Markov's Prize

by Mark Barber

  The doors at the far end of the room opened to admit Gant, who limped in with a protective suspensor field gently glowing around his new leg. He flashed a smile to Rhona and slowly made his way over.

  “What you up to?” He asked as he stopped to lean against the white wall next to her.

  “Sending a letter to my brother. More lies, more stuff to stop him worrying.”

  “I’ve got three older sisters,” Gant nodded, “about twenty years between each of us. My oldest sister’s grandson has just joined up, apparently. He got the call a month or so back and is training to join the navy.”

  “Beats living in a trench, I guess,” Rhona leaned back in her chair. “How’s the leg doing?”

  “It’s weird,” Gant blinked, “I can feel my toes, but I can’t feel anything in between them and the knee. I can’t complain, at least I’m back to having the same number of legs I had at the start of the month. So that’s progress.”

  The doors at the end of the recovery room opened again, and Rhona was surprised to see Tahl and Van Noor enter. Both men wore their green barrack uniforms, their shirt sleeves rolled up neatly out of tradition rather than as a method of combating the heat – the uniforms were able to regulate their temperature automatically. Tahl moved straight over to sit down next to Leonis, a trooper from Squad Xath who had been nearly torn in half by a Ghar assault trooper. Van Noor looked across and saw Gant and Rhona, and he immediately walked over to them, his features stony.

  “Get me up,” Rhona said, “if I’m taking another Van Gnawing, then I’ll do it on my feet, not in that damn chair.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Gant replied, “you’re hurt, stay in the chair.”

  Pain flared up the left hand side of Rhona’s body as she forced herself to her feet.

  “Help me!” She urged Gant.

  The tall soldier slipped an arm around her waist, a pained cry suppressed by his gritted teeth. Rhona put an arm around his neck to support herself, leaning on her right leg to take the pressure off her injuries.

  “Fate’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Van Noor greeted with a dangerous smile as he walked over. “Three of Squad Wen get cut down, and two make a miraculous recovery. Not the one who deserved it. Not the one who followed an idiotic plan with courage and loyalty. She’s dead now. But you two? You’re okay. You’re all good.”

  Rhona took her arm from around Gant’s shoulders and supported herself on her own two feet.

  “Anything to say for yourselves?” The burly senior trooper asked.

  “No, Senior,” Gant shook his head, looking down at the faded blue carpet at his feet.

  Rhona saw Tahl engaged in a lively conversation with Leonis. Both men were laughing.

  “I expected better from you, Gant. ‘Don’t talk to command - they’ll just tell us to wait here’. That’s pretty much what you said according to the recordings, isn’t it? Perhaps now you can be clearer as to why you’re still not wearing a red stripe even after all of your pals from training have been promoted. Strike Trooper Rae deserved better,” Van Noor continued, “better support from her peers. Better leadership from you, Rhona. Better…”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Rhona spat. “You think I don’t know I let her down? I’ll carry that with me for the next two hundred years, or the next two weeks until the Ghar kill me! You come in here looking to turn that tragedy into an excuse to lay into me? That’s where you wanna go with this?”

  “Katya…” Gant urged.

  “No, no,” Van Noor folded his powerful arms and leaned back, “go on, Rhona. Say what you’ve got to say.”

  Rhona stumbled momentarily on her injured side. She pushed Gant’s offer to assist her away and drew herself up to her full height and faced Van Noor.

  “I had conflicting advice from my two most experienced soldiers. One told me to do one thing, the other told me to do the opposite. I had to make a decision right there, right then. I made the wrong decision. But I did make a decision. I made the decision to close with the enemy and I did it leading from the front! If it was Feon Rall, you’d be here telling him that he made a good go of it, and it’s a shame it didn’t work out. Casualties are a part of the game, can’t account for luck, all the normal lies. But it’s not Rall, it’s me. It’s not somebody whose face fits in around here, it’s mine. So say what y’gotta say, Senior. Go for it. But it’ll be in one ear and out the other because where I come from, respect is mutual, and whatever you think of me, I guarantee I’m thinking something pretty similar about you.”

