The Narrow Path To War

by D L Frizzell

  Alex made his way back to the cargo door, moving cautiously so he couldn’t be seen from the cracks in the hull. He could hear the protesting groan of metal echoing within the ancient space vessel. “Cale,” he muttered under his breath, “you better just be lost in here.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It was neither the coldness nor the wetness of the water that jarred Cale into consciousness, but the force of its impact against his face. He felt a hand push his head back hard enough to thud against something. A raspy, lisping voice spoke somewhere nearby, seeming to ask a question. The fog in Cale's mind made it difficult to understand. A different voice replied, closer than the first. The words were equally meaningless to Cale. The voices were having some disagreement, of that he was pretty sure, as they constantly interrupted one another. Silence followed, after which Cale heard a sigh. A moment later, a hand slapped his face with enough force to bring him fully awake. Cale lifted his head and noticed he was standing upright. When he wondered how that could be when he was unconscious, he had to concentrate to figure out the answer. He was strapped to an old operating room table that had been propped on one end and tied in place with ropes. The table’s upholstery had long since dried out, feeling like splintered wood against his back. His arms were stretched to the sides, lashed firmly to the armrests. His feet dangled above the floor, while straps ran between his legs to keep him from sliding down. When a cool breeze chilled him from head to toe, he looked down and realized the only clothing he had on was his underwear.

  As his vision cleared, Cale saw half a dozen bearded men, each dressed in animal fur, standing around a room piled high with ancient technology. Most of it looked unfamiliar, with scorched electronic interfaces and tarnished components. He remembered scrounging through many such objects earlier, frustrated that nothing amounted to more than techno-junk, when he was knocked cold.

  “Somebody hit me,” he told the men, realizing only then that they were probably the ones who did it. A few of them laughed at him before turning back to what they were doing.

  The men were rummaging through the broken equipment. Cale guessed they were looking for something, maybe a motor like he was. His backpack lay discarded against one wall. The motors he'd scrounged had been removed and tossed in with the rest of the junk. He didn’t get the impression they found what they wanted, though. Other men came and went, bringing various objects in for examination. Every piece they brought was scrutinized by one of the men, then tossed on the refuse pile with a grunt. They seemed frustrated, too.

  Cale noticed sunlight filtering down from above. He looked up and saw there was no ceiling to speak of, only twisted metal beams and jagged holes where bulkheads used to be. He felt the table shake from a vibration in the floor, after which some dust fell from above. A scavenger bird fluttered off one of the beams and flew out into the daylight. Cale wished he could do the same. He looked down again when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  Two men stood before him, neither of them with beards like the others. One of them was fat, dressed in an ornate metallic armor that was a few sizes too small. His teeth were crooked and un-brushed. His lower lip was torn apart down to his chin, with a missing tooth between the two edges of the scar. He was ugly, and seemed like an especially mean type of person. The other man wore a dirty outfit with a hood that covered most of his face. He looked familiar, sort of.

  "Norio?" Cale asked. The man's eyes grew wide. He stepped closer to Cale and examined him.

  It was not Norio. He was younger but had the same distinctive Jovian features; tanned skin and dark brows that spread wide above his eyes. The man was dressed like a beggar, a beggar with a steely gaze that unnerved Cale.

  “Who are you?” the beggar asked.

  "I'm a sophomore," Cale said, smiling nervously. He decided to use the same excuse he used at the university when he was actually a freshman, and older classmen were looking for someone to prank. "The freshmen will be here later, if you want to play the joke on them."

  "Why are you here, plainsman?" the fat man asked, spitting out the last word like an insult. Or maybe he just couldn't pronounce the letter P correctly with that horrible, disfigured lip.

  Cale looked at his empty backpack on the floor. “Here? For my class project. For...stuff.” He tried to shrug.

  “Benac is not a kind man,” the beggar said, “nor is he a patient one. We know that entering this vessel is forbidden by your government. It is doubtful you would risk punishment for mere stuff."”

