by J. F. Holmes
Locked in a cell, Uriah picked at his dirty feet as he waited for something to happen. The downside of being in a Mark V Wraith suit was that there really wasn’t any room in it for shoes. Socks, sure, but not shoes. It also required the pilot of the suit to wear skintight clothing, which the rebels had left him in. The bodysuit stank almost as badly as he did, courtesy of the sweat that had poured off him during the orbital drop and subsequent battle.
Eventually they made him shower and change. He’d heard they’d burned his clothing. Not that he could blame them. He’d stunk worse than the dead.
“We have questions,” an interrogator stated as she entered Uriah’s cell, four months to the day after they’d captured him. It was a woman, Uriah was surprised to see. Thus far, all he’d seen were the men of Maelstrom. He looked her over for a moment approvingly. She was dark skinned with nearly coal-black eyes, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a ponytail. Guessing her to be of some sort of southeastern Asian descent and her age to be around 30, he waited for her to continue. “But first, I have some bad news for you.”
“Executing me isn’t bad news,” he informed her. She laughed a little at him. It seemed his comment had amused her.
“No, we’ve decided on something a little…unconventional,” she said as she leaned against the cell’s wall. The door was still open, but Uriah knew at least two guards were out there, maybe more. Escaping was stupid, after all. Where could he go?
“That sounds scary.” Uriah shook his head. “Why won’t you people hang me and get it over with?”
“Why do you seek death so quickly?” she asked instead of answering the question. “What makes living so terrifying for you?”
“What makes death so frightening to you?” Uriah shot back. She smiled softly.
“I’m not afraid of death in the least,” she replied. “I just embrace life, and when death comes, I’ll embrace it as well. It’s just a part of the cycle of humanity.”
Uriah had nothing to say to that. He’d never debated existentialism before, nor moral issues, outside of the occasional fight between Wraiths over who was the toughest. Lacking anything additional to talk about, he slumped down on the small cot and draped an arm over his eyes. After waiting for a few minutes in the silence of the cell, the woman continued.
“The courts have decided your fate,” she said as she picked a stray bit of lint off of her shirt. “They’ve decreed that a lifetime of service to the planet would be better than your death.”
“That’s it?” Uriah asked, surprised. “That doesn’t sound so bad. I should be sentenced to death. I killed a bunch of people.”
“Oh, right, forgot the important bit.” She jerked her head up and grinned. “You’ll also be the ward of a child who had no relatives to take care of him after you killed his father during your attack.”
“What?” Uriah sat up in surprise. He rubbed his eyes and tried to comprehend what he’d just been told. “I don’t know how to take care of a kid. I’ll probably kill him or something!”
“You know, I understand how a Wraith works,” she said, her tone soothing and calm to Uriah’s ear. “I studied them quite a bit. I also know a lot about Imperfects. Before we declared our independence, we followed the laws of the Dominion, remember? When we found an Imperfect child at the age of three, we’d send him or her to the hospital to be chemically neutered, so they couldn’t reproduce. That was the law, after all. We did the same with the adults who tested genetically imperfect before they were to wed. We destroyed dreams, because we were afraid there might be some genetic impurities in the future. Playing God, it turns out, is hell on the psyche.
“Those we castrated or performed hysterectomies on? They were tough kids. We stuck them in Holding Homes, like the law said. But as they grew older, we realized they were isolated from emotional bonds. They couldn’t connect with other people. They were Imperfects, after all. Who cared about them? What did their feelings matter? Only when they became Wraiths, if they could, were they of any minimal value at all. Until that fateful day when we realized what we were doing was evil, what the Dominion demanded of all children who might be ‘tainted’. Evil doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was sickening, and we voted to stop doing it. This meant, unfortunately, that we were suddenly embroiled in a rebellion.
