Cartwright's Cavaliers (The Revelations Cycle Book 1)

by Mark Wandrey

  Jim glanced up at the tester, a serious-looking retired merc holding the slate and sizing up the candidates – nine boys and two girls. His entire demeanor spoke of barely restrained violence. As he turned, they could all see that one side of his face was entirely synth-flesh, and the eye on that side was a solid bright red that glowed with an inner light. Like so many mercs, part of him never made it home. When he got to Jim the man’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at the name again. “Cartwright,” he said. “Any relation to Thaddeus Cartwright?”

  “He was my father, sir.” The man grunted then looked over Jim again.

  “Well, your dad was one hell of a merc.” He pulled the starting pistol from his belt. “Ready…”

  Thirty seconds later, Jim was lying in the grass 120 yards away gasping and wheezing for all he was worth, still trying to catch his breath. His knees hurt, his hips hurt, his back hurt, and there was a stitch in his side so severe he was sure his guts must be hanging out. Even his man-boobs hurt. He lifted his head enough to look down at his belly going rapidly up and down under the shirt plastered to his sweaty chest. He let his head smack back down. A rock dug into his scalp. Great.

  “You okay, Jimbo?” He glanced over to see Rick standing there. The fucker wasn’t even breathing hard. Of course, he’d been there almost nine seconds before Jim. For a specimen like Rick, that was enough time to run another dash.

  “What...time...” Jim huffed.

  “You or me?” Jim just glared. “You did it in 16.25,” he told him. Jim blinked away tears. “You staggered off the blocks a little.”

  “And...you?”

  “What does that matter, buddy?”

  “Just...tell me.” Jim had enough breath back to ponderously lever himself to a seated position. Rick wasn’t looking at him.

  “Culper!” a familiar, gruff voice yelled. They both turned to see the Merc who’d called their names striding over like he was on a parade ground.

  “Sir?” Rick asked.

  “You keep that up you’ll make a top billet, son.” He stopped and punched Rick in the shoulder. It was meant as a brotherly gesture, but it almost knocked the eighteen-year-old off his feet. “Damn fine, son, 8.55 official. Hope you aren’t thinking about being a worthless athlete?”

  “No sir!”

  “Good, your planet needs you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. It glinted silver in the sunlight. “You give this to the recruiter for Gitmo’s Own, tell him Crosser sent you.” Rick looked stunned but took the coin. A silver challenge coin, from a veteran merc. Jim nodded in appreciation. Gitmo’s Own was a good company, if rather small. Crosser glanced down where Jim was still sitting dejectedly in the grass, his red eye glinting in the sunlight. He half nodded, half shook his head, and marched off.

  “Wow,” Rick said, examining the coin. Jim didn’t have to see it to know what was on the coin. He’d memorized all the Merc logos before he’d been old enough to ride a bike. That one would be a globe of the Earth with a stylized ship’s anchor bisecting it and an eagle astride the planet. An ancient symbol of a planetary military unit whose former members formed Gitmo’s Own.

  “Silver,” Jim nodded, “He must have been impressed.”

  “Yeah,” Rick agreed and carefully, almost reverently put it in his pocket.

  “You going to use it?”

  “You know I won’t,” Rick snapped and looked down at his friend, a hurt expression on his face. He held out a hand thick with muscles. Jim took it and his friend grunted as he levered him up to his feet. “We’re both going to serve in the Cavaliers.”

  “Sure,” Jim said. Down the field, students were mustering for the next test, pushups.

  “Come on,” Rick encouraged, patting him on his shoulder, “you always do better at this next one.” Unable to keep his friend’s unabashed good nature from intruding on him, Jim grinned sheepishly and followed him. Rick hurried on ahead to make sure they didn’t miss their turn. When his friend wasn’t looking Jim slipped his necklace from under his shirt and glanced at it.

  A challenge coin, not unlike the one Rick had just received to help him become a recruit, was affixed to a silver chain. Only this coin wasn’t silver, it was a dark metal that had a slight bluish tinge to it. It also didn’t look shiny, as if the metal had been exposed to some extremes before being minted. The image was of a medieval knight, astride a charger, a banner flowing behind him. His lance was lowered as he charged a prostrate dragon on the ground. Inscribed on the banner was “Lead the Charge.” He sighed as he put it away and headed to his next humiliation.

  Hours later, Jim returned to the little flat his family rented for him. It was just blocks from the school – an academy carefully selected by the family to maximize his educational chances. His mother still held out hope he might yet make it into the family business from the ground up and continue the tradition, all physical evidence to the contrary. The apartment in Carmel, Indiana, was evidence of that. “The best leadership and physical development primary classes in the country,” the school’s marketing brochure had bragged. It also happened to have a top-notch Aetherware department, and that was what decided it for Jim.

  It had taken him nearly a year, but he’d managed to skim enough from his allowance for the pinplant procedure. These types of implants had come down steadily in price since they first became available, almost a century ago. He’d had to spend some of his carefully saved money to get a forged permission from his mother to get them; his mother would never have signed it. She believed what mercs went through was bad enough. He’d made an excuse during spring break last year, flown to Tijuana, and underwent the implant surgery.

