“Isn’t it funny we can’t put her in a broom closet, or have her sleep standing up like every other appliance?” The mercenary laughs to himself. He struggles, unpacking the cot from the cargo bay wall. Sweaty at his armpits, as always. “Shows you shouldn’t hold back from anything, body mods included. See, I’d go all-in. I want to snooze anywhere; just flick a switch, and I’d get the best night’s rest I’ve ever had.”
“If you really need the deepest sleep of your life, I’ve got something for you.” The android hisses. Her hand idly rests on her sidearm. With a satisfied scoff, the man turns to you lurking in the corner, requesting audience feedback for another one of his monologues.
For kidnappers, they’re amicable enough.
“Hey clown, you sure you don’t have any others? As much as I’m comfortable with you sleeping on the floor, I don’t want your digital friend throwing us into a black hole if you wake up with a sore back,” the mercenary pries. You shake your head, letting him reconcile with the fact that he’s spending his shuteye on the cargo bay’s filthy paneling. Just like you.
The familiar pirate queen monitors the progress of yet another simple task. After surveying that her subordinates have successfully dislodged the rusted industrial bed from the freight bay wall, she barks her orders.
“Serac, you’re on first watch. Reggie, you get a quarter-cycle rest until you’re up. Every time one of you wakes up, try to hail the Cimarron for reinforcements.”
She stifles a yawn, taking care to maintain her stony visage fixated on her two fellow criminals. The rings under her eyes tell you she’s been up for at least a cycle and a half, no doubt focused on her sought-after prize. Whatever it may be.
“Alright Capitaine, we’ll keep an eye on the clown.”
“No,” she interjects, cold as the tungsten floor. “I’ll take care of the meat. You watch Reggie, make sure she doesn’t get her systems shredded by that AI.”
“The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her,” Dyle echoes over the loudspeakers. It forces a grimace from the android and a cavalcade of laughter from Serac. The mare sighs with annoyance and twists at her hooves, tail beckoning you to follow her elsewhere. You leave in tow, hesitantly accepting the change of guard.
The ovular hallways that connect the ship’s joints haven’t seen this much life before.
Long-dormant rooms looted, boxes of garbage and junk maneuvered into new positions, kicking up dust that makes you sneeze. The merry band has beaten open cargo containers with the butts of weapons, fulfilling the subconscious ransacking instinct shared by every criminal in the galaxy. To their disappointment, there’s little to pilfer.
Dyle normally keeps to himself—you haven’t seen him this talkative since you installed his matrices. Sure, he jokes, but it’s rare he communicates with strangers. He must enjoy the company, pushing his limited vocabulary to straining, pulling out innuendo from long dormant datasets.
Even you feel a sort of comfort from the tenuous truce that gives you a passive upper-hand against your attackers. Unlike usual, the presence of guests emboldens you, the mare’s flicking tail spurring you further. Perhaps you could take a chance and deliver the datapad, then the three criminals. A whole planet to yourself is an enticing reward.
You wonder if Dyle could run subsystems across your own personal colony, or if he would toy with the residents, you included, making every day just slightly too hot or cold for his own amusement.
The mare guides you to what was originally your captain’s quarters. Although it’s the only proper sleeping area on the ship, you prefer to call it your private cabin. She’s protected the room from looting, save for another secret panel behind your desk. One that housed a stash of emergency credits and spezie.
Both skimmed from previous deliveries, both now in the hands of your captors.
“Stolen once more. The cycle continues,” joked the mercenary at your expense.
The captain sits on the built-in bed, taking care to undress the multiple firearms that dot her waistline. One at a time, she stacks the guns, ammunition, grenades on the corner mount furthest away from you, letting you stand awkwardly in the doorway of your own room. She removes the last gun from the pocket of her jacket, your 418, and inspects it between her fingers, toying with its antique make, caressing its frame with her white digits.
“Don’t sleep?”
“Excuse me?”
“If you don’t want to get some sleep, it’s your call,” she says. Her eyes fixate on your weapon, attempting to ascertain its importance. Unsatisfied, she places it underneath what was your pillow, now hers. Her arms maneuver above her head, legs crossing in an exaggerated pose of relaxation with a nicker. It takes a bit of acting to fit into the already undersized bunk.
You once received the bed in lieu of payment. It heats or cools to your exact needs, reading your vitals, amplifying your dreaming conditions, producing optimal temperature and firmness. By his own admission, the client gave you the gadget because it only works half the time. But when it does work, it works. The warmth after a day of trudging through snowbanks, or the crisp coolness after shaking desert sand from your jacket, makes your courier life worth living.
