by David Ryker
“I get it,” Ulysses said with a nod. “Y’all been drugged by the guards, man. They’s playin’ with yer heads. You need to check y’self in with that pretty lil doctor, whatsername, Bloom, and stop wastin’ my time.”
Quinn took a deep breath to keep the frustration from showing on his face. He’d known this wasn’t going to be easy before he even walked into the gym, but he’d also hoped it wouldn’t come to this.
“What if I got Sally to confirm my story?”
Ulysses scoffed. “So one shithouse rat is gonna tell me the other shithouse rat ain’t crazy? I told you not to waste my time, Quinn. You got one minute ‘fore my boys come over here and bust you up.”
Quinn sighed and turned his attention to the Yandares. They had stopped their exercises and every one of them was staring in his direction, obviously intrigued by whatever was going on between him and Ulysses. Sally’s eyes, which normally danced with manic energy, looked wary now, as if she suspected them of conspiring against her. Quinn supposed he couldn’t blame her, especially in light of how she’d been affected by her visions in the mess hall.
This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, he thought as he turned and started walking toward the center of the room. He couldn’t see Ulysses, but he was quite sure the man was fuming. You didn’t turn your back on the leader of the most powerful gang on Oberon One and walk away when he was talking to you, especially when other inmates were watching.
Quinn locked eyes with Sally as he approached. She didn’t move, which he took as a good sign, but her look was far from welcoming. Her old playful demeanor, psychotic as it might have been, was gone now. All he could see in her was dread.
“What do you want?” she snapped once he was within earshot. “Leave me alone.”
“I need your help,” he said quietly. “You know as well as I do that something FUBAR is going down on this station, and we all need to be ready for whatever it is. I think your two girls were just the beginning.”
“Shut up,” she growled, raising a warning finger. “Walk away right now.”
“You know I’m right,” he said. His voice was still quiet, but his eyes were steel. “And we all need to work together against whatever the hell it was that attacked our minds. You want to be taken away too, like your girls were?”
That seemed to have the desired effect. Sally’s slender brows dropped over those huge eyes, but she stayed quiet, and Quinn continued.
“Sloane has seconded one of my men to work in the engineering department. He’s our eyes on the inside. Once we get a better idea of what’s going on, I need you and Ulysses to work with us and figure out what to do about it. Are you in?”
Sally stared at him for long seconds before speaking. When she finally did, it wasn’t an answer to his question.
“You might want to duck,” she said, her eyes shifting to something behind him.
An instant later, his head exploded in pain.
11
Quinn staggered forward from the impact of the blow that had struck the back of his skull. His vision was blurred but he could still make out a dozen or more bodies rushing toward them in the center of the gym, including the hulking shadow that was Maggott.
Things happened fast after that. As Quinn’s eyesight refocused, he saw a pair of Yandares flip through the air and wrap their deceptively slender legs around the necks of two unsuspecting Saints. All the women had to do was drop and they pulled their opponents to the floor with them, flipping them onto their backs. It was a classic grappling move, but with the Yandares it looked more like ballet.
Quinn spun to see Ulysses advancing on him. He was obviously the one who threw the rabbit punch, but Quinn struggled to keep his temper in check and not lash out. This was supposed to be a summit, but thanks to the leader of the Saints, it had degenerated into a brawl.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn ya,” Ulysses said amiably. “You had two minutes, and them two minutes is up.”
To his left, Quinn saw a pair of Saints holding Maggott’s arms while Ruiz advanced on him, his fists up. He knew better than to worry about his man, though, and turned his attention back to Ulysses. He heard Maggott grunt as he heaved his two captors off the floor and dropped them on their heads.
“Don’t do this, Ulysses.” Quinn held his hands up in surrender. “A riot is the last thing we need right now!”
“Too late.” Ulysses shrugged. He swung a haymaker that Quinn easily ducked. “It’s already happenin’. Might as well have some fun.”
