Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  “Got it,” Iona said over the channel.

  “Give me the internal comms,” Fen said. When the signal popped up on her display, she keyed the mic and cleared her throat.

  “We have control of your ship. Your sensor feeds will show ours appearing momentarily. Surrender now or we’ll shut down your systems and shoot you out of the sky.”

  13

  Without timepieces of any kind, it was impossible to accurately gauge how long the days on the prison planet were. A few early efforts were made but quickly given up as the practical concerns of survival took over nearly every aspect of daily life in the camp. Like the rest of the prisoners—or as Dex increasingly began think of them, test subjects—he adopted the habit developed by humanity over the course of thousands of years. A day was a day. He’d worry about synchronizing his calendar if he ever got off the planet.

  As the weeks wore on, Dex did indeed show symptoms of being infected. His were purely physical, several days of a deep fever and shakes that came and went with the suddenness of a light being switched on. His mental faculties stayed reliably solid, however. He felt none of the confusion or paranoia the others suffered.

  “I brought you some rations,” Dex said as he approached Fatima’s spot on the perimeter. The haggard woman had been here longer than most and her symptoms were some of the furthest along. Dex made it a point to visit with every one of the other camp members over the course of a given week, but those on the periphery he made rounds to every day. This was both to provide what comfort he could and to keep a careful eye on their progress.

  Because unless he was missing his guess, Fatima was slowly getting better. Her bouts of confusion were slowly growing less severe and her paranoia lost some of its intensity. It was a tentative conclusion only reached in the last few days as her reactions to Dex popping by to deliver food softened.

  That wasn’t normal for someone whose brain was in a state of actual physical degradation. Her general state of mind was getting better. Dex even asked Erin for her opinion just to make sure he wasn’t falling into the trap of being overly hopeful.

  It wasn’t just Fatima. Several of the others showed similar signs of getting better. It was a good thing for the people themselves, but Dex couldn’t help feeling a shadow cross over his thoughts every time he pondered the situation. Experiments had many stages, and dread rose up in his gut wondering what would come after this one.

  “What goodies did you bring me today?” Fatima asked, looked up at Dex with tired but mostly sane eyes. “I didn’t have the energy to go out looking for the pod this time. Thanks for doing this.” She said it with a tight resignation around her eyes which Dex ignored. In her increasingly lucid moments, the woman tried to apologize to him for her behavior no matter how much he tried to reassure her it wasn’t necessary.

  Dex pulled the pack off his shoulder and crouched next to her. He pulled the seven ration packs out and stacked them in front of her. “Today we have a stunning assortment of second-rate nutrition cubes flavored with beef, turkey, and fish. Though I can’t promise any of them will taste anything like real food.”

  Fatima took the packs with a sigh. “I’d give anything for real food again.”

  Dex grinned at her. “Well, you’re in luck. I’m going to go hunting later today. I plan on bringing back enough lizard beast to feed everyone for a few days.”

  Instead of the happy expression Dex was hoping for, Fatima’s face grew worried. “The last hunting party was killed. You know that since that’s how you met Erin.”

  Of course, hunting was only part of the reason they’d gone out. Well, hunting food. Dex tried not to think about the fact that they’d been planning to kill him.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I’m a lot less worried about me than I am us as a group. I don’t think it’ll matter if there are a hundred people here or not once the next stage of the experiment starts. Things are changing for some of you, and that has to mean something. If these bastards started with kidnapping, I don’t want to think what they’ll do for the second course.”

  Fatima did smile now, though the expression was thin. “You really think we’re getting better?”

  Dex chuckled and extended his arms. “Look at me. I’m not being attacked, am I? You know I do, and more importantly you think you are, too.”

  Fatima snorted. “I’m thinking clearer more of the time, sure. But I’m weak, like I’m getting over a really long illness. Which when I think about it, I guess I am.”

  Dex pulled another item out of the bag and set it on top of the rations. “This is to help you build your strength back up. It’s jerky from my allotment. I don’t like the stuff, mostly because I don’t like thinking about how it’s made.”

  Fatima shook her head. “You can’t give away food like this. You need to stay healthy. So few of us are.”

  Dex pointed at the small bag of jerky. “I’m not going to eat it. The rations are plenty for me, and I plan to do my best impression of our distant caveman ancestors and bring home a fresh kill to feast on. I’m leaving that here. You can eat it or give it to someone else.”

  He stood and stretched his back. Enhanced genetics or not, some positions were just inherently uncomfortable. “Is there anything you want me to keep an eye out for while we’re gone? I know there are some edible fruits and vegetables here but I haven’t been out of camp before to look for them.”

  Fatima cocked her head, considering. “No, I don’t think so. Though we’re going to need more salt soon. The pods never have enough. That’ll mean hauling seawater back here.”

  Every pod came with a small assortment of storage bags, some of them meant to be used as water skins. Hauling seawater for evaporation was a massively inefficient way to get more salt, but one run doing it produced enough to make up the shortfall from the pods for nearly a month.