The floor has none of these features, and you thoroughly weigh your options, risking your limbs.
“I don’t think we’ll both be able to fit,” you say. It’s a vain attempt to edge yourself to the bed. Unimpressed, the mare reaches under the pillow and brandishes your firearm. A red glow emanates from a nearby console, Dyle reluctantly reminding all participants to maintain decorum, you included with your lukewarm bravado.
“Try the floor,” she replies. Her mouth opens as if to follow up with some other comment, some insult or threat that must be hurled with frequency. But instead she closes it prematurely with a frown, as if she hasn’t the conviction to say it. Holding back her anger, flashing a look of deadly skepticism, your captor dials down the lights and you sink to the ground.
The reliable thunk of discarded holsters hits the metal floor. Their jingling is followed by a balled up jacket and bodysuit. You feel around for something to lay your head on. After grabbing what you believe to be your captor’s cropped coat for a pillow, reeking of disintegrator discharge, cigarettes, and sweat, you shut your eyes for an unsatisfying rest.
The idle hum of engines reverberates against the floor. Unlike your bed, the sterile, cold paneling doesn’t shift to make your life any more comfortable. Grimy alloys dig into your shoulder blades, pulverizing your hips. You hear the meandering footsteps of Serac on watch, hypnotically rifling through the over-picked remnants of your possessions. You quickly conclude you won’t be able to overpower him, at least without alerting the rest of his gang. As if you could fight toe-to-toe with a seasoned terrorist.
The mare’s careful breathing is irregular. She fights against the desire to sleep, one so generously laid on by the self-adjusting bed, vibrating and soothing. An idea, one of grabbing a gun while she sleeps, creeps into your mind. Sure, you’ve never fired one, but at such a close distance, you’re bound to hit something. Plus, her minor reluctance towards hostility is an invitation for insubordination, a fact she must know well, as she uncomfortably shifts, attempting to outlast her captive in the race to shut-eye.
You attempt to rouse yourself, dancing between consciousness and dream. Focusing your strength, you take a deep sigh, trying to calm your nerves. However, instead of the normal recycled air, you’re greeted with scratching, itchy crimson particles, ones that commingle with the stinking makeshift pillow. They enter your nostrils, snake down your trachea, and affix themselves within your rib cage. An unnatural force flattens you against the floor. A boot worn by a familiar mercenary. He grins, his eyes a dry maroon, his own breath reeking with narcotics.
You struggle against his constrictions as your vision, like his, turns to the foreign red of a spezie spike.
---
You take a deep breath, filling your lungs with the sweetness of Spring grass. The air is dirty. Unfiltered, humid. A natural, non-artificial atmosphere. The morning fog hasn’t lifted, but the sun peeks through the mist.
Its warmth kisses your wet fur, sending a chill to your hooved feet.
A rumbling builds from silence, disturbing the surfaces of the muddy brown pools of water. You open your eyes for the first time, seeing the iron, white bars in front of you rattle against the earthquake. They’re familiar, the padded walls and metal cage. They corner you, like your blinkers, subjecting you to the deafening cacophony that echoes off the aluminum ceiling.
You can’t see them, but you hear the others. A feminine voice on your left cries out in anger. Another to your right rattles her pen and screeches.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Claustrophobia sets in. You shove at the pads in front of you, bruising your palms before charging them with your shoulder. Your tongue scrapes against the bit in your mouth. The mechanical flavors of high-quality metal gnash against your teeth. Your molars grind like diamond on quartz.
You taste blood as another disembodied scream ejects from a nearby cell, all of you trapped.
Entranced by the noise, your mind calms, shutting out sound until your own breathing remains. First hyperventilating, then slowing, as if you’ve begun to accept your cage. An unseen force massages your consciousness, asking your compliance from a distant box, delivering you calm.
Far-off eyes watch your every move through binoculars. A smoky haze surrounds him, like the rest of the racetrack in this early morning. The precipitation hangs in the air, against the dew, billowing from the shouting punters. You taste what he tastes. An imported orange for breakfast. An unfiltered cigarette. Blood as he nervously chews his chapped lips, still dehydrated and hungover from your evening you shared the night before.
He whispers under his breath as he strains through his lenses, leather and brass pressing against his youthful fingers. The same fingers from the early morning, tracing your shoulder blades, pulling taught the fitted straps of tack. He murmurs, loud enough to be heard by you alone, cutting through startling noises, comforting you.
You’re the race’s favorite, he says. You’re his favorite.
The clouds divide. Sun breaks through the bars. Dawn crawls through the binoculars. It blinds you both. Two sets of eyes cram shut in perfect unison.
