Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]
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Chapter 3
Intimate relations between one (1) or more enlisted corpsmen are not expressly forbidden by Protocol. Corpsmen in good standing are permitted to indulge themselves in sensual, sexual, and romantic behavior without the permission of their overseeing Officers, provided that this behavior is not expressed while on-duty. However, intimacy is not to interfere with the good corpsman’s performance or punctuality, nor should loyalty to any individual corpsman overrule one’s loyalty to the Western Human Defense Corps as a whole. Failure to correctly prioritize may result in Gross Insubordination charges against offending corpsmen as a Camp’s ranking Officers see fit.
- HDC Manual, Annex I § 18
It was dark by the time she returned. The moon was out at least, bathing the dry, rocky landscape in just enough light for her to plan her steps by. On a whim, Gray practiced the footstrike of the Anak from earlier, ball first, heel following. It was difficult to replicate while wearing marching boots, but the modifications were effective. She knew that there were still some part of the technique she was missing, though.
Upon returning, Gray checked in with Captain Burke to fill out a debrief form: during her watch, did she see or encounter any humans; did she discharge a firearm at any point; would she be willing to submit her weapon for a count; did she see or encounter any Anakim. No, no, yes, and… no. Gray stared at the check mark she’d made on the form next to the last question.
It wouldn’t make a difference if I said anything anyways, Gray reasoned. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here, now.
Slipping the sheet back to Burke, she was promptly dismissed for the rest of the night. Gray was grateful, and she headed out the flaps of the officer’s tent to her own. I need to find the guys and put these fridays to use.
Until excavations were completed, Harrison’s was a tent like any other. Sappers were hard at work digging out cellars further up the canyon, and it would be another few weeks before they could wire the place for lighting and open up shop.
Harper was manning the cable tonight, so only Finch and Wesson were with her, and before long the three had gathered around an oil drum with their friday rations and a ratty deck of cards. Finch dealt, though Gray had no idea what they were playing.
“I thought you used up your last friday this week already?” she asked Finch, who was already looking over her hand of seven cards.
“Small miracle, gambling,” she said with a smug grin. “Gold Fox held some tarantula fights while you were gone, and I had my money on the smaller one. Now come on, it’s just a few rounds of Rummy.”
Gray shook her head and grabbed her cards. It was a terrible hand. “We’re not playing for keeps, are we?”
“You wanna?”
She shot a deadpan look at Finch. “Does it look like I have anything worth keeping?”
Wesson laughed and made his first discard. “So how was the treehouse?”
Gray suddenly found herself frowning and tried to make it look like she was studying her cards. “Fine.”
“Boring, huh? Even with your rib?”
“The pain was the most exciting part, actually.” She made to discard something.
“You forgot to draw.”
“Right.” She took another deep drink of her liquor and did as told, suddenly able to put together a short run of spades. The back of her neck prickled with warmth as she fought the temptation to start thinking about what she had seen.
“And how was inventory?”
Wesson shook his head. “Found a bad batch of ammo, leaving us with about a ton and a half until the next delivery.”
“Well, it’s good that we’re not expecting any company for a while, then.”
Wesson threw back the rest of his drink. “I mean, if ‘Naks were the only thing we had to worry about. Fox itself may be safer, but we’ve moved closer to gang territory.”
He was referring to organized bands of brigands that usually liked to stay just as far from civilization—‘civtown’—as the Corps. They were a dangerous type, known to jump anyone passing through their borders who might have anything worth stealing, sometimes shaking down entire caravans. She even heard stories of brigands taking on small teams of Anakim. Sometimes abiding folk in civtown would ask the Corps for help with particularly disruptive activity, but small-time brigands usually exercised more discretion than that.
“Patrols may be exchanging fire more often,” he went on. “Be careful out there.”
Finch made her play: four kings. Gray’s shoulders and eyelids both slumped. She stared at the ace and queen in her hand and cursed at her friend. Finch just grinned.
“Be careful in here too,” Finch chuckled, downing the last of her shine. “So I heard that Alpine says the ‘Nak scent was more concentrated for this last fight.”
“You heard? You were there.”
“No shit, but it’s nice for the Alpine labcoats to agree with us every once in a while.”
Wesson’s attention was piqued. In fact, he looked surprised that a sixth-year would find this out before him. “Harper told you that?”
Finch shrugged. “What? It was an open message. It’s going on the boards tomorrow.”
He looked taken aback. “Yeah, but you… gotta have a little respect for the process, right? You can’t just do whatever you want, the Corps couldn’t run like that.”
Finch rolled her eyes. “Look. Does Harper act like a gossip? Even if it were a secret, it’d be safe with me.”
“It just confirms what we already know because we were there, Wesson. Nothing confidential about that,” Gray said.
“Fair enough. But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable either.”
Finch sighed loudly. “We can both be right.”
“Hm.”
Wesson played a four-card straight and discarded something Gray couldn’t use, so she finished her drink and waved at Harrison for another. She parted with a second friday for it, and threw back the small cup, feeling it burn all the way down. They played a few more rounds.
Eventually, there was a lull in the conversation, and something was percolating its way through Gray’s mind as the alcohol started kicking in. “Something I’ve been wondering,” she began. “What’s the most human thing you ever see a ‘Nak do? How much like us are they?”
This wasn’t the smartest question she could have asked in a Corps camp as it skirted some important rules, but she could have asked dumber. Questions like, “how hot is the sun?”
“I seen one jack off once, remember that?” Finch laughed.
Gray did remember and she found a tightening in her chest at the thought now.
“Must’ve been a big piece of meat,” Gray muttered with a strained chuckle, keeping her eyes on her cards.
“God, are you kidding? It was like…” She held her hands up in the air, greatly exaggerating. “Wouldda been easy target practice.”
“How ‘bout you, Wesson?”
“They only look and act like us in order to fuck with our sense of empathy,” he said, avoiding the question entirely. “If you talk to vets from the first phase of the Disruption, they’ll all tell you that dusting machines was easier than flesh and blood. The Algo figured that out and decided to use our likeness against us.”
Gray frowned. “When did you get to talk to veterans from the old wars?”
“I mean, I didn’t talk to them. But I’ve hung around when we got some passing through once, and they talked about it with the officers.”
That was a mighty privilege, Gray thought. It wasn’t often that enlisted corpsmen were given an opportunity to even get near outsiders, let alone speak to them.
“Anyways, I don’t care what they look like,” Finch said coldly. “I’m happy to kill the fuckers dead after wiping six billion humans off the map. Including my mom and auntie.”
Gray swallowed at the reminder. She discarded, realizing too late that she had a run of hearts hiding in her hand, and Finch promptly won a second time.
“Remind me to never play cards with you ever again,” Wesson snorted.
Finch smiled obnoxiously. “There’s no shame in losing.”
The blond-haired man slapped the remainder of his hand on the table, not even counting his points, and Finch roared with laughter. She shoved the mess of cards at Gray. It was her turn to deal.
The alcohol made gathering up the cards more difficult than she thought it’d be. Her fingers were clumsy, and a few dropped on the ground. When she bent to pick them up, she hit her head on the table.
“God dammit,” she hissed. Wesson’s hand was soon on her arm and he pulled her up.
“You OK there?”
“I think I just… need something to eat.”
“And a night in your own cot,” Finch added. She took the cards back.
Wesson didn’t let go of her arm. “C’mon, I’ll help you back.”
Gray nodded and they began walking. With dehydration and growling stomachs being the accepted norm around here, a little shine, she remembered, went a long way in Corps bellies. She focused on walking straight.
They headed steadily down the road between tents. “Hey Wes,” she slurred, bending the ban on nicks by just shortening his surname. “You ever get confused sometimes?”
