“That’s fine, cadet. Now tell me.” All three, torturer, guard, and interrogator moved in close. Blazer mouthed words.
Angered, the interrogator slapped him. “My translator does not read lips, Anulian!”
Blazer looked back up at him. “I’m sorry,” he wheezed. “You want to know how to access the jump codes?”
He nodded. “Yes, yes, and tell us the jump codes to the home worlds.”
“I don’t know those.”
The interrogator raised his hand to slap him again, but Blazer shook his head.
“I know how to get them.” He gasped, then whispered another response.
The interrogator moved in closer again. “What, speak up?”
“The guild ship’s crew. Everyone on board is needed to access the codes.”
“How, what do they do?”
“Everyone, no matter where they are on the ship, they all have to fart at the same time.” Blazer smiled, his lips cracking. Deniv would have liked that.
The interrogator did not appreciate the joke and raised his hand to signal the torturer to hit Blazer with the prod again.
“Stop,” Blazer called out, his voice feeble. “Have you ever wondered about all the places an energy gatherer can discharge his power?”
The interrogator looked down at him and lowered himself back to eye level. “From the hands, and that’s it. Right?”
Blazer wet his lips and shook his head. “No, it’s anyplace we can make physical contact.”
Blazer spat at the interrogator. A long streamer of sticky saliva bridged the gap between the two of them, and he arced. Electricity flashed across the spittle, throwing him backwards as every muscle in his body fired at once, stunning and sending him twitching to the ground. The guard went for his weapon, drew it on Blazer, and pulled the trigger three times, but nothing happened. The electrically actuated locks on the frame flipped open, and Blazer rolled over before pushing the webbing aside.
The torturer rushed to hammer Blazer with the prod, but he dodged the blow and wrapped his hand around the shaft. He turned it and rammed it into the man’s face. I always wondered what would happen if you hit a blank with one of these. The dial set to maximum, the extraction charge left the man limp, stopping his heart before the reversal charge fired. It must have fried the man’s nervous system, baking his brain.
Blazer slipped out of the torture frame as the guard examined his weapon. The energy cell in the grip was gone. “You want this?” Blazer tossed the emptied cylinder back at him.
The guard fumbled for the battery Blazer had stolen from him earlier; now emptied, it gave him the energy he needed to escape. It was the last mistake the man ever made.
Blazer punched his hand into a nearby light panel. He grabbed onto the power cable within and tore it free. It arced and sputtered—Blazer absorbing the charge as he held up his other hand and discharged. Lightning bolts streamed across the room and into the man’s chest. Blazer kept up the assault until the man’s eyes exploded, and the skin of his own hand was blackened. It merely tingled. Still numb.
The door to Marda’s chamber opened, and the guard there entered. “Is everything all right in…”
Blazer answered him with a face full of lightning. The force of it tossed him back from the door. He slammed into Marda’s interrogator, knocking them both to the floor. Blazer was through the door an instant later. The first guard’s plasma laser pistol in his left hand, he fired at the men, putting a plasma round into each of their skulls before turning on the torturer. That one ran for the alarm, but before he could reach it Blazer fired three more rounds into him. The last cleaved off the back of the man’s skull, the high energy plasma cauterizing his brain.
Blazer stepped over bodies and released the shackles on Marda’s wrists before opening the torture frame. He pulled her free and she collapsed into his arms, exhausted.
“What happened?” she asked, still dazed from the electric shocks they’d hit her with.
Blazer heard a sound and watched Marda’s interrogator stir beneath the guard. The shot Blazer got off on him had only grazed his head. Blazer looked back at the man and fired off another pair of rounds. The first ripped through the man’s head and ripped off his ear, and the second punched straight through his eye.
“We’re getting out of here,” Blazer replied, holding her close for a moment.
Marda nodded as she pulled away, looked up at Blazer. “But there’s no plan.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re getting out of here now,” he said and stepped away from her.
