by Nick Webb
It didn’t kill them, of course, but Jake dropped to his knees with his head between his hands and writhed. The pain lasted for what felt like hours, but probably was only a few seconds. Time seemed to dilate with incomprehensible pain, it appeared.
“First lesson. Don’t touch the collar,” said Velar, as she waved two of her guards over to collect Suarez’s body. As they dragged his limp, ghoulishly staring form out the door, she continued. “Second lesson. Do exactly what I tell you, and you will be rewarded. Disobey, and you’ll be punished. Severely, and without delay. That jolt I just gave you was but a taste. A sample, if you will. Don’t make me actually punish you.” She smiled. It was an ugly, smug smile.
“My people will find us, and they’ll take you down, bitch,” Jake croaked.
“Oh? I doubt that. Captain Volaski is onboard the Phoenix as we speak. He should be joining us shortly with another group of senior officers and marines to rescue you.” She laughed. “And after that group is subdued your ship will be mine for the taking. Chew on that as you spend your first day of the rest of your life in my uranium mine.”
“Where’s Ben? Why is he not with us?”
She fingered the hidden device in her pocket. “He was not as cooperative as you. I had to keep him isolated.”
Jake bared his teeth, and tried to keep the snarl out of his voice. “I swear to you if you hurt him, I’ll rip your fucking throat out.”
A laugh was her only reply.
She turned to leave, but glanced back at Jake with menace in her eye while she patted the bulge in her pocket. “Don’t tempt me, Mercer.” The door closed behind her. A tiny trail of blood marked the path where Suarez’s body had been dragged.
Another body. Another one of his decisions had led to another cold, lifeless body. His head sank down in his hands. Not another one. How much longer could he keep this charade up? Why not just throw the responsibility onto Ben when they all escaped, and let him deal with the body count? Let him make the hard decisions? He’d be good enough, wouldn’t he?
He glanced around at Alessandro and Avery. The scientist looked to be in shock, and the marine looked like he was suppressing a rising rage. “Avery?”
The marine grunted. “I’m going to kill the bastards,” he said. “I’m going to wrap ten of these things around her neck, set them to the highest setting, and then shove my fist down her throat.” He set to work examining the chains around his wrists, looking for a way to unlock them.
“I know, Avery. She’ll pay. But first we’ve got to get out of here.”
Alessandro, who hadn’t said a word the entire time, looked up at him with dazed eyes. “You really think we’ll get out of here?”
Jake forced a stoic look, setting his jaw and nodding. “We have to, friend. You want to die here? I sure as hell don’t. Come on buddy, it’s just another chess game. We’ve just got to find their weakness and then catch them off guard. Just like you’ve done to me every morning for the past few weeks.” He tried on a grim smile. It felt false, and flimsy, but it was all he had.
Fuck Velar.
“If you say so, friend.” Alessandro started fingering his Domitian Collar, searching for any kind of functionality on it.
“Careful there, Bernoulli,” said Jake.
“It must have some kind of access port or settings panel.”
“It’s probably run remotely.”
Alessandro nodded. “Sure, but any device will have manual factory resets and calibrations buttons.”
“Any normal device, sure, but these aren’t exactly the latest entertainment gadget.”
A wan smile of defeat passed the man’s face. “All the same, friend, it’s something to do.”
Jake couldn’t argue with that.
Nearly an hour later, two guards showed up and ordered them to their feet. With rough manners, they bound their hands together, but removed the chains binding them to the walls.
“Move,” one of them said, pointing with his assault rifle at the door. Jake eyed it, and his reflexes nearly made him leap for the weapon, but he restrained himself. Later, he thought. When their chances were better. When he’d found Ben.
They followed the guards out the door, into a long, cluttered hallway. Most of the lights were out, and those that were on, flickered pathetically. At the end of the corridor, another door led out into another passageway, but this one was made of rock—not the wood and brick of the previous one. Clearly, they were underground. The damp, musty smell belied the stagnant air and unwashed bodies.
