by David Ryker
There was fire in her eyes and her cheeks were flushed. She was angry — but more so, upset. “You almost cost me everything,” she hissed.
I felt guilty all of a sudden. I tried to swallow it. “Then stay the fuck out of my way.”
She ripped her hand back and curled it into a fist. “You need to learn your place, tuber.” She curled the other into a fist and stood straight, splaying her stance. “Get the fuck up, so I can knock your ass back down.”
I spread my hands on the table. “You think that’s a good idea? Want to be pulled in three times in one day? There’s a lot of people in here.”
She smirked and cracked her neck. “Don’t worry, it’s been taken care of. There’s an understanding here. We take care of our own shit. Pilots don’t need anyone else to sort it out. So long as it’s… sanctioned. We’re a family, all of us, and we don’t like anyone messing that up. You get it?”
I looked up, towards the officers’ tables, and found them distinctly empty. I swallowed, my guts heavy, heart thumping slowly, squeezing at the back of my eyes. The feeling was dread. “Look—”
“Get up.”
She had pull. With the officers? She and Meyers were close — that much was apparent — or at least close enough to talk as freely as she had earlier. Everett had said that they were tight-knit up here. So what, Meyers had pulled her in, they’d gone over the footage. He’d seen that Kepler had ditched me, and that I’d tried to screw her over, and then… What, she’d told him she wanted to beat my ass, and he’d just said okay? I was finding it hard to buy, but maybe they just wanted me out. It sounded like everyone here had been through the wringer and I’d just dropped in from nowhere, skipped the years of training and studying. Were they just trying to make it so bad for me that I begged them to kick me out?
I pushed back from the table and stood. Growing up on a colony was no picnic, especially as a tuber. People didn’t like them. In adulthood, it was more like being a social pariah. Terraformers were outcasts as it was, but no one else was wont to bother with us. We stuck out too — Tube Defects, they called them. Some had it much worse than me — skin discoloration, lack of hair growth, vocal malformation. I got off lightly. All I had to contend with was one side of my head being white, apparently where I’d leaned against the side of the tube. Growth in the early stages was stimulated with electricity, but it also affected pigment in the cells if a portion of the body was touching the contact point. Made it easy to pick me out. Made it easy for kids to pick me out. As an adult, it was being shunned. As a kid, it was being cornered, bullied, beaten on. It wasn’t fancy Federation training, but it was learning not to get your ass kicked from a young age. I’d been schooled by a House droid built in with Federation Curriculum in the Education and Development Facility in Settlement One on Genesis before being sent to Ninety-Three. Though that was a fancy way of saying orphanage. Still, I was no stranger to having some purist want to take my lunch, or just throw me a beating for no real reason at all. We were all there together, all in the same boat. Most of the purist kids were orphans from other planets, brought to new colonies to get an education and a jump start on life. The only thing they got was a jump start on was serving the Federation. I got that. They were bitter. Full of anger. Hell, who wasn’t? But they thought that gave them the right to beat on tubers. We were easy to pick out of a crowd, and I think that’s all it was. And now, it was like being back there all over again. I was different. Different enough to unsettle them, to make them question their fragile little pedestals. And it’d painted a target on my back.
I sighed and stepped out of the bench into the gap between it and the next one over. I got a look at the two cronies. Guys, our age, reasonably big. Not too big to take one at a time — probably too big for both at once. But first, I had to contend with the pissed-off twenty-year-old-girl standing her ground, ready to throw a punch. I could tell there was no getting out of it, so I put my hands up and beckoned her toward me. “Come on, let’s get this over with,” I muttered.
Then she hit me, and I went down, and stayed there, and I hoped that it would be the end of our relationship. But it wasn’t — not by a long shot.
8
Basic training was far from basic, and on top of that, it kind of sucked.
