By Dawn's Early Light

by Jason Fuesting

  Leah’s voice trembled, “Yeah, that. I’m just crazy.”

  Eric smirked. “Crazy? No, you’re hurting, Leah. There’s a difference. I don’t know if I look like I have my shit together or what, but trust me, I’m thinking all the same things you are.”

  “I’m still useless,” she muttered and plopped onto the rock outcropping, defeated.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Turing pulled me off that project the moment your friend showed up. I didn’t even have a chance to really start working on it. That, and think about it, anyone on these teams here, whatever we were doing obviously wasn’t important.”

  Looking askance at her, Eric asked, “Leah, do you know what was in that bunker?”

  “Heavy shit. Jeff had us moving boxes almost the moment we got here. Everyone else was too busy to really talk. I tried waking you up on my only real break.”

  Eric glanced about at the rest of the work crew to make sure none were close enough to overhear and squatted next to her.

  “I don’t know how much of this we’re supposed to talk about, Leah, so don’t repeat any of this. You understand?” he whispered. She slowly nodded. “We- I killed maybe a dozen men to take that place back. I don’t know if or how much of that you knew, but they were not good men.”

  “Of course not, they,” Leah paused with a shudder, “They used Elizabeth.”

  “Yeah, they did. They were also stealing crates out of there, taking them back to wherever they came from. Weapons, ammunition. Lots of ammunition.”

  Eric saw recognition and concern blossom in her eyes.

  “That’s bad!” she said, horrified.

  “Yeah, very bad. That’s why we’re pulling out what we can as fast as we can so they don’t get more. But more than that, there’s equipment down there. Tons, probably enough to make a really small colony work.”

  “A really small colony? Like ours?” she wondered.

  “Exactly. They’re still inventorying the lower levels as far as I know, but I did hear something about milling machines, and crates of long-term food. Turing said something about cryogenics tubes. I’m not sure if Turing or anyone else has let on how low we’ve been on supplies, but getting the rest out too might be the difference between starving to death this coming winter or not. What you’re doing here is tremendously important to all of us. Who knows, maybe there’s stuff in there that’s more your specialty than the mills are Jeff’s. Just be patient, Leah. There’s reason to have hope, you know.”

  The clouds of worry in her eyes began to evaporate.

  “Maybe, but I’m afraid to hope, Eric. I- every time I start to hope, I remember Fro- the Shrike,” she said.

  “Be patient with yourself. Hurt takes time to heal and forcing it only makes it hurt more,” Eric told her. This is probably not a good idea, but fuck it. He cautiously looped an arm around her shoulders. “I’m here for you if you need someone to talk to, Leah. We both have scars from the Shrike.”

  Chewing on her lip, Leah looked away. “I don’t know, Eric. I don’t know I’ll ever want to talk about what happened. Talking about it makes it--”

  “Real,” Eric finished her sentence when she paused for a word. “It’s okay, Leah. You’re at least trying to get better. Don’t rush yourself. Forcing it might only break things worse.”

  Leah jumped when Byron barked, “Alright, finish whatever you’re doing. We’re heading out in five.”

  Eric squeezed Leah’s hand. “Things will get better, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  He caught her weak smile in reply as he stood. The old commando nodded at him as he trudged through the snow back to the main group.

  Sometime later when the two were marching ahead of the column together, Eric glanced over at the old man beside him. The clouds had long since obscured the sun and a sharp chill rode the air. The chill had descended hard within minutes of the sun’s disappearance. Every inch of even slightly exposed skin burnt from the cold. He kept having to readjust the wrap covering his face. The cloth kept freezing.

  “Byron? This training program of Hadrian’s, you figure they haven’t found the manor yet, don’t you? Hoping we can make ourselves look like a lot harder target than we really are? Maybe convince them it’s not worth the effort?”

