by Joshua James
He tried to scream.
The pain was unlike anything he had ever known. He begged for it to stop, but the voice in his head was gone.
Tissue tore away, wet and sinewy. Liquid oozed down his cheek.
Jolly felt darkness engulf his mind.
And then he felt nothing.
1
Wakey Wakey
Wake up, Sleeping Ugly. I’m shoving all the mission specifics into your tiny little excuse for a cerebral cortex as you get this. You can access them as soon as you gain full consciousness. It’s taking you longer every sleep cycle. You’re getting old.
[BEGIN SITREP]
Two weeks ago
We lost communication with an outer colony of the Union. This isn’t unusual, since the Union is crap at keeping their people alive. But the Empire doesn’t know exactly what happened, and that is unusual. We have more spies in the Union than paid-off politicians.
One week ago
Communication was lost with more than one hundred Union colonies. Even by Union standards, that’s a fubar situation.
Three days ago
The entire Union home world went dark. That’s 3 billion sentient souls for those keeping score.
Yesterday
The Empire dropped an Occupier-class starship, a half-dozen Armada-class destroyers, and enough Marines to subdue an entire system right on the doorstep of a Class-D planetoid inside Union space. Uninvited. A major breach of treaty. Not that the Empire has to care about the treaties they have with the backstabbers in the Union. But still. Not done every day.
Eight hours ago
The Empire sent a bunch of scientists down to the planetoid because the pampered brainiacs thought they’d found something to explain what’s going on. Twenty Frontier Marines went with them. That was enough firepower to secure half the dinky little world.
Two hours ago
Communication was lost with the scientists and their escort team. All drones. All nets. Dead silent.
Now
It’s tactical insertion time. Every Marine with a pulse and a pulse rifle is gearing up to go planet-side. That’s where you come in, sweet cheeks. Wakey, wakey.
[END SITREP]
Lance Cpl. Lucky Lee Savage awoke from hypersleep, just as he had 156 times before.
He didn’t know this yet. He didn’t know anything yet.
He began his waking cycle the way he always did. Floating inside his mind, drowning, grasping for any thought, any detail—anything—that swirled toward him.
He was a Frontier Marine.
He was a planetary submission specialist.
He hated everyone.
He needed a weapon in his hand.
There he was.
Lucky opened his eyes and winced as blinding light spilled in around the hatch of the sleeping pod.
Facts of the mission appeared in his mind. Every useless detail compartmentalized for him, including the knowledge this was just the latest in a long string of high-G stasis sleep cycles.
This one would be no different than the last;
Wake up.
Do the mission.
Go back in the box.
“And good morning to you, too, Sunshine,” said a female voice in his mind.
2
Rocky
His head pounded. His body ached. He smelled. And he was already tired of the info-dump flowing into his brain courtesy of his Augmented Neural Network, which he and every other Marine in basic tech training was told to call ANN, but they all just referred to as their AI copilot.
He called his Rocky.
“Excuse you. I call myself Rocky. You didn’t name me. I’m not your pet.”
“You’re in my head. It’s my call.”
“I’m stuck in here. Not my choice.”
“We’re Marines. We don’t get choices.”
Lucky rubbed his neck, craning from side to side to appraise the other pods in the chamber, some already open. To his immediate left he spotted a kid fumbling with his sleepsuit.
Lucky knew a rookie when he saw one. It might have been a hundred years since he’d been one himself, but he still remembered that feeling. Glancing around at everyone else, feigned nonchalance while watching them disengage from their hypersleep pod because he had forgotten how. Being a rookie sucked.
Lucky nodded at the kid and purposefully pulled his accessory kit clear of his cooling system. The kid nodded back, waited a beat for Lucky to look away, then undid his own kit.
“Only twenty years in biological time, old man popsicle,” Rocky said. “Besides, you spent fifty percent of that on ice in an escape pod.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Rocky continued uploading mission data into his mind while prepping his organic systems for a planetary drop. He felt a stimulant cocktail hit his system, and simultaneously thanked and cursed whoever the military geniuses were that’d come up with the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems now grafted into his body.
In theory, Rocky and Lucky were two separate beings. Rocky lived in a neural pocket in his brain that didn’t share direct pathways with his thoughts. In boot, they’d taught him to use mental constructs. The mind’s eye was a virtual HUD where his AI could display anything from weapons status to drone’s-eye views. The echo channel was where he could direct mental communications with his AI. All his trainers stressed that the AI could not literally read his mind or use his senses. They only had the drones and the biobots.
Bullshit.
The mental tricks were all just a load of mumbo-jumbo make-believe. So was the idea that there existed some red line between him and his AI. Maybe at boot, when the AI was just installed and simply followed all the rules. But Lucky knew better now.
Rocky could read his mind any time she wanted, and half the time knew what he was thinking before he did. Reassurances from some Marine nano-technician in a clean white lab coat was not going to change his mind about that.
“Like reading your mind is hard,” she echoed.
There was no ‘mute’ on the echo channel. Typical Marine design flaw.
