by Tanya Huff
“Stroppy fukkers.” Craig accepted the mug of coffee and stretched his arm along the top of Torin’s chair. Up on the big screen dominating one wall of the rectangular canteen, a mix of Younger Races piled out of their filthy crawler. “We’re what? Twenty-five hundred klicks from the nearest town?”
Torin lifted her mug in a sarcastic salute. “The determination of the true fanatic.”
“They didn’t walk,” Werst grunted. “That would be a true fanatic.”
“That would be insane,” Craig amended.
“Yeah, you don’t get an opinion. You think the bunks to the canteen is too far to walk.”
Marie paused on her way by to nudge Werst’s shoulder with her hip. “He’s not wrong. Why walk when you can fly?”
“Then why is it no one in the Confederation flies? On their own,” Werst expanded. “Without tech.”
“Easy answer.” Marie held her pie out of his reach and continued on to her own seat at the next table. “Once you’ve got wings, you’re having too much fun to bother with sentience.”
Werst nodded thoughtfully. “That explains most of the pilots I know.”
The full dozen protesters—eight Humans, two di’Taykan, two Krai—stayed outside the perimeter, setting up camp in full view of a remote security station so obvious, it didn’t need the sign identifying it.
“They want us to see them,” Ressk noted.
Werst squeezed his thigh with a foot. “No point in them being here if we didn’t.”
One of the male Humans, pale beige, lighter than both Torin and Craig, with an intricate blue pattern on both cheeks, his hair up in a knot on the back of his head, returned to the crawler. A moment later, the visual jerked then settled with no discernible difference in clarity.
“And fail.” Alamber snickered.
When he didn’t emerge, they assumed he was continuing his attempt to shut down the system.
“Should Lieutenant Maaren run an ID?” Pie finished, Ranjit dropped her plate in the recycler by the door. “If that decoration’s a tattoo, he’ll be easy to find.”
Maaren half rose from the table where he and the five PLE’s “observing” the training exercise sat, but Binti cut him off before he could speak. “Not against the law to protest, Cap.” She dropped into her seat with a bowl of . . .
“What the hell is that?” Craig demanded.
“Marilissa . . .”
“Who?”
“The cook. Dark hair, lovely and round. Ex-Navy. Petty Officer Kotas. Marilissa,” she stressed the repetition, “called it moo-stah-lev-ree-AH. It’s like a grape juice pudding.”
Ressk leaned in. “Smells good.”
“I once saw you eat a shoe.” Binti waved her spoon dismissively. “Marilissa says her family brought the recipe from oldEarth. And, yeah, it smells great, so keep your grubby fingers . . .” Her spoon cracked against Werst’s knuckle. “. . . away.”
“This is how the Navy eats?”
“Marilissa cooked in the wardroom.” Binti closed her eyes and licked pudding off her lips. “This is how officers eat.”
“Chiefs and POs eat better,” Torin told them.
Half the heads in the canteen turned toward Elisk. Who shrugged.
“True,” he said. “They were smug about it.”
On the screen, the protesters spoke in low murmurs, facing away from the perimeter, hands by their mouths covering conversations, fully aware of exactly where the DL or civilian security equivalent had been mounted. Every few minutes, one of them would turn, face the lens directly, and yell a slogan.
“Violence begets violence!”
“Veterans need help, not harm!”
“End the Violence!”
“We’re trying to,” Zhou yelled back and accepted high fives from Nicholin and Bilodeau.
The protesters jerked in unison, angry responses spilling into the canteen, too tangled to make sense of.
Nicholin snickered. “I think they heard you, Zhou.”
Alamber tapped his slate and the symbol of an open mouth appeared in the bottom right corner of the big screen. “It’s a two-way system, guys. They yell at us. We yell at them.”
A di’Taykan, who couldn’t have been more than a meter and a half tall, the shortest di’Taykan Torin had ever seen, stepped closer to the lens. “Words can be a weapon!”
