Vengeance Enlisted

by James Scholes

  They must have rebuilt her. She hadn’t died in the accident, there had been enough of her left to rebuild. My heart surged at the thought. My life wasn’t just thrown away here. It had meaning again. Beth and I could be together⁠—⁠we could ask to be assigned to the same squadron. The brass would be happy enough to oblige. Friends looked out for each other, lovers even more so. We would be a stronger unit together.

  “Marine!” Harrod barked. I looked up, a million miles away.

  “Huh?”

  “Duck!” Harrod shouted, but his warning was too late.

  Two drones jumped up out of the shadows. I twisted to take the first one down: fired a half dozen blanks that disabled the droid before it could fire. The second droid was still active, and its sights were on me.

  “Cover fire!” Wilson shouted, but my fellow marines might as well have been tying their boot laces they were so slow.

  The droid fired. Violent energy slammed into me, made my muscles lose all control.

  I went down. I was out. I had failed the mission.

  I didn’t give a damn. I just wanted to talk to Beth.

  It took five days before I got my chance. Five days of torture: both physical and emotional. The training progressed in a blur: we went EVA⁠—⁠Extra-Vehicular Activity: out in space⁠—⁠and I hardly even noticed. My mind wasn’t on the training at all.

  When I went to bed I couldn’t sleep. I could only think of Beth. I still couldn’t fathom that she was alive. It was a miracle. And she was here! Could things get any more perfect?

  But I was thwarted at every turn, no matter how hard I tried to speak with her. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. I know she had seen me. She knew I was here. Was she trying just as hard to contact me as I was her? Were we just missing each other, a constant coincidence?

  Five days… Then I found her. It was pure chance: the asshole steward had ordered Wilson and I to move a crate of broken armour to the recycling station.

  “My knee is still aching,” Wilson moaned. I knew he was lying just to get out of the extra duty, but he knew I wasn’t myself and wouldn’t argue. I just nodded dumbly and Wilson smiled.

  “Thanks. I’ll make it up to you⁠—⁠promise!” and then he was gone and it was just me and the garbage crate.

  Alone, I lifted the crate and propelled it down the hall. It floated on magnetic gyros and responded to the lightest touch. The crate was so large that people had to stand aside in open doors and wait for it to pass.

  It was only as I was reaching the deepest nexus of the ship that I heard a confident: “Wait… Proceed,” and as I passed, there was Beth standing in an open doorway.

  We both jumped in surprise. She stared at me for a moment, and then her face grew hard.

  “Beth,” I said, and I blurted it out, all my words in a rush. “It is so good to see you! I thought you were dead… Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you recognise me?”

  “I know who you are,” she said, her voice cold. “Go about your business, marine.”

  “Beth, you don’t have to talk to me like we are just marines⁠—⁠not to me. It’s okay; nobody has to know.”

  “Stop calling me that,” Beth said, angry. I couldn’t figure out why she was so angry with me. Was it because it had taken me so long to find her? Didn’t she realise I had spent every waking minute trying to find her?

  “Beth, I⁠—⁠”

  “Stop calling me that!” she snapped. She went to leave; I grabbed her by the arm. Forced her to stop.

  She swung around and kicked me so hard that I flew into the crate I was carrying. I collapsed like a sack of potatoes. I hadn’t expected that at all.

  “The name’s Marine!” she yelled, and then she was gone and I was all alone.

  FOURTEEN

  My day got worse when Taylor cornered me.

  “Hey!” he shouted, waved me down.

  “What do you want?” I demanded. I should have known it would be bad news: Taylor had never come to talk to me before. Even through all the drills and training sessions, he had hardly said anything to me that wasn’t essential to the mission. For him to come speak to me now was… Odd.

  “I wanted to talk to you… About Beth. She’s alive⁠—⁠can you believe it? She’s alive!”