He stripped off the sleepsuit and its cooling tubes to reveal his naked body. It felt strange not wearing combat armor.
The room was cool, but the stimulants kept him warm. His muscles burned.
“Must be colder in here than I thought,” someone said.
Rocky sniggered.
Did other guys have AIs that enjoyed dick jokes? Lucky didn’t think so.
He looked up to see a tight shock of blond hair atop a dark brown head. The naked man was facing away from him, but he didn’t need to see the face to know it was Dawson.
Not that he remembered him. After every sleep cycle he woke freezer burned, his short-term memory a big bucket of nothing. He could never remember his last few missions. Rocky kept all his personal interactions filed away and updated his mind instantly when needed.
“If you wanted to remember shit,” Rocky said, “you’d remember shit.”
Lucky knew Dawson talked a big game, but also knew he was a light touch. He was shacking up with a fellow Marine Lucky had fooled around with years ago. Scuttlebutt was they had a daughter living with family on one of the Asiatic Ring worlds.
Frontier Marines weren’t allowed to pair off, and they definitely weren’t permitted to have kids. Not that Lucky disapproved. The less the brass knew, the better.
“You’re not dead yet, Dawson?”
The head turned to reveal a big, stupid face. Always happy-go-lucky, this one. “Just lucky, I guess.”
Lucky gave him the finger as he pulled out his combat dive gear. “Anyone else from the 153rd here?” he asked.
Dawson shot him a quizzical look. “I transferred. 58th now. Remember?”
“Oh right, my bad,” he said.
Dawson seemed to connect the dots. “What the hell you doing here, anyway? Last I heard, the 153rd was on the Red front.”
“Right, right,” Lucky said.
He thought for a
beat.
“Why the hell are we here?” he echoed to Rocky.
“That’s above both our pay grades.”
Lucky felt the familiar sensation as his internal nanobots went to work. His skin shimmered and shifted and slid aside as two-dozen dura-alloy plugs appeared on his arms, legs and chest.
He snapped his combat gear into the exposed plugs with practiced ease, and felt the skin flow back around the base of the connection as millions of tiny electrical shocks leapt from his skeleton across the armor and back again. The bots felt happy.
“Positive contact,” confirmed Rocky.
Lucky felt for the punch pistol on his shoulder, then checked the handle of his pulse rifle on his thigh. Damn, that made him feel better.
“So much phallic love.”
“Stow it, calculator.”
3
Eggheads
On the ansible screen opposite his pod, a baby-faced lieutenant straight out of command school recounted all the facts of the mission that had just been uplinked into his brain.
Someone forgot to tell him this wasn’t a recovery room for common grunts. Everyone here was an elite augmented Marine. With millions of credits worth of Empire tech crammed into their heads, each of the Frontier Marine could single-handedly command and control a thousand-drone army.
“Some of them even pilot starships,” Rocky chimed in. This was a sore spot. She wanted so badly to fly ships. He barely had ambition to get up in the mornings.
Lucky took the bait, like the fool he was. Maybe if he kept it light … “Assist,” he replied with a healthy dose of snark. “You mean assist in piloting starships.”
“Oh, please.”
Truth was, humans couldn’t wrap their minds around the thought of AIs piloting the entire Empire fleet. Soldiers wouldn’t get on those ships. Admirals wouldn’t use them. No, that was unacceptable. There had to be some kind of human input.
So using Frontier Marines made everyone happy. The fleet got the benefit of using AIs—which screwed up way less than humans—but everyone could still sleep at night knowing humans were in charge.
The dirty little secret every Frontier Marine knew, of course, was that the AI really didn’t need jack from the meat bag they were packed into.
The secret to piloting a starship for a Frontier Marine was just to get out of the way.
“There’s more to life than starships.”
He knew it was a mistake even as he echoed the thought.
Rocky leapt on it.
“There are 40,000 AI-enabled starships above Octavia-class in the Empire fleet,” she rattled off. “There are a quarter million Frontier Marines rotating among them. On any given day, those Frontier Marines engage in more controlled jumps, planetary insertions and open space combat scenarios than any million ground-and-pound soldiers. But no, you’re right, there is more to life than piloting starships.”
“Exactly,” Lucky said, now sheepish. His day wasn’t getting better.
“Instead, we keep making combat insertions with the privates. Even though we have more experience than any dozen of them and you are twice their age—”
“But,” Lucky started to object.
“—and I’m not counting biological age. And I have to watch their AIs graduate to destroyers while I end up on backwater mining colonies, coordinating the shitty drones that keep your ass alive.”
Not untrue.
“You know, those pilots rotate into ground assignments,” he replied.
Also true. The act of piloting was mentally exhausting, but it wasn’t conducive to a Marine’s life. If you lived long enough as a Marine, you earned the right to get fat and lazy. But few of them did.
“With your insubordinate ass, that’s all we get.”
Ouch.
Lucky understood. He had a body. The perks of being a meat bag. She did not. A starship was something tangible, under her control. Unlike Lucky, who stubbornly refused to follow her every command, a ship was a direct extension of the AI.
