Teaser: As Below, So Above
Teaser for the short story "As Below, So Above" in the upcoming anthology Gods With Fur. To find out more, you'll have to beg, borrow, or steal the book. Or, if that sounds too much like hard work, you can pick it up on the FurPlanet website, or swing by their table at the Anthrocon Dealers' Den. Also features stories by Kyell Gold, Huskyteer, and Televassi!
Teaser for: As Below, So Above
by Mut
He'd found the note clipped to Thomas's bunk with a magnet. It had been written in an urgent, passionate scrawl as uncharacteristic of the rat as the words. It spoke of sacrifice and redemption, temptation and past sins and a new world. Several times he wrote of Spirit talking to him, testing him, giving him instructions. At the end he apologised profusely to Jake, and hoped he might be forgiven.
Jake had put it out of the airlock along with the body, suiting up to send both drifting towards the graveyard Earth. He suspected he would regret that later, but that he would have regretted keeping those last, confused words more. Back before, there would have been no question: a death on the Station would have been an international scandal. Getting rid of evidence like that would have had the brass, the politicians, the press, and anyone with a keyboard and time on their hands after him. He would have been on trial as soon as they could figure out what law applied to this place. But now, none of that mattered. He did not feel liberated.
The recompression cycle took a long time, and the rat's body was almost invisible by the time he was out of his suit and staring out of the cupola window. His gaze slid away from the grey-blue planet, but he forced himself to stare even after he could no longer tell Thomas from the flecks of dust and debris. He let his mind drift, very carefully not thinking about the events of the past few days. He concentrated on making his tail wag slowly back and forth, on perking his ears up, on slowly breathing in and out.
It was the noise that finally broke apart his meditation. It had been bothering him for a couple of days now: an intermittent, irregular clicking. The Station made a great many noises, from the low hum and high-pitched whine of electronics to the regular whirr of fans to the gentle pinging of metal expanding after it passed out of the Earth's shadow, but this one was new. He'd asked Thomas about it but the rat hadn't been able to make it out. They'd gotten sidetracked by a discussion of the hearing sensitivities of rats and foxes that Thomas, predictably, had ended by claiming expertise in all things biological. Probably he'd been right, but now he was gone and Jake was still here, and so were the noises.
He kicked off from the window with practised ease and floated across the room, grabbing a handle as he passed through the doorway and bringing himself to rest with his paws against the wall. His ears twitched, flicking back and forth. That way, he decided, and pushed off again.
He let his instincts and his muscles do the work, leading him towards the source. He was having a dumb fox moment, a detached part of him decided. There were a dozen other things he should be prioritising, starting with the communications systems. Depending on when Thomas had-- on when he'd last been on duty, they might have gone unchecked for eight, ten hours. If, improbably, someone was still down there and had managed to get a signal up to him, they'd need a reply urgently. He leapt onward anyway, nose questing too now. He didn't want to deal with matters of life and death for a while; he wanted a nice, simple engineering problem to bang on.
Jake slowed down as he found himself heading into the experimental area. Even before, they hadn't come here often. It was a relic of another time, when the Station had had a larger, international crew. Some of the experiments were still live -- still taking data, he supposed, counting cosmic rays as they flashed through -- but anything that required the astronauts' participation was long gone. He wondered briefly whether he should shut the rest down, but shook his head. It would be disrespectful, somehow. Besides, there was no shortage of power; the boxes could go on counting long after the food ran out.
A scent he couldn't quite place caught his nose and he swung to a halt. It was almost like a person's -- a dog or wolf, perhaps. It happened sometimes, up here, that the air recirculation system would play tricks, spreading smells through the Station faster than they had any right to travel, or trapping them in a loop so that you caught dull, mechanical hints of the past. He sniffed again, but it eluded him -- but then the clicking started once more, and he knew what it was. Not one click but four together. Impossible footsteps. His tail wormed its way between his legs. The childhood stories came back to him: stupid, careless fox, caught in a dog's trap, jaws go snap-snap. He could smell it again.
He growled at himself. Stupid fox indeed. Couple of hundred miles of vacuum away from whatever life was left, and he was worried about not being alone enough. He kicked off hard in the direction of the sound, flipping through the doorway and coming to rest in a crouch on the floor. He glared around.
There was a she-wolf.
[... and for more, you'll have to check out Gods With Fur, edited by Fred Patten and published by FurPlanet.]