  Byron’s eyes flicked over to him and the man regarded him quietly a few seconds before giving a nigh imperceptible nod.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, they had quite a few folks at that site, all of them military trained. Nobody would leave that many men out somewhere if they didn’t have more back home, unless it was an emergency. So either we got them all, or we’re outnumbered. Handily,” Eric said and waited.

  Byron kept plodding alongside him, silent.

  “I don’t think we’re that lucky, so what if looking bigger than we are doesn’t work? If they’re armed as well as we are, and I’m pretty sure that’s a fair bet, what do we do?” Eric asked as he spotted the stone wall through the recent mist.

  “You’re a smart kid, Eric. You know what the answer to that is. We can’t let them take the bunker or Turing’s place. There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “How badly do you think it’d go?”

  “Well, standard military doctrine states that to take a nominally prepared position you must have at least three times as many fighters as the enemy. Depending on how well trained and prepared the defenders are, in reality, that can vary from one to one or as high as ten to one.”

  Eric grunted, processing Byron’s words. They followed the wall another hundred meters before Eric asked, “So we’re worth what, maybe a dozen of them right now?”

  “A dozen? No, figure a bit more than that,” Byron answered, fishing a key from his pocket to unlock the gate ahead. “I’m probably worth four. Hadrian five. Julien the same. You might get two, same with Elizabeth. The rest of you though, not something I want to think about. But six months from now? We can triple that number at the minimum.”

  Pushing the gate open, Byron chuckled, “Though to be fair, we let Julien loose with all the explosives we just recovered, we can probably quadruple the number by the end of the week off that alone.”

  Eric stepped to one side to allow the rest of the group through

  “He’s good with those?”

  Byron snorted. “To hear Hadrian talk about it, the man could probably get packed snow to deflagrate.”

  One of the prisoners turned his head at Byron’s comment.

  “Eyes front, specialist,” Eric ordered.

  “Lance Corporal,” the prisoner sighed. “Sounds like your buddy’s my kind of man.”

  “Mind your own business, Corporal,” Eric growled at the man. Byron stepped forward and shoved the prisoner onward.

  Anne met them at the front door. Eric didn’t miss the pistol holstered at her side.

  “I’ve got water on the stove for you boys,” she told Byron while they knocked the snow from their clothes.

  “Good,” Byron replied. “We’ve got two new guests. I need someplace quiet to keep them. Downstairs preferably, away from anything they could get their hands on. Julien about?”

  Anne nodded.

  “He’s been pacing the halls since you left with that ridiculous machinegun of his,” Anne replied as she eyed the two prisoners. “I think I know just the place for them, give me a few minutes. I’ll get Julien for you while I’m at it.”

  “Take fifteen, everybody,” Byron told the others as Anne went inside. “We need to get the sleds unloaded before it starts snowing, so don’t wander far.”

  Byron motivated the prisoners to follow the team inside with a few jerks of his rifle. Eric closed the door behind them, but stayed close enough to the doorway to an eye on the sleds through the windows. By the time Anne returned a few minutes later, a sparse flurry had begun to fall.

  Eric trailed the prisoners as they followed Byron and Anne through the halls. A short time later, Anne led them down a set of stairs Eric had missed in the back of the kitchen.
The boxes cluttering the cold concrete halls and side rooms in the new area reminded him of the bunker until he noticed most of them were empty or nearly so.

  Pausing at a doorway, Anne asked Byron, “Will this do?”

  “Looks like it,” the old soldier replied, glancing inside. “Eric, I’ll watch these two. Go sack out. I’ll wake you in a few hours with a plan.”

  Only a few paces behind Anne on the way up, Eric asked, “Anne? What’s this space? An extension of the pantry?”

  She smiled, “Cellar, dear.”

  “Pretty empty down here.”

  Anne quietly laughed, but Eric heard little humor.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty bare now. We’ve run through quite a bit of everything originally down here. Makes me happy I grew up where I did. We learned tricks to get through the lean times when I was younger. I’ve had to use them all here and learn more.”

