by J. L. Doty
“Your mother vied for a career in service to the Supremacy, but proved to be a rather mediocre officer, and never advanced beyond the rank of command superior. Did she blame us that she never rose to the same stature as your grandmother, that she was never invited to join the Larscom?”
Nikaela’s grandmother, Major Skalde Adeska Vreekande was a woman who intimidated everyone. Nikaela didn’t want this conversation to be about her mother’s regrets, or about her grandmother’s successes. “No, mistress,” she said, “my mother blamed only herself.”
Kristdokar nodded. “Did she now?”
“Yes, mistress,” Nikaela said. “She told me I should always accept responsibility for my failures, as she did. I think she wanted to set an example.”
Kristdokar gave her an unpleasant smile and leaned forward. “But you don’t seem to have too many failures for which you must accept responsibility. You’ve just finished your second year at the academy at the top of your class. Keep that up, and in two more years you’ll graduate with honors. Why are you so different from your mother, Mistress Vreekande?”
Nikaela wasn’t about to reveal that her mother had done everything possible to ensure her daughter succeeded where she had failed, or that Nikaela had always resented the cold discipline her mother had inflicted on her family. But she thought it might not be a bad thing to reveal that her mother had successfully ignited the flame of ambition in her daughter. “I’m more ambitious than my mother, mistress.”
Kristdokar’s smile softened. “Good. Ambition is not a bad thing, and it certainly seems to have done well for you. But be careful that you don’t let it cloud your judgement on a critical issue.”
Nikaela nodded. “I’ll try not to, mistress.”
Kristdokar leaned back in her chair and regarded Nikaela for a moment. “Did you know that your grandmother sponsored me when I was a very junior officer fresh out of the academy?”
That came as a complete surprise to Nikaela. By custom, a woman could not sponsor her own daughter, but her mother had always resented the fact that her grandmother had not used her considerable influence among the elite of the Larscom to find an appropriate sponsor for her. “No, mistress, I did not know that.”
Kristdokar smiled as if she had expected that answer. “Your performance at the academy has brought you to my attention. I and others are watching you closely. Don’t disappoint us.”
Nikaela said, “I don’t intend to, mistress.”
It came out more brashly than she had intended, but the command eagle seemed to approve of her boldness.
Kristdokar abruptly stood. “Your third year at the academy begins in a little under a hundred days. I have you until then, and I intend to push you to your limits. We’ll see if you can do better than your mother.”
To Nikaela, that sounded like a challenge, one she would be happy to meet.
••••
Mathius didn’t lose consciousness, but lay on the floor for several seconds while his head swam. Two of the rebels secured his hands behind his back with plast manacles. His face throbbed where Mercier had struck him, and he tasted blood.
Cranoch stood over him, kicked him in the ribs and said, “Get up. If you can’t walk I’m not going to waste the effort carrying you. You’ll get the same as your father, so get up, shit-for-brains.”
Mathius lay there, and as his mind kept replaying the image of his father’s head exploding, he didn’t care if they killed him. But something inside him made him roll onto his side and struggle to rise, though with his hands manacled behind his back his efforts proved futile. Cranoch and Mercier laughed at his unsuccessful exertions, then Cranoch hooked a hand under one of Mathius’s armpits and yanked him to his feet.
They left his father lying on the threadbare carpet in a pool of blood. Using their rifle butts for encouragement, they marched Mathius out onto the street, and forced him to sit there while they searched the other apartments, houses and buildings.
After Cranoch emerged from one, Mathius heard him say to Mercier. “Another empty house. They must have heard we was coming.”
Somehow the neighborhood had been forewarned and fled. Mathius assumed that his father had stayed behind to wait for him, and had died because of him. He tried not to think of it that way, but in his heart he knew that to be the truth.
The rebels searched all the houses and buildings on the street and collected whatever they found useful, which wasn’t much. Mathius’s neighbors had started the day with little in the way of food, and they would end the day with even less. They marched Mathius away, forcing him to follow Mercier and his men, with Cranoch walking behind him, encouraging him with kicks and slaps.
