by Dan Davis
Onca sighed. He should have slipped out as soon as he woke up.
“Don’t try to back out of this now,” she said. “Be honest with me.”
“It’s early for a heart to heart, isn’t it?”
“Is that what this is?” She stretched her arms over her head, arching her back. “Besides, it’s late, not early.”
“Wouldn’t you rather go for a run instead?”
“After.”
“It’s not a simple answer.”
“Should it not be? Why are you here? What would drive you to do all this and keep doing it? Drive you all this way away from home?”
“Duty.”
She made a small sound. “Duty to what?”
Onca sighed, threw up an arm. “To my country.”
They lay side by side, looking up at the low ceiling.
“It’s an easy answer,” she said. “It’s the answer I always use myself when I am asked. Everyone accepts it. Especially our superiors in the military and in the civilian governments. Of course they do. They are completely entangled with the concept of the nation state and their own one in particular. But duty to a country?” She waved a hand in the air above them. “The concept breaks down when you closely examine it. What exactly about the country are you being dutiful to? The individual leaders? The government? The system of government?”
“Yes. If it’s a good one. Brazil stands for independence. For liberty. We threw off our distant rulers. We were the first nation to outlaw slavery, did you know that? It’s something to be proud of.”
“That’s what you’re fighting an alien for? Brazil’s constitution?”
He sighed. Women never let anything go. They’re never satisfied until they’ve driven their point deep into the argument.
“It’s not just political. Obviously. It’s the people. The culture of the people. The heritage. The art and the music.”
“So, you’re fighting for Brazil. Not for yourself? Not for the rest of humanity?”
“Alright, I am fighting for myself. To find out how good I can be. Every day, pushing myself more. Every day, trying to move the peak of my performance higher. The rest of humanity? I don’t know them. Most of the ones I have met are brutal, miserable bastards. People that know only how to destroy and tear things down.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way. But many people would say that about you, you know?”
He hooked one arm behind his head. “I know. But they would be wrong. I might be a killer but I defend the people who make things. I defend the scientists and the engineers who make this world a good place. And I kill only those who want to tear down the world. I’m a defender of people. Of good people. I’m a monster so that they can live their good lives. At least, I used to be.”
“You’re defending everyone on Earth, now. By doing this. And the people heading out to Mars and the orbital habitats and everywhere that people are.”
“Am I? This whole thing is a secret. Will they ever even know about me? Or will it be classified for all time? Don’t answer that, I know it doesn’t matter. I don’t need validation. And I’m not doing it for them. Most people just want to live quiet, small lives. Then you get maybe thirty percent of people who want only to tear down everything that those small people have. They want to criticize and exploit and steal from them. And then there’s a tiny minority. Maybe less than ten percent. And they are the ones who make the world. They are the scientists and business owners and community leaders. They try to drag the people up out of the shit. And us? Soldiers? Police? We are ten percent of them. The fraction who keeps order. Who will use violence and righteous authority to keep the thirty percent in order. I don’t want to defend all people everywhere. I don’t need to. I only need to keep the ten percent safe. They can do the rest.”
She was quiet beside him. He wondered if she had fallen asleep.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to hear you say that. But I am. I don’t see the world in quite the same way as you. I have more faith in the masses.”
“Why are you doing this, then? You’re not here for Germany but you are here for all humanity? That’s too broad, too all-encompassing to be conceptualized.”
“I am here for Germany. At least, Germany at its best. For Goethe, Einstein and Bach. For German engineering and innovation. And for the best of every other nation on Earth. For the best of us.”
“Sounds a lot like my philosophy.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think it’s types of people. Thirty percent are evil and ten percent protectors? No. I think it’s just that we are animals.”
“What?” Onca looked at her from the corners of his eyes.
“I think we forget that we are just animals. We are so hard on ourselves about the things we do. The atrocities that we commit. And rightly so.” She spoke with a sleepy detachment, as if her mind was far away. “But that’s just our animal nature coming out. The brutal side that is in all of us. Some more than others. And we have overcome that brutality in our art and our science and in cooperation and the spiritual, the divine.”
“You’re religious?”
“Oh. No. God, no. Atheist. But I just mean, that sense of wonder, that feeling of profundity, whatever you call it. Are you religious?”
“Doesn’t it say in your files?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“Everyone believes in God where I come from. So, I suppose I do, too. But I never thought much about it. And I still don’t. Except to curse Him.”
“Must have been rough growing up how you did.”
“Do you want to ask about my mother now? Is that what therapists ask next?”
“Just conversation. I don’t want to get up yet. If you don’t want to talk, you can take a shower here. Or we can do something else?”
It was different from the night before. Slower, less intense. But better, in many ways. It felt less like desperate rutting and more like making a connection. More like communication.
“Maybe I should leave now,” Onca said after. “Before too many people are up.”
