“Yeah, but not to us.”
“Maybe, maybe not; but if the time comes we discover he is and we’ve already killed him, what then? Besides, we’ve got all those empty cryo chambers just waiting for someone to fill them.”
“No!” Arun blurted out. He had felt the stirrings of hope as Banner spoke, but the prospect of being frozen was just as bad as being dead – it would put him out of the picture when everything was being decided. What about the Legion? What about the fate of humanity? The future couldn’t be allowed to form without him.
The blow was a hard one, catching Arun on the side of the head. “Shut up, boy, before I change my mind!” Arun felt the hair at the back of his head grasped, yanking his head round. Banner’s face loomed close again. “It’s time you learned your real place in things.”
— Chapter 02 —
Arun woke to the sound of screaming, and the tang of ozone layered over singed human flesh.
He blinked his eyes open and looked upon a scene from hell.
His mind still not cleared of the numbing cryogenic fluids, and the side of his head throbbing for no good reason he could think of, Arun faced too much strangeness to immediately grasp what he was seeing. He had to build it up, fact by fact.
Fact: a pair of deep-brown eyes was peering at him. They were girl’s eyes. Pretty. Or would have been if not for their surroundings of yellow and indigo swellings from old bruises, and the dark sags of fatigue spreading underneath.
Old dirt, pinched and sallow skin, hard scabs over her split lip: everything in that face spoke of neglect and decay except for the still-vibrant color of her violet hair.
There was someone in his past with hair like that. Someone important. He knew this purple-haired girl.
Indiya!
He just had time to catch his flicker of recognition reflected in those desolate eyes before she squeezed them tight. Indiya clamped her jaws together too, but it wasn’t enough for the rightful captain of this ship to contain the pain welling within her. A low growl forced its way through her teeth, rapidly growing in volume and pitch into piercing howls of anguish.
The captain’s screams shook him, but not enough to reach his partially thawed muscles. Only when Indiya snapped open her eyes and he saw the helpless pleading in her soul did her plight cut through Arun’s post-revival stupor, insisting that he act.
Long-embedded tactical discipline made him assess the situation first.
He was in an ice pod on Cryo Deck 4, with its top hinged back. Indiya’s arms were being pulled painfully behind her in one of Lieutenant Nhlappo’s sturdy hands. The other hand was rubbing a pain stick over Indiya’s shoulder, shooting perfectly calibrated bolts of electric agony into the captain’s nerves, while causing minimal scorching of her flesh.
Like all ship-rats, Indiya’s physique looked tiny next to a seasoned Marine adult such as Nhlappo. Indiya looked like a lost child tormented by a leering adult bully.
Which perfectly summed up Nhlappo.
Traitor!
Rage replaced the cryo fluid in Arun’s muscles.
He surged out of the pod and flew at Nhlappo, fists first.
But in his hasty status assessment, Arun had failed to notice that there was gravity. And in any case, his legs weren’t functioning.
Instead of flying through the air, Arun slithered down the slick front of the pod, hitting the hollow metal-grid walkway with a wet thud. He lay there, so exhausted he had to fight to retain consciousness.
Stay strong, he told himself.
“Show resistance, and your friends will suffer,” said a voice off to one side. The voice sounded familiar but aged, as if it came from a withered old man. Ensign Dock was the oldest man Arun knew, and it wasn’t him, but Arun hadn’t the strength to turn his head and identify the speaker.
Without warning, Arun’s limbs exploded into activity, thrashing his naked body across the walkway in an instinctive effort to generate warmth. He was chilled through. So, so cold.
“I need to warm him,” Indiya pleaded between gasps. Nhlappo seemed to have withdrawn the pain stick for now. “I told you we shouldn’t have revived him so quickly. You need him alive. If Arun dies then you’ll never–”
Whatever Indiya was about to say was lost in fresh screams.
“We do need McEwan,” said Nhlappo, sounding mildly irritated, as if the business of torture was a distasteful inconvenience. “However, there is a wide expanse, rich with the possibilities of pain, that separates mere discomfort from death. I want you to spend more time there before you can warm your boyfriend. It will help you to absorb the chief’s words.”
