Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  “I think I read about this before, maybe.”

  “It was pretty famous, my friend. Four hundred and twenty dead, plus injuries, including all the terrorists and the Sabre Rubro Co-op. A nation in mourning, new laws passed to crack down on insurrection, the usual. In the meantime, we have Onca.”

  Diego threw up a still image on the screen. Onca, bandaged and in a hospital room on Earth, unmistakable sunlight streaming in from somewhere.

  “He knew something was wrong by how the terrorists fought and he ordered his team to abort but the communications were cut off. As the structure was detonated, he took shelter under a stairwell and survived in the rubble for three days. When they pulled him out and told him all of his men had died, the UNOP recruiters got to him and offered him a job. In space, probably a one-way trip, doing something profoundly important for Brazil and the world. The jaguar pounced. He blitzed selection, made it onto the mission, became and retained Subject Alpha status. And so we come, to the hero on the Orb.”

  They cut to the Orb staging area where Onca was waiting with his boarding team.

  The staging chamber, which Ram had viewed before, was a hundred-meter per side cube of a room with the large door in the center of one side and what they called the smokescreen on the opposite wall. It was a fifty-meter square, semi-transparent and was the barrier between the room and the vast arena itself beyond. The slowly swirling, gray screen was lit by the strange feature of the Orb where the ambient light came, seemingly, from the surface of the walls and floors and ceilings so that every person in the room, including Onca himself, was cast in a remarkably even, soft white light that cast no shadow.

  He was dressed in full combat gear. He wore a helmet with visor, body armor, assault rifle, sidearm on one hip and a huge combat knife holstered on his chest.

  “They didn’t know,” Ram said, glancing at Milena. “The Orb doesn’t allow weapons in the arena.”

  Diego responded. “That’s conjecture, really. All we know is that it rejected these weapons, as you are about to see and it rejected the augmentations and weapons we tried during Mission Three. Who knows what the Orb will do in future? It’s hinted that armed combat might be a possibility in future bouts, if we ever get there.”

  “Who’s conjecturing now?” Milena said. “Just play the film, Diego.”

  The playback resumed. The boarding crew was tense. No doubt, they were all thinking of Ambassador Diaz’s disastrous Mission One.

  Onca, though, the Subject Alpha called Rafael Santos, seemed to be the calmest of the lot, simply standing as if he was waiting in line at a grocery store.

  “Did they dose him like you dose me?” Ram said/

  “They didn’t use hormonal adjustment technology for Onca, no. He didn’t need it. During his career, he had other nicknames, like the O Louco which means sort of like the Madman or the Crazy One. And the Lobo Feroz, the Wild Wolf, things like that.”

  “Oh, so, he goes totally nuts in battle?”

  Milena stared at him. “No, it is a joke, because he is always so calm.”

  “Like when you call a great big man Tiny,” Diego said, helpfully.

  “Thank you, Diego,” Milena said. “So, Onca was a man completely in control of his emotions. His greatest gift, perhaps, was his mental toughness. His psychological fortitude in the face of extreme stress. For whatever reason, his brain structure and chemistry, his genetic predisposition plus his environment and then his military training and experience, all combined with his very conscious personal philosophy meant he was able to remain alert but fully in control of his actions, even under intense fire. In effect, he was able to slip into a flow state with ease. In fact, it might be fair to say he existed in a flow state at all times, whether in or out of combat. Everything seemed to come easily to him.”

  “So he was a pretty chill guy,” Ram said.

  “Chill as a jaguar, anyway,” Diego said.

  “Mental toughness, a conscious toughness, is merely half the battle,” she said. “Because you must also be strong emotionally. Mental toughness and emotional toughness go hand in hand.”

  Ram felt sure Milena was leaning on him pretty hard to pick up what she was saying as it applied to him. She was not particularly subtle about how she manipulated Ram. But then, perhaps that was the point. She wanted him to know, wanted him to take ownership of himself.

  “You’re telling me I need to get a grip on my emotions.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “You are mentally prepared and bought into this Project, into this Mission, I can see that. You have reasoned that you are committed but I am afraid that over the next few months before we reach that Orb, you will fail on an emotional level. You will face many tasks that will overwhelm you physically and emotionally and all the reason in the world won’t save you, not really, if your emotions cloud your judgment. An uncontrolled emotional response will disrupt your thinking and reasoning and also, neurotic thinking patterns will generate an emotional, physical response. Either and both of these states are self-replicating, they reinforce each other, setting you in a negative state of mind. When you are in that state, you make bad decisions and then you will fail, at training and at anything. At life. When you fail, you become angry. Everyone experiences anger and self-pity when they are pushed beyond their breaking point but you must train your emotional response to stressors. So, ultimately, yes. Get a grip on your emotions. I would prefer it if you didn’t get badly injured.”

  Or worse.

  The words seemed obvious, seemed like they flowed into the silence even though they were unspoken. Badly injured or worse, everyone in the room must have been thinking it.

  Ram swallowed down a quip and instead asked a genuine question.

  “I thought you were controlling my hormone uptake and my moods anyway.”

