PART 1 – ONCA’S DEATH

Onca leaned out of the side door of the AI-piloted stealth helicopter as it raced low over the jungle at dawn. The shining glass and concrete towers of Sao Paulo reflected the first rays of the morning sun in the distance and already the heat was making his armor’s cooling system whir into life.

Their target was the HQ and manufacturing center for biotech giant Abora Biopharma. The sprawling factory complex had been taken over by a new terrorist group. They held over 400 employees hostage and also dozens of Artificial Persons worth millions of dollars. Before the site had been overrun, the security systems had detected large amounts of explosives being trucked inside the main buildings. At least twenty security guards had been killed in the opening moments and the employees who had escaped told of dozens of terrorists inside, perhaps over a hundred of them.

There were no negotiations asked for and none offered. While the Brazilian Army and local police stood ready, the lives of all the hostages were dependent entirely on Major Onca’s private security firm, Sabre Rubro.

A ten-year veteran of counter-terrorist operations, Onca knew that this one was going to be the toughest challenge he had ever faced.

Onca’s AugHud overlaid the helo’s curving route over the ragged forest canopy, up to and between the distant factory complex. Over one of those buildings, the floating LZ icon counted down the time until his team would be over the target.

4 MINS.

His men had been standing on the tarmac at the international airport all night, waiting for the go from the Sao Paulo state government but it had come too late for the mission to be a night attack. Too late even for the half-light of dawn. They would be coming in stealthily, his two helos as low and as close to silent as it was possible to be but now they would certainly be spotted before they could engage. At least his ground units, two squads on foot and the other squad in the Beast were out of sight, advancing rapidly through the streets of the workers’ town attached to the south of the complex.

But the situation got worse.

Onca’s radio pinged in his ear.

“Major,” Maria said, speaking from the temporary HQ at the airport. With the unbreakable encryption she had built into the comms system, there was no need for codes or call signs. “Update. The media blackout request has been ignored. Airspace over the factory is swarming with news drones and there are two chatter satellites trained on the complex. Live footage streaming online now showing you moving in. Both AI helos, plus ground teams at their ingress locations. And the Beast is under cover but its position is being reported.”

Somebody has screwed us.

The state government, or the Army, or the city or state police, or whoever.

“Get those drones out of the sky, Maria, and the satellites off or pointed away. Put Matos on.”

Onca cycled through his AugHud settings and looked up over his LZ. Drone icons swarmed, most at high altitude but a few buzzed around over the factory complex like insects over a stagnant pond.

“Matos is with the Chief of Police right now. The cops are saying the terrorists have taken out the local power grid plus the mobile generators so there’s nothing to power the jammers at the perimeter.”

Bullshit.

Either the senior police officer or someone else must have been paid off. For a large-scale assault like the one Onca was leading, the online news sites could organize enough flash crowdfunding to bribe a dozen city officials almost immediately.

“Tell Matos to forget the police,” Onca said, watching the LZ icon countdown and feeling irritated that he had to deal with a drone situation instead of focusing on his operation. “Get our own APs out here to shoot the drones out of the sky. Steal the military’s AA lasers and sonic batteries deployed at the airport. And launch the SR drone fleet, I’ll take the consequences. Do it now.”

Already, the operation was a stretch for his small cooperative but the news drones giving away Sabre Rubro’s movements was putting his men’s lives in greater danger. It was Onca’s responsibility to protect them, even if it meant being prosecuted for flying armed drones inside the city limits and outside his contract’s engagement rules.

Onca turned back inside the helo to the other three members of Alpha Team. Every operational member of Sabre Rubro—thirty in all—was on the mission. Each man in their custom-printed armor molded to their body, faces obscured by helmets, breathing apparatus and visors. Their names floated over their heads on the AugHud but he knew each of these men just by the way they moved, by their particular loadout, by the way they held their weapon or held themselves. He switched their name icons off.

He glanced out the open door at the massive LZ symbol.

“Two minutes,” he said on the squad channel as he held up two fingers and circled his hand.

He almost told them about the news drones, almost summarized his command channel conversation. But there was no need. The plan was the same. Each of them expected heavy resistance and every man knew his duty.

They came up fast over the outskirts of the factory, the outer perimeter cleared of trees for at least half a kilometer before the first fence and the grass was still in deep shadow. The flat roofs of the low-rise factory buildings seemed empty.

No terrorists.

They had been there overnight and Onca hoped to neutralize them on the way in.

No matter.

If the enemy wanted to fight it out in the tight corridors and doorways of the facility buildings, then that was no problem. It was Major Onca’s natural environment.

Sabre Rubro’s other helicopter popped up from AugHud View into Real World View from behind two squat chimney stacks, its quiet blade whirring, the noise pitching down as the power eased off, just as his own helo was doing. Bravo Team would deploy right on time.

His men could see on their own displays that they had reached the LZ. They opened the other door and leaned out against their lines.

Onca looked down, the data from dozens of sensors, scanners, cameras and microphones analyzed in real time and fed seamlessly into his AugHud. It showed only two terrorists above ground in the building below him. Both on the floor below the roof. Both armed with assault rifles.

Good.

God grant me endless targets, unto the end of days.

The four of them jumped as one, guided by the jump signal on the AugHud, coordinated with the helo’s AI. Two on each side of the chopper. They fell at full speed, breaking on their lines before their feet touched down. The moment the last of them detached, the AI-controlled stealth helicopter rolled and banked away, heading back out low, ready to invade any incoming missiles or lasers.

No one fired on either helo.

Now that the transport phase was over, the corner of his AugHud, the mission phase clock turned over and displayed: PHASE 2.

His men spread out on the wide, flat rooftop. Weapons up, moving two by two. Onca dropped and drove the spike of a sensor block into the gravelly roof surface. It would provide additional local clarity to the data stream. His other team went to the west parapet, punched the anchors into the concrete with the grapple guns and prepped their lines.

Onca and Ferreira headed for the door down into the building. It was a fire escape door, with access to the ground via an external stairway. The real-time scans relayed to his AugHud the image of two silhouettes with assault rifles on the floor below, turning and running for the internal stairwell.

“Go, go, go,” Onca instructed his team, speaking calmly.

Ferreira blew the fire escape door off its hinges and rushed through the rubble cloud flung into being by the blasted walls. Onca followed right behind.

The scans showed no one inside and had revealed no traps set up either. But those scans were never one hundred percent effective, never could be. He clattered after Ferreira down the narrow stairway and into the top floor. Ferreira pulled open the internal fire exit door and Onca raced into the corridor beyond.

All the lights were on.

Most buildings that terrorists tended to take over had their own solar power generation and that was easy to blow out with EMP bursts prior to the assault. Other places were connected to the grid and the local power company would happily shut it down for the authorities. The factory site was different. It had a nuclear power plant on site.

The terrorists had not taken the power station. This was a good sign as it suggested that they were not truly suicidal.

Still, it was better when the lights were out. His men operated best in the darkness. Even if the terrorists had night vision augmented eyes, they tended to be less practiced than his own teams.

On his AugHud he watched the terrorist silhouettes fleeing for the main stairwell, running like the devil. He and Ferreira would have to sprint in order to catch them but he expected one of the other two pairs would be able to intercept.

He and Ferreira advanced rapidly, ready to support or catch a change in direction. On his AugHud he watched Blanco and Vasquez breach the west windows two levels below him. Both knew where their targets would be even before they breached and had timed it perfectly, shooting as they swung in through the cloud of blasted-out window glass, the sputtering of their guns softer than the sound of falling debris.

“Targets, down,” Blanco said, voice distinct in Onca’s ear.

Onca and Ferreira advanced to the top of the stairwell where the others were holding position.

Bravo had made contact high up in Building A and had taken down four targets.

“Matos,” Onca radioed to the temp command post. “You have to shoot those drones down. They can see us coming.”

“He says he’s on it, Major,” Maria said then said no more.

Strange that she had answered for him. Why was Matos not on the comms himself?

A question for later. In the meantime, Matos could be trusted to defy the military. He’d been doing it all his adult life.

Onca looked across the complex, through the walls and zoomed in to his men’s locations. The Beast was rolling in through the front gate. It would get past the physical security measures, the adaptable tracks would make light work of the tire spikes but it would have to traverse the largest of the anti-vehicle bomb barrier walls.

No matter. The Beast was only part of the plan. It would draw attention at the least and, if they were lucky, RPG and laser fire from inside the building. The terrorists had grown increasingly well-armed over the last couple of years and for an attack of this scale—the largest ever in Brazil, perhaps the largest anywhere—he had no doubt they would have pulled out all the stops. Indeed, they had been detected trundling in trolleys of equipment and no doubt that included the rocket propelled explosives and laser batteries that intel said had been on the market until recently. Onca prayed the terrorists would waste their ammo on the Beast. It had cost him a fortune, wiping out Sabre Rubro’s bank account and most of its credit. It cost more than one of the stealth helos, AI system included. Designed and built in the United States, the Beast was an APC with a full suite of countermeasures and was as close to invulnerable as a vehicle of that weight could be. The plan was for the terrorists to shoot it with everything they had while the other four teams moved in. The Beast scared terrorists into reacting to it and, tactically speaking, that was priceless.

Bravo Team made its way deeper and lower into Building C across the factory site. Delta and Echo pushed deeper into the compound via the maintenance access tunnels that ran from the workers’ town in the outer perimeter.

His own team waited on him, stacked up on the stairwell door. He gestured to proceed and they pushed on down to ground level without making any contact. There was no one showing up on thermal or electric scans.

The stairwell to the underground levels was on the opposite side of the building and they moved through the lobby, then the communal area, then an empty café. His other teams also advanced, all the while the mission clock counted up.

The site was vast. For the first time in his short career at the head of a private security cooperative, he wished he had more men. Then again, to properly cover a place as big as the Abora Biopharma complex, he would need a battalion, at least.

Audio scans were picking up a lot of noise. It sounded industrial. Whirring and grinding.

“Maria,” he said quietly as they advanced. “Identify that audio.”

“Algorithms processing,” Maria said, already working on the problem. She was almost as expensive as the Beast but Onca was glad he had invested in her. In truth, she was too young and he didn’t trust all the internal augmentation she had in her body and brain but he couldn’t deny she had been the best candidate by far, with the most glowing recommendations.

They stacked up by the stairwell door.

“Hold up,” Onca said and looked at Blanco. “Local scan. B-drones.”

Blanco removed the scanner and ducked to the bottom of the door. He fed three of the tiny, spherical B-drones into the tiny gap.

Ferreira looked at Onca, his head tilted a fraction to the left. Before they had left, Onca had repeated to the company the importance of speed on a large site like the Abora Biotech complex. They had a lot of ground to cover indoors and they needed to rush through. By slowing them down he was changing the plan and risked the coordination of the five teams. On the other hand, his men trusted him. The legendary Major Onca could do no wrong.

Yeah, right.

“Prelim results on audio. Confirm sounds consistent with drilling,” Maria said. “Likely from the access tunnel network.”

“Trying to collapse the tunnels?” Onca said, watching Blanco checking the B-drone data on his pad. “Barricade themselves in?”

“Affirmative,” Maria said, sounding certain. “Pattern suggests drilling consistent with methods for demolition charges.”

Blanco watched the B-drones stream on his AugHud while the others covered the door.

Delta and Echo teams were in the tunnels.

He had a moment or two to make a decision on whether to pull those teams back.

Demolition of steel reinforced concrete structures took days to do properly. On the other hand, if all they wanted to do was bring down a small section of tunnel in order to barricade the complex, that wouldn’t place his teams under much risk. The chance of them being under that specific section of tunnel when it collapsed was small and if the explosives were rigged to blow by proximity trigger or something similar then his men’s equipment would pick it up. If the tunnel section came down behind his men, so be it. They would fight through and walk out the front door when it was all over. If it came down in front of them, on the other hand, it put the whole operation in jeopardy.

“Delta and Echo, come in,” he said on the command channel. “Double time through the access tunnels. Watch for hidden triggers. Maria, overlay probable drilling locations to Delta and Echo, all team members.”

Once they repeated and confirmed the order, he saw through his AugHud that their pace increased. Fear of being crushed was a powerful motivation.

“Blanco?” Onca asked his own team member.

“Seems clear,” Blanco said, arms’ length away but speaking through comms. Their armor blocked sounds of conversational volume. “Negative contacts on B-drone data.”

Seems clear.

Onca knew then that he wasn’t the only one unnerved by the change of behavior in the terrorists.

He checked the status of the hostages. It showed all were still in the dining hall inside Building A. Workers separated from the APs, as was normal. Bravo descended toward them from above. Delta and Echo were close to position, coming up from underneath. The Beast was trundling up to the front door.

“Alright,” he said to the rest of Alpha Team, stacked up at the stairwell door. He stopped himself warning them to watch the corners and watch for triggers. They knew their jobs as well as he did. “Blitz to the Target Ops CP doors then breach and clear on Phase Three.”

The four of them rushed through the door into the stairwell, flowing down the levels by section, one pair covering while the other advanced. Down and down toward level UG4, each man in his team weighed down with weapons, ammo, equipment, and body armor and together they made a huge noise clattering down the stairs.

And yet no targets came out to stop them.

He could see them on the 4th floor below ground as they approached. A tight cluster of red dots throbbing as they moved about a single room.

It was difficult to get quality data on below-ground interiors but they had the building layout plus audio data from the probes they had embedded on the roof plus the ones launched into the ground by their A-drones. Along with thermal sensors and electromagnetic analysis, they showed the targets clustered in the largest meeting room on that floor. That room had communications equipment and other electronic devices lighting them up like a beacon.

A beacon that said, kill us.

For all their changes in behavior, by barely contesting any perimeter, they still hadn’t learned how predictable their attacks had become to Sabre Rubro.

The executive meeting room they had chosen to hole up in would probably have little more than a single long table and a couple dozen chairs, maybe pushed to one side to make space for all the equipment. Either way, it was an open room with little to stop his men’s rounds from finding its target. Surely, they were not so stupid as to have only two men above ground to defend them from the incursion they could see happening online, thanks to the news drones that still flew high over the factory compound.

What was Matos doing back at the airport? He had never failed so completely before, never.

At the bottom of the stairwell, they pushed through a pair of fire doors and into a corridor that ran square around the executive meeting room, through the wall in front of them. The executive meeting room had two doors, one in sight, the other around the corner up ahead.

Half of Alpha Team pushed on to the next door, moving quietly now and ready to respond if the terrorists reacted before Phase Three was triggered. Onca kept a close eye for any changes in the movement or audio coming from the room beyond the door he was at.

The targets must have known the attack was happening, they must have done. They must know they had lost two men in this building and four already in Building A. And then they milled about in a big cluster at one end of the executive meeting room.

Something was wrong.

Onca checked in with his units, speaking softly. “Report targets or signs of drilling or demolitions.”

“Delta. Negative on all counts. At checkpoint four-nine. Proceeding into Building A.”

“Echo. Negative, sir. Checkpoint five-one-one. Holding at Building A.”

“Bravo. Four tangos down. Proceeding to checkpoint two-two-zero.”

Both Delta and Echo had made it through both access tunnels without seeing any terrorist drilling crews or additional guards.

Where are they?

“Ops,” Onca asked Maria. “My local audio data suggests drilling is continuing but they’re not in the tunnels.”

“Sorry, sir, it’s difficult to pinpoint. Could be the floors above the tunnels or different sections, they are extensive.”

Maria was the finest civilian operations coordinator on the market but she covered her ass just as smoothly, as if she had her answer prepared. He made a mental note to dock her pay. Civilians hated that.

Aside from the six targets near the roofs, the rest of the targets had clustered in three locations over the entire, vast site. Why hide their operations HQ inside the meeting room on UG4, in a separate building and without holding hostages in with them? Why hold those hundreds of hostages all in the same, open place, and indefensible place, up in the employee restaurant? It was always easy to assume the enemy was tactically ignorant because they usually were. Was that the case here?

The regular movement from inside continued. Male and female voices murmured. Maria’s AIs, performing real-time analysis on the conversations, did not pick up any words or tones of concern. Nine terrorists within, the leaders, perhaps, of the attack. Judging from the technical and communications equipment there, unquestionably the coordinators of it.

That failure would lead to their deaths at the hands of Sabre Rubro.

His AugHud showed his teams reaching their positions, just seconds after Alpha stacked up on the meeting room doors. He watched Bravo finish descending from the roof to their entry point outside the restaurant. He watched Delta and Echo come up the two emergency stairwells on either side of that same restaurant. The three teams would fill the space with flashes, bangs, high-frequency sound and ultra-low frequency waves, as well as gas grenades that choked and blinded everyone not in masks.

He watched through the walls as the icon of the huge Beast rolled up to the front door with teams Zeta and Kappa ready to breach the main entrance and take out the dozens of terrorists that intel said guarded it.

In the corner of his AugHud, the mission phase clock turned over.

PHASE 3.

“All teams,” Onca said. “Go, go, go.”

Alpha blew both doors into pieces with their breaching charges. Even with his helmet and earpieces muffling the noise and his armor protecting his body, the simultaneous blasts shook the world around Onca.

Before the debris had time to fall, Ferreira and Onca advanced inside at full speed, weapons up and ready to unload on the people inside while checking their fields of fire.

There were terrorists inside, true enough. Clustered across the room from him, just as the sensors had described.

But they were safe from harm, inside a protective box. The group of targets stood within a huge metal frame with transparent panels as the sides and roof. Like a cage sheathed in glass. A safe room with clear sides.

Ferreira and the others fired as they advanced into the empty space in the center of the room while Onca slowed, hanging back and looking for threats.

The defensive structure had been assembled in a hurry. Two mounds of discarded packing material had been heaped in opposite corners of the meeting room.

Onca followed behind Ferreira but did not fire. He watched the rounds smash into the side of the clear panels. They did little damage, crumpling some of the outer layers of the glass panels.

Immediately, his three men understood that the glass sides were bulletproofed and Ferreira and Barbosa unhooked grenades.

This is wrong.

Onca’s mind whirred, surveying the scene, calculating possible tactical responses. What purpose would a safe room serve? They had trapped themselves. All Onca had to do was cover it in charges and blow them to pieces or pump gas inside or just cover the ventilation until they passed out. The tactic served no obvious purpose. The terrorists inside were obscured by the smoke and debris cloud and cracked glass but Onca had the distinct impression they were anything but scared. Then, he was sure of it.

They were smiling.

A tingling chill rose up in his chest and neck, even as he shouted a warning.

“Fall back,” Onca cried out, on all channels, scanning the rest of the room, sweeping back and forth with his weapon. “Fall back.”

A familiar whirring sound started up even as he spoke. Flashes of light. The piles of discarded cardboard flashed and jumped and flew apart into a thousand pieces.

Onca turned, ducking low and ran back toward the breached doorway.

Two sentry drones, hidden in the mounds of trashed cardboard, opened up. Rounds spat from the rotating barrels in great gouts of flame and a deafening roar filled the room as the first rounds found their mark.

Ferreira was a step behind him. As Onca dived for the safety of the entrance, the bullets slapped into Ferreira’s armor, the plate inserts clacking as they were hit with a stream of impacts.

Sabre Rubro’s armor was the best in the world. It would resist a magazine of 10mm full automatic fire. Their helmets would resist a high-powered rifle round.

But it had to be practical. A man had to be able to operate swiftly and with freedom of movement.

And it could not resist belt-fed .50cal armor-piercing rounds fired at a rate of 2,000 per minute. That was over thirty rounds per second tearing into Ferreira. Onca barely reached the doorway as he was showered in a spray of blood and chunks of flesh and clothing and armor that had just been his team mate.

Blinded by the mist of blood, Onca smacked into the ragged doorframe and rolled into the corridor, out of the line of fire.

The drone tracked him through the wall, firing continuously into the masonry on the other side of where he lay, swiftly turning the bricks to rubble. He just had a couple of seconds before it chewed through like a power tool so he got to his feet and ran toward the stairwell.

And he fell.

The pain shot through his back and he collapsed onto his face.

“Abort,” Onca growled into his radio. “It’s a trap. All teams fall back.”

“Alpha…,” a garbled transmission came through from Delta. “… in. Repeat, all hostages… dead. It’s like… all dead. They… hours. No…” It ended in rapid, jerking static.

The noise was not static. He realized it was the sound of multiple drone sentries opening up on his men.

“Abort,” Onca said, his voice weak. “All teams, abort.”

One drone gun fell silent behind him. The other, trained on him, kept firing into the wall, traversing along it now.

Onca reached behind him and felt a shredded hole in his armor at his lower back. His gloved hand came back shining with dark blood. The bullet or shrapnel might not have penetrated into his body cavity but it had at the least shredded the flesh of his back on one side.

The one chewing into the wall behind him whirred to a stop.

It was strangely quiet. His adaptive ear protectors dialed back the audio suppression and Onca heard footsteps crunching behind him.

In one movement, he rolled onto his good side and fired a burst into the man approaching. The attacker came on in a crouched trot, his finger on the trigger and long weapon held ready but not in the firing position, like the amateur he was. He wore bulky, old-fashioned body armor vest and a military-style helmet, though it had no visor and the idiot had painted it white with a terrorist symbol stenciled on the front.

It was a wild shot, weapon tracking and bucking while shooting from the hip and fired lying on his back. Still, the five-shot burst clattered in his hands and ripped the approaching man’s throat out. The dead terrorist dropped like water, his home-printed assault rifle bouncing once into the debris of the doorway.

Onca rolled over, got to one knee and threw himself over to the wall opposite the door to the stairwell. He winced and cried out as his back touched the wall. Still, he kept his weapon up and he sighted down the corridor at the blasted entrance to the meeting room.

His injury was bad. The worst he’d ever had and he knew it could prove fatal if he didn’t receive medical attention almost immediately. One or more of the huge AP rounds must have caught him after all. He’d thought he’d bumped into the door frame but it had been worse than that. The pain of it was still distant, suppressed by the adrenaline and terror and yet it came on over the next few seconds, more and more powerfully. He imagined the flesh of his back spread across the jagged ruin of his body armor, his blood gushing out freely.

So, he was dead, then. His men, too. Not just Alpha, likely the others. Perhaps the teams in the APC were alright.

He tried to raise them on the radio while he switched his magazine for a full one.

Static.

He tried Ops.

“Maria. Come in.”

Nothing but static. They were blocking his transmissions, flooding the electromagnetic spectrum with noise.

All that was left to him was to take as many of the terrorists with him as he could before he died.

They came at him from three sides at once. Even while it was happening he had time for a tiny thought that it was both unusual and impressive for a terrorist group to be so highly coordinated and aggressive in their maneuvering.

The first man was a CyBioCon member. His eyes were covered in heavy duty spectrum lenses and he was one of the types that had his cranium fused with molded alloy sheets. For some reason, they thought such nonsense would make them better fighters but they never seemed to teach themselves the basics or wear anti-ballistic masks. Onca shot him between the eyes in the instant he appeared.

But the other two…

One came from the corridor behind him, appearing around the corner and opening fire with an SMG.

The other burst from the stairwell doors and blasted Onca in the head from three meters away.

How had they ever gotten behind him? Surely, there had not been enough time for them to leave the meeting room by the other entrance and circle back? Certainly, not the one in the stairwell. In that case, they had been in the building, lying in wait. Or had approached after his team had passed. How had his sensors not picked them up?

The hostages were dead. All of them. They had been dead when his team found them but they had been showing on the AugHud as alive just seconds before. And the sensors had not detected the magnetic or electrical presence of the sentry drones.

The sensors were wrong. Something had gone very wrong.

When you are ambushed, the worst thing you can do is stay where you are. You pick a direction and punch your way through with extreme aggression.

The first one that Onca heard was the one coming from the corridor behind him so he spun about and advanced, firing as he went. The guy wore a tactical helmet and a heavy armored vest but no throat protection. The tac-armored fool began shooting and, as Onca’s rounds punched through his throat and neck, the man squeezed his trigger and his body went rigid.

It was just bad luck. When a man is hit in the T-zone, he usually goes limp all over. The problem with throat shots was the rounds just slipped right through without causing the kind of ballistic shock that will knock out a man’s nervous system.

His target’s arm and body went stiff and he fell back, twisting and unloaded a whole magazine in a wild arc.

A couple of the rounds pinged off Onca’s chest plates but he kept moving down the corridor, half leaning against the wall. Half a step after he passed the stairwell door, on the opposite side of the corridor, the final man burst through the doors and blasted the back of Onca’s head with a shotgun slug.

His helmet took the full force of the impact and the shock absorbers at his neck prevented whiplash trauma. Even so, it was like being kicked by a mule and he fell against the wall, snapping off a burst as he did so that ripped into the man with the shotgun.

Yet a stray round or piece of shattered masonry from the death-gripped SMG found its way into his body through the destroyed armor, smashed a rib. The round broke into pieces, sending shards of bone and shreds of metal into his body cavity.

He fell.

The last thing he was aware of as his world went dark was the sound of his men in all remaining squads being torn to pieces by automatic fire.

***

Even before he opened his eyes, he knew he had been out for just a few seconds. The stink of fresh blood and the tang of cordite filled his face.

And pain. His back screamed with pain.

Two men dragged him, face down, by the arms. His legs and feet snagged on the rubble and wood debris of the door they had breached. After a few more steps, he was dumped face down on the ground, his helmet banging into the floor. The visor was out of alignment, blocking his vision.

He could not think. All he knew was he had to get away. To fight.

It hurt to take a breath and he coughed out something wet and viscous.

“He’s awake,” someone shouted and they hit him again, in the head and back.

Two of them held him under the arms and dragged him to his knees. They held him there while he hung limp in their arms, relaxing his body as if he was unable to move. Which may, for all he knew, have been the case. But he would assume that his body would obey when he needed it to. He eyed them with peripheral vision. Both had a machete in the belts and sidearm at the hips. One had a Kalashnikov over his back on a strap.

They held him up so his knees barely touched the ground, their fingers digging into the Kevlar covering his armpits.

Someone lifted his head. Onca found himself staring into the augmented eyes of Axiom of Extensionality, the nom de guerre of a Columbian pro-human extremist born Louis Balbo.

“It is him,” Axiom said, his artificial corneas shining with augmented data. “I told you. I knew it and I was right and we have Major Onca himself.”

Axiom held Onca’s head at arm’s length and looked down with a grin on his face.

Onca was astonished to find the leader of Humanus Prosthesis actually on the ground, leading an operation. His shaved head glinted with the tech surgically implanted on his cranium and face. The Proths flaunted their augments. Fetishized them.

“Well, well,” another voice said. “If there was ever any doubt that we were expressing God’s will today, you may be free of those doubts now.”

Onca saw, through blurred vision, the speaker step forward.

Father Magnus. Born in North America as plain old Jimmy McGuire, he was ex-Catholic turned ascetic and proponent of the inherent divinity of true-born humanity and opposed the artificial human program around the world. He led the Sons of the Light, a group dedicated to wiping out all Artificial People, everywhere and arson was their favorite method for doing so. It was their vast incendiary explosive that caused the fire that burned down half of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2115.

“Bullshit,” Axiom said, sneering and still staring down at Onca. “We did this, you credulous old turd. We did.”

It made no sense for both leaders to be in the same room. They hated each other. Father Magnus believed in the purity of humanity. Whereas Axiom’s core tenet was that humanity had to embrace technology to become our true selves.

“He should be restrained,” Father Magnus said.

Axiom scoffed. “He is almost dead. His kidney is hanging out. Look at the blood.”

Magnus argued. “A soldier such as he-”

“Is no more than human,” Axiom said. “And he is almost dead. We must inflict humiliation before his body gives up.”

But then another stepped into view. Tall, severe lines on her long face and wearing urban pattern fatigues

“We don’t have much time before they send in the regular military.”

The speaker was a woman he recognized at once as Venus von Victory. No one knew V3’s real name but Onca knew what she believed in. The sanctity of Artificial Persons’ lives. The AP Liberation Front were Marxist-inspired AP Rights activists turned militant operatives and their MO was raiding labs to free the APs and smuggling them into normal society. They also enjoyed assassinating scientists and lab technicians.

“Calm down, V,” Axiom said. “They won’t know what hit them for hours. They’ll never believe it.”

Father Magnus edged closer. “Nevertheless, she is right to be concerned. Should they choose to act? They have a whole battalion out there. I would rather be gone.”

All three organizations had been effectively at war with each other for years. Where the APLF wanted to save APs, the Sons of Light were killing them. Them being together made no sense. None.

Was he dreaming?

“Alright,” Axiom said. “I am already recording with my inbuilt cameras, streaming to a secure server. You can do what you want to him and we will broadcast it later.”

Everything hurt. Breathing was difficult and any strength remaining in his limbs was swiftly leeching along with his blood.

V3 stepped closer.

“I always dreamed I’d have the Butcher of Belem in my grasp.” She lifted one knee high and kicked him in the visor.

Onca allowed the blow to fall and knew that it was time to act.

All counter-terrorism doctrine was clear. Once you found yourself in enemy hands, every minute, every second you are in custody your chances of escape diminish. Your captors increase their control of the situation and you lose the initiative until your chances of a successful outcome reduce to zero. Once they have you completely incapacitated they are able to do anything they want to you and you have no chance to resist their will. Once you lose the initiative, the best you can hope for is to be quickly executed, a bullet to the back of the head and that would be the end of you. Worse than that would be them using you to further their own agenda. Torturing you for information, forcing you to speak into camera for their propaganda films, attempting to ransom you, committing sexual violence, inflicting long-term pain to exact some kind of revenge for the slights you or your people committed on them and theirs. If you are a high-value captive, your chances of surviving a snatch and grab hostage rescue are very slim.

Every minute, every second, you lose the initiative.

They should have restrained him.

It would be the last mistake they would ever make.