The first hurdle to clear was the written test, which I was told would come once every two weeks, and would cover everything from mechanical operation of the Federation mechs to the history of the Federation, the history of war, tactics and warfare, sciences and mathematics, and philosophy — which was actually just politics mostly. It was a stroke of luck that the first examination was on Federation history. Being a colony kid, we’d grown up having their history rammed down our throats. I didn’t breeze through it by any means, but I passed, which was everyone’s first problem.
The first day, when I’d had my wings clipped by Kepler, I’d sort of thought that she’d just shape up to be the bully, and everyone else would be much nicer. I was wrong. Word spread pretty fast that I was some colony-jumping tuber who’d somehow cheated his way into the Mech Corps. No one took lightly to me being there, and the result of that was a solid four months of hazing, where they’d do everything they could to bounce me out of there. Everything from jostling me to get me to drop my lunch to dumping buckets of water, and worse, over me while I was sleeping. And that was just the kid stuff — during combat training, they definitely weren’t exercising the ‘reasonable constraint’ that they were instructed to. I was sick of getting elbowed and kicked, but it wasn’t enough to get me out of there. I didn’t think anything would be. Whatever they did to me, I’d had worse. Their idea of ‘hardcore’ was far from it. They were rich kids, private schooled, born with silver spoons in their mouths. Growing up in a colony orphanage was a fight for your goddamn life.
The thing was that with every passing minute, the carrier we were on drifted farther and farther from the only place I’d ever called home, and closer and closer to a place where most of the ground troops would likely die. As such, I had no intention of finding myself in the melee, not when there were rumors swirling that the Federation was on the brink of war on a planet called Zelebos over resource appropriation, where the indigenous population was the Zelebosions, a race of humanoid jungle dwellers that outsized humans by three to one, and could rip one clean in two with a flick of the wrist. The idea of jumping into battle with them didn’t sound very appealing.
I was trying to stay cool and collected. And from the outside looking in, I think I might have been pulling it off. In truth, I was hanging on by my fingernails. I’d dip out of quarters to the bathroom after lights out and spend a couple of hours studying on the toilet, locked in a cubicle in the most remote bathroom I could find. Or I’d wake up an hour or two early, snag some extra sim-time on the ground and in the F-Series. I was almost getting the hang of it, which was great, considering that we had an examination coming up. Full immersion simulation, with the time dilation turned right up. We’d be under for a few hours in real time, but inside, it’d feel like weeks. I didn’t know how to feel about it. Everyone else had done it a few times in the academy — or so they kept saying. Telling me what a mind-fuck it was. How it’d break me. I tried to ignore them and keep my head down. And yet, as it loomed, I couldn’t help but feel a little sick. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. I got the bare bones of the concept, that it was about accelerating the way your mind processed information. Inside, everything was in ultra fast forward, but from the outside it was normal. Of course there were the horror stories — the psychotic breaks, the seizures, the hallucinations. But I figured if I’d come through the orphanage on Genesis and made it out without any lingering psychological issues, then this wouldn’t be what broke me. I figured that it was just the academy kids, swaddled from birth and raised weak.
The Upper Training Deck was warm, and the air smelled like stale sweat and heavy breathing.
The ground flashed under me, disappeared and then reappeared. I slammed
into it and the wind jumped out of my lungs. A guy called Jonas was standing over me, tall and thick like a tree. He rolled his eyes, cracking his knuckles.
I stared into the ceiling high above and listened to my heart thundering against my chest. The rafters swam with dust and shimmered in the haze of the halogen lighting. The room was about five football fields across, and was used for everything from hand-to-hand combat training, which was what I was currently engaged in, to target practice, to maneuvers and tac training, to simulation. Three hours in the morning, two in the afternoon.
I’d been getting my ass kicked for four months. Kepler was the golden girl, and my stunt had bought me no favors. Apparently she came from a long line of Federation officers. All pilots. All top of their classes. She had a lot to live up to, and she was doing it. There wasn’t an officer in the ranks that hadn’t come up with her brothers or her father, or uncle, or someone. And there wasn’t an airman in the ship who didn’t know her family’s name — except me, of course. And that seemed to give her some sort of authority. People listened to her, gravitated to her.