Beside him, Maggott stomp-kicked Ruiz across the room as the Yandares traded blows with two of the other Saints. Most of the other inmates were hanging close to the walls, not willing to step in unless whichever gang they were associated with looked to be losing ground. For now, they were content just to be the audience.
A glance up to the mezzanine confirmed that Ridley and Boychuk were also curious, but not ready to intervene. That much was working in Quinn’s favor, at least.
He blocked Ulysses’ blows without countering, but it wasn’t easy. Quinn was trained to end fights, not prolong them, and Ulysses was a vicious opponent. If Quinn let this drag on too long, he ran the risk of serious injury.
“Enough, man!” he barked as he stepped inside the arc of Ulysses’ roundhouse kick and drove an elbow into his ribs. A second later he had positioned himself behind Ulysses, with his forearm firmly around his throat. “Stand down, goddamn it!”
Ulysses answered by driving his bald skull backward into Quinn’s nose. The ferocity of the blow, combined with the element of surprise, caused Quinn to stumble again. He threw his hands up in a defensive posture, waiting for the inevitable follow-up blow that he wouldn’t be able to see.
It didn’t come.
Around him was a chorus of shouts, grunts and Yandare shrieks that were the typical soundtrack of the many battles the Jarheads had endured over the last two years. His eyes finally focused on Ulysses, who was doing his best to deal with Sally. She was raining a flurry of punches and kicks on him, most of which he was barely able to deflect. It gave Quinn a welcome burst of hope.
“Stop it!” she cried as she snaked a kick into Ulysses’ inner thigh. It caught him full on in the big muscle there and he dropped to one knee with a grimace. “Listen to Quinn!”
Quinn spared a look back up to the mezzanine to see if the guards were going to step in. They hadn’t unshouldered their rifles yet, and Tait looked almost bored, but Ridley was watching with interest. He thought he saw her eyes dance a little at the violence down below, which meant she was simply waiting for the right time.
A crude plan quickly formed in his mind and he staggered toward Ulysses and Sally. A few of the wallflowers had entered the fray now, and Maggott was fending off four inmates.
“That hurt, missy,” Ulysses groaned as he stood shakily. “You gonna pay.”
With that, Quinn saw Ruiz’s huge bulk land on Sally from behind, knocking her down and pinning her to the floor. Ulysses limped over to where she lay, her dazed eyes trying to focus, and cocked his good leg back. He was going to kick her head like a soccer player with a shot at a penalty goal.
Quinn leapt forward and landed on the floor in front of Ulysses’ foot just as it reached the midway point of the kick. The impact of the Saint’s boot in his ribs knocked the air out of Quinn’s lungs, but he had saved Sally from almost certain brain damage and possibly death. He rolled onto his side, his arms wrapped around his ribcage, just as Maggott appeared over them all. He reached down and heaved Ruiz off of Sally with a herculean grunt.
“So that’s how it is?” Ulysses growled, limping toward Quinn. “Y’all are teamin’ up against the Saints?”
From his vantage point on the floor, Quinn saw Sally’s eyes suddenly flash with the cold fury that he’d long associated with her before the events in the mess hall. In short, the old Sally was back, and she was going to get revenge.
Shit, he thought.
He managed to push himself off the f
loor despite his protesting lungs and ribs as Sally kipped up into a standing position. Ulysses looked alarmed that she was back in play so quickly and he stumbled backward, favoring his bad leg.
“Saints!” he shouted. “Get over here!”
The panic in Ulysses’ voice was vaguely satisfying to Quinn as he finally got to his own feet. But the feeling disappeared when he saw Sally suddenly leap forward and grab Ulysses by the neck with one arm and pull him toward the low-gravity apparatus. Before any of the Saints could reach their leader, she had his head stuck under a middle rung of one of the free-standing ladders. His legs were on her shoulders, which were supporting the weight of his body. His arms flailed in empty air.
Everyone stopped in their tracks. They knew that Ulysses was in a life-or-death situation: all it would take would be for Sally to drop to the floor and the weight of Ulysses’ body, even reduced as it was, would snap his neck like a twig.
