Rebel Sword

by Peter Bostrom

  I gripped my glowing laser sword in both hands and lifted it high above my head to deliver the final blow—

  —and heard someone clear her throat.

  I froze. Then, “Three questions: Who knocked over all the supplies? What are you doing with that testing rod? And who the hell is Darth Vader?”

  My fallen opponent and the mysterious hooded figure instantly evaporated and the massive throne room suddenly looked very small and very messy.

  “It . . . was probably one of those idiots from waste management,” I said without turning around. “You know how they’re always leaving messes . . . if you know what I mean.”

  I waited for a laugh, but it didn’t come. So I kept going. “And the testing rod? I was just, you know, checking its integrity. I’d hate to miss a vein of metal or botch an atmospheric reading because this thing was on the fritz.”

  I quickly flipped the waist-high yellow metal rod around so that its thick, dark sensor with a horizontal stabilizing bar just below—the perfect size for a laser sword handle—was upright and its tapered bottom end clanged against the dusty metal floor.

  “Yup,” I said, banging it on the floor a couple more times for good measure. “Great integrity.”

  I turned around toward the voice slowly, willing it to be in my imagination.

  It wasn’t.

  In the narrow doorway of the storage room, there stood Private Maria Lopez. She was pretty narrow, too. Her hands were on her hips and her head was tilted a little to one side so that her normally shoulder-length black hair hung in a long, imposing curtain.

  “Sure you were, Walker. And Darth Vader?” She stared out of her hard caramel eyes, daring me to answer.

  I stared back at her, daring her to keep staring at me. The only problem was that Lopez really knows how to stare. Especially if it will make the other person uncomfortable. And she has this impossibly blank face when she does it that makes you feel even more uncomfortable the longer you keep looking back at her, so I knew I had to give in.

  “Look,” I finally said, shaking my head free of the stare, “Darth Vader was a stupid character in these vids my parents made me watch when I was a kid. I’d tell you what they were called, but I can’t without having to pay a ridiculous fee. You know—aftermath of the Great Corporate Wars and all that.”

  She just kept staring at me blankly.

  “Anyway,” I scratched at the back of my head. “Some names from the franchise are still legal, so I say Darth Vader’s name whenever I’m . . . um . . .”

  “Checking the integrity of testing rods?” she offered, tilting her head to the other side in a clear challenge to my own integrity. But there was no way I was going to let her get the best of me again.

  “Shouldn’t you be sitting at a desk somewhere reading trashy tabloids?”

  Boom. Nailed it.

  “Shut up, Walker,” she huffed. “Communication channels are acting up, so Colonel Hiller’s called a maintenance crew meeting in the common room in five minutes.”

  She shuffled out of the doorway and, just before it slid back into place, said, “Oh—and Kovac said you’d better get there early, because he’s going to kick your ass.”

  2

  I NEED TO set something straight: nobody kicks my ass. Not unless I say so. Not even if it’s one of the moodiest and one of the largest human beings I’ve met in real life—like Private Elric Kovac. I swear he’s almost as big as that huge green guy from those ridiculous comic books and vids they made on Old Earth—yet another franchise-related name affected by the Great Corporate Wars. So, yeah, he might be massive enough to kick my ass. But the rest of the maintenance crew adored me, so I wasn’t too worried.

  I opened the side door to my crew’s common area and hopped into the stuffy, crowded room. “Honey, I’m home!” I yelled around a mouthful of my Andromeda’s Way candy bar.

  But instead of a warm greeting, I was hit with the sharp smell of burning metal. A large, scratched up metal table sat among several dead sensor banks and filtration units—the sorts of things you’d expect to find on an out-of-the-way station dedicated to processing the military’s metals, waste, and problem officers. A man was hunched over the dark gray table working on something, but my eyes strayed to the closest corner of the room where Lopez now sat in one of the randomly scattered seats.

  As usual, she was staring blankly at a data pad, probably reading celebrity gossip. Her faded gray office fatigues almost made her blend in with the wall behind her, but on the bright side, it made her lightly tanned skin look a little more colorful.

