Chapter 10
A knock on the door woke Jayce up from the small desk. He blinked hard and glanced around, reorienting to his new surroundings. He knocked over his chair and lunged for the door as a louder knock came. Jayce poked at the door controls and a bolt slammed shut.
“Press and hold the green button!” Dastin shouted through the door.
The door slid open. Dastin wasn’t in his Marine battle armor, but a padded bodysuit under a dusty leather trench coat.
Jayce looked down at his torn and burnt civilian clothes.
Dastin glanced into the closet.
“Why didn’t you change?” the Marine asked.
“I didn’t want to wear Holden’s stuff. Doubt he’d appreciate it,” Jayce said.
“Holden died two months ago on Fesh. Paragon Maru was hunting down one of the Tyrant’s agents near a Shrine and we got ambushed. I collected his personal stuff and got it boxed . . . forgot to go through his shipboard utilities.”
He sniffed the air.
“Ugh. You smell like Maru’s quarters. Fish. So, you’re going through the Veil with us?”
“With . . . you? I thought it was for Attuned only,” Jayce said.
“Ha! I wish. No, you glitter guys and gals can bring us knobs with you. We keep you safe and carry gear while you’re doing all your hoodoo . . . stuff,” Dastin said. “C’mon. Can’t send you down to Illara dressed like you fell off a shrimp boat.”
“Do I get a gun?” Jayce hopped over the threshold and rubbed his hands together as he followed Dastin.
“No! You can carry food and water so someone who does know how to shoot and fight can concentrate on shooting and fighting without the burden of carrying food and water.”
“That . . . makes a lot of sense.”
“I’m not an officer. I don’t make things needlessly complicated,” Dastin said. “You know how to handle yourself at all?”
“I’m a docker. Ratted for crews that went out to the dark currents and made it back. So if we’ll be doing anything on a ship—wet ship—I’m set.”
“You ever been in a fight?” Dastin gave him a sidelong look.
“Couple. I knocked a Bril out in a sanctioned fight once.” Jayce rubbed a phantom bruise on his jaw.
“Oh? And how’d you manage to do that with their keratin plating?”
“They have nerve clusters in the armpits. Sharp poke and they lock up. Lot like us humans getting punted in our . . . favorite nerve cluster.”
“How’d you get away with a dirty shot like that?” the Marine asked.
“It was a sanctioned bout. Only rule is no killing. Break bones or eyes and winner forfeits the pot to pay the apothecaries.” Jayce shrugged.
“We get in a scuffle and you better be ready for killing, because the only way to win the fights we get into is to survive. Best way to do that is to kill the other guy before he kills you.” Dastin whacked knuckles to a door panel and a reinforced door slid open.
Battle armor stood in recesses through the room. Eabani grunted at them from an open locker as the shaggy lizard alien fiddled with a breast plate. He hissed and snapped, then slapped a small box onto the workbench.
“No, he would’ve said something if he could understand you,” Dastin said. “Any implants, kid? Anything that’ll fritz your nervous system if you get anything conflicting?”
“All meat and bone,” Jayce said. “Why?”
“You need a Babel Dot.” Dastin picked up the box. “It’ll translate most anything you hear and can link to the Dot of any language it doesn’t know and train itself. Hack-proof tech. Cheap. Biologically based so it’ll work in the Veil. It’s standard for any spacer and if you don’t have one down on Illara it’ll beg questions we don’t want to answer. No one just washes up on a planet that far in in the Deep.”
“Will it hurt?” Jayce asked.
“Nope.” Dastin grabbed the side of Jayce’s head with his cyborg hand and held him firmly as he moved the small box toward Jayce’s ear. There was a snap and Jayce cried out in pain.
“Ow!” He pulled back, rubbing a growing welt where his ear met his jaw. “What the hell?”
“Ralllghshtar dropped last fortnight,” a low voice growled.
Jayce twisted around to look at Eabani, who was tapping a screen with a short talon.
“Hey, I understood him!” Jayce pointed at the Lirsu.
“Congrats, squeak, you want to sniff my scent glands and be my friend?” A forked tongue wagged briefly from his jaws.
“Do I?” Jayce asked Dastin.
“No! Quit wasting time and hop on up.” Dastin pointed to three stairs leading to a glowing ring in the middle of the armory. Jayce skipped the stairs and jumped into the circle. Small cube-shaped drones floated up from the platform and spun around Jayce slowly. Laser arcs swept over him.
“Suppose I should’ve asked if this was going to hurt, but I wouldn’t trust the answer,” Jayce said.
“Hurts less if it’s a surprise. You’re welcome.” Dastin went to the workstation and spoke with Eabani as the drones kept moving around Jayce.
“I’m getting Governance Marine armor?” Jayce asked.