“Sally,” Quinn groaned. It hurt like hell to speak. “Don’t…”
“I haven’t killed you yet,” Sally hissed, ignoring him and talking directly to Ulysses. Her head was between his legs, facing him in a scene that would have been hilarious under less deadly circumstances. “Will you listen now?”
The panic in Ulysses’ eyes was in stark contrast to the shooting-the-breeze tone of his voice: “You have mah attention, ma’am.”
Holy shit, Quinn thought. He was still struggling to breathe, but it was getting easier. We just might pull this off.
Then two things happened. First, he heard a crackling sound that made his guts go cold. Next, Sally’s body turned a fluorescent blue and her face twisted into a grimace of agony. She’d been hit by a blast of charged dust from one of the guards’ shock rifles, and was now dealing with fifty thousand volts playing havoc with her nervous system.
Quinn didn’t have time to think. He dove forward, tucking into a roll on the cold metal surface of the gym floor as Sally’s body collapsed. His body yelped at him when they collided and he absorbed a small amount of the electricity coursing through her, but he managed to keep control of his muscles. He came to rest on his back less than a second after he started into his roll, his feet propped under Ulysses’ ass, holding him horizontal and preventing his neck from snapping under the rung.
A moment later, Ulysses had extricated himself from the ladder and dropped to the floor beside Quinn. The two of them laid there, breathing heavily, as Sally twitched and bucked against the waning electrical charge.
The harsh bark of an alarm horn filled their ears. From the mezzanine, Ridley was shouting at them to stay put until the response team arrived, unless they all wanted a taste of what Sally had gotten. Quinn scanned the room to see that the other inmates were doing as they were told. Maggott, standing in the middle of a group of Saints, sported a couple of new bruises, but seemed none the worse for wear.
Thirty seconds later, a team of four guards filed in through the hatch in riot armor. Quinn recognized Tait and Holden as two of them. They were joined by Boychuk and Ridley, who had also suited up, and all of them proceeded to take turns thumping the inmates into submission and cuffing them, in preparation for returning them to their cells. Quinn knew that he, Ulysses and Sally were likely headed for the tiny cells that were used for solitary confinement.
Quinn, still lying on the floor, turned to face Ulysses, who was doing the same.
“We don’t have much time,” he hissed. “Are you in or not?”
The guards grabbed the pair and roughly yanked them to their feet, locking their hands behind them in thick rubber restraints. Ulysses turned to Quinn and gave him a wide grin an instant before the guards shoved him towards the entrance.
“Giddyup,” he said amiably.
Quinn had a single moment to savor his victory before a guard drove a baton into his back, sparking a fresh wave of agony in his bruised ribs.
12
Dev Schuster wore the usual mask of boredom that most inmates shared as the guard opened the door to the Jarheads’ cell and ushered him inside. Bishop and Maggott watched in silence from their bunks as he climbed to his own, then waited as the guard locked the door and strode off down the corridor.
When he was sure that they were alone, Schuster leapt down to the floor, his eyes wild.
“You are not gonna believe what’s going on in engineering,” he breathed. “Hey, where’s the captain?”
“Solitary,” said Maggott.
Schuster’s eyes narrowed. “Does that mean the mission was a success or a failure?”
“He pulled it off,” Bishop said impatiently, sitting up in his bunk. “Report.”
“Okay, but I’m telling you, this shit is crazy.”
“Get tae the fookin’ point!” Maggott snapped.
“All right, all right.” Schuster took a seat next to Bishop. “First things first: the Kevin Sloane I’m working for now is not the one we’ve known up to this point.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bishop.
“I mean he’s acting really weird and talking like an AI, for starters. Quinn told us that he’d acted strangely on the surface, and I can tell you he hasn’t stopped since we got back.”
“Mebbe he got his bell rung doon there?” Maggott offered.
“I thought so, too,” said Schuster. “Until he showed me what I was working on.”
“Which was?” Bishop was clearly annoyed.
