Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]

[Olo]

@kisupure I just realized this means that Rice is just a good ol’ farm boy.

[Kisupure]

PART 2

They sat like that for a few long, long minutes before Gray’s tears dried and she felt empty and stiff.

“How did they find out?” Rice asked quietly, thumb stroking her back.

She didn’t say anything for a while because it still felt so far away, now, and if she wasn’t careful then she could almost start to feel like it had never happened at all. Part of her wanted to know what the board said. She checked her watch, had to remind herself that no one was coming to relieve her of her post. This was no post. There was no relief. She shivered.

“Let’s get away from him.” Gray swallowed and looked over to the dead man.

Rice nodded and stood up.

“We’ll walk.”

They walked. In what direction, Gray wasn’t sure, but she told him how it all went down. How he had missed his tracks up on the ridge, how they knew the wound he’d inflicted. How they found his single shell casing.

Then she told him about Kessler, the corpsman from all those months before, and about Wesson beating her. Rice stopped and knelt.

“You never told me you cracked a rib,” he scowled, jerking up her shirt to get a look at the purple, heel-shaped bruise for himself .

Gray winced hard as he gingerly felt the swelling with his fingertips. “It wasn’t this bad the first time.”

“Here.” The giant reached into a pouch at his belt and produced a small pink pill, which he set down on a flat rock. With his tac knife he carefully cut it in half, and handed her both.

“Take one now, the other at sundown.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just follow me. I’ll walk slow.”

They continued. For hours, it seemed like, though at least the pill had kicked in. Rice let Gray take sips of water from the mouthpiece on his shoulder strap, and he let her take his kaffiyeh when they baked in the afternoon sun.

When back out in the open, a pair of wastelanders came up on the horizon at a beating gallop, and the two had to fling themselves behind a rock and some brush to keep from being seen. Gray suspected that the Anak had to do that a lot out here.

Eventually, as the afternoon wore on, Gray began to recognize where they were.

It was the same dry riverbed, the same road where they had planned their ambush. As they came up on the ridge, the view was unmistakable. And there, about 150 yards down the slope, was where the charges had gone off. The pave-mint was cracked and buckled, blackened from char and gunpowder. The place had been picked over, but there were still pieces of metal flung this way and that, the ground still littered with shells.

Gray looked to the giant. “Why are we here?”

His face was harder than it was before, and he scowled deeply before setting off down the embankment. “C’mon.”

She followed for the sheer morbid curiosity of it. The human had no idea what Rice had in mind to show her here of all places, but she remembered Wesson. Maybe he did see something.

They picked their way close to where the charges had been placed, and Rice lit a smokestick as he simply stood and surveyed the scene, distantly rueful. He’d done this before, hadn’t he? Here? He looked over the old wreckage as if he’d been back to visit several times before.

“Look. What do you see?”

Gray scanned the ground. What was she looking for?

“I see junk,” she murmured.

“No. Look.”

And that’s when she saw it.

Peeking out from the sand beside a rock was something round and sun-bleached. As she stepped closer, Gray realized that it was a skull.

A human skull.

Quickly she fell to her knees in the dirt and pulled it up to brush it off.

Something in her still stung from earlier and Gray turned to face him with narrow eyes, emboldened by the pill he’d given her.

“There was a fight here a month ago. Why wouldn’t there be bones?”

“You’re angry, not stupid,” he said with that kind of authority he reserved for his own kind. “Think, Gray. You corpsmen weren’t anywhere near the road. My men were here. I’m not fuckin’ lying to you.”

Grudgingly, she remembered and frowned. When she turned and opened her mouth to say something, Rice spoke from where he now sat on a boulder, looking uncharacteristically tired. She noticed a spray of old blood on the rock behind his calf.

“Those explosives killed 27 humans that night. That’s all we had in those transports. You thought it was weapons, or scrap metal, or something else that would have been of use to you, but all you did was blow up a few dozen people instead. That old man only got it half-right: we don’t literally eat humans, Gray, we farm you for genes. Food we can get anywhere; but it’s good genes that keep us alive. The masters we’re all made from were damaged a long time ago.”

Gray felt like the wind had been knocked from her, again. She could only imagine so much, think so much. But maybe it was better this way; maybe it was all exactly as simple as he made it out to be. What was a gene, anyway? She knew that they had something to do with why children looked like their parents, and could inherit things from them like a good build or bad skin. But he was talking about something else, something much more esoteric. Still, part of what he was saying didn’t quite make sense to her.

