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Final Trumpet

Accidents happen. That much is true in life. Sometimes they happen with such frivolously economic frequency that one begins to doubt the nature of the world around them, if the world or some divine being has seen to denounce, abash, and ridicule them to the extent of its abilities. Such notions we brush off as being the rambling, ridiculous imaginings of the uneducated and brash, we think, until they begin to happen to us. Poe had once written of the Angel of the Odd, a diminutive and strange fellow who wore a funnel-cap and drank profusely, and who was responsible for all of the strange, baffling, and curious occurrences of the earth; I know it is fiction, but I often wonder.

I don't know how the lights went out. They were on, and now they're not. They've been off for a good two hours or so; if the emergency generators were ever going to kick in, they would have done so already. The ship was designed with power failures in mind, but this, whatever it was, was beyond a total seizing of the power. The Vesta was dead.

Even with the lights out, the ship had been paralyzed next to a large, gaseous planet; the light emanating from it would have driven away the shadows of the large cockpit. But there was nothing, only darkness so thick that you could hold it in your hands, imagine it sliding through your fingers like oil. I wasn't bothered by the dark, but the heating system had been deadened as well and I could feel the temperature falling, the heat fading away. Somewhere close by, Angie was playing the trumpet, the melancholy notes humming along the shadow-laced steel walls.

"Angie?"

No response.

"Angie, please talk to me."

Nothing, not a word, only the trumpet in the black. I listened to it and felt tears coming up to my eyes. I had no room for any other sensation; I'd already blown my emotional budget on everything else. I sat down on the cold floor, my back up against one of the fixed chairs--probably the captain's--and allowed my mind to wander down broken hallways of my memory. I don't want to, but I have to; I can imagine light there.

The _Vesta_was a light-class research vessel, but it was recycled from the cadaver of a much larger merchant ship that was destined to the scrapyard, but certain people had put sentimental value on it. Some calls were made, the hold was converted into a research lab, the name was placed into a new list, and it festered in the city's hangar for a few years before somebody finally came up with a good excuse to use it. Rosacea had been a commerce city for the better part of a century, and at times it would be difficult to discern whether or not it was night or day for the ships constantly coming in or heading out, their anti-gravity ports glaring like miniature suns through the star-filled dark. In the morning, the sky was silver-red and hazy with the gasses that poured from smokestacks that weren't smoke, but at noon there was often a strong wind that blew the commercial fog down to Polaro or Lounon City and I could watch the ant-like procession of vehicles from my apartment building beneath the blue sky. The evenings were not much different, the blue of the sky bleeding back into a silver-red and the wind sometimes dying down to allow the fog to reclaim what it had lost and you begin to see why the city was named after a skin disease.

Time doesn't exist in big cities. Businessmen you see walking down the street toward you or beside you can talk about calendars, time schedules, and setting up dates, but when it comes down to the dry, undiluted truth of it, time doesn't exist. Life is a long cycle of things that happen and circulate around to one another, and that system is given the name "time" and classified into neat little folders marked "seconds," "minutes," et cetera.

The _Vesta_wasn't a very big ship, not as big as they can get, but it was a sizeable machine and it needed people to work it, so, sparked on little more than a whim and the post-university promise that our lives would be filled with prosperity just because we studied there, I immediately signed up and sent in my papers. A call on the phone two days later and I was in.

I was surprised, actually, that Captain Cross and whoever else he had as assistants in the hiring process would even consider a photographer to be a good addition for the expedition. I imagine they wanted pictures to give to magazines to display the fruits of our labors, but I would have put my money on that I was hired to show federal agencies and docking stations that our endeavor was indeed for research. There were a lot of hijackers these days, a lot of people with differing political, ecological, or religious views, and the best way it seemed to get everyone's attention was to take over a ship.

If any of those people realized that once the situation reaches media attention--which is exactly what they want--they get instantly written up as crazies, maybe then they'd all shut right the hell up and let everyone get on with their lives.

I boarded the Vesta with little more than several cameras and a change of clothes for a couple of weeks. I had to go through several months of procedures and simulations and run through a battery of tests, just so I could wander around the ship and follow people around. Regulations, an expensive waste of time.

There is little I remember about the days leading up to and the day of my arrival aboard the Vesta; there was nothing much of any particular interest, no grandiose event to mark it, so I allowed it to become lost to memory. As far as I was concerned, it was just a job. I climbed into the taxi cab and looked out the window as it ferried me up the gravity lines to the Vesta, watching people and other vehicles going about their business just as I was going about my own. I was met by a mass of other ship personnel that had been hired and, among them, a group of beaurocrats hoping the sponsors' money had not been wasted. There were two hundred of us, all clustered and tightly packed into the then empty cargo hold. The captain gave a long speech about safety and protocol, reiterating what all of us had already read and heard three times before to drive the point home. He then said something about having such a good and reliable crew, though I doubt he'd even worked with one percent of us.

