To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  “What’s going on, O’Malley?” Jason asked Scabs, trying to keep things on an even keel. He wanted to see Cassie, not get into a tussle.

  “All kinds of shit’s going on, Giraud. Nothing a mil-spec slavey needs to know.”

  Those were fighting words. Jason figured he had two choices: knock out the grinning ass-munch – and get a nasty beating from his friends in return – or turn around and walk away. Pops had taught him how to fight, and his time in the Corps had refined those lessons, but getting into something he couldn’t win wasn’t a good idea. This part of town didn’t get a lot of police supervision, and the first thing the party’s organizers had done was set up a privacy field that prevented imps from transmitting outside the area or recording anything for posterity. That meant any criminal activity would go unobserved, with only unreliable witness testimony for the authorities to go on. Best to get out. He was about to when Juice stepped in:

  “Take it easy, Scabs.”

  Juice Perkins was a good five inches shorter than Scabs, but he made up for it by wearing his hair in half a dozen multicolored spikes that protruded from his head in every direction, making him look like some sort of exotic fish or even more exotic plant. He was also the alpha of his pack: Scabs O’Malley stepped aside and lowered his head when he heard his boss show up.

  “It’s nothin’, Juice. Just playing around.”

  “Don’t be dissing paying customers, Scabs. Bad for business,” Perkins said before turning to Jason. “Good to see ya again, Giraud. Been a while.”

  They fist-bumped and for a second it was just like when they’d been at P.S. 7 way back then, just a couple neighborhood kids trying to avoid learning stuff and have some fun. All Jason had to do was subtract the crazy hairdo and remove the tattoos and age lines that made Juice look a good fifteen years older than he really was. Jason managed to smile back at his old friend, but the expression was more of a disgusted grimace than anything else. However bad his prospects were, at least he wasn’t an undocumented junk-peddler with a taste for his own merchandise.

  “Have some fun, Marine,” Juice added. “First drink is on me.”

  He offered Jason a cup filled with punch and God knew what else. Jason shook his head, a fake grin pasted on his face like a Halloween mask.

  “Mind if I help myself to a beer instead?”

  Scabs and Juice exchanged a look before the latter grinned again.

  “Sure thing, Giraud. Anything you want.”

  What was that about? Jason wondered while he got a beer – one with its cap firmly on – and opened it. Just a plain ice-cold Coors, locally-made and more than good enough for him. Perkins wasn’t called Juice because he loved his citrus drinks; he was a serious dope dealer, the kind that liked to hook the unwary. Jason had no desire to sample those wares. He took a tentative swallow, tasted nothing but honest beer, and drank some more.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” said someone behind him.

  Jason turned around, a genuine smile on his face. “Hey, Cassie.”

  Cassandra Dunkel’s normally long and lustrous black hair had been cropped to a medium-reg length. It gave her face a boyish look that her lipstick and the sundress – and the figure hinted at under it – belied.

  “Hasta la vista, baby,” he told her.

  She laughed. “That means goodbye, dummy.”

  “I know.” He liked making her laugh.

  They both loved old-timey movies. Casablanca, The Terminator, Groundhog Day – those 2-D flicks were windows to the past, to a time before aliens had shown up and burned down half of humanity. They helped them picture Earth, the original homeland where humans had risen from the primal muck and wondered if they were alone in the universe. They had watched dozens of flicks set on Earth but never visited it. Jason’s only sojourn off-world had taken him to New Parris, a planet that barely counted as inhabitable and was populated mostly by Marine boots, drill instructors and units on rotation.

  “How’s ObServ?” he asked her. Cassie still had a year left in the military; she’d opted to do her term in-system.

  She shrugged. “You know how it is. Army Corps of Engineers; nothing too exciting but I’m learning a lot. Might stick at it. I like building stuff.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Another shrug. “Not really; lots of hard work, but it means something. Spent the last year in Westria.”

