Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part One

Chapter One: A Death Wish

Setting: Marques Space Station, Upper Earth Orbit


Graeber chewed on the unlit cigar and kneaded his forehead with calloused hands. He was eyeing a stack of flimsies on his desk and thinking about sliding the whole stack into the incinerator slot in the wall—

The door opened and Hawking walked in. “Don’t do it,” he chuckled.

“You don’t know how close to retirement I am,” Graeber growled. As the door closed behind Hawking, Graeber thumbed the locking protocols under the arm of his chair and activated a scrubber in the ceiling. Before Hawking was even seated, Graeber had the cigar lit and was reclining, eyes closed, forehead smoothing out, shoulders relaxing.

“I know exactly how close to retirement you are,” Hawking laughed. “You’re so close, you’ll never do it. You’ve got enough credit to live on forever—which you won’t, if you keep up with those—and you still do rotations up here, where you’re not needed. Why don’t you at least stay planetside and run things from a hammock?”

Graeber laughed at that. “You wish, boy.”

“Yes, I do—and not just because you’re thirty years older than me and seventy pounds fatter—I think I’ve earned a little trust. You don’t have to check up on me like this.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Graeber asked, eyes opening, real concern on his face.

Hawking smiled. “Just checking.”

Graeber shook his head.

“No, apparently it’s more serious than that,” Hawking continued. “You’re up here every three months because you can’t stay away—you’re obsessive about it. You need to be put in a home for old folks. Admit it: your life is over. You’re dried up and useless. Step aside for the younger generation.” He smoothed his hair comically.

Graeber puffed away in silence.

“Hey,” Hawking soothed. “You know I’m only joking, right?”

“You think you are,” Graeber groused.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Tell me about this problem-child you’ve adopted,” Graeber said finally.

“Oh, him,” Hawking groaned, but Graeber noted that he seemed grateful for the change of subject. “Well, he’s not a child; in fact he’s too old to be a test pilot.”

“Then why’d you hire him?”

“I talked to him. For two hours.”

Graeber’s eyebrows went up. “Smart?”

“No one who applies for this job could be called that. No, it was just his knowledge of ships. He seems to have been a test pilot somewhere else.”

“Seems? You didn’t check?”

“Of course I checked,” Hawking objected, genuinely hurt. “You won’t believe what I found.”

“Is it in this stack somewhere?” Graeber gestured at the flimsies with disdain.

“No, I didn’t make any copies of this,” Hawking murmured, offering a slip to Graeber.

The slip was some new-fangled pocket device, and Graeber had difficulty figuring out how to plug it into the wall terminal, but when he did so the screen filled with pages quickly. Graeber yanked the cigar out of his mouth and coughed. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah, that was going to be my whole report on this guy—just those two words, with a date and my initials.”

“Is this a scam? Maybe he fudged some of this.”

“He doesn’t even know I looked for it. I hired him on the spot; why would he need to make any of this up?”

“On the spot? Just because he knows a lot about ships?”

“I trust my instincts. He seemed sincere, he knew his job, and he said he’d accept any payscale. I thought the worst case scenario would be firing him after the background check.”

“What about running off with one of our ships—or crashing one into the station?”

“He hasn’t flown anything yet.”

“What are we paying him to do, then?”

“We’re not; he’s paying to lay over here until his paperwork goes through.”

Graeber grunted. “I’m suspicious already. Why isn’t he still planetside?”

“He was never on-planet. He came in a relay ship.”

“A cargo freighter? From where?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Hawking said, standing. “Finish reading my report, and then talk to him yourself.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to give him his first assignment. Now that the boss has approved him, there’s no sense paying him to sit around, right?”

“Who says I approved him?”

“You will. Come see him when he gets back.”

Graeber grunted and turned back to the wall terminal. He let out a low whistle and began reading. “Spencer Fyodorim. Hmph. Where’ah you from, kid?”

* * *

The entire crew wanted to know the answer to that question.

Ever since Spencer Fyodorim had set foot on the station there had been something to complain about—and usually it was loss of sleep. Forty-seven pilots—soon to be forty-eight when Spencer was official—slept in five overlapping shifts that rotated through three different bunkhouses. There were some mats, some hammocks and a lot of cots; some men slept with isolation equipment such as tents or blindfolds and earplugs; one of the bunkhouses had sounds piped in—machinery and air recycling noises, some of which were sounds the actual equipment no longer made, but which had been recorded and looped to lull the older pilots to sleep; and one of the bunkhouses had been graffiti-ed into an eyesore by several pilots who reasoned that it didn’t affect anyone’s sleep.

What did affect everyone’s sleep was being put in a rotation with the rookie.

From the day that Spencer had arrived, he hadn’t gone one night without waking up at night—usually screaming—and then becoming almost amnesic about the episode. When asked about it, he would have trouble remembering anything. Not that many of the crew asked him about his episodes; most of them staunchly ignored him. After all, he was not—strictly speaking—part of the crew yet.

Generally speaking, what happened in the crew quarters was the crew’s business—like the graffiti, or the gambling, or the occasional “family member” coming to visit—so Hawking knew from the outset that he shouldn’t interfere with how any new crew member acclimated himself to the group. The trouble was that Spencer didn’t seem to be acclimating himself at all. Scorned at meals and ignored anywhere else, Spencer moved about as though he were the only occupant of the station—it seemed that he was giving everyone else the silent treatment and not the other way around.

