Star Soldier (9 page)

He tried to sit up, and winced painfully. Back, shoulders and sides, every muscle protested the slightest twitch. If he lay perfectly still and didn’t breathe too deeply he’d be okay.

Then he wondered where everyone was. He’d have to sit up to find out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know that badly.

Finally, with a moan, he lifted his torso and swung his feet off the bench. He sat there panting, and groaning. A muscle in his side quivered and cramped. He shot to his feet, yelling, and clutched his side, all his muscles complaining at the movement. He paced until the cramp eased away.

Where was everybody? He might have shrugged, but that would have hurt.

Oh, to finally be out of the dreadful cylinder. A ripple of fear, like electricity, shivered through him. He didn’t
ever
want to go back. They’d have to kill him first.

Frowning, Marten faced the door. The last thing he remembered was someone calling the major. Was this some sort of test, a means to make him talk? He decided no, that was too sophisticated for these brutes. He shuffled to the door, waited and dared touch it. It didn’t shock him, which he’d half suspected it might.

“Did they steal your balls, Marten?” he whispered.

A hideous smile stretched his lips in lieu of an answer. He twisted the doorknob, his heart pounding. He stared into an empty corridor. Lines of puzzlement creased his forehead. He opened the door wider. The corridor went about twenty paces before coming to a T-junction. He listened, but heard no one.

Okay. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. So he moved down the corridor. The lights glowed overhead, and somewhere a generator hummed. He came to the junction, and he knew that to the right was the auditorium. Left were the cells. The only way he wanted to go back to the auditorium was with a machine gun in his hands. So he went left.  Where was everybody?

This didn’t make sense.

He laughed bitterly.

Why did it have to make sense? An opportunity should be taken, not analyzed to death.

He crossed a line painted in the middle of the corridor. On one side, the corridor was white. The other side was green. Cells doors lined the green walls. He peered through a tiny glass window in the first door. Empty. He moved to the next. That cell was also empty. He tried the knob. Locked. So he kept moving, increasing his pace. The truth came to him that it frightened him to be alone. He shook his head. It had never frightened him down in Level Sixty.

Marten passed another painted line as he headed for the guard areas. The corridor color changed from green to blue. At the next door he came to, he opened it and went through. The air was damp and hotter than in the hall. He paused. To his left were the showers, the slick-suit dressing room and a hatch to the heat flats. To his right… he didn’t know what lay behind the door he’d always seen the guards enter.

So he tried it, and to his surprise, the door opened. Marten stared into a room with a wall of TV screens and a control panel. His heart thudded as he entered. Then he stopped, unbelieving. A grin transformed him as he picked a shock rod off a chair. He clicked it to its highest setting, feeling it hum in his hands. He barged through the next door. In the room was a lunch box. He tore it open and crammed a sandwich into his mouth. It tasted like egg and hurt his throat because he swallowed such big chunks. He didn’t care. He guzzled orange juice and gnawed on a chocolate bar. For a moment his gut hurt, then strength seemed to ooze into him.

Back in the control room, Marten tested switches. The TV screens flickered into life showing the heat flats. He peered more closely. People in slick-suits floated face down in the scum, with glaring sunlamps hanging three feet above them in the ceiling. Workers usually crawled through the algae, using a bar to break apart clumps and scrape hardened slime from the bottom. Five-hour stints were all a person could take before heat exhaustion set in. Marten cursed under his breath. None of those bodies so much as twitched. He saw that slime had crusted on some of them. That took at least three hours to form.

Marten pressed more switches, jumping views. There were more dead floaters. A lump stuck in his throat. Then he saw movement. He counted them, seven people at a lock—wait. It was this hatch and it looked like his old squad. One man slowly banged against the iron door.

Marten moved out of the room, down the corridor, through the showers and decontamination center. He hurried to the hatch, cranked the lever and spun the wheel. The hatch opened with a
whomp
.

A vile, swampy stench blew into the room and a blistering humidity caused him to sweat. He staggered from the entrance. Picking up an emergency hose, he waited. His old comrades dragged themselves into the room, flopping onto the plasteel floor. Scum clung tenaciously to them, making them look like swamp monsters.

