We Dare

by Chris Kennedy

  “Kill?” She asked, obviously amused. “Pirates? There are no pirates on Solomon.”

  “I…” here I paused, uncertain. I almost seemed to know that pirates were, indeed, on Solomon. Somehow, with no rhyme or reasons, I could even pinpoint where they were on a map. It was scary, but I decided to speak up anyway. “No, they’re here, on the planet’s surface. I can show you on a map.”

  “That’s okay, I believe you,” Doctor Pulvere said and smiled. She took her hands away from the keyboard and stretched her back. “While we were talking, I found a pirate’s base that is reputed to be on this world. It has been hitting colonist’s resupply vessels regularly and they have what seems to be a den near here. The marines are too busy to do anything, and the Navy can’t drop kinetics onto their base without disrupting the atmosphere. This seems to me the ideal situation for the new mechanized infantry. How about it? Do you want to try it out?”

  I was nervous, but ready. “Yes. Only one problem, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know how to use a gun,” I admitted. She smiled again, and I immediately felt more confident about my abilities. I don’t know what it was about this woman, but she could motivate me to be greater.

  “I think you know more than you realize,” she commented as she turned back to her computer for a moment. Satisfied with whatever she had typed in, the doctor began to walk toward a set of wide double doors at the other end of the warehouse. Noticing that I wasn’t with her, she stopped and glared at me. My heart dropped as I saw the disappointment in her eyes. I couldn’t let her down. I followed loyally behind. I would take down the pirates and protect the Dominion. It was expected of me.

  “Where are we going?” I asked the doctor.

  “To get you a weapon, then send you in to kill some pirates.”

  My heart leapt into my throat. It was something I’d always wanted to do, and now I was getting the chance to do it. The strangest thing about it all, though, was that I knew deep down that this was wrong, that I’d never even given any thought to fighting pirates before. Now, though, it didn’t matter. Killing pirates was my only mission in life. I would kill all the pirates or die trying.

  Doctor Pulvere led me to a smaller room where four rather nervous looking men wearing identical uniforms were waiting. I had seen something like what they had on in a vid once and immediately recognized them as marines. I had to duck to get through the doorway even though it was almost seven meters high. There was more than enough room for me to stand upright to my full height once inside. This, of course, made the men back up warily. Either they had never seen someone as large as I was, or my suit scared them. Either way, it pleased me to see other Imperfects like these marines respect me. Being reminded that I was the ultimate authority on behalf of the doctor made me feel amazing, powerful. I smirked inside my suit. Those pirates don’t stand a chance, I thought as Doctor Pulvere began to explain to the marines precisely what I needed.

  I had no idea what a Ma Deuce was, but when the marines began to bolt a massive gun on my left arm, I couldn’t help but feel a little giddy. It made that arm a little heavier than before, but I managed. The marines then attached two large circular drums beneath it and began to feed the belt with all the ammunition on it into the machinegun. The drums each weighed over two hundred pounds. To compensate for the added weight I leaned more to my right. It was awkward but I managed.

  “Yes, that’ll do nicely,” Doctor Pulvere stated as she inspected me with a critical eye. She appeared to be pleased, which made me all tingly once more. My brain was on fire with the amount of pleasure I was receiving at her apparent satisfaction. I was more than ready to go and kill every pirate in the universe, and anyone else that the good doctor needed dead. She smiled and I about died of orgasmic bliss. “You ready to go, young lady?”

  “Yes!” I nearly screamed. The sensations were too much. I needed to kill, needed to rip the heads off of every single enemy of the doctor.

  “If you think about a map, one will appear in your vision,” she told me. I tried to think of a map and, just as the doctor said it would, one appeared. It showed a blue glowing dot in the middle with a red X to the left of center. It actually wasn’t too far away, from what I could tell. “That red X might appear to be close, but it’s actually ten kilometers away. Your suit has more than enough fuel to make it there, destroy the pirate den, and return. If you pivot left and right you’ll see the position of the X will change.”

