Orphan Brigade (2 page)

As usual there was nothing new to see, but his eyes locked onto the one open corner of the small room, near the door. The ceiling and the lights were far overhead, but he now noted the texture of the wall under its coat of light green paint. Rough and grainy when he inspected it up close, Mortas was surprised he hadn't noticed that earlier.

For no reason other than to give his mind something to do, he backed into the corner with his knees bent. Mortas wore a flimsy set of black pajamas, and felt the cold of the wall on his shoulders when he pressed his palms against the surface on either side. A delicate vibration tickled, a distant thrumming that made him wonder if his new cell was inside a spacecraft of some kind. Mortas extended his arms and was pleased to discover he could raise himself off the floor this way. Twisting his bare feet outward, he planted them against the opposite sides of the corner and tried to take some of the weight off his hands.

Shinning up slowly now, enjoying the different view of the small room, Mortas was a yard or so off the ground when he abruptly slipped and dropped to the floor in a heap. It hurt just a bit, but Mortas experienced a thrill at finally having found something new to do, some kind of activity that was all his own. He imagined that Corporal Cranther could have gone straight up to the ceiling, a skill the dead man might have learned either as an orphan runaway on Celestia or as a Spartacan Scout. Cranther had been short and wiry, and the taller Mortas assumed the task would have been easier for him.

Pondering Cranther's size reminded Mortas of an ovular pile of smooth stones next to a gurgling river on a distant planet, and so he decided to think of something else.

H
e awoke in the darkness for no reason at all, something that seemed to happen often. Although his meals were identifiable as breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Mortas suspected they were provided at random intervals to keep him from establishing a day/night routine. He tried anyway, turning off the light after consuming the dinner meal, but sleep was usually a long time coming and there was no way of telling how long he'd been unconscious when he woke up.

This time Mortas had dreamt of the others, but nothing in that unconscious hallucination should have awakened him. They'd been walking across level terrain in the dark of night, the four of them side by side in a way that they'd never traveled in real life. Cranther had taught them how to move tactically, using the ground to conceal their presence when possible, but in the dream they'd been walking along as if they had nothing to fear in the surrounding gloom.

Gorman, the pacifist, had been quietly telling a nice little story that Mortas had already forgotten, but it didn't seem to matter. The dead man's voice had been calm and comforting, just as Mortas remembered it, and he and Trent and Cranther had been enjoying whatever the chartist had been saying.

Lying there in the dark, Mortas pulled the blanket up tighter around his neck, his fingers digging into the fabric. He suspected he was being watched, but the memory of the dream was so vivid that he could almost feel the presence of the other three and couldn't keep from whispering the words aloud.

“I miss you.”

M
ortas awoke with the symptoms that indicated he'd been drugged again, and slowly sat up. His latest cell was round, with the bunk in the center. Squinting, he decided that his new quarters resembled the inside of a large, cream-­colored drum. It was well lit and warm, and Mortas wondered if he was still dreaming.

The room was large enough that ten paces wouldn't take him across it, and the bed was its only furniture. He now saw that it was indeed a bed, with white sheets and a gold-­colored set of real covers, as opposed to the hard bunk and thin blankets of his previous accommodations.

The drum's curved walls were interrupted at regular intervals by unadorned columns that jutted out slightly. Those were gray, and he counted ten of them. The room's door was also white, but all of a piece with no hatches for food trays or guards' orders. His eyes coming into better focus, Mortas also detected a compression handle in one segment of the wall that he supposed led to a bathroom.

Try as he might, it was impossible to view his new surroundings without believing he'd somehow passed an important milestone.

Standing, Mortas noted that he now wore a sturdy set of green pajamas instead of the flimsy black ones that had been his uniform for so long. His feet were bare, but when he looked for the useless paper slippers he found something that made him catch his breath.

A new pair of rubber-­soled exercise shoes had been placed at the foot of the bed, along with a set of athletic socks. Mortas grabbed one of the sneakers as if fearing it would somehow disappear, turning it over and over. Then, heedless of who might be observing him, he let his unadulterated joy spread across his face while pulling on the socks and the footwear. Mortas walked a few paces, enjoying the stretch and the bounce under his feet before striding quickly all the way around the cell.

The freedom to move in that fashion was simply delicious, and after so close a confinement it felt as if he were flying.

The athlete in him forced Mortas to warm up and even stretch, but he could hardly contain his excitement before he began to jog, then to run, actually
running
, around the perimeter of the room. It was intoxicating, the space and the light and the ability to enjoy it. He soon grew winded but didn't stop, turning easily so that he was moving backward, bouncing gently and throwing light punches at the air. Mortas was still smiling when he came to a halt, panting, staring down at the miraculous shoes. Remembering how hard it had been, trying to shin up the corner of the last cell using nothing but bare feet. That made him smile even more, and he spoke aloud.

“Well what do you know? All I had to do was start climbing the walls.”

T
he ball was heavier than Mortas remembered, but he'd only played this particular game briefly, at Officer Basic. Stratactics Ball was a military invention, a constantly morphing competition that forced its players to develop game-­winning strategies along with player-­level tactics. That was how it had gotten its name, and he'd grown to enjoy it a lot.

Also referred to as Sim Ball, the game was a product of the decades-­long war with an alien race that resembled humanity in so many ways that they'd been nicknamed the Sims. Battling for the habitable planets of distant solar systems, both sides had been forced to adjust their frames of reference to fit a war that spanned enormous regions of space, key locations that were constantly in motion, and enemy fleets that could appear almost out of nowhere.