In truth, I didn't quite perceive everything as I should have because my mind was elsewhere, too busy locked down on something else to pay attention to anything. I had known for some time that my fiancée had been seeing someone on the side, had known it ever since I had noticed the change in the way he carried himself, the way he talked, the way he became more confident with each passing day, and the way he didn't bother to cover his tracks. He would often leave his phone out, openly displaying numbers and names I didn't recognize. I talked to him about it one night, and he didn't become angry or anything, didn't try to deny it, and I didn't harangue him over it. We had been drifting further and further apart, it was inevitable for something to happen to make us realize this wasn't going to work; neither of us were ready. I helped him get his things, and he gave me one quick look, an apologetic glance before heading out the door.

I had thought that the sound of the door shutting would have stuck with me for a long time, as though that one instance would forever be marked separate from every other time the door had closed. Turns out, it was just another time the door shut. Wood against wood, metal lock clicking into place, goodbye.

I had tried to let Jason go, but it was harder than I had thought. He was not my first love, but neither was he the worst. I ended up missing him more and more as the days progress, missed his presence, his silhouette in the doorway, and I remember feeling that same bleeding pang of loss as I sat in the taxi, waiting for it to reach the docking hangar of the ship, and for the long two hours I had spent in the simple living quarters in the barracks prior to the fixed, mandatory lunch hour. I remember there was a lot of excited conversation in the lunchroom--the captain was adamant about calling it the mess hall, which made the pacifists a little nervous--concerning our destination, the places we would see between there and here, and all the potential discoveries we would make. I scoffed whenever I heard one of the sciency types make some kind of overly enthused comment and tried to make a show of indigestion or coughing.

I didn't really care for many of the people I met there. They were pushy and arrogant, and often selfish to the point where they began to resemble children, though I doubt many children would act the way they had. Even though I was the cameraman, it seemed at times that they knew more about lighting, filters, and proper documentation--or at least they fancied they did. After following a person who believed they had a lot of important things to say for a couple hours, I would begin to find the dark confines of my little room more comforting than the open, hexagonal corridors and brightly lit recreational rooms. I wasn't being antisocial, it was just those self-righteous bastards were so tiring.

I would often stare at my reflection in the simple, rectangular bathroom mirror. I was tall and dark for my species, something I had inherited from my grandfather apart from the scoliosis and a novelty alarm clock; scales the color of pencil graphite covered my body from head to toe, but the tip of my long tail brightened into a blue like a summer sky. I was born with chestnut brown hair but once I became fifteen I began dying it to match my tail. I wasn't very athletic or trim and I didn't care to be, though I tried to take care of myself. At least that much I was good at. My purple eyes I got from my mother, more than she'd ever need to give me.

It was on the third time-cycle aboard the Vesta, I believe, that I first met Angelo. It was an accident, pure and simple and one hundred percent inflicted on my part. I was in the shower, trying in some way to forget the nonsense of the people I had to work with--I had turned off the water at the exact moment a streamer of soap had slid into my eyes. I started groping around for the towel I had set on a hook nearby, swearing so loudly in my head that some of it had managed to slip out. When my hands connected with something dry and fuzzy, I happily used it to wipe my face.

"Hey!" cried a voice that echoed off of the walls in its shrillness and surprise. I opened my eyes and, much to my own shock, saw the slim, small shape of a fox standing in front of me, a yellow-orange shape in front of my stinging eyes.

There was some laughter bouncing off the walls, and I saw the blush flare up on his face. He looked around with wide eyes at the crowd--there was a small gathering in the shower, hardly enough to be called a crowd, but I suppose it was enough for him--and without looking at me or anyone else, the poor guy ran out of the shower room like his tail was on fire, before I had even a chance of apologizing. The laughter continued unabated until the humor lost its flavor some ten or so minutes later, and by that time I had already dried myself, put on a change of clothes, and headed out into the corridor. Before I left I had asked someone, a rather large and muscular specimen of a geologist, whom I had just mistakenly used as a towel.

The tiger had told me that he was an engineering specialist that had been hired aboard for his work with non-antigravity systems. To hear that thin, rather shrimpy fellow be called an engineer my ears found somewhat dubious, but far stranger things have happened. I felt bad for humiliating him, and I had made up my mind to apologize, but when I asked the tiger what the engineer's name was, he had no answer.

It was perhaps a week after this incident, or at least many, many hours later when I had by chance encountered him again. It was once more in the shower, and I was standing beneath the corner faucet closest to the exit, lost in my own mind. There was nobody else in the room, and when I heard the pattering of steps and saw his form emerge into the hot mist, I felt a tinge of joy. He was a difficult man to find, elusive to the point of nonexistence, and I know from experience that that embarrassing event--for which I was responsible--had been stewing and congealing in his mind during the interval. He had stepped to one of the faucets at the far wall, never noticing me; with the hopes of making amends I stepped quietly through the mist toward him.

"Excuse me?"

He looked up at me and I saw the soft features of his face break into a grimace, and I didn't blame him. He said "Ugh, hi," and stared at the wall in front of him, a familiar expression of disdain on his face.

