On that hard farming world you took responsibility for everything. It was the first step in making things right when the fields flooded in winter. Or fixing things without a spare part for several parsecs. There wasn’t anyone else to blame in the nine nearest systems.
“Are you dead?” she’d outright asked in the darkness that surrounded them. Because… maybe he was. Maybe she was that much of a failure. “Lopez…”
Maybe… maybe he was.
“Nah,” Lopez said after a moment. “But I might as well be. Sergeant ain’t supposed to come back without his men. Legion don’t like that.”
Maybe all of this was her fault. Even this part.
“We don’t know…” she said after a moment of thinking what to say and how to say it. “Anything.”
But what she really meant was, We don’t know if Beers is dead. Not for sure.
“I already lost Cave and Lightspeed,” Lopez said, his voice a croaking whisper. “Speed’s vitals grayed out during the ambush. So he’s dead. I looked over and saw Cave got his head blown off by a high-powered blaster at close range. Musta been from one of the ground-floor shooters.” He coughed. “Was an ambush. Plain and simple. Led us right into it. Fell for it like a damn basic.”
He didn’t say anything after that. Because what could you say? And she felt the same as Lopez. Going over everything she’d done only confirmed that she’d done everything wrong.
That brief conversation had been followed by long hours of darkness and thinking in which each of them judged themselves with little pity or mercy. Reviewed their actions as leaders and found them wanting.
Now she was being dragged down a tight brick corridor barely illuminated by wan light sources. She was surrounded by masked pros, working fast and efficiently to get her hustled down the dingy hall. In a small room at its end, she was ener-chained to a chair and blinded by a massive, hot, white spotlight.
“What were you doing over Detron yesterday?” asked Mean Eyes. She recognized his voice. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything but the bright white light. Couldn’t shield her eyes. Wanted to desperately, but could only look down where the glare was a little less. Then she could see the dark silhouettes of the masked figures all around her. The telltale outline of their blasters at the ready.
“Where?” she asked weakly, acting a little worse off than she already felt. Maybe that would buy her something.
A solid backhand sent her head to one side. Her ears rang and that side of her face felt numb. She could taste blood in her mouth and her heart was suddenly running like a drive motivator on jump.
It felt like she’d been hit with a chunk of wood rather than a hand.
Perhaps she had.
“You’re not regular marine combat infantry. You’re not an officer. We spotted your SLIC come down on the rooftop above our ambush. So what were you doing over Detron, Sergeant?”
“Medic,” she tried.
Silence. Mean Eyes laughed, but no one else did. It was a graveyard chuckle. She could hear the soft scrape of his hard boots as he walked around her inside the tiny bare room. His glove made a leathery rasp as he pulled it off. Then another.
“Medic, huh? Operating off what was clearly not a medical SLIC with no med bot on board. Or even a crew chief. Or the standard one-door gunner. And we take you with an N-18 slung around your back. But that’s what you want to go with for this round? Medic?”
She nodded and spat out a raspy “Yeah” like some gambler who was going to play her hand confidently, despite how bad it really was.
“Round two, then,” muttered Mean Eyes, and she was hit again. Except this time the blow smashed down on her shoulder and it felt like her whole spine on that side had suddenly been dislocated. The blow knocked her senseless and rang every pain center her body had never told her she’d had.
“By the way… Sergeant Almond… there are only ten rounds. Round ten… I tire of your evasions and blow your head off. Sooooo… I’d think more about cute answers real hard before I use all that E-and-E gibberish they tell you works. It doesn’t. Everybody talks. In the end, every… body… talks. Copy?”
She wanted to cry. Right then and there. And she hated herself because she wanted to. People in the room probably thought the brief look of contempt and disgust that crossed her face was for them and Mean Eyes. But it wasn’t.
Don’t be weak, Amanda, said her dad’s voice. Don’t be weak when they’re strong. We’re descended from the first colonists on this world. We came here with nothin’. And we made somethin’ outta nothin’. They can’t take that away from you. From us. We’ll always be free, Manda. Even when we ain’t. Copy, little girl?
And hearing his voice in her head… well, that made her want to cry even more. One tear escaped, and there was nothing she could do to prevent its jailbreak from her eye.
Mean Eyes leaned in close.
“There’s no shame in it, Sergeant Almond. No shame at all. Believe me… I understand.”
She shook her head and ginned up her old self. What her dad used to call her stubborn look. And sometimes her “up to your own ways, Manda Panda, ain’t you?” look.
“Going forward,” continued Mean Eyes in an almost grandfatherly tone, “I want you to know there’s no shame if you want to cry. I’m going to hurt you in order to find out everything I need to. And when you start to scream… or when you beg me to stop… or even when you cry, Sergeant Almond… there’s no shame. I understand. So you just go ahead and cry and scream and beg for mercy if you have to, okay?”
And then…
“Third round, Sergeant.”
The blow landed on the other shoulder.
“Seven left to go. What were your orders as a Reaper?”
31
Rechs was moving swiftly through the surging