She was pegged to be the youngest female pilot in history, and held most of the training records already. That much was common knowledge. There wasn’t a recruit in the ship who didn’t want to cozy up to her, ride on her coat-tails. She had a chip on her shoulder about it. Something to prove. Apparently, me snagging the top sim-score, and without even meaning to at that, really pissed her off. I was hoping that letting her deck me would have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. She made it her mission to get me out of the Corps, and she was using all her pull to do it. She was picking my sparring partners and choosing the biggest, meanest fuckers there. She was choosing my sim environments, my target practice routines, the scenarios for my tac training. All she had to do was offer to organize it and the instructors were happy enough to let someone else do the paperwork. She was making it as difficult as it could be in the hopes I’d fail — incidentally, she was just making my training a lot more thorough than anyone else's, which wasn’t a bad thing. I was trying not to show it but I was busting ass to stay in the Corps.
“Get the fuck up,” Jonas grunted. He wasn’t human, but he wasn’t far off. The Polgarians were a humanoid race with dark, ridged skin, ridges on their skulls and arms, and a far higher muscle and bone density than humans. As such, hitting him was like hitting an anvil, and getting hit was like running into traffic. They paired Polgarians with Polgarians for sparring, humans with humans, but today there was an odd number of both, and I drew the short straw.
I lolled my head sideways and cast a glance over to the sim-pods. Kepler was standing there, hips locked, arms folded, short hair hanging loose over her ear, smirking. She watched me, and her cronies sniggered. They always seemed to be a rotating bunch — hungry airmen all trying to suckle at the popularity teat. When she’d hit me, I’d gone down, and she’d blown off some steam, but she was holding a grudge. I think I made the right call, though. She was lighter than me, but she still hit like a fighter. I watched as she’d ground her heel in, twisted into her knee, and thrown from the hip, giving it everything she had. I could have stopped it and clocked her, and I’d stayed up nights, sponging the blood from my nose or cheek after a tangle at afternoon sparring, thinking about it. All it would have achieved, though, was getting me kicked out. The only reason I wasn’t gone already was because I wasn’t fucking up. I wasn’t biting back and I wasn’t picking fights. Boots filled with petroleum jelly, socks with the toes cut off, towels being stolen while I was in the shower. They thought it was treatment enough to get me to go, but they were private school kids who’d all grown up with a silver spoon in their mouths. They thought this was hard? They’d obviously never taken a look inside a Colony Education Facility. That was hard. That was getting a pillowcase put over your head while you sleep and having six kids punch you until your ribs cracked.
I dragged in a breath and rolled over, spitting blood onto the mat. I got to my feet and shook off the stars, curling my fists. It was taking a while to get to know how a Polgarian fought. Lots of up-close-and-personal stuff. Grapples. Throws. Shoulder barges. Elbows and knees armed with jutting spines. They hurt the most. Only got caught with them once. That was enough. I thought I had it figured out now, and it’d only taken two weeks of being tossed around by Jonas to do it.
Despite being bigger and stronger, Polgarians were a little slower, and weren’t really much for blocking. Their hard exterior made landing painful blows more difficult, but they weren’t impervious, and like all humanoid species, had soft spots. Things that dangled on humans dangled on Polgarians. Thumbs still hurt when they were bent back. They needed their eyes to see and their throats to breathe.
I cracked my neck and raised my hands, circling. Jonas grinned and raised his. “Want more, huh?”
I could taste copper. “If you’ve got it to give.”
He lunged forward before I had chance to finish and I leapt back, stepping left and right. The last time I’d tried this, it hadn’t gone so well. Now, I hoped I knew better.
