Scouts

by Nobilis Reed

  “I love you,” I said, my voice cracking. It was the only thing that would still have meaning.

  “I love you, too. No matter what happens to us, remember that.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  We had said the same thing to each other, back before we even started looking into becoming Scouts. That promise had been broken as soon as the slightest strain was put on it, but that promise was built on a lie. Now, with a new relationship built from the shards of the old, I knew it meant something. I would remember her as long as I lived.

  We turned our heads and kissed, but it was hard to maintain through the tears.

  “Time’s up,” said one of the guards and we were shoved apart.

  As they carried Valka away, I could hear her shrieks of grief echoing from the walls.

  We walked along for a bit and then a section of wall suddenly slid up, revealing a tiny cell. Shirley removed my restraints, stripped off my clothes, and gently pushed me inside. I didn’t resist. She stood in the doorway, her face unreadable.

  “Oxygen,” I said and she looked away. I didn’t really think using my safe word that way would get me out of this prison cell, but it did hurt more than I could stand to see my life crumbling around me.

  As the door closed, she mouthed a word, almost imperceptibly. It could have been sorry, but I couldn’t see how she could be sorry for any of this.

  The room was two meters wide, two meters long, and two meters high. Too small to walk in and barely big enough to lay down. The floor, walls, and ceiling were made of the same soft-but-resilient material as a Scout bed and glowed faintly. A covered hole in the corner with a water sprayer above it was clearly for sanitary purposes.

  I wailed until my voice was raw, all pretense of dignity gone now that I was alone. I beat my fists on the walls. In between, I sat and sulked, imagining a thousand ways to get my revenge on Shirley. When that was done, I lay down and tried to sleep.

  As soon as I closed my eyes, the lights flashed and a loud crash rattled my teeth.

  I started, my sleep spoiled, heart pounding. “What?”

  “Cadet Challers Dizen, who are you working for?” The voice was synthetic. Impersonal. Pitiless.

  I squinted against the bright light. “I was just trying to help Masters and Valka.”

  “Someone contacted you. Who was it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re t . . .”

  Another klaxon split the air. I clamped my hands over my ears. Then it was gone and the lights went out completely.

  Did they want Trace? Was that it? Trace didn’t have anything to do with this. They couldn’t want her.

  “Who is your contact with the Pirates?”

  “I don’t have con . . .”

  My denial was obliterated by the noise.

  “We know everything. Your entire life has been recorded. All that remains is whether you will redeem yourself and cooperate, or if you will refuse and prove yourself completely useless.”

  “Trace. Her name was Trace.”

  “Good. So Cadet Trace Hom was part of the conspiracy?”

  “There was no conspira . . .”

  Another blast of sound interrupted me. “Do not lie to us, Cadet Challers Dizen. You were in a conspiracy with Cadet Trace Hom.”

  “To maintain the hideout in the robot. That’s all.”

  The blackness stretched in silence. I waited for a response. There was nothing. I groped, found the corner, and curled up in a ball.

  Everything seemed to be going so well. The Scouts didn’t seem to have taken any notice of our activities. Shirley’s betrayal bit into my stomach. I vowed to make her pay for it if the opportunity ever came.

  Might as well have vowed to visit the Norma Arm.

  When I woke up, I smelled food. Groping in the darkness, I found warm bread, some tea bulbs, and cut raw vegetables. I ate them all as fast as they would go down.

  Sleep came at irregular times, often interrupted by the disembodied, angry voice. Always, they wanted to know who I was working with, who I had spoken to, and what I had said.

  Before long, with the constant assaults on my sleep, the irregular food, and the light and dark, everything outside the room started to seem unreal. I started having nightmares. The world took on a dreamlike quality and the dreams became more vivid. The difference between sleep and wakefulness blurred. I fought hard to hold on to what was real, but in the isolation of that little cell, the fight was a hard one.