“I thought clones didn’t have to worry about any of that?”

“Genes mutate, degrade over time. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but they’re like the Corps manual. Every time one of us is made, we get our own manual, written by hand, copied from a copy of a copy. I’m the 402nd copy of a human man who was once named Elliot Anders Rice. He died in 2067 at the age of 44, in an Algo pairing facility. He was one of the eight original humans that the Algo cloned us all from. All us ‘Naks.”

Gray gently returned the broken skull to the soil, and a blustery wind picked up from the south. She watched it kick up clouds of dust, scatter dry leaves and bits of scorched cloth. A small lizard darted to the top of a rock to give a dominance display.

“Were you… gonna pair with me?” she asked.

Rice smiled bitterly as he flicked some ash into the wind. “No. And we don’t get to pick them anyway… you’re matched to a genetic line. And then sent to to a facility to be used to administer gene therapy for a few years. You’re fed, watered, clothed, just like the Corps. But it’s not a life. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Is it better than being in the Corps?”

The enormous man looked at her, holding her gaze as he took a last long drag of his smoke before tossing it away.

“Nothing’s better than anything else here,” he said quietly. “’Nak or human, free or bound. Only way out is to get out.”

Emotion welled up in her as she decided he was, indeed, telling the truth, and had been the whole time. Part of her wanted to cross the small distance to bury her face in his side and be received by his embrace, but it seemed naive and childish. So she hugged herself instead.

“Rice, I’m sorry about what I said… I… Earning my freedom meant so much to me, I’d do anything to get it.” Gray swallowed. “I thought it was real.”

He looked uncomfortable with those words hanging in the air. “It is real. Just not in the Southland.”

“Then I have to leave.”

For the first time since they met, she seemed to catch him truly off-guard, and he looked at her with something that wasn’t even there when she had asked him to kill her.

“Fuckin’… what? And go where?”

“Anywhere.” Gray stood up. “And you’re coming with me.”

“No.”

“You want to stay here? You want to keep fighting over nothing? Killing your own over nothing? You’re a bond too, you know.”

He stood and let the silence crackle between them.

A very harsh gust kicked up suddenly, and she shielded her eyes from the blowing dust. When she opened them again, she noticed dark clouds on the southern horizon.

The rains.

“I guess summer’s over,” Gray murmured, staring at the clouds. They looked like they were bubbling up from the earth in the far distance. That’s how they always came, every year. Ominously.

Rice was quiet though, quiet and still, and when she looked up she saw his cutting eyes were fixed not to the south, but to the east, towards the hills. It quickly became obvious what he was staring at: high in the air and slowly arcing down toward the ground on a thread of smoke, was the bright green light of a signal flare. Her heart skipped a beat.

“Fox,” Gray whispered.

Rice cursed loudly and had a warlike look about him, like he’d been roused from a daze.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “You know, don’t you?”

“They weren’t supposed to start yet!” the giant growled at the sight. “I was supposed to have 24 hours!”

“24 hours? Rice what the f—!“

“I don’t plan attacks, Gray, I see them through. Last night I was told Camp Fox had 24 hours. Then you happened, and I saw an opportunity to make it look like brigs got to you before we did. I would have you on the road and be back in time for… the offensive. But it looks like they want Fox wiped off the map before it starts raining.”

Fighting in the mud and the rain was miserable, and it made guns jam up faster.

“I was going to tell you.”

He grabbed her by the arm with one massive hand and dragged her into something resembling a sprint. It didn’t take long for the little human to stumble on the uneven ground, and Rice only slowed just enough to hoist her up onto his back for her to cling to him and his ruck. Then he took off at a breakneck pace through the rocks.

The corpsman hadn’t said anything more, but when they were underway he must’ve sensed what she wanted to ask.

“320 brownbands,” he said, panting. “Against 1100 corpsmen.”

Rice slowed to a jog, then stopped altogether. Gray wondered if he was winded, but the way he rested his hands on his knees painted a different picture.

“I tried to stop it,” he muttered. “I fucking tried, Gray, you have to believe me. I over-reported your numbers, your battle readiness… But someone else must have reported the real intel from under me. Another Rice.”

Another Rice.

