Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  Gorman, the pacifist, had been quietly telling a nice little story that Mortas had already forgotten, but it didn’t seem to matter. The dead man’s voice had been calm and comforting, just as Mortas remembered it, and he and Trent and Cranther had been enjoying whatever the chartist had been saying.

  Lying there in the dark, Mortas pulled the blanket up tighter around his neck, his fingers digging into the fabric. He suspected he was being watched, but the memory of the dream was so vivid that he could almost feel the presence of the other three and couldn’t keep from whispering the words aloud.

  “I miss you.”

  Mortas awoke with the symptoms that indicated he’d been drugged again, and slowly sat up. His latest cell was round, with the bunk in the center. Squinting, he decided that his new quarters resembled the inside of a large, cream-­colored drum. It was well lit and warm, and Mortas wondered if he was still dreaming.

  The room was large enough that ten paces wouldn’t take him across it, and the bed was its only furniture. He now saw that it was indeed a bed, with white sheets and a gold-­colored set of real covers, as opposed to the hard bunk and thin blankets of his previous accommodations.

  The drum’s curved walls were interrupted at regular intervals by unadorned columns that jutted out slightly. Those were gray, and he counted ten of them. The room’s door was also white, but all of a piece with no hatches for food trays or guards’ orders. His eyes coming into better focus, Mortas also detected a compression handle in one segment of the wall that he supposed led to a bathroom.

  Try as he might, it was impossible to view his new surroundings without believing he’d somehow passed an important milestone.

  Standing, Mortas noted that he now wore a sturdy set of green pajamas instead of the flimsy black ones that had been his uniform for so long. His feet were bare, but when he looked for the useless paper slippers he found something that made him catch his breath.

  A new pair of rubber-­soled exercise shoes had been placed at the foot of the bed, along with a set of athletic socks. Mortas grabbed one of the sneakers as if fearing it would somehow disappear, turning it over and over. Then, heedless of who might be observing him, he let his unadulterated joy spread across his face while pulling on the socks and the footwear. Mortas walked a few paces, enjoying the stretch and the bounce under his feet before striding quickly all the way around the cell.

  The freedom to move in that fashion was simply delicious, and after so close a confinement it felt as if he were flying.

  The athlete in him forced Mortas to warm up and even stretch, but he could hardly contain his excitement before he began to jog, then to run, actually running, around the perimeter of the room. It was intoxicating, the space and the light and the ability to enjoy it. He soon grew winded but didn’t stop, turning easily so that he was moving backward, bouncing gently and throwing light punches at the air. Mortas was still smiling when he came to a halt, panting, staring down at the miraculous shoes. Remembering how hard it had been, trying to shin up the corner of the last cell using nothing but bare feet. That made him smile even more, and he spoke aloud.

  “Well what do you know? All I had to do was start climbing the walls.”

  The ball was heavier than Mortas remembered, but he’d only played this particular game briefly, at Officer Basic. Stratactics Ball was a military invention, a constantly morphing competition that forced its players to develop game-­winning strategies along with player-­level tactics. That was how it had gotten its name, and he’d grown to enjoy it a lot.

  Also referred to as Sim Ball, the game was a product of the decades-­long war with an alien race that resembled humanity in so many ways that they’d been nicknamed the Sims. Battling for the habitable planets of distant solar systems, both sides had been forced to adjust their frames of reference to fit a war that spanned enormous regions of space, key locations that were constantly in motion, and enemy fleets that could appear almost out of nowhere.

  Stratactics Ball was played on an enclosed rectangular court of no set size. That was intentional, as the game’s limitless variations were designed to keep its players in a mode of uncertainty. The court where Mortas stood was probably forty yards long and twenty yards wide, with a ceiling ten yards over his head. He remembered that the side walls on the courts at Officer Basic had been transparent, with rows of seats rising away beyond the barriers. The walls on this one were all painted a dull gray that bore the smudges of past matches, and there was no audience that he could detect.

  Three round holes set side by side in the walls at either end of the court served as goals, each of them only marginally larger than the ball and too high for any normal human to reach unaided. Even as Mortas watched, the panels on one set of goals rearranged themselves. The two outside apertures had been open while the middle hole was closed, but now the two openings to his right were available while the one on his left was blocked. The goals would open and shut at unspecified intervals and in no set order throughout a game.

  Team size varied, but when there were more than twenty players a standard restriction kept half of them from crossing midcourt. Throwing the ball to a teammate was the only way to advance it, but the pass could include bounces off the walls, ceiling, and floor. Intercepting the ball or knocking down an enemy pass immediately switched the defenders over to offense, and vice versa. To keep the injuries to a minimum, a player was required to halt as soon as he or she had the ball.

  That is, until the ball passed a dashed line just a few yards short of the goals. This was known as the Close Contact Space, and it was the only part of the Stratactics arena where it was permissible to run with the ball or to tackle an opposing player. Some imaginative scoring techniques had developed over the years, including scrum-­like human pyramids over which the ballcarrier would charge in order to reach the requisite height to jam the sphere through an available opening.

