Destiny's Hand

1 A Grasshopper's Head

Year 2798, Homthai 2nd Tuesday, early midday; Ship Of Destiny habitat:

Artim Drakkin's left hand shakes. He's woken standing over a body on the floor. Naked and sweaty with an unfocused anxiety, he doesn't know what he did.

A helmet is in his right hand, with tubes and lines hanging like insect innards. It's light for its bulk and smooth where it brushes against his pale skin.

A familiar wall of doors encircles him, defining a room so small he couldn't collapse without his skull cracking on the way down.

Pain in a dozen places; he presses through clumped and sticky curls to rub a lump on the back of his neck. Discomfort everywhere else distracts him from investigating further. His nose feels squished. His back and hands, even down to his knees and toes, all hurt. There's no blood on the floor. No cuts that he can feel or bruises that he can see, just a feeling that he'd played a sport he wasn't in shape for.

The body at his feet is a smaller, younger man that's dressed in a uniform blue onesuit. Face down and curled like a croissant, athleticism is still clear with smart cloth stretched tight and a lean face suggested by a shallow cheek, a contrast to Artim's baby face and relatively pudgy physique.

His left hand stops shaking and thoughts start to bounce.

They fill an entrance hall that doubles as an elevator. It's a dull gray but well-lit space. The curved wall has doors outlined green, blue, and yellow. He knows a red one is at his back that opens to his living pod, his home.

Artim imagines his brain cut out, plopped in vinegar and returned as he tries to force away fogginess, and his eyes lock on the tree silhouette decorating his neighbor's blue outlined entrance. The doorcam in the leaves shines like the nosy eye of the man living there. Spurred by the thought, he spins around and hammers on his door. After a protesting beep at the mistreatment of its tap point, it opens.

Gripping the blue onesuit and then averting his eyes, Artim drags the body inside.

He isn't sure of the time now. The last he remembers it was late morning. Presuming a short blackout, he expects the nosy gardener that lives across the hall, as well as the neighbors to either side, aren't home yet.

Short and light, the body is easy to maneuver across the smooth floor. Stopping at the outer curve of his home's main room, Artim releases it and stumbles away.

A wheeze comes from his throat. He struggles to breathe steadily and can't figure out if the sound was a broken laugh or strangled cry.

There's no way out. He has become the rarest of crew, a murderer, a killer with his hands.

Bark is the victim's nickname. Artim knows the young man, more than the passing everyone knows everyone in the spaceship's habitat. He had just run into him the day before yesterday.

Artim was walking with Katelle Voune, his woman. In public view under the sunax's eye, Katelle had faced Bark and his friends down. He and another were tagged as peace makers or pakers for short, a position which empowered them almost as herd dogs for people. There had been strong words, and she had humiliated them.

It will be no secret that he's here. He guesses Bark had probably been coming to check in and maybe attempt to intimidate. Despite his nickname, Artim remembers the small man as a bad fit for paker duty: skittish and polite, a poor bully.

Not even superficially examining his presumed handiwork, Artim turns his back and falls into his bed cubby. Dropping the helmet, he presses his hand against his chest and tries to calm a heart beating as if he had just circumnavigated the habitat. Giving up, he tugs a sheet around himself and curls into a ball.

I will be caught. I will face counseling and ethical training. If he survives that, Artim expects an early retirement, a medical coma, and an accidental death. My department will make me betray everyone and everything if they can. The honorable thing would be to try and hurry things on to a coma. I should isolate myself, tap up a confession or maybe even a manifesto.

Artim peeks out of his sheet at the helmet on the floor. That was responsible somehow. I'm no killer.

He has no memory of hurting Bark. He does feel an echo of rage, like a visceral reaction to a violation too traumatic to process. "I'm so sorry." I shouldn't have put that on.

A black visor, bulbous on the sides, a drooping enclosure for mouth and throat, and a pair of lines coming off the top like wilted antennas; the helmet is like a giant gray grasshopper's head. It summons a vicious memory from almost two decades prior, when he had ripped the heads off hundreds of actual grasshoppers.

It was a gleeful mass murder. Ostensibly for the one token per ten heads, Artim had taken perverse pleasure in it. One of the ten farmers, an old woman, paid him and funded a horde of other children that swarmed her farmstack hunting the little hoppers. It ended with insecticide, but left a yearning.

Curled tight enough to allow only shallow breaths, he considers the poor qualities defining him. "I liked... to watch... them twitch."

Artim throws himself straight, despite the aches, like a spring popping out of something breaking. Am I a coward? He tries, but can't imagine sacrificing himself for Katelle or her cause.

"I have to survive." He rubs his bare arm. She'd be the real catch, maybe enough for a good plea deal.

Artim prays with a gesture towards the broken ship god, finger drawing a circle in the air and then slashing through it. He wishes he could slip back just a few days, back before he heard about the mutiny that never was, before he was suspended from teaching, all the way back to the boringly idyllic moment just before he surprised his woman with a romantic love pod reservation and got committed.

. . . .