by Dan Davis
“Alright,” Alvarez said, speaking slowly, eyes flicking to Branca. “I give you my word.”
“And one other thing that I need from you. Considering that you need me, that Brazil needs me more than I need you, I would appreciate this other favor. Considering what is at stake here. Considering that I could turn my will against the military and against anyone who might do harm to people I care about, I would argue that I’m not asking for much.”
“What is it that you need?” Alvarez said, glancing at General Branca, who was looking wary.
Onca nodded his thanks. “General, you will also give me your word that you will get me to Florida in time for the launch, no matter what I do to General Branca.”
Branca sat bolt upright, eyes bulging.
“Well,” Alvarez said, stepping backward as he spoke. “I suppose I can do that.”
Before Branca could get fully to his feet, Onca darted across the space between them and drove his stiffened fingers into Branca’s trachea. The blow had Onca’s full weight behind it, delivered like a striking snake. The man collapsed back into his armchair, clutching his ruined throat and fought to squeeze air into his lungs.
Onca leaned over the young General and pointed a finger in his face.
“I will go on this mission, General. And I will be the best candidate. And I will win. I would have done this without your threats. So, you must understand, that you did this to yourself. Do you understand that, General Branca?”
The man’s face was deep purple and his eyes bulged. He tried to throw himself out of his seat but Onca pushed him back down with the same attention he would give to waving away a fruit fly.
“You do understand,” Onca said. “That is wonderful. You will lose consciousness in a moment. Perhaps you will receive medical attention before your brain is deprived of oxygen for too long. Perhaps General Alvarez will take pity on you and perform an emergency tracheotomy himself? If he did, you might owe him a few favors, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe his life would be easier with you out of the way. I suppose it depends on how he feels about you. Do you have any last words?”
Branca clawed at his own neck where the purple bruising was already spreading.
“Look at my face as I say this,” Onca said. “You threatened the wrong man.”
It was doubtful the man was able to make much sense of what Onca was saying but he probably caught the essence of it. After a couple of seconds of thrashing, Branca stopped moving and lay slumped in the chair like a ragdoll.
Onca looked at General Alvarez, who had half turned away, a finger in one ear.
“Ah, Onca, my dear boy,” Alvarez said, voice higher pitched than usual and strained joviality. “No doubt you’ll want to get to Florida as quickly as you can. Quickly as you can. I’m just arranging for my personal jet to take you right away.”
So, Onca realized, there were indeed benefits to being Brazil’s greatest hero.
You could get away with murder.
3. ONCA’S DUTY
Sandra blocked and slipped every punch he threw, ducked under the elbow he whipped back at her head and hit him hard in the ribs with two punches then smacked him under the jaw with an open hand palm strike.
They were fully armored so it would not normally have hurt. But Sandra was pumped full with a synthetic testosterone, adrenaline, and ViBeMax cocktail. Add to that the strength- and speed-enhancing servosuit powered armor and the force of the blow knocked him momentarily senseless.
He acted on instinct, throwing a knee in a rising strike where he expected she would be.
But her previous combo was a feint for her real attack. She caught his knee before it connected and slipped outside it, kicking his rear leg out from under him. He twisted as he went down but she had predicted that, too, and she rotated onto his back, going for a rear choke. They crashed into the floor, hard and he reached back to pry her grip from him.
Instead, she released the choke and took his arm, spinning around—quicker than he had ever seen anyone perform the move—and forcing him into an armbar. She heaved back, trying to break his arm. She grunted inside her helmet, the power pack on her back thrummed and the motors whined. Onca’s arm stretched. Pain shot out from his elbow down to the tips of his fingers and up to his shoulder, aching and stabbing. He imagined his tendons snapping, his elbow joint overextending and popping out, shattering bone. She squeezed further, inching deeper into her grip, sliding like an anaconda.
The powered armor was strong enough to do it.
Around the edges of the training room, the watching candidates were deathly silent. Onca knew that, inside, they would be cheering Sandra for all they were worth. Most of them had beaten him during the two years of the voyage to the outer Solar System. But he had beaten each of them in turn, more often than they had him. But only just. Each of them was committed to achieving the maximum level of performance humanly possible, even if that required cramming dangerous amounts of drugs into their systems, training to the edge of injury and risking permanent damage to themselves and each other.
He pushed one of her legs into position, rolled over and climbed to his feet, arm still in her grasp. She clung onto him with a death grip, clamped around his arm with the inexorability of a machine. He cried out with the effort but he lifted her off the ground then slammed her down on her back, her helmeted head cracking on the floor beneath.
Her grip did not loosen. But it did slip downward enough for him to twist out of it, grab her wrist and smash his uninjured elbow into it.
The powered armor was weakest at the wrists as the hydraulic links between the forearm and the hand plate attached only on one side and the rigid outer shell of his own armor struck hard and clean at the ulna while he held her hand open.
It cracked, smashing the bone and she growled in animal fury at the injury. Onca twisted her hand and kicked her in the side of the head with the heel of his boot. He let her go as her head bounced on the hard floor once again, dazed just for a moment.
