by Grant, Peter
They traveled in companionable silence for a few minutes while Steve threaded his way through the morning traffic. As they reached the outskirts of Preston and turned onto a highway, Abha said, “I guess we’ve got a lot to share about our orphanage backgrounds. You start. Where were you born and raised, and how did you end up in an orphanage?”
“I was born on Old Home Earth,” Steve began. He told her what little he could remember about his parents, their death in a vehicle accident when he was only five years old, and the provisions in their will that ensured he was admitted to a private orphanage, rather than entrusted to the self-serving bureaucracy of Earth’s Child Welfare Services.
“I guess I was very lucky that my folks were wealthy enough to do that. CWS was much more interested in itself than in the kids it was supposed to help. Its bosses concentrated on bureaucratic infighting and turf wars with other agencies instead of their mission. Later, when I was old enough to understand, I read about all sorts of scandals where its field agents ‘cooked the books’ for their own benefit at the expense of the kids in their care. You know – inflated expense claims, falsified record-keeping certifying that they’d checked on kids when they hadn’t, that sort of thing. A lot of the kids ended up being neglected or abused as a result. I was very lucky to be spared that.”
Abha made a moué of distaste. “I ran into some of that too – but I don’t want to interrupt your story. I’ll tell you mine later. Go on.”
“OK. I was in the orphanage for almost twelve years, until I graduated high school at the age of seventeen. It was… not good.” He was silent for a moment as he remembered. “If you dump a bunch of boys together, of different ages and sizes, they’re always going to establish a very physical ‘pecking order’. There was a lot of bullying, even though the Benedictines did their best to keep it under control. Their best was pretty good, but they couldn’t be everywhere all the time. I learned to hate bullies with a passion, as well as those who use or abuse others rather than accept and respect them for who they are. As a result, I guess I’m a bit fanatical about those things to this day. I won’t permit them in my subordinates, and I won’t accept them towards me from anyone else.”
“What happens when you find it in your superior officers?” she asked.
“That’s only happened twice during my eight and a half years in the Fleet. Each time I was able to sort it out by talking to the person concerned. If that hadn’t worked, I’d have taken it up the ladder, and if necessary resigned my commission rather than accepted it. Thankfully, that’s never been necessary – at least, not yet.”
“I’m glad. I share your hatred for bullies from my own experience. Oh – we turn off here.” She indicated an upcoming off-ramp. “Turn right at the stop sign.”
“Gotcha.” Steve took his foot off the throttle.
“After about half a kilometer, the plascrete ends and the road becomes hard-packed dirt. It’s pretty rough and rutted – it’s just a farm road. We go about five clicks until we reach a grove of trees at the foot of a ridge. We’ll leave the truck there, in the shade.”
“OK.”
“Go on about the orphanage.”
“I was lucky to end up at St. Anselm’s. It had a really rigorous academic program with very high standards, and only kids who tested as particularly bright were sent there. The brothers encouraged all of us to do more than the required minimum, and as soon as we reached our teens they offered us access to college-level courses through another Church institution. By the time I graduated high school I also had half a Bachelor of Science degree under my belt.”
“You were very lucky. My school education was nowhere near as complete, or as challenging.”
“Yeah. That helped me a lot when I joined the Fleet – but I’m getting ahead of myself.” Steve stopped talking for a moment as he negotiated the turn at the foot of the off-ramp, then headed towards the foothills of the mountains in the distance. “I was stuck on Old Home Earth, in a society riddled with competing bureaucracies, where individuals had to conform or be frozen out of anything worthwhile. I wanted to get the hell away from there, and the only way I could see to do so was to become a merchant spacer and earn my way to someplace better.”
He explained how, after several months, he’d landed a merchant spacer apprentice berth aboard the Lancastrian freighter Sebastian Cabot, with the help of her Bosun, Vince Cardle, who went on to become a father figure to him. His face and voice turned somber as he described Vince’s death at the hands of pirates, eighteen months later. He left out details of his encounters with the Dragon Tong, before and since. He’d never shared them with anyone in the Fleet – not even Brooks. There was too much risk of being tarred with the Tong’s fearsome reputation.
“So that’s how it was,” he concluded as the truck bounced slowly down the uneven farm road. “I enlisted eight and a half years ago, served a four-year term under the Foreign Service Program to earn Commonwealth citizenship, then applied for a commission. I’ll be promoted to Senior Lieutenant when the mid-year promotion signal takes effect on the first of July, at the same time you’re advanced to First Lieutenant.”
She nodded slowly. “I know you’ve skipped over a lot during your Fleet career. Brooks has talked about you a couple of times. He says you’re the best Spacer officer he’s ever encountered, and it’s thanks to you he earned his first prize money at Midrash. Apparently it was quite a substantial award.”
Steve grinned. “It was – we found smuggled rhodium aboard a big freighter, and the total Prize Court proceeds were very nice indeed.” He didn’t add that Brooks had received over four hundred thousand credits, while Steve had earned twice that sum as a member of the team that had made the actual discovery. “I was shot during the fight that led to the confiscation, so the prospect of all that money helped to speed my healing! Brooks is the best Marine officer with whom I’ve ever served. We’re very close friends, and have been ever since we were roommates at Officer Candidate School. I guess he’s become the brother I never had.”