“No,” Dastin said. “It would be a waste if you become a baby Paragon. Maru wants a Light Armor suit for you. Takes days for a fully fitted set to come out of the printers we have aboard. You’ll get a suit eventually. Mostly so we don’t accidently shoot you during a fight because you’re not dressed like the rest of us.”
The lights on the drones pulsed and sank back into their recesses.
“His dirtside gear won’t take too long,” Eabani said. “He’s mostly skin and bones. My clan wouldn’t even have him for a feast.” The alien turned to a cabinet, which thrummed and bumped as it worked. “You should show him. Bet he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Show me what?” Jayce hopped down from the scanner.
“Nothing good. Come here.” Dastin went to a larger locker and pressed his bare palm to a reader. He drew a pistol and stepped back. The locker swung open, and Jayce cried out in shock.
The Tyrant’s soldier he had fought face-to-face was inside a cage, its torso strapped to the back of the locker. The head was held back with a dark band across the forehead. Broken cyborg joints at the shoulders and hips squeaked as actuators kept functioning. The bare-boned jaw opened and closed slowly. Milky white eyes stared at nothing.
“Why is that thing here?” Jayce edged toward Dastin, thinking to put the Marine between him and the nightmare, but forced himself to stay still and exposed to the limbless soldier. “I thought it was . . . dead.”
“He is. He’s not. The Grip has him.” Dastin stepped closer. “Come closer. He bites but he can’t get out of his crib. You see the metal in his flesh? Starts at the back of his neck and base of the skull, extends over the forehead and around the neck.” The Marine tapped the muzzle of his pistol against the cage in front of the prisoner’s face.
“I see it.” Jayce took hesitant steps closer. “What do they mean?”
“They mean he should’ve died a long time ago,” Dastin said. “The Tyrant’s Grip. It’s pre-Collapse technology. Ancients used it as last-ditch life preservation technology. It was meant to shut down and keep the nervous system alive if the rest of the body failed. Too much blood loss? Fatal trauma? The Grip activates and keeps the brain alive long enough to stabilize the user until a clone’s ready or the survivor gets dumped into a cyborg rig. Call it stasis. Hibernation. Not optimal but it’s better than dying—at least that’s my guess on what the Ancients were thinking.”
“So, he’s not . . . dead?” Jayce sniffed the air and caught a whiff of formaldehyde.
“Not completely.” Dastin rapped his muzzle against the cage and the prisoner grunted. His head lolled from side to side. “His brain is still functional and it never ceased functioning. He’s not much more than a vegetable now. The ones with all the augmentation can get their synapses burnt out if they take too much damage. I don’t know how much of the original person’s still in there. Likely doesn’t matter, the Grip . . . it changes you.”
“The Ancients did this to themselves?”
“It wasn’t the same back then. The Tyrant rediscovered the technology during the Black Chanid Invasion. Back when he was still a hero of the Governance . . . he twisted the Grip. A device about the size of a small-caliber bullet gets surgically implanted into the nervous system”—he tapped the base of his skull—“and then nano-filaments start growing through the brain and spine. Can’t feel it at all. And when a soldier falls in battle, it doesn‘t just keep their mind alive, it twists who they were into someone utterly loyal to the Tyrant.”
“And the old Council just let that happen?” Jayce touched the back of his own head, then looked to one side, his mind piecing things together.
“The Chanid Invasion was before my time, but the Governance was losing that war until the Tyrant managed to turn the tide. When you’re facing annihilation, it’s amazing what the brass will let slip by. Legend is the Tyrant was the first to take the Grip; most of his soldiers followed. But instead of a long sleep after getting hit in battle, the Grip brought them back. Got them into the fight within minutes of being mortally wounded so long as they still had enough of a body left over to keep moving.”
Dastin holstered his pistol and his voice spoke softly to someone far away.
“You ever see the dead come back? A whole field of corpses rising up, praising the Tyrant. All of them even deadlier than they were before they were knocked down . . .”
“Can’t say I have,” Jayce said.
Dastin shook his head quickly.
“Tyrant was smart.” He rubbed his chin. “He didn’t want revenants as simple terror troops, he wanted to keep skills and experiences. Turns out, the longer you’ve got the Grip on you before it activates, the more of your mind you keep. Manage to survive for years and you’re not all that different. Thing is, the Grip works to keep the nervous system functional. The rest of the body will rot away. Some of the Gripped went pretty far to keep their bodies functional—artificial hearts and blood replaced with hyper-oxygenated fluid that kept the rot away. Those the Tyrant used to favor were almost perfect. They just never aged again. The cannon fodder, like this basket case, went full cyborg as the meat failed.”
“This is how he overthrew the Council?” Jayce asked. “By the time he defeated the Chanid he had an army loyal only to him?”