He chuckled, and his arm worked its way around her shoulders instead. “Yeah, when I’m trying to do inventory on 3 hours of sleep.”
“No, no. Confused about… what our enemy even is.”
He looked at her wistfully, cautiously. “Well, I can tell you what they’re not.”
Gray screwed up her face. “I’m trying to be serious, man. I’m not that tore.”
“After five years you’d think I’d know you well enough to know when you’re full of shit. Now look, we’re here.” She pushed open the flap to her section of the tent and Wesson helped her to her cot. “Hang tight while I find you something to eat, alright?”
“Yes, sir,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes. He disappeared back outside with a smile. It figured Wesson would like getting sir’d. He was gunning for promo, after all, and it was no secret that he intended to get it. It was also no secret that he liked being buttered up.
In the big toon tents, which were partitioned off into fourteen rooms, each housing four or five cots and a single light bulb that was cut off at exactly 10pm every night, there were usually a few folk mingling or trying to catch some shut–eye before a shift. The place was impeccably clean, mostly because her tent–mates hadn’t had time to settle in and make a mess of the place yet. The tents were not especially comfortable places to be: dimly lit, and stiflingly hot if you wanted to keep the sun out. Gray wondered what conditions the Anakim lived in, and decided it was probably much of the same.
She didn’t know how many minutes had passed before Wesson came back, though it was probably fewer than it felt. He handed her a small cup with a metal foon sticking out of it.
“It’s all the cook would give me,” he declared as she balked at the slurry inside. “And here.” He produced a flask of water, which he began to pour into her own. “Or you’ll be begging for a bullet to the head tomorrow.”
She sat up and spooned some of the green–brown mush into her mouth. It was salty, and the high algae content made it taste distinctly like pond scum. There was meat in there somewhere too, but the only clue was in the small tough bits of ground–up tissue and the thin film of grease that clung to the utensil when she took a bite. What animal the weekly shipments of ‘wet ration’ were made from had already become a popular subject of the rumor mill.
Still, it at least didn’t suck the moisture from your mouth like hardtack.
“Thanks,” she mumbled.
“And between you and me,” Wesson said quietly, crouching down to give her his best fatherly look. “Be careful of the stuff you ask around here, even with friends. I know you don’t sympathize, but some young boot hearing you talk at the bar doesn’t. People still get reported. People still get retrained.”
Gray just frowned.
“And I know it’s easy to get confused sometimes. But just remember that the Corps is our lifeblood. Without it, humanity wouldn’t have stood a chance. We could all be dead, or worse.”
“What’s worse than being dead?” she scoffed.
Wesson leveled his eyes at her and she swallowed. “We could be packing ‘Nak bullets right now, for one thing.”
Gray blinked, surprised at how odd this sounded. Bondship was bondship, wasn’t it? Every enlisted Corpsman was a bond. The only reason anyone was here was the hope of getting that coveted freemark and being addressed by your given name for the first time in a decade. The Freedom Ceremony was what dreams were made of.
She almost opened her mouth to ask him if he really thought that being the property of the Corps was better than being property of The Algo. But you didn’t say things like that in a Corps camp, no matter how much you drank or how much you wanted the last word.
“Probably,” she mumbled. “At least its only ten years of this, and the Corps does keep its word.”
“The Corps always keeps its word.”
Wesson smiled again as he rose, satisfied that he’d reached her. But just as he was about to leave, she stopped him.
“What happened to us, Wesson?”
The handsome tenth-year paused and his eyes fell to the ground for a moment. “It’s like you said, you weren’t feeling it.”
Gray thought for a minute, chewing slowly. “I guess I just got tired of sneaking around. We’re not youngyears anymore.”
“I think being a good corpsman really matters to you now. I respect that.”
“And you’re almost out of here anyways.” She looked up and their eyes met. “Even though you want to stay with the Corps, I’ll probably never see you again after you get your promo.”
“Everybody’s gotta say goodbye at some point.”
Gray nodded drunkenly.
“Now get some rest, I’ll tell Harper you missed him.”
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@kisupure I love how harsh this world is, and I love that our heroes are still enslaved and all that entails. We know how to feel about military characters, but Gray and her comrades are oppressed by much more than just military discipline. I’m especially intrigued by the question of whether it is better to be enslaved by the Corps or by the Algo. I’m sure a little fraternizing with a 'Nak will be very revealing.
I can really feel the landscape, and all your neologisms are delightful. Pacing is perfect.
This is one of those precious rarities: an excellent story that just happens to have size feels. I think I’m greedy enough to demand an illustration.
All my M/f stories and discussions can be found here.
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@olo Thanks Olo! It’s a hard balancing act, and it gets harder the further into things as I write. I’m still struggling with keeping a certain tone - don’t want it too graphic and warlike, and I don’t want too much worldbuilding, because they could very easily smother the building relationship and eroticism. But the griminess and misery are part of the point too!
As far as some art goes, I’ve got good news and bad news… good news is that I’ve done a LOT of sketching over the years. The bad news is that none of them have made the cut lol. I’ll get to work on that though
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CHAPTER 4
[ No Manual excerpt this time, I’m still humming and hawwing over what it’s going to be about. ]
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It was a week later when a group of six or seven civvies on horseback were received by the camp.
Gray was on weapons maintenance near the commander’s tent—a coveted job done in the shade of a tarp—when she saw the wastelanders being ushered inside. Except for the occasional band of merchants or trappers bringing in healthy bondsmen for selling, she hadn’t set eyes on an outsider in almost four months, and it was a bit jarring to see folks dressed in something other than threadbare fatigues. From their clothes, she could tell they were from one of the wandering clans, maybe a minor merchant family. Their loose, flowing dress was in deep reds trimmed with yellows and blues and beiges. The shade of red, though, was on the orange side – dyed from the plentiful eucalypts rather than the much–coveted cochineal. Definitely a minor family.
“Wonder what they’re here for?” wondered one of her duty partners, Cox, shielding his eyes. They had all paused to watch. “I don’t see any bondsmen.”
Azimi glanced at their horses and the man tending them. “No pack mule neither,” she noted. “I don’t think they’re here to trade.”
Gray shrugged. “They’re probably trying to get away from some brigs.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’re the new neighbors looking to hammer out a protection contract. They look important enough. See those saddles?” The color of their clothes was one thing, but the tack had copper hardware. “And the closest civtown is only a couple hours’ ride away. I’ll bet they’re loaded.”
“Too bad we can’t ask them ourselves,” Cox muttered, getting back to work. Corps Protocol for interacting with wastelanders was strict. Enlisted corpsmen were not permitted to engage them in any way unless an officer was present, and were not, even then, allowed to speak unless spoken to first.
After a good half-hour, the group in their gaudy red was escorted to a lavish guest tent a few doors down.
“My friday’s on protection contract,” Cox said.
Azimi grinned, unable to resist a bet. “Mine’s on trade deal.”
“Brigs,” muttered Gray.
Commander Hitch stepped out of the tent, and the maintenance group fell silent, returning to their duties. Out of the corner of her eye, Gray saw him say a few words to a clerk, who nodded and took off at a brisk pace. By instinct her gaze fell on the tall flagpole beside the commander’s tent, which was already being fitted with a series of brightly-colored signal flags: a small blue one with a white square in the center went first and was followed by a red and yellow pennant.
“It’s a round-up,” Azimi said quietly. She was referring to the captains.
Gray didn’t have a good feeling about this, as there were few reasons to convene Fox’s fourteen captains all at once and most of them involved fighting.
“Better grab your boots,” Gray said, minding the lingering pain in her side. “I think we all just lost our bet.”
