by Dan Davis
He had a feeling that they would be coming for him. Captain Williams sat at the bar talking with the hostess. Onca nodded to them both but the hostess glared back with open hostility. The life in the bar was even more subdued than it had been on his way in. Subdued and even hostile. But he could detect no threat of violence from any of the patrons or the security. If anything, they all seemed wary.
The meaningful looks traded between the Captain and the hostess proved that they knew each other well. Onca pushed down the surge of jealousy. She was no one. A brothel keeper. She was like the people he had left behind years ago. Let the Captain have her attention and affection, if such a thing was possible with a woman like her.
“Just you?” Onca asked the Captain as they left together, stepping from the cloying, sweaty stink of the bar, out into the clear desert night.
“Not even close.”
Williams nodded at the small convoy of four HOAVs, lightly armored military vehicles in the parking lot and the dozen military police, half sitting inside their vehicles and the rest covering the area. One of them had his stolen bike mounted on the rear rack.
No wonder the hostess was so pissed. They were scaring the customers away.
“Nice of you to keep them outside,” Onca said.
“Yeah, well, this place is important for the guys on the base. I have a moral obligation to keep us on good terms.” Williams stifled a yawn. “Now, please get in the fucking truck, Major.”
Williams sat in the back with him and almost immediately fell asleep as the convoy rolled out onto the highway with no fuss. Onca wondered how often the MPs had to come and round up a soldier from the base.
Onca elbowed Williams.
“How is she?”
“Iveta? If you really cared, you might have stuck around to find out. Waited at the clinic like her friends—”
“Save the lecture for the General, alright, Williams? Just tell me how she is.”
“Broken skull, collapsed lungs, broken back, severed spinal cord, internal bleeding, brain damage. Nothing that isn’t reversible, in principle. Definitely ended her career in UNOP, though. Probably in any military. And I doubt she’ll be up to visiting whorehouses for a while.”
Onca let out a long sigh and lay his head back.
“Women shouldn’t be in this business.”
He felt Williams glaring at him. “Because men never get hurt. Your misogyny isn’t based in reality, Onca.”
Onca snapped his head up. “I don’t hate women. They just have different skill sets. It’s not natural that they’re soldiers.”
Williams laughed, genuinely amused. “Natural? Are you kidding? What makes you think anyone here is natural? The women here are pumped with as much testosterone as you are, they just take drugs to stop them growing beards and the like. They’re all packing upgraded nerve fibers, muscular enhancement, biomechanical augmentation. You know this, right? The maximum strength applicable in the powered armor is the same no matter the sex of the user. Come on, Onca.”
Onca shook his head. “It’s not the physical attributes. It’s the mentality. The obsessiveness that men have. It’s the—”
“The bar is the bar. UNOP standards make no concessions for what’s between the candidates’ legs. You’re the only one here making value judgements based on gender. It’s obvious in the way you reacted to this. Would you have ridden off into the night if you’d severely injured one of the men? What the hell am I saying? You’ve ended the careers of, what, five or six guys already at this point? How many of those incidents made you run away and screw a hooker? That sounds kind of symbolic, doesn’t it?”
“Of what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. But it’s all in your psychological profile, Onca. It probably comes from unconscious feelings of abandonment due to childhood trauma or something like that. To be honest, that’s what everyone’s says. But your fucked-up head is fucking up your career in UNOP.”
Onca didn’t know what to say. What could he say? Everything seemed upside down. Williams was acting strangely, like a real man for once. The Captain must have always been hiding his true self behind his uptight professionalism. All of a sudden, Onca felt tired. Irritable.
“Is that it?” he asked. “I’m getting kicked out?”
Williams looked out the window at the blackness beyond. “That’s up to the General.”
“Great. A goddamned amateur soldier is going to judge me defective. Might as well pack my bags now.”
Williams turned from the window, mouth hanging open. He snapped it shut. “Now you’re definitely kidding, right?”
“About what?”
“You never looked into your commanding officer’s background?”
“I’m not one to look for horns on a horse’s head.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Williams dug around in his pants pocket, chuckling. “You’re like someone from a thousand years ago, you know that?” He pulled out a crumpled 2D screen, unfolded it on his lap and keyed the switch. “Search. Archive news. General or Colonel Megan Richter. Indonesian Civil War.”
He held out the screen as the results scrolled through. Images of war, of soldiers covered in blood. One image showed repeatedly. That of a young woman, face distorted by a full-throated shout, dense blood plastered from neck to hairline on one side and gesturing with a bloody combat knife while holding a service pistol in the other hand. The date on the image results said 2109.
“That’s not General Richter,” Onca said.
Williams shook his head in amazement at Onca’s ignorance. “This is a famous picture, it was everywhere fifteen years ago. There’s a whole lot of footage from the battle, from headcams they released and there’s a famous cut of it, like a movie, with a cinematic score and everything.”
“Fifteen years ago, I was just about joining the military,” Onca said. “Where I grew up, I didn’t know anything about the world.”
I still don’t.
