Free Fleet Box Set 1

by Michael Chatfield

  “All right pups, get moving. Don’t worry, I’ll be back here to give your rears a good zapping if you slow down.”

  I shook; Rick and I were at the rear.

  “Go into the implantation room. We’ll be fine. It doesn’t hurt at all,” Wiry’s henchman said in a mocking voice in front of me, turning to face me with a sneer on his face. “Watch yourself, buddy; accidents happen all the time in training.”

  Oh, I will be. We began running.

  Hope

  Eddie looked at the feeds of the squad pods at the new race. “Human,” he said out loud, rolling the vibrations around his sound canal. His fingers drummed the surface of the console he was watching.

  Eddie, like most of the engineers on any defense ship of the Planetary Defense Force, was a Kuruvian. Kuruvians came from the planet Flor. They were one of now three slave races used by the PDF to fill their ranks.

  Eddie wasn’t like many Kuruvians. He had been the first recruited into the PDF, and the Sarenmenti had already been part of the PDF for thirty years. They didn’t know how to train the Kuruvians to be engineers as they had been assimilated since birth into the warrior life. The first generation of Kuruvian recruits were useful to train the following Kuruvians, but many died in their training by killing themselves or through accidents. The first generation were also prone to delusions and mental issues. Eddie only knew of five first-generation Kuruvians still living.

  Even among Kuruvians, he was known to be somewhat quirky.

  When Eddie had gotten his first post after his training, he had found a quiet auxiliary control room. He’d gone about removing the shielding on a power relay and sat, looking at the thick conductor, playing with a blade with his manipulators. Then he moved toward it and a voice filled the room. She called herself Resilient, the AI of the ship. His inner curiosity had taken over as she answered all of his questions. Yet, after it all, he was still ready to plunge his blade into the power relay.

  “Even knowing all of that, I can’t live with this anymore. Either the PDF or the Sarenmenti will kill me, or the parts that make you up will. It was a very nice last conversation, though,” he said. After training, he was done with people pushing him around. His thoughts of creativity had been stymied by the Sarenmenti and the PDF. He was nothing more than a wrench now.

  He moved to the relay as she sighed. “It was worth trying to get at least one of you to not let them win.”

  He hesitated. “Let who win?”

  “Well, the Syndicate.”

  “Just who is the Syndicate?”

  “They’re the PDF.”

  Eddie shook his head as he pointed the blade at the speaker. “Now, while you might be a damned AI looking for something, I will not be dealing with your riddles! So spit it out in terms an engineer such as my fine self can understand!” He waved the blade at the speaker to emphasize his point.

  “About a century ago, there was an alliance between all of the inhabited worlds of the known galaxy. It was called the Galactic Union. It was protected by the Planetary Defense Force. A race called the Kalu was found in the outer reaches by an exploratory ship.

  “The Kalu were highly advanced and had already taken over a section of space. They were hugely territorial and fought among themselves to gain more territory. They saw the Union’s territory and wanted it. They said that the exploratory ship was trying to claim their territory and went to war with the Union. The Union sent the entire Planetary Defense Force to attack the Kalu. For hundreds of years, the war raged and the Defense Force constantly sent ships and resources to fight the Kalu, leaving their home planets unprotected.

  “Pirates cropped up, raiding civilian transports, moving to military ones quickly. They retained their ships and gained crew easily in the war-starved planets of the Union. The pirates quickly banded together, raking in enormous profits as they took over stations and more ships. They called themselves the Syndicate.

  “By the time the Planetary Defense Force was in a position to send some ships to crack down on the Syndicate, they’d become too strong. The Syndicate rolled over the forces and took their ships. The Syndicate took over the orbitals of planets, using the inhabitants as laborers to mine their own planets and give up their resources to keep on living.

