Laniis Baker leaned against the railing on the picturesque walk overlooking the mountains, and the wind teased her hair against her cheeks and played over what little of her throat was exposed by her Fleet uniform. She felt that cold like a shock against the sliver of flesh beneath her chin, but the rest of her neck remained warm; unmoved.
Strange to trade one kind of collar for another. Some would have said that at least this one she could take off, but they would have been wrong. She was as chained to Fleet as she had been to a Chatcaavan Emperor’s hand, and it didn’t matter if she’d chosen that service. Her dedication to it had become compulsory, as unavoidable as an addict grasping for a bottle.
The petite Seersa ran her gloved finger over the railing, then began strolling alongside it, dragging her hand behind. The healers had noticed. There was no hiding it from them, particularly since she’d been delivered into their care demanding to be released back to duty. “There’s nothing wrong with my body,” she’d snarled to them. “So I’ve been dented a little, and had more unwanted sex than reasonable. But I’m not sick, and I’m not in need of a hospital, and I’m not done!”
Thinking back on it, Laniis sighed. She could have chosen a more measured response to her rescue. It might have gotten her further once the healers had realized she was right, and had no physical injuries they could reasonably treat.
If they’d wanted evidence of mental injuries, though, she’d delivered that over with confetti and cake.
The Seersa turned her back on the vista and headed for the nearest exit, boots making a reassuring thump with each footfall on the crete path. The sightseeing trail wound a significant distance around the gorge that bordered the northern outskirts of Terracentrus, where the city gave way to parkland and the inevitable skiing and skating resorts. She’d wandered some of those parks during previous years, though it would have taken dedication to get through a significant percentage of them; both the Alliance’s capitals had been purpose-built for their work, and their designers had wanted the natural beauty of their sites integrated with their architecture; as symbol, and as aspiration for the new federation they’d been creating. Thus, Heliocentrus, in the southern hemisphere of Selnor, hosted the Alliance’s capital in winter amid the tropical lushness of a city curved around its pearly beaches and turquoise waters… and Terracentrus, in the northern hemisphere, welcomed the governance of the Alliance in summer, to the temperate loveliness of its mountain climate.
Terracentrus was also Fleet’s unofficial home away from space. The service might conduct most of its administration from the orbital station, but the first Fleet Academe campus had been established in Terracentrus, as well as the first Fleet hospital, and that had unavoidably shaped some of its culture. Which was why Laniis loved Terracentrus in winter. When the capital shifted to Heliocentrus, and took with it most of its excess population, Terracentrus felt almost like a Fleet town. The ratio of uniforms to mufti was far higher in any given crowd, and in some places you would have been lucky to see a civilian at all. The exceptions were the touristy areas, like the one she was in now… but then, she’d chosen to come here for just that reason. To be surrounded by the people she’d sworn to protect when she’d taken her oath. To remind herself that no matter the confused knot her feelings had twisted into, the most overwhelming remained: “Not them. Never them.”
She slid her gloved hands into the pockets of her Fleet undress jacket and walked on.
Her debriefing hadn’t gone well. Or, more specifically, the part that mattered most to her hadn’t. The part where she reported what had happened to her had gone fine. She hadn’t minded talking about it because it was over. When they’d started asking after her impressions of the political situation, and how the Ambassador had changed it… that part she’d even enjoyed—because as painful as it was to rake those memories over, analysis interested her, and she was proud that she’d gleaned so much from her knees. She knew the Ambassador hadn’t escaped with them, since he hadn’t been on the transport, and while she couldn’t say with certainty why he was missing, she could guess. “If he’s internalized their mindset and worldview… and I think he has… then he’s staying because throwing what he’s done in their face might impress them.”
“Or get him killed?” the woman had asked her, ears flicking back.
“Or that,” Laniis allowed. “But if he doesn’t die, then… who knows what he might achieve?”
