by David Ryker
When we got to the Spaceport, a run-down square of a building that blockaded the airlock that suction-cupped to the side of whatever ship was docked, I was thrown into a line and the soldiers and officer turned and walked away. Someone jabbed me in the ribs with the muzzle of a rifle from the other side, and I shuffled forward toward the gangramp. Behind me and in front were dozens and dozens of people — big, tall, human and not. Most tubers were human — we were easy to grow, apparently, so most of the recruits were human. The other races, though, were all humanoid, carbon-based, oxygen-subsisting. We got a lot of different species through. Outcasts, dregs, nomads, fugitives, runaways. Anyone looking for a fresh start that didn’t care where they landed. And you’d have to not care to be okay with landing on Genesis, and then settling down in Ninety-Three. The only work to be had was terraforming or maintenance. Neither were exciting prospects, so they didn’t attract the best crop of people. All shit flows downhill, I guess, and Ninety-Three was right at the bottom of one.
I swallowed and caught the eye of one of the soldiers guarding the line. He was gripping his rifle tightly, and his finger looked twitchy. I kept my head down instead, and tried to focus on the fact that I’d at least be able to check something off my bucket list.
I’d always wanted to get off Genesis; I just never envisioned it happening like this.
Twenty minutes later, I’d been scanned, tagged, and strapped into a seat headed for orbit. The countdown rang through the cargo bay and I stared at all of the scared faces around me. None were from my crew, but I didn’t think about that for long. We worked together, but we were never close. It was a rotating cast, ever changing. Getting close to people just wasn’t something you did. I knew some of the guys in the line from around. Others not so much, but none of them were soldiers. You could tell by the look in their eyes. I wondered how many would be dead by this time next year. We’d heard the stories of Federation incursions. I hoped they weren’t true. I licked my dry lips, dying of thirst, and tasted the dried bile on them, sour and sickly sweet. My heart throbbed in my throat and I realized that I was gripping the harness with white knuckles. I’d never flown before and my breathing was shallow. I’d had enough excitement for one night. I just wanted to go home and fall face down in bed. Maybe cry a little. Maybe a lot. I felt the tears come again, and my mind whirled with what was to come. I swallowed hard and felt an iron lump in my throat, hot and sharp.
For a second I thought about what would happen to my hab, to all my stuff after I was gone. Then I realized that I had nothing to leave behind except dirty laundry and a couple of shiny rocks I’d found on the surface. Almost seemed stupid to collect them now.
And then the countdown hit zero and the thrusters kicked me in the ass.
4
“This is bullshit,” a kid in front of me scoffed. He must have been no more than eighteen. The sides of his head were shaven, and I could see a Parthacion tattoo running up his neck out of his collar — weird symbols and tribal lines. They were war-paint for the Pathacions, supposed to bring good luck in battle. They were the rage among the kids, if you were into that sort of thing — getting tattooed in some back-alley somewhere just to show off to your friends. Then again, he looked exactly like the sort. I didn’t know him — probably from another settlement — but I knew his type. He had a bit of cockiness about him — obviously didn’t have much experience working for the Federation. Maybe he was from off-world, sent to Genesis as a punishment to serve community service. Maybe he was a runaway. Either way, I didn’t care, and I didn’t want to ask in case he decided to tell me. My head was pounding and I needed to sleep. All I knew was that the Federation weren’t big on shit-talkers.
I kept quiet, but he continued. “I don’t fucking get it,” he announced, his volume rising.
We were in line, queueing through the hangar of the Regent Falmouth, a Class 1 Federation Carrier — basically a flying space station. Our dropship had been swallowed up by the hold and then we’d been ushered out through the pools of sick left by those who’d never gone orbital before. I hadn’t either, but I’d also not eaten or drunk anything for sixteen hours. But it was the fact that I’d barely slept other than being knocked unconscious and almost suffocating that was making my fuse short. “Shut up,” I grunted at the kid. He was two people ahead.