Williams grinned at him. “Alright, so it’s Colonel Richter in command of a battalion that gets surprised and cut off by the insurgency.” Williams gestured over the screen, flicking through images and short clips as he spoke. The results said they were arranged chronologically. “Then the enemy rises up from outside and moves in to start the siege. They were four days from reinforcement and without air support. They had a few drones, a few light vehicles. She was everywhere at the perimeter, not sleeping and jacked up on amphetamines, falling back keeping her men alert. Falling back and adapting to the attacks. Still, they were massively outnumbered and taking casualties, growing weaker while the enemy grew stronger. They were losing. The reinforcements were delayed. It was desperate, they were getting overrun. And that’s when she showed her greatness.
“Over two days she baited the enemy commander into attacking one sector and then she massed all her most mobile and aggressive units in a counter attack. It was incredible. She enveloped the enemy leadership, captured and killed them while holding off the rest of them. It was hand to hand, room to room stuff. She had to fight through the building, you know what’s it like when you can’t stop or slow down, can’t lose momentum. Her staff officers were acting as her bodyguard, all hands to the pumps, you know? Floor by floor, this was the enemy command post and she killed three men with her own hands, she didn’t have time to reload her sidearm and she stuck the last one with her knife. You can’t see much but this is the clip. The famous picture was taken during the advance. Anyway, they didn’t believe that they had the leader in custody and kept pushing so she took him to a rooftop and warned them to withdraw or she would kill him. Well, they didn’t withdraw. She killed him herself, in full view of the cameras and everything. Back of the head, look. No hesitation. That took all the fight out of them. Eventually, they withdrew before the international task force troops reinforcements finally arrived.”
Onca scratched the stubble on his chin. “Shit.”
Williams nodded. “She’s a war hero. A real one. A killer. You think she
ended up here by accident? She could have run for public office, she could be doing the speaking circuit and earning hundreds of thousands for every half hour speech. But she fought to get this job because she knows how important it is for humanity. She had the whole world at her feet and she wanted this. She knows this is every soldier’s duty. To make this happen for our species. Our culture. Our planet.”
“Isn’t she a little old for you, Williams?”
“Hey, I don’t mind anyone knowing that I would crawl through a mile of shitty barbed wire for her. Yeah, I would be honored to be intimate with her. Anyway, she’s only, like, forty-five or something, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Williams. So, how much trouble am I in with the war hero?”
Williams shrugged, sat back in his seat. “Like I said, it was a training accident. Everyone has reviewed the video from the suit cams and the building cameras. It’s obvious what happened, she was balanced on the outside of the open window, gun aimed at your back when you turned and knocked her out. It was obviously instinctual. You knocked the weapon aside as she fired. How did you know Iveta was behind you?”
“Servos on the suit are not quiet enough for stealth. I keep telling everyone.”
Williams was quiet for a while, like he was working up to something. “Anyway, accidents happen but your response to it doesn’t bode well. Running to the brothel further indicates that you have too much psychological damage to be selected for the mission.”
“Did General Richter say that when she sent you after me?”
“She didn’t send me, base security alerted me. No one would wake the General just because you snuck out. Anyway, the AIs predicted you would go AWOL weeks ago.”
“I don’t believe AIs predicted this. Someone would have stopped me leaving rather than chasing after me with all these HOAVs.”
“Analysis showed you were regularly exercising close to the motor pool and around the base patrol exits. Anyway, it’s not like anybody needs an AI to work out you hate it here.”
“I didn’t realize I had hurt your feelings, Williams.”
“You’re the best soldier we ever tested here in practically every category but you’re at risk of deselection just because of your mindset. The General makes her recommendation to the UNOP Board and they make the final selections. Honestly, you’re at risk of being left behind. And we don’t even know if you truly care. Maybe you do but it’s just hard to tell if the chip on your shoulder is because you’re here or if it’s who you are. Either way, it doesn’t look good for you.”
In the distance, the lights of the outer perimeter gatehouse lit up the night, a glowing white ball of light in the blackness.
“They would never leave me behind,” Onca said. “I don’t need to make friends to fight that alien. It’s not a team game. It will be me on that alien space station, me in that arena. Alone. They would never deselect me.”
Williams yawned. “I can see why you would think that. But that fight is years away. The mission isn’t the fight. That’s one part of the mission. You have any idea how many thousands of people, how many rocket launches are happening right now? Every day, while they fit out the ship in orbit. You know how much goes into getting a team to the outer solar system in fighting shape? Even getting a sniper team into place to fire a single shot. Would you say that pulling the trigger is the whole mission? In this analogy, you’d be like, you’d be the bullet, okay? If you’re not a team player, if you’re so closed off that no one can properly assess you, how do we know you’re not going to blow up in the chamber? How do we know you’re going to fly straight? How do we know—”
“Alright. Don’t labor the point.”
