by Andy Boot
"Daylight. We're losing time."
"Not necessarily. Remember that we're going into the day."
Simeon frowned. "You always had this way of making things sound complicated. What has 'going into the day' got to do with anything? What does it even mean, for the Gods' sakes?"
Jenna sighed. She was staring ahead - partly to judge the distance between their holoship and the coast of Varn, and partly so that Simeon wouldn't break her concentration - but she could imagine the vexed expression on his face. The fiery eyes staring down the aquiline nose, the long jaw, lean jowls and high cheekbones seeming to direct his gaze so that it had the burning intensity of a laser. When he wasn't happy, you sure as hell knew it.
"Look, stupid, it's really simple. We're not losing as much time as you think. We're heading towards the rising sun, so we're actually ahead of where time is in Bethel right now. Clear enough?"
"It'll have to do," Simeon grumbled.
"Hey, cut that out," Jenna said angrily, turning to face him and in the process causing the solidity of the holoship to flicker indistinctly for a fraction of a moment. She caught herself, brought her anger under control. If she lost it like that again, by the time she got it focused, they could find themselves embedded in the ship up to the knees.
Simeon had noticed this too, and he raised a placating hand. "S'ok, Jen. I didn't mean you weren't doing a good job. I just meant..."
"Yeah, well, you just remember that," she bristled, cutting him off.
He returned to looking out at the rising sun. He knew he'd been unfair and that he'd angered her. First rule, after all... Best to let her calm down and continue piloting the ship without interruption, at least until they were in sight of Varn.
Jenna had other ideas.
"Sim," she hadn't called him that for a long time, "why did you ask me? Why didn't you raise a general alarm?"
He chuckled. A deep, growling sound that seemed out of place in such a slim frame. It also had the bitter edge of irony. Without turning around he said: "You think I was going to admit my failure? I was hand-picked for this job, and I messed up. Me. No-one else. So if anyone was going to put it right, it had to be me. How could I tell anyone what had happened, admit my stupidity? You were right about me just now... a stupid grunt from the ranks. Blaster fodder with no place in a world without war." He gave a short, barking laugh. "Thinking about it, I wasn't even much good, then... and maybe that's why they picked me."
"I don't follow," Jenna said softly. She'd always hated the streak of self-doubt in him, and she wasn't sure she wanted to hear about it when they were more than half-way to a foreign shore in what was - for want of a better term - a combat situation. But she knew him: he had to say it.
"Think about it, Jen. You've got a formula for Inan-wide peace that means dragging these old guys out of their academies and touting them as super-weapons. Which they are. But they're also frail old guys who could be taken out long-range by a sniper without warning. They're Mages, not seers, right? Wrapped up in their own little worlds. So you give them bodyguards."
"Makes sense to me."
"Yeah, except then why would you then appoint someone who had spent most of their war service on a prison farm? I can grow crops... combat experience doesn't include a shovel and a bucket of animal shit."
"They must have seen something in you," she said, groping for the right words.
He laughed that bitter growl once more. "Oh yeah..."
They continued in silence. He stared out of the port, not even seeing the sea as it reddened in the rising sun, lost in a private hell of doubt. Jenna stared straight ahead, willing the ship to move faster. Despite herself, she wished he hadn't come to her. Wished that she had been posted anywhere but Bethel as an assistant envoy. Wished that she had never met Simeon 7.
As the ship slowly progressed, she had little else to do but think of how their paths had crossed, back in the last days of the war.
Kyas was a small nation state. The terrain was rough around the coast, hard to penetrate without a concerted bridgehead. This had been their protection in times of war. Situated close to Bethel yet choosing to ally themselves to Varn, they would have been in a vulnerable position if not for the rocky lands that kept the seas at bay. Only some sparse vegetation and the rangy Anlo could survive. The Anlo, a horned, furry, stringy creature - waist-high to the average Kyan - was a hardy survivor, and its image had come to represent the Kyans, taking prominence on their nation state emblem.
Inland, the soil was richer, made up of equal parts loam and clay. Some areas were easier to farm than others, and although the terrain was still hilly, there were large tracts of plain which were used for arable farming. In these areas most of the cities and towns had been settled. The only habitable areas around the coast were those inlets where port settlements had sprung up, serving as the sole trading areas before the advent of technological and magical air travel.
The difficulty of access by sea had isolated the people for much of Inan's history. Walls of rock, jagged and hard to get past, claimed much of the coastline. Only in a few places did the landscape sink down to sea level. These rocks also extended out under the water, forming reefs of sharp, sudden death for those who dared to sail over them. Only in few places did these natural defences subside sufficiently for the people to build small towns and ports, and for them to dare to venture out and find channels through which they could pilot sea traffic.
Through necessity, they had developed holoship magic to a much stronger degree than any other nation state. It served as a defence - how much harder to attack a land by air that had a better air fleet than you - and as a bargaining tool. Aerial warfare had grown with the years, and the magic and tech born of necessity had made them an ally for whom others would pay well.
