Page 1 of My Tiny Human Wife

CHAPTER 1

AVERY

The wind has been screaming at Beacon Station Seventeen for nine hours, and I've stopped flinching every time it finds a new gap in the walls to howl through.

That's the thing about living alone on the roof of the world. You learn the building's voice. The way the north tower groans when the gusts come off the ice shelf. The tick of the heat exchanger that means I'll be elbow-deep in its guts by morning. And underneath all of it, steady as a pulse, the low electric hum of the long-range beacon that in two years has never once gone quiet. That hum is the whole point of me. As long as it sings, somebody out in the dark can still find their way to a safe zone.

I keep one hand on the console and the other wrapped around a mug of something that used to be coffee. On the cracked display a convoy crawls across the grid, twelve transport markers limping south along Route Caldera, packed with people who'd rather be anywhere but a frozen frontier the Centuries War chewed up and left for dead.

“Caldera convoy, this is Seventeen.” I thumb the headset. “Your eastern channel's gone to static. Cut hard left at the ridge marker and follow my relay. I'll walk you through it.”

A voice crackles back, half a man buried in noise. “...copy, Seventeen. We've got kids on board.”

“I know you do.” I keep my tone level, because mine is the only calm thing they can hear right now. “That's why we're doing this slow and boring. Slow and boring gets everyone home.”

I talk them through the ridge one waypoint at a time, the way you'd coax someone down off a ledge. Left at the marker. Watch the drift. Mind the gap where the supply road washed out three winters back. By the time their markers settle inside the safe-zone perimeter, my coffee's gone stone cold and the storm has eaten another hour of light. Twelve in. Twelve parked. I let myself breathe.

Quiet folds back over the control room, broken only by the gale and that patient pulse on the board. This is the shape of my days now. Talk a convoy through. Patch a relay. Eat something out of a can I can't taste. Sleep in snatches with one ear on the alerts. Two years of it, and the loneliness has worn a groove I've learned to lie down in. Armstrong was never destined to be a gentle place; the whole planet is a prize in a war older than I am, fought over the metal buried in its bones, and the cities change hands so often the maps can't keep up. Out here on the northern edge, though, the fighting mostly forgets I exist. That suits me. I'm not trying to win anything. I just want fewer people to lose.

The relay chirps again, but it isn't the convoy this time. It's a bulletin, routed down from whatever Coalition listening post still bothers to talk to me. Renewed engagement, northern corridor. Heavy ordnance. Avoid sectors nine through twelve.

Those sectors are practically my backyard.

I don't join wars. I made that call long ago, in a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore, the day two officers in pressed uniforms told my mother that Elias wasn't coming home. They used so many words. Service. Sacrifice. Necessary. I was nineteen, and I remember thinking that not one of them was my brother. Eli was engine grease and terrible jokes and a warm palm on the back of my neck, and they'd folded all of that into a flag and handed it over like the trade was fair.

So no. I don't carry a rifle. I carry a signal. I keep the lights on for the ones the war would rather forget, and I tell myself that's enough, and most nights I almost believe it.

The explosion arrives without warning.

Not a sound first, a punch. The floor jumps beneath my boots and the whole tower lurches, and my heart slams into my throat as the overhead lights stutter, die, and gasp back to life. Somewhere below me a window lets go. I'm already moving, one palm flat on the console to ride out the shudder, the other scrambling for the emergency channel.

“This is Seventeen, report⁠—”

The board lights red before I finish. Not one alert. A whole column of them, stacking faster than I can read. Proximity. Impact. Thermal bloom, near, near enough that when I haul myself to the north window the horizon has gone wrong, a deep ugly orange smeared low across the snow.

A single convoy transponder is still pinging out there. Just one. As I watch, it flickers, stutters⁠—

—and goes dark.

The hush afterward is its own kind of loud. A whole convoy, erased, near enough that I felt it in my teeth. For two years I've kept my head down and my hands clean and my grief shut in a box where it can't reach the controls. I press my palm to the cold glass and watch that orange glow eat the night, and somewhere beneath the fear a much older feeling turns over and stretches awake.

Not again. Not while I can do something about it.

I grab my coat.

CHAPTER 2

TORVAK

Three hours into the patrol, the valley begins lying to me.

Snow keeps records. It holds every track and every scorch long after the soldiers who made them have moved on, and a warrior who learns to read it lives longer than one who doesn't. I have studied ground like this for nineteen years. The story written across this sector does not match the orders that sent us into it.

Nineteen years I have given my people. Nineteen winters spent on worlds much like this one, taking ground, losing it, taking it back again, until I have buried more of my own than I have left to lead. Honor demands that I follow the commands handed down to me. Honor has never once told me whether those commands deserve a single drop of what they cost. Lately I have lost the ability to feel the difference, and a leader who cannot feel it becomes a danger to every soldier who trusts his judgment.

We advance in loose formation through the pass, five of my soldiers fanned around the armored transport, weapons low, breath ghosting in the brutal air. Hesk holds point. I take the flank where I can watch the high ridge, because the ridge is where a patient enemy would wait for a column exactly like ours.

Then I see the wreck that should not be here. A burned-out hauler sits half-swallowed by a drift, civilian by the shape of its frame, and the blast pattern fans outward, the wrong direction entirely. Whatever destroyed it was not fired from the Coalition line our briefing promised. It was set against the hull, up close, deliberate, and then the scene was left to tell a different tale to anyone who came asking.