Defiance

by Bear Ross

  He reached for the photo as it fell, trying to catch it. The cannon’s muzzle flashed, highlighting the smiles of his sisters Jessica and Hannah.

  Jered's world filled with bright pain as he bucked against the seat's restraints. He looked down at the new hole in his mech's control readouts, then further down, at his own midsection. Jered's lower body was now a shredded wreck, and flame and smoke curled up within Judah's control cabin. Something welled up in him as his breath slipped away, a cauldron of white-hot fury turning to cold. He gasped for air as one hand fumbled for the fallen picture of his sisters.

  Kramer's vision closed in, and the last thing he saw was the red and white power claw breach through the blast shields, through the armored glass, through the display screens, and through what was left of his chest. Blackness swallowed him. The crowd roared, while Judah continued to jibber a mindless staccato into his dead ears.

  Chapter Two

  JUNCTIONWORLD

  FOURTH GATE ZONE

  KRAMER FAMILY COMPOUND

  Jessica Kramer almost had her new gun put together. Now, if only her mother would quit interrupting.

  “Yessica!” Consuelo Kramer’s voice called out, her thick Venezuelan accent carrying throughout the habitation pod. “Yessica, clean up your things from the living room, immediatamente. Your father, he want to watch the match your brother has today.”

  The tomboy downstairs sighed and rolled her eyes. She set down the baking tray of print-welded firearm parts on to the coffee table. Jessica Kramer yelled, exasperated, back to the ceiling.

  “Mom, Poppa never watches Jered's matches, you know that,” Jessica said. “He says it’s bad luck. And they’re not talking, right now, anyway.”

  “Besides,” Jessica muttered under her breath, “I need these parts to cool before I put my new handgun together, gate damn it.”

  “Hey, bubelah, that’s no way to talk to your mother, even if she can’t hear you,” her father, Solomon Kramer, said from behind her. “And, trust me, this match is different. I’ve got a feeling about it. You keep your things where they are. I’m going to watch upstairs with your mother.”

  At the sound of her father’s rough voice, she tried her best to not panic, sliding the non-gun-part object in her hand into its previous hiding spot. She completed the move before he finished walking across the kitchen from the attached mech hangar.

  Solomon Kramer’s short, broad frame looked like a grizzled plug in human form. He wiped his greasy hands on his pants, then touched her cheek as he walked to the couch. She tried to pull away from him, wincing in exaggerated disgust.

  “Gross, Poppa. What is that, turbine grease from the new plasma reactor?” Jessica said. “Are you working on that new prototype without me? When are you going to let me go out there and help you?”

  “Soon, baby girl, soon. When you’re ready,” Solomon said, smiling through the faded scars and burns on his face.

  “Poppa,” Jessica said, a slight edge of hesitation in her voice, “When is Jered going to come back with Judah?”

  Her father’s brow wrinkled, and he ran his hand through his sparse gray hair.

  “When this meshugge ‘life-debt’ to the Gatekeepers is over and done with,” Solomon said, “your brother and I need to have a long conversation about his ‘borrowing’ my prize mech. Don’t you worry about it, baby girl.”

  Solomon Kramer looked over the spread-out parts of the printed firearm in front of Jessica. He picked up the detached barrel, then dropped it once the heat registered through his thick fingertips, cursing in his native Yiddish. He cooled the singed digits in his mouth. Shaking the momentary pain away, he looked at the parts with a careful eye.

  “That’s hot. Is that a twenty millimeter?” Solomon asked. “More important, is that your mother’s baking sheet?”

  Jessica nodded, an impish grin on her face.

  “Yup. It’s a 20mm Mattis,” she said. “It’s a design I found on the data networks. Tevren improved some stuff, made the grip fit my hand, and printed it out for me.”

  “That’s a lot of handgun for a little girl, even one as tough as you, baby,” Solomon said. “That twenty millimeter is meant for big shooters like Ascended, and other folk that size.”

  “I can handle it, Poppa. Prath’s been teaching me,” Jessica said. “He said to relax, ride the recoil, and let your sights cycle back on target, instead of trying to force it. It’s working, I think.”