It also gave them the perfect territory for containing enemy prisoners. To escape by air was virtually impossible. The port settlements were tightly sewn up, and to risk the inhospitable terrain that ringed the rest of the nation-state was to invite an almost certain death. Perhaps there were those prisoners who would prefer this to a life subjugated as a farm labourer: they were in the minority. For the most part, any prisoner taken and shipped to Kyas was content to settle into the well-established system that allowed the Kyans to concentrate on war and trade, using a virtual slave labour force to farm the nation's food crop.
It was a part of any Kyan's military training that they serve time as prison farm security. A tedious task, part-farmer, part warden, it served some well as it kept them from active service and the risk of death. Others felt constrained, and that their talents were wasted.
Ensign Jenna Eslo was one of the latter. Her father had been a holoship engineer, killed in the great battle of Tempus Peak when she was only a small child. He was a hero and, as a result, she had been brought up on tales of his skill, bravery, and selfless devotion to the cause of Kyas. It was no surprise then that the impressionable child had grown into a dedicated adult. She had entered the holoship academy as soon as she was eligible for military service, determined to develop her magical skills and continue in the noble tradition of her father.
Despite the equality in other fighting units of the military, the holoships were regarded as a specialist skill and still mostly the preserve of the male. She encountered hostility from other grunts, and some prejudice from the minor Mages who instructed the raw recruits on the finer points of constructing and piloting the mind-based warships. Her father's reputation smoothed some of this, and she stayed the course as the few other female recruits fell by the way, transferring to other branches of the military.
Jenna Eslo graduated with honours, attaining the rank of Ensign at a younger age than any of her peers - male or female. Yet she would never achieve her ambition. The only thing she wanted was to honour her father's memory by being like him. Perhaps, in some darker recess of her mind, she was driven by the thought that only in self-sacrifice could she be worthy of him.
That cankerous thought may hav
e been the thing that nagged and itched at her as fate denied its fruition. Her timing was bad: as she graduated, the war was drawing to a close, though none but the higher echelons of each nation state were aware of this. Moreover, she had first to serve out her time as prison farm security. A tour of duty in such a service was the fate of a Kyan at the start of their military career, and as a career break every five years - assuming they survived that long.
Jenna was at the very beginning of her career, straining to go out and prove herself. It was considerably more than frustrating to have to sit out six periods on a prison farm. Furthermore, she was from the south: those in authority had directed that her time be served in the north, where the nights and winters were inhospitable. Kyas was not a large nation state, but large enough for there to be differences in the people of the north and those of the south. The taciturn northerners were loath to mix with southerners, even if they wore the same uniform of military service. So she was not even granted the consolation of serving her time near to friends and family.
She found it grimly funny that she felt less at home than the men of Bethel she had to guard. In the north of Kyas they said that if you sniffed the air you could smell Bethel. Many of the male guards would use this as an excuse for a series of coarse jokes involving the dung heaps and organic matter used to feed the crops.
At the farm prisoners were kept segregated for the purpose of avoiding cohabitation: after all, which nation state would wish to pay for the offspring of those it was keeping confined? By the same token, guards were usually allocated on a same-sex basis, to avoid any relationships that could be looked upon as detrimental to the cause of war.
Usually.
Sometimes the numbers would not add up, and so there was some mixing of the sexes between guards and prisoners. It was rare, but the fact that it had precedent meant that her complaints were dismissed. So she settled spikily to her six period stint, willing it to end quickly so that she could be off to war.
She was not to know that at the end of the six periods, with just weeks till her deployment, the peace was to be declared. She would not get her chance to fight and her chance, perhaps, to be a martyr.
Yet, by the time that this happened, her views had changed in a way that she had not expected. The men of Bethel who came under her charge had not been the black hearted enemy she had expected. Not monsters. Merely men. She had begun to realise that the myths with which she had been raised were simplifications. She was now well out of adolescence, into her twenty-fifth anum, and all her life she had been either focused on her dead father or, or on her holoship training. It had been tunnel vision.
The harsh weather, hard outdoor slog, and the phlegmatic attitude of the men to whom she acted as overseer were, perhaps, an unlikely catalyst. She felt her attitudes begin to change. They became deeper, more complex and less immediately understandable
At least, it was on this that she blamed the action that could have seen her instant dismissal and the execution of another.
She had first noticed Simeon 7 about three weeks after her arrival. The first week had been induction, and the second had been spent in getting to know the territory to which she had been sent. The prison farm covered a vast area - with at least a hundred and twenty enclosures, growing seventeen different crops in rotation. The prisoner's barrack blocks were located at the north-western tip. This put them as far away as was possible from the nearest town and although they were near to the coast, the forbidding rocks and the reputation of the Anlo for feeding on those foolish enough to make a break for it were enough to discourage any escape.
Third week. Enclosure Seventeen/One. Sweet Bagas, a root crop. A seven-man party, including two who were obviously firm friends. A squat, heavily scarred man running to fat, and a tall, lean warrior worked slightly apart from the others, joining in conversation with them on occasion, but obviously continuing some debate of their own.
