Uprising

by David Ryker

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s very likely that you picked it up during your time at the Indus Alliance front during the war. It was likely—sorry, I know this isn’t easy to hear, and it’s never easy for me to tell you—something you ate. If you ingest certain types of worm eggs, the secretions in your stomach can cause the eggs to hatch into larvae, which then enter your bloodstream and end up in your brain. They laid dormant for some time, possibly a couple of years, until your symptoms began to exhibit.”

  The thought made Chelsea’s stomach hitch, but it was also somehow soothing. Losing your mind was easier to deal with if there was a distinguishable cause, and what she assumed was a cure, or at least a treatment.

  “What… what are my symptoms?”

  Dr. Copeland tapped at the bracelet she wore on her left wrist. “So far, mostly dissociative problems, which basically just means that you don’t recognize reality as reality.” Her expression darkened somewhat. “There’s the memory loss, of course, and there have been a few hallucinatory episodes, though they seem to be getting less frequent, thank goodness.”

  Chelsea took a deep breath. Hallucinations. It helped to explain the bizarre thoughts she’d been having.

  “What kind of hallucinations?” she asked, though she already had an idea.

  “Mostly harmless,” said Dr. Copeland. “You fantasized about living in outer space.”

  At that moment, the door to the suite slid open and a tall, handsome, impeccably dressed older man entered the room. It looked like her father, but the expression on his face was unlike any Chelsea could remember seeing there before.

  It was fatherly concern.

  “How’s our girl?” he asked softly as he crossed the room to stand next to her bed.

  “She’s lucid,” Dr. Copeland said with an indulgent smile. “We’re in another round of reminders.”

  Oscar Bloom reached out to take Chelsea’s hand and she reflexively drew it away.

  Why did I do that? she asked herself, seeing the hurt in his eyes. Why would I reject my own father? She smiled weakly and took his hand in hers; Oscar practically beamed in response and gave it a squeeze.

  “I was just telling Chelsea about her hallucinations,” said the doctor. “The dreams she’s been having about working on that mining facility of yours. Where is it, again? Uranus?”

  “Oberon,” Oscar said absently, stroking Chelsea’s forehead. “She talked about going there when it first started up, as an adventure, but I convinced her that it would probably be boring as hell. Not to mention dangerous, with all those inmates. She saw the light pretty quickly.”

  Oberon One? Inmates? Space? It seemed vaguely familiar, but the images wouldn’t coalesce in her mind, like a dream that seemed intense while it was happening but then faded quickly upon waking.

  “What… what else did I hallucinate?” she asked timidly.

  “Nothing important, darling,” said Oscar.

  “The others weren’t well defined,” said the doctor. “We couldn’t quite understand what you were saying. Something about alien mind parasites, but that was probably just your way of processing the information I’d given you. And you were having fantasies about stealing things with your friends.”

  “That was probably just a flashback to your early teens,” Oscar soothed. “Nothing to get worked up about.”

  That much Chelsea remembered: she and two friends sneaking into a Tower mall jewelry store while on break from school and daring each other to pocket a number of spaceships. When her father found out, he had given her a lecture and then paid the store owner not to press charges.

  Spaceships? What? We stole earrings, not spaceships.

  “In any case, it appears as though the course of treatment is working,” said Dr. Copeland. “Each time you emerge from a dissociative episode, it takes less time for you to get your bearings again. At this rate, I’d say you’ll be free of symptoms within ten days, perhaps less.”

  Ten days? “How long have I been here?” Chelsea asked, alarmed.

  “Just about three weeks.” Oscar kissed her forehead. “But it won’t be much longer now. Then you can come back home and we can get to work on your campaign.”

  She nodded. That sounded good. She didn’t like being in the hospital—who did, really?—and she was ready to get on with her life and…

  And what?

  “What campaign?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Oscar and Dr. Copeland shared a concerned glance that tilted Chelsea’s equilibrium again.

