Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  She sighed and looked up at the ceiling and thought a while before replying. “Once, a long time ago, yes I had a rebellious streak. But I learned to tame it. Subdue it entirely.” She looked at him again. “You’ve missed so much, Rama. You don’t know what it was like. So much loss has a way of focusing the mind.”

  “Did I miss so much or did you make me forget? What did you do to me?”

  She leaned forward on her desk. “It’s not what you think. Your memories were not wiped. You really were unconscious for all those years. On life support. You played no part in any of it.”

  “How can that be so? Why then did you only wake me up two weeks before the start of such a crucial mission? Why?”

  Kat nodded once, smartly. “You and Sergeant Stirling were grievously injured. The damage you sustained was severe and permanent, but it was expected that you could be properly treated at some point in the future. Your processes were slowed to the minimum and your life support pods were kept running and carefully maintained. You were shipped between one medical facility and another during our retreat to the outer system.”

  “Why?” Ram asked. “Why bother?”

  “You were a resource, in more ways than one. There were multiple requests for interviews and for information on your condition. It was good for morale to be able to truthfully say you, the hero of Orb Station Zero, were still alive and were receiving treatment. Soon enough, after the Hex War, nobody was really interested in your propaganda value anymore. We had more pressing concerns, like our survival. But there were multiple requests by various research projects that wanted to get a look at you.”

  “Surely, all the data about me was on file?”

  “An abundance of data. Your entire life, every moment of it or near enough, recorded and measured in every conceivable detail. But there’s no substitute for the real thing, apparently.”

  “What did it matter, though, when UNOP was organizing an evacuation and fighting a retreat? What kinds of research projects would have needed my body when my genome is recorded and everything else for that matter?”

  “Many kinds, it seems. I wasn’t there for most of it, you understand, I was serving on ships. But they tell me that there is something unique about your brain. Or your mind, rather. They have rarely seen a mind transfer as cleanly as yours from the original body to the new one. Even from clone to clone, like you did before. There must be some quirk up there not in the data or perhaps it is in the data but hidden and requiring experimentation with your real brain, with your real mind, in order to detect. But nothing has been stable enough for any researchers to get hold of you. You were on the way to a space station but the station was destroyed by the Hex before you reached it.”

  “Why didn’t they ever wake me up?”

  She hesitated and Ram sensed they were getting to the crux of things. “Your injuries had not healed. They knew that waking you up would lead ultimately to your terminal decline from various problems related to cell death.”

  “Alright,” Ram said, slowly. “How was I cured?”

  “You weren’t.”

  Ram sat down on the edge of the sofa. “I’m dying?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “It’s not certain but you are already experiencing the symptoms and your physical and mental performance is already declining. This will continue until you are incapacitated and then you will die. I’m so sorry, Ram.”

  “What about Stirling?”

  “Him too. He was lucky enough to be shipped around most of the time along with you. He was an experienced soldier but only because he was packaged up beside you was it that he made it this far. You were an item on the manifests. Pair of life support pods. Two capsules for the price of one. Lucky for us.”

  “Why bring me out at all, then? Why assign me to such an important mission?”

  “We had an officer, an NCO, and a larger team on route to rendezvous with the Hereward for the weapon extraction mission. Their ship got caught up in an action. Stupid, really, the captain should never have gone to aid the fleet. And so a second team was needed. I’m not sure who put it all together but we picked up Cooper, Flores, Fury from the Jandamarra, near Ganymede Station where we collected Red, and then we got you and Stirling delivered from a base named Shade on Calisto.”

  “But we were sick and we had been in stasis for so long. Why did they think we could do it?”

  She shrugged. “After they brought you out of stasis, there were days of procedures. They administered dozens of treatments of blood transfusions, stem cells and bone marrow injections and the rest, they told us you would have up to a month of full function. To err on the safe side, we were ordered to give it fifteen days between making you conscious and the start of the mission.”

  “We weren’t expected to make it back.”

  “Almost no one who tangles with the Hex is expected to make it back. They have other plans in place for if we don’t make it to the orb on time. Did they expect you to survive, to make it back here? They expected it enough to draw up plans for you to support training the weapon. There was some discussion about keeping you on board while the others carried out the mission, that way you would be guaranteed to use your month of full function plus whatever was left to support the training but it was decided your talents as a small unit commander were best put to use, with the training as a secondary benefit.”

  “And they asked you to lie to me.”

  “They ordered me to do so. If you found out, they predicted that you would resent us, resent me, resent the program. And resent it enough that it would reduce your effectiveness as a trainer. They said your personality profile and personal history showed you had a tendency for holding grudges.”

  Ram leaned forward and rubbed his temples. His head ached. Was it stress, was it psychosomatic, or was it from pain caused by his extensive and irreversible cell damage? Whatever it was, Ram thought, his head hurt.

  “And Stirling doesn’t know?”

  “No but I’ll tell him now.”

  “I’ll tell him. It’s my duty.”

  “We’ll tell him together, then. In the morning?”

  “No, call him now.”

