by Greg Dragon
Jack walked forward and stopped at the booth. The first Hunter indicated the seat, and Jack complied, wondering what was coming next. He had just noticed that all of the windows on the wall next to the booth were blacked out when he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his shoulder. He looked down, staring at the spot where the pain had erupted, and saw another of the Hunters withdrawing a needle of some kind.
It’s just like the pain from the dart. The one that Jagan’s slavers shot you with.
A wave of dizziness swept over him and he felt his feet begin to tingle. The tingling sensation spread rapidly along his legs, up his body and into his arms, then his neck and his face. As it flooded over his cheeks Jack felt the world slipping away.
Will they put you in a fighting pit? He thought.
No. He didn’t think so.
The Pit
Many Years Before
Jack threw his weight to his left, hit the floor and rolled. Behind him, he heard a sharp clang as something hit the ground, hard. He pushed himself up, jumping to his feet, and spun around, instinctively swinging the wooden bat in his hand around in an arc as he came up. But his opponent wasn’t there. Instead, the man was away across the other side of the pit, hopping from foot to foot, almost dancing as he swung the flail around his head.
The crowd above roared their enthusiasm, and Jack made the mistake of glancing up. Above him, maybe fifteen feet from the floor of the pit, was a metal railing attached to a barbed-wire fence, and looking down at him were dozens of faces, all of them wide-eyed, many of them grinning. A cacophony of voices assaulted his senses as the crowd shouted words that he couldn’t decipher.
And it was a mistake to take his eyes off his opponent. Jack felt, more than saw, the man rush forward, and he sensed the flail – a ball of stone attached to a handle by a long chain, swing towards his head. He threw himself sideways again, rolling away, as rush of wind brushed past him.
“Oh! It looks like we found a lively one!” came a booming voice, seemingly from all around him. But Jack was too busy avoiding the man with the flail to locate the speakers that the voice bellowed out from.
He gripped his bat too tight, his fingers turning white from the exertion, and once again threw himself away from his opponent, coming up across the pit again.
This time the man facing him stood still for a moment, his head cocked to one side as he scrutinised Jack.
He’s weighing you up, Jack thought. He’s looking for a weakness. Well, he shouldn’t have much trouble. There are enough of them.
The fight was obviously unfair and intentionally so. Jack had heard of the pit fights, and how those that were part of Jagan’s clan used them as entertainment, and he knew that he was meant to die there. His opponent was armed with a more lethal weapon, and wearing a leather jacket and leather trousers, but he was also wearing a motorcycle helmet with a mask attached, and some shoulder pads made of a material that Jack didn’t recognise. Was it metal? Reinforced plastic? A lot of Jagan’s men wore armour scavenged from the ruins or made from scrap metal. Jack, on the other hand, was wearing what he had left when they brought him in, just the t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans.
Jack stood there, breathing heavily, as the man started to circle around, edging towards him, and still swinging the flail.
One hit from that thing and it will all be over, he thought, also considering his own weapon. It was a wooden bat, and thin. If he tried to use it to hit the man over the head, against the motorcycle helmet, he may dent the helmet, even stun the man, but the bat would most likely break. It already had some cracks in it.
And then the choice was taken away from him as the man lurched forward, jumping the distance between them and swinging the heavy stone ball down towards his head. Jack stumbled, falling backwards, but still he tried to bring the bat up, tried to defend himself. He felt the wind rush out of his chest as he hit the floor, and then felt a jolt in his arm followed by the sound of wood cracking. He rolled sideways, and only just in time as the heavy stone flail came swinging in for a second strike. Again it missed him by inches and bounced off the floor where he had been just a moment before.
Jack pulled back the bat, about to attempt a strike, when he saw that half of the weapon was lying on the floor a few feet away. All that was left in his hand was a foot-long splinter attached to the rubber grip.
His opponent came on again, swinging the flail around his head, and all Jack could do was back away towards the wall. His shoulder hit wood and he realised, with certainty, that he had gone as far as he could. The next lunge would be his end.
And then it came. The man stepped forward and swung the flail low, coming in from the side, and faster than he’d expected, but Jack, unarmoured as he was, was faster. He fell sideways and felt the heavy stone of the flail hit the wall. And then the man’s eyes went wide as the ball smashed through the wooden barrier and stuck there. Jack’s opponent had just half a second to attempt to pull the flail out from the wall, and he heaved on it, wood splintering and cracking, but the flail didn’t move. It was stuck fast in the dirt behind the barrier, and Jack saw his moment. Just as the man let go of the flail, and reached for the knife at his side, Jack lunged forward and rammed the sharp end of his broken bat at the man’s neck.
Luck, it seemed, was with him. The wood splinter burst through the leather around the man’s neck and into his throat. Jack pushed hard, but then let go of the bat, his hands jarring with the impact, as he stumbled back and fell to the floor.
He gasped for breath, heard the crowd above the pit roaring with enthusiasm, and watched as his opponent grabbed hold of the bat and stumbled. Blood poured down the man’s chest and down his arms.
