Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  “Probably a lot of diapers need changing round here, right, sir?” Cooper said, looking up and grinning. The young Marine had taken a liking to Rama, for some reason.

  It appeared that there was a rumor amongst the Marines that the civilian EVA suits waste systems were nothing more than adult sized diapers, unlike the active mechanical systems in the combat models.

  “They don’t have diapers in their suits,” Ram muttered. “Now, quiet, Cooper.”

  The Marine grinned. “Whatever you say, sir.”

  Captain Cassidy continued with his grim update. “My men are patrolling and setting up forward observation posts so that we will not be taken completely unawares again. However, I urge you to be ready for anything. One final point that I would like to make before I hand over. Everyone knows this is a civilian led mission. However, due to the critical security situation, I would appreciate it if all the civilians here would obey the requests of any and all Marines, whether you understand or agree with the request itself. We are here to protect you. If you are spoken to in a manner that you find insulting then I apologize and you may take it up with me once we are all safe. Until that time, ladies and gentlemen, please do as you are told. Trust us and we will get you through this. Thank you.”

  He stepped back while about five people clapped, briefly. Cassidy bent his head to speak inaudibly to Former Director Zuma.

  “I keep saying it,” Cooper said beside Ram, “but we just need to deliver a bomb into the enemy base and blow up their hive queen.”

  “Shut it, Cooper,” Ram said. “There is no hive queen. The wheelers are like us. Individuals.”

  “I doubt that, sir,” Cooper said. “If it looks like a fucked-up spider, moves like a fucked-up spider, then that’s what it is.”

  “Spiders don’t have hives,” Ram said. “Or queens.”

  “Well, wasps, then. Whatever.”

  “Be quiet.”

  Rama was impatient. All he wanted was to go after Milena and all these people were doing was speeches. He wanted to wade through the tiny people everywhere, strap on his guns and march after her. But he had no guns and he had to find out where she was first. Either the bastards in charge did not know or they were not telling him.

  Former Director Zuma stepped up. Once, when the Victory had left Earth, Zuma had been in command of the entire mission but was demoted after the incident where the crazy Russian subject Alina had murdered the Subject Alpha, Mael and all the other subjects had been killed in the shootout with the Marines.

  Ram glanced over at Sifa. She stood to one side, looking just like herself. He could not believe she was there. He had seen her die and now she was alive again.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Zuma said. She was short, powerfully built and middle aged but still fit and powerful inside her combat-style EVA suit. Once, he knew, she had been military. “I know I can speak for all of us when I say we feel safer knowing that you are all here protecting us from the aliens out there. And to all of you here I say that we must hold the course. We have fought off two attacks now and we are still here. We killed a whole lot of them. This is a victory. We put out the fires. We will rebuild the antennae and reestablish contact with the Victory. We will cover the courtyard again and reinforce our defenses, building trenches and ramparts with the bulldozer. Our brave Marines are installing mounted weapons and we will build a watchtower. We will be ready for anything. We will resist anything. Now, you have all been assigned to new work parties for the next phase—”

  “What about the people that they took?” Ram said. He was surprised, as he had been before, by the volume of his voice. A number of people in front of him jumped in surprise.

  A scowl passed over Zuma’s face but she turned it into a concerned smile. “Thank you for speaking, Ram. We all appreciate what you have done for us, back on the Orb and again here, during the attack. And my heart aches to think of those we lost during it. But we are simply unable to risk pursuing them. Much as we would like to—”

  “We have the ETAT vehicles, they can be used to pursue the enemy. We have plenty of people, plenty of weapons. We have to try something, we can’t just leave them to those bastards.”

  In the sea of heads between him and Zuma, a few people nodded.

  “I swear, I feel the same way that you do,” Zuma said. “But our priority must be to this outpost. We do not know what will happen in orbit around the planet. The Victory will win or perhaps withdraw from the enemy ship. But we must be here when the Stalwart Sentinel and the rest of the fleet arrives. The Ashoka and the Genghis will be following close behind the Sentinel and transport and support ships behind them, increasing our security with the arrival of each reinforcing ship. Securing this position is our best choice, from a cost-benefit analysis.”