But it was near the end, where they’d begun evaluating her fitness for duty, that she’d started bristling, obviously and literally, so that she’d taken to smoothing the fur down on her arms throughout that interview. She hadn’t realized that a debrief would involve members of the medical corps, and she hadn’t appreciated being cornered. And then there had been the part about mandatory counseling!
“Mandatory counseling with whom?” she asked, trying not to bare her teeth. “You have someone on staff with experience relevant to mine? Enough to give me useful advice?”
No, that had not been her smartest move. After walking a few hours, she could even admit that she was maybe moodier and more prone to outbursts than usual, but… wasn’t that normal? She’d gone through terrible things. She knew she’d be working through them for a long time. But she didn’t feel broken or sick. Just… overwhelmed. Hiding from her life wouldn’t fix that, though. If she holed up in her room at her sister’s house, she would dwell on everything that had happened to her, and then she’d really be a mess.
“What do you want?” the kindly Tam-illee with the Fleet medical patch had asked her.
“I want,” she’d said, “to go back to work.”
But leaving, she was depressingly aware that other people had the power to decide whether she returned to duty or not, and it felt far too much like being in the harem again. Did it matter whether the people controlling her life were doing it for her own good or for more sinister reasons? In the end, she remained powerless.
She took walks. A lot of walks. Her reflection in the windows of Terracentrus’s downtown shops, silver with dark blue and black, blended with the crowds with their more variegated palettes. She liked joining the river of people there, watching them do normal things. It was cold enough that the fried donut she bought from a cart came in a heatfoil, and she was grateful because she removed her gloves to eat and the wrapper kept her fingers warm. She also licked them, her breath puffing out over her bared knuckles, and the sugar and cinnamon heated her tongue.
Despite her agitation, she liked wandering the Fleet district as well; the area near the Academe was rife with parks and small collections of shops and housing, swirling up a hill toward the hospital complex. That, she avoided. But near the base of the hill there were pubs and stores frequented by people in uniform who weren’t examining her for signs of erratic behavior. Once in a while she had a drink at Blue Smoke, which was still haunted by the Academe staff, just as it had been when she’d been a cadet. She remembered sneaking into it to ambush one of her instructors; the memory made her smile.
She toured the Apron, the area around the port that had somehow become a boutique shopping area, dense with tourists even in winter. Sitting at a café table outside, drinking hot cocoa, she’d watched the rising glint of ships heading for orbit, their noise muffled to a distant purr by the sound baffles erected around the runways and launch pads.
The resorts and the deep parks she skipped though. Being alone with her thoughts felt like an invitation to ruminate endlessly over whether Fleet would reinstate her or remand her to medical care. She preferred to go where people were; to see the quintessential Alliance, here, in one of the seats of its power. The dragons had had chains and whips and ships. But their dominion paled against the diversity and vibrancy of the Pelted. So many minds, Laniis mused, walking yet again. So many ways of seeing things. So many people, so different, pulling together. How could the Chatcaava possibly equal it?
The answer was ‘they couldn’t.’ And as with so many bullies confronted with beautiful things they couldn’t create, their reflexive response was to destroy those things, or try to make them theirs by force.
Laniis bared her teeth, glancing up at the bright alpine sky, and the orbital infrastructure hidden behind its arc. Well. Let them try.
Months of abuse at the hands of apex predators had left Laniis hypervigilant, but even so she almost missed the man who was following her. He was excellent; since he was human, she guessed he was a loan from one of the Terran military services, which would explain his skills. She didn’t question that he was on her side; those months in the harem had also made her exquisitely sensitive to aggression and volatility. Did the medical personnel think she was erratic? They should take notes from her one day.
She trusted her instincts, so the next time she saw him sitting on a bench, she joined him.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” he said. “Nice catch.”
“Thanks.” She glanced at him: light brown skin with dark curls, cropped, and eyes the color of whiskey, deceptively mild given the intellect and discipline she could sense in the way he held his body. “So why are you following me…?”
He offered his palm. “Montie Dawson. Currently in Special Forces.”