* * *
The commander met with the captains for almost two hours, after which the captains relayed the news to each of their toons. There’d been some kind of large ‘Nak mobilization: four–hundred of them, by the outsiders’ estimate, and at least six truckloads of equipment, heading south–west and massacring or menacing every human camp unfortunate enough to get in their way. Civvies rarely had the resources to fight ‘Naks without help from the Corps.
Alpine, which they’d cabled asking for advice on tactics given the size of the mobilization, took less than 8 hours to give their reply in that familiar clipped style afforded by telegraph bandwidth:
ALPINE 47G9D BLUE OFFICE TO FOX MSG FOLLOWS
FLANK AND AMBUSH FROM HIGH GROUND STOP
SAPPER ORDNANCE FROM UNDER OR BEHIND STOP
NALEZING STOP
This telegram was posted on the board outside every captain’s office. The colonels and generals at Base Camp Alpine, with their tactical bird’s-eye view afforded by the constant wires, were ordering a guerrilla attack. For some reason, the word “nalezing” was shorthand for “do no more than absolutely necessary”, and, according to Harper, was sent at the end of most wires from Alpine.
The in-person briefing with captain Burke of Brown Fox toon, those assigned to ‘barracks’ #11-12, took all of an hour, during which more intelligence brought by the wastelanders was revealed. Afterwards, there was little time to do anything but gather up gear and hit the sack unless you wanted to be marching on 5 hours’ sleep.
At 0430 hours the next morning, Gray and five–hundred others woke up to the sound of a horn, grabbed their loadouts, and began the ten–mile march that would put them on track to intercept the force of Anakim. Gray’s side still felt awful under load, so she dug out her last little broken piece of cody and slipped it between her lips for the trek.
Everyone was too preoccupied with focusing on the fight ahead of them, their footing below them, and their pack load on top of them. It was three miles in when the sun rose over the mountains, all pinks and silver–blues of the morning sky. Already it was hot, and Gray had to cover her neck and face with a kerchief. Others were beginning to do the same.
In her head, she took inventory of her equipment, making sure she hadn’t missed anything, not that she could turn back now: kicker, sider, tac knife, six spare mags for each gun, a trio of emergency grenades, cordage, mutli–tool, binos, more goddamn hardtack, and a gallon of water. There was no telling how long they’d be out here, but she hoped, for the sake of her busted ribs, that it wouldn’t be longer than one night.
They arrived at their destination under the unrelenting afternoon sun, where everyone was told to take a breather and get something to eat while the captains talked. Their location was an old floodplain next to a river that hadn’t seen water in decades. A collapsed bridge a mile away, covered in fading graffiti, completed the picture as did the other scattered remains of pre-Disruption life. There was a two–lane road on the high side of the riverbed, up on a low bank, and it was understood that the Anakim would probably be taking this road to their likely rendezvous point: a compound of theirs known to exist some sixty miles further.
The bulk of the enlisted boots were instructed to divide up into groups of six, each headed by at least one tenth-year, to stake out points in the rocks away from the road where they might stand a chance of landing shots. Meanwhile, the sappers and grenadiers would situate themselves closer, armed with a small arsenal of explosives that would be detonated as the ‘Naks stood directly over them. With that strategy in mind, the sappers, Wesson among them, got to work.
About an hour before sundown, Gray and a few others from Brown Fox were ordered to scout the area and see if there wasn’t any sign of the approaching unit. Gray headed due west, over a small ridge and into the dusty landscape below, kicker at the ready. She’d been sent on a lot of reconnaissance assignments over the years, being part of the scouting division; her good eyes and ears, and silent maneuvering made her an ideal specialist. As did her lackluster proficiency with Morse code.
Gray trekked along for a good mile, climbing rocks, descending embankments, weaving her way through the sagebrush and cactus trees, and kept an ear out for the snakesthat liked to come out at sunset. Eventually she found a good vantage point, a small hill, to stop and take a look around. Obscured by tall brush, Gray shimmied up a boulder and lay on her good side while she brought out herbinos to scan the horizon.
Far off in the distance to the north she could see the tall buildings of an old city, and at around her 10 o’clock was the faint silhouette of a large island not far off the distant coast. But so far, there didn’t seem to be a trace of the giants or anyone else. She glanced at her watch, and saw that she had some time to kill. With nothing else to do but wait, she got as comfortable as she could manage, and –
Ch–chak.
The sound of a round entering the chamber of a gun was almost as familiar to her as the beat of her own heart. Sometimes it was comforting. Sometimes it wasn’t.
Gray whipped around, sider in hand. There, she was met with the sight of an Anak and his long, rugged rifle pointed squarely at her. He was about thirty yards away, and her heart nearly stopped when she realized her odds of landing a fatal hit from this distance were next to nothing.
“Fuck,” she whispered, suddenly resigned to the arrival of death at any moment.
The two stared at each other for the longest few seconds of her life. Shoot him! she screamed in her head. Shoot the motherfucker!
But her trigger finger seemed frozen in place, just like the rest of her. Part of it was instinctual: if she fired and missed, she was guaranteedto be killed. If she didn’t, she still had her slim, slim chance. But part of it was something else entirely.
His face was obscured by his own kerchief, wrapped similarly around his head. He wore a plated vest, with straps and pouches making him seem even broader. There was a knife fixed to the webbing near his shoulder, what looked to be a mouthpiece for a bladder of water near it, and… a short, stout antenna sticking out of the top of the pack on his back. Gray’s eyes widened when she realized what she was looking at.
He was a sentinel.
With a scowl, Gray slowly raised her hands, letting the sider fall slack around her trigger finger. This was the smartest thing to do.
But he didn’t move. This was getting ridiculous.
“Fucking capture me or shoot me,” she shouted, trying to steady the wobble in her voice. “What the hell are you waiting for!”
She was expecting it in retaliation for opening her mouth; that bang, that white–hot flash. It didn’t come.
In the silence of the desert, Gray heard him growl. He lowered his gun like it took all his strength to do so, and he loosened the cloth, turning to slip silently back into the deep shadows of the land like she wasn’t worth his lead.
“Hey!”
Gray had no idea why she called after him. She had no idea why she jumped up, ready to hit the sand and get closer.
But she heard a whistle, one of the sentry’s calls. The both of them froze. They whistled again, but she didn’t respond. She was supposed to respond. Gray glanced at the Anak, who was coiled and ready to take off. He gave her a dangerous look.
Some seconds later a sentry from Brown Fox crested the hill. It didn’t take him long to see the both of them at the bottom.
“Holy shit!”
“Kessler, it’s not—!”
Panicked, he reached for his grenade anyway. Gray was surprised at how fast he managed to tear out the pin and hurl it at the ‘Nak, and just as surprised to find that, as her eyes followed the little ball of iron as it arced through the air, that his pitch was coming up short, and that it would land closer to her than its target. Gray dumbly stumbled back and away from the thing, moving in slow motion.
But the Anak didn’t. He moved decisively and she found herself suddenly inches away from that massive body as the flashbang exploded, sending dirt and bits of metal flying in all directions. The giant caging her against the ground hissed through clenched teeth.
They stared at each other for hardly a second, then he got his bearings and disappeared into the settling night with a sloppy trail of bullets on his heels. She’d never seen 500 pounds move so fast.
Gray was left sprawled in the dirt as it occurred to her that she’d felt no squeeze.
No pheromone.
No chemical musk to warp her mind into responding to him like a desert hare responds to a hungry coyote. It took her a moment to get up.
“Fuck! You alright?” Kessler asked as he slid down the embankment and helped her to her feet. “Did he do anything to you?”
Gray just stared off in the direction that the sentinel had gone, still a bit dazed. But things came back to her soon enough and she rose.
“You idiot!” she hissed, shouldering him away. “That little stunt could be heard for miles!”
