Hiiro
I hadn't seen many movies back in my pioneering days, a shortcoming I'd more than made up for in my life of crime that followed. In movies, space flight was usually this fast paced thrill of nonstop action from one adventure to the next. Unsurprisingly, the movies I'd watched had lied to me.
The reality of star hopping was a dreadfully dull one composed to two, fourteen-hour shifts; the main purpose of each, being to ensure that we weren't about to die a sudden violent death, or a faint sleepy death, or a long chilly death. This was done by regularly ensuring that all the very sophisticated machines that kept each individual kind of death at bay kept doing each and every one of their jobs. Fortunately for me, I was too technically illiterate to be assigned a watch on any of the truly important machines and was instead assigned to the star hopping equivalent of a hot water boiler. Which meant every two hours I had to check a gauge and maybe adjust a pressure valve. So eight times in a twenty-eight hour day, I did just that.
The rest of the each day was mine to be as bored as I liked.
Recovery claimed the bulk of my free time and initially I had regular checkups with Gerald since none of the other medical mercenaries wanted to deal with me. That sentiment wasn't exactly one way either. My ethnically homogeneous upbringing hadn't prepared me for just how alien my fellow humans could be. There were close to forty mercenaries in the outfit though I only saw the half on my shift on a regular basis. The majority of the Stalking Shadow's crew that pinkish skin which reminded me of a pig, the minority shared my own tanned earthen hue but their faces were wrongly proportioned, the remaining handful had features similar to my own flat face but their skin was nearly as black as charcoal. Then there was Princess and another man with white skin named Gidget who were white like arctic snow and about as warm.
I managed to keep my head down for nearly four days. I was eating alone in the ship's mess when a black man a head taller than me sat down opposite me. Flat-green eyes sized me up from under a head of short blonde fuzz that seemed terribly at odds with his dark skin, yet perfectly in line with the rogue's smile that reveled teeth nearly as bleached as his hair.
"It ain't prison rules lil' man. You don't have to keep it or leak it. I'm Eric."
"Hiiro."
"So what's your deal, Hero? I see you lugging that fire extinguisher with you everywhere you go and I got curious."
"Maybe I just like to be prepared."
"That's some botshit and I ain't buying none of that. There's prepared and then there's paranoid."
"You'd be paranoid too if everyone was out to get you." I said, pausing just long enough to let the moment build before shattering it with a knowing wink.
"You almost had me. You a funny man Hero." Eric leaned into his meal, closing the distance and dropping his voice to a whisper. "There's a bet on you, it's up to two large. You tell me what the deal is with that fire extinguisher and I'll cut you in, eighty-twenty."
"Fifty-fifty." I countered instantly.
"Hard bargain, but fair. So what? You afraid of fire or something?"
His question caught me by surprise for no real reason other than that I'd never considered it before. Ever since the arctic and this heat within me, I hadn't made a fire for recreational and the last time I'd needed one for survival was back in my pioneering days. Even when I was living like a savage in the drug-hazed months that followed, I hadn't built a single fire in all that time. The scarce game and fish I caught were either ate raw or seared in the citric sap of ashiddokoa trees once the 'normalizing' effects of the injections wore off.
In a moment of consideration, I supposed my relationship with fire had changed without really changing at all. It was a tool, one that I could control right up until I couldn't. Fire was a double-headed axe that felled a tree with just as much enthusiasm as it would burn a man alive. It needed to be directed in order to be useful, otherwise it was only dangerous. Doubly so now that I was a living ignition source.
"Closer to the opposite." I offered the half truth with an innocent shrug. "Sometimes things near just burst into flames. It's a curse."
Eric smiled wider than seemed normal.
"You just earned yourself a cool K of cash, Hero."
And just like that, I was a part of the crew whether I wanted to be or not.
* * *
Over the passing days I learned some more about my current abode as we hurtled through the stars at speeds I couldn't even being to guess at. Something my planetside upbringing had completely failed to prepare me for was just how efficient a living space could be. Everything from the corridors to the rooms to the toilets was designed to take up as little space as possible while having the maximal storage allocation in return. Every wall and ceiling was either a drawer or a cubbyhole or a mounting point where bulky goods could be tied down out of the way.
