” Ozzi’s voice comes out strained—not tense to the point of snapping, but certainly with whatever else he wants to say pulling the words tight. “Did it…work?”

“It’s working.” Not as much progress as Hob hoped for, but Ozzi’s going to try to guilt him for every hard-earned inch. “You’re lucky you didn’t have to see this on Victory. They had these, uh, what did we call them—oh, bug-eyed hairbrushes, and do you want to guess what the dick on one of those things looks like?”

Ozzi follows Hob when he descends, carefully, from the tree. “This isn’t empty prudery. It’s not like I grew up in a sex-neg culture, I just—fuck.” 

He’s not behind Hob’s shoulder when Hob looks up from examining the site of the CFM haunt’s disappearance. Could he have—? No, there wasn’t enough emphasis behind that “fuck” to trigger a transition. Hob makes his tight chest relax enough to draw in a full breath. Make some notes. Write down his ideas, make a vague sketch, in case he forgets before he gets back to his mobile unit. 

He’s finishing up, tucking his compendium back into its pocket, when Ozzi speaks up, from far overhead in the trees where he can’t see. “I’ve never really understood why they can’t just terraform the dying planet itself. Like Zetharin. Divert a couple blocs of the Transit Fleet, load everyone and everything that matters onto a ship—all at once instead of in waves, like they’ll move people here. Send in the terraformers, reset everything back to factory defaults. One happy healthy brand-new sparkling-clean planet, zero dead planets, everyone wins.”

“They don’t take guys like me aside to explain company policy.” He looks around but can’t find a spark of ghostlight anywhere in the shadows. His line is a weak one, and he knows it. He doesn’t need a primer on the economics of it all. It’s only a matter of how you draw your lines of cost. C-suite execs see a bottom line that has to accommodate valuable and often perishable freight—freight that would only lose value while Transit Fleet ships serve as apartment buildings instead of cargo transports. It’s much pricier to house a planet’s population for the months and months it takes to execute a successful terraformation and clearance than it is to just leave them in place for the time being. And if you waste a planet that didn’t offer any economic value in the first place, then it’s hardly a waste at all. Folks like Ozzi do their accounting differently, and that’s fine for him, if he wants to go start his own pro bono terraforming organization, and in the meantime other people like Hob have to live in the real world where food doesn’t fall from the sky and engine fodder doesn’t grow on trees.

“It’s expensive,” he says, to a knotty chestnut tree, since he still can’t tell where Ozzi is. “That’s all. It would be too expensive.”

A rustle shakes the branches somewhere overhead. A pair of leaves, still green, flutter idly down. They settle silently to the forest floor. Hob calls Ozzi’s name without really expecting an answer.

Not because he’s crossed. Hob doesn’t think so. He really doesn’t think so. It would take more than that. There are lines that haven’t been crossed. All of this today was about exorcising a CFM, not a human being. But Hob walks back alone anyway, following his own tracks homeward.

---

The next morning, Hob wakes himself before his alarm. There’s a lot to do today, and their schedule is only getting tighter. He reads through updates from Jaara first—the next sector has been quieter, thank goodness, and they’ve made up a little of their lost time. He signs off on a few decisions, crew schedules, and supply drop requests. 

The last thing in the packet is a list of potential rendezvous points, depending on how soon he thinks he can clear the ground here. With time, they get farther apart and closer to the secondary nexus…except for the final point, which is right where he’s sitting now. 

It’s not as if they couldn’t get by without him. It’s not as if they aren’t getting by without him right now. Jaara feels better if she can point to his signature on the things she’s already figured out; he’s just her magic ballet shoes or magic feather or magic magnetic boots, depending on which version of that story the grown-ups in your habitat told. It’s not the end of the world if he stays here, circling the drain, a while longer. The world already ended, a long time ago now.

He fusses for a while over a new illusion, recycling some parts from the previous version where he can, altering scale and paint colors and textures as needed, but his heart isn’t in it. In the late morning, he loads a too-heavy bag and heads out, under a sky scabby with clouds, in the direction of the wrecked ship. 