Kessler’s face went white. “But he was right there! You’d have done the same thing!”
Gray was angry at the interruption and confused at why she was angry at the interruption. Either way, the youngyear had fucked up and bad.
“You need to use your goddamn head, Kessler, or you’re going to get people killed! You won’t make it to your fourth year keeping this up.” She turned to retrieve her binos from the rock and catch her breath.
“And I had the situation under control,” she continued. “He had his back to me.”
Then Gray started back up with Kessler scrambling to keep pace. “Why the hell was his back to you? Did he think you were unarmed?”
The more her hands shook and the redder her face, the deeper she scowled. “I don’t know why,” Gray muttered. “Now shut up until we get back. If you really did give us all away, I’d at least like to try putting up a fight.”
* * *
“The hell was that!” Burke demanded as soon as she caught sight of the approaching pair.
“Kessler here got spooked and threw a grenade, sir.”
She could see, even in the awkward illumination of a small flashlight, the cordage in Captain Burke’s neck tighten.
“Sir, it–it was a ‘Nak! He was right there, right next to Gray! I–I didn’t know what he was doing, if he was going to jump her or what!”
The words that came out of Gray’s mouth just then surprised her, and it felt as though she were suddenly watching herself and unable to do anything about it.
“I didn’t say it was a… ‘Nak, sir.”
Kessler all but froze, excepting for his mouth, which fell open.
“But you said… his back was…”
“You threw your flashbang at a dog.”
Burke took this opportunity to give him a good reaming. “You mean to tell me that you wasted a perfectly good ambush and a perfectly good grenade on an* animal**?*” barked the captain, stepping closer to obliterate his personal space with trained precision. “My god, corpsman, if it wasn’t against policy I’d have you shot.”
Kessler stammered, feeling a different kind of squeeze.
While enlisted soldiers were technically all of the same rank, corpsmen with more years of service were generally afforded greater respect. But Gray felt uneasy and had to look away. Burke excused her, and Kessler never spoke to the seventh-year again.
“You alright?” Finch asked Gray as she sat down on the hard ground without a word.
“Yeah.” A strained pause. “No sleeping tonight, thanks to Kessler.”
“Is that what that was?”
Gray nodded.
She tried telling herself that this was exactly what he deserved, but that was bullshit and she knew it. A sentinel snooping around should have scared the piss out of her, and not from the pheromone. That antenna? It was a direct line to The Algo. He didn’t need to kill her, all he had to do was report what he’d seen and sit back to watch the bloodbath.
Though there was something odd about him—no, she could no longer be sure about any of them—this second-guessing was already spinning out of control.
The Enemy was not to be humanized. Or everything would start making a little less sense than it did before.
But her thoughts kept circling back to the Anak. Who was he ? The way he looked up at the sky when he thought he was alone was eerily similar to the way he looked at her through the sightlines of his boomer. She remembered his eyes: blue, and hemmed with worry lines, laugh lines, maybe both. Or maybe just from squinting in the bright desert sun.
“Gray,” Finch said.
She started, and the younger corpsman looked at her as though she’d been trying to get her attention for a while now.
“What?”
Finch was holding out her worn deck of cards. “Draw to see who gets first watch.”
Gray ran fingers through her hair and took the first card. The four others did the same, and they turned them over together. Finch’s five and Saiyeh’s two committed them to the first one–hour shift, the pair of nines would go after, and then the face cards would finish up.
“Ass,” Finch grumbled at her luck, collecting the cards again and tucking the deck carefully away in a chest pocket. Gray didn’t give a damn about the watch sequence either way. Two hours of sleep on hard dirt was still two hours of sleep on hard dirt. And that was besides the ugly feeling that she’d secretly doomed them all to a grizzly, painful death. A cool sweat beaded along her neck.
As she settled down for sleep, arms folded tightly and chin tucked into the webbing across her chest, a word for what she’d done popped into her head, taken from Annex II of the Manual, and it sent a chill down her spine:
Treason.
* * *
She got a lot less sleep than she’d hoped for. And when she did, she dreamt of an Anak counter–attack: thousands of hulking, brown-banded shadows, lead bouncing off their armor as they ripped corpsmen from their foxholes. Gray woke with a start when a ‘Nak bullet caved in her skull.
“Nightmare?” asked Munez, their designated tenth-year who bunked on the other end of the Brown’s toon tent.
The moon had set at some point, and all she could see of him was the small orange speck of light at the end of his smokestick. Finch and Saiyeh were still hunkered down for a few hours’ sleep alongside Carey and a fourth-year whose name was escaping her. Munez’s cherry brightened as he took a drag.
“Not looking forward to this ambush.”
He chuckled faintly. “Who is.”
“What’s your style?” she asked.
Gray enjoyed working alone, but right now the eerie hush was getting to her. The Corps had a combat style it taught in training, but everyone had their own preferential spin. It would be useful to know how her fireteam was going to move.
“Keep mobile, aim low, don’t waste ammo.”
Gray nodded, peering out through the darkness. “Not sure how mobility is going to help us in this one,” she thought aloud. “Wouldn’t it be better to stay put? Hidden?”
“Way I see it,” Munez said, “By the time we need to start shooting, the ‘Naks are going to be on top of us. Gonna get chaotic out there if we’re outnumbered.”
1-to-1, of course, meant outnumbered.
“Point. But we do need to stay hidden as long as–”
She saw the outline of his raised arm and Gray stopped talking, whipping around to follow his gaze.
Off in the distance, to the north where the mission leader was positioned, shone a red light toward the groups of corpsmen hiding in the rocks. It began to flash in a legible sequence.
*Nak in 45, *it said in Morse code.
Gray frowned and glanced nervously at her watch: it was just after 0100 hours. “So much for sleeping.”
Munez took out his flashlight, snapped in a red lens, and responded with two quick bursts followed by a longer flash before putting it away: the letter U, the shortened prosign for “understood”. All around them similar responses lit up in the darkness.
Gray reached for Finch’s knee to give it a gentle shake.
* * *
Thirty minutes before they were due to step into the Corps trap, Gray could hear them. The roar of vehicle engines and the sound of many feet on asphalt gave them away.
Gray’s stomach turned. She just kept thinking about that damn antenna. Her fingers tightened their grip on the kicker in her lap and her heart pounded away painfully in her chest as they drew nearer. A quarter mile away; two–hundred yards away; one–hundred. Could this really be happening? What was the catch? Gray looked behind her, up to the top of the bluff, expecting to see a line of towering shadows sneaking up behind them, but all she saw was stars.
“I can’t believe they’re walking right into it,” she whispered.
Finch clicked off the safety on her gun. “Let’s hope our luck doesn’t run out before the night’s over.”
Munez hushed them, and in the darkness she could make out him counting down with his fingers. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
The sound was immense.
There was a bright flash of light, and the vehicles were suddenly no more: balls of fire billowing smoke littered the sides of the road. The force of the explosion killed many instantly, and threw others to the ground, stunned and injured. Hopefully most of them would stay there. The rest of the Anakim scattered in the tumult, trying to regroup just as the corpsmen flanking them along the ridge opened fire.
It was a lot easier to kill them this way, Gray noted as she squeezed the trigger; they didn’t look quite so real, shadowed against the dancing flames. She took one down, two, four—but regroup they did, and before long they’d reformed into smaller, single-file teams that snaked their way towards the scatterings of muzzle flash among the rocks. The pointmen had begun to pick up pieces of metal to shield themselves with.
“Two-o’clock!” one of them shouted, and one of the behemoths behind him opened fire at a group of corpsmen near where Gray and her team were hidden. A grenade was thrown too late, missing its target. Boom.
“Two o’clock clear!”