Kneeling down, he liberated the guard’s sidearm and extra magazines, then handed them to her. She hesitated when she saw his charred hand, but she took the weapon. They took up positions on either side of the door to the next chamber. Blazer signaled her, opened it, and rushed in. He dispatched the guard and interrogator with four quick rounds as Marda followed and put her two shots in the torturer’s head. Blazer relieved the guard of his weapon while Marda released Chris from the interrogation frame.
Chris leapt from the interrogation frame and kicked the dead man in the crotch. Her face a mask of rage, she dug her heal into it, crushing his genitalia.
“He’s already dead, he can’t feel that,” Blazer commented and pulled lab coats from the rack on the wall, tossing them to Marda and Chris. Both women pulled the coats on.
“I don’t care. It felt good,” Chris growled.
Blazer shook his head. He understood, but they didn’t have time for it. The three of them worked through the next five chambers in rapid succession, leaving their comrades behind as they rushed through. They couldn’t waste any time lest a guard get too curious and raise the alarm.
Chris seemed to take particular joy in the last chamber. There, one of the guards who had seen fit to take particular advantage of her clothing situation stood over Trevis. He died with three plaser rounds from crotch to heart.
Blazer led them back to the middlemost chamber, freeing their comrades and arming them on the way. His hearts pounding and his hand beginning to burn as sensation returned, they waited in the central chamber. The others took the moment to rest while Blazer pulled open a circuit panel and dug his hand into the main power trunk within. Now or never.
He pulled for all he was worth, charging himself up for the biggest discharge of his life. The skin of his hand sizzled, burning out the nerve endings again as the hair on his arm cooked, filling the chamber with an acrid smell, but he didn’t care. This is it, we escape or we go down fighting, but either way, I’m taking as many of them with me as I can. As he pulled his hand away, he found them all staring at him. They looked beyond tired, but this was the furthest they had gotten in any escape attempt.
Blazer walked to the door, smoke still rising off his blistered and blackened arm. “We all know what’s next. Four guards are manning the central station. We kill them. We get our friends and we escape.”
“You know I’m down with some revenge porn,” Porc commented, extending his damaged hand claws, one of them snapped off, to leave a jagged stump. “But that ain’t a plan, what do we then? We still don’t know where we are.”
“It doesn’t matter, so long as we get out of here,” Blazer replied, his eyes cold. “We’ll make our way to a storage level, or bay, and plan our next move. Free the others and then escape.”
“The other who?” Gavit asked.
“The other cadets. At least those from Singularity Base have to be around here somewhere. Then we go with what Trevis suggested, steal a transport and escape. We let the Confederation know where we are and what happened.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Gavit asked. “I don’t know any jump codes home.”
Blazer looked over the group. Arion and Bichard weren’t there, so the others wouldn’t know that what he was about to tell them was a complete lie. “I know a jump code to a safe system the Mappers Guild uses as a fall back point in case of attack. We can get help there.”
No one questioned
it. They either believed him, or were desperate to care. He wanted it to be true so badly, he was half convinced himself.
Adrenaline and a fresh surge of electricity fueling Blazer, the cadets took up positions around the door. Blazer opened it and they rushed into the passageway, firing blind towards the control console. One lucky round managed to fell one of the guards before they could take aim and fire more effectively.
A single stun round grazed Gavit’s shoulder and he fell to the ground cursing, his right arm paralyzed by the blast. Blazer turned his gun on that guard and fired two rounds, the first catching him in the chest, the other drilling a hole through his neck and throat. Chris downed two more, her ferocity that of a feral beast.
The fourth guard was nowhere to be seen.
They moved toward a lavatory not far away, thinking the guard could be there, but they were wrong. As Blazer neared the console, the fourth guard jumped up from behind it. Rage still pushing him, Blazer spun about, grabbed the guard by his throat, and discharged.