She smiled, teeth flashing white against her darker skin. “I’m glad for both of you. I haven’t had any luck with prize money so far, but I live in hope. It would help a lot with some plans I have for the future.” She gestured ahead. “There are the trees I mentioned. You’ll see a faint track leading off the road into them. There’s a little glade out of sight of the road where we can park. Your truck should be quite safe while we’re gone.”
“I’m sure it will. There hasn’t been any other traffic since we turned off the highway.”
He parked the truck beneath a tall, shady tree. They spent a few moments transferring the food containers to their packs. Steve threaded his belt through the loops of the machete sheath, then selected a couple of long, straight fallen branches and trimmed protruding twigs and leaves off them to make hiking staffs.
“Thanks,” Abha said as she accepted one of them. “I know I owe you my story, but we’ve got a hard hike up this hill ahead of us, then it’s another hour’s walk to the stream and swimming hole. Can I tell you more when we get there?”
“Sure. We’ll probably need all our breath for hiking anyway.”
~ ~ ~
Steve unfolded a solar sheet and spread it over a bush in bright sunshine, then plugged two food containers into sockets in its capacitor pack, to warm while they swam. He undressed behind a tree and donned his running shorts. A few moments later Abha appeared from the bushes behind which she’d changed into her swimsuit. It was a one-piece design, modestly cut, but it couldn’t disguise her trim, athletic figure. Small, firm, nubile breasts topped a flat, muscular torso flowing down over broad hips to long, dusky-brown legs. He couldn’t restrain a smile of appreciation at the sight.
In turn, her eyes wandered over his lithe, well-muscled figure. “You’ve looked after yourself, I see,” she teased. “You’ve got almost enough muscles to be a Marine!”
Steve sniffed. “Someone has to set an example for the ground-pounders! You loo
k very good yourself.”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t dive in if I were you. The water’s not very deep.”
They waded into the mountain-brown water and launched themselves into the center of the pool, both sighing audibly with satisfaction as it washed the perspiration from their bodies..
“I’m surprised the water’s this cold,” Steve commented.
“Don’t forget it flows out of the mountains,” she pointed out. “There’s still snow-pack up there at higher elevations.”
“You’re right. The water’s warmer in the sunlit patches.”
They floated in companionable silence for a while. Eventually Steve said, “Your turn now. How did you end up in an orphanage?”
Abha turned her head to look at him. “I was born on Nasek. Ever heard of it?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
“It’s one of the planets of the Bihar Confederation.”
Steve’s brow furrowed. “Doesn’t Gandaki, the planet of the Gurkha mercenaries, belong to the same Confederation?”
“It’s an associate member, not a full member. We’ll meet some of its mercenaries on Rolla. Major Venter told Captain Shelby and I on Thursday that the planet’s hired a battalion of them to provide security while its own armored battalion undergoes re-training, and to assist while a second armored battalion is raised and trained.”
“That’s good. I’ve never worked with them before, but I understand they’re very professional.”
“So I’m told. It’ll be a new experience for all three of us to train with them. Anyway, Nasek was settled by emigrants from Old Home Earth in the first phase of the Scramble for Space. There’s a great deal of race consciousness on the planet, unfortunately. They take so-called ‘purebred’ birth very seriously – having parents of pure Indian ancestry. It’s considered very important. If you have mixed or foreign ancestry, they look down on you. Problem is, both my father and mother were what’s called Eurasian – having mixed Indian and Caucasian ancestry.”
Steve couldn’t prevent an angry frown. “I thought the settled galaxy – except for Earth and a few of the earliest planets to be colonized – had got over that nonsense, given how interbred all races, cultures and creeds became during the Scramble for Space. I’ve only encountered strong racial consciousness in ethnic cultural societies like the Chinese Tongs.”
“I wish you were right,” she said with a sour face, “but it’s not always like that, particularly on ethnically homogenous planets like Nasek. I grew up under that social discrimination, and it hurt. We lived in Ambarad, a city full of people like us, so we were sheltered to some extent: but the ‘purebred’ would always find ways to make their feelings known. It got much worse when an epidemic hit the city and surrounding region. It was a really nasty disease, a mutation of diphtheria from Old Home Earth combined with a local germ. The authorities later classified it as a unique illness. They gave it a scientific name, but because it began in Ambarad, people on Nasek called it ‘halfbreed disease’. They even blamed those of us with what they called ‘impure ancestry’ for causing and spreading it! That wasn’t true, of course, but there’s no arguing with that depth of prejudice.” Her brow furrowed angrily.
“Standard vaccinations didn’t protect against it, and regular diphtheria had been under control for so long that no-one had any experience in treating it. It spread very fast – local hospitals and doctors were simply overwhelmed. It eventually killed over half a million people in and around Ambarad. The authorities couldn’t figure out how to stop it, so they resorted to desperation measures. They threw a cordon around the entire province and quarantined it. No-one was allowed in or out. Of course, that effectively condemned many of the victims to death.”
