There were six prisoners left alive. Myself, Murderess, Liar, Corrupt, Addict, and Pirate.

If the others were telling the truth, they’d all started off in a training flight of forty inmates, just like mine. Subtracting the handful who had become gofers or died in legitimate

accidents, at least two hundred and fifty prisoners must have been culled by the drills. Sealed naked inside the airlock and blasted on a garbage trajectory, bound for deep space.

A string of frozen corpses, sailing into an indifferent infinity until the end of time.

Why us?

I searched the faces of the other survivors, trying to figure out what common quality we shared. Why had the drills chosen us when so many others perished? They couldn’t have picked six more different people. Maybe that was the point. Whatever the drills wanted from us, they would have it soon. The difficulty curve of our training wasn’t linear. At the start of the flight exercises, the beacon rings were wide enough to fly three ships through. Now, they had shrunk to the point where there was barely a meter of clearance for a Yama to fly through. Anything but a bullseye and the ship would clip against the ring. That was an immediate failed run. Worse, if we struck the ring hard enough, the cockpit would recoil, contracting with crushing force. Murderess blacked out in a high-G turn, her fuselage striking a ring mid-spin. She had to be towed back to the ship bay. When the drills pulled her out, she was sobbing. Her eyes were blood red, and her entire body was one big, ugly bruise. The drills still made her fly the next day.

I hit my share of rings, though never that hard. Every time I felt my ship crushing around me, I remembered Toucher, the inmate who died during acclimation. His voice, high and desperate as he pleaded with the drills. The slaughterhouse reek of the human soup that spilled out when they unsealed his ship. It’s funny. I must have sat through a thousand lectures about the Glory of Mankind and the Destiny of the Hezo. I can’t remember a single thing about them. But I will never, ever, forget that smell.

The memory motivated me as the other inmates flamed out. One by one, they hit the absolute limits of their reflexes. They’d have a disastrous run and lurch out of their ships, battered and bloody as cage fighters. They would cling to the dock grating and weep until the drills carried them away. There was no mercy. Not long after the rings were downsized, the drills fitted them with thrusters. After that, we had to fly through moving rings.

I never broke. The others hated me for that, but what could I do? It wasn’t my fault they couldn’t hack it. Ring 5 was the last colony to surrender to the Hezo. All my relatives died fighting them. I was orphaned and enslaved, living as a human toy in the infamous arcades. No one who wasn’t there would ever believe the depravity I witnessed. Torture, extortion, murder. There were real death matches in those days. People think it’s just a legend, but I’ve seen them.

If I wanted to eat, I had to win. It’s a Zen thing. If you lose the moment, you lose. Corrupt and Addict came to me for advice when they started to plateau. I tried to help, but I knew they wouldn’t understand. It couldn’t be explained. You had to be there.

The gulf widened. Eventually, the drills had to set up one course for the others, then reposition the obstacles into a more challenging configuration for me. Knowing the others were rooting for me to fail made me want to succeed even more.

There were no radios in our ships, of course. We had signal lights, but we didn’t dare use them to chat. The drills would have beat us bloody. I had nothing to do while they re-arranged the course but stare at the station and think about how things had changed.

The Hezo didn’t build this space station, just as they didn’t build their freighters. They’re squatters, a pack of apes scratching their heads and ooking at the monoliths of the ancients. They can’t even keep this place running. They renamed it Awakening House Reeducation Complex. The drills probably have no idea of the history of this place and wouldn’t care to learn.

But I knew.

While I was searching for parts in a long-sealed storeroom, I came across an ancient manual. It was written in VTS, but it wasn’t ciphered so I could puzzle most of it out. The manual was meant to orient newly-arriving administrators to the station. There was a timeline of ownership. The VTS were the last empire to hold the station before the Hezo arrived. They had used it to train fighter pilots. Before the VTS, the station was controlled by the Policia N’graya who used the place to churn out augmented super-soldiers. Both the VTS and PNG used the designation TR440 for the station. The original builders were UNESECA. They left no record of why they’d built a secret space station in the heart of a dust cloud.

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At the back of the manual, there was a survey of the asteroid the station was carved from. A/XAR2137 used to be a kidney-shaped chunk of nickel-iron, just over five kilometers in diameter. Beneath it was a diagram of the finished station, with the original UNESECA name. I laughed out loud when I read it.

