“Good. Because we need you to keep embarrassing them like that. Keep giving people the confidence to believe that they can say what they want. Vote for who they want.”
“Okay, but I’m not sure I know what—”
“Don’t worry—they’ll give you plenty of opportunities. And all you have to do is what you think’s right. That’s it. Simple.”
“But won’t I just be going back to C2 tonight?”
Pierre sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Brandon still doesn’t have the points to get you out. We’ll even lose Sebastian in a few days when Caelus transfers him back . . . which’s another reason why we’re moving now.”
‘Moving now.’ What did that mean?
Brandon’s face grew as serious as Pierre’s. “Did Sebastian ever mention anything about being good in the Box?”
“Yeah, when we were on the transport. I got the impression that he was exceptional.”
Pierre and Brandon shared a glance. “He told us the same thing, but we were worried he was just saying what we wanted to hear,” explained Brandon. The thing is, though, there’s no way he would’ve gotten in otherwise, since his physicals are terrible and his socials . . . “
“Are almost as bad,” said someone else.
“Which means his strategy and pattern-programming scores must be off the charts,” Fin chimed in. She had made her way across the room to stand behind Pierre, coffee in hand, propping her elbow against a pipe.
“And that’s the play,” said Brandon as he placed a vial on the table and began drawing fluid up into a syringe. “We invite Caelus to a Challenge while we still have Sebastian.”
An indignant voice spoke up from behind. “Hold on a second. Just to get this straight, you’re planning to risk all the points we’ve saved up—the ones we’ve freaking bled the last nine months for—on some Green, just because he says he topped out? Do you know how many kids have said they topped out since we got here?”
“Yeah, but none of them were like Sebastian, without other talents. He’s not a chemist like Fin, or a winger like Castor, so there’s no other reason they’d want him. We checked,” said Brandon as he flicked the syringe.
“You checked?”
“Yes, honey, we fucking checked.”
“You put him in the Box?”
There was silence. All around me, disheveled faces, most of which carried bruises and bags under their eyes, fixed upon Brandon. Looking so tired and used to disappointment that even a moment like this could barely summon an expression greater than curiosity. The only things moving in the room were a couple of flashing columns on a lightpanel spreadsheet in the corner.
“Come on, man, think for a second,” Pierre said finally. “If we put him in the Box, it would show up on Caelus’ log. He’d know we’re up to something.”
“And just look at him. Look at him,” Brandon added, jumping back in. “There’s no other possible place for those scores to go. That fat head of his is it, and hotshot here just said Seb told him he was a tech genius on the transport.”
The group, which had grown larger over the past minute, turned to me.
“What context did he say that in?” asked the Blue who’d been questioning Brandon. “Was he bragging? Was he—”
“He wasn’t bragging,” I said. “We were talking about the reasons we came here and he said he was just hoping that being good in the Box would help him fit in.”
A couple of Blues laughed.
“Well, there you have it,” said Brandon as he nonchalantly plunged the syringe into a vein in his forearm. “The slipper fits.”
I couldn’t help but follow the purple liquid’s progress down the tube, amazed at just how much of it there was disappearing under his skin. “You want some, don’t you?” he asked, smirking.
“Not particularly, sir.”
“Did you hear that, guys? He sirred me!”
Someone patted me on the shoulder from behind and said, “Don’t waste your breath.” And then someone else said, “Respect’s not given here, its taken.”
Brandon continued, amused. “You should try it, seriously. Ingredients are fresh off that GZ freighter and when it’s fresh it’s like . . . it’s like—”
“He said he didn’t want it, sir,” Pierre said.
“He doesn’t know what he wants. How could he? He’s never felt all those synapses firing up there at once: Bang! Bang! Bang!” He tapped a finger hard against my forehead. “The brain’s full of a lot of chemicals we didn’t choose. Might as well put some up there that we do.”
Pierre looked disgusted. “You’re an idiot.”