“We have a winner!” came the bellowing sound of the match’s commentator. The crowd above roared.
“Bring him on up!”
But the world around Jack darkened and spun, and he fell forward into the dirt. He was vaguely aware of boots on the ground around him for a moment, but then he passed out.
That had been the first fight, but not his last.
Caught
The darkness of unconsciousness after the fight felt much the same as what Jack now experienced. Except this time, as the world came back in a swirling lack of colour, he wasn’t lying on the floor of a cage, but on a metal bed attached to the wall of a chamber even smaller than the cage he had spent most of his time in down in The Pits. But the walls of this new prison were solid, grey metal, and the only light came from a circular disk in the ceiling.
It took him a while to sit up, and he rubbed his forehead, trying to alleviate the throb of the headache that now pounded on the inside of his skull.
How long have you been out? An hour? A day? It could be any amount of time and you wouldn’t know.
At least the cage in The Pits had a view of daylight.
There was something else. Something, as he sat there on the bed, looking around at the room that was void of any furniture apart from the bed, that bothered him. His stomach was churning and his head felt light.
Motion, he thought. It’s motion sickness. That’s what I’m feeling. I’m moving. Or rather, the chamber that I’m in is moving.
A Trans.
That was what the windows had reminded him of.
The picture that he had once found of the strange, amazing construction that had been created by the people of long ago, and used, somehow, to travel great distances. The magazine from bottom of the dumpster in the old factory north of The Crossing and out towards the Ashlands. It had a picture of such a thing, and a long story about something called a Trans. That was what had been next to the booth in the last hall, and what he had seen before they made him sit in the wheeled chair and injected him.
I’m on a Trans.
But where am I going?
Promotion Demotion
Lisa sat looking at the window of the Trans carriage. Outside, a beautiful sunset raged over the forested hills. A deep orange glow, sliced with yellow and red, covered most of the
landscape and highlighted the endless sea of spruce trees that covered the land. Except none of those trees were alive and Lisa knew it. Even if the land above had once been covered with trees, it would be difficult to look at them through the window she faced.
The Trans hummed along the track, barely making an audible sound as it swept along. It was nearly two hundred feet underground, rather than up on the surface, and the dazzling view of sunset was actually a screen display to make the enclosure of the carriage less stifling.
Lisa looked away from the screen and back down to the display pad in her hands. There, in bold type, were her new orders and her new assignment. She sighed heavily and closed her eyes for a moment before continuing to read.
The last few hours had been the worst of her career so far. That something could change so quickly, and for a misdemeanour that she considered so small, was beyond her. And yet, she thought back to the meeting that she had been called to attend with the Section Governor, a big, bearded man called Alderton, and she realised that it was only she that thought it minor.
“So, Corporal...Markell. You were reported for removing your faceguard while out on duty. Do you have anything to say on the matter?” the tall man had said, and Lisa could tell that he was not impressed, and that he wouldn’t treat the incident lightly. But even so, she hadn’t expected it to go as far as it had.
“Your record is exemplary. Top performance, high discipline record. Excellent. Not so high a delivery record in the last couple of months. Hmm...not so good, but that’s common at the moment, so we can overlook that.”
Alderton hadn’t offered her the chance to reply and had merely continued to rattle on.
“We can’t ignore the misdemeanour of removing your face guard, though. I have been advised to use the highest discipline in accordance, but I’m not an unreasonable man, and considering your record, I think the best choice will be to reassign you to a new duty. Take you off the recruitment operation. The alternative is to discharge you, and I’m sure neither of us wants that.”
And apart from some formalities, that had been it. After two minutes of listening to Alderton, she had been dismissed and told to go and wait in her quarters for her new assignment.
That had been just two hours ago, and her new assignment was waiting for her on the system when she got back to the barracks, with instructions to be packed up and waiting at the Trans terminal in twenty five minutes.
Twenty five minutes. That was all they had given her. And the rest of her squad were out of the barracks and on duty, not to return for at least six more hours. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. Instead, she had quickly packed her few personal belongings and hurried out of her room, heading to the terminal and arriving with just five minutes to spare.
Guard duties at the NE7 Resource Recycling Facility.
She’d heard of the place before. It was where they sent a huge number of captives after they were sorted into possible abilities at the terminal. In fact, Lisa knew that on the very Trans she was on, there would be fifty or more new workers heading for that very facility.
Resource Recycling Facility. That was a joke. The place was a rubbish dump, far, far out into the Ashlands across the dead waters. It was a place that killed most of the workers sent to work there. There were stories from many years before, from a long time before Lisa was born, that said the NE7 zone was used as a rubbish tip for the city, a place so far away that it wouldn’t matter what they dumped there. And yet it was now used as a salvage area, where captured workers would sift through the rubbish to find anything of use.
A promotion, the assignment had been called in her note from Alderton. She was now promoted to First Corporal, and would be in charge of expedition security.