The only exception to these maximally efficient designs, were two rooms of the utmost importance. The first was a large lounging space called the 'Crush,' which served as a catchall relaxation area with a mix of tables, variable lighting, couches, hammocks, screens, games, snacks and invaluable empty space. The second was the armory just off the ship's hanger and machine shop. While I'd initially questioned why an armory of all places would have such massive, lofty chambers, the answer became obvious as soon as I'd pass the rows of massive rifles and tool cabinets.
Armor the size of giants lined the final corridor in the depths of the armory. Most of the suits carried common ancestry, bearing the shape of a lumbering heavy-armed, barrel chested man on squat, powerful thighs and long shins. The average height of each suit was somewhere close to three meters and a single leg would have weighed more than I ever would in my life. Faintly curved slabs of metal plating reminded me of ancient honor blades and lamellar antiques from a half-forgotten age.
Other designs were scattered throughout to bays; one that looked like a fuel drum with legs, a pair with long lean arms bordering the skeletal, another that hulked over the lesser giants with a lopsided left-favored build, and at the far back like a king and his general were two sets of armor without equal. The first was painted in the ugly red of dried blood, the legs longer than any other in the armory giving it rather heroic proportions and what could only be dozens of kill tallies etched into its shoulder plates. The right hand suit was painted in the common bluish-grey but shorter and wider in build, almost fat with so much armor plating that even at rest it appeared to be lurching forward, ready to pounce.
"You better not be getting any ideas, snooping around in here."
I turned from the armor to find a large pink man covered in pale scars— which was an unsurprisingly common descriptor on this ship. This one however, I actually recognized.
"Just exploring, Leeroy. No ideas, just… wow."
"I know what you mean. I've spent the better part of twelve years in that armor and every time I see it, it's like the first all over again." Leeroy said with a bemused smile in his blue eyes.
"Which one is yours?" I asked, standing beside him at an amicable distance.
"Dreadnought Arms, Standhaft pattern, model B with a few personal touches added." There were a few seconds of silence as I looked for any type of manufacturer stenciling before Leeroy nodded his chin to the right. "The one that looks like an angry dwarf about to charge. Its name is Anvil."
"You named it?"
"I didn't. It's Havoc's fault." He pointed to the red giant. "Hammer," then back to his armor, "and Anvil. Say what you will about that stupid lug, but that sonuvabitch is one of the meanest big mothers this side of Enocht."
I nodded along as if I knew what that was.
"Why are you here, Hero?" Leeroy asked, reaching a hand out to idly caress the knuckles of his armor.
"I was exploring th-"
"Not here in the armory. Here, on this ship. And don't give me some botshit about being brought here and now you're stuck."
The botshit in question really was the truth of the matter, but a single glance at Leeroy's stoic expression and way he'd positioned himself beside me, told me that he was weighing my worth. In his mind, that question alone would be enough to absolve or condemn me. I got the feeling he wouldn't take kindly to a short answers, so I let my eyes wander over the armor standing before me as I looked deep into my past for the answer. After a silent minute, I spoke with a steady intensity.
"I was painting this house a few years back. The deader was just some guy who'd pissed off the wrong people by putting his nose in places it didn't belong. On his last little 'fact finding' trip, he shot three public officials and I got the call to make sure he never did it again. When I got to his place, a normal little rundown hole-in-the-wall apartment, he was waiting for me."
"Did he at least put up a good fight?" Leeroy asked, something like pride in his tone.
"That's the strange part. He saw me, he saw the gun in my hand, and he just sat there, then he started talking. He knew what I was there to do and that nothing was going to change the outcome. We both knew I wasn't going to let him walk out of there no matter what I heard. He didn't plead or beg. He just talked to me because he knew I'd be the last person who'd ever listen to him."
"Sounds like a real lost cause."
"Not at all. He had this… I don't know, this clarity-"
'In the face of death, life gains a singular focus…' Leeroy said vacantly.
