No one bitched about the training. Everyone knew it would keep them alive. It also helped that it didn’t pit us against one another, but forced us to help one another to become better. Friendships and relationships were quickly made, as everyone started coming together.
Yasu participated, but it was half-hearted. She knew most of the things she was being taught. All the training did was give her awkward moments when there was something partners should do together, and Yasu didn’t have a partner. Then there were the times she went to the mess—she felt an odd feeling of awkwardness as she looked at the couples who went everywhere with each other but she was alone.
All she had gotten in the days since he’d disappeared was a text message asking her whether she could run a hand-to-hand tutorial. She hadn’t replied, but a few days later, one of the younger Mechas asked her to teach her to defend herself. She had no doubt that Salchar had told the little girl to say that, but Yasu couldn’t call herself a warrior if she didn’t abide by her code.
So she started teaching hand-to-hand for half of the day. She wandered around to see whether there was anything that looked interesting that she could join in on, or something she didn’t know.
These were just distractions until she got back to her empty room. She was left to ponder. With most of the other couples, after the action aboard the ship, they’d relieved their pent-up stress of battle with each other.
When they’d finished the assault, her husband had ignored her yet again. He slighted her by sleeping on the floor, as if he were disgusted to share a bed with her.
She’d been woken up by his data pad beeping. Annoyed, she’d thrown it at him. Her face had registered shock as it hit him in the stomach and the battle suit crimped, as if trying to stop a wound bleeding. His face showed pure rage as her mask had descended.
She could see the signs of blood loss as he practically crawled into the head in so much pain. She’d been in shock as he came out, his face deathly white as he walked out of the doorway. She’d rushed to the door and watched him go into the armory. When he fell to his knees, her heart quivered. Shrift rushed over with a needle as the armory’s doors closed.
She stayed awake, waiting even as the lights turned off to signal the night cycle and then back on to recognize the day. She wanted to say sorry, that she hadn’t meant to. She didn’t want to track him down in public and announce his wound to the world. She’d asked Shrift later how he was; he looked mortified as he said Salchar was fine before he went to do something else.
She wanted to tell him how he was enough of a warrior to not warrant that shame. Just as she was thinking he might warrant it for making her wait so long, her implants and the speakers of the Mecha living quarters came to life.
“All Mecha units are to assemble in the hangar.”
She picked herself up, tiredly checking her clothes were in order as she came out of her quarters, blending in with the other battle suit-wearing humans as they were greeted by a group of Sarenmenti. One stood on a pedestal and less than twenty stood around it, waiting for them to all file in.
She looked around the room, seeing Shrift before she saw James beside him. Salchar, she reminded herself with a cold voice. Her eyes hardened as he felt her stare, turning and locking stares with her. Anger, pain, and annoyance filled his eyes before he quickly looked away, as if he hadn’t seen her.
Anger filled her at his flippant ways. Did she want to be his wife? No! Yet they were married and she vowed to make him understand his duties to her as his wife. Any thought of apologies for opening his wound were lost.
“My name is Officer Drask. I will be in charge of the two Mecha platoons on this ship,” he said as the last of the four thousand Mechas walked in.
“These will be your platoon officers in charge of you.” He signaled to the Sarenmenti around him with a wave. Then the room darkened as a holographic projector behind him fired up. A dust bowl of a world appeared in mid-air, eliciting a few gasps as most humans hadn’t seen more than a few holographic images and none this big or detailed.
“In two days’ time, we’ll be dropping onto Planet 3247. We’ve been tasked with taking the power stations on the planet. Our forces will be compromised of the battalion of humans currently in service with support from the shuttle craft and the fleet.” The planet expanded, showing power stations highlighted on the planet as well as population centers usually hundreds of kilometers away.
***
He had my full attention, my annoyance at Yasu’s cold stare forgotten as my mind worked.
Twenty thousand humans are in the Mecha Corps. We need to ramp up training with rifles and swords then. Squad, platoon, and even company drills and methods to attack the enemy on flat terrain.
He continued to talk. “You will be armed, but remember your commanders will have a kill switch on them. Any attempt on their life will mean you and your mate will die,” Drask said in a bored tone.
Great. If I died, the Blade Mistress was going to follow me into hell. Putting that chilling thought to the back of my head, I pulled out a data pad, sending messages to a few of the names on my pad. A rough group of four hundred got messages and stayed behind as the rest of the Mechas left. The Sarenmenti stared at us for a few minutes before they shook their heads, probably putting it down to a human quirk, even if a Kuruvian was beside me facing the U-shape that the others had taken.
Waiting till they left, I started talking. “We need to ramp up training. As you can see, we have minimal time to get our people ready.”
“What made you boss?” one man asked.
“He’s Salchar, you idiot,” another barked. The other man, chastised, looked at me with wide eyes.