  Jim stripped out of his sweaty sweat pants and shirt, then gym shorts, and gloriously dug the jockstrap out of the crack of his ass and the folds between his legs. Sometimes he hated not changing and showering at school. Of course, dealing with the stink of himself all afternoon was not nearly as bad as getting naked in front of all the other guys in the locker room. He stopped on the way through the bathroom to grab his interface device and clicked it in place behind his ear.

  In the bathroom he glanced at himself in the mirror – hairless chest, man-boobs, rolls of belly fat, other worse things lower. It was only a quick glance, more out of habit that anything else. A minute later he was in the shower letting the stinging hot water wash away the sweat and grime of the afternoon tests.

  As the soap and water did their jobs, Jim closed his eyes and let himself slip into the Aethernet through his pinplants. It was only his own personal node, but he’d been working on it for a year. Building, improving, and creating his own world. A long time ago people would have called it virtual reality. But that was before Aetherware was invented. Inside the Aethernet, his mind linked directly via synaptic relay, was better than reality. Especially his current reality.

  As he was drying his considerable body, his relay informed him of an incoming call. When he mentally clicked to answer it, he was surprised to find it was a message and not a live call.

  “Jim, it’s Mom.” Jim shook his head, as if he wouldn’t know. The contact ID linked to his mom’s GVP – her Global Verified Persona – the second the call came in. “I wanted to call and see how you did on the tests! I know you did great! Look, I’m stuck in Seattle on company business. We’ve run into a few problems, so I won’t have time to come out tomorrow like I had planned. I’m sorry, we’ll get this taken care of, and then I will fly out there first thing on Sunday. See you then.”

  He pondered his mother’s message as he dried himself off. After his father died, she had taken over running the company. While not a merc, she came from old money out East; she’d let the company’s military leadership run contracts while she managed the money. All indications were that she’d done pretty well. When his father was still alive, she’d helped out as an accountant. Father had insisted. Cartwrights weren’t known as the idle rich. So he was left with the mystery of what she would be involved in that was both company busines
s and a big enough problem for her to miss their planned appointment.

  He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and shuffled into the apartment’s living room where he kept his rig. He glanced briefly at the only prominent picture in the room – a large 3D Tri-V of his father and himself. Jim had been nine years old, standing on the back of an ancient Drake ACV, armored combat vehicle, holding a laser carbine almost as big as he was. His dad stood a little in front of him, like Jim, looking at the photographer. All around them were members of the Cavaliers waving and hamming it up for the picture, just before a deployment on contract. It was the last time he’d ever seen any of them alive.

  The full-body support chair gently reclined as the robotic arm reached out and made contact with his pin-points. Jim felt the momentary disconnection as his biological senses were shut down, and he fell away from the real world, and into the Aether.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 2

  “The seeker-bots are going crazy,” the mining foreman chirped. “They’ve found something!”

  Ashattoo turned part of his viewing area away from the slate which displayed the expected yield data for the well, and he turned in the direction of the foreman. The mine on Ch’sis had been almost a complete bust for the Athal, and he was just unlucky enough to be in charge of it. His brood mate had pitched the deal to the Athal Collective. He’d been doing valuable historical research before being transferred to Ch’sis. To be taken away from a job he’d loved and sent to the ass end of the universe had left him with a profound feeling of betrayal.

  “What nonsense are you speaking?” Ashattoo spat back. There was only one hour left until feeding break and there was still much to be done. He didn’t want to waste time analyzing questionable data.

  “The probe shaft you ordered on mine feed nine,” the foreman said, using a foothand to smooth the sensing hairs on his side.

  “I gave no such order.”

  “Sure you did,” the supervisor insisted. “Yesterday at the research meeting.”

  Ashattoo looked away from the data in annoyance, giving his complete attention to the foreman, who noticed his annoyance and yet...still persisted.

  “You said that a probe shaft on mine nine would provide answers to interesting questions.”

  Ashattoo’s mouth parts fell open, and he spit fluid on the floor. “Fool!” he barked, “I said it would be foolish to sink a probe shaft in nine; it would only answer a question that does not need answering and provide questionable data!”

  “I...don’t remember it that way.”

  Ashattoo threw up all six hands in frustration, slapped the slate he’d been reading onto his tool harness, and skittered over to the supervisor who twitched in fear. He used most of his high-attenuation eyes to examine the screen, first noting with horror that the probe shaft had been sunk more than three miles already. At just under 100 credits per yard…it was a disaster.

  “Five thousand credits, you grub!” Ashattoo exclaimed in frustration. “You don’t listen to what I say, and you waste many thousands of our credits on a probe shaft!?”

  “But, look at the data!”

  “What could possibly be so interesting?” he moaned. The supervisor pointed at another area of the readout, beside the basic drill data. The seeker robots at the end of the probe looked for certain elements and reported the results back. That data helped steer the probe, and this particular probe was capable of deviating several degrees per yard dug. It was picking up massive concentrations of a particular noble gas. “That is...interesting.”

  “That’s what I said,” the supervisor mumbled peevishly.