I proceeded to tell him about the accident and the fact that it was an accident, and as he listened to me I saw the features of his face soften, very slowly and with evident reluctance. While I spoke, I couldn't help but let my eyes roll over him, following the curves of his body. There was a tattoo on his upper arm, thin black letters that I couldn't see quite clearly in the mist. When I had finished, the fox was quiet for a while; he only looked at the wall, with a sad smile on his face. When he spoke, his voice was gentle and muted by the fog. I saw that his eyes were the same pool of blue as a summer sky.

"I know you didn't mean to be rude, it was just an accident. I've just been really nervous about...all this." He gestured around him, sweeping his hand in a tight arc.

"The shower?"

"No, this. Being up here this far, with nothing all around us. Nothing but nothing. Ever since we started, it's been getting to me. Sorry."

"No, it's not a problem. I know how it is." I lied; I had no idea how it was. This was my first time beyond the atmosphere of Xicarph, as well, and I had never really given much thought to my surroundings, of what lay beyond this ship, until now. I just took it as a miscellaneous fact--I was in space, so what? Standing next to him I started to think about that, the cold and the dark all around us, pressing inward. Fear took on the consistency of a knife, tearing through the nerves in my spinal column. When he spoke, the suddenness of his voice nearly made me jump.

"I don't see you around much," the fox said. "You're barely in the hallways and you're never in the mess hall. Are you one of the scientists?"

I laughed, whether from the idea that he thought that I was a scientist or that he had been noticing where I was and was not. "No, I'm a cameraman. They hired me to show people back home that we're not wasting good tax money."

"Ah."

We lapsed into vocal silence, the splash of water on the tile like rainwater echoing along the walls. I expected somebody to walk in and ruin the conversation, but nobody did.

I took a step closer to him, rather eager to see his tattoo and what it said. Through the thin mist I could see the letters, and my heart fell when I read the name "Angie."

"Is that your girlfriend?"

"What?"

I pointed to his tattoo. He looked at it, a little smile breaking his face. He had a nice smile.

"Oh, no. Actually, that's my name."

I returned his smile, feeling awkward. He told me that his name was Angelo, but he liked being called Angie and that he had gotten the tattoo after a night of heavy drinking. Being in the tattoo parlor, he said, was the only thing he remembered from that night, the dimness of the lights, the heavy smell of patchouli incense, and a young hyena with a purple, blue, and green mohawk sitting somewhere at his left, a dull warmth tingling under his fur. I made something up about being drunk and doing something stupid, and he laughed.

We heard the clang of a door opening and shutting, and Angie jerked his head to the shower room entrance. He looked back at me and asked what my secured email and room number was. I told him what they were, and he told me his. As several others went about their business, Angie finished up his wash and headed out. I tried to not notice as he walked out, but the twitching of his soaked tail brought my eyes down to his rear, and I liked what I saw.

I will not try to deceive myself or anybody else, I had felt a bur of criminality sticking to my bones when I flirted with him. I still had Jason in my mind and my heart, and the sliver of him that remained would not leave. I knew full well that I was being silly, but the sensations were still there. In fact, after I came back to the dim confines of my room I began thinking heavily about Jason, Angie, and myself, psychological expulsion. I set myself to the task of removing Jason from my mind.

Spurred on by what Angie had said, I began frequenting the mess hall more often, imposing myself on places I otherwise would shy away from just for the chance to see him. He haunted a corner seat by one of the far, wall-hugging tables, allowing me to make the assumption that he was a man of ordered habit. When I began sitting next to him, nobody made any assumptions; our social invisibility was a great boon. We would often send emails to each other over the ship's computer system, and we quickly devised a careful code. Some of our messages were personal.

As our affinity for each other grew over the passing days, the Vesta was slowly but surely reaching its destination. The star system had been lovingly referred to in books and maps as the Wharden system, named after a famous surrealist painter who had lived a century earlier. It was a fitting designation, I had learned, for there were many aspects and facets of the Wharden system that remained a mystery to the civilized universe. Things that simply should not be were occurring and recurring there, anomalous things that spat in the eye of science with such vigor and defiance that it had finally spurred a research group to travel there and gather information, if any information can be made. Personally, I believe it would lead to only more and more questions, as is the nature of these things.

The closer we came to Wharden, the more animated the scientists became, as though they were magnetized to the lust of research. They spoke more quickly and succinctly, and became more easily frustrated with those who didn't understand what they were talking about or who they felt were detrimental to their cause. As the documenter, I found that it didn't take much to get their dander up.

My job was to shadow the scientists and the crew each and every day (that was exactly how it read on the papers they gave me: "each and every day...for the remainder of the expedition") and the finds they would make, if any, upon reaching Wharden. I had already garnered some twenty-odd hours of footage, some four hundred photographs--some were good but there was a lot more crap than otherwise, just taking up good space, and truncating the good from the bad would take a good day or two. This wasn't a one-man job, but you can bet I was looking forward to that uncut paycheck.