“How far down are we?”
“Shut up. No talking.” The guard eyed Jake, and pointed to his own collar in warning.
“What, do they prevent us from talking too mu—“ and suddenly his head snapped to the side and he shrieked in pain. The flash subsided as he panted, but the fiery daggers inside his head throbbed for a few more seconds, before ebbing slowly away.
“Yes,” said the guard.
Well that’s going to put a damper on our escape, he thought.
***
The guard led them to an elevator shaft that plunged them down another several hundred meters or so, and the air soon became thick and warm. The smell of unwashed bodies intensified and rose up to meet him as a dense, ripe wall as they exited the elevator and plunged into a mass of people. Some laid against the walls, as if sleeping. Others huddled sitting on the ground in tight, silent circles, while still others fiddled with mining equipment. Both men and women—at least there were no children down here, Jake noted with a feeling of relief, until he saw a young man who couldn’t have been more than fifteen sitting up on one of the iron girders spanning the length of the low, jagged rock ceiling. The teen swung one hanging leg back and forth as he eyed the newcomers.
The guard pointed to another man—better dressed and not as thin as the other slaves, but gaunt nonetheless.
“Boss,” said the guard to Jake, still pointing at the other man, and then turned to leave with his companion.
The man the guard called boss walked over to them. He walked with a limp, and his bland, pale skin spoke of years beneath the surface. Stringy hair grew in tufts on his balding head and spilled over onto his tattered shirt. But compared to the rest of the people there, he looked veritably healthy. “Oh good. More grunts. Listen, friends. The rule here is that you work. If you make your quota, you earn your food and I don’t get punished. If you don’t make your quota, I get punished. If I get punished, I take it out on you tenfold. Understood?”
Jake, his head still sore from the last shock from his collar, decided to risk speaking again. “You sleep without a guard?” He glowered at the filthy man, who advanced on Jake until they were eye to eye.
“Funny. I don’t want to be here anymore than you do, so just shut it, ok? We all work, we all live. Simple. And if you think about doing anything to me, you’ll have to deal with him,” he indicated the boy up on the girder and laughed gruffly. “Jeremiah doesn’t take well to people jostling me around.” He picked up a heavy-looking piece of machinery and shoved it into Jake’s chest. “Take it. I’ll teach you how to use it, and then you teach your friends.” He glanced at the other two, pointing at the floor. “You there. Pick those up.”
Avery bent over and with a grunt, picked up a device that looked identical to Jake’s. Alessandro hoisted his up, as if it were just a small power tool. Jake rolled his eyes at himself as he wondered how the scientist lucked out with the light one. The tools looked identical, but Jake’s must have been thirty kilos at least.
The man they called boss dug into his front pocket and extracted a whistle, which he blew. Jake was not prepared for the sound, since the rock walls seemed to magnify the shrill noise, and he nearly dropped the hulking piece of mining equipment onto his toes. “Break’s over! Move!” The boss pointed down the long, sloping passageway, and with an assortment of grumbles and groans, the crowd got to its feet and started shuffling down. There must have been nearly one hundred people, Jake guessed. The boy sitting on
the girder dropped down to the ground and tailed after another slave—a gaunt, haggard man who glanced back squinting at the newcomers. Had they been recognized? Impossible. No one here would know anything about the Phoenix or the Resistance.
Jake, Avery, and Alessandro followed the boss close behind. Every now and then, a passageway would branch off the main one, and a small group would peel away and follow it. They passed a few motorized carts—empty, but soon to be filled with valuable ore, which Jake supposed would be hauled to the surface for processing. He wondered why they didn’t just dig a large open-air pit and make the process more automated.
He didn’t feel like asking. People with power couldn’t abide questions.
At the junction with another branching side-passage, the boss stopped, and pointed down it, indicating that they follow the winding path. Jake went first, and occasionally, a pale, flickering light would come to life on the low ceiling just as it became too dim to see one more step ahead of him. After nearly five minutes of trudging along with the mining equipment, he ran into the blank wall at the end of the passageway, and nearly dropped the heavy load.
