The Galactic Arena Prequels (Books 1 & 2): Inhuman Contact & Onca's Duty

by Dan Davis

  “I knew they would never stop. If I beat them to a pulp, they would come back at me over and over until they got me. I didn’t want to do it. Maybe I did, I was angry all the time. But I killed them. One by one, leaping from the shadows and cutting their throats or stabbing them in the chest and back. Carlos went crazy, tearing the place up. They went about in one big group by that point, so I had to track them back to where they slept and I took them when they went for a piss or went off with a girl.

  “Someone sold me out. Never found out who. But Carlos cornered me in the back of a phone shop, little shack, really, open at the front, you know? And the crowd outside saw when I jumped from up inside the roof, in the shadows of the corner by the rusting rafters, with the cockroaches and spider carcasses. I jumped out, they say I was snarling. All I remember clearly is knowing that everything rested on that moment, on that single attack. On the tip of that knife finding its way into Carlos’ neck.”

  Onca grabbed the water bottle they had left for him and drank.

  “So,” Megan said. “That’s when you had to run away from home?”

  “That was a bit later. After Carlos, people left me alone. And I left them alone. Every now and then, someone would come fight me but everyone who lived nearby was afraid of me. You can’t survive for long in that environment without people to watch your back and stand up for you. In the end, I made enemies of more serious people than lightweight amateur gangsters like Carlos and his goons. Men. Men who would burn down a neighborhood to kill just one kid. And that was when I joined the army. No one else to run to.”

  Megan crossed her arms. “I see.”

  He closed his eyes, the effort of recounting his past and the opiates overcoming him.

  “Do you? Maybe you do. What I’m trying to say is I have been solitary my entire life. Even in the army. In patrols, I was a forward scout. A sniper without a spotter. Being a sergeant was the hardest rank I had because of how close I had to be to the men in my unit, whether my squad or the whole platoon. The other sergeants in the company. When I was commissioned as an officer, it was easier. Everyone expected me to be isolated by that point.”

  “Your men loved you,” Megan said. “The ones that didn’t hate you, that is. I’ve seen your entire history. They knew you.”

  “They loved my competence. They loved my success. And that’s fine.”

  “What about when you were in the Joint South American Rapid Response Force? You made friends there, men that even followed you to Sabre Rubro. Your Mexican friend, Hernandez.”

  And I repaid his friendship with infidelity. His daughter, his wife’s daughter, is mine. She will be eight years old now. No, I was no friend to him. Every time I try friendship, I ruin it.

  But he said none of that.

  “He’s dead.”

  She reached out and took his hand. “You have been a good friend to me.”

  “Exactly,” he pulled his hand back. “And this is where it got me. I know now. It is too late for me to change my ways. My life experience has burned pathways into my brain that are deep and wide. It is too late to reroute them. I need to go back to what I know. Regain my place as the priority candidate. I need to do it immediately, before the monthly reporting gets done.”

  Megan hesitated. “Why the urgency?”

  Onca started to tell her. About his government’s threats to his daughter’s wellbeing.

  He stopped.

  “It’s who I am.”

  ***

  Years passed. The Nemesis ploughed on, beyond the orbit of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, spinning and spinning around its axis, twice every minute. The inside of that vessel was all Onca knew. From leaving Earth to arrival at the Orb was almost 15 years. A chain of 178 months, over 5,000 days inside a vast machine that was reactor, engines, fuel, cargo and the similar, limited volume of living and working space as a small hotel.

  His life on Earth became a distant memory and only the cycle of training, eating and sleeping was real. Waking early, pounding the treadmill with weights on his back, helping to push him harder toward the ship’s outer hull under foot. Fueling himself with carbohydrates at breakfast, one to two thousand calories. Morning training session with knives, firearms or unarmed. Training both unarmored and armored, using powered servomotor armor as well as rigid and flexible body armor combinations. Midday meal of carbohydrates and high protein, two thousand calories. Afternoon physical training, weight training and cardio. Training for strength or muscle mass or endurance. Aerobic and anaerobic. Low intensity, high intensity, interval training. Evening meal high protein with fresh salad greens from the ship’s gardens. Regular medical evaluations, injections, treatments. Evening strategic training session and VR combat. Early to sleep. And the cycle began again.

  Every day the same and yet every day different. Endless variables to consider and trial, from training regime to strategies, reviewing and refining techniques for months and years only to throw them all out again when a better approach was discovered, trialed and tested and employed. Onca sustained injuries, to his hands and his knees. A back injury proved beyond the ability of the ship’s elite medical team for months before an experimental treatment finally proved effective. The intensity of the training, the high radiation environment of space and his body’s ageing threatened to defeat him before the ship arrived at the Orb.

  Around him, the candidates and crew lived entire lives. Romances kindled, flamed and died away around him like roman candles until everyone had history with everyone else. Years of jealousies and petty rivalries creating an entangled web that Onca found utterly impenetrable.

