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Dec. 27th, 2024 10:04 pmIf Rayne had any exciting, dramatic ideas about fighting the patrol squad after his move with the door — any fantasy of escaping into the endless tunnels of Eros — it’s over the instant the Earther’s fist makes contact with his face.
Their trainers emphasized one thing, over and over again: anyone who is raised on Earth is stronger than you. It doesn’t make you inferior. But they have lifted three times the weight from the moment they were born, every instant of every day, and even your training in high-gravity environments and your mandated resistance work and your centrifuge time as a child won’t make up the difference.
So the Martian fighting style is all about avoiding contact from the enemy. About using angular momentum to increase the force of your hits, and decrease the force of theirs. Weapons with longer reach, and curves. And, eventually, the peak of Martian engineering, the weapon that could reform as you wielded it.
The weapon that’s buried in the wall, very very far out of reach, and currently useless to Rayne.
He has no time to dodge or make the hit a glancing blow. He just sees a flicker of moment and then he’s on the floor, straining for breath, a throb of pain spreading from cheekbone to nose. No memory of the hit itself or of the fall to the ground. Reflex has him reaching out to push himself up —
“Don’t fucking move!”
And Rayne freezes. Goes limp and still, hands out, compliant. He is surrounded by soldiers who are stronger than him, who have weapons trained on him, and he’s pretty sure he just got a minor concussion. There’s no point in fighting.
“I surrender!” He says it as clearly as he can. Has to spit it, a little, because his nose has started running blood. Then there are hands on him, twisting his arms behind his back, tightening a ligature of some kind around his wrists.
It’s not the time to fight anymore. It’s the time to survive.
Their team apparently splits up, most of them breaking off to search for the remaining Martians in the tunnels. Rayne is held at gunpoint, ordered to freeze and stay still, and shoved onto his stomach as the blood from his nose pools on the ground. Radios go off. Orders are issued.
The few that have Rayne at gunpoint are joined by others, different uniforms, dark blue instead of dark green. Rayne tentatively identifies them as military police. Probably, he thinks, because the military police are the only ones with actual facilities to deal with people who are captured or imprisoned. He can’t imagine anyone expected to find a Martian on Eros. Certainly not one in uniform, an official combatant, under a command structure, entitled (in theory) to the full measure of rights accorded to military prisoners under the Geneva Convention.
Someone takes a fistful of his uniform at his back and hauls him to his feet, nudges him forward. “Go,” a Marine says, beside him. “Do exactly as we say and we won’t shoot you.”
“You get that?” A shove from behind him almost takes him off his feet.
“I surrender,” is all Rayne says, in return. Seems like they’re not sure he speaks English?
They hustle him past a scene of soldiers rushing back and forth, teams assembling, shouted orders. They all look so young — they’re shorter than Rayne and thicker, like they have too much baby fat. If he doesn’t miss his mark, most of them are under a quarter century. They stop to gape at him like a zoo animal, him and his dripping nose and his red uniform. He keeps his head down, and follows the nudges from his minder. Corridor to elevator to corridor. Level HH, section 4. Shuttered stores to the left and right, an emptied marketplace.
They make it to a little jail. Probably a local drunk tank, taken over by the military police when the Earthers moved on in. In an antechamber, three hold guns on him (guns, honestly; are they really going to risk a breach in here?) and two of them spread out his arms, palpate every part of the jacket, pat down his sides, his front, between his shoulder blades and at the small of his back. One takes the reed from his ear, the spare rations, the multitool, while the other even grasps his genitals through his trousers and shifts them, nudging every spare inch of space. They take everything. Boots are undone and added to the pile, and then fingers reach up his trouser cuffs and skim his calf. He keeps still, gazing ahead, trying not to startle or shift. Or betray any of the violation inherent in his body being no longer his own.
There’s a fierce debate over whether or not to actually let him keep wearing the uniform, which itself has functions that can help in situations where, say, all the air abruptly leaves a room, or things get really cold.
Eventually, the argument is resolved: apparently he gets to keep the jacket, or it’s just too much trouble to remove with the current restraint situation.
He’s taken to a cell — a lockup, with a metal low-grav toilet and a concrete shelf for a bunk, without padding. And he is shoved down, very particularly, onto the floor, against the wall. His shoulders are wrenched, and his hands are now only distantly throbbing, which doesn’t bode well. The blood from his nose has dripped down onto his uniform, probably smearing all over his face.