  I did so and, sure enough, the X moved. However, so did the marines who had helped attached the Ma Deuce to my left arm as the barrel swept across their heads. They yelled and managed to avoid being brained by the long barrel of the machinegun.

  “Sorry!” I apologized and pointed the barrel upward. Suddenly it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to fire the blasted thing. I looked over at the doctor, ashamed. “Doctor, I’m…I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to shoot this machinegun. I’ve failed you.”

  “It’s okay, child,” she whispered and gently reached over and patted my hip. “Don’t do it now, but when you’re ready to fire simply clench your left hand and hold it shut. The machinegun will fire until you unclench. Just be careful. You only have twelve hundred rounds of ammunition before you’re empty. Try not to blast through that in one go, okay?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said in a respectful voice, recalling what Sister Verona had told me about politeness when dealing with Perfects. I loved the doctor, of course, but extra politeness never hurt. “Do I just go to the X spot and kill everyone in the pirate’s den?”

  “Yes dear, that’s precisely what you need to do,” she said and smiled. Oh, it was glorious! I would die for that smile. “Don’t fail me.”

  “Never!” I gasped as stronger emotions raced through me. I lumbered awkwardly out the door and back into the training warehouse. The map on my screen showed me that another route out of the building would get me there faster, and I would fit through it. Plus, it would keep me away from the administration points, which filled me with a strange sense of dread.

  I moved away from the military base and deep into the wilderness around the city. I’d grown up in the city but had never stepped foot outside the city limits. I didn’t know of any other Holding Home kids who had snuck out of the city and ever come back. We could only guess as to their fates. Dead? Maimed? Eaten by wild animals and then worn as skins? All of us kids had no idea.

  Now, out on my own and within the Mark One suit, I knew that I was the top predator around. There was nothing that could actually hurt me in the wilds. The pirates might have machineguns that could do something, but I had absolute and perfect faith in Doctor Pulvere and her suit. She wouldn’t fail me, not in any way, shape, or form. This suit of hers was perfection.

  As I raced along, the former euphoric sensations I felt faded, and soon I began to crave some sort of communication with the doctor. Strange as it was, it paled in comparison to the anger which was beginning to build. Every second away from the doctor caused my rage to build. I vowed then and there to kill every single pirate I found. They were the reason I could not stay in the presence of the doctor and bask in her brilliance.

  As my hatred fueled me, I realized I was rapidly closing in on the position marked on the map. The suit helpfully zoomed in, and I could see the pirate’s den from over a kilometer away. It was what I had expected it to look like, with a wide-open field for pirate ships to land on and lots of defense towers. I figured that if I could see them, they should see me soon enough. I needed to correct this.

  Not knowing how far the rounds in the Ma Deuce could shoot, I decided to creep in a little closer. Unfortunately, I knocked down a small spruce tree and startled a herd of deer which had been bedding down for the day where I was walking. They were on their feet and bounding off toward the pirate den in a flash, which caused the guards atop the towers to glance in my direction. I was close enough now to see the absolute shock and surprise on their faces.

  “I
guess that’s close enough for the Ma Deuce,” I murmured as I aimed the machinegun up toward the closest tower. A small reticle appeared on my screen, showing me where I was pointing the barrel of the gun. I realized that if I fired now, the only thing I would hit would be the concrete support structure and not the men ten meters higher. I adjusted and clenched my fist.

  What came forth from the barrel of the Ma Deuce was unlike anything I had experienced in my life. The muzzle flashed brightly as I poured forth hate from the barrel and into the bodies of my unwitting targets. The two pirates in the tower seemingly came apart at the seams as the rounds tore through them. Bright red blood splashed radiantly into the clear blue sky, and I could see entrails and gore dripping down the side of the tower, a beautiful yet macabre painting of death and carnage.