Some of the men complained enough to Hawking that he moved Spencer to the guest quarters, which was a nice-sounding name for solitary confinement. The guest accommodations amounted to little more than a tiny room sequestered in a wing of the facility populated by computers so that little, if any, sound reached the room. It was a privilege reserved for visiting observers, usually commercial dealers insisting on a completely unnecessary first-hand look at the testing process. Isolating them from the crew served two purposes, since it also allowed the men to belligerently bad-mouth the client in the bunkhouses. Boys will be boys, after all.

While Spencer spent a few days in the guest quarters, the men wasted no time in venting about him and his nightmares back in the bunkhouses.

“Always under attack, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, or some planet coming apart under his feet.”

“Sounded like a name that one night, didn’t it? Laurie? Dora?”

“Nah, man, he was callin’ for his mama when he woke me up.”

“Oh, not one of those. Brinker, how’d you cure that one momma’s boy?”

“Didn’t. I just drugged him every time he was on my rotation.”

“Well you shoulda drugged this guy. What’d you give what’s-his-face?”

“I ain’t sayin’—I might need to use it on you one of these days.”

“You know, he had an attack right in the mess hall today.”

“An attack?”

“What do you mean? You mean like a seizure?”

“Pretty much. He started talkin’ funny, and the next thing we knew? He was passed out right on the table.”

“Did Hawking see it?”

“When’s the last time Hawking ate in the crew mess, genius?”

“Well, did you tell him?”

“What for?”


One day, Spencer awoke in sick bay with the distinct impression that he’d struck someone across the face. He looked around for the attending medic, but finally decided he was alone. He sat up slowly, felt no ill effects, and eventually got dressed and left before anyone returned to check on him.

Watching on a monitor in an adjacent room, one of the station’s nurses—a man named Ecksel—pressed a cold pack to his eye. He’d had his instructions from the pilot who’d delivered Spencer to sick bay: write no report, give no treatment, attempt no retribution. Ecksel felt sorry for Spencer and wanted to help him with the seizures, but Spencer hadn’t seemed like he was having a seizure when he closed Ecksel’s left eye for him.

The story the pilot told him had intrigued Ecksel, however, so he began doing some research on the type of seizure Spencer was having. He included all the variables as they’d been related to him: Spencer got a medium- to severe-headache just before the attacks; he had commented more than once about a smell like oranges during an episode; he spoke clearly, perhaps a bit louder than usual; and he seemed to need to complete some urgent task—and if impeded, he would lash out or black out immediately.

Such had been the case today. Spencer arrived in the company of the pilot, but apparently the pilot had told Spencer they were headed for the observation deck. When Spencer found out they were at sick bay, he fought both the pilot and the nurse briefly and violently. Then without any warning, he turned off like a switch had been thrown somewhere.

Ecksel found some reading material on his planetlink about unusual behavior during semi-conscious states, and he stayed up all night reading.


Hawking didn’t find out about the seizures first-hand or from the crew; he read about them in one of a series of eye-opening documents that turned up in the paper trail that was Spencer Fyodorim’s past. He’d hint cryptically to Spencer each time they crossed paths at what he’d learned, but the two did not chat casually. Both seemed to feel that this would be detrimental to Spencer’s already rocky relationship with the rest of the crew.


After only a few nights being sequestered from the rest of the crew, Hawking realized the error he’d made; relations between Fyodorim and the crew were worsening as long as Fyodorim was treated like an outcast. He put Spencer back on rotation with the other men in the bunkhouses, but advised him to see the station medic for a sedative to suppress the dreams.

Hawking never followed up on that visit, but for the next two weeks Spencer did not wake up at night. The crew were mute on the matter, but Hawking was willing to settle for indifference—for now.


Hawking suffered Spencer—and overrode protests from the crew—for one simple reason: he could tell where Spencer belonged.

In fifteen years Hawking had run through so many pilots that he felt like he had a sixth sense about them. He looked at some and knew they weren’t worth keeping around—the kind that would get themselves killed or someone else killed, or the kind that whined and moaned about the milk-runs but wouldn’t stick their necks out for the dangerous trips.

He especially loathed the ones that sat around talking about the ship they were going to buy some day—the ones that were fascinated with one ship, or one class of ship, to the exclusion of all others, so that every conversation eventually came around to their pat recitation of the specifications of their dream ship.

A good pilot, in Hawking’s opinion, could be read quite neatly by the way he talked about ships: finding something interesting or noteworthy in any class or make of ship; demonstrating a wide knowledge not only of engine lore but also of the history of ship design; or clamoring for the chance to fly the unusual ships that came in—not just the sleek, the fast, or the expensive.

Unfortunately, as Hawking had also learned, some of the best pilots were lost in testing ships that were death traps from the drawing board up. There was no way to predict who would be lost, and it was not worth hiring fools and hoping they would be the ones taken. Great pilots all too often met death on terms they gladly chose for themselves: at high velocity, and in the vast emptiness of space.

For this reason, Hawking was determined to keep Spencer around. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that they’d struck a chord when talking about ships they’d flown; perhaps it was a character-driven hunch; but more likely it was the simple belief, on Hawking’s part, that a pilot only belonged in one place.

And if he was wrong about Spencer, so what? Every pilot should have that chance to see death coming—and not blink. Let Spencer Fyodorim get himself killed out here one way or another. If Hawking read his past right, he’d earned it.


So, there was one point on which everyone—including Spencer—was in agreement, though no one had put it to words: that if Spencer met with an unfortunate accident testing a ship, it would not bother them much.

The crew saw nothing about him that impressed them much; Hawking saw it all, but respected Spencer’s decision; and Spencer was ready to die—though as of yet no one, not even Hawking, knew why.