Onca allowed the weak, womanish blow to knock him sideways into the man on his left. The man holding his right arm lost his grip and the one he fell against grabbed him with both hands to stop him falling down.

Summoning up the last reserves of strength, he threw off the guard’s grip and yanked the machete from his belt, heaved himself up onto his feet and dragged the machete up and up across the guy’s throat. Even though he wasn’t expecting it, he jerked back and the cut was too shallow to kill. Still, he went wheeling back, shouting in fear and pain.

An explosion of panic burst around him. Axiom reeled away from Onca’s wild machete backhand, shouting incoherent warnings.

The blade thumped into the top of V3’s skull, dropping her to her knees. Still moving as fast as he could, he tried to yank the machete from her head but it was stuck fast so all he did was drag her over, dead or dying. He lost his grip on his weapon.

But to stop moving or even slow down would be to die. So, he let it go and charged the other guard. The man was lost in indecision, trying to pull his most powerful weapon—his assault rifle—off his back instead of drawing his sidearm or even his machete. That indecision would mean his death. Still, the guard backed up, tangled in his rifle strap. He changed to grab his sidearm just as Onca reached him and bore him to the ground.

The man was one of Axiom’s followers, a Humanus Prosthesis adherent, with eyes shining with data streaming over them, his head covered in components that released nootropic drugs and provided targeted electrical brain stimulation that supposedly increased their combat efficiency.

Onca smashed his helmet into his face, took his pistol from him, pushed the weapon under his chin and blew the top of his head off. The bang was loud and it bucked in his hand. A heavy weapon.

Someone shot Onca in the head at the same time. A small caliber round so it pinged off rather than doing damage but Onca’s back was a mangled mess and another round into there would finish him immediately.

He leaped aside and instinctively turned toward the source of the shot and snapped off a series of his own, the pistol banging in his hand as the slugs hit their target.

Another of the terrorists fell, a man across the room. One of the Sons of Light in their ridiculous brown uniforms, his chest and throat blown out.

Onca kept moving, turning back to shoot at Axiom and Father Magnus.

Both men had fled for the safety of the transparent panic room. The big, old Father Magnus moved surprisingly quickly and Axiom moved like a ninja, flowing into the open-door section of the huge room before Onca could get a clean shot.

Father Magnus, however, took a glancing shot to the shoulder before the door swung closed and the final two rounds in the magazine smashed into the bulletproof glass and alloy frame.

Onca tossed his empty weapon and chased down the final man in the room who was attempting to flee. He threw him into the shredded door frame, smashed the man’s eyes with finger strikes then stamped on his neck, leaving him to suffocate.

He must have blacked out for half a second because he found himself on his knees, looking at the floor, his breath ragged and his chest tight. Onca’s armor was slick with fresh blood. Most of it his own.

Fight the exhaustion. Fight it. Fight.

It was the one thing he knew how to do. He would not go out on his knees.

Inside the panic room, Father Magnus held his wounded shoulder while Axiom typed into a screen on a trolley. Bundled cables snaked out of it and down into a meter-square hole cut into the floor inside the panic room.

That was how they would escape.

He could not allow that. Not after what they had done to his men and to the hostages and to countless others around the world. He tried to ignore the bodies of three of his team laying around the room and fought his way to the sentry drone closest to the panic room.

While Axiom tapped away and Magnus stood watching, Onca checked the ammunition feed on the drone, flicked the switch to manual control and pulled out both restrictor pins. He swung the gun around on its mount and aimed it at the glass wall of the panic room. It hummed with the flow of power from the huge batteries.

Magus nudged Axiom, who turned and sneered before turning back to his screen. Magnus looked in pain but not afraid.

They had to die.

He leaned his weight on the handles and pressed the thumb buttons. The drone barrels whirred into life and the rounds zipped out, smashing into the center of the largest side panel. He kept it focused on a single spot as the heavy slugs hammered into the glass. It swiftly chewed through layer after layer of the glass and polymer, sending shards spinning away in all directions.

Magnus looked nervous but Axiom turned a final time in triumph, grinning.

As the sentry gun fired, the building shook.

A deep rumbling, low and in his guts, that grew and built until the world shook. A feeling more than a noise. And a feeling that he recognized.

Demolition.

They were bringing the building itself down, somehow. He recalled the reports of drilling and the chemical sensors that had detected explosives in the terrorists’ equipment.

It was hard to see but both men climbed down inside the hole they cut into the floor inside. The rounds smashed through and ricocheted around, smashing the equipment into shards of plastic and dust.

The sentry drone ran out of ammo. The barrels span and smoked. He pulled the Kalashnikov off a terrorist, checked the magazine and, with a snatched-up machete, hacked into the remnants of the shredded polymer and forced his way inside the panic room, armor snagging. Every step he was weaker. Every moment might be his last. Outside, the ceiling crumbled and smacked into the top of the box.

Consciousness dangling by a thread, he swung himself down into the hole.

Axiom and Magnus had knocked down the ladder so he lowered himself down the bundled cables.

He slipped and fell onto his destroyed back.

The agony was overwhelming and his machete and rifle fell to either side.

Above him, the building fell, like God Almighty hath smote it from on high and it felt as though the world was ending.

Forcing air into his lungs, he rolled onto his feet and hurried after the smear of blood left on the wall. His prey may have split up, gone separate ways down the tunnel and it was possible the blood was a trick. But he had to go one way or the other.

After limping a dozen meters to the dogleg bend in the tunnel, he took the corner with his weapon up.

Axiom lay dead. Face down in the center of the tunnel, the top of his head blown off in a spray of filthy pink brains and bone shards mixed with strips of wiring, silicon, and alloy.

Magnus limped ahead about twenty meters away, his gun still in his hands.

Onca took careful aim and double-tapped two shots into the man’s lower back. The sound boomed but was lost in the rumbling that came from all around, his vision shaking.

He made it to where Magnus lay, rolled him over and sat down on his legs. The great leader was dead. Onca had wanted to question him but even if the terrorist had been alive, questioning him would be futile. Onca was not long for the world himself and the building was falling down on him. No one knew where he was and there was no hope of rescue before he died.

Still, he would not die on his knees.

Just for good measure he fired a final round into Father Magnus’ head and started walking.

Around him, the building roared and shook.

The roof fell.

***

For a while, all he knew was pain and light and confusion. People around him, caring for him, doing things to him.

It was incredible to him that he had lived. He knew after some time that he was in a medical center, though he could not speak or move and that they were making him better.

Days, perhaps weeks spent in drug-induced sleep with brief periods of semi-conscious confusion blended together until one day, the military came to see him.

He knew they would. Even though he had not yet recovered enough to have had a discussion with a doctor about his own injuries, he found himself sitting propped up in his bed. The sun streamed in through a closed window. An AP nurse withdrew a syringe from his arm and walked away, closing the door behind her without a word.

Leaving two Generals standing in his room. A young one at the foot of his bed and one by his side, older, grizzled and familiar.

“Colonel Alvarez,” Onca said, his voice little more than a croak.

The old man’s mouth tightened. “General Alvarez now, Major.” The General spoke softly, almost with warmth.

“Of course,” Onca said, annoyed at the medication making him so stupid. “Good to see you again, sir.”

Speaking started him coughing and the four-star General leaned down and held a straw to his lips so that Onca could take a sip of water and ease his throat.

“This is General Branca,” Alvarez said, introducing the officer at the foot of the bed.

He was as light-skinned as they came, though his hair was dark. His face was unlined and close shaved. A man who had spent his life indoors. He had only two stars on his shoulders where Alvarez had four.

“Sir,” Onca managed.

“Honored to meet you, Major,” General Branca said, his voice as smooth as oil. “Now I can tell my children I met Brazil’s greatest hero.”

“You’re Military Intelligence,” Onca said.

General Branca stiffened, a frown on his face. “You know me?”

“Never heard of you.”

Alvarez practically grinned at the exchange.

“I am the Brazilian military envoy to the United Nations Orb Project.”

Good for you. Onca almost said it but he held his tongue. The young General so clearly wanted Onca to ask what the United Nations Orb Project was that he almost felt sorry for him.

“The mission,” Onca asked General Alvarez at his side. “It has been weeks, yes?”

“Five weeks,” Alvarez said, frowning. “The medical personnel have kept you informed of your progress, have they not?”

Onca closed his eyes. “I remember people speaking to me, now and then. I don’t recall much more.”

“Well,” Alvarez said, relaxing and perching himself on the edge of Onca’s bed. Branca shifted on his feet as if he did not approve. “They grew you a new kidney and implanted it. They fixed your bones, sewed up your guts and stitched you back together. You will make a full recovery. Back to a hundred percent in no time at all, so they assure me.”

“My men,” Onca said. “The mission. What happened to my men?”

Both Generals looked uncomfortable but Alvarez did not flinch from maintaining eye contact.

“They are all dead. It looked for a while like some might pull through but they were injured very severely indeed.”

“The whole thing was a trap.”

“Indeed,” Alvarez said, sighing. “A well-planned, coordinated attack intended to wipe out Sabre Rubro. And in that, I am so sad to say, they largely succeeded. But you killed the leaders of three of the worst terrorists in the Americas. Worldwide, even. And you survived. You can rebuild.”

“General, this is nothing but failure. Complete and total failure. What about Matos? My Operations Controller, Matos Hernandez, he was at the airport with Maria my Intel Officer and their team?”

“This is where it gets difficult, Onca. I’m sorry but Matos was killed. Your Intel Officer, Maria, was a double agent.”

“A sleeper agent,” General Branca cut in.

Alvarez threw him a look that shut the man up.

“How?”

“Knife in Captain Hernandez’s back, straight into the heart. He didn’t suffer, for what it’s worth. Maria was discovered by one of your techs, who raised the alarm before she killed him. She herself was killed trying to escape. She fired on the regular Army guarding the airfield and they shot her in return. The guard she wounded was a better shot that she was. If only they had taken her alive.”

Branca spoke up. “She would have blown her brains out rather than give up—”

“General Branca,” Alvarez snapped. “Your input is not required.”

Branca pursed his lips, as though he was trying to hold in a smile.

“She was one of them?” Onca said, the additional failure hitting him harder even than any of the others. He pictured Matos Hernandez dying alone with a knife in his back, murdered by a woman that Onca had hired. “I checked her background. I checked it. More thoroughly than anyone. Every detail of her life. I even had every essay she wrote analyzed.” Onca shut his mouth, knowing a stream of pathetic excuses when he heard one.

General Branca cleared his throat. “With permission, General?”

Alvarez waved his assent.

“You could not have known,” Branca said. “I’ve never seen an agent in deeper cover. My Cyber Forensics Team called her a genius. We still don’t know which of the groups she was working for, there’s no record of her ever going near anyone who could be a terrorist. She was seen, by eye witnesses we have interviewed, arguing with and even fighting with terrorist sympathizers while she was at university. But then she was also infatuated with technology and perhaps she always harbored some kind of respect for the transhumanist element.”

“Axiom got to her,” Onca said, remembering the man’s brains splattered across the concrete access tunnel.

“We simply don’t know who or what got to her,” Branca said. “But none of this is why we’re here.”

Alvarez snapped another look over his shoulder at the two-star General standing at the foot of the bed. When it had been Colonel Alvarez commanding the Airborne Assault Battalion that then-Captain Onca had served in, that look had turned many a Lieutenant into a quivering mess. It had a diminished but similar effect on General Branca.

“So why are you here?” Onca asked the General. “Do you think I had something to do with it?”

“Good God, no,” Alvarez said. “Never. We know that, despite your past with the Army, you are a true son of Brazil. You would never betray your people. And, in a way, that is why we are here. It is because we need you.”

Onca chanced a look at General Branca, who returned his gaze without giving anything away.

“I’m not in the Army anymore, General,” Onca said. “Just a contractor. Or, I was. I don’t have a company anymore.”

“You know,” Alvarez said, after a pause. “You could go back to doing just that. I know you won’t feel like it now but when you get back to yourself, back to one hundred percent, then you could rebuild your company. Start a new cooperative. Your expertise will still be desperately needed, despite the hammer blow to the terrorists you gave them last month. I mean it, Onca. Everyone out there in Brazil is mourning Sabre Rubro but they rejoice that you live. They are crushed at your losses but they see it as a victory, of sorts and no one blames you. I promise you something else. You still have every special forces soldier in Brazil ready to join your team. You could go back and you would continue to keep your people safe from our enemies.”

Onca kept one eye on General Branca, who looked increasingly angry as Alvarez spoke.

“My men are dead,” Onca said. “I failed them. That’s it.”

He knew, with absolute certainty, that he should have died with them. A leader can lose men and a commander can be killed. But there is a good reason why it is a Captain’s duty to go down with his ship. To be alive when his men were dead was shameful beyond comprehension. And these Generals, these agents of the God damned Brazilian Army had denied him that.

“And you should have let me die,” Onca muttered.

Alvarez pursed his lips. “I understand. You feel deep fried. But I think I have something for you. A way for you to give even more to your people. To serve once again. More than you ever have before.”

He almost laughed, bitterness rising like a bad taste in his mouth. It was as though they had handed him his shame and then offered a way to take it away, like they were doing him a favor.

It felt like the old days, all over again.

“You want me to join a United Nations project.” Onca spoke to General Branca.

Alvarez smiled. “Even now, drugged to high heaven, he is quick. Didn’t I tell you he would catch on quick?”

Branca sighed and did everything but literally roll his eyes.

“What is it?” Onca said.

“A very special assignment. You would join the military again, and simply sign a few watertight legal agreements. You would be representing your country. You see, the United Nations is putting together a special task force. Each nation on Earth gets to send someone to represent their country. Well, most of the significant nations, at least. We have to send the very best soldier or fighter that we have in the entire country. The best man we have, officer, NCO or enlisted.”

“How do you define the best soldier?” Onca asked, amused.

“In this case, we need a man who is good on his feet, fighting alone. Hand to hand, close quarters, firearms. An old-fashioned soldier, in many ways but he has to be smart, creative and driven. Committed. And he has to be physically elite, in terms of strength, stamina and agility. A world class specimen.”

Onca stared at the man. “And you want me to represent Brazil? I am honored you chose me but I am hospitalized, General. Look at me. I cannot fight.”

“You will make a full recovery in time to join the project. Listen, if you choose to accept, we will do more than ensure your recovery. If you accept, then Brazil will divert enormous financial resources into making you into even more than you were.”

“Sorry, General. I won’t have any of that augmented shit in me. Never.”

“I understand, I feel exactly the same way myself. No, this is just biological enhancements. Extra strength in your bones, stronger muscles that are more efficient, that kind of thing. You would have faster reaction times, be able to carry more and run for longer. A dream come true for any right-thinking man. I know that my old body would welcome feeling young again. And there’s no risk, none at all, we will have the best surgeons in Brazil working on you.”

“Only if I agree,” Onca said. “What is the mission?”

“We can’t tell you that,” Branca said, as if he’d been just waiting for a chance to say it. “Until you sign up.”

Alvarez chuckled. “I’m afraid it’s true.”

“Can you tell me where I would be going, at least?”

“No,” Branca said.

“The United States,” General Alvarez said. “At least initially. After that, well. I will tell you after you sign.”

“I can’t be the first person you came to with this?” Onca said, feeling wary. “I’m the best soldier in Brazil? I’m too old. I’m already slower than I was.”

“You’re, what, thirty-two? Hardly time yet to hang up your boots. You’ll be better than ever, far better. Here, read this agreement then sign at the bottom. Then I can tell you.”

He unfolded a screen and handed it over. Onca scrolled through dire warnings, page after page of threats. It said nothing other than his freedom and even his life would be outside of his own hands after he signed.

“How is this any different to the military?” he asked them.

“Exactly,” General Alvarez said. “You’ve done this before. Simply do so once more.”

Onca took a deep breath, felt his head spinning. He had no one. All his friends had been in Sabre Rubro. There was never any family to miss. No woman who would miss anything of him except his wallet.

There was Lena, of course. And he would have to organize things with Camilla, now that Matos was gone. Camilla would get Matos’ life insurance payments and Onca would continue to provide for the girl. All he needed to do was set the finances up in a such a way that they would never need fear being poor.

“You would have to pay me well,” Onca said.

General Branca frowned but Alvarez grinned. “We would, far in excess of a Major’s salary. The project is swimming with funding, isn’t it, Branca.”

“It would be something that we could negotiate,” General Branca said.

Alvarez’s face clouded with contempt. “You speak as if it is your money, you damned tight ass. Major, we would pay you more than a General earns.”

Branca muttered something under his breath.

“I appreciate the offer but it is hard to agree to something without knowing what it will mean.”

“I’ll tell you this,” Alvarez said. “You’ll be going into a selection process. An international team will be selected to go away for a long time. You’ll be giving up the rest of your life, probably, to this mission. But only if you are selected. If you’re the best in the world, you’ll do some of the most amazing things any man has ever done.”

“You should go to see Enzo Martins,” Onca said. “He’s still in the service.”

Alvarez nodded. “He’s good. He’s good. A good man, good blood. Truth is, Onca, we did go to him. First of all, we found this young guy called Henry Sousa, doubt you know him. He came up real fast soon after you left and his scores were through the roof. Physically, he could have been breaking world records in the decathlon or almost any sport he wanted. Smart kid, too.”

“Too smart to say yes?” Onca said.

“He agreed before I could finish speaking and I told him less than I’ve told you. Poor kid. Died in his second week up in the USA. Training accident. Got himself diced to pieces. We begged for a second shot so we went to see Captain Sousa. They loved him up there. You know what he’s like, consummate professional, fun to be around. He just wasn’t up to the required physical standard.”

“Henry wasn’t up to the standard?” Onca said. “Bullshit.”

“You have to understand what we’re talking about. What we’re offering here. This UN project is looking for the best men in the world. In the whole world, Onca. Now, Brazil is not going to have a dog in this fight, not anymore.” Alvarez leaned in. “Unless we send you.”

“Me?” Onca said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Look, you’re famous. You were famous before the live stream of your dawn raid on Abora Biopharma before the buildings collapsed so dramatically, and now?” He shrugged. “They will only give us this last chance if you are involved.”

“Look, I appreciate you coming to see me, General. It must be something important. But I’m just not interested in serving my country again.”

“You don’t get it, Major,” General Branca said, his voice growing louder. “You don’t understand what’s going on here. You see, you never made it out of that building alive.”

“Branca,” Alvarez said in warning.

“What’s he talking about?” Onca asked him.

General Branca’s face shone with triumph. “It’s true. Tell him, General. You never made it out. You died, Onca. You were dragged out of the rubble, dead as a dry fish. You are legally dead. Do you understand? You were given a burial just as your men were. We brought you back for this.”

“Brought me back? Are you joking? I’m alive. Clearly, I was never dead. Perhaps I will sue the military for this deceit—” Onca broke off. His mind was working so slowly. “You are threatening to kill me if I do not comply, is that it?”

“No,” Alvarez said. “But your wounds were more severe than any but the most expensive surgical and medical techniques could deal with. Even you, a national hero, would not have received such treatment had it not been for our intervention.”

“I didn’t ask for special treatment. I don’t intend to be held to something I never agreed to. Are you suggesting that I now owe the military my life?”

“You owe it to your country,” General Branca said. “As a Brazilian.”

Is that what I am?

Onca stared at the Military Intelligence General at the foot of his bed. “I owe it, really?” Onca said. “I haven’t given enough already, is that what you’re saying?”

“You’re damned right I am,” Branca said. “If you don’t do this then you are betraying your country. Betraying your people. This is your chance for undoing some of this horrific failure you have committed. You’ve fucked up so badly that Abora Biopharma has threatened to relocate to Mexico. Billions, probably trillions of dollars might be lost. If you don’t do this then Brazil will not have any place at the table, we’ll be relegated to—”

“Branca!” General Alvarez barked the name, stood and stalked to the end of the bed. He paused and lowered his voice, speaking with extreme control. “Why don’t you wait outside?”

General Branca stood up straight, puffed his narrow chest out. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, General Alvarez. I am a General, too, and it is my responsibility to see that no disclosure is made to the—”

“You are a General by courtesy only,” Alvarez said, still speaking softly but with enough menace to cut the other man off. “And I said get out of here before I roll you into a ball and kick you through the window.”

Branca’s mouth twisted to one side and his face twitched as if he was thinking through his chances of resisting the will of the Special Forces legend that was General Alvarez.

The junior General stomped away, throwing open and shutting the door behind him so hard that the window glass rattled.

Alvarez turned, apologetically, back to Onca and returned to his side.

Onca watched him, trying to work out if the whole scene had been planned and acted out on his behalf.

“Military Intelligence,” Alvarez said, shaking his head as if he was disappointed they existed. “Listen, I’m going to tell you the truth, alright, son?”

That would be a first.

“Alright, sir.”

“This project might have the title of a UN mission but it is so much more than that. It began as civilian-led, and to be honest, it still is but the world’s military services have been much more involved in the past few years. It is not possible to overstate the importance of this mission, of this project. You want to be part of this, Onca. I swear to you that you will not regret it. We will make you better than you ever have been. Imagine that. And then you will get the chance to test yourself against the best in the world. And that’s before the mission even begins. You were made for this.”

“And if I don’t sign up?”

Alvarez looked to the heavens. “If General Branca were in here, he would continue to threaten you. He would say that you owe your life to the Army. I know, I know. They already threw you out. Nevertheless, it is true. They brought you back to life here. Now, personally, I would like nothing more than to shake you by the hand, thank you for your service and send you on your way. But these Orb Project people? The normal rules do not apply to them. These people, they would likely leave you in the state that they found you in. Legally speaking? It would not be murder. As far as the world knows, you are already dead. I can imagine how easily the devious, evil little sons of bitches would do it, too. Can’t you? You might imagine one of the military hospital APs here being sent an authorized treatment plan and it includes an injection with an inhuman volume of morphine or something else deadly. And the AP nurses here, you’ve seen them, all they can do is follow orders, blindly doing their duty without a thought in their idiot heads. They’d stroll in here, shoot it up into your drip here and that would be it. No more Major Onca. A real death, this time. A permanent death. And no one even has to feel like a murderer. You have to give it to these people, my friend, they are truly devious. Devious, indeed. As for me, of course, I would hate for anything like that to happen to you but who am I compared to our government? I cannot fight them. And neither can you. Here, my dear friend, do your duty. Help Brazil, one last time.”

Do your duty or we will kill you. Same old army.

Onca sighed, drugged, exhausted but conscious enough to know when he was in a corner. He pressed his thumb to the screen and it beeped, glowed green.

Alvarez beamed. “You are a true hero, son.”

Go fuck yourself, you slimy piece of shit.

“Alright, General. You got your way. You and your lapdog out there. Now, tell me about my mission.”

“I’m afraid I still can’t tell you what the mission is until you are selected. And this is something that you must achieve. You must.”

Onca snorted. “What do you mean, I must be selected? Another threat?”

Alvarez stood, shedding the last of his false joviality. “Plenty of time for us to get into that. Let’s just say for now that it would be in your best interest to be selected. And in the best interests of your loved ones.”

Onca stiffened. My loved ones? He had no loved ones. There was only one person that Alvarez might be referring to but no one knew about Lena. Or his brief relationship with her mother. Or did they?

Forcing himself to remain calm, Onca nodded, as if making a commitment to the General. “Can’t tell me anything at all? Not even where this operation is going to be?”

“I can tell you that you that it is somewhere very far away. And somewhere very dangerous.”

“Europe?”

General Alvarez had a strange, distant look in his heavily lined eyes.

“It’s space, Major. When you are selected for the final mission, you will be sent into deep space. Long distance. Long duration. And you might never make it back to Earth.”

PART 2 – ONCA’S RISE

The military base was out in the desert in the southwestern part of the United States of America, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. They flew him in on a cargo flight along with a bunch of support personnel and massive crates of equipment and supplies. He had changed planes twice already before boarding the massive cargo plane and along the way he had been shunted from place to place as if he were no more important than any other piece of cargo. There was no escort and no conversation possible in the hold where he lay on a taut cargo net, supported by a web of bungee cord, and got as much sleep as he could. The noise was so all-encompassing that it enveloped you in a cloud of vibration and became almost pleasant, if you allowed it to be.

He felt like a young recruit again, heading into the unknown. Heading from being a medium sized killer-fish in the little pond of the short-lived slums outside Sao Paulo into the huge world of the Brazilian Army. Again, and again joining the Air Mobile, the Special Forces Brigade. But by that point, he was already making a name for himself.

Already, even before he landed at the base in the desert, he was getting the distinct impression that he would not be much of anything in the United States. The American crew and personnel ignored him.

When the rear ramp lowered, he was hit with a blast of air so hot and dry it was like opening the door to an oven, his eyes overwhelmed by the sudden flood of white phosphorus-bright sunlight.

Onca grabbed his gear and followed the American down into the tarmac and took a look around, blinking away the glare.

The airstrip was wide and bustling with cargo planes, transport helicopters, air defense drones and the crew servicing them. Dominating everything was the sky. So vast and blue and bright that it hurt to look at it and the sun seared his skin. He tasted dust and hot oil. The men unloading the cargo shouted friendly abuse at each other as they worked, seemingly something common to the profession the world over.

One of the cars weaving about through the streams of personnel pulled to a stop in front of him, cutting him off.

“You Rafael Santos?” the driver called out, grinning. He was a sergeant but young, his dark face shining in the dusty heat. “I’m Samuels, jump in, sir.”

They raced off toward the base, motor whirring as Sergeant Samuels put his foot down and careened between people and vehicles with the suicidal abandon of every young soldier in control of a jeep.

“So, you’re the new Brazilian, sir?” Samuels shouted.

“I guess I am.”

“Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, sir. It’s just no other country’s been able to send replacements out here. How come Brazil is so special anyway? Sir.”

Onca chose to ignore the question. He didn’t know the answer anyway.

“Where we going, Sergeant?”

“Uh, taking you to the General, sir. She probably wants to give you the tour herself.”

“The General is a woman?” Onca asked. Typical UN, Onca thought.

“Sure as shit she is,” Samuels said. “Uh, sir. She’s General Richter.”

“Okay, got it.”

“You don’t know her, sir?” Samuels asked, glancing at Onca. “It’s just you don’t seem impressed.”

“Never heard of her,” Onca said. “But I have served under and alongside female officers. It’s fine, Samuels. I know they can make effective administrators.

The sergeant laughed, shaking his head. “I’d like to see you say that to her face, sir.”

“What’s the setup here? Where do I bunk, where’s the mess? Actually…” Onca looked around. “Where even am I?”

“Huh? This is Patton. The George S. Patton Training Center, so it says on the signs and the maps. But don’t be fooled. Training center, it ain’t. That’s just to make it sound uninteresting and stop anyone taking too close a look. What we really have here, sir, is a military base bigger than beta-class cities, hosting an infantry battalion and an aviation wing with that gigantic airfield. There’s also a logistics group and an engineering support battalion and plenty of other units spread out all over. And all of it just to hide the fact that UNOP is here in force, with the selection program.” Samuels laughed and shook his head.

“You do not mean they established a base here just to camouflage the UNOP program?” Onca said.

“I know, crazy, right? Especially as this is western Nevada. I mean it’s pretty much Army, Navy or Air Force from state border to state border anyway, so who would notice another bunch of lunatics playing in the sand?”

Onca took in the lines of fences and patrol towers in the distance, in all directions. “These regular forces are not just providing intelligence cover. They are defending the perimeter.”

“Sure, that too, I guess. We have to be ready to repel any attack. Lot of crazy terrorists out there, sir.”

“What do you know about the UNOP program? This selection process. Who are the others who came before me, what are they doing?”

The man shuffled in his seat. “Not sure if I’m supposed to really talk about that, sir.”

“Did anyone order you not to talk to me?” Onca glared at the young Sergeant, who glanced over and grinned.

“Right, well, everyone has been here since January so you got four or five months to catch up on. Tell you the truth, I’m surprised they let you in, sir. Not sure what you’re supposed to do if you missed months of tests and everything.”

“What tests have I missed?”

Aides to the Generals Branca and Alvarez had briefed him on what to expect before they had packed him off. Onca had gotten the distinct impression that they were either hiding things from him or they were hiding how ignorant Brazil was about UNOP’s inner workings.

“I just mean the physical tests and the proficiencies tests and that kind of thing, you know.”

“I do not know, Sergeant.”

“Right. Sure. The tests are like endurance races of ultramarathon distances and they do sprints. Reaction time tests. Then there’s shooting range tests with every weapon you can think of. Hand to hand combat. Plus, tactical tests, timed runs in the Killing House. There’s written tests, too. VR stuff. They get tested in the midday sun, inside the deep freezer rooms, they do a lot of this with and without all kinds of combat gear, plus space suits. They test everything, sir. Trying to find the best of the best of the best. The best cubed, you know what I mean?”

At a right angled, blind corner, the jeep almost plowed through a group of US Army soldiers undergoing physical training in formation. The driver yanked the wheel so drastically that the jeep cornered on two wheels. Onca grabbed the roll bar handle over his head and slammed a hand on his bag to stop it falling out. Samuels span the wheel back and the jeep bounced down on all four wheels again, swerving away from a decorative stone wall around an administration building off the side of the road.

Onca glanced over at his driver. “Are you qualified to operate this vehicle, Sergeant?”

“I work for the General, sir. Sometimes my duties require me to drive. Most of the time, I work in the HQ.”

“Are we in a particular hurry?”

“Sorry, sir, I just don’t get out much. Here we are. Follow me, please, sir. Let me take your bag, sir.”

The HQ was a huge building, all concrete and industrial steel but dressed up with squared off, sparsely-planted flower beds. An ostentatious statement in the middle of a desert, for all their scrawniness.