“Careful!” The boss smacked Jake hard in the back of the head with a small, tubular electronic device he’d been carrying. “That thing is worth more than your life, I can guarantee that.”
Jake bent his knees and set the equipment down before reaching around to rub his ankle. The tendons still had not healed properly ever since the run-in with the surly drunk in the bar on the Earth shipyards. It seemed like ages ago, though he realized it was only a little over two weeks.
The boss growled. “Hey, this isn’t rest time! Pick it back up! I’ve got to show you how to use it, and then I’ve got to go patrol the hallways for slouchers.”
Alessandro hemmed. “Excuse me? How many words?”
The boss screwed up his face and glared at Bernoulli. “Huh?” He turned back to Jake. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Alessandro paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “How many? Before the shock?”
Realization dawned on the boss’s face. “Oh. I don’t know. Fifteen or twenty. But after awhile you get more. It discourages revolt. Helps the lower class slaves stay demoralized.”
“And you?” Bernoulli asked.
“Me? Ha!” The man pulled the cap off the electronic device he held in his hand. “I get however many I want. I need them to tell dumbasses like you what to do.” He pointed at Jake. “You. Point that thing at the wall, and engage the power.”
Jake looked down and examined the giant tool in his hands. Indeed, at one end of the grimy object, an array of three metal rods protruded, each covered with wires wrapped as if they were massive solenoids. Several large, unmistakable switches dotted what Jake supposed was the top, and the largest one sported a fading symbol that he recognized as the Russian symbol for “power on.”
He flicked it, and when he held it properly around the worn rubber grips, found the trigger. When he pulled it, a blinding beam of ionized, electrified gas shot out the front, slamming into the rock wall ahead of him. A blast of heat, and the occasional white-hot spark of rock hit him in the face.
The boss yelled. “Careful! You’ll lose your eyes if you don’t close them and look away.” Jake powered the device down and looked at his handiwork, while the boss grumbled his disapproval. “See? All you made was a hole in the wall. You’ve got to take out wedges. Small enough to carry, but big enough to make the trip down the passageway worth it. You’ve got six hours to haul out one ton of ore each.”
Alessandro’s head snapped to glare at the boss. “One ton! If I carry twenty kilos per load, that’s fifty tri—“ his head lurched back and he screamed, apparently having hit his word quota.
“Yeah, that’s right smartypants. Fifty trips. Some people can do it in forty. But,” his face descended into a distasteful grin, “the women take longer. Sixty. Sometimes seventy. But God help me if it ain’t fun to watch.”
Alessandro had set the extractor down and was now furiously rubbing the back of his head, panting and sweating as if he’d run a mile. Jake thought he heard the man mutter an expletive under his breath. He wondered how low they could speak without triggering the collar’s sensors. He reached down to pick up Bernoulli’s extractor, and, tugging at it, realized it was just as heavy as his own. Huh. The scientist must be far stronger than he realized.
The boss held up the cylindrical device. “This is an omni-scanner, which we use as an ore discriminator. When you haul a piece back to the bins, you scan it first. If the concentration of Uranium is at least one percent, you dump it in the green bin. If it’s less, you dump it in the red bin. Remember, green good, red bad. Got it?”
They all nodded wearily.
“Good. Then get to work.” He handed the cylinder to Avery, and strode back down the passageway and out of sight.
Avery turned to Jake. “Well, Captain?”
Jake only grunted. “You heard him. Let’s get to work.” He hoisted the extractor back up to his chest, aimed at the wall, and imagined the white-hot beam slamming right into the hull of the Caligula.
***
Po had to sleep. She had lost track, but she was sure it had been over thirty hours since she last slept. Sooner or later, it would catch up with her, during some critical moment when an error of judgment would mean life or death for every crew member in her charge. She shuddered to think of it. These people trusted her. Ostensibly looked up to her, if the rumors were true. She couldn’t let them down, and therefore, she had to sleep.