  “You know,” Solomon said, “the Ascended named the 20mm Mattis after one of the big warlords from their past, when they were still back behind the Sixth Gate. Those big apes love that guy. He’s like the ultimate mensch to them, a real cult figure.”

  “Yes, Poppa, Prath’s told me all about it,” Jessica said.

  “He helped them escape the Predahounds; made some big, heroic last stand at their original planet’s worldgate.”

  Mid-conversation, Jessica saw the gears in her father’s mind switch, and a paranoid look crossed his face.

  “Where’s your sister?” The elder Kramer said, pulling back from her while his right hand strayed to the machine-pistol on his own hip. He scanned the immediate vicinity with an earnest combination of hunter and prey. Years of punishing mech combat in the Gatekeeper’s arenas had taken their toll on his looks, but his bright gray eyes shone, searching through the subdued lighting of the habitat. She had seen this look on his face, this sudden change, before. It was like he was trying to look through the walls, searching for some unknown, threat.

  “Hannah’s off…somewhere, with Tevren, I don’t know,” Jessica said, her mood darkening at the mention of the boy technician’s name. “I think they’re over in the Fifth Gate Zone, at that stupid amusement park, or something. I don’t really know, and I really don’t care.”

  Solomon Kramer lifted her chin up. The sudden paranoia from before faded to fatherly concern on the man’s face.

  “Listen, little one,” he said, the lines crinkling around his eyes,” you and your sister are going to have to work this thing out over this Tevren boy. If you can’t, I’m going to have to let him go from working at my mech hangar, whether he prints out guns for my daughters, or not. We have to be united—”

  “Yeah, dad,” Jessica said, interrupting her father. “‘We have to be united, or they will crush us if we are divided.’ You’ve told me this before, Poppa, like, a million times.”

  “But I need you to listen, baby girl,” Solomon said. “The Gatekeepers want all of us ground under their blobby little thumbs. We can’t give them any excuse to move in on us. You two need to patch this up, otherwise...”

  The elder Kramer’s spoken thought trailed off. Consuelo’s voice from upstairs stopped him before he could finish his oft-repeated discourse in the evils of the Gatekeepers.

  “Yessica, go tell your father the match, it’s starting!” she said.

  “Be right there, Consuelo,” Solomon bellowed back. He cocked his head and smiled at Jessica. “Don’t use your mom’s cookware for putting together pistol parts, baby girl. I made that mistake once. Just once.” He tromped through the hab pod, up the stairs leading to the second-floor balcony and living quarters.

  Jessica watched him go, then retrieved the stolen bottle of booze from its hiding place next to her in the couch cushions. She was relieved her father had been too busy lecturing her to notice it. She looked at the main viewer screen up on the wall, then checked to make sure Solomon Kramer was all the way upstairs before she took a quick drink from the bottle, wincing at the taste.

  The screen showed a short biographical segment about her brother, narrating his life story. Jessica forgot about her sister and Tevren as the liquor took effect. She smirked at the network’s melodramatic and carefully-edited portrayal of Jered Kramer, the ‘Heir Apparent to the Kramer Legacy,’ and stole another bitter sip from the container.

  What the biographical blurb didn’t tell the audience was that her older brother had screwed up, once again, at the casinos in the Fourth Gate Zo
ne. Today’s event was part of working his debt off by engaging in cut-rate death matches for a Gatekeeper. A Gatekeeper who her dad hated, hated even more than the rest of the gross little blobs that ruled Junctionworld.

  “Mikralos,” she blurted aloud, the booze loosening her young tongue. Gatekeepers had the weirdest names, she thought.

  Jessica, being sixteen standard years, enjoyed her older brother’s wild, reckless attitude and lifestyle, but she knew that her father was right: The Gatekeepers were looking for any excuse to subjugate and re-enslave Solomon Kramer, his legacy, and his family.

  The interdimensional overlords plucked Kramer from his own time and planet because their scouts identified him as a fighter, a prime candidate for the arenas. If they had known then what they knew now, the Gatekeepers probably would have left him to his fate.

  Those many decades ago, when they offered to rescue him from certain death, Solomon was fighting against incredible odds in the sewers of the Warsaw ghetto. He was a starving rebel in a futile uprising, outnumbered over a hundred-to-one by the Waffen-SS. Cornered and injured, still he fought on.

