Chapter Text
(Reprobate Squad)
“I hear we’re getting reinforcements,” ‘Chubby Bunny’ Ne'le muttered as she tore her helmet off.
“Where’d you hear that, CB?” ‘Flicker’ asked.
A few weeks in this redder-than-fire zone, and she felt like something had died in her. Was it her kindness? Was it her patience? Was it the weaker parts, cast off for survival? She didn’t know, nor care anymore.
Caring was what got you killed.
Hope, though? Hope was fresh, and new. For a moment, she felt like her old self again. Hope. How long had it been since she’d felt that? Even before deployment to this state, her optimism had drowned itself under weekly tragedies and grim reports from other zones that leaked across the borders.
“From where?”
“Delaware’s garrison is finally paying everyone back for the loan of troops. They’re splitting off to help their neighbors.”
“About time,” she grunted. “Still, small zone, right?” How many could it possibly be?
“Oversized garrison, though, or at least it was.”
“Great. That’ll put us back up to strength,” Flicker muttered.
The gloomy idea hit all of them at once, making each sit or stand bolt upright and exchange a glance, though none dared say it.
The surge Azraea had brought down, throwing a sizable chunk of the Fleet’s reserves into one troubling pocket, had been meant to combat the growth of insurgency in the state. Supposedly, the others were pacifying, and the brass were desperate to stop whatever had gone so wrong from backsliding further, before the festering wound could spread.
Slowly, Bunny went back to shining her lasrifle.
Too little, too late.
Old Wives Tales
Morsh and her retainer had been chatting all night long, when at last Lady Rakten stopped avoiding the subject of the day. “How have they been doing?”
“Fine, I suppose,” Morsh grunted ambiguously.
“And they’re okay now?”
“Well, I’ve been trying to give them some privacy,” The bodyguard refilled Nive’s glass of scotch. “Perimeter monitoring is keeping an eye for me. Anything of a decent size heat signature approaches within a gravball field, I’ll get an alert. Whatever happens within that perimeter? Well, maybe we’ll get an after-action report.”
“Hopefully not too detailed,” Lady Rakten took a big gulp, grinning despite the distastefully crude topic.
There was something bothering Morsh, though, and the slightly liquored up state at last seemed to be wearing down her employer’s barrier. “I keep thinking about the actual military groups we’ve tried to fold into the Peacekeepers, Security Forces, and even Marines. It rarely goes well. Almost never, I hear. Yet the Navy and Marines keep trying. Over and over. It’s like they’re desperately trying to prove that their conquest was a difficult one, only for the experiment to come to a humiliating and dismal end, every time.”
Lady Rakten’s face lost none of its smile but her voice took a sour tone. “Yes. Would you say then, that Elias is not going to pass muster?”
“Well, no,” Morsh said. “You said he lags Nataliska academically by a wide margin. I want to be clear-eyed about his capabilities. I do not want to repeat the mistakes of those past instructors of other attempts with training humans. Besides, you know Nataliska, she’s not a warrior at heart.”
“What do you suspect?”
“Maybe I’m jaded,” she mused, eyeing her half-empty glass. “I want your perspective on whether it is possible the Marines have been upselling the humans’ capabilities at war.”
“Humans are stubborn,” Lady Rakten suggested, and Morsh grunted an assent, holding off on refilling her own glass for as long as the Lady spoke. “It also justifies the Navy hanging around in low-orbit and Marines going out, patrolling and cavorting on leave. They get to spend time around humans, and justify rubbing shoulders with other noble governesses and the like, which makes the kind of long-term connections that normally aren’t possible. A fleet passes through and gets what it needs from a System Lady, or the Interior pays a quick and unpleasant visit after they’ve departed.”
“It’s been, what, almost three years of Governesses on assignment with Generals and other officers? Four in some places? Advisors, too.”
“Such interactions usually tend to be brief, by design. Social functions on or around Earth are beginning to resemble those on the core worlds. And now a Prince, of all things, has arrived, complete with that ridiculous Vanguard. Earth has taken on an extremely outsized significance, with the fleet and nobles at the center of it all.”
“I read in Stars and Strikes that there’s more noblewomen per capita here than anywhere outside the Home system,” Morsh agreed, waiting to see if the normally cautious Lady Rakten might finally let her opinion come leaking over the edge of the dam. “So uh, you think they’re losing sight of the objective? Or is it on purpose, to talk up how hard their job is? It would prove their own continued presence’s necessity.”
“I disagree that they’re intentionally taking so many casualties, since that’s what you’re implying,” Lady Rakten sounded a bit offended.
“Even if it does mean they get to stay here? Just a few sacrificed Privates was probably the initial thinking.”
“I know noblewomen in the Navy are accused of caring not at all for the commoner Marine. That does not mean they’d wish to appear incompetent in front of the Empress’s own family, and the galaxy at large’s eyes on the system. A military’s worth is in what it can accomplish.”
“Then they’re losing control of a situation they thought they had under them,” Morsh grumbled. “Humans have a tendency to buck far longer than you’d think would be wise.”