Munez stopped firing. “Remember what I said about keeping mobile?” he said over the noise. “We need to move!”
Finch swore as she reloaded her gun, pocketing the empty magazine.
“And we need cover,” Munez shouted as he unclipped a grenade from his belt. “Pull pins on my mark!”
It seemed like a good enough idea at this juncture, and Gray reached for a flashbang.
“Mar—“
As Munez stood to get a clear shot, a bullet caught him in the belly just as the iron left his hands and he was thrown to the ground with a wet sound. Gray winced as ten hard years of service bled out beside her. There was nothing to say, he was already dead. Dusted like so many others.
Their orders were, if things took a turn for the worse, to retreat. Nalezing. And from the way those menacing shadows were moving now, it seemed that a retreat was quickly becoming prudent.
“F-fucking kicker’s jammed again!” Saiyeh cried, frantically trying to engage his rifle’s action.
Gray blinked back moisture and yanked the gun out from under their dead comrade.
“Here! Munez won’t need his anymore!”
She shoved it at Saiyeh, and groped around to retrieve the dead man’s spare ammo with trembling hands. If only there’d been time to grab his smokesticks too. Could have traded them for a cody.
“They’re coming,” said Finch, her face hard in the red light.
“We need to get the hell out of this foxhole!”
Gray saw a small opportunity to make up for her guilt. “I’ll cover us,” she said. “Go!”
The fireteam’s remaining corpsmen leapt to their feet and dashed away like mice.
“There! Your eleven!” came the thunder of an Anak voice.
A line of four of the giants were approaching from behind. Gray was careful to spray their feet during the split-second she had clear sight of them through the bush. Protected only by leather, her shots easily found flesh, and they slowed. She watched with distant satisfaction as two of them hollered in pain and stumbled into the rocks, calling her a few colorful names. Quickly, she turned on her heel and hurried to catch up with the others ahead.
The briefing never mentioned a specific fallback point, because failure had seemed so unlikely. But the ‘Naks, as usual, stymied their best efforts. All it took was a charge or two that failed to detonate, a quick enough response to the first explosions—the devil was in the details, and the Anakim, damn them, never seemed to lose their edge. So the plan now was to simply run: run hard.
The flames from the burning trucks licked the air some thirty feet up, and shone so brightly that the entire floodplain was bathed in red. Gray, Finch, and the others scrambled up the bluff and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t looking so good, though: another six ‘Naks were on their heels.
“Twelve high!” one shouted. She could hear the grin on his face as they closed in. The air was starting to thicken with the *scent. *Gray swallowed and tried to ignore her body’s predictable response to it as she ran for her life.
“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she chanted. Bullets found purchase in the sand around her, which at least had the effect of hiding them in a cloud of dust.
They cleared the top, and looking south briefly, she saw movement among the rocks as other corpsmen disappeared into the moonless dark on the leeward side of the hill.
“Don’t you fucking lose ‘em!” one of the ‘Naks shouted. The pheromone in the air made his angry voice sound all the deadlier, like it was right behind her. Gray swallowed, breathing hard, and squeezed a little more speed out of her tired legs.
“Split up!” Gray called to the rest of her unit between labored breaths. Individually, they stood a better chance this way and they all knew it. “We’ll be a bitch to find in the dark!”
“Go, go!”
And like that, the five of them melted into the night.
Gray could hear the crunch of her own feet on the sandy earth now, her gear clunking and moving against itself, her quick gasps for air, even her pounding heart—it all suddenly seemed too loud. But she’d outrun her pursuers, and could hear them turning their fire to other targets and their voices got further away.
“Better not be any spiders in here,” she whispered, thinking on the irony of being killed by a brown recluse in the middle of this.
Gray made sure to listen closely to the battle still going on around her as she made herself as invisible as possible. Minutes passed, and she could tell that the fight was moving away from her.
But over the next short while, she stopped hearing the longer and more frequent bursts of fire she associated with open engagement; the kind you could afford when you had a clear shot at many opponents. What Gray heard now was slower, more measured. Her first instinct was that this was the strategy of predators stalking prey. Gray swallowed hard.
She was startled by an explosion of gunfire and the ear-splitting bang of grenades. The corpsmen were retaliating? A nearby ‘Nak was hit—she could hear his choked swear. Careful footfalls once again turned into a frenzied shuffle of dirt and rubber against a chorus of sharp pops and thundering booms.
There was nothing for it, Gray had to leave her hiding spot. As much as she hated the Corps, she still cared about the men. Gray gripped her kicker, steadied her breathing in spite of the pheromone growing stronger by the minute, and prepared for pain.
Though when she launched herself out of the crevice, she found something altogether different: the face of an Anak soldier. And a familiar one, to boot. It was the sentinel from earlier. Except this time he reeked.
By instinct Gray whipped her 5.56mm kicker towards him, and he did the same; suddenly she was facing the business end of his enormous 50-cal. As if there was a contest between them. She panted and shook.
“You always this ready for death?” he asked. He sounded like the desert.
“Like any good corpsman,” she said, focusing very hard on steadying her voice as the pheromone began to coil in the pit of her stomach. It’s just a chemical, Gray told herself. Keep your fucking head. Her mouth was like the desert now too: dry.
“Why’d you s-save us, sentinel?”
She minded her training: maintain Situational Awareness, focus, breathe, and you stood a decent enough chance. Gray breathed, focused on him. It was very hard to see his face, but she tried like her life depended on it. He had good bone structure, she thought. It was a strange thought. She should not have thought it, especially not now. Not while feeling so much like prey.
Without averting his eyes he lowered his boomer. They were close, Gray realized—very close. Then suddenly, they were closer. She choked down a yelp when she felt his fingers wrap entirely around her bicep.
Then the Anak’s lips were on hers. Gray trembled in his grip, feeling hot breath from his nose, and tongue quickly, urgently, prodding her open. There was a grunt of approval when she did. He tasted like smoke and smelled like dust. Breaking away left her panting, slack-jawed, stunned. The beating in her chest suddenly had an echo in her belly.
“I didn’t save anybody from anything,” he rumbled beside her ear.
Then he pulled back to study her.
“Huh. You don’t mind the stink.”
“Mind” was an understatement. Gray swayed when he pulled away, all but suffocating now. She wouldn’t have been able to describe her expression in that moment, or speak much at all. He didn’t think on it for very long, either way. Without warning, the giant turned and headed off toward what remained of the fight.
“Party’s over!” He shouted between bursts of gunfire, keeping ducked down. “You got what you wanted, 34th, now move out!”
Gray sucked in a breath to help clear her head, and saw two more huge silhouettes approach the sentinel less than 10 yards away. “Hey! What do you mean, move out? Move nothing, we have ‘em cornered!”
“You get your boots out of here, you fuckin’ hear me? Central wants you back in six hours.”
“And Central’s not gonna like us showing up empty-handed!”
“Do I need to repeat myself, brownband?”
“We’re not leaving until we clean up this mess!”
Her jaw fell further open when the sentinel swiftly jabbed the butt of his boomer into the soldier’s belly, sending him to the ground. Even the Corps knew that sentinels were bred to be agents of high rank and that defying their orders was unacceptable.
“Find your C-fuckin’-O and get the hell out of my section.”
The other soldier was not going to repeat his brother’s insubordinate mistake. “What about the cargo, sir?”
“It’s gone, now move!”
The three of them melted into the shadows and Gray was left alone, with her gun and her scattered thoughts. The squeeze had passed, leaving her feeling weak and her hands clammy.
She took a moment to breathe.
http:/sizekink.com
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@kisupure You are really good at increasing the tension while keeping us focused on all the stakes. I also admire that for every mystery you remove (Sentinel’s got a crush!), you add another (why is the fear pheromone inconstant?). I also liked the detail of the local gentry having an embassy with Fox’s commander. So neo-feudal.