A buzzer sounds, then a gunshot, and you sprint from your tomb onto the muddy track.
---
A pair of straps constrain your chest to the chair. Gravitational forces grip your skin, pulling your organs out of place. If you open your eyes now, they’ll rip from their sockets. You’ll be disemboweled any second. Outside, paint peels from the hull, warping the craft’s aluminum exterior.
There’s no way out of this tin can, you think, as it thunders through atmospheric reentry.
The flight is alien, but feels familiar. Maybe another mold of you has been here before. You anticipate gravity at first. Then, the textures of native Martian greenery and Venusian fine wines at your destination. A villa in a crater, once more filled with babbling water, now complemented by viscioli orchards that stain your sorrel coat. A complex surrounded by multi-kilometer-tall mountain ranges that hold year-round luxury winter resorts. Skiing on the slopes, covered in snow that never melts, drinking cocoa from some unheard of plantation light-years away.
You’ll go swimming and be weightless again, hand-in-hand, digits intertwining on piscina’s surface.
The hand grips yours. You don’t dare open your eyes, but you know who it is. The tired, old face that watched you floating in the tank, in the red liquid that gave you life from nothingness. He’s the same man that sculpted your body to his commands, fostering a relationship that lasts several lifetimes and gives your soul purpose.
Your heart fills with electricity. It emanates from the brand he placed, the iron a molten orange as it plunged into your sternum. You always remember how gently he held the fiery instrument that scarred your chest, how his confidence in that moment kept you from crying out in pain. He’d done it before, he said, and as he soothed your tears. You feel the branding over and over, again and again, memories left behind by each of your separate copies.
But now his grip is abnormal. His calm touch is replaced with a clasp that pins you underneath. Although he says something, it’s too loud to hear him over the intense rattling of metal components. Yet it perfectly resonates in your mind. You want to look at him for a final time, but you can’t open your eyes, and you know he can’t either. Your fear rises, coming to a slow boil, cooking you as you try to scream.
A flash of hot air tickles your face and, all at once, engulfs the both of you.
---
You roll over, heaving blood and mucus into the mud. Your hands sink to their wrists, knees and legs caught in the muck as you find yourself on all fours. You parried the blow, but you feel a sharp pain in your hip. The rain continues to beat down on you, as it does every waking moment, your mane a sopping mess. Gripping your blade, you shamble to your feet, shuffling against the amphitheater’s uneven ground that hides teeth, bones, and caltrops from previous duels.
Slamming your gladius against your scutum, you let out a battle cry, trudging forward against the arena’s sludge.
Your adversary, who stupidly tries to leverage themselves against their shield, sinks deeper into the mud. The man groans and flails wildly, an arm to his stomach holding his entrails in place. Another dying criminal, strong with the element of surprise, weak when faced one-on-one. You stand over him as he wails, thrusting his plasma lance in desperation, missing you, falling further into the sediment. The crowd roars with the endless monsoon.
Bettors howl and fill the open-air amphitheater, shaking it with calls for blood.
For the first time in your career, you hesitate. You look down on the dying man, sensing a familiar kinship. Not with the man, but with the tortured spirit that hides beneath the armor, within the mangled tulpa that struggles for survival. Within the doomed criminal is a mirage of pain and anger, held by an unseen feminine energy that shadows yours. You feel this soul, lifetimes of this undying connection. Forgotten explosions of passion, then a final one of tragedy.
A soul severed from yours, set adrift for hundreds of years until this moment amid the torrential downpour.
A labored voice shouts out behind you, and obediently you turn. His metallic hand cups his mouth, the other holding a simple black umbrella. Your owner, the android, cheers for slaughter. He’s foreign to you, compared to the meat you overshadow. His mechanical red eyes violate your every orifice, malicious in their construction, arbitrary in their command.
Remembering your true purpose, murder, you scream in anger, jamming your gladius into the shoulder of the dying gladiator.
You shriek, stabbing and hacking, severing tendon and crushing bone, bits of torn flesh commingling with the rain striking your face. The blood graces your tastebuds, flooding your nostrils and triggering your hunger. You don’t stop, attempting to dislodge the adversary’s manubrium before throwing down your weapon and digging your thumbs into his eyeballs. As you find his brain, put your maw a few centimeters from his face and scream.
Continuously, until you can’t hear anything, drowning out the whispering spirit that gives you pause, slamming your eyes shut, satisfying your inhuman lust for violence.
Once your vision returns, you’re on the bridge of the Chang Tsung-ch’ang. Your home, your cage. The luxury craft silently orbits the rainforest planet below, covered in clouds that bring endless storms. Again, you’re screaming, hungry.