The chief? That other voice had to be Banner, but he sounded as if he’d aged decades. How long had Arun been left on ice?
“Well spoken, Nhlappo,” said Banner. “You know, boy, I was impressed with you at first. Turns out that Nhlappo is more admirable in every respect. She understand the limits of her position, and her strength too. In short, former Lieutenant Tirunesh Nhlappo is a survivor, not a fool with a head stuffed full of wild dreams. And yet I find myself in a regrettable situation, McEwan. That little trick you played worked. Because of it, I do need you, as you planned all along.”
Warmth and control were returning to Arun’s limbs. “I’ll never do anything for you,” he growled, drawing on his reserves of strength to turn his head and spit at the murdering Ancient. He managed to turn his head, but at the sight of Banner, his mouth dried.
Banner grinned to see Arun’s shock, the berserker’s whole face energizing with glee. “I know you won’t do anything for me, no matter how skillfully I have you tortured. But you will serve me; to save her.” He nodded toward Indiya. “Springer too. How much of their pain will it take before you yield to my will?”
The same threat he had used outside CIC, because he knew it worked. Arun could form no answer. His half-frozen mind was still too narrow, too sluggish, to encompass more than Banner in his wheelchair. The delight the berserker felt at other people’s discomfort shone from the man’s eyes like a beacon. But those eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. The way the skin draped over his shrunken frame was so ill-fitting that Arun started to question whether it actually belonged to Banner. Until he realized that Banner’s rasping breath, sallow skin, and the fact he seemed too weak to stand even in the low-g, were consistent symptoms: the berserker was afflicted by a wasting disease, as if the many centuries of his existence had asserted their claim on him.
With a slight whine from the chair’s motor, Banner moved closer and gave Arun an evil grin, from a mouth missing half its teeth. “Go on, boy. Look! I’ve made a few changes while you’ve been asleep. The ship wears my symbol now. The mark of the wolf.”
Unable to make sense of Banner’s words, Arun looked beyond the man himself, and flinched when he took in the entirety of the usurper’s wheelchair.
It was, he decided, no longer a chair so much as a wheeled throne, bristling with weapons and backed by a peacock fan of three spears. Mounted on each spear was a severed head. Markowitz, Banner’s one-time rival for control of the Ancients, took pride of place in the center, directly above Banner’s head, his mouth still locked in a snarl, glassy eyes rolled upward onto the end of his spear. To Banner’s rear-left was Chief Petty Officer Turbine, one of the most experienced Navy personnel. To his right… Mercifully, Hortez’s eyes were too milky to give the impression he was staring at Arun, but his face still wore the look of surprise burned forever into Arun’s memory. Arun was hit again by the shock of that moment when Banner switched from rowdy soldier to ruthless murderer.
Banner had changed in more than just appearance, though. Back then the man had struck Arun as not merely ruthless but calculating and cunning. Those qualities seemed to have withered with his body, perhaps driven out by desperation. In their place Arun now saw petty viciousness and barbaric display.
If Banner’s intention was to intimidate by demonstrating the fate of anyone getting in his way, then it was working. Arun had never fe
lt so helpless. Even back when he was in hiding on this ship from his twin brother, Fraser, he’d had resourceful allies. He’d hidden with Springer, but it had been Indiya and her freakish friends who had kept him alive.
He looked over to Indiya, who stood with head bowed, using her gloved hands to wipe her face clean where it streamed with tears and snot. There was no hope there; her spirit was as badly beaten as her body. Even her self-cleaning smartfabric fatigues had been reprogramed to emulate a threadbare gray smock, with a crude wolf symbol displayed on the front.
Captain Indiya looked owned, unrecognizable as the girl he had shared an adventure with when they’d first met. They had been kids then, still secure in the invincibility of youth. The universe felt grittier now and more daunting.
The sense of smell was always the last to return after thawing from cryo. Now it came back with a vengeance, assaulting Arun’s nose and throat with the stench of death. The severed heads had been left to rot. The whole ship felt diseased.
