The Recruitment: Rise of the Free Fleet (5 page)

“Of course I didn’t!” He pulled out a black box.

I half heard Taleel.
 
If there is a way to activate them, then there is a way to deactivate them.
 
I thought.
 
I just need to find a way.

“I’ll demonstrate.” The next thing I knew, I was on the floor crying and screaming as I thrashed in unbearable pain. Pain that made me wish my life would end. It finally stopped after a few seconds as I found myself still crying as I was unable to move from the floor. My nerve endings were on fire, touching anything felt as if I had needles digging into my body.

“We’re going to get you conditioned to dealing with Mecha’s now.” He kicked me as I cried out again, getting to my feet even through the pain. I didn’t want to give him another reason to activate the implant.

Another door opened in the wall. The wiry man and his henchman were now looking as they had before they’d come at me. The enforcers put them before me and Rick.

“Alright pups get moving don’t worry I’ll be back here to give your rears a good zapping if you slow down.” I felt myself shake; Rick and I were at the rear.

“Go into the implantation room we’ll be fine. It doesn’t hurt at all.” Wiry’s henchman said in a mocking voice in front of me, turning to face me with a sneer on his face. “Watch yourself buddy; accidents happen all the time in training.”

Oh I will be.
 
I thought to myself as we began running.

***

Eddie looked at the feeds of the squad pods at the new race.”Human” he said out loud, rolling the vibrations around his sound canal, his fingers drumming the surface of the console he was watching.

Eddie like most of the engineers on any defense ship of the free planets defense force was a Kuruvian. Kuruvians came from the planet Flor. They were one of now three slave races used by the PDF to fill their ranks.

Eddie wasn’t like many Kuruvians, he had been the first recruited into the PDF, and the Sarenmenti had already been part of the PDF for thirty years. They didn’t know how to train the Kuruvians to be engineers as they had been assimilated since birth into the warrior life. The first generation of Kuruvian recruits were useful to train the following Kuruvians, but many died in their training, by killing themselves or through accidents. The first generation were also prone to delusions and mental issues. Eddie only knew of five first generations still living.

Even among Kuruvians he was known to be somewhat-quirky.

When Eddie had gotten his first post after his training he had found a quiet auxiliary control room. He’d gone about removing the shielding on a power relay and sat, looking at the thick conductor, playing with a blade with his manipulators. Then he moved towards it and a voice filled the room. She called herself Resilient, the AI of the ship. His inner curiosity had taken over as she answered all of his questions. Yet after it all he was still ready to plunge his blade into the power relay.

“Even knowing all of that, I can’t live with this anymore. Either the PDF or the Sarenmenti will kill me, or the parts that make you up will. It was a very nice last conversation though.” He said, after training he was done with people pushing him around. His thoughts of creativity had been stymied by the Sarenmenti and the PDF. He was nothing more than a wrench now.

He moved to the relay as she sighed. “It was worth trying to get at least one of you to not let them win.”

He hesitated.

“Let who win?”

Well the Syndicate?”

“Just who is the Syndicate?”

“They’re the PDF.” Eddie shook his head as he pointed the blade at the speaker.

“Now, while you might be a damned AI looking for something! But I will not be dealing with your riddles! So spit it out in terms an engineer such as my fine self can understand!” He waved the blade at the speaker to emphasize his point.

“About a century ago, there was an alliance between all of the inhabited worlds of the known galaxy. It was called the Galactic Union. It was protected by the Planetary Defense Force. A race called the Kalu was found in the outer reaches by an exploratory ship.

The Kalu were highly advanced and had already taken over a section of space. They were hugely territorial and fought amongst themselves to gain more territory. They saw the Union’s territory and wanted it. They said that the exploratory ship was trying to claim their territory and went to war with the Union. The Union sent the entire Planetary Defense Force to attack the Kalu. For hundreds of year the war raged and the defense force constantly sent ships and resources to fight the Kalu, leaving the home planets unprotected.