  Until finally, they were there.

  “Hard to believe that thing is four thousand meters in diameter,” General Richter said, staring at the image on the screen. “Four kilometers. It’s just a blacker circle on a black background.”

  Onca grunted. “Because there’s nothing to show scale.”

  “There’s the Wheelhunter ship,” she said, nodding at the screen as she brought the new images up. It replayed the flash and the time-lapse of the vast alien vessel maneuvering itself into orbit. It was a ship twice as large as the Nemesis but still dwarfed by the impossible vastness of the Orb. Both ships orbited the alien structure at the same distance but on opposite sides so they were visible to each other only by the tiny probes both sent out into orbits of all kinds. The UNOP commanders hesitated to make any move to intercept the enemy’s probes or make any sudden moves that might be taken as an act of aggression by either the Wheelhunter ship or the Orb itself.

  The Nemesis was in a constant state of readiness, with everyone on edge and half-expecting a call to battle stations at any moment.

  Onca did his utmost to tune it all out. He removed himself emotionally from those tensions, pulled back inside and disengaged from their fear and their excitement.

  It took an iron will. Even the most Zen-like of his fellow candidates seemed infected by the stress.

  Onca could not allow himself to feel anything that might negatively impact his carefully honed peak in performance. Still, every time in the previous two days he saw an image of the Wheelhunter vessel, he had one thought.

  My opponent is on that ship.

  And with that thought, one other came unbidden and inevitable.

  One of us will die.

  “I wonder if humans will ever construct something of this size,” General Richter said, filling the silence as she always did. “If we will live out here on the edge of the system.”

  “Why bother?” Onca said. “There’s nothing out here.”

  “You really don’t contemplate this stuff at all, do you?” He heard the wry smile in her voice. “We could take apart objects in the Kuiper Belt, build a series of huge space stations from the mass and have a vast human population thriving out here, ringing our system. They could even launch off from here out into interstellar space. Maybe move them out, push the habitats away from the Sun and string stations between here and the closest star systems so we have
stepping stones, way stations to the next stars. Or they could be moved into the inner solar system and add enormous amounts of living space closer in.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work,” Onca said. “And not something I need to be concerned with.”

  She nodded, waved the screen off and turned away. “I’m getting romantic in my old age, ignore my rambling. Carry on, Sergeant.”

  The weapon’s specialist nodded to the General then handed over the MPR-18 Combat Rifle to Onca.

  “It’s finally there, sir,” the Sergeant said. “The recoil adjustment is seamless. No matter the sequence in the magazine, you’ll get no variation, none at all. Try it.”

  Onca removed the magazine and checked the color-coded rounds where they showed through the frame.

  As no one knew how the alien creature’s skin would stand up to bullets, they were hedging their bets with the firearms and his primary weapon would have a mixed loadout. That mix would include hollow point, saboted tungsten penetrators for armor piercing, fragmentary explosive, highly corrosive superacid, and blade-like flechette rounds. For years, they had gone back and forth on whether to favor killing power over accuracy. An issue was that the most effective mass for each form of projectile was different, which meant differing mass of propellant and therefore different levels of recoil. The energy needed to drive a heavy metal round at the highest possible velocity into the target was vastly greater than required for the hollow points to be effective. Alternating the round types decreased the overall accuracy of the weapon but committing to just one kind of cartridge risked choosing something the alien was resistant to.

  The intelligent recoil adjustment system that the engineers had devised was able to read each round and adjust the kickback felt by the user so that it was precisely the same at every shot, whether fired in bursts or on full automatic.

  So they said.

  The ship’s firing range usually hosted weapons firing blanks combined with integrated accuracy testing but they also had a live fire box. A long, steel plated cuboid filled with packed shreds of rubber and God only knew what else that absorbed the rounds before they could ever threaten a hull breach. The explosive and acid cartridges had inert substances in the place of active ones, matching their mass and physical properties exactly.

  Onca was in full armor so he flicked on his ear protection system and fired the whole magazine into the box. The weapon purred in his hands, tearing through the entire mag as smoothly as silk.

  He changed mags three times.

  “It’s perfect,” Onca said.

  The sergeant positively glowed. “We’ve worked very hard to make it so.”

  “What’s the mechanical failure rate now?”

  The sergeant’s grin fell from his face. “The cartridges will not fail. Our quality assessment in the manufacturing—”

  “I didn’t ask about the cartridges. It’s the feeding I’m worried about. It’s the cycling.”

  “There is one jam for every three hundred rounds fired.”

  Onca nodded and placed the MPR-18 back on the table. “Nowhere near good enough. I’ll stick with the all-FMJ mag, unless you can improve that rate by at least one-hundred percent. At least.”

  General Richter stirred herself from her revere. “But there’s no time to make improvements,” she said. “You’re fighting tomorrow.”

  “Alright,” Onca said. “I’ll take one magazine of each round type other than the FMJ, and I will take two of those. Can’t go wrong with slugs.”