Arun was so overwhelmed with disgust that he didn’t notice the second chair being pushed by a wolf-liveried berserker, until Nhlappo gave him a kick to his kidneys.
“Here’s your transport,” she said. “Enough sightseeing. We’re going on a journey.” She turned to the berserker pushing the chair. “Hood him, and double check he’s firmly strapped in.”
The Wolf raised his fist – a salute? – and came over to drag Arun to his wheelchair.
It was only when Arun was strapped to his chair, and the hood was being placed over his head, that he wondered why Banner needed him. The berserker chief seemed convinced that Arun had done something clever before he was frozen. So too did Nhlappo. But what?
Arun didn’t have a clue.
— Chapter 03 —
They traveled to CIC, the nerve center of the ship, in silence, except when Arun tried to ask what he was needed for. A punch to his head, so hard it had to have come from Nhlappo, ensured he didn’t speak again.
Once they arrived, his hood was removed, but they kept him strapped to the chair.
Banner had made a few changes while Arun had slept.
Berserkers were posted on seats throughout the lower deck, armed with plasma pistols and knives. They carried a sense of boiling danger that could erupt instantly, despite looking as physically wasted as Banner. They certainly had more fight in them than the Navy personnel at their stations with heads down. Among them were a few Marines that Arun remembered showing promise in the Navy cross-training program he had devised with Indiya.
He spotted Laban Caccamo at the Sensor Team station. The big Marine was stripped to the waist, displaying fresh welts across his back.
The upper deck of CIC was even worse. Berserkers outnumbered the rest five-to-one, many of them training carbines down into the lower deck where Arun’s chair had been parked next to the commander’s platform. A painted wolf’s head snarled down at him from the overhead.
Banner was slowly hauling himself out of his wheeled throne and into the CIC command chair. No one offered to help, but the effort left him breathless.
“What’s happened to you… Ancients?” Arun asked, unsure how they would take to being called berserkers.
“Ancients!” Banner grunted. “The Wolves, that’s what my pack are called, and you’re in my pack now, boy, make no mistake. Learn quick if you want to stay that way.”
Arun shrugged. “Are the Wolves affected by an epidemic?”
Banner finished settling into his command seat. He leaned one elbow on the chair arm and sighed. “In a manner of speaking. We’re suffering bone and muscle atrophy. I don’t hold you responsible for that problem.” He waved at Nhlappo. “Explain!”
Nhlappo moved to stand in front of Arun’s chair. “Space atrophy,” she said. “Early Earth astronauts had the same problem in low- and zero-g. Evidently the Wolves were kept on ice throughout the inter-system journeys on previous assignments. Now we know why. It’s a problem that’s been engineered out of our model of human generations ago. But the Wolves are only basic Homo sapiens stock with some crude grafts, bred for the psychological traits of violence and limited remorse.”
“My favorite giant has no sense of diplomacy,” said Banner. He laughed, until the effort turned into a cough. “What she means is that we’re psychopathic barbarians,” he added when he’d recovered. “I know what you call us: berserkers. It would be a good name if we weren’t so fucking weak.” He slammed his fist feebly against the chair.
“Is that why you thawed me out?” Arun asked. “Do I have a cure?”
“Asshole,” spat Banner. “That’s a dumb question. Luckily for you, the answer’s yes.”
At a hand-waving gesture from Banner, Nhlappo gripped Arun’s hair tightly in one hand, and brought the other back to hit him.
Arun tried to buck and writhe away, but Nhlappo’s grip was too tight. There was no escape. When the blow landed it knocked the color out of his vision. His world shrunk to the inside of his head for several seconds until his senses returned.
Nhlappo watched his face all the time, her grip on his head still unbreakable.
Arun blew out a bloody tooth into her face. She nodded, satisfied, and stood erect.
“Hopefully that’ll save us time listening to your stupid attempts at bravado,” she said. “Listen up, McEwan. We know you’ve locked up Beowulf’s controls. We’ve no comms. Can’t open any hatches or hangars. We’re decelerating at a constant 0.3g and can do nothing about it. The Wolves need a mix of higher and lower g to combat their wasting. This is the worst of all worlds for them. And the security AI is offline. Whether it’s plotting against us or dead, we don’t know, and I don’t like it either way.” She leaned in close to Arun’s head, the spatter of his blood still on her face. “You did this. Undo it!”