Onca only had to wait a half hour before he was shown into the General’s office, which in senior officer terms is practically being rushed straight inside. The General sat behind her desk, an aide at her shoulder holding out a screen for her signature. Onca stood at ease in the center of the room and waited.

“Major Santos,” the General said. “I’m dreadfully glad that you are able to join us. However, you must understand that you are exceedingly late to the party.”

“Yes, General. But I am here now.”

“Your file is most impressive. And I have heard of you, of course. Most importantly for us, your preliminary test scores and your biotech enhancements would seem to qualify you for our selection program. Assuming they are accurate.”

He allowed the final insult to the integrity of the Brazilian authorities, did not rise to the bait. He had far less faith in their honesty than anyone could.

“Yes, General.”

“You have a steep mountain to climb and I’m not sure there is enough time for you to reach the summit. But I can assure you I will give you every opportunity to do so. Now, I’m sure after your travels you will wish to rest today so Captain Williams will show you to your quarters. Tomorrow you can begin the program. Welcome to Patton. And welcome to UNOP.”

She picked up her screen and the aide, Williams, stepped up. A typical rear echelon type, with obsequiousness written all over his pasty face.

“This way, Major,” Captain Williams said. “If you please.”

“Actually, General,” Onca said. She looked up, surprised. “I have been resting for so many hours that I lost count somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. I would prefer to get started right away.”

She raised an eyebrow, her mouth twitched at the corner. Then she nodded once at her aide Captain Williams and picked up her screen again.

“The teams are at the rifle range, sir,” the aide said. “Please, follow me.”

Onca fought down the urge to salute the General before he left. Either there was no saluting at the base or they just weren’t saluting him. Either way, he decided, he would not be the only chump throwing one-way salutes.

Another jeep ride. He jumped in the front passenger seat again, beside the waiting Sergeant Samuels. This appeared to irritate Captain Williams, who climbed into the rear and snapped instructions at the driver.

The rifle range was four kilometers away on the far side of the base, opposite the airfield. Even with the Sergeant’s suicidal driving technique, it took a long time to get there, weaving through the wide streets of the base, past parade grounds and barracks blocks and training grounds.

“Looks like a real base,” Onca said to the Sergeant next to him.

“It is real,” Williams shouted from the back seat. The Sergeant kept his mouth shut. “It’s home to the Eleventh Rapid Response Force, US Army.”

“But Sergeant Samuels was just telling me how this is all fake,” Onca said. “Just to distract from the UNOP activity.”

The Sergeant’s face was expressionless.

“Not at all,” Captain Williams said from the back. “It’s a working base. The conventional forces do provide physical security for the Project and also help to keep prying minds from enquiring about all the activity going on here. The media and the locals don’t have any reason to be more curious about this base than anyone would be about any other.”

“Locals?” Onca asked over his shoulder. He could not imagine anyone choosing to live in a desert.

“Well,” Captain Williams chuckled. “There’s a town about two hundred kilometers due west of here but all that’s there is a couple of bars and a whorehouse for the mining community.”

“Sounds like my kind of place.”

Williams laughed in a high-pitched snort, his nerves showing.

“So, the Eleventh RRB provide security,” Onca said. “Do you get terrorist attacks here?”

“No more than any other military base. We get the usual bomb drones flying in from time to time but the AA net picks them off far over the horizon. We’ve not seen any other forms of attack, thank goodness. But then, they must know they’d never breach our perimeter.”

“You’d be surprised what a terrorist will do even if he knows it’s a lost cause.”

“Of course, this is your area of expertise, is it not?”

You’re god damned right it is.

Onca nodded. “Spent most of my career in counter-terrorism.”

“It’s in your file.” Williams edged forward. “In the Brazilian Army and then you set up a cooperative with many former comrades. How did that happen?”

“The Army and I had a minor disagreement,” Onca said.

“Oh,” Williams sounded embarrassed. “Well, you will enjoy speaking to Hiroko Takamura, she was a counter-terrorist operative for the Japanese Defense Force. And Pia Norris ran a private military outfit, too, now I think about it.”

Onca turned slowly in his seat. “Two of your potential operatives here are women?”

William’s looked blankly back. “Er,” he sputtered. “Women, yes. Of course. In fact, there are nine women still in the running, out of thirty. Why would there not be?”

Onca sighed and turned back. If they were letting women get this far in the selection process, then Onca knew he had been lied to about the stringency of the tests. No matter how much you wanted it to be the case, the elite cubed could never include women. They were just too small, too weak and too slow. Some of them were good shots but they generally lacked the aggressiveness and decisiveness of men.

He also knew then that his chances of being the best of everyone had improved quite considerably.

But he said none of that to Captain Williams, who spluttered his outrage at the mere expression of surprise that women be involved. That was Americans for you.

The sounds of the rifles cracked in the desert air long before the jeep crested the last rise and pulled to a stop.

Around fifty people arrayed along the firing line, which was exceptionally long indeed. The targets beyond stretched far into the swirling, miraged air down range and they resounded with the impacts of the rounds fired by the soldiers nearer to him. The men and women stood or lay prone or in various stances and positions, shooting everything from pistols to machine guns. Tables groaning with the weight of weapons lay in a shaded area to one side, covered with awnings to protect the metal from getting too hot to touch with bare hands. Instructors or advisers spoke to some of the shooters while others recorded, tapping away on screens or filming and recording narration. Above, a swarm of drones buzzed. At the periphery, far from the action but poised and ready for action, were six mobile AA units, their barrels and rocket pods pointed up and out, ready to intercept missiles or bomb drones.

Captain Williams leaned in and shouted in his ear. “Come on. I will introduce you. To the Colonel.”

They crunched over to the shaded area toward a man who sat hunched in a plastic lawn chair with a big black sheet over his head fluttering like parachute fabric. On the way over, Onca took care to note which of the thirty shooters reacted to his appearance. Some of them turned and stared openly and those he marked as the ones who would come for him first. They were, generally, the biggest and strongest, physically and had the highest levels of testosterone. It would be their nature to attempt to assert their dominance over a new male entering the group.

“Colonel Boone,” Captain Williams announced. “I have Major Santos, up from Brazil, finally.”

The figure pulled his blanket, revealing that the Colonel was a hulking great muscle man. Under the blanket, he had a screen with a 3D display, which was washed out and practically invisible in the desert sun. He had the kind of dense, taught flesh that came after decades of juicing and heavy lifting. The military-style buzz cut suggested he felt ready to bang on a helmet and march off to war at a moment’s notice. His skin was deeply tanned and his face lined from all the sun and wind and life he had experienced.

“Major,” the Colonel said, his voice as tough and sand-blasted as the rest of him. “Or should that be former-Major?”

“I usually go by Onca, Colonel.”

“Alright,” the grizzled giant said, slouching back in his plastic chair. “You know, it’s a funny thing. I heard you were dead, Onca. Heard they dropped a building on your head.”

Onca shrugged. “I’ve survived worse.”

Colonel Boone grunted a couple of times, which Onca presumed was meant to be a laugh. “You’ve done some great things and no doubt you would have done some great things here. Unfortunately, you’re late. I don’t know how you will get up to speed quickly enough to avoid the cut. We have a bar here, Onca.” The Colonel held out one massive forearm, covered in a riverine landscape of bulging veins, over his lap and parallel to the ground. He slowly lifted his arm upward. “Every day, we move this bar up. This bar represents the minimum standards every individual here must meet in order to avoid being cut. It is this bar which motivates the people to achieve truly superhuman standards in shooting, stamina, strength and combat ability, measured by tactical awareness, battlescape management, CBQ and hand-to-hand combat both armed and unarmed, with a variety of weapons, tactics, and operational outcomes.”

“No problem.”

“I don’t think you understand, Onca. You won’t have time to reach the standard set by the previous weeks and months of training here. I’m afraid that this is going to be a short trip for you. I hope that you enjoyed your time in the United States.”

Back when Onca had applied for the Special Forces Brigade, during the selection process the officers in charge had attempted to demotivate the applicants, repeatedly questioning your commitment and your ability. I’m sorry, son, they would say. I’m sorry but you’re just not what we’re looking for. You don’t have what it takes. Why not quit now? You’re embarrassing yourself, you would make it easier on everyone if you bailed now.

“What do I need to achieve, Colonel?” Onca asked. “In order to stay until the end of the day.”

The big man paused, his parachute-blanket half over his head. “I’m sure you’re confident of success. That’s because you don’t understand what you’re up against. These aren’t ordinary soldiers we have here.”

“I’m not ordinary either.”

“I’ve seen your file, I know what upgrades they’ve given you. I bet you feel like you could hurdle the moon but, compared to what we have here, your toughened bones and high-efficiency muscles ain’t going to mean dick.”

“I wasn’t talking about my upgrades.”

The Colonel grunted. “Everyone thinks they’re special shit. You know we had close to two hundred heroes at the start of this process and every one of them was the best in the world. Thirty left, the best of the best.”

Onca turned and surveyed the row of people firing downrange.

“Who’s the best shot?”

Colonel Boone glanced at his aides and at Captain Williams.

“Who’s bottom of the pile today?”

“Char Debusey, right now, sir,” of the aides said, reading off a screen.

“Out-shoot that woman,” Boone said, “and maybe you can stay another day.”

Before the Colonel buried his head under the blanket again, Onca was sure he saw a small grin on the man’s big, grizzled face.

When Onca strutted over to the weapons tables on the way to the shooting line, the looks from the others became increasingly overt. It was clear than many of them had augmentation biotech implanted into their flesh. Three of them wore bulky, power-assisted armor.

“Welcome to the program, sir,” the quartermaster behind the table said. He was stripped to the waist but had the bearing of a senior NCO. “Can I interest you in a weapon today?”

“What do I have to use?” Onca asked Captain Williams. “To beat this person called Char Debusey.”

Williams pursed his pink mouth and peered down the line, lowering his shades and squinting. “She’s using the M-32 battle rifle.”

“That’s this one, right?”

The quartermaster kept a perfect NCO blank expression. “No, sir. That’s the M-42. This is the 32.”

“I’m sure you don’t need to use exactly the same weapon that she is using,” Williams said. “What is your preferred loadout?”

“For a battle rifle? Most of my career I used the IMBAL AD-9. Which you won’t have. But I have trained with many weapons. I will use the M-32.”

The quartermaster grinned, presumably believing that he was seeing an arrogant man who was about to be embarrassed. But Onca knew weapons. He had trained extensively with the M-42 and used an M-32 when choosing gear for Sabre Rubro. Some soldiers become extremely attached to particular weapons and speak evangelically about this or that manufacturer or specific variant. It made a certain amount of sense. It takes time to become completely used to a weapon’s idiosyncrasies. Balance, optimum rate of fire, the location of every button and mechanism, the most comfortable stance. And although no one weapon could excel at everything, some weapons were objectively better than others. Yet, once you got to the upper echelons of small arms manufacturers, almost every product they offered was simply an accurate and reliable tool for putting high-velocity rounds into a target.

“Thirty-two rounds in the magazines?” Onca asked. “Safety here, firing mode, magazine release here? And it pushes the first round into the chamber automatically, right?”

“Right on all counts, sir.”

He took the M-32 to the firing position they directed him to and lay down to zero the telescopic sight. On the rocky desert floor, they had bolted alloy grills along the long row at the head of the firing range, elevating them a few centimeters above the hot sand blowing just underneath. Atop the grills were plates, two meters’ square or so, each with a huge white number. Onca lay down on the number forty-two, amazed that it was cool to the touch. He had seen plenty of non-conducting alloys before. He even owned guns made from them. But there must have been tons of the stuff at the firing range, costing who knew how many millions of dollars. In Brazil, they would have just thrown a blanket down on the ground. Typical Americans.

Around him, many of his new comrades eyed him with open curiosity. He ignored them, for now. He needed to focus completely on the task at hand and would leave the others for later. Captain Williams ducked down beside him and held out a small case with a pair of ear protectors inside. Onca nodded his thanks as he pushed them in.

The telescopic sight was medium strength with a wide-angle lens, ideal for medium range and multiple targets. He lined up on the hundred-meter target and fired. It was only a few centimeters out, high and to the left so he needed no more than five shots to be sure he had the sight zeroed for that range. He did the same at two hundred and three hundred meters until he was getting such a tight grouping that the holes in his target tore a gaping, ragged hole in the center.

“I’m ready for the test,” Onca called to Captain Williams, who was standing a few paces behind him.

Williams approached as Onca stood and reloaded. “Nice shooting. They’ve programmed a standard sequence. You’ll fire standing, in a static position. You’ll have targets pop up along this corridor from twenty meters to four hundred meters. Targets will be fully extended from point-five up to three seconds. There will be between sixty and eighty targets. One round for each is a score and the closer to the center of the target, the higher the score. Questions?”

Onca shook his head, tucked two additional magazines in his belt, planted his feet and pulled the rifle into his shoulder. If the targets would come as close as twenty meters, he would have to go in and out of the telescopic sight.

“Ready?” Williams asked.

The other shooters slowed or stopped. He felt the eyes of dozens turn toward him.

Block them out. Only you exist. Only you and your target.

“Yes.”

A tone sounded from underneath him and the first target popped up from out of the ground, white on the desert red rock and sand beneath and behind.

The biological improvements they had made to his body were always there, always working. The doctors called them passive enhancements because they did not require activation but there was nothing passive about what they did to him. He felt clearer of mind, stronger of limb, and full of energy from the moment he woke until he lay down at night. There had been little enough time for practice with his new and improved biological systems but every run and workout had been electrifying, every combat training session a revelation.

He put a round in the center and snapped the rifle to the next target, popping up at eighty meters, and squeezed the firing button. Center. His improved eyes tracked to the next target, one hundred and fifty meters. His improved nervous system pulled his aim over and his muscles held him precisely on target as his reticule met the spot he wanted to hit.

Time after time, he reacted, locked on, fired and tracked to the next. All other senses—the muffled crack of the weapon banging in his hands with each shot, the cases flying away in his peripheral vision, the feel of men gathering to the sides and behind—were distant, secondary to his primary focus. His world narrowed to tracking, moving, firing, tracking.

As the thirty-second round left the barrel, Onca ejected the magazine, tracked to the next target, pulled the next from his belt and slid it home, repositioned slightly and fired the shot into the center.

The targets sped up during the next phase of the test, appearing in rapid succession. He went through the mag in no time at all, then reloaded, expecting the next phase to be tougher still.

He was right. Two targets began appearing at once, then three at the same time, often one at close range and the other at the farthest distance. Each would be up for a different amount of time, so the order of shooting was important yet the timings appeared to be random. Usual practice was to take out the nearest targets first as they were, generally, the most dangerous so Onca stuck with that consistently. Sometimes it was the wrong choice and making all of his shots was difficult but sometimes you have to choose a strategy and see it through.

After the third mag change, he tracked back and forth until the sound chimed beneath him. He was hot. Incredibly hot, with sweat running down him all over. Sensations of the world came flooding back in. The blue-white glare of the sky, the oven-heat of the air and desert rock underneath him.

He made his weapon safe and turned to check his score with Williams.

The whole firing line was silent, turned to face him. His new colleagues had stopped their own tests, their own practice, to watch him. The new guy.

Behind, Colonel Boone stood, legs planted in gritty sand, huge arms crossed over his chest. His aides fluttered around him.

“How did I do?” Onca shouted to the Colonel, walking toward him.

The huge officer flicked his eyes to Williams.

Out of the corner of his eye, Onca saw Captain Williams nod once.

“Welcome to UNOP, Major Santos,” Colonel Boone said, then looked at the Captain again. “Take him to Disclosure.”

***

Inside the briefing room, Onca took a seat while Williams closed the blinds and lowered the lights.

“You know that UNOP stands for United Nations Orb Project,” Williams said as he took a seat opposite Onca at the boardroom-style table. “And you know that this mission will involve a journey in space. But I wonder if your government has told you exactly what the mission entails? And why we need a soldier such as yourself to be part of it.”

Onca shrugged. “I assume it relates to the Mars colonies. Or perhaps some other base further away. So many people are going up every month, now. I am willing to bet that there is a risk of splinter groups forming, perhaps terrorist activity following our colonists.”

Williams shook his head. “There is no terrorist activity in space. We vet everyone extremely thoroughly.”

So did I. There is no way to be sure about anyone other than yourself.

“What is the mission, then?”

Williams typed on the surface of the table and a screen glowed into life on the wall beyond the head of the table.

It showed a silvered disk on a black background. No, the disk was more like a chrome ball, shining in the darkness.

“This is the Orb.” Williams spoke softly. With reverence, perhaps. “This object is four kilometers in diameter.”

“Who built this?” Onca asked.

“We don’t know.”

Onca looked at him. “The Chinese?”

Williams let out a tiny laugh. “It appeared in our solar system decades ago.”

“No,” Onca said. “No, no. The Ascension Leak videos? They’re not real? I don’t believe you.”

Williams nodded. “It is true. The footage from the Ascension was captured over forty years ago, during the first manned mission to the Orb. Of course, none of the Artificial Persons companies wanted it to get out and most governments supported them. Everyone had a stake in the truth not coming out that the ship’s Artificial Persons had woken into some sort of self-awareness.”

There was not much in the world that reached Onca on an emotional level but he felt like he had been kicked in the guts. He found his head in his hands.

“You mean that APs truly are capable of consciousness?” All the terrorist groups he had been fighting for years believed in the veracity of the Ascension Leaks. Onca could not believe that he had been wrong all this time.

“The APs nowadays have been thoroughly revised since then. They’ve been continuously iterated and optimized for decades. No, the early years in the AP industry was barely regulated but now it’s all been sorted out. We even employ them in the Project. Anyway, nothing excuses the way those terrorists behave. Kill the lot of them, that’s what I say. You and your men are bloody heroes, no doubt about that. So, you have seen the Ascension Leak videos?”

Onca rubbed his face. “Enough of them to convince me they were fakes. You’re saying it’s all true? A mission to visit aliens?”

“Clearly, the AP named Max spoke pure nonsense for hour after hour and came to highly critical conclusions about our society but the voyage happened just as he described. Max, the Artificial Person, was one of the last survivors of that mission. He boarded the Orb and took readings, recorded the internal structures and so on. The Orb was empty. No aliens. Nothing alive. Nothing moving. No one home. Then the Orb communicated with us once more, telling us to send a champion back in thirty years.”

Onca sat up straighter. “So, you recruited us.”

“No. That first champion already went. Unfortunately, the idiot civilians running the project went and sent a goddamned politician.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Captain raised his eyebrows. “UNOP misinterpreted the alien communications. They did not realize it was to be a fight. You see, they assumed we were invited for a conversation. The Orb signals with the outer layer changing color but it also sends genuine radio signals, right at us, right at our ships and satellites. It told us that we were in line for a whole lot of wonderful gifts. Gifts of technology and so on. What a tease, right? So, we thought they would hand them over. We were wrong. I’m going to show you what happened when we sent a diplomat into a death match with a monster.”

Williams brought up video of a group of men and women walking through darkness, lit by personal flashlights gleaming from everyone’s shoulder or chest. Headcams recorded bare heads, overalls and what looked like Navy-style uniforms. They were clumped together like frightened sheep, no spacing at all.

“This is on that Orb? If it’s four kilometers’ diameter, how are they walking normally?”

“Gravity on the alien structure was ninety percent of Earth’s. We don’t know how it does it.”

Onca jabbed a finger at the screen. “No space suits? Breathing apparatus?”

“The first mission discovered that the Orb replicates our atmosphere pretty well. When they went on this second mission that we’re watching now, the atmosphere was subtly different. It stank of sulfur, for one thing, but it was perfectly safe for humans too. Pressure, humidity, oxygen. Made for us.”

“Are those the only military personnel?” Onca pointed out a handful of men at the front and rear with assault rifles and combat gear.

“They honestly thought it was a diplomatic mission. The military liaisons from pretty much every member country had to gang up to lobby for this many. Not that it turned out to be important. There was nothing they could do to save the ambassador.”

“Were they amateurs? Why are they sticking so close to the main group?”

Williams shrugged. “The UNOP Marine Corp was pretty new back then. No one really expected them to be utilized and there was no drive to recruit the best people. Just anyone willing to give up the Earth, possibly forever.”

Onca glanced at the Captain. “A soldier takes that chance every time he takes any mission.”

“Alright, so the boarding party reach this huge chamber, okay? Look at it, a hundred meters a side, no openings but the one they just came through. The scale of this place is inhuman. It’s no wonder they were so scared.”

On screen, the group clustered and fussed around the finely dressed, upright older gentleman who was the ambassador.

“See that one section of wall is this kind of force field thing? It is not something you want to touch. They test it here, watch.”

Williams skipped to a section where a gaggle of tech nerds gathered at one corner of it and lowered metal rods and other things into a square of swirling, semitransparent wall. Each item was fried off, instantly, wherever it touched the force field.

“That would be a useful device,” Onca said.

“I heard our UNOP Research and Development guys have produced something like it but only at a smaller scale and it takes an absurd amount of power to generate and contain. That means it’s not deployable. But one day, maybe. Who knows.”

“So, here’s the bit you’ll want to know about. Ambassador Malcolm Diaz stands in the center of the force field and it chimes three times. You hear that? It means the Orb is about to open up.”

The center of the swirling screen blinked open to reveal to the cameras a vast chamber beyond. Above, the ceiling arched over in a dome shape, like an upturned bowl. Other than Diaz, it was empty. The low light came from everywhere, diffused and even. There was no cover at all, no good firing positions.

The far side was so distant that it barely showed up on the camera.

“Dimensions?”

“It’s like four hundred meters across. Two hundred high. Like I said, the scale is inhuman.”

The forcefield was back in place, blurring the image but Onca could see enough to know the ambassador was alone.

“You said there was a monster? An alien?”

“Yep, watch the far side.”

A shape appeared on the far side. Hundreds of meters away from the camera and blurred but it grew larger as it approached. A yellow shape against a dark background.

“That’s the monster,” Williams said.

“I suppose that is my cue,” the Ambassador said on the screen, half turning to the camera behind him. He and the others in the crew indulged in a bit of back and forth banter. Everyone was excited, extremely tense, covering their terror with appallingly false bravado.

Diaz squared his shoulders, straightened up and marched out into the great, empty space. It was a long walk to the center, two hundred meters. Williams sped up the footage until the cameras zoomed in past the ambassador and focused as best they could on the yellow shape. The monster. The alien.

The creature was bizarre. Onca sat up and leaned forward. The alien was shaped like a circle. A wheel. The shape of the monster was a thick wheel with six spokes, no, legs. Each leg had a large, flat pad. All six appeared to touch the ones either side, so they fit together almost without a gap between them to form the rim of the wheel shape. Two long arms stuck out from the hub at the center perpendicular to the legs. It looked strong. Heavy.

It was big. Bigger than a man.

At the ends of the arms were what had to be the most dangerous weapons the creature had. The hands at the ends of the arms had three long fingers and at the end of the fingers, claws. They had to be. Long, wicked-looking claws.

The ambassador was unarmed.

The alien lumbered toward the human, growing larger and larger. The man seemed to grow ever smaller.

“It is two meters tall?” Onca asked. “Perhaps more?”

“The diameter is two point eight meters,” Williams said.

On screen, the ambassador drew to a stop. His fear was written in his posture. The man’s shoulders were drawn up, his head lowered as if he was being pulled into himself.

The alien monster kept coming.

The two arms rolled over and over, sticking out from the central hub. Huge, long, knobbled arms ending in three-pronged hands. They stuck out to both sides, rolling over and over, with the legs and central hub closing in on the ambassador.

“Greetings,” the man said, attempting to sound imposing and powerful. “I am Ambassador Malcolm Diaz and I am here representing humanity, which is my species and for my planet, which is called Earth, and all the lifeforms that we share it with.”

The alien did not stop.

Its feet made a soft thump-thump-thump on the black tiles, growing louder as it cartwheeled up to the man. It was a monster half his height again, surely many times his weight, with the long arms twirling and the hub seemingly without eyes or mouth or any features at all other than lumpen sockets where the limbs met the hub.

The ambassador finally realized the danger that he was in but for some reason he did not flee as the alien leaped ahead and accelerated the final few meters, charging him down.

Probably he was just too old and slow and his instinct, such as it was, took over far too late. He barely completed a half-turn before the great yellow monster was on him. Onca assumed the thing would run him over like an automobile accident. Instead, it swerved, pivoting on one of the feet and slashed a long arm into the man. The blow smashed straight down into his head and chest with incredible force.

Earth’s ambassador snapped in half at the spine and the blow ripped on through and blew the man’s chest apart in an explosion of bright blood. The man’s skull was crushed so completely that it disappeared into pieces.

The alien spun, turned, rolled back and smacked into the body against the floor repeatedly, gathering smashed parts to break further into pieces. The body was obliterated further with every blow. Shredded strips of clothing hung sodden with chunks of flesh as the blood-splattered creature flailed into the gore, flinging it everywhere.

Then it simply turned and rolled back the way it had come. Its feet left a trail of blood, glinting in the dimness.

Williams paused the video.

“Did the Marines attack?” Onca asked.

“The transparent forcefield structure remained in place and they could not get through immediately. It parted only when the alien had exited the arena. They sponged up Ambassador Diaz and then there was nothing left to do but leave. Go back to the ship on the shuttle.”

“So now it’s our turn? This program is to select someone to battle that monster?”

Onca’s heart pounded high in his chest at the thought of it.

Williams nodded, a small smile on his face. “So, now you know. You have signed non-disclosure agreements, of course, but if any leaks about this can be traced back to you then I’m afraid you would be subject to an extrajudicial capital punishment. We all would.”

“Humanity is at war with this Orb? With these aliens?”

Williams shrugged. “It is not as simple as that. And not, I hope, as dangerous. It seems as though this Orb is sent to us from some truly great and mighty civilization. We are invited by the Orb to come and fight for gifts of technology and even for the rights to colonize extrasolar planets.”

“The yellow monsters are not the ones who made the Orb?”

“Absolutely not. The Wheelhunter starship arrived at the Orb two days or so after the ambassador’s ship. There was some kind of electromagnetic and gravitational disturbance tens of thousands of kilometers from the Orb, and then they picked it up. Here, let me show you.”

The screen showed a large ship in space. Larger and more complicated than anything humans had made, he was fairly sure. Not that Onca knew much about space.

“The Wheelhunter was the representative of its species. The Orb had invited it, just as it had invited us. Only, the Wheelhunters come from another star system and the Orb brought them to ours through a wormhole that it created. Off the starboard bow, or whatever.”

“You call them Wheelhunters?”

Williams looked embarrassed. “An unofficial name. All that matters is that soon we will launch a new mission to that Orb. It will take maybe fifteen years on a spaceship before we can board that gigantic alien space station, where we will enter the central space and fight one of them to the death.”

“We will?” Onca said. “You mean, I will.” He jerked a thumb at himself.

“Really?” Williams asked, hesitantly. “You still want to be a part of this? After what you’ve seen, knowing that you’d be giving up your life on Earth, knowing what that creature can do?”

“More than anything.”

***

His quarters were the finest he ever had or even heard of. A whole chalet all to himself. It was larger even than his apartment in Brasilia. When he woke in the morning, a US Army Artificial Person knocked on his door with a delivery and then carried three huge metal cases into the main living area, like it was a hotel bellboy and not a logistics support assistant. Even though the massive AP stomped around with that typical dead-eyed AP expression on his face, Onca almost tipped the thing.

The crates were from the Brazilian Army R&D Unit. Inside each contained 365 daily doses of the pills, syringes and disposable items he needed in order to keep his new and improved body functioning at full efficiency. There was an encoded message he unlocked with his thumbprint and a swab of spit. It was explicit instructions about following the regimen to the letter, along with dire warnings for his health if he took anything other than the exact doses. Also, warnings to lock the cases after use and any failure to secure them against tampering by foreign nationals would lead to his incarceration for life. He had three years’ worth of medication to take but could get more by contacting the names and addresses as listed and so on and so forth.

Onca knew that if he was selected to go on the mission to the Orb, he would need many more cases.

He cracked that day’s stack and downed the tablets, drank the little vials and jabbed the disposable syringes into his thigh. Then it was time to go to work.

Captain Williams was there at 0630 to collect him.

“Will you be looking after me every day?” Onca asked.

Williams snorted a laugh. “Today is my last day. I will show you the way from your quarters to the main UNOP building and get you all linked up to the online system so you can check the schedule yourself after today. But if you want an aide, a bag man, I can organize one for you. They call them valets.”

Onca almost refused out of hand. Then he realized it would be helpful to have someone to carry his gear and look after him. Someone to fill his bathtub with ice at the end of a long day of training and so on.

“An AP?” Onca asked.

“Of course. They are one hundred percent obedient within their SOP criteria. I’ll requisition it now and it’ll be here when you finish your training today.”

When they got to the training center, Onca was escorted underground to a massive gym. Around the outside was the standard equipment, punching bags, resistance machines, free weights. But the center was an open space, the floor covered with training mats.

There, the others trained. Some shadow-boxed, others ran through grappling drills in smooth, slow motions.

“Onca,” the massive Colonel Boone called from the sidelines. “Time to see what you’re really made of, son.”

The exercising men and women paused their activity to turn and fix him with twenty-nine steely-eyed stares. Onca ignored them and went for the cluster of men around the commanding officer.

“Good morning, Colonel,” Onca said as he approached the grizzled old soldier. “I haven’t had a schedule yet or I would have been here for the start.”

Boone made a noise halfway between a laugh and a bear’s growl. “I’m sure you would have, Onca. I’ve been giving your file a closer look since yesterday. You know, you’ve had a remarkable career.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Interesting transition from Army to private contractor a few years back. Not a lot of detail on that.”

“No, sir.”