“A loaner,” she guessed, covering it.
“Right.” He smiled crookedly. “And I’m not surveilling you for our mighty superiors.”
Some tension she hadn’t realized had been precipitating a headache eased. Laniis touched the back of her neck. “I’m glad to hear that. But if you haven’t been assigned to tail me, why are you?”
“How do you feel about coffee?”
Laniis flipped her ears back. “I… like hot drinks?”
Dawson stood. “I’m buying.”
With a shrug, Laniis rose. “Well, then… lead the way.”
For a human Dawson could have been taller. As it was, Laniis would have found it difficult to describe him to someone else. Brown skin, dark hair, brown eyes, medium height? No wonder he’d ended up in Special Forces. Maybe he’d been some kind of intelligence agent for Terra prior to accepting his Fleet commission. He could also move, when he chose, and without ever looking hurried. She hastened to remain abreast of him, and to look like it wasn’t costing her any effort.
He noticed, she guessed, because he slowed down. Either that, or he’d decided on their coffee shop. Maybe. She followed him into the exterior glass elevator of the building he’d selected, and out of it onto a wide skirt of flexglass. It became a pedestrian skybridge that connected this tower to the one adjacent, but the landing had been built out into a balcony of significant size, and the shops on the floor opened onto it. Montie wandered halfway around the building to another intersection, this one a skybridge with a crossbridge at its center, creating a stunning central plaza floating hundreds of feet above the ground: one with a fountain that recircled its water from transparent panels under each bridge, so that she could watch the water bubbling under her feet, distorting the view of the ground.
That was where they had their coffee; at a table snug against the rail of that plaza, overlooking the skyscrapers and the port, and the distant mountains. The foot traffic was constant, using the bridges, or stopping at the fountain to patronize one of the carts there. The mocha, Laniis thought, was good. The mille-feuille was better. But the view…
“It’s something else, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Laniis agreed. Her companion had bought a cup of coffee—black—and a blueberry muffin. “So. Dawson—Lieutenant? Lieutenant Commander?”
“Alet’s fine,” he said, grinning. “We’re not on duty.”
“I noticed,” Laniis muttered, and pushed her fork through the pastry.
“You want to go back.”
She looked up.
Dawson had his hands wrapped casually around his cup, warming his fingers. His eyes were sober.
“Yes,” she blurted. “What’s it to you? And how do you even know…”
“Who you are?” He shrugged and pulled a piece off the muffin. “Scuttlebutt is alive and well. You should be aware of that much, at least.”
“Yes, but—”
“However,” he said, unhurried, “I was on the other end of the communications with the Ambassador. My partner and I were the ones who heard him report you were with him… and who searched for what possible missing Fleet officer could be described as a Seersa, ‘soot points on argent.’” He smiled wryly. “Eldritch.”
“Yes!” Laniis blurted, stunned. And, ears sagging. “He mentioned me.”
“He wanted us to know you’d been found, yes,” Dawson said. “It’s how we knew to expect you, coming off that ship.”
“Is he…”
“Still alive?” Dawson cocked a brow at her, nodded at her expression. “As far as we know. For now.”
Her shoulders slumped and she stared into her mocha, watching the steam distort her perception of its surface. Speaker-singer. What would he do now? So completely alone? And the Slave Queen… she’d done so much to abet the escape. Would the Chatcaava discover her part in it? Would they punish her for it?
How long could either of them survive?
Laniis ran her hand over her mouth, sighed out shudderingly. “Sorry. I was just… thinking. They’re in so much danger. And I’m…”
“Not?”
“I’m here,” she said. “When I should be doing something to make sure what happened to me can’t ever happen again. Except… before I can do that I have to somehow convince a bunch of people who’ve never so much as torn the corners of their uniforms that I’m not disabled…!” She grimaced. “I… I’m sorry. I probably just convinced you I’m crazy.”
“You don’t sound crazy to me.” He drank, and at her stare, said, “It’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Because I thought you might want someone to talk to about it.”