He came at me with a grab and I fended it off, shunting his outstretched fingers with the flat of my hand. They bent back and he curled them in and sucked his hand to his chest, eye twitching. He lunged with his right instead now, in a wide swipe. I got inside it and threw my arm up, feeling it connect with my forearm. I ignored the pain and lashed out with a kick instead, low and hard into his inner thigh. The thickly knotted muscle absorbed the blow, but with no hardened and ridged skin, it struck home. He sagged backward to a knee, his leg moving outward, and I took the chance. I wound up my arm and lashed out with the bottom of my knuckles, connecting hard with his ear — the softest part of his head, left undefended by the arm clutched to his chest. He yowled and keeled backwards, protecting his face, shocked more than anything. I didn't let up. He never had, and that anger was bubbling up.
I threw my foot into the soft patch between his abs and chest and shunted him backward, leaping after him and throwing my other foot over his shoulder. He scrabbled for me, but it was too late, and I twisted hard toward the ground and pulled him over, locking one leg around his throat and the other over my foot to keep it there. His hands were beating on my legs like drums. I caught one by the fingers and found the thumb. It took both of my arms to wrestle one of his into submission, but I had him by the neck; the question was whether he’d pass out before I had to let him go from the blows. His fist beat on my thigh and knee and I gritted my teeth through the pain, squeezing as hard as I could on his throat until I felt it close.
He wheezed and flopped, but I wasn’t going to let him go. If I did, he’d beat the hell out of me. No, I was too far gone now. I had to keep going, whether it was right or not.
My legs ached and my blood gushed in my ears, deafening me to the cries of the other recruits around the mat who were all chanting and yelling for Jonas to get up. Boos and screams of indignation rang through my head as I starved his brain of oxygen. They faded away with every hard beat of my heart as my muscles filled with lactic acid and throbbed.
I didn’t know how long I was like that, but out of the darkness I felt hands on my chest and shoulders. My legs loosened and I was dragged off Jonas, who gasped and rolled onto his side.
Two airmen had hold of me, one on each arm. They looked grave.
“Jesus Christ!” the instructor, a human by the name of Shaw, yelled. “You’re not trying to kill him, Maddox!” He let the pad he was holding slump at his side and put his hand on his head, which was speckled with thinning gray hair, shaking it.
Jonas gasped for air on the ground and the two guys dropped me. I hit the mat and rolled to my knees. Everyone around me was staring blankly, like they were pissed off at me. Figures. No one said shit when Jonas was laying into me — tossing me around, hitting me in the back of the head, ignoring tap-outs. I raised my head and locked eyes with the nearest guy, staring him out until he looked away. No one would say shit. No one really gave a shit. They were al
l too concerned about what anyone else thought to really have an opinion of their own. I was the bad guy, and that was it. The villain to hate. I shook my head and spat blood onto the ground. Fucking vultures, all of them, staring down their noses at me, the only tuber in the Mech Corps, waiting to see if I’d get hurt, or worse, so they could be there, just to see it.
Shaw made a turning motion with his hand. “Alright, that’ll do. We’ll break for today.”
Everyone dispersed slowly, and a couple of his friends carried Jonas off. The crowd thinned until it was just Kepler, standing at the edge of the mat. She had her arms folded, jaw set and mouth carved in an scowl like she had some shit up her nose.
“You down for round two?” I asked, my voice hoarse from the fight.
She turned away and sidled off back toward her own group. They were still lining up for sim time. I watched her go, and when I was sure she wasn’t going to look back, I fell to the ground and rubbed my thigh, wincing. Jonas had done a number on it. I didn’t know if I could stand. But I had to, because no one was going to help me up.
I was lying in my bunk, reading a tome called A Brief History of Mechanized Warfare: Third Edition, which was anything but brief, when the door opened.
I was sharing my room with seven other guys, mostly human. Sometimes the division was clear cut, other times there was a mixing of races — humans just not quite human anymore. Some with longer ears, others were taller, some had white eyes, some black. Some had noses that were wide and flat and others had scales. It was a real mixed bag, but that was the Federation way. All people, one Federation — and all that shit.