“Well, because needs must. If any of you think you can do a better job, please take over.” I opened my arms.
Oddly, no one put their hands up.
“No one could,” Henry said. Nods came from around the formation.
“Well, you’re all smarter than me, that’s for sure,” I said glumly as they chuckled good-naturedly.
“Anyone with something that will help us in this specific task, bring it to your commanders. Also, anyone who has been involved with intelligence gathering, hacking, and computer systems or had good technical, engineering, or trade skills is to meet me in armory four.
“Henry, is the organization table satisfactory?”
“Yes, sir. Wish we had more than just our ship and that of Bok Soo and Rick.”
“We’ll just have to manage.” I shrugged as he nodded. “That table is how things will remain until later. Make sure that there are clear lines of authority if someone goes down.”
Henry nodded soberly. “Yes, Commander.”
“Also, I’m going to have a video set up in one of the maintenance hubs. All squads are to see it. It makes a few things make more sense.” I gave them a look that I hoped instilled the importance of the documentary—the one Eddie had put together—they were about to see.
“When are we going to show them the video?”
“Instead of first-aid, I’m going to have you run your squads into the maintenance hubs I showed you and watch it. Answer any questions they have and direct them to the locked forums for questions. Make sure they don’t discuss what they saw with others, as they might not have watched it already. Anything else?”
They nodded that there wasn’t.
“All right, then see to your squads.” I gave them the two-finger lazy salute. I don’t know how it had come to be, but that and head bowing were how respect was shown, instead of the rigid salutes of the military back on Earth.
I guessed it made us look as if we were playing soldiers. I didn’t care.
Vacation’s Over
“Well, that was interesting,” Shrift said as I entered the armory.
“Yes and it also means you’re going to have a lot of people using Mechas to run through weapons drills.”
He sighed in annoyance. “I wish we had those simulation units, but only spec ops get those.�
�� He groaned as he unlocked the racks of Mechas.
I pulled the universal jack from the data pad, connecting it to the internal port on my neck. I downloaded all of the video and audio I’d got in the meeting and with my own people before sending it through the chat room to Bok Soo and Rick.
The forum and chat room piggybacked the signals of the dreadnought out to the other nine ships, updating on every connected human-owned data pad. Resilient had flashed a message the first time she made contact with the data pads once I’d come back from the boarding action. A few had signed in with their name, ship, and armory. A few had ignored it, but more and more were joining the network, solving our communication issues.
Shrift had told me that the Kuruvians used similar systems to transmit information and talk to their family members on other ships; as such, all of them were in the loop.
I looked up as a small group entered the armory, headed toward me.
“Uh, excuse me, but what are we here for?” a man asked as I sat there, sending a message to Henry’s data pad.
“Well, you’re here to organize them. Good initiative.” I smiled and looked up from my data pad. The man, obviously wishing he didn’t speak now, looked at the others in the room now looking at him expectantly.
“What do you need us to do, Commander?” he asked after a few moments of collecting himself.
“What’s your name?”
“Felix.”
I pulled the data pad’s cord out of my neck. A few looked away as the cable retracted into the data pad. “Felix, I need the engineering associated people and those who know computers and intelligence gathering in two separate groups in, say, five minutes. If you don’t get this done in five minutes, I’ll have someone replace you,” I said with a happy smile as I went back to my data pad.
With a lot of shouting and moving, Felix had the group broken into two in three minutes.
“Good. Now there are four squads that will be coming through here in,” I consulted my data pad, which contained the training schedule of the ship, “four minutes. Felix, who are your leaders?”
“Min Hae will be in charge of the intelligence group. I will be in charge of the engineering group.”
Most of the people who had been taken from Earth had been from Korea, Japan, China, and the West Coast of America and Canada. It was where the training station had been when their collectors had dropped down, recruiting us.
They needed people; they didn’t care where they came from.
Thankfully, with the implanted translators, the language barrier had been negated and most things had been hammered out with what I thought to be the best of all the cultures coming together.
Any problems, like being annoyed someone that wasn’t from your area in the world was in charge of you, had disappeared. There was no time to worry about things like that when we were all just trying to survive. Prejudice would usually result with a boot to the head and someone telling you to pull your head out of your ass. It was work together, or die.
“All right, Shrift.” I wrote a message on my data pad and held it out to him. He shook his head in the negative and I continued. “First, we’re going to watch a little movie; follow me.”
I took them through to the maintenance hub. I hooked in my data pad and began to play the video documentary as I secured the hatches and doors. The people in the room looked at me with question as I took a seat and watched the movie with them. At first, a younger Eddie appeared.
“Hello there, I am the chief engineer of the Resilient, possibly known to you as the Golden Refuge. Now, hold onto your manipulators lest they fly off.” He began with the history that we had all been taught and then he continued with videos, files he’d scrounged up that depicted the battles as the Syndicate attacked the PDF. Eventually he led to the rise of the Syndicate, as well as the destruction of so much technology and information, which seemed to be the largest thing Eddie focused on. He was only Kuruvian, after all.