Mathius struggled on, reliving again and again his father’s death. He shook his head and tried to flush that memory from his mind. He stumbled, and Cranoch cuffed him in the side of the head. Mathius staggered and fell to his knees. Cranoch cuffed him again and he cried out in pain. The older man leaned over him and said, “Nothing but silence from you, ass-hole. Got it?”
Mathius nodded, eager to avoid the older man’s fist.
“You’re learning,” Cranoch said. “And you’d better keep learning. Now get up, and show me you can catch up with the rest.”
Mathius struggled back onto his feet and rushed to catch up with the other rebels, Cranoch dogging his heels, kicking and cuffing him even when he did keep up. They walked for a couple of kilometers and led him to a walled compound with a gate that had been constructed by slapping together random sheets of metal. Mercier stopped outside the gate and exchanged words with two guards. The gate screeched with an unholy racket as the guards swung it open, and they walked onto the grounds of an old mansion hidden behind a stone wall on a large lot. About fifty rebels moved about, all wearing a mismatched mix of cobbled-together uniforms.
The grounds inside the wall were mostly bare dirt, but well maintained, without the debris that littered the streets. The mansion stood two stories high in the middle of the compound, its walls pocked with holes from weapons fire. It had a flat roof, on which Mathius spotted several snipers, the barrels of their guns aimed out toward the city surrounding them. On a balcony on the second floor a woman leaned on a stone balustrade, her billowing dress exposing copious amounts of cleavage. Behind her stood a young girl that appeared to be about Mathius’s age. She wore a dress made of some sort of sheer fabric, and in the bright sunlight the dark areolas of her small breasts produced faint shadows behind the thin material. Their eyes met, and he saw nothing in hers but a haunted emptiness. He wondered if soon he would look out at the world through eyes like hers, lifeless and devoid of hope.
The older woman called down to Cranoch, “Got a newbie, eh? A little old, isn’t he?”
“He’s young enough to learn,” Cranoch said. “It just may take a little longer to teach him what he needs to learn.”
Mercier added, “And he’ll have a stronger back than the rest. We’ll make good use of him.”
To Cranoch, Mercier said, “I have to report in.” He nodded toward Mathius. “Get him settled.”
Mercier climbed the steps at the front of the mansion while Cranoch pointed to a couple of the men and said, “You and you. Come with me”
Cranoch grabbed Mathius by the back of his neck, and with a mix of kicks and slaps he guided him to a building at the back of the walled compound. Two boys sat on the ground in the shade of one of the building’s walls, their hands cuffed in front of them. They appeared to be about eight or nine years old, their faces covered with smudges of dirt, and in their eyes Mathius saw stark and unremitting fear.
Cranoch stopped in front of the seated boys, then spun Mathius to face him. “What’s your name, kid?”
Mathius thought about giving him a false name, but Cranoch saw something in his face and raised a hand to cuff him. Mathius cringed and said, “Mathius. My name’s Mathius.”
Cranoch gave him an unpleasant grin. “Well then, Mathius,”—he waved a hand at the two seated boys—�
��meet Timor and Phillan. You three are going to get to know each other real good.”
Without warning Cranoch spun Mathius about. The two men accompanying them each grabbed one of Mathius’s arms, and held them while Cranoch removed the manacles binding his hands behind his back. Then they pressed Mathius’s back against the outer wall of the building. They lifted his hands above his head to a set of manacles that had been bolted to the wall a few meters from the two younger boys. Mathius didn’t resist as they locked his wrists into the manacles, knowing such an effort would be futile. The two men walked away while Cranoch took a step back, put his hands on his hips and looked Mathius over carefully.
Standing there with his arms held above his head, Mathius looked into the older man’s eyes, and again the image of his father’s last moment of life returned to him. It kept coming back no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.
Cranoch raised his fist and held it in front of Mathius’s nose. “Look at this, boy, and tell me what you see.”
