Why am I still alive?
With every execution I watched, the question became harder to answer. In my first training flight, I watched thirty-nine inmates get airlocked. All of them were better than me in every way the Hezo could want. They were older, stronger, and better educated. True believers, dripping with zeal. Into the vacuum they went, yet here in the barracks
I remained. I spent my nights peering at the ceiling in the faint crimson light wondering, Why me?
I was the youngest person on the station by a decade. The Hezo captured me when I was fifteen years old. I lost track of time after that, but I couldn’t be much older than twenty. I was a baby. Murderess was forty-one, Corrupt was fifty-five.
Pirate was old. His body was that of a man in his mid-forties, but there was a Methuselaean cast to his eyes, a century-deep weariness at odds with his cheerful demeanor and incessant yammering. It was taboo to mention his agelessness.
The Xian-Zwitterion Process had been outlawed in the Hezo for generations. Most who’d undergone it had defected to the Collaborators early in the war, or else they’d been executed. But there were still a few like Pirate floating around, jutting stones in the river of time.
Other than a knack for cleaning toilets perfectly, there’s not much to me. I never did anything interesting with my life like the others. Washed-up child gambler, trolling the nets, part-time mechanic, then prison. I wasn’t beautiful, nor ugly. I was short and skinny from the shit rations like everyone else. Just a big zero. Why did they keep me around?
I suppose I showed promise as a pilot, at least compared to the others. It wasn’t a high bar. We only flew basic exercises, but Pirate and I were at the top of the pack. He edged me out now with experience, but my circuit times were climbing faster than his. I knew I would overtake him. The legacy of a misspent youth.
Before the nets were cut and the arcades were shuttered, I used to play a space-battle simulator called MARTYR. It was a blatant recruiting tool for the Hezo Navy. They set the consoles up in the poorest habs of Ring 5, which was by far the worst of Keilu’s eight artificial rings.
It was free to play, and the graphics were incredible. You strapped in a special gyroscopic isolation pod that let you feel every shot. There were leaderboards and prizes, a tidy little bit of propaganda. The joke was, if you did too well in a game, you would open the hatch and find a recruiter waiting for you.
It wasn’t a joke. When I was ten or eleven, I tried to run with the big dogs in a free-for-all deathmatch. There were a couple of tournament guys playing. I was doing well at first, but it didn’t matter. We all got dumpstered by an arcade ace who went by the handle OBS.
By my second death, he was up fourteen kills with zero deaths. I couldn’t land a shot on him. I tore off my harness and rage-ejected, screaming he was a cheater.
Then, I saw the three men standing outside of his pod. I shut up in a hurry. On the overhead display, it flashed the final score, twenty-three to nil.
OBS was all smiles when he emerged, then he saw the Navy guys waiting for him. They did all the smiling after that, clapping the big winner on the back, congratulating him. They led him away, and it was clear he had no choice in the matter.
Twenty-three to nil.
I remember talking with the other players, calling OBS a try-hard idiot for stunting on us. What kind of moron would keep playing after they turned sixteen? But as I got older, I appreciated the trap they’d laid for us. The game was all we had. We were all deck-poor debt-slaves, scavenging for scraps in the lowest hab tier. Not even basic edu. None of us would ever climb out of this pit.
But, in the game, we could fly. When you were winning, you felt totally free, above everything and everyone. I understood why OBS couldn’t stop playing. I promised myself I wouldn’t let it happen to me. I would make enough to buy my freedom and retire from gambling. I would be free.
Look at me now. I stretched out my hands to the crimson emptiness of the barracks ceiling. Free. It was nobody’s fault but my own.
☼
“All right, simpletons! Time to play Name That Plane!”
The other inmates flinched, hunching their shoulders and shrinking into themselves. Silhouette training usually ended in vicious beatings. But not for me. In the classroom, we were only accountable for our own stupidity. I could finally watch the others reap their own ineptitude without suffering alongside them.
The display wall was cold and dead. Taking its place, a roll-down screen had been bolted to the ceiling with plumber’s tape. My eyes lasered in on an orange fringe of rust accumulating on the new bolts. I needed to remember to scour that off the next time we were ordered to clean the classroom.
