by J. N. Chaney
"Food is just food. Fuel for the machine. Give me a chocolate bar, and we'll talk."
Grady nodded toward one of the packets in the meal ready-to-eat. "You never know what you’re going to get."
I skipped ahead and tore open the small package with my teeth. It was full of some chewy, fruit-flavored candy. I threw the entire handful into my mouth at once and mashed it, thinking it might grow on me.
"Any more details than they gave in the briefing?” I asked. “Does this guy have medical needs? Allergies?"
"Finish your food, and we’ll hit the range,” replied Grady, not really answering my questions. “Then we'll run through some training exercises, make sure you're still sharp."
"I'm good to go right now," I said, slapping both hands hard on the table and standing abruptly. A jolt of electricity shot through my left arm. For a hot second, I thought they’d left the prison restraint software active.
Grady and his men flinched and tightened their security. I pocketed some of the soft candies from the other MREs without letting them see it just to see if I could do it.
If they realized I had palmed the items, they didn't let on. Grady wanted me to sharpen my skills, so I was going to sharpen all of them. "Let's do this!"
"He's a fucking lunatic," said the third man who I didn't know yet. His name tape suggested he was called Maverick.
He looked like as much fun as a spec ops field manual.
Grady walked in front of me, and the other two followed. We didn't encounter any crew-members, which confirmed Briggs had more than just my old friend and his goons monitoring me right now. This was an elaborate operation, perfectly coordinated between spec ops and ship security. I had to be impressed.
"Quite a hike," I remarked, surveying my surroundings. My left eye revealed evidence of deep, sonic cleaning. This corridor had been prepped well.
"It's a big ship," Grady said without looking back.
"Battleship?" It was a test question. I still wasn't sure how friendly my old friend was. Would he save me when the chips were down or leave me to fend for myself?
"Destroyer class. But you already knew that."
"How would I know that?" Looking back at Crank and Maverick, I gave them a winning smile. "I was in dark ops, not the Fleet."
Sergeant Crank didn't answer.
Grady stopped at the door and swiped the security card. "It's a VR range. Better than the real thing."
"Says you."
Inside, I realized it was not only a virtual reality facility, but a small, infrequently used one. Probably for fleet officers who only used it once or twice a year the day before mandatory qualifications.
Grady waved his hand at the practice weapons. I stepped forward and started with the HDK—short barrel, magazine fed from the bottom between the trigger assembly and shoulder stock, optics on top, flashlight below the barrel, and a personal favorite of mine. My escorts stood back and said nothing. They were probably impressed but never showed it. I drew a smiley face on one target with bullet holes just to make sure they were watching.
“Nice,” Grady said. “You always were a fucking spaz.”
“So what if you can shoot," Sergeant Crank said. "How is your conditioning?"
It was a dumb question. The guy should’ve known better. He'd been in spec ops long enough to know we worked out wherever we could, even if it was a cell. That was what kept us from going crazy.
What he was really doing was looking for a fight. First, we’d have some sort of macho gut check workout and, lo and behold, we’d wind up on the mat punching and choking each other.
He probably wouldn't poke this bear unless he was confident in his abilities. A quick glance at Grady and the other guy confirmed my suspicion. They were curious, probably had a betting pool going.
"I'll get by," I finally answered.
Crank popped his knuckles and furled his upper lip into a sneer. "Yeah? You been doing jumping jacks and push-ups?"
He was trying to piss me off. Yeah, sure I’d done the calisthenics, but I’d also been doing handstand push-ups and making every conceivable exercise as difficult as possible—from doing tons of reps superfast or super slow or in combination with other body-weight exercises.
He had to know this. That was what he would've been trying to do if he was taken prisoner and put in confinement. There were also meditation exercises and a number of other techniques to hold on to the sanity for as long as possible in the harshest environments imaginable.
"You want to throw down or what?” I asked, tossing a glance back at him.
“Yeah, Cain. That’s just what I want. We’ve got a ranking system. How long an operator can keep me from choking them out. Grady lasted thirty-eight seconds.”
“How long are you gonna last?” I asked.
Crank’s eyes went wide, and he smiled in anticipation. "You gonna give me a fight, then? Some real competition?"
The stiffness I’d noticed earlier probably indicated he trained a lot, too much, like a black belt in jiu-jitsu trying to maintain rank. So he had some injuries, and also five hundred ways to put me down.
I walked onto the mat and kicked off my shoes. He snorted a curse.
"Aren’t you going to bow to the mat?”
I faced him and started moving around to get loosened up. “Why don’t you make me?"
"That's bullshit. You can disrespect me, but don't disrespect the dojo or the art," he demanded, giving me a hard look.
I’ve always had a healthy appreciation for practitioners of martial arts and other disciplines. But the mat is just a mat to me. I'd never been here before and I didn't know who ran the place. Maybe if I did, it would be different. There was no wise sensei or sifu demanding respect, just a couple of spec ops dudes squaring off for no good reason.
"Fine," he said when I didn’t respond. Crank gave the training area a short bow, but the moment he got on the mat, he rushed me with a flying superman punch.