  Eric frowned as his eyes jumped from one empty box to another.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked as they reached the stairs up.

  “I dunno. I guess I figured things were pretty set here? You know, based off what I’ve seen?”

  “Oh,” Anne sighed with a shake of her head, “No. I’ve been doing everything I can to keep life here close to the way it was before. Sometimes I’m a bit more successful at fooling than others. The last few years, any time we got a new group of people in Turing would have me splurge a bit on the food. Your group is the last we could afford to do that with unless your friend manages a miracle. Even if he does, the list of what we won’t have after spring is way too long.”

  “Like?” Eric asked, pausing at the door to the main hall.

  “Don’t worry about what you can’t change, dear,” Anne gave a wistful smile. “On your way, now.”

  “What’s this about prisoners?” Julien asked from behind him. “I don’t remember the plan including taking prisoners.”

  “Wasn’t planned. It just turned out that way.”

  “Eh, that happens I suppose. I’ll have to ask Hadrian about how he took them.”

  “You’ll have to wait. He’s still at the bunker. Wasn’t in much shape for the walk back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got shot before we made it inside. He’s lucky he was wearing one of those gel inserts. I ended up having to clear the bunker on my own.”

  “Oh, I see,” Julien said, but Eric heard, “Bullshit.”

  “I won’t lie, I was lucky as shit. They didn’t see me, I flanked them. They panicked.”

  Julien’s eyes narrowed. Doubt still clouded the man’s eyes.

  “Anyway, I’m going to help the sled folks unload and then get some sleep. I’m supposed to help Byron interrogate our new friends later.”

  “Ah. Luck to you then and good night.”

  “So,” Byron said as he stared across the table at the man. “Lance Corporal?”

  “Taylor.”

  “Got a first name, Corporal?” Eric asked and sipped his coffee. The interrogation room was quite small, formerly a storeroom in the basement. Byron and Eric had spent a few hours removing anything that wasn’t the ceiling lighting, the lone desk Lance Corporal Taylor sat at, and the metal folding chairs everyone had.

  “Chris. Christopher.”

  “Well, Chris,” Byron said as he wrote in his notebook, “You have a problem.”

  “I do? Well, yeah, I do.”

  “Yes, you do,” Byron said and tilted his notebook toward Eric revealing a simple message in large lettering. Play along.

  “See, my job is to fix problems,” Byron told Corporal Taylor. “Right now, I’ve got a lot of people who want me to fix yours in a very abrupt fashion. Final even. Seems you might have pissed off a few of them, to include my boss.

  “But I’m a reasonable man, Chris. My friend here can be, too. Usually. But seeing as your friends tried to shoot him and you were setting to blow him up, I’m not thinking he’s feeling too charitable right about now. Eric?”

  Eric scowled at the prisoner as he slowly shook his head.

  Byron finished with, “So, seeing as I’m the only one in this building that doesn’t want to use your carcass for fertilizer, we have a lot of work to do if I’m going to help you.”

  “Help me?” Chris said.

  “Well, you do want help, don’t you? Most people tend to not care for getting executed.”

  “You got me. Not a big fan of executions, especially my own.”

  “Good. So, help me help you. You can start by telling us what exactly you were doing at the bunker complex.”

  “Well, we found it a few months back.”

  “Who’s we?” Eric interrupted.

  “Me and twenty some-odd other guys. Major Gore was in charge.”

  “So you found the bunker. Who came up with the idea of getting into it?” Byron prodded.

  “Idea? We found it that way. I figured the tree came down a few days earlier. It’d been raining for a week straight, like the clouds were trying to drown us.”

  “And then?”

  “The major spent a few days sorting through what we’d found. First time I’d eaten that well since I got here. He sent back a group with as much as they could carry. Started getting cold a week after that.”

  “I’m having a hard time believing a dozen men carried out all that’s missing,” Byron said flatly.