  “Oh…wow,” I whispered and relaxed my firing hand. The Ma Deuce stopped spitting out rounds immediately. A small screen appeared in the corner with what appeared to be a bullet in it. I quickly figured out that this was how much ammo I had left in the drums of the Ma Deuce. I blinked in surprise as I realized I’d fired over fifty rounds at the tower. If there were hundreds of pirates in the den, I’d run out of ammunition long before I got to kill all the pirates. I’d need to be more careful in the future.

  Ahead I could see smaller figures on the ground scrambling as the alarm sounded. Since they were obviously aware of my presence I decided to run to the den. If I could get there quick enough, then I could potentially stop them from getting better prepared. It was a trick I learned at the Holding Home. If there’s no other option available, attack.

  The first thing I discovered was that the Mark One suit was fast. I had been quick before, since it had allowed me to roam the streets of New Haven without being molested by creepy strangers. The ability to outrun even the gangers had come in handy on numerous occasions. Now, though, I seemed to fly across the open ground, my heavy steps leaving large footprints deep in the soft dirt behind me.

  A group of pirates appeared in front of me, seemingly out of nowhere. The suit’s reticle appeared in my eyes and the Ma Deuce came up almost of its own accord. I squeezed off a few shots and watched in satisfaction as two of the pirate’s heads exploded into a fine red mist. The others started shooting back, and the Mark One’s armor was tested at long last.

  Unsurprisingly, the suit held up under the barrage of gunfire. My senses tingled as it dawned on me that Doctor Pulvere’s design was working perfectly to keep me alive. I had promised her that I would kill each and every pirate I found, and it was a promise I intended to keep. I stopped running, leveled the Ma Deuce, and let it rip.

  The results were predictable. Eight dead pirates, one living Imperfect encased in a massive armored suit of death. There was nothing that could harm me.

  I jerked violently as something exploded against my right shoulder. The suit warned me that I had been hit with a grenade, fired from a distance great enough to prevent it from identifying the source. Remaining still meant becoming dead, so I started sprinting at an oblique angle toward the den. Two more explosions blew up a small cloud of shrapnel and dirt before me. Near misses, but they enabled the suit to locate the shooter at last. It was a young woman, no older than I was, firing from a concrete bunker about forty meters ahead. I sighted her head, aimed carefully, and squeezed off a single round. The shot removed her head from the body’s shoulders. I looked around and moved in further.

  A warning light told me that the suit had suffered some external damage on the right side from the grenade. I couldn’t fix it, but since it didn’t seem to be affecting my shooting or movement, I ignored it for the time being. I figured that once I was back with Doctor Pulvere she could fix it. I hoped that she would accept my apology and not be too disappointed in my damaging her suit.

  As I got closer to the pirate den I realized there were a lot of concrete bunkers which were close enough together to make me very suspicious. Figuring that the majority of the den was underground somewhere, and that I needed to find an entrance, I began to search for a building which looked like it would lead underground. Here my history as an Imperfect child left to their own devices on the streets of New Haven paid off.

  Past experience told me that every ganger who roamed the bad parts of New Haven needed somewhere to operate out of. One of the things that kids in Holding Homes always knew was how to spot them. It would be someplace that would look plain and boring, not the slum housing falling to the ground or ritzy high-rise towering into the sky. Nothing to draw attention to it, either good or bad. These buildings, usually squat and almost always ugly, were where ganger bosses like to store their goods, be it drugs, stolen property, or anything else that caught their eye.

  The best bet for most of us kids was to avoid them. Gangers seemed to take perverse pleasure in tormenting young Imperfect kids, even going so far as to kill them for sport. There used to be a gang a few years back that ran underground fights between young kids. They would give them long knives and tell them to kill each other, or they would be killed instead. These fights were always to the death, and lots of gambling went down during these events. Fortunately, the Praetorians eventually stepped in and stopped them before I was old enough to get caught up in the fights. Still, I knew of many Imperfect men and women with long, ugly scars running up and down their arms from these underground battles.

