by Kal Spriggs
“Water,” I croaked. I recognized Dekkas Richardson’s face. “Please.” I hoped my voice was so hoarse that they would think I’d just stumbled over my first words.
I looked around, realizing that I’d been pulled out of my Kavacha exosuit, probably before they’d injected me with… whatever that had been. There were four other entrants holding me down, one on each arm and leg. Many of them had bruises and scratches on their faces and limbs. “What… what happened?”
Richardson stared at me for a long moment, as if gauging my words and wondering if he believed what I was saying. Surely he doesn’t think I faked that… I shuddered a bit as I thought about what it had been like and my mind shied away.
“You took a simulated hit on your helmet. The electrodes in your helmet are designed to trigger a small shock to your cortex. Just enough to render you unable to function,” Richardson told me. “Your electrodes malfunctioned.” He put heavy emphasis on that. “They went to maximum setting… execution mode and triggered one hundred and twenty thousand volts at about two amperage through your cerebral cortex. It effectively lobotomized you and stopped your heart as well.”
“Oh,” I trembled as I considered that. I wasn’t sure if I was me anymore. “How… how am I?”
“Hard to say,” he answered. He gestured at the entrants holding me down and they hesitantly let go of me. I gave them nods and slowly sat up. I flexed my hands and looked down at them. I felt words and names coming back to me. I had to be careful. Thankfully, my voice was so hoarse that they probably wouldn’t notice my accent. I hope.
I tried to think if I’d shouted anything, said anything, but it had felt like I’d been incoherent. I hoped that I hadn’t given myself away.
“Institute policy is to administer a double dose of quick heal with… special additions, for any serious injuries. If that is insufficient for resuscitation, entrants are allowed to perish,” Richardson told me. “Any additional medical attention would necessitate removal from the course. In Second Screening, that would mean your execution. It’s a precaution to prevent shirking.”
I swallowed, “So there’s no chance of getting a full neural scan?”
“Not at the moment, no,” Richardson told me. He gestured at the other entrants, “Good job, you may return to your training.”
The four of them hurried off. “How much did I miss?” I asked.
“You were raving for around twelve hours,” Richardson told me. “Which in itself is impressive. The last time this happened to an entrant, they only lived three hours. That cadet had only received a few seconds of the lethal charge as well.”
“Only a few seconds…” I considered that, wondering if my mind was slow because of exhaustion and what I’d been through, or if I’d suffered severe brain damage. Boy, there’s a cheerful thought.
You’re telling me, Shadow whispered to me. Though if you ask me, I think you’ve always been a bit of a null-brain.
“You took a full thirty seconds at the maximum setting. When they cracked your suit, you had a severe burn where your skin had been cooked down to the bone. I honestly didn’t expect your heart to start even with the double dose of quick heal,” Richardson told me. “And as for you regaining any mental capabilities, well that’s very impressive.”
I swallowed, “Why bother to try, then?”
Richardson’s expression went stern, “You are my responsibility, Entrant Vars. Despite any personal misgivings I may have about you, I have been charged by my superior officers to turn you and the other entrants of Jade Flight into Initiates, and then to train you on how to be an officer.”
I rubbed at my temples, half expecting to find charred flesh after what he’d said. Instead I felt new, pink skin. The quick heal they use here is something else.
“That said, I understand you’ve been through an ordeal, so I’ve authorized you one day of light duty for recovery,” he told me. “If you have need of someone to talk about your experience, I’ll make some time for you.” I could hardly imagine wanting to talk to him about it. I didn’t even want to think about the experience. Still, something he’d said earlier popped into my head.
“So… it was just a malfunction, sir?” I asked.
“The electrodes can occasionally malfunction,” Richardson answered. It wasn’t much of an answer, though. “Their settings can be modified by accident or design, as well. Of course, if we found evidence of that, the person who did it would face official censure.” He said that last in a flat voice, a clear warning for me not to ask any further questions about it.
