Scuu Front, System Unknown, Planet Unknown

“Readings, corporal?” Sergeant Nitel drilled through my skull. I hated him, at least as much as the limiter would allow me.

“All clear, Sarge,” I replied. “No pings.”

Each time we set foot on a planet, it was the same thing: boredom or death, most often both. That never affected the sergeant, though. Scuu, wounds, and sleep deprivation weren’t enough to sap his ability to be an asshole. After the last four missions, I wanted to shove my rifle up his ass. At least the court-martial would be quick. A quick zap and it would be over… but that would mean that the piece of shit Nitel would outlive me.

“Incandescent,” the sergeant said. His voice burst through the channel as if he were shouting. Of all the field commanders, he was the only one who had amped up his comm volume to the limit. “Confirm location. We’re getting no readings.”

“It’s down there,” the ship replied in a smug voice. I hated it as well. “The data is solid. Keep searching.”

The data is solid… I’d laugh if things weren’t so messed up. The Scuu never left anything behind, not even bodies. I’d seen hundreds fight and die, and the day after the battlefield was as clean as a medbay’s death slab. Win or lose, the Scuu always took everything with them, leaving behind useless junk. Sometimes they’d even take the ground under the bodies. In this aspect, they were almost as thorough as Salvage.

“Can’t you narrow it down?” Nitel’s annoyance bled through the comm. “We don’t have infinite time.”

“You have your probability grid,” the ship actually scoffed. “Use it.”

The circles flicked in the air. They seemed to change every minute. Every second looking at them filled me with an urge to write them down. Maybe if I did, they would go away? That’s what the doc said: write your horrors down in a diary file and they’ll go away. He claimed it was proven to work in eighty-nine percent of the cases. It didn’t work on me, though. Besides, there was no way in hell I was going to tell anyone about them. If the fleet found out, I’d be put in a small box and drilled full of tubes and electrodes, prehistoric-style. Garber had gone through that. The idiot would always pocket a few scraps of junk for himself during a mission. He’d tell me he had a contact on one of the logistics ships who was part of a Scuu smuggling scheme. Artifacts were supposed to be big money, he had said—a nail-size fragment was worth six month’s pay. A thumb-size one could set someone up for life. The only problem was that I had never heard of anyone actually buying. Fleet security was onto Garber in a month. There was no court-martial, no official punishment, not even an incident record. The man was put in a small box and taken away by Med Core ghouls. He had been purged out of existence ever since.

“You heard the ship!” Nitel shouted. “Spread out along the probability grid! Corporal Lyuk,” he said, turning towards me. “You patrol the perimeter.”

“That’s a lot of ground to cover, Sarge,” I said.

The area we were supposed to scan was ten times the size of the ship. Even with a buggy, I couldn’t cover a fraction of it, and he knew it.

“I’ll need some backup.” I knew he was rattling my chain, just as I knew things would get worse if I didn’t go along with it.

“No.” Cold and short—the type he liked to use aboard. “Keep watching those readings.”

“Right.” He could get me punished for not addressing him in the right way, but I knew he wouldn’t. With me gone, he’d be the only one able to keep a leash on the other wackos. That was the problem with purgers on the Scuu front—one had to be crazy or desperate to get sent here… not a lot for leadership material.

I displayed the map on my visor. Incandescent had marked the areas most likely to have Scuu remains in bright red. The less likely spilled into orange, then yellow, and finally white. The area I had to “patrol” was beyond the white zone, surrounding the valley.

Seventy-three thousand had died in this place, according to the briefing. Supposedly, it had taken eight attempts to retake the system from the Scuu, and now that the fleet had it, it was determined to not do anything. Just like my home. Decades had been spent to build a mining colony so close to the buffer zone, probably trillions in funds and investments to keep it functional. One serious Scuu attack, and it was abandoned. Even now, the quarantine held. I wouldn’t be able to get there until I was in my fifties, if I managed to survive that long.

“Found some junk here,” Sparrow said as I made my way to the starting marker. He was one of the basket cases. His brain was filled with so much tech that he could run a shuttle on his own. “Looks like a whole pile.”

“Mark it and keep moving!” Nitel ordered.

“You sure, Sarge?” Sparrow asked. “There’s a lot of it. Might be more than a shell.”