She took a deep breath. “I was nine years old. My parents got us out of Ambarad, but we were prevented from leaving the area by the cordon. We had to go back to the city to get food, which was being air-dropped there. That put us back in the heart of the infectious area. All of us caught the disease, and… I was the only one to recover. My younger brother and sister died first, and… at last, my parents too.”
She was silent for a time, floating in the water, eyes looking into some unfathomable distance. Steve reached over and touched her shoulder gently, sympathetically. She started, half-smiled at him, and blinked back the tears she’d refused to allow herself to shed.
“I – I was lucky to have neighbors who recovered from the disease. They took me in and fed me until the cordon was lifted, after a treatment had been developed. By the time the epidemic was over there were thousands of children like me, who’d lost their parents and most or all of their relatives. We were all declared wards of the State.”
Steve nodded. “That almost happened to me when my parents were killed, because I had no surviving relatives on Earth – my parents came there from another planet. If it wasn’t for their lawyer, who fought in court to be appointed as my legal guardian, I’d have disappeared into the state system.”
“You were lucky he did that for you. Those of us who survived on Nasek weren’t so lucky. The authorities appealed for families to take us in as foster children, but we carried a double stigma – we were of mixed-race ancestry, and survivors of ‘halfbreed disease’. Those were huge obstacles. Few ‘purebred’ families were willing to take us. There was an irrational planet-wide hysteria that we might still carry the disease somehow, even though it had been all but wiped out by then. The public outcry eventually forced the authorities to inoculate everyone in the affected area, even though people like me had already been rendered immune by having survived it.”
She rolled her shoulder slightly to show him three faint pock-marks on her upper left arm. “The vaccinations scarred us indelibly. Everyone on Nasek knew where to look for them, which made us easy targets for their prejudices and fears. Eventually, with no other alternative, the authorities had to build orphanages to accommodate us. That took a long time. The first year was very hard. We had to live in tent encampments through a cold winter until the new facilities were ready. It was very cold, and there wasn’t enough staff or blankets or food or warm clothing. More of us died while we were waiting. When we eventually moved to the new orphanages, life there was very bad.”
She fell silent for a moment, clearly lost in her memories. Steve wondered whether he should say something, but decided to remain quiet as she shook her head as if to clear it.
“I spent eight years in an orphanage in the city of Dhotal, about a thousand kilometers from Ambarad. We went to local schools, but our status as orphans, plus the added stigma that many of us were ‘halfbreeds’, meant that the other kids looked down on us and bullied us. I hated my time there – hated it!” Her lips pressed tightly together. “There were six hundred girls in our orphanage. We slept in thirty-bed dormitories, so there was no privacy at all. We had to compete for everything, and the personnel were too few and too busy to give us much individual attention. You can imagine the result – constant competition among us, bullying, victimization, the lot.”
Steve reached out again and squeezed her arm gently, sympathetically. She started as his hand distracted her from her thoughts, then reached up and touched it in acceptance. They smiled at each other for a moment before she continued.
“I was fortunate to be in the middle of the group, age-wise, so I didn’t stand out. I tried to make myself invisible in the crowd, and concentrated on learning all I could. I knew that without family to support and help us, we’d all have to make our own way in life without relying on anyone else. I also learned to fight, as a defensive measure. I guess you can understand that there was a lot of fighting in the orphanage.” Steve nodded silently. “Some of the older girls were really predatory. It was… not good. After a while, a local gymnasium began offering aikido classes, and I signed up at once. I earned my first dan black belt before I left.”
Steve’s eyebrows rose. “That’s interesting. I studied karate at a local dojo for precisely the same reason; to protect myse
lf against the bullies in the orphanage. I qualified as second dan before I graduated high school. I’ve since reached sandan, third dan, along with earning my Fleet Expert badge in unarmed combat.”
She smiled. “Martial arts are another thing we share in common, then – and like you, I’ve continued my training. I’ve also earned the Fleet Expert badge, and I’m nidan, second dan, in aikido as well. Also, one of the instructors at the gymnasium had retired from Nasek’s armed forces as a Sergeant-Major. He was a master of shastar vidiya. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?”
“That’s the ancient Sikh fighting art, isn’t it? One of our teachers at the dojo went to an interdisciplinary martial arts tournament in India, where some shastar vidiya masters put on a series of exhibition bouts. He brought back a recording and played it for us. They were very fast, very smooth. It looked to me to be a useful martial art in the close quarters of a melée.”
She nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s it! I’m amazed you know about it – very few people do, outside Indian martial arts circles. Anyway, Ustad – that means ‘mentor’ or ‘teacher’ – Ustad Prabodh normally taught boys only, but he was at the gymnasium one day when I was practicing aikido kata alone. He watched me, and something about me must have impressed him. He invited me to join his classes, which I did when I was twelve. I studied under him for six years. There are no Japanese-style ‘belt’ grades in his school, but when I turned eighteen, he awarded me what he called a ‘warrior’s knot’ for the hilt of my kirpan. The knot identified his graduates.”
“What’s a kirpan?”
“It’s a Sikh short sword or dagger, with a curved blade.”