Torin reached for Alamber’s slate and tapped the icon closed. “Don’t engage.”
“Aw, Boss . . .”
“Keep ears on them in case they make plans to advance. We don’t need the complication of them wandering into an exercise.”
“Stop murdering Confederation civilians!”
Civilians had died on Threxie, and Torin still had no idea how they could have prevented it. Robert Martin had done the killing, but she hadn’t stopped him in time. Of course, the military hadn’t stopped Martin—hadn’t realized how unstable he was when he was discharged—nor had the Confederation as a whole served him well, with less resources than needed going to veterans organizations. Torin wasn’t taking all the blame. Only some of it.
“You needn’t take some of the blame for everything,” her therapist had said. “They had a bad harvest on Paradise last year. Was that your fault, too?”
“Only if some asshole armed the corn.”
After that conversation, she’d dropped her therapist down to once every four tendays, as required for the Strike Teams. It seemed safer for all concerned.
One of the Human protesters, who seemed absurdly young, crossed her arms and held onto her scowl as she shouted, “I see no philosophical difference between the Strike Teams and their victims!”
“Not exactly pithy,” Ranjit observed.
“On second thought, shut them up.” When the noise of the canteen moved back into the forefront, Torin said, “If they cross the outer perimeter, we’ll hear the alarms. We can be at the inner perimeter before they are.”
“When we get there, can we shoot at them, Gunny?” Nicholin asked. “I mean not to hit them, just to make them . . .”
“Shit themselves?”
Nicholin pointed at Werst. “What he said.”
“It won’t. You have to understand the damage a bullet can do before it frightens you.” She glanced around the canteen, saw Marilissa watching from the kitchen. “We’ve all seen the damage. We’ve done the damage. We’ve taken the damage. That lot? They’ve never been closer to the war than a news feed. And that was the whole point of us going out there. If they get to the inner perimeter, we’ll go out, and I’ll have a word with them.”
“Don’t you have to understand what a gunnery sergeant can do before one frightens you?” Marie asked.
Torin smiled. “No. And that’s lunch.” She tapped Craig’s thigh, pushed her chair out, and stood. “Let’s get back to work.”
Little more than empty land and barracks, the training facility could have been automated. Expecting field kitchens, the Strike Teams had been pleasantly surprised to find a cook and four lesser mortals preparing food as well as half a dozen members of the PLE keeping an eye on things. Of the ten, only Petty Officer Miralissa Kotas had served. Torin understood why few veterans joined planetary police forces; it was too similar while simultaneously too different. There were less differences between the military and the Strike Teams and dealing with that disconnect took up most scheduled therapy time.
Humans and di’Taykan started the day with a ten-kilometer run while the Krai worked the nets—although both Humans and di’Taykan enjoyed throwing themselves around the nets, a ridiculous amount of what they did involved running. Running to cut people off. Running to avoid zombie H’san. Running across giant webs.
“Snipers don’t run.” Zhou and Orrnis, the snipers from U’yun and Ch’tore, stood behind Binti. “We strike from afar.”
“And not very far lately,” Orr
nis muttered.
Torin raised a single brow. “Do I look like I care?”
“Told you it wouldn’t work,” Zhou grumbled, stripping down to shorts.
“Worth a shot,” Binti muttered. “There’s bugs down here.”
When the PLE’s obstacle course proved to be no challenge, they expanded it.
“What would we build a new wall from? And, honestly, do we look like a construction crew? We don’t even have heavies to help.” Marie turned Lieutenant Maaren toward the cliff rising forty meters up out of a shallow angle of tumbled blocks of rock, a patch of brilliant pink at the ten-meter mark and rising. “Nature provides, and we can’t build one of those in a station. I wish we’d brought drop sleeves.”
A few meters away, Torin adjusted her harness—she had nothing to prove to Tylen, the four time free-climbing champion of 4th Recarta, 2nd Division, Gamma Company—and enjoyed the juxtaposition of wide-eyed excitement on Marie’s face and wide-eyed disbelief on Lieutenant Maaren’s.