“This is my section!” he continued, yelling in the direction of the flare, which was now being carried by the winds. “And I have another five goddamn years here!”

She slipped off and Gray looked to him, then to the hills, and took off at her own jog.

“Where are you going?” he snapped.

“I need to see it,” she called. “One last time!”

[Kisupure]

I’m doing it, folks. I’ve officially decided to pay money for an editor for this dumb story. Mostly just to see what the editing process is like, but also because I just want to treat myself? (Yeah, I have a weird definition of “treat”.)

I’ll keep yall posted.

This is the end of the “open beta”, though. There’s still probably one more chapter left, and it’s a doozy, but I figure this is a good enough cliffhanger for now.

[Olo]

@kisupure

“Distract him by dropping trou, Finch. You know the drill.”

[Olo]

@kisupure

So not so much Soylent Green as Midsommar.

[Kisupure]

Part 3

“No you don’t.”

Rice had her by the arm before she could get far. Gray struggled, tried peeling his fingers off of her, but he was not letting go.

“Rice!”

“It won’t help anything! You’ll just get yourself killed.”

Gray watched the flare smoke disappear with the next gust, and she sat down. Rice soon joined her. They stared at the hills together in the late afternoon sun, shining like polished brass against a backdrop of rosy mountains.

“Why?” Gray said after a while. “Why now?”

“I don’t know. I’m just told to make these things happen, never told why.”

The wind blew dust in her eyes and she squinted.

“What do we do now?”

It felt so strange to remember, over and over, that there was nowhere she had to be, no scheduled duties, no ruck. The emptiness scared her, and Gray suddenly found herself desperate for something to do. But camp getting wiped from the map right before her eyes, the horror of it, wanted to chain her to the rock.

“We should go. C’mon.”

Hesitation.

“Gray.”

She let herself be led away, and together they headed north-west, into unfamiliar hills and a few miles afield from the firefight raging on in the embrace of the mountains.

/* /* /*

It was some hours before they found the spring, deep in a narrow cleft in the foothills, and by then the human was exhausted. It wasn’t much more than a muddy spot on the ground, but when he dug away at the dirt a puddle formed, which he bent forward to drink from.

Gray had to sit and catch her breath. Her skin radiated heat in a dangerous way, and the earth was still too warm to lay on. But Rice had a remedy: at the top of a pile of sand, he pulled aside a thick shrub to reveal an opening in the rock. It was just tall enough for a human, and the giant had to stoop to fit.

“It’s cooler in here,” he said. “Can you walk?”

Barely. Gray nodded, and made her slow way up to him just inside. Rice crouched and produced a small flashlight so that they could peer into the darkness. After confirming that there were no recent signs of habitation, he instructed her to strip and lay on the ground.

“You’re sunsick,” he said. “I’ll get you water. Keep talking to me, don’t fall asleep.”

He left quickly, tearing off his gear as he went.

She looked around a little, and even in this state she noticed this cave was more of a uniform tunnel. “What is this place?” Her voice was weak.

“It’s a prospector’s mine,” he called out to her from the puddle outside. “There’s a handful of them in the area, much older than the war. There’s even one further up the canyon with a mine cart still in it. It’s remote, though, and I need a rope to get there.”

“That explains it.”

It was a familiar sort of space, and she recognized it from the several years of her own childhood spent deep underground looking for bits of phosphorus or titanium, working by candlelight because the company was too cheap for electricity. She could tell that this was an old mine, though. The air was stale, and the dark had a watchfulness to it, like it had long since been reclaimed by the earth and taken on life beyond the hands of its maker.

“Explains what?”

She looked down into the inky blackness of the passage, listening to her breath. It mesmerized her, and she stared until colors started to swirl in her eyes.

“Gray? You still with me?”

“Yeah.”

Rice came up and knelt beside her, a looming shadow that was becoming all-too familiar. He pressed the mouthpiece of his water bladder to her lips and she drank deeply.

/* /* /*

That was where they fell asleep together, splayed on his bedroll with nothing on between them but her underwear and their skin barely touching for the sticky heat.

At some point in the night they were woken by the sound of thunder, lightning falling across their bodies in harsh, brief silhouette. They laid in silence as the rain came in shortly after, and when they woke up the next morning, it was still coming down. The gulch outside had transformed into a rushing stream overnight, brown with silt.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked.