  Milena tilted her head. “I am and I will. But do you really wish to live like that? Like an infant? A puppet on a string?”

  “When you put it that way, no. Not at all.”

  “Onca was a master at connecting to short-term goals, like focusing his emotional attention on the short term, while focusing his mental toughness on the longer term, the bigger picture. He allowed them to carry him through times of intense stress with what seemed like ease from the outside. Now, watch what an emotional shock he had to face right before stepping into the arena.” She pointed at Diego. “Play it.”

  On the Orb, the boarding crew was silenced by the sound of a clear, pinging chime ringing out in the chamber.

  Without a word, Onca stepped up to the swirling smokescreen.

  The Orb played a low, discordant tone that made Ram flinch. The crew in the replay flinched, too. They began arguing about what it meant.

  “Lower the audio, Diego,” Milena instructed. The replay continued in almost silence while Milena narrated. “They had to work it out as they went along but they had prepared for this, to a certain extent. We call it the Zeta Line now but back then, they didn’t know.”

  Onca handed over his weapon to another marine and stepped back up to the swirling sheet of semitransparent plasma that Ram knew from his reading would part to allow the Subject Alpha through into the Arena.

  Nothing happened.

  “That noise, the negative tone?” Milena said. “It keeps sounding every time he steps back up to it.”

  Onca removed his helmet and stepped back to the screen. It did not part.

  The support crew seemed agitated but Onca simply stripped off his body armor. It was a remarkable outfit, clearly molded perfectly to the marine’s extremely impressive physique. It was presumably a complex and multilayered textile-like material, flexible at the joint and movement areas at the true waist under the rib cage but rigid around the chest. Onca pulled off a large, throat-protecting gorget piece from around his neck, unstrapped grieves and leg armor. Still, the screen would not part.

  Not until he was stripped to his thin underclothes and his boots did the chime sound.

  One of his marines stepped
up and handed Onca back his assault rifle. The discordant note sounded and the plasma smokescreen whipped shut faster than the eye could see. Even when the rifle was swapped for the sidearm, a large caliber hand cannon type semi-automatic tactical pistol. The Orb sounded the negative tone once again.

  Onca, impassive, handed back his weapon and in return took a large, evil looking combat knife. It was serrated on the lower half of the back blade, had a wicked curve to the top half of the front blade and was as long as Onca’s forearm. He brandished it as he stepped up to the screen again.

  The discordant note sounded.

  He handed his blade over so that he stood there in no more than his thin, stretchy underclothes, wearing black military boots.

  The Orb chimed again.

  For the first time, Ram saw Onca’s head drop, just a little. Surely, he realized in that moment that he had no chance of victory against the giant alien. And yet he stood straighter after just a moment.

  He turned and nodded to his crew, who called out to him.

  “Turn the audio up,” Milena said, her voice flat.

  “Is there anything you want to say, Onca?” A woman on the playback called out.

  Onca, his face impassive, looked over his shoulder. He shook his head, once.

  The woman called out again, a slight edge of desperation in her voice. Ram guessed she cared a great deal for the man who was about to die. “Anything we can tell them? This will be declassified one day.”

  Onca seemed to sigh and started to shake his head again but he stopped. “Diga-lhes que eu fiz o meu dever.”

  He marched right into the arena, the screen closing behind him.

  There were a couple of minutes that Diego sped through, while cameras were set up close to the smokescreen and the view beyond was somewhat hazy because of it, though they had removed the swirling with post-processing, the Intel Officer explained. The 400-meter interior of the arena took a while to walk across. And to roll across.

  “What did he say just then?” Ram asked Milena.

  She shrugged. “He said to tell them I did my duty.”

  Ram didn’t know why, exactly, but that brought a lump to his throat and the warm promise of tears to his eyes. It was stupid because Ram had always somewhat poured scorn on concepts like duty.

  On the screen, Diego slowed the replay. Ram noticed that the Intel Officer was not himself watching the action unfold.

  The Wheelhunter dwarfed the human. Onca was perhaps a little over average height. He was in amazing shape yet rather lithe and was only maybe ninety kilos. The Wheeler, on the other hand, weighed half a ton at least. It rolled onward, cartwheeling in that deeply unnerving way it did, the great footpads flapping on the floor, over and over. The knobbled, long arms with their three-fingered, clawed hands rolled over and over.

  When the gap between them closed to around thirty meters, the Wheelhunter lurched into a crazed, spinning acceleration. It covered the distance in under three seconds.

  Onca feinted to the right then leaped to the left, rolling smoothly over his shoulder and jumping up into a fighting stance, moving into an attack.

  The Wheeler had tilted slightly away from him, deceived by the feint. It recovered immediately, swerved toward the human and lashed out with its wicked, long arms.

  A two-meter, ball-jointed arm with three long claws on the end can deliver an incredible force. It delivered that force across Onca’s chest, neck and the top of his head, almost instantaneously. The force tossed Onca sideways in a tumble, as if he’d been hit by a racing car. As his body tumbled, the top of his skull, sliced by the claw, spun away like a china plate. His destroyed throat sprayed bright blood in a mist of pink through the air of the arena. The body crashed into the floor and slid another couple of meters, leaving a red stain along the black surface.