Onca looked out of the window as the convoy rolled through the gatehouse and into the base. The sky in the east grew lighter every moment and soon the beige and gray buildings would be touched with the morning sunlight. The military day had already begun and Onca had lost a night’s worth of rest. No doubt General Richter would want to chew him out before long. But in many ways, it was a relief to be back. He didn’t understand the world outside. Being on a base, any base, was almost like coming home.
Williams’ eyes were on him. “It’s up to you, Onca. No one cares about a training accident. Sergeant Katzarov was never going to make it to the Orb anyway. We’re just worried about what’s going on inside your skull. How much do you really want this? Enough to get over yourself?”
You don’t know what’s inside of me.
“I will do what is necessary,” Onca said, coming to a decision.
Williams nodded, warily. “Well. Good.”
I will make it so that they have no choice but to take me.
***
Just as Williams said, no one punished him. The General did not even call him in. Colonel Boone appeared to be particularly harsh and full of contempt the next day but the other candidates ignored him just as much as they always did. And that was just fine.
He got through the day on autopilot. From the start of the day on the shooting range right to the end, Onca was tired. After his sleepless night, he went for a run at his usual time. It was his opinion that the best way to combat sleep deprivation was through intense exercise but, apparently, that was scientifically unlikely. During the lunch break, he ate alone, quick as he could and then ran for close to an hour, sweating himself almost unconscious in the midday heat. The medics poured salt and sugar into him and sent him to the afternoon session. He was not at his best and yet he shot better than half of the men and women left.
Even tired, exhausted and dehydrated he could wipe the floor with the other candidates but still it was not enough. There was only one way that could show to the General and the Selection Committee and the UNOP Board that Onca, Major Rafael Santos, was the best candidate.
The Wheel.
He knew they were tracking his movements. There always had been a chip under his skin at the wrist that read biometrics and it was trivially easy to include location data. Just as it was trivially easy to strap on a wristband that redirected the signal to a fixed location.
He had used it on nights when he went exploring around the base. It was important for him to know about the secret parts of the place he lived and worked in. It helped to alleviate the boredom.
On many of those nights, he had let himself into the Wheelhouse. And he had looked upon the Machine. The Wheel.
Inert, massive. A hulk in the dark. Built to the precise dimensions of the alien, it was a gigantic wheel suspended from the ceiling by a robot arm attached to the hub. The bottom two of the six feet rested on the floor of the training room. They had even painted the thing yellow.
Onca stared at the metal claws they had fitted to the ends of the long fingers. The claws that had left his countryman torn to pieces on the floor beneath it.
It was designed to be programmable, of course. The speed could be reduced to mere fractions of those recorded in the previous mission and the behavior of the arms and legs could be made to do anything that it was hypothesized that the alien could do. And yet the cowards in charge had retired the thing after the third death.
Even declawed, it could hit with enough force to kill. And had done.
In Onca’s opinion, it was a mistake. The worst mistake that the UNOP Committee, the Selection Board and the war hero General Megan Richter had made. What the hell was the point of urban warfare deathmatches and static firing range tests when all that mattered was defeating the real-life analog of the mechanical death machine they had built in the Wheelhouse?
He dragged the plastic sheeting off the control panel and pushed the power buttons.
Nothing.
In the tangle of cables underneath the terminal, Onca crawled around checking the connections.
General Richter and Colonel Boone had extrapolated the deaths per session and concluded that the attrition rate would be untenable. In fact, they had simply not gone far enough. They had pulled back from the obvious conclusion.
> Throw people at the machine until they found a man who could defeat it.
He found a power junction with the circuit breaker displaying red on the switches. He pulled them all back to green and above him the control panel whirred into life.
If the future of the human race truly was at stake, then no one life mattered at all and to be afraid of losing the best soldiers in the world was absurd. There would always be more. Soldiering was a profession with an unlimited supply. And there was no need to limit it to soldiers. You could invite anyone to try their luck. Build a dozen machines and ship them around to cities all over. Hell, build a thousand. Build ten thousand and test everyone on Earth. Might even help alleviate the overpopulation issue while you were at it.
They would have found their team in no time and at the cost of only a few hundred or a few thousand lives. To do otherwise was typical sentimentality. An inability to go all the way with something, all morality pushed aside for the sake of the necessary outcome.
Was that not what soldiers did?
The software ran a calibration sequence that asked for periodic confirmations that everything was alright with the hardware and that no one was nearby or within the designated secure area. Onca could understand that it needed reassurance. He could have done with a little for himself.
He took off the huge set of overalls he had on, freeing the body armor below. From his duffel bag, he drew the helmet and powered it up.
The Wheel juddered into life.
Its banging and shaking made Onca jump and he was so startled that his heart rate took longer than usual to settle down. He almost laughed at himself.
While he prepared his equipment and the Wheel’s program, he worked up to a decision that he had to make.
Everyone said that he would be fighting with his assault rifle in hand but no one actually believed that. It was too good to be true. There’s no reason to doubt it, they said.
Yeah, right.
It just seemed obvious that it would be blades versus blades inside the Orb arena. Claws against knives. Hoping for more was wishful thinking.