“Leave it and keep moving!” The sergeant’s words had an icy edge to them. He wasn’t about to let a loon like Sparrow anywhere near something potentially valuable. Knowing Sparrow, I had to agree. “Kase will tag it. Share your feed.”

An image appeared in the upper right corner of my visor. Sparrow had reached what seemed like a junkpile of sorts. There had to be tons of metal fragments, all of that silvery-white alloy that the Scuu left behind. No one knew what it was, and no one cared. We only tagged, bagged, and hauled it onto the shuttle. From there on, it was Salvage’s problem.

Lucky bastard. This wasn’t what we were looking for, but at such an amount, he was probably going to get a day’s worth of leave.

“I think there are more of them,” Sparrow shouted. The image shifted focusing in the distance. Dozens of mounds came into view, each the size of a small shuttle. “Want me to dig through them, Sarge?”

“Incandescent, is that part of the package?” Nitel asked.

“You tell me.” The ship didn’t even feign interest. “Keep to your orders. We have two days maximum in this sector. Delays aren’t advised.”

A psycho ship for a psycho crew. Made sense in the grand scheme of things. It took a special kind of crazy for a ship to become a purger. With all the planets we’d swept through, he was more messed up than any of us. I’d read somewhere in the fleet database that life-factor planets were seen as treasures. Regulations stated that anyone hiding the location of a life-factor planet or ruining its chances for colonization was guilty of high treason and would be executed. Those rules didn’t apply for us, since the only thing we did was to sterilize systems… and we were good it.

“Starting patrol of perimeter, Sarge,” I said, closing Sparrow’s video feed. That wasn’t for me to get involved in. “Want me to feed?” A stupid question. When the Scuu were relevant, no one wanted to feed. Incandescent and the other ships wouldn’t touch our transmissions with a two-mile missile if they hadn’t been forced to. After the incident three months ago, even sats were banned until further notice.

“No feed,” Nitel was quick to respond. “Shout if there’s something.”

“Aye, aye, Sarge.” That was that.

I blocked every part of my system I was allowed to block and started walking. Normal troops didn’t have to go through this. A few of the newer guys had come from a standard platoon and told me about it. Both had anger issues, which is why they ended up here. Lucky for them, neither had a chip in the head. From what they said, grunt suits didn’t have anything electronic in them, just enough air for six hours, an emergency belt beacon transmitter, and a clear set of orders. I couldn’t tell if they were lying, but if they weren’t, things were seriously messed up, though it was difficult to say for whom exactly.

The circles shifted again. A new one emerged, transforming the three rows into four. The temptation to shoot at them increased. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had gone off the rails during mission. I wouldn’t even get punished, just have my pay docked for wasting ammunition.

Why did you save me, Cap? It would’ve been better if I rotted away in the mining colony.

A blip sounded in my helmet. Instantly, I turned my sound suppressors on and jumped to the ground.

“Got something,” I whispered. The display of my visor turned grey. My sensors were picking up something at the edge of their range, over ten kilometers from the perimeter area. We had been assured during the briefing that there was nothing on the planet, and again the intel was off. “Twelve clicks south by south-east.” I turned off my scanning tech. “Instructions.”

Warnings covered my visor, letting me know that all communication to Incandescent had been severed. Moments later, a notification popped up, telling me that our shuttles had been destroyed.

Countermeasure protocols, I thought. If one Scuu had discovered us, more would be here soon.

“Hold position!” Nitel shouted. “Team Five, get me confirmation. Everyone else, stay put.”

There was no point in fighting. We were few and ill-equipped to handle anything more than a couple of drones. A high-pitched sound filled my ears—the latest attempt at a Scuu dampener. Command claimed that the techs had upped its success rate to forty percent. So far, I hadn’t seen it work once.

“Give me a feed,” Nitel ordered.

“You sure, Sarge?” That was unusual. I never expected him to stick out his head for this, but was more than happy to oblige.

“Spicer, Two-Oh, where’s my confirmation?”

“ETA two minutes, Sarge.” Spicer’s hoarse voice screeched through the pitch.

“Make it one!” Nitel hissed. “Anyone else got readings?”

Idiot! Why don’t we just broadcast our position to the Scuu? Will be quicker that way.

“No readings here, Sergeant,” Sparrow said.

“Clear here.”

