Lost Valor

by Kal Spriggs

  I knew that I’d need to be in good shape if I was going to escape. I’d have to be capable of fighting, capable of killing, if need be. I couldn’t help an acid burn of self-hate as I thought about how I’d been caught. My sister and I had jumped two pirates, trying to sneak into our parents’ dig site and hide there in the tunnels. But while my sister had gotten the upper hand, I hadn’t. The pirate I’d been fighting had knocked me down. I hadn’t been able to get away from him, and my sister had kicked out the support that held up the ceiling.

  I closed my eyes, remembering her look of determination, even as tens of thousands of tons of sand and rock fell on her. She’d done it to save me, I knew, to kill the pirates trying to get us and maybe to give me an opportunity to escape. But she’d died in the process. Like my mother. I felt like a coward as I considered what I’d done so far, how I’d undermined their efforts to save me.

  Working out gave me a way to exhaust myself so I’d actually sleep. If I was too tired to think, maybe I would be too tired to be angry at myself.

  I knew when we made orbit because Vars showed up, just before when we normally had lunch. “Get all of your papers together,” he snapped. “Bring them with you.”

  Ted and I gathered our papers and did as we were told. It was a short walk from the cargo bay with the prisoner cells to the shuttle, down what was obviously a corridor they used mostly for moving cargo and prisoners. The handful of side hatches were all locked, so even if Ted and I somehow managed to escape, we’d have nowhere to go.

  The shuttle was a cargo shuttle, with a few fold-down seats along the sides. There were a number of heavy boxes and crates down the center, several of them looked familiar and I saw dust and grains of sand here and there. I was willing to bet that this was my parents’ research material and notes.

  Vars took a seat across from us, his gaze boring into me. The other two guards took seats at the back of the shuttle. The cargo shuttle had a single hatch, near the front, that I assumed led to the cockpit. I had to fight the urge to make a break for it, fighting a mad impulse to try and take over the shuttle, maybe even to try and ram it into Wessek’s ship. Vars clearly hoped I’d try something so he could hit me with the implant. Besides, beyond some training simulation time, I didn’t know how to fly a shuttle.

  The shuttle didn’t have any windows or ports. I could feel as the warp-field for the ship itself shut down, because we lost gravity. I clutched at my seat, trying not to float off, even as Ted did the same. Vars gave a cruel laugh as we both fumbled around. My stomach flip-flopped a bit and I heard Ted gag.

  “If you throw up,” Vars grunted, “I’ll make you lick it up.”

  Ted’s jaw clamped shut.

  The shuttle maneuvered away from the ship, here and there the motion pushed us around. I could tell that we hit atmosphere, though, because the entire shuttle rattled and shook, and I could hear the roar of atmosphere on the ship’s hull. That’s promising, I thought to myself.

  The shuttle’s thrusters brought us down and gravity resumed soon enough. Ted practically bounced out of the seat as we hit turbulence and Vars laughed again as my friend scrambled to hold onto something. I wasn’t much better off, clinging to the flimsy folding seat and wondering if I dared hope that the shuttle would crash and explode. Oddly enough, I found that I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live, I wanted to get back home... and I wanted to make all of these pirates pay for what they’d done to my family.

  I could feel the shuttle bank and swoop as it came in for landing. I wasn’t sure if that meant we were swerving around buildings or flying through a canyon, though. At least the planet had an atmosphere of some kind, that was far more promising than an airless moon like Ted had mentioned.

  It took us three weeks, by my count, I thought, remembering back to all the offered meals that Wessek had tempted me with. That didn't even count the two weeks I'd been unconscious. In five weeks, we could be almost anywhere in the Periphery or even back in Guard Space somewhere in the Harlequin Military Sector.

  I tried to think of places that pirates operated out of, but I just didn’t know. The only systems I could think of were Vagyr and Hanet. Hanet was where the mercenary guild operated out of, though, and Wessek didn’t seem to act like a mercenary. And the Vagyr system, while being a pirate haven, was still in Guard space. They wouldn’t allow implants like the ones we had, or slavery... would they?