Ananke Station.

From space, the prison looked like a spinning top, carbon black and two kilometers wide. The docking spire was its spindle. The outer rim of the disc was reeded with habitat

modules. There was no way to tell which one was our barracks, but I tried to guess anyway. The entire structure had been blacked out and tessellated with anti-scanner baffling. Outside of a few significant meteoroid impacts, the exterior hadn’t changed in centuries. The rot was all inside. Every day, it got worse. Equipment had been ripped out everywhere, exposed conduits were plugged with epoxy. The automatic locks had been swapped for physical keys. Something about the way the drills jingled as they trudged past the barracks felt absolutely prehistoric.

There were bright yellow pneumatic lines running through the drab halls. Motors had been pulled, many systems now running on compressed air. The military had become Mennonites.

When I first arrived here, Awakening House ran like a clock. Every day was choreographed down to the minute. It was either move in step or be crushed by a stampede.

Now, the halls are empty, the drills preoccupied, the schedule hosed. Sometimes, we waited hours for the drills to show up. There were missed meals and scrubbed sermons. The only constant was flight training. We never missed a session.

Much of the station was offline. Facilities we had used for the entirety of training were closed off. We were led to alternate rooms, sometimes halfway across the station. As we marched, I

spotted slipshod fixes everywhere. Near the ship bay, there was a pool of fluid beneath a badly patched pipe. In the mess hall corridor, a door was wedged open with a “DO NOT CLOSE” sign taped to it. We couldn’t turn a corner without running into evidence of incompetence. When something ran out, sweetener, caffeine, indomethacin, that was it. There was never any more.

Freighters used to resupply us at regular intervals. We never saw them, but we could feel the jolt of the linkage with the spindle, the low hum of their massive engines

resonating through every surface. None had docked since we began flight training. Maybe the reason the drills were so gung-ho to execute prisoners was they knew they couldn’t feed them.

One night, we were all jolted awake by a tremendous bang, followed by a roar of depressurization. The red barracks light flickered, the blowers stopped, and the temperature dropped. All I could think was: Finally.

We trembled in our bunks, blinking as the emergency lights strobed. The squadron was locked inside the barracks. We could only wait for the drills to let us out and lead us to the warmer sections near the reactor. No one came. One by one, the emergency lights faded.

I have never been more afraid in my life. That’s the worst way to die, lost in absolute darkness. Each breath felt shorter than the last. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t spare the

oxygen. We were finally forced to huddle together for warmth after piling every piece of clothing and bedding in the barracks on top of ourselves.

Pirate was the one who told us what to do. He saved our lives. When the lights finally came on, we were lightheaded from hypoxia.

There was a big shuffling after that. Many of the drills we’d seen every day were gone. Their replacements were disheveled and nervous, uneasy around us.

I wondered if this was my chance to break out. I could kill one of the green drills, use their keys to gain access to the weapons locker, and die in a blaze of glory. But I didn’t have the balls. There weren’t enough survivors to stage a revolt. I wasn’t even sure the squadron would follow me. I didn’t trust any of them, not even Pirate.

Somehow, the others saw all this and still believed in the mission. I don’t think they were that stupid. I think the others couldn’t accept all their suffering was for nothing. The drills provided them with a fantasy that there was a justice, an order in the universe. They cleaved to it with all their might. The other inmates were all so much older than me, but they were still children.

I let them have it. The fantasy was all that kept them together, and I was too tired to swim against the current.

The night after the blackout, I expected Pirate to come to my bunk again. I was ready to tell him my story, eager to pick his brain for what might have caused the explosion. But when he rose, he went to a different bunk.

Murderess.

Pirate and Murderess had been close together in the huddle. The pair disappeared into the latrine. It wasn’t to talk. They were quiet, but I could still hear it all. I lay in the red dark, throbbing with envy. The drills must have run out of the suppressants they were putting in our food. I wasn’t looking forward to the return of my libido.

This new development meant I didn’t have to tell Pirate my story. But I would have rather gotten it over with. Instead, I lay alone in my bunk, turning myself inside-out with want. Pirate and Murderess still hated each other, I could hear it in the way they fucked. Their brush with death had simply flipped a switch, and there was only one way to turn it off.