The first thing I became aware of was the smell. Not the fresh, loamy scent of turned earth or the sweet perfume of alien pollen you might expect from stories that start this way. No, this was the flat, metallic tang of ozone, the sour reek of recycled air that’s been breathed too many times, and underneath it all, the coppery, sweet stench of voided bowels and something else, something profoundly and terminally still. An atmospheric field, nearly strained to capacity.
Ah. So that’s how it starts. Waking up in a field. How utterly, predictably cliché.
My head throbbed with the distinct, fuzzy ache of a broad-spectrum neural stunner. It felt like my brain had been removed, vigorously shaken, and stuffed back in with a few bits missing. Memories were a jumbled puzzle. I could picture my grandmother’s face, stern and lined like old leather, her voice a low rasp telling me to run, little fox, run and don’t look back. I remembered the feel of high-altitude wind on my face and the complex, beautiful schematics of a gravitic modulator I’d never get to build. But the last few hours? A complete and utter blank. A void filled only with the lingering ghost of electricity dancing along my nerves.
Yeah, a lot of stories start this way. Waking up in a field of some sort, some strange planet or something, no idea what was going on. The irony was so thick I could taste it, a bitter flavor at the back of my throat. I was missing a few memories, but most of my life was intact, and with just a hint of logic—and the overwhelming sensory evidence—I could actually figure out what was going on.
I was lying on my back. My body felt heavy, lethargic, pins and needles swarming in my limbs like a hive of angry insects. I was dressed in a pair of heavy, grease-stained coveralls that were several sizes too large, the rough material scratching against my skin. My feet were stuffed into clunky, steel-toed boots that felt like they weighed as much as I did. And around my wrists, cold and unforgiving, were a pair of steel manacles, their edges already chafing my green-tinged skin.
Charming. They couldn’t even spring for comfortable restraints for their kidnapped chattel.
A low groan echoed my own internal misery. I wasn’t alone. There were a few other young men stirring around me, groaning and shifting on the remnants of a dozen different lives violently interrupted. Some city boys in sleek, dark city-weave, three Charlottes in practical but elegant traveling clothes, a few dwarves in sturdy, earth-toned tunics, and a couple of orcs who looked like they’d been snatched right out of a mining pit, their musculature straining against simple, rough-spun fabric stained with dust and mining detritus..
The ceiling was a curved arch of riveted durasteel, too high to touch, marked with faded yellow stencils and serial numbers. The air hummed with a familiar, low-frequency vibration. No, this was an atmospheric containment field. We were in one of the dipper’s huge cargo containers. I had filled them plenty of times with ore and trade goods, and recognized the specific wear patterns on the metal walls. In the middle of the container, a small, boxy generator was keeping the containment field active, its indicator lights glowing a steady amber as it slowly chugged away at its fuel supply.
I craned my neck, my oversized ears twitching as I focused on the fuel gauge. From the looks of it, it was about halfway empty. My mind, always running calculations, did the math. Twelve of us, breathing. With twelve guys on board, we were about three-quarters of the way up the dipper, if they had put in a fresh fuel rod, and we should make it to the top with plenty of time to spare. A cold knot tightened in my stomach. If we were still close to the beginning of our trip, we’d make it to the top as a dozen asphyxiated and vacuum-frozen corpses. The fleet’s cost-benefit analysis apparently didn’t include a margin of error for its conscripts.
“Scrot.”
The word, guttural and filled with a depth of feeling I wholly understood, came from behind me. I honestly thought I had escaped. I’d been so careful, so far out in the high country, away from the major spaceports and their prying sensors. I’d believed the stories that the wilds were a haven, that the Fleet’s reach didn’t extend that far. I should have known better. The United Planets Fleet had sensor systems and tracking tech that the commonwealth of Korse could only dream of, a fact they demonstrated with infuriating regularity by EMP-blasting us back to the steam age every generation or so.