Gray lying to save her skin and put Kessler in the soup was cold. She better not wind up in the same foxhole with him later.
A little aerial recon would go a long way in this setting. Did I miss an explanation for its lack?
I’m glad you explained “nalezing.” At first I was afraid the sisters-in-arms were being ordered to stand down.
Couple of cavils:
“Better not be any spiders in here,” she whispered, thinking on the irony of being killed by a brown recluse in the middle of this.
I’m afraid you failed to describe Gray finding a crevice for cover before she was already in it.
As much as [Gray] hated the Corps . . .
When did that happen? It was my impression that Gray thought of the Corps as the last best hope, both for her and for humanity.
Illustration prompt: Sentinel wincing as he’s shielding Gray and taking the shrapnel.
All my M/f stories and discussions can be found here.
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@olo Ofuk, good catches. I really wanted to make a spider joke somewhere, but I think I’ll have to move it to another scene. And as for the other one, hm, you’re right. I have her more in the “grudging respect” headspace, so you’re right, “hate” is too strong a word to use here.
Bless you Olo, and I’ll get started on that drawing soon for your troubles!
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@kisupure Keep the spiders where they are, just add a sentence before it, describing how Gray found an arroyo in the dark.
All my M/f stories and discussions can be found here.
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@olo OHHK I see what you mean. I must’ve been looking at a different draft that had something like that in there.
And note to self, major oopsie: tenth-years shouldn’t really exist, they will have graduated from enlisted-dom by the “end” of the ninth year, barring unfortunate scheduling. Change all to ninth-years.
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@kisupure 9th-years. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Should be some snappy jargon to refer to “graduates.”
Regarding Gray and her “hatred” of the Corps, it’s perfectly reasonable for her to resent the Corps as its regulations impinge more and more upon her interest in the sentinel. It’ll be totally subconscious, tho.
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@kisupure When I saw that there were new chapters, I was very excited, and oh my god, they were fantastic. You write some of the best tension scenes in macro fiction and I find myself rereading certain parts just to savor all of the emotions. I mentioned this before but one of the things that I enjoy the most about this story is the gradual humanization of the Anakim. They go from being faceless monsters to complex beings with surprising motivations. Really good stuff!
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CHAPTER 5
The Chain of Command must be maintained at all times. However, losses due to death, disease, or retirement are routine among Camps. In the event that an Officer is no longer able to fulfill the function of his duty for whatever reason, his replacement is found and installed at the discretion of the Commander, with the position going unfilled for no longer than two (2) consecutive weeks. In irregular circumstances, a temporary Officer may be used for a period up to, but not exceeding, 180 consecutive days.
- HDC Manual, Section 8 § 14
She hid herself again as the gunfire dissipated into the cool night air. After a few very long minutes, everything was still again. Everything except for her racing heart. Gray blinked, swallowed, touched her lips with a gloved finger. Did that all really happen? She tasted him on her, still, though the pheromone had wafted away. The only thing that felt real now was the chemical fear, and the deep ache in her side.
It took a moment to get her bearings, and when she did she left her hole to find the others. There would be injured. Immediately, she thought of Wesson, positioned with the other sappers so close to the attack.
It didn’t take long to run into two other corpsmen from Green Fox, but she was looking more for her friends. Finch would surely be found nearby, so Gray pressed on in the direction the redhead haddisappeared in, calling out her name. Beside a cluster of prickly brush, she found the sixth-year. Even in the darkness Gray could see the younger girl clutching at her arm and breathing shallow.
“Some party that was,” Finch panted.
Gray frowned when she carefully reached out and felt the sleeve of Finch’s shirt soaked through.
“C’mon,” Gray said, grabbing the younger girl’s fifteen–pound gun. “Gimme that. Can you walk?”
“Yeah… yeah. I can walk.”
“One of you get me a med kit and a goddamn light!”
One of the Green Foxers, she didn’t know his name, rummaged through his pack and produced a small box in one hand and then the beam of a flashlight was focused on Finch’s arm shortly after. It was bad.
Gray used her tac knife to cut off the sleeve of Finch’s shirt, and proceeded to clean the wound to the best of her ability. The ‘Nak bullet had only grazed her, but it took a chunk of flesh with it. One lucky inch was the only reason she still had an arm.
Gray tied off a tourniquet to help stop the bleeding, and put two little white pills into her friend’s mouth. They weren’t morphs or codys, but a standard-issue field medicine that would make you nauseous if you took too many.
“If you think you might puke, let me know. We’re gonna get you home one way or another, alright?”
Finch rose slowly to her feet. “I’m done for,” she whispered. “They’re gonna sew me up and leave me for the fucking coyotes like all the others.”
“No they’re not,” Gray hissed. “Now shut up and save your strength for the ruck, alright? Getting home is half the proof they’d need to keep you.”
Gray said it like she meant it, but she wasn’t sure. A different kind of fear knotted her stomach.
* * *
It didn’t take long to find a captain directing soldiers. He represented Blue Fox.
“Get back to the mouth of the canyon,” they were ordered. “And wait until sunrise. If the ‘Naks come back, I don’t want more than a hundred of us out here.”
“What about the injured?” A Green Foxer asked.
“I’ve got fifteen out looking now. To be frank, I don’t think we’re going to find many. You’re dismissed, corpsmen!”
In their exhaustion, not a word of disagreement was said as they turned and headed towards the dark silhouette of the mountains, east. Eventually they stumbled across Saiyeh and the others and continued as a group of seven.
It was slow going. Gray checked her watch for a third time: it was about 0300 hours, and they still had, by her count, almost four miles to go. A pack of coyotes yipped and yowled in the distance.
Finch, succumbing to the pain, was sweating badly. They took turns putting her good arm around their shoulders to keep her steady. Their destination was reached after two hours of this.
“They still dusted us,” somebody muttered, breaking the silence as they all settled down on a strip of soft sand. “We had the advantage and they still fucking dusted us.”
“Their line trailed more than we were expecting,” Gray muttered. “We could only blow up so much road, and half were still on their feet after the charges went.”
She’d been witness to so many defeats, big and small, that getting so upset seemed meaningless. What you did was leave the dead, pick up the living, and make sure to hit harder next time.
“My best friend died tonight.” Another corpsman paused to suck in a breath. “They didn’t even put a bullet in him. Just pulled out a knife and…”
Everyone was silent. He didn’t need to finish.
Gray couldn’t have mustered much of a response anyways. While her body was spent, her mind was buzzing. She couldn’t stop imagining that Anak’s face in the darkness. In a very real way, she’d looked on the face of death itself and survived. This meant that she’d kissed death, too. Gray licked her lip, tasting salt instead of smoke.
That’s when it occurred to her: the enormity of not just being kissed by an Anak, but that he desired it.
That he knew how.
Gray thought back to the mysterious Signy, and froze at what her mind was putting together. The knot in her stomach tightened.
She’d heard stories—rumors, really, or legends—about Anakim passing by civtowns and demanding favors from the local humans. Or abducting them. Though it was supposed to be that they were celibate, since no female ‘Nak had ever been known to exist and what was the point of giving a clone a sex drive? But if the same stuff that made them vicious, brutal soldiers is what made them men, and decidedly so, then it would follow that they’d have needs. Maybe very human needs.
“Something wrong?” someone asked.
Gray almost jumped. “Just… thinking. I heard the local sentinel call off the attack and I want to know why.”
“Christ.What fucking idiot would leave survivors after this?”
“An idiot that wants us to stick around.”