The Colonel snorted. “You know what else I noticed? Commendations for your shooting and recommendations for sniper school. Awards for urban warfare techniques like room clearing and breaching security doors in record time. You even came first in the jungle training school. Not a lot in there about your hand to hand combat achievements. Bit of a glaring omission, wouldn’t you say so?”

Onca almost laughed. He had been fighting ever since he was a child. Since before the first of his memories that started the narrative of his life he had been battling the other kids around his age and the dangerous older ones who might cripple or even kill you if you said the wrong thing or just got in their way. He’d never had any parents or siblings or anyone to stop him or protect him. After a few years he got known as a kid who would never back down from a fight and, when he got good at it, people would come looking for him. Wanting to take down the skinny kid who had beat their brother or their crew mate to a pulp. Even when the gang had brought him onboard, they used him like a totem, like a mascot. The kid half your size who would turn you inside out. They all went the same way. Right up until the day he had fought back against the wrong man and had to escape into the army.

“I can fight,” Onca said.

Colonel Boone nodded. “We’ll see, Major. We’ll see. Why don’t you take some time to get warmed up? Then we’ll line you up some opponents, what do you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

His opponents were selected because they were the toughest in the room. A hulking great Mexican, a stocky American and a lanky, wiry Chinese.

“What is the purpose of this session?” Onca asked Colonel Boone while everyone gathered around the edge of the cleared mat space in the center of the room. His question drew laughter from most of them.

“It is not a fight to the death, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Boone said. His competitors laughed. “Not yet, anyway. Competition rules, no eye gouging or fish hooking, no blows below the belt. Five rounds, three minutes apiece. Not that they ever come to that. Fight ends when someone taps out, is knocked out or when the ref calls a stop. Do you understand?”

Onca knew he was being set up to fail. There was no way they expected him to get through three competition-style fights with no preparation against opponents that had been training for months at an elite level. They had picked three men. He knew from the way they were built and the way they moved, each would have a different fighting style and different areas of combat expertise.

Still, Onca had never fought a fight he could not have won, in principle. And a key part of his recuperation had been combat training. He did not tell the Colonel that.

The tall Chinese man was his first opponent. A kickboxer if ever he saw one. His stance suggested extensive muay thai training but it could have been a ruse and Onca prepared for an early takedown attempt on his enemy’s part.

All around them, some people shouted encouragement. Others were completely silent.

Onca was reminded that despite the nature of group dynamics, everyone around him was hoping to beat everyone else and be the one selected for the mission.

When the bell sounded, the guy danced forward, feinted low for a shooting takedown but then snapped a roundhouse kick to Onca’s head. He moved forward smoothly, flowing like water but when he transitioned to the kick he was so fast that Onca barely registered the sudden change in motion.

With the upgrades they had made to Onca’s biology, he was faster than he had ever been. His body responded to the threat without much in the way of—or time for—conscious thought. He slipped inside the leg that whipped toward his head and snapped an overhand right into the sweet spot under and slightly behind the ear. Usually, he would not have used a closed fist on a head strike but as he was connecting with the semi-soft tissue of the neck he put the full force of his new and improved muscles into the two knuckles of his right hand.

It was a brutally effective strike. His opponent was unconscious before he hit the floor but Onca followed him down anyway and smashed his elbow into the man’s face just as the back of his head bounced off the mat. Far from an instinctual, unthinking blow on a man who was unable to defend himself, smashing his face in was calculated to instill an edge of fear in those who were watching.

The fact that the Chinese soldier suffered a burst nose and fractured cheek was just something the man would have to suffer. Onca was there to win and everyone there had to accept they were at risk of injury or death. If they didn’t then they soon would.

Medical Assistant APs dragged the Chinese man out of the combat area and held him down as he returned to consciousness.

Silence. All around the other soldiers stood watching with contempt or, at the least, dislike. He glanced around and most met his eye. One or two smiled or even grinned at him, going for wolfishness and bravado but it was easy to slap a smile on your face to pretend a confidence you did not feel. Still, he marked those ones out as the ones to beat. One of them was even a woman.

Onca threw a look at Colonel Boone to gauge his tone. The old man had a genuine grin on his face and Onca took that as all the encouragement he needed.

“Alright,” Onca called out. “Who’s next?”

***

“You have not been making friends here,” General Richter said from behind her desk. “In fact, it looks as though you are intending to make every single soldier on this base into your personal enemy.”

She was a strong-looking woman, long of limb and slim but with healthy width to her shoulders. She could have been anywhere from thirty to a youthful fifty, her golden hair dragged back into a bun, giving her face a somewhat startled, severe aspect.

Onca stared at a fixed point over her head, arms behind his back. Halfway between attention and at ease.

“I did not realize I was here to make friends.”

The General nodded slowly. “Quite right. On the other hand, you do have to live with these people while we make our final selections. They are competitors but also comrades. Brothers and sisters in arms.”

“Ha!” Onca said. “Some comrades. Listen, General, I have my own quarters and I am happy in my own company. I do not need to make friends. I’ve had brothers in arms before and I don’t need any again.”

“Is that so? Well, I am sorry to hear that. Does holding that attitude make you happy?”

“Happy?” He was surprised that a General would know the word.

“Yes, Onca, happy. You might have heard of the concept.” She tilted her head forward. “Or perhaps not.”

“General, our purpose here is more important than any one individual. More than any one person’s life. Certainly, it is more important than our happiness.”

“Ah. So, you admit that you are unhappy?”

Onca sighed. Why can women never leave you alone, he thought. Always needling into you with their questions, burrowing like a tick until they force you to admit your hatred for another man or your fears that you might fail at some endeavor. Always, they weaken. Undermining a man’s psyche. Infecting him with her own doubts, her own worries.

Female soldiers were no different. Just because some woman is a good enough administrator to be promoted to General, does not make her immune to her gender’s knack for pointless boring and searching.

“I admit that my happiness has no bearing on my performance.”

The General inclined her head. “Is that so?”

“I am the leading candidate. I have been the leading candidate for weeks. In every test, I am the highest performing individual.”

“That is quite true. No one could deny that. After all, it is right here in the data. Irrefutable.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And yet I do rather worry about your psychological state.”

Onca ground his teeth. “My psychological state, General, has not slowed me down yet.”

The General spoke mildly. “How do we know?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, how do we know that the unresolved psychological issues from your past have not negatively impacted your performance?”

“I am the best performing candidate in this program.”

“Undeniably so. And yet will that be enough to defeat the alien creature?”

She left the question hanging there.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” he said.

The General leaned back in her chair. “You see,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That nonsense right there. You suppose we’ll find out? You suppose humanity will find out whether you were all that you could be after you go up against this creature, is that it?”

Onca said nothing. He knew a senior officer’s rhetorical question when he heard one.

“I know what you think, Onca. You think that you have excelled here and you have. You also think that you have achieved a combat speed comparable to the speed of the Wheelhunter creature. And you have. But we have only seen this thing run down an unarmed man. We simply do not know what the upper limits of its performance are. We do not know what weapons of ours will penetrate its skin. Will your combat knife do it? Will an armor penetrating round work better than a hollow-point? Will that damned Orb even let us through with a rifle? You actually think you’re good enough to cover every possibility? Or do you really care so little that you are willing to just find out after the fact?”

There was little in life that could arouse an emotion from Onca and he was aware that she was attempting to get to him, to challenge him on an emotional level. But he could not let her get away with it so easily.

“Are you actually questioning my commitment?” he asked. “I work harder than anyone else here. I gave up my life for this even before I knew what the stakes were.”

“You didn’t have much choice, as I see it. From what UNOP Intelligence tells me, after years of exemplary service, the Brazilian military effectively blackmailed you into joining this program.”

Onca swallowed. “That’s not how I see it.”

“Truth is, Onca, I am unsure of how much I can push you on, emotionally. But for the sake of truth, of honesty, I have to say I worry about your mental health. I want to discuss the deaths of your company, Sabre Rubro, in your final mission, can I do that?”

A chill ran down the back of his neck. A sick feeling down in his guts. “If you must.”

She inclined her head just a little. “I am not a psychologist by profession but I am fascinated by the field. And, more importantly, I have a lot of them working for me.” She tapped the screen on her desk with a pointed finger. “In here, I have report after report about everyone here. Not just candidates but my officers and other personnel. I am well aware that everyone has a history of damaging life events, from childhood trauma to professional disappointments but you, Onca, have more than most. Your resilience is perhaps the most remarkable thing about you and I can say that even though the details of your childhood remain totally unknown to anyone but you. And yet I do worry. I do. The file is unclear about why you left the military but seeing how it followed a mission against a group of rural separatists who were later arrested and executed by your government, I would guess you were ordered to do something to them when they were in your custody that you felt would be immoral. Perhaps you were asked to leave rather than face a court martial and they avoided a scandal, I don’t know. Perhaps that’s my own experience prejudicing my assessment. But then you ran a wonderfully successful private company for over a dozen missions. And it ended in betrayal and tragedy. And from what I can tell, you have had no time to grieve. No time to process those events. For all your resilience, I do not believe for a moment that you are pathologically lacking in empathy. You do need to go through that process. And perhaps you have done so, quietly and by yourself. But you are so closed off that I really have no idea.”

Onca nodded. “I know your type well. You enjoy telling other people that they are broken and that you have the solution. You are like the priests and the communists. I have achieved everything that I set out to in my life so far and I continue to do so. There is nothing wrong with me.”

After staring at him for a long moment, she got to her feet, wandered around her desk and sauntered toward him. She stood so close to him that her chest brushed against his and she peered up at him, staring into his eyes.

She waited until he looked down at her before she spoke. Speaking softly, almost intimately.

Shockingly, she spoke in Portuguese. And spoke it well.

“Perhaps it is good that you say so little. Every time you speak, it only worries me further.”

He did not know what to say.

“You speak my language?” Onca blurted out.

A tiny smile twitched the corners of her mouth.

“I speak many languages. Yours is one of the most beautiful in the world.” Before he could respond, she turned and walked back toward her seat, speaking without looking up at him. “I simply don’t want decades of trauma to explode when you are billions of miles from Earth.”

Back behind her desk, her General’s demeanor was back in place and she switched back to English.

“Alright, you are dismissed.”

Onca wanted to make some parting comment, some barb to leave in her to show how strong he was, how much contempt he had for her absurd notions.

But he felt too tired, somehow. And he just left with a vague sense of being defeated.

It was extremely irritating.

***

Deathmatch. Blank-firing weapons with laser tag adapters so that when someone got hit, they were taken out of action immediately.

It was Onca’s best game.

The combat zone was a typical urban warfare training area but it was notable for its size and complexity. Most that he had trained on in Brazil had been four or five concrete shells around a fake road. Sometimes if you were lucky they had a ruined car in the road for added realism.

Americans, generally, went over the top in everything they did. And the urban warfare training area in Harris was four city blocks and hundreds of meters per side. Good for training large unit sizes and coordinating multiple units. It was not impressive merely in scale but also in detail. Each room was fully furnished, either as an office, residence or retail space. They even had fake plastic food in the fruit bowls, for Christ’s sake. It was ridiculous.

Also good for exceptionally long rounds of deathmatches.

He crept through the interior of Building C-12 on the north side, third floor. Listening. Six players plus him left active in the zone, according to his AugHud. Most of the other ten had gone down in the first few minutes but the rest had made it through the initial madness and gone to ground. Onca had turned his audio amplifier up so high that the desert wind on the edges of the glassless window frames sounded like a hurricane.

Every day was a new challenge. Every few days, someone would fail to meet some benchmark or other and they would be asked to leave. Onca knew they were looking for twelve candidates to take to the Orb but he had worked to become the top contender and he meant to be the number one at the end of the selection process.

Trouble was, so did everyone else.

The General was living in a dream world where she thought the most elite soldiers in the world, from all over the world, would end up working together in a team. This, despite the fact that her own selection process was pitting these individuals against each other for months. But that was women, for you. They had no idea about the real world. And women soldiers were the worst. They had no idea about actual warfare, about life on the ground in an all-action, deployed military unit. Women imagined the world as a better place than it was and that was good, in its place. But that place was far from combat.

He rolled his feet as he walked, instinctively picking out the path through the twelfth building in Block C. It was an office space, with open plan style desks free from clutter and communal areas for the non-existent staff to brainstorm or whatever the hell people did in offices. There were plenty of places for someone to spring an ambush on him so he went slowly, stopping every few paces to listen for the sound of breathing or the shifting of a foot on the floor.

Or, in this particular instance, the whine of a powered armor servomotor.

Onca was hunting.

His prey was called Iveta Katzarov.

She had slipped into the entrance on the ground floor six minutes before. Since then he had cleared each room downstairs and progressed upward, keeping an ear out for her escaping behind him.

Sergeant Katzarov was a veteran from Bulgaria’s elite paratrooper battalion and had supposedly fought in battles down in that confusing corner of Europe. Onca didn’t know anything about that part of the world or if Katzarov truly had fought in frontline operations there but he did know that she was good enough to have survived UNOPs selection process while many others had fallen.

It was possible that she had allowed him to see her enter the building. In fact, considering what he knew of her tactical prowess, it was highly likely. But he was confident he could sniff out her trap before she sprung it. And if he blundered into it, he was sure he could fight his way clear.

Her powered body armor lent her greater strength and speed than her sex was ordinarily capable of but it was not those traits that made a good soldier. Adaptability, capability, aggression. Making decisions so fast they seemed instinctual to outside observers and ensuring that those decisions were the right ones more often than not.

On the other hand, her armor also featured adaptive camouflage systems which supposedly blended the soldier into the background visually and also aurally. In practice, however, a trained eye was never deceived. They only worked efficiently in dimly lit environments like night engagements. In the jungle, they were excellent until they got wet—which was always—but in the bright desert sunlight, you could spot the outline of even a stationary soldier at fifty meters.

All the technology in the world could not overcome pure soldierly ability.

Still, he went slowly, deliberately and kept checking behind him for another player to come and take him out or for his prey to have got around him, somehow. At the open doorway at the far end of the office, he took position and listened for sounds in the corridor. Nothing but the steady, occasionally gusting, breeze outside the windows.

A shot. Distant, in Block A, way across the central intersection. A burst of automatic fire, then another.

In his AugHud, the number indicating total active players dropped to six.

Onca took to the corridor smoothly, sweeping through at a steady pace before pausing at the next open doorway. Another office inside. No sound. No movement. He sniffed and caught no scent either.

He slipped in through the doorway, weapon up and proceeded on through, checking the hidden spaces behind colorful couches and desert bushes in huge planters.

There was no good reason for the General to have called him in and chewed him out. Onca had given no indication to her or anyone else that he had any psychological issues. It made no sense unless she was playing him in some way.

Footsteps. Distant, perhaps but there was movement somewhere.

Taking position against the outer wall, he glanced out at the street beyond as the wind howled on the walls of the building, blowing faint clouds of dust down the main street. He couldn’t see anyone and ducked back inside. He bent low and moved to the next window.

The more he thought about it, the more he was sure General Richter had been attempting to unsettle him. These people were all about pushing the candidates, physically, professionally but also emotionally. Colonel Boone was a player of mind games, too, sometimes praising mediocrity and sometimes criticizing achievements in the most withering way possible and even though Onca knew it and no doubt the other candidates knew it too, it was still unsettling. Even the General’s man, Captain Williams, had pretended friendship for some time before Onca realized it was a ruse. That the officer was a plant who was reporting back to the General and relaying to Onca the information that the powers in charge of the program wanted him to know. The future of humanity hung in the balance so there was no reason for them to leave anything to chance, to not control every aspect of the selection process.

A noise.

Somewhere close.

A howl of wind that became the whining of a suit of servomotors and the grinding of metal on concrete.

Sergeant Katzarov.

She came at him while he was turning and he reacted with instinct rather than thought. He fell back into the same mindset he had last felt when the drone autocannons had opened up on him and his men in the boardroom of the factory site.

Katzarov fired her weapon, her blanks clattering from high and behind him, shattering his mind and eardrums before the sound suppressors could shut down the amplification. He threw himself into her without conscious thought, striking up with his assault rifle barrel before shoving her hard with the butt of the weapon.

And she was gone.

A second later, a sickening thump. And he knew what had happened. What he had done.

***

That night, he escaped the base.

It had been almost a game for him in the preceding weeks. A way of making his spare time more interesting. Every morning he woke at 0500 and was out running at 0510. He ranged all over the base, taking a different route almost every day and during those long runs before starting work he would be working on a project of his own. Onca learned the layout of the base, the delivery schedules, the patterns of behavior that the AP support staff followed. He ran through the back alley behind the kitchens, ran to the airstrip and around the hangars, he ran through the non-combat motorpool and took his turnaround breaks there. Not that he needed to stop for water after a mere ten klicks but the guys who worked there started early and they liked real soldiers and they asked him questions. He would joke with them about how he couldn’t reveal any secrets and while they talked he would see where they locked the starter keys to the vehicles and where the batteries were held.

Wherever he went, whatever he did, he always had an exit plan.

And that night he helped himself to one of the off-road bikes, slipped out of a patrol exit and rode hard into the desert.

It was cold. Bitterly cold with the air rushing over his skin as he got the bike up to speed, bouncing through the rough desert. It was a vibrant, pure night but still he had his visor’s night vision on so that he didn’t smash into a rabbit hole or whatever they had out in the wilderness. With the strength dialed almost all the way back, it was almost as bright as daylight though stripped of color. A monochrome daylight view of the desert at night. Stars so bright and numerous that he could not look at them. Occasional glints from animal eyes or discarded pieces of military hardware winked back at him as he weaved between the rocks and rode the lumps and humps while the motor rose to a high whir over the crunching sand and gravel flying out behind. The freezing air hurt as it filled his lungs. The ache was good.

It was a long way across country to the dirt road, the going was faster when he got on that. At the T-junction, he knew turning right would lead to a city called Reno. Left and he would end up in Las Vegas. He had no interest in either place. There was somewhere closer the idiots in the motor pool had told him about. Onca spent a little time heading north on the highway, weaving through the dense traffic before heading west again down another dirt road, the dirty sign on the corner reflecting his headlamp. He pulled over twice to let a truck by heading back to the highway so he knew he was heading down the right road.

They called it a town but all he saw of it was the neon glow of the signs declaring there was a bar and that it was open 24/7. The glare of the truck headlamps around the parking lot choked out the light of the stars.

In the entrance, a hulking thug with his cheap suit stretched tight across his chest, stepped in Onca’s way.

“I don’t know you,” the man said. “And you look like you’re packing attitude. So listen to me when I tell you we have a zero tolerance policy here, pal. You step out of line one time, you’re out the door and you’re out for good, you understand?”

Onca felt the icy mist fill his limbs. The security guard was surely used to being the biggest, toughest, meanest man in the room and, working in the place that he did, had no doubt resolved a number of professional scuffles in his time. It would feel satisfying to break the man, Onca knew. Smash his limbs or dislocate his jaw. But was that how he wanted to spend his evening?

Maybe.

“I’ll cause no trouble,” Onca said.

The hulking thug smirked. “Oh, I know you won’t. You can go in.”

“Looking for a private dance?” the hostess asked him at the bar. She stood at his shoulder, the caked-on makeup and half-assed cosmetic surgery unable to disguise the hard-lived years.

“Something more private than that.”

He followed her through a beaded curtain, along a corridor, and into a waiting room. He sat on an old couch for a while with his drink until the hostess came back with three, bored looking girls, each wearing next to nothing. They had varying builds, shades of skin and hair styles but all had the same dead-eyed weariness and slouched posture of the perpetually jaded.

Onca had expected to feel something.

“What about you?” he asked the hostess.

She barely blinked. “I don’t do that no more.” Bored. As if she was running on automation software. He bet she was asked the same question every night. “Not now I got my girls, here.”

“Alright, that one,” he said, pointing to the girl nearest to him. One side of her head was shaved and tattooed with a swirling, Polynesian-style intricacy. She looked tough.

He knocked back the rest of his American whiskey, the burning foulness distracting him long enough to get up and put one foot in front of the other.

Upstairs, the room reeked of cleaning products and stale sweat and under the sheets the plastic cover over the mattress squeaked when he sat on the bed. It was stiflingly hot.

“What’s your name?” he asked her as she stripped off what little she wore.

“Faith,” she said. How original. “What’s yours?”

“Onca.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“It is.”

She sat down beside him. She smelled of soap and antiperspirant.

“What’s it mean?”

“In English, the word is jaguar.”

She tilted her head, a frown wrinkling her forehead and her nose. “What’s jaguar mean?”

He sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

It didn’t take long for him to finish with her. It had been longer than he could remember since he had been with a woman. She barely had time to feign interest before he climbed off her.

“You really been on the road a long time,” she said as she wiped herself down with a pink towel. “Been deployed overseas, right? Don’t they got women in other countries?”

“Yeah. I was recovering in hospital for a long time,” he muttered, like an idiot. “Been busy since.”

“You’re a soldier. Want to know how I know? Because of your body.”

“Very perceptive.”

She almost smiled. “I’m one of the smarter models.” She seemed proud of herself for working it out. “We get soldiers in here all the time. From the base, right? You know, we got plenty of time left. You want to go again?” She tossed the towel aside and lay back, one arm behind her head.

“Yeah,” Onca said. “Sure.” But he stayed where he was, hunched over sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at his toes on the plastic floor.

What are you doing here, man?

“Take your time,” she said. “Maybe pour us a drink? On the side, there, see? You got to pay but you already swiped over way too much. I’ll have a vodka. Don’t worry about a glass.”

He rattled through the basket of miniatures on the dresser, tossed one to her and cracked an American whiskey for himself. He drank a sip but didn’t turn back to her. The flavor was bitter and the fumes filled his nose, made him nauseated.

“Something on your mind?” she asked, sighing. She was so young but already weary and barely present in the moment. Who knew how many nights she had spent this way?

“No,” he said. “I had a bad day at work.”

She patted the bed beside her. “Come and tell me all about it.”

He looked at her, then. “You get paid extra for counseling work?”

Licking her lips after lowering the miniature vodka, she looked him up and down. “Like I said, get soldiers in here all the time. Mostly, it’s salesmen, factory workers, salt miners. Fat, dumb and old as shit. Losers.” She pointed the tiny mouth of the bottle at him. “You look a movie star. With more scar tissue. And it’s a Tuesday. Slow night.”

He sat down on the bed again. “There was an accident. I hurt someone, she fell out of a window and now she’s in hospital. I just had to get away for a while, that’s all.”

“Your fault? You running away?”

“It was my fault. I’m not running away. I’ll head back, soon.”

“Going to face the music, huh? What’s this then, one last ride before they lock your ass up?”

“Something like that.”

“Well.” She ran the ball of her foot up and down his back. “For another hundred you can stay here the rest of the night. If you like. I’m a real good listener.”

He smiled to himself. She knew a sucker when she saw one. A loser, like she called those other guys. A sad old man who was so lonely that the sex was just an excuse so he had someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t tell him to shut up.

“Thank you,” he said, standing up and pulling his clothes on. “Hope you have a good night.”

On a whim, he swiped another hundred-dollar transfer into her account, then hesitated. The urge to transfer hundreds more, just out of pity for her, came and went. Was it pity? Or was it an apology or, perhaps, a form of penance for his sin? But he could not give her more. He needed to save his money so that he could pass it on to Lena. If he managed nothing else in his life, the least he could do was see that the child would inherit some worth from him. Anonymous cash wasn’t much of a legacy but it was better than nothing. He put his wallet away.

“Hey,” she said, standing up and holding one of the sheets over her body. “You come back again and you ask for Faith, alright?”

He had a feeling that they would be coming for him. Captain Williams sat at the bar talking with the hostess. Onca nodded to them both but the hostess glared back with open hostility. The life in the bar was even more subdued than it had been on his way in. Subdued and even hostile. But he could detect no threat of violence from any of the patrons or the security. If anything, they all seemed wary.

The meaningful looks traded between the Captain and the hostess proved that they knew each other well. Onca pushed down the surge of jealousy. She was no one. A brothel keeper. She was like the people he had left behind years ago. Let the Captain have her attention and affection, if such a thing was possible with a woman like her.

“Just you?” Onca asked the Captain as they left together, stepping from the cloying, sweaty stink of the bar, out into the clear desert night.

“Not even close.”

Williams nodded at the small convoy of four HOAVs, lightly armored military vehicles in the parking lot and the dozen military police, half sitting inside their vehicles and the rest covering the area. One of them had his stolen bike mounted on the rear rack.

No wonder the hostess was so pissed. They were scaring the customers away.

“Nice of you to keep them outside,” Onca said.

“Yeah, well, this place is important for the guys on the base. I have a moral obligation to keep us on good terms.” Williams stifled a yawn. “Now, please get in the fucking truck, Major.”

Williams sat in the back with him and almost immediately fell asleep as the convoy rolled out onto the highway with no fuss. Onca wondered how often the MPs had to come and round up a soldier from the base.

Onca elbowed Williams.

“How is she?”

“Iveta? If you really cared, you might have stuck around to find out. Waited at the clinic like her friends—”

“Save the lecture for the General, alright, Williams? Just tell me how she is.”

“Broken skull, collapsed lungs, broken back, severed spinal cord, internal bleeding, brain damage. Nothing that isn’t reversible, in principle. Definitely ended her career in UNOP, though. Probably in any military. And I doubt she’ll be up to visiting whorehouses for a while.”

Onca let out a long sigh and lay his head back.

“Women shouldn’t be in this business.”

He felt Williams glaring at him. “Because men never get hurt. Your misogyny isn’t based in reality, Onca.”

Onca snapped his head up. “I don’t hate women. They just have different skill sets. It’s not natural that they’re soldiers.”

Williams laughed, genuinely amused. “Natural? Are you kidding? What makes you think anyone here is natural? The women here are pumped with as much testosterone as you are, they just take drugs to stop them growing beards and the like. They’re all packing upgraded nerve fibers, muscular enhancement, biomechanical augmentation. You know this, right? The maximum strength applicable in the powered armor is the same no matter the sex of the user. Come on, Onca.”

Onca shook his head. “It’s not the physical attributes. It’s the mentality. The obsessiveness that men have. It’s the—”

“The bar is the bar. UNOP standards make no concessions for what’s between the candidates’ legs. You’re the only one here making value judgements based on gender. It’s obvious in the way you reacted to this. Would you have ridden off into the night if you’d severely injured one of the men? What the hell am I saying? You’ve ended the careers of, what, five or six guys already at this point? How many of those incidents made you run away and screw a hooker? That sounds kind of symbolic, doesn’t it?”

“Of what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. But it’s all in your psychological profile, Onca. It probably comes from unconscious feelings of abandonment due to childhood trauma or something like that. To be honest, that’s what everyone’s says. But your fucked-up head is fucking up your career in UNOP.”

Onca didn’t know what to say. What could he say? Everything seemed upside down. Williams was acting strangely, like a real man for once. The Captain must have always been hiding his true self behind his uptight professionalism. All of a sudden, Onca felt tired. Irritable.

“Is that it?” he asked. “I’m getting kicked out?”

Williams looked out the window at the blackness beyond. “That’s up to the General.”

“Great. A goddamned amateur soldier is going to judge me defective. Might as well pack my bags now.”

Williams turned from the window, mouth hanging open. He snapped it shut. “Now you’re definitely kidding, right?”

“About what?”

“You never looked into your commanding officer’s background?”

“I’m not one to look for horns on a horse’s head.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Williams dug around in his pants pocket, chuckling. “You’re like someone from a thousand years ago, you know that?” He pulled out a crumpled 2D screen, unfolded it on his lap and keyed the switch. “Search. Archive news. General or Colonel Megan Richter. Indonesian Civil War.”

He held out the screen as the results scrolled through. Images of war, of soldiers covered in blood. One image showed repeatedly. That of a young woman, face distorted by a full-throated shout, dense blood plastered from neck to hairline on one side and gesturing with a bloody combat knife while holding a service pistol in the other hand. The date on the image results said 2109.

“That’s not General Richter,” Onca said.

Williams shook his head in amazement at Onca’s ignorance. “This is a famous picture, it was everywhere fifteen years ago. There’s a whole lot of footage from the battle, from headcams they released and there’s a famous cut of it, like a movie, with a cinematic score and everything.”

“Fifteen years ago, I was just about joining the military,” Onca said. “Where I grew up, I didn’t know anything about the world.”

I still don’t.

Williams grinned at him. “Alright, so it’s Colonel Richter in command of a battalion that gets surprised and cut off by the insurgency.” Williams gestured over the screen, flicking through images and short clips as he spoke. The results said they were arranged chronologically. “Then the enemy rises up from outside and moves in to start the siege. They were four days from reinforcement and without air support. They had a few drones, a few light vehicles. She was everywhere at the perimeter, not sleeping and jacked up on amphetamines, falling back keeping her men alert. Falling back and adapting to the attacks. Still, they were massively outnumbered and taking casualties, growing weaker while the enemy grew stronger. They were losing. The reinforcements were delayed. It was desperate, they were getting overrun. And that’s when she showed her greatness.

“Over two days she baited the enemy commander into attacking one sector and then she massed all her most mobile and aggressive units in a counter attack. It was incredible. She enveloped the enemy leadership, captured and killed them while holding off the rest of them. It was hand to hand, room to room stuff. She had to fight through the building, you know what’s it like when you can’t stop or slow down, can’t lose momentum. Her staff officers were acting as her bodyguard, all hands to the pumps, you know? Floor by floor, this was the enemy command post and she killed three men with her own hands, she didn’t have time to reload her sidearm and she stuck the last one with her knife. You can’t see much but this is the clip. The famous picture was taken during the advance. Anyway, they didn’t believe that they had the leader in custody and kept pushing so she took him to a rooftop and warned them to withdraw or she would kill him. Well, they didn’t withdraw. She killed him herself, in full view of the cameras and everything. Back of the head, look. No hesitation. That took all the fight out of them. Eventually, they withdrew before the international task force troops reinforcements finally arrived.”

