NIGHTSWEATS
Sten wrestled with his pillow. After the day’s events he was exhausted. On top of that, he couldn’t remember when he’d last enjoyed a full night’s sleep.
Mahoney’s briefing had disturbed him. To be sure, his “one riot one Ranger” story was amusing. In his early days his chest would have popped the fasteners on his tunic when Mahoney applied that little tale to his Mantis team. One crisis, one Mantis team.
Although Sten was still on the far side of thirty, he’d survived so many murderous attempts that he’d used up more lives than a fleet of cats. Even so, instead of pride, he had a nagging sense that his luck might soon give out. Underscored by his confused feelings for Venatora. An enemy of the Emperor.
Hells, she was Sten’s enemy as well. But kill her? If it came down to it he wasn’t confident he could pull the trigger. Which would give her the edge in any confrontation.
Unless she had her own doubts.
Sten thumped his pillow. The single sheet was wet from adrenalin-charged perspiration. Finally, he gave up and rolled out of his bunk. He fetched his kitbag and dug out his comm, thinking he’d read a little.
What few possessions he had were in the kit bag, or stowed in his locker aboard the Jo’l Cash. Piled all together, it wouldn’t weigh more than ten kilos, or so. That, and the little money he had in his Imperial bank account was all that he could call his own. For him home consisted of whatever bunk he was assigned, or temporary safehouse quarters and hotel rooms when on a mission.
There was certainly no room for a family, a wife, or even a girlfriend. The last woman who met that definition dumped him before their last mission in the Wolf Worlds. She was a Mantis beast handler now and a damned good one. Wherever she was, Bet was sure to be giving the local bad guys hell.
In weak moments he missed the shabby quarters he and his family shared on Vulcan. Like all Migs they’d been poor, living from pay period to pay period and borrowing against future wages by adding more years to his father and mother’s Company contracts.
They’d both been dirt scrabble farm kids on some backwater planet and were sitting ducks for the Company recruiters who came around extolling the wonderful lives they would enjoy on Vulcan. Regular raises in pay and advancement in rank were practically guaranteed. Plus, they’d have their own home, plenty of good food, marvelous recreational activities, like the Feelies where famous Prime World stars graced the big screens.
The biggest draw was the promised educational opportunities for their children. Considering how smart the members of the Sten family were, the recruiter said, their kids would leave school to get great jobs as techs, or even engineers.
All lies, of course. The moment they landed on Vulcan they learned the hard truth. Migs—pejorative slang for untrained migrant workers—were so low on the totem pole of Vulcan’s hierarchy, that factory ’bots were considered more important. And pay was so miniscule that there was never enough money to pay for their housing unit, or to put decent food on the table.
The Company made it easy for Migs to add time to their contracts, and easier still to spend those credits. Joygirls and Joyboys, gambling machines, and cheap booze and narcotics were featured in all the rec areas. Bleak as life for a Mig was, those inducements were hard to resist.
Sten would be there still, slaving away at a lathe or some other lowly job, if the Company CEO, Baron Thoresen, hadn’t made the wrong choice when a rec hall accident threatened to expose a highly illegal project aimed at undercutting the Emperor’s AM2 monopoly. That choice had cost the lives of hundreds of Migs, including Sten’s family.
When Sten revolted against the Company and tried to sneak aboard a ship that would carry him away from Vulcan, he was sentenced to hard labor in Vulcan’s Exotics Section. Known by his fellow prisoners as “Hellworld.” This was not an exaggeration. The materials they handled were so deadly, their equipment and protective gear so shoddy, that few lived more than six months.
Sten had survived in Work Area 35 thanks to his friendship with a mystery man known only as Hite. His friend’s rough manner disguised a remarkable intellect. Hite was killed by a guard before Sten learned anything about his background.
He was an expert street fighter many times over and he’d taught Sten so well, that he never really faced a challenge in the military until he started training in Mantis Section, where you learned as many ways to kill as there elements on the periodic table.
He also infected Sten with his bleak sense of humor, which shook the young man out of his doldrums so he could start fending for himself, instead constantly mourning the loss of his family.
Hite was also a skilled back alley surgeon. Thanks to him Sten had a secret weapon that no one outside of the Mercury Corps shrink, Rykor, and his closest friends like Kilgour and Ida and Doc knew about. Oh, yeah. And Mahoney. But Mahoney knew about everything.
Sten had built the ultimate knife from a stolen bit of a crystalline substance so rare and valuable that a few grams were worth more than what even an engineer earned in a year. It was unbreakable and couldn’t be found by even the best snooping devices.
It was a slim double-edged dagger with a skeleton handle custom fit for Sten’s fingers to curl around in the deadly knife-fighter’s grip Hite had taught him. There was no guard, just serrated lateral grooves between the haft and blade that tapered from 5 cm width down to a needle tip. The knife was 15 cm long and only .39 cm thick. It was possibly the deadliest fighting blade ever made.
The crystal tapered to a hair-edge barely 15 molecules wide, and the weight of the blade alone was enough pressure to dice a diamond. The knife was housed in a fleshy sheath Hite had surgically constructed in Sten’s arm. If he curled his fingers a certain way, the knife instantly shot into his hand. One swipe could remove a enemy’s arm. Another could cut through tempered steel. Lock Sten in a room and he’d cut his way free as soon as his enemy was out of sight.
And so, after all these years working for the Eternal Emperor the only thing of true value that he owned was that knife.
Sten sighed, got himself a drink of water, then crawled back into his bunk. Pulled his covers up and found a likely book to read on his comm. It didn’t hold his interest long. In the nostalgic mood that had overtaken him, he wished he had access to his only other prized possessions. Two real books. Printed on real paper with real ink. Protected by battered cardboard covers.
Each book had cost him a month’s wages. The first was Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, by an ancient author whose name was C.S. Forester. It was a marvelous novel about a young naval officer back during what were known as the Napoleonic Wars. Instead of rocket ships, Hornblower sailed his world in wooden ships whose source of power was the wind, not AM2. The book traced his days as a midshipman—basically a boot camp private—to lieutenant.
There was very little known about Mr. Forester or his books, but Sten had ferreted out the fact that there were eleven books in the series, tracing Hornblower’s rise from midshipman to fleet admiral. A knowledgeable and friendly rare book seller had promised to alert Sten the moment any of the other books surfaced.
The other book was The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. The hero was Gully Foyle, a spaceship engineer who had been betrayed by his bosses and left for dead in uttermost space.
Through a remarkable series of events Foyle remade himself into a man of royal bearing possessed with a wealth of knowledge. He used those abilities to revenge himself on the men who had betrayed him. There was a lot more to it than that. An ability called “jaunting,” in which a human could teleport himself to any location. Of course, even in modern times true teleportation of something the size of a man, was impossible, but it was an interesting idea.
Hite had loved that book and had memorized large portions of it, including the poem that opened the novel. To this day the words were fixed in Sten’s mind:
“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.”
Bester said he based the book on another famous novel—The Count Of Monte Cristo, written hundreds of years before by a Alexander Dumas, a French author of African descent. Dumas was also the grandson of General Dumas, a legendary figure in the Napoleonic wars who was said to be so strong that he could sit astride a horse, wrap his long legs around its belly, grasp the overhead beams in a barn and lift himself and the horse off the ground.
Sten grinned at the memory of that little factoid, which was most likely apocryphal. He recalled wondering if the general was a heavy worlder like Alex Kilgour. That was nonsense, of course. In Dumas’ days the only world inhabited by human beings was the planet Earth.
His mind wandered on that track for a half an hour or more. Then slowly, his eyes closed and he finally fell into a deep restful sleep.