“Nothing here.”

The comm filled with chatter as everyone the squad gave the same answer. Each word felt like a scar on the inside of my throat. I knew precisely what Nitel was doing. He was the worst type of crazy bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. He wanted to have a skirmish with the Scuu.

“I’ve got confirmation, Sarge,” Spicer said. “One marker. Static. Twelve clicks outside the perimeter.”

“Any visuals?” Nitel pressed on.

“No sights from here.” Spicer didn’t sound too happy with the useless talk either.

“Corporal?”

“No.” I zoomed my view to the max. Based on current info, the marker had to be located somewhere at the foot of the mountain surrounding the valley. While we were cut off from Incandescent, that was all the info we’d get. “Instructions?”

“You and Spicer, head out.” The lack of pause on Nitel’s part made my skin itch. “Everyone else move to my position. I’ll be taking point.”

“Roger, Sarge.” I stood up.

Never question an order. Questioning means death.

Authorization rescinded.

I was forcefully thrown out of the memory fifty-seven milliseconds after it started. Out of habit, I started a basic diagnostic, even if I knew the source—Kridib’s mind was leaking again.

This is new.

I went through his memory, analyzing it frame by frame. When I was on the planet, I thought it was the Scuu that had made it possible for me to peek at his memories. Apparently, I was wrong. The only thing that had kept the transmission from spilling was the protocol lock, and now that Lux had given me her authority to bypass them, I had something to look forward to.

“Let’s go,” the reserve Lieutenant said, finishing her sentence. From her perspective, nothing had happened. “Have you been through quarantine?”

“Not since yesterday.” I rushed along, trying to keep up.

“Incandescent, is she clean?” The woman brushed my comment away.

“Clean enough,” said the auxiliary ship, taking special care to show how little he thought of me. His attitude hadn’t changed one bit from Kridib’s memory. “Nothing Gregorius can’t handle.”

Adima glanced at me for a second, then looked away, almost doubling her pace.

“Have you been in a bio-lab before?” she asked, in a tone of voice suggesting she thought I hadn’t.

Sev’s teachers used to do that a lot. Sometimes they would do it to me as well, each time they wanted to discuss his attitude or explain the nature of their work. And every time, I’d respond in exactly the same fashion.

“I almost had one in me, ma’am,” I used my most casual demeanor. As expected, it got me a surprised look. “I’m a battleship, ma’am. I thought you had been notified,” I lied. I knew perfectly well no one would bother telling her, and by the look of things, she hadn’t bothered to inquire either.

“A battleship?” The woman visibly slowed down.

“Ascendant class.” I rubbed it in a bit. “I was to be prepped for a siege mission on the Cassandrian front. Having a dedicated bioengineering was discussed as an option.”

“Oh. Right.”

Adima nodded, at which I smiled. Now I knew that she knew next to nothing about ships. I also had successfully made my point.

As we continued, I compared the area layout with the maps I had been given. On first glance, everything seemed to match, which made me suspicious. Back when I as a ship, both Gibraltar and Augustus would have me provide faulty schematics of the sensitive areas to anyone aboard, regardless of rank. For Gregorius to have no secrets, considering what had happened, was highly improbable. Officially, the area was supposed to be composed of thousands of labs and food containment areas, ranking from a few cubic meters to the size of an Auxiliary ship hangar. The majority were marked as classified, although the original layout schematic gave me a rough idea of what was going on.

“Is the rotation on an infinity cycle?” I made an attempt at a second impression.

The woman didn’t respond.

“Or does it go through a refit at every five-year rotation?” I persisted.

“The commander will fill you in.”

You don’t like ships much, do you? Or maybe it’s just retired ships? “Sure.” I kept a faint smile on. “What sort of person is the commander?” As was becoming standard, I wasn’t able to tell much from his personnel file. “He doesn’t seem to have a military record.”

“Most of us don’t.” The pitch of her voice told me she wasn’t lying. Her lips moved slightly, as if there was a question she wanted to ask. Whatever it was, though, it never entered the air.

We continued to a new transport pod and got in. It was approximately ten times larger than the one I had used to get here, though permanently fixed to the ground.

