Call of Courage: 7 Novels of the Galactic Frontier

by C. Gockel

  “And, this boy, he…”

  “He may have been a boy, but he was already a monster, enormous.”

  Stelvick was reluctant to obey a direct order from her when she was appointed team leader. When he did obey, it was with muttering indolence. He brutalized his opponents in the training exercises, needlessly injuring and seldom heedful of reprimands. His wrath would turn easily on the other members of their cluster.

  “Perhaps every litter at the kennels has struggles over the balance of power. Always a strong one, perhaps too much so, too content to kill without forethought. Too prone to violence. Maybe the drillers intended it that way, as a means to allow us to sort ourselves out, thin the pool.”

  “I don’t know, Ty. They don’t tell us much about the kennels.”

  She could not bear the strain of apology in his voice. Did he not understand that this was the only life she’d known? This was just how it was. Awkwardly, she rolled over in the bunk, facing him.

  “Shall I stop, sir?” Sir. There. The title came out unbidden. She bit her lip.

  His voice was odd, thick sounding. “I hate that you had to live like that…grow up that way.”

  “It made me who I am. I don’t know anything else.”

  “It still doesn’t make it right.”

  “Stelvick was just waiting for an opportunity. The others were at mess. Not a driller in sight. I’d been injured that morning during hand-to-hand, so I was resting in the barracks.”

  That was not the whole truth. Sela had been reluctant to go to the medicenter. Sometimes, an injured booter would go there and never return. Recycled, the drillers called it. She had not wanted to risk being recycled. Whatever that meant.

  “He knew I would fight and that I was injured, so he ambushed me.”

  She recalled the staggering explosion of pain at the back of her head. The tiles of the waste rec room cold and solid beneath her. Sudden rough hands on her as her stunned brain struggled to catch up with the physical onslaught. The purr of ripping fabric. Cold air meeting exposed skin. His terrible weight and the invasive pain of him. His sneering voice: Next time you give an order to me, you skew bitch, you think on this. Long and hard.

  Sela had decided to tell no one. Not a driller or a single member of her cluster.

  “Certainly he had to be charged? Punished?” Jon asked.

  Sela rolled onto her back and looked up into the empty black of the ceiling. It was difficult to look at him when she lied.

  “He was dealt with.”

  What happened to her was not going to happen to another female. Any leader would make the same decision to protect her team. She waited for her chance, her own opportunity to ambush. She wanted to say she relished it. But she did not. There was an inquiry after his body was found, but hardly an energetic one. Perhaps even the drillers had been relieved that Stelvick was gone. No one had seen or heard a thing. Stelvick was an unfortunate casualty.

  “Days later, I became sick. Except, it was not illness.”

  “Atilio?”

  She nodded with a thin humorless smile. “By then, I figured out what the implant had been for.”

  As an example to other females that did not conform, the drillers decided the non-reg breeding would not be terminated. Instead, Sela was trained well into the final days of the accelerated pregnancy. Her heart felt like it would explode whenever she took a single step, and her stomach bowed out in a great embarrassing arc. The looks, the taunts. Sela bore it all in silence. She had done them all a favor. She had slain the monster living among them. The punishment had been worth it.

  “Seventeen years later,” Veradin said. “And the boy ends up assigned under his own mother. The Fates—”

  “Coincidence.”

  The thought that what had happened with Stelvick or her son was engineered by an unseen entity made her feel hollow.

  “My son is gone now. It’s like he never happened. It feels like it did when they first took him from me.”

  “Ty, I don’t know what to say.”

  Sela sat up, pulling away from him. She felt suddenly clumsy, flushed and very aware of her lack of clothes. This had been so foolish. She could not stand the anguish in his gaze, the pity in his voice.

  “Where are you going?” His fingertips traced down her back.

  Sela slid her hand beneath his pillow, freeing her confiscated clothes. “I think we both know this was a mistake.”

  “Mistake? That’s not what I think at all.”