  “It’s just your senate campaign,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry, that’s not something you need to worry about right now. You just rest and focus on getting better—”

  At that moment, the door slid open again and someone walked into the room. Chelsea couldn’t tell who it was, as the newcomer was obscured from her view by Dr. Copeland’s body.

  “Whass going on?” a female voice slurred.

  “Oh, Christ,” Oscar muttered, standing. “Doctor—”

  “Already on it.” Dr. Copeland’s expression was decidedly different as she leaned toward Chelsea, hypospray applicator in hand. “You should sleep now, Chelsea. You’re starting to hallucinate again.”

  “Izzat Chelsea?” the newcomer yelped. “Whass happening here? Oscar, when did Chelsea get here? Oh, sweetheart, I missed you so much—”

  The woman was blubbering now while Chelsea fought the effects of the sedative.

  “Who is that?” she asked, bewildered. “What’s wrong with her?”

  The doctor, who had been working furiously on her wristband, stopped and gave her a strained smile.

  “See for yourself,” she said, leaning back and giving Chelsea a view of the stranger. It was a morbidly obese middle-aged woman with Asian features and short, spiky hair. She was wearing the same hospital bedclothes as Chelsea.

  “Chelsea!” the woman brayed. “Oh God, whass going on?”

  “She’s just another patient here,” Dr. Copeland hissed as darkness began to encroach on Chelsea’s peripheral vision, and her belly felt the now-familiar sense of falling that always accompanied it.

  “You need to keep her out of here, Oscar,” she heard the doctor say in a demanding voice. “If you don’t, this whole thing is over.”

  “Fine,” her father snapped. “I’ll take care of it. And watch your tone, Indira. I don’t take orders from anyone, least of all doctors.”

  Then blackness overtook her.

  2

  Napoleon Quinn barely had time to feel the first blow land in his midsection before the second one struck home in the back of his skull. Fighting two opponents at the same time was never easy, but it was particularly difficult when your opponents were competing against each other.

  He staggered to his left from the force of the second punch, trying to keep from losing his balance. The polished concrete floor of the New Alcatraz central courtyard was pretty to look at but treacherous to navigate in his stocking feet. The first guy to attack him had knocked Quinn down and yanked off his prison-issue boots for exactly that reason.

  “That’s the best you can do?” yelled a tall young man with windswept hair from the balcony that overlooked the area. He was a cousin in the Wentworth Global Family, Quinn knew, but he’d never gotten the guy’s first name. “Jesus, what am I paying you for?”

  “Hey, piss off!” yelled an older man from the other side of the balcony. “Tell that idiot of yours to clear the way for my guy! He’s obviously doing the better job!”

  Quinn turned so that his back was to the high concrete wall, which forced both his opponents to face him head-on. He took stock of them as he struggled to suck in breath—one was about his own height but almost as wide as Percival Maggott, the other was shorter but powerful and knew what he was doing, as evidenced by the rabbit punch. The first guy was putting on a show, but the second one was only interested in putting Quinn on the ground.

  Now that he was facin
g them, Quinn could see behind the two men as they advanced on him. Near the center of the courtyard, Maggott was trading punches with six inmates who were clearly just cannon fodder to keep the big man from stepping in to rescue Quinn. Geordie Bishop was bringing all his hand-to-hand experience to bear against a pair of inmates with obvious military training, and Ulysses Coker was all elbows and knees in a close-quarters fight with two men with the telltale shaved heads and eyebrows of members of the Southern Saints.

  “Y’all know who I am?” Ulysses barked indignantly as his shin connected with the side of one of the men’s thighs. “Yer dead men walkin’!”

  “Save it, carpetbagger!” yelled the other, driving a fist into Ulysses’ ribs. “Ever’body knows yuh sold out to these Yankee Marines! Y’ain’t no Southern Saint!”

  All around them, men in white silk coveralls watched the bouts with intense interest. A few, like the two men who had yelled at each other, watched from the safety of the balcony. In the three weeks that he and his friends had been in the prison, Quinn had learned that the upper decks of New Alcatraz were reserved for the wealthiest of the inmates, the ones who were serving out their slaps on the wrist in spacious cells with catered food and plush beds.