It was the day after we had reached the Wharden star system that Angie had invited me to his room--number 208. Feeling my nerves jangling around as I walked down the hall, a tray of lunch cradled in my hands and my camera absently bouncing against my hip, Jason filled my mind. I remembered him walking out the door, the look on his face. I didn't want that again.

When he opened the door, I was assaulted by a thick wave of some flowery scent, the concentrated aroma of an entire garden that rushed up my nose and almost made me choke. He was wearing a blank, dark blue shirt, a pair of black pants that looked flashy in the light of a desk lamp behind him. He gave me a smile, and I couldn't help but smile back. Jason was driven back and out of my head as I stepped through the doorway.

We ate lunch there and talked, seated at a table he had set up beside the wall. There was a window beside us, but it was covered over by a thick white curtain. I forced my head to wrap itself around the complexities of his work, but I've never been any good with numbers. He was very astute and knowledgeable; he didn't have a budget for ten-dollar words. I was rather impressed and a little intimidated, but he was very nice and polite. Angie didn't flaunt himself around, like many of the people I work with; many of his accomplishments he brushed off as mere flukes. I shook my head, telling him there was no such thing. I took a sip of my water--Angie didn't drink alcohol anymore, specifically not at work--and looked at him, looked at the tilt of his smile in the soft light.

"So what else do you do, Angie? What do you do when you're not finding and fixing problems on the ship?"

"Uh, not much, not really. I'm pretty boring."

"No, you're not. Trust me, I know boring, I am boring."

After some hesitation and nervous shifting in his seat, Angie cleared his throat. "Well, sometimes I play the trumpet."

"Really?"

"But it's not professional stuff. I mean, I just play when I'm nervous."

"Which would be a lot, I'm guessing."

"Yeah...The notes help me calm down."

"I can understand that."

The fox smiled at me before sticking a forkful of food in his mouth, evading further conversation. He didn't mind talking about work or his job specs, but when it came to himself he always clammed up. I wondered if he knew I had noticed this or not, but I think he did.

After a bit of lengthy persuasion I managed to convince Angie to play a few bars for me. He was very reserved about it, like he was trying to keep everything that was him a secret from the outside world, but finally he had relented. He got up and grabbed a small black case from beneath his bed, bringing up a fine looking trumpet. Its light, brassy surface glistened with a perfect polish, showing me how well he treated his instrument. Angie stood there for a few seconds just holding it, his eyes darting from me to the trumpet as though I might ridicule him. I told him to go on, and he looked at the door--goddamn, was he jumpy.

When he closed his eyes and put the mouthpiece to his lips, a sound broke across the dim room, a sound that was haunting, sad, but held an illusion of joy. I listened to him as he played a song that I could almost recognize, a song from a movie that was popular when my grandparents were young. I was enchanted as he played through its entirety, feeling the notes reverberate and strike some kind of nerve in me. When the song was over some three minutes later, I had just enough self-awareness to understand that my mouth was hanging open.

"How was that?" Angie asked, and in all honesty I was stricken dumb. He looked like he had made some transgression, like he had done something he wasn't supposed to, which flabbergasted me. He was amazing--I told him so and asked for another. The fox smiled and shook his head, but he played anyway, his tail brushing through the air with a new vigor. I sat there and listened, I could only listen, all my attention stuck on him and his instrument. When he had finished another rendition, a lighter, livelier song from another sepia-toned age, I brought up my camera and asked if he minded. Angie gave me a look, worried about something though I could see the secreted intrigue.

"Is this for the documentary?"

"Nope, personal album only."

The fox gave a nervous smile, glancing at the door as if it might burst open at any moment. I let him take a moment or two to get comfortable and ease into it before I began shooting. It was only in having him fill the camera lens that I realized that not only was he intelligent, skillful, and a wonderful person, he was beautiful. It was much later after I had returned to my room that I realized how great a person he really was, and it would be quite a bit after that when I began to understand how difficult it became to remember Jason.

After our meeting I began a private documentary, one to be viewed and reviewed only by the maker and his subject. I began spending more time out of my room and more simply wandering the ship, particularly around the hall near room 208, pretending to be shadowing particular individuals. I made it a point to use separate memory cards and footage plates for the two projects. No matter where we were, if I had managed to catch Angie's eyes he would blush and sometimes so would I, and nobody noticed. Since we had entered the Wharden system I found the majority of my time being used to capture the progress of science and the concerns of space travel; they had me spending a lot of time in the laboratories, keeping my camera focused on fidgety old duffers in white coats and their young, pissy assistants, listening to them jabber on about objects, numbers, chemicals, words that I doubt half of the viewers would understand. When I was ordered to film a director of astro-sciences give a speech about anomalies of the known physics, I felt the sting of every eye on me as though I could be responsible for making him look or sound stupid and ridiculous. They displayed their recent antiquities, treasures stolen from some lost and nameless nearby planet, tiny stone obelisks and rings that looked like ornamental jewelry you could by in any mall, with such wide-eyed zeal that it made me nervous just thinking about them, the way they made their discoveries to be above everything and everyone else. All I saw were bits of stone, but they--the whitecoats--personified them as being pivotal to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe.