  Preventing a goal was quite difficult because the holes were located behind defensive players who could be expected to pay more attention to the bodies rushing toward them than to the shifting apertures at their backs. The attackers could see which goals were open, and so the defenders were forced to come up with their own schemes for learning what was going on behind them.

  Regardless of their plans, both the defenders and the attackers could see successful strategies undone in an instant if the apertures rearranged themselves at the wrong moment. There was no time for celebration after a score, as the ball was literally shot back into play almost at once—­and from any one of the six goals. The projectile usually sailed the length of the court, rebounding wildly and causing a mad scramble.

  Command touted Stratactics Ball as one of the reasons the badly outnumbered humans had stemmed the advance of the relentless Sims. They cited the game’s complexity, unpredictability, and ferocity as being analogous to war in space. It was not lost on any of its players, officer or enlisted, that regardless of the strategy or tactics employed, gaining a victory usually hinged on a violent confrontation at close quarters with someone’s back to the wall.

  Remembering the spirited games in Officer Basic, Mortas walked a little closer to the two open goals and stopped. Even now, standing alone on a playing court as a prisoner of the armed force in which he served, he still obeyed the rules of the game. Faking a two-­handed bounce pass, he shifted the ball into his right hand and then heaved it sideways over his head. He’d grown skilled at hitting the target this way, and had been recruited to play on different teams because of that talent.

  The ball sailed through the stale air, seemingly on course, but its curved flight took it just far enough out of alignment that it whacked into the painted ring around the goal with a loud slap. It bounced twice before coming to a stop, and he had to walk over to retrieve it, feeling slightly disappointed that his skills could have eroded so quickly.

  Quickly? Although his ordeal on the barren planet had lasted several
days and nights, Mortas had no idea how long he’d been in captivity. He looked around the empty court, still a little surprised to have been granted an unsupervised exercise period, and wondered who might be watching. The guard detail that had been with him for so long had disappeared in the last move, the one that had landed him in the round room with the real bed.

  His new accommodations even had a bathroom with a shower, and Mortas had spent a long time looking in the mirror. The face that had stared back at him was thinner than he remembered, with almost a wolflike cast to it, and he’d even detected the beginnings of a long, thin wrinkle across the skin of his young forehead. His dark hair had been cropped close during one of his transfers, and he’d remembered the bite of the burning embers that had landed on his scalp in the chaotic run across the enemy airstrip. Fortunately they’d left no scars.

  “Still me,” he’d remarked to the air before starting to wash his face.

  Once he’d cleaned up, Mortas had been given a fresh T-­shirt and athletic shorts to go with his new sneakers. Then a mildly friendly attendant had escorted him to a small mess hall where he’d eaten alone, after which he’d been offered the chance to exercise.

  Which had brought him to the Sim Ball court. Mortas had been seen by several ­people in the corridors, and he was still trying to decide if that was good or bad. He already knew that large numbers of Force personnel had been searching for him at one point—­befitting the missing son of Olech Mortas—­and so being seen by random ­people was encouraging. That is, unless he was so far from Earth and the settled planets that it didn’t matter who recognized him.

  The air in the large room had changed while he stood there thinking, and he caught a whiff of something harsh in his nostrils. Mortas shut his eyes and sniffed hard, once, then a second time with his head turned to the side. A heavy, undeniable odor, filled with dire connotations. Having been through numerous shipboard emergency drills, he knew that fire was one of the greatest hazards of space travel. The scent contained more than a hint of smoke.

  Mortas looked around quickly, trying to locate the source, his nose tipped upward and sniffing in loud, short inhalations. His eyes stopped abruptly when they detected the slightest shimmering movement from the two open goals facing him. He took a step forward, now identifying wispy gray tendrils wafting from the tops of both holes.

  The ball fell out of his hands and he was running, straight across the court toward the low door that mated perfectly with one of the court’s sidewalls. He was still two strides away when the noise came, making him jump because it was so loud, a mechanical slap that kept on coming. The alarm blasted at him from above, but he was still able to hear the emergency bolts shooting home on the only way out just as he reached the hatch.

  He slammed into it anyway, hoping to spring it, and bounced off painfully. A robot voice boomed at him now, rebounding off the insulated walls, telling him that there was a fire and that all personnel were to secure all hatches and prepare to battle the blaze wherever they were. He found himself standing at the door, beating on the material with both palms, shouting for help even as the air grew thick with the aroma of smoke.

  Mortas turned away from the unyielding exit to see that the open goals in the far wall were belching now, a cascading gray cloud that spewed forth and billowed toward the high ceiling. Tumbling, churning, thick with chemicals that were already poisoning the air.

  Without thinking, he was prone on the hard floor and trying to remember what to do. Recalling a voice telling him to hold a damp rag over his mouth and nostrils, he dragged his T-­shirt up over his nose. Not damp, but better than nothing. The alarm was still honking, so loud now that he couldn’t make out the words that accompanied it. His vision darted across the flat expanse, knowing that there was no other exit.

  His eyes began to smart, but Mortas hardly noticed because the floor beneath him was growing noticeably warmer. A grinding, machinelike rattling joined the booming siren, forcing him to bring his hands up over his ears. Crawling on his elbows, he dragged himself up against the wall near the door for no reason other than the desire to be close by if it miraculously opened.

