Samuel did his best to fight the nausea as he tucked into his meal, though the more bites he took the better he began to feel. He was in the process of quaffing his third mug of water and his second plate of food when Mag sat down at his table. She too had a plate piled high with processed food, though Samuel could not help but to notice that her left arm was no longer entirely normal.
Mag looked at him and followed his gaze, then grunted and revealed her hand. The entire arm had been amputated at the shoulder and replaced with a crude robotic arm. The quality of the prosthetic limb was appalling, considering the technology of the age, and Samuel’s mouth was agape.
“Yeah, it’s a hunk of junk, isn’t it?” said Mag, understanding Samuel’s look of shock. “The doctors gave me the choice between a model covered by the universal marine triage plan or one of the high end models that I’d have to borrow on my credit line for.”
“No offense, Boss, but I’ve seen better arms on labor droids,” admitted Samuel as he did his best to return to his meal and not stare at the claw-like fingers that clumsily grasped Mag’s water mug. “Is our health plan that bad?”
“Well, this is Grotto kid,” grumbled Mag as she shoveled down a mouthful of eggs, “They don’t get all that imaginative with naming things, so if a plan has the word ‘triage’ in front of it, you can assume it isn’t going to be designed with your best interest in mind.” She shrugged. “This happens all the time. A marine gets some serious combat damage and the choice is a crappy triage treatment or a chance to have the cutting edge stuff. If I’d been willing to take on a ton more debt, I could have an arm that looked identical to my old one, tattoos and all. Or I could have opted for a servo arm that I could mount tools on. The possibilities are as big as your credit line, and a veteran who has been around as long as I have has a big damn credit line.”
Samuel frowned. “I get not wanting more debt, but-” he began before Mag cut him off.
“But, nothing. I’ve paid off the life-bonds of my son and both my grand kids. Paying off mine is just a few pay cycles away,” Mag explained, pausing to take a bit of fried protein paste. “So, as long as I can avoid any more of Grotto’s sneaky little debt traps, I’ll be able to retire in a year or two with enough credits to die in relative comfort.”
“I wish I had things figured out like that. It seems like the longer I do this the more confusing things get, and I’ve only been doing this for a few months,” Samuel muttered as he toyed with the last scraps of his meal. “Everything is upside down.”
“Keeping things confusing is good for the bottom line, that’s part of Grotto’s game, hell, that’s part of it for every corporation, company, and cartel from here to the other side of the universe.” Mag set her fork down and looked directly at Samuel. “Just do your job, don’t sustain any major wounds, and don’t forget for a second that you are completely on your own. To the company you’re just a resource, no different from bullets, trucks, or raw minerals. Keep your head on straight and maybe you’ll walk away from the game with more than you came with.”
Mag got up from the table and put her tray in the receptacle before turning to Samuel.
“Don’t beat yourself up about Jada,” said Mag as she awkwardly clutched his shoulder with her clawed robotic arm, “Everybody knows about it, you two weren’t all that smooth about making your exit.”
“I feel like an idiot and a philanderer,” admitted Samuel, rubbing his temples with his fingers, as if trying to clear the memory of her, however sweet it might have been.
“You are a philanderer, that’s true, but you’re also a soldier, and soldiers fight and die a long way from home. When you’re that close to death, sometimes you need to get it on with someone who knows what you’re going through, just to prove you’re still alive. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying that it happens, and just like a stout drink, it keeps you steady.” Mag began walking out of the mess hall. “I’m sure Jada needed it as much as you did, hell, most of you new recruits probably bunked up last night. It’s just how things are.”
Samuel finished his meal and returned to his suite, his mind swimming with memories of the evening’s recklessness. His roommate, Oliver, was still snoring when Samuel climbed back into his own bunk. With his pen light and a data pad he began to write a letter to his wife, to tell her of his first mission and to express his doubts about joining the marines. However, after nearly an hour of struggling with what to say, he deleted the letter and shut down the data pad. Mag seemed to be correct. Even in his attempts to write down what happened, he found the boundaries of language too limiting to communicate clearly what he was feeling or what he had seen.
Silence, it seemed for now, was the only honest choice.
4. SPACE HULK
“As you can see from the surveillance photos, the squatters have grafted much of the hulk together, using spot welds and even high tension cables to further bind the various pieces of the ship,” said the shift manager as she used her remote to zoom in on one particular portion of the massive ship. “Intel advises that this particular vessel is our most effective means of entry.”
Samuel looked at the vessel, a yellowed, oblong ship of a sleek design that he’d never seen before. Though Samuel was in no way a master of ship identifications outside of the Grotto hive fleet with which they had been serving for the better part of the last year, he did recognize the Praxis Mundi logo etched into the side of the ship.
Praxis Mundi was a long range shipping company that made regular runs into the Baen system. The company was a smaller player in the galactic trade wars and tended to operate as a neutral shipping option for companies and individuals moving modest volumes of cargo extra long distances.
Next to Samuel sat Ben, who was engrossed in the briefing and taking notes as it went along. Ben had never paid this much attention in academy and it was evidence of a much larger change in the man. They were only a year in and it had already been a hard tour. Change had become part of the daily struggle.
After the mission on M5597, the Baen Reaper fleet had been assigned to leave the 5500 sector and rendezvous with Grotto Hive Fleet 822 for an extended mission. The hive fleets were essentially mobile factories and refineries that move from region to region within Grotto space.
The fleets would strip entire worlds of their natural resources, then after a few months or years, they would move on, leaving the planet to its fate. The fleet carried only a modest military element since it was not a frontline endeavor, however, it did travel with a small contingent of security forces that operated out of a single, mid-sized battle frigate.
In the event of a full-scale engagement, the fleet would undoubtedly succumb to a professional combat force, though the single frigate was sufficient to ward off any pirates or Red List ships that might prowl the space lanes.
Samuel was later informed that some one hundred or more standard years ago, Grotto had engaged in a major trade war with Aegis Inc. over a somewhat remote solar system that was, at the time, thought to be rich with natural resources.
After two years of bitter conflict Grotto withdrew from battle. The board of directors determined the war had reached a point of diminishing returns against the projected profits to be yielded from the resource exploitation.
For Aegis Inc. it had been a pyrrhic victory. They had committed so much money, manpower, and material to the war effort that despite their ‘victory’ the mining and harvesting operations continued to operate in the red. After another five years of dwindling profits and relentless raids by Red Listed pirates, the entire sector was abandoned and had sat idle for a full seventy years.