Tsuros tugged down the screen, but when he released it, it shot right back up with a whir of springs. He exhaled sharply through his nose and pulled the screen down again. This time, he tied a wire at the base to a protruding screw driven directly into the dead display wall.
From his contemptuous snort, I knew Tsuros had ordered a subordinate to fix the latching mechanism, and they had failed. I would have given a great deal to watch the bumbling repairman catch hell.
The drills were careful to present a unified front, but I knew the truth. I could sometimes hear them bellowing at each other through the vents, like the lowing of distant beasts.
Tsuros went to dim the lights, but the rheostat didn’t work. The lights only flickered. Another snort. Tsuros’ jaw muscles bulged, the cords of his neck growing taut. I was nervous, and so were the others. Tsuros’ anger was radioactive. If it breached containment, we might all catch a lethal dose.
There was a metal click as Tsuros whipped out a clasp knife. My hair stood on end. I was certain one of us was about to get gutted. Instead, Tsuros pried off the lighting control panel with the blade. I heard the crack of an electrical arc, then we were cast into darkness. I fought to keep from crying out. I didn’t breathe until I heard the clack of the blade folding back into its handle.
Boots drummed across the darkened deck. I heard a switch flick, and then the projector’s fan rattled and spun to life. The bulb warmed up, and I could see again. Tsuros cast a monstrous shadow as he passed before the projector screen. We hurried to line up in front of it at attention. I was too slow, I got stuck at the far left closest to Tsuros. It was always a bad idea to be within his arm’s reach. To my right were Murderess, Liar, Corrupt, Addict, Glutton, then Pirate. The seven survivors.
Tsuros flipped the first transparency on the glass, then turned the knob. The silhouette of a spacecraft came into sharp focus. I recognized it immediately, a Clab SOCC.
“Pirate! Identify!”
Pirate hesitated. I clenched my jaw, trying to will the answer into his head.
“Collaborator Skysweeper Orbital Cleaning Craft, sir!” Pirate barked.
“What’s the tonnage?” Tsuros pressed.
“No answer, sir!”
WHAP!
Tsuros slapped Pirate on the back of the neck. I kept my eyes straight at the screen. From the sound alone, I knew Tsuros had left a welt.
“CORRUPT! What is the tonnage of a Collaborator SOCC?”
“Fifty KT, sir!” Corrupt answered.
I steeled myself for the slap. He was off by an order of magnitude.
“WRONG!”
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WHAP!
“MURDERESS!”
“No answer, sir!”
WHAP!
WHAP! That last one was Addict. Tsuros clocked him without even bothering to ask the question. Of course, they didn’t know. We had no reason to know. The SOCC wasn’t even a military craft. But for whatever reason, Tsuros was adamant we be able to identify every ship in the known universe within seconds. It made me wonder what in Diyu our mission could be. It was my turn in the crosshairs.
“Traitor, what is the tonnage of a Clab SOCC?”
“Sir! Five-point-five KT fueled, four-point-six dry.”
“Correct! Traitor, how many reactors are in a VTS Frigate?”
“Ten in a standard frigate, sir! Eight turrets, one propulsion, and one backup! The Scorpion variant adds three reactors for the Stinger Plasma Projector for a total of thirteen!”
WHAP! He hit me hardest of all. The sound rippled through the others in a flinching wave and sparks danced in front of my eyes.
“Nobody likes a show-off, scum,” Tsuros stage-whispered into my ringing ear.
“Yes, sir!” I shot back. My cheeks were ablaze. The others didn’t understand that, for me, this was a reward. It hurt so good.
With boot steps as regular as a metronome, Tsuros returned to the projector. There was a tall stack of transparencies to plow through with multiple angles, partial occlusion, and colored diagrams. The questions came fast and furious today, and the reprisals were more vicious than ever.
Something was eating Tsuros, and it wasn’t just the decrepit state of the classroom. The lesson went on for hours. Every time someone messed up, they would get hit. Two hours in, the others looked like they’d just lost a boxing match.
I never missed a question. I loved ships. My earliest memory was being held up to a porthole so I could watch a UNESECA freighter arriving. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. I remember the local transports hurrying out of its way, like sardines fleeing a whale.
