by John Daulton
And then something must have happened. The Prosperions had somehow sent the fleet home. That had to be it. And good for them. The best thing for everyone. Especially Blue Fire.
Thinking of her helped calm the rising tension that had begun to fill Orli, the torrent of emotions stirred to life by the recollection of recent events.
But how recent? She had no sense of time. She stared up at the bright white luminescence of the ceiling. No help there. It could have been days. Or hours. Or months. How long had she been asleep? What had they done to her?
She looked back at her arms, where the straps had been. There were faint red marks there from where she’d struggled trying to get out. So it couldn’t have been too long. And there were needle marks. Several of them. She wondered what they’d put into her. And why.
She lay back and tried to calm herself, tried to make sense of what she could recall, but in the end, she couldn’t. She had only a sequence of events, but somehow they lacked cohesion. Visions of things that had happened as if viewed through that gas cloud outside Altin’s cell.
At least he had gotten away. That was something to cling to. He was safe. They were all safe. The rest could be worked out in time.
Time was an odd commodity for her, however, for she had no gauge of it beyond the red marks on her arms. But more of it passed after. Her only measure of it was the fact that two meals were brought to her, pushed through a narrow slot in the door. She knew the meals must mark the passing of some set number of hours. The empty plate of the second had been taken away for what had to be another hour before she saw her first human face since awakening. Two faces, actually, both Fort Minot Security by the patches on their sleeves, which proved that the return to Earth was not some drug-induced dream. She wondered if the Hostiles’ arrival, if their presence in orbit around Earth, was also real. She feared it must be.
The two security personnel cuffed her and, unforeseeably, gagged her, shoving a black rubber ball in her mouth and binding it tightly in place with a series of straps over and around her head. The question in her eyes, sent to each of her captors in turn, prompted only, “Your captain’s orders,” from one of them.
They brought her out of the cell and led her through a brief series of hallways and onto an elevator. They kept her facing the back wall when they selected the destination floor, so she had no idea how far they’d gone when the doors opened again. She could tell by the sense of vertigo that hit her when she stepped off that they’d climbed very far and very fast, indicating that her cell was deep below the surface, well into the bowels of the Earth. The ball gag was uncomfortable. It spread her mouth too wide, hurting her jaw and making it hard to breathe.
They guided her down another series of corridors and finally into a small room where they sat her down in a small plastic chair at a small plastic table. An empty chair sat across from her. One of the guards removed the gag, and she couldn’t decide if she should thank him or tell him to fuck off. She chose neither, and both men immediately exited the room, leaving her once again alone.
She looked around. Again there was nothing in the room but white walls, too-bright light coming from above and a single door. Were it not for the absent toilet and sink, it might have easily passed for the very same room she’d just been taken from. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, but she waited for it anyway.
She sat for so long her backside began to hurt, so she rose and stalked the edges of the room, all the while her mind running through events. Running through reasons why she might be here. She knew it had to be mainly because of Captain Asad. But why? And why the gag?
Finally, frustration building to a near frenzy that she thought might make her burst, a gentle knock sounded upon the door. Immediately after, a smallish, squinting young woman came into the room. She wore a conservative skirt in fleet black and a white blouse beneath a jacket cut in the military style. Orli thought she might still be in her teens. “Ensign Pewter,” said the woman upon entering. “My name is Angela Hayworth, and I’m here as counsel for your defense.”
“My defense?”
“Yes. General court martial. Charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit mass murder …,” she paused and activated her tablet, pulling up the list before continuing, “attempted murder, espionage, aiding and abetting the enemy, dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming of an officer.” She looked up from the tablet with a medicine-taste face and added, “Those are the most important ones anyway. There are several more.”
Orli’s first instinct was to argue, but she skipped it. This was obviously the work of Captain Asad. She calmed herself and studied her defense counsel for a moment, the young woman standing straight and silent as she did. “How old are you?” Orli asked, not bothering to pretend she wasn’t skeptical of the woman’s youth.
“Twenty,” Orli’s attorney replied in a tone that suggested she was used to the question and simply wanted to get it out of the way. “I graduated high school three years early and was ahead of the curve all the way through law school, which I finished almost a year ago. And if you want the truth, you’re lucky you got me, because I don’t think we’d have had a snowball’s chance in hell even if I’d been at this for the last fifty years.”
Orli laughed. Sort of. But she did relax some. “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that kind of thing out loud. At least not in front of me.”
“I’m not. But, while I may be young, I’m not stupid. My only hope is to delay the execution long enough to get real justice in here. This is the worst railroad job I’ve ever heard of. It’s as if all safeguards for your rights have been thrown off. And from what I understand, they didn’t even get anything from the chemical interrogation to justify doing this.”
That was a lot to process. Orli didn’t doubt that the young lawyer was sharp, and she even decided she liked her well enough. At least she had a smart attorney, if not an experienced one. She sat back down, trying to work through the rest. “Justify what? What is ‘this’?”
“Your execution.”