  Near her stood an old holovid projector, which played a scratchy, slightly blue image of a newscaster who was no doubt droning on about how great the government was or talking about another successful Peacekeeper mission and how young citizens would be lucky to join their ranks. Now, the United Federation of Sol’s Peacekeepers were famous for taking good care of their troops, but what the holovids and recruitment posters didn’t mention was that this sort of care lost steam the farther away you got from UFS headquarters on Earth.

  A small display in the corner of the holovid showed the time: four minutes until the meeting. If we were going to settle our score, Kovac needed to get here. Soon.

  I looked back to the table to see Chief Engineer Aaron Rand sitting there in his usual faded light blue mechanic fatigues. He was hunched over a few small silvery objects, using his micro-welder on them.

  He reminded me of one of those ridiculous children’s stories about goblins who hoarded piles of silver and gold in their caves. Except he wasn’t bald like a goblin—he had a thick head of dark brown hair that was parted severely to the side. But he was kind of pale and lanky, and he did usually have big bags under his eyes. So pretty damn goblinish.

  Rand pressed down hard on the metal object and it went shooting out of his hands, across the table, and off the edge.

  “No!” Rand yelled.

  But I was already moving. I shoved the rest of the candy bar into my mouth, quickly reached down, and snatched it out of the air.

  “Gowr it!” I said through my caramel, nougat, and chocolate-covered teeth.

  Lopez looked up at my sloppy sounds and wrinkled her nose before muttering, “Gross,” and returning to her data pad.

  The runaway object in my hand was heavier than I thought it would be and it fit nicely in my palm. I laid it down on the table and pushed it gently back toward Rand. He grabbed it and was immediately back to making sparks with his micro-welder. Not a word of thanks.

  “Hey, Rand,” I said, swallowing. “Working on another useless piece of machinery?”

  Rand finally looked up. He was wearing a goofy-looking pair of round, almost black lenses to shield his eyes from the micro-welder’s tiny sparks.

  “If by ‘useless,’ you mean ‘potentially life-saving,’ then you’d be correct.”

  He returned to his welding and said, “And don’t bother making inquiries about my participating in your useless diversion. I would calcitrate your nether regions.”

  “Um, we use English here,” I said. Boom.

  “Very well—I’d suggest refraining from asking me to play Death Bolts, because I will most certainly kick your ass.”

  There’s no way Aaron Rand could ever kick my ass in anything. Seriously. For starters, he had a mustache. Who wears a mustache? Nobody. He was also a few inches shorter than me and didn’t have nearly the reach I do, so I’d clean the floor with him in a fist fight.

  But he was smart; I’d give him that. Sometimes I wondered why he didn’t just quit the Peacekeepers and go teach at a university or some other place that actually cares about big words and philosophy lessons instead of working as a mechanic on a godforsaken rock like Nix. I mean, Pluto hasn’t been a planet for almost five hundred years now. And Nix isn’t even Pluto’s largest moon. Or its second-largest.

  I leaned forward and pointed a finger at Rand. “No way, Goblin—you wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Rand glared at me unde
r furrowed eyebrows and opened his mouth to respond, but then closed it and returned to his tinkering. Yeah, that’s what I thought—he was speechless.

  Three minutes until the meeting. I plopped down on the chair across from Rand and began to drum my fingers idly on the table. I reached into my pocket for something else to snack on, but came out empty. Damn.

  Rand activated the speaker on one of the little items he was working on and the sound of static erupted. He jabbed a tiny tool into its center and there was an unusually bright spark.

  Suddenly, the static died and a voice with a thick Irish accent said, “. . . Gamma Sector . . .”

  The static returned. Rand twisted his tiny tool until the voice came back.

  “. . . portal . . .”

  More static. Rand grunted in frustration as he twisted his tool for several seconds. The speaker squealed for a moment and then the trembling voice said, “. . . they’ve got magic . . . ,” but it was once again lost in static.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Hey, Rand,” Lopez said, still looking down and swiping quickly through whatever she was reading. “I don’t know what Walker is paying you to play that fantasy trash, but I’ll double it if you turn that off.”