“I mean,” he continued, ignoring me, “why the fuck have I got to be up here? Who the hell do the Federation think they are serving up a conscription notice, huh? When I—” He cut off suddenly and faced front. The thudding steps of a Federation mech cut through the din. It sidled slowly by, huge machine gun in its arms. It was at least twenty feet tall, more than three times the height of any of us in line. Across the armored body, the word ‘F-Series’ was emblazoned in white.
Along with everyone else, I stared at the huge lumbering beast as it stomped past, square shouldered and armor plated, a little camera ball rotating two thirds of the way up the bulbous body like a swiveling eye. But I wasn’t enamored like them. People had an obsession with them — and sure, they were cool. We’d all heard the stories. Heroes. Epic adventures. Saving lives and destroying the forces of evil. But I figured they couldn’t all be true, if any of them were. Inside that angled, steel-shod body was just a regular person. There was nothing amazing about them.
Someone whispered “House Cat” behind me. I turned half on.
“What?” asked someone else.
“They call them House Cats,” the first voice said again.
“Why?”
“‘Cause you need nine fucking lives to pilot one!”
Some people laughed. I didn’t. I watched it go indifferently. The Mechanized Corps were the Federation’s elite arm, sure, but when your entire force is made up of colony workers — farmers, miners, terraformers — how good do you have to be to be ‘elite’? Most soldiers transitioned into Exo. I’d read up on it when I’d turned eighteen — thought about enlisting. It was the only way to get off-world and out of my job, and for a while, I thought it seemed better than being a ‘former until the day I kicked it, but with ninety-six percent of troops landing in Exo after assessment, and with the current three-year survival rate at seven percent, I didn’t really fancy my chances. ‘Forming didn’t seem so bad in comparison.
The House Cat trundled out of range and the kid with the tattoos piped up again. “I could just slip out of line now, jump a guard, take his rifle, jack a cruiser, and then boom, out of the hangar and straight to freedom. No way you’re going to catch me in the Exo Corps, dying like some fucking idiot — like the rest of you fucking idiots.” He snorted like he was hot shit.
I rolled my eyes.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Got it all planned out — next time one of those dumb-shit sentries comes waltzing by—”
“Will you just shut the hell up?” I snapped. I couldn’t control it.
He turned to face me, one eye half closed in some mild attempt at menace. “The fuck you say?”
The two people between us moved out of the way, all wanting to just keep their heads down, and he stepped up. I sighed. That lack of sleep was killing me and I was in no condition to fight, but the headache was begging me to knock this guy’s teeth into the back of his throat, on the verge of collapse or not. “I said shut your fucking mouth.”
“You wanna go?”
“To dinner?” I raised an eyebrow, the anger bubbling up in me. I’d had the night from hell and I felt like kicking his ass might let me exorcise just a little of my frustration.
His fists curled. “I’m gonna kick your ass, you—”
“Piss off, kid.”
“Right, that’s it.” He smiled in a way I’m sure he thought was menacing.
He wasn’t gonna hit me. If he had any intention to, he would have done so already. He was waiting for someone to step in, or for a guard to intervene. But it seemed that no one really gave a shit. All of the people in this portion of the line were from Genesis, and as such, all of them had looked into enlisting
— pretty much the only way to get off planet without stowing away on a ship and hoping you didn’t get found — and knew that the seven percent survival rate was what lay ahead. As such, no one really had much reason to give a crap about anything. I wasn’t feeling especially fresh, and I just wanted the guy out of my face. I didn’t feel like catching a hook, so I defused. “Look, shit-head, you’re pissed off, I get it.” I dropped my tone a little lower. “But swinging for me right now isn’t gonna do anything for your chances of getting out of this. Smart money says to bide your time, you know?”
He glowered at me. “Oh yeah, got it all figured out, huh?”
