Markov's Prize

by Mark Barber

  The door slid open and Jemmel walked in, following suit by hanging up her weapon and jettisoning her armored plates. The short, shaven-headed woman looked over with red-rimmed eyes.

  “That look supposed to be sexy?” She sneered. “You look like crap, Rhona.”

  “Explain this,” Rhona demanded, “we wear battle armor which protects us to fight in space. In a vacuum. Our armor is completely sealed and air tight. So how, how the hell, have I got an entire desert inside my body glove?”

  Gant was the next to wander through the door. He looked up at Rhona and forced a weary smile before poking his head back out into the corridor.

  “Qan?” He shouted. “Come here, quick! Kat’s in her bra!”

  The sound of heavy, sprinting footsteps echoed from the corridor for the briefest of moments before coming to a stop.

  “I can’t,” Qan called back. “I’m too knackered to run! Can you ask her nicely not to put anything else on? I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

  Gant walked across to his room and collapsed onto his bunk, still clad in his dust-covered armor.

  “That was a complete and utter waste of three days,” he murmured.

  “At least we all made it back,” Rhona yawned. “I checked on Sessetti. He’s recovering well. Clythe and Rae have gone off to see him.”

  “Can you put those things away before you kill somebody?” Jemmel suddenly snapped.

  “It’s a panhuman body, in underwear,” Rhona sighed as she lay back on her bunk and set about tearing the body glove off her legs. “Get over it.”

  Qan appeared at the door and stared at Rhona with a huge grin.

  “This is the best thing I’ve seen in about a year,” he beamed, “but I kinda expected sexier underwear from the likes of you, Rhona.”

  “I’m kind of a traditional girl in that when I’m in combat with a bloodthirsty mob of genetically engineered killers, I like to be comfortable underneath and wear a massive suit of armor on top. But believe me, if the Concord Combined Command start offering the sort of armor which the women were wearing in that movie I caught you watching the other week, I’ll be the first in line to volunteer to wear it. Although I’d imagine I wouldn’t last long in a fight,” Rhona added with a wink.

  “You know, I bet you actually would, too,” Jemmel said.

  “What is your problem?” Rhona growled. “Yeah, I know I’m good looking. It doesn’t define me. There’s more to me, a lot more. I know that, I’m confident with that, and I don’t give a damn what you think. So keep your opinions and comments to yourself. Just because you’ve given up on yourself doesn’t give you the right to pass judgment on anybody else.”

  “Given up on myself?” Jemmel seethed, jumping to her feet. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Aw man, I wasn’t the prettiest girl at school so I’ll shave my head, get tattoos, and spend my life yipping at anybody who opens their mouth,” Rhona stared at the shorter woman. “Jeez, Jem, just grow your hair out, put some make up on, and act like a grown woman instead of an angry, fourteen year old boy.”

  “Woah! Woah! Woah!” Gant stood up, holding his hands out defensively. “C’mon, guys! We’re all shattered from three days of running from killer midgets in battlesuits! This isn’t us! Let’s just stop, take a deep breath, and call it quits before this gets out of hand.”

  Rhona nodded and sank back down onto her bunk. She followed Gant’s advice, inhaling a lungful of recycled air before breathing out slowly.

  “I’m sorry Jem,” she said, “that was a really nasty thing to say. I didn’t mean that. You’ve got every right to live the way you wanna live and look the way you wanna look. Not my place to judge.”

  “It’s cool, Rhona, don’t sweat it,” Jemmel sank down on one of the sofas in the communal area in the center of the block. “I’m just being a bitch. I could do it a lot less.”

  “Yeah,” Qan nodded slowly, “yeah, we’re all friends again. Now you two kiss each other and make up properly.”

  “Shut up and go… stick one of those movies on,” Jemmel retorted.

  The rooms fell silent for a few moments until Gant found the energy to carefully remove each of his suit’s armored plates and then set about carefully cleaning them with a small equipment auto-servicer.

  “How many casualties did the company take?” Qan suddenly asked.