  I shot forward in my seat. “Hey—take it back. I wouldn’t be caught dead with anything fantasy.”

  “Really?” Lopez shot back in a monotone voice, still swiping. “Then who just defeated Darth Vader in the storage bay?”

  Rand raised an eyebrow, but kept looking at the communicator and twisting his tool until the sound finally cut out altogether.

  I opened my mouth to explain the importance of checking the integrity of testing rods, but I was rescued when the main door slid open at the far end of the room to reveal a hulking form.

  Kovak didn’t quite step through the doorway as much as he kind of squeezed through. As usual, he bobbed his cropped, dirty-blond head while his watery blue eyes stared blankly ahead. In one of his meaty hands he shook his trusty vibro-hammer to the beat of what everyone assumed was the same hard-core music he always blasted in the exercise room. But the thing is, I knew what he was really listening to in those headphones. And it sure as hell wasn’t hard-core.

  Kovak lumbered around the stacks of broken equipment to the table, grunted, and dropped his vibro-hammer on the table with a loud thud. Rand’s silly-looking black lenses shot up and he looked like he was about to yell, when he saw who had interrupted his work. His face suddenly broke into a grin.

  “Hello, Kovac,” Rand said.

  “Hey—what’s that? Something for me?” Kovac asked in a deep, slow voice, not bothering to remove his headphones. In addition to looking like that hulking green superhero, he sounded like him, too—he spoke slowly and only used a few words at a time, as if he brain couldn’t handle more than that.

  “Yes, something for you,” Rand said. “I’ve altered these last-generation comm units so they broadcast over a scrambled channel to try and get around the recent disruption.”

  A self-satisfied smile pulled at Rand’s lips. “It also has the added benefit of creating a private channel I can use to wrest my right to privacy back from the UFS.”

  “I need privacy,” Kovac said, letting his mouth hang open. It wasn’t the most intelligent look.

  “Yes you do—we all do. Here’s one that works.” Rand slid one of the round communicators across to the table to Kovac. He grunted, picked it up, and slipped it into one of the cargo pockets on his enormous light green fatigues.

  Rand slid another one to me. “I suppose you’ll be needing one, as well.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I can take care of myself.” But I dropped it into one of my cargo pockets, anyway. I could always use it for target practice.

  Kovac grabbed the seat closest to mine and dropped into it so quickly that I was sure the legs were going to buckle. By some sort of miracle, they held.

  He looked over at the news holovid, so I did, too. Two minutes until the meeting. The holovid displayed a still, three-dimensional image of a smiling soldier in a crisp dark green uniform with close to a dozen medals pinned to his chest. Kovac grunted again and nodded toward the image.

  “Vaiega’s on Neptune.” Kovac said. “Stopping another rebellion.”

  “Yeah, lucky bastard. You know,” I said a little more loudly, “I was the one who got him through basic training. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be begging for credits somewhere instead of posing as the UFS’s poster child.”

  “Was that during your first or fifth time through basic training?” Lopez asked flatly without looking up from her data pad. Rand snickered and Kovac snorted lightly.

  She’d pay for that one. But I stopped myself from delivering a devastating comeback on the spot, because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me.

  Kovac checked the time. One minute until the meeting. He picked up his vibro-hammer from the table and shook it at me. “Now you’re dead,” he said.

  If I didn’t already know Kovac, I probably would have wet myself when that bear of a man pointed a twenty-kilo piece of heavy equipment in my direction—and maybe I did, just a little. The hammer’s head looked like a metal brick had been injected with a quadruple batch of rapid growth hormones, and when activated, it could pound through pretty much anything. It usually took two people to operate—a sort of built-in safety mechanism—but Kovac could do it one-handed. Damn, he was strong.

  “Look, can you get that thunder hammer out of my face?” I said.

  “A thunder hammer?” Kovac asked slowly.