Your thumbs cut against cracked ocular lenses, now oozing red pseudo-optic liquid that pools with your own blood on the floor. The wealthy Helium trader is lifeless in your clutches, mouth aghast with horror, chest wiring ripped to shreds, what few human organs he had left crushed with your fingers. As you slowly withdraw your digits from the motionless corpse of your owner, you become a slave with no master. Your soul once more is alone, adrift in the cold expanse of space.
Only until recently, it feels.
---
A foot collides with your stomach. You open your eyes to take in the blinding lights. Unable to breathe, you cough, desperate for some sort of oxygen, organic or synthetic. As you dry-heave, you heard a litany of familiar voices.
“Capitaine, I—”
The jocular accent appears. It intermingles with the sharp thuds of punches landing. A set of yellow sunglasses hit the floor, along with what sounds like miscellaneous objects from around the room. A mare shouts with rage.
“Getting high on spezie? Now? On a ship that’s actively trying to kill us!”
Your pupils shrink, giving you a front-row seat to a voracious beating as the gladiatrix brings your pistol once more to the side of the mercenary’s head, cutting him across his diminished hairline. One hand holds him in place, the other whales on him. She tosses the gun to the floor, accidentally discharging and embedding a low-caliber bullet in your wall. You can tell she’s left-handed as she punches anywhere possible, above, below the belt, pinning the seasoned terrorist by the collar with a single fist.
“What kind of criminal spikes a VIP who has vitals tied to the ship? How spiked are you?”
“Hey clown,” another familiar voice says. Digits gently touch your cheek, forcing your head upwards. Reggie gives your face two light, stiff slaps. She ignores the beating occurring behind her, providing you a mechanically soothing smile. “Hey love, are you feeling alright? Your ship’s disabled to reacting during spike periods, isn’t it? Bit of an important question, and the Captain would rather I ask you directly.”
“Yeah,” you attempt to say, slurring your words, your tongue lolling out the side of your mouth.
Your eyes cross, and your feet are on fire. You want to ask what’s happening, but you’re overcome with the smell of rotting flesh, then charcoal, and finally lemons, the multifaceted olfactory high overcoming your conscious and subconscious actions, impatiently intermingling with your shadow and dancing with your id.
“That’s alright,” she assures you. Her manicured hands cover your face with a relieved smile, putting you into darkness. She chuckles against the sounds of punches still landing against flesh, and wryly whispers under her breath, “bloody Hell, they’re both spiked out of their minds.”
You slump back against the floor, spiraling towards an unseen destination.
Visions of three suns commingle in your mind. They dance with one another in a perfect equilateral, baptizing themselves in a pool of red sludge as they ricochet against invisible confines. A white hand extends to you, unshorn fetlocks beckoning you forward. The lily wrists give way to a sorrel coat and a naked shoulder from behind an olive tree. A familiar equine face curls from the other side, smiling, one you haven’t seen in hundreds of years.
Ten thousand stars fall from the endless space above, and you run to the safety of the forest, embedding yourself in what you find. Reluctantly soft fur, an uncertain embrace. One drawn to you with a forgotten magnetism.
As you pry open your eyes, you’re in bed once more, this time face-to-face with the white-diamond chest of your captor.
Your shared bunk warms, sensing your wake. Its slight vibrations attempt to lull you back to dreaming, implying your sleep schedule has been erratic. While your body fights against the perfected ministrations of luxury, you take in your view.
Your feet hang off the side of the bed, as usual. You two captains are configured in an imperfect symmetry, one that allows the mare access to as much surface area as possible. Her chest in front of you raises and lowers in a deep sleep. An unflinching snow-white hand locks its digits around the grip of your sidearm, the other pinning you. Blood stains her dull purple combat brassiere, now an unseemly brown from coagulation. It almost matches her coat’s rusty hue.
From this vantage point, you safely view the symbol on her sternum.
It’s a complex symbol. A familiar coat of arms. Three bezants against a red backdrop, practically faded black from scarring. Complete with twin olive branches that intertwine above a slave’s barcode. Finally, below that, roman numerals that add up to an expected hundred-forty-two.
The vibrating intensifies, massaging your sore body and eliciting a satisfied groan from the mare. A smile creeps over her maw as her eyelids flutter open, pupils darting from side to side, rapidly confusing themselves into hibernation and shutting once more. A content sigh escapes her lips as she edges closer to you, and smelling cinnamon and exhaust and freezer-burn, you drift once more into hundreds of nightmarish, somnambulistic visions of eerily recognizable landscapes.