The vehicle stopped, and the Dark Ones began to get out. The door nearest her opened and Ramirez stood there, beckoning with his hand to come out.
“Last stop,” he said. “Everyone out.”
The fox girl climbed carefully out, catching the hair or her tail on metal protrusions inside the vehicle and having to stop to disentangle herself. Once outside, she tried to take a cleansing breath, but dust and dirt kicked up by the vehicles caused her to cough. Must these beasts ruin even the air, she thought.
She opened her eyes through the grime and looked up to see Ramirez gesturing to a small white building directly in front of them. A short set of three wooden steps, made from her precious guum trees, led to a simple door with strange alien characters on it.
Alacea took a haunted breath as lines from the Dark Ones’ legends came back to her.
Those they kept alive for their amusement were locked in wooden cages, ever guarded by the vicious beasts they kept as pets. For no reason but to inflict more pain, the cages were made too short, and the frightened tods and vixens could only hunch over or kneel with their heads bowed…
“Home sweet home,” Ramirez said, stepping up to the door and opening it. He turned to another Dark One and called out to him. “Hey, tell Jenkins, Smith, Carson and…. Copperfield to arm up and meet me here ASAP.”
The other Dark One bowed his head quickly to the alien and ran off.
“All right, Ma’am,” Ramirez said, turning back to her. “Let’s go.”
She turned her attention back to him and gasped. This was it. She squared her shoulders and raised her head. If they were going to force her to bow, then every moment before then she wanted to spend with her head held high. Alacea stepped forward and climbed the steps, closing her eyes and offering a prayer to the Gods.
When she opened her eyes again, she was puzzled. The room in which she stood was clean and well-lit by an orb of light in the ceiling. A small, raised bench stood in the corner with blankets and a puffy pillow on top of it. She wondered if the Dark Ones expected her to sleep on it or if it was just there to sit upon. A small table stood on the other side of the room with a large white bowl, two drinking cups and what appeared to be two glass bottles of water.
Then she saw what must be the cage. A wooden box with two doors as tall as she was. She swallowed nervously as Ramirez walked up to it.
“So, you got no luggage,” he said, opening the box and showing her the space inside which held an extra blanket. “But if your friends bring you a change of clothes, you can put them in your wall locker here.” He closed the door and gestured to the table. “You got water there, and I’ll see about getting you some more so you can clean up. I’ll get you a towel too. The cot isn’t great, but it’s all we got.”
Alacea followed his gestures and his strange speech as best she could. Apparently, he did not intend for her to get into the box. Perhaps he was only threatening her with it if she misbehaved.
Ramirez continued, walking to the door again and reaching out to the lightswitch. “Lights here.” He switched them off and on real quick, causing Alacea to jump in surprise and look at the ceiling. “We’ll bring you lunch and dinner when the chow hall opens.”
He turned back to her and waved to get her attention. “Okay, now, this part is important okay?” Once he was sure he had her attention, he went to the door and pointed at it. “NO!” he said loudly as if trying to teach a dog not to pee on the carpet. “Okay? NO!”
“No,” she repeated carefully.
“That’s right, no,” he reiterated. “If you need something, you bang on the door.” He demonstrated by knocking on the door.
A knock came back and he opened it. Jenkins, rifle over her shoulder and helmet and gear on, stood there.
“Got the word, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “What’s… Hey, is that a Va’Shen?!”
“Yeah, she’s a detainee,” Ramirez told her. “I need you, Smith, Carson, and Copperfield to watch her. The captain wants her taken care of. DV treatment, you know? But she’s a detainee.”
Jenkins nodded. “Yeah, no problem. What she do?”
“Um…” Ramirez turned back and looked at the frightened-looking fox girl. “Maybe mass murder?” he replied uncertainly. “I don’t know. All I know is the captain wants her to stay put.”
“No problem,” Jenkins said. She looked past him at Alacea and waved, giving the Va’Shen a bright smile. “Hi, Honey! I’m Rachel!”
Alacea looked nervously from side to side and raised her hand to mimic the private.
“Awfully shy for a killer,” Jenkins noted to Ramirez.
“LT will be by later to interview her, just keep an eye on her,” the noncom told her. “You know how the Va’Shen are. You blink and they’re gone.”
Jenkins nodded. “You got it, Sarge.” She turned to Alacea again. “You need anything, I’m right outside, Honey.”
With that, the Ranger private stepped back outside and closed the door. Ramirez turned back to Alacea.
“So, this is when I ask if you have any questions, but I don’t know how to speak Va’Shen, so…” He gestured to her, inviting her to give it a shot anyway.
He shook his head. “Nope,” he said to himself, “That was a waste of time.” He turned to go. “Remember,” he said, and he knocked on the door. Opening it, he stepped outside and closed it, leaving Alacea alone.