I sidestepped without even raising my hands to block.
Landing on one foot but recovering quickly, he circled around to face me again. He dropped low and tried to take me down by pulling my knees out from under me like a galactic-class wrestler. I lowered my center of gravity and widened my stance, pushing down on his head and one shoulder to keep him away.
Takedown defense wasn’t one of my best skills, but I stuffed his attempt easily.
I winked at Grady.
"Are you even breathing hard?" he asked, panting a little himself.
"Nope."
“He’s got ten years on you, Crank. Step it up a notch,” commented Grady, clearly enjoying the spectacle.
Crank tried the tactic again and I drove my knee into his face. Blood spurted across the mat. Without waiting for him to recover, I grabbed one of his arms and pulled him past me, then jumped onto his back to lock in a rear-naked-choke.
Eight seconds later, he was out cold.
Had he learned his lesson?
Of course not.
Pushing himself to his feet, he shook his head, trying to focus his eyes on something other than abject humiliation and defeat. Moments later, he snarled curses. “Again, you son-of-a-bitch.”
We circled each other for a while, fists up and feet moving nimbly. I remained cautious. Just because I put him down once didn’t mean he was a pushover.
"You think that was clever?" he asked. “All you did was raise the price you're gonna pay."
I dropped low and shot forward, grabbing his left knee and leveraging my weight into it. There was no way one leg could hold my entire body weight. He went down hard.
With no hesitation to celebrate, I scrambled on top of him and took the mount position. Getting my heels locked in and holding him in place took longer than I planned. He continued to fight, but I chipped away at his defenses until I had him in an arm bar.
He rapidly tapped his hand to submit, but I increased the pressure until he screamed.
Grady tried to pull me off a second later, but I stood on
my own and walked away.
"That was a shit move, Hal,” he said, his face a mask of fury. “You could've maimed him with that stunt."
"He'll be alright. I know when to stop, unlike him."
Grady held my gaze for a long time, his expression tense. "I think that's enough testing for one day. Let's get ready to do this mission before you disable the team who is supposed to come and help you."
Grady kicked everybody else out of the room after Crank and I were done beating the shit out of each other. I got hit by a bit of agoraphobia in the large training room, which wasn't large by a normal person’s standards. As tough as I thought I was, spending so much time in isolation on death row had probably done permanent damage to my psyche.
"That was a fucking circus," I said.
He pulled a bench from the side of the room and sat on it, steepling his fingers together and looking at me thoughtfully. "It had to be done, and you know it. None of these guys have seen you work or trained with you."
"I'm glad you remember, at least."
He shrugged. “You’re a freak of nature. Always were. I wasn’t surprised they made you a Reaper.”
"We have time for real training?"
He probably knew this was coming. Behind all the ass kicking and trick shooting were hours of practice. We moved onto the mat and went through combative drills, slowly at first, and then much faster. I pushed the pace until we started making mistakes and then backed down to a more reasonable level.
By the end, we were sweaty and laughing.
"I wish I knew what went wrong with you, Hal." It almost sounded like there was a hint of regret in his tone.
Not having an answer, I strode toward the door, pretending I could leave whenever I wanted. It kept me sane, but I knew it wasn't true.
Grady joined me and we went into the main room.
It didn't take much to see what was going to happen next. The camaraderie we’d shared slipped from his expression the closer we got to the exit. In the main room, a squad of ship soldiers waited.
One of them stepped forward. "I'm Sergeant Myers. Turn around. My men are going to place you in restraints."
Grady started to say something.
The sergeant interrupted him. "This was discussed. Cain is still a criminal. He doesn't get to roam the ship. Look on the bright side, our brig is much nicer than death row."
4
Grady and I walked across the gangway. His team wore heavier armor and carried more weapons than the recon gear they assigned me. Triple-weave carbon fiber protected my shins, forearms, and torso. Hoverboarders wore thicker helmets than what the Union thought I needed.
“You have secured comms with my team and medical sensors. I’ll know if you get hurt and how bad,” he explained as we walked.
I ignored Grady, more than a little annoyed he hadn't remembered my pregame ritual. In short, I liked to think things through without a lot of chitchat. There was too much subterfuge around this mission, not unusual in my line of work—or what had been my line of work—but fuck me running, this was ridiculous.
Something was wrong. Grady's nervousness betrayed the gravity of the situation. He wasn't just worried about a failed mission. If I didn't come back with this doctor, there would be consequences.
I needed to stop thinking of him as a friend. We hadn't operated together for a long time. People changed. Shit happened.
He kept talking and I kept ignoring him, preferring to look out at the hellhole they were about to push me through. Okay, they weren't actually going to push me. I'd jump. Hesitation was something I’d gotten over in basic training a long time ago.
Dreadmax had been a battle station before it was decommissioned and left dormant for two decades. Someone decided it wasn't a big enough failure in its original role and turned it into a prison for the worst of the worst. The problem was the overly grand design the Union hadn't been able to support at the time. They wanted a ship the size of a moon with the firepower of a few cruisers.