  “Twelve dead, same again wounded,” Rhona replied, “nearly half of us. Post engagement report says we took out four Ghar battlesuits. Four.”

  She dreaded the thought of how it would all feel when the shard assistance being directed into her head had worn off. When the day came to face how many lives had been lost with clarity and no medication to fall back on.

  “Yeah, but we gave those little unarmored bastards a good kicking,” Gant offered, “we must have dropped a hundred of those.”

  “But they’ve got thousands more,” Jemmel sighed.

  “It’s all the more reason to be thankful,” Rhona said. “We’ve got two days here before we’re back in the line. Two days of nobody trying to kill us. We can lie around here and worry, or we can go do something to pick ourselves up. C’mon, let’s go get changed and get out of here. That mandarin says there’s a safe area about two hours in a Duke from here and we’re cleared to leave the firebase. It’s some little coastal town which is on the right side of the lines and is now under our control. Let’s just go find a bar and sit down by a beach with some drinks.”

  Gant and Jemmel exchanged looks.

  “What?” Rhona asked.

  “The population is mostly Concord now,” Gant explained, “but there’s still those who are IMTel incompatible. Not many, a real minority, but just a handful of people who’s minds won’t merge with our nanospheres, once there’s one in place here. And they’ll remember exactly what things were like before we got here. Just before you joined the company, Kat, a few of us went out to some city excursion when we had a couple days of second line respite. It was a planet called… W’Than Three. Anyway, one of the locals hadn’t merged with the IMTel. Saw a bunch of strangers with military haircuts and put two and two together. He bombed the bar we were in, killed three of our guys.”

  “Sorry, Rhona,” Jemmel said. “I’m not going through that again. If I’ve got two days off, I’m spending two days sleeping.”

  The room fell silent again. Rhona grabbed her datapad and set about constructing a letter to send to her brother.

  ***

  Outskirts of the Nienne Desert

  Equatorial Region

  Markov’s Prize

  L-Day plus 34

  The cramped interior of the C3T7 transporter drone seemed almost spacious with only three passengers inside. Tahl had often looked at the exterior of the vehicle and wondered how it was possible to cram ten troopers inside the angular hold which hung below the midpoint of the drone. If it was possible to apply compression technology to living matter without harming it, the T7 Duke was proof.

  Tahl looked across at the other side of the passenger hold at the drone’s other two occupants. Strike Leader Rall and Strike Trooper Sessetti had both been wounded in action whilst fighting the Ghar. Rall had taken a hit in exactly the way Tahl would have predicted – leading a head on assault against battlesuited Ghar. His squad of five soldiers had managed to destroy a single Ghar trooper with grenades. Sessetti, meanwhile, had been gunned down by a trooper whilst his squad held a defensive position. The medical reports described massive trauma to the lower torso – the young soldier had been nearly cut in half. Both men would be dead without modern medical care; the same care which allowed them to return to combat duties after being severely injured.

  “Not quite what it looks like on ‘Infinity Rangers’?” Tahl offered a smile to Sessetti.

  The young trooper blinked at him.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “Infinity Rangers,” Tahl repeated, “that holo-show that was popular a few years back Probably before your time. It’s about soldiers
from a fictitious force which looks surprisingly like C3, fighting bad guys across the galaxy. Their armor makes them look like drop troopers, but don’t ever tell a drop trooper that! It’s a sore subject. Anyhow, in the show, there’s a whole lot of gunfire and explosions, but nobody ever dies and the bad guys aren’t all that scary. Probably keeps the people back home from thinking the worst about what we’re doing out here.”

  Sessetti smiled uncomfortably and nodded. Tahl could easily check Sessetti’s emotions through his shard connection with the company, but he always found it to be something of an invasion of privacy unless it was in combat, where it was often necessary. Still, the spiritual side of Tahl’s study of kerempai had led him down the path of interpreting non-verbal communication, and right now, Sessetti was where so many junior soldiers found themselves – uncomfortable with the rank gradient and therefore reticent to talk to higher ranking soldiers.