With their targets at three hundred meters, the long meadow became a range.
“If you oriented in the other direction, you’d avoid the crosswinds,” Maaren began. “We can . . .”
Torin cut him off by lifting her KC to her shoulder. “The crosswinds are why we chose this location. No challenge otherwise for the Marines, and the Navy’s not going to hit anything regardless.”
“I heard that, Gunny,” Elisk called.
“It’s not a secret, Lieutenant.”
* * *
• • •
Maaren opened the canteen door and stood aside as Surren and Elisk pushed past, hurrying inside. No one got between the Krai and food. “I can’t believe you thought that was fun. You people are crazy. You know that right?”
“It’s one of the job qualifications,” Torin told him.
“It wasn’t one of mine.” Craig slipped by as well. “You’re going to be holding that door until the dogs come home, mate. This lot’s got nothing you’d recognize as manners.”
“Aren’t you one of this lot?”
“Which is why I’m inside and you’re still holding the door.” He gave him a two-finger salute and headed for the counter.
“He’s not wrong,” Torin said following. The food waiting in the stasis field was still predominantly a cross-species selection, edible by all three of the Younger Races, and very much like what they’d all eaten while they served, but, unlike at lunch, there was a specific Human, Krai, and Taykan dish as well.
“I made avgolemono,” Marilissa explained, nodding at the soup. “It’s my way of remembering where my people are from. My staff felt that if there was a Human food . . .” She gestured at the tomagoras and the abquin. “There’s minimal food value for Humans in the filling of the abquin and the kinir has a lot more fiber than our bodies can comfortably cope with. While you can eat the tomagoras, you’ll be . . . Warden Ryder!”
“Eat the tomagoras, shit fire. I know.” He piled a large helping on his plate. “Now this is what I call tucker.”
Marilissa’s eyes were wide. “Warden Kerr?”
“It’s fine. He burned his taste buds off long ago. Now me, I draw the line at my aunties’ chatpate aloo.” Picking up a bowl, Torin filled it with soup, and realized Marilissa had returned to staring at Craig, brows drawn in. “Is his portion going to leave the di’Taykan short?”
“What? No, no.” The cook nodded toward the covered trays still in the kitchen. “I was Navy, remember. I’m used to quantity. It’s just . . . eating food intended for another species can be dangerous.”
Torin added a thick piece of dark bread to her plate. “Technically, everything native to this planet is food intended for another species.”
“Werst ate a shoe!” Binti called from the other end of the line where she stacked the last empty spot on her plate with fried plantains.
“He’s Krai.” Marilissa called back. “He doesn’t count. There are no shoes on the menu,” she added as Torin set the soup bowl on her tray and moved on to solids. When three Krai and two di’Taykan joined the food line, Marilissa fell silent until, unable to contain herself, she pointed at Torin’s plate, loaded with garlic protein slices, and said, “You need more vegetables.”
The pile of unfamiliar green fronds smelled like citrus and tasted like pears. Torin sat at the big round table her team had claimed, glanced around, and noticed all the Humans had a sizable serving.
“Turnobi.” Maaren shoved a forkful in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “It’s cheap and filling, high in lysine, grows like a weed. First settlers couldn’t kill it, so they cooked it. Eat enough of this, you don’t eat as much of the pricy, imported stuff.”
Lifting a frond, Torin peered. “Cheap and filling. That woman was wasted in the Navy. She could cook for the Corps.”
“Violence begets violence!”
Alamber grinned and turned down the volume. “Dinner theater.”
“Reruns.” Werst lifted the top piece of kinir and nodded in satisfaction at the inside of his abquin.
“They’ve been doing this most of the day.” Binti waved her fork in the general direction of the screen. “I’d be bored out of my mind.”
“They’re fueled by righteous fury. They consider it righteous,” Zhou protested when Nicholin punched him in the arm. “I don’t.”
“Melt the guns into plowshares!”