“You’re worried about someone seeing you leave my quarters? Why? I’m not. Everyone is fucking everyone else on this ship. Why should we be any different?”
Onca said nothing.
“I don’t want to rush you,” she said. “Or force you into anything. But I liked last night. And this morning. And I don’t just mean the sex. I hope that you don’t pull away from this. I would like it if we could be friends.”
“The others would see it as favoritism. Resent it.”
“It bloody well is favoritism. I don’t want to invite any of the others into my bed. Well, maybe Sergeant Anderson. You never cared what they thought before, why start now? And if they are true colleagues, they would just be happy we’re banging each other.”
“I never realized what a romantic soul you are.”
She laughed. “Come back tonight. This is simple, Onca. We’re just two friends who occasionally screw each other. No one can get hurt or lose out on anything here.”
“Alright. Just no more whisky.”
“You can do what you want. I’m taking a drink.”
***
For months, life was good and growing better. He saw Megan almost every night and shared a bed more often than not. They even started sharing a bed without having sex and Onca realized he truly enjoyed her companionship. Enjoyed it at a fundamental level and in a way that he had never experienced before.
Everything else stayed the same.
Or so he thought.
He trained just as hard as he always had. He slept in no later and he jumped out of bed at 0530 just the same and pushed himself into a long run, no matter how late he had been up with Megan, talking or screwing.
Despite every nuance of their performance being monitored and analyzed by complex algorithms and AIs, no one spoke to him about the changes in his performance. Later, Megan explained that it was within the parameters for ordinary variation but he knew that she was lying.
/> It was only a small thing, at first. But, when he looked back, he saw the signs everywhere.
“Good morning,” Onca said to the others at their table in the mess hall one day in the fifth year. “What’s breakfast today?”
“Pastries,” Sandra said. “Special treat for Anna Jensen’s birthday, you know, from the science team? Danish like this, and different croissants. There’s American style donuts up there, too.”
Onca pulled a face as he sat down with his bowl and spoon. “I’ll stick with oatmeal and peanut butter, thanks.”
“Every day,” Sandra said, in mock outrage. “Every bloody day, porridge and peanut butter. I don’t know how you can face it. And you turn your nose up at these?”
“And I don’t know how you guys don’t like it. It’s got everything—”
“It’s got everything the body needs, yeah, yeah. Well, I’m eating pastries today because my body needs it.”
Onca shook his head and shoveled a spoon of breakfast in his mouth. “You lack discipline,” he said, speaking with his mouth full. “Eating that crap means you’ll run out of glycogen before the end of the morning session and you know it.”
He thought of those words two weeks later when Sandra caught him with a left hook to the back of his head, just behind the ear. Or so he found out when he woke up from being knocked senseless.
“What did you hit me with?” he asked the blurry form above him.
“You’re in the infirmary,” the doctor said.
Just a lucky punch, everyone said and Onca was inclined to believe them. After all, he’d been concussed before, knocked unconscious, trapped in locks and forced to tap out. When you train with full contact sparring sessions using competition rules, severe injuries happened even to the best of them.
Ten days after, he suffered a broken cheekbone, an overextended Achilles tendon and a torn hamstring all in a single round.
Something was very wrong.
“My performance has plummeted,” he said to Megan as they reviewed the data in her quarters.
“Don’t exaggerate.” She sighed and sat back. “It’s more of a stagnation, that’s all.”
“While many of the others have overtaken me in key areas. I know what this is.”
“It would be easy to jump to conclusions. You’ve a series of injuries that have plagued you and a drop off while you recover is completely natural.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Megan. Back to front. My performance dropped off before my injuries. Weeks before, look.”
She argued. Found a dozen reasons to explain it and all of them made sense. To her.
But Onca knew the truth.
Happiness had ruined him.
“But you’ve been doing everything the same,” the argued. “We said our relationship could never change our schedule and we have stuck to that completely. You keep the same hours. You train for just as long.”
“I’m not as focused. I don’t train as well.”
“I don’t believe that. Anyway, we’re talking barely any changes in most of the criteria. Your minutes per klick pace has even gone up. Deadlifts are up.”
“Can’t you see? There is nothing wrong with my body. It is the most sensitive tests I am failing. Shooting. Anything requiring concentration. My problem is mental. It is a lack of focus.”
“We will work it out,” she said, looking at him strangely. “Stay the course and we will see this through. I believe in you, Onca. You can do this.”
Onca nodded, looking at the point when his performance started to suffer.
But he knew what he had to do.
The Wheel.
***
Onca dressed for war. Full armor, full weapons loadout but without live rounds. He wouldn’t fire his weapon in the new Wheelhouse, not even the blanks, but he felt it necessary to prepare himself in exactly the same way as when he would board the massive Orb and venture inside the arena.
They had increased the security on the Wheelhouse mechanism. They had enough of the candidates sneaking in at night and trying their hand at the terrible machine.
