by Dan Davis
Ram laughed. “Can’t argue with that.”
“And stop talking to Doctor Monash. Next time he tries, you just punch his face in. And will you just ask R1 out for dinner before it’s too late?”
Ram sighed and shook his head.
“Well, then,” Stirling continued, “I suppose you should get back in there. You don’t have time for many more sessions. How many hours do we have before boarding? Let’s see… seventy-six hours, Jesus wept. With your meals, exercise, and rest time, you’re not getting many more tries. This time, though, try to exercise a little control, will you, sir?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You need to do better than that.”
“Just run it again.”
Ram tried his best. Over the next two days, he came close to victory twice.
Every training session ended in failure.
***
Ram lay on his bunk, which had once been Henry’s bunk, doing his best to get some rest and to prepare his mind for the coming battle.
It was not working.
R1 opened his door without knocking and stood in the doorway. “We’re starting our final maneuvers,” she said without preamble. “Would you like to come to the mess? They’re setting up a screen to relay the images from the scopes so we can watch Orb Station Alpha coming into view as we go into orbit.”
Ram tried not to move. Whenever he was completely stationary, he could almost forget he was in a stolen body. “It looks exactly same as Orb Station Zero, doesn’t it? It’s precisely the same in every way.”
“Well, yes, that’s true but as I’m sure you are well aware, collectively watching our arrival is less about that than it is about the crew coming together—”
“I’ll pass,” Ram said. He knew he could not stand to have the crew looking at him, judging him, wondering about his state of mind. “I need to rest.”
“Of course.” She swallowed. “I will stay with you.”
“Don’t let me stop you socializing, R1.”
She stepped into the room. “I have no interest in going. I only suggested it because I thought it would be good for your state of mind.”
“That’s thoughtful of you.” He turned to look at her. She was chewing her bottom lip and her brow was faintly wrinkled. “But I can’t face anyone. I just want to get on with it.”
“Well, a few more hours and you shall have your wish.” She stepped close to him, looking down. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Ram thought about asking for her to climb into his bunk so that he could hold her. It would be his last chance for any physical connection with someone before he died.
But he knew he could not do that.
She would associate the body with Henry, who had been something like a son to her and who reminded her of all the dead subjects that she had lost along the way. R1 had flinched the only time he had been tempted to make contact. She would certainly reject his request.
And even if she did not, Ram could still not shake the idea that the body he was occupying was not truly his. It could never be a true connection.
It was even less real to him than an Avar program. He was in the wrong skin. It was wrong, just wrong. He did not belong in it. It was almost as if the body itself could tell that something was wrong. While his mind rejected the body, was the body rejecting his mind?
“No, I don’t need anything else. Thank you.”
She hesitated, as if she wanted to say more. Her fingers twitched and he thought she was about to reach out to him. Instead, she lowered her head. “Rest well, Rama Seti.”
Watching her walk away, he felt an urge to call her back. He yearned for some connection, emotional if not physical. But it seemed pointless. He needed to focus on the coming battle and nothing else.
“I’m going to lose.” He did not realize he had spoken but the words burst from his mouth unbidden.
She turned in the doorway and looked back. “It is possible. But so is victory. You must hold onto that hope.”
“Just blind hope? Is that all I have?”
“There is no one anywhere in the galaxy who has a better chance than you. That will have to be enough.”
“That’s true.” He turned and propped himself up on one elbow. “R1?”
She took a step forward, an uncertain smile on her face. “Yes, Rama?”
He had the absurd urge to ask her out for dinner. The whole notion was ridiculous and above all it was pointless. There could be nothing normal for him, not ever.
“Nothing. Goodnight.”
Ram tossed and turned until he stood up and began pacing back and forth in his small room. But that just made him hyper aware of his body and he threw open his door, needing to expend some energy. On his way to the training floor he found Stirling in the control room, dozing in his wheelchair, an empty screen on his lap. Ram sighed and started to close the door on him when the sergeant spluttered.
“I’m awake!”
“It’s fine, you rest,” Ram said.
“I was awake, you big bastard,” Stirling muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Are we there yet?”
“Everyone is gathering in the mess to watch the final maneuvers as we go into orbit.”
Stirling rolled his eyes. “Have they not got anything better to do? Shouldn’t they be arming the missiles and standing by the guns?”
Ram found himself grinning. “There’s no hex vessels in sight, yet. They will be coming from the wormhole in the next few hours. We don’t expect any trouble and I’m sure everyone on watch is ready for anything.”
Stirling frowned. “So weird.”
Ram stared. “What is?”
“Your face.”
“Thanks, sergeant. Just what I wanted to hear.”
“No, I mean. Obviously your face is weird. Henry was a weird looking fella. It’s just weird seeing your expressions on Henry’s face. And it’s Henry’s voice but your words, your cadence, your emotions.” He shook his head. “The things you’ve done, sir. I don’t know how you do it.”