  “Tell you what,” Dex said. “I’ll make the trip myself after the hunt. Instead of making a bunch of us bring back skins, I’ll just stay out there a few days and evaporate the water myself. I can bring back way more salt that way. I’ll save some just for you.”

  Fatima smiled again, this time with a little more warmth in it. He saw the effort it cost her. What should have been an easy thing was made into work by this place and the suffering the people here lived through. Illness and exposure on top of being ripped from their homes. Dex felt it, too, but his well-controlled anger reacted far more at what had been done to those who’d lived here longer.

  She had asked him more than once why he was being so kind to her, and the question nearly broke his heart. Basic human decency was an endangered beast here, scraped away by the fuckers who Dex promised himself he’d find one day.

  It said a great deal about the desperation among these people that having a thing like salt for their food was seen as a reason for joy.

  *

  The hunt was almost immediately worth the time. This was due less to the prowess of the hunters and more to the teeming biosphere of the planet. Whatever measures kept the local fauna away from the camps—Dex assumed their captors set up some kind of artificial protection—were clearly necessary. The weird octopedal life forms great and small were everywhere.

  Less than a mile from camp, they got their first and second kills. Admittedly, Dex felt terrible for sneaking up on a pair of lizard beasts while they were mating, but if you’ve got to go...

  The team was precise in their approach, moving in silently to flank the pair and rushing in with weapons made from bone and pieces of pod hull. Dex himself held a long sliver of metal roughly in the shape of a sword if that sword was uneven and continuously tapering to a point. There was no cross guard or hilt, just a grip badly smoothed with chunks of rock and tightly wrapped with a piece of cloth.

  The small plasma torch was one of the few tools given to the test subjects, presumably because the need to cut apart the pods for resources was a key element of their survival. The tiny fuel tanks didn’t last long and were precious, but he’d convince
d the others that a small number of metal weapons was a necessary use of materials.

  And so Dex rushed in just ahead of the others and steeled himself for the killing blows. The jagged blade whipped forward and took the male lizard in the throat with a precise thrust and downward yank, tearing its throat apart all the way back to its spinal column. Its weight came down on the female, which tried to pull away in wild-eyed panic.

  Dex repeated the move faster than any normal human could have hope for, silencing her shrieks just as the others stepped in with their makeshift spears and took the dying beasts in their hearts.

  He took several steps away and dry-heaved. Fortunately he’d skipped breakfast. The thought of doing this made his stomach roil, so as in all things Dex planned ahead.

  “You okay?” asked Li Jun, one of the other hunters.

  Dex waved away the concern with one hand, still bent over. “Fine. Just don’t like doing that.”

  Li Jun gestured toward the sword laying on the rocky soil. “You were good with that thing, though. Thought you must have been some kind of soldier before you came here.”

  Dex straightened and shook his head, turning to Li Jun. “No. Back on Threnody, one of our tests was being put through a series of...I guess you’d call them fights, but with animals. We had to kill them.”

  Li Jun recoiled in horror. “Oh, my god. They made you fight death matches?”

  Dex chuckled darkly. “No. I almost wish they had. They made sure we were safe. Gave the things shock collars or bracelets depending on what kind of animal it was. If the proctors thought we were going to die, they’d flip a switch and we’d be safe. Then, as a punishment, we’d be forced to kill them while they lay there helpless.”

  Li Jun shuddered. “I don’t mean to sound like a dick here, but what the fuck is wrong with your people?”

  Dex sighed. It was a question he’d been asking himself his entire life. “Cultural ego for acts Threnodians performed ten generations ago combined with a seething hate for anyone not from our planet. The place was founded by a bunch of well-meaning biologists and geneticists who went way too far when it came to singing the praises of their brand of science. Also, they think a war with the rest of the Alliance is inevitable, so they’ve spent the last thirty years preparing for it.”

  Li Jun scratched his jet-black beard. “So you weren’t a soldier, but you were supposed to be?”

  Dex hesitated, then decided to tell at least part of the truth. “Not a soldier. A killer. My whole cohort was an experimental unit meant to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace. That’s why I figured out a way to escape and took it.”

  Li Jun got The Look. The one everybody who got a glimpse through the veil of mystery surrounding Threnody eventually ended on. It was a mix of revulsion, sadness, anger, and a touch of disbelief. Not that they doubted Dex specifically. Few did. He never came across as trying to shock or scare. He simply relayed the facts.

  No, it came down to the simple fact that people didn’t want to believe. No one wanted to admit that a handful of generations could twist a culture so badly that it would subject its children to experimental gene therapy and make their childhoods an endless nightmare of death and punishment.

  Dex understood this reaction. It was universal but for a single exception. Iona hadn’t doubted for a second. She took in the information and instead of recoiling away from Dex, a product of that culture, she had embraced him.

  Not even she knew the full truth, however. There was a reason only a select few were given the dangerously experimental set of gene alterations for intellectual capacity, and Dex wasn’t sure he would ever be in a place emotionally where speaking that truth aloud was possible.

  Suddenly weary, Dex bent over and grabbed his blade. The trip to the sea seemed like a doubly fine idea just then; being away from people for a little while meant a break from questions that raised old ghosts he’d prefer to stay at rest.

