Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  But what did Ram know. He didn’t know anything about the UNOPS Marine Corps.

  A light rain began falling again. His hydrophobic visor and armor shed the water like he wasn’t even there but the world around him, cast in shades of gray, shone with slickness. The ETATs and their drivers adjusted to the new driving conditions, slowing down and taking corners with heightened care. The black hills were carved by water, and rivers sliced their way down from altitude toward the plains where they meandered in new channels or thundered through deep gullies. Everywhere, the erosion had left piles of scree sloping up the flanks of jagged mountains and outcrops. It was slow going but the drivers had routes already mapped out from the satellite images they had pulled from the network. Even so, they needed to head up and down awkward slopes, cutting back and forth over valleys and zigzagging into the highlands above the plateau.

  All the evidence suggested that the wheelers were underground. Scans also indicated an area just 120 kilometers from the outpost was riddled with lava tubes. Underground channels that had, thousands or millions of years before, flowed with hot magma pouring from deep volcanic chambers out onto the surface. The diameter of the tubes varied from five meters up to twenty or even more. Some had eroded into open channels. Others, below the water table, flowed like natural aqueducts. But there were some lava tubes, pushed high by some hypothesized tectonic activity, that had remained as clear tunnels. They did not know how many tunnels there were. They had no idea how many kilometers they ran for.

  It made sense that the wheelers had used them for their base on the planet. Humans had done the very same thing on the Moon and on Mars. Ram had visited them virtually, through Avar, and he had seen how efficient a habitat they made. Cover the ends of the tube system with airtight structures, plus roof over any eroded skylights and you made yourself a nice, secure place to live that was shielded from radiation with minimum effort. The reason the UNOP outpost had been established on the plain, so they told him, was to be next to the airfield and the lava tubes had been eyed as the next step in colonization plans before they had discovered the wheelers called them home.

  So, just 120 kilometers as the drone flies but twice that distance in the ETATs while they crisscrossed back and forth across the broken landscape. Up and down and up again. They had to climb out of the vehicles four times so they could unload and then heave them out of loose scree and up slippery rock surfaces.

  “Dawn is coming,” Corporal Fury said, pointing at a nearby peak that seemed more silhouetted than it had before. “Time to lay up.”

  They parked the vehicles tight against the wall of a sheer rock face and pitched the tents in between. Three tents with Level 1 Environment Seals. They were modular and fitted together to create a three-pod structure with space enough for nine people, including armor.

  “They’re not made for me,” Ram pointed out. “I’ll have to sleep in the ETAT. On it. What’s the difference, anyway?”

  “You can squeeze in,” Stirling said. “It’s important to have time with your helmet off.”

  “Eight hours for every twenty-four,” Ram said. “But I feel okay. I feel good.”

  “You get inside,” Stirling said. “Squeeze in beside Flores. She’s buff as shit but she’s the shortest. And she won’t mind getting squashed, because she’s tough as balls, right?”

  “Hey,” Flores said. “Don’t talk for me, Sarge.”

  “I don’t think you understand the chain of command, Flores,” Stirling said.

  “Oh,” Flores said, innocently, “are we still doing that?”

  “Go on, sir,” Stirling said, speaking to Ram. “Get your giant backside in your pod.”

  Ram crawled in and lay down with his legs drawn up as best he could while Flores scrunched herself against the far wall of their shared pod section. Most of the Marines used their helmet as a seat but Ram was too big so he just reclined like a Roman at meal time.

  Despite claiming he would be happy to sit on the ETAT in full armor, it was an immense relief to crack the seals on his helmet and breath shared air. Even if it did stink of old sweat. No matter what the manuals said about the suits’ antibacterial processes and waste removal systems, Marines confined to their armor for days on end would always stink. Just as sure as they would moan about it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cooper said. “Which one of you fucking idiots forgot to swap out your waste module before climbing in here?”

  “No one,” Harris said. “That’s just your breath.”