  “I do.”

  Balled-up clothing clutched to her waist, she left.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The water in the shallow basin was torturously cold. Sela splashed her face and neck until her skin felt numb. Finally, she sagged against the compact silver sink of the waste rec room. Eyes shut, she rested her forehead against the mirror. She released a long pent-up breath, opened her eyes.

  “What are you doing, Tyron?” she muttered at her reflected twin.

  Wrong . It had all been wrong. But right, at the same time.

  Little wonder there were the rules of Decca to prevent fraternization between subordinates and their superiors. Sela had imagined being with Veradin, but always in a vague sense. The way you crave something in an absent unrealized manner, thoughts buoyed up without a hint of reality for support—a self-indulgent daydream.

  Just as she had confessed to Jon, it did not truly matter to her that he was Human. His persona had not changed with this discovery. In fact, it showed the consistency of his character: he was willing to carry the burden of this life-rending discovery alone rather than risk losing her.

  But it had changed her.

  Things were complicated enough. They were unwitting pieces in some strategy that neither of them was likely to glimpse as a whole until it was too late. And she had permitted this self-absorbed fantasy to play out. She had succumbed to a baser desire to have him.

  Now it was done. Out there. Irreversible.

  Their vulnerability was complete. If Jonvenlish Veradin was her weakness before, now it was far worse.

  “Focus,” she said.

  It can never happen again. It will never happen again.

  She toweled the water from her face and neck and got dressed. She had taken a fresh shirt from Jon’s belongings, doubting he would mind. It was oversized for her, but lacking in bloodstains. She paused. A quiet murmur drifted into the corridor. A voice.

  Sela checked the vox panel just over the sink. Its lights were dark. The vox link was inactive. Jon still occupied the bunkroom. That left one thing: Erelah .

  The voices grew louder as Sela reached the tiny galley. One voice plaintive and childlike, the other more direct, commanding. It was an argument, but she could not discern words.In the shaft of light cut from the common passage, Erelah sat on the floor, leaning against the bulkhead with her back to the doorway.

  “Who are you talking to?” Sela asked.

  Erelah turned and looked up at her, wide-eyed, plainly startled. She did not sound entirely certain when she replied. “I wasn’t talking.”

  “I heard voices.”

  Sela triggered the internal lights. They revealed dark maroon smears along the sleeves and collar of Erelah’s baggy flight suit. Furtively, she turned away, hiding her hands.

  “What do you have?”

  “Nothing.” Erelah stared straight ahead.

  Sela yanked the girl’s hand from behind her back and wrenched the object away. It was a shiv, more accurately a piece of sharp metal from the coms array casing. Still in control of Erelah’s arm, Sela shoved the sleeve up. A crazed pattern of welts seeped blood from the pale skin of the girl’s forearm.

  “Why would you do this?”

  “I can’t get them off. See? Scales, pushing out of my skin. Like Tristic.” Erelah pulled away and scratched at the injured skin. She looked up at her with those eerie green eyes. She was like a child, pleading. “If I scrape them off, Tristic can’t come in.”

  She seized Erelah’s wr
ists, trying to keep her from injuring herself further.

  “There’s nothing there. No scales. Only skin. You’re damaging yourself.”

  She had encountered soldiers like this. It always seemed to be the conscripts. They could not hack what they experienced in battle. Fear consumed them from the inside, erasing their pride and reducing them to broken things. It was far worse than a simple case of battle burn. A meditech could not fix their pain. No amount of cajoling could bolster them into being whole once again. They were shipped off if they survived their internal onslaughts. These broken beings became someone else’s problem, not Sela’s.

  This one was her problem.

  Erelah shook her head and turned wet eyes up at her. “I can’t make her stop.”

  Sela pocketed the shiv. “There’s no one here, Erelah. Just you and me and your brother.”

  She is here, and Valen is not. He was worth a dozen of her.

  A part of her wanted to tell her to suck it up or rage at her, as she had done with those psych-damaged conscripts. If what Erelah suffered was all in her head, she could control that too.