But Onca had been breaking security networks since he was a child and had kept up the hobby, on and off, ever since. He made short work of the half-hearted security measures and turned off the alarms.
They did not want anyone hurting themselves on the Wheel again. But they also believed that no one would take such a risk again because they trained with the device regularly. They thought there was little need for the health and safety precautions during the off-hours night watch period. No one had anything to prove any more. No one was psychologically damaged enough to take the risk.
But Onca needed to prove to himself that he was still the man he once was.
As before, he disabled the protocols that restricted speed, torque and the life preservation algorithms.
The screens flashed dire warnings at him that he had to tap through, over and over. Confirm, confirm. 3D, bright red, and flashing words leapt up out of the display unit. He stopped them alerting the core systems but knew he would not have long before he was discovered and shut down.
He jammed the door to the Wheelhouse by forcing up the emergency override handle in the wall.
The mechanical Wheel juddered into life, the huge motors making rapid banging sounds loud enough to resonate through the internal walls all the way to the crew quarters in the habitation ring sections. Surely, someone would come to investigate soon. He had to hurry.
There was little chance, in Onca’s opinion, that the alien Orb would allow him to take his assault rifle into the arena so he left it on the control panel and drew his single, large combat knife. Working with the weapons specialist and machinists in the spaceship’s shop, they had found a steel alloy with a material structure that resulted in a blade with just the right flexibility but with incredible hardness and durability.
And Onca had a profound sense that the arena would let him go in with at least one knife. Everything about the set up suggested the Orb builder aliens-whoever and wherever they were-had set up the fight with the Wheelhunter species so that it would be a fair one. Why else would the vast space of the arena be empty? Why else would the Wheelhunter creature in the last mission have come in without projectile weapons or some sort of equivalent?
The strategists and even Megan warned him about making assumptions but what else could they do? Any of them?
Onca unlatched the security gate and stepped inside the combat zone. Underfoot, the crosshatched yellow lines warned him that he was now in danger and to step back if he had entered by mistake.
No shit.
The Wheel, scarred and tired-looking, surged toward him. It had been hacked and battered so often that the legs and arms had picked up a series of loose, mechanical noises as it cartwheeled across the combat zone. It sounded like a case of socket wrenches bouncing down a concrete stairwell. The rolling arms with the three sharp blades on each hand turned with a jittery madness, blurring as they whipped at his face.
He twisted away from the first attack and stabbed up with his new combat knife, scoring the machine’s fingers without even looking. Against the real alien, that blow might have severed the hand. No one knew if the Wheelhunter aliens experienced physical pain but Onca was convinced that no advanced species could develop enough without a profound sense of its own mortality.
The machine Wheel, on the other hand, knew no pain. It did not flinch or shy away from combat knives, no matter how technologically advanced and deadly they were.
It caught him with a bladed finger.
A blade tip, slightly curved like an eagle’s beak, tore a short gash in the shoulder of his suit as he darted by the device and it latched onto the edge of one of the flexiplate inserts.
The inexorable mass of the machine dragged him off balance and staggered him, pulled him back and down.
Disbelief. Confusion as his back hit the hard floor, arms flung out just for a moment and already he was rolling away, blade up in one hand to fend off th
e follow up swipe.
A massive, mechanical footpad rolled down onto his hand. Crushing it.
Onca did not cry out. He shut down the sense of the pain as the waves of the agony crashed against his awareness.
But the injury distracted him enough and immobilized him enough for the device to spin, turn and hack its other clawed hand into Onca’s head.
Then he screamed.
***
“I know why you did it,” Megan said, standing over his bed in the medical compartment. She was scowling, arms behind her back, looking down her nose at him. Like a General.
He was hooked up to a dozen beeping machines and dosed up to the balls with painkillers and God only knew what else. But he was conscious enough to see that, as well as disapproving, she was pitying him.
Disgusted, with himself and with her, he turned away.
“Obviously.” He spat the word out.
She drew a deep breath. “It will be weeks before you are back to your old self.”
“Months. So the doctor said. But I will do it. And then I will take back my position as the prime candidate.”
“Of course,” she said, smoothly. But he knew what she would be thinking. What they would all be thinking.
He is finished.
“I made a mistake,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “You were not concentrating. I reviewed the video. You left it recording on purpose, so that we could see your victory. See how irreplaceable you are. But you weren’t focusing like you normally do. You were too emotional, you were trying it for the wrong reasons.”
“No,” he said, then hesitated. “Also, yes. But I know why I was not focused. And that is the mistake I made.”
She hung her head. “You think it is because of me. Because our relationship has made you soft.”
“It has. You can’t deny that it has. I was right and I should never have listened to you. I opened myself up, to you and to the others. I was convinced by what you said about my true duty. But I should not have made friends, not with you and not with any of them.”
“That is nothing but resistance. That is you evading difficult emotions. True personal growth is difficult, you must push through.”