He dropped down over her, ready to finish her off.
Sergeant Jackson, acting as referee, leaped in and pushed Onca away.
“Medic!” he called.
“I’m fine,” Sandra said, clutching her wrist, trying to get up, eyes glazed over.
“Stay where you are, Sandra, it’s over now,” Jackson said.
Onca felt the eyes on him as he stood looking down, breathing heavily.
“For Christ’s sake, Onca,” Jackson said, half turning. “Why do you always have to take it too far, huh?”
“Too far?” Onca sneered. “We’re training to be the best, here. She would have snapped my arm in that suit, would that have bothered you?”
In his peripheral vision, he saw a few candidates and support staff shaking their heads in disapproval. No one answered him.
“Alright. I’ll go fight the only opponent worthy of me on this whole ship.”
Suddenly angry, he stomped out of the training room as the medical personnel came in.
***
The Wheel span toward him, the arms spinning round and round. Motor whirring.
Onca gripped his combat knife, steeled himself.
At Onca’s insistence, UNOP built another Wheel device on the spaceship Nemesis prior to leaving Earth’s orbit. In the training section, they had re-purposed one of the exercise spaces so that it could be quickly converted into a new version of the Wheelhouse.
Every candidate trained on the device. In Onca’s opinion, it was the single most valuable element in their preparation. The Wheel was programmable with speeds and motions that had not been recorded in the previous mission when the ambassador was cut down so quickly but what it was capable of was only educated speculation.
The synthetic skin covering the foot pads slapped on the floor as it rolled, cartwheeling closer. So tall it almost touched the low ceiling of the low spaceship interior.
It powered down. Whirring to a stop.
Onca whipped round, anger surging up.
General Richter stood at the control panel, alone.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, brightly. “Care to join me for a chat?”
He followed her through the training section into the administration ring and turned to head into the senior officers’ area.
“Not my office,” Richter said. “Come to my quarters.”
Onca cleared his throat. “Alright.”
Her quarters were larger than those of the candidates. It stood to reason, seeing that she was the most senior officer on the Nemesis who was not a member of the ship’s crew. Still, it was a little irksome as it was not she who would be the one facing the alien in the Orb’s arena and winning for humanity these great gifts that would lift the people of Earth into an astonishing and limitless future.
Assuming he won.
Her room was similar to his and the other candidates’ but she had an internal screen wall between the main door and her bed, creating a tiny lounge area. One storage wall by the refrigeration unit had a section for food preparation that Onca would have killed for. He could have fixed his own meals, maybe. Or snacks, at least.
She had a lounge area in the corner with a comfortable-looking twin-seat couch and armchair, covered in tasteful pale blue-gray fabric, around a low table. There was a short stack of books on it.
“Take a seat,” Richter said, indicating the social area.
Onca nodded his thanks and sat on the couch, assuming that the armchair would be her favorite seat.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked, opening a cabinet at the kitchen area.
“Water, thank you, General.”
She laughed as she took out a half-empty bottle of spirits. “Don’t call me General, you idiot. How about whisky?”
“Water is fine.”
“It is,” she said. “But I’m pouring you a whisky all the same.”
Well, why ask me, woman?
“I don’t drink.”
“Yes, it’s a terrible shame. And a position I don’t agree with.” She held the tumbler out to him. “You don’t have to drink it.”
It would have been petty to not accept the glass so he nodded his thanks and grabbed it from her hand.
Instead of taking the armchair, she slid into the other couch seat beside him. Onca sat up straighter and moved sideways to give her more room, out of politeness, but it seemed to amuse her.
“If you don’t want me to call you General,” Onca said. “What would you prefer?”
She took a sip and leaned back into the corner, slinging her offhand over the back of the couch, her tight top stretching across her breasts. “How about Megan?”
Onca pursed his lips. “Seems a little informal for the ranking army officer onboard. But alright.”
“Call me Richter if it makes you feel more comfortable. But I’m sick of being called General. What am I General of, now? Out here?” She sighed and took a drink.
“It’s your rank, not a position,” Onca said, shrugging. “You earned it. That’s what you are. That’s what people call you.”
“Of course. Does it annoy you when people here call you Major?”
The fumes from the drink in his hand wafted up into his face. A chemical heat promising comfort. He left it where it was.
“You asked me in here for a reason,” Onca said. “I assume one or more of the others came crying to you about the sparring session today. Is there something you need to say to me? Megan.”
She seemed disappointed. Sad, even. “No one came to me. I saw what happened on the video and data feeds.” She paused, broke eye contact. As if she was unsure what to say next. “I don’t have anything to say to you about it. My reason for asking you here, you say? I suppose I just wondered if you had anything to say to me. Perhaps you have something on your mind.”
He almost smiled. “You know therapy doesn’t work on me.”
A rueful smile before she knocked back a slug of booze. “And there it is. Round and round we go. I don’t want to be your therapist. I’m just offering. Well. Offering to be your friend. Is all.”
