Spoils of War

by Terry Mixon

  What was it the woman had said? “You have my word.”

  Whatever word that might be. Did she have her own word? What might it be?

  The woman narrowed her eyes in a way that reminded One Twenty-Four of Keeper. “That’s a promise among my people. If you break it, others will doubt your word in the future. Stay true to it. I’ll be back shortly. I’ll also send someone to keep an eye on you.”

  With that, the woman turned and exited the room.

  One Twenty-Four supposed it made no difference if she allowed the doctors to do as they would. If they were going to cut her apart, there was nothing she could do to stop them. She’d just hope that the end wouldn’t be too painful.

  Grace made her way back to the container where the marines had stored their gear. Now that they’d successfully picked up the rest of the platoon, she was finally beginning to unwind.

  The timing had been tight. There’d been less than eight minutes left by the time they’d retrieved Na and the rest. Far too close for her taste.

  They’d raced away from the transshipment center as quickly as they could, and she’d watched in horror from the bridge as the place exploded, destroying a lot of ships that still hadn’t gotten clear of the blast radius.

  She didn’t know how many people had died, but it had to have been a lot. The only solace she had was that it hadn’t been her or her people that had done this. The Singularity had. Once again, they’d shown their true colors.

  That last thought made her feel guilty. Someone had shown their true colors, true, but she couldn’t paint the entire Singularity with too broad a brush. The perpetrators had to be the same people that had sent armed guards to murder a child. What kind of monsters did that?

  The rage that thought shot through her made her pause and take a deep breath. Whoever they were, she’d likely never get her hands on them. If she did, she wasn’t sure that the rules of war would save them from her retribution.

  Yet her side bore some responsibility for the bad blood. She thought back to all the talk she’d been part of, the disdain and disgust she’d used when talking about the people of the Singularity. Her view of them had to be slanted, but she’d let her feelings pass by without much conscious scrutiny.

  The fact that the girl had thought that nothing but death awaited her made Grace want to retch. She’d never be part of something like that, but she probably wouldn’t have to look too far to find someone who relished the idea.

  She had some hard thinking ahead.

  She resumed walking and cornered Na as soon as she was in the container. “How’s the platoon?”

  “We’ve got a few injuries, but nothing life threatening,” her second said. “Other than Scott, we all made it out.”

  Grace heard the sorrow in the other woman’s voice, but Na’s expression never wavered. She was an Imperial Marine. Grief didn’t stop them from doing their duty.

  “She died as a marine, saving her comrades,” Grace agreed. “Sometimes, a death that means something is the only reward we get in our line of work. What kind of injuries do we have?”

  “Mostly flechette hits that chewed up that mercenary armor. Basically, shrapnel wounds. A few got actual flechette penetration, but nothing fatal. The medics checked everyone out and said they’d live. Turn around.”

  Grace frowned. “What?”

  “I saw your armor. Someone shot the hell out of your back. Let me make sure you’re not bleeding out. That would look bad on my next efficiency report.”

  “I probably caught some shrapnel, but I’m not bleeding out.”

  Na raised a single eyebrow and made a circling motion with her finger.

  Giving in to the inevitable, Grace turned her back to the NCO and started to unseal the skinsuit. As a marine, she’d long ago lost any hint of body modesty. When it came time to don armor, there was no time to be sensitive. There was nothing sexual about duty-related nudity.

  The other woman didn’t bother trying to get her skinsuit off. Being much more direct, she pulled her marine knife and used its almost monomolecular edge to cut the back of the skinsuit away.

  Then she hissed. “You’re all chewed up. No serious bleeding, but you’ve got armor fragments in there. Maybe even a flechette that lost most of its velocity, since you’re still alive. How did they manage to shoot you in the back? Running from danger isn’t your style.”

  “I’ll get it looked at as soon as I take care of the postcombat briefing. I got shot in the back because I had a little girl in my arms. Better me than her.”

  Na grunted her agreement. “I heard something about that. It takes a lot of guts to take hits like that to shield an enemy civilian. So, how did it happen?”

  “She literally fell on us as we were making our escape. She’s maybe eleven or twelve, and a member of their ruling caste. She has full-face tattoos and said her name was One Twenty-Four of the Andrea Line. I’m not sure why she had a number rather than a name.

  “Kayden told me that I should’ve left her behind. He told me that I couldn’t keep her as a prisoner because the Empire doesn’t see genetically modified people like her as human by law.

  “Speaking of Kayden, where is he?”

  Na shrugged as she grabbed a medical kit. “He’s in his quarters back in the engineering section. I gather being shot at wasn’t on his bucket list. I secured his stunner.

  “He’s probably cleaning up and decompressing. He might also be supremely pissed that you didn’t listen to him about the girl.”

  “Perfect.”

  Grace grimaced as she stripped out of the ruined skinsuit and allowed Na to clean off the worst of the blood.

  “That law is a legal fiction to stick a finger in the eye of the Singularity, but he’s right,” Grace admitted. “Legally, that girl is nothing but a thing. So, to make sure that she stays alive, I’ve declared her as my booty.”

  Na stopped cleaning and leaned around Grace’s torso to look at her face, her expression one of incredulity. “Seriously? You’re going to own a person?”