“Those kids, though? The ones we’d already failed? They saw that we’d tried to fix things, so they tried to help us. Ninety percent of them suicided, believing that was the right thing to do. I know I wept. My mother was in pieces because of it. My father damn near drank himself to death in horror. Just how far had we gone as a society to drive children to believe their deaths were needed because they were unwanted, unnecessary?
“Is that why you don’t fear death, young Wraith?” she asked Uriah, staring hard into his eyes. “Do you seek death not because it’s a release, but because your worthiness is based solely on your ability to fight?”
Uriah couldn’t speak. His throat constricted, and he discovered there were tears in his eyes, running freely down his smooth cheeks. Fear, true fear, gripped his heart with icy fingers. That was something he’d only admitted to himself, long before, when he’d been a child hiding under the bed so the larger kids couldn’t hurt him. Was he afraid of life? Was dying as an Imperfect more preferable than living as one? The bonds upon his soul began to crack, just a little.
“We’re offering to give you a reason to live, Wraith,” she told him. There was kindness in her voice, entirely unexpected. “Help them the way nobody helped you. Live.”
It was her compassion that shattered the last hold the emperor had over him. He bowed his head and openly wept for the first time in his life. The poison drained slowly out of the emotional wound. His soul screamed in agony as he realized he wanted to live. Pain, anguish, old hurts, all welled to the surface. Looking up, Uriah saw that she, too, was crying. He found himself nodding, feeling stupid for having believed that the way of the Dominion was for the best. He’d been betrayed. Humanity had been betrayed. The worst part? It had betrayed itself.
“I’ll do it,” he promised, sniffling. Uriah hastily wiped his face with his arm sleeve. “I swear to God I’ll help the child learn to love.”
“This,” she told him as she dabbed her own eyes. “This is why we’ll win the war.”
***
Uriah was wearing clean clothes and shoes as he stood in the old Holding Home. It was now a home for war orphans, and the population of children here was blessedly small. Very few children in this world had nobody to care for them. Others had been adopted, but some just didn’t seem to fit. Uriah was here to meet one of them.
The only way he would find his way back to humanity was through raising a child correctly. That was a fitting measure of his worth, his punishment for his crimes, but also a salve to the emotional wounds he’d been dealt at an early age. The old Uriah would have laughed and eaten a round from his handgun instead of doing this. However, without the whispers in his mind, the guilt and fear, he no longer felt compelled to die in the name of a man he’d never laid eyes on. His soul broken but slowly on the mend, Uriah could do nothing but stand there silently as the court officer brought in a young boy, perhaps thirteen at the most. A big child, but with an innocent expression on his face.
“Uriah Cliff, this is Jack Clemons,” the woman from his cell introduced. Jack had a defiant glare in his eyes, not unlike the one Uriah had had at the same age while at the Holding Home. “You’re going to be responsible for Jack until he’s of legal age.”
“You’re bald,” the little boy said, without preamble or hesitation, “and skinny. Do you even know how to cook? I eat a lot, so you better learn to cook.”
“Aw, fuck me…”
End
A 2014 John W. Campbell Award finalist, Jason Cordova is best known for his popular “Kin Wars Saga” military SF series with the fifth book, “Winterborn”, coming out sometime late 2019. He is a kaiju enthusiast and currently lives in Virginia. This story is set
in the Kin Wars universe. His work can be found on Amazon.
Maintenance Mode
John M. Olsen
Otto Fernley knew it was a bad day when the emergency airlocks of Victory Station slammed shut around the repair bay. Air pressure alarms hooted in the background. The subtle airflow in the bay stopped, concentrating the background smells of grease and dust. He’d never make his quota with the transport tubes blocked off behind those doors, and Sergeant Anders would mark him down for the delay. She’d dock his pay, and he’d be even farther away from retirement, all because some yahoo had poked a hole through the station hull.
Infantry soldiers were dumb as bricks and would break anything they touched. It was in their job description as the pointy end of the spear. Otto wished they’d stop touching the station when they visited. The mech pilots, on the other hand, respected the mechanized armor they used, and Otto took great pleasure in making that armor work at peak efficiency. Sure he was biased, but who wasn’t?