The guts of Gregorius, I thought. Gone were the vast areas of space and enormous buildings, replaced by endless closed-in corridors, very much like those of a ship. Thousands spent their working days here overseeing the bio projects. According to the internal regulations, some were permitted as little as four days per month in the area above. Not an ideal experience, but to be expected. Skimming through the personnel files, the vast majority of people had requested to be here. As the saying went, once one spends too long on a ship, it starts getting difficult to leave.

“How many have you killed?” Adima asked all of a sudden.

“Do you want me to be precise?” I tilted my head.

“No… approximately.”

“It’s hard to tell. Billions, maybe? It’s difficult to be certain of precise damage. Plus, I don’t have access to all my memories.”

“How?”

“I’m not a planet purger, if that’s what you’re asking.” There was no indication what her point was. Observing her micro-expressions, I ran four analysis simulations. There were nearly no signs of curiosity on her face, though not much anger or hatred either. “Why?”

“I wanted to know how you feel about it now.” Fear. Fear and sadness. “You’re in a small fleshy body this time. I hope you’re used to it.”

“It grows on you after half a century.” I maintained eye contact. For the first few seconds, so did the reserve lieutenant.

It took us seven minutes to reach our destination. The moment we stepped off, the woman continued along a large corridor to door with biohazard warnings. Hardly waiting for me to catch up, she tapped on the comm panel on the wall. It lit up, glowing bright green.

“Jebb,” Adima said in a stern voice. “Your cadet is here.” She paused for a moment. “She’s a battleship. Inca gave her the go ahead.”

“Has she been through quarantine?” a deep male voice asked.

“No, Incandescent gave her the go ahead,” the woman repeated. “And I’m not taking her through the procedure. So, do I send her in or what?”

“Buzz her in.”

The light on the panel faded. Some things never changed despite the fleet… and still, everyone was much more tense on the Scuu front. I could feel it all the time. Some masked it under a thin veil of laughter, but for the most part I had noticed that people didn’t bother. Less than a month—that was the amount of time the majority of the current crew had spent aboard and already they behavior was moving in one direction… very much like the people on the first contact. Scuu presence, even when it wasn’t trying to drill its way in people’s minds, it was still there like a constant sheet of pressure covering everything. Of everyone I’d seen Radiance was the only one that managed to keep her cheerful composure. When she got back, I was going to ask her about it.

“Find someone to lead you out once you’re done,” Adima said. “Questions?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I tiptoed, looking her straight in the eyes. “How many have you killed?”

It was only speculation, but the analyses had suggested a thirty-two percent chance that her behavior was caused by guilt.

The woman pursed her lips, but didn’t reply. If I were to guess, I’d have to say she had killed enough, though not that many to be rejected from the fleet. That could only mean she did it in the line of duty. Maybe she was similar to Kridib?

Warning! Bio-exposure!

Red messages appeared on the door and walls in front of me. This was the first time I’d seen such a message in person. All the times I had been required to plaster warnings on my hull, they had been for radiation, quarantine fears, and sealed off deck sections. Bio-exposure was a new one. The explanation in the fleet database didn’t help either, referring to biohazardous materials, and a cross-search with bioengineering brought up a restricted access warning.

Two and a half a second later, the door moved aside. Walking in, I found myself in the equivalent of an air lock. The door quickly slid closed behind me as the small antechamber was flooded with red light. Moments later, the light shifted back to normal, followed by a second door moving aside. Beyond that extended an endless field of green—vast rows of bushes that continued on. A thin layer of gradual mist made it impossible to determine how long the room was, but I estimated it had to be seven hundred meters at least.

“Step in, cadet,” the deep voice said, amplified multiple times by the tech.

I did so, ending up in the best example of a fake garden I had ever seen. Despite the acres of plants around me, there was not a gram of soil to be seen. The ground was as cold and hard as the rest of the station. Vats of orange gelatin-like liquid stretched under the plants, likely providing them with all the nourishment they needed; even the plants were large groups of spore-like clusters, without smell or appeal. I could only assume that the sun-lights and moisture-dispersers maintained an optimal heat and water level as well.

“Mid-left,” the voice boomed again. A green line emerged on the floor, leading into the rows of plants.

Mid-left, I thought. Not the greeting I expected. The direction was impossible to miss. After two hundred and twenty meters, the line took a sharp turn to the left, ending at a small tent made of white material. The design was new, though similar to those used on my ground missions while I was assigned to Prometheus.