Finally, some hours after the beginning of the damned tour, we had come upon a series of thick, transparent panes of glass protecting something small, what appeared to me to be a round flask big enough to hold a mere five fluid ounces. Inside was something black and dry, fine flakes of something had been dried and blackened into an oblivion hue to match the darkness outside this ship. The director gesticulated to this artifact and lavished on it, bestowing a personality onto it. He caught the look I only subconsciously knew I was wearing behind the camera, and he pitched a fit, demanding that I delete the footage and we do all of this at another time. I argued with him and we both became furious--he struck out at my camera with a fist, but I was quick enough to turn it away so that his knuckles only grazed the dense black plastic casing. The director's peers, eager to show how close their lips were to his ass, cheered for him and laughed me out. Happy to get the hell out of that, I rushed out of the lab and stepped to the mess hall, my pace amplified by my anger and bewilderment. What the hell goes on in that lab?

I met Angie in the mess hall, his eyes bright and his smile cheery. There were small pockets of people surrounding us, but they were talking so loud we were certain they couldn't hear our conversation. He asked me how my day was going, and he showed as much surprise and confusion when I told him what had happened in the lab.

"That's strange. Dr. Devereaux isn't a violent man, and neither are his students."

I showed him the scuff on my camera and he scoffed, shaking his head.

"Weird. It's just as weird as the lights in the engine room."

"What's wrong with the lights?" I asked him.

"They keep flickering out. You turn them on and they'll be good for maybe five minutes, but after that mark they start flashing really quick, and then they burn out. At first we thought some wires were crossed, so we tore out the paneling and took a look; everything was fine. Not a wire out of place."

"Huh."

"And it doesn't matter what kind of light it is. We've tried a range of systems, but nothing works. We even set up an external switchboard of standing lights inside the room to make sure the workers could see what they were doing, but even that started going. It's just odd."

I hummed a response, still too stuck on my own problem to think about Angie's. We spent much of our lunch in silence, lost to the magnitude of our own circumstances. I was thinking about all of the footage I had shot and the photographs I had taken, thinking about what I would keep and what seemed alright, and what I would realistically have to keep. I considered making a piece about the psychological aspects of long-distance voyages, but I doubt my employers would either accept or enjoy that. When I had finished, I tossed a napkin down on the tray and got up out of my seat, wishing I was back in the forgiving dimness of my room. I was already out of my seat when Angie put his hand on my wrist, stopping me.

"Hey, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind seeing me later tonight. I wanted to show you something."

"What?"

"It's just something I've been working on. With my music?"

"Oh, right."

I told him I'd be there, agreed to the time. A headache was starting to formulate behind my right eye, squirming to life and clawing at nerves. I tried not to sound like I wanted to get away from him, but I needed to get to my bed. I had a lot of shit to do.

On the way to my room, I met a trio of ship personnel rushing down the hallway, guarding a gurney as they wheeled it at breakneck speed down to the infirmary. "Out of the way!" shouted one of the guards, and I practically had to jump to the side and press myself into the wall to allow them to pass. As they did, I had caught sight of a familiar face, a face I had caught on my camera not too long ago, a man who took a swing at me. For a moment I wondered what had happened in the lab, but then the thought faded and was replaced by another: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?

When I got back into my room, I took some over-the-counter crap to get rid of my headache and seated myself in front of the computer. For the next few hours, I stared at the footage and photographs I had taken, excising the erroneous pieces and placing the parts that seemed suitable for the documentary into their proper locations. The work was exhausting mentally, but it also seemed tiring physiologically; every part of my body felt like it was slowing down. I barely noticed when my breathing became broken, my eyes ached, and my hand arm slipped from the table, jolting me up out of the nap I had slipped into. When I glanced at the time on my computer, I swore loudly and got up, remembering Angie.

I was ten minutes late when I got there; I brushed it off as being not a big deal, though Angie seemed a little miffed. Apologizing as well as I could, I sat down on the bed and asked him what he wanted to show me, hoping it wouldn't take too long.

The fox had taken out his trumpet, fidgeting with it and looking at me with an annoyed eye as though those ten minutes were a big deal to him. I was getting impatient, but I didn't say anything. I didn't want to ruin this clandestine thing we had going on. It often seemed, particularly these days, that opening my mouth just gets me in more trouble than otherwise.

After a bit, Angie went on with what he wanted me to hear. I wasn't feeling up for it, but I pretended to be as enraptured as I was when I had first heard him. I had too much on my mind, too much I couldn't dissociate with yet. It was a good song, it had a pleasing sound, certainly livelier than the first song he had played, and he played it with an air of confidence that defied his normal personality. He seemed a lot more assertive than he did before, that was for sure.