“No,” I admitted. “But if I was gonna make a break for it” — which I was pretty sure I was at some point, considering the odds — “I’d pass through Transit and wait to be dispatched. Pulling some stupid shit’s going to be far easier on a troop transport than it would be on a Federation Carrier. Hell, staring down the barrel of a death sentence, maybe you could even get a few recruits onboard to help you, yunno, even the odds.” I was talking out of my ass. I didn’t plan to start a mutiny, but I would have definitely been looking for an out after transitioning. I figured, though, the idea of leading his own little band of merry men would appeal to the kid. I watched the gears turn in his head and then after a few seconds he nodded like we’d come to some sort of unspoken agreement. I tried to sigh quietly enough that he wouldn’t hear as he turned around.
We all shuffled quietly forward toward what now looked to be SimPods in the distance. There were hundreds of people ahead of us in the line, and the hangar was abuzz with activity. Ships being loaded up, mechs being moved, soldiers patrolling, and every now and then some unlucky soul making a break from their line, running to who knows where. They usually got about ten steps before one of the patrolling drones hit them with a taser disk. After that, they crumpled, seized, and were dragged away. There was no escaping the Federation. Not ever. I guess I was more used to it, being a tuber, than everyone else was. I stared at the barcode on my arm. I’d always belonged to them.
Two hundred and twelve minutes later, I ambled up to a yellow and black line and had a rifle shoved in my face. “Wait there,” I got told by a soldier. I watched the kid with the tattoos sidle up to the SimPod and climb inside. The door closed and hissed shut, and a red light flickered to life overhead, accompanied by a timer that reset itself to zero. The pod was a big oval, like an egg.
I sighed and looked at the floor, at my dusty boots, and caught a whiff of vomit. I’d still not had a decent shower or been allowed to sit down, or been offered anything to eat or drink. I was dreading the Sim — there’s no way I’d be sharp enough to do well at it. The whole thing was designed to weed out the bad from the terrible — the worst then went to be cannon fodder in whatever war was being fought close by that required bullet sponges, and the less horrible recruits would be shipped off to some distant planet to fight for something they didn’t give a shit about. It was all covered in the ‘After Your Enlistment’ pamphlet, except not exactly in those words. Looking around, I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be here voluntarily. I wondered how many were.
The light went off and the door opened. Tattoos strolled out, grinning. He cracked his knuckles. “Piece of cake.” The timer read twenty-three seconds.
“Get moving,” the soldier with the rifle growled. “Down there, keep left.”
The kid went around the pod and disappeared. There were dozens lined up, all with their own lines of recruits being ushered in.
“You, inside,” the guard ordered.
I took a breath and stepped up onto the steel rungs and into the egg. The door hissed shut and a screen came to life. STAND ON THE X. I looked at the floor and moved over the white X in the center of what looked like an omni-directional treadmill. A rod descended from the ceiling with a set of goggles on one side, and a fake plasma rifle on the other. PUT ON YOUR HEADSET, the screen ordered. I obliged.
The goggles sucked on my face until the world outside disappeared and then a jolt of pain lanced through my skull. A quiet buzzing lingered in my ears for a second, and then it started.
The dropship rumbled numbly. I looked around at all the new Exo recruits, held against the wall between the arms that would soon enough let them go and plunge them into some alien hell.
I stared around at the nondescript helmets, all facing forward, and almost lost myself to the idea that it wasn’t real. I let myself smile and flexed my fingers around the butt of the rifle and looked down, turning it over. Humph, it felt like the real thing. Just a second ago it was plastic and light. This felt like steel. It was heavy and I could feel the surface slick with the chamber grease. The goggles were doing more than just showing me a virtual world. I couldn’t figure out how, but I knew this was deeper than the simple VR goggles I’d saved up a year for back on Genesis to kick back with some video games when I was off the clock.