That set Orli back. She blinked up at Angela a few times, trying to figure out what missing memory she hadn’t reclaimed earlier. Nothing came. “Executed? When? What do they think I did? They have me on video trying to get Altin out of the cell. That’s hardly a death penalty offense, much less one requiring validation through a chemical interrogation. They already had the evidence.”
“That’s just one of the charges. I read you the list. In fact, that one is way down toward the bottom. It’s all the rest. The conspiracy to commit mass murder is the big one, that and the aiding and abetting the enemy, there are several counts of that. They’d have charged you with one count for every one of the hundred-thousand-plus Hostiles in orbit if they’d thought they needed to.”
“Hundred thousand Hostiles in orbit?” Orli’s mouth gaped. Then she knew; the missing memories came flooding back. It was real. She could vaguely see the image on the screen in sick bay in her memory. It was true. The Hostiles had come to Earth.
“Yes. Well, they don’t know exactly how many, but those are the newest estimates. More are coming all the time. They blame you for it. They had at you in that chemical session for over an hour trying to discover whatever secrets and covert plans you had or knew of regarding Altin Meade and the Prosperion monarch in that regard.”
“Well, then I didn’t tell them much.”
“No, you didn’t. Apparently either you never knew of any plans, or you did but the Prosperions buried them too deep in your mind to find. That or they erased them before you were taken away. Not that anyone down here cares which, by the way.”
That didn’t seem right, much less fair. Orli studied the woman’s face, wondering for a moment if maybe she had been chosen because she was so smart, and so young. Maybe they picked her to come in here and try to trick information out of her. But Angela sat there so patiently yet clearly indignant about what she thought was going on. Her eyes had seemed so wide and honest as she
spoke, her passion rising with each word, so much so that Orli had a hard time believing all that was fake. And, as she looked about the room, in the end it wasn’t like she was in a position to do anything about it anyway. She had no choice but to trust her. “So when will they … you know, come for me, to do it? What do we do?”
“Well, for the most part, you just sit there,” said the young attorney, a softening of her aspect making it appear as if she understood what had just passed through Orli’s mind. “They haven’t technically convicted you yet, but if what I think is going to happen happens, it’s not going to matter what either of us has to say. I’m convinced what’s really happened is that they’ve decided you are far too risky to keep alive at this point, even as a bargaining chip. They believe you are a magnet for Altin Meade. Or a beacon. Something like that. I mean, think about it: they actually flew you down here, through that nightmare up there. It’s insane the risk they took.”
That made Orli cringe as she once more recalled the image on the nurse’s station monitor.
The attorney nodded when she saw the look in Orli’s eyes. “Yes, exactly. They’re so worried about what you know or have learned from the Prosperions that they actually think you might be capable of doing magic yourself.”
That made Orli laugh, although short lived, fueled mainly by incredulity and nerves. “That’s ridiculous. They know all about the Prosperion brain thing. The mythothalamus. They know perfectly well I can’t cast spells.”
“That doesn’t change the fact they put you in that gag, does it?”
She nodded. That explained a lot. “What’s to keep me from doing magic now?”
“The room is electrified. They’re watching us. If you do anything that looks like magic, zap. Both of us. So please don’t even pretend.”
“Wow,” was all that Orli could say. She looked up and around the room again. It didn’t seem much different, but she supposed the floor had sounded a little different beneath her feet than the hallways had. So had her cell. What a bunch of bastards.
“Yes, exactly. So as you can see, reason is mostly out the window and anything like justice is long gone. This is all being pushed through for the show, which means it has to come from the very top, surely the director himself.”
Orli had sense enough to be frightened now as reality began to settle in. “Then why are you here at all?”
“Like I said, the show.”
“They’ll have this conversation recorded. What’s the point?”
“No, they won’t. This is your confidential time.” She looked disgusted as she said it, as if all the high ideals she’d gotten as she gobbled up all that coursework in school were lies, as if she’d consumed the principles of justice and equality and trusted the value of the system in which it all worked so seamlessly, processed and locked it all down in her facile, eidetic mind only to discover that it was rancid and poisonous. It was as if she’d been eating from some rotten carcass found lying on the side of the road and yet never known, the whole time thinking it something else, something held up throughout her childhood as some great feast for the mind. Orli’s treatment by the system sickened her, and it was obvious.
Orli saw it in the woman’s eyes, and the dawning sense of her plight grew. Somehow, without ever having thought about it, she’d always assumed that her people, the people of Earth, had a polished and refined sense of justice. Especially back here on Earth, on the actual home world. Earth was supposed to have something on the order of mechanized justice, a system of automated right, or at least something as close to it as humans were capable of. Not this. Not something where one man could just type in an access code and override the work of centuries trying to master the concept of human decency. How was this any better than the wave of the War Queen’s scepter, or even the whim of Lord Thadius and his desire to own her as if it were his noble right?
And to think people in the fleet called the Prosperions primitives.
Orli repeated her question of moments before. “So what do we do?”