“I’m tired of being asked to talk about what happened to me—”
He held up a hand. “I don’t mean about that. I mean about being stuck here. Feeling like you’ve been benched for no good reason. Feeling like you should be ashamed of surviving and still being on your own two feet instead of being crippled.”
Laniis gaped at him.
“I’m not saying there aren’t people who come home too messed up to get by,” Dawson continued, unruffled. “That’s normal too. That’s life. But a lot of us get smacked up by the job and the last thing we want is to be told we can’t hack it anymore.” His smile was mostly teeth. “That would be one of those situations where they’re trying to tell us how we feel, which I hear is against their religion.”
“You… you believe me?” Laniis whispered.
“I’ve been there. A lot of us have. I just wanted you to know that coping on the go is a legitimate way of working through your experiences.” His eyes were somber, and in them… she saw scars. Scars that he had learned to live with. “Maybe later you’ll want to talk it through with someone. You should be open to that. But sometimes you need to work things out your own way, and in the company of people you trust. And if you don’t trust the medical personnel here, then… you’re better off not letting them crawl around your psyche.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust them,” Laniis protested, even though she wasn’t sure she did. “It’s just… I don’t feel… like they’re looking at me and seeing a person. They’re seeing a problem about to explode. A walking case file. A victim. And maybe I am all those things, but I’m not done.” She thought about that and sighed. “That’s really the issue. I’m not done with the Empire. They made the first move, and I lost that fight. But if I give up now, then they’ll have won forever. And I’m not done.”
And Dawson… Dawson said only: “I get it.”
Speaker-Singer… how she had needed to hear that. Someone understood what she was going through. Someone had been through it themselves. Laniis looked down at her pastry and realized it was still there, waiting to be eaten, and renewed her assault on it.
“I want to send them a message,” she said suddenly.
“Who’s them?”
Memory now of orange eyes, gentle and alien and unfathomable and yet… “The Ambassador, and the Slave Queen of the Chatcaava. She was helping him. She helped with our escape.” She looked at him. “If you were involved with the initial communication with the Ambassador, then… you would be able to get them a new message. Wouldn’t you?”
“Possibly,” Dawson said. “But I don’t know how much traffic is getting through. You think a message like that would add anything?”
“Yes. And they deserve it. In fact…” She trailed off. “See if anyone else from the rescue wants to record something too.”
Dawson was studying her with interest now. Somehow he’d finished his entire muffin; when, Laniis didn’t know. The conversation hadn’t seemed that long. “You want to send a thank-you card to an alien slave.”
“Yes.” When he paused, she said, “I… there are reasons—”
“Are there?” He shook his head and said, “No, you don’t have to tell me. Sometimes you go with your gut, and this… this is one of those wild cards that might come to nothing, or might flip some switch we need flipped. So… yes. Record your message. Keep in mind it might be read.”
“I know.”
He nodded. “Then get me that when you’re done. And… if you want my advice?” At her enthusiastic nod, he finished, “Don’t be so angry at the headshrinkers.”
“I am angry, though,” she muttered. “I’m… I’m angry a lot more than I used to be.”
“Enough that it’s seeping into everything?”
“No.” That she knew for certain. “Just more than I used to be. And I’m sad too, sometimes, though not as often as I’m angry. Mostly I feel…” What? “Frantic. Like I’m trapped. Again. Like they won’t let me fight.”
Dawson mmmed. “You remember what you were like as a cadet?”
That made her laugh. “A little?”
“Channel that wet-behind-the-ears girl. It’ll offset some of the moodiness. Your goal, alet, is to get them comfortable with releasing you, and for that you have to stop acting like you’re desperate for the fight.” His smile was sardonic. “At home that would have gotten you back on the horse. Here… it makes them nervous.”
“It had better stop making them nervous,” Laniis said. “Because when the Chatcaava come over the border, they’re not going to be impressed by talk.”
His glance then was considering. “We know that. You need to start thinking of it as your job to convince them. And by that I don’t mean yelling at them.”