  “Drop trooper,” Rall nodded slowly, “now there’s something I’d like to have a go at. Jumping down behind enemy lines, blowing stuff up. That sounds like the life.”

  “You only end up doing about one or two jumps per year,” Tahl said. “It’s a risky way to enter combat and it needs a pretty sterile environment if you’re to avoid massive casualties. It’s pretty exhilarating though, the actual jump along the transmat beam.”

  “You used to be a drop trooper, sir?” Sessetti asked hesitantly.

  “Only for a couple of years, when I first joined up. I only logged five combat drops. The rest of it was pretty similar to what we do in the strike corps – a lot of time in the back of a T7.”

  The drone began to slow down as it neared its destination. Tahl patched in to the drone’s cameras and looked out across the desert ahead. Fine, yellow sands stretched out in soft dunes, rippled by the light wind. Mixed in with the yellow in almost equal proportions were swirls of blue; the courser, darker sands uncovered by the winds and painting the entire landscape with a vivid and unique effect not dissimilar to marble. The horizon was broken with dull, orange hills made of jagged rocks with winding canyons and ravines snaking through. Up ahead was the construction site of Firebase Delta, the formation’s next base of operations in the fight against the Ghar invaders. Engineering drones were already busily constructing a defensive perimeter made up of kinetic barriers, scanners, and automated gun turrets.

  The drone slowed to a stop and eased down to touch the soft sand before the door slid open on the left hand side of the hold. Tahl stood up, holding out a hand to gesture for the other two troopers to go on ahead of him. Sessetti was first out – the six troopers of his squad stood waiting for him at the edge of the landing area. A few whoops and cheers were issued by his friends as he hopped down from the Duke before jogging over to meet them. Rall was next to jump down. Nobody stood waiting for him.

  Tahl stepped down into the yellow and blue sand, the glaring suns causing him to wince and turn away as a single figure walked out to meet him. Dressed the same as all other troopers in the busy firebase construction area, Van Noor wore his battlesuit with his helmet replaced by his beret.

  “Welcome back, sir!” Van Noor shouted over the din of the construction behind him, saluting smartly.

  Tahl returned the salute and reached out to shake the senior strike leader’s hand.

  “Hello Bry,” he smiled. “I’ve missed a lot. I’ve caught up on all that I could on the flight across.”

  “Mandarin Owenne says you’re late,” Van Noor said as the two walked away from the landing area, “but he’s done a good job of keeping the company in one piece. We’ve taken a lot of hits, but Owenne ordered a fighting withdrawal as soon as it was obvious that we were outgunned. Intelligence says this is the area the Ghar are heading for, so here we are. Good fields of fire, at least, we can capitalize on our longer-range weaponry out here in the desert. No cover, though, until we get into those canyons. That concerns me. I’ll take you to Formation HQ, the commander wants to get you up to speed on what you’ve missed.”

  Van Noor led Tahl toward a corridor which cut through rows of stacked packaging crates. Out of the corner of his eye, Tahl saw one of the soldiers from Sessetti’s squad suddenly break away from their reunion and run across. He felt a gnawing discomfort in his gut as soon as he realized it was Rhona.

  “Sir!” The young woman saluted smartly as she caught up with them. “Good morning, Senior.”

  “Not now,” Van Noor said, “the strike captain has literally just arrived and we’re heading to HQ for…”

  “It’s alright,” Tahl gently interjected to stop Van Noor. “Give me a moment, Strike Leader, I’ll be right with you.”

  Rhona saluted smartly again and walked out of earshot to wait in the shade of the stacked crates.

  “She’s changed,” Tahl said pointedly as he turned back to Van Noor. “What have you said to her?”

  “She told me she threatened you with regulatory action, Ryen,” Van Noor said defensively, “so I put her back in her box. Firmly.”

  Tahl sighed and nodded slowly.

  “I’ll deal with that in a second. Look, Bry, I need to talk to you about something. I’m not sure where to start and I don’t think you’re going to like what you hear, but I’ve got to tell you.”

  Van Noor shot a confused look at Tahl, but he remained silent.