  “Strike Trooper Gant, go get yourself a drink,” Van Noor said without taking his eyes off Rhona’s.

  Gant limped away without a word. Van Noor leaned in until he was well within Rhona’s personal space. She did not yield one iota.

  “Of course I’ve got no respect for you,” the veteran soldier began, “why would I? You’re hopeless at what you do, you bring nothing positive to this company, and you shun any attempts to bring you on as a soldier. You order a perfectly capable young woman to her death and what’s your response? ‘I made a bad decision’. Is that all she meant to you, you callous, arrogant bitch? She’s dead because of you, and you need to take ownership of that. So yeah, I don’t like you. But it’s a long queue I’m joining. Nobody likes you. The strike leaders in this company are a fraternity, a family, and you repetitively raise your middle finger to all of them because you think you’re better. You won’t learn from their years of experience, because you think you already know it. You don’t stop to wonder why everybody else gets along and nobody likes you, whereas anybody with a shred of humility would stop and take a good, long look at themselves. Whereas you get your own troopers killed through you own incompetence, you think it appropriate to judge and threaten your own company commander because of your opinions regarding his conduct. I’ve spent nearly forty years as a soldier, and I consider it an absolute privilege to serve alongside every other man and woman in this formation. All of them except you. Because you are nothing better than a dumb, stuck-up, Freeborn ex-stripper playing dress up as a soldier. So if you want to get theatrical and offer to hand in your rank badges, please do so, because I will happily call your bluff and tear them up right in front of your smug face. Now, have I made it perfectly clear how everybody here feels about you, or do you want me to expand on any of the points I’ve covered?”

  Rhona turned away for a moment and then faced him again.

  “Sorry, what? D’you say something to me?” She grinned. “Like I said, in one ear – out the other. Senior.”

  Van Noor uttered a word which Rhona would never have used to describe even her most hated enemies, and then stormed off out of the recovery suite. Once he was gone, Rhona checked nobody was looking her way, and then she turned her back on the room, struggling to control her breathing and fighting back tears from the impact of his words.

  “I’m sorry, Ila,” she whispered as she wiped at her eyes, “I’m so sorry…”

  Her wristband bleeped to let her know she had used up all of her medication. Taking a deep breath, Rhona looked down at her chair.

  “To hell with it,” she muttered to herself, limping slowly and painfully past the suspensor chair and over to the duty medical drone in the corner to top up her medication.

  She limped over to the long window at the far side of the room and looked down as the world carried on below her in the early afternoon suns. Again, tears welled up as she thought of Ila Rae.

  “You okay?” Gant asked as he hobbled over.

  “Yeah… yeah I’m cool.”

  “Don’t let him get you down,” Gant offered. “It’s just like you said. You made a bad decision. It’s not all your fault.”

  Rhona’s eyes flashed up at Gant. She opened her mouth to speak but thought of Van Noor’s words and decided against it.

  “Just gimme some space, dude,” she turned away. “I want some time to think.”

  Gant stumbled away and took a seat on one of the vivid, orange sofas in the cente
r of the room. Rhona watched as Tahl moved on to the next trooper and shook his hand warmly before engaging in conversation. She turned away. The thought of composing a message to Rae’s parents or the brother she spoke so fondly of entered her mind. Three times over the course of the next hour she set about starting a recording, but every time the guilt and uncertainty made her stop and erase the message. After perhaps half an hour, Tahl moved on to Gant and sat down next to him on the sofa. Within minutes, the two were laughing. Rhona realized that Tahl had spent ten or fifteen minutes with all of the Beta Company casualties in the room, except for her. She would be next. For some reason it made her feel sick.