  Jason nodded. The second largest continent on Marduk-One still wasn’t fit for human habitation; the flora and fauna were decisively hostile and clearing them out and making the ground suitable for earthlike plants was very hard work.

  “The good news is, we did it,” Cassie said, and that got his attention.

  “You mean it’s done?”

  “Pretty much. Last summer they brought some new tech from Xanadu. My unit helped deploy it. Nano-swarms; they cleared out the worst of the bugs. Word is they’ll start expanding the beachheads by the end of the year. Everybody who held on to those land claims is going to make bank.”

  Jason felt hopeful for the first time since he’d been rejected by the Marine Corps. There would be plenty of jobs available in Westria after the most hostile life forms – an insect species whose sting was uniformly lethal – were cleared out. He’d never gotten a land claim for Westria – Grand-Pops had but he’d sold it off a long time ago – but there would be plenty of other ways to earn money from the new settlements. Construction crews would need security, since some of the local fauna in the western landmass would still be around, including some fairly dangerous critters. A guy who knew which way to aim a rifle could probably find employment. Maybe things weren’t as bad as he’d thought.

  “Buy you a beer?”

  “I probably shouldn’t, not being legal and all,” she demurred before grinning again. “But hey, why not?”

  At twenty, Cassie couldn’t drink, couldn’t vote, couldn’t do much of anything. It was darned unfair as far as Jason was concerned; he’d crossed the line into legal adulthood a couple of months before, so he still had vivid memories of waiting for it.

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said after paying the guy at the bar.

  “Cheers.”

  They drank.

  At first things were great. They talked and danced; after a few drinks, Jason’s normal awkwardness about dancing in public didn’t seem so important. He looked dorky as heck but Cassie didn’t mind and that was all he cared about. Neither of them noticed anything was amiss for an hour or two; that was when his vision started to blur around the edges.

  “Whoa,” Cassie said when he tripped on his own feet and almost fell on her. “Easy there, liger.”

  “Napoleon Dynamite,” he said, slurring his words. “Ligerrrrrs.”

  “I have you thinked enough,” Cassie told him. She looked confused and was slurring her words, too. “Think you had enough. Thinked isn’t even a word.”

  “Didn’t drink that mush. Much,” Jason said. “Mushhhh.” He giggled at himself.

  “Me nether. Neither?”

  They were leaning on each other for support in the middle of the dance floor. A kid a few feet away was spinning around, faster and faster, out of synch with the music; he looked scared.

  “I can’t stop!” he shouted as he spun past them. “Can’t stop!”

  A couple other people were on the floor. One of them was having convulsions.

  “What did they do?” Jason said.

  Cassie collapsed in his arms and he fell under the sudden weight. He had barely enough coordination to shield her head with his body so she didn’t smack it on the concrete floor. They’d put something in their drinks. What? How?

  “Semper fi, dumbass!”

  Jason looked up and saw Scabs looming over him. “Have a nice trip, Giraud.”

  “What… did...?”

  “Too good to drink the punch, were ya? Well, I laced the outside of the bottles. You trippin’ on some Warp Spice, baby! The stuff they give fighter pilots, plu
s a little extra. You’re gonna see some deep skyey voids!”

  Jason’s addled mind made him wonder whether ‘skyey’ was a real word or not, but Cassie shuddered in his arms, bringing him back to reality. He lay her down on the floor as gently as he could and tried to get up; instead, he ended up on his hands and knees, too dizzy to stand. They’d poisoned everybody. If that stuff was real Spice, there was no telling what it would do to people. Especially the one percent of humans who weren’t warp-rated. They could go crazy or die.

  Jason, somebody said behind him. Except he didn’t hear the voice with his ears. It just echoed inside his head like a stray thought. He turned around.