Patricia had intercepted Ramirez on his way back the DV hooch and took the extra towels and water off his hands. With these new parcels in-hand, she continued on to where they were holding the detainee.
She wasn’t sure what “interview,” was supposed to mean here. The captain had started to say “interrogate” but deliberately switched it up. The intel lieutenant assumed that to mean that he didn’t want the girl treated harshly. That limited her options, but it did make her feel better. She just couldn’t see the fox girl as being some kind of military mastermind, no matter what she may have said.
Perhaps the situation said more about her boss than it did Alacea. He had been ready to shrug his shoulders and leave before she made that statement about the cities.
Maybe someone who had lost that much shouldn’t be in a position like this.
But who else was there? One reason there were so many members of the 5th Rangers here in the first place was that they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They had lost everything. Staying in the Army for another year or so was a good way to start to rebuild, especially on a planet where everything was paid for and there was nothing to spend money on anyway.
She saw Jenkins and gave the private a smile.
“Afternoon, LT,” Jenkins greeted.
“Anything new?” Patricia asked her with a nod to the door.
“It took a little bit of uncomfortable charades, but we got her to the bathroom and back,” Jenkins said. “Copperfield will be here in a bit with chow.”
Patricia nodded. “Okay, I’m going in.”
“Good luck, Ma’am!” Jenkins said gamely as she opened the door.
As she entered the hooch, she looked down and saw Alacea sitting on her knees in the center of the room, her eyes closed in either meditation or prayer. The cot had been upended and placed upright in a corner. In its place the blanket and pillows had been arranged on the floor in a circle with the edges folded up.
Patricia placed the towels and water on the table.
“Hello,” she greeted, and Alacea’s eyes opened and found her. Patricia gestured to herself.
The fox girl rose to her feet and bowed low from the waist.
Patricia bit her lip and looked down to see Alacea’s tail jerking left and right, a sign of the girl’s fear.
Alacea swallowed.
The Army officer tried to sound soothing.
The girl swallowed again and considered the Dark One’s words. Her eyes glanced down to her tail.
Alacea said, making a motion as if brushing her hair.
She saw the light go on behind Patricia’s eyes. “Oh, a brush!” She held a finger up and walked back to the door, knocking on it.
Jenkins opened the door and looked inside. “Everything cool, Ma’am?”
“Yeah, Private, we’re all good,” Patricia said with a smile. “I need a favor. Can you go to my quarters? On the top shelf of my wall locker is a hairbrush. Could you bring it here? Our friend here would like to brush her hair.”
Jenkins looked back and forth between the two of them for a moment before speaking again. “Oh, I am not falling for that,” she stated plainly.
Patricia’s face fell. “Falling for what?”
“She asks you for a brush, you send me to get it, then POW!” Jenkins explained. “She conks you on the back of the head, and she’s gone. Not falling for it.” She looked at Alacea and gave her a friendly smile. “It’s a nice try, though!”
The lieutenant cleared her throat and spared a glance back at Alacea. “Private,” she began, “I really don’t think we have to worry about that. Now, please go get the brush.”
“No, Ma’am,” Jenkins told her.
“Jenkins, I am ordering you to get that brush,” Patricia told her dangerously.
“No, Ma’am,” Jenkins repeated. “I am not leaving this post until properly relieved by another sentry or my commander. Now, when Copperfield gets back, I will send her to get your brush.”
Patricia glared daggers at her. “Private, I am a lieutenant,” she reminded her.
“Yes, Ma’am, but you’re not another sentry and you’re not Captain Ben Gibson, and so I’m not leaving. Now, you need anything else?”
The lieutenant took a breath. “No… thank you.”
Jenkins closed the door, and Patricia took a deep breath before turning back to Alacea.
Alacea resumed her place in the center of the room, and Patricia sat across from her, taking out her notepad and pen. She had researched how to ask certain questions before-hand and wrote them down so she wouldn’t risk messing it up.
Alacea told her.
Expecting this question, Patricia asked a follow up.
Patricia had to go off script earlier than she thought.
Alacea seemed to grasp the question now.
Okay, still not helpful, but she’s trying, Patricia thought.
Patricia bit the inside of her cheek in frustration. She abandoned the question and went to the next on the list.
Alacea looked down at the ground. she said.
Patricia worked through the statement, trying to make sure she understood it.
The lieutenant growled low in her throat. There was something off about her responses. Kasshas had had a flowery way of speaking that made it hard for Patricia to follow, but it did give her an idea of what it sounded like when a Va’Shen was being evasive. It could just be a local dialect or an error in translation, but she got the feeling that Alacea was speaking in a way that made it sound like she was answering the question without actually answering. But the way she was making it sound made it seem like she was a war criminal. That didn’t make any sense. A war criminal would try to double-talk in the other direction.