Onca scratched the stubble on his chin. “Shit.”

Williams nodded. “She’s a war hero. A real one. A killer. You think she ended up here by accident? She could have run for public office, she could be doing the speaking circuit and earning hundreds of thousands for every half hour speech. But she fought to get this job because she knows how important it is for humanity. She had the whole world at her feet and she wanted this. She knows this is every soldier’s duty. To make this happen for our species. Our culture. Our planet.”

“Isn’t she a little old for you, Williams?”

“Hey, I don’t mind anyone knowing that I would crawl through a mile of shitty barbed wire for her. Yeah, I would be honored to be intimate with her. Anyway, she’s only, like, forty-five or something, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Williams. So, how much trouble am I in with the war hero?”

Williams shrugged, sat back in his seat. “Like I said, it was a training accident. Everyone has reviewed the video from the suit cams and the building cameras. It’s obvious what happened, she was balanced on the outside of the open window, gun aimed at your back when you turned and knocked her out. It was obviously instinctual. You knocked the weapon aside as she fired. How did you know Iveta was behind you?”

“Servos on the suit are not quiet enough for stealth. I keep telling everyone.”

Williams was quiet for a while, like he was working up to something. “Anyway, accidents happen but your response to it doesn’t bode well. Running to the brothel further indicates that you have too much psychological damage to be selected for the mission.”

“Did General Richter say that when she sent you after me?”

“She didn’t send me, base security alerted me. No one would wake the General just because you snuck out. Anyway, the AIs predicted you would go AWOL weeks ago.”

“I don’t believe AIs predicted this. Someone would have stopped me leaving rather than chasing after me with all these HOAVs.”

“Analysis showed you were regularly exercising close to the motor pool and around the base patrol exits. Anyway, it’s not like anybody needs an AI to work out you hate it here.”

“I didn’t realize I had hurt your feelings, Williams.”

“You’re the best soldier we ever tested here in practically every category but you’re at risk of deselection just because of your mindset. The General makes her recommendation to the UNOP Board and they make the final selections. Honestly, you’re at risk of being left behind. And we don’t even know if you truly care. Maybe you do but it’s just hard to tell if the chip on your shoulder is because you’re here or if it’s who you are. Either way, it doesn’t look good for you.”

In the distance, the lights of the outer perimeter gatehouse lit up the night, a glowing white ball of light in the blackness.

“They would never leave me behind,” Onca said. “I don’t need to make friends to fight that alien. It’s not a team game. It will be me on that alien space station, me in that arena. Alone. They would never deselect me.”

Williams yawned. “I can see why you would think that. But that fight is years away. The mission isn’t the fight. That’s one part of the mission. You have any idea how many thousands of people, how many rocket launches are happening right now? Every day, while they fit out the ship in orbit. You know how much goes into getting a team to the outer solar system in fighting shape? Even getting a sniper team into place to fire a single shot. Would you say that pulling the trigger is the whole mission? In this analogy, you’d be like, you’d be the bullet, okay? If you’re not a team player, if you’re so closed off that no one can properly assess you, how do we know you’re not going to blow up in the chamber? How do we know you’re going to fly straight? How do we know—”

“Alright. Don’t labor the point.”

Onca looked out of the window as the convoy rolled through the gatehouse and into the base. The sky in the east grew lighter every moment and soon the beige and gray buildings would be touched with the morning sunlight. The military day had already begun and Onca had lost a night’s worth of rest. No doubt General Richter would want to chew him out before long. But in many ways, it was a relief to be back. He didn’t understand the world outside. Being on a base, any base, was almost like coming home.

Williams’ eyes were on him. “It’s up to you, Onca. No one cares about a training accident. Sergeant Katzarov was never going to make it to the Orb anyway. We’re just worried about what’s going on inside your skull. How much do you really want this? Enough to get over yourself?”

You don’t know what’s inside of me.

“I will do what is necessary,” Onca said, coming to a decision.

Williams nodded, warily. “Well. Good.”

I will make it so that they have no choice but to take me.

***

Just as Williams said, no one punished him. The General did not even call him in. Colonel Boone appeared to be particularly harsh and full of contempt the next day but the other candidates ignored him just as much as they always did. And that was just fine.

He got through the day on autopilot. From the start of the day on the shooting range right to the end, Onca was tired. After his sleepless night, he went for a run at his usual time. It was his opinion that the best way to combat sleep deprivation was through intense exercise but, apparently, that was scientifically unlikely. During the lunch break, he ate alone, quick as he could and then ran for close to an hour, sweating himself almost unconscious in the midday heat. The medics poured salt and sugar into him and sent him to the afternoon session. He was not at his best and yet he shot better than half of the men and women left.

Even tired, exhausted and dehydrated he could wipe the floor with the other candidates but still it was not enough. There was only one way that could show to the General and the Selection Committee and the UNOP Board that Onca, Major Raphael Santos, was the best candidate.

The Wheel.

He knew they were tracking his movements. There always had been a chip under his skin at the wrist that read biometrics and it was trivially easy to include location data. Just as it was trivially easy to strap on a wristband that redirected the signal to a fixed location.

He had used it on nights when he went exploring around the base. It was important for him to know about the secret parts of the place he lived and worked in. It helped to alleviate the boredom.

On many of those nights, he had let himself into the Wheelhouse. And he had looked upon the Machine. The Wheel.

Inert, massive. A hulk in the dark. Built to the precise dimensions of the alien, it was a gigantic wheel suspended from the ceiling by a robot arm attached to the hub. The bottom two of the six feet rested on the floor of the training room. They had even painted the thing yellow.

Onca stared at the metal claws they had fitted to the ends of the long fingers. The claws that had left his countryman torn to pieces on the floor beneath it.

It was designed to be programmable, of course. The speed could be reduced to mere fractions of those recorded in the previous mission and the behavior of the arms and legs could be made to do anything that it was hypothesized that the alien could do. And yet the cowards in charge had retired the thing after the third death.

Even declawed, it could hit with enough force to kill. And had done.

In Onca’s opinion, it was a mistake. The worst mistake that the UNOP Committee, the Selection Board and the war hero General Megan Richter had made. What the hell was the point of urban warfare deathmatches and static firing range tests when all that mattered was defeating the real-life analog of the mechanical death machine they had built in the Wheelhouse?

He dragged the plastic sheeting off the control panel and pushed the power buttons.

Nothing.

In the tangle of cables underneath the terminal, Onca crawled around checking the connections.

General Richter and Colonel Boone had extrapolated the deaths per session and concluded that the attrition rate would be untenable. In fact, they had simply not gone far enough. They had pulled back from the obvious conclusion.

Throw people at the machine until they found a man who could defeat it.

He found a power junction with the circuit breaker displaying red on the switches. He pulled them all back to green and above him the control panel whirred into life.

If the future of the human race truly was at stake then no one life mattered at all and to be afraid of losing the best soldiers in the world was absurd. There would always be more. Soldiering was a profession with an unlimited supply. And there was no need to limit it to soldiers. You could invite anyone to try their luck. Build a dozen machines and ship them around to cities all over. Hell, build a thousand. Build ten thousand and test everyone on Earth. Might even help alleviate the overpopulation issue while you were at it.

They would have found their team in no time and at the cost of only a few hundred or a few thousand lives. To do otherwise was typical sentimentality. An inability to go all the way with something, all morality pushed aside for the sake of the necessary outcome.

Was that not what soldiers did?

The software ran a calibration sequence that asked for periodic confirmations that everything was alright with the hardware and that no one was nearby or within the designated secure area. Onca could understand that it needed reassurance. He could have done with a little for himself.

He took off the huge set of overalls he had on, freeing the body armor below. From his duffel bag, he drew the helmet and powered it up.

The Wheel juddered into life.

Its banging and shaking made Onca jump and he was so startled that his heart rate took longer than usual to settle down. He almost laughed at himself.

While he prepared his equipment and the Wheel’s program, he worked up to a decision that he had to make.

Everyone said that he would be fighting with his assault rifle in hand but no one actually believed that. It was too good to be true. There’s no reason to doubt it, they said.

Yeah, right.

It just seemed obvious that it would be blades versus blades inside the Orb arena. Claws against knives. Hoping for more was wishful thinking.

Onca took out his twin machetes and gave each blade another check over. They were custom made but based on the Brazilian Army IMBEL 2065 Pattern Jungle and Combat Knife. The design featured a massive 25-centimeter blade and a clipped point, better for stabbing someone with than the traditional machete shape.

With a final check of his armor and equipment, he started the video capture suite and ran the program.

Onca stepped into the secure area.

The Wheel groaned and hissed into life as the servos and gyroscopes whirred inside the limbs of the mechanical alien beast. The yellow skin over the surface was some sort of ballistic gel material covered with a textured layer that would precisely record the strength of blows it received and the depth of cuts into the gel beneath.

Onca flexed his arms, looking across the area as the arms rolled toward him. The blades on the end were removable but he was trying to prove his worth beyond question. So there was no room for doubt. No room for any civilian to say “Yes, but…”. It had to be unequivocal. Still, he was wary of those six long blades and the danger they posed, even with his armor.

He slipped sideways while the machine was still five meters away and it moved to match him, rolling over like it did in the replays.

It rushed forward, accelerating up to the full speed recorded all those years ago.

Onca could have programmed it to run at half speed or at any percentage but he needed it to be realistic. He could have warmed up to the full speed. Could have started at ten percent and built up to one hundred to give himself practice and ease into it. But when he got to the alien space station he would have to walk into the arena and start the fight at full speed right away. So that was how he had to do it now. He had to remove any doubt from anyone’s mind. His own included. His own most of all.

It whipped toward him, motors screaming as the wheels inside spun, the replica arms rolling over and over.

Onca moved, darting back the other way and the machine alien flipped over to match him.

So fast. Faster than he could believe.

Inhumanly fast.

Time only to roll his shoulders and fend off the incoming blow from the triple bladed threat, the power of it sending his offhand weapon flying, not deflecting the blow enough and the machine-alien hand smacked him on the arm, smashing on through to his shoulder. His armor took the full force but the mass and momentum were impossible to resist.

Onca rolled with the blow, letting it throw him over and coming up to find the arm ripping into his chest. It was there, looming over him, a terrifying machine programmed to kill him.

The reality of it flicked through his mind. The fleeting thought.

This is a mistake.

It hit him so hard in the chest that he could not get a breath, the impact shocked him through his whole body. As it yanked back the mechanical arm, the bladed fingers caught his anti-stab armor plates across his chest and ripped them apart, tearing away the outer layer.

Pain.

Something had gone through, deeper, cut his body.

No time to think, he slashed at the arm as it withdrew, catching something at least, hard enough to jar his arm.

The parameters for victory were simulated injuries to the Wheel. It would assess the total newtons of impacts received and the total depth and volume of cuts and gouges to the ballistics gel. The parameters were by necessity somewhat arbitrary but the project scientists had set them on estimates. He had to do more damage. A lot more.

Still moving, always moving, he stepped back and ducked the follow-up, stabbing with his offhand blade up into one of the foot pads and transferring to the other side. He swiped both blades as he went, carving chunks out of the gel covering the feet and hub. The arm on the other side connected to the top of his helmet, staggering him, blinding him. He twisted away to the sound of the machine pursuing him and the impact on his back sent him sprawling onto his face, arms spread wide with the machete combat knives gripped in both hands.

Fear built as he scrambled aside, the whirring and juddering chasing him. A mechanical claw caught him in the heel as he rolled away, tearing his leg armor away and gouging a wound through his calf.

You’re going to die.

Onca leaped up, spinning and hacking at the arm that came toward him and forced it aside with rapid strikes and charged in close. He could not get a breath, his leg almost buckled under him.

Alright, enough now.

The wheel kept spinning, the six legs hammering down as it rolled at him and Onca cut and cut the limbs within reach and forced his way to the center, to the hub section. He stabbed into it, punching his blades into the middle over and over.

The machine whirred and juddered, slowing and stopping until it was no more than an electrical hum.

Onca collapsed onto it, chest heaving and wheezing, blind to anything. He dropped both weapons, clanging to the floor and hung on to the warm synthetic flesh.

Clapping.

He twisted his head to the side, pain shooting through his neck.

Through watering eyes, he saw a blurry group of people applauding.

He licked his lips, sipped in air through the tightness in his chest.

“Help.”

He fell.

***

“What were you thinking?” General Richter said from behind her desk.

“I’m fine. Completely recovered. Near enough.”

“Are you joking? I read the medical reports, I had hourly updates. I know how you are. That’s not what I asked.”

Onca smiled. “What was I thinking? That I would remove any lingering doubt as to my suitability for this mission.”

She nodded. “Well, you’ve certainly done that. The Selection Committee is ecstatic. The UNOP Board could not rubber stamp the decision fast enough. You are guaranteed a place on the mission.”

Onca could not fight the grin that spread across his face. “You don’t seem happy. I would have thought you would see this as a success. A vindication of your systems and processes and choices.”

“It is, yes. And I am gratified that you survived your off the books encounter with the Wheel. Unfortunately, you inspired three of your colleagues to attempt the same thing last night. Lieutenant Nguyen was killed. Almost immediately, unfortunately.”

Onca threw up his hands. “You cannot blame that on me. That one is not on me. Why did you not put security on the Wheelhouse? Why not power it down for good?”

She nodded. “Yes, of course. Colonel Boone had posted two guards on the Wheelhouse but they were talked around by the candidates. They will be court-martialed. It seemed like they were having a high old time and they were convinced it was their route into the mission. Unfortunately, they did not appear to appreciate the risks.” She shrugged. “Perhaps they did. And no, I do not blame you. It just seems as though the bodies stack up behind you.”

Onca took a deep breath. His heart raced. “I am a soldier.”

“You are.”

“And you have left plenty of bodies behind you, also.”

“I have. That’s true. And I have spent a long time working on myself to overcome the emotional difficulties that resulted from my experiences with violence.”

Onca snorted, genuinely amused. “That is the difference between women and men.”

She seemed amused by that, also. “So your position is that men do not experience mental health issues following high-stress experiences?”

Onca shrugged. “Some men. Not me. You seemed convinced that I am broken. I am not. Your own scientists and doctors report that I am an outlier, that my genetic structure and environmental influences have resulted in a body with all kinds of physical traits unusual in themselves and unheard of all together in one man. Is it not possible that my mind is the same? That I am not weakened by distressing experiences but in fact, am strengthened by them? Surely, in the range of individual variability, there must be some people like that. And if that is likely then surely I am one of those people. The evidence suggests that this is the case.”

General Richter sighed, leaned back in her chair. “Alright. Fine. My instincts have been wrong before. I just hope you can hold it together during the years we are journeying through space in a tin can the size of a barracks block.”

“We? You’re not going on the spaceship?”

“I certainly am. We’re going to have to learn to get along, Onca. And it’s time for both of us to pack our bags. Shortly, we will be relocating to Florida. From there we’re going into orbit and docking with the ship, the UNOPS Nemesis. The largest space craft ever constructed and our new home for twenty-nine years. The rest of our lives, most likely. Time to say your farewells to Earth. And before all that, it is time for you to say goodbye to Brazil.”

“General?”

“Your government has requested you return to Brasilia. I’m sure they want to congratulate you and so on. And although this entire project is officially a secret and you will not be publicly acknowledged until later, I’m willing to bet you’ll have politicians queuing up to get their picture taken with you. For posterity. You might one day be the most famous Brazilian in history.”

“Christ, save me.”

***

It was as the General had predicted in Brasilia. Senior Generals escorted him between meetings in government buildings and secure sites and, more often than not, they wanted a picture or video of the meeting. Onca was utterly miserable. Fighting the desire to slug every politician in their grinning, idiot mouth.

At the end of the trip, his colleagues invited him for a quick drink in a hotel suite before the transport took him to the airfield. They said it was to toast to his success. Onca sat in the too-soft, cracked leather chair and waited for the conversation to turn to the real reason they had accosted him.

“You did well today, Major,” General Alvarez said as he filled his tumbler with single malt Scottish whisky from the side cabinet. And another one for General Branca. “Do you still not drink? One for the road, perhaps? For old time’s sake?”

Onca shook his head.

“Well, I hope you don’t mind if we indulge ourselves,” Alvarez said as he passed General Branca his glass. “I know how much you despise those politicians. But they certainly liked you.”

“Politicians like to attach themselves to success,” Onca said. “Especially when there is no risk to them.”

Branca looked surprised as he nodded in agreement.

“How is there no risk to them?” Alvarez said, settling down in his soft chair opposite Onca.

“If I beat the alien then they share the images publicly and claim responsibility. If I fail or am not selected for the final fight, the images are simply not released and they have lost nothing.”

Alvarez puffed out his chest. “But you have already been selected.”

“For the mission, yes. But as General Richter enjoys pointing out, there are years between leaving Earth and arriving at the Orb. There are twelve candidates setting out and one of us will be chosen to fight the final fight. I am the best candidate now. I am the only one to have defeated the mechanical wheel device on the full settings. That does not mean I will be the man chosen at the end. Anything could go wrong, I could be injured or develop an illness. My performance could drop off and one of the others could improve. It is a long trip, Generals.”

The two senior officers exchanged looks that we full of meaning.

Branca, the General from Military Intelligence and Brazilian liaison to UNOP, shuffled himself forward in his seat and leaned in.

“You must win, Onca.”

Onca fought down the violence rising inside him. “I intend to.”

“Easy, Major,” General Alvarez said. “We know that you understand your duty.”

“My duty? Sir.”

“To the Army,” Alvarez said.

“To Brazil,” Branca cut in, speaking over the senior General. “You must do this for all of us, Major. We are one of the top states financing the Orb Project but we are still regarded as junior partners to the Americans, the Chinese and the Russians. Even the Indians. Already, with your selection as the number one candidate our stock has risen considerably within the Project. And it would fall in the same fashion should one of the candidates from the other nations be the victor in the arena. God forbid one of the Americans or the Chinese.”

“I understand,” Onca said. “But the final selection will be out of my hands. General Richter will be on the ship, the UNOPS Nemesis. And the ship will be far away but in constant communication with the UNOP Board. All I can do is continue to be the best candidate.”

“Quite right,” Alvarez said, swirling his drink. “Quite right, indeed. And yet…”

Onca looked at him, waiting.

“And yet,” Branca said. “You could help to ensure the others do not succeed.”

They watched his reaction closely.

He laughed.

“You want me to sabotage my comrades? In an enclosed space, where I have to live and work, for fifteen years? And perhaps fourteen years of the return journey? I don’t think so, sir.”

Alvarez scowled. “What did you say?”

“Comrades?” Branca said, gesturing to the senior General to be quiet. “I have read all of General Richter’s reports. You’re the most unpopular man in the Project. And it looks to us as if the feeling is mutual. You have no love for those people. In fact, you seem to despise them. You have worked to undermine each of them. You have injured many of them in the last six months, beating them to a pulp on the practice mat, putting them in the infirmary. One of them you threw from a third-floor window and the woman still cannot walk. She may never recover. You did that to ensure you would come out on top. You did. Do not pretend you have any morality, Onca. We know what you are.”

Alvarez hushed the other man up as he was speaking but the words were still spoken.

“You know what I am?” Onca said, speaking quietly. “And what is that?”

“A patriot. A proud member of our armed forces, despite a temporary disagreement when you went private. But you are one of us and we know that you will do your duty.”

Onca nodded. “If you read the reports, you know that Richter already has doubts about me. Taking out the other candidates would only mark me as a man to not be trusted with the final challenge.”

“She is irrelevant,” Branca said. “You overcame her absurd opinions with your sheer ability. Your sheer force of will.”

Alvarez drained his drink and set his drink down on the table, clinking with crystal solidity.

“No one is asking you to take them out,” General Alvarez said. “Merely that you remember your duty to your country. That’s all we ask.”

They expected him to say something. They were not going to let him leave until he agreed so Onca decided to what he always had done with senior officers. Tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, then do as he saw fit.

“Of course,” General Branca said, speaking into the silence before Onca could respond. “I would normally encourage a man now by vaguely threatening something that mattered to him. Unfortunately, in your case you don’t have anything that matters to you, do you, Major? Your legacy, perhaps. Your famous name. We backed you after Sao Paulo. We looked after your name, briefed the media that you were a hero. It would be trivial to let them know how it was all your fault. That you let a woman into your organization who was a terrorist. How you personally led your men into an obvious trap and yet you somehow managed to survive. It wouldn’t take them long to ask questions about your own loyalties.”

Onca smiled, nodded.

“I knew you were a piece of work, General. I expected you to go down this road earlier. But fine. You got me. I’ll do whatever you say.”

It was Branca’s turn to smile. “I know you don’t care. What does a slum kid care about what the country thinks? The elites, the politicians? You hold them in contempt, as you should. If only you had a living legacy that you cared about. Sadly, you have no family. And no friends left alive.”

Onca returned his look with what he hoped was complete blankness.

“Or have you?” Branca said, a little smile twitching the corner of his mouth.

General Alvarez got up to pour himself another drink. Branca kept speaking.

“We all thought it was quite touching, the way you looked after your men’s families after the Abora Biopharma Sao Paulo disaster. Especially the late Captain Matos Hernandez. You even went to visit his wife before you transferred to the United States. Such dedication to the wellbeing of your best friend’s wife and his daughter is not remarkable in itself. In fact, it is perfectly common. But we were investigating you closely and I’m afraid we discovered your regular transactions to Camila Hernandez’s account. I’m sure you thought you covered yourself thoroughly but my men are professionals and they flagged it as possible terrorist funding activity. Of course, that was ridiculous. Once we tracked the payments back through the years, we saw that they started seven years ago. And we tracked the payments from Camila’s account into her savings account for her daughter. Little Lena, who is aged seven years old. Did you ever get a paternity test? Well, in case you were wondering, we obtained some of the girl’s genetic material and you are undoubtedly Lena’s father. Just in case you had any lingering doubts, I just wanted you to know that. To have the certainty. I wonder what Matos’ family would say if they found out the truth about the precious little darling? About the perfect daughter-in-law, the dutiful Camila. We would stop the payments, of course, and certainly the Hernandez clan would disown the poor woman. Who knows what would happen to the mother and child at that point? You know what these Mexican immigrants are like, they’re obsessed with honor and so on. Quaint, really. But quite brutal.”

Onca sat perfectly still.

Alvarez lurked in the background, obsessively swirling his drink. Branca sat back, his threat delivered.

“General Alvarez,” Onca said, speaking softly. “I swear to you that I will be the man that defeats the alien at the end of the mission. Please see to it that Ms. Hernandez and her daughter continue to be supported for the duration of the mission and that the terms of my will are carried out, should I die during it. You are a military man. An honorable man at heart. If you give me your word, soldier to soldier, I know that you will hold yourself to it because honor and duty are important to you.”

“Alright,” Alvarez said, speaking slowly, eyes flicking to Branca. “I give you my word.”

“And one other thing that I need from you. Considering that you need me, that Brazil needs me more than I need you, I would appreciate this other favor. Considering what is at stake here. Considering that I could turn my will against the military and against anyone who might do harm to people I care about, I would argue that I’m not asking for much.”

“What is it that you need?” Alvarez said, glancing at General Branca, who was looking wary.

Onca nodded his thanks. “General, you will also give me your word that you will get me to Florida in time for the launch, no matter what I do to General Branca.”

Branca sat bolt upright, eyes bulging.

“Well,” Alvarez said, stepping backward as he spoke. “I suppose I can do that.”

Before Branca could get fully to his feet, Onca darted across the space between them and drove his stiffened fingers into Branca’s trachea. The blow had Onca’s full weight behind it, delivered like a striking snake. The man collapsed back into his armchair, clutching his ruined throat and fought to squeeze air into his lungs.

Onca leaned over the young General and pointed a finger in his face.

“I will go on this mission, General. And I will be the best candidate. And I will win. I would have done this without your threats. So, you must understand, that you did this to yourself. Do you understand that, General Branca?”

The man’s face was deep purple and his eyes bulged. He tried to throw himself out of his seat but Onca pushed him back down with the same attention he would give to waving away a fruit fly.

“You do understand,” Onca said. “That is wonderful. You will lose consciousness in a moment. Perhaps you will receive medical attention before your brain is deprived of oxygen for too long. Perhaps General Alvarez will take pity on you and perform an emergency tracheotomy himself? If he did, you might owe him a few favors, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe his life would be easier with you out of the way. I suppose it depends on how he feels about you. Do you have any last words?”

Branca clawed at his own neck where the purple bruising was already spreading.

“Look at my face as I say this,” Onca said. “You threatened the wrong man.”

It was doubtful the man was able to make much sense of what Onca was saying but he probably caught the essence of it. After a couple of seconds of thrashing, Branca stopped moving and lay slumped in the chair like a ragdoll.

Onca looked at General Alvarez, who had half turned away, a finger in one ear.

“Ah, Onca, my dear boy,” Alvarez said, voice higher pitched than usual and strained joviality. “No doubt you’ll want to get to Florida as quickly as you can. Quickly as you can. I’m just arranging for my personal jet to take you right away.”

So, Onca realized, there were indeed benefits to being Brazil’s greatest hero.

You could get away with murder.

PART 3 – ONCA’S DUTY

Sandra blocked and slipped every punch he threw, ducked under the elbow he whipped back at her head and hit him hard in the ribs with two punches then smacked him under the jaw with an open hand palm strike.

They were fully armored so it would not normally have hurt. But Sandra was pumped full with a synthetic testosterone, adrenaline, and ViBeMax cocktail. Add to that the strength-and speed-enhancing servosuit powered armor and the force of the blow knocked him momentarily senseless.

He acted on instinct, throwing a knee in a rising strike where he expected she would be.

But her previous combo was a feint for her real attack. She caught his knee before it connected and slipped outside it, kicking his rear leg out from under him. He twisted as he went down but she had predicted that, too, and she rotated onto his back, going for a rear choke. They crashed into the floor, hard and he reached back to pry her grip from him.

Instead, she released the choke and took his arm, spinning around—quicker than he had ever seen anyone perform the move—and forcing him into an armbar. She heaved back, trying to break his arm. She grunted inside her helmet, the power pack on her back thrummed and the motors whined. Onca’s arm stretched. Pain shot out from his elbow down to the tips of his fingers and up to his shoulder, aching and stabbing. He imagined his tendons snapping, his elbow joint overextending and popping out, shattering bone. She squeezed further, inching deeper into her grip, sliding like an anaconda.

The powered armor was strong enough to do it.

Around the edges of the training room, the watching candidates were deathly silent. Onca knew that, inside, they would be cheering Sandra for all they were worth. Most of them had beaten him during the two years of the voyage to the outer Solar System. But he had beaten each of them in turn, more often than they had him. But only just. Each of them was committed to achieving the maximum level of performance humanly possible, even if that required cramming dangerous amounts of drugs into their systems, training to the edge of injury and risking permanent damage to themselves and each other.

He pushed one of her legs into position, rolled over and climbed to his feet, arm still in her grasp. She clung onto him with a death grip, clamped around his arm with the inexorability of a machine. He cried out with the effort but he lifted her off the ground then slammed her down on her back, her helmeted head cracking on the floor beneath.

Her grip did not loosen. But it did slip downward enough for him to twist out of it, grab her wrist and smash his uninjured elbow into it.

The powered armor was weakest at the wrists as the hydraulic links between the forearm and the hand plate attached only on one side and the rigid outer shell of his own armor struck hard and clean at the ulna while he held her hand open.

It cracked, smashing the bone and she growled in animal fury at the injury. Onca twisted her hand and kicked her in the side of the head with the heel of his boot. He let her go as her head bounced on the hard floor once again, dazed just for a moment.

He dropped down over her, ready to finish her off.

Sergeant Jackson, acting as referee, leaped in and pushed Onca away.

“Medic!” he called.

“I’m fine,” Sandra said, clutching her wrist, trying to get up, eyes glazed over.

“Stay where you are, Sandra, it’s over now,” Jackson said.

Onca felt the eyes on him as he stood looking down, breathing heavily.

“For Christ’s sake, Onca,” Jackson said, half turning. “Why do you always have to take it too far, huh?”

“Too far?” Onca sneered. “We’re training to be the best, here. She would have snapped my arm in that suit, would that have bothered you?”

In his peripheral vision, he saw a few candidates and support staff shaking their heads in disapproval. No one answered him.

“Alright. I’ll go fight the only opponent worthy of me on this whole ship.”

Suddenly angry, he stomped out of the training room as the medical personnel came in.

***

The Wheel span toward him, the arms spinning round and round. Motor whirring.

Onca gripped his combat knife, steeled himself.

At Onca’s insistence, UNOP built another Wheel device on the spaceship Nemesis prior to leaving Earth’s orbit. In the training section, they had re-purposed one of the exercise spaces so that it could be quickly converted into a new version of the Wheelhouse.

Every candidate trained on the device. In Onca’s opinion, it was the single most valuable element in their preparation. The Wheel was programmable with speeds and motions that had not been recorded in the previous mission when the ambassador was cut down so quickly but what it was capable of was only educated speculation.

The synthetic skin covering the foot pads slapped on the floor as it rolled, cartwheeling closer. So tall it almost touched the low ceiling of the low spaceship interior.

It powered down. Whirring to a stop.

Onca whipped round, anger surging up.

General Richter stood at the control panel, alone.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, brightly. “Care to join me for a chat?”

He followed her through the training section into the administration ring and turned to head into the senior officers’ area.

“Not my office,” Richter said. “Come to my quarters.”

Onca cleared his throat. “Alright.”