  “No,” Grace said, shaking her head firmly. “That’s as much a legal fiction as the law itself. I’m doing this to protect her from having somebody in Imperial Intelligence decide that maybe dissecting her is a great idea after all.

  “Which, by the way, is what she thinks is going to happen to her. She’s certain that the Empire is going to butcher her at the earliest opportunity so that they can figure out how she works. I heard it from her own very lips when I saw her in the medical center.”

  “That’s complete and utter bullshit, ma’am,” Na said as she got back to work. “She’s not an enemy combatant.

  “Still, she’s bound to have critical intelligence that we’ll need to extract from her. How are you going to balance what duty requires while keeping somebody like her safe? Hell, it’s not like she’s a pair of boots. Even if you won that fight, where would you keep her?

  “It’s not exactly like you can have a child wandering around in a duty area. We’re Imperial Marines. What we do isn’t safe for regular civilians, much less a child.”

  Grace nodded. “I’m wondering all that and more. The first thing that I’m going to have to deal with is the fact that some people on this ship aren’t going to be happy about what I’ve done. I don’t know who they are yet, but I’m confident that there’s going to be someone who’s convinced that I’ve lost my mind.

  “I want to ask you directly. Do you have a problem with what I’m doing? No judgment from me if you have reservations, but I need to know that you have my back.”

  “I’ll back your play, ma’am,” Na said immediately, not pausing as she cleaned Grace’s wounds. “The fact that you have to do this makes me sick.”

  Na finished her work and grabbed a new skinsuit for Grace, handing it to her and starting to clean up the supplies she’d used in treating Grace.

  “It might even be someone inside the platoon,” the NCO admitted. “I’ll talk with them and find out if anyone has a problem. If th
ey do, I’ll address it.”

  The finality of her tone made it clear that she’d address it firmly, too. Good. Grace loved her people and didn’t like putting them in this kind of bind, but she wasn’t going to compromise when it came to the girl.

  “Thanks,” Grace said as she slid her legs into the new skinsuit. “I’ll talk to Anders and Kyle about her. It’s going to be their responsibility to deal with any problems on the crew side. I want you to post two marines outside the medical center. I don’t want them intimidating the girl, so make sure that they’re unarmored and only have sidearms. Women only to start with.

  “They’ll be there to make sure the girl doesn’t get into trouble because she’s from the Singularity, so make sure that they don’t have any axes to grind. We can hate the Singularity, and we can hate what it’s done to the Corps, but we can’t let that bleed over onto a civilian child. Nits do not make lice, Sergeant. Is that absolutely clear?”

  Na braced. “Clear, Lieutenant. I’ll make damn sure that none of our marines is going to give this girl any problems. I’ll talk to her as well. The best way we can prove that we aren’t monsters is to be decent with her.”

  Grace nodded, satisfied. She grimaced in pain as she slid her arms into the sleeves of her new skinsuit and made a promise to herself to see the medics as soon as she’d finished a longer briefing for Anders and Kyle.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” Grace said. “We’re going to have a ceremony for Scott tonight. We can’t lay her to rest, and we have no uniforms, but we’ll do her full honors.”

  “We’ll be ready, ma’am,” Na assured her. “Go make sure those Fleet slackers don’t screw this up.”

  Grace laughed and headed toward the passageway. Neither officer was going to be happy about what she’d done, but she was sure they wouldn’t take it out on a child. The crew might have other ideas, though, and that was what she needed to make sure they were watching for.

  And, of course, they’d want to take full advantage of the briefing to chew her ass off for putting them in a difficult spot.

  Time to face the music.

  17

  One Twenty-Four eventually decided that the people seeing to her injuries weren’t going to harm her. It wasn’t anything they said, since they couldn’t speak a language that she understood, but they only seemed to be trying to mend her hurts.

  She’d never been injured so badly before and so took some interest in what they were doing to her. The various medical processes that she’d gone through in the crèche were very different than what was happening now.

  They had portable devices that they ran over her body that made her feel somewhat better, and then one of them spoke with her briefly and prepared to put a somatic stimulator on her head. She drew back a little at that, and the person spoke in a reassuring tone. She finally allowed it.

  When she woke, she didn’t feel any pain. Whatever had been wrong with her had been fully healed.

  Her situation had also changed. The two people that had healed her were gone. In their place was a short woman with black hair and a dark-skinned face. Her eyes looked strange. There was something odd about how her tear ducts were shaped.

  After a moment, she decided that the woman was pretty. She wasn’t certain what criteria she’d used to come to that conclusion, but it felt right.

  The woman was seated in a chair near the portable bed on which One Twenty-Four lay. She wore some type of dark gray coverall. On her hip, One Twenty-Four saw that there was a weapon of some kind.

  The woman said nothing while One Twenty-Four examined her. And even when she’d finished, the woman just sat there with a slight smile on her face. She seemed content to wait and see what One Twenty-Four did.

  With the woman’s seeming invitation, One Twenty-Four sat up and examined her curiously for a little while. Once she felt as if she’d learned what she could by sight, she spoke.

