I remember when Glutton joined the squadron. None of us could believe our eyes. He was the largest human any of us had ever seen. When the Hezo captured him, he weighed two hundred kilos. Two hundred! I can’t even imagine how much wheeling and dealing it took to sustain that mass.

Even more impressive, Glutton had somehow survived his training flight, burying thirty-nine normal-sized people. His skin hung off him in sallow flaps, and his eyes had retreated into dark pits. I tried to be his friend, but he wasn’t interested. It hurt my pride, even more so when Addict came along. Addict was supposed to be the last, before Toucher died and we got saddled with Murderess.

Addict and Glutton were thick as thieves at once. They could not have looked more different. Addict was born on Anubis Station. He had spindly limbs with big knobby quarter-gravity joints. Glutton was raised on Gonegone at 1.6G. He was actually big-boned on top of his ridiculous obesity.

Even now, in his deflated state, Glutton still had a kind of cherubic quality to his face. There was a sense he was once the apple of someone’s eye. Addict had a face not even a mother could love, and I mean that literally. He was abandoned at birth. He told us his story with an amputee’s nonchalance. He smoked that person away long ago.

Addict had been alive less than forty-eight hours when Anubis Station Security found him whimpering in a compost chute. He weighed just 1,500 grams. The woman who gave birth to him was nowhere to be found. Somehow, she’d managed to conceal her unauthorized pregnancy for seven months. She gave birth alone, in a plumbing access shaft.

There were habitat modules ringing the shaft. Ten thousand people surrounded her, but no one heard a peep. After all that fear and suffering, she dumped Addict in a chute and disappeared. They never figured out her identity.

He must have been one ugly baby.

Things didn’t improve. Addict’s face was cadaverous, lined with pale welts where the Hezo had boiled away his tattoos with lasers. His eyes were too intent. They would linger while he puzzled out what he could extract from you.

Glutton was the same way. The men each had a hunger they couldn’t conceal, an overwhelming desire for more than they were allotted. I doubt the two would have become friends if they’d met on the outside. At best, Addict would have traded Glutton his rations for dope precursors.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

But here in prison, the pair became inseparable friends. They chattered every instant the drills weren’t around. If we split them up to separate tasks, they would pout and do such poor jobs the rest of us would wind up redoing their work. Eventually, we gave up trying to change them, just like every other person in their lives before us.

Addict never stopped talking, and Glutton absorbed every word like a second helping of dinner. They always talked about the same things, getting high and eating. Addict had an endless chronicle of the dirt he’d done to stay high: intercepted shipments and waylaid couriers, plundered stockpiles, and ginned-up prescriptions.

Glutton had just as many stories of angles he’d worked to get extra food. He could turn a single sandwich ration into a one-man banquet with an afternoon of wheedling. He’d eaten all kinds of things the rest of us could only dream of. Live crawfish, preserved iceworm, real beef, wild fruit.

It hurts to even consider how much disappeared into Glutton’s gullet, how much was shot up Addict’s arms. If those two somehow managed to escape, I’m certain they would immediately return to gorging and getting high. But there was no danger of that. Their flight scores were terrible. I could only hope they would execute Addict first. I didn’t want to lose my wager with Pirate.

We were in the eighth training course now and starting to look more and more like actual pilots. Even Murderess could pull off most of the basic maneuvers. I’d mastered them all, and I wondered why. Why was there so much focus on movement, and none on targeting? It was all preamble, no punchline. They were training us like fighter pilots, but what could a squadron of fighters do against the Collaborators?

The drills kept cranking up the difficulty of the training sessions. They made us race, setting up obstacle courses of glowing beacon rings and comparing our times. Whoever was the slowest didn’t eat, and it was always Glutton.

The drills caught Addict sharing his food with Glutton. Both inmates caught a beating that landed them in the infirmary for a week. This meant they were a week behind in training when they recovered. Their times got even worse.

I noticed some circuit times declined after Glutton and Addict returned, especially Liar’s. On one run, Liar came in dead last, overshooting a turn I thought he could have easily made. The fool was going to get himself killed. After his day without food, Liar outright asked the rest of us to sandbag. He’d worked out a rotation of tanked runs so no one would miss eating for two days in a row.

“No.”

Murderess was the first to refuse. Corrupt declined with a bit more hand-wringing diplomacy. The rest of the squadron turned to me.

“Fuck that,” I said.

A week later, we stared at Glutton’s face through the thick glass of the airlock porthole. He was too exhausted to weep. I wound up losing that dinner after all.