Before he comes within sight of it, he changes tack. Back and forth, wide swings, keeping himself between the meridian and the ship. He kicks up underbrush as he goes, silencing the creak of crickets; he rifles through piles of leaf litter and sends flocks of startled birds skyward. There’s no guarantee he’ll find what he’s looking for. All creatures come into the world with a hunger, whether they arrive as squirming squalling nestlings or fully formed adults. Surely one of them, surely a whole swarm, has been through here before him. 

In the end, it’s because of that hunger that he finds the body. He thinks it’s a mushroom at first, a swell of white tucked between the roots of a tree. But when he gives a testing poke, his fingers find something smooth and hard. He tugs, and the roots grudgingly surrender the gape-eyed skull. It’s streaked with dirt, but there’s not a molecule of flesh clinging to it. No way to know if it’s actually Ozzi’s, but a quick analysis from Hob’s overlay tells him the markers of age and size are a match.

So.

He takes his time spiraling outward from that spot, and turns up a few more odds and ends. Most of an arm, a few desiccated shreds of ligament holding humerus to radius, or ulna, Hob can’t remember which is which. Three rib bones and a vertebra, scattered at distant points, all of which show signs of tooth marks. He doesn’t even try to distinguish carpals and tarsals from pebbles, overlay or not. Everything he finds, he adds to a growing pile alongside the skull, and stands back, wiping his dirty hands on his shirt. 

The modular habitat doesn’t have a shovel. It’ll have to be a flattish rock and bare hands. The hole doesn’t get very deep, not even after a great deal of effort on Hob’s part, but then, with remains this thoroughly picked over, he probably doesn’t have to aim for a full two meters. Once he’s thrown dirt back over, to fill in the big empty spaces around the bones, he stands for a moment. Maybe he should throw a couple flowers on it. Maybe he should say something.

Maybe he should get on with his work.

In the shadow of the shipwreck, he unfolds the ladder from his pack and counts the sections of Process he’s about to violate. Jaara would have known specific page numbers, probably, but he contents himself with ticking off on his fingers. One: Don’t enter potentially unsafe terrain alone. Two: Always have a plan for safe evacuation. Three: Don’t scale a ladder without a crew partner at the bottom to hold it steady. Well, he’s kilometers outside Process by now, and it’s HQ that sent him there, so to all seven hells with Process at this point.

It takes some maneuvering to get him inside the cockpit in a way that he’s (fairly) certain will let the charred metal take his weight. Once he’s there, he finds himself in the company of two of Ozzi’s late friends: a pair of half-melted spacesuits with blackened bones peeping through at separated shoulder seams. The industrious creatures that tidied up Ozzi’s remains haven’t been at work in here: the unpleasantly organic smell of decaying flesh asserts itself over the ozone stink of the fire.

Hob eases them, one at a time, out of their seats and totes them toward the hole in the hull. “Sorry,” he says helplessly, but there’s no way he can navigate the ladder safely with a corpse on his back. He tips them out onto the dirt below and doesn’t look to see them land.

There’s not much else to see in the cockpit, except smoke stains and cracked computer screens and the flame-retardant emergency kit under the main console. Hob opens that and peruses the contents: a first-aid kit (bleakly hilarious), next-of-kin contacts (not that funny at all, actually), and the datasafe that probably backed up their reconnaissance or research or whatever they did, which might also tell Hob something about what happened to the ship. He slides everything into various internal pockets on his suit for safekeeping, except for the respirator mask in the first-aid kit, which he slides over his face, enjoying his next breath of trimethylamine-free air.

There’s one more body in the cabin behind the cockpit, and Hob hauls that to the front of the ship too. Once he climbs down, he apologizes again to the three corpses, and arranges their limbs a little less pathetically: straightening legs, folding arms across chests.

“Oh, sure, I see,” says Ozzi. It takes Hob a moment to locate him, a crystalline spangle of ghostlight in a shaft of pure sunlight. “I’m supposed to try to fuck them, yeah? That’s your M.O.?”

