by Dan Davis
“So now it’s our turn? This program is to select someone to battle that monster?”
Onca’s heart pounded high in his chest at the thought of it.
Williams nodded, a small smile on his face. “So, now you know. You have signed non-disclosure agreements, of course, but if any leaks about this can be traced back to you then I’m afraid you would be subject to an extrajudicial capital punishment. We all would.”
“Humanity is at war with this Orb? With these aliens?”
Williams shrugged. “It is not as simple as that. And not, I hope, as dangerous. It seems as though this Orb is sent to us from some truly great and mighty civilization. We are invited by the Orb to come and fight for gifts of technology and even for the rights to colonize extrasolar planets.”
“The yellow monsters are not the ones who made the Orb?”
“Absolutely not. The Wheelhunter starship arrived at the Orb two days or so after the ambassador’s ship. There was some kind of electromagnetic and gravitational disturbance tens of thousands of kilometers from the Orb, and then they picked it up. Here, let me show you.”
The screen showed a large ship in space. Larger and more complicated than anything humans had made, he was fairly sure. Not that Onca knew much about space.
“The Wheelhunter was the representative of its species. The Orb had invited it, just as it had invited us. Only, the Wheelhunters come from another star system and the Orb brought them to ours through a wormhole that it created. Off the starboard bow, or whatever.”
“You call them Wheelhunters?”
Williams looked embarrassed. “An unofficial name. All that matters is that soon we will launch a new mission to that Orb. It will take maybe fifteen years on a spaceship before we can board that gigantic alien space station, where we will enter the central space and fight one of them to the death.”
“We will?” Onca said. “You mean, I will.” He jerked a thumb at himself.
“Really?” Williams asked, hesitantly. “You still want to be a part of this? After what you’ve seen, knowing that you’d be giving up your life on Earth, knowing what that creature can do?”
Everything has changed. There is a new enemy. A new challenge.
“More than anything.”
***
His quarters were the finest he ever had or even heard of. A whole chalet all to himself. It was larger even than his apartment in Brasilia. When he woke in the morning, a US Army Artificial Person knocked on his door with a delivery and then carried three huge metal cases into the main living area, like it was a hotel bellboy and not a logistics support assistant. Even though the massive AP stomped around with that typical dead-eyed AP expression on his face, Onca almost tipped the thing.
The crates were from the Brazilian Army R&D Unit. Inside each contained 365 daily doses of the pills, syringes and disposable items he needed in order to keep his new and improved body functioning at full efficiency. There was an encoded message he unlocked with his thumbprint and a swab of spit. It was explicit instructions about following the regimen to the letter, along with dire warnings for his health if he took anything other than the exact doses. Also, warnings to lock the cases after use and any failure to secure them against tampering by foreign nationals would lead to his incarceration for life. He had three years’ worth of medication to take but could get more by contacting the names and addresses as listed and so on and so forth.
Onca knew that if he was selected to go on the mission to the Orb, he would need many more cases.
He cracked that day’s stack and downed the tablets, drank the little vials and jabbed the disposable syringes into his thigh. Then it was time to go to work.
Captain Williams was there at 0630 to collect him.
“Will you be looking after me every day?” Onca asked.
Williams snorted a laugh. “Today is my last day. I will show you the way from your quarters to the main UNOP building and get you all linked up to the online system so you can check the schedule yourself after today. But if you want an aide, a bag man, I can organize one for you. They call them valets.”
Onca almost refused out of hand. Then he realized it would be helpful to have someone to carry his gear and look after him. Someone to fill his bathtub with ice at the end of a long day of training and so on.
“An AP?” Onca asked.
“Of course. They are one hundred percent obedient within their SOP criteria. I’ll requisition it now and it’ll be here when you finish your training today.”
When they got to the training center, Onca was escorted underground to a massive gym. Around the outside was the standard equipment, punching bags, resistance machines, free weights. But the center was an open space, the floor covered with training mats.
There, the others trained. Some shadow-boxed, others ran through grappling drills in smooth, slow motions.
“Onca,” the massive Colonel Boone called from the sidelines. “Time to see what you’re really made of, son.”
The exercising men and women paused their activity to turn and fix him with twenty-nine steely-eyed stares. Onca ignored them and went for the cluster of men around the commanding officer.
“Good morning, Colonel,” Onca said as he approached the grizzled old soldier. “I haven’t had a schedule yet or I would have been here for the start.”
Boone made a noise halfway between a laugh and a bear’s growl. “I’m sure you would have, Onca. I’ve been giving your file a closer look since yesterday. You know, you’ve had a remarkable career.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Interesting transition from Army to private contractor a few years back. Not a lot of detail on that.”
“No, sir.”