Marten twisted the nozzle, hosing them with detergent. One of them closed the hatch with a clang. When they were clean, he helped them peel off their slick-suits and masks. They looked worse than he did, with hot, feverish skin, some with tiny blisters on their face, neck and torso. As they crawled to the showers, he sprinted to the control room, experimented until he found the right switch and turned on the water. He hurried back. They lay on their sides or stomachs, slurping water off the floor. Then they lay still, blissful in the drizzle.

Later, they crawled to the drying area. Stick was one of them. He struggled to his feet and tried to face Marten down.

“You want some?” wheezed the street fighter.

Marten wasn’t sure what he felt, whether the man’s bravado was admirable or laughable. The truth was it would be simplicity itself to beat Stick to death. Then the scarred street fighter, the former knifeboy, flexed his hands in classic karate style. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so easy.

“You lied about me,” said Marten

“Yeah?” said Stick, hunching his shoulders.

“They almost killed me for it.”

Stick glanced at the others.

One of them, Marten saw, tried to sit up. Then he noticed another working his way to his feet, a mean-faced, muscle-bound Asian. Marten stepped back so he could keep all three in view.

Stick frowned. “Wait,” he told them. “How come…” He tilted his head in puzzlement.

“How long were you in the heat flats?” Marten asked, giving the knifeboy time to orient himself.

Stick examined the tiny blisters on his arms. He seemed bemused. “Where’d they go?”

Marten shrugged.

“Ain’t anyone here?” asked a tall, stork-like man called Turbo, who leaned heavily against the wall.

“You’re incorrigibles, right?” Marten asked.

That deepened their scowls.

“You’re from the slums, right?”

“So?” said Turbo.

“You feel like eating more crap?” Marten asked, “Or maybe dealing it out for a change?”

Stick cracked his knuckles as he glanced at the other two, the only ones who showed interest in Marten’s words.

“What do you have in mind?” asked the muscle-bound Asian, a Korean.

Marten lowered the baton to a water slick. A spark jumped from the instrument, the electrical current making momentary tracings in the water.

“What about between you and me?” asked Stick.

Marten shrugged. “There is bigger game afoot.”

Stick grinned.

“Yeah?” said Turbo. “Count me in.”

11.

In dull horror, Marten crept into the auditorium. He had to walk carefully because water made the floor slippery. Six of the twenty cylinders contained occupants. They floated rigidly; their hands like claws and pressed against the stoppers.

“What…?” Stick couldn’t finish the question. He was pale.

Turbo made retching noises, but there was nothing in his stomach to vomit. The bullet-headed Asian, a gunman by the name of Omi, stared steely-eyed at the scene.

Marten moved to his old cylinder, noting that it was filled with water. He gazed about the auditorium.  For some reason everyone had left. His chest hurt as he visualized what had happened. The water had started again, gushing too fast to pump. Rage gripped him. He stalked to the medical center where Stick yanked open drawers and examined equipment.

“Anything?”

Stick shook his head.

Marten rummaged around and picked up a little black disc. He pressed it against his arm. It beeped as it diagnosed him, a red light winking. It was a medkit, a biomedical-monitoring device and drug dispenser, usually giving Quickheal, Superstim or Hypercoagulin. A pneumospray hypo hissed, using compressed air to inject him with drugs. Marten licked his lips and tossed the kit to greedy-eyed Turbo.

“Oh yeah,” whispered Turbo. He punched in override codes and pressed the disc to his lean chest. Then he moaned pleasurably and shivered.

“Sweet.” Stick drew a long knife out of a drawer and by clicking a switch made it hum. It was a vibroblade, a hideous close-combat weapon. The blade vibrated thousands of times per second, so fast the motion was invisible. The knifeboy’s delight was obvious.

Then they froze. From the nearest corridor, there sounded the pounding footsteps of someone in a hurry.

Marten and Stick exchanged glances hardly daring to breathe. Marten flanked the door, his two-handed grip tight upon the baton. Stick waited on the other side. The sounds came closer and closer. Plastic body armor rattled. Then a guard exploded through the door, a short-barreled gun in his hand. Stick chopped and his knife sang. The guard’s knee disintegrated in a spray of blood and bone. With a scream, he went down. Marten roared and swung.
ZAP
! The guard’s head flipped back and his helmet went spinning.
ZAP
! The guard’s chin snapped against the floor as his entire body flopped downward. Rage, fear and hatred drove Marten’s muscles.
Zap, zap, zap
! He hammered the guard’s head until Turbo and Stick dragged him off.