“Don’t be a dick.” Hob takes a deep breath. Even in the respirator, the flavor of rot clings to his skin. It’s enough to make a guy a little edgy. “I’m trying to be human. Do you want me to bury them? Do you want to just say a few words, or—?”

“I’ve already said everything I need to say to them.” Ozzi coalesces a little: the suggestion of a shoulder, a face. “Are they going to let a grave just stay here in their nice neat new forest?”

“They might. If I request specially.”

A red glitter shivers through Ozzi. Hob says, reluctantly: “No. Probably not.”

“Okay.” Ozzi fades again, then pulls back together, even clearer than before. “Sure. Yeah. Bury them.”

Hob isn’t going to get any less tired standing here. He starts, again, to make a hole. This time, there’s a fragment of the hull that makes for a halfway-acceptable shovel, and the ground is softer here too, deep lodes of a friendly and eminently diggable silt. Maybe this is where the terraformers planned to put a green cemetery. He probably needs to dig deeper this time. And his back is already tired from his earlier efforts. It’s going to be a long day, an extra long one in a series of long, long days.

He stops more often for breaks, to wipe the sweat from his face, to see if Ozzi is still there. After a few of these, he stops to sit on the side of the growing grave and takes a crewcake out of his pack. These things are supposed to provide on-the-go energy for a day of heavy work, but mostly they just seem to work his jaw muscles to the point of drooling exhaustion. 

“So,” he says, gnawing a corner off. “What was it like? Up there?”

Ozzi pauses in his lonely, drifting vigil over the silent bodies. He’s almost a full haunt now, even this far from the meridian. Hob can see the lines in his forehead as his eyebrows rise. “You’ve been there,” he says. “At least we only saw it through the drones. But you’ve been right there. You know better than I do.”

Hob thinks about waves of light washing over a world. He thinks about scarlet snake-whales the height of a man, screaming and writhing as they fight the inevitable. He thinks about iridescent flowers a cartwheel in circumference, whose petals immediately droop and wither and relinquish their hold on life, not enough substance to their soul to demand their own right to existence. He takes a bigger bite of the crewcake. It takes him longer to chew, so his tight throat has a chance to relax. 

“Real nightmare shit,” he says, once he’s worked his way through the mouthful.

The sound Ozzi makes is a little too desperate to be called a laugh. The conversation feels over, but Hob isn’t ready to pick up the shovel again yet. He nods toward the three crumpled spacesuits. “Who were they, Ozzi?” 

“My friends.” Ozzi thinks a moment, then adds: “My coworkers. My family. The lines get blurry in our line of work.”

“That can happen with people who care a lot.”

“Not that you would know.”

“Not that I would know.”

They grin wearily at each other across the clearing, across the line of bodies. Hob pushes himself to his feet and picks up his makeshift shovel.

---

Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was part TWO of “What Any Dead Thing Wants”, by Aimee Ogden, narrated by Isaac Harwood. Next week will bring you part THREE and thus the satisfying conclusion.

Some things I liked this week! Obviously the detail of the shrimp-flavored mealmix that definitely doesn’t taste like shrimp but is equally definitely delicious, at least to Hob. Symps! WHat a perfect insult-y word by the capitalist corporations for the activist exo-world sympathizers (which I assume by now you are beginning to have quite a bit of sympathy for.) Also! Ripe membrane sac, and Hob’s disgust at knowing the concept.

This section also has a moment where Hob makes an ill-thought out comment to Ozzi that “exos aren’t humans.” But here it marks a change — Hob has been making annoying comments on purpose so Ozzi will have enough emotion to leave. But now he is clearly seeing Ozzi in a different light, because when he makes the annoying comment, he tries to quickly move on, and get past it.

And finally, we also get the detail of WHY we terraform other planets, when we could obviously re-terraform our own destroyed ones. Capitalism, of course.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.
And for our closing quotation this week we return to Mary Oliver’s poem “The Waterfall,” which says:

Gravity is a fact everybody
knows about.
It is always underfoot,
like a summons

Thanks for listening! And have fun.