Angela pursed her lips, shaking off whatever lament she’d entertained. Back to business. “The main thing is not to do anything that gives them reason to carry out the sentence any more immediately than I think they’re going to. They never execute anyone earlier than forty-eight hours after sentencing, although that’s not actually written in the NTA rules anywhere. What we don’t want to do is give them justification to deviate from that convention, given that they’ve already thrown out the rest of the rule book. I hope you understand, because I need time.”
Orli nodded. She wasn’t going to be able to do much anyway, not with her hands bound, her mouth gagged and while buried God-only-knew how many miles beneath the Earth’s surface in a base for which she had no door codes or chip recognition. And if they put her on the stand, she’d tell them what she knew, which, according to her fledgling defense counsel, had already been dismissed as lies and Prosperion propaganda. She nodded. “I understand.”
“I will do everything I can in the courtroom, but my cousin works in the JAG office, and he said he heard Commander Adair, that’s the prosecutor, talking with the judge on the com, talking about how this is all going to go down. That’s how I found out what I … what we were in for. Our only hope lies in the fact that my uncle is the ranking judge advocate at Fort Reno, and I’m going to him for help the moment this trial is through. You’re not even getting a hearing first. It’s completely wrong in every way.”
“I have to tell you, as my attorney, you’re not making me feel very confident at all.”
Orli’s attempt at levity didn’t work for either of them. “I know. I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I wish I could tell you something different, but I was taught that dealing in the truth is the fastest way to justice. I have to believe that is true, despite how it seems otherwise right now.”
Orli harrumphed at that, every cell in her body filling with the irony. “Well, we’ll see how that works out. But let’s not be above lying if it seems like it might help. If what you’re saying is correct, I’m not sure a perjury charge is going to hurt me much. If we have to throw out a few ideals to save me, I’m fine with it.”
Angela ruffled at that, shaking her head and looking as if she were about to make an argument. A knock on the door prevented her from doing so. Two guards came into the room, the taller of the two with his assault rifle drawn. He pointed it at Orli as soon as his partner was out of the line of fire. “It’s time,” the shorter one announced.
“Time for what?”
“Your trial,” both the guard and Angela said at once.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” Orli remarked. “That’s how much time they gave you to prepare with me?”
“I hope you don’t think I made up any of what I just said, Ensign. You are in serious trouble here. Try not to make it worse. Give me time to help.”
The young woman’s sudden formality stung a little, but she relented immediately and reached down a hand to help pull Orli to her feet. Orli swallowed hard as Angela looked deeply into her eyes, sending in that heavy glance all the weight of dreadful certainty. Orli drew back from it, from that severity, and the cavalier impulses of an instant ago were completely gone.
Orli stared out into the small courtroom from her seat on the witness stand. There were Marines all around the edges of the room, three of them with rifles raised and trained on her, prepared for her slightest incantation, the least hint of her invoking her magical powers. If she weren’t in such deep shit, she could have been amused by it all, but she was, so she wasn’t.
She had to avoid looking at Roberto sitting in the back row because every time she saw him, she felt like she might come unhinged a little. He just kept staring at her, like his heart was breaking, and she knew that for the burly Spaniard, it probably was. She tried to send him back a reassuring glance, to let him know she would figure something out, but there was a brokenness in his expression that scared her.
It was easier to look at Captain Asad.
He was the center of this whole nightmare. He always had been. From the very start he sought conflict. He’d never wanted to trust the Prosperions no matter what they did. It was his absolute dedication to finding hostility in everything that got her here. And when he’d taken the stand, she’d watched him give his testimony so methodically, so systematically, and so incorrectly that she’d wished she really could cast magic. She’d read once in one of Altin’s spellbooks that Prosperion transmuters could actually unbind the energy in living cells. Unmake them. She couldn’t think of anything she’d like to do more than unmake him as she’d watched him drone on and on. She hated him.
But there was no hate in his relating of the story. The man was as efficient in giving his version of events as he was brutal in his interpretation of the facts. And worse, young Angela couldn’t even put a dent in his version of how the whole Prosperion-Hostile debacle came about. How could she? Everything he’d said was true. The Prosperions, and Altin, had helped save Blue Fire from fleet attack. Blue Fire was the party responsible for the annihilation of the Andalians. Blue Fire was responsible for the death of most of the Aspect’s crew. Blue Fire was responsible for the destruction of more than half of the ships that had been sent out those twelve long years ago. All the Hostiles in the air above Earth that very moment had appeared during the heated exchange following the Prosperion intervention that had saved Blue Fire’s world, and right after Altin Meade had been taken out of the Aspect’s brig. With Orli’s help.
There was nothing in any of that that wasn’t spot-on true.
Captain Asad now sat next to a JAG officer of roughly the same age, Commander Adair. From the familiar way they whispered back and forth, she was pretty sure they’d known each other for years. The jury had been dismissed. Orli’s young attorney had requested it when Orli pointed out that Captain Metumbe and Captain Putin, two of the three jurors present when they’d come in, were confidants of Captain Asad. So she’d waived her right to a jury. Which meant it was up to the judge. Based on what Angela had told her, she was pretty sure she already knew how that was going to go.