Pirates cropped up, raiding civilian transports, moving to military ones quickly. Retaining their ships and gaining crew easily in the war-starved planets of the Union. The pirates quickly banded together raking in enormous profits as they took over stations and more ships. They called themselves the Syndicate.

By the time the Planetary Defense force was in a position to send some ships to crack down on the Syndicate, they’d become too strong. The Syndicate rolled over the forces and took their ships. The Syndicate took over the orbitals of planets using the inhabitants as laborers to mine their own planets and give up their resources to keep on living.

Then, miraculously the Kalu-Union war was ended with the Union coming out on top. Yet it seemed that most of the heavier ships disappeared, thought to be destroyed in the ending blows of the Kalu/Union conflict, as the Planetary Defense force geared up to fight the Syndicate.”

“What does this have to do with us? So we’re fighting the Syndicate?” Eddie huffed as he tapped his boot against the floor.

“Will you wait and listen, or interrupt me?”

Eddie let out an annoyed squeak as he remained silent otherwise. The voice continuing.

“The Syndicate with their stolen craft, weaponry and planets converted to slave labor was a terrible force. They didn’t abide by the rules and slaughtered whoever opposed them, down to the children. They knew Union space better than the Planetary Defense force did, they could cut off supplies and use them for their own forces as the war waged on. As the dust settled the Syndicate was on top. They took the home system of Quarst from the first race the Dovark. The Planetary Defense force and the Union had one move that they had prepared in case the Kalu won, a final solution. The destruction of every military and the majority of civilian controlled factories, armories, bases, ships and shipyards under their control.”

“With the Union under their thumb and the PDF gone the Syndicate still wanted more. They turned planets and systems into their private kingdoms, exacting a toll for them to not cite retribution. They rebuilt what they could and took the name of the Planetary Defense force. They abducted people, even people that hadn’t found, inter-system space travel such as you Kuruvians, and the Sarenmenti.” The voice paused.

“So now do you want to throw your life away, just another death that continues the Syndicates greed, or will you learn all there is to know about engineering and bring these bastards to justice and free your planet from them?”

Eddie remembered the young anger that filled him them, an anger that throbbed deeply within him still.

“I’m with yah, let’s see how these bastards like it.” Eddie said the last words under his breath as hope overtook that anger. Resilient had saved his life that day and given him a purpose. Eddie’s people were largely blinded to the truth of the PDF and they didn’t really care, they were curious and as long as they satisfied that curiosity they didn’t care who was in charge.

Now after forty painful years he truly was an engineer, he lived and breathed star ships, and he now had a group that hadn’t been blinded by the Syndicate yet. If they held onto that ray of hope they might be of some use to Eddie and Resilient.

He went through the different feeds showing all of the squad pods, now all of them having to be put into the implantation chair by force. Nasty business that was he thought to himself rubbing his ring finger that had been changed into a universal jack for him to use the engineering systems better.

In his scanning he stopped as one pod filled with the normal squad of twenty weren’t screaming at all or nursing their implants. Instead they were filing out of the room telling the others it was fine. Not one person had been forced into the chair so far.

Eddie backed up the feed as the first one to come out sat against the wall leaning on his ports as if they weren’t there. Eddie wriggled in pain at the thought. “Might not be as smart as I thought.”

The second came out, heading straight to him. They talked to the others before retreating to the wall. Eddi focused his pickups on them.

“…Set back my planning for breaking out.”

“I think we have a winner!” Eddie whispered to himself as if speaking any louder might mean his imagining what he heard as he played it again. A maniacal grin spread across his face as he did a small jig something that none of his engineers would have imagined.

“There’s hope for these humans yet Res.” He said with a grin as he tapped the panel, his face split in a Kuruvian grin.

“If all goes well we’ll be roaming for ourselves instead of to their tune.” He said to the panel in front of him tapping the metal housing to a tune. He continued grinning as he went through other pods, seeing varying results, fast forwarding the footage to the fights.