  “Alright, knock it off,” Stirling said. “Get some food in you and hydrate and then we’ll sleep. If it’s alright with you, sir, me and Harris will take the first watch.”

  “What’s that?” Ensign Tseng asked, looking up from the external monitor on his wrist pad. “Oh, no, it’s alright, Sergeant, I will take the first watch. You will sleep.”

  “Are you sure, sir? It’s just that—”

  “I said the watch is mine.” Tseng stared at his sergeant.

  Stirling held his gaze for a moment. “Yes, sir.”

  They broke out their preferred rations. Ram had chosen a selection of self-heating packets of mixed rice that required a tab to be yanked on the bottom that created a quite intense heat while you stirred the contents. Even though some of them elected to eat cold meals, within a couple of minutes the entire tent structure was steaming with a discordant stench of cooking smells. Ram’s mouth watered and he ate his first rice packet before it was fully heated and started heating the next one before finishing the first.

  “How many of them do you need to eat?” Flores asked.

  “Two-thousand calories per pack,” Ram said. “I should probably eat four or five but I’ll stick to three.”

  “And you need, what was it, ten-thousand per day?” Flores said.

  Ram was surprised that she knew. “Depends on my exertion levels,” Ram said, mouth full of rice. “But yeah, at least that. Sometimes twice. I think my record when I had a high intensity day was over thirty thousand. I had to chug down protein and oil drinks.”

  “Holy shit, Ram. I know you like eating but that is impressive.”

  “I was training for that day my whole life,” Ram said, laughing. “If only someone had told me earlier that I was supposed to combine this insatiable appetite with endless exercise, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up too fat to leave my apartment.”

  Cooper cut in. “You must have known that. How can you not have known that you need to burn as many calories as you eat in order to stay the same size?”

  Harris groaned. “He was joking, you utter cretin. You moron. You braindead—”

  “Alright!” Stirling said. The tent rang with the echo of his voice. Stirling continued, his words as soft as a whisper. “Keep your voices down. Unless you want the wheelers to find us before we find them? No? Okay. Finish your food.”

  Fury rammed down her unheated energy bars, chewed and swallowed her drug doses. Then she sealed her helmet back on her head, lay down on her back and checked her sidearm and combat knife were present in their holsters and promptly fell asleep.

  Stirling was watching Ram. “She’s been doing this a long time,” he said, gesturing to the sleeping Corporal Fury. “Seen action all over Earth. On the Moon a bit, when she was young. Did stuff on Mars she never talks about. We can all learn from how she sets her priorities.” Stirling looked around at all of them. “We will have one hell of a fight tomorrow. And when we snatch our people away from the wheelers, we might be fighting a running battle all the way home. Get some rest. All of you. Lieutenant, you’ll wake me in two hours?”

  “It’s Ensign,” Tseng said. “And why don’t we make it four?”

  Stirling’s face creased slightly. “Alright, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll do that.”

  Something was off about Ensign Tseng, as far as Ram was concerned. They were all rated as psychologically defective in some way but the officer was all wrong. His attitude was prissy and he was perfectly competent in his organization of his team but
he made no effort to bond with them. And he was clearly nervous about the situation but not overly so. Perhaps he was. The man was hard to read. Someone who took his duty so seriously that he was crushed when his career advancement had been squashed by his clashes with his superior officer. It had made him miserable, clearly. Or maybe he had always been that way. His technical ability and ambition had got him to a certain point but his personality had got in the way.

  Ram sighed and turned onto his back, stretching out as far as he could. Not very far. Still, he wasn’t tired. His daily pills. He took them from the hip pouch on his armor and chewed them down. Tasty cocktail of anabolic steroids, Human Growth Hormone, timed release amphetamines and all manner of performance enhancing nootropics.

  It was odd how familiar everything felt. His whole life, he had been playing team games in Avar. For much of that time he had been the leader of a group of professional Avar players and he had grown to know many of them intimately. As colleagues, team mates, friends, comrades. Being in tent shelter with the Marines felt so similar that it was remarkable.