Then he continued on with how the PDF started to expand to fill its menial roles. How it took the barely cave-dwelling Sarenmenti and forced them into the warriors that they were. How they’d done the same with the Kuruvians, all of them told the same lie. Making all of the “recruits” all but slaves in name. He talked on how the races were matched together in an attempt for them to mate; then they would have their children taken away, only to be trained from birth to be a member of the PDF, making the later generations of recruits fanatics for the group that had given them a home and filled their minds with propaganda.
Throughout, he played reports, had videos, transmissions and such that he had picked up over the years. He looked up, right at everyone in the room. “The PDF is a lie, and even if it wasn’t, do you want to have your planet and children become slaves?”
The video disappeared as shock and anger showed on nearly every face.
“Is that real?” Min Hae asked as everyone turned to me.
“I believe so. I pulled information from the ships that we raided. From what I read, it supports what you’ve just seen. I need you and your people to go through it with a fine-tooth comb to find what’s real and not.”
He nodded as I turned to Felix.
“I need you and yours to rig every Mecha we have with auto-injector systems, and work on getting a system put in our battle suits. I put one in mine and Yasu’s to have one male and female setup. Improve the design if you desire. I was doing it on the fly.” He nodded. “I also want you to work on disabling the Mecha kill switches. I was thinking of maybe using liquid nitrogen or another freezing substance to freeze it and a mechanism to break it. That’s all up to you guys.”
“I think we can come up with something,” Felix said.
“Have you showed the others this video?” one of the intelligence guys asked.
“Not yet. Through training, I’m going to rotate people through and have them watch it. I’ve also transmitted it to the other ships for them to watch.”
“Isn’t there the risk that someone might betray us?”
“Betray us to the Sarenmenti, or the ship’s crew that we never see?” someone replied, talking of the ship’s crew with more vehemence than the Sarenmenti. The man who had asked the question blushed. No one would betray another human to the other species on the ship. To each other—maybe.
“That’s good thinking, though. We need to think about keeping all of this contained. The crew and Sarenmenti can’t know what we’re doing.”
“What about the Kuruvians?”
“All of them are on our side; they all know the truth.”
“If they knew the truth, why haven’t they acted?” Felix asked.
“They’ve been bred to be engineers and discoverers. The majority of them are not suited for combat. Only a few of their people are even willing to put on a Mecha and fight. They’re mostly the gunners of each ship.”
“What are we doing this in aid of? What’s the end goal?” Min Hae asked. A few others nodded.
“To take control of the ships in this fleet,” I said simply. I had nothing to hide. Either we succeeded or failed. If we failed, well, I doubted I would have much time to regret my actions.
“You are Salchar,” Min Hae said, as if that was reason enough for my plan to work. Looks of disbelief became shrugs of acceptance.
“That’s why I’m going to pull people from both your groups for special positions within the ship. So give me your best and I’ll let them pick from the listings of positions first.”
“What positions?”
“Well, I’m going to need navigators, engineers, pilots for shuttles, sensor crew and all the rest. If you know anyone who would suit those positions, push it to Min Hae and Felix, who can then push it to me. Though, as said before: do not tell anyone what you’re doing unless you’re allowed and they know what our real situation is.”
I saw the gleam in more than one eye. It was always good to give these people some kind of goal. It motivated them and I needed motivated and determined people
now.
“You know that lovely undisturbed sleep you’ve been having the past couple of days? Well, you can say good-bye to it as we’ll be doing sleep training from now on!” This was met with a few grumbles but even those who complained leaned forward. They wanted to learn more.
They accepted this as the engineering group took my suit with my initial plan on the kill switch as well as the auto-injector function Shrift and I hadn’t fully ironed out. Shrift went off with them, happily answering their questions about the Mecha as my and Min Hae’s group took over my couples pod and I parsed out the information I had to them all.
The armory door opened as Yasu glared at me. I quickly finished what I was doing and made my way to her.
“How are the hand-to-hand classes going?”
“They are willing to learn, even more so after the announcement that we will be taking a planet,” she said soberly, obviously not wanting to talk about that. “What are you up to, Salchar?” Her eyes studied my face.
There was no way I was going to be lying my way out of it. I tried to think of how best to explain it as a squad was being guided to the maintenance hub-turned presentation room.
“Go with them.”
She studied me for a second before doing so. There’s so many ways this can go wrong, I realized as I was placing my trust in thousands of people. It made me want to stop doing what I was doing and bring it back to three or four people I could trust completely. As soon as I had the thought, I dismissed it, remembering my unknown promise to them. They deserved an equal chance to survive; it was up to all of us.
Free Fleet Box Set 1 Page 19
