Splatmandu Paintball Club | Three Rivers, MI

Story colaboration between Ted Cross and Scotty Benthin

The air was thick as I moved through the narrow hallway, the heels of my boots clacking as I moved towards the large double doors. It was always hard to breathe on this planet - the oxygen content not being the same as home, always took time to adjust. If I am lucky I won’t be here long enough to worry about it. It was my time to stand before the leader of this event and to assist in the upcoming games as much as I could. This was part of the tradition, the last years’ winner was assigned to assist the new teams, and they will need it. If their arrival was anything like my team had been, they are going to have a ton of questions.
If I only knew then what I know now…

I’m not sure where we are. The last thing I remember was being on the front line with the rest of my command group. We were assaulting an enemy stronghold and getting mauled pretty bad for the effort. That’s our job. The 13th Penal Legion, that is. We are all convicted criminals facing various punishments. We get all the crappy jobs. Command decides which missions are too dangerous for “good” line troops. That’s where we step in. The good thing is if we survive all our missions, we get a full pardon. The bad thing is if we don’t survive, we get a full pardon posthumously. We are all given one ‘last chance’ at redemption by fighting in the worst combat zones in the galaxy. Not many make it. That’s why we are called the ‘Last Chancers’.

That’s all in jeopardy. We got snatched from our current assignment by unknown aliens. This is bad. Command doesn’t like not knowing what our location is at all times. They are liable to add desertion to our list of crimes if they don’t just shoot us on sight. The only information we have was given to us by a human in Red body armor…

The doors flew open, and as they did five bright red laser dots appeared on the center of my chest. The grouping I had noticed was about the size of a dime. I was facing five haggard looking men, but with eyes wide as dinner plates. They were the faces of veterans.
” Easy soldiers. I am more than likely the only friend you have right now.”
I slowly raised my hands. ” Nothing in these hands…or up the sleeve.”
The dots didn’t waver.
” Listen, I know this is … well kinda weird, but even though you have no reason to, you have to trust me right now.”
My eyes roamed from face to face. Pausing on the one I knew was in charge.
” Besides, your weapons were deactivated during transport. They don’t work”
Five triggers pulled instantly, the loud “CLICK” almost sounding as one.

Oh…this is going to be fun, I thought to myself.

He never gave us his name. The man was somewhat short and stocky, a common trait in people from heavy gravity worlds. That makes them especially strong and tough. He looks to have seen some action. His red body armor was scarred from heavy fighting.
‘He has definitely seen some action.’ I thought.

He is a warrior. Not one to be screwed with. That much was obvious. He carried himself like a person that could handle himself in a fight. All of us had a bead on him, but I’ll be damned if none of our weapons would work.

“You are to be part of a game and you are the grey team leaders.” Said the warrior.
“Why us?” I ask
“Because the game masters have been watching you. They felt you would provide a good game.” He replied.
“What sort of game?” I asked
“It is a game of life or death for their entertainment.” He said with a wicked grin.
“What is the prize?” I asked.
“Life.” He said with a sad smile.
Then he walked away, laughing.

After the Red warrior left the room, I looked at my men. I could see the anger and worry on all their faces. This group of convicts and I go way back. I could read their faces like a SITREP. They were pissed and looking for someone or something to kill.
“Well boys, what do you think?” I asked.
“I dunno boss, he didn’t give us much to work with.” said one trooper.
“There is no doubt we are in it deep boys, but we are used to that. We are always in it up to our eyeballs.” I said
Worried looks all around.
“Sir, some of us are close to receiving our pardons. The way we disappeared from the front line could see us shot for desertion.” said one worried trooper.
“We will burn that bridge when we get to it.” I said. “Right now, we need to concentrate on getting off this rock. To do that, we are going to have to win this ‘game’. So win it we will, even if we have to kill every living thing on this planet.”
They all agreed with that philosophy. All these grim faced men had a certain moral flexibility. They would do whatever it took to accomplish the mission. Right now, that mission is to win.