  “Sure,” Ram said. “Only it doesn’t cost you anything to sit here while our people are out there, suffering who knows what.”

  Zuma nodded, an understanding smile on her face. “I know why you feel so emotional. We all do, of course, but you in particular lost a close friend and colleague. And then there is the guilt you must feel for abandoning your post in the mess hall. You must be thinking that, had you followed orders, you would have been there to save those people, instead of up at the front where we already had dozens of Marines fighting.”

  “Abandoned my post?” Ram was too astonished to express his outrage properly. In a great rustling of EVA suits, the multitude of heads turned into faces. “I didn’t have a post, I was shut in with the civilians. Anyway, if I hadn’t been there on the wall, the wheelers would have broken through.”

  Zuma scoffed. “I hardly think criticizing our brave Marines is going to win you any favors around here, Ram, no matter your history. Now, you need to let us do our job.”

  “Fine,” Ram said. “I’ll go after them myself.”

  Zuma glanced at Captain Cassidy, who stepped forward, his face thunder. “You will not.” The Captain, no doubt mindful of his audience, shook with the effort to keep his temper under control. “You might think you are a Marine but if you were a real one, you would know what a terrible tactical decision that would be. You already screwed up once and look what happened. You will not do so again or so help me, I will destroy your custom weapons and take away your EVA suit. You can sit in this outpost on your hands until the Sentinel arrives. Do you understand me, Seti?”

  Ram nodded. “I understand you perfectly, Cassidy.”

  The Captain’s face turned red and his eyes bulged. “I won’t have someone guilty of—”

  Zuma touched Cassidy lightly on the arm and spoke up. “I’m happy we can all agree. There is so much to do and we must get on with it. And Ram, you and Sifa have been tasked with collecting the remains of the dead wheelers in the attack. They’re everywhere. It is such a messy job but you two are the only ones strong enough. Don’t worry, you will have a team of Marines to protect you. Everyone else, let us go to work.”

  Zuma and Cassidy watched Ram.

  It seemed to Ram that all the people in the room hesitated and looked to him, waiting for him to argue. Expecting it. As if they were collectively holding their breath.

  But what could he say that had not already been said?

  All he could do was pretend to play along. Play their game.

  “Alright,” Ram nodded, shrugging elaborately with his hands, palms up. “Let’s go to work.”

  Then, when they relaxed, he would make his move.

  ***

  “It’s a shit job,” Cooper said. “I feel bad for you guys.”

  Ram and Sifa dragged another wheelhunter corpse by the legs over to the back of the ETAT buggy and dumped it on the floor. Cooper sat on top of the roll cage, leaning on the barrel of the belt-fed grenade launcher mounted next to him. The rear of the ETAT already had a pair of wheeler corpses stacked on the flatbed, limbs sticking out everywhere like a nightmare sculpture from a fever dream.

  “Cooper!” Sergeant Stirling shouted. “Eyes on the horizon, you bloody useles
s idiot.”

  “Sorry, Sarge.”

  The team were deployed in an arc in front of the ETAT while the two giant ex-subjects labored to tidy up the mess out in front of the outpost. Commanding the team, Ensign Tseng sat perched in the all-terrain vehicle’s passenger seat and watched Sergeant Stirling do all the actual commanding.

  Ram had to fight the urge to run after Milena. Playing it cool was harder than he had expected but he had to be strong. Had to give no one any suspicion that he was getting ready to pursue the wheelers who had abducted Milena and the others.

  “It is a shit job,” Ram said, breathing hard. His back was starting to ache. He and Sifa stretched the dead alien between them and heaved it up to the top of the pile.

  They missed. It hit the stack and bounced down to the ground again.

  “That first one was too big,” Sifa said, her familiar voice sounding in his ear, breathy like those times she had panted his name while riding his naked body.

  Not this body. And not that Sifa, neither.

  “Stand back,” Ram said.