The threat of the older man standing in front of him forced his attention back to the moment. “A fist,” he said.
Cranoch shook his head sadly. “No, Mathius. It’s not a fist. It’s your teacher.”
The older man lowered the fist and drew it back, doing so slowly and methodically as if he wanted Mathius to know what was coming. Then he punched Mathius in the ribs. Mathius cried out, but with his hands locked in the manacles bolted to the wall above his head, he couldn’t double over.
Cranoch hit him again and his legs buckled, tears streaming down his cheeks. The manacles cut into his wrists as he hung there with his knees dangling just above the ground.
Cranoch said, “That was your first lesson, kid. We’ll continue the lessons in the morning.”
The older man turned and walked away. Mathius watched his back recede as he crossed the compound, and any hope he might have had of escaping left him in that instant.
2
Hanging, Leaning, Hanging, Leaning
WHILE THE COMMONWEALTH Senate Intelligence Committee heatedly debated the situation on Novalis III, Lieutenant Colonel Katrine Primatov stood near the back of the room and tried to tune out the noise. Like everyone on Trafalgar, the capital planet of the Commonwealth, they all had their own opinion on how to handle an unpleasant civil war on a minor planet for which they had no official responsibility. Since they had convened in closed session, the politicians spoke with more candor than they might have otherwise. As a senior Blacksword officer, Katrine frequently sat in on their discussions, and might be called upon to advise the politicians.
Her implants chimed and her AI said, Colonel Blacksword wishes to speak with you, but if you can’t break away, she said it’s not urgent.
She subvocalized, “Please put her through.”
The colonel’s image appeared superimposed onto her visual cortex. Fran Thealone, also known as Colonel Blacksword, was a small, wiry woman with thin cheeks, blue eyes and short white hair. “Katrine,” she said. “Any progress?”
As long as Katrine didn’t actually vocalize her words, the conversation would remain fully encrypted. “Some,” she said. “By and large, they’d like to intervene on humanitarian grounds. But the legal issues we’ll run into if we interfere in the internal strife of an independent planet have them stymied. At least they’re being pragmatic.”
“Any way we can use the Kelk as an excuse?”
Katrine shrugged. “That’s why they’re in closed session. We know the Kelk are involved. For the most part they’re providing humanitarian aid to one of the factions, and maybe we can prove they’re shipping in some small arms and ammunition. But that’s just not enough.”
The colonel shook her head, “Yah, we’d end up with all the independent systems on our back.”
Katrine said, “And you can bet the Kelk would have their fingers in that pie.”
“You’ve got people on the ground?” Thealone asked.
“Yes,” Katrine said. “If they come up with anything even remotely actionable, I’ll let you know.”
The colonel signed out.
Katrine returned to listening to a discussion that had digressed into a tedious repetition of an argument that had gone around once already, and come back again.
••••
Mathius had learned that the manacles bolted to the wall were too high up for him to kneel on the ground. He struggled to his feet after Cranoch left, and tried to catch his breath. His fears darted from one thought to another, but thirst quickly surfaced and demanded his attention. He desperately wanted to wash away the salty taste of his own tears.
Dusk had settled over the city, with night not far off. He glanced around the compound, then looked down at the two boys seated on the ground nearby. They stared back at him with wide eyes, but when he looked their way, they lowered their eyes to the ground and quickly bowed their heads.
He said, “My name is Mathius.”
The younger of the two boys had short-cropped, brown hair light enough to be almost blond, and a fair complexion. As Mathius waited, the boy slowly raised his head, but refused to look him in the eyes.
“I’m Timor,” he said.
The older boy was his opposite, with olive skin and black hair that would probably glisten in the sunlight were it not for a powdering of dust in the dark strands. At the sound of the younger boy’s voice, he looked up and said, “I’m Phillan.”
Mathius said, “I’m really thirsty. Can you get me some water?”
Both boys shook their heads frantically. Timor said, “We’re not allowed to move without permission. We have to be good boys, or Cranoch will teach us a lesson.”
