Grimacing, Stanton screwed his eyes shut and slapped the palm of his left hand against his forehead. “It’s like, they’re pictures… they’re here, in my head, right behind my eyes, and when I talk about it, I see it. I smell it, and I can’t move, I can’t…”
“Stanton.” Trainer took her hand and gently pulled Stanton’s arm away from his face. She could feel him shake. “Captain, open your eyes, and look at me.” She waited until Stanton did and then she tightened her grip on his forearm. She had to appeal to honor and duty; she had to inject the sense of his importance into his psyche like a hallucinogenic drug. Manipulative? Of course, but this was civil war.
“Stop.” She drilled him with a look. “Stop. This. Right now. You understand me? You pilot a goddamn Zeus. You’re a warrior. Shakes or not, you’ve been trained to do a job, and, by God, you’re going to do it. Because we need you, Captain. You can’t afford the luxury of withdrawing from the fight.”
“Luxury.” Stanton’s chin quivered, and she saw the shine of sudden tears in his eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?” he said, and she heard his shame. Stanton looked away, then seemed to remember the cigarette in his hand. He sucked greedily; the tip glowed hot red and, in another moment, twin streamers of blue-gray smoke jetted from his nostrils.
“Look,” said Stanton. He swung his head back, and she saw that while the tears were still there, he’d regained some of his self-control. Good, she thought. Got him crying. Halfway there. Now, got to pace this just right.
“I… ,” he said again, his voice clogged with emotion. “I don’t expect you to understand. But these were… are my friends, and the simple fact is that we’ve never been trained for… for this.”
“You’re a soldier.”
“Sure, but trained for a real war, not this! I haven’t been trained to fight, to… kill my friends, my… damn it,” he said, and now a single tear crawled down his left cheek. Stanton’s face was still grimy with black ash from the battlefield, and the tear left a solitary, white track. “That’s our sister regiment, the Golden Lions, out there. Doctor, I trained with some of them. I know who they… what their faces look like inside those machines. Those are people in there.”
Oh, my darling Jonathan, are you out there, are you safe? “We all know people, Captain,” said Trainer, keeping her voice as steady as she could. Focus, focus on the mission! Her heart felt as if a fist had grabbed hold and squeezed. “We all have friends… and now it’s hard, but they’ll kill us if we don’t kill them first. They’re the enemy.”
“But they’re not,” said Stanton. His lips were shivering so much that when he took another pull from his cigarette, the tip bobbled up and down. “They’re still the same people. It’s the damn politics that have changed, that’s all. This isn’t a war about principles; there’s nothing just about it. It’s simply killing.”
“And that’s why you froze?” Trainer asked, choosing another tack. They could discuss the illegitimacy of a civil war all day and, while she agreed, they’d get nowhere. “That’s why you ran? That’s why you left your infantrymen to fend for themselves?”
“I…” Stanton’s mouth opened but nothing more came. After a few seconds, he scrubbed his lips with the flat of his left hand. He looked away, but not before she saw the emotions chase across his face: fear, shame. Despair. “I’m tired,” he said, finally. “I want to be left alone for a little while. Please.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Please.” Stanton’s expression was fierce, and she saw that his left hand was fisted, the skin over his knuckles white from tension. “Just for a little while.” And then, in a low murmur: “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“And what have you done, Stanton?” When he didn’t respond, she touched his shoulder. He flinched. “What have you done?”
“No.” He seemed to shrivel into himself. “No, I can’t. Not… not now. I don’t,” he pressed his fists to his temples. “I don’t want to think!”
“About what?”
“No, please, can’t you leave me in peace? Please, just go away,” Stanton whispered. His eyes snapped shut then bugged open, as if he couldn’t stand what was in the darkness before his eyes. “Please.”
Trainer debated then pushed up from her chair. She felt as if she were very close to getting at the terrors bouncing around in Stanton’s mind. But while she had to wiggle into his head and twist his thoughts to serve the mission, she couldn’t afford to break him. “All right, Captain. But be very clear about this. My job is to get you back to duty, pronto. Yours is to fight. Everything else—love, friendship, compassion—is a secondary consideration. Hell, they’re not even on the damn list.”
They locked gazes for a few seconds. Then, Stanton said, “I was wrong about one thing. You know what I said before? About it being like hell?” He dropped his cigarette, then crushed the smoldering butt against the concrete floor with the heavy wedge of a MechWarrior boot. “It was worse.”
“Your hell’s inside you, Stanton, and you’ll beat it,” Trainer said, unsure if she believed this. “You’re going to go out there and fight… and you’re going to be fine.”
As she turned to go, Stanton said, “I want to ask you a question.”
She looked back. “Go ahead.”
“How can you do this?”
“Do what?”
“This.” Stanton looked around at the cots, the other