  “Who are you? My name is One Twenty-Four.”

  The woman’s smiled grew slightly. “My name is Na Fei. My given name is Fei, and I don’t mind if you use it. In my culture, the family name comes first. So, where Grace Tolliver’s given name comes first, mine comes at the end.

  “If that’s confusing, I won’t be offended if you make a mistake. A lot of people do, and one gets used to it. I work with Grace as her second-in-command. She asked me to keep an eye on you and to make certain that you felt safe. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Fei didn’t make her feel as threatened as the others had. One Twenty-Four decided that her desire to know more outweighed her concerns about cooperating with these people. After all, she was their prisoner.

  They wouldn’t stop asking her questions. If she could learn things herself, perhaps that was the best that could be hoped for.

  Also, the woman’s command of her language was much better than the first woman’s. She still pronounced things oddly, but her meaning was clear enough.

  “Am I allowed to ask questions as well?”

  The woman nodded. “Certainly. Why don’t we trade? I’ll even allow you to ask first. Ask whatever you like, and I’ll answer if I can. If it’s on a subject that I’m not allowed to speak of, I’ll tell you so and allow you to ask another question. The same applies to you. Is that acceptable?”

  One Twenty-Four thought about it and nodded. “I can’t think of anything that I know that I won’t answer a question about. I grew up in the crèche. It’s not like I know very much about the Singularity or their secrets.”

  She studied the woman. “You said that you’re the other woman’s second-in-command. What does that mean? Were you here to attack the crèche?”

  The woman’s smile widened slightly. “That’s actually two questions, but since they’re related, I’ll allow it. Grace and I were once Imperial Marines. My rank was sergeant, and I was a noncommissioned officer. Grace was the commanding officer of my platoon and a lieutenant. The Imperial Marines use that kind of rank structure so that people with varying levels of authority know where they fall inside the hierarchy.

  “As a sergeant, I had a number of others that I commanded, but I took my orders from the lieutenant. She, in turn, took orders from those in higher-ranking positions. And at the very top, our senior officers took orders from the civilian government of the Empire. If one goes up far enough, one finds the emperor.

  “As for what we were doing here, are you aware that the Singularity and the Empire are in a state of not-quite-war where they send raiding parties back and forth across each other’s borders?”

  One Twenty-Four shook her head. “I know that the Empire is our enemy, and I know the consequences of falling into your hands, but I don’t know anything about the fighting itself.”

  She felt her eyes narrow slightly. “You speak of your membership in the Imperial Marines, yet you’re here working together. If you brought others you once worked with on this raid, then I begin to doubt part of your story. It seems too coincidental.”

  The woman shook her head. “You’re entirely too clever. Yes, our departure from the Imperial Marines is a fiction. I’ll explain that in a moment.

  “Now, I understand that you’re worried about your future. Grace has ordered that no harm befall you, and that’s why I’m here. In addition to myself, I have two marines stationed outside this compartment to make sure that there are no disturbances.

  “No one is going to offer you harm on this ship, and Grace is taking every step that she can to make certain that nothing untoward comes to pass. Personally, I don’t believe that anything terrible would happen to you in any case.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re a victim of propaganda. Will there be people inside the Empire that hate you just for being from the Singularity? Sadly, yes. There are people like that everywhere. I suspect the same is true inside the Singularity.

  “Having captured you puts Grace into an unusual position. I think she’s come up with a creative way to deal with most objections to what she’s done, and I believe that s
he can protect you. I and the rest of the marines will endeavor to assist her in doing so.

  “As far as the raids that brought us here, we were instructed to leave our positions as Imperial Marines so that we could act on our own and strike at the Singularity. The Singularity does much the same to the Empire.

  “Both governments know that’s a legal fiction, but it allows us to have a level of conflict that doesn’t rise to full-scale war. Our mission was to find an economic or military target inside the Singularity and destroy it. We happened to choose the cargo transshipment center where we found you.

  “To say that the mission went somewhat awry from there would be an understatement. We planned to overload the fusion plant and destroy the transshipment center after allowing everyone to leave, but someone overrode what we were attempting to do and set a shorter destruction time.

  “They also didn’t want anyone to know that the end was coming and blocked us from making a public warning until far too late. So, while we escaped, many others did not. That saddens me, because such a loss of life was not in our plans.”

  One Twenty-Four felt a wave of cold wash through her.

  “I know what happened,” she said in a whisper. “Keeper gave the order. She instructed everything to self-destruct and gave a time limit of forty-five minutes. Then we were supposed to escape.

  “I suppose the rest of them did. Keeper wouldn’t have set a timer that was too short. I wonder if they think that I’m dead now.”

  The other woman watched her for a few moments and nodded. “Perhaps. That may be a question that you never get an answer to. Who is this Keeper?”

  “Keeper is… Keeper. She is an adult of the Andrea Line. It was her duty to teach us the ways of the Line and to make certain that only those who met expectations survived the crèche.”

  The woman’s expression froze. “What do you mean by ‘survived the crèche’?”

  “Each of the twelve lines in the ruling caste decants children every six years. Each line is responsible for educating and training their own children. Those that are unsuitable or fail to meet expectations are culled.”