  She turned to look at her own reflection in the glass next to her and frantically set about adjusting her hair to make sure it looked perfect. She had upset him enough and had clearly made a lot of enemies – ensuring she looked smart and professional seemed to be a good idea. After a few more minutes, Tahl stood, shook Gant’s hand, and walked over to Rhona. She folded her arms and brought one foot back to rest on the wall behind her, making sure she looked casual. Tahl stopped in front of her.

  “Glad you’re okay, Strike Leader,” he smiled, “stay tough.”

  With that, he turned away, pulled his beret on, and walked out of the room. Ignoring the pain which flared up along her midriff, Rhona quickly limped after him and shot through the door into the empty, sterile corridor outside the recovery suite.

  “Hey,” she shouted after him, “sir!”

  Tahl stopped and half turned to face her.

  “You spent, like, a quarter of an hour talking to everybody else. Why won’t you talk to me?” She asked, aware how hurt her tone of voice must have sounded.

  Tahl closed his eyes and exhaled.

  “Because you’ll carry on assuming I’m somebody I’m not,” he said quietly. “You’ll think I’m trying to get something from you which I’m not.”

  “I won’t,” Rhona answered immediately. “Look, sir, I just said I wanted to be treated the same as everybody else. That’s all. This isn’t treating me the same, this is just excluding me.”

  Tahl opened his eyes and turned to face her, wearily dragging his beret off again. He gestured back to the recovery suite. Rhona turned and limped back inside, the pain in her abdomen causing her to hiss every time her left foot touched the floor. Tahl followed her to the corner of the room by the window and sat opposite her as she slunk down into one of the orange sofas, away from the conversation which buzzed around the rest of the room. Tahl leaned forward and rested his folded arms on his knees.

  “So what do you want to talk about?” He asked softly.

  “I dunno,” Rhona said, mimicking his posture, “the senior’s already come over and had a talk with me about some things.”

  “I know, he’s already submitted a complaint against you for insubordination.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes. Look, you leave that with me. I’ll talk to him and calm him down. This won’t go anywhere. But he’s already told me what you’ve said to him this afternoon. I don’t agree with the way he has gone about this, but I need to be honest with you. If it comes down to any sort of complaint between you and Bry Van Noor, I’ve got his back. Unless there’s a very good reason not to. Loyalty is everything. So don’t push this further, I’ll deal with it and put a stop to it.”

  “Why does everybody see me as some whinny bitch who just wants to play the system and cause trouble?” Rhona exclaimed. “It’s not me! I’m trying my best, sir. It’s not me.”

  She looked up and saw genuine sympathy and care in Tahl’s features.

  “Look, it’s cool,” she smiled dismissively. “I can take care of myself, I always have. So… what were you talking to the other guys about? Sure seemed to make them laugh.”

  “Ah, this and that,” Tahl shrugged. “I can talk about things other than company level attacks and carbines, believe it or not.”

  “Right,” Rhona nodded, turning her eyes away. She hesitantly looked back at him. “So… can I ask you something?” Rhona ventured.

  “Depends.”

  “How did it all happen?” Rhona asked. “My pa used to watch your fights. You were famous. How did you go from that to, well… this?”

  “It’s probably more of a story as to how I ended up competition fighting in the Determinate,” Tahl shrugged.

  “Well, go on, I’m listening,” Rhona leaned forward.

  Tahl looked away, one foot tapping as he drummed the fingertips of one hand against the knuckles of the other. After a long pause, he began to talk again.

  “My father was a famous martial artist where I grew up. It was a foregone conclusion that I’d study kerempai as soon as I was old enough, when I was five. I took to it very well and my father was a great teacher. By the time I was nine, I was winning all sorts of competitions, medals, trophies. I was noticed by Master Janshea. She is the most experienced and proficient martial artist alive. Anywhere. She saw potential in me, and my entire family moved planets just so that I could study under her. She was nearly three hundred years old when I began studying, so to say she had a lot to give would be an understatement.