"I remember thinking that he had to be the most dreadfully sane man I'd ever met. He just sat there in his recliner, and told me everything he'd done while I kept him square down the length of my gun, thinking that any second now I'd pull the trigger. He just kept talking. He wasn't even trying to convince me that he was in the right, he wanted me to know his side of the story and the flawed rationale that brought our paths together. I think he'd been screaming at the wall for so long he was just relieved to finally see another face as he spoke. He just wanted someone to have a conversation with, to acknowledge him and the years he'd spent. He wanted an answer to the question and after years of silence the only way he could be heard was to finally snap— to be a reasonable man forced to unreasonable action."
"What question?"
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'Why did I live when so many others didn't? Why am I still alive?' I quoted from memory, the words still sticking with me after all these years. "I looked at him down the barrel of my gun, and I saw myself twenty years down the road if I didn't get the hell offworld. I saw what waiting for an answer looked like, a man haunted and ignored for years while he sat still, hoping the answer would come to him."
"So what'd you do?"
"I pulled the trigger. Then I swore to myself that I was done waiting— I was going to find my own damned answer." Warmth flooded my limbs at my affirmation.
"Just another man hunting the truth, eh? To what question though?"
"Does it matter?" I countered, putting more steel into the words than I'd meant to.
Leeroy lifted his scrutiny from me, turning his attention to the armory around us. I could almost feel his chewing over my words like the sweet twigs of a Cane tree, putting in the work for a little bit of good around a mouthful of splinters.
"No, I don't suppose it doesn't." He finally said. "A man on a mission is a scary thing."
"Whys that?" I asked, tearing my eyes off the past and fixing them in the present.
"Nothing to lose and everything to gain." Leeroy answered.
I could only nod. It was a profound truth as simple as it was powerful.
* * *
"All hands, prepare for realspace reentry in one hour, followed by three cycles on the float for our layover." A polite man said softly over the ship's intercom on my twenty-third cycle.
I looked up from the poker game I was currently losing, expecting the intercom to provide further instruction yet none was forthcoming. After folding a pair of threes, I looked to the gamblers across from me and put a question to the table.
"What's he mean by 'on the float?'"
The largest woman on the Shadow—and the largest I'd ever seen in my life for that matter—raised and then spared me a look typically reserved for the very young or the very, very old.
"What's the matter Terran? Scared of a little micro-G?" Jhordan teased.
"Cut the little man some slack Jay, at least he's not as bad as Savage or Nowak." Eric said, calling.
Nowak rolled her eyes at the comment but that didn't stop the silent woman from smiling and raising enough to bully the table's fifth, a friend of Eric's named Cid, into folding.
"I don't think I've met Savage yet." I said, leaning into a shoulder stretch to try an peek at Jhordan cards.
"Stupid bastard got SAS as soon as the thrust cut," Cid said. "He was so terrified of the medbay he locked himself in his room for four days, eating nothing but dried prunes the whole time."
A round of chuckles went up around the table while I sat in confusion, waiting for the rest of the story. Eric, always quick to play the mentor, jumped in after laying down a low flush.
"When we got some weight to us again, the poor guy's whole room was an inch thick in 'ejectia' from both ends. He got cleaned up, we made planetfall to go shwack some rebel base and he full sprints down the ramp to go kiss the dirt, swearing he'd never go to space again and his luck was so fucking piss poor, he's not two steps off the ship before he trips a mine."
"It took me five showers just to get the bits of him out of my hair." Jhordan said, tossing back her voluminous golden curls and flipping her cards— a pair of red lords.
"And on that day we swore 'no more dried prunes.' Cid finished with a wry smile.
The rest of the table laughed and I couldn't help but wonder if I'd missed something before laughing along at a man's pointless death anyway. Eric moved to scoop up his winnings, but Nowak held up an arctic tanned finger as she reveled a trio of angels and seized the pot.
"But you still didn't answer my question." I said.
"What question?" Cid asked, shuffling the deck for the next round.
"What did the intercom mean by on the float?"
"Your standard must be worse than mine of you don't know what float means." Jhordan teased.
"It means we've got about ten hands left before we need bolt down everything and start sucking our chow through a straw. If a bimbo like Jhordan can handle zero-gee, anyone can do it."
As it turned out, adjusting to null gravity was a lot harder than it looked. A fact my self appointed instructors/cheering squad constantly reminded me off.