To the new, keen eyes of Ensign Jenna Eslo, this was obviously suspicious, and a chance for her to stamp her authority on the prisoners. Gods alone knew that she was failing in that with her fellow guards.
"You - what are you doing?" she yelled from atop the sixteen-hand Tallus. The creature snorted, breath misting on the cold air, and shifted under her tense grip.
"Digging. As you want," replied the squat man blandly. The other looked at her. He was trying to keep his expression neutral, but anger bubbled close to the surface.
"The talking. What were you talking about?" she asked. From the corner of her eye, she could see that the others in the enclosure had ceased work, and were watching with interest. Unconsciously, her hand strayed towards her blaster.
"Typical," spat the tall prisoner. "We're held here, we do what you want, and because you feel like it you pick on us."
She was torn. He was, of course, correct. She was using them to assert her authority for no other reason than... well, to assert her authority. But now she had started she could not back down. To take no further action would be seen as weakness. It would cause problems with the prisoners. It would get back to her fellow guards.
The squat one had thrown down the tool with which he had been turning organic matter into the soil. He addressed the tall warrior.
"What did you do that for, Sim? You know she's gonna have to take some kind of action."
Anger blazed in her. From the way in which he had said it, she could feel that he was mocking her. She drew her blaster and fired at his feet. The wooden haft spluttered and burnt, turning to ash in the intense heat. The metal head buckled and melted, spreading across the soil.
"That will come out of your credit," she said, trying hard to stop her voice shaking with anger. It was a good punishment: the credit system acted as an incentive for the prisoners to work harder, allowing them a small measure of luxuries from prison farm stores. To take this away was to take away some semblance of being a man.
"As for you," she continued, directing her gaze to the tall warrior, who watched her unblinking, "you will come to the main admin block at sundown, where you will be punished.'
"For what?"
"For daring to ask."
She turned the Tallus and dug her heels into its flanks. It's long, spindly legs loped awkwardly over the soil, breath whinnying in its throat. She did not look back, but she was sure she could hear some faint laughter.
It was only when she was some distance away that she recalled: she had forgotten to get the squat prisoner's name or number.
The tall one turned up at sundown. She expressed her surprise.
"You'd only come and find me on the morrow," he shrugged. And when she asked the name and number of his squat companion, he shrugged once more. "That I couldn't tell you. War wound... bad memory. You should have asked."
It was then that her temper snapped and she did something she should never have even contemplated: she came round the desk and hit him. A roundhouse punch. She had gone through basic combat training, but as a holoship trainee she had not been through bodybulk training. She was slow, weak compared to others on the farm. The tall warrior caught her arm with ease and used her own momentum to turn her, pinning her to the wall. He looked down into her face. She knew he could see the sudden fear in her eyes.
"That was really, really stupid. Even for a Kyan," he said quietly. "I know the routine here. We all do. Just because we know escape would be futile, don't think we pay you no attention. This is the admin block. It has eight admin rooms and three sleeping quarters for those on night duties. The dorm block is to our left, the recreation and repast hall to the right. Both of them are too far for any noise to carry. At sundown, everyone will be either sleeping or eating, ready to change watch. You're the only one here. And you've nowhere near the experience or strength to break the rules by striking a prisoner and expect him not to retaliate." He let her go and stepped back. "We get by here... all of us. Mostly by giving and taking. Prisoners would rather be home: maybe we get picked for repatriation swaps, maybe we die here. But at least
we can live with some dignity... all of us."
Her breath was tight in her chest. Partly from fear, partly from the pressure of his body against hers, crushing her. She was petrified of being brought face-to-face - literally - with her own limitations. So she did the last thing in the world she should have done.
She kissed him.
By necessity, they had to be furtive about what came next. She discovered that the squat warrior's name was Daliel, but she never did get around to punishing him. How could she, when he was to collude with the tall one - she found out his name was Simeon 7 after she jumped him - in helping them to get time together?
Of course, he wasn't helping them purely from a sense of altruism. Like Simeon, he found the credit he was accruing had a certain capacity for growth that it had not had before. He was also discrete, which was another advantage, and smart. A back injury which came to him suddenly caused a switch in duties. A switch to a two man checking shed for stored and harvested crops. A checking shed near the admin block. Oh yes, Daliel was smart: beyond lighter duties and more credit, it was hard to see what he gained, but perhaps any gain was better than none in such a situation.
Jenna didn't care. Neither did Simeon. For his part, he had been alone too long as a prisoner. If there was anything else, he was careful not to give it away. For her part, a more complex set of emotions coursed through her. All of her life Jenna had been dedicated to the ideal of military service. There had been no room for thoughts of the opposite sex except as those she would serve alongside. Anything else had been repressed: if not consciously, then certainly by her subconscious as something that would only obscure the goal. Maybe there was something in there, too, that related to her father. How could anyone live up to the god-like creature she had created from her imaginings and the stimulus of the stories she had been told?
Now it had been unleashed: all that had been pent-up and contained. On not just a man, but a warrior; not just a warrior, but a prisoner of war. A man who should be her enemy. A man who, despite having been captured rather than shot down in flames, still had dignity and nobility.