  Cale stared at Benac, whose hateful eyes belied his otherwise blank expression. The fat man licked his teeth constantly, especially around the gap in his lip. "Can I have something to drink?" Cale asked.

  “I will be direct,” the beggar continued, ignoring Cale's request. “Benac believes you are here for two reasons. The first, to spy on us.”

  “Spy on you?” Cale choked back a laugh. “I don't even know who you are!”

  “You pretend ignorance, boy,” Benac grinned. “That is what I was hoping you would do.” He put the flat edge of his sword against Cale's lower lip and tapped it. The beggar cleared his throat to get Benac's attention and moved him away to speak quietly.

  Blue lightning flashed between the exposed girders overhead. The sound of thunder echoed through the ship, accompanied by the screech of twisting metal. The floor heaved, rearranging the junk that was strewn about the room. After the shaking stopped, the floor didn’t rest at quite the same angle it had a moment earlier. The operating table rocked precariously, then righted itself without falling over. Cale's eyes opened wide in terror.

  “These storms are wonderful things,” Benac said, picking up a stainless-steel tray from the floor and admiring his own reflection. “Wherever they go, pain follows. It would be a shame to waste such an opportunity in this wonderful place."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alex stumbled when the magnetic shock hit. After dusting himself off, he refocused on the trail the Jugs had left in their wake. It wasn’t obvious if Cale had been tis way or not, as the footprints were too varied, and he didn’t know what kind of shoes Cale wore.

  A scream echoed through the corridors. Alex burst into a run, hoping that the acoustics in this place weren’t leading him in the wrong direction. When he reached the junction between several corridors, he stopped and listened. He heard a pleading voice, Cale's voice. Knowing he must be near, he crept quietly, checking around each corner before proceeding.

  Only a few scattered rays of sunlight managed to penetrate the hallway where Alex found himself. The walls of the corridor had buckled over the centuries, collapsed by the incalculable tons of rock atop the Celeste. Wires and rusty conduits protruded from the ceiling, forcing Alex to duck repeatedly. Even with the urgency of the situation, he had to move slowly to navigate the wreckage without giving himself away.

  He finally emerged into an open lobby where the floor was almost level. Light beamed down from a massive split in the ship's superstructure, revealing a campsite the Jugs had made. Bedrolls were scattered around a makeshift fire pit, where glowing embers kept a cooked rodent warm. On the floor nearby, a set of broken double doors read 'General Surgery'.

  Alex looked around the lobby. A nurse's station was covered with recently discarded trash. Pools of stagnant water had collected in the low-lying parts of the floor where old tiles had rotted away to reveal metal decking underneath. He made his way around the wet areas, not wanting to get electrocuted when the next electromagnetic shockwave hit the plateau. Looking down the deserted hallways that intersected with the lobby, he heard Cale's voice, closer now. Moving towards it, other voices became audible. He caught sight of shadows in an open room down the corridor. They were talking in a casual tone, unconcerned about the young man pleading for his life.

  Alex had a sobering thought - he had nothing to defend himself with. Cale was crying, just through the doorway ahead of him, begging his captors to stop. If Alex didn’t bring something to fight with, he would end up in the same predi
cament. He searched some nearby rubble and found a length of pipe with a sharp point on the end. Thinking it would have to do, he grabbed it and moved towards the door.

  The door opened into a small anteroom with sinks and shelves that led to a larger room where Cale was. The lettering on the door said it was an operating room, which probably meant there were a lot of sharp objects inside. Alex steeled his resolve and prepared to charge in.

  Footsteps crunched through the debris behind him. He pivoted to see a large, bearded man in tattered furs approaching, holding what looked to be the cooked rodent, picking meat off its ribs with his fingertips. Alex reacted instantly, knowing he'd be seen if the Jug looked up. He ducked into the anteroom for an escape route but found himself pinned between the approaching Jug and his comrades in the next room. He had just enough visibility to see a countertop inside the doorway, and dived underneath it, crashing into the garbage piled there. The voices in the room stopped talking and turned to face the sound. Alex pulled himself into a ball under the counter and held still.

