“What is your crime?”

“I killed the future.”

“What is your name?”

“Murderess.”

“You are empty,” Sergeant Tsuros would say, concluding the ritual. Then he’d punch Murderess in the stomach, hard enough to drive the air from her lungs. I must have watched her sobbing for breath on the floor a dozen times.

I was always a little too interested, and the others could tell. Everyone was required to watch, but only I wanted to. I knew it repulsed the others, but I didn’t care. There were so few things in this place I truly enjoyed and seeing that cunt get belted was always the highlight of my month.

Murderess was beyond stubborn. When the Hezo ordered her to keep her baby, she declined. Openly! All she had to do was feign complications like everyone else. But she just had to take a stand.

I don’t know who hated her worse, the inmates or the drills. The drills hated her for her crime. The squadron hated her for getting us in trouble. We soaked up so much collective punishment for that woman and her opposition-defiant disorder. She was one of those people who had to test every boundary, but she was also a slow learner and never shut up.

It was a truly unfortunate combination for everyone. I got the feeling all the drills wanted to execute her, but they’d been overruled. When the drills are unhappy, it means the rest of us are miserable. The week Murderess joined the squadron, I went to bed every night expecting to find her strangled in the morning. No one did it. I think we were all hoping someone else would.

In her defense, things were rigged against Murderess from the start. She was a late arrival, replacing an inmate who died from an accident. The squad was undergoing ship acclimation, which was an especially awful time.

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We were all recovering from brain surgery, irritable and prone to bouts of senseless rage. The surgeons fitted us with pilot interfaces, three shiny black dots on either temple. Our vestibular systems were chopped up and re-arranged to allow us to survive high-G space combat. There was an awful price to pay, five days of crippling nausea and constant vertigo. Our suffering was hysterical to the drills. They laughed at us as we stumbled and clung to the walls for support, tipping us over for sport. Anyone who didn’t get up right away caught a boot. We learned to walk again in a hurry.

During the acclimation process, the drills sealed us inside our ships to check for adverse reactions. Not from us, of course. If we got rashes or if our faces swelled up and couldn’t breathe, that was just too bad. It was the ships the drills were worried about.

Being sealed inside the Yama was the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced. It felt like I was stuck against the roof of a giant’s mouth and he was trying to scrape me off with his tongue. The ships were built to keep us in homeostasis; comfort was irrelevant. Each was supposed to be molecularly keyed to its pilot. But like everything the Hezo did, there was a tendency to fail.

Murderess’s predecessor was an inmate named Toucher, a slug-tongued outcast no one liked. I can remember his slobbery voice as he pleaded with the drills. He begged them not to make him get back into the ship. Of course, this only made the drills seal him inside for twice as long.

When the drills popped the Yama’s hatch, they didn’t pull Toucher out as much as pour him out. His ship had closed around him like a fist and crushed him into a paste. We all saw it. Worse, we all smelled it. Nobody slept that night, but there was nothing to do but pray it didn’t happen to us.

The drills were on edge, too. They must have caught hell for crushing that poor fool. They had to find a replacement for him.

Murderess was one of the gofer washouts. She had a background in logistics, so they assigned her to assist the quartermaster. It must have been a rude awakening, thinking she’d miraculously survived only to be sucked back into the nightmare.

They had to build a new ship for her, so she had nothing to do while we acclimated. It wasn’t exactly endearing to see her watching from the sidelines as we all suffered.

I tried to empathize, to be nice to her. I was the only one. Many times, I offered her a bit of advice or a shoulder to cry on. She declined. I was attracted to her, and she wasn’t attracted to me.

The story of my life.