Mathius understood such fear, and it occurred to him he would probably come to understand it even more in the days to come.
Shortly before sunset, a rebel guard looped a chain through the manacled arms of the two boys, then locked both ends of it to a metal spike driven into the ground. The guard also delivered a bowl of food for each, but nothing for Mathius.
Mathius hadn’t eaten in more than a day and his stomach growled. He asked, “Do I get something to eat?”
The guard looked at him and grinned, but said nothing.
Mathius pleaded, “Can I at least have some water?”
The guard grinned again, and walked away.
From his position standing above the two seated boys, Mathius saw that the food in Phillan’s bowl contained a watery gruel, while Timor’s contained a thicker and more substantial slop, with bits and pieces of something to chew on. Phillan looked at the gruel in his bowl, his eyes blank and uncaring. He lifted it to his lips and swallowed some of it, then lowered it and looked at the better food in Timor’s bowl with undisguised envy. He turned to Mathius and said, “If you’re a good boy, you get better food. They start you on the bad stuff, and you have to prove you can be good.”
Mathius hadn’t been far off about the ages of the two boys. Timor was eight, and Phillan ten. Both tended to avert their gaze whenever he looked their way, though he sometimes caught them watching him when they thought he had turned his attention elsewhere. The two young boys had been captives of the rebels for about three months, so apparently Phillan had not been good enough. Phillan looked at the empty bowl in his hands and said, “I’ll learn to be good, real good. I will.”
That night Mathius never did find a way to sleep. The height of the manacles wouldn’t allow him to sit or kneel, so he tried leaning against the wall and dozing lightly, but weariness crept up on him and he scraped his face as he slid a few centimeters down the wall, then jerked awake. He tried putting one foot about half a step out from wall, and locking his knee so that his leg could act as a rigid brace. But as he started to drift off his knee buckled, and when he snapped to a stop hanging from the manacles with his knees just above the ground, he wrenched his shoulder painfully. He dozed briefly, suspended from the manacles, but his shoulders began to ache, and hanging from his wrists limited his breathing to shallow gasps. The night p
assed in an agonizingly slow dance of hanging by his wrists, then standing and leaning on the wall, hanging, then standing, hanging, standing, hanging . . .
Mathius heard the slap as a distant noise that seemed to have nothing to do with him. But a fraction of an instant after his mind registered the sound, his head rocked to one side and his face lit up with fire. He didn’t have the strength to climb to his feet, but two men lifted him by his armpits and stood him up facing Cranoch, supporting him between them. The night had ended and the early morning sun lit the grounds of the compound with long shadows.
Cranoch leaned close to him and spoke softly. “You almost weren’t breathing. Can’t have you dying on me before I know if you can be a good boy. What have you got to say for yourself, shit-head?”
Mathius smelled some sort of food on the older man’s breath. But his throat had gone so dry he couldn’t speak, couldn’t even swallow, could only think of something to wet his lips and throat. He managed to croak, “Water.”
“Water,” Cranoch said as if addressing a large audience. “He wants water. We rescue him from the streets, and he wants us to give him some of our precious water.”
Cranoch looked at Timor and Phillan who still sat on the ground nearby. “You two, stand up.”
The two boys jumped to their feet, but with the chain tethering them to the spike in the ground they could only stand in a crouch.
Cranoch asked them, “Should we give him some of our precious water?”
Timor said, “I don’t know.”
Phillan said, “Sure, why not?”
Cranoch nodded carefully as if he agreed with the boy, then his hand lashed out with blinding speed and he backhanded Phillan. The boy slammed to the ground, and because of the chain connecting him to Timor, he dragged the smaller boy down with him.
Timor lay still like a small animal in the presence of a large predator, his eyes wide and focused on Cranoch. Phillan struggled up onto his elbows, his eyes rolling about and his head rocking from side to side.
“Wrong answer,” Cranoch said. “We can’t give him water if he doesn’t ask politely like a good little boy, can we?”