Beacon 23: Part One: Little Noises (Kindle Single) by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online Page A

twirl in space, there’s a faded picture that some former resident put up, which is why I suspect I’m not the only one who sits here. In the picture, a man in slickers is standing outside an actual, Earth-based lighthouse. A wave taller than the lighthouse looms behind him, must be twenty meters high. The wave is slamming into this tapered pillar of stone, and you figure it’s the last shot of the lighthouse or the man, that this tidal wave utterly destroys both of them in the next fraction of a second, and that the man is smoking his pipe and squinting up at what must be a drone with a camera or something, like he’s thinking, “That’s the most curious thing,” and has no idea his ticket is about to get punched from behind.
    I’ve spent more time looking at this poster than I have at the field of stars and rocks out the window. For a while, I assumed it was computer generated. You can never tell with these things. Sometimes the real looks fake, especially when you’ve looked at the fake for so long. But why would anyone hang up some CGI with such reverence? The paper is slick, not like the thermal crap we print on here. And there’s not a crease on it, which means it was brought flat packed or in a courier roll. Either way, someone took some care in getting it here. So I assume the damn thing is real. I assume this guy is real, that he’s having his last toke there at the end of his tiny world and his tiny life.
    I get a good gwib buzz staring at this photo, sometimes for hours, while I wait for a CPU to need a reboot or some ship to come out of hyper and ask for directions or give me some news of the war. This man is taking a hellstrom with a shrug and a deep drag like he’s such a boss. Such a cool customer. Meanwhile, I lose my shit over some distant, infernal clicking sound. That lighthouse keeper was my hero for the longest time. Until I learned more about that photo.
    Turns out there’s a dozen variants of similar shots. And yeah, they’re all real. I sent a research request to Houston after I couldn’t turn up anything in the archives, and I could easily imagine the conversation on their side, because I’d had my share of them when I worked ground support during training:
    Chief of Ops: “I’m sorry, 23 wants to know what?”
    “Uh, sir, he wants the history behind a particular photo. And no, it’s not a spectral chart. Or anything . . . uh, scientific. It’s . . . well, here. He sent a digital cap.”
    Long pause while the Chief stares at a handlet.
    “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”
    “Nossir.”
    “And he used a research request on this? Has he got any left?”
    “First one he’s ever used, sir. Guy has a clean record. Served on the front before he got his red badge and was reassigned.”
    “Lemme guess: blow to the head?”
    “Nossir. Had his guts shot out by a Lord. Was given a quiet beacon out on the edge of Sector Eight.”
    “So he’s probably hugging that GWB like she’s some dollar hooker at the end of two tours.”
    “Probably, sir. Would be my guess.”
    “Ah, fuckit. The boy’s a war hero for crissakes. See what you can dig up.”
    Of course, that’s probably not how it went down. Some lackey most likely got the request, Binged that shit himself instead of sending it to the actual research department, and fired off eight pages of search page results and their targets back to me. Probably took him two seconds. I got the response three months later from a tug grabbing an ore load that didn’t belong to them. Said they had something for me, then went into the belt and took billions of dollars of something for themselves. It’s a crazy world out here on the edge, but enough shrugging and looking the other way, and it all seems to sort itself out.
    And as it turns out, my goddamn hero-of-the-mist lighthouse keeper was just as batshit scared as the rest of us. The whole history of that photo is well documented. The shot was from a manned helo, of all things. While the