  Instead, she gripped the girl by the upper arms and urged her to her feet. “Come on. You should rest.”

  The girl came with her, compliant and weak as they stepped back out into the common passage. It was clearly dangerous to let her roam the ship alone. Sela guided her back to the storage space that served as Erelah’s room.

  It was not until the backs of the girl’s knees hit the edge of the cot that she looked around, as if suddenly aware of the change in setting.

  “Don’t lock me up again!” She attempted to pull away.

  Sela forced her back down.

  She squatted to her level, hands still gripping Erelah’s arms. “Listen to me, Erelah. You have to fight this. If you are anything like Jon, you have the strength to do that. You have made it this far. You have survived nearly two years on your own. Do this for your brother, if you cannot do it for yourself.”

  She folded under a choking sob.

  “Maintain, soldier. Am I clear?” She released her hold and straightened, standing over her.

  Erelah swiped at her eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak but then nodded ardently, like a child fearing a reprimand.

  A bleating sound echoed down from the command loft.

  What seemed like ages ago, Sela had programmed the nav-comp to alert her to course changes. She did not trust the flight computer, or more accurately, was not about to place blind faith in the contents of Phex’s stellar nav charts.

  There were quite a few things on this ship that she didn’t trust. Even if the girl seemed calmer now, it was unwise to leave her unattended.

  After one long judging stare, she turned to leave. “I’ll wake the captain. He’ll tend to you.”

  “No. Don’t tell Jon.” Erelah grabbed her sleeve. “Please.”

  Sela pulled away with an irritated grunt. The girl’s theatrics now challenged the last of her patience.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” Erelah said. “It’s not your fault. It’s how First made you.” She looked up at Sela with queer solemnity. “But I know what you think.”

  As she met the girl’s stare, Sela felt a sudden surge of heat. It prickled from the base of her skull and down her neck.

  She took a step back, retreating to the threshold. There was something very wrong with Erelah Veradin. It was as if the girl bore some contaminant. Sela wanted no part of it.

  “I am a danger. I am a liability. They should just retire me. Like any one of those battle-burned ‘scriptors.” The expression on the girl’s face became stony. The meter and tone of her words drew out, became measured, precise. Her heavy Eugenes accent flattened into perfect Regimental. A chill rose on Sela’s skin as she realized the girl was doing a nearly perfect imitation of her voice. “End me so I can harm no one. Retire me…like you did cadet Stelvick.”

  Stelvick . Sela’s heart flattened.

  “What did you say?” she hissed. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. She had told no one. Ever. Not the drillers during the inquiry. Not the other booters in her cluster. Certainly not Jon. In fact, the story she had told him, though highly edited, was the only confession she had ever made about Atilio’s conception.

  Erelah sagged back to the cot. She dropped her head into her hands. Her mass of dark hair fell over her face.

  “Now do you see?” she sobbed. “I’m hollow and stuffed full of other people. I open my mouth, and someone else talks.”

  Sela stiffened. Her eyes began to water. “This is some trick. How do you know about Stelvick?”

  Erelah shook her head. The lilting Eugenes accent was back when she spoke again: “You knew you had to be the one to stop him. The drillers wouldn’t have cared. And when you did it, you were sad for him. It was the first time you had ever killed. You never looked away. He slid down the wall. There was blood everywhere. You stayed, and you watched…and you watched…until he stopped breathing. No one else was going to get hurt by him. You made sure—”

  “Stop it.” Sela backed away. This was impossible. How could she know?

  Sela refused to believe in such fantasy as mind-readers and oracles. They were stories for children and entertainments on the holo-web. No one could delve into the mind of another and see their secrets.

  It was a fractious, pleading rush. “You can do what I can’t. Kill me. Before it gets worse.”

  “Madness,” Sela seethed, triggering the door shut just as Erelah opened her mouth to speak.