  The man with the rodent barged in where Alex had knelt only moments earlier. He stomped through a puddle, kicked aside the garbage without a second thought and tossed the rodent’s carcass into the shadows near Alex. The man shoved the operating room door open to reveal a brightly lit chamber filled with old equipment. When the others saw their comrade, they relaxed and went back to their conversations.

  Alex was now in a bad position. The operating room door had jammed open, and the anteroom was now bathed in light. He wouldn’t be able to stay there while he worked out a plan. Still, he had to know if Cale was okay, so he eased out of his hiding spot and peeked around the door frame. Cale was strapped upright to an operating room table, his feet dangling above the floor. Except for being mostly naked, having some black circles painted on his body, and being scared out of his wits, he seemed unhurt. So far.

  Alex did a quick scan of the room to get an idea what he might do. He saw the floor was just as badly decayed as the lobby's floor was, with a large pool of stagnant water off to the side. Most of the jugs were standing on bare metal next to a pile of junk. Alex heard two of the Jugs talking, and maneuvered to get a better view. One of them, a fat one, wore tight-fitting metal armor. The other wore a nomadic outfit that looked like the kind Norio often wore, except it was in much worse condition. Alex got a glimpse of their faces and knew they were both Jovians. This wasn’t simply a rogue group of bandits – these men were spies.

  Alex decided to help Cale first and get answers later. He was glad he’d told Keeva to get the militia. He tiptoed back into the corridor to look for something better to fight with. The corridor was empty, so he went from room to room to see what he could find.

  Nothing in the hospital ward was recognizable, let alone helpful. As often as he’d read books about Earth, Alex had never seen anything like these machines before. One room had a large ring-shaped device with a bed resting in the middle. There were snaps of electricity arcing from the ring to the floor, so he gave it a wide berth and moved on. Another room had what looked like a giant aquarium; it was cracked and empty. Seeing nothing useful there, he hurried through the rest of the rooms. The best weapons he could find were scalpels, some motorized tools – dead, of course - and a saw. He doubted these objects would be much better than the pipe but kept the best ones as he continued looking. In a closet at the end of a hallway, some wood-handled mops sitting in empty buckets. Of all the recognizable things he would encounter on the Celeste, these were the last items he'd have wished for. Concluding it was unrealistic to find actual weapons in a hospital, he set his items in one of the buckets and hurried back into the hallway.

  A scream echoed through the ancient surgical ward. Cale pleaded loudly for them to stop what they were doing but screamed again seconds later. Alex felt the pit grow in his stomach as he tried not to think about what they were doing to his friend. Cale's screaming became constant, and Alex gave up his search for anything better.

  He paused when he saw another door with a faded logo of a lightning bolt on it. It was some kind of electrical station, filled with transformers and a large generator. A quick search through some boxes uncovered a spool of copper cable. It was a centimeter thick, designed to handle large amounts of power. It gave him an idea. If he was right about the storm outside, it would create an electrical charge in the generator's coils, which he could use against the jugs. He scanned the array of dials on the generators for indications of voltage. Nothing. Centuries of magnetic anomalies left the motor fused solid. He cursed under his breath.

  Another magnetic shock wave hit the Celeste, this time bigger than the first. Alex felt the hair rise on his arms and heard a faint hum down the corridor. He ran in the direction of the noise, stumbling as the floor heaved up and down. He wasn't worried about being noticed. Anything that wasn't attached to a deckplate or a bulkhead was sliding around noisily, so any racket he made was drowned out. He could tell by the increasingly alarmed comments from the jugs in the other room that they were also worried about the shockwaves. Strangely, though, one of them seemed to be enjoying it.