************************

We have been sitting here in this room now for several days. The men are starting to get snippy. This much down time is not good for front line combat troops, especially this group of malcontents. Even I am starting to get testy. If we don’t get out of this room soon, it’s possible we could end up at each others throats. It could come to blows but I won’t allow it to go any farther. Blow off some steam, yes. Kill each other, no. I doubt it would go that far anyhow. We have had each others backs for far too long for that to happen. Brotherhood forged in the fires of combat.
All the men have their little quirks. Some are more obvious that others. If you spend enough time around a person, you learn to gauge their temperament by those quirks. Like I said, we have been a team for a long time. Prisoner 070179 was the first Last Chancer I met. He has been sitting by the door almost the whole time we have been trapped in this room. To someone that doesn’t know him; he is just checking and re-checking his gear. I know better. I know he is quietly watching and listening to everything and everyone in the room, waiting for the right moment to make a move if necessary. He won’t light the cigar he has been chewing on because it’s his last one. He will save it for a special occasion. He loves his cigars almost as much as he loves to fight.

Prisoner 070179 hails from Telos. It’s a heavy gravity mining colony on the outer reaches of human controlled space. Gamma sector, if you look on a star chart. A frontier world where brawling and drinking is the favorite pastime. That makes him the strongest, toughest, and meanest S.O.B. in the room when it comes to bare-knuckle brawling. His strength and temper is what landed him in the 13th.

The day this team was put together, I was standing on the landing platform of Atten Prison Facility waiting for the rest of my command group. When the first prisoner shuttle arrived, they didn’t bother to land. The Imperial prison guards just tossed prisoner 070179 out of the rear hatch, 10 feet off the platform, shackles and all. I remember them yelling just before they sped off, “Hey! Good luck with that one!” I noticed one guard with a black eye and another with a fat lip. As he picked himself up off the plascrete no worse for wear, I thought, ‘Oh goody, a hard nose brawler and a tough one at that. I hope he can take orders. I would hate to have him shot right here and now.’

“Prisoner 070179 reporting for duty!” he barked.

The lack of ‘Sir’ got my immediate attention. He was testing my authority already. One thing I learned when dealing with these convicts was to not give them an inch. I fixed him my command stare and raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t believe I heard you correctly troop.” I said coldly while resting my hand on my empty side arm holster. Maybe that scared him, but I doubt it. I think he recognized I would broker no disobedience.
“Prisoner 070179 reporting for duty, SIR!” he replied after thinking for about 1 second.
“Prisoner 070179,” I said while looking through his file. “A.K.A. Dando. Heavy weapons specialist. Convicted of: Manslaughter, disorderly conduct, drunk in public, destruction of public/private property, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, and my personal favorite, urinating in public.”
“Yes, sir.” He answered.
“My kind of trooper.” I said with a grin.

 
Dando single-handedly dismantled a squad of Jantin Paladins, several MPs, and the bar they were all in in fairly short order. Ended up accidentally killing one of the MPs. Scuttlebutt had it that it took 6 MPs with stun wands set to maximum to bring him down. One stunner will knock a horse goofy. With my most sincere smile, I said, “Welcome to the 13th Legion.”

Prisoner 022586 is keeping himself busy trying to figure out how the aliens shut our guns down. I think he has had that assault rifle apart more than a dozen times. He keeps telling us they should work. Every circuit in the rifles appears to be in perfect order. The damn things just won’t work. The disgusted look on his face tells me he is about to take the weapon apart for the umphteenth time. Pretty much the same look he had when I told him he was going to be a Last Chancer.
Prisoner 022586, he prefers the handle Hammer, is a tech prodigy. One of those kids that is too smart for his own good. He was on the fast track to becoming one of the greatest tech minds of our time. Then he got cocky. According to his file, he hacked into the Ajax Planetary Defense Grid and managed to set off a global red alert. All the orbital MACs came online, the Navy scrambled fighters, defensive ack-ack batteries were readied, and Guard units were mobilized to repel a planetary invasion. Pretty much scared the poop out of the entire population. World leaders were not happy. What really sunk his ship was that he refused to tell the government how he managed to crack the 528 bit encryption from his home desktop computer. In theory, that is impossible without a mainframe supercomputer.

