Soft War: Strikebreaker [ Sample Chapter ]

By Rare Hydrogen

Note: This is a sample chapter of my upcoming book Soft War: Strikebreaker. Some things might change.

Chapter 0

“Space is cold. The hearts of our corpo-capitalist overlords are even colder. We must kindle the flames of the revolution.”

The familiar, velveteen voice spoke into the darkness as if she were addressing an auditorium, not a lone man in a cramped, tube-like slingpod. As the cylindrical craft sailed through space at sublight speed, the man inside slowly began to wake up.

Blinking in the dim blue light, immobilized from the neck down, and breathing into a rubbery mask pulled over his nose and mouth, for some people, this would have been a claustrophobic nightmare. Unfortunately, Dice Hagar was one of those people.

“Oh Jesus Christ…” The passenger groaned, groggy from his long sleep. “No! I’m not supposed to wake up yet!”

The man tried to move his arms first, then his legs, but nothing budged. His whole body had been locked in place for the duration of the long spaceflight, to prevent injury. That thought hardly reassured him as he twisted his torso to wrench out his wrist, to no avail.

There was a feeling of suffocation, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the slingpod, and he started hyperventilating. He probably would have passed out, had it not been for the luxurious voice’s steady background audio.

“Until all workers are free, the New Socialist Frontier will keep up the fight.” she said. She sounded so familiar where had he heard her before?

The passenger tried to steady himself and focus on the words of the recording. Typically, slingpods played gray noise or ocean waves to their passengers to keep brain activity stimulated during cryo-sleep. Many studies had found these lullabies warded off the painful stupor that sometimes followed longterm cyro periods.

“For humanity’s future, socialism must prevail. By any means necessary.” He remembered her now. That was Regina’s voice, he could picture her face. Dark skin, round soft cheeks, always smiling, always positive, always there.

He remembered now that the deepspace lullaby he’d chosen was an audiobook Regina had recorded. She had read a selection of essays from the New Socialist Frontier archives, and given it to him, a long time ago. Seemed like as good a time as any to listen to it, on his first trip beyond the milky way.

“Vital spike detected. Transmitter authentication complete.” Suddenly the deep, metallic, AI voice of the onboard slingpod interrupted her audio cast.

“You have been sleeping for 18 days. 4 hours, 72 minutes. The current time is 03-20-3924 UT 02:31 AM. Would you like to play your wake-up message now?”

“Yes,” rasped Dice through the mask. “And get me something to drink while you’re at it!”

The slingpod’s AI voice went silent and Regina’s prerecorded wake-up message played for him instead.

“Good morning, Comrade Hagar… or maybe it’s night wherever you are. Either way, wakey wakey!”

Oh Regina. Chipper as always.

“I’m supposed to read you this great big packet, but let’s just skim it for now, hey? I mean, it’s not like you forgot how to use your arms and legs, right? Let’s hope not.” Her joke made Dice snort under his mask.

“As you may recall, our society is dominated by ultra wealthy corporations. These greedy bastards run some of the most dangerous, inhumane, unsustainable factories ever conceived, and they hide them away on distant rim worlds.”

“Ease up, Regina. I was just asleep. It’s not like I had a total lobotomy.” Dice said, trying to use sarcasm to lower his heart rate.

“These corporations prey on the vulnerable, hiring them en masse before shipping them off to the edge of the universe to do dangerous, back-breaking work on distant planets.”

“One such corporation is Primetime LLC. Primetime is a corporate behemoth. They’re a major supplier of HNO3, which is an accelerant used in the fusion reactions that power interstellar travel. In other words, no HNO3, no sublight travel, no galactic economy. You know where I’m going with this.”

“It better not be a desert.” Dice quipped back.

“You’ll be landing on Karthos-23b, an icy desert planet—”

“Oh come on!” He cursed, shaking his head.

“— rich in Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Primetime owns a whole portfolio of planets just like this one, and there’s just one facility on the planet so far. Facility #302. But here’s where it gets interesting.”

“A while back, the NSF received a message from some workers at Facility #302. They said they were going on strike after trying to start a bottler’s union and they wanted our support. Well, it seems like things are heating up now, because recently, the strikebreaking company Pendleton was contracted by Primetime to send in their scabs to Karthos.”

“But lucky for us, we have a backdoor into Pendleton, so instead of their scabs, we’re sending you. And you, comrade Hagar, will help these workers unionize.”

“Oh that sounds like fun.” Dice muttered.

“So to sum it all up, your basic objectives are:

1. Infiltrate the Primetime facility, posing as a Pendleton scab.
2. Form a coalition with the workers. Gain their trust.
3. Seize the means of production from the managerial forces on Karthos.
4. And last, make contact with the NSF, and we’ll help coordinate the sale of the HNO3.”