  Looking up through watering eyes, a stench far fouler than ordinary smoke penetrating the shirt, he saw that a dark, roiling cloud had obscured the ceiling. A glance at the goals showed that all three were open, vomiting the noisome gas that was rapidly polluting an already-­dwindling amount of oxygen. He saw the forgotten ball moving on its own, its material swelling with the heat and rolling, lopsided and silly, out of his sight.

  The floor was actually hot now, and he sensed more than heard a long string of rippling burps that could only be the boiling of whatever was beneath him. His fingers pressed into his running, smarting eyes, and then a loud thud in the compartments below the court got him moving.

  Up now, one hand clapping the fabric over his nose while the other tried to shield his eyes, bent over because the smoke had come down so low. Kicking madly at the door, feeling no give at all, several steps back, then running forward to jump with both soles only to rebound and land painfully on his kidneys. Back on his feet, coughing, eyes turned to slits, crouching, then running toward the exit again, knowing it wouldn’t open, that the stinging in his feet wasn’t the pain from striking the door but the heat of the fire on which he stood, the gas swirling around him, running shoulder first into the hatch and dropping like a stone.

  The smoke was almost to the floor, the heat was everywhere, and Mortas realized with true terror that he had to abandon the room’s only exit. Fearing he’d never be able to find it again in the cloud, eyes forcing themselves shut, the shirt back up over his nose, Mortas crawled blindly across the surface in the vain hope of finding a patch where the fire wasn’t going to roast him.

  Mortas was lying on a lukewarm patch of floor, curled in a ball with his entire head inside the sweat-­soaked shirt, when a pair of hands roughly took hold of him. They pulled him to his feet, the shirt coming down to reveal that the room was being blown clear of the evil cloud and that the door stood wide open behind a tall figure holding him at arm’s length. His eyes were refusing to open fully, and his lungs were fighting to expel whatever was roughening them, but Mortas recognized the coal-­gray tunic of his father’s security detail.

  “Jan! Jan!” The hands, incredibly strong, had him by the upper arms and were shaking him even though he and the other man were the same height. Eyelids fluttering open just a crack as he recognized the voice but not believing it. “Jan, it’s me! Hugh Leeger! Do you know me?”

  Mortas shook his head to clear it, simultaneously relieved and angered by the dawning realization that the life-­threatening event had been a setup. He contorted his body, trying to break loose, recognizing the man who was the chief of his father’s security detail. The man who had practically raised him, from the day his mother died until the day he’d gone to boarding school. Big brother, surrogate father, coach, mentor, and friend.

  Mortas’s fists were flying without any instructions to do so, aiming for the face with the intent of doing real harm, but bouncing off Leeger’s expert parries instead. Then the hands were on him again, his body twisting, his center of gravity gone, and he was facedown on the floor with one arm behind his back bearing Leeger’s full weight.

  The familiar voice in his ear, gentle but not kind. “Amazing. No matter how old we both get, I can still pin you in one fall.”

  “Lean your head back, please.” The technician was short and pretty, with jet-­black hair piled under a barrette. She was also very nervous, and managed to run most of the eye drops down Mortas’s cheek. His eyes had been flushed out by a doctor who couldn’t wait to pass him on to someone else, and now he saw an amused look on Leeger’s face as the security man stepped closer.

  “I’ll do that.” He took the drops from the tech, and the woman was gone a grateful moment later. Mortas scowled up at him as Leeger pried his eyelids open and carefully
squeezed a few drops from the bottle, not wasting any. “Everybody gets so scared whenever your father is in the area. I’ve never understood that.”

  Mortas blinked rapidly, lowering his chin. He was sitting on a shiny metal stool in a small examination room, and although his breathing had returned to normal, his eyes still stung. The nervous doctor had said he’d been dosed with a harmless irritant similar to riot gas, but the insides of his nose retained the odor from the smoke.

  “Where am I?”

  “Home.” Leeger returned to the small chair near the door and sat down smoothly. “Earth orbit. You might have had the shortest combat tour on record, Jan. This here is a Force research facility, for testing stress levels and physical readiness. That was a special Sim Ball court, in case you haven’t guessed. It’s rigged up to do all sorts of things to unsuspecting Force personnel.”

  “So why do it to me?”

  “Oh, you already know the answer to that. You were exposed to an alien life-­form we’ve never seen before, one that did things that none of our scientists can explain. Up until now everybody’s been focusing on why the Sims can’t reproduce and why they can’t form our syllables, but the appearance of that alien put all that stuff on the back burner.”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “Sure I did. Nobody knows what that thing was, how it could do the things it did, and what else it might have been able to do. We had to make sure you weren’t carrying a passenger, in other words. So creating a situation where you believed you were about to die was the only way we could be certain there wasn’t anything left of that thing hidden inside you.”

  “You didn’t seriously believe that, right?”

  Leeger leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Jan, the entire Human Defense Force went on alert because of that alien. Almost every Forcemember in the war zone has been put through the same type of scan that caught that thing, the one that showed it wasn’t human. That’s how seriously they’re treating this.”