  The Gatekeepers, though formal and domineering, love an underdog. Jessica’s father said it helped them for marketing their broadcasts, to have a pilot with a valiant backstory. The overbeings brought him to Junctionworld and charged him for his renewed existence. The cost of their rescue was his inescapable servitude. They healed his wounds, trained him to pilot mechs, and the rest was history.

  Solomon Kramer had been a thorn in the blobs’ sides for years, now, ever since he won his freedom against all odds. It was an embarrassment to the Gatekeepers, one they had tried to correct many times, but her father was just too good, in and out of the arenas. His cagey ability to stay one step ahead of them came at a different cost, though.

  Solomon’s constant paranoia from living in this formal-yet-lethal pocket dimension had been justified too many times, already, by the machinations and plots of the alien overlords. The elder Kramer was convinced that Jered’s selling of himself back into Mikralos’s arena was part of some conspiracy by the Gatekeepers. Jered was a good pilot, nearly as good as her old man, but Jessica hoped nothing bad would happen to her brother. Not only might Jered get hurt, but it would prove her father, gripped by his madness, was right.

  Like I don’t hear Dad’s conspiracies enough, she thought, letting out a sigh.

  The warm-up to the upcoming death match on the viewing room’s main screen droned on in the background. Two alien sportscasters chattered away, their pre-game banter blending into the background as musical fanfare played. Gingerly testing the hot parts, she found they were cool enough to be handled. Jessica test-fitted the parts of the heavy revolver together, the large, simplistic parts interlocking together with a bit of effort and hand fitting.

  Jessica focused on getting the cylinder mated to the frame of the revolver, the four gaping mouths of the large chambers each lining up with the barrel as she cocked and dropped the hammer, rotating them through their firing cycle. Horns and flashing lights from the screen briefly strobed in the background, glinting off the sleek lines of the custom firearm. She reached for the bottle from its hidden spot, and took another swig.

  She couldn’t wait to show her Poppa the new revolver. She stared at it, turning the heavy chunk of printed and machined steel over in her hands to view it from all angles. She tried a few dummy cartridges in the cylinders, just to see if they fit, and could be extracted once fired. Everything worked perfectly.

  A howling scream from upstairs filled the habitat. It was her mother. Alarmed, Jessica tucked the bottle away and looked up at the screen.

  Judah, the Kramer family’s brightly-colored gladiator mech, crumbled in the match’s instant replay sub-screen, a cannon shot piercing through the main canopy’s armor over and over again in excruciating detail from a variety of angles. Jessica’s jaw and the pistol dropped.

  Confused, Jessica rewound the sports network to the start. After the introductions and opening fanfare, Jered and Judah went from the starting ring into a suicide run at the opposing mech. It was surreal, watching her expert gladiator pilot of a brother charge into close range without a single scrap of cover. Next, the cannon hit. Then, a crushing blow in close combat that hollowed Jessica’s heart.

  She watched as the red and white mech slugged its heavy battle claw through the shattered cockpit, shoving the armored gauntlet’s talons so far into Judah’s hull that the sponsor’s logos were no longer visible on the forearm. As the crowds roared, the other pilot ripped Jered’s shattered corpse through the breach, throwing it to the ground. The red mech’s jets flared, and the cameras caught every cinder as Jered was charred to pieces, her brother’s body washing away in a torrent of reactor plasma. Judah, now a shattered husk of wrecked armor, toppled backwards to the arena floor.

  There were wails of pain and anguish upstairs as Jered died over and over on the replays. Her mother’s shrill voice became frantic, and her father’s deeper tone came in response, but not distinct words. Were they arguing? About what? She thought.

  Muffled shouts and angered cries flew between her parents upstairs, unseen by Jessica. Her father’s voice yelled, and then a gunshot rang out through the habitat. Something heavy fell to the floor above her head with a thud.