  The shuttle stopped moving and then we seemed to settle, like we’d landed on some kind of elevator or something. A few minutes later, I heard creaking and groaning outside, and then the rear hatch opened.

  “Out,” Vars grunted.

  “So welcoming, aren't you?” I grated at him as I stood up, helping Ted to his feet. We walked out the back of the cargo shuttle, down the ramp and into a big, rusty-looking landing bay. The groaning and creaking must have come from the big, overhead doors above us. The landing bay had a disused look, with numerous piles of broken equipment and tangles of cables dangling from the ceiling. The walls looked to be of dark gray concrete.

  Vars and the guards walked us down the bay to a hatch. Vars paused outside it to type in a code, shielding what he typed from our sight. The hatch opened and he waved us in.

  I stepped into the corridor, seeing light to the side and I gasped at what I saw.

  The window looked out on tall, jagged spires of rock. In the near distance, I saw a volcano belching fire into the sky and down below us, I saw a river of bubbling magma flowing. Looking around, I could see that the facility lay on some sort of rock spire, though I couldn’t make out many details.

  Vars gave a braying laugh as Ted and I stared out the window. “Just in case you had any thoughts of escape. The atmosphere is toxic, you’d cough your lungs out before you got anywhere.”

  I looked back at him, and his dark eyes bored into me, “There’s no escape, Armstrong.”

  ***

  Chapter 4: This Is Getting Complicated

  Ted and I were moved to a processing area. Vars ordered us to strip down, then he sprayed us with a hose. The cold water stung and it had some kind of harsh chemicals in it that burned my eyes and nose. When we’d finished, naked and dripping wet, he moved us into another room, where a woman in doctor’s scrubs inspected us. I flushed, trying to cover my privates, but she ignored that, poking and prodding me before typing something into her datapad. “Should we vaccinate them?”

  “How much will that cost?” Vars asked.

  “Complementary, we like to minimize the risks of contamination among the imports,” she answered.

  “Go ahead,” Vars answered.

  Before I could protest, she had an injector out and stabbed it into my arm, followed by Ted’s arm.

  “They’re approved. You’ve implanted them already?”

  “Type one control implants,” Vars nodded.

  “Very well, would you like me to put them into the retrieval system?” she asked.

  “No,” Vars shot me a look, “they’ll never leave the facility.”

  I wasn’t sure what that was about. They were talking about us like we were cattle or livestock. Slaves, I swallowed, we’re slaves. The realization hit me like a bunch to the stomach. I almost curled up and my body started trembling. I was only fifteen years old and I was a slave. The unfairness, the evil of it all left me feeling weak and terrified.

  Vars threw some folded clothing at us. It was a simple gray shirt and pants, made of some cheap, rough fabric that scraped on my skin. The pants barely stayed up on me, I’d lost enough weight that I had to tie the cord at the waist tightly to make sure they wouldn’t fall off. My legs were too long for them, too, and my calves stuck out the bottom in a ridiculous fashion.

  After we dressed, Vars led us out. I was still damp, my dark hair clung to my head and the fabric of the clothes stuck to me in different spots. Vars shoved us down the corridors, coming at last to a laboratory area, with various bits of equipment and machinery. I recognized a prototyper and several other machines t
hat my parents had at their lab. In fact, as I looked closer, I saw that it was the equipment from my parents’ lab.

  My hands clenched into fists and I turned to face Vars, but he was a few meters away, waiting with two more of the armed pirates. “You’ll work here.” He snapped his fingers and one of the pirates, who brought forward the papers we’d spent two days putting in order. The pirate threw them down on a table, scattering half of them.

  “Get to work,” Vars finished. He and his goons stepped back. A moment later, the doors slid shut.

  Ted wandered around the room, looking at things. “I don’t even know where to start. Where did they get all this stuff?”