  His dead dog Woof was standing there, looking just like he had at his best, when Jason had been eleven years old and Woof had been three. The scrappy mongrel pooch had a bit of German Shepherd and some Labrador, a floppy-eared lovable bastard. He’d died the year before Jason had gone off for Ob-Serv, and losing him had been harder than his parents’ deaths, mostly because he’d been old enough to understand what dying was.

  Woof was dead. And Woof had been a good – a great – dog, but he’d never talked. Only some heavily-modded dogs could talk, and Jason’s great-gramps couldn’t have afforded one on his best day.

  You can call me a dog-ghost, Woof said, and the mental voice was just what Jason would have imagined his beloved pooch would sound like, gruff and smart-assed. Or even Ghost Dog like that old-timey movie you liked so much.

  I’m going nuts, Jason thought.

  Not exactly, Woof told him. Your senses are wandering into warp space, where ghosts are real and dreams can come true. Nightmares, too. Be careful or you’ll fall right in, body and soul.

  Jason felt like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to make the insanity go away. Scab started laughing; he could hear the mocking sounds and he somehow knew that spraying the bottles had been his idea, all part of a dumb plan to create more addicts. Anger overcame dizziness and fear.

  “You.” Jason struggled to his feet and marched towards Scabs; he felt as if he was floating there. “You fucking asshole!”

  “You want to dance, Giraud?” Scabs shouted back, flexing his enhanced muscles. “Come on!”

  Scabs took a swing at Jason, but he was moving in slow motion for some reason. He slapped the druggie’s fist away and got his hands around the drug-peddler’s neck.

  “You…”

  Jason blinked, ignoring the choking sounds Scabs made, or his futile struggles. The world was being washed away by colors, by impossible colors that swirled around him like a tornado. Scabs began to scream. They were falling through the ground. Impossible.

  Damnit, Jase, Woof growled as Jason fell into warp space.

  The last thing Jason saw was Scabs being torn apart by the lights.

  * * *

  Jason knew he was in trouble. They didn’t keep you in the hospital for days on end if you weren’t in trouble.

  Most of the time, unless you showed up near-dead at the town’s clinic, they fixed you up in a few hours, a day tops, and they sent you home. The rare exceptions happened when there were too many patients for the clinic’s six auto-docs to tend at once. Jason had woken up in one of the med center’s dozen beds, with Pops hovering worriedly nearby. The first thing he’d done is ask about Cassie. She was a few beds down, hidden from view by a curtain. Still in a coma, Pops had said.

  Two nurses had spent the next two days poking and probing him, occasionally joined by the clinic’s staff physician. Jason knew Doctor Chaffey as the guy who showed up in school to do lectures about keeping up with the nano-meds regimen that kept most everyone healthy if not good-looking – cosmetic meds cost extra, and they weren’t cheap. According to Pops, Chaffey was a glorified technician who mostly let the auto-docs do all the work. He certainly didn’t seem to know what had happened to Jason; he provided a lot more questions than answers.

  That was why Jason knew he was in trouble. Scabs was dead. All they’d told him was that the drug dealer was missing, but he knew better. Whatever had happened during the party hadn’t left a body behind, but Scabs hadn’t survived. Juice had been arrested but Scabs was dead. The only thing that made any sense was too crazy for Jason to tell anybody, not even Pops. Spice. That drug had done something to him, turned him into a warp demon, the sort of critter you saw in horror flicks, except for real. Sooner or later, they’d take him away before he could hurt anybody else. He’d started to see things that weren’t there. So far, he hadn’t told anybody about them.

  And if you’re smart you’ll keep it that way, Woof told him.

  The ghost dog had been haunting him ever since he’d woken up. Every few hours, he’d see the pooch staring at him from another bed, or floating over his head. Jason closed his eyes and tried to make the ghost go away.

  “Hi, Jason.”

  He opened his eyes and saw a stranger standing by his bed. A uniformed stranger, wearing the field grays of the Warp Marine Corps. For a moment, he worried that he might be hallucinating again, but the man looked too normal and he heard him with his ears rather than his mind.

