Luke "High Hopes" Kittery twisted out the last screw from the toaster in his lap and
tossed both screw and screwdriver back over his shoulder. The hazy reflection of his
hollow-eyed, unshaven face stared glumly back at him from the stainless steel
appliance casing.

"Come on, Toast Chief 4000," he mumbled. "Help me out here, would you?" He ran his
hand over the appliance. "Or I’m the one who’s toast."

Luke pulled the base from the casing, flung the casing aside, and eased a pair of
needle-nose pliers into the toaster’s core. Gently he pulled out a small, square
computer chip.

With great care, he stood up and began picking his way across the ship’s galley,
stepping over what looked like an electronics torture chamber. Casings and wire-
tangled guts of pulled apart personal computers, video cameras, entertainment
units, a microwave oven, and a limp maintenance robot littered the floor. The once-
white walls of the galley were covered with hand-scrawled diagrams of circuit
configurations and mathematical equations, half of which were scratched out. A two-
foot pile of empty meal pack containers overflowed from the tub of a dissected
washing machine.

Dradling the chip, Luke made his way down a short corridor, the walls of which were
also covered with row upon row of scribbled calculations, and entered the cockpit of
the V.S. Tigris Dawn.

Such as it was. The cover of the navigational computer, charred and warped, lay on
the floor beneath a jumble of soldering tools. Beside it, a grease-smudged digital
encyclopedia lay on the floor, a complex diagram titled Master-Slave Drive
Configuration on its screen.

From inside the exposed navigational computer compartment, an eerie blue glow
shimmered.

Most of the myriad of screens on the pilot’s console were black, except for the word
STANDBY. Only the navigational screen was active. On it, a row of large numbers
scrambled down its glass face.

In the window above the pilot’s chair, distant stars hung absolutely motionless in a
wall of black.

Luke knelt down and, wincing, reached into the glowing compartment and pulled
out a food tray covered with a crudely assembled computer board. Wires trailed from
it into the glowing chamber. Holding his breath, Luke lowered the chip into the last
empty slot beside twelve other chips of various sizes and shapes.

From the pilot’s console, a chime sounded, and Luke’s bloodshot eyes shot up to
the navigation screen. There was a small but perceptible increase in the rate at
which the numbers cascaded down.

He let out his breath. "Well, that’s it," he said to himself. "That’s the last of them."
He heaved himself to his feet, stepped over to the pilot’s chair, and dropped into it.
He stared out past the wooden rosary that hung before the cockpit window at the
smattering of unfriendly stars that glowed coldly before him.

He rubbed his eyes. "Well, I guess I’m earning my pay on this run," he mumbled, and
a humorless smile crossed his characteristically solemn 24-year-old face.

His thoughts drifted to the memorial plaque back at the Vanguard Mainstation on
Poseidon and tried to think of the last name engraved on it—the one beneath which
his own name would probably soon be neatly etched. It was Kenneth "Bumblebee"
Newberry. His grim smile widened at the memory of the jovial, portly pilot.

Newberry had been nicknamed "Bumblebee" because of a trait that his typically
cynical fellow pilots claimed he shared with that Earth insect: although scientists
had proven that it was impossible for a bumblebee to be able to fly, it did anyway.
Such was the case, the pilots claimed, with Newberry.

All of the Vanguards had nicknames, given to them by their fellow pilots. The pilot
called "Zombie" had won his nickname after bringing his ship, or at least most of it,
into port just one day before he was to have been declared officially dead.
High Hopes felt very close to Zombie at the moment.

There was Pirate, who had lost an eye to a micro-asteroid and wore an eye patch;
the Kid, who, according to computer analysis, had aged only two hours on a four-
month run to Achilles three years ago; Acid, whose arm had to be hastily amputated
by medics after it suddenly began dissolving following her return from a seemingly
routine flight; and Back Talk, who two years ago arrived at her destination of Earth,
and much to everyone’s surprise could only speak backward and couldn’t understand
a word that was being spoken to her. She had to be completely retrained by speech
therapists to speak forward again, though when she got angry, she would still curse
fluently in reverse, much to her fellow pilots’ delight.

High Hopes’ eyes drifted to the old Sacred Heart Spacecraft League card taped onto
the pilot’s console. Jesus stared at him solemnly from it. To this day he didn’t know
which of the Vanguards had put it there, or exactly why. For some reason he had
always thought it had been Bumblebee. Had it been a message perhaps? The result
of a premonition? The comfort of one soon-to-be dead man to another? Who could
tell. The Vanguard pilots did things in their own weird ways.

The Vanguard pilots were indeed a strange group. But that was only natural. They
had a very strange job: to ride ExploraCorp’s frontships out into space and, in short,
hope not to get killed. And to serve as instructional cadavers for scientists if they
did not. That was it. Usually.

But this trip had hardly been usual, High Hopes thought to himself as a wisp of red
ions shimmered briefly over the cockpit window and then was gone.

Alex Lobdell © 2009
Excerpt From
"High Hopes for the Dead"
by Alex Lobdell
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