SPECIAL FORCES
By
Unknown
Timeline: At New Pacifica
Author's E-Mail: =Unknown=
SPECIAL FORCES
Hollie Krieghauser looked up, the ankles of her regulation security boots crossed tight. The pre-fab walls of the detention center were neither cool nor warm, but were fairly slippery as she angled for a better glance at the security terminal. She couldn't see the image that flashed onto the screen, she only saw the chief's thick neck flex with the sound of the sensor. He gave the terminal his thumbprint, and Hollie a quick turn of his head as he rose to respond. Hollie sat steady behind the blue lasers of the perimeter bars.
The chief opened the sealed door onto the mild autumn air, a bittersweet smell of drying leaves, rotting pines, and perhaps, some were speculating, an unusually early first snowfall. Taking a step back, his heels produced a precise click against the wooden floor, newly-hewn and barely used. He held the door open with his free hand.
A needless glance to his watch told the chief she was eight minutes, 45 seconds late. In the three months they had become acquainted, the chief hadn't known the doctor to be eight minutes, 45 seconds late for anything.
Julia smiled. "Minor emergency in the Children's Ward." Hollie poked her chin up, trying to get a better listen. "If I had known my career would consist of scrapes and sprains, I would've done something else with my life." The doctor's eyebrows pricked from beneath her bangs.
The chief's mouth twitched. He wasn't quite as tall as Julia, with fairer skin and thinner hair. Twenty years in the military had dug him out of his debt. He could snap a civilian in half like a piece of low grade bi-mat.
His reply was another click of his heels and--if one was watching closely enough--a graze of his thumb along his pistol's shaft. That click turned him enough to let the doctor crowd past. The toes of her boots were stained red from the clay ridges bordering the Martins', while her hair circled the collarbone of a shirt whose sleeves gathered just above the muscles of her forearms; one couldn't tell if the last vestiges of the Stations had been shaken off months or years ago. Hollie's attire was not dissimilar to that of the doctor's; her regulation wardrobe had been stripped some months ago, save for her tiny boots, and replaced by standard garb.
The women's gazes burst like the meeting of sharp tips of metal.
"Knock when you're through," the chief said.
"Thanks, Aaron."
The chief made a deliberate move with one hand, keying the private security channel on his gear. In the vestibule of the detention center- -one hand to the doorknob, one to his pistol, both eyes on Julia--he filled out to full magnitude, his small but taut arms and chest unmoving as the reef rocks that shored the sea. He awaited her response.
Julia sighed, swallowing hard the wrong words that had yet to penetrate thick skull and muscle, but accessed the same channel. The chief pulled the door shut behind him.
"So...." Julia said, unshouldering her med-bag. "How are you feeling?"
Hollie snorted against Julia's smile. It tossed her hair--thick black against her white workshirt--along the pre-fab all at her back. Loosened strands stuck to it. While her records estimated her age at close to 30, the inexhaustible stock of hair nature had yielded, hanging dark and wild past her breasts, set her looks back by nearly a decade.
"Terrific! I haven't had accommodations this nice since my cold sleep capsule." She didn't bother to indicated her windowless cell. Julia regretted that the only available pre-fabs had been intended for boxed structures. She wished Hollie had had at least one window to look out on the memorial plots, the flattened mounds flanked by anemones. It might have helped.
Julia fished her diaglove from her bag. On the opposite side of the perimeter bars, squatting some meters away, the doctor regarded her readouts, glove set on long-range scan. She had gotten burned twice on those lasers. Same hand. She was lucky she hadn't suffered irreparable damage.
Hollie had smirked.
"You're in excellent health," Julia concluded.
"Would it be juvenile to say 'told ya so'?"
"I thought some of your biological processes would have altered after spending some time here, but I was wrong."
"Well, this place is just full of firsts for *you*, isn't it, Dr. Heller?"
The doctor lowered her head, if only to deactivate her glove, and her bangs fell close to her cheeks. She pressed the strands behind her ears as she looked up at her patient. Hollie had very pale, very thick skin.
Julia sighed. "The colony ship is leaving in two days...."
"I'm packed. You?"
"Kris can't leave here...."
"Kristoffer will go home with me, Julia. That's the one thing this filthy planet can be damn sure of."
Julia could feel her voice harden in her throat. "I think you'd be making a mistake, Hollie. His tie to the planet...."
Hollie pinched up her voice. "'Oh, his tie to the *pla-net*!' 'Oh, his tie to the *crea-tures*!'"
"Hollie, this planet has forces that you know nothing about...."
"That *you* know nothing about!"
Julia felt her fingers tighten beneath their sheathing. "It's true, we don't have a full understanding of the changes the Syndrome children are experiencing, so I shouldn't have to explain to you...."