  He bent low, wrapped his arms around the alien’s central hub and picked the whole thing up in a bear hug. He walked it forward and threw it onto the other two.

  “You are stronger than I am,” Sifa said.

  “I’m bigger.” Ram shrugged, elaborately flapping his arms up and down once so that she could see him shrugging inside the suit. “Still, this body is not as strong as my last one. Much less muscle mass. Makes sense, the last body was when I was training to grapple their champion.” He slapped the dead alien next to him. “But this time, I suppose they wanted me to have more stamina. Real world utility.”

  The Marines in the ETAT drove it toward Wheeler Row. Ram and Sifa walked after it. The buggy was weighted down so far that the vehicle could barely exceed walking speed without risking damage to the suspension.

  “Your last body,” Sifa said. “Strange, how we use these words. Not many people can speak as we do.”

  He had barely spoken to her since the attack but every time he heard her voice, it caused him to feel unsettled. She sounded different. The Sifa he had known was playful, joyful, sensual. She had been quick witted and, sly, maybe.

  This new Sifa was boring. Her speech monotone. He supposed that, when they had uploaded her mind to the surviving clone, there had been some sort of mistake and not all of her had copied over correctly. It was sad. Just sad.

  “I know,” he said. “It is strange. Confusing. But it’s not all bad. I mean, I’m here when I should be dead. And you, too. I never thought I would see you again.”

  She shook her head. “I have no memory of you.”

  “So I heard. Something went wrong with the procedure?”

  “The single viable version of my mind was from before you were revived on the Victory. I am sorry. I know that we were friends. At least, you were with the other Sifa. They showed me video of her. Of her speaking with you. But that was not me.”

  He wanted to ask if they had shown her video of the two of them screwing but he guessed that would not be polite.

  “Well,” Ram said, searching for something to say, “I’m just glad you’re alright. And, hey, we just get to make friends with each other all over again, right?” He grinned.

  “I would like that,” she said, without any indication that she meant it.

  They unloaded the bodies and dumped them at the end of the line. Ram couldn’t remember who started calling it Wheeler Row but, you had to hand it to the Marines, they were great at naming things descriptively.

  The problem was knowing what to do with the alien bodies. Digging graves or a pit big enough would take the bulldozer and engineers a day or more and use up some of their precious rock blasting charges. Burning the bodies was an affront to the exobiologists who wanted to study them. So, all they could do was remove the corpses away from the outpost, somewhere downwind. Stacking them high would provide potential cover for the enemy, should they return and fields of fire had to be kept clear. Hence, lining the bodies up next to each other in Wheeler Row.

  “I still say we should have posed the corpses so they spelled out S.O.S.,” Ram said as they hitched a lift back out to the battlefield. “Or R.A.M.A.”

  “They will have the radio working again soon,” Sifa said, straight faced.

  “Right,” Ram said. “Sure.”

  He stared up the hills looming over the outpost, wondering how quickly he could cover the distance between him and Milena over that incredibly tough terrain. Tried not to think about what they might be doing to her.

  Ensign Tseng, in the passenger seat, looked over his shoulder as best he could in his suit. “I believe it would have been best to arrange the bodies in poses and display them all around the outpost. Sever the limbs, impale the hubs on spikes at the perimeter.”

  “Okay,” Ram said, unsettled by the idea of the enemy doing something similar to Milena. Is that why they took our people? “You think it would intimidate the wheelers?”

  “Unknown,” the Ensign said. “But it is worth doing on the chance that it would. Unsettling them psychologically might give us a tactical edge.”

  “Did you, you know, float it up the chain of command?”

  The Ensign scoffed. “Every suggestion I ever made has been thrown back in my face by that man.”

  Ram glanced at Sifa, who rolled her eyes and pulled a face.

  “By Captain Cassidy?” Ram asked, casually. “You two don’t get along?”

  “Ha,” Ensign Tseng said. “As if you didn’t know.”