  In the meantime, I told them everything. I told them about Trace, and the hideout, and Suna, and Zun. I gladly told them all about Shirley and everything she had done to make my activities possible.

  And when that wasn’t enough, I made stuff up. It didn’t seem to matter. Talking resulted in food and sleep. Refusal, or even hesitation, was punished. Before long, I had constructed an elaborate fantasy in my head full of lies and betrayal, doublecrosses and triplecrosses, with plenty of names to give up to my captors.

  Time passed. I don’t know how long. Ten days? Thirty? A thousand? I had no way to tell.

  The door of my cell opened. The walls outside were green instead of white.

  “Good news,” said a man. “We’re going to reward you for all you’ve done. You’re getting your old body back.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “My old body?”

  He didn’t explain further. He led me out and down a short corridor to a gentank where a couple of technicians were waiting.

  I wasn’t sure, right then, whether I was dreaming or not. They opened the gentank and helped me down into the blue gel. Something inside me tried to protest, tried to tell me not to do it, that they would be able to make me into whatever they wanted, whatever was useful to them.

  That voice was small. The greater part of my mind wanted to just go along to make sure they didn’t start with the klaxon, with the lights, and let me sleep. Inside the gentank, I knew I would sleep. I had the strangest sensation of deja vu, that this had happened to me before, but I couldn’t tell whether it was in a dream or real life.

  I could swear I knew that technician, that I’d seen him before, but all my thoughts were lies—things I had made up and things I had dreamed.

  All except that little voice in the back of my head.

  It got louder.

  They still need you for something or they would have killed you like they killed Joco. They don’t need your mind anymore; it’s broken. So they need your body. They’re trying out a template that Cassandra made, trying it out on someone they don’t care about. They’re lying to you.

  My imagination fixed on the dozens of newgen templates they could use. Would they make me into a limbless Astrolo, put me completely at their mercy. They could combine Astrolo and Ovor, and just turn me into an endless egg factory. They could take what they had done to Trace to its logical conclusion and turn me into just another component of their drive system, orgasming on command, a living orgone factory.

  Or they could be using this as a convenient way to finally dispose of me. The gentank would simply unmake me, take me apart into my constituent molecules and store them away to use on others.

  I tried to fight the horrific possibilities flooding my mind, to somehow escape from what I knew would be a fate worse than death, but the conditioned, compliant, dreaming part of my mind had become too strong. That little voice still screamed in my head as the lid of the gentank came down. The chemical smell came and I slid into sweet unconsciousness.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Masters’s face swam into view, a vision in the mist, blurry and indistinct, but I knew it was him. Only it wasn’t Masters. It was Robert.

  “Challers?”

  “Unh.” I recognized the voice. Blinking, I wiped the gel from my face.

  “Challers, we need to hurry. Can you walk?”

  I wasn’t in the gentank anymore; I was propped up on the edge of it. I guessed that I had been yanked out still unconscious.

  “I . . . I guess.”

  I l
ooked down. I really was back in my old body. I swallowed and stretched. The fog that had clogged my mind cleared a little. This was real.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where’s Valka? Where’s Shirley? What’s going on?”

  “There’s no time to explain, just come with me. We can get you cleaned up when we’re aboard my ship.” He shoved me, still covered in goop, into a Scout uniform and handed me a pistol. “Do you know how to use this?”

  Another shock of reality. I remembered that day in the target range when I realized I could kill, in quick flashes of memory, each like a bucket of cold water in my face. I definitely wasn’t dreaming. I thumbed the safety and selected three-round bursts.

  “Yes.” My stomach protested with a painful somersault, but I swallowed the bile back down.

  “Good. If we’re lucky, you won’t have to use it. Ready?”

  I was still sore and dizzy from the aftereffects of the gentank, but I nodded. “Let’s go.”

  We hurried away from the lab, through the twisting corridors. I was lost, but Robert knew the way. He peeked around corners as we went, kept an eye behind us, alert every moment for an assault or ambush. I kept quiet.