Marda yelled, “Stop!” but that scarcely penetrated the roar of the lightning pouring out of his arm and into the man. He finally released the guard when the report of a round flying past his ear alerted Blazer to danger. Steam and smoke rose from the charred corpse as he panted and looked back at Marda.
“Doing what I have to do. Go see to Gavit,” he ordered, his voice like ice.
Marda took a step back as he stared her down, fear in her eyes.
“Get them out of there,” Blazer ordered, turning to Gokhead.
Gokhead wasted no time and set to work. He searched the control panel for door controls while Marda went back for Gavit. It took Gokhead a moment to translate the Terran Alphabet, fatigued as he was. The doors swung open a moment later, and Gokhead slumped back.
“Now! We’re getting out of here now!” Blazer yelled. He wasn’t worried about being heard. He figured, in fact, that whoever ran this facility already knew they were on the move. They couldn’t afford to hesitate.
The rest of the squadron slunk out of their dark cells. They looked upon Blazer. Arion stepped back at the sight. Blazer felt sure that the rage and hatred filling his eyes were the same as he’d displayed at Garov 18965. “We’re getting out of here, Arion.”
No one questioned, instead limping towards an elevator, Bichard, his carapace cracked, carrying Gavit. Gokhead looked at the panel inside and pointed to the number of a level several stories up. “This is a hangar.”
Gavit flexed his right hand. “Good. If it flies, I can fly it.”
Telsh added her own affirmative. “I be flying anything they got, been doing it before.”
Blazer slammed the button and the doors closed. As the acceleration of the elevator pressed down on him, Blazer abandoned any plan, for the time being, to rescue the other cadets. The adrenaline of the escape had left him, and he could see the same in the others. Better to fall back, then return feeling stronger.
When the elevator slowed to a halt, everything went dark.
Star System: Classified, UCSBA-13, Neurosimulation Bay 1
Total darkness engulfed Blazer. His senses felt numb. Is this death? No, something’s there. He felt pressure build around him. Am I floating? It felt like floating, then something pressed across his back and the back of his legs. I’m sitting, something’s on my head, it’s heavy. What’s that in my mouth, a tube? He probed it with his tongue and tasted nutrient fluid. He felt his hands and flexed them. Something leathery lay beneath them. He reached up and felt a smooth helmet upon his head. What new torture is this?
He tore the helmet from his head and readied himself to face his captors. Instead, technicians in Confed uniforms greeted his eyes. One of them ran after the orange helmet he’d flung across the deck. He felt incredibly weak, but sat up. Several technicians ran up to him as he looked around. The rest of the squadron was there too, all in the same form-fitting gel seats arrayed six at a time around four central pillars. Medical readouts hung over their heads. He looked at the suit he was sitting in—it was similar to the suits they’d worn at the holographic simulation parks, only far more advanced.
Blazer tried to get up, still suspicious and felt a charge begin to form in his fingers.
“Careful cadet, it takes a few pulses to get your legs back under you the first time, especially after being in so long,” a Drashig technician told Blazer as he disconnected the suit.
Blazer looked back at the technician and his two-thumbed hand where he gripped Blazer’s arm, precisely where he had a broken his wrist the cycle before. It hurt until the darkness engulfed him, but now the pain, all of it, was just a memory. He looked over at Arion sitting there in his gel seat, rubbing his head. Opposite him, Marda sat up, a four-armed Otlian helping her to her unsteady feet. He reabsorbed the charge in his hand, his mind slowly clearing.
“What just happened?” Blazer asked.
A door slid away and Admiral Sares walked in, Commander Tadeh Qudas in tow. “You just escaped,” he announced.
“Admiral, please be telling us, what in the deepest pit of Sheol just happened?” Blazer pleaded. He still felt weak and realized why. I haven’t absorbed any electrical current in at least four cycles.
“Everything that you’ve experienced since your capture at the bunker has been simulated,” the Admiral replied and walked up to one of the central spires, laying a hand on it like a loving father. “This is the newest direct neural interface simulation system used by the Confederation. I’ve been working on its development and implementation for a long time. You’re only the third class to use it.”