“But I’m your idiot,” Brandon replied, walking around behind Pierre and mussing up his hair.
“Jesus,” said the Blue next to me.
“It’s not like they’re going to catch you,” said Brandon, letting his last words ring emphatically. “Our chemist can boil you up something and you’ll be pissing holy water all week. Isn’t that right, dear?”
Fin’s eyes flickered with annoyance as a few more C3 Blues emerged from a corridor and began walking over.
Pierre cut in. “Anyway, like I said, Sebastian’s the wild card and we need to play him before Caelus takes him away. He’s smart and can make the same calculation, but he hasn’t heard it from the sources we have and won’t be able to act with the same assurance. It’s important we do the Challenge tonight, though, before he figures it out.”
There was a chorus of protest.
“Are you serious?”
“How do you know he’d even accept it?” asked someone else. “Especially on such short notice.”
“He’s in no position to turn down a Challenge. Aaron’s made him look stupid twice; he can’t afford to show any more weakness,” Pierre pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter—it’s done. I submitted the Challenge the moment Aaron walked through the door,” said Brandon, somewhere between smug and unsure. I think it was only because he was trying so hard to be cocky that it was noticeable how afraid he was. The tightness in his jaw right after he spoke. His hand squeezing his leg. It didn’t match. “So time to get fired up!”
“This is so reckless,” a blond cadet said.
“Better than the usual circle jerk,” said a short, pale Blue next to him.
“Yeah,” said Pierre. “Because we’ll never get another chance like this.”
“You better hope that shit is out of your system by tonight, Brando,” the Blue behind me said.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head, Rhys. All that game tape Shu and his boys watched—see what good it did them? You can’t predict the Zeroes.”
“Oh, so it’s just random when you crash then?”
“And get the shakes?” said someone else.
“All part of the plan,” Brandon said breezily as he got up and began jaunting around the room, making boasts and proclamations.
“As much as I’d like to stick around for this, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be in class,” I said.
“We all are,” Pierre replied. He had the look of an irritated moderator as he rolled his eyes at Brandon and leaned back against one of the quadruple-decker bunk beds. He seemed drained now. Not apathetic, but getting there. A to hell with it kind of face. I wasn’t sure if he actually thought this Challenge—whatever it was—would work, or if he was just ground down and frustrated enough to try anything. But then, a second later, he straightened his back and the expression was gone, replaced by the thoughtful, sanguine resolve I’d seen when we’d met yesterday.
“Uh, I left my U-dev and uniform in the other barracks, so I’m not sure . . .”
“We’re about the same size so can take my old green one,” Pierre told me. “And we’ve got a few guys on the inside who’ll get your U-dev back. Trust me, you don’t want to pay for a new one. In the meantime, Fingers over there will hack into your schedule and print you a route. That’s all you’ll need for now.”
The boy named Fingers gave me a nod, then started
punching commands into the lightpanel mounted on the wall, disappearing the assignment spreadsheet that had been there previously.
“Where’s Sebastian?” I asked.
He beckoned toward a short corridor, which I presumed led to the washroom. “Brushing his teeth.”
“Does he have any idea about this Challenge you’re planning?”
“No,” said Pierre.
“He might not handle the pressure well,” I offered, having already seen him freeze up twice.
“You better make sure he does, because it’s the only way we’ll get enough points to get you out.”
Chapter 11
There was no droop, only sinew sticking out under the short hair, more pronounced than anything I’d ever seen on a pit bull. The bark reverberated, and it lashed about on its leash, occasionally sliding around in a pool of its drool. Commander Marquardt, standing by the dog’s side, stared at each of us as we passed under the archway, usually just a second or two, though a little longer at Sebastian, and longest of all at me.
After the accident, just the thought of flying was nauseating; I hadn’t even been back in a cockpit since. But Pierre was unequivocal about it “looking good” for me to be a part of the Challenge; so, after much protest, I agreed.