  “With this natural ability I’m told I’ve got and the best teacher alive, I studied all day, every day. When I was sixteen, I could enter adult competitions. I was winning everything I was entered for. Then, when I was twenty, the master entered me into a competition on the eastern fringes of the Concord, as it was then. Unfortunately for me, my reputation had spread past the Concord’s borders. A twenty year old martial arts prodigy with an unbeaten record in competition fighting was too good an opportunity to miss – a guy called Warne arranged for the ship I was on to be attacked by pirates. They killed most people onboard and took me off to the Determinate.”

  Tahl leaned back and folded his arms, forcing an unconfortable smile. “That’s how I started full contact competition fighting.”

  “But you would have been wrenched out of the IMTel!” Rhona exclaimed. “You know how it works – for a Concord citizen to be moved onto the reduced support of the military shard takes a couple of months of Behavioral Activation

  Training! To be… just completely severed! That would…”

  “Give me behavioral problems?” Tahl offered. “Anger management concerns? Mental health issues? Just made me a better fighter in the cage, in their eyes.”

  Rhona looked into his eyes. He understood. He did not know yet, but he understood her. He understood loss, betrayal, being used by the grand circus that was organized crime in the Determinate; he knew about all of it. She reached out to hold his hand but thought better of it. Tahl sprang to his feet.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said quietly, “I don’t want that.”

  “You told anybody else about all of this?” Rhona asked.

  “In the last four or five years? Just Bry. And you.”

  “Why d’you tell me?” Rhona asked, struggling painfully up to her feet.

  Again, Tahl closed his eyes and exhaled.

  “You know why, Katya,” he said before turning away and leaving the recovery suite.

  ***

  Firebase Alpha

  Equatorial Region

  Markov’s Prize

  L-Day plus 53

  Rain plummeted from the green-grey clouds above, turning the sands into an ankle deep sludge which cascaded down to the turbulent purple waves of the beach. Sessetti wished, for once, that he had his hyperlight armor on rather than the thin, green material of his barrack uniform. Even with the rain shield projected just above his head providing an invisible energy plate to protect him from direct rainfall, the wind still blew enough around the sides to soak his entire uniform. The news he had received from Strike Leader Althern had come as something of a surprise – now that replacement troopers had arrived, Squad Wen would be reforming and he was to return to it. After the disastrous charge against the Ghar in the ravine in the Nienne Desert, the four surviving members of the squad had been split up and sent to
act as temporary replacements with other squads, hence Sessetti’s role in Squad Xath under Althern. He had not seen Jemmel, Qan, or Clythe in days, except for fleeting glances across crowded briefing tents and during guard changeovers.

  Sessetti dragged his boots through the sludge, his shoulders hunched up as the rain cascaded down from the darkening skies above. One thing which crossed his mind regarding the decision to reform Squad Wen which had not been mentioned was the loss of Squad Chyne. Heide and all seven of his troopers had been killed in one engagement when they were caught out by a rapid counterattack and torn apart by a squad of Ghar assault troopers. The help arrived too late for Heide and his soldiers, but the four Ghar assault suits had been swiftly dealt with – Sessetti had arrived in time to see one of the Ghar hacked down by plasma fire, another torn asunder by a C3M4, and the final two Ghar broken apart by Strike Captain Tahl. Sessetti had watched in amazement as his company commander had ripped the two lumbering battlesuits apart with thunderous strikes from his elbows, feet, and hands. He had lost an eyeball in the process, but that had been repaired already.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Sessetti stepped onto the dull, red transmat pad outside the firebase’s accommodation block and was beamed inside, away from the wind and rain. He stepped off the pad into the grey, concrete corridor and began the familiar walk to the old accommodation rooms. After a few corners, he arrived at the door to the squad’s communal hub and stepped inside. Jemmel and Qan were already there, unpacking their possessions back into the storage boxes in their respective rooms.

  “Hey, Georgi Hax!” Jemmel smiled as she saw him, a reference to a famous singer from their parents’ generation. “You’re back!”

  “All in one piece!” Qan stepped over to shake his hand warmly. “Looks like that’s half the band back together!”