  “A lot of it,” I said, walking over to the prototyping machine and looking at it, “like this, was from my parents. They must have stolen the entire lab, everything they could move.”

  “What’s that?” Ted asked.

  “A prototyping machine,” I answered. “My parents used it to try and recreate different materials and items they dug up. It has trays with different chemicals and it injects those into the tray and bombards it with microwaves. It needs a lot of power and a feed of raw materials and you could make just about anything.” My eyes misted up as I remembered how my dad had helped me use it to make a toy ray gun when I’d only been five.

  Somewhere, back on Century, that toy gun was probably lost and abandoned. Maybe some alien archaeologist will find it someday and he’ll wonder what purpose it once served... It was a random thought, but it gave me a bit of humor to move on.

  I checked, and sure enough, it wasn’t plugged into any power source. I opened it up and saw the trays of chemicals were empty too, either spilled or damaged. There was some residue, a black, tarry gunk all over the assembly tray. I didn’t know much about how it worked, but I was willing to bet that it was ruined.

  I didn’t know what half the other equipment was. Some of it was newer stuff that my parents must have recently acquired, some of it was from other researcher’s labs, and some of it was covered in heavy layers of dust that made me think it must have been in storage. The pirates must not have known what was useful and what was important, so they’d brought everything.

  I moved to a wooden crate and lifted the lid. Inside, I saw trays of alien artifacts, some with the carefully noted tags typical of my mom, others clearly not yet cataloged. Some were bits of technology, some were pottery shards and pieces of broken glass. I had no idea what to do with it all, what might be important and what wasn’t.

  I was certain of one thing, though. I’d burn all of it, every piece of equipment in the lab and all my parents’ notes, to keep Wessek from benefiting from any of it.

  While I walked around, looking at different things, I was also looking at the walls and ceilings. I saw monitors of various types, for video, audio, and motion. There were other things too, maybe designed to scan for radio waves or radiation. I didn’t know... but I could assume that anything we did in this room would be watched.

  “This is going to be a lot of work,” I said as I made my second circuit around the room. I found an empty notebook and picked it up, finding one of my parent’s pens out of a box. Somehow, taking notes felt right to me. “We’re going to have to put the paper notes back in order,” I waved at the stack that the goon had thrown on the table. “And then we need to start trying to translate it all. It’s probably going to take months.” That was going to be faster than I wanted to admit out loud. I’d recognized a lot of the code words my parents had used and numbers that might seem like gibberish were tied to birthdays, anniversaries, and other key events in my parents’ lives. I’d mentally converted some of it just while we sorted it... and I was sure I could do the rest in weeks rather than months.

  “Then we start on the encryption,” I pointed at the computers, none of them hooked in. I wondered if they’d been damaged. A couple of them looked pretty battered. “Hopefully that will go faster if we’ve translated the notes.”

  As I spoke, I wrote things down on my notepad. But I wasn’t writing what I said. I was writing down what I needed to do to escape and get my revenge. Number one on the list was to map out what I could of the facility. Number two was to find tools and weapons, and this lab was full of potential.

  “We need to find out what Wessek wants,” I told Ted, “what he’s after, that will let us prioritize things.”

  Ted shivered, “I learned not to ask him questions.”

  “We’ll need to know, so that we can give him the information he’s after,” I gestured, “There’s dozens of projects that my parents worked on. I don’t even know everything they did, I do know a lot of it had government funding, which means it probably had various applications.” I knew more than that, but I wasn’t going to say it aloud. The real reason I wanted to know his priorities was so that I could use that against him, string him along, delay him until I had the resources to make my escape.

  One way or another, I was going to get out of here.

  I went over to the stack of papers and started laying them out on the table, sketching things into my notepad as I worked. “First things, first,” I said, sketching out a rough map of the facility, “let’s get a feel for where things are, right?”