They all looked around in shock and amazement. Virtual reality simulations were nothing new, but this was beyond anything. It felt real.
“How, I mean that was more real than real,” Arion stated, staring at the computer. “What about Deniv and Milius?”
Tadeh Qudas stepped into the middle of the chamber with the Admiral. “They failed. Deniv cracked under the pressure, most of what he told his captors was garbage, but some truth leaked out. Milius experienced a psychological break. She’ll be going home on a medical discharge.”
Fragging bastards, you can’t do that to them. Anger still hanging at the back of his brain, Blazer stepped up to confront them, but Zithe beat him to it.
“How could you do this without our consent?”
“Cadet, stand down!” the Admiral ordered. “You signed that consent when you entered the Special Ops program,” he continued. “Now you had best get yourselves to medical for examinations and to get cleaned up.”
“Has anyone else made it out yet?” Blazer asked, the anger draining away, exhaustion in its wake.
“No,” Tadeh Qudas replied. “You’re the first ones out, and in record time. We had a bit of a time reworking the scenario to have such a large group in one prison block. Your lack of losses has been impressive. Normally we have to combine shattered teams together. Sergeant Korto is beside himself that you broke his streak.”
Admiral Sares looked up at the control room. “We’ll also have to come up with additional responses to escape scenarios. You caught us by surprise with this last one and the system didn’t have time to construct anything past the elevators. We’ll improve that for the next time, to include the actual hangar and ship escape scenario.”
Blazer shuddered at the thought of going through that again.
“For the rest of your time at this academy, your Special Operations mission training will be accomplished in these simulators. It will allow us to put you through real battlefield scenarios without risk of physical injury.”
Arion held up a hand and waited for the Admiral to acknowledge him before speaking. “Sir, what if we die in there?”
Everyone looked at the Admiral. It was a valid question given how real it had all felt.
“The system safely ejects you, and we have medical teams on standby just in case. We’ve not had anyone die in these simulators, even when they were still in development.”
“What
about psychological trauma?” Arion pressed.
The Admiral stared at an empty seat. “It happens. We do our best to limit any harm, but like Cadet Millius, it can happen.”
That’s not exactly reassuring, Blazer thought. “What now, sir?” Blazer asked through gritted teeth. The simulators made a certain kind of sense, but what they’d just gone through still left him wanting to lash out at his captors.
“We’ll send you to medical for a full work up. Then you’ve earned a rest. Consider yourselves civilians for the next three cycles.”
The chance to relax, to eat real food again, to climb into a shower, even a sonic shower, and to sleep sounded glorious.
“Your fellows won’t receive the same courtesy if they are pulled out at the end of the testing. They will have to resume classes the next cycle.”
“We’ll take it,” Blazer remarked and all of them started for the door. Tired as he was, he wanted some time in the gym to beat on something.
Tadeh Qudas stepped in front of them, halting their progress. “Admiral, I believe you have something more to tell them?”
The Admiral harrumphed and turned back to the cadets. “We have a tradition for cadets who complete the exercise early. Meet me at Mendrick’s next cycle for breakfast and drinks. Dismissed.”
UCSBA-13, Medical
Blazer felt as if he should be used to the exhaustion by the time medical staff had finished with them. He’d never had an examination take so long before, as they poked and prodded them, making sure that their extended stay in the simulators had had no adverse side effects. So far they were all coming out with blue boards.
Others were not so lucky. Blazer felt a pit in his stomach when he passed the bed Milius lay in. She just shook and jabbered to herself, speaking to something that wasn’t there.
“She’s actually come a long way,” his nurse explained after seeing Blazer’s concern. “Therapists are working with her, and we’ve got her set up with more once she gets home.”
“Be letting me through,” Telsh called and pushed her way to sit beside her old friend.
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