One of them shoulders into the cell with a full set of cuffs. Gets them on Rayne’s wrists, and attached to a metal loop protruding from the wall close to the floor, near Rayne’s lower back. Then he snaps off the… zip tie? Whatever had been holding Rayne’s wrists together.
He doesn’t make a sound, biting down on the inside of his lip as the blood rushes back into his hands. Don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight. He compliantly curls himself into a ball, taking up as little space as possible.
Ankles weighted down too, with shackles. How dangerous do they think he is?
“Let the Colonel know he’s secured.”
“Sir!” And the shuffling sound of soldiers moving aside, saluting.
Rayne looks up.
The man who steps inside is younger than Rayne expects, but perhaps older than Rayne himself. Lighter-skinned than most Martians, and with rare, honey-blond hair, cropped in short curls. Army uniform, not Navy — dark green, two rows of buttons down the front. He catches a glimpse of the double-globe on the shoulder. Colonel’s insignia? He tries to remember, but he can only think of the naval ones, simple bars.
Rayne awkwardly cants his shoulder forward, using it to wipe some of the blood off his face. A little dignity would be nice, when facing the commanding officer of the enemy forces, but, hey, apparently that’s asking a lot. Worse: moving his head makes the world swoop and tilt around him, like Eros has gone into combat maneuvers. He fights the accompanying nausea, swallowing saliva gone unpleasantly coppery. The blood has pooled at the back of his throat, not pulled down by the low Eros gravity.
The officer turns back to the MPs. “Gauze.” It’s an order — one word, and the guy’s taken command of the room completely. Rayne feels microscopic in comparison.
“Med kit,” one of the MPs says to another, “by the desk.”
“You speak English?” the probably-colonel asks, as one of the MPs goes to fetch. On Rayne’s frown, he persists: “Francais? Arbaah?” — mangling the pronunciation of the last, of course. That’s not even what Martian Arabic is called. “Call a translator,” he tells one of the other MPs.
Rayne lifts his chin in a negative gesture, remembers that Earthers don’t get that, and carefully shakes his head instead. The most minute back-and-forth motion, and somehow even a motion as small as that sort of makes the world smear before his eyes. He’s not going to play games like this; he couldn’t keep it up. He doesn’t want a translator. He wants control. “English is fine.”
“Conversational fluent?” asks the man.
“Good enough.” Of course conversationally fluent; he’s even academically fluent. His dissertation was in English. Rayne knows the way he speaks is accented, and wishes he knew exactly what it sounded like to them.
The first MP is back with the gauze. With it, the colonel approaches Rayne. Carefully but smoothly, but not like Rayne’s a rabid animal but like the colonel doesn’t want to make him feel too trapped. ‘Careful’ looks natural on him.
“Easy,” he says, apparently seeing Rayne tensing up before Rayne even felt it. “Name, rank, and identification number, soldier.”
That musical voice makes gooseflesh erupt all along Rayne’s skin. The colonel commands like it’s a reasonable inevitability, like Rayne would want to obey. Rayne’s not fond of that command-voice being turned on him, and he’s even less fond of being touched, after that search. But he has no say in the matter. One hand presses gauze to Rayne’s nose; the other cradles the back of his skull, gently maneuvering him.
He tucks away the petty impulse to bite the hand wielding the bandage. Lets himself be maneuvered, but also makes sure to hack up an aesthetically displeasing clot of blood, coughing it out of his throat like a cat with a hairball. He spits it to the side, and is rewarded with a brief look of disgust from his stupidly charismatic caretaker.
“Rayne,” he says. “Derek. Major. N190989MC.” His voice is raspy. Enemy captors are entitled to that much. If only for the sake of future prisoner exchanges.
The thought, and the implications of that thought, make his blood run abruptly frigid. Holy shit. Holy fuck, he’s been captured. He’s out of the fight unless he escapes, but he’s probably not going to escape, he’s headed for a prisoner of war camp on Earth or Luna and maybe a tiny shot at being sent back to Mars in an exchange, in how long? He’s gone from command of an elite unit to a total lack of control over his fate in an instant.
Makes him feel like he did before the war even started.
“You a marine?” asks the commander. Behind him, one of the MPs ducks out, no doubt to run the name. One disadvantage of being the guys that are rebelling: there’s all these citizenship records that Earth still has.
Rayne snorts. Winces, because of the blooming bruise across his face. Flattering, to be mistaken for a that kind of combat specialist. Was it the knife throw? Probably was the knife throw. It was pretty badass.