"Did you have to work at sucking that hard, or is it just raw talent?" Jhordan teased as she literally danced double helixes around me. The fact that the massive woman could swim through the air like a fish in water was mind boggling. As was the far more arcane fact of how she was doing it.
"Just give me a push already!" I barked, floating helplessly a half meter from anything I could use to reposition myself. My hand had slipped when I was launching myself, ruining my angle and condemning me to a long, slow flight down the ship's thoroughfare.
"Slow traffic stick to sextant three." Cid said, hurtling pass me towards the ship's nose.
"Just kick me into a wall already!" I pleaded.
"Float or fail, Rookie." Cid hollered before touching off a wall and disappearing from sight.
"Did your homeworld not play billiards, or were you more of a darts lad?" Curtis asked from where he floated ahead of my flight, ensuring every maneuvering handle was folded back into the walls.
"What?" I asked, reaching for anything but only succeeding in adding a nauseating spin to my flight.
"Billiards? Pool? Ricochet?" Curtis clarified without actually clarifying anything.
"I don't know what any of those are."
"Did they not have any pubs where you came from?" The pig-skinned, brown haired man switched dialects and uttered a long-winded curse, or maybe it was a prayer. Either way, I didn't catch a word of the rapid-fire lilting mess.
"It's all about angles." A spectacled man—who'd introduced himself as Clancy but was more often called Mister Fagis out of earshot—said. "Visualize your flight plan every time you touch and recalculate while you drift."
"Would one of you just throw something at me already!" I said.
"And ruin all the fun?" Jhordan asked, floating passed me just outside of kicking distance. "Not a chance. You're the best show we're gonna get all cycle."
"Make a hole!"
I flailed myself downright and there she was, like a blindingly-white light at the end of tunnel. Princess was sailing straight towards me, salvation carried in her open arms if not in her stern expression. She came in fast, slamming into me without really impacting as our coupled bodies adopted her momentum to carry us back up the corridor.
"Thanks for th-" I started.
She had me in a loose hug and she spun around me until I was steady and her heavy black boots were planted on my torso. She back-flipped off of me with just enough force to get herself to a doorway and send me glacially drifting through the air in the exact same way I'd been initially.
"Take him to the hanger and throw him around until he get's it. Then give him a pistol with some blanks and toy with him until he can save himself." Princess ordered, her voice as ice-cold as her snow-white skin had been against mine.
"Hey!" I yelled before she could disappear out of sight. "Get back here and help me!"
Her inhumanly large eyes flicked to regard me as I helplessly drifted through the air. Her face was as uncompromising as the rest of her narrow, boyish build, but there was something in her repulsively-alien purple eyes that made me feel as if I'd cast her adrift instead of vice versa. She spoke in little more than a whisper, her words intended for our ears alone.
"If you can't help yourself, you shouldn't expect anyone else to do it for you. Once they know, we'll be the same to them. Remember that."
"Where's the fire, Blondie?" Jhordan asked, dragging her huge self closer to me but halting a respectable distance away from Princess.
"Ops meeting. We've got a job offer. I'll know more when I get up there."
"What kind of job?" Jhordan asked. Princess answered with a glare that would have rusted iron and wilted flowers. "Okaaay, whatever. I'll try not to break your boy-toy while you're distracted."
It might have been a trick of the light, but I thought a spotted a flush of color in the white woman's skin before she launched herself helm-ward. I didn't have long to consider what I might have seen because Jhordan's hand wrapped around the back of my neck and she threw me to the ship's rear. She set loose a wild laugh as she pounced after me, golden curls trailing and arms spread wide in a parody of Princess's stoic flight.
"Come on hot-stuff, you and me are gonna have some fun!"
We were still having 'fun' when Leeroy and a cluster of mercs all floated into the hanger and started getting a shuttle prepared for takeoff.
"Someone throw the Rookie down here! I'm taking him for a ride along."
Curtis tackled me like a runaway train, riding our shared momentum down to the floor where he stuck the landing and I didn't. Leeroy didn't even blink as he neared me, instead he reached out a hand and plucked me from the air at the cost of some momentum.