The Colonel snorted. “You know what else I noticed? Commendations for your shooting and recommendations for sniper school. Awards for urban warfare techniques like room clearing and breaching security doors in record time. You even came first in the jungle training school. Not a lot in there about your hand to hand combat achievements. Bit of a glaring omission, wouldn’t you say so?”
Onca almost laughed. He had been fighting ever since he was a child. Since before the first of his memories that started the narrative of his life he had been battling the other kids around his age and the dangerous older ones who might cripple or even kill you if you said the wrong thing or just got in their way. He’d never had any parents or siblings or anyone to stop him or protect him. After a few years, he got known as a kid who would never back down from a fight and, when he got good at it, people would come looking for him. Wanting to take down the skinny kid who had beat their brother or their crew mate to a pulp. Even when the gang had brought him onboard, they used him like a totem, like a mascot. The kid half your size who would turn you inside out. They all went the same way. Right up until the day he had fought back against the wrong man and had to escape into the army.
“I can fight,” Onca said.
Colonel Boone nodded. “We’ll see, Major. We’ll see. Why don’t you take some time to get warmed up? Then we’ll line you up some opponents, what do you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
His opponents were selected because they were the toughest in the room. A hulking great Mexican, a stocky American and a lanky, wiry Chinese.
“What is the purpose of this session?” Onca asked Colonel Boone while everyone gathered around the edge of the cleared mat space in the center of the room. His question drew laughter from most of them.
“It is not a fight to the death, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Boone said. His competitors laughed. “Not yet, anyway. Competition rules, no eye gouging or fish hooking, no blows below the belt. Five rounds, three minutes apiece. Not that they ever come to that. Fight ends when someone taps out, is knocked out or when the ref calls a stop. Do you understand?”
Onca knew he was being set up to fail. There was no way they expected him to get through three competition-style fights with no preparation against opponents that had been tra
ining for months at an elite level. They had picked three men. He knew from the way they were built and the way they moved, each would have a different fighting style and different areas of combat expertise.
Still, Onca had never fought a fight he could not have won, in principle. And a key part of his recuperation had been combat training. He did not tell the Colonel that.
The tall Chinese man was his first opponent. A kickboxer if ever he saw one. His stance suggested extensive muay thai training but it could have been a ruse and Onca prepared for an early takedown attempt on his enemy’s part.
All around them, some people shouted encouragement. Others were completely silent.
Onca was reminded that despite the nature of group dynamics, everyone around him was hoping to beat everyone else and be the one selected for the mission.
When the bell sounded, the guy danced forward, feinted low for a shooting takedown but then snapped a roundhouse kick to Onca’s head. He moved forward smoothly, flowing like water but when he transitioned to the kick he was so fast that Onca barely registered the sudden change in motion.
With the upgrades they had made to Onca’s biology, he was faster than he had ever been. His body responded to the threat without much in the way of—or time for—conscious thought. He slipped inside the leg that whipped toward his head and snapped an overhand right into the sweet spot under and slightly behind the ear. Usually, he would not have used a closed fist on a head strike but as he was connecting with the semi-soft tissue of the neck he put the full force of his new and improved muscles into the two knuckles of his right hand.
It was a brutally effective strike. His opponent was unconscious before he hit the floor but Onca followed him down anyway and smashed his elbow into the man’s face just as the back of his head bounced off the mat. Far from an instinctual, unthinking blow on a man who was unable to defend himself, smashing his face in was calculated to instill an edge of fear in those who were watching.
The fact that the Chinese soldier suffered a burst nose and fractured cheek was just something the man would have to suffer. Onca was there to win and everyone there had to accept they were at risk of injury or death. If they didn’t then they soon would.
Medical Assistant APs dragged the Chinese man out of the combat area and held him down as he returned to consciousness.
Silence. All around the other soldiers stood watching with contempt or, at the least, dislike. He glanced around and most met his eye. One or two smiled or even grinned at him, going for wolfishness and bravado but it was easy to slap a smile on your face to pretend a confidence you did not feel. Still, he marked those ones out as the ones to beat. One of them was even a woman.
Onca threw a look at Colonel Boone to gauge his tone. The old man had a genuine grin on his face and Onca took that as all the encouragement he needed.
“Alright,” Onca called out. “Who’s next?”
***
“You have not been making friends here,” General Richter said from behind her desk. “In fact, it looks as though you are intending to make every single soldier on this base into your personal enemy.”
She was a strong-looking woman, long of limb and slim but with healthy width to her shoulders. She could have been anywhere from thirty to a youthful fifty, her golden hair dragged back into a bun, giving her face a somewhat startled, severe aspect.
Onca stared at a fixed point over her head, arms behind his back. Halfway between attention and at ease.
“I did not realize I was here to make friends.”
The General nodded slowly. “Quite right. On the other hand, you do have to live with these people while we make our final selections. They are competitors but also comrades. Brothers and sisters in arms.”