“Take that as a no.” A shift of his hand on Rayne’s skull, and somehow he’s directed Rayne’s gaze straight at him. Electric, and terrifying. Angilo’s eyes are a remarkable grey-blue, like Earth’s ocean, or its sky. The color of blue that shrouds infinity. Rayne’s wrists shift aimlessly against the shackles. “I’m Colonel Alessandro Angilo. Want to tell me what a Martian officer is doing on Eros?”
He’s trying to be a good captive, really, but the look he shoots Angilo is totally involuntary, and pure are-you-fucking-kidding-me. Is this interrogation? Is this supposed to make him want to open up?
“One-time offer,” says Angilo. “You surrendered. If you come clean, and work with our forces, you can have restored UN citizenship. Guaranteed place to live, on Earth. Basic living stipend.”
He says this like it’s a good offer. Like Rayne would actually want an excuse to ditch the Martian rebellion. Like Rayne never saw the ships coming down over Mars Prime. Never saw the Earthers opening fire on the crowd. Like Rayne didn’t join this of his own free will, and like Rayne doesn’t want to see it through to its bitter, bloody end.
Rayne twists his head, shaking off Angilo’s hands. Even though there’s still a trickle of blood coming from his nose. Quite sincerely, he responds, “Go fuck yourself.”
Angilo’s expression flickers, cycling through something Rayne can’t identify. It’s not the condescending disappointment he’d expected; the Colonel’s reaction is more complicated than that. It eventually settles on something like bemusement, puzzlement. And maybe a little regret, though Rayne could be imagining that.
He should regret. Angilo blew it, making his offer so fast. Not exactly a trained interrogator, is he? You’re supposed to start off with little requests, little concessions. Someone skilled enough never would have let Rayne draw that line in the sand.
“Get a medic in here,” he says to one of the MPs. To Rayne: “How dizzy are you right now? Can you name the Secretary-General?”
Rayne tries for a smile and ends up somewhere closer to baring his teeth. “The Prime Councilor,” he says, “is Tegg Ritchie.”
“Traitor,” snarls one of the soldiers, surging forward. Someone young, new to fighting, because he too-easily lets his fellows block the way, back him down. Rayne doesn’t even afford the speaker a glance. Whoever he is, he doesn’t matter. Angilo is in charge. Angilo matters.
Angilo doesn’t speak. He’s busy returning Rayne’s examination in full measure. An unnamed, tense emotion thrashes in the pit of Rayne’s stomach. It’s Rayne who breaks the gaze first.
“I’m Martian,” he tosses at the soldier who spoke.
“You’re human,” snaps the man back. “Humans are from Earth.”
He has a point. Human lungs can’t breathe the bitter, caustic emptiness in Mars’s atmosphere. Human bodies are soft, and full of water, and Earth is soft, and full of water. To people who grew up on Earth, Mars’ rebellion must seem a particularly vicious, violent way of cutting the umbilical cord.
No, umbilical cord isn’t the right metaphor. It’s what a Martian would say, because umbilical cords are meant to be cut; Martians might respect the origin-place of humanity, but they don’t want to be tied to it forever. What would an Earther say? Severing a vein, maybe. A limb. Earthers can’t imagine being parted from their precious blue-and-brown marble. Rayne might be made of the same water and salt brimming in Earth’s oceans, but his bones are iron and frozen dust. Pink-grey sunsets. Bleak, endless deserts, swallowing the unwary. Mars is sharp and dangerous, hostile and blooming with human color in all the wrong ways. Precious, fleeting, wrong ways.
Rayne can’t find a comeback. He wants to say something pointless and insulting, like: if you’re human, I don’t want to be. Something to cut them to the quick, something witty. But he can’t grasp for anything clever enough, and why is he antagonizing the people with all the guns? He needs to shut up, is what he needs. And hope they don’t leave him here when the algae goes off.
He burns with the urge to speak, but he silences himself.
Angilo watches him, another moment, then glances to the other soldiers. “ETA on the medic?”
Blood from Rayne’s nose slips ticklish down over his lips. Angilo’s eyes track the renewed bleeding, and Rayne resists the urge to swipe the blood away with his tongue.
Angilo releases a breath. He crouches in front of Rayne, and brushes the already-stained gauze over Rayne’s lips, dabbing the blood away. Rayne flinches, and then allows it, half turned away, tense as a wild animal. He tries to breathe in, through his nose, but it’s mostly blocked. Swelling, he thinks. Feels tight and painful and it throbs with his heartbeat.