“There were plenty of powerful people that didn’t care for the Council and how they were running things. The Tyrant’s coup was a pretty bloodless affair. The purges came later and that sparked the revolt.”
“Did . . . did every soldier that fought for the Tyrant have the Grip?”
“No. It was voluntary. The Tyrant swore to be loyal to his soldiers beyond death. He was persuasive and charismatic when he needed to be, and most of his soldiers took the Grip. It seemed better than dying. Is my guess, anway.”
“My father—” Jayce swallowed hard. “At the beginning of the Revolt, the Tyrant sent a ship to my home world. They ordered a tithe, one out of five fighting-age adults. Volunteers got a signing bonus, but the flotillas weren’t exactly eager to send their workers off to a war that hadn’t touched us out so close to the Deep. So, then there was a mobilization and my mother’s number came up. I was just a baby . . .”
“Your father took your mother’s place?” Dastin said.
Jayce nodded.
“Mom got a little money, and the Tyrant sent her his paycheck every month. Wasn’t a lot, but it kept us from starving while she raised me. My dad didn’t know his letters, but we got a message from him and a picture after he finished training. He never said where he was being sent, only that he loved us and he’d come back soon as the fighting ended. That was the last we heard from him. Then the Tyrant was killed, and the new Governance took over and his pay stopped coming. Mom and I figured he was dead. Probably not long after he was taken away . . . the Tyrant was known to keep paying families of the fallen.”
“Your planet wasn’t the only place the Tyrant mobilized,” Dastin said. “I’ve heard your story before. Shame it had to happen.”
“Yeah, well, the new Governance wasn’t too eager to keep paying the families of the Tyrant’s soldiers, and with all the trade routes failing things on Hemenway got worse. Mom took me to another flotilla to find work and our ship sank during a bad storm. She had to fight for a life vest for me . . . then she drowned. Survivors got picked up a day later and I was all alone at nine years standard.”
“Sorry, kid. Sounds like both your parents loved you more than life itself. Doesn’t bring them back, but you’re still alive. Speaking of alive, you need to know how to kill these meat sacks.” The Marine pointed at the soldier in the cage. “We train to aim center mass on targets. Less chance you’ll miss. With the Tyrant’s soldiers you have to destroy the nervous system. Two rounds in the pink meat.” Dastin tapped the side of his head. “If they’re already Gripped, hitting them in the chest might disable them if you sever the spine. Take off a limb? That’ll just piss ’em off. Decapitation works most of the time. Most.”
“Why is this one still here? All alive . . . alive-ish?” Jayce asked.
“We try and free them from the Grip,” Dastin said. “They’re not of their own free will anymore. If we can right some of the Tyrant’s wrongs, then we should do it. And there are some who were Gripped unwillingly. They deserve to die clean, not in the service of a monster that wanted everyone to be ‘loyal beyond death.’”
“We’ll take this one back to Governance space.” Eabani thumped a plastic-wrapped package into Jayce’s chest. “They’ll transfer him to a lab to be worked on. Right now, we’ve got him on a numbing drip. He’s not lucid at all and probably having a great time in there.”
“Is this my glowy armor?” Jayce tested the heft on the thick package.
“No, that’s your outfit for when we hit Illara.” Eabani handed him a pair of boots. “It’s not a Governance world. Not even a Syndicate outpost. We have to blend in while we’re down there. Plan on self-rescue.”
“Your shinies will be done in a couple of days,” Dastin said. “Now get changed and dump your fish-bait-smelling rags in the trash. Then come back here for another assignment. You’re a part of this crew, you’re a part of the work schedule.”
“I don’t know how to do anything on a starship.” Jayce shouldered a large jacket from Eabani.
“Do you know how to clean? You think you can do what I tell you to do without me having to kick your ass until you do it?” Dastin asked.
“Yeah . . .”
Dastin gave him a quasi-gentle kick to the rear end.
“Then why are you standing there looking at me like an idiot? Go get changed like I told you to and come back here!” Dastin kicked at Jayce again, but the younger man hopped out of the way.
“Moving!” Jayce hurried out of the armory.
“Maru’s going to get him killed,” Eabani said after the door shut behind Jayce. “He recruited us all for missions through the Veil. Trained us. Now he’s going to throw that fish”—he sniffed twice—“into the fire? Kinder to shoot him in the leg now.”
“For as long as I’ve served with Maru, I’ve never fully understood him. This is some Paragon thing we don’t get, and we’re not going to get it. So we do our job and do our best to keep everyone alive. Same as it ever was.” Dastin gave the limbless prisoner one last look and closed the locker.
“You remember your promise to me, Eabani,” he said.
“Always.” The alien raised an arm and gave the shorter Marine a paternal pat on the head.