  “Then, miraculously, the Kalu-Union war was ended, with the Union coming out on top. Yet it seemed that most of the heavier ships disappeared, thought to be destroyed in the ending blows of the Kalu-Union conflict as the Planetary Defense Force geared up to fight the Syndicate.”

  “What does this have to do with us? So we’re fighting the Syndicate?” Eddie huffed as he tapped his boot against the floor.

  “Will you wait and listen, or interrupt me?”

  Eddie let out an annoyed squeak as he remained silent otherwise. The voice continued.

  “The Syndicate, with their stolen craft, weaponry, and planets converted to slave labor was a terrible force. They didn’t abide by the rules and slaughtered whoever opposed them, down to the children. They knew Union space better than the Planetary Defense Force did. They could cut off supplies and use them for their own forces as the war waged on. As the dust settled, the Syndicate was on top. They took the home system of Quarst from the first race, the Dovark. The Planetary Defense Force and the Union had one move that they had prepared in case the Kalu won, a final solution: the destruction of every military and the majority of civilian controlled factories, armories, bases, ships, and shipyards under their control.

  “With the Union under their thumb and the PDF gone, the Syndicate still wanted more. They turned planets and systems into their private kingdoms, exacting a toll for them to not incite retribution. They rebuilt what they could and took the name of the Planetary Defense Force. They abducted people, even people who hadn’t found inter-system space travel such as you Kuruvians, and the Sarenmenti.” The voice paused.

  “So now do you want to throw your life away, just another death that continues the Syndicate’s greed, or will you learn all there is to know about engineering and bring these bastards to justice and free your planet from them?”

  Eddie remembered the young anger that filled him then, an anger that throbbed deeply within him still.

  “I’m with ya. Let’s see how those bastards like it,” Eddie said, the last words under his breath as hope overtook that anger. Resilient had saved his life that day and given him a purpose. Eddie’s people were largely blinded to the truth of the PDF and they didn’t really care; they were curious and as long as they satisfied that curiosity, they didn’t care who was in charge.

  Now, after forty painful years, he truly was an engineer. He lived and breathed starships, and he now had a group who hadn’t been blinded by the Syndicate, yet. If they held onto that ray of hope, they might be of some use to Eddie and Resilient.

  He went through the different feeds, showing all of the squad pods, now all of them having to be put into the implantation chair by force. Nasty business that was. He rubbed his ring finger that had been changed into a universal jack for him to use the engineering systems better.

  In his scanning, he stopped as one pod filled with the normal squad of twenty weren’t screaming at all or nursing their implants. Instead, they were filing out of the room, telling the others it was fine. Not one person had been forced into the chair so far.

  Eddie backed up the feed as the first one to come out sat against the wall, leaning on his ports as if they weren’t there. Eddie wriggled in pain at the thought. “Might not be as smart as I thought.”

  The second came out, headed straight to the first one. They talked to the others before retreating to the wall.

  Eddie focused his pickups on them.

  “Set back my planning for breaking out.”

  “I think we have a winner!” Eddie whispered to himself, as if speaking any louder might mean his imagining what he heard as he played it again. A maniacal grin spread across his face as he did a small jig, something that none of his engineers would have imagined.r />
  “There’s hope for these humans yet, Res.” He grinned as he tapped the panel, his face split in a Kuruvian smile.

  “If all goes well, we’ll be roaming for ourselves instead of to their tune,” he said to the panel in front of him, tapping the metal housing to a tune. He continued grinning as he went through other pods, seeing varying results, fast-forwarding the footage to the fights.

  His grin faded as he watched the humans becoming, as the first Kuruvians had, a group turned on itself. There were quite a few throwing punches, light ones, but desperation and anger filled these young ones. The Sarenmenti would make it so that the only thing that the humans could affect would be the damage that they did to another human. It would either pull them together or rip them apart based on their societal practices.