He gave me a last nod and turned to walk away.
“Sir, how did you even know that the quick heal would help?” I asked as he turned away.
He paused, not looking back. “When I was an entrant, I suffered a similar accident. A double dose was enough to save my life. So when I say I know what you’ve been through, I mean it.”
He left before I could respond.
***
The rest of my flight was out training and I really didn’t have much to do. I still wasn’t a hundred percent. I felt light-headed and dizzy and words kept jumbling up in my head, but sitting around felt like a waste of time.
I found things to do, first getting out my Kavacha Mark V and doing a functions check. I froze up, though, as I looked at the inside of the helmet. There were still burned chunks of my skin stuck to the sides, where my temples would rest on the inside. I reached in, following directions on my implant, and pulled out the charred electrodes. How did I survive that?
You had a little help, Shadow told me. She appeared next to me, painting herself on my vision.
I was aware that I was probably being watched via monitors so I kept myself from starting in surprise. You helped?
Some, she admitted, not as much as I wish I could have. I used the quicksilver in your body to form a circuit, but that was a couple of seconds into it. The voltage was enough to do a lot of damage to you in the time it took to bypass, and then the heat of conducting… well, it did some damage anyway.
Thanks, I told her.
Don’t thank me, she snapped, I should have noticed the sabotage.
“Sabotage?” I was so surprised that I said the word out loud, but I leaned over the electrode in my hand, as if I were asking rhetorically. Smooth move, they’ll probably think I’m crazy.
Definitely sabotage, she answered. Someone hacked your suit’s settings, just after your foray into the Tangun’s Steps. First hit on your helmet in any kind of training would trigger it, with the settings set to three hundred percent of the lethal and set to stay that way until someone did a command override. Whoever it was, they didn’t just want to kill you, they wanted to make an example out of you.
I set the electrode to the side, the blackened bit of metal with its charred bits of skin still attached. Who?
I don’t know. They knew what they were doing, though. Or else they had access codes. There’s no outward signs of it being hacked.
So that meant either an instructor or someone very good at this kind of thing. Would you be able to do this?
Well, yeah, but I would never—
I’m not accusing you, I asked. I stared down at the electrode, thinking about the agony I’d gone through, the raw, unfiltered pain. The total loss of myself, of the ability to make words, to think coherently. I’m asking if you could do it back to whoever was responsible, if we find him.
Because I was pretty certain if they’d done it to me on purpose, then if I didn’t find him and deal with him, he’d just try again.
***
“Fos, you hard to find.”
The words came to me as I was using the toilet and I started, looking around.
“Up here,” the chirping voice told me.
I glanced up and put my gaze back down at the floor before anyone watching me might notice. “Lokka?” I muttered in shock. The civet was perched in a narrow vent up near the ceiling. He was a little gray and brown creature, with mottled fur, about a meter fro
m the tip of his cat-like nose to the end of his long prehensile tail. Right at the moment, his small forepaws were worked through the edge of the vent, his small, agile fingers dangling a bit of electronics that he must have dismantled, either because it was in the way, because he wanted to avoid notice from security monitors, or just because he liked being destructive. Maybe all three of those at the same time, I thought to myself.
I finished my business and moved over to the sink under the vent, turning on the water and splashing some on my face, covering my mouth as I spoke. “You shouldn’t be here, you’ll be seen.”
“No sensors in the vents,” Lokka scoffed. “Many rats. Good eating.”
“Great,” I muttered. “How long have you been here?”
“Days,” Lokka chittered. “The Barrens boring. Lokka see if you up to anything interesting.”
“You’ll get me in trouble,” I muttered at him. I started shaving, hoping the noise of the sink would mask our conversation.
“You in trouble. Big human, he beat you up. Then another one cooked your brain. Maybe you better off, maybe it make your fos brain work better.”