He was the second Last Chancer I met that day on the landing platform. This time the shuttle actually landed. As 022586 was escorted out of the rear hatch, all the guards were grinning and laughing. Hammer didn’t look old enough to be out of high school much less a criminal of the caliber required to be in the 13th. The scowl on his face told Dando and I that whatever was so funny was at Hammers expense.
“Prisoner 022586 reporting for duty, sir.” He said.
“We just call him cupcake.” One guard interjected with a chuckle.
The nasty look that Hammer shot at the guard brought more laughs.
“Feth you, Jake!” Hammer snapped.
All the laughter stopped, however, at the cold stares the guards got from Dando and I. After all, we convicts have to stick together. Poor little Hammer was stuck between two groups of very mean, nasty, and bad tempered men that clearly didn’t like each other. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut with a combat knife.
“Well, he is all yours.” The ranking guard said with a chuckle.
With a hand signal the shuttle started to spool up its engines and the guards retreated to the safety of the rear hatch.
“Thanks guys. Those jackasses think that name is hilarious. They’ve been calling me that since we left…..” he paused. He noticed we weren’t smiling at him either.
“022586, lets get something straight. We may have to work together to survive, but that don’t make us friends nor will we ever be friends.” Dando said with a scowl. Now it was Hammers turn to be nervous.
“Ah, sir, what exactly am I doing here?” he asked.
“We needed a tech guy and your it. You are going to be a Last Chancer.” I said.
There was that truly disgusted look I told you about earlier.
“I think I would rather stay in my cell.” He said under his breath.
“Too bad,” I said with a small grin. “Welcome to the 13th Legion…….cupcake.

(Special Ops 141)

We had been stuck in the same foxhole for days when the orders came in. I knew that if they needed the Roughnecks, this mission was of extreme importance. It was going to require 8 weeks of special training, and we were going into outer-space. That is all they would tell us. The news got everybody excited, but i had an uneasy feeling in my gut.

 It’s been 8 weeks and were getting ready to launch and they still won’t tell us anything. What kind of training was that, weapons straight out of a Sci-Fi movie. Survival techniques that would be illegal on earth. Everyone’s excitement has turned into anxiousness and caution. What in god’s good name could they be training us for. It’s obvious space is not where this battle is going to take place. All that is going through our minds is what are we going to encounter.
It’s been 3 weeks and we are nearing our destination. Orders will be coming through, but information is still on a need to know basis. The alarm starts going off and that is are queue to strap in and get ready for a rough landing. Everything starts shaking and we can feel gravity, a good sign that this planet is habitable. Everything got still for a few moments and then impact! The way we were bouncing around we must have landed in water. It wasn’t to long before getting beached. We had no idea what we were getting into…….

022477 had been pacing the room. It’s not that it’s a small room. Quite spacious, actually. Larger than our cells, at any rate. 022477 just don’t like being stuck in places with no way out. That is probably the main reason he ‘volunteered’ for the 13th. He would get a chance to get out of his cell. If there was a way to get out of this room, he would find it. That’s what he does. He can get into and out of places no one else can, usually with things that don’t belong to him. He’s not just a thief, he’s an exceptional thief. If it has wheels, wings, or value, he can and will steal it.
022477’s file says he got an early start in the criminal world. His father was a small time crook. Dad would take the boy on some of his heists. 022477 was in and out of the juvenile justice system most of his life. Once he turned eighteen, the judge gave him a choice, prison or Imperial Guard. 022477 decided the Guard would be better than a jail cell. He became a master of “appropriating” items in the guard. Goodies just sort of showed up in the platoon barracks. Just like magic. That’s what the platoon started calling him. Majik.

One night while snooping around the warehouse district, he noticed some vehicles and people moving in and out of an “abandoned” building. Being the type of person Majik is, he snuck in to investigate. Turns out, there was some type of top secret weapon system in that building. So top secret, it didn’t even flag top secret. So top secret that if they catch someone snooping around that shouldn’t be, they just disappear. He was lucky that I was able to talk the intelligence guys into giving him to me on the condition that he kept his mouth shut. To this day, he hasn’t spoken a single word about what he saw in that building. We catch glimpses of people watching him. Pretty sure they are spooks with a kill order if he talks.