Her quarters were larger than those of the candidates. It stood to reason, seeing that she was the most senior officer on the Nemesis who was not a member of the ship’s crew. Still, it was a little irksome as it was not she who would be the one facing the alien in the Orb’s arena and winning for humanity these great gifts that would lift the people of Earth into an astonishing and limitless future.

Assuming he won.

Her room was similar to his and the other candidates’ but she had an internal screen wall between the main door and her bed, creating a tiny lounge area. One storage wall by the refrigeration unit had a section for food preparation that Onca would have killed for. He could have fixed his own meals, maybe. Or snacks, at least.

She had a lounge area in the corner with a comfortable-looking twin-seat couch and armchair, covered in tasteful pale blue-gray fabric, around a low table. There was a short stack of books on it.

“Take a seat,” Richter said, indicating the social area.

Onca nodded his thanks and sat on the couch, assuming that the armchair would be her favorite seat.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked, opening a cabinet at the kitchen area.

“Water, thank you, General.”

She laughed as she took out a half-empty bottle of spirits. “Don’t call me General, you idiot. How about whisky?”

“Water is fine.”

“It is,” she said. “But I’m pouring you a whisky all the same.”

Well, why ask me, woman?

“I don’t drink.”

“Yes, it’s a terrible shame. And a position I don’t agree with.” She held the tumbler out to him. “You don’t have to drink it.”

It would have been petty to not accept the glass so he nodded his thanks and grabbed it from her hand.

Instead of taking the armchair, she slid into the other couch seat beside him. Onca sat up straighter and moved sideways to give her more room, out of politeness, but it seemed to amuse her.

“If you don’t want me to call you General,” Onca said. “What would you prefer?”

She took a sip and leaned back into the corner, slinging her offhand over the back of the couch, her tight top stretching across her breasts. “How about Megan?”

Onca pursed his lips. “Seems a little informal for the ranking army officer onboard. But alright.”

“Call me Richter if it makes you feel more comfortable. But I’m sick of being called General. What am I General of, now? Out here?” She sighed and took a drink.

“It’s your rank, not a position,” Onca said, shrugging. “You earned it. That’s what you are. That’s what people call you.”

“Of course. Does it annoy you when people here call you Major?”

The fumes from the drink in his hand wafted up into his face. A chemical heat promising comfort. He left it where it was.

“You asked me in here for a reason,” Onca said. “I assume one or more of the others came crying to you about the sparring session today. Is there something you need to say to me? Megan.”

She seemed disappointed. Sad, even. “No one came to me. I saw what happened on the video and data feeds.” She paused, broke eye contact. As if she was unsure what to say next. “I don’t have anything to say to you about it. My reason for asking you here, you say? I suppose I just wondered if you had anything to say to me. Perhaps you have something on your mind.”

He almost smiled. “You know therapy doesn’t work on me.”

A rueful smile before she knocked back a slug of booze. “And there it is. Round and round we go. I don’t want to be your therapist. I’m just offering. Well. Offering to be your friend. Is all.”

Onca took a slow, deep breath and let it out carefully. “Why? I’m sorry, I appreciate it, I do. I am expressing curiosity right now. I have no reason to doubt that you are telling the truth about offering friendship but I am genuinely curious as to why. I have been nothing but poor company and a poor officer since we first met. I’m surprised you would want someone like me to be a friend to you.”

It was as though she attempted to keep a straight face but instead a small laugh escaped. “Very true. You have been a total shit. But.” She took a sip. “It is a small ship, it is a long time to be on it and I am… bored.” She downed the rest of her drink and got up to get another.

While she did so, Onca took a sip of his own. The heat burned the back of his throat and made his eyes tingle.

“You’re bored?” he said as she came back with a full glass and put the bottle within arm’s reach on the table. “But you get to mess with the Captain and the ship’s officers.”

She laughed more fully at that. “You know, I have learned about astronomy and space propulsion systems. But they all have navy, aviation or astronaut backgrounds. And none of them have seen combat. I don’t say much to them, they don’t say much to me.”

Every morning, Onca saw General Richter running on her favorite treadmill, pounding away at a fast pace and putting in ten or twenty kilometers before breakfast. Once a week, she ran a marathon distance or more. He knew that she spent the morning reviewing training targets and meeting with the training staff. Afternoons she spent liaising with UNOP back on Earth or with the ship’s crew. Evenings, she messed in the lounge with the bridge crew away from the eyes of the plebs. Most evenings he would see her leaving or arriving at the gym for another workout.

“You’re always active,” he said. “Seriously. How can you be bored?”

“Did I say bored?” she said, watching the liquid in her cup as she swirling it round and round. “Perhaps I should have said, lonely.”

The word hung there between them for a while.

“And you thought you would ask me to your quarters?”

“You may well laugh. But yes.”

“I’ve been nothing but… unpleasant to you. Rude. Childish.”

“You’ve been worse than that,” she said. “And I always forgave you. Forgive me if that sounds condescending. Perhaps it is condescending but I always thought of you as a man who is damaged. A man living in considerable pain.”

He shifted in his seat. “Always the same. You see a man who is reserved and you assume that he is hiding something. You know this phrase in English, that says still waters run deep? I think it means that quiet people must be hiding something. You think this of me.”

“And,” she gestured with her whisky, “you’re saying that you are not like that?”

“You said to me before that you’re an amateur psychologist,” Onca said.

“Hardly amateur,” she muttered. “Being a General is like being the warden of a psychiatric hospital.”

“Well, then, you will know what I mean when I say that you are projecting your own issues onto me.”

She laughed. “No, that’s not it. Not at all.”

“Then you’re seeing what you want to see,” Onca said, exasperated. “The thing about me is, I’m an empty shell. You might think that inside here I am bottling up years of emotional problems and twisted neuroses but the fact is, I don’t know anything or do anything or feel anything that is not soldiering. I’m a machine with one program. And if you keep trying to prize me open, all you’re going to find is a bunch of rusty old gears and cogs.”

“Very poetic. I’m all choked up. Look, Onca, I just don’t believe you. You might very well be an outlier but you are still human and no one can go through what you’ve been through and not be affected by it.”

While she was speaking, he took another sip, grimacing as it seared his throat again. Not as bad, that time.

“What if you’re right? Just suppose that you are right. And suppose my therapy sessions with the psychologist unlock some horrific shit and that process ruins my ability to fight? That would be true madness, wouldn’t it?”

She tilted her head and squinted at him with one eye. “Why would it ruin your fighting ability?”

“Because this is who I am. All my aggression and desire to succeed comes from my life, from my early life and the decisions I made early on.”

“Therapy doesn’t take away your childhood, Onca. It just frees you from it. And, anyway, I’m not trying to get you to go to the sessions, I gave up on that months ago and instead I just wanted a chat. That’s all. Forget about the mission for a little while. A drink. Or two. A bottle. A whole night?”

He took another sip. “Alright. Yes. I would like that.”

“So. Do you need me to give you orders now? I’m prepared to do that. Remove your clothes, Major, and get into my bedroom.”

***

Did she change him? Change who he was? Is that what happened?

All his past comrades who went down that road said of their wives and long-term partners that they tried to change their husbands. They found enough that they liked to be getting on with and then when they got their claws in, with a child or shared loan on a house or a dog, then they tried to fix all the problems that their soldier husbands had. Whatever their problems were.

His retinal display said 0415 so it was less than an hour before he had to get up, take a piss and go for a stationary run. He should probably either get up or try to get back to sleep.

But he didn’t feel like doing either.

Beside him, Megan Richter breathed deeply inside a tangle of sheets that exposed entirely one muscular shoulder and the entirety of her left leg and buttock. The memory of the night before, of her throwing herself up and down on him, of him plowing her for what seemed like a long time. The officers’ quarters were soundproofed but it was likely half the ship had heard them at it.

She rolled onto her back, sighing and running one long leg up and down one of his.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

First, it confused him. Then it annoyed him. She sensed his irritation.

“No, no, not in my bed,” she muttered. “Why are you on the mission? Why did you join UNOP?”

Onca sighed. He should have slipped out as soon as he woke up.

“Don’t try to back out of this now,” she said. “Be honest with me.”

“It’s early for a heart to heart, isn’t it?”

“Is that what this is?” She stretched her arms over her head, arching her back. “Besides, it’s late, not early.”

“Wouldn’t you rather go for a run instead?”

“After.”

“It’s not a simple answer.”

“Should it not be? Why are you here? What would drive you to do all this and keep doing it? Drive you all this way away from home?”

“Duty.”

She made a small sound. “Duty to what?”

Onca sighed, threw up an arm. “To my country.”

They lay side by side, looking up at the low ceiling.

“It’s an easy answer,” she said. “It’s the answer I always use myself when I am asked. Everyone accepts it. Especially our superiors in the military and in the civilian governments. Of course they do. They are completely entangled with the concept of the nation state and their own one in particular. But duty to a country?” She waved a hand in the air above them. “The concept breaks down when you closely examine it. What exactly about the country are you being dutiful to? The individual leaders? The government? The system of government?”

“Yes. If it’s a good one. Brazil stands for independence. For liberty. We threw off our distant rulers. We were the first nation to outlaw slavery, did you know that? It’s something to be proud of.”

“That’s what you’re fighting an alien for? Brazil’s constitution?”

He sighed. Women never let anything go. They’re never satisfied until they’ve driven their point deep into the argument.

“It’s not just political. Obviously. It’s the people. The culture of the people. The heritage. The art and the music.”

“So, you’re fighting for Brazil. Not for yourself? Not for the rest of humanity?”

“Alright, I am fighting for myself. To find out how good I can be. Every day, pushing myself more. Every day, trying to move the peak of my performance higher. The rest of humanity? I don’t know them. Most of the ones I have met are brutal, miserable bastards. People that know only how to destroy and tear things down.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way. But many people would say that about you, you know?”

He hooked one arm behind his head. “I know. But they would be wrong. I might be a killer but I defend the people who make things. I defend the scientists and the engineers who make this world a good place. And I kill only those who want to tear down the world. I’m a defender of people. Of good people. I’m a monster so that they can live their good lives. At least, I used to be.”

“You’re defending everyone on Earth, now. By doing this. And the people heading out to Mars and the orbital habitats and everywhere that people are.”

“Am I? This whole thing is a secret. Will they ever even know about me? Or will it be classified for all time? Don’t answer that, I know it doesn’t matter. I don’t need validation. And I’m not doing it for them. Most people just want to live quiet, small lives. Then you get maybe thirty percent of people who want only to tear down everything that those small people have. They want to criticize and exploit and steal from them. And then there’s a tiny minority. Maybe less than ten percent. And they are the ones who make the world. They are the scientists and business owners and community leaders. They try to drag the people up out of the shit. And us? Soldiers? Police? We are ten percent of them. The fraction who keeps order. Who will use violence and righteous authority to keep the thirty percent in order. I don’t want to defend all people everywhere. I don’t need to. I only need to keep the ten percent safe. They can do the rest.”

She was quiet beside him. He wondered if she had fallen asleep.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to hear you say that. But I am. I don’t see the world in quite the same way as you. I have more faith in the masses.”

“Why are you doing this, then? You’re not here for Germany but you are here for all humanity? That’s too broad, too all-encompassing to be conceptualized.”

“I am here for Germany. At least, Germany at its best. For Goethe, Einstein and Bach. For German engineering and innovation. And for the best of every other nation on Earth. For the best of us.”

“Sounds a lot like my philosophy.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think it’s types of people. Thirty percent are evil and ten percent protectors? No. I think it’s just that we are animals.”

“What?” Onca looked at her from the corners of his eyes.

“I think we forget that we are just animals. We are so hard on ourselves about the things we do. The atrocities that we commit. And rightly so.” She spoke with a sleepy detachment, as if her mind was far away. “But that’s just our animal nature coming out. The brutal side that is in all of us. Some more than others. And we have overcome that brutality in our art and our science and in cooperation and the spiritual, the divine.”

“You’re religious?”

“Oh. No. God, no. Atheist. But I just mean, that sense of wonder, that feeling of profundity, whatever you call it. Are you religious?”

“Doesn’t it say in your files?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“Everyone believes in God where I come from. So, I suppose I do, too. But I never thought much about it. And I still don’t. Except to curse Him.”

“Must have been rough growing up how you did.”

“Do you want to ask about my mother now? Is that what therapists ask next?”

“Just conversation. I don’t want to get up yet. If you don’t want to talk, you can take a shower here. Or we can do something else?”

It was different from the night before. Slower, less intense. But better, in many ways. It felt less like desperate rutting and more like making a connection. More like communication.

“Maybe I should leave now,” Onca said after. “Before too many people are up.”

“You’re worried about someone seeing you leave my quarters? Why? I’m not. Everyone is fucking everyone else on this ship. Why should we be any different?”

Onca said nothing.

“I don’t want to rush you,” she said. “Or force you into anything. But I liked last night. And this morning. And I don’t just mean the sex. I hope that you don’t pull away from this. I would like it if we could be friends.”

“The others would see it as favoritism. Resent it.”

“It bloody well is favoritism. I don’t want to invite any of the others into my bed. Well, maybe Sergeant Anderson. You never cared what they thought before, why start now? And if they are true colleagues, they would just be happy we’re banging each other.”

“I never realized what a romantic soul you are.”

She laughed. “Come back tonight. This is simple, Onca. We’re just two friends who occasionally screw each other. No one can get hurt or lose out on anything here.”

“Alright. Just no more whisky.”

“You can do what you want. I’m taking a drink.”

***

For months, life was good and growing better. He saw Megan almost every night and shared a bed more often than not. They even started sharing a bed without having sex and Onca realized he truly enjoyed her companionship. Enjoyed it at a fundamental level and in a way that he had never experienced before.

Everything else stayed the same.

Or so he thought.

He trained just as hard as he always had. He slept in no later and he jumped out of bed at 0530 just the same and pushed himself into a long run, no matter how late he had been up with Megan, talking or screwing.

Despite every nuance of their performance being monitored and analyzed by complex algorithms and AIs, no one spoke to him about the changes in his performance. Later, Megan explained that it was within the parameters for ordinary variation but he knew that she was lying.

It was only a small thing, at first. But, when he looked back, he saw the signs everywhere.

“Good morning,” Onca said to the others at their table in the mess hall one day in the fifth year. “What’s breakfast today?”

“Pastries,” Sandra said. “Special treat for Anna Jensen’s birthday, you know, from the science team? Danish like this, and different croissants. There’s American style donuts up there, too.”

Onca pulled a face as he sat down with his bowl and spoon. “I’ll stick with oatmeal and peanut butter, thanks.”

“Every day,” Sandra said, in mock outrage. “Every bloody day, porridge and peanut butter. I don’t know how you can face it. And you turn your nose up at these?”

“And I don’t know how you guys don’t like it. It’s got everything—”

“It’s got everything the body needs, yeah, yeah. Well, I’m eating pastries today because my body needs it.”

Onca shook his head and shoveled a spoon of breakfast in his mouth. “You lack discipline,” he said, speaking with his mouth full. “Eating that crap means you’ll run out of glycogen before the end of the morning session and you know it.”

He thought of those words two weeks later when Sandra caught him with a left hook to the back of his head, just behind the ear. Or so he found out when he woke up from being knocked senseless.

“What did you hit me with?” he asked the blurry form above him.

“You’re in the infirmary,” the doctor said.

Just a lucky punch, everyone said and Onca was inclined to believe them. After all, he’d been concussed before, knocked unconscious, trapped in locks and forced to tap out. When you train with full contact sparring sessions using competition rules, severe injuries happened even to the best of them.

Ten days after, he suffered a broken cheekbone, an overextended Achilles tendon and a torn hamstring all in a single round.

Something was very wrong.

“My performance has plummeted,” he said to Megan as they reviewed the data in her quarters.

“Don’t exaggerate.” She sighed and sat back. “It’s more of a stagnation, that’s all.”

“While many of the others have overtaken me in key areas. I know what this is.”

“It would be easy to jump to conclusions. You’ve a series of injuries that have plagued you and a drop off while you recover is completely natural.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Megan. Back to front. My performance dropped off before my injuries. Weeks before, look.”

She argued. Found a dozen reasons to explain it and all of them made sense. To her.

But Onca knew the truth.

Happiness had ruined him.

“But you’ve been doing everything the same,” the argued. “We said our relationship could never change our schedule and we have stuck to that completely. You keep the same hours. You train for just as long.”

“I’m not as focused. I don’t train as well.”

“I don’t believe that. Anyway, we’re talking barely any changes in most of the criteria. Your minutes per klick pace has even gone up. Deadlifts are up.”

“Can’t you see? There is nothing wrong with my body. It is the most sensitive tests I am failing. Shooting. Anything requiring concentration. My problem is mental. It is a lack of focus.”

“We will work it out,” she said, looking at him strangely. “Stay the course and we will see this through. I believe in you, Onca. You can do this.”

Onca nodded, looking at the point when his performance started to suffer.

But he knew what he had to do.

The Wheel.

***

Onca dressed for war. Full armor, full weapons loadout but without live rounds. He wouldn’t fire his weapon in the new Wheelhouse, not even the blanks, but he felt it necessary to prepare himself in exactly the same way as when he would board the massive Orb and venture inside the arena.

They had increased the security on the Wheelhouse mechanism. They had enough of the candidates sneaking in at night and trying their hand at the terrible machine.

But Onca had been breaking security networks since he was a child and had kept up the hobby, on and off, ever since. He made short work of the half-hearted security measures and turned off the alarms.

They did not want anyone hurting themselves on the Wheel again. But they also believed that no one would take such a risk again because they trained with the device regularly. They thought there was little need for the health and safety precautions during the off-hours night watch period. No one had anything to prove any more. No one was psychologically damaged enough to take the risk.

But Onca needed to prove to himself that he was still the man he once was.

As before, he disabled the protocols that restricted speed, torque and the life preservation algorithms.

The screens flashed dire warnings at him that he had to tap through, over and over. Confirm, confirm. 3D, bright red, and flashing words leapt up out of the display unit. He stopped them alerting the core systems but knew he would not have long before he was discovered and shut down.

He jammed the door to the Wheelhouse by forcing up the emergency override handle in the wall.

The mechanical Wheel juddered into life, the huge motors making rapid banging sounds loud enough to resonate through the internal walls all the way to the crew quarters in the habitation ring sections. Surely, someone would come to investigate soon. He had to hurry.

There was little chance, in Onca’s opinion, that the alien Orb would allow him to take his assault rifle into the arena so he left it on the control panel and drew his single, large combat knife. Working with the weapons specialist and machinists in the spaceship’s shop, they had found a steel alloy with a material structure that resulted in a blade with just the right flexibility but with incredible hardness and durability.

And Onca had a profound sense that the arena would let him go in with at least one knife. Everything about the set up suggested the Orb builder aliens-whoever and wherever they were-had set up the fight with the Wheelhunter species so that it would be a fair one. Why else would the vast space of the arena be empty? Why else would the Wheelhunter creature in the last mission have come in without projectile weapons or some sort of equivalent?

The strategists and even Megan warned him about making assumptions but what else could they do? Any of them?

Onca unlatched the security gate and stepped inside the combat zone. Underfoot, the crosshatched yellow lines warned him that he was now in danger and to step back if he had entered by mistake.

No shit.

The Wheel, scarred and tired-looking, surged toward him. It had been hacked and battered so often that the legs and arms had picked up a series of loose, mechanical noises as it cartwheeled across the combat zone. It sounded like a case of socket wrenches bouncing down a concrete stairwell. The rolling arms with the three sharp blades on each hand turned with a jittery madness, blurring as they whipped at his face.

He twisted away from the first attack and stabbed up with his new combat knife, scoring the machine’s fingers without even looking. Against the real alien, that blow might have severed the hand. No one knew if the Wheelhunter aliens experienced physical pain but Onca was convinced that no advanced species could develop enough without a profound sense of its own mortality.

The machine Wheel, on the other hand, knew no pain. It did not flinch or shy away from combat knives, no matter how technologically advanced and deadly they were.

It caught him with a bladed finger.

A blade tip, slightly curved like an eagle’s beak, tore a short gash in the shoulder of his suit as he darted by the device and it latched onto the edge of one of the flexiplate inserts.

The inexorable mass of the machine dragged him off balance and staggered him, pulled him back and down.

Disbelief. Confusion as his back hit the hard floor, arms flung out just for a moment and already he was rolling away, blade up in one hand to fend off the follow up swipe.

A massive, mechanical footpad rolled down onto his hand. Crushing it.

Onca did not cry out. He shut down the sense of the pain as the waves of the agony crashed against his awareness.

But the injury distracted him enough and immobilized him enough for the device to spin, turn and hack its other clawed hand into Onca’s head.

Then he screamed.

***

“I know why you did it,” Megan said, standing over his bed in the medical compartment. She was scowling, arms behind her back, looking down her nose at him. Like a General.

He was hooked up to a dozen beeping machines and dosed up to the balls with painkillers and God only knew what else. But he was conscious enough to see that, as well as disapproving, she was pitying him.

Disgusted, with himself and with her, he turned away.

“Obviously.” He spat the word out.

She drew a deep breath. “It will be weeks before you are back to your old self.”

“Months. So the doctor said. But I will do it. And then I will take back my position as the prime candidate.”

“Of course,” she said, smoothly. But he knew what she would be thinking. What they would all be thinking.

He is finished.

“I made a mistake,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You were not concentrating. I reviewed the video. You left it recording on purpose, so that we could see your victory. See how irreplaceable you are. But you weren’t focusing like you normally do. You were too emotional, you were trying it for the wrong reasons.”

“No,” he said, then hesitated. “Also, yes. But I know why I was not focused. And that is the mistake I made.”

She hung her head. “You think it is because of me. Because our relationship has made you soft.”

“It has. You can’t deny that it has. I was right and I should never have listened to you. I opened myself up, to you and to the others. I was convinced by what you said about my true duty. But I should not have made friends, not with you and not with any of them.”

“That is nothing but resistance. That is you evading difficult emotions. True personal growth is difficult, you must push through.”

“Sit down,” he said, nodding at the lightweight chair beside his bed.

She hesitated for a moment then eased herself in, looking back expectantly.

He told the story hesitantly, feeling he owed her the truth but unused to speaking about himself, his past.

“When I was a little boy, they used to try to beat me up. And I never ran away from a fight. The older kids, the ones in the gangs. And no matter how many times I beat them up, they only tried harder. Always, they were a year or three years older than I was. And I used to think, when I get to their age, be as big as them, they will leave me alone. I must not have been very clever. There were always boys a year older than me and they always wanted to fight me. Then when I was a about twelve, this young guy called Carlos came for me. Carlos was the nephew of a big gang guy, and young Carlos wanted to make a name for himself just like the others in his family had done, by smacking down every other kid in the neighborhood in such a brutal way that the reputation he established would last his whole life. And I knew he would come for me. It was all the same to me and I beat him to a pulp. And a couple of his idiot friends who jumped me after.

“I was injured badly. Carlos and his thugs crawled away, cursing my name. Promising revenge. So, I hid. Not out of fear, though I was afraid. I knew that by disappearing they would have to blunder around looking for me, giving me the advantage. I don’t know how I knew this. But I did. Days, it lasted. They went around threatening all the other kids, offering rewards for sightings of me. So I stopped speaking to anyone, avoided my friends and anyone who knew me. They would sell me out, I knew that and I didn’t hold it against them. They were just trying to survive, same as me. Same as everyone. So, I hid in the shadows, watching them from the darkness and from rooftops, waiting for the best opportunities and slinking away when they were too many. And when they broke into pairs or went about one at a time, I would attack.

“I knew they would never stop. If I beat them to a pulp, they would come back at me over and over until they got me. I didn’t want to do it. Maybe I did, I was angry all the time. But I killed them. One by one, leaping from the shadows and cutting their throats or stabbing them in the chest and back. Carlos went crazy, tearing the place up. They went about in one big group by that point, so I had to track them back to where they slept and I took them when they went for a piss or went off with a girl.

“Someone sold me out. Never found out who. But Carlos cornered me in the back of a phone shop, little shack, really, open at the front, you know? And the crowd outside saw when I jumped from up inside the roof, in the shadows of the corner by the rusting rafters, with the cockroaches and spider carcasses. I jumped out, they say I was snarling. All I remember clearly is knowing that everything rested on that moment, on that single attack. On the tip of that knife finding its way into Carlos’ neck.”

Onca grabbed the water bottle they had left for him and drank.

“So,” Megan said. “That’s when you had to run away from home?”

“That was a bit later. After Carlos, people left me alone. And I left them alone. Every now and then, someone would come fight me but everyone who lived nearby was afraid of me. You can’t survive for long in that environment without people to watch your back and stand up for you. In the end, I made enemies of more serious people than lightweight amateur gangsters like Carlos and his goons. Men. Men who would burn down a neighborhood to kill just one kid. And that was when I joined the army. No one else to run to.”

Megan crossed her arms. “I see.”

He closed his eyes, the effort of recounting his past and the opiates overcoming him.

“Do you? Maybe you do. What I’m trying to say is I have been solitary my entire life. Even in the army. In patrols, I was a forward scout. A sniper without a spotter. Being a sergeant was the hardest rank I had because of how close I had to be to the men in my unit, whether my squad or the whole platoon. The other sergeants in the company. When I was commissioned as an officer, it was easier. Everyone expected me to be isolated by that point.”

“Your men loved you,” Megan said. “The ones that didn’t hate you, that is. I’ve seen your entire history. They knew you.”

“They loved my competence. They loved my success. And that’s fine.”

“What about when you were in the Joint South American Rapid Response Force? You made friends there, men that even followed you to Sabre Rubro. Your Mexican friend, Hernandez.”

And I repaid his friendship with infidelity. His daughter, his wife’s daughter, is mine. She will be eight years’ old now. No, I was no friend to him. Every time I try friendship, I ruin it.

But he said none of that.

“He’s dead.”

She reached out and took his hand. “You have been a good friend to me.”

“Exactly,” he pulled his hand back. “And this is where it got me. I know now. It is too late for me to change my ways. My life experience has burned pathways into my brain that are deep and wide. It is too late to reroute them. I need to go back to what I know. Regain my place as the priority candidate. I need to do it immediately, before the monthly reporting gets done.”

Megan hesitated. “Why the urgency?”

Onca started to tell her. About his government’s threats to his daughter’s wellbeing.

He stopped.

“It’s who I am.”

***

Years passed. The Nemesis ploughed on, beyond the orbit of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, spinning and spinning around its axis, twice every minute. The inside of that vessel was all Onca knew. From leaving Earth to arrival at the Orb was almost 15 years. A chain of 178 months, over 5,000 days inside a vast machine that was reactor, engines, fuel, cargo and the similar, limited volume of living and working space as a small hotel.

His life on Earth became a distant memory and only the cycle of training, eating and sleeping was real. Waking early, pounding the treadmill with weights on his back, helping to push him harder toward the ship’s outer hull under foot. Fueling himself with carbohydrates at breakfast, one to two thousand calories. Morning training session with knives, firearms or unarmed. Training both unarmored and armored, using powered servomotor armor as well as rigid and flexible body armor combinations. Midday meal of carbohydrates and high protein, two thousand calories. Afternoon physical training, weight training and cardio. Training for strength or muscle mass or endurance. Aerobic and anaerobic. Low intensity, high intensity, interval training. Evening meal high protein with fresh salad greens from the ship’s gardens. Regular medical evaluations, injections, treatments. Evening strategic training session and VR combat. Early to sleep. And the cycle began again.

Every day the same and yet every day different. Endless variables to consider and trial, from training regime to strategies, reviewing and refining techniques for months and years only to throw them all out again when a better approach was discovered, trialed and tested and employed. Onca sustained injuries, to his hands and his knees. A back injury proved beyond the ability of the ship’s elite medical team for months before an experimental treatment finally proved effective. The intensity of the training, the high radiation environment of space and his body’s ageing threatened to defeat him before the ship arrived at the Orb.

Around him, the candidates and crew lived entire lives. Romances kindled, flamed and died away around him like roman candles until everyone had history with everyone else. Years of jealousies and petty rivalries creating an entangled web that Onca found utterly impenetrable.

Until finally, they were there.

“Hard to believe that thing is four thousand meters in diameter,” General Richter said, staring at the image on the screen. “Four kilometers. It’s just a blacker circle on a black background.”

Onca grunted. “Because there’s nothing to show scale.”

“There’s the Wheelhunter ship,” she said, nodding at the screen as she brought the new images up. It replayed the flash and the time-lapse of the vast alien vessel maneuvering itself into orbit. It was a ship twice as large as the Nemesis but still dwarfed by the impossible vastness of the Orb. Both ships orbited the alien structure at the same distance but on opposite sides so they were visible to each other only by the tiny probes both sent out into orbits of all kinds. The UNOP commanders hesitated to make any move to intercept the enemy’s probes or make any sudden moves that might be taken as an act of aggression by either the Wheelhunter ship or the Orb itself.

The Nemesis was in a constant state of readiness, with everyone on edge and half-expecting a call to battle stations at any moment.

Onca did his utmost to tune it all out. He removed himself emotionally from those tensions, pulled back inside and disengaged from their fear and their excitement.

It took an iron will. Even the most Zen-like of his fellow candidates seemed infected by the stress.

Onca could not allow himself to feel anything that might negatively impact his carefully honed peak in performance. Still, every time in the previous two days he saw an image of the Wheelhunter vessel, he had one thought.

My opponent is on that ship.

And with that thought, one other came unbidden and inevitable.

One of us will die.

“I wonder if humans will ever construct something of this size,” General Richter said, filling the silence as she always did. “If we will live out here on the edge of the system.”

“Why bother?” Onca said. “There’s nothing out here.”