Ram suddenly found he had a lump in his throat. He bit back an absurd flood of emotion and cursed the strange mix of hormones causing him to feel so unstable.
“I’m not doing great with it, to tell the truth. I’m trying to accept it, trying to not be resentful of the captain and of UNOP. But… I’m struggling to let it go.”
“I know what you mean well enough.” Stirling spread his hands, indicating his current condition. “But then, you know, what’s the point of carrying it around? Why have the weight of resentment? UNOP doesn’t give a shit how I feel about it. Our senior officers don’t. Who gives a shit?”
Ram nodded, trying to remember something he had heard recently. Then it struck him. “Back on Earth, I spoke to a priest.”
Stirling smiled. “I remember.”
“He said something like, forgiveness isn’t about whether they are worthy to receive your forgiveness but whether you are strong enough to grant it. He said if you truly forgive someone it frees you from the weight of holding it. Whether they or anyone else knows about your forgiveness isn’t even important. Because forgiveness is about you, not the one who wronged you.”
“Yeah, sounds right enough. Sounds like a clever bastard.”
“He’s probably dead now.”
“Aye, maybe. So will we be, soon enough. So let’s go meet our fate with our chins up, sir.”
He found a lump in his throat again. Not knowing what else to say, Ram stuck out his hand.
Stirling looked up, his expression grave. It was clear they both understood that this might well be goodbye. They had fought together, they had trained Henry together, they had suffered their physical and mental decline together. But now Ram would go on where Stirling could not follow.
Stirling nodded and Ram nodded back.
They shook hands.
Ram took a deep breath. It was time to put it all behind him.
It was time to get to work.
26.
The UNOPS Hereward brought its orbit down around Orb Station Alpha with only 28 hours before the Orb’s deadline.
Unlike the last time Ram had been through the experience, at Orb Station Zero, they did not have to wait for the enemy ship to arrive via the Orb-generated wormhole. Instead, the Hex ship was already waiting.
Both the hex and the humans were waiting for the same thing. And eventually, they heard it.
COME
The Orb beamed its standard boarding instruction at the Hereward.
The massive, shining white shuttle sat above the closed bay doors, filling the interior space of the shuttle bay with just meters to spare. The top of the shuttle was attached to the shuttle bay ceiling by a huge docking clamp.
The shuttle was big enough to hold thirty people or more in the passenger compartment and the hold below could handle all their gear with room enough to spare for a ground vehicle or two. The body was fat and the wings little more than stubby appendages sticking out up high but the lines over the cockpit were smooth and sleek. High over the cargo hatch at the rear, the massive engines looked powerful enough to blast the monstrous thing halfway to the sun. Smaller engines were tucked under the wings, tight against the fat hull, for powered atmospheric flight.
The huge landing gear rested on the bay doors, which were plastered with yellow and black warning chevrons and stenciled text suggesting in the strongest possible terms that one should avoid standing on the doors whenever they slide open.
They were ready and waiting for this command, sitting in the shuttle in their flight suits.
“Boarding Team shuttle ready to depart,” the pilot said on the radio. “Permission to depart.”
“This is the captain speaking.” Kat’s voice was all business, of course, but Ram could detect the deep emotion behind it. Everything was at stake. “Know that all of humanity is with you. We have faith that you will succeed. Good luck everyone and Godspeed.” The quality of her voice changed and she spoke to Ram on a private channel. “Ram, I just want to say. I’m sorry about everything. But I know you’ll win. I know it. Good luck.”
Even though the sound of her voice irked him, Ram realized he no longer felt resentment for what she had done to him and to Henry. Stirling had been right, as had that priest. Soon he would be dead and it seemed pointless to hold a grudge down into death. It helped him to breathe easier.
“Thanks, Kat. You did what you had to do. Now it’s up to me to make it count.”
“Kill the bastard, Rama Seti.”
“I will.”
“Alright, come on,” Lieutenant Blackman snapped. “We must get underway.”
The engines started and the shuttle hummed and then shook while the air was cycled out of the bay.
Strapped into the huge central reentry chair and encased in his flight suit and helmet, Ram turned as best he could to look at the people seated around him in the passenger section.
Scientists and engineers and a few crewmen. Lieutenant Blackman was the senior officer and he was in control, though it was clear he was wound incredibly tight. But then, they all were.
R1 smiled across the passenger compartment and gave him a quick thumbs up. Doctor Monash was there beside her in case his expertise was required but he had promised to keep quiet until then.
Stirling was dying in the Med Bay and Fury refused to take any part in it. Both of them broken, one in body and one in mind, and so he had no Marines backing him up.
Ram closed his eyes and attempted to cultivate a sense of calm. He had been through similar situations many times and this exact situation once before.
The shuttle shook and the engines roared briefly and then died away into a steady hum interspersed with pops from the thrusters.
“Clear of the bay,” the pilot said. “Stabilizing spin. Heading for Orb Station.”