“There’s just one more thing… We don’t know who on Karthos contacted us. The worker who reached out did so anonymously.”

“Wait what? You don’t know the contact!” Dice stuttered in disbelief.

“I know, I know. Don’t get me started,” Even weeks apart, and 58 trillion miles away, she’d known Dice wouldn’t like that. “We did give them a passphrase though, and I saved it in your mission files on your transmitter. It’ll be pretty obvious, I hope.”

“Good luck, Dice.”

And with that, Regina’s comforting voice went silent, and her message was over. It was a lot of information to take in, but it wasn’t anything new, except the part about the contact. In their pre-flight meeting she’d explicitly left that part out.

He took a moment to reflect on his time with the NSF. He remembered the way he’d been recruited after returned from Mars, the first meetings he’d had with Regina in that shadowy cafe, the training he’d had back on that ranch in… in… where was that ranch again? Wasn’t it north of his apartment back in Mexico City? He couldn’t remember exactly. It was hard to tell if the Cryo was still clouding his memory, or if it had just been so long ago that he’d forgotten.

“Prepare for re-entry.” The deep AI voice suddenly broke in.

The slingpod had traveled 58 trillion miles, and was nearing its destination, a small, blue-white dwarf planet called Karthos-23b. As it approached the planet’s atmosphere, three fins deployed from the slingpod’s cylindrical body and fired thrusters in the opposite direction.

“HRRK!” The slowing was so abrupt that Dice felt like his head was going through his ass.

Like a tomahawk spinning over and over through the air, the slingpod dropped out of sublight and tumbled end-over-end towards the sparse cloud cover of the planet. As the gravity of the planet intensified, the stabilizer engines fired to halt the violent toppling, much to Dice’s appreciation.

“Slingpod stabilized.” The AI voice alerted him.

“Thank Christ.” Dice muttered between heavy breaths, hoping the blood vessels in his brain hadn’t exploded.

The boosters continued to fire periodically to slow the craft’s rapid descent. After steadying to a dead drop, it fell like a onyx-black cruise missile dropping straight towards the ground, creating a hollow ring of back-pressure through every cloud it passed through.

Finally, the chutes deployed, and more buffeting followed. Even so, the thin atmosphere of the planet barely slowed it down. The slingpod crashed hard, blasting into an ice shelf and splitting the frozen mass in half.

For a few moments, the transport craft lay dormant in the newly excavated ice crevice, hibernating from its interstellar travel.

Then, four tiny ports depressurized, exhaling air and water vapor in tiny little whisps, and when they were finished, the front door of the pod unlatched and slid up the chassis, revealing the passenger inside, and the styrofoam planks that trapped his body.

Dice pushed out the inserts violently, and then like a vampire rising from his slumber, rose from the dark metal cylinder and looked around. He was still breathing hard and fast, but he at least he had survived.

“She wasn’t kidding about how cold it is here.” He said, clutching his arms and shivering.

His skin-tight dark-blue PLS (Personal Life Support) jumpsuit was insulated and fit him like a glove. The only exposed area on his body was a small hole cut for his face and mouth, which was still mostly covered by his oxygen mask.

Karthos-23b had a semi-hospitable atmosphere, but that didn’t make it comfortable. The lack of oxygen density meant rebreathers and gold plastic oxy-lines were must-haves for the planet’s surface.

This trip was only the second time Dice had been away from Earth, and he didn’t want to dwell on the first. The craggy rock and ice was nothing like his home back in Mexico. It reminded him of Mars.

After grabbing a single emergency flare and his backpack, Dice began scanning the cavern for a way out. He decided on an easy series of handholds to follow, and after that, he found a small hairline fracture in the rocks to climb up the rest of the way.

On the surface, the winds swirled tiny wayward snow banks into new icy dunes. These little dunes were disturbed by a black hand that suddenly emerged from below, grasping for purchase. It was followed by another, equally greedy hand, then finally, his head and torso escaped the trench as well.

As Dice straightened upright, he looked around himself. In the distance, there were shimmering ice storms ravaging the surface. There were no trees or signs of life anywhere. Just a barren, frozen wasteland, rich in hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, but thin in breathable air. That’s when he heard it. Behind him, the roar of a crude combustion engine, and as he turned, he discovered its owner: a black scud-shuttle, bounding over the broken, craggy landscape towards him.

The scud shuttle was was a long, angular vehicle, like an SUV made of two train cars, the front towing the rear, with the slanted steel face of a Burmese Python. As Dice turned to greet the engine’s thunderous approach, he glanced at his signal flare, shrugged, and tossed it into the cavern.

“Guess I won’t be needing you after all.” He chuckled, before waving as the shuttle parked just before the crevice.