“You really don’t contemplate this stuff at all, do you?” He heard the wry smile in her voice. “We could take apart objects in the Kuiper Belt, build a series of huge space stations from the mass and have a vast human population thriving out here, ringing our system. They could even launch off from here out into interstellar space. Maybe move them out, push the habitats away from the Sun and string stations between here and the closest star systems so we have stepping stones, way stations to the next stars. Or they could be moved into the inner solar system and add enormous amounts of living space closer in.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” Onca said. “And not something I need to be concerned with.”

She nodded, waved the screen off and turned away. “I’m getting romantic in my old age, ignore my rambling. Carry on, Sergeant.”

The weapon’s specialist nodded to the General then handed over the MPR-18 Combat Rifle to Onca.

“It’s finally there, sir,” the Sergeant said. “The recoil adjustment is seamless. No matter the sequence in the magazine, you’ll get no variation, none at all. Try it.”

Onca removed the magazine and checked the color-coded rounds where they showed through the frame.

As no one knew how the alien creature’s skin would stand up to bullets, they were hedging their bets with the firearms and his primary weapon would have a mixed loadout. That mix would include hollow point, saboted tungsten penetrators for armor piercing, fragmentary explosive, highly corrosive superacid, and blade-like flechette rounds. For years, they had gone back and forth on whether to favor killing power over accuracy. An issue was that the most effective mass for each form of projectile was different, which meant differing mass of propellant and therefore different levels of recoil. The energy needed to drive a heavy metal round at the highest possible velocity into the target was vastly greater than required for the hollow points to be effective. Alternating the round types decreased the overall accuracy of the weapon but committing to just one kind of cartridge risked choosing something the alien was resistant to.

The intelligent recoil adjustment system that the engineers had devised was able to read each round and adjust the kickback felt by the user so that it was precisely the same at every shot, whether fired in bursts or on full automatic.

So they said.

The ship’s firing range usually hosted weapons firing blanks combined with integrated accuracy testing but they also had a live fire box. A long, steel plated cuboid filled with packed shreds of rubber and God only knew what else that absorbed the rounds before they could ever threaten a hull breach. The explosive and acid cartridges had inert substances in the place of active ones, matching their mass and physical properties exactly.

Onca was in full armor so he flicked on his ear protection system and fired the whole magazine into the box. The weapon purred in his hands, tearing through the entire mag as smoothly as silk.

He changed mags three times.

“It’s perfect,” Onca said.

The sergeant positively glowed. “We’ve worked very hard to make it so.”

“What’s the mechanical failure rate now?”

The sergeant’s grin fell from his face. “The cartridges will not fail. Our quality assessment in the manufacturing—”

“I didn’t ask about the cartridges. It’s the feeding I’m worried about. It’s the cycling.”

“There is one jam for every three hundred rounds fired.”

Onca nodded and placed the MPR-18 back on the table. “Nowhere near good enough. I’ll stick with the all-FMJ mag, unless you can improve that rate by at least one-hundred percent. At least.”

General Richter stirred herself from her revere. “But there’s no time to make improvements,” she said. “You’re fighting tomorrow.”

“Alright,” Onca said. “I’ll take one magazine of each round type other than the FMJ, and I will take two of those. Can’t go wrong with slugs.”

No one bothered to correct him or point out that it was only an assumption. They didn’t need to.

“Want to examine the sidearm, sir? You’re still going with my WL-12?”

“Of course.”

General Richter cleared her throat. He knew what was coming and responded before she could say it.

“Yes, I said what I meant. I want the stopping power of the twelve millimeter, even if it means taking forty percent fewer rounds in each magazine. If I’m using the weapon at all then it’s because the primary was ineffective or it malfunctioned. I’ll need the power, not the rate of fire.”

“But if the Orb doesn’t let you through with the MPR-18, for some reason, then your sidearm will need to fulfill the tactical role of the primary weapon so why not—”

“Megan.”

That stopped her in her tracks.

“Onca?” she said, a wry smile on her face. How many times had he seen her look at him like that over the years? It made his heart ache. But he stamped those feelings down, squashed them underfoot and moved on.

“It’s too late to have this discussion. I know my loadout. I know my combat knife, I know my armor. Everything has been settled for months, bar the MPR recoil system and, I’m sorry Sergeant, but this innovation has come too late. No, it’s decided. It’s decided. My equipment is ready. I’m ready. I want all my gear checked and triple checked, from now until the combat begins and with backups for every component ready to hand.”

“The whole ship is focused on exactly that,” Richter said.

“I know. Good. What about the shuttle?”

“If there were any problems, we would know about it. Let the crew do their job. They’ll get us down to the Orb in time, Onca.”

“Fine. I’ll be in my quarters until it’s time to board.” He nodded to the firing range crew, the Sergeant and the other armorers and let himself out into the corridor, pulling the door shut.

Before he had taken four steps, she threw open the heavy door and marched after him.

“What the hell was that?” she asked, falling into step beside him. “Was that it?”

He glanced down at her. “I wanted you to meet me in my quarters but I didn’t want to invite you in front of the others.”

“The others? What do you care what anyone thinks?”

“I don’t but you have to command them all the way back to Earth. Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

She grabbed his shoulder and yanked him to a stop, pulling him round to face her in the corridor. “You’re an idiot, do you know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t you think that by now everyone on this fucking ship knows everything about us? Do you think I care what they think? Why the fuck are you smiling?”

“No reason, General.”

“Stop being a dick. Listen, I’ve had the mess prepare something special. The officer’s chef has been researching it for months, practicing in secret. You’ll love it.”

The elaborate meal was already there when they arrived in Megan’s quarters. The tiny dining table had been transformed into what appeared to be the settings for a romantic restaurant, complete with tiny vase of plastic flowers and an electronic light in the shape of a candle.

“For Christ’s sake,” Megan said as they walked in. “I told them not to go overboard with this shit. I’m sorry, I’ll clean it away.”

“Last meal for the condemned man?” Onca asked, half-heartedly aiming for levity but failing miserably. He knew he should avoid humor. He was no good at it. “Not that I’m ungrateful.”

Her eyes hardened. “It’s more like one last carbo-load for the morning. And yes, you are being ungrateful. Just be quiet and eat your dinner.”

Onca sat down to it and tucked in.

The chef had made a selection of pastels, deep fried savory pastries that could be heaven on Earth from the right street vendor but replicating the fresh, crispy pies on a spaceship had proven a step too far for humanity. They had been served as a first course, which was odd. The main meal was a feijoada, a bean stew, with a vast mound of rice.

“And coxinha,” Onca said, breaking apart his deep fried, shredded chicken meat parcel, molded into a teardrop shape supposed to replicate a chicken leg. He grimaced as he ate. “Interesting texture. And flavor.”

Megan smiled. “They had to use textured soy protein, obviously. But it’s indistinguishable, isn’t it.”

“Mmm,” Onca said. Every dish was the worst version he’d ever had. He shoveled it all down his neck and told her he loved it. And it was true that he loved what she had done for him, even if the chef deserved to be court-martialed for crimes against Brazilian culture.

What he wanted to ask Megan was whether she was trying to get him to think of Brazil so that he would fight harder in the alien’s arena the next day. But he did not want to fight with her. He wanted their meal together to be a civil one. It was their first in a long time, years perhaps, and it might be their last ever.

“Do you want to talk about tomorrow?” she asked him after they finished eating.

No. I need to stay focused. I shouldn’t even have come here. You are a distraction, a dangerous one.

“What’s left to say about it?” As he spoke, he realized he sounded angry or contemptuous so he reached out a hand and placed it over hers where she gripped the stem of her wine glass. “I’m not trying to be unkind.”

She had that smile on again. “I know. Talked it to death. I just feel like we’ve been here supporting you all this time and then you’ll be going in there by yourself. I wish I could be in there with you, that’s all.”

“You will be.” He squeezed her hand a final time and let it go.

***

Just as in the previous human mission to the Orb, thirty years before, the alien space station beamed instructions at their ship right on time.

COME, it said.

Well, alright.

The shuttle was little more than a beefed-up reentry capsule with a lander like they used for Mars missions and everyone in the boarding party was crammed inside and strapped into their seats with geometrical efficiency. It puffed its way out through the shuttle bay doors with steady slowness and the thrusters slowed its orbit so the Nemesis shot on ahead. The shuttle descended toward the Orb’s vast, obsidian surface.

The passenger section of the shuttle held the boarding crew that would be joining him on the Orb. All twelve of the candidates in combat gear and a range of weapons, should anything happen to Onca or if for some reason the Orb decided to deny him entry to the arena. Some other crew members, each with their own tasks supporting the mission with science experiments, mapping and scanning exercises, even sat hunched with equipment clutched on their lap. The cargo sections were filled to bursting with gear required for these various tasks. Not least of all, the medical machines that would hopefully save Onca’s life, should he be badly injured during the combat.

Hardly anyone spoke.

While the thrusters sounded in fits and starts throughout the descent into the Orb structure itself, the craft’s engines roared to life right before the shuttle capsule banged into a landing inside the huge space.

“This is your pilot speaking. Landing confirmed. Welcome to the Orb.”

Almost immediately, many crew relaxed and began whispering excitedly to each other, unstrapping themselves.

Onca held himself in a state of calm tension, not allowing his anxiety to rise beyond a certain threshold but not fighting it down so much that it would relax him overly much either.

The inside of the Orb hangar outside the shuttle was a featureless black cube. Their powerful beams searched around the huge space and yet the walls, ceiling and floor surfaces themselves emitted their own soft glow. The huge bay was a hundred meters on all sides with a fifty-meter opening on the wall opposite the outer door.

Onca glanced at the screen as the massive outer Orb hull doors slid shut with barely a vibration felt through the craft. Vast quantities of breathable and warm atmospheric gases rushed into the vacuum around the outer hull of the shuttle, causing the alloys and ceramics to ping like a symphony until the temperature equalized.

They disembarked, most crew focused on unpacking their work just as they had practiced so often. Yet, even the most professionally-minded of them took a few moments or more to look about them, somewhat slack jawed. Their shuttle craft sat in the center of the huge cuboid, the ceiling around 300 feet above.

After the on-site gaseous and biological analysis confirmed the presence of the sterile breathable atmosphere that previous missions had found, no one wore space suits or breathing apparatus.

When everything was ready, the boarding crew marched to the fifty-meter portal in the wall opposite the now-closed outer hull doors. The corridor was a klick-long straight line through the center of the Orb toward the central arena. They went in relative silence but for the echoing sounds of the equipment trolleys, whining servo suit motors and the tramping of boots on the hard, black surface. Everyone knew where their place was.

Onca kept his emotional state as steady as was possible. His fellow candidates surrounded him, as if they were an honor guard, protecting him from the Orb as if the aliens that had built the thing were about to leap from the walls and attack.

Perhaps they were. It was an affront that they would put humanity in such a position in the first place. Forcing an entire planet to choose a representative and fight another. Bringing one species from some other star system on the other side of the galaxy, or wherever the Wheelhunters were from.

The presumptuousness of it was offensive.

Ignore it.

It was not relevant. That was for other people to think about.

Onca had one job. The only job he’d ever been good at. The job that he had dedicated his life to and had learned to excel at more than any other man or woman he’d ever known.

Kill the enemy.

***

In the Orb staging chamber, Onca waited while the other candidates and the rest of boarding team finished their preparations and set up their experiments. These were a range of sensors like seismographs, scanning the interior by banging on the hard floor and walls of the space, attempting to get a picture of the rest of the structure of the Orb using what Onca assumed was ultrasound and the like. From their demeanor, he assumed that they were having little luck.

The staging chamber itself was another vast, hundred-meter a side cube of a room with the large opening in the center of one side. Another inhuman space, the sheer scale oppressive and unfamiliar. On one wall was the huge square section they called the forcefield or the smokescreen, a fifty-meter square, semitransparent barrier between the staging room and the vast arena beyond that Onca had imagined himself fighting in, over the long years.

The swirling, gray-white screen appeared illuminated by its own power. As if it was radioactive. It was the same with the rest of the surfaces inside the Orb. The ambient light, such as it was, glowed almost imperceptibly from the very walls and floors and ceilings so that every person in the chamber was cast in a dull light that cast no hard shadow. It reminded Onca powerfully of the momentary dusk in the rain forest, those few moments when the chlorophyll green darkness of day became the gray-green dusk, pregnant with the utter darkness of a jungle night before it plunged headlong into it. The feeling was so powerful that he swore he heard the cacophony of screeching, clicking and whistling of the creatures of that Amazonian dusk echoing through the huge room around him and he even caught the whiff of sodden earth.

The pang of homesickness, so successfully stamped down for so many years, threated to overwhelm him. He clamped his eyes shut, took out his enormous combat knife and gently ran the tip along one cheek, deep enough to just about draw blood. He had not yet strapped his face-piece over his helmet and so it was the only part of him not covered in heavy plate or armored fabric.

The distraction brought him out of his revere.

“The hell are you doing?” Richter said, concern and fear in her voice and on her face.

“Proving to myself that I am here,” he said.

She hesitated then nodded. “Alright.”

The General waved over the doctor, who swiped the line of blood from his face.

“Merely a scratch,” the doctor said to General Richter. “The bleeding stopped already.”

Richter waved the doctor away.

“You alright, soldier?” she asked Onca.

“I never suffered from an overactive imagination,” Onca said. “But I was just struck by the madness of all this. And of the thought of home.”

Just as a dying man might do, in his final moments.

“Well,” she said, “don’t start using your brain now, Onca. Don’t break the habit of a lifetime.”

He smiled, dutifully, and felt another pang at what he had given up in order to be where he was. It was too late to change anything and that, perhaps, was why he was feeling so absurdly emotional.

Focus, Onca, you goddamned moron.

“I never told you why they threw me out the army, did I?” he said to her.

She looked alarmed, as well she might. “It’s alright. I believe I worked it out anyway. Now’s not the time.”

“Got to do something while we wait for this damned Orb to give us the go,” Onca said. “Anyway, not sure I’ll get another chance to talk to you, Megan.”

Her eyes were full of something. “Don’t go all gooey on me now, Onca.”

She’s right, you made your choice.

“I’m just talking, is all,” he said, shrugging his armored shoulders. “It’s not even an interesting story. They ordered me to clear out a village in the far west of Brazil, up in the hills. The idiots were harboring escaped Artificial Persons. Dozens of them. We found them hiding in pits and basements dug all over the area and they seemed surprised by how easily we got them. The man who ran the place did not beg me or anything like that, even when I had him on his knees. All of them, lined up side by side. The humans in one line and the AP fugitives in another. The village big man just said, I feel sorry for you. Peered up at me with pity in his eyes, pity for me and my men. There were kids there, too. I was rattled. Shouldn’t have let that moron get to me but he did.

“I radioed for confirmation of my orders, which was a stupid thing to do. They confirmed I was to execute everyone, human and AP and torch the bodies. I argued, thinking I was important, that I held sway with command but they didn’t budge. Instead of following orders, I took them all into custody, called in transportation and bussed them out of there. Humans and APs. They were so grateful, it was pathetic. They called me a hero and their savior, no matter how much I told them to shut up. It made me sick. Obviously, I changed nothing. There was some sort of rushed trial, just for show and then they were all killed anyway. The village kids were sent away, orphaned, destitute and destined for a life of shit. And then the army asked me to leave before I was court martialed and sentenced to something serious.”

“You did a good thing,” Megan said, unsurprised by the story. She was good at uncovering hidden truths. “You stood up for your beliefs.”

“No. I took the cowards’ path. I let other people do the killing for me and I changed nothing and got myself thrown out the only real home I’d ever had. But it’s alright. It was a long time ago. Such a long time. It doesn’t matter.”

Megan was growing annoyed. “Those kids are alive because of you. Just like all the hostages you saved over the years. Do you know how many? I added them up. It was over six hundred. Six hundred people that are alive now because you saved them. All those families. Stop acting so morbid, Onca, you’re making me concerned. Look. You did good. You’re a good man. You had a great career. And now you’re going to be the hero of all Earth. Imagine that.”

“This will be classified for a long time.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But you’ll be in the history books eventually. This will unlock the galaxy for us. But don’t think about that, focus on the moment.”

He mentally shook himself, looking round. No one was paying him and Megan much attention but if they heard his ramblings, no doubt they would be worried, too.

“I’m sorry. I’m fine. Just feeling nostalgic, I think. Sometimes people get this way before an operation.”

“You’re superb at controlling your emotions,” she said. “I doubted that anyone could have the discipline to exert that kind of self-control for that long. But you were right. You are better, clearer. More effective when you’re focused so completely on your objective to the exclusion of everything else. Honestly. But I think you’re just picking up on the enormity of this whole thing. Your focus has helped to screen you from it, in many ways. But it’s alright, you can forget all this, forget everything. You’ve defeated the mechanical wheel a hundred times with nothing more than a knife so you can do this. You know it. The crew knows it. Our superiors back on Earth expect you will win in style. Every other candidate here knows it better than anyone.”

Onca nodded. “We’ll see.” He reached out an armored hand and placed it on her shoulder, giving her a tiny squeeze. “Megan. Thank you.”

He knew he should probably tell her that she was the best friend he ever had or something. Tell her that if he would ever have wanted a wife then it would have certainly been her. But she surely knew he felt that way, and if she didn’t feel the same it would be pointless to say so. And he was already dangerously unfocused and emotional. He had to allow himself to become ice cold again. Let the blue mist fall.

She put a finger to her ear and tilted her head, listening to communication from the ship.

“Almost time,” she said. “Wheelhunter shuttle has entered the Orb on the far side.”

Onca nodded and stepped toward the enormous forcefield.

He was dressed in full combat gear. He strapped the face piece and gorget across his face and neck, fastening it to his helmet and visor. The armorers checked his body armor over, yanking on straps and tightening the plates. Another handed him his sidearm which he inspected and holstered high on his waist. He did the same to his huge combat knife, sliding it up into an inverted chest holster. He checked the magazines, pushed them into the webbing over his belly and kidneys where he could grab them swiftly. Finally, he inspected the assault rifle that would shred the alien to pieces.

The armorers and quartermasters, as well as the other members of the boarding crew around him were tense. Most of the other candidates had seen action but for all of them, it was a unique situation. No doubt, many were thinking of Ambassador Diaz’s disastrous Mission One and how that man had met his end.

Onca, though, was not concerned. He held himself in a state of highly tuned readiness.

All around him, the relevant support crew gave him and each other the “thumbs up”, confirmed verbally in sequence.

“AugHud, Comms, Helmet and Visor, all go.”

“Armor set, go.”

“Ammunition, go.”

“Sidearm, go.”

“Combat knife, go.”

“Assault rifle, go.”

“All set, Alpha Candidate cleared for combat.”

As the crew finished their checks, they stepped away, keeping their eyes on him. Onca moved slowly forward, getting closer to the forcefield, ready for when the Orb called to him.

Unexpectedly, someone started clapping.

The applause was contagious and Onca advanced through the staging room as every crew member and candidate paused in what they were doing and turned to honor him. The military personnel threw out salutes and a couple of brave souls clapped him on his armored back. But mostly, they stood still and applauded.

He managed to keep his composure and felt almost like saying something. But what could he say? Something about it being an honor to serve with them would be appropriate.

The Orb sounded a crystal ping inside the staging area, reverberating as if the sound came from everywhere at once, like the light.

It was expected and yet everyone froze.

Silence.

Onca’s heart rate increased and he took a long, slow breath to calm himself.

Without a word, Onca stepped up to the swirling smokescreen, expecting the chime to sound again, as it had done in the previous mission.

The Orb played a low, discordant tone. It thrummed through the walls and the floor under his boots like a digitized, broken air horn. The crew around him flinched, and immediately began arguing about what it meant.

It was clear to Onca.

It was just as they had feared.

Megan was there, at his shoulder.

“Seems I’m over dressed, General,” he said. “What should we try first?”

“Keep to the sequence we practiced,” she said, her face taut and her eyes hard as steel.

Onca turned, handed his rifle to the waiting armorer and stepped back up to the swirling sheet of semitransparent plasma.

It sounded again, a sound as off-key as fingernails scraping ceramics but felt deep in the guts.

With the others’ help, Onca removed his visor, gorget and helmet and stepped back to the screen.

It did not part and the discordant tone sounded.

The support crew were agitated but Onca simply began stripping off his armor and the men near him jumped in to help, taking off the large, throat-protecting gorget piece from around his neck, and leg sections.

Still, the screen would not part.

They took off his chest and back plates, leaving the woven Kevlar and Moztek underlayer.

Even that was not enough for the Orb.

The piece he wanted most was the helmet but even that was too much for the Orb and Onca allowed it to be removed with the greatest reluctance.

Not until he was stripped to his thin underclothes and his boots with no weapons did the chime sound.

The swirling, smoky grey forcefield blinked away, showing the vast space beyond.

“Wait,” Megan said. “You can’t go in like that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“So. No armor,” Megan said, nodding. “Okay, we know that now. Fine. Give him back his weapons.”

The weapons specialist stepped up and handed Onca back his assault rifle. The discordant note sounded and the plasma smokescreen whipped shut faster than the eye could see.

Even when the rifle was swapped for his sidearm, the Orb sounded the negative tone once again and the screen stayed where it was.

Onca handed the sidearm back, received his combat knife and stepped up to the screen again.

The discordant note sound.

He handed his blade over so that he stood there once more in no more than his thin, stretchy underclothes and heavy black military boots.

The Orb chimed again, whipping the screen aside.

“Ah,” Onca said. “It wants me unarmed and unarmored. Of course.”

The crew and candidates stared at him, horrified.

All he felt was a growing numbness.

“No,” Megan said, “you can’t go in like this.”

Onca nodded. “It will likely be quite one-sided.”

“You don’t have to go out there,” Megan said, eyebrows knitted together. “We could forfeit. Accept the loss. Walk away.”

“We don’t know what the implications are,” Onca said, shaking his head. “We don’t know what the Orb would do if we didn’t even try to fight. Perhaps the builders of this thing would destroy the Earth in retaliation.”

“They’ve given no indication of that. But I get your point,” Megan said, her face rigid with tension, eyes flicking everywhere as if looking for a way out. “Perhaps someone else might decide to go in your place?”

Onca almost smiled. The candidates tensed behind him.

Sandra stepped forward, as did Hiroko and Omar and Hunter. All of them willing to take his place and face certain death to save him. The fact that they would do such a thing, without hesitation, was the thing that threatened to overwhelm him. Comrades after all. He waved them back and all he could manage was a brief nod to them, with a lump in his throat, to acknowledge their great generosity and the honor he felt.

“I would not accept anyone taking my place. I fought to get here. It falls to me alone. Anyway, I should have died years ago, in that Abora Biopharma complex. I did die there. All this since, everything I did, all I learned. Everyone I cared for. This has all been borrowed time. Now I must repay my debt.”

Her eyes were hard. She nodded.

“I’d better hurry,” he said, feeling close to naked without his armor, without his weapons.

He stepped up.

“Is there anything you want to say, Onca?” Megan called out.

Onca looked over his shoulder and shook his head.

What’s the point?

She called out again, her voice urging him to listen. “Anything we can tell them? This will be declassified one day.”

Onca sighed and was going to ignore her but he stopped. No, it did not matter what anyone thought of him or what they wrote about him in the histories, if they ever did. It made no difference to Onca, who would be dead soon, he knew.

But he thought of his daughter. Lena. The girl, a woman grown now, back in Brazil, who would one day discover that he was her father. All Lena needed to do was to get her genome sequenced and tested and compared to a member of her father’s family.

What could he say that would explain why he had abandoned her so thoroughly? How would it be possible to say what drove him across the solar system and why he committed to a fight when he knew for certain that he could not win it.

Ultimately, perhaps, it was simple. He turned and spoke in his mother tongue.

“Tell them I did my duty.”

He marched right into the arena. The impenetrable screen closed behind him in an instant.

The 400-meter width of the arena was surely the largest internal space any human had ever been in. The top of the dome above was higher even than the Mirante do Vale, the giant slab of a skyscraper back in Sao Paulo. And the arena floor was twice as wide as the space was high.

On that distant point opposite, he saw it. Movement in dirty yellow.

The alien.

It grew as it rolled toward him, just as he himself advanced to the center. The alien rolled over and over, cartwheeling steadily, relentlessly.

Like a monster from legend, there was no doubt about it. A horrifically inhuman creature with no eyes, no ears, no mouth. A beast with no mercy, no compassion, no reason that could be detected. Now that he wore no gear at all and considering the slightly reduced gravity, Onca could run the entire width of the arena floor in under a minute, though he would be depleted after.

But why rush? The alien was coming for him, as sure as the certainty of death.

The air stank of sulfur. A foul stink filling his nose and choking the back of his throat that only served to deepen his revulsion.

Estimated at a weight of at least half a ton, it rolled onward, cartwheeling over and over, the endless chain of footpads drumming slowly on the floor, over and over. The knobbled, long arms with their three-fingered, clawed hands rolled and twisted while they flexed, as if it was imagining tearing the puny human apart.

How could he harm a monster such as this? Without so much as a bladed weapon, what in the hell could he possibly do, other than try to die like a man?

If he could target the joints where they met the central hub, perhaps it would be vulnerable. Failing that, he could try to break one of the long bones, the upper section of the arm had the narrowest diameter. If he could pin what counted as its elbow to the floor he might be able to stamp the center of it into snapping, both his feet at once, perhaps. A minor injury by itself would not do much harm but if he could slow the thing down, even by a little, he could cause another injury and then another, crippling it. Whittle away at the monster until it was disabled enough for him to work it over.

When the gap between them closed to around thirty meters, the Wheelhunter lurched into a crazed, spinning acceleration. It covered the distance in under three seconds.

Without time to think and the Wheelhunter towering over him, Onca feinted to the right then leaped to the left, rolling smoothly over his shoulder and jumping up into a fighting stance and moving in to attack.

The alien tilted slightly away from him, deceived by the feint. It recovered instantly, swerved toward the human and lashed out with its wicked, long arms.

One of those arms, two meters in length and ball-joints at every junction, whipped out at him, the three claws on the end of the three fingers flashing across faster than the machine had ever moved. Even when they had programmed it to faster speeds than had been observed in the previous mission, the machine had not moved so quickly. It delivered that force across Onca’s chest, neck and the top of his head, almost instantaneously.

The force tossed Onca sideways in a tumble. It felt like being hit by the wheel machine, the time it almost killed him, only worse. Much worse.

Along with the terror, the pain and anguish, he knew he was dead.

As his body tumbled, the top of his skull spun away. His destroyed throat sprayed his bright blood in a mist of pink through the air, though he clutched uselessly at it. He crashed uncontrollably into the floor and slid along it some way, rolling and sliding on the blood that gushed out of him, leaving a red stain on the black surface.

Onca was not done.

I will not die on my knees.

He struggled to his elbows and knees, blood welling from his chest, neck and head and spattering onto the floor beneath him. The stink of blood engulfed him.

“This is not the end,” Onca muttered, holding his throat as he struggled to his feet, blood flowing hot over his fingers. “My brothers and sisters. Of Earth. Will return. Will finish you.”

The great monster cartwheeled back and whipped its arm down.

His last thought was one of pride.

He had done his duty.

EPILOGUE

In her office in the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Megan looked out over the East River and across to the boroughs that made up the western end of Long Island. It was windy and fine rain fell in sheets of gray water gusting over the river like smoke.

Her days were spent in the building but it was during her early morning runs when she saw the big, glass oblong of the structure from along the river that she thought of Onca. It was a tenuous enough link, she supposed, the fact that the architect of the UN HQ building was the same Brazilian man that had designed the planned city of Brasilia back in the mid-twentieth century.

Brasilia was where Onca’s funeral had been. It was where a discrete, anonymous monument was erected to honor the man’s sacrifice.

“One day,” she had promised him as they lowered an empty coffin into the grave. “One day, we will make it mean something. One day, people will know of your sacrifice.”

It had been December, the height of Brasilia’s rainy season, and the rain had soaked her uniform so thoroughly that it was as if she stood under a lukewarm shower in her somber clothes. The raindrops fell large and heavy, each one splashing like a shell casing into the neat grass of the military cemetery.

December rain in New York was a different matter. On her morning run that day, it had fallen thin and bitter, stinging her face with a million icy needles.

Had the man behind her known it was the anniversary of Onca’s funeral? Had he known that her thoughts would be running that way, that dropping Onca’s name would be most effective on this day more than any other?

Of course he had.

“Well,” she said, without turning around, “you somehow managed to worm your way all the way up to this floor and all the way into my office. You’d better get on with telling me why.”

“Yes, thank you, General Richter, I will do so,” the young man said, his Chinese accent quite strong. “I have a recommendation for the future of UNOP. For the next mission to Orb Station Zero.”

She turned about and looked at the slight man sitting with his knees together in front of her desk. He looked like a little boy trying to be good for his teacher. Or his mother.

More like grandmother, old girl.

“How old are you?” she asked.

If he was offended by her question, he did not show it.

“I am nineteen years’ old.”

She laughed. “You look younger. But I am amazed that you have a position in the biology department at such a young age. Did you say you were a doctor?”

He shrugged, as if none of this was of the slightest importance. “I was a child prodigy. I had an early start. I have almost received my doctorate, yes.”

“Alright, fine. So, what can I do for you, Mister Fo?”

A thin smile appeared on his lips. “I have a few ideas about what we need for the next mission. I have sent many messages to my superiors and yet they do not trust in my opinions.”

“And why on Earth would you come to me?”

“I thought that you would listen.”

She pursed her lips and eased herself into her chair. Unfortunately, no matter how much she ran, she was gradually growing fat in her old age, despite the gerontological treatments that UNOP pumped into her every month.

“Do not let my job title and this rather fine office up here fool you into thinking that I have any authority to make your ideas happen, even if I liked them. Since the failure of the last mission, ever since I returned to Earth, I am afraid I have fallen out of favor as far as UNOP is concerned.”