Eventually the song petered out to a pair of notes that vibrated in the air with a lasting tranquility, smoothing over my agitation. He looked at me with his soft blue eyes and shrugged his shoulders--there was the doubt coming back. I told him it was great, fantastic, and applauded, enjoying the blush that sprung up through his fur. We had sex sometime later, and as we lay together beneath the sweat-stained sheets, trying hard not to fall asleep, I contemplated telling Angie who I had seen being rushed through the corridor. I was more than willing to gloat over the significance of karma, but I don't think he would have liked that. Jason had once told me that I could be a callous bastard, and as much as I would have enjoyed it, I kept my mouth shut. The fox lay with his hands laced behind his head, breathing softly, his mouth tilted up in a smile as his eyes were closed; I watched him, saw the sweat glinting on the bridge of his muzzle. Beyond his dozing form, the desk lamp flickered several times, burnt out, and then turned back on.

We had spent a solid month and a half in the Wharden system, a good forty-or-so days. The day we began heading back to Xicarph, the captain had invited me into his office. According to him, we had acquired nearly three tons of rocks and flora of several nearby planets, and enough data to fill a library. This he had learned from the science heads. He was interested in the progress I had been making with the film and accompanying photographs, so interested, in fact, that I felt a peculiar air of foreboding to all of this, as though my progress report was just a sideline. In truth, I should have seen it coming. When I had packed my gear back up and was about to head out the door, the captain told me to wait. I sat back down, wondering what was up.

The goat looked at me for a moment, held me with his stare, and took a long sip from his cup. It was coffee, but I could smell scotch. When he set down the cup and laced his hands together, I knew there was going to be trouble.

"Accidents happen. I know they can happen all the time, especially in this kind of environment. It all boils down to self-control, kid. You follow me, right?"

I told him I did, but I had no idea what he was getting at. He looked at me for another moment before grabbing a small black remote from a desk drawer. He pointed it at a screen beside his desk, the screen flashed, and he browsed through a set of numbers, preceded by the letters CAM. He clicked on one--CAM-B12--and leaned back in his seat.

The screen showed a twisted angle of the shower room, only slightly fogged up. I saw myself in the corner, and after a moment, Angie stepped through.

Oh...

There was no sound, just video. I watched the conversation replayed between us, my eyes jumping from the screen to the captain. He wasn't looking at me, just at the screen. The silent conversation went on until the goat paused it.

"You do know that personal relationships between coworkers is prohibited, right? You did read the packet we sent you?"

"I'm fully aware of that, but we're not coworkers. I--."

"Oh?"

"I was hired by the company that funds this expedition, not by you; I'm a third party on this ship. And that means that whatever is going on between me and that man there, as if it were any of anyone's business, is between us only. Which means that this surveillance is unnecessary and offensive."

The smile that broke over the goat's face wasn't a kind one. "Yes, son, that's quite true. You were hired by the same company that hired me, and I'm not allowed to record anyone on this ship without due cause. However..."

The goat flipped through the cameras again, this time selecting one that displayed a room that was for the most part dark, save for a single desk lamp. There were moving shadows beneath a roiling bed sheet. Fuck...

"Because you are not the captain, and because you are on my ship, you have to adhere to and obey the laws set down by my hand. That isn't megalomania, kid, that's the law. The packet you must have read has it all in perfectly concise, legal format; my ship, my rules. And the rules state that any employee who is not the captain, who lives in the barracks, who eats in the mess hall, who takes orders like any other personnel, are to be treated justly as personnel. Now, if this shit continues and I find out that you haven't been listening to me, you can kiss your sorry ass goodbye and so can he. I can walk into any university and hire another cameraman and engineering specialist for half the price you're being paid.

"I know how things can get when you're far from home and you need to feel new flesh--Hell, I've got two kids at home and maybe a dozen or so on any of a hundred docking ports--so I'm giving you one more chance. From now on you stick to your job and only your job and there won't be any repercussions. How does that sound?"

I stared at him, unable to speak, feeling like if I did only a long and furious string of expletives would come out--I bit my lip to keep it shut. I nodded in reply to his answer and walked out rather briskly, grabbing my gear and refusing to look back at him. Above, the fluorescent lights flickered angrily.

I considered doing it, just ignore and forget about Angie while the expedition continued, to stick to the documentary and the paycheck that awaited at the end of the road. I considered that thought and mentally spat on it. I realized that I loved Angie too much to give a fuck about what happened to me...or him, apparently. After I got back to my room, I made up my mind and started enacting my plan.

On the fourth day of our return journey, we had stopped on a planet called Vess to refuel. Vess was a largely unpopulated planet with only a single city to its name, but the people there were kind and considerate. At least that's what I was told. I wasn't allowed to step foot on the planet, only document it from the portholes or from the loading bay. We didn't stay long, spending enough time and money to grab more fuel. We should have hired an electrician or two, since the lights were still pissing up.