At least, that was what she told herself as she marched down the hall towards her quarters. Since they were currently underwater and the pilots had no way to train, she’d left Lieutenant Grace with the bridge, rather than the less-experienced Ensign Ayala. She figured a few hours in charge of the whole ship might do the Wing Commander some good. Give her a different view of things.
The ship groaned. She could almost hear the deck girders creak as she walked down the hallway, stressed from the incredible forces pushing against the hull. Spaceships were not built like submarines. The science officer told her that the hull plates on the lower decks were likely experiencing over ten times atmospheric pressure—far more than the ship was designed for.
Four hours. She allowed herself four hours to sleep. What could happen in four hours? Surely nothing Lieutenant Grace couldn’t handle. The woman was capable—she could give her that. In the week or so she’d been the Wing Commander, she’d whipped it into better shape than Po imagined Jake would ever have done had he remained its leader. He was far more suited to command of the ship than he was of the squadron, even though he’d commanded Viper Squadron back on Earth for over two years. She thanked her stars that Captain Watson had chosen him.
Collapsing on her bed, she called out to the computer: “Wake me up in four hours.”
“Acknowledged,” the disembodied voice replied.
Her mind drifted to various images as she tried to sleep, and before long she realized that she was dreaming, though only half so. Klaxons reverberated in her mind as the images of the battle over Earth replayed before her. The Caligula, firing a steady stream of railgun fire, the Fidelius, with its contingent of celebrities, politicians, and other citizens of Earth, blown to pieces by a well-placed torpedo. The turncoat Ensign who’d fired the fateful shot, before raising a gun to his own head and splattering half the bridge with his brains. The former XO splayed out on the floor with a metal rod sticking out of his temple.
The klaxons. The yelling. The screaming. It all flooded back to her. That night. That night in San Bernardino. Her home. Their home. She ran down the stairs and peered out the window, looking up at the night sky. The bombs showered down; the force of one landing in the street knocked her away from the window and hurled her into the opposite wall. She got up. Blood in her mouth. She tried to run upstairs, but the blast had collapsed one of the exterior walls into the stairwell. She ran back downstairs and outside, hoping to scale a ladde
r up to the kids’ room. Rick was up there with them. They’d be safe. They’d all be safe until she made it.
She found the ladder, and set it up, not heeding the aircraft that shot by overhead, showering that section of the city with bomb after bomb. Why were they attacking so indiscriminately? Didn’t they know there were children there? Innocent people that had nothing to do with the Resistance?
A bomb struck and blasted her with a massive shock wave. She flew off the ladder and into a nearby tree that broke both her fall and her arm. But it didn’t matter. The pain didn’t matter. The jagged radius bone sticking out of her forearm didn’t matter. Fire ravaged the house—what was left of it. She screamed. Oh, how she screamed. She ran towards the burning structure, but a neighbor tackled her and restrained her. Hours later, she entered, after the fire crew had snuffed out the dying flames. She found them. All three of them, huddled together. It had happened before, and now it happened again, accelerated, pausing at certain moments to etch certain images deeper into her mind.
She knew it was a dream, but she couldn’t stop the image from replaying. She knelt down and held them. Burned, desiccated bodies are so much lighter than normal, healthy ones—it is odd what one thinks about when in shock. The klaxons. The alarms. The inhuman screams coming from her own throat. It all mixed together. She looked down at the bodies; her throat constricted around a cry.
The faces. The faces were not them. They were other people. The two fighter pilot recruits. Ashdown, and Xing.
The klaxons. She jolted up in her bed, shaking her head and trying to figure out what was real and what was dream. The images were old—just memories. Nightmares, not dreams. But the sound—the alarm was new. She rubbed her eyes and tried to clear her head.
“Commander? Are you there?”
She recognized the voice. Lieutenant Grace. The sound of the voice was almost unrecognizable over the klaxon of the red alert. Sweat stained her undershirt and she grabbed a soiled uniform top from the floor to mop her face.