  “I was just talking to her,” I told him, made it sound as though what we had been talking about was more important than Taylor could ever imagine. That was how lovers were. And weren’t Beth and I lovers? We had been… But it didn’t feel that way anymore. It felt like a lie.

  “What did she say?” Taylor asked, cautious and optimistic all at the same time.

  “It’s private,” I said, and Taylor broke into a huge grin.

  “That bad, huh?” he laughed, relaxed. “Look, I know you and Beth were an item, but that’s over now. I’m just giving you a head’s up: I want her. I’m going to make a move on her. I thought you should know, since we’re training together. I need to know that you’ve got my back if it comes to danger. Just because Beth and I are dating doesn’t change the fact that we’re marines. We have to work together.”

  “We’re not over,” I said.

  “I wasn’t asking your permission,” he told me and he flashed his cocky smile at me. “Just so you know: if you fall, I’ve got your back. Just like before⁠—⁠I didn’t let the steward kill you. I still won’t. We’re part of the same team.” he waited for me to say something. When I didn’t he just nodded to himself, said: “Yeah?” and then walked off, left me standing there.

  It took a few seconds for my anger to rise. The nerve… When I recovered enough to take him down, Taylor was gone.

  I hurried after him in the direction I had seen him go, but the first person I saw wasn’t Taylor.

  It was Beth.

  “I⁠—⁠,” I said, downcast. I hadn’t wanted to see her. Still didn’t want to see her. She was… Confused. Had to be. The Beth I knew and loved wouldn’t have kicked me in the guts. She would have held me, cried with me, sought comfort with me.

  Beth didn’t want to see me, either. She looked ashamed. The fresh scars that crisscrossed her face made her look slightly collapsed, like a deflated cushion⁠—⁠but the scars would fade as her new skin found more colour, and they did nothing to detract from her beauty.

  She was still beautiful to me.

  “Beth, I… I…” I stammered like a fool. Beth didn’t say anything. She just watched me with hard eyes: the eyes of a trained marine. Her soft features had hardened during training. I suppose mine had, too.

  “It is so good to see you,” I told her. The words sounded lame to me, as though we were strangers that had never shared a kiss, a bed, or hearts entwined. “If I had known you were alive, I would have come and found you sooner. I would have done everything for you.”

  “Please, don’t do this,” she said and when I looked up at her beautiful face I could see how miserable she was.

  “But I have to,” I told her. “I made up my mind to become a marine to get revenge: I was going to kill Taylor.”

  “What?” she was shocked. “How could you sat such a thing? And revenge… For what?”

  “For killing you,” I told her. “If he hadn’t been flying so recklessly none of this would have happened.”

  “You think the accident is his fault?”

  “You don’t?” I asked, and now I was the one confused.

  Beth stared at me as though she had no idea who I was. I might as well have been a gecko to her. An alien.

  “Beth, why are you looking at me like that?” I asked her.

  “I can’t believe I loved you,” she said. “You talk of revenge without even taking a single second to think of your own actions⁠—⁠you started the chase! What happened to me was just as much your fault as Taylor’s. No, it is even worse: you were supposed to love me, and yet you didn’t even trust me enough to show a new friend around town. That’s not love, not to me.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, but she ign
ored me and kept talking.

  “Do you know how dead I was? Dead! They had to rebuild me, brain and all. And it is funny because they could extract all my memories but none of my emotions. So when I think back at our time together I can see everything we did but I can’t remember how I felt… And, you know what? I don’t know what ‘old Beth’ saw in you. What made you so special? I don’t know. But I see Taylor and everything he does, and the man he has become and now I can remember what excitement feels like. For me, this is the first time I have been excited in my whole life. The first time! When I make love to him, it will be the first time I have ever felt true joy⁠—⁠because the memories I have of you are soulless, empty. Oh, and I will make love to him, if he still wants me. So I am going to ask you kindly: leave me alone. Whatever we had died with me. I’m Taylor’s girl now.”