A buzzer sounded in the cargo bay and a red light started strobing. On the catwalk between the two rows of troops, an officer, grizzled and gray, stepped down from the next compartment. He was wearing a pilot’s suit, and his face was covered with scars. He had his helmet under one arm, and the other was gesticulating. “Troops,” he yelled over the sound of explosions outside the ship. “It’s almost time. Your objective is simple. Survive. We need boots on the ground. Overwhelm the enemy forces. If they’re shooting at you, you’re shooting back, got it? These fuckers are big, they’re mean, and they won’t think twice about putting a bullet in you.”
He turned, his eyes roving across the helmets of the troops strapped up ready to drop. I looked at my arms and legs, at the exo suit. Hydraulic and sprung, my joints felt light, my arms strong. Struts protected my chest and shoulders, rose around my neck — armored me from whatever was coming next. I swallowed hard and then the floor dropped from under me.
The belly of the ship opened and I plunged out along with everyone else. Smoke and fire swirled below and the dropship peeled away into the clouds. We all hit the ground in unison, bounced, and then sprang forward toward cover instinctually. The air was a mess of bullets and plasma rounds.
The ground was carved up with shell holes and craters. In the distance, dark shapes seethed in the smoke, and the cries of some alien species, pissed off at the Federation, rang in the air, punctuated with the whistle of mortar fire and the fizz of plasma rounds.
My shoulder hit the broad side of a foxhole and I pinned myself against the ground. The HUD in my helmet lit up like fireworks, displaying vitals, callsigns of the friendly troops around me, as well as measuring distances to alternate cover, and the chances of reaching it without incident. I shook my head but it wouldn’t budge. How the hell was anyone supposed to see anything in these things?
A troop sank down next to me and gave me a thumbs up. I returned it, trying to convince myself that none of this was real, but the ache in my shoulder was arguing against that hypothesis. The soldier showed me three fingers, then curled one down, and then the next. When his fist closed, he leapt to a stance and scrambled over the top of the fox hole. He didn’t even stand up straight before he got blown backwards by a plasma round. He landed a couple meters away, half his chest missing. I swore inside my helmet and stared around, watching soldiers in every direction get blown apart.
“Get moving!” A voice rang in my helmet. “Sitting on your ass ain’t going to win this war, soldier! Go, go, go!”
I rolled onto my hands and knees and looked for cover. The HUD told me that I had a 72 percent chance of making it to what looked like the remains of a building about ten meters away. My adrenaline was surging, and it was keeping everything else at bay. I couldn’t feel the hunger or thirst or fatigue I knew was gripping me, and despite knowing this wasn’t real, it felt like it was. The goggles had to be interfacing with my brain somehow. Basic electric signals to simulate feeling. Simulate muscle movement. Simulate the sounds and the chemical reactions. But it felt off, somehow. The ground felt smoother than it shoul
d and, despite the explosions and projectiles flying overhead, I couldn’t feel any wind or disturbances of the air on my skin. It was good — better than I’d ever experienced, but there was just enough to cling onto to keep reality and this world separate.
I climbed out of the hole and my feet hit asphalt. I stole a glance sideways and realized I was running down a road. Stacks of bricks and what remained of walls littered the battlefield. This used to be a town.
I dived under a missile that peeled off a mech in the distance and rolled through a broken doorway.
The ground rumbled behind me as a dropship swooped in. Its hold doors opened and it popped out a dozen F-Series Federation mechs decked out in white and blue liveries. They landed hard and then pounded forward, loosing machine gun fire into the distance from their rifles. The muzzles chattered and spat flame.
The last out was a different sort of mech, taller and sleeker than the House Cats. It fell halfway to the ground before its thrusters kicked in and kept it aloft. It drew two huge pistols and started punching rounds into the smoke ahead of us. A rifle popped up from its shoulder and glowed blue before spitting a plasma round into the distance. Something exploded.
It hovered forward, directing the House Cats and barking orders at the troops over comms. “Move up, soldiers. Collect some scalps!”