  Ram was about to argue that he did not, in fact, know about it but Sifa was making cutting gestures with her hand and she twisted her fingers over her faceplate where her mouth was, as if buttoning her lips. Ram was pleased to see that some of the old Sifa was in there after all.

  Milena. She was a prisoner, and Ram was doing nothing.

  Not doing nothing. He had a plan. Spend a few hours doing what he was told, obeying every order, presenting no outward resistance to the chain of command. At the same time, he would do everything he could to obtain his custom firearm, and whatever other equipment he could obtain. Then, when night fell, he would steal a vehicle and make a run for the alien base. Fight his way inside, find Milena, and escape.

  The only problem was that he had almost none of the detail worked out. That, and the fact that the civilian and Marine commanders would be expecting him to pull something like that.

  I’ll just be cool. Play at being obedient and dutiful until sunset.

  The sun was already getting lower in the sky.

  The sun. Not our Sun.

  Instead, a strange star that looked so much like Sol, hanging in that strange sky, a sky like a tropical sea churned by a storm.

  Soon, he would go into those hills, and kill more wheelers. As many as it took. All he had to do was play it cool for a few hours.

  But he could not stop his mind working in a particular direction and he could not hold his tongue for long.

  “Listen, guys,” Ram said on the team channel as the ETAT stopped by the next body. “What did you think about Zuma and Cassidy’s order to not go after the six who were taken?”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Cooper said. “You ain’t mixing me up in anything. I’m in enough trouble.”

  “Hey, no,” Ram started to object as he realized what a stupid thing it was to say. “I’m not going to do—”

  “It doesn’t matter what any of us think,” Ensign Tseng said. “Orders are orders. And you would do well to remember that.”

  “I remember the threats well enough,” Ram said, speaking lightly and he bent to lift up a wheeler body all by himself. Sifa leaned on the ETAT, watching him. “Funny, how they have to threaten me, isn’t it? Until you remember that I never signed up. I never volunteered for the mission. I never joined the Marines. I’m just here. So, what do I care about following orders?”

  Cooper and Harris laughed, heartily, but Ram did not know why.

  “Well
, we did join up,” Tseng said. “And did volunteer. In fact, we fought to be here. So we won’t listen to any more of your seditious comments. Get on with your work.”

  “I’m working, aren’t I?” Ram said, dumping the body on the flatbed, irritated by the junior officer’s tone. “And if you guys are all such committed Marines, how come our brave and brilliant Captain Cassidy keeps giving this team all the shit jobs? How come all the other Marines ignore you? Other than the times they say nasty shit to you on private channels. What did you guys do?”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Harris said.

  “Don’t tell this bastard nothing,” Sergeant Stirling said. He was the biggest man on the planet, other than Ram, and he had a mean look about him. “None of you.”

  The Marines fell silent. Even Ensign Tseng was suddenly disinclined to debate.

  “Hey,” Sifa said to Ram on a one-to-one needlecast, “I have to tell you something. About what they did to you while you were—”

  “Listen up,” Ensign Tseng shouted on the team channel. “New orders just in. The xenobio guys need a new alien to slice up, stat. Rama, you will take this one here. Doesn’t look too badly shot up, right? It’s only a little one. Sifa, you will carry on working here. Sergeant Stirling and Corporal Fury will assist you, using the ropes and winch where necessary.”

  “Wait a second,” Ram said. “I can’t lug this thing all the way back to the outpost.”

  “You could if you had to,” Tseng said. “But they’re sending the other ETAT. There it is now.”

  It raced from around the damaged outpost walls and bounced toward them, a Marine driving with a civilian in the passenger seat. It slid to a stop in a shower of stones that pinged off everyone and covered them in dust.

  Sergeant Stirling marched to the ETAT driver. “Watch it, you fucking idiot.,” he roared. “Are you trying to get yourself on this burial detail, is that it? Let me explain to you this thing we call good manners. Seeing how your jinxhead mother was too much of a dumbfuck to teach you herself. Get your ass out of that chair while I’m talking to you, what do you think you are, a fucking rear admiral, you useless excuse for a Marine.”