The day Majik joined my merry band of cutthroats always brings a smile to my face. Dando, Hammer, and I were going over the logistics of the Legion when a sonic boom got everyone’s attention. We saw the fire trail of a shuttle doing an orbital drop.
“Looks like a combat drop.” Said Dando.
Combat drops are pretty much straight down. Very bumpy and very fast. Anybody that says combat drops don’t scare them is either lying or crazy. Most people take the long way down. A nice gradual glide in from high altitude. This pilot knew what he was doing. He didn’t scrub one bit of speed on his approach. Very much like going into a hot LZ. The guards surrounding the platform were watching the shuttle very intently. They were backing away from the platform. Just when it looked like the shuttle was going to make a large hole in the world, it flared out, engines screaming in protest. The shuttle settled onto the platform like a leaf on the wind. When the rear hatch opened, a naval rating stumbled out and promptly puked on the deck. While Navy was heaving his guts out, a tall, thin prisoner walked out of the hatch with the swagger of a fighter jock. He grinned as he walked past the ensign. I noticed that his shackles were hanging form one wrist. ‘How the hell did he get out of those?’ I thought. The sound of more engines could be heard approaching fast. Dando was watching the sky.
“Gunships.” He said calmly.
The Valkyrie gunships came in fast. They came to a hover on both sides of the shuttle. If having that much ordinance pointed at him bothered him, Majik didn’t show it. He came to attention in front of me.
“Prisoner 022477 reporting for duty, sir!” He said with a smile.
A second shuttle came in behind the gunships. As soon as the shuttle touched down, a fire team poured out of the hatch. They ran straight for Majik.
“Freeze 022477! DO NOT MOVE!” The team leader screamed.
The fire team surrounded us, weapons at the ready.
“You are going back to the hole and you’re going to stay there until MY kids are old and grey.” Growled the guard.
A Navy pilot got out of the second shuttle and was busy yelling at the rating that, by the way, still looked pretty green. I’m betting the shuttle that Majik landed belonged to that pilot. Security-wise, somebody dropped the ball and somebody was going to pay for it. That somebody was going to be Majik.
“He’s not going anywhere.” I said “His butt belongs to me now.”
“Like hell, he escaped and stole a shuttle!” The team leader snarled.
“Do you really want to tell your CO that a prisoner not only escaped but took YOUR shuttle on YOUR watch?” I asked.
He was still pissed, but his common sense prevailed. He must have decided he didn’t want that particular blemish on his record. With a huff, the guard spun on his heel and stormed back to the shuttle with the rest of his fire team. Once aboard the shuttle, the gunships peeled off and both shuttles chased after the gunships.
“Thanks, sir.” Majik said.
“No problem, welcome to the 13th.” I said.
“Ah, sir? You don’t suppose that fire team leader would want this back do you?” said Majik while holding the guards wallet.
I think they could hear us laughing from orbit.

I stood atop the cliff, looking down at the transport bobbing in the water, the slight sea breeze sliding over my skin and the scent of the ocean filling my nostrils. I had been informed that the craft had been snatched from space and brought down here for the purpose of the game. I was also told by the powers that be, that the occupants had no idea this had occurred. With that in mind I started down the small trail on the cliff face leading to the shore.
I stood waiting, just out of reach of the lapping waves, for the hatch to open. The sounds of men moving and equipment getting checked echoed through the metal hull of the transport as I shifted from foot to foot in the soft sand. It was a strange looking craft, not one I recognized at all, the marking were very similar to those I had seen on the first group, not the same, but alot alike? I wondered if perhaps these two parties may all ready know each other? Perhaps engaged on another world? I began for the first time to wonder about my ” hosts” motivation? Maybe this time its more than just a game?
The hatch blew with a loud report, jarring me from my thoughts. Two men, both fully armed sprang from the breech seconds behind the flying door, landing poised and ready for action. Both barrels swung immediately towards me.
” Step back! Hands in the air!” one shouted as he stepped towards me. Of course I did as I was told.
” I mean no harm” I stated as I took a slow step backwards.
” On the ground!” he shouted as he moved closer.
” Don’t think so soldier…its kinda wet.”
CLICK! CLICK! He pulled the trigger of his weapon twice. And his eyes grew wide.
In a flash he was on me, knife drawn for the kill. He bounced off the force field and flew back into the water.
” Like I said…kinda wet”
The flustered soldier sprang to his feet, a look of hate in his eyes. I knew that if this one ever caught me off guard it was going to get messy.
” AT EASE!” The voice of authority boomed forth.
I turned to look at what I then assumed was the commander of this group of men.
” This is not Alon 6 is it?” he asked.
” No…it is not.” I responded
” So what has command gotten us into this time?”
” I doubt if command even knows where you are right now. You may have already been written off.”
His eyebrow raised slightly
” Then perhaps you can enlighten me.”
It was apparent he was a man in charge, and wanted answers.
” As far as where you are, well I am not really sure. As far as what your doing here, that I can explain.”