It must have been my mother holding me up, but I can’t remember anything about her. I was either two or three when she sold me. I like to imagine I bought her passage off Ring 5, that one of us made it out. But she probably just spent it all on drugs. Maybe she did the same thing over and over again, maybe I have brothers and sisters. I’ll never know.
I didn’t have money for contemporary media access, but the state-approved classics and vocational databases were all free. I used to collect repair manuals. I would pore over them for hours in my cubby until my cheap pad ran out of charge. My favorite thing to do was look at the exploded component view, and then try to visualize where each part was supposed to go. I loved assembling the ship piece by piece in my mind.
For the second time, I watched Murderess fail to distinguish between a Hezo AC-13 and a Clab Hari-77. It felt impossible she could keep screwing this up. The ships were superficially similar, both long-range scouts, about the same size and shape. But the Hari-77 was autonomous and had no armament. What looked like a canopy bubble was actually a sensor array.
For Murderess, the impossible was definitely possible. A dark purple line on her cheekbone from the blade of Tsuros’ hand was proof. Corrupt’s lip was split, and Addict had a mouse over his right eye. Pirate had a trickle of blood running down the side of his mouth through the un-plucked patches of his beard. He could remember the older ships perfectly, but he had trouble learning the newer ones.
One thing I’d noticed, there were no really new models of Collaborator ships. Everything we looked at was thirty or forty years old. I wondered if they’d run out of ideas, or if our ships didn’t survive long enough to report on the new models.
Every muscle in my body ached from the tension as we reviewed the endless stack of transparencies. Over a certain timescale, the anticipation of pain is worse than the actual. I could enjoy it in the abstract, but it was nothing like the visceral immediacy of a fist in the eye.
The other inmates reeled, struggling to remain at attention. I wore the soldier’s mask, but inside, I basked in their suffering. They hated the slides, hated Tsuros, hated me for being right. If only they knew how I exulted!
Tsuros put a slide on the screen, and his nose twitched. For a long time, he stared at the projection and didn’t ask us anything. What the hell was he thinking? Whatever it was couldn’t be good. His right hand curled into a fist. He turned his slitted eyes on me. My turn.
“Traitor!” Tsuros demanded.
“Sir! Collaborator AGA/LAG 81!”
“Role?”
“Dual role, interceptor-harrier, sir!”
“Deployment?”
“Glömer class carrier, sir!”
“Where were they first encountered?”
I froze, recognizing the trap. Officially, Da Jiao had been scrubbed from the Hezo Star Maps. The system had been classified. If I answered correctly, he could use my knowledge as a pretense to execute me. It would have been safer to feign ignorance. But Tsuros didn’t need a pretense. I decided if I was going to die for this, I might as well go all the way and invoke the ancient, forbidden name.
“Arcturus.”
I let my muscles go limp, expecting Tsuros to belt me immediately. But he surprised me and kicked me in the back of the knee. I hit the deck hard, and then he was on top of me, howling in my ear.
“YOU WILL ADDRESS ME AS SIR, INMATE!”
“YES, SIR!”
“NO SUCH STAR EXISTS! ARE YOU CLEAR ON THAT?”
“YES, SIR!”
He followed up with a wicked kick in my groin. I croaked and gasped, fighting back the urge to vomit. I couldn’t spare the calories.
Tsuros stood in the projector beam. His face gleamed like a golden idol. An angry god, looking down on his creation with infinite disdain. Tsuros glared at the wobbly line of inmates, at the ruined light control panel dangling from the wall. His eyes lingered on the door, and his lower lip bulged as his tongue swept across his teeth. He turned back to the slide, inhaling deeply through his nostrils. He was making up his mind.
“Sit!” Tsuros commanded. The others moved towards the chairs lining the walls.
“No! On the floor with Traitor like the dogs you are.”
The other inmates hastened to join me, stifling groans as they sank to the floor.
“Arcturus…,” Tsuros trailed. He swept his hand towards the ship projected on the screen. We were looking at the top view, a titanium-white delta, with royal blue cheek blazes just below the canopy. The tips of her armament were crimson, twin front cannon, banked by linked polyphasic beams at center wing.
From the top view, her main weapon wasn’t visible, but I knew what it was. A tri-catalyzed torpedo, roughly the same mass as the rest of the ship.