  Before I could say anything she stormed off. I was floored even more effectively than when she had kicked me.

  Taylor… It all came down to Taylor. He had taken everything I ever cared for⁠—⁠even her feelings for me. Even her soul. My heart burned deep within me.

  I really was going to kill him.

  FIFTEEN

  “All hands, prepare to jump. All hands, prepare to jump!” The alert came over the loud-speaker. It was some days later, and I was still in a complete funk. Just a mindless zombie.

  But the alert cut through all the chaos in my mind and I dove to the nearest wall and hung on. Every marine around me did the same thing. They weren’t going to be fooled twice, and nobody wanted to suffer the indignities of their first jump.

  We jumped.

  The sense of vertigo and gut-wrenching terror was less this time. Being deep inside the ship rather than against the hull must have helped. I hardly even felt it⁠—⁠just a lurch in the stomach and a sudden pain in the head that was gone as quickly as it arrived.

  When the sensation stopped, I looked around to everyone else. Most of the recruits were smiling, a few were laughing⁠—⁠this jump had been much easier than the last one⁠—⁠but there were two marines I could see that had to run back to their bunk to change their pants.

  I hated to think how their sleeping bunk-mates would handle the arrival of their shit-stained pants. But that was life aboard a battleship: if the shit wasn’t yours, that didn’t mean you wouldn’t have to deal with anyone else’s.

  “Where are we?” someone asked. It took me a moment to realise it was Harrod⁠—⁠the jump had thrown me off more than I had thought. Everything was a bit of a blur.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “Let’s go take a look,” he urged and he took me by the arm, wouldn’t let me argue. I didn’t want to look out the view-ports, didn’t care where we were. I just wanted to mope around. Harrod was having none of it and I gave in to his urging.

  “Wilson!” he shouted as our friend emerged from around a corner. “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilson said. “I was about to go check.”

  “Come with us,” Harrod said, and the three of us hurried over to the view-ports.

  We weren’t the only recruits who were keen to find out where we had jumped to: there was a queue by the view-ports.

  “There’s nothing there,” I heard someone moan. “Just stars.”

  Harrod looked confused.

  “Why would we jump to nowhere?”

  “We’re on the wrong side of the ship,” I told him and tugged his arm, took him and Wilson back the way we had come. I was getting swept up in the excitement of it all. There were messages blaring over the loud-speaker: “Gamma Team, prepare to engage… Gamma Team, prepare to engage…”

  Something was happening, that much was obvious. We hadn’t just arrived to empty space. There was an energy to the battleship that had been missing lately.

  There were just as many recruits standing by the view-ports on the opposite side as before, but the difference was that these recruits had something to look at.

  A giant asteroid floated in front of us.

  “It’s huge,” Wilson said. Lights from our battleship made the asteroid glow. It was a dark brown, almost red. Its surface was craggy, with deep valleys etched into the rock. There were flecks of white on the surface⁠—⁠ice, trapped from some long-forgotten incident with a passing comet.

  That wasn’t what had grabbed everyone’s attention, however. No, the most impressive part was the space station that had been built into the rock.

  Docking bays and antennas stuck out from the surface, stark and utilitarian. The station was dark, with no lights or any signs of life. The open hanger bay was like the dead mouth of a whale. Inside, everything was black.

  “What is this place?” I wondered, curious despite myself. This was what I needed to get over my funk. This was interesting.

  “Someone said it was attacked,” one of the marines answered me. Someone I didn’t know. “By the geckos.”

  “Is this a rescue mission?” Wilson wondered. As he said that, we saw one of the drop ships leave the Devastator’s hanger and head towards the waiting, dark hanger bay of the asteroid.

  “You don’t send marines for a rescue,” Harrod said. An excited chill ran over everyone as we all had the same thought.

  “Maybe they are still there,” the other marine said. “And we’re here to clean them out.”

  The drop ship disappeared inside the asteroid’s hanger.