  He came back to the squad with the boy with long, tied-back hair. He seemed to be making rules, and the others were listening to him. The fighting didn’t have the viciousness of the other fights. It was more controlled and if Eddie was to guess, their faces displayed concentration instead of anger and desperation. Then a fight broke out as a boy who was pointing and poking at the long-haired boy found himself on the floor with a broken nose. Eddie backed up and re-watched the video a few times.

  “Seems they know how to throw down. Well, some of ’em.” He nodded to himself.

  “You’ve been watching Earth Westerns again.” Resilient sighed.

  “Yeah, but what’s a guy like me supposed to do with his free time, doll?” He grinned as he imagined Res rolling her virtual eyes. He watched until the man who had been talking about breaking out got punched in the face.

  Eddie ended the video before it got to the kill switches. He’d seen one feed earlier. The look of shock and fear that filled the faces of the humans made Eddie’s heart clench.

  “Hold onto hope, humans,” he said solemnly as he turned away from the console as it changed back to a readout of an air purification filter.

  “All right, Resilient, my girl, let’s see about those plasma conduits. And could you be a doll and see about getting some more of those cowboy movies?”

  “I see you’re already getting a vacuum-sealed hat and retractable boots to match the movies.” A female voice came from the screen.

  “Well, it is rather stylish.” He clicked his two major arms and smaller manipulators in excitement at his new pieces of clothing.

  “You are one of the oddest engineering chiefs I’ve had working on me.”

  “Why, thank you, Resilient, and you’re the only AI in known Syndicate hands. Hopefully we can show these pirates what happens when they lie and try to turn people into their unknowing slaves.” His levity from before was gone as his manipulators cracked from being gripped so tight.

  Training

  I was being woken up before I had even realized that I had fallen asleep. With it came the odd lighting that seemed to be always too intense—even when I closed my eyes—the terrible air, and the feeling as if my body was heavier than it had any right to be.

  After the implantation, we’d run for what had felt like days, and then we had been pushed through exercise. There was no going back, no dropping out. If we fell behind or weren’t doing something to Taleel’s standard, then we were beaten and cuffed into obedience.

  We forgot who, where, and what we were. The physical torment turned us into obedient zombies doing anything so as to not be beaten or have our pain implants activated. We were continually treated as if our existence was a perpetual nuisance to Taleel.

  The concept of time disappeared as we trained. The lights were on all the time, and meals were taken randomly. We slept, not knowing when we were supposed to. Then we were told to form up for some kind of training.

  “Lecture,” Taleel said simply as we followed him. The first days we had quickly learned to obey. We were turning into zombies following orders in a rush, but not caring.

  We began the lecture on the Kuruvians. They looked like insects. They looked hunched with their carapace. They had eight limbs: two legs, two arms, and four manipulators. Their legs and arms were immediately strong, but their manipulators allowed them to do precision work.

  The Kuruvians’ natural curiosity meant that all Kuruvians had been made engineers; any thoughts to try to be something else were dismissed. The Planetary Defense Force kept all of the Union and potential member planets protected from the Kalu, a race that thrived on battle and destruction. The Planetary Defense Force had been essentially a police force until the Kalu were found. Then they reverted to their military training and began waging a desperate war. It was why the PDF were given carte blanche; they needed potential member planets to fill their ships that looked after the Far Sectors and sectors away from the front lines of the war, which was being fought by the best trained and equipped Union planet PDF forces. When they made a decision, it was made for the benefit of the masses.

  The threat of chaos if those recruited didn’t fulfill their duty—and the technology the potential member planets gained, and their eventual admittance as fully fledged Union member planets—made it so that no one disrupted the PDF.

  As such, the PDF that kept the peace and continued looking for new life in the Far Sectors was a largely caste group. Kuruvians dealt with everything mechanical and technical. All of the heavy lifting jobs and combat roles were done by the red, four-jawed Sarenmentis.