I’m like a mascot. Meet the General who has been on the Orb. Come, shake her hand and move on. Do not let her failure infect you.

“I understand your current worth to UNOP,” young Fo said. “And I understand your history with the second mission. All of this is why I fought to see you, specifically.”

“What do you mean?”

“Speaking frankly, no one else in the project was willing to see me. No one high up enough.”

“I am no longer one who is high up.”

He spread his hands and leaned back in his chair. “But you have access to those who are. And, again I hope you do not take this poorly, but you are someone who I suspect is willing to listen to an out of the box concept.”

“Someone desperate.”

He had the good grace not to respond.

“Alright,” she said, sitting back. “Tell me.”

“Raphael Santos, the man known as Onca, was the greatest physical specimen we could find, with the greatest training and the greatest performance of anyone on Earth.”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me something I don’t know.”

“His genetic potential is truly remarkable but he simply lacked the mass to compete with the size of the alien.”

“I’m still waiting.”

The young man named Fo sat up straighter, like a pencil rammed quivering into an apple. “I have developed a gene editing method to take the best pieces of Onca and turn them into a range of cloned soldiers.”

“You’re in the clone project already. You’re suggesting using a clone of Onca? But why would clones of him do any better with the next mission to the Orb? He already failed once.”

“Ah, yes, but I am not talking about making copies. His genes are quite marvelous. The man was from Brazil, his genetic diversity is astonishing. DNA of West African, Native Amerindian, Portuguese, Northern European origins, primarily. Even Chinese, I am delighted to say.” He hesitated. “The magnificent Major had no known family. Testing of Brazilian citizens has discovered no close relatives. But I wonder if you know of anyone related to the man? A child, perhaps.”

How did you find out about her? A prodigy, indeed.

Megan hesitated before making a decision. “He had a child. A daughter. She is a police officer. Highly decorated, in fact, and someone I had considered recruiting to UNOP. Perhaps you were aware of the fact, young man?”

“Might I suggest you follow through on that intention, General? It might prove rather useful in my work.”

“You still haven’t told me what you are proposing, Mr. Fo.”

“What I shall do is design varieties of APs with the specific traits that I desire. As well as that, I shall grow these specimens to be gigantic men and women. Over two meters tall, certainly and with muscle mass and aggression enough to take on a Wheelhunter, unarmed, unarmored, and win.”

“You want to put Artificial Persons in the Orb Arena?” Megan said, shaking her head. “Your predecessors experimented with that. APs will never be capable of the necessary mental performance. They’re too slow, too hesitant. They have no creativity. And that’s fundamental to their design, there’s no way around the ”

He did not blink. “I have an answer for that. A way of achieving what is required. It would be a massive program and it would cost a fortune.”

“Ah,” she said. “I see. And how much would this venture of yours set UNOP back?”

His smile was so wide that it distorted his narrow face. “At least five billion in the first year, by my calculations. And the costs would soar from there.”

She laughed. “It’s no wonder your superiors rebuffed you. I’m surprised they didn’t throw you out of UNOP just for suggesting it.”

Fo leaned his skinny body forward, gesturing with his long, pale fingers. He had an absurd grin on his face. “There’s more to it than that, General Richter. Much more. And if we do it my way, we will undoubtedly be victorious in the next mission.” He shrugged, the grin widening. “Or the one after. What is thirty years, or sixty, for that matter, when the survival of the human race is at stake? But when it is successful, it will be you that they have to thank for it.” The young man’s smile faded into seriousness. “More importantly, it will establish the genetic legacy of the great Major Onca for all time.”

“Alright,” Megan said, sighing. “I’m listening.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

That was the second of the two prequels in the series. The main story begins in Orb Station Zero Book 1 in the Galactic Arena Series.

Grab it right now on Amazon:

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

Orb Station Zero is the story of Rama Seti and the fourth mission to the Orb, which takes place over one hundred years after the events of Inhuman Contact.

The Galactic Arena Series as a whole features tons of action, space battles, and infantry combat. Multiple alien civilizations fight for dominance of the galaxy through the processes imposed by the mysterious Orb Builders. Humanity can only hope to compete by utilizing genetic manipulation, advanced weapons tech and the men and women of Earth and her colonies with the greatest gifts for violence.

***

If you enjoyed Onca’s Duty, please leave a review! Even a couple of lines would help me enormously by making this book more visible to new readers.

I hope you enjoy the rest of this series.

TIMELINE

2039

First Orb signal received

2046

Hanno probe launched

2055

Hanno probe triggers Orb communications

2056

United Nations Orb Project (UNOP) Founded

2057

Construction of UNOPS Ascension begins

2060

Mission Zero launched

2061

Great Engine Burn

2063 - 2075

The Big Sleep Phase

2063

Mission Zero accident – contact lost

2079

Mission Zero arrives at Destination

2079

Hanno Probe comms system salvaged

2079

Orb boarded. Message received.

2085

Mission One - Ambassador selection

2090

Mission One launched

2095

Mission Zero returns to Earth

2096

Max’s files anonymously leaked online

ORB STATION ZERO EXCERPT

Please enjoy the following excerpt from Orb Station Zero (Galactic Arena Book 1)

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UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

CHAPTER ONE – RAMA SETI’S HEAD

The first time the UNOP operatives cut off Rama Seti’s head, it was for a good cause. Perhaps, the most important cause in human history. The second time, three years later, it was in order to save his life.

The Tactical Surgeon knew that his target, Rama Seti, was not expecting to be beheaded in the middle of the night. The target’s apartment was on the 37th floor of 6 Constitution Plaza, Delhi and Mr. Seti had the kind of security system that made high net worth individuals sleep soundly. Entry to the building itself was controlled and patrolled, funded by the residents’ monthly fees. Even so, from the personality profile in his file, the Tac Surgeon knew the target was not a man to trust other people to keep him safe.

The target had invested in an automated body scanner, fingerprint and retinal scans combined with a password combination lock with a timer that didn’t allow the door to be opened outside of 1400 to 1700, when the target took his deliveries. The apartment door was high carbon steel reinforced with six locking rods that bolted through the door and into the frame.

Yet the best civilian security on Earth would not stop United Nations Orb Project (UNOP) Tactical/Surgical Team 8 from breaking through.

It was 0300, local time. Suitable bribes had turned the heads and cameras of building security and the UNOP T/S Team 8 electronic specialist rendered the alarm system inert, gave a nod and the lock breaker stepped up and started work. While he drilled into the door by the main lock, the rest of the UNOP Marines covered him. The non-surgical team members carried assault rifles, armed with non-lethal electroshock rounds to take out unarmed civilians but also a selection of AP and hollow point magazines for local law enforcement and enthusiastic security guards if it came to it.

The locksmith put down his drill and turned to the Tac Surgeon.

“Five minutes,” he whispered.

“Surgical team,” the Tac Surgeon said into his internal mic. “Come on up.”

There were only twelve hours and thirty-four minutes until wheels up on the orbital shuttle and UNOP were remarkably keen to get the target’s central nervous system onboard. So much so that they had offered a bonus big enough to upgrade the Tac Surgeon’s already-booked Mars colony cabin to first class. Why they wanted this particular target so badly, he could not fathom.

The Tac Surgeon waited in the hall, half-heartedly reviewing the target’s file while he waited. He had broken into dozens of homes in the last couple of years to perform tactical surgery and he knew that some people invested in security to keep their family safe. Yet the target, 28-year-old Rama Seti, had no family. None that counted, anyway. His parents lived on the other side of Delhi, he never saw them and had no other relatives. He had no children and the surveillance notes said all his sexual partners in the previous decade had been visiting prostitutes. The target must have paid them well, or perhaps they were just financially desperate enough to engage in intercourse with a man as morbidly obese as Mr. Seti.

The UNOP Marines locksmith carried on with his work, inserting a self-guiding wire into the hollow part of the door up toward the internal computer that controlled the time lock.

Previous targets had installed layers of high-tech security to protect their precious gold, jewelry, works of art or gemstones that they would not trust to bank vaults. But the valuable content of Rama Seti’s apartment was cutting-edge technology for online virtual reality competitive gaming. The target was the founder and Chief Executive of Rubicon, a gaming cooperative with one-hundred members. The gaming system was known as the Avar and it was the ubiquitous online system the world over. None of the other Rubicon members was even based in India. Avar brought players the world over together seamlessly to compete in virtual worlds. Spectators and fans would join the players and watch in real time from the sidelines or even down amongst the players, unseen by them and each other and unable to affect the outcome.

It all sounded incredibly tedious to the Tactical Surgeon. Spending your life playing make believe when humanity’s very existence was on the line.

“These virtual reality people are disgusting,” he muttered.

“Sir?” The Marine next to him asked.

The Tac Surgeon did not bother to respond.

The target’s most prized possession, the file said, was his custom Avar Chair. It cost more than the Surgeon’s annual salary had back when he had been a junior resident in Austin. The headset, gloves and shoes of the device were engineered to the micrometer and the seat itself was designed to reduce the risk of bedsores. It aerated and cooled, massaged and moved so that blood flow was unrestricted. Vital for the target as he was recorded as being in the chair anywhere from eight to eighteen hours every day.

“Remarkable,” the Surgeon muttered as he flicked through his screen. “Goddamned waste.”

“I’m through,” the locksmith said. “Ready to open.”

“Initiate entry,” the Tac Surgeon said, yawning, and the locksmith heaved open the door. It swung out into the hallway without a sound.

The team members held their breath. They had experienced more than one night when unplanned alarms sounded, ruining their carefully laid plans and earning the Tac Surgeon a mauling from his UNOP commissioners.

But not tonight. The Marines swept inside with their weapons up, leaving one man to watch the hall and another to descend to cover the lobby and their exfil. The elevator door chimed and the surgical team trundled their equipment after the Marines.

The target slept on in his bedroom, oblivious, snoring like a broken air conditioning unit.

“That is not a healthy sound,” the Tac Surgeon said, to no one in particular.

In the main living area, almost empty other than the obscenely expensive Avar chair, his surgical team laid plastic sheeting on every surface. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in layers of clear plastic. More team members rolled the heavily-reinforced and extra-large gurney into the target’s bedroom.

The Tac Surgeon had personally performed thirty-four corporectomies and only the first half a dozen had been in a proper medical facility. And yet, even after so much experience in the field, performing the most complicated tissue removal procedure in medical history inside an unsanitary apartment made him deeply unhappy. It was sordid. Disrespectful to the medical profession. But UNOP paid better than anyone and they didn’t care about his past run-ins with uptight Research and Ethics Boards with morals stuck back in the 21st Century.

He wandered after his anesthetists into the subject’s bedroom where the rumbling and snorting echoed from the walls. It smelled of sickly-sweet sweat and the kind of rank feculence particular to the morbidly obese.

The anesthetic dosages had been prepared well in advance. All his team had to do was inject the patient and heave the disgusting fat son of a bitch onto the gurney, which was wheeled in next to the bed.

“What are you idiots waiting for?” he said in the internal comms system. “Get on with it.”

“He’s too fat,” one replied, gesturing. “Adipose tissue at the neck too thick for the needles to penetrate. We are changing them now.”

The Surgeon drew a deep breath but he stopped himself from shouting abuse at the morons. He would just kick them from the team after they got the target’s nervous system safely back to the UNOP shuttle at the spaceport. While his morons changed needles, he peered closely at the young man’s snoring face. The neck was indeed horrendously thick, perhaps ten centimeters of adipose tissue that he would have to cut away before even beginning the surgery proper. It would be a long procedure and he silently cursed all obese people the world over for being such pathetic slaves to their urges.

His anesthetists came back and injected their first round of sedatives while the others prepared to lift the huge mass of blubber onto the gurney.

Leaning over the target’s body, he looked over his shoulder at the security team leader. “This will be the worst one yet. How anyone can allow themselves to reach a state like this is beyond me. And for a prospective subject, with his genetic potential, the waste of it is offensive to me.”

“Tall guy, too,” the Marines Lieutenant said. “Six-five, right? Taller than most of the others. That’s weird, right? I thought they were identical.”

“Environmental factors create the individual variation,” the Surgeon explained, sighing at the ignorance of the military mind. “This one ingested more calories from a very early—”

The patient groaned and waved a fat hand up in the air. The surgeon jumped back, the slab of a fist whooshing past his face.

“What the hell?” the Surgeon shouted. “What did you give him?”

Both anesthetists approached to examine the groaning patient. “Just an involuntary—”

The target opened his eyes, took one look around, shouted in fear and threw himself out of his bed in a mass of quivering flesh.

The Tac Surgeon ducked aside as his surgical team scattered, crying out as the man threw them aside as if they were children. The Lieutenant shouted to his Marines, drew his electroshock pistol and shot the man in his quivering, flabby back. It seemed to only drive the man into a wilder frenzy. He was a head taller than anyone in the infiltration team, even the Marines, and three times the weight. The target tossed the gurney over as if it was nothing.

The Surgeon fell into a stack of computer equipment, the cases of the machines tumbled down onto his head, slicing open his scalp.

In the end, despite the Marines’ attempts to wrestle the stumbling, wild, half-drugged and stunned man, it was his own size that brought him down. The sedatives and panic helped to wear him out and within a few seconds, he was wheezing and slowing. He fell quite suddenly, falling across the upended gurney, buckling and snapping the steel tube frame.

Everyone stood looking at each other, breathing deeply.

“Help me up, you fools,” the Surgeon commanded the anesthetists, who cleared the pile of fallen cases from him and heaved him up to his feet. “When we’re done here today, you two incompetent fools will be finished.”

“Men as overweight as this one are difficult to judge—”

“Save your excuses or I’ll operate on you next. I’ll take your legs and leave you in India, how would you like that? Just get him up and onto the gurney.”

The gurney was beyond repair.

“Can’t you operate on his bed?” the Lieutenant said.

The Surgeon did not bother to hide his contempt. “I need a completely stable platform for the procedure. Do you have any idea how precise you have to be when you sever a man’s spinal cord? No, we’ll have to call this off.”

The Lieutenant scratched his jaw. “What about that giant-ass Avar Chair?”

The Surgeon hesitated. Then laughed. Perhaps the military mind was not so useless after all.

“Get your Marines to help heave him into it,” the Tac Surgeon commanded the Lieutenant. “And hurry. We have a long set of procedures ahead of us and the shuttle launches in twelve hours.”

While the target’s mind was downloading, the Surgeon removed great chunks of body fat. The bio-waste bins filled up right away and the blood suction pumps kept clogging up. After a while, the Surgeon just started flinging globs of adipose tissue onto the floor. Most of the UNOP Marines found excuses to leave the room at that point but the Lieutenant stayed, seemingly unconcerned. Hours later, he woke the target up.

“What’s happening?” Rama Seti mumbled.

The patient no longer had control of most of his body but the Surgeon had not yet severed the connection to his diaphragm. It was unlikely that the patient’s eyes worked but he knew the young man could hear and probably retained a sense of smell, that most primal of senses. Machines beeped, plastic crinkled as the people around him walked here and there. A machine sucked and gurgled. Despite the apartment’s expensive air-conditioning system, the room reeked of the hot metallic stink of surgery. It must have been really quite disorienting for the patient and the Surgeon felt a momentary, faint pang of empathy.

“We are in the middle of performing surgery on you,” the Surgeon explained. “I have cut away much of your body, trying to preserve as much of your ganglia as I can but now I am beginning to sever your spinal column and the final links to your body. I prefer to do it with the patient conscious as any sudden incoherence on your part may indicate I am heading for a problem.”

“My body?” the patient said. “Please, please, I don’t understand, just let me go, take anything you want.”

Some people in his team laughed while they worked.

“There’s only one thing we want from you,” the Surgeon said, playing to his small crowd.

The man said nothing for a while and the Surgeon stopped, scalpel in hand until he muttered another question. “What are you going to do with me?”

“You’re going on a long journey, son,” the Lieutenant said, to further titters from the surgical team.

“Please, do not tell him anything,” the Surgeon said.

“It ain’t like he’s going to remember this, is it. You’re going to zap his hippocampus, right?”

“Quite right. Yet I would rather not stress him unnecessarily with the enormity of his situation.”

The Lieutenant chuckled. “Come on, Doc, there’s no way this disgusting sack of shit is ever going to be selected to be a subject for Mission Four. What a lazy freak. He’s going on a shelf somewhere at HQ until they incinerate him without ever waking him up.”

“I’m sure you’re right about this one. I can’t tell you how sad it makes me that these will be his final moments of consciousness,” the Surgeon said, trimming away remnants of tissue under his patient’s chin. “I will be so glad when the mission finally launches. I am looking forward to a comfortable, quiet, semi-retirement on Mars. I would rather enjoy being a family doctor for a peaceful little colony town, you know?”

“What?” Rama Seti, blind, paralyzed, and soon to be little more than a severed head, muttered. “What are you saying? Please, don’t do this. What’s happening?”

“Alright,” the Surgeon said, handing over his scalpel and taking the circular saw in its place. “I am about to remove the last sternocleidomastoid. I am afraid, Mr. Seti, that this will hurt quite a bit. Suction, please.”

A motor whirred and the Surgeon carefully eased the tiny blade sliced into the target’s last attached neck muscle.

Rama Seti screamed.

CHAPTER TWO –REALITY

Time passed.

And Rama Seti woke. He knew he was awake because the glare was like a scalpel in his retinas. There were people around him, he was sure. Shapes and sounds moved beside his head. It reeked of antiseptic and minty-fresh breath. He tried to move and to speak. Someone hushed him and sponged lukewarm water into his mouth which he licked up with a rough tongue. A cool hand stroked his forehead.

“You are currently disoriented,” a voice said in his ear. It spoke English but the accent wasn’t Indian. “Please remain calm.”

Had he been in an accident? Was he in hospital? All Rama knew was that he had to find out what was going on.

“It’s bright,” Ram said, his voice sounded strange to himself. Rumbling, deep.

“You have been asleep, Rama.” The voice was soft, comforting. As a mother or father might speak to a child. Ram was afraid of it.

“Where am I?” He couldn’t see properly.

Ram’s throat felt full of glass. Machines beeped steadily around him.

“A special facility, Rama Seti,” the voice said.

“Who are you?” Ram’s heart thumped in his chest.

“I am a medical doctor. My name is Dr. Fo. The others here in my team are biotechnicians, nurses, anesthetists and so on. We are all leaders in our field. None finer in the Sol System, I promise you.”

Shapes and shadows loomed around him. Soft shoes swished on hard floors. The clatter of metal implements in metal bowls rang in the cool air that drifted across his face.

“Can’t see,” Ram said, fear rising.

“We will rectify that shortly,” the doctor said, a smooth, cool palm patted Ram on the forehead. “Eyes are complicated, Rama. Yours were a remarkably astigmatic and a little myopic. The muscles strained from a decade and a half of overuse of Avar headsets and we had to do a little extra work tinkering around in there.” A finger tapped Ram on the bridge of his nose. “When we correct the calibration your eyes will be significantly improved, along with the rest of you. Here we go.”

Ram blinked smears of light away and a grinning Chinese face leaned over his. The doctor was possibly middle aged but it was hard to tell. Probably a heavily-surgeried old bastard with newly-grown skin. Still smiling, the face pulled away.

He was on his back, probably on some sort of a hospital bed. The room beyond Dr. Fo’s face was lined with large white tiles and soft light came from somewhere. Ram tried to look around but he still could not move.

Was he dreaming? Had his Avar malfunctioned? He wanted to wake up, wanted to get up, run, get away.

Yet he couldn’t move, not even a little, not his arms or his legs. He couldn’t move his head to look around.

What the hell was going on?

“Can’t move,” Ram said, his throat dry. “What happened?” His voice sounded amplified, as if it didn’t belong to him. “Was I in an accident?”

“In a way,” the doctor chuckled again, his cool hand patted Ram’s forehead and then it rested there. “But you are all better now.”

There was a faint pressure on the back of his head where it rested on the bed or gurney. Ram pursed his mouth and the skin there cracked into tiny crevices. He licked his lips, his tongue rasping against the ridges of dry skin. The wet sponge returned, dabbing cool beads of water into his mouth. He sucked the water down, the moisture spreading inside, freeing his tongue.

Why could he not feel his body? Nothing made any sense.

“Tell me what happened,” Ram said. Why did his voice sound so strange? “Why can’t I move?”

The doctor leaned down to look Ram in the eyes. He smelled of powerful soap and the whiff of mint.

“You are sedated, Rama Seti and your endocrine system is under our control. Your file states that you have a high resilience to emotional shock so I don’t mind telling you that you were abducted from your home. An infiltration team escorted surgeons into your apartment in New Delhi where you were rendered unconscious and they removed your morbidly obese body. The only parts of you that we needed were your head, spinal column and as much of the central and peripheral nervous systems ganglia as we could get.”

“Am I in Avar?” Ram said, his heart racing. His face flushed with the panic of it. “This can’t be real. This is Avar, isn’t it?”

“You were a professional Avar gamer, I know. But this is the real world.”

Anger and fear surged through him and Ram tried to jump out of bed.

Nothing happened.

“You are attempting to move,” Dr. Fo said with joy, looking at a screen next to him. “That is a marvelous sign. We have disabled your movement from below the neck, other than your diaphragm for conscious breathing and speaking. Just like when you plug into your Avar, yes? Just like when you enter REM sleep. As I was saying, we brought your head and spinal column here. Plus a few of the important nerves, especially the solar plexus and so on. It makes fusing your nervous system to the new body so much easier.”

Horror crept up Ram’s neck into his face, warming it like spilled blood in an Avar-induced nightmare. And perhaps that was it. Perhaps he had finally succumbed to the Avar Psychosis that had claimed so many others of his profession. His cooperative colleagues had often warned him about it but he’d always disregarded their concerns. Ram always thought he could handle eighteen hours a day in the chair every day.

Maybe he had been wrong.

“What a second,” Ram said, his voice deep and unfamiliar in his ears, panic rising in waves through his face. “Are you seriously telling me that you cut off my head?”

Dr. Fo chuckled. “Oh dear me, no. How could you think such a thing? No, no, no. We cut off your body. The procedure is called a corporectomy.”

Ram’s throat constricted and his heart thudded in his ears and he struggled for breath. It had been years since he’d had a proper panic attack but he knew the signs.

I have to get out of here.

A new voice, a woman’s voice, close above him muttered a warning. “His catecholamines are spiking. I’ll ease him back down.”

The hot sensations drained from his face and his panic receded. They were controlling him, somehow, giving him drugs and he knew he should be angry about it yet he was relieved. It was nice, feeling calm.

“Why are you doing this?” Ram asked, straining to see as far around the room as he could. He could not see much. There were people there. Machines, beeping and humming.

“I will show you.”

Even swiveling his eyes so far over in his sockets that the muscles ached, Ram couldn’t see the doctor anymore. Instead, he noticed the soft glow of pale blue lights from high up around the room. The white ceiling above had a bluish tinge from the artificial lighting. There was no daylight.

Someone pulled a screen attached to a mechanical arm down over him. Ram looked up and for half a moment saw a reflection in the black of the screen.

The face was familiar. But it was not his own.

“Welcome to the new you,” Dr. Fo said and the screen flicked on.

The image showed a man on a gurney, covered by a sheet up to the upper chest. A screen on a mechanical arm overhung his face.

That man was not Rama Seti.

It couldn’t have been.

The figure was muscled as heavily as a bullock. The body of a champion bodybuilder only bigger, all veins and lumps and crevasses and ridges. A body resembling a relief map of the Himalayas. A body like the avatars Ram used in the Galactic Games persistent world, and Shield Wall the European early medieval massively multiplayer wargame that had pretensions to historical accuracy but disregarded scale. A body that existed only in comics and animated films and maybe on the Artificial Persons that they designed for asteroid mining and outer system exploration.

A creeping horror crawled over his skin as he began to understand, at least a little, of what was happening to him.

Tubes, data cables, and fluid drips ran out from under the blanket and snaked along the floor out of sight.

In the image on the screen hanging over his face, the screen hanging over the face of the muscled giant on his screen.

Dr. Fo stood next to the bed, at the giant man’s shoulder. He seemed diminutive in comparison.

“Do you like it? We matched the skin tone of the body to your own. It was paler than you before the procedure but it’s trivially easy to do. You have a rather lovely natural color but it was awfully washed out from the lack of vitamins and UV.” Dr. Fo chuckled, shaking his head. “Your diet was appalling, Rama Seti.”

“That’s not me.”

On the screen, the giant’s mouth moved as Ram spoke.

“You will experience a period of adjustment to your new self, of course,” the doctor said, resting his hand on Ram’s forehead. He saw it happen on the screen and felt the palm on his head at the same.

Ram struggled to comprehend what was happening.

“That’s not my head, it’s not me.” Ram swallowed as he spoke.

The muscular figure on the screen was Indian but he had a handsome face, a strong jaw line. Prominent cheekbones.

Nothing like Ram’s face at all.

“It is very much your old head that you grew all by yourself.” The doctor stroked Ram’s shorn scalp. Caressed it. “Rama, your face and head is the only external part of you that remains your own. You have been increasingly overweight since your early childhood. Not your fault, of course, it was your mother and father’s fault. Your mother did it because she wanted to make you happy. You father, well. Never mind about him. My surgeons removed the excess adipose tissue from the face and especially the neck area.”

“I’m thin.”

Ram had never seen himself thin before. He had never looked in a mirror and seen a face that was tight. He had never seen his cheekbones. His cheeks had never gone inward, only puffed out like a cherub or a hamster or the other horrific terms of endearment his mother used to call him by. Ram watched on the monitor as a single, shining tear ran down one temple into the raised sheet that cushioned his head. The urge to wipe it away was intense but Ram could not move so much as one of the massive muscles that he now owned.

Ram’s head looked smaller than he remembered it, with all that fat taken away. In fact, it looked small attached to those huge shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” Ram said, watching himself on the monitor speak the words. “Did you shrink my head or something?”

Dr. Fo chuckled. Even a couple of amused snorts came from the nurses and technicians as they worked around him.

“We have reinforced your skull with extra bone mass, in fact. As with the bones in your new body, we have increased the density and so increased the overall cranial mass. In terms of volume, we encouraged extra bone growth on the external side but of course, we did so subdermally. You have extra bone all around the cranium, face and jaw which has made your head around six percent larger. And it was already a deliciously big head to begin with. Indeed, the size of your big old head was one of the factors in your selection. You see, your new body is very large indeed, for a human, and having such a large head helps with the transplant process.”

Your new body. Strange thing to hear. It couldn’t be real, could it?

“I was always tall,” Ram said, feeling the need to stand up for himself, for his old body.

Dr. Fo grinned and pulled out a screen. “You were a fairly impressive 199 centimeters tall, much taller than the Indian and Earth average. You certainly maximized your genetic growth potential. But now, you are 261.26 centimeters tall. In other words, in the top one percent of the tallest people who ever lived, although most of them were gangly weaklings, half crippled by pituitary tumors. You, on the other hand, may have the most muscle mass on a single body in history, even counting Artificial Persons. Although, this body is not natural. We designed it, we grew it, nurtured it so I suppose it’s cheating but you are a human from the neck up.”

Ram had a wave of unreality flush through him. The sense that the world could not be trusted, that he could log out of his Avar and be back in his apartment if only he could find a way of getting out.

“This is not happening,” Ram said, hearing his now-deeper voice rumbling in his chest. A larger chest cavity, a larger throat and a deeper voice.

“I assure you it is,” Dr. Fo said, gesturing at the room around them. Ram could see quite a lot with his peripheral vision but a single room could be modeled with perfect realism within Avar. “But if it helps you to feel better in the short term then please, go right ahead and believe that you are in some sort of VR device, while you acclimatize to your new reality and learn why you are here. No skin off my nose.”

“Why?” Ram asked. “Who are you people? Where am I? I need to speak to my co-op. I need to speak to my parents, come on, you have to let me out of here, this isn’t legal. This isn’t legal, you can’t do this to me.”

He needed to get out, to get away from them.

“Rama Seti,” Dr. Fo said, leaning over him. This time, the man’s face was not smiling. Not even a little. “You will find no allies in the judiciary realm. As for your friends and family, well, they believe that you are already dead. We will never let you go. Not ever. Of course, this is a violation of your legal and human rights but our purpose is so vitally important that we left ordinary ethical concerns behind us decades ago. Your rights as an individual are as nothing in comparison to what is at stake here.”

“Bullshit. What could possibly be so important?”

“Rama, you are here to save humanity.”

***

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Davis writes science-fiction, fantasy and historical fiction stories packed with exciting action, captivating characters and intriguing themes.

He is inspired by science fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Kim Stanley Robinson, Orson Scott Card, John Scalzi, Neal Stephenson and Iain M. Banks. He has read all of Bernard Cornwell’s books more times than can possibly be healthy.

Dan’s main interests include history and the sciences of biology and astronomy and his stories tend to feature these subjects, by accident and/or design.

He is a husband and father living in Essex, UK.

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EMAIL: dandaviswrites@outlook.com

Thanks so much for reading

BOOKS BY DAN DAVIS

The Galactic Arena Series

Inhuman Contact (Prequel Novella 1)

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UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MG47ANM

Onca’s Duty (Prequel Novella 2)

That’s this book!

Orb Station Zero (Book 1)

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UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

The Immortal Knight Chronicles

Historical Fiction - with Vampires

Vampire Crusader (Book 1)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0157LXEEA

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0157LXEEA

Vampire Outlaw (Book 2)

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UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01CKU0VJM

Gunpowder & Alchemy

Flintlock Fantasy

White Wind Rising (Book 1)

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Dark Water Breaking (Book 2)

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Green Earth Shaking (Book 3)

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UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018THC1LQ

For a complete and up-to-date list of Dan’s available books, visit:

http://dandavisauthor.com/books/