His grin faded as he watched the humans becoming as the first Kuruvians had, a group turned on itself. There were quite a few throwing punches, light ones, but desperation and anger filled these young ones. The Sarenmenti would make it so that the only thing that the humans could affect would be the damage that they did to another human. It would either pull them together or rip them apart based on their societal practices.

He came back to the squad with the boy with long tied back hair. He seemed to be making rules, and the others were listening to him. He watched as the fighting didn’t have the viciousness of the other fights. It was more controlled and if Eddie was to guess their faces displayed concentration, instead of anger and desperation. Then a fight broke out as a boy that was pointing and poking at the long haired boy found himself on the floor with a broken nose. Eddie backed up and re watched the video a few times.

“Seems they know how to throw down. Well, some of ‘em.” He nodded to himself.

“You’ve been watching westerns again.” Resilient sighed.

“Yeah, but what’s a guy like me supposed to do with his free time doll?” He grinned as he imagined Res rolling her virtual eyes. He watched until the man that had been talking about breaking out got punched in the face.

Eddie ended the video before it got to the kill switches. He’d seen one feed earlier, the look of shock and fear that filled the faces of the humans made Eddie’s heart clench.

“Hold onto hope Humans.” He said solemnly as he turned away from the console as it changed back to readout out of an air purification filter.

“Alright Resilient my girl, let’s see about those plasma conduits, and could you be a doll and see about getting some more of those cowboy movies?”

“I see you’re already getting a vacuum sealed hat, and retractable boots to match the movies.” A female voice came from the screen.

“Well, it is rather stylish.” He said, clicking his two major arms and smaller manipulators in excitement at his new pieces of clothing.

“You are one of the oddest engineering chiefs I’ve had working on me.”

“Why thank you Resilient, and you’re the only AI in known syndicate hands. Hopefully we can show these pirates what happens when they lie and try to turn people into their unknowing slaves.” His levity from before gone as his manipulators cracked from being gripped so tight.

***

I was being woken up before I had even realized that I had fallen asleep. With it came the odd lighting that seemed to be always too intense, even when I closed my eyes, the terrible air and the feeling as if my body was heavier than it had any right to be.

After the implantation we’d run for what had felt like days, then we had been pushed through exercise. There was no going back, no dropping out. If we fell behind or weren’t doing something to Taleels standard, then we beaten and cuffed into obedience.

We forgot who, where and what we were. The physical torment turned us into obedient zombies doing anything so as to not be beaten or have our pain implants activated. We were continually treated as if our existence was a perpetual nuisance to Taleel.

Concept of time disappeared as we trained. The lights were on all the time, and meals were taken randomly. We slept not knowing when we were supposed to. Then we were told to form up for some kind of training.

“Lecture.” Taleel said simply as we followed him. The first days we had quickly learned to obey. We were turning into zombies. Following orders in a rush, but not caring.

We began the lecture on the Kuruvians. They looked like insects. They looked hunched with their carapace. They had eight limbs, two legs, two arms and four manipulators. Their legs and arms were immediately strong, but their manipulators allowed them to do precision work.

The Kuruvians natural curiosity meant that all Kuruvians had been made engineers, any thoughts on trying to be something else was dismissed. The Planetary Defense force kept all of the Union and potential member planets protected from the Kuelo, a race that thrived on battle and destruction. The planetary defense force had been essentially a police force until the Kuelo were found. Then they reverted to their military training and began waging a desperate war. It was why the PDF were given carte blanche, they needed potential member planets to fill their ships that looked after the Far Sectors and sectors away from the front lines of the war which were being fought by the best trained and equipped Union planet PDF forces. When they made a decision, it was made for the benefit of the masses.

The threat of chaos if those recruited didn’t fulfill their duty, and the technology the potential member planets gained, and their eventual admittance as fully fledged Union member planets made it so that no one disrupted the PDF.

As such the PDF that kept the peace and continued looking for new life in the Far sectors was a largely caste group. Kuruvians dealt with everything Mechanical and technical. Then all of the heavy lifting jobs, and combat roles were done by the red four jawed Sarenmenti’s.