Laniis sighed and looked glumly at her mocha before having a sip. “And if I don’t know the first thing about persuading them I’m not crazy, and the Chatcaava are?”
“Then,” Dawson said, “You listen to this sneaky human spy while he tells you how it’s done.” His eyes flicked to her plate. “You going to destroy that or eat it? I’m getting a refill and if you’d prefer something less messy…”
“Life’s messy,” Laniis said, and attacked the pastry again. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
That, it turned out, was one of the more astonishing coffee dates she’d ever had, but she cherished it—not just for the advice, which she was determined to put to use immediately but because… during it, she realized she had been admitted to a circle of people she hadn’t guessed existed, and held themselves apart: the veterans who’d seen action, and lived through things even their fellows in uniform might not have. That she might be one of those people, and still be able to hold her head up and keep fighting—that those people might recognize and respect her—meant so much to her. She couldn’t have described how much. But that acceptance softened the edges of her anger, and brightened the suffusive blanket of her depression, and it made it possible for her to see the blessings in her situation. She even managed to put some of the human’s suggestions into action, bridling her impatience and her fears that she was missing something on the border, something that needed her experience and expertise to turn the tide.
As… a survivor.
“Some of you Pelted like to talk about the warrior spirit,” Dawson had said over their third cups of coffee. “That’s fair. Some of us like to too. But what we really are, you and I and everyone else in this war… are soldiers. That means something different to everyone, but to me it means—among other things—we’ve got one another’s backs. That if we fall down in the field, we help one another up. You go out there, alet, and you look for that. You help your fellow soldier up, and you lean on him when you’re hit. You do that, and you’ll find healing. Not in war, because violence doesn’t heal. But in your brothers- and sisters-in-arms. And that’s a healing you’ll never be able to explain, except to someone who’s been through it.”
She had mused on that before asking, “What other things?”
“That we don’t do this for the glory of it, but because we want to keep the predators at bay.”
That had sent a shiver down her spine, for the rightness of it, and given her the discipline, and the hope, to wait. In that spirit, she made her recording. Dawson told her later that listening to it had helped convince her superiors to put her back in the saddle; that the deep knowledge of the situation revealed by it, and the fact that she’d suggested the other rescued citizens add their thank-yous, had demonstrated that she was too valuable to leave on the sidelines, and that she had the emotional maturity to manage herself.
Laniis didn’t know about that. She only knew that she meant every word of it. Especially the offer she’d made at the end.
Especially the offer.
Another walk, this time to the port. There was a ship waiting for her in orbit… a Special Forces hold. Not Dawson’s, but good people, people used to stitching their way through the dark spaces on the border. The wind tugged at her uniform skirt, but this time she didn’t mind the slightness of the cold under her chin. She’d chosen this collar, this duty, and this fight. It was time to get back to it.
If this can be gotten to her. I'll assume the best, so please, Ambassador, pass this recording to her.
Mistress, I wanted you to know that I am well. I came home expecting... I don't know. Everything to be different. And it was, of course it was. But the important things were all the same. My family was still alive and they were so glad to see me. They thought I would never come home again.
I'll never forget the Empire, and that's not a good thing. That wasn't a surprise. But I don't think I'll ever forget you, and I'm glad. You made it bearable. Not only that, you made my escape possible. You and the Ambassador. I'll be forever grateful.
When we made the escape, Fleet Intelligence made it known that any kind of escape by any citizen from the Empire was a "broken parachute" situation—one where you could expect only failure and death. Because of the two of you, Fleet Intelligence has upgraded that to "possible landing," which means... well, that anyone captured by the Empire can expect the possibility of release. Just the two of you together: you made that possible.
I guess I just wanted to thank you, to let you know what your company and your help meant to me. And if you ever need me—I hope you'll find some way to reach me. I know how things there are for women, but I have faith. And until that day, I wish you well. More than well. I wish you all the best, in whatever way is possible to you.