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Gritting my teeth against the lingering stunner-shakes, I struggled to my feet. The gravity was… light. Alarmingly so. Less than half of what I was used to. My body, built for Korse’s comforting 2.5 gees, felt impossibly buoyant, every movement threatening to send me floating. That’s good, the analytical part of my brain chirped. Lighter gravity means less atmospheric pressure to contain. We’re nearer the top. Near the end.
Someone else was struggling upright. I glanced back to see a Charlotte boy, his shock of white hair a stark contrast to his dark clothes, his sharply-pointed ears laid flat against his skull in distress. He looked pale, his city-softened body not handling the stunner or the transition well.
My nose wrinkled. The stench of death I’d smelled earlier had a source. One of the twelve hadn’t made it. A slender form, one of the city baseline human boys, lay motionless a few yards away, his eyes open and staring at the steel ceiling without seeing. He’d been dead for maybe six hours. Some people, especially the soft, city-bred types who prided themselves on being ‘unmodified’, did not handle a stunner well. He was probably still alive when they loaded him, but without a med-tech to restart his heart on the trip, the combination of the neural shock and the gantry-gees—which was probably a crushing ten gees Earth-standard for his fragile system—had been too much. His heart had just… stopped. A quiet, ignoble end before the war even started.
I took a quick, discreet inventory of my fellow prisoners. Three elves, looking ethereal and annoyed. Two surviving city boys, shaky and scared. Three dwarves, already looking around with a pragmatic, assessing gaze. And three of us wilders. The other two wilders were clearly first-gen orcs, their frames massive and powerful even in the low-g, their skin a dull gray without the faint green undertone of my third-gen modifications. They lacked the clan-mark tattoos that would denote a specific orcish family, marking them as unbonded, just like me.
I was surprised. Usually, even the fleet was careful to keep the various sub-breeds of Korse apart, especially the wilders. The short dwarves were capable and got along with just about anyone, but the wilder orcs and elves were still technically at war over some stupid scrot like water rights or a generations-old insult. Throwing us all together in a metal box seemed like a recipe for a bloodbath. In this case, I supposed, whatever stupid scrot they were fighting over was probably irrelevant to us now. The Fleet had a wonderful way of making former enemies into fellow victims.
“Yo, goblin.” One of the orcs wagged his chin at me, his voice a gravelly rumble. He grimaced, deliberately showing off his overdeveloped upper and lower canines, like he thought that would scare me. “You got a way out of this?”
I shrugged a little, the movement feeling exaggerated in the light gravity. “Notice the scrotting place is empty? Unless you want me to take a piece out of the wall or disassemble the generator unit, we are in here till they let us out.” I offered him a thin, sharp smile. “Any other bright ideas, orc?”
The name was intentionally insulting. My own breed of wilder was third gen, but with vastly lighter and denser muscle and bone for dealing with our world’s crushing gravity. I was technically an immature gremlin, not a goblin. Despite their reputation, orcs were not actually stupid; they just tended to be impatient with intellectualism, the way they were impatient with just about everything that didn’t involve hitting, lifting, screwing, or eating.
I felt a heavy clunk reverberate through the deck plates. The container had been retrieved from the gigantic carbon cable. Gravity was suddenly all over the place, swooping and lurching as we were swung through a Zero-Gee stretch to be placed on the teardrop counterweight station at the top of the cable. The atmosphere grew thin for a moment, the air turning sharp and stale, causing all of our ears to pop painfully. The generator wheezed, its lights flickering to red as it couldn’t keep up with the rapid pressure change and started to chug to a stop.
Oh, for scrot’s sake. Without conscious thought, my hand shot out and slapped the side of the generator. It wasn’t a random gesture. I focused, letting a tiny trickle of my affinity flow through my fingertips, feeling for the flawed circuit, the hesitation in the monofilament feed. There. A tiny jump-start of energy, a nudge to bypass a faltering connection. The generator hiccuped, then roared back to life, the lights stabilizing to amber as the pressure began to painfully re-equalize. I pulled my hand back, hoping the motion looked like I was just steadying myself against the lurching. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice. The orcs were too busy looking green, the elves too disdainful, the city boys too terrified.