  Without a backward glance, she made for the command loft to the call of the nagging nav-comp. Once the course correction was satisfied, she would wake Jon to deal with his sister.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  /Retire you? As if Tyron would really do it./

  The pressure in Erelah’s head surged until it felt as if her very skull would split and the thing that dwelled in there would crawl out of it. She doubled over, fingers digging into her scalp. It had taken all the control she could manage to keep Tristic at bay when Tyron was in the room. Now the beast redoubled her efforts. It was a thunderous onslaught, making all the others before seem weak taunts.

  /Tyron. What an insufferable nuisance. What gall she possessed to think she could defeat me. Me!/

  Erelah could not gather the strength to stand. Her jaw was clenched shut beneath the steady pounding of pressure-pain.

  /You have not known agony until now. Your brother and his breeder will know it ten-fold./

  She released a shuddering sob. Her vision blurred under the haze of tears.

  Pulse thundering against her ears, she collapsed to her side on the deck.

  With numb and tremulous fingers, she pulled the tiny vial from a pocket in her ruined jumpsuit. Tyron had probably never known it was in the medistat kit.

  Xiocine. A common tincture. Healing if used carefully on a wound. Deadly if ingested.

  Here was escape.

  She had fantasized about this before: finding a rip in the skin of this world and slipping through.

  “This time.” Erelah realized she had spoken aloud. She looked up.

  Tristic was gone.

  The pressure in her skull vanished. The beast’s hold could last only so long. The harder Tristic pushed, the shorter the onslaught.

  I don’t know how much more I can take.

  Tyron wouldn’t stop her; she was busy in the command loft, wallowing in her own mire of self-loathing. Even if the soldier were in the very room, she would probably cheer Erelah on. Jonvelish likely slept under his aching mound of guilt.

  Would he even surface to care?

  Erelah swiped impatiently at her tear-streaked face then gingerly removed the vial’s seal. The glass ticked against her teeth as her nervous fingers quivered. Her tongue recoiled with the taste of the first droplets. It was overpoweringly acrid.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jon’s voice erupted as he darted through the doorway.

  Quickly Erela
h turned, seeking to drink the remainder. He slapped the vial away. It landed with a tiny, unimportant tink! on the deck.

  “What is that?” Jon demanded. His anger was undermined by the fear in his face. “Erelah?”

  She tried to back away, pushing with weak legs along the floor.

  Would this little bit be enough? Please, Miri, granter of mercies. Let it be enough.

  She soon had her answer as mist invaded the edges of her vision. Her mouth. Her lungs had become lazy.

  “Erelah?” He seized shoulders that belonged to someone else. She watched more than felt.

  Come on. Wake up!

  His commanding voice was now tinny, disconnected. Another unimportant tragedy being acted out somewhere else.

  The mist thickened, deepened. She gave herself over, gladly.

  wakeup...erelah…ty!...getdownhere

  The shouts of the far-away drillers carried in angry echoes against the walls of the maze-like bunkers in the kennel compound. Here all the walls looked the same, save for the large painted numbers that gave each place its name, and thus its level of importance and use. Just like the people there: drillers and booters. Tightly shaved heads. Dark eyes in varying shades of carefully-bred Eugenes brown. Gray single suits with colors and designations over the breast that suggested levels of importance and use. They all tended to look the same, sometimes even up close. The color of Sela’s hair was a secret even from herself until her first assignment, when she was allowed to grow it out.

  She was aware of other sounds too: the scrape of heavy boots, the rasp of wet labored breathing, the relentless pounding of her heart.

  Stelvick looked different far away and close up. He was a towering beast. Except now, he looked smaller, deflated. In a sense, that was what was happening to him. He was deflating, a hole made in him, allowing what was within him to escape into a growing maroon puddle on the floor.

  The same maroon, once slimy and warm, now cooled between her fingers and on the hilt of her combat knife. Sela had seen blood before, often her own, from times on the training mats, but this was not hers. This belonged to Stelvick.