"Look, if you want to live here--go, do it, be my guest--be some dogood lackey field medic with sand in your shoes. And, hey, why not, right? I mean, it's not like you can go back...to the Stations*." Hollie gagged on a fake laugh. Julia flexed her jaw as much as she could. "Look, Julia--" Hollie dumped herself over the side of her cot, working her way hips-first to the edge of the cell. She squatted opposite the doctor, pushing her palms to the floor, and sighed through a sad smile. "You screwed up--and that's okay, it's only human--but, see, you *planned* on spending the rest of your life like this...."
Julia grinned. "No, Hollie...."
"So what's the difference if you spend it lapping up after the Council or Adair?" Hollie's smiled dripped, soupy and sweet, through the sharp lasers. She lopped her head to one side, and Julia could see clearly now the doubled-up patches of connective tissue stretching throat to shoulder. Her records said she had been struck with a separation pipe by another teen at a Eureastern colony. Some fragments remained. Julia suspected the Council had "rescued" the young woman not a moment too soon.
"Well, at least I don't feel I owe Devon something every time I tie my shoes." Hollie's smile closed until it wasn't. Julia munched her inner lip. Slow and soft as spring clouds, she said, "It's always something with them, isn't it?" The doctor nodded affirmation of her own question. "I think that's difficult for other people to understand. That they really can split your life into a million pieces if they want to." Hollie's lips fluttered against each other. She tipped her head to the other side in a quiet move. Similar markings. "So what was it this time? Your citizenship? Your post in the Guard?" Julia followed Hollie as she heaved up and walked off. She took a breath. "Kris's bills in the Ward...?"
Whatever scab the doctor picked open had finally oozed. Hollie snapped her pillow with the heel of her boot, sending it spinning straight for the perimeter bars. Instinctively, Julia put a hand out, recoiled, checked for damage.
Hollie smirked.
Julia packed and zipped her bag, her hand interwoven girlishly through the strap as she stood. She paused, dislodging a dry breath that had balled up in her throat. "Hollie....Why won't you just tell us who the planet contact is? Your mission--despite your vast efforts to believe otherwise--was not a success. We know there's an operative--we know *you're* an operative--and we know the other person must be close or your assignment would've been pointless. Just because we don't have a legal governing body to indict you doesn't mean you'll maintain that freedom once you've reached the Stations. You won't find a Council member sympathetic to your plight," she added dryly. "I doubt very much any of them will want to hear this tale when you arrive back at the Stations."
Hollie drew her head back as if to laugh. "You wanna know what I think?""Please."
"I think I'll have the Council's attention for at least a little while...."
"I agree...."
"Like when I tell the Special Force's Contingency that the information drop to the contact was even easier than they thought...."
"Which is redundant, since the Council's been monitoring us."
"And that the piggybacks that fried most of the colony ship's systems were very neatly downloaded into your own..."
"Oh, yeah. They'll be beside themselves with glee to hear we don't have full access to the library grids." She snorted. "Nothing that'll kill us." Julia wished now more than ever that Hollie had been afforded a window onto the cemetery, a work-in-progress she had gotten off to a very strong start.
"And that your precious little town--the entire existence of this *planet*!--is held together with cheap bits of poly-tac and bio-cord. And...."
"Hollie, you may not want to believe this, but your survival probability is considerably higher *here*. Not on the Stations. Kris's is non-existent off-planet, and if he *did* make it back to the Stations, how long do you think it would take before...."
Hollie's point was stated without a single word; her eyes punctuated the warning the doctor didn't need to hear twice. Julia had only seen that unusually vivid shade of blue in one other place: it was the disturbing color the sky imposed when the weather was about to turn. Until recently, Hollie hadn't even known she shared that color with another living thing.
Hollie would return to the Stations the day after tomorrow.
Julia rolled her lips tight. "Fine," she said, and disappeared into the vestibule.
What had she been expecting, anyway? A recant of Hollie's Council connections? An apology? A spirulina trail to where the contact was holed up? She had just spent the worse part of 20 minutes talking to a woman who--believing her son would die in transit--had randomly rigged a hospital ship's pods to fail. Still, Julia had come to expect more.
A few knocks and the door swung open, Aaron right behind it. To his surprise, Hollie was right where he'd left her, boots as straight and tall and clean as his ever were. Julia took a step back, Aaron squeezing past and into the corridor. The doctor snapped the door shut on the regurgitated air of the detention center.
Hollie smirked.
Outside, Julia stood ankle-high in the untrimmed outland, its grass dunes tumbling one over the other until they reached the sea. Pushing back a scrap of hair, she fought with some annoyance the autumn breezes that kicked up from the shore. Some unruly strands dragged through a crevice in her flesh; a minuscule cut on the tip of her finger was beginning to well. She would return immediately to the hospital on the other side of the colony, which--although only a tiny corner, on a very minor coastline, on the only landmass they had ever seen--it was the place they had carved out and built up as their home on the planet.
Which was held together by a lot more than poly-tac and bio-cord, even if Hollie Krieghauser would never see it.
-The End-
This text file was ran through PERL script made by Andy. Original text file is available in Andy's Earth 2 Fan Fiction Archive.