  And, apparently, armies of inmate goons willing to beat up their enemies for them.

  Quinn took a breath. His vision was clearing, and he knew now that the man on his right was the one to watch in this fight, so he shifted to his left slightly to address the bigger one.

  “Can’t win a fair fight?” he called up to the balcony.

  The bigger man turned his attention upwards to the man who’d hired him, and Quinn took the opportunity to launch his right foot into the guy’s testicles. One down.

  “Kiss my ass!” Wentworth yelled from above. “I lost billions in SkyLode stock when you assholes blew up Oberon One! You brought this on yourselves!”

  Bishop landed a stomp kick to one of his men’s solar plexus, sending him sprawling to the concrete floor. “There were alien mind parasites on it!” he hollered. “You’re welcome!”

  “Pft!” the older man in the balcony scoffed. “Don’t insult our intelligence! For all we know, you did it on Oscar Bloom’s orders! Everyone knows he was stockpiling palladium for weeks before you attacked the station! Now the price has gone through the roof!”

  “Ye fookin’ numpty bawbag!” yelled Maggott. He grabbed one of his opponents by the throat and hoisted him several inches off the floor. “Yuir tryin’ tae kill us ‘cause Oscar Fookin’ Bloom’s got more money’n ye do? What sort o’ daft thinkin’ is that?”

  Quinn’s eyes were locked on his remaining opponent now, and he raised his hands to fighting position on either side of his head. This man was serious, and he wouldn’t be distracted, so Quinn couldn’t allow himself to be, either.

  “Ugh!”

  He couldn’t spare a glance, but the grunt let Quinn know that someone had landed a blow on Maggott that actually hurt, which was never a good sign. He could only hope that the rest of them could hold their own, because the serious man was moving in on him. A right fist whipped toward his left side quick as a snake, missing Quinn’s eye by a hair’s breadth as he snapped his head away. It was quickly followed by a left hook to the ribs that Quinn felt before he saw, and pain exploded inside him.

  “Anytime you want to step in!” he heard Bishop yell at the guards as they watched impassively from the sidelines, their arms crossed over their uniformed chests. “Or do the men up in the balcony pay you, too?”

  “That just proves how stupid you are!” the older man sniped from above. “Of course we pay them!”

  The Jarheads had learned early on that New Alcatraz was designed more for show than anything. It was built by the Trilateral Government on the same island in the San Francisco Bay as its namesake, which had been bombed into oblivion during the war. Some of the world’s most notoriously vicious criminals were housed here, as were many well-known white-collar types whose crimes were mainly financial in nature. The idea was to trick the general public into believing that no one was above the law in the eyes of the new government, and that all criminals were going to be punished in the same way regardless of how much money they had. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The prison was multi-tiered, ranging from penthouse suite “cells” for the richest of offenders, all the way down to accommodations that rivalled those of Oberon One for comfort and spaciousness.

  The latter, of course, was where the Jarheads had found themselves after Drake dumped them in here. Quinn, Bishop, Maggott and Ulysses were dropped into a four-bunk cell while Dev Schuster had his own accommodations in the isolation wing. Quinn had only seen him a couple of times since then. Both were brief, monitored visits where they couldn’t speak freely, but Quinn knew the separation was because Drake had his own plans for Schuster.

  The serious man was getting more serious in his attacks, relying on blindside follow-ups to his blows and landing a few more hard shots on Quinn, which was enough to draw cheers from above. But it also allowed Quinn to study his opponent’s pattern: the man always attacked from his own right as a distraction and then followed up with a blindside blow that was designed to do real damage with his left. This told Quinn that the man was pretending to be right-handed when, in fact, he was a southpaw. It was a good strategy, and if it had worked, it would have tricked Quinn into continuously leaving himself open.

  But it didn’t work, and Quinn abruptly drove a piledriver fist straight into the man’s left bicep, essentially rendering that hand useless. The pain in the guy’s face was more satisfying to Quinn than he would have thought possible.