Otto tucked a spanner into his shirt pocket. Now he sat with two repaired mech suits standing five meters tall in the repair bay. He had no way to swap the next pair in for a refit and diagnostic check. With no machines to fix, he figured he might as well check in with home. He put on his maintenance master helmet and activated the AI. “Booboo, please call Felicity.”
A tinny voice in his ear said, “You’re on shift. Access denied.”
“Activate maintenance mode. Unlock wide band radio link on the mech suit in repair dock one, then call Felicity on a secure channel.” There were loopholes and workarounds if you knew the maintenance interfaces like Otto did.
“Maintenance mode active. Connecting your call.”
A few moments later the corner of his helmet HUD lit up with an image of his wife in their tiny apartment on the lower residential ring of the station. “Otto! Is something wrong? I heard the alarm for the pressure doors.”
“It’s nothing. They’ll get it taken care of, and we’ll be back in business in no time.” He didn’t believe it would be that fast or that easy, but there was no sense in alarming his wife over minor details.
She sighed and shook her head. “When you’re done with your shift, we need to talk. I want you to put in for a transfer to something ground-side.”
That conversation never went well, and they’d been over it almost every time a supply ship docked. The pay was better here, and he’d retire sooner, but she deserved his best efforts, because they were a team. It wasn’t always about what he wanted. Maybe it was time to get off this orbiting tin can. He had a friend who owed him a big favor. “Sure. Let’s talk about it. I know a guy.”
The wide-band combat receiver crackled and came to life in his helmet, displaying the full range of signal diagnostics as it played an incoming audio signal. “Station power is secure. Wired communication lines are down. Moving to shut down low security comm next. Team one and team two, continue to objectives.”
That wasn’t right. Nobody used the combat channels on the station. A quick peek at the master panel in his repair bay showed a growing number of red lights for systems in the central core of the station. This wasn’t a drill. He returned his attention to his hidden back-channel. “Felicity, get everyone from the residential level to the escape pods, but don’t activate them. Just be ready. Something’s wrong. If you see an officer, tell them we have boarders.”
“You said everything was fine. Escape pods and boarders don’t sound fine, Otto!”
“Sorry, love. I gotta go.”
He disconnected the call and contemplated how angry Sergeant Anders could be when annoyed. “Booboo, place a personal call over the diagnostic system to Sergeant Anders.”
An image came to life in the corner of his visor. As he’d expected, her olive-skinned face held what looked like a permanent scowl, surrounded by a low-gravity halo of jet-black hair. “Otto, if this is another one of your pranks, so help me—”
“No. Listen. I think we have boarders in the hub. They’ve taken the fusion reactor and cut the hard comm lines. They’ll be moving down soon.”
Sergeant Anders whipped around to her master console, scattering the solitaire game on her desk. Cards spun through the low gravity and floated to the floor. The same red status lights showed on her screen, visible through his HUD display. The confirmation set his teeth to grinding.
Over the combat frequency came a new message. “Objective one complete. Three casualties. Clearing the next ring.”
“Sergeant, they’re on their way. I sent Felicity to get the residential level into pods, but told her not to eject yet. Whoever’s off shift will get them organized, but they’d be sitting ducks for whoever’s out there if they launch. At least the pods will be safer than the apartments.”
Sergeant Anders pulled a sidearm from somewhere offscreen and glanced toward her door. “Good thinking. I’ll try to reach C and C to—”
The screen blurred with movement and transmitted the sound of small arms fire, then flashed white and went dark.
“Booboo, can you reestablish the connection?”
“Networking error.”
Command and Control would never hear from Sergeant Anders. At least his warning had given her a chance to go down fighting. Who was the off-duty commander? Otto scoured his memory and found the name he needed. “Booboo, open a personal call to Commander Caspin.”