“What has any of this to do with me?” Arun genuinely didn’t know.
Nhlappo slapped him. Hard enough to make him see stars for a moment, but not enough to drive the sense out of him.
“Nine days ago – six months to the day since you were stored on ice – the ship’s systems locked up. You boasted to me on many occasions that you’d set a special lock only you can undo, because of the unique pheromone implant you were given back on Tranquility. I never realized you were serious, or the extent of what would be locked down if you were.”
That didn’t make sense. He’d never said anything like that to Nhlappo.
A vein throbbed at Nhlappo’s temple. She was incandescent with rage! “No true Marine would ever endanger their comrades in this way.” She was screaming at him now. “What if you’d been killed in action? What if you’d died of natural causes?” She clenched and unclenched her fists repeatedly, so angry she couldn’t speak. He’d never seen her like this.
“The ship would have locked up with your fellow Marines inside,” she growled when she’d regained control. “Your dead man’s switch is just the sort of selfish thing I’ve come to expect from you, McEwan. The Chief says you might be useful, but I know you’d betray your comrades again and again. Just as you’ve always done. I want you dead. And I want your death to be prolonged and agonizing.”
Arun tried to read Nhlappo’s mind through the window of her eyes, but all he saw there was anger. Did she really think he’d betray his comrades? And where had Nhlappo’s cruelty come from? She was ruthless, for sure, but had never reveled in cruelty like this.
A thought struck him. Secretly installing a dead man’s switch wasn’t like Arun at all, and Nhlappo knew it. But Banner didn’t. Taking the rest of the ship with him sounded exactly the sort of thing the Wolf would do. And if Arun had set a pheromone lock, they could disable it using the alien who had implanted the pheromone communicator inside Arun: Pedro.
Nhlappo was playing Banner. But why? Was she seeking to take Banner’s position for herself?
“Admit your responsibility to the Chief,” she urged.
“Yes. It was me,” Arun replied. “Only I can unlock the systems. And, yes, the cod
e is a sequence of pheromones.”
She narrowed her eyes, as if seeking deceit on Arun’s face. Seeing none, she nodded to someone behind him. “Bring in the first hostages,” she said.
“I might be weak,” Banner told Arun as he heard the hatch behind him open and the approach of shuffling feet, “but this space atrophy is not going to kill me. I’m not going into an ice box neither. You future humans will be our servants until the day I die. And you’re going to do it with a gun against your heads. As I’m about to demonstrate.”
Beaten figures were shoved into a huddle about ten paces in front of Arun. Indiya was there, her hands gloved and handcuffed behind her. Springer was there too, as were Umarov and Janna. All of them kept their gazes down as they were made to kneel on the deck.
“No countdown,” said Banner. “No negotiations. If I don’t think you’re cooperating, I’ll kill one of your friends without warning. And if we run out of hostages before you unlock my ship, we’ll just go get some more. Look into my eyes, boy!”
Arun obeyed.
“I would rather kill everyone on this ship, myself included, than concede defeat. You do believe me, don’t you?”
Arun nodded.
“Good. Now unlock my fucking ship!”
Now what? Arun didn’t have any codes. Didn’t know anything about a lock. But what if Pedro had set a genuine pheromone lock? Maybe he could unlock the ship.
“I need to get out of this chair first,” said Arun.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” said Banner in his rasping voice. “But I’m not going to set you free. Tell me where you need to go, and I’ll have you pushed there.”
“Over by the main sensor console,” Arun replied. It was as good a place as any.
Before anyone moved Arun, Nhlappo spoke up. “Chief, I’ve an idea how to make this even more painful for McEwan.”
She leaned in close to Banner with a glint of evil in her eye. The leader of the Wolves tilted his head to present his ear, a motion that looked so well practiced that it betrayed Nhlappo’s role as his regular confidante.
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