* * *
The sun was just skirting the horizon when the ragged group began to pick themselves up to leave. More survivors had trickled in over the last few hours of pre-dawn, and they numbered in the dozens now. But they paused as the latest group came up the ravine, probably two-hundred strong, with several limping or clutching at bloody bandages. There was one captain leading them, leaving another four unaccounted for.
“Any sign of a ninth-year sapper named Wesson?” Gray asked when people started sitting down to rest. “Wesson? Anybody?”
Most of the corpsmen were too exhausted to pay her much attention, but a few others exchanged looks and shrugged. Eventually someone spoke up. “Tall, blond guy, right? Slashed ear? There’s a salvage team combing the debris out there, mostly sappers. He could be with ‘em.”
That was a pretty big “could”, and Gray was nervous.
Another twenty minutes brought in a few dozen more corpsmen. There were two more captains among them.
“Did Captain Burke make it!” someone shouted over the crowd.
“Yeah, where’s our Brown captain!”
“And Hastings, too!”
“Brown and Red didn’t make it,” a ninth-year replied as he shoved tabs of cody at his injured downrank fellows like candy. “Green and Gold are still at the wreckage. There’s a lot to get through.”
“Fuck.”
Gray returned to her original group and sat down again. There was nothing she could do at this point but wait. She wanted a cody too.
The wounded, now led by ninth-years, eventually picked themselves up to head back to Fox. A few of the badly wounded could barely be coaxed to their feet—it was hard to look at them. Many were as good as dead.
It was past noon when they’d finally reached the first guard station at the edge of camp. A few of them were sent in to fetch medics and litters, and they were quickly received by a dozen medical staff who rushed the wounded into the big white tent, Finch among them.
“She’s gonna be OK, right?” Gray asked, following the medic who had taken a first peek at her friend’s arm.
“She’ll live, if that’s what you’re asking,” he replied, knowing full well that was *not *what she was asking. “Come back in a few hours and I’ll tell you if she’ll be able to aim a kicker ever again.”
With that, he hefted another gurney up off the ground with the help of a second medic, and they disappeared inside. Gray ran a hand, crusty with dried blood, through her matted hair, and thought of the spare few fridays she had stowed away under her mattress.
But first, Harper. She had to find Harper.
* * *
Spending two fridays with the wireman didn’t help much, but they killed as much uneasy time as they could. In the Manual’s short annex on psychiatric hygiene, it was recommended that corpsmen who were MIA should be assumed dead until proven otherwise. It was necessary to move on as quickly as possible. Harper himself was struggling with the guilt of not having been sent out at all, stationed at the comm instead, and said little. Swallowing grief down whole to maintain the famed Corps stoicism was a common sight, and Harper was doing his best. Gray put a hand on his shoulder.
“Sentiment is the enemy of survival,” she said, quoting the mythical figure of General Pierce, the Corps’ first commander and leader of some of the Disruption’s greatest battles. It was painful advice, and a number of younger corpsmen took offense to it. But as the years trudged on, Gray only found it more and more salient. Others usually did too. Life was hard, and the Corps made no promise to anyone that it would ever get better. There was something approaching beauty in that kind of honesty.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
Gray threw back her shine. “Look, I know you were shaking sheets together, it’s harder than you want to admit.”
“Just… don’t.”
Gray eyed him. “I had Graham,” she said, letting the name linger in the air for a second. It had been, what, four years? “And don’t forget, Finch is my fuckin’ friend too.”
Harper looked down at his drink and scowled. “Well we’re two of us down, anyways.”
Gray sighed hard. She refused to believe that Wesson was dead. He was good at this, the whole marching and shooting and taking orders thing; he didn’t survive nine and a half years with the Corps for nothing right? Munez was the statistic, not Wesson, he couldn’t be.
“I’m sure he’s having the time of his life sorting through ‘Nak trash. It’s Finch I’m worried about,” she said stiffly, giving the three–fingered salute to the wireman as she rose. “I’ll see you outside.”
She didn’t really know what to do with herself. It was a bright and sunny Southland afternoon, a few clouds dragging long streaks across the sky. She should have slept.
Gray thought about planes—she’d heard them described once as big flying cars—and wondered what the skies looked like when they were full of ‘em. Did they flap around in clusters like birds? Did they need to track along some kind of road through the air like vehicles did? Were they loud? Quiet? Did the ‘Naks ever use them? She stopped, feeling that she was wasting her own time. Planes didn’t exist now any more than elevators did, or swimming pools, or internets. They accomplished so little for being such a burden on resources. Casualties of the Disruption, just like people.
Gray decided to trek over to Burke’s office and glance at the board. See if there was anything for her to do. Of course there wasn’t; the schedule was old, and the captain was dead. What was the Protocol for this? Gray struggled to remember, suddenly feeling uneasy at not knowing what her duties were, or if her time was her own, how much of it she had.
It would be weeks before Alpine could reshuffle the camps and send Fox replacement officers; in the meantime, they’d have to get somebody else to do the job.
Glancing around at the half-empty tent city, Gray decided that she needed to put some distance between herself and the others for a while, so she started walking. When she was finally surrounded by nothing butsteep slopes and dry brush, Gray let out the breath she’d been holding.
Her fatigues were filthy and suddenly stifling. With dirty fingers she undid the buttons to her shirt and tore it off to expose her shoulders and beige compression top. A few scars marked the skin of her sturdy arms, tanned as they were compared to her much paler collar bones – some from her wasteland childhood, others from combat. She lifted the hem of her shirt to glance at her side, which still hurt. That was only a few weeks ago, wasn’t it? Seemed like ages already.
The breeze and the sun felt good on her skin, and her boots came off too. Then after her boots, her pants. A minute later and she was laying on a patch of coarse sand to stare up at the clouds in some meager shade. She sucked in a full breath and found she could do so with less pain.
Gray’s mind drifted from one thing to another, but it eventually circled back to that brown figure in the dust with those blue eyes; the man almost twice her height and her lie as big as Fox itself.
It circled back around to that kiss.
“You’re fucked, you know that?” She frowned and closed her eyes. “Right fucked.”
Gray dozed off without realizing it. She woke up in the shadow of the canyon, and her watch told her that she’d been asleep for almost two hours. It was time to head back. As she shimmied her pants back on, she decided that kiss had saved them all. She still felt sorry for what she did to Kessler, but she had to. The idiot youngyear left her no choice. If he hadn’t shown up and panicked, then she might’ve been able to… to what?
* * *
Gray returned to camp, deciding that she couldn’t put off seeing Finch any longer. The med tent was such a miserable place, and she didn’t yet want to know what the sixth-year’s outlook was.
She ducked into the structure, passing the partition to the third bed on the left. Half covered by a cool, white sheet, Finch rested her head on a pillow and stared upwards. Her eyes were sharp, if distant—Gray’s heart sank, knowing that they hadn’t given her any morph.
“Hey.”
“They’re giving me four weeks.”
Four weeks. That was generous for a sixth-year.
“We’ll get a sider back in your hand in four weeks. How’s the arm?”
“Going to leave a nasty scar.”
“Nastier than Cooper’s?”
Finch looked away and cracked a faint smile.
That’s when Gray knelt down and touched Finch’s good arm. “You’re not getting released, alright? I promise. Harper and I are gonna make sure you make it back out there in one piece.”
The sixth-year nodded stiffly.
“You want anything to eat?”
“Just wanna sleep.”
“Would a little shine help?”
Finch gave her friend a telling look, and Gray nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
She bee-lined for Harrison’s tent, and when she was inside a small commotion had picked up. Though she couldn’t tell what it was, it sounded like it was coming from the quad. She wished the two corpsmen ahead of her in line would hurry up.
“One please, sir,” Gray said to the enormous, bearded officer.