  Alex got to the room with the large ring around the bed and saw that it was the source of the hum. He walked closer to it and startled when the saw got yanked from his hand. It flew through the air to collide with the ring. He put the scalpels in a drawer on the other side of the room so they wouldn't get pulled onto the ring also, then moved closer to it. The rhythmic vibration within the ring told him something was spinning inside. Alex smelled ionization in the air. The snaps of electricity had grown significantly larger, dancing across several exposed metal plates in the room. He knew he'd found something better than a motor - it was an electromagnet. As the shockwave subsided, the electromagnet also wound down to a stop. Alex got to work uncoiling the wire, hoping the storm would wait for him to construct a weapon.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Benac admired his sword and held it up to see the red drops flowing off the tip. Blood flowed from the left side of Cale's abdomen as he hung limply against the operating table's restraints. Benac had run him through with the sword, sticking the point into the table behind him. When the shockwave hit, the table bounced up and down with the blade firmly embedded in it. As Cale's body was jostled upon it, his flesh tore against the sharp edge. It was more than he could bear and passed out.

  “He would give us answers if he had them,” Daigre told Benac. He did not think it honorable to torture an innocent child. Of course, they could not allow the boy to leave and report their presence in the Plainsman Territory. He preferred to give him a quick death to the kind that Benac had in mind.

  “I do not care if he has answers,” Benac retorted. “I prefer he does not.” He gestured at the bucket on the floor. "Wake him again."

  When Daigre did not comply, Benac clucked his tongue and waved a Jug forward to do it. Another bucketful of water brought Cale around, and the Jug stepped back to his place.

  Benac moved in close to Cale, his eyes gleaming with sadistic cruelty. “Listen, boy. I am sure you have noticed the drawings I made on your body.” Cale couldn't help but look at the circles of paint again. "They are crude, I admit," Benac smiled. "I am not an artist."

  Cale said nothing. The fear in his eyes told Benac everything he wanted to know.

  “These are the places where a sword will kill you," Benac continued, touching each paint smear. "I promise not to stab you there." He noticed that he’d gotten a bit of the still-wet paint on his fingertip, which he proceeded to wipe onto Cale’s nose. “Well, I guess that part is off-limits now,” he tittered.

  Cale struggled frantically against his restraints, his whimpers growing to screams again.

  "This is a waste of time," Daigre said. "We should kill him now."

  "Your weakness sickens me," Benac sneered at his comrade. "The Guile promised me you would be an exceptional servant. I don’t know why I continue to give you chances to redeem yourself. You have failed me at every turn."
>
  "These sadistic methods are pointless," Daigre shot back. "They are a distraction from our real mission!"

  Benac pushed Daigre to one side and shoved a finger into his captive’s fresh wound. Cale stiffened, his face a mask of pain. Benac raised his blood-covered fingertip and waited until his young prisoner stopped convulsing. He proceeded to touch several unpainted spots on Cale’s body, making sure Cale watched, leaving a red mark at each location.

  "No!" Cale pleaded with each mark Benac made. Benac grinned and took one more swipe of blood from Cale’s wound. He drew a line across the diameter of Cale's right arm, just below his shoulder.

  Cale recoiled in terror, twisting violently, pulling hard to free himself. The straps only seemed to tighten. Benac stepped back and let him struggle until he had no strength left. Cale finally gave up and went limp.

  “This will only be the beginning, I think,” Benac said.

  “What do you want from me?” Cale sobbed.

  “There is a suspicion among my people,” Daigre replied, coming forward, “you are stockpiling weapons that use electronics; weapons that can kill us from far away.” He held up a bundle of wires that came from Cale’s pack.

  “That’s junk!” Cale cried.

  “I doubt you would risk your life in this accursed vessel for junk,” Daigre said. “Perhaps it is more likely you are a servant doing your master’s bidding, so that he need not enter this very dangerous place on his own?”

  Benac didn’t wait for Cale to answer. He pushed his sword through the other side of his abdomen, slowly, as if feeling each muscle separate until the point clicked against the table on the other side. He waited a moment, looked around at the ceiling, and gave a disappointed grunt that another shockwave hadn't struck at that moment.