Rice sat just inside of the mouth of the tunnel, gazing at the rain. He was out of smokes.

“It’s better to go north than east,” he rumbled. “East of the mountains gets so hot you won’t last half a day without water.”

“Are you coming with me?”

Rice studied her feet for a little while before turning his blue eyes back outside.

“I’ll take you as far as the pass at the Rocks. I’ll make sure you get out safely. Someone probably wouldn’t mind a trained shot like you to bring up the rear of their—“

“You’re scared, aren’t you?”

He thought for a moment before rising, blocking the entrance with his bulk, and stepping out into the rain. Outside he stood, naked in the downpour, and turned his gaze upward toward the leaden sky.

“You smell that?” he called to her. “Who would’ve thought wet dirt and granite could smell so fucking nice. Come out here, the heat’s finally died down.”

Gray stepped out into the rain, skin turning to gooseflesh at the sensation. It was good, so, so good, and she couldn’t help but gawk up at the sky like he had, and open her mouth to catch some of the falling water. The muddy stream came up to her ankles, sluicing past them and disappearing down the edge of the lower rockfall, sounding far more torrential than it was. Her toes sank into mud.

Is this was it was like to have somebody? They made a strange pair, but the coarseness of his entire being, his body and thoughts and words, was not at odds with her. It wasn’t even his size, or his pheromone, or his razor-sharp senses that for now were occupied with marveling at the rain like a child. Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him. The world was home to humans for untold generations; Gray knew rain deep in her bones, but maybe Rice didn’t. He was an outsider, even the desert, and it could never be any other way.

The human kissed his hipbone. When he hoisted her up she wrapped her legs around his ribs and crushed them together, mouths tangling.

“Take me as far as you can.” Gray whispered it like a secret. “I’ll need your protection.”

When his hand moved under her, slipping aside the rain-soaked garment clinging to her core, the human sighed.

/* /* /*

It rained for the whole day, and by the end of it hunger gnawed at them both. The next morning Rice went out, scrambling up the side of the canyon to hunt for something where it was drier. He returned two hours later with nothing, and this had him on edge.

Gray had spent the prior evening tying their clothes together and washing them in the rain, stomping out the blood and sweat and replacing them with dark silt. When it was time to leave, they were dry.

Rice knelt with his pack, though, frowning at it.

“What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer, instead reaching in with one big hand and pulling out a slim black panel, attached to the top of which was the short antenna. He ripped cables out from it until it was free except for one: the earpiece. After getting one last look at it, he threw it into the darkness where it landed with a clatter.

“When they come looking for the transponder, I’d rather not be wearing it.”

The weather was good, sky dotted with clouds, and soon they were off again, headed north-west by game trail. When they came across a fat rattlesnake, Rice made quick work of it, stopping only once they reached some shade to clean and cook the kill over an alcohol stove no bigger than the palm of her hand, bite by bite. Gray could have eaten the whole thing, but after he passed her three large puffs of white meat, she assured him she was full, and silently he devoured the rest before continuing on their way.

It would have been much quicker to descend into the lowlands to make use of a road, but that way safety was only had in numbers or speed, and the pair had neither. After two days and precious little food, they came to the great swath of floodplain where it all began, the place where Fox called home for five years. The arroyo, nearly a mile wide, cut deep into the hills so that they had no choice but to cross it.

Rice surveyed the land in a new way, and Gray had to ask: “This isn’t your territory anymore, is it?”

“No. We’ll have to pass quickly or we’ll be noticed by the sentinel. In fact, he’s probably already looking for me. C’mon.”

He took a step, but something in the basin flashed with reflected sunlight, and she stopped him. Gray pointed, and he pulled out his binos.

“People,” he said, adjusting the focus dial. His eyes narrowed into them. “No… corpsmen. A dozen, maybe.”

Breath caught in Gray’s throat. “Can you see their colors? Are they Fox?”

“We’re too far away.” He put the instrument away and shouldered his ruck. “C’mon, we’ll be able to keep out of sight easy enough.”

“Keep out of sight?”

“They’re not your friends anymore, Gray. They will kill you.”

The trail they followed grew unacceptably steep and narrow, and the two found themselves climbing down the ridge and getting dirt down their sleeves. They worked their way to the floor of the arroyo carefully, as kicking up too much dust would give them away.