Images of the vast Orb were patched into the suit helmets and the passengers cooed and gasped at the shining black mirror surface looming over them.
“Ninety seconds until Orb entry,” the pilot said as the thrusters popped and hissed. When they coasted above the hundred-meter square opening, the pilot rotated the shuttle, thrust inside and maneuvered them down to the floor. The feet banged and bounced slightly as the shuttle settled.
“Solid landing confirmed. We are docked with Orb Station.”
The hangar bay was one hundred meters on all sides with a fifty-meter opening on the wall opposite the outer door. The inside of the Orb hangar was a familiar but featureless black cube, illuminated with bright blue-white light and the walls, ceiling and floor emitted their own soft glow.
All of them watched on their screens as the outer hull doors slid shut behind with an inhuman smoothness and air howled around the outer hull of the shuttle. The breathable gas mixture produced by the Orb was heated and the action of the hot air on the cold outer hull caused the passenger compartment to ring with the ping-ping-ping of the panels expanding.
“Outer door closed,” the pilot said. “Atmosphere reading nominal. Gravity nominal. Radiation within safety parameters and falling. Filters picking up no contaminants or life signs. We are green across the board and ready to disembark.”
They opened the rear doors, extended the ramp and began unloading the gear. Ram released himself and inched his way out of the shuttle and into the Orb hanger.
Ram disengaged his suit systems and removed his helm.
“Hey, you can’t do that yet.”
“It’s fine,” Ram said, without pausing. “Obviously it’s fine, come on.”
R1 did the same thing and no one stopped her.
“You do not appear nervous,” R1 said. “Externally.”
He looked down at her, shrugging. “I’ve done this already. And I’ve played this out on Avar. This part is nothing.”
She did not reply and though her expression remained blank, he knew her well enough by now to know she did not believe him. And she was right. He was nervous. Anyone who measured his heart and respiration rates and his hormone levels would have seen how nervous he was. But nerves were good, within reason. For peak performance he needed elevated levels of cortisol and epinephrine.
One of the techs paused in his work and stepped closer, a smile on his face as he looked up. “Yeah, must be like déjà vu, right? Everything is exactly the same on this Orb, everything, down to the levels of light and the atmosphere composition. Well, in this section, obviously you’ll have a totally different environment inside the arena itself and the enemy champion is a different—”
“Stop talking,” R1 said to him, placing herself in between him and Ram. “And move away.”
His face turned pale. “Right, sorry, sorry.”
“I just need to keep my grip on reality for a few more hours,” Ram said. “Then it won’t matter anymore. Even if I win.”
“You will win.”
Ram didn’t reply for a moment. “It’s not exactly the same, you know. It does feel different because I’m different. The air feels way too dry. I’m looking down from a different height. Everyone is moving slower. The sounds have a different quality, the lights are brighter. This body is so completely different to the one I was in before. It’s not the same at all.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Not now, Doctor. I need to focus on the fight.”
“Of course.”
“It makes me feel like I’m an intruder in this body and I can’t wait to get out of it.”
“But you know that—”
“I know, I know. Victory is the only thing that’s important.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I don’t believe victory is the only important thing.”
“What else is there?”
She opened her mouth to reply but was interrupted.
“Alright, we’re all set up. In your places please everybody. Let’s head inside. Nice and easy, just like we practiced.”
The boarding team moved through the space to the fifty-meter open door in the wall in front of the s
huttle’s nose. The corridor was a straight line through the center of the Orb toward the arena, a kilometer-long cuboid leading to the heart of the station.
They went in silence, in the pre-arranged order. Everyone knew where their place was and where they were going.
Ram was in the center of them all. There was nothing that would harm him before he got into the Arena but still no one wanted to take any chances. He felt like royalty.
Forgetting all that, Ram allowed himself to be carried along by the mass of bodies and the trundling trolleys while he focused on the upcoming fight. Running through scenarios over and over.
He tried to block out the smooth, black walls far away on either side and forced himself to forget where he was and the implications for victory or defeat. It was too much.
And yet his mind ran immediately into the astonishing fact of the Orbs’ existence, and then he found himself wondering about the Orb Builders and if what the traitor had said about them was true. Were the Hex right about them?
He certainly was awed. The traitor was right about that. Being on the station made him feel it more than he ever had before.
The power of the beings that made something so vast, so powerful, so mysterious. Was there a line a species could cross where one could consider them worthy of worship? The Hex seemed to think so and it was hard to argue with that.
Once, Ram had longed for humanity to join the network of galactic civilizations that would collectively create an information, trading, and political network stretching across the stars. But now all he hoped for was to keep Earth safe from harm. After having witnessed so much destruction and death and suffering wrought by the invaders, he now knew that nothing was more important than protecting your homeworld.
The Wheelhunters and the Hex had been at war for centuries. It seemed that the same fate awaited humanity. Endless existential warfare down the generations. What would that do to his people?