Unceremoniously, he grabbed her friday and stuffed it away into a lockbox under the counter before holding a cup to to large keg behind him. The alcohol looked deceptively like water at the bottom of the metal tumbler, but already she could smell the difference. It would go down scalding.
But Gray collided with a body as she rounded the corner outside, and Finch’s “medicine” went splashing to the ground.
“No!” she hissed, watching helplessly as the liquor sank into the fabric of her fatigues. “Goddammit, you—“
But when she looked up, there was a familiar face there.
“Wesson!” Gray cried, throwing herself at him. “Wesson, you’re alive!”
“I… yeah, yeah I’m alive.”
He blinked like he’d lost a lot more than one night’s sleep.
“…Are you OK?”
“OK? Couldn’t be better. I’m, uh… getting promoted.”
* * *
“Weson’s what?”
“He’s getting his promo.”
“He’s going to lead brown toon?”
“I… I don’t know. I just… here.” Gray handed over the shine and Finch threw it back. “I’ll see what he has to say, but I don’t think he knows much himself and the man looks like he needs to sleep for a week anyways.”
“So do you.”
“I think something happened to him out there. He had this look in his eye.”
“…So do you.”
Gray snorted, turning away to hide the redness creeping up her cheeks. “Since when did you care what people’s eyes are doing?"
Just then, a medic stormed through the partition, and the corpsmen hanging around injured friends paused their conversations. He tapped a pencil against his clipboard.
“Alright, alright, everyone out! Y’all smell like shit, and its hot enough in here without the extra bodies crowding around. Come back tomorrow!”
Gray was suddenly glad for the order to vacate. Finch laughed bitterly as she left.
* * *
Wesson sat on a crate, nursing his own cup of shine as Gray and Harper were enjoying seconds. He’d given them all his last remaining fridays, because officers didn’t need them. Officers were paid.
“It all happened so fast,” he said, sounding breathless just from recalling the fight. “We… we were ducked down when the charges went off, and barely had any time to get our bearings before you all started shooting over our heads. The ‘Naks didn’t even realize most of us were there. They rushed right by, heading for the rest of the corpsmen.
“I took a few down, their backs aren’t armored at all. But as soon as they saw muzzle flash, they were on us. I was all ready to get out and join you, but I twisted my foot, fell, and hit my head. Next thing I know, sun’s coming up.”
Wesson turned his head so they could see the purple lump above his ear. No wonder he looked like he couldn’t even remember his enlistment number.
“Holy shit.” Harper shook his head in disbelief. “Of all the times to forget your helmet!”
“Some blue foxer found me, sorted me out, and once I got some water I was told to get to work with salvage. The captain only wanted ninth-years.”
Wesson took a drink and sighed. His tired eyes had been fixed on the ground this entire time.
“And?”
“Huh?”
“What’d you find?”
“Oh, uh…” He took another drink then frowned, realizing his cup was empty. “Nothing, really. The usual. Guns, ammo. Looted the bodies. Acquisition’s packing it all up now.”
That was indeed the usual. There wasn’t much to loot from a ‘Nak, most of them rarely had anything approaching personal possessions. Some of the gear was personalized in some way, either from embellishment or repair, but Protocol demanded that all “raw materials” were to be sent back to Alpine for processing, including body armor. Camps were allowed to keep half of the munitions spoils.
“What was in the trucks?”
Wesson frowned, looking troubled. “Nothing. There was nothing.”
As Gray watched him, Harper continued. “So what happens now? Are they sending you away?”
“I don’t think so. I think I’m filling Burke’s shoes until the Freedom Ceremony, then I’ll get transferred in the big shuffle.”
Camp Fox currently had fewer than a hundred ninth-years, but Wesson was still the logical choice for promo. He could recite the Manual line by line, the officers liked him, and he never strayed from Protocol. Moreover, he was one of the few who wanted to stay: the Corps was more than just a way out of bondship for him, it was his life.
“Anyways,” Wesson said, glancing at his watch, “They’re gonna ring the dinner bell soon. You guys should go get in line. I’m gonna head back to my cot and get some…”
But dirt crunched behind Gray and she turned to see the commander himself, flanked by a clerk and two captains. The seventh-year instinctively made herself smaller in their presence.
“Wesson?” said Hitch.
He snapped up. “Yes, sir?”
“You’ll come with us.”
“I-I was about to go lay down, sir, my head’s killing me.”
“We’ll get you a cody and a cold pack, son. You can sleep later. There’s a lot of work to do now.”
Wesson’s eyes flicked between Gray and Harper as he stood up.
“I’ll see you around,” he said. “Save me something to eat.”
“Don’t bother,” Hitch replied, eyeing the corpsmen squatting on the ground as he clapped a hand on Wesson’s shoulder. “You’re having an officer’s meal tonight. Hsen, go get his effects. He’ll be moved from the platoon tent as well.”
Hsen, the clerk, dipped his head. “Yes, sir.”
As the group disappeared down the road, Gray heard Hitch ask Wesson how he was feeling.
The pair of remaining corpsmen exchanged looks, mouths open. They sat like that for a beat, processing what they’d just seen.
“Another cup?”
“Fuckin’… yeah. I need another cup.”
-
@kisupure Nice misdirect with the opening Manual excerpt. I was partially expecting Gray to be promoted.
Also surprised that Gray reported the sentinel’s calling off the pursuit. It doesn’t incriminate her in any way, but it does put a spotlight on his loyalties.
Did . . . Gray rub one out after her stroll and before her nap?
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@nephilim Thank you so much! This is high praise
I’m really glad it’s coming together, it was a calico-quilt mess for a long time. Committing it to internet paper has helped me solidify a lot of ideas, and I was worried that it would still suffer from its hodge-podginess… but my worries are evidently unfounded!
Balancing the worldbuilding and “newspeak” of it all has been a real challenge, as I’ve gone off the deep end of that sort of thing for other projects before and its easy to lose sight of the story. I realized that this needs to be “just enough” - just different enough, just futuristic enough, just awful enough to carry the reader over into this feasible-if-you-squint version of our own timeline.
And I’m excited you discovered my weak spot for desert plant life!
@Nyx Thank you SO MUCH Nyx. I was told by someone else on another platform that the way I write is still very “purple”, and I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that… I guess I like to take a scalpel to my characters’ inner lives and that’s considered egregiously descriptive in the normal lit world. Oh well, I’m lucky that kink readers like that sort of thing! (I’ve started calling it “stylistic overwhelm”.) And hope you enjoy more weirdness coming from characters on both sides of the war here soon.
@Olo You keep calling stuff JUST before it happens LOL. Next chapter she’ll get a minute to herself…
And yeah, Gray’s turning out to be little jumpy. She doesn’t want anything to be about her. She’ll be uncomfortable being the protagonist of her own story for a little while longer.
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@kisupure said in Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]:
@Nyx Thank you SO MUCH Nyx. I was told by someone else on another platform that the way I write is still very “purple”,
Christ. I must be maroon or something, then.
No; I love how you slice, dice, dissect the characters’ inner worlds. Don’t stop it. Don’t ever stop it. It’s a talent that’s woefully overlooked, I think. Too many people get praise for the heavy logistics of moving set pieces in a story (like Snyder); I would rather see their inner world, because painting that fearsomely, but believably, whilst still providing peripheral story and ongoing narrative without missing a beat? That’s talent.
I enjoy Gray and her inner musings. Don’t stop. I mean, entire literary empires have been erected on the inner-world premise ('hem, George RR Martin has entered the chat. And so does Stephen King of his older works, to be fair, we’re talking Lisey’s-Story-era).
Forget those idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
However;
I’m going to use that from now on: “stylistic overwhelm.” Love it.
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