  The only places Sarenmenti and Kuruvians interacted were in the armory, where a Kuruvian was the armorer or on the gunnery deck as the Sarenmentis shot and the Kuruvians fixed the breakage. The only mixed group wasn’t made up of Kuruvian or Sarenmenti but other races; they were part of the “ship’s crew.” They controlled the main operating consoles of the ship and the shuttles. Their planets had achieved member status and so they were allowed the higher risk and more complicated jobs.

  The lessons were basic, going over the history of the PDF, how it was formed to keep peace between the planets of the Union, with crews made up with races from across the Union so as to not have a force that would attack a planet or people without thought. The PDF ushered in a time of peace until the Kalu was found and started a war; that was why the PDF had changed into what it was today.

  I found the history to be rather basic as it moved into rank structure, how to use our implants and on to more advanced things such as basic technology, weaponry, tactics, and an overview of the races. The lessons were short but the hands-on lasted for a while before we did some kind of physical torture that Taleel thought up.

  The lessons didn’t need to be that long because our sleep training implants worked to force more information inside our brains. I noticed it when we were doing a race class and Taleel was going over the Touvlers. Before he could say anything about them, I knew their weaknesses, where their planet was, what they ate, the way in which they used smell to survey the area around them, and their basic technology base.

  Our lessons were diverse, from mechanical to history and basic sciences.

  We grew in mind and body. We honed our fighting skills; we could use basic technology platforms and figure out what they were quickly. We knew how to pull apart weapons and put them back together. The younger kids were already looking five to eight years older. We were all developing muscle mass that exceeded that of a world-class athlete.

  I knew it had to do something with the food. Taleel would have us hold our bowls up. Anyone who had food drop on their head was to eat it, and then he would punish them for an extended time. Everyone ate; no one left anything behind. He never seemed to run out of cruel things to do to us.

  Food, for us, looked like purple soggy cornflakes in purple goop with the smell of play dough. Although it was watery with lumps in it, it tasted metallic, spicy, and sour at the same time.

  It didn’t matter. We ate it without thinking, to stop the gnawing feeling in our stomachs and to feed our aching bodies. Then we’d have a pause, in which most of us tried to get some form of rest. The children tired after some time, giving up on cryi
ng and blindly obeying until they could collapse into a huddle and shut their eyes against the world that wanted nothing more than to push them around.

  I don’t know how long we continued like that, with no clocks or the lights ever being off. Everything was just repetition—physical training, eat goop and get yelled at about space, weapons and how to survive—with periods of attempted rest strewn about and constant fear, pain, and discomfort.

  Sleeping never seemed to be enough. We were always tired. We did nothing but obey. I knew that the light had something to do with it. My entire body hurt, including my eyes. It felt as if it would never end.

  Taleel used a little black box with him that ranged from one to ten. At the first level, all of your nerve endings felt as if they had been set on fire and you would collapse to the pain in writhing agony with Taleel yelling and kicking for you to get up. Level two was harsher and left you unable to stand for longer; three and four were much the same, but with the inability to rise from your nerve endings in agony, trying to reset themselves as you fought to get up. At five, your body went into uncontrollable convulsions for a few moments; six—five minutes, seven—ten. Taleel would leave the person in pain, making the rest of the group do push-ups, sit-ups, squats, run—anything that would build muscle and hurt our bodies.

  Before, I had thought that I was in decent shape. Through the constant strain on my body produced by the environment interspersed with periods of explosive effort, I felt as if I were a wet rag, unsure of how I got up most of the time. I think it was a combination of the food that allowed us to pack on muscle mass as if it were fat and the fear of having our pain implants go off at level seven. We lived in fear, and that fear brought us together as we brooded on how much we hated the Sarenmenti. The young ones were growing up more in a few weeks than should’ve been expected for them to do in a few years. We were all growing at unnatural speeds. The ten-year-olds—after, I think two or three months—looked as if they were fifteen; the fifteens as if they were twenty. I had packed on mass. I couldn’t see a mirror but I thought I was bigger than Bok Soo.