  “Where are all the guards?” I couldn’t see how we would be allowed to just walk out.

  “We know how to plan a mission, unlike some cadets I know.”

  “That wasn’t our fault!”

  “Wasn’t it?” He turned to look me in the eye momentarily. “Do you think Command doesn’t have people watching for just the kind of thing you were doing? When you killed that Ovor in the maternity school, they knew the next car leaving the station would have the perpetrator.”

  “Killed? We didn’t kill anyone!”

  “Didn’t kill anyone? His head was smashed like a melon!”

  Valka. That was Valka. She had stayed behind to “take care of” the Ovor man who had almost raped me. That was indeed the most expeditious way to take care of him.

  I shuddered. “I didn’t know anything about that.”

  “That may be, but it was what got this whole mess started. They scanned the car as you were travelling back, figured out who you were, and came and got Shirley. She could either arrest you, or she could get arrested herself. It’s a fine position you put her in.” He rounded a corner, raised his weapon, and fired two short bursts.

  Two Scouts lay on the deck, neat holes in the centers of their chests. The wall behind them was splattered with gore. Robert was channeling some serious crisis orgone into that weapon. As we ran by, I swallowed hard to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged.

  “Stay sharp,” he said.”The gunfire is going to attract attention.”

  “Then why did you shoot them? Couldn’t we have talked our way past or something?”

  He opened a side door to a ramp circling up the sides of a wide shaft. “Too risky. By now, they know you’re not in your cell; they’re going to have people converging on us.”

  “What about Valka?”

  “They’re listening, Challers. Just follow me and stop asking questions.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without Valka.”

  “Vacuum take it, Challers!” He slapped me across the face. “Shut up and run!”

  I ran. Every stride could have been taking me farther from Valka. I stumbled, wanting to turn around right there and make sure we were getting her too, but for once in a very long time, the rational part of my brain took hold. If Robert could rescue me now, I could rescue Valka later. With my own freedom, we would still have hope. I pushed on, past the numbered maintenance hatches set every few meters along the ramp.

  Shouts echoed from below. “Stop!”

  Robert swung his pistol downwards and fired a burst. Ricochets sang through the shaft. I felt the ramp vibrate as more rounds struck the floor beneath us.

  He pushed me towards the wall. “Run. If you see them, shoot!”

  We hustled together, using the ramp floor as cover, trying to keep the angle between ourselves and our pursuers close enough that they couldn’t see us. For a few seconds, we were safe, but another burst cut across our path. We dropped to the floor and I crept up to the edge of the ramp. One of them on the ramp below was going down. He was angling to get a good line of sight on us while his partner climbed the ramp. Another burst slammed into the ramp.

  I looked back at Robert, who still lay where he had dropped. He groaned, clutching his arm. Blood dripped from under his hand. One of the rounds fired from below had caught him high on his right arm.

  Vack. Now it was up to me. I peeked over the edge again. I could hear the running footsteps of the man’s partner on the ramp below me. I didn’t have more than seconds until he caught up. Another burst of gunfire rattled the ramp and I ducked back behind the edge.

  The man shooting at me was right out in the open. There was no cover for him. All I had to do was peek over the edge and shoot.

  And become one of them.

  Become one of the people who would kill to advance his own agenda, one of the people who considered his own life more important than anyone else’s. There wouldn’t be time to shoot to maim. I took a deep breath, trying to quell my fear, quiet my heart. I wanted as little crisis orgone as possible going into that weapon. I didn’t know how worked up I would have to be to put a hole in the side of the station, but I didn’t want to find out.

  I rolled to the side, raising my weapon over my head to poke it over the edge of the ramp. I fired a burst to get him to flinch, then aimed and fired again. He went down.

  I leapt to my feet, catching Robert’s elbow as I went. Had I killed my target? There would be time to worry about that later. For now, we needed to run. I fired a couple bursts down the ramp, just in case the second pursuer was close, and we took off.