  ***

  We got a good start on organizing things. Most of that was trying to move the big equipment into some semblance of order, including plugging it into power where that was available. I didn’t even know what many of the machines were, but I plugged them in and ran them through their start-ups as best as I knew how. My dad had kept manuals for everything and the pirates had brought those along with everything else, so I followed the instructions. I doubted I’d use half of it, but at least I could drain power from Wesseks reactor in the process. It was a small, spiteful thing, but it was the best I could do at the moment.

  We’d just finished pushing a heavy scanner into position and Ted started making the power connection when Wessek arrived. He was talking with a tall, pale man as he came through the doors and Ted and I moved to the side as they came into the lab. “As you can see,” Wessek waved at the lab, “we have acquired much of their equipment and artifacts. We’re decrypting the data and lab notes and we’ll be ready to begin replicating some of their technology soon.”

  He started going into technical details and I listened with half an ear even as I stared at the people he’d brought with him.

  There was Vars, of course. The tall, dark haired boy had his normal expression of arrogance. There were also a pair of pirates in their body armor. But uniquely, all three of them were unarmed. In fact, as I looked at Wessek, I saw he didn’t wear any visible weapons, either.

  My gaze went to the others in the group and that was where things grew interesting.

  There were three guests, accompanied by a man and woman who were clearly guards. Both guards wore heavy armor with full-face visors, the armor was red and black, with a crimson dragon imprinted on the shoulder. I didn’t recognize the crest, but I hadn’t really had any classes on recognizing uniforms from other nations at the Academy Prep Course. That was supposed to start during Plebe Year.

  The two guards both carried sleek-looking rifles and I recognized a few of the attachments on those rifles: sights, cameras, and laser designators. It was obviously expensive gear and so uniform that they were either military or very expensive mercenaries, I’d guess.

  The three guests, too, stood out. The first one, the one Wessek was explaining things to, was a tall, thin man, his skin almost unhealthily pale. He had dark, hooded eyes and wide, thin lips and he most reminded me of a snake. His hair was cropped short, a red stubble that stood out starkly against his pale scalp.

  Behind him were a boy and girl, probably about my age, I’d guess. They both had pale skin and the same red hair, though the boy's hair was longer and the girl's was much longer, both of them with their hair drawn back and secured at the back of their heads. The boy’s features were similar enough to the man’s that I assumed they were father and son, though th
e boy had wider shoulders and I could see thick muscles under his too-tight shirt. I wondered who he was trying to impress.

  The girl was equally pale, but her green eyes were vibrant and I could tell she was taking in every detail of the lab... including Ted and I. She noticed me staring at her and I saw her arch an eyebrow, “Uncle,” she spoke up to Wessek’s guest, “who are they?”

  “Just a pair of slaves,” Wessek said quickly, darting an angry look in my direction. “They’re assisting me in setting things up and decrypting the information, nothing more, my Lord.”

  His guest turned his hooded eyes in our direction. He didn’t seem particularly interested in us, but there was something there, behind his outward disinterest that made me shiver. Those dark eyes of his seemed to pin me to the ground. “Why do you need slaves to decrypt the files?” He had a low, almost sibilant voice, drawing out the “s” in slaves.

  Wessek’s confident smirk had vanished and his olive skin had paled. “One of them is the son of the scientists...”

  “The scientists that you inconveniently killed, yes?” the man asked, turning his hooded-eyed gaze on Wessek.

  Wessek froze and his face went pale. “Yes, my Lord.”

  “See to it that you keep him alive... I’d hate to hear that you completely failed in acquiring the technology that you promised me,” the man’s voice was almost hypnotic. From the way that Wessek seemed to wilt on himself, I didn’t doubt that there’d be serious, possibly fatal, consequences for that failure.

  Interesting, I thought to myself. I’d assumed that Wessek was in charge. But it seemed that this man, whatever his name was, controlled Wessek. Of course, that meant he’d sent Wessek to capture me and kill my parents, though I guessed that killing my parents had been more due to Wessek and Vars messing up than anything else.

  “I won’t fail, my Lord,” Wessek stuttered.