  “I’m Major Martin Howard,” the man said. “I’m here about the incident on Friday.”

  “I didn’t mean to take those drugs, sir. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

  “I know. We got the whole thing on tape. Their privacy blockers weren’t as good as they thought. You and your friends were poisoned without your knowledge or consent.”

  “What was in that stuff?”

  “A knock-off of some of the chemicals the military provides for warp-rated personnel to ease transitions, along with some designer psychotropics. We’ve gotten some samples from Mr. Perkins, who has decided to cooperate to avoid the death sentence. He claims he didn’t know how strong a dose O’Malley had sprayed on the bottles, but he’s still guilty as sin.”

  It sounded like Juice was going to get what was coming to him. Dealing drugs was bad enough, but trying to hook people by dosing their drinks would get him a quick meeting with a court-appointed executioner or a few decades doing hard labor in some hellhole or another. Cooperation would spare him from the former but not the latter.

  “The important thing, however, is the effect the drugs had on you, Jason. They altered your brain, you see. You’ve been seeing stuff, haven’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve been closely monitored since the incident. Some of your micro-expressions show your eyes focusing on things no one else can perceive.”

  Behind the Marine officer, Woof grinned at him.

  Jarhead knows his stuff, the dog said.

  “Am I crazy? I think I killed Scabs. I think I took him somewhere and he died there.”

  And now you’ve gone and spilled the beans, dumbass, Woof chided him.

  “No, you’re not crazy, Jason. But you are probably right about the other guy.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Like I said, we have the whole thing on tape. No charges will be filed against you.”

  Jason slumped back against his pillow. At least he didn’t have to worry about that.

  Major Howard wasn’t done, however: “I know your father was in the Corps – fighter pilot. Fought in the Great Galactic War.”

  Jason nodded. He didn’t really remember very much about his parents. They had died in a hovercar accident when Jason had been four. Pops had a large library of video and images of them, but that wasn’t the same. He had some vague memories of screaming fights. His father had been angry all the time. During his darkest moments, he wondered if the aircar accident that had taken his parents’ lives had been an accident at all. Dad had disabled the automatic controls because he claimed he could pilot anything that ever rose up in the air under its own power. Had an argument got out of hand badly enough that he’d done something crazy?

  It wasn’t like that, Woof said. Your father didn’t try to hurt your mother or himself. He was overconfident and got di
stracted.

  How do you know that? Jason sent back.

  You were curious, so I took a look. But never mind that, pay attention to the gyrene.

  Unaware of the talking dog, Major Howard went on: “You are not crazy Jason, but your symptoms represent something rather unique. Your medical exam results triggered a priority alert and I received a set of sealed orders instructing me to approach you.”

  I thought medical records were supposed to be confidential, Jason thought as the Marine continued talking. Woof tilted his head to one side, clearly amused.

  “This isn’t my kind of assignment – I’m actually on leave before heading back to New Parris for reassignment – but as the highest-ranking Marine in the system, it’s my job to come here and inform you of your options.”

  “My options?”

  “Yes. I can instruct the doctor to treat your symptoms and suppress them. You’ll undergo some intensive drug therapy until the hallucinations and unusual phenomena go away. The treatment may take years, and it’s not a hundred percent effective. There are also some side effects, including reduced motor control and inability to concentrate on tasks for long periods of time.”

  They’d done just that to his father after he mustered out. Warp fighter pilots needed to take all kinds of medications to stop seeing things and they probably had made things worse for him. Finding a decent job while on drugs, legal as they might be, would be next to impossible. Jason was no dummy, though; he figured the reason the officer was making the first option look downright terrible was that he wanted Jason to pick the second one.

  “Alternatively, I can get you back into active duty, effective immediately,” Howard said. “I’ve seen your records; you applied to remain in the Corps at the end of your Obligatory Service term. If we weren’t in the process of an across-the-board reduction in forces, you’d have been a shoo-in.”