And what the hell was that anyway? Expeditionary? It was a damn demotion is what it was, she thought. Bastard decided to get rid of me, send me out into the far away, into the ashes. And probably only because firing a trooper was not the done thing.
Lisa sighed again and wondered what her parents would think when they found out, or her brothers. Her position and pay were the mainstay of her family’s tickets on the next transport off-world. She hoped to hell this wouldn’t damage their chances.
Her thoughts were snapped back to the Trans as a light went on at the far end of the carriage, followed by a repetitive buzzing noise that grated at her nerves. She had been alone in the large, spacious compartment for over two hours, for most of the journey, but now the far doors hissed open and two Trans staff stepped swiftly into the room and sat down in the nearest seats.
“All passengers please be seated for deceleration,” came a metallic voice from the speakers above her head. The voice echoed somehow, or maybe it was just her imagination. The message repeated a dozen times and then stopped. Then there was a loud sound of rushing air from all around her. Lisa felt her stomach lurching, as though it didn’t want to stay where the rest of her was.
The display panel to her left switched off for few seconds, the beautiful forest scene vanishing from view, and Lisa felt a strange pang of regret. But there was no time for her to mourn the loss of a fake scene, for the screen flickered – as did the others in the carriage – and then an image of a very different place appeared, this one very real.
And First Corporal Lisa Markell got her first glimpse of a place that she wished she had never had to visit.
Caught
Jack forced his hands up to the wall, trying to prop himself up as the Trans began to slow down. There had been no warning. One moment he had been sitting in the middle of the room, staring at the blank wall, and the next his stomach had heaved and he slid across the polished floor to bump into the wall. Realising that raising his arms to sit himself up was only going to make him feel worse, he lay flat on the ground and waited for the motion sickness to abate.
Had Ryan laid on the cold metal floor when he travelled here? If he travelled here. That had bothered Jack from the moment he’d watched the huge man being dragged off to the Conversion Facility, to a different place. And then the sorting of people, and the different corridors that led to...wherever they all led. He’d presumed that all captives went to the same place. But the possibility that he would be sent somewhere completely different had become very real.
But maybe he was wrong to think so, maybe Ryan had sat in the very same chamber, wondering where he was going. Jack lifted his hand and traced the outline of a stickman and then a smaller stickman next to it.
All you managed to get the boy for his birthday was a pair of crayons. Sure, they were colours he didn’t have, but it wasn’t much, was it? Had Ryan sat here and drawn his stickmen on these walls?
It was foolish to think that, of course. He knew that. Whatever reasons the Hunters captured people, they would be different for each person, surely? Grown adults who were healthy would be sent to work somewhere, and the sick would be...well...he didn’t know where they would go.
He estimated that it took two minutes for the Trans to stop. Jack had presumed that the other corridor, where the limping man and the old woman had gone, would lead to the place where they dealt with that, but he’d been sent down the same damn corridor as a man sick with Ratter’s Plague. As for children, they would surely go somewhere else.
Jack sighed and tried not to dry heave, but his stomach wrenched with spasms as the motion of the slowing Trans reached its most violent. For a moment, he thought that he would actually be sick, or maybe pass out, but then the feeling was gone. The Trans had stopped.
He lay there for a few seconds, his head spinning, before taking a deep breath and sitting up. His stomach growled loudly enough for him to hear it.
How long is it since you ate, anyway? Three days at least. Has to be. The wheat bread you traded for with those nails, wasn’t it? Damn that stuff had tasted nasty. And that had to be three days, unless you’ve been out cold for longer.
And how fast had the Trans been travelling for it to take so long to stop?
Stupidly fast
.
Jack sighed, and sat there in the dim light, wondering how long he would have to wait before the door opened and they ushered him off to somewhere else.
Almost as though someone was listening to his thoughts, the door at the other end of the tiny compartment hissed open and a green light flickered on above it. Jack hadn’t noticed the tiny panel above the frame of the door and cursed himself for it.
Years ago you would have spotted something like that. But he wasn’t given long enough to properly berate himself before a metallic voice spoke from the panel.
“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right.”
Jack frowned.
No guards?
He waited a moment, wondering just what would happen if he sat there and ignored the voice.
“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right,” repeated the voice, and as Jack watched, one of the other captives shuffled past the doorway. The man looked confused and more than a little dazed.
Pretty much how you feel.
Jack rose to his feet, deciding that he wasn’t really so keen on finding out what would happen if he didn’t do as the voice said, and then started to walk towards the door. The old man passing by the door glanced at him.
I know him. That’s the guy with Ratter’s Plague.
Jack stopped, watching the man from the middle of the room. He’d expected to never see the guy again, expected them to cart him off to somewhere, wherever they dealt with nasty diseased people.
Probably a pit.
But then he noticed that the man’s skin was no longer mottled with red pock marks.
Jack frowned, and looked the man in the eyes.
“I’m not sick no more,” said the old man, raising his hands to look at them, his expression that of a child seeing something unknown for the first time. Then he touched his chest. “It don’t hurt here no more,” he said, a grin spreading across his grizzled and scarred face.
