Deadeye and the Gravedigger

He survived by running away. The company called it heroism and promoted him.

Wilbur Grubb has exactly one ambition and has never wavered from it: do not die. It served him well while nobody was looking. Then four separate acts of self-preservation got welded into one long unbroken line of valour, and Consolidated Frontier Holdings noticed.

Six weeks later they bolt a rota to the muster deck. Frontier Vanguard, First Class. First entry on every hazard operation for the quarter, his name printed forty-one times down the left-hand side.

Now they have found a way to sell him.

The Reclamation Drive will recover nineteen company ships lost across thirty years in the worked-out deep the heritage feed has christened the Gravedigger. It is announced as remembrance. It is filmed as a homecoming. And the hand who came home goes into each wreck first, on camera, for a producer who is absolutely delighted with him and cannot hear the word no.

Two difficulties. The safety handbook Wilbur sheltered behind has been reissued in a spirit-forward edition three hundred and forty pages shorter, with his clauses quietly gone. And out across the belt, young hands are copying the Deadeye method exactly as the feed describes it, going quiet, standing still, waiting on the one true moment, and dying of it.

He is the only man alive who knows the method is running away. Saying so is the one unsayable thing on the frontier, and he is not brave enough to say it.

A comic space opera about cowardice, corporate storytelling, and the specific horror of being believed in. For readers of Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, John Scalzi's Redshirts, and Douglas Adams.