  14

  “I hope you realize how much trouble it is for me to meet you like this,” Sharp said as Grant and Iona entered the small chamber.

  Grant pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, hello to you too. Sorry to inconvenience you, but I thought you made it pretty clear you didn’t want any critical updates sent over the air or through the Ansible. This can’t wait. We’re already past your deadline.”

  Sharp sat back in his own seat and steepled his fingers. “I’ve been following your status reports. I thought it merited a little more leeway. Are you here to convince me Dex isn’t a threat to the fleet?”

  Grant nodded. “You think I’d force you to meet me all the way out here just to tell you bad news?”

  The room was about three meters across, a cylinder of metal with a single airlock on the wall. The gravity plating made it functional enough to work in, but the facilities were limited. Anchored to a small asteroid in the backwater of a transit system, the tiny structure was meant for secret meetings just like this one. The batteries would let it function for eight hours before shutdown and recharge was needed, but Grant knew they wouldn’t need anywhere close to that long.

  “Iona,” he said, gesturing toward the sim. “This is your show.”

  Iona stepped forward and nodded toward the wall screen, which lit up with a dizzying barrage of information. “What you’re seeing here is the raw data we’ve accumulated over the last few weeks from a variety of sources. The most recent of which was an assault on a Red Hand freighter whose information storage was untouched. It gave us insight into how Drummer and the Red Hand are managing to make flawless attack runs, and by confirming that suspicion we also opened up new avenues into our investigation of Dex’s kidnapping.”

  Sharp didn’t look impressed. “I don’t have the time to sift through all that, obviously. I have a thousand other Ghost Fleet ships to deal with. Give me the short version.”

  Iona glanced at the screen again. The display wiped clean, the scrolling data replaced with a dozen images of a ship from several different angles. “We’ll start with the most important first and work our way down the list. This is the ship that took Dex. These are just a select few images recorded from as many worlds, and everywhere this vessel shows up, it has a different name and transponder signal. We’ve been calling it the Smith, which is short for the Jonas B. Smith, the only name it uses that has showed up in more than once place. The Smith appears to travel extensively, everywhere from large colony worlds to distant stations, running the gamut from frequenting law-abiding sectors of space to the dankest corners of the criminal underworld. There is only one line connecting its appearances, one we only discovered because we knew to look for it.”

  Sharp’s eyes narrowed with interest. “Go on.”

  Grant knew they’d set the hook but suppressed his own smile. Iona had done all the legwork on this one, with assists from Crash and Spencer.

  Iona brought up a new set of information on the screen. “These are missing persons reports. Everywhere the Smith shows up, people go missing. Sometimes several from a single location. Before you ask, yes, I’ve checked the numbers over and over. Did you know that missing persons cases almost never happen on any of the major colonies? There are too many digital checkpoints for personal terminals. Yet everywhere this thing goes, the statistics jump. I can show you a line chart that will curl your toes.”

  Sharp ran a hand across the stubble on his face. “So Dex was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  Iona shrugged. “That’s the theory we’re working from. The Smith snatches people at random so long as they fit a set of criteria. Every captive ranges in age from early adulthood to late middle age, and the gender ratio is almost even. My guess is that it’s exactly even, we just don’t have all the information.”

  Sharp waved a hand at the screen. “So the kidnappers don’t know Dex is part of the Ghost Fleet, which means they won’t have any reason to question him about it. That’s what you’re trying to convince me of here.”

  Iona’s brows drew together. �
��I can paint you a detailed picture if you don’t want to take my word for it, sir. But nothing we’ve uncovered points to anything other than Dex being part of a random sampling.”

  Sharp put up his hands defensively. “Whoa. I’m inclined to believe you. After what your crew risked against the Children, I don’t think you’re the kind of people who’d risk the lives of the entire fleet if you thought there was any chance of it, even if it meant letting go of one of your own. Until or unless we find evidence Dex was taken because of his affiliation, I’m satisfied.”

  Iona relaxed slightly. “Okay, then. You probably shouldn’t get too comfortable, because what we discovered about the Red Hand is probably going to upset you all over again. Namely, the reason they have such good information is because they’re able to access nearly any computer system they want completely at will. The reason we’ve been able to uncover so much about the Smith is because the last ship we hit had an archive of every bit of data from every ship, station, and anything with a computer in its range covering the last year. An entire room in that freighter was nothing but digital storage. They’re hacking everything, dumping the data into their systems, and sifting it for information they can use to plan their assaults.”

  She braced herself for Sharp’s reaction to her next words. “Turns out you should be worried about the security of the fleet—the whole fleet, not just us—because these guys can also get into standard Navy systems somehow.”

  Sharp sucked in a harsh breath. “You can’t be serious. Did they infiltrate the Seraphim?”

  “No,” Iona said with a note of pride in her voice. “When I’m aboard ship I run a sandbox between comms and the rest of the system. No matter how good, an automated digging program can’t compare to how well I can defend our systems. Any sim could do the same.”