“Just do your best,” Pierre said after I told him about the low score I’d gotten on my sims. “Sebastian told me you purposely flubbed those, but it doesn’t matter: with him controlling so much, you’ll mostly just be shooting.”
But ‘mostly’ still meant flying. Normally that would’ve just been something mental that I could work through, but the controls were weird, too, seeming almost intentionally convoluted. And while Sebastian had spent the morning agonizing over strategy, I’d spent it simply learning the nuances specific to the Corinth Box. Things like the sensitivity gauge for the steering and the button for the thrusters were on the top right when I was used to them being corner left, and the chaff deployment was overhead instead of being on the center stick. Small things, but when you added them up they became big things.
They wanted me out there, though, so flanked by Fin and a C3 Blue I didn’t know, I strode down the corridor to the Box Room. Sebastian was just ahead of me, alongside Brandon and Pierre, and I could hear the Box lingo that constituted their final preparations being tossed back and forth. Our fleet’s four-to-one numerical disadvantage had become five to one because of the kind of ships Sebastian wanted to select, but he was so sure of himself that no one protested. Everyone seemed to want—to need—to believe.
Commander Marquardt trailed close behind, his black beast snapping, bellowing out hot air and saliva as we climbed into the Boxes. I’d expected them to give us the kind of ceremonial welcome you see at prestigious institutions on the Link, or at least meet us on the way in, but there’d been none of that. Just the tie-in and Tread Room and now the gnashing and pawing from the dog, whose veined, yellow eyes were the last thing I saw as the chamber closed. Everything was pitch black until a flickering light illuminated a syringe lying in wait beside the controls. I picked it up and, with only a few seconds of hesitation this time, jammed its contents into my arm.
“All right, everyone should be inside—I’m getting all green signals.” It was Sergeant Rhys’s voice in my earpiece.
“In a few moments the second round of ship selection’ll come up,” Pierre explained. “Sebastian, just holler out what you want us to buy and Fingers will get it. What’s for sale’s in the middle, our current inventory is on the left, and remaining credits are in the top right corner. We only have two minutes to make augmentations.”
“They’re on in three, two, one,” chanted Rhys, and then our screens came to life. From what I’d gathered, the ships available to supplement the core fleet changed every battle, so we’d have to think tactically about what we wanted, based upon the map and scenario. Sebastian had made some very odd choices when picking out the core fleet, buying a bunch of long out-of-service carriers and a squadron of bombers so old they had to fish them out of some obscure supplementary file, and I was curious to see what he’d pair them with.
“Get the freighters,” Sebastian said.
“The smuggling ones? We’re not doing any—”
“We need their jammers to run cargo masking.”
“Just do it, no more questions,” said Brandon. “We’re already in this deep,” he muttered under his breath.
“Hmmmmm . . . this is a tough call . . . buy the Zs and the Ls,” Sebastian continued. “We’re gonna need their torps to break ’em up.”
Another disembodied voice spoke up across the comms. “That’s one-third of our credits—”
“Shut up, Reiman, didn’t you hear what I just said? Sebastian, don’t explain yourself, we don’t have time,” Brandon said, becoming annoyed.
“Okay, well actually that’s all we’re getting. Spend the rest on Arrowlites and Slipshot fighters.”
Even I knew that was an imprudent number of fighters.
After a few seconds of silence, Fingers’ voice cracked over the radio. “We don’t have enough room on the cruisers and carriers for half that many.”
“We do on the outsides.”
“Just do it, Fingers! I’m sure he knows the specs,” Brandon snapped, only this time with the kind of detectable doubt that would cost him currency with those Blues who already thought this Challenge was crazy.
I, on the other hand, was getting a clearer idea of what Sebastian was going for. The way I saw it, half of the old cruisers were fake bait and the other half were just hangar space for the Slipshots. The Arrowlites would be on the backs of the rest of our ships and the freighters’ advanced jammers would run interference so Caelus wouldn’t know how fighter-heavy we were. It all hinged on his believing that the reason we looked so light was that we had a portion of our strength hidden somewhere in the nebula.