“Ha!” Onca said. “Some comrades. Listen, General, I have my own quarters and I am happy in my own company. I do not need to make friends. I’ve had brothers in arms before and I don’t need any again.”
“Is that so? Well, I am sorry to hear that. Does holding that attitude make you happy?”
“Happy?” He was surprised that a General would know the word.
“Yes, Onca, happy. You might have heard of the concept.” She tilted her head forward. “Or perhaps not.”
“General, our purpose here is more important than any one individual. More than any one person’s life. Certainly, it is more important than our happiness.”
“Ah. So, you admit that you are unhappy?”
Onca sighed. Why can women never leave you alone, he thought. Always needling into you with their questions, burrowing like a tick until they force you to admit your hatred for another man or your fears that you might fail at some endeavor. Always, they weaken. Undermining a man’s psyche. Infecting him with her own doubts, her own worries.
Female soldiers were no different. Just because some woman is a good enough administrator to be promoted to General, does not make her immune to her gender’s knack for pointless boring and searching.
“I admit that my happiness has no bearing on my performance.”
The General inclined her head. “Is that so?”
“I am the leading candidate. I have been the leading candidate for weeks. In every test, I am the highest performing individual.”
“That is quite true. No one could deny that. After all, it is right here in the data. Irrefutable.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And yet I do rather worry about your psychological state.”
Onca ground his teeth. “My psychological state, General, has not slowed me down yet.”
The General spoke mildly. “How do we know?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, how do we know that the unresolved psychological issues from your past have not negatively impacted your performance?”
“I am the best performing candidate in this program.”
“Undeniably so. And yet will that be enough to defeat the alien creature?”
She left the question hanging there.
“I suppose we’ll find out,” he said.
The General leaned back in her chair. “You see,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That nonsense right there. You suppose we’ll find out? You suppose humanity will find out whether you were all that you could be after you go up against this creature, is that it?”
Onca said nothing. He knew a senior officer’s rhetorical question when he heard one.
“I know what you think, Onca. You think that you have excelled here and you have. You also think that you have achieved a combat speed comparable to the speed of the Wheelhunter creature. And you have. But we have only seen this thing run down an unarmed man. We simply do not know what the upper limits of its performance are. We do not know what weapons of ours will penetrate its skin. Will your combat knife do it? Will an armor penetrating round work better than a hollow-point? Will that damned Orb even let us through with a rifle? You actually think you’re good enough to cover every possibility? Or do you really care so little that you are willing to just find out after the fact?”
There was little in life that could arouse an emotion from Onca and he was aware that she was attempting to get to him, to challenge him on an emotional level. But he could not let her get away with it so easily.
“Are you actually questioning my commitment?” he asked. “I work harder than anyone else here. I gave up my life for this even before I knew what the stakes were.”
“You didn’t have much choice, as I see it. From what UNOP Intelligence tells me, after years of exemplary service, the Brazilian military effectively blackmailed you into joining this program.”
Onca swallowed. “That’s not how I see it.”
“Truth is, Onca, I am unsure of how much I can push you on, emotionally. But for the sake of truth, of honesty, I have to say I worry about your mental health. I want to discuss the deaths of your company, Sabre Rubro, in your final mission, can I do that?”
A chill ran down the back of his neck. A sick feeling down in his guts. “If you
must.”
She inclined her head just a little. “I am not a psychologist by profession but I am fascinated by the field. And, more importantly, I have a lot of them working for me.” She tapped the screen on her desk with a pointed finger. “In here, I have report after report about everyone here. Not just candidates but my officers and other personnel. I am well aware that everyone has a history of damaging life events, from childhood trauma to professional disappointments but you, Onca, have more than most. Your resilience is perhaps the most remarkable thing about you and I can say that even though the details of your childhood remain totally unknown to anyone but you. And yet I do worry. I do. The file is unclear about why you left the military but seeing how it followed a mission against a group of rural separatists who were later arrested and executed by your government, I would guess you were ordered to do something to them when they were in your custody that you felt would be immoral. Perhaps you were asked to leave rather than face a court martial and they avoided a scandal, I don’t know. Perhaps that’s my own experience prejudicing my assessment. But then you ran a wonderfully successful private company for over a dozen missions. And it ended in betrayal and tragedy. And from what I can tell, you have had no time to grieve. No time to process those events. For all your resilience, I do not believe for a moment that you are pathologically lacking in empathy. You do need to go through that process. And perhaps you have done so, quietly and by yourself. But you are so closed off that I really have no idea.”
Onca nodded. “I know your type well. You enjoy telling other people that they are broken and that you have the solution. You are like the priests and the communists. I have achieved everything that I set out to in my life so far and I continue to do so. There is nothing wrong with me.”
After staring at him for a long moment, she got to her feet, wandered around her desk and sauntered toward him. She stood so close to him that her chest brushed against his and she peered up at him, staring into his eyes.