The flickering problem wasn't relegated to one sector of the ship, either. It was like an electric epidemic, spreading to all parts of the Vesta, making the lights flicker though no mechanical issue could be discerned. There was some concern that something was fundamentally wrong with the vessel, but these allegations were allayed by the captain, saying that everything was fine and that the issue will be seen to and fixed by the time we get back homeside. But Angie disagreed. "We have no clue what's wrong, if there's anything that should be wrong," he said to me one day during lunch. "It's like the lights just don't want to be on anymore."

The _Vesta_would be home within a week. I had finalized that beginning and middle of the footage and compartmentalized all of the photographs. I'm sure they would want me to document our return to Xicarph, so I kept an extra twenty minutes-worth of space open. After I was sure that everything was where it should be, I walked to Angie's room and asked if he wanted to have dinner in my room. With my luck, I figured he'd be busy, but he wasn't; he came to my room at eight in evening--or a reasonable deep space facsimile--dressed in a nice blue shirt and shorts. His trumpet case was swaying against his hip, and he came with his own food from the cafeteria, but I had already done the same. I tried to replicate the same feelings we had when we ate lunch at his room, with a table set by the curtained porthole. I even had a candle lit between us, a little thing I had stolen from the emergency equipment room. He noticed this and asked me why I was being so novel, and I told him the truth--I laid myself out like the meager foodstuffs I had put on our plates, summarizing my feelings for him in as much words as I could coherently give out.

I watched the expression on his face shift between bemusement and concern. Out of nowhere a bolt of fear wrenched through me when I realized that I hadn't really considered if Angie just wanted this to be a casual thing, an exhaust vent in the middle of a wearying situation. I worried about that silently as I told him what he meant to me, sweating too heavily in my shirt and jeans. He listened to me until I finished, and when he put his hand over mine and kissed me over the measly candle I knew the answer to my query.

We ate our dinner and talked for a while, conversation eventually devolving into sex. I made sure the damned cameras could see as much as possible. I'm usually a top, but I let myself go tonight; I put the condom on him and got on my hands and knees on the bed, tail up. He was awkward at first, but gentle, taking time to work himself up into a proper rhythm. I was annoyed at his politeness, but I didn't make it into an affair, just tried to enjoy the feeling of having him inside of me, exploring my depths. I kept stealing glances at where I imagined the camera to be, one of the corners where the walls met the ceiling.

When he started breathing in haggard gasps, broken moaning, I felt him grip my hip and the base of my tail in a hard clasp. I felt him hump me rapid-fire for a few moments before he stopped, shuddering into me with a grunting groan. I listened to him pant in the dark, enjoying the damp heat that permeated the shadows like fog, like shower mist, and I didn't want to be anywhere else. I saw a red light filtering through the gap under the door, but I knew my eyes were playing tricks on me. Angie threw his arms around me, and I felt that the smile I had on would never fade.

I don't know how long we lay there, I on my stomach and he on my back; time didn't matter to us. The shadows were warm, and I think I had fallen asleep for a mere minute or two. I wouldn't have cared if time had stopped and we would lay here for millennia. I loved him too much to care about anything else.

"What's that sound?"

I blinked awake, only half aware that the fox above me had said something. The shadows were too soothing, too seductive to stay conscious. "Hmm? Did you say something?"

"Can't you hear that?"

I shifted my body so that I could look up at Angie. His face was creased with a familiar worried expression, his eyes darting back and forth. I couldn't hear anything, but he had better ears than I did.

Angie got off of me and started putting his clothes quickly back on. I could hear the whisper of his boxers sliding over his legs and another wave of arousal ran through my bones; I wanted to stay but I caught the urgency in his voice. Letting out an annoyed sigh, I stood up and tried to find my pants, making a comment about the ship's personnel sticking to personal privacy that I had hoped would spark a laugh but didn't. I heard him grab something in the dark, probably his trumpet case, and he headed to the door. I hadn't yet put on my shirt when I heard the door open, and I swore loudly in my head.

A scarlet light spread from the corridor into my room, making everything distorted and hellish. The ping of an alarm was sounding from overhead speakers, but the alarm was fuzzy and perverted into an insectile hum. It was like a scream that came from a hundred miles away, from deep underwater. Angie swore and looked down both ways of the corridor.

"What happened!? What the fuck is going on?" Angie ran down to the right and I followed him. My terror and confusion were overloading my mind, feeling a chill jitter my bones as I ran, trying to keep up with the more nimble vulpine. He ran down the corridor to a terminal set into a wall; he swiped his identification card through the slot and over the electric eye, waiting for the system to load. I saw that pixels were flickering in and out on the screen, as though pieces of it didn't want to do anything.

I stood beside him, looking around like an idiot and wondering why I wasn't hearing any footsteps or seeing anyone. This was an emergency, right?

"What the hell happened?" Angie said, his voice shrill and panicky in his horror. I looked over his shoulder, trying to make sense of it. It depicted the diagram interior of the ship, with six points of pulsating red around it.