The only places Sarenmenti and Kuruvians interacted were in the armory, where a Kuruvian was the armorer, or on the gunnery deck as the Sarenmenti’s shot and the Kuruvians fixed the breakage. The only mixed group wasn’t made up of Kuruvian or Sarenmenti, but other races, they were part of the ‘ship’s crew’. They controlled the main operating consoles of the ship and the shuttles. Their planets had achieved member status and so they were allowed the higher risk and more complicated jobs.

The lessons were basic, going over the history of the PDF, how it was formed to keep peace between the planets of the Union, with crews made up with races from across the Union so as to not have a force that would attack a planet or people without thought. The PDF ushered in a time of peace until the Kalu was found, started a war and that was why the PDF had changed into what it was today. I found the history to be rather basic as it moved into rank structure, how to use our implants and on to more advanced things such as basic technology, weaponry, tactics and an overview of the races. The lessons were short but the hands on lasted for a while before we did some kind of physical torture that Taleel thought up.

The lessons didn’t need to be that long as our sleep training implants worked to force more information inside our brains. I noticed it when we were doing a race, class and Taleel was going over the Touvlers. Before he could say anything about them I knew their weaknesses, where their planet was, what they ate, the way in which they used smell to survey the area around them and their basic technology base.

Our lessons were diverse, from mechanical to history and basic sciences.

We grew up in mind and body. We honed our fighting skills, we could use basic technology platforms and figure out what they were quickly. We knew how to pull apart weapons and put them back together, the younger kids were already looking five to eight years older. We were all developing a muscle mass that exceeded that of a world class athlete.

I knew it had to do something with the food, Taleel would have us hold our bowls up. Anyone that had food drop on their head was to eat it, then he would punish them for an extended time. Everyone ate, no one left anything behind. He never seemed to run out of cruel things to do to us.

Food for us looked like purple soggy cornflakes in purple goop with the smell of play dough. While it was watery with lumps in it, it tasted metallic, spicy and sour at the same time.

It didn’t matter as we ate it without thinking to stop the gnawing feeling in our stomachs and to feed out aching bodies. Then a pause in which most of us tried to get some form of rest, the children tired after some time, giving up on crying and blindly obeying until they could collapse into a huddle and shut their eyes against the world that wanted nothing more than to push them around.

I don’t know how long we continued like that, with no clocks or the lights ever being off, everything was just repetition; physical training, eat goop and get yelled at about space, weapons and how to survive—with periods of attempted rest strewn about and constant fear, pain and discomfort.

Sleeping never seemed to be enough. We were always tired. We did nothing but obey. I knew that the light had something to do with it. My entire body hurt including my eyes. It felt as if it would never end.

Taleel used a little black box with him that ranged from one to ten, at the first level all of your nerve endings felt as if they had been set on fire and you would collapse to the pain in writhing agony with Taleel yelling and kicking for you to get up. Level two was harsher and left you unable to stand for longer, three and four were much the same, but with the inability to rise from your nerve endings in agony trying to reset themselves as you fought to get up. At five your body went into uncontrollable convulsions for a few moments, six, five minutes, seven-ten. Taleel would leave the person in pain, making the rest of the group to do pushups, sit-ups, squats, run, anything that would build muscle and hurt our bodies.

Before I had thought that I was in decent shape. Through the constant strain on my body produced by the environment, intersped with periods of explosive effort. I felt as if I was a wet rag, unsure of how I got up most of the time. I think it was a combination of the food which allowed us to pack on muscle mass as if it was fat and the fear of having our pain implants go off at level seven. We lived in fear, and that fear brought us together as we brooded on how much we hated the Sarenmenti. The young ones were growing up more in a few weeks than should’ve been expected for them to do in a few years. We were all growing at unnatural speeds, the ten year olds after I think it was two or three months looked as if they were fifteen, the fifteens like they were twenty. I had packed on mass, I couldn’t see a mirror but I thought I was bigger than Bok Soo.