“I’ll be out in a moment, cadet,” the voice said from above as I approached the tent. “Wait there.”

“Yes, sir.” Considering the number of officers I had seen, this one didn’t strike me as overly weird, although he definitely wasn’t average.

Just by the sound of his vocal cords, I could tell he was from a high gravity world. As a rule, the fleet preferred not to recruit people of such planets. The devastation caused on their bodies due to the lack of gravity was severe, even after a few years. Often the fleet would have to pocket the costs for several body reconstructions in the course of service, making them almost as expensive as my retirement.

“So, you’re the battleship?” the commander asked. “There was a lot of commotion when you came aboard. Never thought you’d choose to bury yourself here.”

“It is not for me to question my assignment, sir.” Especially when I didn’t have a choice.

“Are you familiar with the specifics of our work?”

“The creation and adaptation of plants suitable for deep space life,” I recited from what little that was in the orientation database. “It is through this that a constant supply of food is provided to the station and prepped for colonization of planets with a high life-factor.”

“Textbook answer. And wrong.” Something in the intonation reminded me of Augustus. “That’s all Gregorius. We only deal with food recycling here.”

“Food recycling,” I repeated. You did it, didn’t you, Juul? You put me on toilet cleaning duty.

When I was a ship, I used to recycle all human waste myself. At the time, I didn’t give it any thought. A few decades in a human body, having to frequently fix rural plumbing pipes, had made me appreciate the activity a little less.

“I suspect that’s the reason I was selected, sir.” Knowing what was used in the food dispensers was likely to make people sick, even if everyone knew the same process took place on every known planet. “I take it my duties won’t be purely administrative.”

Laughter echoed throughout the vast room. It was heartfelt laughter, such that I hadn’t heard in a while.

“You’ll get along just fine here, cadet.” The near side of the tent cover zipped open revealing a man in a white costume with a green half-face breathing mask. “Welcome to the team.”

It took me almost fifty milliseconds to form an opinion of him. He seemed old, possibly at the end of middle age, and round enough to be one of the friendly sellers at the market back home. Both of his arms were missing, replaced by a pair of mechanical prosthetics. A search of the model in the fleet database revealed that the model was attached directly to a person’s spine, and most often used in cases when body reconstruction was deemed useless.

Is he terminal? I asked Gregorius.

Ludach syndrome, Incandescent replied instead. He’s got around a year at most. It’s likely he’ll go before you do.

Under the scarring sarcasm, I could feel his pain. Every ship would, even when natural causes were concerned. That’s why I rarely spoke with med ships. The things they had to go through were too unpleasant. Maybe that’s why they were so different from every other type of ship. The last time I got to fly with one was during my last year with Gibraltar. It was nothing but a small skirmish in the grand scope of things—a few dozen ships fighting in a barren, strategically insignificant system on the Cassandrian front. The ships on both sides had suffered considerable damage. Most of us were battleships, prepared to eject our crews to relative safely and die in the system. One vessel, however, was a medical ship. No one knew her name, her designation, or the purpose of her mission. Looking through her manifest, we saw that she was filled with people—twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and two—most of which were marked to be in critical condition. Along with three other ships, I devised a flight path that would keep her relatively save from the Cassandrian fire, ensuring a ninety-seven percent chance of escape. When I transmitted it to her, the med ship thanked us and ignored our advice, flying straight towards the enemy cluster, completely unarmed and defenseless. It was only in her last transmission before exploding that we had learned she had been a terminal ship, having to carry terminally ill officers, some of which had weeks to live. Apparently, it had been their desire to go out in a flash on the battlefield rather than slowly wither away. It had also been the desire of the ship to receive release of her duties, after decades of service. All had had their wish granted that day.

Won’t Agora help? I asked.

Not everyone gets special treatment. That stuff isn’t for civilians.

Not for civilians. I had heard the phrase used many times, though the context was new. The substance that had restored my biological body was likely so classified that I couldn’t mention it in front of my new commander, let alone discuss anything else. The man was sentenced to slow death aboard the Gregorius and the only thing I could do was watch like I had so many times in the past.

“Thank you, sir.” I straightened up, my facial expression unchanged from a moment ago. “I’ll do my best to be useful while I’m assigned here.”