"Oh, god," Angie whispered. "The emergency life modules are all gone. They're all gone!"

The screen distorted once, flickered irately, and went black. The card slid out of Angie's hand and fell to the floor, unnoticed as the fox stepped back from the terminal and up to the wall as if something might jump out at him from the blackness of the screen. For no reason other than to seem like I was being helpful, I grabbed the card and gave it back to him.

I don't know what caused me to turn around and look behind me--it could have been a sound, it could have been the fiend-light flashing in the corner of my eye, or it could have been the need to see someone. I turned and set my eyes staring down the corridor, at the series of emergency lights that were pulsing red as the bulbs inside rotated.

At the end of the corridor, the furthest light faded away, leaving blackness. Several seconds later, the next one faded, died or killed off. I felt an irrational and anonymous fear wash over me as the lights dimmed, feeling not as though something were disappearing, but that something was coming, steadily nearing us in a subtle, imperceptible gait.

"Angie."

"They left us..."

Another light died. There were four more between us and a wall of nothing.

"Angie!" I grabbed his upper arm, but his eyes remained on the terminal screen. "We have to go, right now."

Three lights now. The darkness was creeping forward.

I screamed his name into his ear and he finally looked at me. I don't know what he saw, but when the pupils of his eyes darted from my face to a point behind me a sound of unintelligible horror escaped his throat; in an orange blur he turned and hauled tail down the corridor, his trumpet case banging loudly against the wall. I didn't look behind me to see what he had seen, I didn't need to. I could feel it, something behind me, something breathing down on me a cold air that I could feel through my skin, my organs, the marrow in my bones. It was dark and cold, something that came from the same ocean of black that surrounded the Vesta.

We ran down paths and hallways--I didn't know what destination Angie had in mind, but I followed him nevertheless, eager to be away from the dark. We eventually made it to the navigation room, it was, like the rest of the ship, devoid of life. The buzzing alarm still hummed through the speakers, emergency lights bathing the room in bloody red, but red was light. Angie ran to the control panel, where small lights blinked beneath buttons in a discordant pattern.

"Maybe we can send out a signal. We're not that far from, uh, from..." Angie faltered as he began fiddling with the buttons. I saw his tearstained face, shining softly in the light, his hands shaking as he ran through a sequence of buttons. He was running on pure panic, his mind going through everything it knows to find a route to safety. I stood beside him, watching, hoping that whatever he was doing would lead to some positive results.

No positive result was coming. There were no communication satellites in the area to bounce signals around, and radio transmission would take far too long. Besides, the radio was as shot as the alarm system; assuming anyone would hear it, they wouldn't understand a damn word. But Angie tried as hard as he could. He tried until the radio gave one final squeal, one final peal of static, before fading away. In a rage, the fox threw the headset down onto the floor, where it burst in a scattering wave of black plastic and wiring. He sat down on the floor and covered his eyes with his hands, sobbing into his palms. I put my arms around him, looking out through the window at the planets outside, or whatever they were.

We sat there for a long time, though it may have been a short time, as if it mattered out here. The lights in the navigation room all faded, one by one, piece by piece, the shadows acquisitioning more and more territory. After that, the light that came from the outside windows fell, disappearing into a numbing dark. By that time, Angie had stopped crying, filling the void with his broken sniffling. I couldn't feel anything other than the fear and the sadness of the situation. I let him leave me for a moment to search and scrape along the floor; I knew he was searching for his trumpet. It was getting colder.

I sat down on the floor, waiting for Angie to play. There was only time here, all I could do was wait. Eventually, the first notes blew through the shadows, and I could only listen to them. Enough time passed that I realized with the suddenness of a lightning strike that all of this was my fault. Angie and I were in this position because of me. A crushing wave of guilt and horror flooded my mind, carrying away everything else. The tide came in, tearing away the filth on the beach, and left it bare.

Angie continued to play, and I wanted to scream. I wanted to suffer for getting us in this mess, but I had nothing sharp to pay with, couldn't see anything.

"Angie?"

The trumpet rang out in the frigid black.

"Angie, please talk to me."

I crawled toward the music, to the one thing that made any sense out of all of this. I didn't know what was going on, what had happened, what was going to happen to us (though I had a pretty idea), and I felt the want, the absolute need to be with him. I slid over the metal surface, my jeans whispering over steel. My hands were extended outward as I crawled, begging quietly for a familiar touch.

Finally, my hand met with warmth, the curve of a shoulder and an upper arm. The music was strongest here, and I cried while I put my hands around the fox, the man whose life I had ruined alongside my own. I felt that he was sitting cross-legged as he played, so I shifted myself so our knees were touching. I sat at his left, pressing my head against his, enjoying his music and the feel of his body. The temperature was falling fast, but maybe it could last just a little bit longer.

"I'm sorry, Angie. I'm so sorry."

There was no answer. Tears began falling out of my eyes as I said what I wanted to say.

"I love you, Angie."

"I love you, too."

The voice came from my left.

But the trumpet...