Marten nodded after a moment. They let go.

Without a word, Omi picked up the dead guard’s short barreled .44 off the floor. He checked the slide and tested its heft. Then he rummaged the dead man for extra bullets.

Stick knelt beside the corpse and began unbuckling the body armor.

“What about me?” complained Turbo.

“The helmet is still good,” Stick said.

Turbo scooped it off the floor, inspected it, put it on and snapped the chinstrap. “What do you think?”

“Beautiful,” said Stick.

Marten trembled and forced himself to move. He wiped the gory shock rod on the dead man’s clothes. He felt surreal. Hollow. Used up.

Stick said, “Bet I know what happened.”

“Huh?”

“Where everyone went, bet I know.”

Marten focused on him. “Yeah?”

“Highborn! They must’ve finally got here and gone underground. The army needed the cops to help fight.”

Marten nodded. Could be.

“So what now?” asked Turbo, his face twitching in the manner of the over-stimulated.

Marten glanced at the cylinders, at the floaters, at their dull stares. Something in him hardened. He said, “We kill more of them.”

12.

Endless corridors and empty rooms, wherever they trudged the vast algae production center had become a desert. They found regular clothes in a storage bin and donned splay jackets, dungarees and boots. Marten found an extra energy cell for his baton. In a guardroom, Turbo shattered a candy bar machine. Several floors down, they opened a hatch into a settling tank. Turbo peered at the thick soup below. He blanched, drew back and shook his head.

Marten looked in. About a hundred workers floated dead in the brine. They’d been shot in the back or in the back of the head. Their blood slicked the goop like oil.

Marten clenched his teeth until they ached.

“Mass murder,” slurred Turbo.

“Like they’re covering their tracks,” said Stick.

“Who is?” snapped Marten.

“PHC.” Stick must have noticed Marten’s incomprehension. “Things got really rough in the pits several months ago.”

“Yeah,” said Turbo. “When the war started.”

Stick nodded in agreement. “When Major Orlov arrived.”

“No way are they gonna lose to the Supremacists,” Turbo said.

“But why are they gunning down all the prisoners?” growled Marten.

Omi smiled sourly.

“Did I ask something stupid?”

“Naw,” said Stick. “It’s just that Omi does the same thing, only in the slums. He takes out the troublemakers, makes sure those he’s hurt can never come around to hurt him back.”

“It’s insurance,” Omi said flatly.

“It is cold-blooded murder,” slurred Turbo. “It’s because they’re bastards.”

Omi shrugged.

They moved on warily, to scenes of greater mass death. Gleaming corridors often ended in piles of gory butchery. Many of the dead had been dumped unceremoniously into the various stages of algae production.

They rode an elevator down to an office section and prowled the next corridor. The halls were shorter and narrower, constantly twisting and turning.

 Marten felt overwhelmed. The mass death appalled him. What kind of choice was there for anyone? Earth was trapped between implacable enemies, with PHC killers on one hand and Highborn on the other. There was no hope for a better future.

Turbo stopped short, his long face twitching. “No, no, no!”

The others watched him.

Turbo tore off his helmet and threw it at the floor. “Why’d they kill everybody?” he yelled. “It don’t make sense.”

“Easy,” said Stick.

“Easy?” shouted Turbo. He laughed wildly.

Marten jerked around. He thought he heard a click from ahead.

“You’re just feeling the stims wearing off,” Stick told his friend.

Turbo laughed even more wildly, a bit hysterically.

“Look—”

“Duck!” shouted Marten. He hurled his body against Omi, throwing him to the floor. He saw a blur fly past, strike the wall, bounce and ricochet around the corner. It exploded with a roar, hot metal pinging off the walls.

With eyes blazing and mouth open, Turbo zigzagged in a crazy-man’s rush around the corner. They heard him roar an insane oath, and then a thud and a rattle sounded. A second later, Turbo yelled, “It’s safe!”