“Tell me about her, Traitor. How does she fight?”
“Sir! No answer!”
I honestly didn’t know. Everything about Da Jiao was so heavily classified. I knew there had been a great battle at Usurus, and that it had been a turning point in the war, but I’d never been able to find footage or even a description of what had happened.
Tsuros jutted his lip with a superior nod. He turned back to the screen and gazed at the ship.
“The 81s are wasps. They issue from their carrier in a great angry swarm, shooting down incoming missiles and fighters. When the threat is neutralized, they go after the attacker. They fly in, dancing through flak, so close they can practically land on the target. Then they open up with the peelers, polyphasic beams. If they get through the hull, they lay their egg, a tri-cat torpedo. They buzz off, and then BOOM!”
Tsuros banged his fist on the projector table, making the image jump.
“Hundan. Our fighters couldn’t touch them,” Tsuros said, talking more to the screen than us. His eyes were focused on something far away, aflame with some ancient hate. Finally, he wheeled back on us.
“Arcturus is named from Arcas, the cursed hunter. He was turned into a bear, then imprisoned in the sky. The gods fixed his constellation above the horizon so he could never taste water again.”
There was a long and painful silence. We didn’t understand why Tsuros told us this.
“What really happened there, sir?” I dared. I was certain Tsuros would hit me again. I wanted it.
Tsuros turned to the squadron. There was something intolerable in his gaze. One by one, we broke. When he spoke again, his voice was low and even, stripped of all his customary theater.
“Get out of my sight, you dogs. Except you. Stay, Traitor,” Tsuros ordered. My heart pounded. Tsuros had finally lost it, he was going to strangle me. I felt a pang of anguish in my bruised testicles and excitement singing in my temples.
At last.
When the others filed out, Tsuros brought two chairs, slamming one onto the deck beside me with a bang that made every cell in my body jump.
“Stand up.”
I did so immediately, ignoring the pain in my groin. I stood ready to launch into attention or parade rest if either was ordered. But Tsuros didn’t seem to care. He stared at me intently.
“I am going to tell you the legend of Arcturus. You are not to repeat a word to anyone. If you whisper one syllable of what I say, you will find yourself cast into the stars as well. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir!”
“My curse is more than just thirst, Traitor. I will fire up a crucible and make you my Vazul. Surely, a freak like you knows the story?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Refresh my memory, inmate!”
“Vászoly of Nyitra, sir! Grand Prince of the Hungarians. Abducted by his cousin, King Stephen I. Abacinated and deafened with molten lead so he would be unfit to rule. Died in 1032.”
“Excellent, inmate. But that’s nothing compared to my wrath. You won’t see the airlock for years. I will flay you until your entire body is a single, shrieking, exposed nerve. You will be shackled in the burn ward, hooked up to life support. Flame imperishable, a being of pure pain. You will beg to die for years before I give you to the void. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir!” I replied. I tried not to wince from the swelling pain in my crotch. Tsuros was a hell of a drill. He had every hair on my body standing at attention.
“Sit,” he commanded.
Tsuros took the chair beside the projector. We sat facing the screen as if we were watching a movie together. Tsuros would throw on a transparency whenever he mentioned a ship, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each. He told me the idiosyncrasies of each design, the tactics he’d seen each employ. I drank in every word.
With me, Tsuros could get into a level of detail that would have been wasted on the others. All the information I’d been able to amass as a civilian was just a thin outline compared to what he knew. Tsuros spoke as if he’d fought with or against nearly every ship that had flown for the last century. Perhaps he had. I began to wonder what Tsuros’ real rank was. He knew far more than a sergeant had any right to.
While the rest of the flight scrubbed toilets, I reveled in the legend of Arcturus. It was as if Tsuros had composed it just for me. The legend had everything I wanted. Spaceships! Secrets! History, hubris, human misery! The best part was the oath of secrecy. With every breath, absolute suffering loomed over me, like an executioner’s axe.
I felt so alive, and so afraid. The threat to flay me was no bluff. Tsuros was the devil himself. He knew exactly how my gears turned, and he would wind them until something snapped. Rung by rung, ring by ring, he dragged me deeper into the pit.
What was at the bottom?