  I looked around and quickly spotted the most likely building. Unlike some of the others that appeared to be rundown and abandoned, this one had a few boarded-up windows but otherwise was in decent shape. What convinced me, though, was the men who kept coming out of the building in spite of its relatively small size. Either they were packed in there tightly or there was another entrance I couldn’t see.

  As the pirates came out of the building like ants out of a kicked anthill, I realized I was missing an opportunity and started firing. Large holes appeared in the wall of the building as some of the rounds from the Ma Deuce punched through the person I was shooting and impacted the wall. I painted the formerly white stucco walls red with the blood of the pirates.

  They started falling back inside in search of protection, so I continued to walk my stream of gunfire into the doorway. There the bodies began to pile up as they struggled to run and escape to the safety of the building. The pirates were struggling to climb over their dead and wounded in an attempt to flee. I removed that hope with more well-placed shots and continued to fire until there were none left moving.

  I glanced at the counter and saw that I had fired over one thousand rounds already. Dismayed, I vowed to be more discriminatory when it came to shooting in the future. With less than two hundred remaining and an unknown number of bad guys still to be found, I would have to make every shot count from here on out.

  I continued to approach the building but couldn’t hear anything on the inside. Visually sweeping the bodies in from of the door, it became apparent that a lot of them weren’t dead but merely wounded. Knowing that the doctor would be displeased with my efforts if I left anyone alive, but at the same time realizing I needed to conserve ammunition, I simply began to step on the heads of the wounded.

  It was over in a brutally short amount of time.

  I ducked into the building and looked around. I could see a small trapdoor in the floor in the corner of the large open room, which was exactly what I expected. However, it quickly became apparent to me that I had no way of getting down there easily. Carefully maneuvering myself inside the building, I stayed crouched low enough to not destroy the roof. It wasn’t painful since the suit was doing all the work, but it still felt awkward with the Ma Deuce and the nearly-empty ammo drums on the left throwing off my balance. Still, I managed, and finally ended up standing over the trapdoor looking down into a dark tunnel.

  After a few seconds of inspection, I determined that I probably couldn’t fit down into the hole. Still, I needed to clear the underground tunnel for any more pirates. I looked around the room for something that would give me an idea. As I stared
at the stucco walls it dawned on me that while I might not necessarily be able to drag anyone out, I could definitely bury them within. The walls looked more than heavy enough, and I knew that they were pretty solid.

  It didn’t take me more than ten minutes to tear down the house on top of the trap door after I closed it, ensuring that any pirates trapped in the tunnel were stuck. For good measure I piled the bodies of dead pirates on top of the house, as a message to any who might come after to help them. It was a long process, not because of the weight of the bodies, but because I wanted to ensure I got as many dismembered parts together as I could beforehand.

  Doing this continued to give me unimaginable pleasure and more than once I had to stop and breathe as the shaking became too much. There was just something so exciting and marvelous about pleasing the doctor by killing pirates. Nothing I had ever experienced in my life could top the sensations that coursed through me at that moment.

  A noise from my left drew my attention. It was another pirate, though this one was encased in some sort of heavy lift device. I’d seen them before during construction projects in New Haven. Twin lifts extended from each arm and enhanced the wearer’s strength tenfold, and the support legs could help move tons of equipment fast inside of an enclosed area. This one appeared to be modified slightly, with thicker arms and a protected driver’s area.

  I brought my Ma Deuce up and targeted the driver’s compartment. Clenching my first, I unleashed hell onto the last remaining pirate that I could see. The large rounds from the Ma Deuce bounced harmlessly off of the lifter’s arm. The person driving that thing must have figured I would try something like this and had been prepared. I left the gunfire taper off as I began to trot toward it. I was down to six rounds now, which was silly. I’d wasted a stupid amount of what little ammunition I had left trying to shoot a walking tank like me.

  Not like me though. The lifter was slower, and while I knew it was probably twice as powerful, I could maneuver. It would be a nasty fight if I got in too close and let the lifter grab me with one of those arm lifts. I remembered what the doctor had told me earlier about being graceful and put that to use.