Fortunes were made long before the construction finished. Typical Union bureaucracy and pork-barrel politics had lined a lot of pockets.
Where did they go wrong with the design? They wanted to travel slip tunnels and dominate entire systems with one ship. It was so big, it was like a moon made of fat rings and bulky spires. But once the damn thing was nearly built, funding had gone dry. With only three-quarters of the facility built, the boys upstairs had decided it would make for a better prison than a space station.
"That's the reason we’re going to drop you instead of attempt a landing," Grady said.
“I’m sorry, what?” I hadn't been listening, so I didn't know what he was talking about. The briefing had stated they would land, and I would deploy from the ship while they set up security. I'd known that was bullshit the minute they said it.
Grady, my old friend, would push me out and see if I survived the first ten seconds in Dreadmax. Then maybe he’d follow and mop up with Sergeant Crank and the others.
Most of the superstructure was steel, the cheapest they could find. It necessarily had shielding plates and some energy fields to maintain pockets of surface environment, but I could see huge strips of rust and several towers that had collapsed in disrepair. There were observation towers rising in several places and shorter buildings two or three stories tall that looked like dormitories or warehouses.
“Looks like a trillion-ton doughnut. Barely has a hole,” I said.
“You have a way of minimizing everything. That’s half your problem,” stated Grady.
“My problem is I’m too good at sneaking into places and killing people.”
The main ring, so thick it was hard to see all at once, had streets of a sort, trenches with point-defense batteries that had been repurposed to blow the shit out of misbehaving inmates. Some of the point-defense turrets had been stripped and welded shut.
"Those used to be automated, back when there was a budget to run proper security on this place,” Grady said.
"What if they decide to mutiny and take the place over? There's a shipyard right there on the horizon," I said, pointing. The structures below passed faster and faster as we decreased altitude. Dreadmax had a central spire with the main ring spinning around it. It almost looked like a sphere, or a moon, but that was an optical illusion. Matching speed with the ring wouldn’t be hard for a good pilot and ours seemed to be one of the best.
He shook his head. "None of the ships work. They would have been better off scuttled in space. I was told by someone who knows someone who heard it from a guy that the shipyard is full of sentimental projects, ships named after people who invested enough money to get their name on the prow and demand they not be jettisoned into the void."
"They don't look that bad," I said. Moments later, we passed over the shipyard and I realized how wrong I was. If Dreadmax was in bad shape, the moored vessels were ten times worse. One actually cracked loose of its moorings and drifted away as we passed. It was like watching the bottom of the ocean and seeing a sea creature shake free of the sand.
Debris floated free where it shouldn’t have existed in the first place. There were several hangars with blast doors that looked as though they hadn’t been opened for a decade. I wondered when the last time they’d parked a super carrier in there was.
“The only important parts of Dreadmax are the power plant, gravity generators, and life support. If any one of those things goes down, it’s over for the convicts,” Grady said.
“And your doctor,” I pointed out. “I have a pretty good idea one of them is going to fail in twenty-four hours.”
Grady flushed red, indicating I’d guessed correctly.
“Nice. Thanks for holding back. That’s something you should’ve told me during the brief. Maybe when we were planning this out.”
“You didn’t plan it,” he reminded me.
“And that’s part of the problem. Briggs says I’m here because I have the experience, but that only counts for killin’, I guess. Doesn’
t matter that I’ve got more experience with extractions than every single one of you. What if I ran into trouble and requested a pickup time well after the entire place goes dark? And what the fuck happens to the people down there when it does? Shouldn’t there be an evacuation mission?”
“Every person in that place was already sentenced to death at least once,” Grady said.
“Like me. How cheery,” I remarked.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“You’re not the one about to be pushed out of an airlock. I mean, I’ll jump on my own. Anyone pushing me is gonna have broken fingers, but you know what I’m saying.”
“Believe it or not, a lot of people are counting on you. Lives are at stake,” he said.
“Sure. I’ll bring back your doctor, or scientist, or whatever he is. You can take that to the bank.”
“Just stick to the plan,” he retorted. “We don’t need any of your hotshot cowboy shit. Step one foot off the planned route and you’re dead along with the principal.”
“What the actual fuck, Grady? No plan ever works like that. The second I’m down, ten things will go wrong. If I’d planned this mission, there would have been allowances made for random shit.”
“Like I said, you didn’t—”
“Stop reminding me,” I interrupted.
“You brought it up.”
“Grady, why aren’t you doing this mission with your team? Doesn’t spec ops do search and rescue?”
He didn’t respond, which was in itself an answer.
Grady’s team wasn’t expendable. More importantly, it wasn’t the only team on this mission. They had already sent at least one group of unstoppable badasses. Who were probably dead. Or worse. Whatever that might be.
“Are you going to swoop in once I find him? Steal my glory? Leave me there on the ultimate death row?”
“I’m running your extraction team.”
“But you’re not the only spec ops unit on this operation,” I said, pointedly. “You’re just the only one I’m allowed to know about.”
He adjusted his gear and checked his team as he answered me, a good way to avoid eye contact. “Stop breaking my balls, Hal.”