Once at the bottom, Rice covered his head of dark hair with the shade cloth, and after a wordless nod they darted out across the floodplain. But Gray’s curiosity got the better of her, the ache for old camaraderie, and they were a scant hundred yards away from the group of corpsmen when she caught Rice’s belt loop to him.

“What are you doing?” he hissed. “We have to move!”

“Give me your binos.”

“They won’t fit you.”

“I’ll look with one eye then.”

Gray held her breath as she propped the heavy pair of binoculars up on a rock and pressed one open eye to the lens. The angle wasn’t good, but it was enough, and she recoiled with a gasp. They were still too far away for her to read the lapels, but they were close enough for her to recognize faces.

“Holy shit,” she panted. “It’s brown toon. It’s…”

But a twig snapped somewhere and the giant shoved her to the dirt on instinct. Sider in hand he whirled around, and a few yards off, ducked down, was another familiar face.

Another Rice.

Wild-eyed, Gray looked him over. His hair was different; longer and pulled into a knot on his head. It didn’t appear that he shaved nearly as often either. And there was a jagged scar along his jaw.

“You’ve got gall coming here 402,” the strange Anak rasped, and lifted his own sider to meet them. Without otherwise moving, his scorching blue eyes darted to the human laying prone on the ground. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Gray, was it?” He chuckled quietly, and it was an ugly sound. “How’s Finch? She still Fox’s resident shark, or did she finally get her deathwish?”

Gray balled her hands into fists.

Rice’s face was a mask of silent fury, and she was surprised when he spoke with measured calm. “You pull that trigger and they’ll be all over us.”

“I’m aware of that. Which is why you’re going to come with me. If you do, I’ll even let the ‘yuman go.”

They stared each other down for a few very long moments.

“What’s it gonna be, Rice?”

[Kisupure]

Been banging out the modified ending this week after sitting on this since last year. It’s coming together!

[Olo]

@kisupure I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling, rising above and rendering trivial the human-nak conflict. I also really enjoy how the hardship afflicts Gray and Rice differently.

Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him.

This reminds me of a path-not-taken by the recent iteration of Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons are a very young civilization, and they look at humans with a weird mix of arrogance and deep insecurity. This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.

Of course, now I want to know how the new sentinel also knows the corpsmen by name. Has Rice been gossiping?

[Nyx]

@kisupure I’m very excited to see the continuation of this story! It has an excellent balance of sizey stuff and world-building/character development.

[Kisupure]

@olo

I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling

Than you! It’s a secret love letter to an area of California where I spent most of my life. And there are definitely some parts of San Bernardino that already look like a post-collapse desert wasteland lol, so it’s not hard to imagine. But for a fun fact, “the arroyo” is where JPL is currently located.

BSG was the first scifi series that felt really compelling to me, so it’s cool that you made that connection. It informs a lot of the stories I write about “things humanity makes” (and I write a lot of them/commentary about them in my non-kink creative life too!)

This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.

I was hoping for an “american classic” ending, the type employed by some of my favorite dystopia/warring cultures books (Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Ender’s Game, hell even Grapes of Wrath). Shoot for the moon and all that! Characters are doomed but there’s still a vague hope for something better that you never get to see.

Has Rice been gossiping?

Ahh I don’t think I made that clear enough then - they’ve come back to where Fox used to be, located in a section prowled by a different sentinel. He was watching them for years.

[Kisupure]

Part 4

“Think about what you’re doing.”

“I don’t need to.”

The other clone of Elliot Anders Rice was just like hers: quiet, clipped, and self-assured. In motion they both might’ve been unstoppable, and decidedly at rest, unmovable. Together they were a tangle of wills.

“You’re 386,” her Rice noticed. “How long do you have?”

“Another season.”

“Then why do you care if we live or die? Your service is almost done, you’ll be euthanized at the end of it. Let us go. Central won’t even know.”

“Because I’ve been alive long enough to come to get sentimental about things, 402. To like things. Want things. And I want to see the look on the your face when you get dragged away.”

The other sentinel shifted the slightest bit, which must’ve pushed the snake coiled at the base of the bush next to him into agitation. The sound of its rattle filled the air, and it was all the opening that Rice—R-402—needed.

The bullet tore through the other Anak’s neck, misting them both in a spray of red as he fell, gurgling and twitching for a moment before laying still. The snake elegantly fled.