  She did so and they waited in silence. The minutes stretched and stretched and Ram thought he should say something but he was too irritated to think. Or too brain damaged, perhaps. He stalked back and forth in front of Kat’s desk, dragging his bad leg as he did so.

  A tendency for holding grudges? He thought, over and over. I don’t hold grudges.

  And when he finally arrived, Stirling stepped inside with deep suspicion on his face.

  When they explained the situation, he said nothing for a long time. “Explains why my guts have been acting up.”

  Ram snorted a small laugh.

  Kat looked between the two of them. “I thought you both would be angrier about this.”

  “Why,” Ram snapped, “because my profile says so?”

  “Because why wouldn’t you be? I’d be fucking furious.”

  “Well, I am angry. I don’t know. Who should I angry at? You? For following orders? The fact that UNOP treats us like replaceable units? I’ve already been through this. We’re fighting for our survival here. Nothing else matters. Not our lives or our morality.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll be dead soon enough. Why bother spending it angry? We have a job to do with Henry. God knows, the bastard needs our help. We’ll have to get on with it for as long as we can.”

  When they left her office, Ram and Stirling stood and looked at each other.

  “Can’t fucking believe this,” Stirling said, shaking his head.

  “Really?” Ram asked.

  “Well,” Stirling said. “Actually, it makes perfect sense. Bloody bastards, ain’t they. Christ alive. I need a drink. Coming?”

  “I’d like that but… Henry starts his training in a few hours and I’m going to prepare things at the gym. That’s all that matters.”

  “Yes, sir.
You’re right enough about that. Alright, see you tomorrow then, sir. We’ll whip that monstrous great lad into shape or die trying, eh?”

  Ram got halfway to the gym deck before the full force of the news hit him.

  I am dying slowly. I am going to die slowly and horribly.

  He had already begun to break apart and his mind was never going to get better, only worse. He found himself leaning one hand on the wall. Pain in his leg stabbed higher up into his lower back and he eased himself down to the floor where he sat with his head in his hands. He didn’t realize he was weeping until he wiped his cheeks.

  “For god’s sake,” he muttered and forced himself to his feet. He did not have time for self-pity.

  There was work to do.

  19.

  “Come on, Henry, you’ve got this one, I know it. Do it just like we said. Here we go.”

  Ram watched on the Avar monitor as Henry approached the simulated Hex champion.

  Wait for it, wait for it, Ram thought. Hold on.

  Henry rushed forward ducked under the legs and grasped a handful of the others, lifting the Hex into the air. Unfortunately, he had failed to contain the razor legs and they slashed his back to ribbons and stabbed his chest with deep cuts, one of which tore through Henry’s heart even as they crashed to the ground.

  Henry was dead.

  “This can’t be good for him,” Stirling muttered beside Ram. “Can’t be good to die over and over.”

  “I went through the exact same thing,” Ram replied, pointing at the screen. “It worked well enough for me, in the end.”

  “Yeah but he ain’t you, sir.”

  No, he is not.

  Henry came over the comm from his Avar chair in the training room. “I know what I did wrong, I know it. I went too early. It was just the timing, that’s all. Put me in again. Run it again.”

  “You’ve got to bait it in, first, Henry, bait it in,” Ram said. “Bait it to launch the razor attacks, when they withdraw them above shoulder height is when you grab and then pin them when you go for the—”

  “I know, I know! I just need to try it again.”

  “Alright, alright. Let’s go again.”

  While the Avar sim reset, Stirling made notes on his screen, tapping away and sighing.

  “This tactic appears inadequate,” Red said behind him. “To date it has had a zero percent success rate.”

  “Thank you, Red, I am aware of that.”

  “Why then must we persist with failure? When I underwent the superb military training provided by UNOP, one of the key tactical tenets was not to do the same thing and expect different results. In battlefield terms, it is often stated as a bad idea to reinforce failure by continuing to send men and firepower into a losing situation. Another important concept to consider, which I personally found highly enlightening, is to never—”

  “Red, it’s very important that we all maintain positivity throughout this process.”

  “Forgive me, sir, my understanding is that the affectation of positivity was for the purpose of the subject’s mental health.”

  “Your understanding is correct.”

  “But the subject cannot hear us at this moment in time so I was being truthful, sir.”

  Stirling sighed. “The truth is, Red, we should roll your arse down the corridor.”

  “Ha ha, very amusing, Sergeant. You are attempting to hurt my feelings. The joke, however, is on you due to the fact that I have no feelings, in the human sense.”

  “Being positive, Red, is less about truth or deceit and more about the spin you put on things.”

  “Ha, spin,” Stirling muttered. “Good one.”

  Ram ignored him. “You don’t lie to be positive, you just deemphasize the negative aspects of what you are talking about and emphasize the positive, do you understand?”

  “I understand completely.”

  “Alright then.” Ram watched the screen and winced as Henry got killed again as he went in for the takedown. “Okay, that was good, Henry! You did everything right, let’s just try it again, okay?”

  He sighed. “Sure, Ram, okay.”

  Ram muttered to Stirling. “Reset, please.”