“Okay, guys, we have a few seconds,” Sebastian began over the comms. “Pierre, I need you to position a mixed group of fighters, including the old F-11s and Arrowlites—basically anything that won’t fit—on the rear of any ship where you can find space, destroyer class or above. And, Fingers, as soon as we go live, you’ve got to start running interference with the freighters.”
If they figured out what we had on those freighters it would be over quickly, but it was plausible they’d believe we only wanted them for their sensors, given the nebula’s low visibility. I had my doubts that Caelus would fall for that, but Sebastian had spent the entire morning watching game film on him, so hopefully he had better insight.
I punched a button and the weapons wheel lowered in front of me, the gun sight dancing on my retinas, making me feel a little bit more powerful—the five-to-one not seeming quite so bad now that I was toggling between missile types.
“We’re live!” shouted Pierre, and my stomach dropped as I flipped, suddenly finding my fighter hanging upside down off the bottom of one of our cruisers.
“Holy hell,” I mouthed to myself. It was beautiful. The broken nebula’s purple stripes haunted the space below while dozens of fighter squadrons swooped past, blue, red, and green beacon lights flashing from their wings, dwarfed by the battle ships and carriers.
“Lock in your vectors, everybody.” Sebastian’s voice was shaky but deliberate. “Sending flight schemes and attack patterns now. Rhys, send destination coordinates in case the network goes down.”
“They’re deploying closer than we thought they would, but it’ll do.”
“We gotta launch fast. Fingers, what’s the fighter status?”
“All set, and our jammers are in place for signal dispersion. I don’t think they’ve spotted them.”
“Looks like they’re tightening their formations; no sign that they’re taking the bait,” said Rhys.
“Slingshots, switch to secondary missile launchers—interference from the nebula is messing with the D7’s targeting sensors.”
“Keep the pilot chatter off the command channel—you guys are on three,”
hollered Pierre.
“Jesus,” said Brandon. “We’ve practiced this a million times.”
“Now they’re heading right toward us, aggro as usual,” said someone else. This probably meant Caelus believed we’d hidden our main force and was moving fast to crush the remainder while it was still isolated.
Sebastian paused for a moment to acknowledge this and then continued on with his directives, the waver in his voice fading with each word. “Bring the bombers to the front of the formation and get ready to launch fighter squadrons one to seventeen. Pierre, you know what to do. I have control over all patterns, but I’ll need some help making ship-to-ship adjustments. Squadron heads, set autonomy levels to three; warships, you’re at five.”
It felt dreamlike hanging upside down. The ships, the nebula, and the colors all made it strangely peaceful, but it was still scary with nothing but two inches of coated glass separating me from nothingness. Box or no Box, it would feel real enough with that syringe fluid inside me if it shattered.
I turned my head and saw another pilot hanging ten meters away from me in a different cockpit, the suction of her landing gear also clinging to the cruiser’s cooling module. For a second I thought she was the girl from the catwalk and my pulse skipped, but when her cockpit rotated I could see through the oxygen mask that it was someone else. Pierre and Rhys had been concerned about Sebastian’s choosing the cheapest wing of pilots—supposedly known for their obstinacy—to use on the Challenge, but he’d insisted he wouldn’t have enough credits to buy the stuff he needed otherwise, saying, “We can’t get top shelf everything.” But so far the wing didn’t seem so bad. I gave a quick wave to the girl, who was probably somewhere a few rooms over plugged into a pilot Box, and after a few seconds she waved back.
“Fighters on standby, hold on the launch until first torpedo volley is away, then gun it with everything you’ve got!”
“The Zs and Ls will be in firing range in six, five, four—”
“At mark, fire Ts at their formation’s center—condensed spread!” yelled Sebastian.
Lakes of Mars Page 7