  Ashattoo wondered – what was the chance, on this world of all worlds? They’d harvested modest amounts of gaseous hydrocarbons, enough to make the operation almost worth the expense of the 100-cycle lease, and the Mining Guild didn’t sell leases on worlds that had even a minor possibility of being profitable with ease. More than 10,000 cycles ago, Ch’sis had been a veritable treasure trove of various rare gases. Despite the remnants of the white dwarf in the center of its system, though, Ch’sis wasn’t found to possess the rarest of the rarest of the rare – a gas so rare it was usually only found in the rocky core of a former gas giant. Ch’sis had been such a planet and had barely survived the supernova that reformed it. After the gaseous atmosphere had been blasted away by the shockwave of its star exploding, only a planetoid less than four thousand miles wide remained.

  The intense pressures inside a gas giant were ideal for the creation of exotic elements and the pooling of other more commonly found ones. Deposits of fluorine gas sometimes found deep in the core of such worlds, exposed to the unbelievable radiation of a supernova, resulted in something else entirely – something extremely valuable – and something that was usually found in combination with...

  “Xenon gas,” Ashattoo said, the light in the operations center glimmering off his multifaceted compound eyes. Was it possible? “Any hint of it?”

  “Of what?” the foreman asked.

  “Don’t be a fool!” Ashattoo snapped.

  “No,” the other replied sheepishly. Ashattoo didn’t really blame him, the very idea of anyone finding a deposit, previously undiscovered, on a world so thoroughly gone over, was unthinkable.

  “Press the probe deeper,” Ashattoo ordered.

  Four hours later Ashattoo flew down the bare-walled corridors of the mining module to his office, using both feet and foothands to speed himself along. He was glad his ancestors had not been flightless, like his species was now outside of the near-zero gravity of the facility. If he’d been forced to walk, he probably would have stumbled all the way there. He was in far too much shock to have navigated by conscious thought.

  He activated his main computer and used his security code to compose a message to the Collective. They had to be informed immediately. In minutes the dispatch was completed, using the highest level encryption algorithm at his disposal, and sent out to the jump point. There it would await the next ship to transit through the system. His multifaceted eyes took in the room. Did everything look different? If the discovery played out, it would be different in amazing ways.

  All the rest of that day and into the next, Ashattoo set every available robot in the manufactory unit to constructing the extraction, refining, and storage facilities needed to process the incomprehensible treasure sensors had indicated was buried in the gas giant remnant below. As he worked the next day, his slate gave him a routine notification. His message had been relayed to a free trader passing through the Ch’sis stargate in the correct direction. With luck, the Collective would receive his amazing news in a matter of a few weeks. He would not realize the magnitude of the events he’d accidentally set in motion for months to come.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 3

  When Jim returned to his apartment on the afternoon he turned eighteen, he was wallowing in the pit of the lowest moment of his life. He’d had to go to the school to get his final grades as well as the results of his VOWS. His grades were stellar, of course. Even with mandatory physical training dragging him down, he finished with a sliding scale GPA of 4.86, in the upper ninety-ninth percentile.

  The VOWS, however, were graded based on a battery of physical and mental tests, with the physical having greater weight in the results, of course. Each category was graded from 100, worst, to 500, best. There were five mental categories and four physical. The mental total was divided by five, the physical by three. Thus the mental range was from 100 to 500, the physical 133 to 667, resulting in an aggregate between 233 and 1167.

  To stand even a remote chance of being picked up by a company, a graduate needed to score over 900. Even with a mental category score of 471, just 29 points below perfect, he only managed a combined score of 664. Dead last in his class. The PhysEd teacher wouldn’t even look him in the eye when he handed Jim the chip with his VOWS score.

  Jim briefly considered swinging by the little startown just outside of Beach Grove to pick up some
drugs. Maybe a little Sparkle, to lift his feelings? It was stubborn pride that stopped him. He’d managed to make it through his entire education without resorting to drugs to feel better, despite always being “the fat kid” in his class. Sure, maybe everyone else was destined to be beautiful, but he was going to be running an entire merc company.

  It had become harder as his teens hit. He’d been taller than Rick initially. Sure, Rick was thin and athletic, but being taller had meant something, right? Then their growth spurts hit. Rick shot to over six feet, while Jim petered out at around five foot nine inches. As Rick got even leaner, his muscle tone began to arrive. He ate like a horse, and grew the muscles to match. Jim ate sparingly, and grew to resemble a hippo. It didn’t seem to matter what he did. Of course, the doctors gave him diets and all kinds of advice, which he tried to follow, but once he discovered the Aethernet, his level of physical activity – and consequently his level of physical fitness – went steadily downhill.

  So with the abysmal VOWS score in his pocket, he stared at the cab’s control screen and half reached for the Chicago Starport’s icon. A one-hour ride on the hyper-expressway. As an extra territorial area, he could acquire anything he needed there for the right price. A function of Earth’s joining the Union, the zones around starports were basically not human territory. The laws of the Union stood there, and the Union had damned few laws. The surrounding community was mostly indifferent. Normally a human needed to be twenty-one to enter without an adult escort, but he had a pass. Perk of the family.