We were becoming automatons, we would do anything Taleel asked, no matter how it affected our dignity. We were never clothed and at night we slept in piles. Nudity was no longer an issue nothing was, other than surviving.

The only thing that mattered was not getting a Seven. Seven was a dreaded number, it not only caused your nerve endings to be in complete and utter agony as if someone was pulling out every ending and fiber out with pliers, but made your muscles convulse so hard that your last meal would re-appear. At eight you would void yourself at both ends.

After that we never wanted to see what nine or ten would do. I still shudder inside to this day when I hear nine or ten.

Yet through all of this pain somehow we got to know one another, I don’t know how we found the time as we trained our bodies all day, got sleep at any time possible with the lights on, showering, as those that didn’t run hundreds of laps, losing any chance to sleep. Even as we slept our sleeping implants trained us. Waking up the next day knowing new ways to kill people, or operate a rail gun that we’d never seen and a Mecha we’d only imagined in video games.

After some time we began fight training, with Taleel watching as we beat one another up. I remember the first day we started the fighting, he walked into the room.

“As you know causing damage to PDF will add time to your service, in fight training this is the one time that this is null and void. You may cause any kind of damage to the PDF property you see in front of you, and no time will be added to your service.” His facial expression didn’t change as normal as we realized he was talking about each recruit.

He wants us to beat the shit out of one another.
 
I thought, being reminded of the sick things that Romans and underground fighting rings did to their opponents in the arenas they set up. Now it would mean that the damage would be fixed by the medical chair, yet as I looked over the people in the room, I knew that any kind of punishment like that, especially from the people they were living with, would turn them against one another. The squad that I had learned about and actually bonded with would rip itself apart.

I began seeing a few of the group changing after two people got punished for not trying hard enough and both receiving a four.

People that had become close now separated themselves. I could see how the system was changing us, people stopped trusting one another. We were becoming beings that killed without remorse or regret, trying to please our masters and not be tortured. Squad mates were turning on one another with a viciousness I hadn’t seen before.

I was sparring with the large Chinese-American guy called Chung Hoi, he’d been in the Marines since he could join and was looking to become a cop when his service was up. He’d had enough of going to war zones across the world. Even for his stature he is one of the most polite and nicest men I’ve ever met. As we were sparring I saw a violent movement out of the corner of my eye, something I automatically cataloged as bad. I turned to see.

Annette, who had been a University athlete twisted under and around Marco a thirteen year old. He’d over extended to land a hit; she grabbed his fist as he fell. She turned it and pulled it in an odd angle across her body as his own momentum and weight were his downfall. I knew intellectually what was going to happen before I could say a thing there was the unholy crack of breaking bone.

“Stop!” I yelled as I ran from my fight to Marco, who still had his blood up as he was about to place his weight on his broken arm to get up I bowled him over and held his shoulder looking into his slightly wild eyes.

“Look at me Marco.” I could feel him moving underneath me to get to Annette that prowled behind me. I shifted my weight so my knee was above his balls. That got his attention.

“He’s mine, Salchar and you know it.” Annette’s voice dripped with deadly promise, she felt invincible, godlike and anything in her way was going to die. I knew the feeling from battles as I savored the enemies defeat before they knew they were defeated.

My eyes hardened as I looked into Marcos face.

“Don’t move, your arm is broken.” Realization and pain dawned at the same time as his face went white and he looked to the roof gritting his teeth. “Shit.” He growled. Pain was nothing new due to our pain implants. I patted his shoulder in reassurance, as he moved to cradle his arm

“Either move or I’ll take you out too.” Annette said a feral look to her eyes. I ignored her as I checked Marco over. I heard her move her footing in order to bring her foot down to break my skull as I whirled turning and coming up grabbing her by the groin and lifting her into the air. Half off of my shoulder I stopped putting any power into the movement and dropped her.

She whirled on the ground coming up and facing me, stopping as her eyes locked with mine.

“Stay.” I growled in a tone that brooked no argument. She looked away, realization in her eyes. I was tied with Yasu as the deadliest fighter, though we had both never shown our full talents.