From the front of the vehicle, a lone security officer emerged, and waved him over. The bearish man had a bushy, dark beard that ballooned out from under his breathing mask, and pale skin, what little of it could be seen from under the heavy blue riot armor. Dice waved back at him, carrying his duffle bag on his shoulder as he jogged over.

The other man pointed him towards the rear car, and Dice followed. At the rear end, the guard cranked a lever to unseal an empty truck bed and motioned for Dice to climb in first.

They sat on opposite sides of the empty hauler, and hung on to the mounting rails for support, as there were no seatbelts or seats to enjoy. When the door shut, the scud-shuttle lurched into a to turn, before steadily picking up speed.

Both men pulled their rebreathers off and could finally hear each other, even as the engine spun up with a loud, dull roar.

“There should be enough air in here to get us back to base. Anyways, paperwork time. Your name is Luiz, right?” The guard had to shout to be heard over the engine.

“I go by Dice, actually.”

“Ah okay.” The guard typed something into his wrist transmitter. “Anything funny about your landing? Didn’t hurt yourself, did ya?”

“I’m fine.” the younger man thought it best to keep his answers short. A useful habits when talking to enforcement officers.

“Good. I’m Captain Raybold.” the older man said, hand outstretched. Dice glanced at the man, hesitated, then finally shook it. Holding the captain’s hand was like palming a kettlebell.

“Here, plug this into your transmitter, so you can download our comms link channels.” Raybold said.

The captain held out his Gate cord out to Dice, who took it and plugged it into his wrist transmitter. The download started immediately, and the comms link app had a new channel to receive on, called Facility General 158.07. Dice unplugged his end and the Gate cord retracted right back into the captain’s wrist transmitter.

“We’ll take you by the canteen, then straight over to Skully’s crew. Glad we could get you on such short notice. We’ve had some… let’s say personality issues spring up recently, and we’re falling behind on production…” Raybold said.

“You Pendleton scabs sure are expensive, but at least I can trust you to not make any more trouble here, right?” The captain was joking, trying to lighten the mood.

“Yes sir. I won’t be any trouble.” Dice lied through his teeth.

Unbeknownst to Captain Raybold, Dice’s entire mission was to stir up exactly the kind of trouble the head of security didn’t want. He was a poison pill, in a sense.

It was a brilliant, silent victory for the NSF that they had managed to hack into a strikebreaking company like Pendleton, and could replace anti-union scabs with pro-worker salt agents.

But Raybold wasn’t aware of any of this. To him, Dice was just another scab.

“Since you’re basically one of us, I’ll skip the crap about being the friendly but stern cubmaster with you. The folks who work here, they’re animals. Don’t go trusting any of them, or they’ll bite you. Some of them would steal the oxygen right out of your hose if you let them.” The guard captain said frankly.

“They sound like a fun bunch.” Dice replied.

“Very.” The captain remarked, glancing out the small window slit.

As they neared the large industrial compound, Raybold explained some of the common facility routines and rules. There were two alternating 12-hour shifts, and the production line was never down. No breaks, no holidays. Workers were expected to eat and sleep during their off time in the communal barracks. Don’t leave doors open. Spot a leak, say something. No open flames on the production floor.

Dice had heard spiels like this before. Quietly, it amazed him that the rules on Karthos-23b were somehow more restrictive than the deep-sea algae farms of the Caribbean and the penal colonies of Mars. It was no surprise the workers wanted a union.

They pulled up to the main airlock entrance of the plant, and Dice followed the captain’s lead. Both men pulled their rebreathers back on and exited the scud-shuttle, which wasted no time speeding off.

“Welcome to Primetime #302.” Raybold said over the general comms link channel.

As they stepped into the mucky wetroom, the airlock door behind them sealed shut, and the red light turned to an abnormal greenish-white. Dice heard the room repressurize and watched Raybold remove his breathing mask again, and followed his example.

Past the bare-bones single airlock, they emerged into a small front office with a front desk, a single cubicle, and a side room and a large window. Inside the side room, two security guards sat talking. One with a glass eye glared at Dice as he walked by.

“Don’t mind Cramnik, he stares like that at everybody.” Raybold said, trying to cheer-up his new worker.

Beside the office sat a small, sparsely stocked company store. Raybold opened up the metal shutters and went inside. He grabbed a plastic packing crate and brought it back to Dice, then pointed further down the hallway.

“At the end on the left, there’s a short hallway, past that is the crew barracks. The security team have bunks off to the right. Go find yourself a free bunk in the crew side and get suited up, then meet me back here and we’ll get you out on the floor.”

The captain handed the large plastic box to Dice, which felt unusually light and empty. The salt agent walked alone down the long greenish-white hallway, and passed by a series of long windows and a sealed side door.

It was through these windows that Dice got his first glimpse of the HNO3 bottling plant, and the huge industrial machines it contained.

Want to read more? Check out the rest of the story here: Soft War: Strikebreaker.