  “Because they didn’t. Colonel Gliar sent a detachment back with the first group to help recover what we could. They left right before the real snows came in. Figure it was about sixty people.”

  Byron scribbled notes and asked, “So, how exactly did you get here?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story.”

  “Good, we’ll come back to that. This Gliar guy, he’s a marine like you?”

  Taylor’s complexion darkened and the man looked stuck between angry and ill.

  “Hardly. He’s legion scum.”

  “Oh really?” Byron replied with raised eyebrows. “How exactly does a Marine come to take orders from a legionnaire?”

  Chris grit his teeth. “When he has no other choice.”

  “So for all the talk about how honorable and competent a Marine has to be, you’re going to hide behind that? No choice?”

  Chris clenched his jaw. “Look, buddy. I knew something was fishy when they sent me along as a technical adviser to a bunch of legion types. Orders are orders right? So I help them do the job and the next thing I know we’re all getting dropped on this shitball. We wander around for part of a day and get spotted by a hunting party that turns out to be legion as well. It’s not like they gave me a choice. Work with them or die.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Byron said. “You were detached from your regular unit?”

  Chris nodded.

  “You performed some mission attached to a legion group?”

  Another nod.

  “And instead of returning to your unit, the fleet dropped you and the folks you were attached to on this planet?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you were forcibly conscripted by legion types already on planet?”

  “You’re tracking.”

  “Were the legionnaires here from the same unit as the ones you were working with?”

  “Some of them. They’re not all from the same legion.”

  Curiosity got the best of him and Eric asked, “Are there others like you? Folks who aren’t legion?”

  “Damn few.”

  “Why’s that?” Byron followed up

  “Easy. If you don’t have a legion tattoo or have someone with one to vouch for you, you’re prey. Hell, even if you do have someone to vouch for you, you’re still not completely safe.”

  Byron’s lip twitched. “Define ‘prey’, Corporal.”

  “Exactly what it sounds like. You’re not even human to them. If you have something they want, they’ll take it. If they have a use for you, they’ll force you to do it. Slavery, whoring, those are starts. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard s
tories that last winter when they ran low on food, the unmarked were on the menu.”

  Eric blinked and asked, “On the menu? Your group ate people?”

  “Woah, ‘your group’ is awfully personal. They’re their own group. I just happened to have the bad luck to get stuck with them and just enough good luck to not end up dead. I didn’t eat anyone. I didn’t kill anyone unless they were trying to kill me and I sure as hell didn’t rape anyone either.”

  “Eric,” Byron said, sitting his pen down. “How about you go get us some more coffee and have Anne start another pot. This might take a while. Oh, and take this note to Turing.”

  Day 21

  Solid blows rattled his bedroom door in its frame. Eric startled out of deep sleep to find his pistol already in his hand. Hard knocking, not someone trying to kick the door in. Relax.

  “What?” he groaned, exhausted. The last five days had taken its toll. Six on, six off had been his least favorite shift schedule on the Fortune. The change of venue planetside did little to alter his opinion. It sucked no matter where you were. Six hours off meant four hours of sleep at best. After a certain point, creeping exhaustion always won, but in the end with Eric’s help Byron had won as well. Corporal Taylor had cooperated freely, but the legion prisoner had not. Eric shivered slightly, knowing that he’d only seen a small portion of what Byron had put the man through to break him.

  “Turing’s getting everyone together out back in fifteen minutes,” Hadrian said through the door.

  “What for?” Eric growled.

  “He needs witnesses.”

  “What? No, fuck it, I’ll find out when I get there.”

  So tired he felt three steps behind his physical body, Eric fumbled on a set of clothes and made his way to the back door with a short detour through the bathroom. Still rubbing his eyes, he emerged onto the back porch to find Hadrian and Byron standing to either side of the prisoners a short walk from the porch.

  Turing stood a few meters in front of the group in his long leather coat. The quiet officiousness from Turing’s dress and demeanor clicked home with cold realization.