  “Epsilon team, prepare to engage,” the loud-speaker told us. A handful of marines hurried away from the view-ports to their posts. Harrod shared an excited smile with Wilson.

  “I hope they leave enough geckos for us,” he said. We were Theta team, but it did not sound as though they were sending teams out in any order. Alpha team were still to engage, and they were normally first for everything.

  “It’s probably just another training exercise,” Wilson said. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. “They told us we wouldn’t be using live ammunition again, remember?”

  “Whilst on the ship, yes⁠—⁠but that asteroid isn’t the battleship. This is different.” Harrod had already made up his mind. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t share their excitement, either. My funk returned with a vengeance, like a train hitting me at full speed.

  This space station was a change. I hated change. I wanted things to stay the way they always had been. Beth and myself, together forever… But that wasn’t my reality any more. This space station just confirmed the shift in my life. I wanted it to go away. I wanted all of it to go away.

  “Are you alright?” Wilson asked. He was frowning at me.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You look tense,” he pressed.

  “I said I’m fine!” I snapped and felt instantly like a fool. I shook my head: “forget about it.”

  “Whatever you say,” Wilson said, but I saw him and Harrod share a look and I hated them for it. They must have noticed my lack of focus. They were worried⁠—⁠not for me, but for the team. They didn’t give a damn about me. I certainly didn’t give a damn about them.

  “Leave me alone,” I said⁠—⁠to none of them, to all of them, I didn’t care who listened just so long as they obeyed. They just watched me go.

  But I was living a fool’s dream. I was a marine on a battleship. There was no such thing as being alone.

  And there certainly wasn’t any going back.

  SIXTEEN

  Marines kept flying over to the asteroid station and they kept coming back soon after. There was a constant stream of them.

  Any marine that was training near the main hanger could hear the screams of the injured. They were carted away quickly by waiting robo-medics. The blood remained on the hanger’s deck, a grisly reminder of the war.

  “Nobody will tell me anything,” Harrod said over breakfast one day. “They all say they have orders to keep things secret. What the hell is going on over there?”

  “Must be a special training thing,” Wilson said with a shrug. “Some kind of surprise.”

  “
Then why so many injured?” Harrod shot back. “I heard some people have died.”

  “From who?” I asked, and they both looked up because I hadn’t spoken much since my outburst a few days prior. “If nobody’s talking, then who told you?”

  “It was just something I overheard,” Harrod said, annoyed that I was ruining his excitement. “They could be lying⁠—⁠but we’ve all seen the injured. Somebody could have died.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking about my own injuries. Was death even possible anymore? Which led my thoughts down an even more dangerous road: what point was there in revenge if Taylor could come back from the dead?

  But could he? I wondered. By all accounts, once someone was dead, they were dead. Even Beth must have had enough to salvage to come back from whatever place she had gone. If I blasted Taylor’s head to pieces, what could they salvage? And did it even matter? How dead did I have to make him before vengeance was mine?

  “You still with us?” Wilson asked. He frowned at me. I just shook my head.

  “Just thinking about the geckos,” I said. I think they believed my lie, and even if they didn’t they didn’t push it.

  “They say geckos are fifteen feet tall,” Harrod said. “I’ve only ever seen drawings. You know, because of all the secrets. Nobody ever comes back to tell us what’s real.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said. I smiled; Harrod had improved my mood considerably. What was I worrying about death for? The answer was known by everyone.

  We were marines: nobody ever came back.

  The injured became a steady stream in the battleship’s corridors. There were too many for the hospital ward to handle. One of the hangers was set up for casualties, with beds stacked four high. I only went down there once to check out the situation. Curiosity got the better of me: I had to see it for myself. I was amazed at how many recruits were serving on this battleship. Seeing so many injured in the one place was eye-opening. The sheer scale of the war was immense⁠—⁠and this was just one battleship. The war waged across the galaxy; a thousand planets were wrapped up in conflict.