Patricia’s eyes narrowed, and she came up with a new idea.
It was after nine p.m. local time when an exhausted looking Patricia walked into the chow hall and made a bee-line for the huge metal coffee pots that lined the wall. There weren’t enough troops on the base to warrant a full-time chow hall, so the kitchen was closed during non-meal times, but the cooks had strict orders to always have coffee available.
As she poured herself a cup, she turned to the only other person in the room. Ben was hand-writing reports at a corner table.
“Well,” she said, causing him to look up. “She confessed to all of it.”
Ben lowered his pen and sat back in his chair. “She did, huh?” he asked quietly.
Patricia nodded and pulled out the chair directly opposite of him. “She stated unequivocally that she is responsible for the attack on Persephone and the deaths of everyone involved.”
The Ranger captain let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Really?” After he had had some time to calm down, he had begun to see things Patricia’s way. Whenever he thought about one day coming face-to-face with Persephone’s destroyer, he had always imagined some pompous, elderly tod who took pride in what he had done, not some young lady in dirty clothes.
She nodded and looked down at her coffee. “And that’s not all. It looks like we hooked a real big fish here, Sir.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Not only did she confess to the Persephone attack, she was apparently involved in others,” Patricia told him.
“Epsilon Eridani?” he asked in amazement. Jeez, just who did they have here?!
Patricia nodded. “And Gamma Hydra. And Wolf Seven. And Vega…”
“They never attacked Vega,” Ben cut in.
“… and Altair,” she continued. “And Mars. And the Moon. She also confessed to planning the attack on Pearl Harbor…”
Ben rolled his eyes and dropped his pen on the table, realizing he had been had.
“And get this,” Patricia said, grinning upon realizing the game was over. “She ordered the killing… of one… Abraham… Lincoln!”
The captain glared at her. “This is funny to you?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I’m not lying. She confessed to everything I asked her about. She just doesn’t know enough to know she’s lying.”
“Why?” Ben asked pointedly. “Why play this game? What does she hope to gain from it? Is it she just crazy?”
Patricia shrugged. “Whatever the reason, it’s linked to the villagers. Every time I asked her about them, she confessed to something else. It’s like when a mom goes to the police and tells them, yeah, sure her little boy did X, Y or Z, but it wasn’t his fault because she was a bad mom.”
“Is it possible there’s someone among the villagers she’s covering for?” Ben asked.
The terp shrugged again. “I don’t know. But she will not tell me where they are, and she will not even entertain the idea that she’s not responsible for whatever it is they may have done in the war.”
Ben leaned back in his chair again and looked at the ceiling in thought.
Patricia regarded him for a moment. “So… I was never near any of the actual fighting,” she admitted slowly. “So, I don’t know, but… aside from Persephone, I never heard of the Va’Shen doing anything that was really… you know… over the line. Did you he
ar or see anything like that?”
“Nothing really new,” he confessed. “Nothing we humans had never done to one another. The Va’Shen were really good at sneak attacks and ambushes. I can only imagine what kind of hunters they are. But we never saw anything like mutilated bodies or mass graves or anything like that. I think that’s why Persephone was such a big deal, and why we ended up nuking the cities in the end.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at her and took a breath. “Washington never seemed to want to go all out against the Va’Shen. Most of us just figured they didn’t like having to pay for a war when it cost more than a billion dollars to move a single vehicle between star systems. So, they shoe-stringed us whenever they could because… well… the war was far away. After Persephone, I think someone on Capitol Hill realized that if they could do that to a colony, they could do it to D.C. too.”
Patricia nodded. That made a cynical sort of sense.
“I want to talk to her tomorrow,” he said. “First thing.”
She nodded again. “Yes, Sir.” The lieutenant rose from her chair and pushed it back under the table. “Good night, Sir.”
“Good night, Patricia.”
Three years ago…
Being toward the end of a convoy in a dry, dusty climate sucked. The dirt kicked up by the vehicles in front of you made it hard to see or breathe. If you were the turret gunner, it was even worse and all you could do was wear goggles and a balaclava to try to keep the dirt out of your nose and mouth.
It was that thought that spurred Ben to look up and back from the passenger seat of the LTV and check on his gunner. “Peterson!” he yelled. “You doing okay?”
Normally LTVs were equipped with digital “smart-gunners,” a cylindrical, rotating robot that could be controlled from the vehicle’s terminal or even a commander’s pad. The problem was that the system, minus the actual gun, weight about 500 pounds. Your average soldier weighed about 180, and the Department of Defense paid contractors to move equipment by the ounce. For the government, it was a pretty easy choice.
The Vixen War Bride Page 7