  Tseng was shuffling around in his corner, glancing at his wrist pad. The surveillance system and the ETATs monitored the area automatically for sound, movement, any changes in heat or light or any electromagnetic fluctuations at all. Still, Ram could understand wanting to look at the camera feeds. Human senses were familiar. Could be trusted. It wasn’t logical but that was people for you.

  The Marines shuffled and squirmed and the air filtration system hummed. Tseng’s wrist screen cover clicked open and then closed again.

  Ram cracked an eye. The ensign shifted on his backside, clicking his cover open again. It was easy for Ram to check his own screen and see what Tseng was looking at. The camera view showed the route back down the slope. Back the way they had come.

  It made a certain sense. The south was protected by the steep cliff they parked next to. West and east, down and up the slope, were the likeliest two approaches but the enemy could have come across the broken ground to the north.

  Ensign Tseng never changed the orientation of the camera. Kept pointing down the slope. Westward. He fidgeted. His eyes flicked over the Marines, stopping as the met Ram’s.

  He looked away, afraid.

  Guilty.

  Ram rolled over and crawled toward the officer. Flores squirmed aside. Fury rolled out of the way and Stirling shouted a warning. Ram, on his hands and knees, filled the space.

  “Stop,” Tseng shouted. “Halt. That’s an order.”

  Stirling sat up, his eyes wide and he moved to intercept Ram while Tseng scooted backwards. Stirling was immensely strong but he was only human. Ram shoved him aside, rocking the entire shelter when Stirling fell into the wall.

  Dragging Tseng by the ankle, Ram pulled the man to him. The ensign yanked out his sidearm, pointed it at Ram’s face but it was easy to yank it out of the man’s hand and toss it aside. He pinned him down. It was easy.

  “You sold us out,” Ram shouted. “Didn’t you.”

  “Take your hands off me, you freak. I order you to let me go.”

  “Order? What will you do if I don’t? I’m not even a Marine, remember? How will you enforce that order, Ensign Tseng?”

  Stirling spoke. “He won’t have to.”

  The sergeant, on his knees, held his sidearm pointed at Ram’s head.

  “He sold us out,” Ram said.

  “Explain,” Stirling said.

  Tseng started to object. “I didn’t, he’s lost his mind again, he—”

  “Shut up.” Stirling cut him off. “Talk, Ram.”

  “He’s waiting for the others to come and find us,” Ram said. “He was watching the road back to the outpost.”

  “I was on watch, you moron,” Tseng shouted, defiance and confidence overcoming the fear. “That was what I was supposed to do.”

  “Why were you not looking any other way?” Ram said.

  “I was. I did!” Tseng laughed, eyes flicking to Stirling. “He’s lost his mind. I told you. Paranoid. Post-traumatic stress, isn’t it. Coming back. See? I told you. Paranoia all over again.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ram asked. He looked around the tent. No one would meet his eye. No one but Stirling.

  “He’s talking about how you were before,” Stirling said, speaking softly.

  “Before what?” Ram’s heart raced. “I never had post-traumatic stress. I was never paranoid.”

  “You were, sir. That’s what they told us, anyway,” Stirling said, lowering his weapon. “After the Orb. Before you came down to the planet, here.”

  Ram shook his head. “I was dead. For ten months, that might as well be a whole year. They brought me back. Before the shuttle left the Victory and landed here.”

  Stirling took a deep breath. “You died, yes. They brought you back, pasted your brains back into that cloned body, yes. It wasn’t a year, though, sir. Not ten months, neither. More like a couple of weeks after the Orb fight and you were up and walking around in that new body, back to your old self. Almost right away, you started to train with us. But then there were problems.”

  Ram sat back, his head pushing against the ceiling. Tseng scrambled away.