  No one bothered to correct him or point out that it was only an assumption. They didn’t need to.

  “Want to examine the sidearm, sir? You’re still going with my WL-12?”

  “Of course.”

  General Richter cleared her throat. He knew what was coming and responded before she could say it.

  “Yes, I said what I meant. I want the stopping power of the twelve millimeter, even if it means taking forty percent fewer rounds in each magazine. If I’m using the weapon at all then it’s because the primary was ineffective or it malfunctioned. I’ll need the power, not the rate of fire.”

  “But if the Orb doesn’t let you through with the MPR-18, for some reason, then your sidearm will need to fulfill the tactical role of the primary weapon so why not—”

  “Megan.”

  That stopped her in her tracks.

  “Onca?” she said, a wry smile on her face. How many times had he seen her look at him like that over the years? It made his heart ache. But he stamped those feelings down, squashed them underfoot and moved on.

  “It’s too late to have this discussion. I know my loadout. I know my combat knife, I know my armor. Everything has been settled for months, bar the MPR recoil system and, I’m sorry Sergeant, but this innovation has come too late. No, it’s decided. It’s decided. My equipment is ready. I’m ready. I want all my gear checked and triple checked, from now until the combat begins and with backups for every component ready to hand.”

  “The whole ship is focused on exactly that,” Richter said.

  “I know. Good. What about the shuttle?”

  “If there were any problems, we would know about it. Let the crew do their job. They’ll get us down to the Orb in time, Onca.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in my quarters until it’s time to board.” He nodded to the firing range crew, the Sergeant and the other armorers and let himself out into the corridor, pulling the door shut.

  Before he had taken four steps, she threw open the heavy door and marched after him.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked, falling into step beside him. “Was that it?”

  He glanced down at her. “I wanted you to meet me in my quarters but I didn’t want to invite you in front of the others.”

  “The others? What do you care what anyone thinks?”

  “I don’t but you have to command them all the way back to Earth. Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  She grabbed his shoulder and yanked him to a stop, pulling him round to face her in the corridor. “You’re an idiot, do you know that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t you think that by now everyone on this fucking ship knows everything about us? Do you think I care what they think? Why the fuck are you smiling?”

  “No reason, General.”

  “Stop being a dick. Listen, I’ve had the mess prepare something special. The officer’s chef has been researching it for months, practicing in secret. You’ll love it.”

  The elaborate meal was already there when they arrived in Megan’s quarters. The tiny dining table had been transformed into what appeared to be the settings for a romantic restaurant, complete with tiny vase of plastic flowers and an electronic light in the shape of a candle.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Megan said as they walked in. “I told them not to go overboard with this shit. I’m sorry, I’ll clean it away.”

  “Last meal for the condemned man?” Onca asked, half-heartedly aiming for levity but failing miserably. He knew he should avoid humor. He was no good at it. “Not that I’m ungrateful.”

  Her eyes hardened. “It’s more like one last carbo-load for the morning. And yes, you are being ungrateful. Just be quiet and eat your dinner.”

  Onca sat down to it and tucked in.

  The chef had made a selection of pastels, deep fried savory pastries that could be heaven on Earth from the right street vendor but replicating the fresh, crispy pies on a spaceship had proven a step too far for humanity. They had been served as a first course, which was odd. The main meal was a feijoada, a bean stew, with a vast mound of rice.

  “And coxinha,” Onca said, breaking apart his deep fried, shredded chicken meat parcel, molded into a teardrop shape supposed to replicate a chicken leg. He grimaced as he ate. “Interesting texture. And flavor.”

  Megan smiled. “They had to use textured soy protein, obviously. But it’s indistinguishable, isn’t it.”

  “Mmm,” Onca said. Every di
sh was the worst version he’d ever had. He shoveled it all down his neck and told her he loved it. And it was true that he loved what she had done for him, even if the chef deserved to be court-martialed for crimes against Brazilian culture.

  What he wanted to ask Megan was whether she was trying to get him to think of Brazil so that he would fight harder in the alien’s arena the next day. But he did not want to fight with her. He wanted their meal together to be a civil one. It was their first in a long time, years perhaps, and it might be their last ever.

  “Do you want to talk about tomorrow?” she asked him after they finished eating.

  No. I need to stay focused. I shouldn’t even have come here. You are a distraction, a dangerous one.

  “What’s left to say about it?” As he spoke, he realized he sounded angry or contemptuous so he reached out a hand and placed it over hers where she gripped the stem of her wine glass. “I’m not trying to be unkind.”

  She had that smile on again. “I know. Talked it to death. I just feel like we’ve been here supporting you all this time and then you’ll be going in there by yourself. I wish I could be in there with you, that’s all.”

  “You will be.” He squeezed her hand a final time and let it go.

  ***

  Just as in the previous human mission to the Orb, thirty years before, the alien space station beamed instructions at their ship right on time.

  COME, it said.