“There is more to their potential than persistence, else why are we about to throw that boy into the most premiere academy alongside my only daughter when these experiments have tended to end rather explosively?” She sighed theatrically.
Instead of smiling, Morsh’s expression turned thoughtful. “He has a certain willfulness to engage in personal violence that is useful to have in a recruit, and worrying to see in an officer if not tempered.”
“That will last until his first real sparring match,” Lady Rakten wagered.
Morsh did not bother to correct her. “There’s something else…odd about him. He strips equipment down with a familiarity he should not have, and he seems to be able to identify things by more than intuition. His grasp of tactics and strategy is good. Solid. When presented with scenarios he knows to ask about terrain, crossfire, exit routes. Once he asked about time available to arrange his forces. These aren’t the considerations someone just makes. He has only the slightest hesitation when I press him for suggested actions just to check if he’s stalling.”
“Do you believe by stalling he’s analyzing what he thinks he should say, rather than what he wants to say? That his answers would be different, once he is free to act upon any latent curiosities he might have?” In other words: Is this what gets the human soldier experiments to end so explosively? The moment he’s out of supervision, is he liable to get my only daughter blown to smithereens, and you just left the two of them alone?
“At first I suspected he had moral hangups on the idea of killing. Then I saw him behead a practice dummy and kick it like a toy. Now I’ve narrowed it down to him just trying to guess what I think the right answer is, which won’t be good enough once I or some other instructor isn’t around. Just intuiting what we think they should say would flatter the instructor enough to turn them loose prematurely and the predictable happens. Or…”
“Or?”
“...Or it’s a deception, for some other reason.”
Why would he lie? Morsh wasn’t sure, but it felt discomforting.
“Deception,” Lady Rakten rolled the word around while swirling her glass in mimicry of a memory the two shil’vati shared. “That seems to be a skill of his. I mistook him for harmless, innocent, naive.”
“So did I, once,” Morsh tapped her forearm, then spared a glance at the detached Eldixi dummy’s head, now serving as a temporary centerpiece on the table. “I have a feeling it’s not a mistake many people will get to live through.”
Morsh had faced down countless enemies. Very few even attempted deception, and there weren’t many opportunities for it. Lone survivors of pods tended to be too injured to put up much of a fight, and turning your back on an enemy, even a wounded one was drilled out of her before she’d left basic.
“Yet we owe much for his deception over a particular dinner.”
“You didn’t attach the family name as a rider. You let Amilita tug him over the finish line, and she had to co-sign Governess Cre’sin for a noble endorsement.” The ‘you have your doubts, too’ went unstated.
“He’s dangerous,” Lady Rakten yawned and stretched, finally admitting to Morsh what she suspected.
“To Natalie?” Morsh was gazing back at the perimeter monitoring system with a frown.
“No, I don’t think so. We’re useful to his aims, whatever they are, and he has had plenty of opportunities to show where his loyalties lie with regard to Nataliska, and by extension, us. Chasing down what you are owed is a painful enterprise that almost never leaves you made whole in the end, and indeed that is what they are counting on. It is sometimes more useful to remain indebted to someone than to have a shaky debtor. I figure as long as Elias feels he still is owed a favor, then his connection to the family will remain.”
“If that is his angle, then it’s no longer some big mystery to me,” Morsh said, eyes wandering around the spacious frontier house. “There’s at least a million men on Earth who would kill to be in his shoes. And once he’s in space, up there? Well, while I value your company, if my motivations were just money or power there’s going to be a lot of other options for him to pursue, or rather, to pursue him. If that’s the truth, then the only complicating factor for us is that Nataliska seems quite smitten, which could become a problem down the line if Bronwyn…” Then her gaze snapped back to the security monitor and she leaned closer to it, squinting.
“What’s wrong?” Lady Rakten asked.
“Something just breached the perimeter.”
“An intruder?”
“No…” she said, then checking her watch. “It’s three o’clock in the morning and the pair of heat signatures were exiting the perimeter, not entering.” She tapped the floating indicator, switching the angle around for Lady Rakten. “Their vitals are fine. They’re in motion, but heart rates are normal. No panic.”
She pulled up the very limited perimeter footage on the projector they’d been cleared to utilize, and then the bodyguard laughed a moment later. “Would you look at that…”
“What is that?”
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” she pinched the image to zoom in as the brief few seconds of footage ran from the start again. “I’d fail them instantly if I caught them going through the city in broad daylight, but I didn’t expect them to use the currents, the moonlight, and silently drift right down it in whatever it is they’ve either found or made.” Morsh stood from the table with a yawn and stretch. “Alright. I’ll rest up in the car, just in case they hit the emergency summons. The homing beacon will bring them the car and shorten the response time.” She ran some fuzzy math and gave a guesstimate of about two minutes, assuming the car was ready.
“Go, it’s late, or rather, extremely early,” Lady Rakten gave a yawn and stretched, clearly at her limit.
Morsh plugged her omni-pad into the interface and leaned the seat flat, one final thought before falling asleep.
You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? But I’ll find out what’s going on in that head before I let you go up there...