  “He’s insane,” Tseng said, calm but with a brittle edge. “More than any of you, he is. And that’s saying something.”

  “Alright, Ensign,” Stirling said, his voice soft, like he was soothing a child.

  Ram’s mind whirred. A lot of weird stuff started to make sense. For a long moment, the only sound was the ensign’s big panic breaths. In, and out. In, and out.

  “Am I?” Ram asked Stirling. “Insane?”

  The big man holstered his weapon.

  “Well, sir.” He scratched his chin. “Seems like you did go a wee bit loopy, for a while.”

  10.

  Kat hung on to the hand grips in the ceiling and looked down at the seated VIPs in her passenger compartment. Each of them was taking the first doses of the antiradiation medication that had been handed out and passed along to everyone. One of those handing out the drugs was Feng. The bastard had sneaked his way onto her shuttle despite not being a VIP or on the passenger manifest. She ignored him. She would deal with him later.

  “This is the situation,” she said, tasting the bitterness of the medication at the back of her throat. “And there is no way to take the edge off this. The Victory has been destroyed.”

  The chorus of cursing was quieter and shorter-lived than she had expected. But then, they were smart people. They had been ordered to abandon ship, they had felt the battle raging while the shuttle was inside the Victory’s shuttle bay and they must have been preparing themselves for the shock ever since.

  A voice called out. “What happened?” One of the medical doctors.

  Kat shook her head. “Hard to say, at this point, I’m afraid. That’s partly why I came back to speak you. I need—”

  “What about survivors?”

  “Yes, the escape capsules! Did they get away?”

  Kat held up one hand to quieten them down. “Too early to say. To perform a proper analysis of—”

  “Why aren’t the engines firing?”

  “Is the shuttle damaged?”

  Dr. Ahmar called out in his powerful baritone. “Something hit us, did it not? Ten or twelve minutes ago, by my estimation.”

  “Are we going to die, too?”

  Many spoke at once, their faces contorted like a troop of panicking chimpanzees instead of the senior scientists and engineers that they were supposed to be.

  I shouldn’t have to deal with this. I’m just a pilot.

  She raised her voice over theirs, snapped at them. “Quiet! All of you, stop talking, now. I understand you’re all afraid. I know many of you are senior management and team leaders and you’re used to demanding answers. But I am Lieutenant Katerina Xenakis and this is my shuttle. I am in command until we land or board another UNOP vessel and you all disembark, at which point, please feel free to register a complaint against
me with my commanding officer. Whoever that turns out to be. Until that point, you will do me the favor of shutting up.”

  Some of them stared at her with open mouths, a couple with smiles. Quite a few nodded their heads at her.

  “Thank you. Now, we are not firing our engines because I do not wish to give away our position to the enemy. And also because we have a power transmission problem. I would be content to drift away from the wheeler vessel until Admiral Howe’s Stalwart Sentinel arrives and defeats the enemy. At which point, we could safely radio for help. We have food and water onboard that would last us days at least, possibly weeks. But there are a couple of problems with that strategy. With all the debris out there, it is not possible at this moment to determine the precise location of the enemy vessel. There is also the issue that with our current course we will encounter the planet’s atmosphere in approximately twelve hours. I say encounter but at this angle and at this speed, we will be torn apart by shock heating.”

  She gave them the opportunity to mouth off again but no one spoke.

  Kat smiled. “But our engines have a power transmission problem, you might be thinking. How in the world can we avoid plummeting to our doom? In fact, the monopropellant reaction control thrusters are operational. Again, I know what you’re thinking. The RCS thrusters are for maneuvering while docking and for orienting the shuttle in orbit. They’re for steering, you’re thinking. Yes, you are quite right. But it wouldn’t take much thrust while we’re this far out to push us off the current trajectory and bring us in at a shallower angle so that we could ease our way in, nice and slow. Like a pebble, skimming across a pond.”

  She waited again but none of them made so much as a whisper. They all knew about orbital mechanics and reentry.