Ressk frowned, dropping half of his kinir onto Werst’s plate. “They’re designed not to melt. And what’s a plowshare?”
Turned out no one knew.
“Something local?”
Maaren shook his head. “Never heard of it. So,” he turned to Torin, “what are your plans for tonight?”
“We’ll be back on the range after it gets dark.”
“Again? I mean, I don’t shoot, but more practice . . .”
When it became clear he had no idea of how to finish his protest, Torin set her spoon down in her empty soup bowl. “Do you know why we’re all still alive, Lieutenant? Because terrorists like Humans First don’t put the time in.”
A pan hit a solid surface at the serving counter unnecessarily hard and Torin glanced back over her shoulder to see Marilissa refilling the plantain. Seemed she had opinions. Ex-Navy; of course she had opinions.
* * *
• • •
“I checked on the protesters before I came out. The two di’Taykan and the Human male who tried to block the security signal haven’t been seen for a while.” Yahsamus swatted at an insect who seemed to find the Taykan more flavorful than the other species and fell into step beside Torin. “I admire his staying power.”
“We didn’t see them leave together; he could be off on his own.”
“When he could be off with willing partners? Your people are strange to me, Gunny.”
Torin laughed, and they walked side by side along the beaten path toward the range where the snipers were showing off. One hand resting on her KC, she trailed the other over the heavy seed heads of the perimeter grass.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
The night made Yahsamus’ dark green hair look black. This close, however, Torin could see the ends moving leisurely, silhouetted against the sky. “Given the teams are dirtside as often as they’re not, we need this. Wind. Weather. Gravity. Light conditions. Or lack of light.” Clouds covered the stars and most of the light from the moon. “Temperature variations.” They walked through a current of cooler air. “Humidity. It’s different when it’s real.”
“I don’t know. The simulators have always made it seem pretty real to me.”
“Not this real.”
Lightning flashed in the distance. Ten seconds later, thunder boomed.
Yahsamus grinned. “Neat trick, Gunny.”
“Thank you, Tech.”
“So you’re enjoying this, right
?”
“Yes, I am.”
* * *
• • •
Torin had already fired her twenty standing, twenty kneeling, twenty prone and cleared the targets to make way for the next five shooters when the storm broke. Solid sheets of heavy drops swept across the landscape driven by the wind, interspersed with moments of a constant, but slightly gentler, rain.
“Gunny?” Although she’d finished as a captain, Ranjit had come up through the ranks; she had no difficulty making herself heard from the three-hundred-meter line.
“Keep firing, Cap. The enemy’s not going to wait for good weather.”
On the near side of Ranjit, Marie shook her head, shoulders up like an annoyed cat as she quickly squeezed off her last five rounds. The row of targets flashed green, indicating everyone had fired, and the line raced forward a hundred meters to the next position. As another sheet of falling water moved through, the watchers, either finished or waiting their turn, took the moment to race east behind the targets and dive in under the nearest trees. Krai built their arboreal habitats as far from the ground as possible, so if they weren’t worried about lightning strikes, Torin wasn’t going to sweat it. There would, however, be a discussion on range safety when this group finished. With live rounds in the lanes, the area behind the targets remained off limits regardless of whether or not those rounds were currently being shot or how thorough the target’s inertial dampers were supposed to be.
Remaining a safe distance off to the west of the targets, wind slapping wet weeds against her legs, Torin lifted her face, eyes closed, and let the downpour wash away the sweat and grime.
The five shooters wasted no time on their knees. The targets flashed green, intensity adjusted for the ambient light, and they advanced as another sheet came through. Torin considered calling it, her point made, but the laughter and profanity mixed as they threw themselves prone suggested the five were enjoying themselves. Turned out, Marie was fluent in at least one language other than Federate.
As they settled and the first shots cracked, the hair lifted off the back of Torin’s neck. She turned, frowned at the figure she could barely make out through the rain, and grunted at the impact just below her sternum, air forced out of her lungs in a rush. Mouth open, she couldn’t seem to draw new air in.