  Solomon Kramer's paranoia caused him to build or buy only the best security systems for his home and workplace. At the sound of the firearm’s discharge, internal alarms blared, and blast doors slammed shut throughout the home’s living spaces. Each room became its own stronghold and survival cell. Jessica was trapped in the living room, unable to assess the situation or reach her parents upstairs. The overhead illumination blinked out, and the only light in the sealed room came from the looped sportscast of her brother’s grisly death.

  “Mom? Poppa? What the void was that?” Jessica yelled towards the ceiling, booze-blurred fear causing her voice to crack in mid-question.

  Even through the armored walls, Jessica could still hear the sound of her mother’s crying, a soul-bruising sound which crescendoed into another scream. A second gunshot rang out. Then silence. Jessica gripped her newly-assembled revolver tight and at the ready, though she didn’t have a single round of live ammunition to load in it.

  Jessica strained with her blurred senses, hoping to hear any movement from upstairs. Only the silence of a graveyard met her ears. She could no longer look at Jered, dying over and over, on the view-screen. She threw the bottle of liquor at the image projector, shattering it. The living room was now pitch black.

  Time passed. Sirens moaned in the distance, barely perceptible through the habitat’s thick walls, growing louder as they approached. It was the Enforcement Directorate, the Gatekeeper’s combination of armed forces and police. They were a brutal force, a mix of drones and bio-printed, blindly obedient, Model Nine troopers.

  Blinding sparks and choking smoke flew from all four edges of the armored hatch connecting the hangar to the kitchen. The heavy security door clattered to the ground with a deep boom, crushing her mother’s kitchen table. Jessica hid her revolver in the thigh cargo pocket of her utility coveralls, the heavy weapon bulging against the seams as she took cover behind the couch.

  Past the ragged edges of the scorched kitchen hatch, Jessica saw her father’s hangar, filled with a cloud of hovering security drones. A trooper’s silhouette occupied the space once taken up by her father only minutes before, one hand holding a laser carbine, the other commanding her to come forward.

  “Subject. Attention. Present empty manipulators. Step forward,” the Enforcer said in the clipped tones used by the bioprinted soldiers. “Make no furtive movement. Approach. Deadly force may be utilized.”

  Her hands up, Jessica came around the edge of the couch into the blinding spotlights of the drones. The tall, lanky trooper pulled her into his iron grip, slapping her into restraints as she tried to voice her protests.

  “Gate damn it, my parents are still in there,” Jessica screamed, tr
ying to pull away from the Enforcer. “They’re stuck in there, and I think they’re hurt. I don’t know why. I need to get back in there! I have the access codes, just let me go, and I’ll help!”

  Unmoved, the Model Nine trooper passed her down a gathered line of identical armed and armored beings. The half-dozen Enforcers formed a stacked-up entry team. Each, in turn, searched her with mechanical precision, spinning and pushing her to the next in line once their assigned portion of her person was cleared. She tried to squawk her protests, but her intoxicated senses were hard-pressed to resist. Near the end of the stack, the soldier-being tasked with her lower body removed the revolver from her pocket. The last Enforcer placed the weapon in an evidence bag and scanned her hand with a digit-press reader. A hologram of her face and personal information appeared in midair. The base-line trooper handed the scanner to a nearby Model Ninety-Nine officer and stuffed her into a waiting Enforcer grav-vehicle.

  “Process subject Kramer, Jessica, at Fourth Zone Barracks. Prep for intel scan, but do not execute until order sent. Stand by for further instructions,” the advanced officer model told its subordinate, who nodded in acknowledgment.

  “You venting blob-puppets, let me go!” Jessica said, raging at the unflinching, expressionless soldiers through the grav-car’s window. “Let me go, you pinheaded, tank-bred meat-bots!” Tears now flowed down her face as the reality of the situation bore down on her.

  The vehicle lifted off. Looking back through the window, Jessica heard the muffled explosions, and saw the eye-blistering flashes, as the Enforcers breached her family’s home, door by door, room by room.

  Chapter Three

  JUNCTIONWORLD, FIVE YEARS LATER

  SECOND GATE ZONE

  JEV’S AUTO-BAR

  “Ugh, Jev, can you turn that dung off, please?” Jessica Kramer said. She ran her hand through her dark hair, trying to avoid looking at the main viewing screen in the dank, robot-staffed bar.