There were shouts coming from the knot of corpsmen, but Rice spoke with only the slightest edge to his voice.

“That mistake cost him his life: ’Naks aren’t supposed to want things.”

“But you want things,” Gray said.

“Nobody’s perfect. C’mon!”

Rice rose to a crouch but Gray leaped up. She surprised herself when she stood between the Anak and three corpsmen quickly approaching with their guns drawn. Without thinking about it she already knew that running now would be a bad move. There was just not enough cover, not for hundreds of yards. But Rice seemed to think there was.

“Let’s go!” he said, looking as if he was prepared to physically move her.

“I’ll buy you time.”

“Buy me—!”

“Get down, there’s a ‘Nak behind you!” shouted one of the corpsmen.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

There was a change in their posture, she noticed, as they “blinked”; Corps slang for that moment one was confronted with something new and sudden, taking the brain a moment to reorient itself.

“Gray?”

“I said get down!”

“Harper, don’t shoot him!”

“It is you!”

There was no mistaking that dark skin gleaming in the sun and head of short, sculptured hair, and he pushed his way past his two companions to surge forward and envelop her in a crushing embrace.

“Where’s Finch?”

The question interrupted his happiness, and he didn’t hide the pain. “Finally got what she always wanted. Made sure to tell me she got six of ‘em on her way out.”

Gray knew exactly what those words meant. Their friend’s dark desire was so obvious that even the old sentinel could see it through a pair of binos. When Harper let her go, he produced Finch’s tags from a stained pocket, and she nodded.

After putting them away again like the precious things they were, he finally let his tense gaze drift upward to Rice, then downward to the body bled out onto the sand. The others quickly joined them, weapons raised, and Rice lifted his empty hands in the universal gesture of non-hostility.

“Gray,” the sentinel growled.

“Is he your… your prisoner?” Harper sniffed cautiously at the air. “Where’s the squeeze?”

“There is no squeeze.” She grabbed him by his tattered sleeves then, suddenly buzzing with wild energy. It was becoming clear, now, and Gray had to tell them as quickly as she could, before this perfect moment of strangeness ended. “He’s helping me get out of the Southland, Harper. It’s bullshit here, all of it. I’m going… going where I can get freedom without a mark. Please, you have to come with me." She turned to the other two now standing by, filthy and shocked. "All of you!”

But the report of a sider filled the air, its bullet finding flesh, and everyone ducked as Rice pitched, clutching his shoulder. They turned to see a lone captain staggering in their direction: Wesson.

[Olo]

@kisupure

Good for Finch.

Rice(-402) letting Wesson get the drop on him has got to hurt more than the round in his shoulder.

[Kisupure]

Part 5

“She’s a traitor!”

Gray set her jaw and knelt down to get a better look at the giant’s wound. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could be, bullets doing less damage to him than another human, but it was still painful, and Rice was starting to sweat from where he sat propped up on the ground.

The captain moved like he was drunk on shine, Gray noticed. As he drew near, there was something else that seemed odd about him; his uniform was cleaner than the others’.

“They’re fucking.”

“At least I wasn’t assaulting,” Rice panted with a smirk at the corner of his mouth.

“And you!” Wesson snarled, turning to the Anak with a strange combination of rage and dissociation in his voice. He seemed frustrated by the fact that the massive man wasn’t howling in pain. “You fucking started this all, you disgusting… You’re like animals, aren’t you? Go into heat and start rutting against anything that moves.”

He turned to her, and she could see it in his face: the effects of the sweet liquor. He took a step closer. “You sold us out, you lying, traitorous whore.”

Gray’s first impulse was to deny him, to explain how Rice had gone out of his way to try and prevent this…

But Wesson, shaking, did the miraculous thing: sider pointed at nothing, he reached into his pocket to grab the flask again, fumbling one-handed with the screw cap. Gray’s eyes narrowed.

“You’ve been drunk this whole time, haven’t you?”

Wesson was torn between getting his next fix and winning the argument with her, but in this state, it was looking like he wouldn’t get far with either. He cursed under his breath and in a moment of brave indignance she snatched the flask from him.

“Let me help you with that, sir.”

Gray opened it and poured its contents out onto the ground. Wesson cursed again, loudly this time, as she threw the flask away.

“You didn’t fight at all, did you?” She turned to the gathered corpsmen. “How many of you saw him?” No one answered. “How many of you saw this scumbag fire a single shot or lead a single man?”