"Don't let this get to you," He said. "Spacer brats raised on the float always get like this with Terrans. Everybody's got their strengths." Leeroy paused to set me down and made sure I had a grip on one of the floor straps before resuming his flight. "Cid, you're about the same size as Hero, grab him a voidsuit and a battle belt."
"Where am I going?" I asked. "I thought we were still in space."
"We got a job, so get in the shuttle, get dressed, put a gun on your hip, shut up, watch me, and if this goes tits up and I get shot, shoot the prick who shot me. Did you get all that?"
"I think-"
"I don't like repeating myself, but you're new and I like you so far. Mouth closed, eyes and ears open. Okay?"
I furrowed my eyebrows, but nodded in agreement anyway. The shuttle the away team was loading onto reminded me of a long-haul cargo truck, it was clearly designed to haul freight instead of hauling ass. As I rounded the shuttle's rear, I was greeted by a well-oiled machine that had no place for me in its operation. Rather than asking questions or getting in the way, I parked myself on wall bench and watched.
A lengthy checklist was run through, then weapons and munitions were floated aboard and stowed in overhead racks. The sight of it brought up blissfully ignorant memories from my pioneering days, long hours shared against the untamed wilds of Intatenrup sowing an easy brotherhood within my old troop. Only these mercenaries weren't setting out to civilize the harsh wilderness for future generations; they were gearing up to kill and die for something as trivial as money. During my criminal exploits, I'd developed a fair appreciation for the finer things in life and the price tag that usually accompanied such things. I'd been more than willing to kill for justice and to prune corruption from my homeworld— and the money had been a nice perk on the side. But now, feeling the weight of iron in my heart if not in my hand, I was hesitant.
"Strip and get into this." Leeroy commanded, tossing me a black-and-grey bundle that I assumed was my voidsuit. "Lucky you. You get one with a condom catheter instead of a double insert."
I almost asked what he meant until I saw it. The look on my face must have said it all.
"Yep, that one goes on and that one goes in. Unless you'd rather drown in your own piss and suffocate on your own farts in there."
Something rapped the shuttle from outside, then I heard Princess's voice.
"Leeroy, a word."
He disappeared out the shuttle's rear and I started putting on the unfamiliar gear in the company of three other men I barely knew. From my position near the shuttle's tail, I could barely overhear Leeroy and Princess talking outside.
"I'm not going with you. I've got a bad feeling about this." Princess said.
"All the more reason you should come. If it hits the vents, you can be there you bail me out."
"No. You don't get it."
"What is it? Stomach bad? Or is this more of a lower intestine bad feeling."
"This isn't nerves. It's one of those bad feelings. Like on the Barbabra before it's hull cracked."
"Shizer. You couldn't have mentioned this earlier?"
"It wasn't there earlier. It's like… I can feel something massive out there and it keeps turning its head towards me."
"That's not exactly actionable intel."
"It's the best I've got. Just, be careful. I don't have enough friends that I can keep losing them like this."
"It's just a meeting. We're taking precautions, what else do you want me to do? Call off the meet?"
There was a lull in their conversation that lasted long enough for me to finish changing and start clipping on my loaned battle belt. I ejected the half spent clip of blanks from my pistol's internal magazine and slid in twelve lethal replacements.
"Look at me, I don't care what you see, or what you think you can see. No one can see the future, you're not that big of a deal."
"What if I'm right?" Princess asked. "What if this is another Talfryn an-"
"Talfryn is dead. And if this is another one, we'll kill it dead too. You've got to stop living in fear of his shado-"
Any further eavesdropping was ruined as the shuttle coursed to life around me, the idle hum of electronics drowning out anything below a reasonably polite volume. A half minute later, Leeroy stepped aboard and changed with a practiced ease that put my earlier fumbling to shame.
"What'd the Ice Queen want boss?" Clancy yelled from his place at the shuttle's helm.
"She's on the rag, so she won't be joining us."
"She didn't seem much bitchier than usual before. Oh well, no skin off my back."
"Alright lads, listen up! We've got an hour flight, four hour round trip. We aren't expecting any trouble but prepare for the worst and hope for the best. So here's the job…"