Something flashed and the vid image changed.
A severe-looking woman in a white lab coat replaced the lieutenant. Lucky realized he was looking at a video from before the landing party had gone silent.
The woman’s eyes lost focus for a moment as her eyelids fluttered. Then she spoke, and something about her seemed familiar. She was inside a plastic tent with light bots floating around. Just past the flapping tarp edge Lucky made out the base of a hastily constructed building and a couple of old Union-make rovers. Nothing Marine-issued, though. This was either recorded right after they’d landed, or the party was traveling very light.
Next to her stood a man waving a gloved hand over a very expensive-looking six-dimensional data cube. Lucky looked closer and saw it wasn’t in fact a glove. It was a modified hand. A cyborg. Typical. Scientists get all the good toys.
His face was beet red, like he’d just finished a vigorous workout before setting to work. But Lucky soon realized he was flushed with rage.
“That’s about as angry as I’ve seen an egghead in a lab coat,” he said aloud to nobody in particular.
“Somebody must’ve moved his beakers,” said a Marine while doing push-ups.
The scientist was still speaking, gesturing at her angry colleague, and it was something Lucky knew he should care about. But screw the brainiacs.
Oh yeah, that chemical cocktail was doing the job. He liked how angry he felt.
“By the way, I’m not a Marine. I’m an augmented neural system composed of a trillion-trillion nanoprocessors throughout your body.”
Rocky murmured on in his head as she had throughout his military life. All his life, really.
He took a second to pick up the thread of conversation she was referring to, then he dropped it.
“Just keep me up to speed, will ya?”
“Sure. You’re in trouble.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Before Rocky could answer, a loud voice cut through the recovery chamber.
“Man, hypersleep gives me gas.”
Lucky heard grunts and groans as someone launched something across the room. The Marine scratched his balls as he sat on the edge of his chamber, the top half of his sleepsuit hanging off.
Lucky liked him immediately.
“Everything gives you gas, Malby.”
Lucky turned to the new voice. Female. Stenciled on her combat gear bag, the name Jiang.
“How’s it hanging, Lucky,” she said without looking up. Jiang was short and muscular and already sweating from a vigorous workout. She looked like she could handle herself. Something about her drew him in, but damned if could figure out what.
Lucky didn’t have data on her, so assumed he hadn’t worked a cycle with her.
“It’s all still there,” Lucky said.
In fact, he’d had a momentary thought that he’d lost an arm last cycle. Right below the elbow. He looked down. It was fine. Everything grows back on a Frontier Marine. Eventually.
That’s the upside to having nanobots crawling all through your body.
“Lucky Savage? No shit?” said Malby.
He felt eyes move his way. Murmurs followed.
Malby strutted over like a peacock with his ass in the air.
“My buddy jumped with you,” he said, looking around to see who else was watching.
Lucky changed his opinion instantly.
“So you’re the Marine the brass can’t kill,” Malby said with mock admiration, sliding the towel back and forth around his neck.
Dawson had his combat gear on already. He walked past, ignoring Malby.
A Marine with Cheeky stitched on his sleepsuit took the bait. “The Butcher?”
“The Butcher,” agreed Malby, grinning.
“But here’s the thing,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “My buddy said it’s a bunch of bull. There ain’t nothing special about you.”
Lucky extended his arms, checking the seals on his combat gear.
<
br /> Jiang finished her workout and started applying her own gear. “Malby, didn’t you spend most of your last mission in regeneration stasis after you shot yourself?”
Someone laughed.
“I didn’t shoot myself; somebody shot me,” he snapped. “In the back.”
Jiang smiled without looking up. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“All I’m saying,” Malby continued, “is somebody named Savage ought to be a lot tougher than this joker.”
“Guess I’m tough enough in a fight,” Lucky said.
“You don’t look tough to me.”
“We aren’t in a fight.” Lucky stood up, checked the scope on his rifle, and holstered it. “Yet.” He winked.
Malby puffed out his cheeks and looked like he might take a swing at Lucky. Then he laughed and rolled his eyes.
“Whatever,” he said.
Lucky walked out of the recovery room and into staging.
“I liked him,” Rocky said cheerily.
What had he called him? The Butcher? When had that one cropped up?
He was so sick of the stories.
The Marine the brass couldn’t kill.
The warrior who survives every mission.
The ultimate lifer.
What a load of BS.
Everybody knew Lucky’s story; lone survivor of a mission gone wrong, found alive after fifty years in hypersleep.
Now he was indestructible, the charmed one, forever lucky.
Nobody wanted to hear the real story.
In that version, he watched as his ship was destroyed and his friends were slaughtered.
Then he was captured. Experimented on. Tortured.
Finally, he escaped, half-dead and plagued by demons.
He didn’t feel lucky.
4
Hammerheads
“Good morning, my popsicles!” screamed a voice Lucky recognized from another lifetime. Sergeant Peters. Alive, and ugly as ever. Even nanobots couldn’t fix a face that hastily put together.