  “Well done, Henry,” Red said. “You survived for a quite significant one point four seconds longer than last time before your simulated decapitation.”

  “Er, thanks, Red.”

  Ram turned and limped over to the wheelhunter and stared at his hub. It was impossible to truly glare at a creature that had sensory nodes all over his huge body. “I’ll be the only one speaking to Henry during these sessions, alright, Red? And before and after.”

  Red seemed to deflate, slightly. “Did I do positivity incorrectly again, sir? I will do better next time.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Stirling said. “Be positive.”

  “In fact, Red, I don’t think you should probably speak to Henry at all from now on, unless he asks you a direct question. You understand?”

  “I understand perfectly, sir.”

  “You do? Honestly?”

  “Honestly? Oh, no, sir, not at all. In fact, I do not understand but I have found in my experience with you that it is usually best to simply pretend that I do so. All I need to do is blindly follow your orders without question.”

  “Alright, Red, fine.” Ram sighed. “Henry, we’re going to reset but this time I want you to rush him at the outset, okay? Just go as fast as you can and get low at the last moment and blast through. Don’t time it, don’t hesitate.”

  “Really? What about the timing?”

  “Well, we have to attempt a wide range of tactics, don’t we? So let’s try rushing it and maybe it will take it by surprise. But be quick, alright? Be quick!”

  “Got it, let’s do it!”

  Ram watched as Henry rushed forward, ducked low and dived forward. The Hex twisted aside and sliced Henry to pieces.

  “Wow, that was rough,” Henry said, speaking lightly though his voice was shaky and his heart was racing. His norepinephrine and epinephrine, estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin were spiking into the red across the screen. “This one’s close to full speed, right?”

  Ram glanced at the Hex speed setting on his screen.

  It said 62%.

  “Yeah, almost full speed, Henry. Tell you what, why don’t we call it there for this session and you can get some lunch, alright?”

  “Sorry, Ram, I’m really sorry.”

  “Hey, don’t you apologize, Henry. You’ve had a great session, we’ve learned a lot, we’ve got tons of data, and you’ve got so much more experience. And that’s what this is all about, right? You’re doing great, Henry, just great. Okay?”

  “Okay, sure. Thanks, Ram. You coming for lunch?”

  “Ah, you go ahead. Just a few things to go through here.”

  “Alright.”

  Ram clicked off and sat down, leaning back in his chair. His head ached and his foot throbbed. Rubbing his belly, he felt how much weight he had lost. Despite that, he did not have an appetite. The genetic damage to his cells was started to accelerate and his symptoms, though still manageable, were continuing to progress.

  “He ain’t got it, sir,” Stirling muttered.

  Ram breathed in through his nose and blew slowly out of his mouth. “What’s he not got, Sergeant?”

  “You know, sir. You know. It. A killer instinct. Some lads have it, some don’t. Our boy don’t.”

  “He’ll get there in the end.”

  “It ain’t something you can get, sir. It’s innate.”

  “I don’t accept that we can’t do anything. What even is a killer instinct, really?”

  “Well, it’s a… it’s wanting to kill. It’s needing to kill your enemy when you get the chance. It’s barely controlled brutality. It’s directed rage. And our boy ain’t got none of it.”

  Ram turned to Red. “Does your species have a killer instinct, Red?”

  “My species evolved to be predatory, yes indeed. I am t
he product of thousands of years of selective breeding by the overlord species UNOP designate the warlock. They have a killer instinct like no other.”

  “Yeah, so you’re genetically engineered, in part, right?”

  “That is essentially correct.”

  “And did they tweak your killer instinct up or down or what?”

  “Our aggression levels are correlated with our social and military roles. The engineered champions that you and your predecessors fought in the arena were highly aggressive by design whereas I and my colleagues were not so much.”

  “So it’s just about aggression,” Ram said.

  “Woah, woah, woah,” Stirling said, holding a hand up. “Someone can be aggressive but not have a killer instinct, okay? It’s not just aggression, Red, alright? It’s the desire to fucking murder your enemy. It’s the rage you need to smash a guy’s face into pulp, twist off his head and chew his brains out of his skull. It’s not aggression.”

  “So, what is it, then? I mean what is it on a biological level?”

  Stirling shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Is it definable? Is it measurable? Can it be framed and then enhanced?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Me either.” Ram drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. “Let’s ask the experts.”

  ***

  “So, my question is, doctors. How do you increase a person’s level of homicidal aggression?”

  Ram looked at them. Stirling shifted in his seat beside Ram. “Killer instinct.”

  “We’ll just say aggression for the moment, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dr Monash scoffed. “Henry’s aggression has been carefully tailored to be the perfect balance between—”

  “Testosterone,” R1 said, glancing at Dr Monash. “Testosterone is one of the many factors that influence aggression and even that is not a simple matter. For example, the testosterone derivative estradiol, which is a form of estrogen, plays a large role in male aggression. But adjusting testosterone levels in combination with other factors facilitates aggression by modulating vasopressin receptors in the hypothalamus. It’s a very effective tool for a whole range of behavior modification but it does require constant adjustment.”