Angilo is close enough that Rayne can see subtle lines at his eyes. Smile lines, not frown. Angilo’s real smile must be something lovely, Rayne thinks.
This is not something he wants to know about his enemy.
The medic rescues him. An Earth-military medic, not Red Cross, but Rayne will take what he can get. She shows no surprise at the fact that a fully uniformed Martian is chained in a drunk tank in front of her, asks no questions of Angilo or the other soldiers, just sets her kit down and kneels by Rayne, brushing Angilo aside.
“What do we have here.” This is not a question; it is a warning. She takes hold of Rayne’s head with impersonal and experienced hands, notes the angle of his nose. Makes him uncurl, briskly.
Rayne abruptly remembers wolves and jungle cats and how they show their bellies and throats. Which looks more like a surrender to an Earther? Tight in a ball, or open and exposed? For a Martian, the answer is easy: whichever makes you smaller.
“Broken,” she says. He looks sharp at her until he understands she means the nose. There’s a light shining in his eyes, and then something stuck in his ear. “Concussion. Slight; you’ll feel better soon.”
Oh, great, what a comfort.
Then she takes hold of his nose, and Rayne tenses in alarm. “On the count of three.” This is also a warning. “One,” and then she pops his nose back into place with a wrench that he feels from his forehead to the base of his skull.
He makes no noise, again. Maybe he should be proud of this: the stoic, arrogant Martian, in the crowd of captors. But, promptly ruining any dignity he might have gained from his toughness, he turns to the side and retches, swallowing against the heave in his throat, holding back the limited contents of his stomach. He does not vomit. He comes pretty close, but he does not vomit.
“Mother,” says Rayne, carefully, in English, ”fucker.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but Rayne feels, somehow, as though she approves of his reaction.
But she does feel all over his skull, and then, inevitably, her fingers brush just pass his hairline on the back of his neck. “The hell?” she murmurs, and shifts up to look.
And there it is. A purely Martian invention, the very simple interface that allows Rayne to connect with the khilik that he wields. He has some fuzzy idea that it was also used to help put his brain into a receptive hypnotic state when he was going through basic training.
Angilo’s caught a glimpse now.
“What is that?” Says someone, from behind him.
The way they stare, Rayne thinks, now doesn’t look so much like soldiers confronting an enemy combatant. More like Rayne is a victim.
Their trainers emphasized one thing, over and over again: anyone who is raised on Earth is stronger than you. It doesn’t make you inferior. But they have lifted three times the weight from the moment they were born, every instant of every day, and even your training in high-gravity environments and your mandated resistance work and your centrifuge time as a child won’t make up the difference.
So the Martian fighting style is all about avoiding contact from the enemy. About using angular momentum to increase the force of your hits, and decrease the force of theirs. Weapons with longer reach, and curves. And, eventually, the peak of Martian engineering, the weapon that could reform as you wielded it.
The weapon that’s buried in the wall, very very far out of reach, and currently useless to Rayne.
He has no time to dodge or make the hit a glancing blow. He just sees a flicker of moment and then he’s on the floor, straining for breath, a throb of pain spreading from cheekbone to nose. No memory of the hit itself or of the fall to the ground. Reflex has him reaching out to push himself up —
“Don’t fucking move!”
And Rayne freezes. Goes limp and still, hands out, compliant. He is surrounded by soldiers who are stronger than him, who have weapons trained on him, and he’s pretty sure he just got a minor concussion. There’s no point in fighting.
“I surrender!” He says it as clearly as he can. Has to spit it, a little, because his nose has started running blood. Then there are hands on him, twisting his arms behind his back, tightening a ligature of some kind around his wrists.
It’s not the time to fight anymore. It’s the time to survive.
Their team apparently splits up, most of them breaking off to search for the remaining Martians in the tunnels. Rayne is held at gunpoint, ordered to freeze and stay still, and shoved onto his stomach as the blood from his nose pools on the ground. Radios go off. Orders are issued.
The few that have Rayne at gunpoint are joined by others, different uniforms, dark blue instead of dark green. Rayne tentatively identifies them as military police. Probably, he thinks, because the military police are the only ones with actual facilities to deal with people who are captured or imprisoned. He can’t imagine anyone expected to find a Martian on Eros. Certainly not one in uniform, an official combatant, under a command structure, entitled (in theory) to the full measure of rights accorded to military prisoners under the Geneva Convention.
Someone takes a fistful of his uniform at his back and hauls him to his feet, nudges him forward. “Go,” a Marine says, beside him. “Do exactly as we say and we won’t shoot you.”