  Several meters away, he heard signs that his companions were turning the tides in their own battles. Maggott was chuckling, which meant his opponents were probably getting tired of their attacks having little impact on the big man, while Bishop was letting out frequent staccato breaths as he focused on quick, proper execution of techniques. Ulysses, for his part, was still raving about the men he was facing not knowing who the hell he was, dammit, but the strength of his voice indicated he wasn’t in any immediate danger.

  But his own opponent was far from out. He worked around the loss of his arm with lightning-quick shin strikes against Quinn’s knees, hobbling him and sending jolts of searing pain up his legs all the way to his balls. Quinn knew that he had to end the fight while he could still walk if he wanted to have any hope of surviving the encounter, so he sucked in a quick breath to distract himself from the pain in his knees and dropped forward into a dive roll, headed straight for his opponent’s lower legs. He sent out a little prayer that the guy wouldn’t figure out what was happening and bring his knee up into Quinn’s nose until it was too late.

  The prayer didn’t work, but it actually worked out better for Quinn because the man raised his left leg just as Quinn tackled him, which left him with only one foot on the concrete. Quinn’s momentum drove the guy backward even as his own right shoulder took the brunt of his opponent’s attempted kick, and he heard the air rush out of the man’s lungs as the two landed on the floor. Quinn finished the roll, emerging in a crouch and ignoring the stiffness rising in his right arm. He dropped instantly to his ass, raised his right leg high and brought it down squarely on the man’s face in an axe kick.

  His heel felt a jolt of pain run through it as it connected with his opponent’s nose, followed by the warm wetness of blood, but Quinn knew the fight was over. He struggled to his feet, his mind briefly registering the bloody footprints his sock was leaving on the floor as he turned to see his men. Maggott’s attackers lay in heaps on the floor while Ulysses continued to holler at his fellow Saints, despite the fact they were unconscious. Bishop dispatched his final adversary with a perfectly placed head butt that sent a thok echoing through the courtyard.

  The four men instinctively regrouped in a circle in the center of the area, their chests heaving with ragged breaths, and Quinn turned his gaze to the balcony above them.

  “Tea t
ime over?” he panted. “Because if it is, we’ve got shit to do.”

  Wentworth and the man he’d been arguing with earlier were now side by side, their faces red, fuming about how they weren’t going to pay for services that weren’t delivered. Quinn took in huge gulps of air and wondered how the beaten inmates would react to the news that they’d get nothing in return for their efforts, and whether the Jarheads could expect a fresh wave of opponents willing to jump in and try their luck.

  One thing Quinn was sure of: he and his men couldn’t keep this up forever. They’d been fighting since the day they arrived, only hours after they had landed after their mission to obliterate Oberon One, and it was safe to say they were all nursing some serious grudges because of it. That anger helped in the first several rounds, but rather than establishing themselves as people not to be messed with, their resistance had apparently just upped the price on their heads. It seemed there was no shortage of reasons for people to want them dead: rich inmates lost money because of them, poor inmates were trying to earn money, some wanted status, some wanted revenge for their fallen comrades on the space prison.

  They were all tired of it, and tired of not knowing what had happened to Chelsea, Gloom and Ben after they landed, or what Drake had in store for Schuster. Worst of all was knowing that Kergan had escaped in that alien ship. He was still out there in the solar system somewhere, and they could all be sure of one thing: he wasn’t happy about what they’d done to his plans to bring the Gestalt to Earth, and he was almost certainly going to try again, only this time, they wouldn’t have the benefit of knowing where he was and what he was doing.

  Meanwhile, the Jarheads were spending all their time and energy trying to stay alive.

  “I’m sick of this shit,” said Wentworth. He pointed to the quartet of guards who had been watching the fights from the inner walls of the courtyard. “Ten million credits to whichever of you kills these assholes.”

  Quinn let out a heavy sigh and shook his head. It’s like déjà vu all over again, he thought.