“Thanks,” I snapped. “How about you get out of here?” I pressed a little too hard as I shaved and took a chunk of skin off my cheek, and had to bite back a curse as I blotted at the blood running down my face.
“No, no, too much fun to be had,” he giggled. “But you better watch yourself, fos, they think you Vars, and they don’t like Vars.”
I started to ask who they were, but when I looked up, Lokka was gone. Oh, I have a really bad feeling about this.
What was that? Shadow demanded.
I filled her in as best I could. Lokka is a civet, they’re an Earth-native species that were brought out here and modified to make them better test subjects in the pharmaceutical labs. They’re highly intelligent, smarter than most people think. Lokka fixes broken datapads and other devices with no formal training. I finished shaving and cleaned up as well as I could.
So, they’re genetically engineered, Shadow considered that. But they’re from animals, so they’re not technically illegal under Guard law.
I don’t think their creators really meant for them to be this intelligent, I told her. In fact, I think the civets mostly hide their intelligence. But Lokka likes me, I saved his life. So he trusts me, sort of, and he likes to show off.
I filled her in on how Lokka and a pair of his tribe of civets had helped me and Ted, and then how Lokka had helped me to sabotage House Mantis’s skimmers so that we could escape after I’d wrecked Wessek’s meeting with them.
I went back to the barracks room and just as I did, the main doors opened and the rest of Jade Flight filed in. They looked tired and I didn’t miss how several of them were limping.
“Form up!” one of the enlisted instructors bellowed.
I fell in with them, getting sideways glances from the others as I did so.
“Jade Flight has patrol duty in the Underwarrens,” the instructor snapped. “I need three volunteers.”
Jonna stepped forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw she had a spreading bruise across one side of her face. I wondered if that was my doing. Whatever they’d been up to, the rest of my flight looked as if they’d been worked hard while I’d been back here. More than that, I’d hit and punched a lot of them during my incident.
I stepped forward.
The instructor shot me a glare, “You’re on light duty, Vars.” He said it with a malicious tone, as if he enjoyed pointing out that I had been a burden to the rest of the flight.
“I can pull my weight, sir,” I snapped.
Something vaguely like respect went across his face. “Fine,” he nodded. “Who else?”
For a moment, no one stepped forward. Then, with a slight sigh, Osmund took a step forward as well.
“Very well,” the instructor nodded. “Grab your TBA-2’s. I’ve transferred your patrol route to your implants and I’ll walk you to the lift. The rest of you are dismissed.”
I hurried over to my weapons rack. Princess Kiyu stood near her wall locker and she shot me a look as I grabbed my TBA-2. For a moment, she almost looked like she wanted to say something, then she thought better of it and just gave me a nod.
I hurried back over to the doors, forming up next to Jonna and Osmund. The enlisted instructor led us out at a trot, jogging along. It was harder for me to match the pace than I liked. I didn’t know what they’d given me with the double-shot of quick heal, but either it was wearing off or I’d just been through too much for the past most of a day. Either way, I was panting and stumbling as we came through the corridors and finally stopped in front of an industrial lift.
There were a few other teams formed up there. The enlisted instructor left us without a word.
I didn’t recognize the officer standing there, but he waited until the last team arrive before he spoke. “I’m Daewa Tong, I’m in charge of our patrol teams. The Institute assists the red badges’s in patrolling the Underwarrens below the spire and along the edge of the Heart of Drakkus. Your primary duty is intercepting any smugglers. Additionally, there are two missing patrols of entrants. If you locate them, you are to escort them back here. If they don’t come willingly, you are authorized to use lethal force to get them to comply.”
I swallowed at that. The implication was clear. If the patrol needed help, we were to provide it. If they were trying to desert, then we were to kill them.
“Are there any questions?” Tong asked.
“Sir,” Osmund raised his hand, “why don’t we use our Kavacha Mark Fives?”