“No further managed connections are available.” The radio diagnostics system infrastructure had failed.
“Booboo, monitor all alarm systems and report status on screen.”
“Please select an alarm system from the following list—”
Interrupting, Otto said, “Damage and fire.” He rubbed his chin. “Also add violations of the noise policy.” Fighting and quiet didn’t go together. With some luck, he could track what was going on through the heavily-redundant alarm and monitoring system.
A graphical overlay appeared in another corner of his visor, showing the status broadcasts of dozens of safety devices and their backups. Safety and emergency systems were the only network still working in the whole station, and only because its redundancies made it nearly impossible to take down. He avoided the command interfaces and stuck to status display. No sense giving himself away yet. The core and first ring of the station showed red flags, but nothing critical. Sporadic noise violations appeared, then vanished. These invaders knew what not to shoot, making this much worse than a random raid. With this precision, they knew what they wanted. It was probably some paramilitary group.
The invaders were using a standard ground combat frequency, and aside from Otto’s custom helmet, the mechs in the service bays were the only equipment on the whole station that used those frequencies. If they knew that, he’d be their next likely target as they came down from the central core of the rotating station. He’d be high on their list anyway, due to his position between the staff offices and the lower residential sections. If they were okay with piracy, they’d have no reason to leave survivors as witnesses. Anything he could do to slow them would buy the residents and off-shift personnel time to do something useful.
Given their speed, he had a few minutes at most to prepare for their arrival. He jumped for the mech in station number one and climbed in through the rear hatch. A deft move jacked his helmet into the control systems. The airtight hatch sealed behind him as he slipped his arms and legs into the control harness and tightened the straps.
His helmet software wasn’t the same as a regular pilot’s interface, but he had diagnostic control over everything, down to the pilot’s catheter back-pressure. He’d annoyed more than one pilot with that one, and lost a month’s pay over it. It would’ve been worth it but for Felicity’s disappointment. He’d promised to only pester pilots who deserved it, but all he’d got back from Felicity over the incident was an eye roll and a shake of the head. He’d never messed with anything critical like the motor actuator safeties that made the limbs move.
A crucifix hung in the cockpit from a cargo lo
op to his left, wired in place by a previous mech pilot. A small personal recorder hung next to it. Some pilots were funny about their little trinkets and decorations, and he’d never touched either, out of habit. The straps pinched over his pocket, so he removed the spanner and examined the two trinkets wired to the mech. After a moment’s thought, he detached the small recorder and put it in the small side pocket of his trousers, leaving the awkward spanner attached in its place beside the crucifix. Superstitions allowed for trading trinkets, or at least they should. He was, after all, temporarily and unofficially a mech pilot.
This mech had come in with severe damage, weeks ago, and the pilot hadn’t arrived with it. The previous pilot would likely never see it again, and the next pilot might toss the trinkets anyway to replace them with his own.
“Booboo, give me a full power-up test. Override live fire lockout at test level zero.”
“Power on. Override is a violation of standing station orders. Please confirm.”
“I confirm override.”
The weapon systems came online, showing a full load of five hundred rounds of 20 mm ammo feeding the machine gun in the mech’s right forearm. The ranged weapons came online with a chirp. Firing his rockets or mortars would probably kill him as well as any opponent in such enclosed areas. It would also do serious harm to the station if he hit anything important. All he needed now was to get out of the repair bays and down to the common foyer in the residential ring. Protecting Felicity and the others would be easier from there.
If it was time to make a mess and break things, he’d do it right. Maybe this was how real mech pilots felt. Everything around him became fragile when he wore the suit. Everything was expendable. Everything but Felicity and the other families.
“Booboo, override the emergency seal on the high bay interior door and open it.”
“Opening.”
At least he didn’t have to go through an authorization for everything. That would have taken forever. An icon blinked on his helmet’s HUD, showing new machines available for maintenance over its short-range wireless link. Had it been blinking this whole time?