Onca took a slow, deep breath and let it out carefully. “Why? I’m sorry, I appreciate it, I do. I am expressing curiosity right now. I have no reason to doubt that you are telling the truth about offering friendship but I am genuinely curious as to why. I have been nothing but poor company and a poor officer since we first met. I’m surprised you would want someone like me to be a friend to you.”
It was as though she attempted to keep a straight face but instead a small laugh escaped. “Very true. You have been a total shit. But.” She took a sip. “It is a small ship, it is a long time to be on it and I am… bored.” She downed the rest of her drink and got up to get another.
While she did so, Onca took a sip of his own. The heat burned the back of his throat and made his eyes tingle.
“You’re bored?” he said as she came back with a full glass and put the bottle within arm’s reach on the table. “But you get to mess with the Captain and the ship’s officers.”
She laughed more fully at that. “You know, I have learned about astronomy and space propulsion systems. But they all have navy, aviation or astronaut backgrounds. And none of them have seen combat. I don’t say much to them, they don’t say much to me.”
Every morning, Onca saw General Richter running on her favorite treadmill, pounding away at a fast pace and putting in ten or twenty kilometers before breakfast. Once a week, she ran a marathon distance or more. He knew that she spent the morning reviewing training targets and meeting with the training staff. Afternoons she spent liaising with UNOP back on Earth or with the ship’s crew. Evenings, she messed in the lounge with the bridge crew away from the eyes of the plebs. Most evenings he would see her leaving or arriving at the gym for another workout.
“You’re always active,” he said. “Seriously. How can you be bored?”
“Did I say bored?” she said, watching the liquid in her cup as she swirling it round and round. “Perhaps I should have said, lonely.”
The word hung there between them for a while.
“And you thought you would ask me to your quarters?”
“You may well laugh. But yes.”
“I’ve been nothing but… unpleasant to you. Rude. Childish.”
“You’ve been worse than that,” she said. “And I always forgave you. Forgive me if that sounds condescending. Perhaps it is condescending but I always thought of you as a man who is damaged. A man living in considerable pain.”
He shifted in his seat. “Always the same. You see a man who is reserved and you assume that he is hiding something. You know this phrase in English, that says still waters run deep? I think it means that quiet people must be hiding something. You think this of me.”
“And,” she gestured with her whisky, “you’re saying that you are not like that?”
“You said to me before that you’re an amateur psychologist,” Onca said.
“Hardly amateur,” she muttered. “Being a General is like being the warden of a psychiatric hospital.”
“Well, then, you will know what I mean when I say that you are projecting your own issues onto me.”
She laughed. “No, that’s not it. Not at all.”
“Then you’re seeing what you want to see,” Onca said, exasperated. “The thing about me is, I’m an empty shell. You might think that inside here I am bottling up years of emotional problems and twisted neuroses but the fact is, I don’t know anything or do anything or feel anything that is not soldiering. I’m a machine with one program. And if you keep trying to prize me open, all you’re going to find is a bunch of rusty old gears and cogs.”
“Very poetic. I’m all choked up. Look, Onca, I just don’t believe you. You might very well be an outlier but you are still human and no one can go through what you’ve been through and not be affected by it.”
While she was speaking, he took another sip, grimacing as it seared his throat again. Not as bad, that time.
“What if you’re right?
Just suppose that you are right. And suppose my therapy sessions with the psychologist unlock some horrific shit and that process ruins my ability to fight? That would be true madness, wouldn’t it?”
She tilted her head and squinted at him with one eye. “Why would it ruin your fighting ability?”
“Because this is who I am. All my aggression and desire to succeed comes from my life, from my early life and the decisions I made early on.”
“Therapy doesn’t take away your childhood, Onca. It just frees you from it. And, anyway, I’m not trying to get you to go to the sessions, I gave up on that months ago and instead I just wanted a chat. That’s all. Forget about the mission for a little while. A drink. Or two. A bottle. A whole night?”
He took another sip. “Alright. Yes. I would like that.”
“So. Do you need me to give you orders now? I’m prepared to do that. Remove your clothes, Major, and get into my bedroom.”
***
Did she change him? Change who he was? Is that what happened?
All his past comrades who went down that road said of their wives and long-term partners that they tried to change their husbands. They found enough that they liked to be getting on with and then when they got their claws in, with a child or shared loan on a house or a dog, then they tried to fix all the problems that their soldier husbands had. Whatever their problems were.
His retinal display said 0415 so it was less than an hour before he had to get up, take a piss and go for a stationary run. He should probably either get up or try to get back to sleep.
But he didn’t feel like doing either.
Beside him, Megan Richter breathed deeply inside a tangle of sheets that exposed entirely one muscular shoulder and the entirety of her left leg and buttock. The memory of the night before, of her throwing herself up and down on him, of him plowing her for what seemed like a long time. The officers’ quarters were soundproofed but it was likely half the ship had heard them at it.