  Luckily, our destination was only seconds away. A door at the top of the ramp opened and we dived inside. It was an emergency airlock, a type I was familiar with. The heavy door closed and Robert slumped against the wall, grimacing with pain. The outer door had red lights around the edge, indicating that the exterior was a vacuum.

  My rescuer’s face was pale and sweaty. There was an awful lot of blood.

  I looked around the tiny chamber for some way to keep the door from opening again, but there was nothing.

  “Great,” I said, “now we’re trapped.” I took the first aid kit out of its vacuum-proof container and applied an emergency bandage to Robert’s arm. It bonded instantly, and I could see the relief of the built-in anesthetics wash over his face.

  He smiled and shook his head. “No. We’re almost free.”

  He stumbled to the outer door, hit the button, and it slid open. A short plastic transfer tube led to the belly hatch of a Scout ship. We crawled through and closed the hatch behind us. A hand reached down to help Robert up the hatch to the main deck. Once he was up, I got to see who it was.

  Grecca.

  She practically yanked my arm out of its socket pulling me up the hatch for a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. “You made it!”

  “We did, but Robert’s injured. We need to get him into the tank.”

  “No,” said Robert, “not yet. I’m alive, I’m not going to black out. You two are going to have to power the ship while I keep us from getting recaptured. As soon as they figure out where we went, they’re going to launch the drones. We need the fastest orgasm you’ve ever had.”

  “Can do, captain,” said Grecca.

  “You going to make it to the bridge on your own?” I asked.

  “I’ll be fine. Go get started.”

  Robert made his way to the bridge, steadying himself with his good arm.

  Grecca took my hand. “Come on. The quicker, the better.” She led me back to the chamber. “The rendezvous point is fairly close, so we don’t need a good orgasm. We just need a quick one.” She knelt in front of me, pulling my pants down as she went.

  “Rendezvous? With who?”

  “Shirley, Masters, and Valka.”

  “Valka! You mean .
. .”

  “Yes, she’s being rescued right now. Or at least, that’s the plan. We won’t know until we get to the rendezvous point. Concentrate, Challers, we don’t have time for talk. Now lie down. We don’t want to be standing if Robert has to make evasive maneuvers.”

  Valka. We were going to see Valka. My heart leapt, but at the same time, I knew how dangerous getting away would be. I lay down in the middle of the chamber.

  Shirley’s voice crackled from the intercom. “I’m strapped in. Starting up, hold on tight.”

  “Ah, here we go,” said Grecca, removing the crumpled pants from my ankles. She moved closer and gave my as-yet-unawakened cock a lick. “Bleah!” She made a foul face and spat. “You taste terrible!”

  “The gel from the gentank,” I said and propped myself up on my elbows. “There wasn’t time to clean up.”

  “Well, this isn’t going to work like this.” She got to her feet just as the ship lurched to one side, and she stumbled and flailed for balance.

  I took her hand and pulled her back down to the floor. “There are other ways. Kneel down, we’ll do it like new recruits.”

  I hadn’t had an orgasm for a long, long time, and while my body was freshly remade from the gentank, my mind was more than ready. We quickly stripped off the rest of our clothes and knelt facing each other.

  “First one to come wins,” I said with a wink.

  “No fair! Men always win those races.”

  “Tough. Just try, it’ll help me.” I wrapped my hand around my cock and concentrated on her body, watching as she stroked her breasts and pussy. My body reacted, filling my hand with hardening flesh.

  “That’s it,” she said, “do it for me. Do it for Valka.”

  One hand drifted back and forth between her nipples, making them into tight little knots of pink flesh. The other drew two fingers between her pussy-lips, making small, liquid sounds as she stirred her juices.

  The ship bucked again, nearly toppling us, and I tried not to imagine the threats that could be causing Robert to have to maneuver that way. I focused my thoughts, blending all the skills I had learned in Physicality to let my body take over.