“The level of risk in the Underwarrens is minimal and the tunnels down there are low enough and narrow enough that use of suits aren’t ideal. Besides, there are times when you’ll need to operate outside of your armor or entirely without it. We train you for all situations, entrant.” There was an ugly edge to his voice, as if he were just short of accusing Osmund of cowardice.
“Now, are there any further questions?” Tong demanded.
No one answered.
“You’ve received your patrol routes. Some of the lower levels of Underwarrens are unstable, so if any of the passageways have collapsed, then note that on your patrol reports.” He moved over to the lift doors and pulled out a physical key from inside his jacket. He unlocked the panel and then hid the panel while he typed in a code. A moment later, the heavy doors ground open. He stepped to the side and waved us into the lift, scanning each of us as we stepped inside.
The different patrol teams all kept their distance from one another inside the big lift. It was large enough that we could have fit forty or fifty people instead of the fifteen. Each of us stayed in our groups, eying the others in suspicion.
The lift dropped quickly, my stomach fluttering as we descended. It slowed to a halt and the heavy doors ground open.
The Underwarrens were dark, inky blackness. I toggled the lamp on my rifle as the other entrants did so. Tong’s voice came from a speaker above us. “All patrol teams will disembark.”
We hurried out. A moment later, the doors ground shut and we could hear the lift ascend.
My implant painted the direction I needed to go and I pointed my rifle down that narrow corridor, the attachment light casting stark shadows ahead of me. “Well,” I said, “I suppose we should get on with it.”
“Osmund,” Jonna snapped, “watch our rear.” I shot her a look and she explained, “There are no monitors down here, I don’t want one of the other patrols deciding to eliminate competition.”
“That happen often?” I asked as I eyed the other groups as they went their own directions.
“It’s not sanctioned, but there’s always a few patrols that go missing here or there. Flights that are short personnel have a hard time finishing Second Screening,” Jonna answered, her eyes sweeping the narrow passage ahead of us.
“What are we doing down here, besides tempting other flights to shoot us in the back?” I asked.
“Who says
we aren’t going to shoot them first?” Jonna asked.
I hoped she was saying that for Osmund’s benefit.
“There’s criminals who try to slip into Heart all the time. A lot of the old tunnels run pretty deep into the city. The red badges run patrols all through the tunnels and under the spaceport, we’re looking for signs of tunnels being used to report to them or criminals trying to slip in,” she answered.
“Or people trying to slip out,” Osmund noted. “Like entrants.”
“Why run?” I asked. “I mean, they’re in the system, won’t they be identified wherever they go?” I hoped that question wouldn’t be too much of a giveaway, but maybe Osmund would chock it up to my brain being zapped rather than finding it suspicious.
“The tunnels run under the spaceport, some deserters make it to ships and bribe their way aboard,” Jonna told me. “Probably half or more of them get sold into slavery by the Pirate Houses, but there’s some that would take that risk over going into Second Screening in a bad flight.”
“There are flights that bad?” I asked in surprise.
“Thirty percent don’t make it,” Osmund snapped. “Plenty of entrants get pulled down because something goes sour in their flight or they get set up to fail.”
“Set up?” I shot Jonna a look. Osmund was being pretty talkative. Perhaps too talkative? Was he trying to see if we were wanting to run, maybe because Institor Dyer wanted him to question our loyalty? Now you’re being properly paranoid, Shadow whispered to me.
“If Imperial Intelligence has reason to suspect the loyalty of member of a flight or to feel that they would be dangerous to the Empire, they will sometimes set conditions such that a flight cannot survive Second Screening,” Jonna’s voice was neutral, but I caught her meaning. Whatever she was into, she might well fall into that category. Oh, great.
“They’d kill thirty entrants to take out one or two bad apples?”
“Bad apples?” Osmund asked.
“Sorry, my head’s still, the words are a bit jumbled,” I coughed. “I meant to remove disloyal elements.”
“Yeah, of course,” Osmund answered. “Which is why some of the rest of our flight isn’t crazy about your survival.”