  “You know—the hammer that Norse god used to—never mind.”

  Lopez’s eyes flicked toward me.

  “Anyway,” I hurried on, “are we playing Death Bolts, or are you too scared?”

  Kovac pounded the hammer on the table, leaving a dent. “I’m never scared.”

  Rand raised his head slowly and looked over the top of his black protective lenses. But then he smiled and went right back to work.

  “Okay,” I said. “Prove it. Use my bolt.”

  I pulled a spare metal bolt from my pocket and slid it over to Kovac, who plucked it off the table.

  “Fine—I will,” he said through gritted teeth. “You go first.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.” I fished out another bolt from my pocket and turned toward a disposal chute in the wall next to the common area’s main door. I cleared my throat and said, “Computer—activate disposal field.”

  The hole, which was slightly larger than a data pad, was suddenly filled with a patchy grid of thin, dull green laser beams. All I had to do was toss the bolt across the room between the dead equipment and into the hole without it touching any of the lasers. If I did, I made it to the next round. But if my bolt hit one of the laser beams, I would lose the game and what little pay I had for the next week. And since careful aim meant throwing the bolt really hard, it could come flying back and nail someone in the room if I hit the edge of the chute just right.

  Rand and Lopez both wisely pivoted in their seats so their backs were now facing the hole—just in case—but kept on welding and reading.

  “Don’t miss, Walker,” Kovac rumbled.

  I began to raise the bolt, but then stopped. “How about double or nothing? Two weeks’ pay? That is, unless you’ too scared.”

  “I’m never scared,” Kovac said in exactly the same way as before.

  “You should be scared,” I said. “Say goodbye to your credits—and your next trip to Pluto.”

  I swallowed, hoped nobody saw how difficult it was to do so, and raised the bolt between my thumb and forefinger. I took a deep breath, pulled my arm back, let the bolt fly, and . . .

  The door slid open and a tall, muscular man strode into the room and straight into the flight path of my bolt. There was a blur of dark green as Colonel William Hiller snatched the bolt from midair left-handed. Kovac and I both gasped.

  Colonel Hiller slowly opened his old black and s
ilver command glove to see what the projectile was. I think he was disappointed that it wasn’t a bullet or something more menacing than a standard construction bolt. He clenched his jaw, shook his head, and glared at me.

  “Private Walker,” he barked.

  I jumped to attention, bumping the table and getting an angry look from Rand. “Yes, sir!”

  “We’ve lost contact with a patrol in Gamma Sector and need someone to troubleshoot the problem with testing equipment. Congratulations, Private. You’ve just earned that honor.”

  Without looking, he casually tossed the bolt toward the disposal hole. It sailed cleanly through the opening and didn’t graze a single laser beam.

  “Suit up, soldier, because you’re coming with me. Now!”

  3

  I WAS STILL a bit star-struck at having Colonel Hiller as the commanding officer of my station. I mean, I had a poster of him in my room when I was a teenager. Everyone did. The UFS Peacekeeper recruiters gave out those posters like candy—and sometimes with candy—during their regular high school visits.

  But this William Hiller looked different than the thirty-something badass who brandished a plasma cannon on my bedroom wall. He looked dangerously middle-aged and his deep-brown skin had a few thin, raised scars that hadn’t been on the poster. He had the same short black flat-top, but now it was gray around the temples. And instead of looking ferocious, he looked tired.

  But this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for—once he saw how great I was at my job, he’d be sure to give me the promotion I kept applying for.

  I sprinted to the storage bay and grabbed my yellow laser sword—I mean, my testing rod—and rushed back. Hiller was gliding down the narrow corridor toward the airlock and I had to hurry to catch up with him.

  “Sir!” I panted. “Thanks for trusting me with such an important mission.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t trust you. That’s why I’m coming along for a simple reading. To make sure it’s done right.”

  It was like he’d shoved a double-sided dagger into my stomach, pulled it out, and then stabbed me with the other end, too. I guess this wasn’t the mission I thought it was going to be. It was more like a punishment.