“I was there,” he growled.

“Where were you, cap?”

“I was there!”

“You were cowering in the mud, I can see it on your uniform. You don’t deserve to call yourself a corpsman, Wesson, and you never did.”

The silence was deafening before it was interrupted by Rice’s slow, deep laugh.

“Shut up!” Wesson cried, and fired another sloppy shot into the sentinel’s leg. The giant grunted, hissing and biting back his pain. But she could see it in the cordage of his neck pulled tight as a tent skin and the sweat now dripping down his face. Gray was livid, the floodgates to weeks of grief and rage intoxicating her in a moment of unadulterated fury.

She tackled the captain to the ground. With the brass’ liquor in his veins, it was easy enough to take on the larger man and wrestle his weapon from him. In seconds she had his sider, and was pointing it with two shaking hands at his chest. The man under her fell still, and he stared at her with those cloudy blue eyes. Blinking.

Air sheared in and out of Gray’s nostrils, and sweat prickled at the nape of her neck. Her blood burned.

“Harper,” Wesson said. “Help me out here. You gonna let her do this? She betrayed me. Us."

Harper was silent.

“Douglas?” he tried.

Douglas was silent too.

“Somebody needs to get this goddamn dirty retrainee off me! That’s an order!”

Gray pressed the barrel of the sider to Wesson’s breastbone. “Tell them what retraining is.” He hesitated. “Tell them where you were sending me, you coward!”

He couldn’t and he wouldn’t. She looked him dead in the eye.

“It means being given to the Algo, doesn’t it? That’s where the good specimens go, isn’t it captain?” She turned to glance at the others. “I didn’t betray anybody, the Corps gave me to that sentinel!”

Taking her eyes off him had been a mistake, because he wrenched the gun back from her and pointed it right between her eyes. There was bloodlust on his face this time.

But Rice was quick with his uninjured arm, and Gray jumped at the louder gunshot. Spasming, Wesson fired a single shot into the air, missing Gray, before falling limp.

Quickly, she tended to Rice, whose injured arm and leg were held stiffly out before him.

“Do we have a medic?” she asked.

Harper shook his head. “No.”

She swore, and wiped the sweat from his wide brow. Their eyes met and he tried to get up. “What are you doing? You’re in no shape to walk you giant motherfucker.”

“Not the first time I’ve been shot,” he grunted. “And this one—“ He patted his oozing wound on the outside of his thigh. “—Was worth it.” Rice was able to get himself upright enough to balance on a rock and catch his breath. After a moment, he found his stash of little white pills and popped two.

Douglas was the first to interrupt. “Is it true, Gray?”

Another corpsman, a fifth-year named McGill, added: “Yeah, why would they do that? The ‘Naks, they…”

“Need humans,” Rice finished.

Gray swallowed. “Just like Corps needs an enemy.”

The group stood in silence for a while.

“We can’t stay,” Harper said, holstering his weapon. “When the battle turned, we were all told to rendezvous here, then shelter at Camp Jay until new orders came from Alpine.”

“We’ve been here since this morning but no one else has showed up. We’re not sure how long to wait.”

“Camp Jay is another ten miles west,” she said. “With injured it’ll take you two days to get there. And that’s if you’re not jumped.”

Harper sucked in a deep breath. Gray saw his shoulders stiffen then slump.

“Are you the ranking corpsman now?”

He nodded. “Come back over with us. There’s a bit more shade over there. The… sentinel can come too.”

Gray emptied Wesson’s pockets while Harper and McGill looted the dead Rice. She found a wad of fridays, some real money… and a pouch of tobacco. Douglas took his boots and she was about to stand up when she decided to grab his tags. Then, like the flask, she hurled them with all her might across the flats, and the last she saw of them was high in the air as they shone briefly in the sun. No one would know who this body once belonged to.

“C’mon, Gray.” Harper put his arm around her shoulders and turned to Rice. “Not that we can help, but can you walk?”

“I’ll get by.”

[Olo]

@kisupure It wouldn’t have played well with the corpsmen, but Gray deserved to take Wesson out.

[Kisupure]

@olo I knooow. But Rice was only doing what she’d asked him to do in the end.

In the other ending, she was actually going to have to confront Finch first, and kill her. But Wesson was always going be done in by the big guy.