Schuster leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We talked about the meteorite strikes maybe opening up a new vein of palladium, yeah? So I asked him if that was the case, and he said no. Then he set me to scanning for something else.”
He paused a moment for effect, then quickly continued when he saw Bishop’s hand curl into a fist. “Do you know anything about the extended periodic table? What am I saying, of course you don’t. Sorry. Anyway, it’s a list of elements that scientists believe must exist but don’t have any proof of. Make sense?”
“Like a giant squid.” Maggott nodded.
Bishop turned to him. “Now neither of you are making sense.”
“Actually, Mags is right,” said Schuster. “For years people knew giant squids existed because they saw evidence of them. Giant sucker marks on whales, stuff like that. But they never actually saw one until the early days of the 20th century. This is like that, sort of.”
Bishop frowned, clearly angered by the fact that Maggott had grasped something before he had. “Okay, I think I get it.”
Schuster knew he’d have to keep it as simple as possible from now on, which shouldn’t be hard, since even he didn’t really understand everything he was about to tell them.
“Sloane had me start scanning for unusual ripples on the surface,” he said. “That in itself isn’t unusual. It’s how they determine the ideal spots on the surface to do sounding for palladium deposits. But Sloane had me looking for something else: a certain type of radiation signature.”
“So you’re looking for something other than palladium?” Bishop scratched his chin. “But why? Palladium is the most valuable substance there is. SkyLode exists solely to find it and get it to market.”
“Exactly,” said Schuster. “Oberon is the best known source of palladium in the solar system, and Oberon One is pretty much just a forced labor camp masquerading as a prison. They pay billions to all three government factions in return for the rights to the minerals and a steady supply of prisoners to find and extract the palladium. In fact, Sloane told me that SkyLode is already planning a surface colony once they determine where the best deposits are located.”
“And yet you’re looking for something else. And you don’t even know what it is.”
“That’s right. I won’t bore you with the details, but Sloane basically had me looking for evidence of an element that no one has discovered yet. He seemed to be certain that it was there; it was just a matter of finding it.”
“And?” Bishop asked.
“That’s the thing,” Schuster said with a grin. “Whatever ‘it’ is, it’s defi
nitely down there. And there’s a lot of it.”
“I dinnae get it,” said Maggott. “What’s this got t’do with whatever happened in our heeds?”
“I don’t know, but I do know that the others in engineering are acting weird, too. None of them spoke to me the whole time; they just went about their business like I wasn’t even there. At first I assumed it was because I’m an inmate, but after awhile it was more like they were… I don’t know, drones or something.”
“What were they working on?” asked Bishop.
“I didn’t get to see a lot of it, but I did manage to sneak a few peeks at their screens as I walked by. They all seemed to be focused on the Rafts.”
“That’s probably not unusual. I’m sure transport maintenance is a big part of their regular duties.”
Schuster nodded. All six of the Rafts were leftovers from the Trade Wars of the 2070s. They had been used to transport troops and equipment from the Earth’s surface to the military satellites in orbit, which was why they were appropriated by SkyLode. With a wing span that allowed for sleek maneuvering in the Earth’s gravity, and a deep cargo belly, Rafts were perfectly suited for back-and-forth jumps from Oberon the moon to Oberon One. And the fact that they’d been decommissioned after the Trilateral War made them essentially free for the taking.
“That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “Except for one thing: one of the schematics I saw included something on the nose that I’ve never seen before. I can’t be sure, but I think it might have been a plasma cannon.”
Maggott cocked a shaggy eyebrow. “Oberon’s Rafts ent got no weapons.”
“Exactly. That was one of the reasons the government let SkyLode have them—they were pretty much harmless. One of the decrees of the Shanghai Treaty was that private corporations could no longer own military-grade weapons of any sort. That includes ones attached to ships.”
“And why would they need weapons anyway?” asked Bishop. “Even if the war wasn’t over, we’re two-and-a-half billion kilometers from Earth at closest orbit. The only traffic we see is the quarterly supply ships. For all intents and purposes, we’re completely alone out here.”