Stratactics Ball was played on an enclosed rectangular court of no set size. That was intentional, as the game's limitless variations were designed to keep its players in a mode of uncertainty. The court where Mortas stood was probably forty yards long and twenty yards wide, with a ceiling ten yards over his head. He remembered that the side walls on the courts at Officer Basic had been transparent, with rows of seats rising away beyond the barriers. The walls on this one were all painted a dull gray that bore the smudges of past matches, and there was no audience that he could detect.

Three round holes set side by side in the walls at either end of the court served as goals, each of them only marginally larger than the ball and too high for any normal human to reach unaided. Even as Mortas watched, the panels on one set of goals rearranged themselves. The two outside apertures had been open while the middle hole was closed, but now the two openings to his right were available while the one on his left was blocked. The goals would open and shut at unspecified intervals and in no set order throughout a game.

Team size varied, but when there were more than twenty players a standard restriction kept half of them from crossing midcourt. Throwing the ball to a teammate was the only way to advance it, but the pass could include bounces off the walls, ceiling, and floor. Intercepting the ball or knocking down an enemy pass immediately switched the defenders over to offense, and vice versa. To keep the injuries to a minimum, a player was required to halt as soon as he or she had the ball.

That is, until the ball passed a dashed line just a few yards short of the goals. This was known as the Close Contact Space, and it was the only part of the Stratactics arena where it was permissible to run with the ball or to tackle an opposing player. Some imaginative scoring techniques had developed over the years, including scrum-­like human pyramids over which the ballcarrier would charge in order to reach the requisite height to jam the sphere through an available opening.

Preventing a goal was quite difficult because the holes were located behind defensive players who could be expected to pay more attention to the bodies rushing toward them than to the shifting apertures at their backs. The attackers could see which goals were open, and so the defenders were forced to come up with their own schemes for learning what was going on behind them.

Regardless of their plans, both the defenders and the attackers could see successful strategies undone in an instant if the apertures rearranged themselves at the wrong moment. There was no time for celebration after a score, as the ball was literally shot back into play almost at once—­and from any one of the six goals. The projectile usually sailed the length of the court, rebounding wildly and causing a mad scramble.

Command touted Stratactics Ball as one of the reasons the badly outnumbered humans had stemmed the advance of the relentless Sims. They cited the game's complexity, unpredictability, and ferocity as being analogous to war in space. It was not lost on any of its players, officer or enlisted, that regardless of the strategy or tactics employed, gaining a victory usually hinged on a violent confrontation at close quarters with someone's back to the wall.

Remembering the spirited games in Officer Basic, Mortas walked a little closer to the two open goals and stopped. Even now, standing alone on a playing court as a prisoner of the armed force in which he served, he still obeyed the rules of the game. Faking a two-­handed bounce pass, he shifted the ball into his right hand and then heaved it sideways over his head. He'd grown skilled at hitting the target this way, and had been recruited to play on different teams because of that talent.

The ball sailed through the stale air, seemingly on course, but its curved flight took it just far enough out of alignment that it whacked into the painted ring around the goal with a loud slap. It bounced twice before coming to a stop, and he had to walk over to retrieve it, feeling slightly disappointed that his skills could have eroded so quickly.

Quickly? Although his ordeal on the barren planet had lasted several days and nights, Mortas had no idea how long he'd been in captivity. He looked around the empty court, still a little surprised to have been granted an unsupervised exercise period, and wondered who might be watching. The guard detail that had been with him for so long had disappeared in the last move, the one that had landed him in the round room with the real bed.

His new accommodations even had a bathroom with a shower, and Mortas had spent a long time looking in the mirror. The face that had stared back at him was thinner than he remembered, with almost a wolflike cast to it, and he'd even detected the beginnings of a long, thin wrinkle across the skin of his young forehead. His dark hair had been cropped close during one of his transfers, and he'd remembered the bite of the burning embers that had landed on his scalp in the chaotic run across the enemy airstrip. Fortunately they'd left no scars.

“Still me,” he'd remarked to the air before starting to wash his face.

Once he'd cleaned up, Mortas had been given a fresh T-­shirt and athletic shorts to go with his new sneakers. Then a mildly friendly attendant had escorted him to a small mess hall where he'd eaten alone, after which he'd been offered the chance to exercise.

Which had brought him to the Sim Ball court. Mortas had been seen by several ­people in the corridors, and he was still trying to decide if that was good or bad. He already knew that large numbers of Force personnel had been searching for him at one point—­befitting the missing son of Olech Mortas—­and so being seen by random ­people was encouraging. That is, unless he was so far from Earth and the settled planets that it didn't matter who recognized him.

The air in the large room had changed while he stood there thinking, and he caught a whiff of something harsh in his nostrils. Mortas shut his eyes and sniffed hard, once, then a second time with his head turned to the side. A heavy, undeniable odor, filled with dire connotations. Having been through numerous shipboard emergency drills, he knew that fire was one of the greatest hazards of space travel. The scent contained more than a hint of smoke.

Mortas looked around quickly, trying to locate the source, his nose tipped upward and sniffing in loud, short inhalations. His eyes stopped abruptly when they detected the slightest shimmering movement from the two open goals facing him. He took a step forward, now identifying wispy gray tendrils wafting from the tops of both holes.

The ball fell out of his hands and he was running, straight across the court toward the low door that mated perfectly with one of the court's sidewalls. He was still two strides away when the noise came, making him jump because it was so loud, a mechanical slap that kept on coming. The alarm blasted at him from above, but he was still able to hear the emergency bolts shooting home on the only way out just as he reached the hatch.

He slammed into it anyway, hoping to spring it, and bounced off painfully. A robot voice boomed at him now, rebounding off the insulated walls, telling him that there was a fire and that all personnel were to secure all hatches and prepare to battle the blaze wherever they were. He found himself standing at the door, beating on the material with both palms, shouting for help even as the air grew thick with the aroma of smoke.