  “Those two weeks Owenne gave me. I went to see your family.” Van Noor’s eyes widened in amazement. Tahl began speaking again quickly, eager to explain. “I only saw them for five minutes. You know how long it takes to get all the way back home. I know it’s none of my business, but I had to try. I had to! I can’t just sit idly by and do nothing whilst your world is falling apart, and you’ve done nothing wrong…”

  “I did do something wrong!” Van Noor raised his voice, quickly checking over both shoulders to make sure nobody was within earshot. “Mate, this isn’t your concern!”

  “I know that, but I’ve made it my concern. Right or wrong, I’ve involved myself now. I’m sorry if this isn’t what you wanted, but I had to try! I explained everything to Becca, everything I possibly could. I tried to tell her about how it all works, saved game points, the sniper…”

  “Both she and I now know what I’m capable of, and so do you. I… appreciate what you tried to do, Ryen, but you shouldn’t have gone.” Van Noor turned away and placed his hands on his hips, wincing in the fierce sunlight for a few moments in silence before he spoke again. “Did she seem okay? Did she look alright?”

  “She looked okay. Tired, but alright. But I disagree with you,” Tahl said firmly, “on both counts. You’re no longer capable of what… the other guy did because you’ve been educated now. You know the consequences. You’d never do it. And I’m glad I went, because whilst I didn’t achieve much, she did listen a little. Just a little. And I knew I couldn’t make things any worse.”

  “What do you mean, she listened?”

  “As I was walking away,” Tahl explained, “Alora ran after me. She gave me this to give to you.”

  Tahl took the carefully folded piece of paper which had accompanied him for light years of travel and handed it to Van Noor. The older man looked at it.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t look at it?”

  “It’s not for me. I was told to give it to you.”

  “You’ve brought it all this way and you didn’t open it?”

  Tahl shook his head.

  Van Noor took it and carefully unfolded it. He immediately raised a fist to his chin as tears formed in his eyes. He wordlessly turned the paper to show Tahl. A beautiful, black and white picture of Van Noor holding hands with his two children as they walked along a beach had been drawn on the paper.

  “You prick, you’ve made me cry in front of the guys,” Van Noor smiled shakily, turning away.

  “Your children still love you,” Tahl offered, “it was worth making that trip if only to bring back proof of that for you.”

  Van Noo
r did not answer. After a few moments, he turned to face Tahl again, composed.

  “Thanks,” he said sincerely, “I mean that. Thank you. I just wish… well, I shouldn’t be here missing my daughter grow up. Look at this! She can really draw! I should be back there, helping with… look, it doesn’t matter. We need to get to HQ. You go talk to… her, and then catch me up. But you’ve done me a favor, mate, and I owe you. So let me at least speak my mind and give you some free advice. Steer well clear of Rhona. I do not get a good vibe from her. Beneath the pretty smile and the perfect teeth and the huge boobs, she’s a nasty piece of work. Steer clear of her, mate. Don’t let one pretty girl be your undoing.”

  Tahl opened his mouth to speak but realized he had nothing to say to Van Noor’s accusations. The brawny senior soldier gave him a clap on the shoulder and walked away. Tahl turned to look at Rhona, who was busily checking her armor and rubbing away patches of dirt and grime. Tahl walked over to her.

  “Sir,” she looked up, “I’ll be quick, I know you’re busy. I just wanted to put everything to rest between us after our last talk. Senior Strike Leader Van Noor has spoken to me, and…”

  “Drop the rank,” Tahl said. “Just say what you want to say. I owe you that. This is nothing to do with our roles in the company, this is because of me treating you poorly. So just be open, say what you need to say, and then we can both move on.”

  “What was going through your mind when you picked me for promotion?” Rhona asked without hesitation.

  Tahl paused and looked away, trying to remember his actions from months past. He looked back at her. She had cut her hair shorter, still long enough to reach halfway down her neck. Both styles suited her. He closed his eyes and shook his head. He doubted very much that he would have noticed such a relatively minor aesthetic change in any other woman under his command.