  Still, Onca was not done. He should have been dead but his body did not understand that yet and he struggled to his elbows and knees, blood welling from his chest, neck and head and spattering onto the floor beneath him.

  The Wheeler, however, had not stopped. Ram had to bite back the urge to shout a warning at the replay as he watched the great monster cartwheel up to the tiny human and whip its arm down onto his back. The force of the impact must surely have killed him, snapping his spine and crushing the rest of his torso. More than that, the claws tore out chunks of flesh and bone and organs as it smashed and ripped him with a wild, frenzied series of whip-like blows.

  When there was little left but shredded flesh, the Wheeler paused for a moment, as if inspecting the remains. It then rolled away toward the other side of the arena, leaving a chain of red oval footprints behind it.

  Diego cut the footage, not meeting anyone’s eye.

  Ram let out the breath he didn’t know he had been holding. He didn’t know what to say.

  Milena was watching him closely. “My point in showing you this right now,” she said, “is not really about tactics or training techniques. This is really to help you understand what the other subjects are going through. This man is a worldwide legend in special forces, even though they mostly think he died in that demolished building. You can imagine the metrics collected during the selection and training process and we’re fairly confident that Onca was the best non-augmented, non-genetically engineered, old fashioned human soldier ever tested. His numbers are off the charts. And you saw what happened to him. The subjects onboard are pushing themselves and each other this hard for a reason. They are terrified of themselves failing. Terrified of this mission failing. We can’t let it happen. And that’s the real difference between them and you, that they have fully committed to sacrificing themselves. Not just them but everyone on this ship, more or less. We have to remove ourselves, our personalities, our emotions, our identities from what we need to achieve. However we do it, we must all put ourselves away. It sounds corny and old-fashioned or perhaps authoritarian and communist but the term I always come back to is, the greater good. Have you heard this way of saying it? For the greater good?”

  Ram nodded, thinking about Onca.

  Tell them I did my duty.

  “If the greater good was for my country or for the state or for a corporation,” Ram said, “I would laugh in your face. Even if it was for my own parents. But we’re talking about the whole human race. You can’t get any greater than that, I guess.”

  “Do you think you can commit to losing yourself for all of them back on Earth and elsewhere in the system?”

  “Alright.” Ram shrugged. “I’m in. All the way. No more self-pity, no more complaining or any bullshit. I’ll do my duty.”

  PART 3 – SURVIVAL

  18. THE PRICE

  “How long have you been here now, Rama?” Director Zuma asked him from behind her desk.

  “Two months,” Ram said, knowing full well that the Director would know precisely how long he'd been here. “Two months since I have been awake. Obviously, I was kept unconscious for thirty-three months before that.”

  Ram glanced over his shoulder at Milena, seated in the corner behind him but she did not even bother to look up from her screen.

  The interview, in the Director’s own office, was Ram’s opportunity to demonstrate to the top brass that he had truly bought into UNOP, to the Mission Four objectives and his own part in all of it. He knew that he was a tiny cog, he knew what he was giving up in order to be part of the great machine. He knew what the stakes were.

  And now he had to prove it to them.

  Director Zuma spread her hands across the top of her desk. “I know that has been a source of anger for you and quite rightly, too, in my opinion. I hope you understand why we did not reveal that fact to you immediately upon waking. It is most unfortunate that you found out by yourself rather than being told but there you go, these things happen, all water under the bridge now, isn't that right? Of course it is, and you are doing so well now that you are all settled in. Very well indeed. Look at your performance statistics, aren't they wonderful? You must be proud o
f yourself.”

  “I appreciate you saying so,” Ram said, and he kind of did, “but I’m bottom of the group in almost every category.”

  “Number one in applied strength, strongest person ever, they tell me. Often you're doing well in the Avar simulations. That's nothing to be sniffed at, as they say. So, you are bottom everywhere else and by some margin. But so what? You should be proud of yourself. You are making a great contribution to this mission and to the Project overall. I could not be happier that we chose you.”

  She stared at him with a smile on her face.

  “Great, thanks. That's great to hear.”

  “Nasty business with Mael a couple of months ago,” Director Zuma said. “I was very sorry to hear that you spent so long in the medical sections.”

  Ram shrugged. “The pain suppression inbuilt in this model body is pretty good. Dr. Fo is a genius and Milena helped with all her hormones and drugs so I didn't suffer much. I was back to ninety-five percent in six days.”

  “What a marvelous attitude you have. Mael is a problem for you, for many of you, I know that. And I want you to know that I do not like the man, for who he is. For what he does. His behavior is appalling, barbaric. I know that tensions are high in the ludus and that low-level physical altercations are occurring regularly. You are doing well to maintain your own safety in difficult circumstances.”

  Low level, she said but everyone had been beating the living shit out of each other for weeks. “All part of the job, right? We have to focus on the big picture. Our own personal issues, our own safety is of no concern when our planet, our solar system is at risk.”