“You get that?” A shove from behind him almost takes him off his feet.
“I surrender,” is all Rayne says, in return. Seems like they’re not sure he speaks English?
They hustle him past a scene of soldiers rushing back and forth, teams assembling, shouted orders. They all look so young — they’re shorter than Rayne and thicker, like they have too much baby fat. If he doesn’t miss his mark, most of them are under a quarter century. They stop to gape at him like a zoo animal, him and his dripping nose and his red uniform. He keeps his head down, and follows the nudges from his minder. Corridor to elevator to corridor. Level HH, section 4. Shuttered stores to the left and right, an emptied marketplace.
They make it to a little jail. Probably a local drunk tank, taken over by the military police when the Earthers moved on in. In an antechamber, three hold guns on him (guns, honestly; are they really going to risk a breach in here?) and two of them spread out his arms, palpate every part of the jacket, pat down his sides, his front, between his shoulder blades and at the small of his back. One takes the reed from his ear, the spare rations, the multitool, while the other even grasps his genitals through his trousers and shifts them, nudging every spare inch of space. They take everything. Boots are undone and added to the pile, and then fingers reach up his trouser cuffs and skim his calf. He keeps still, gazing ahead, trying not to startle or shift. Or betray any of the violation inherent in his body being no longer his own.
There’s a fierce debate over whether or not to actually let him keep wearing the uniform, which itself has functions that can help in situations where, say, all the air abruptly leaves a room, or things get really cold.
Eventually, the argument is resolved: apparently he gets to keep the jacket, or it’s just too much trouble to remove with the current restraint situation.
He’s taken to a cell — a lockup, with a metal low-grav toilet and a concrete shelf for a bunk, without padding. And he is shoved down, very particularly, onto the floor, against the wall. His shoulders are wrenched, and his hands are now only distantly throbbing, which doesn’t bode well. The blood from his nose has dripped down onto his uniform, probably smearing all over his face.
One of them shoulders into the cell with a full set of cuffs. Gets them on Rayne’s wrists, and attached to a metal loop protruding from the wall close to the floor, near Rayne’s lower back. Then he snaps off the… zip tie? Whatever had been holding Rayne’s wrists together.
He doesn’t make a sound, biting down on the inside of his lip as the blood rushes back into his hands. Don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight. He compliantly curls himself into a ball, taking up as little space as possible.
Ankles weighted down too, with shackles. How dangerous do they think he is?
“Let the Colonel know he’s secured.”
“Sir!” And the shuffling sound of soldiers moving aside, saluting.
Rayne looks up.
The man who steps inside is younger than Rayne expects, but perhaps older than Rayne himself. Lighter-skinned than most Martians, and with rare, honey-blond hair, cropped in short curls. Army uniform, not Navy — dark green, two rows of buttons down the front. He catches a glimpse of the double-globe on the shoulder. Colonel’s insignia? He tries to remember, but he can only think of the naval ones, simple bars.
Rayne awkwardly cants his shoulder forward, using it to wipe some of the blood off his face. A little dignity would be nice, when facing the commanding officer of the enemy forces, but, hey, apparently that’s asking a lot. Worse: moving his head makes the world swoop and tilt around him, like Eros has gone into combat maneuvers. He fights the accompanying nausea, swallowing saliva gone unpleasantly coppery. The blood has pooled at the back of his throat, not pulled down by the low Eros gravity.
The officer turns back to the MPs. “Gauze.” It’s an order — one word, and the guy’s taken command of the room completely. Rayne feels microscopic in comparison.
“Med kit,” one of the MPs says to another, “by the desk.”
“You speak English?” the probably-colonel asks, as one of the MPs goes to fetch. On Rayne’s frown, he persists: “Francais? Arbaah?” — mangling the pronunciation of the last, of course. That’s not even what Martian Arabic is called. “Call a translator,” he tells one of the other MPs.
Rayne lifts his chin in a negative gesture, remembers that Earthers don’t get that, and carefully shakes his head instead. The most minute back-and-forth motion, and somehow even a motion as small as that sort of makes the world smear before his eyes. He’s not going to play games like this; he couldn’t keep it up. He doesn’t want a translator. He wants control. “English is fine.”
“Conversational fluent?” asks the man.
“Good enough.” Of course conversationally fluent; he’s even academically fluent. His dissertation was in English. Rayne knows the way he speaks is accented, and wishes he knew exactly what it sounded like to them.
The first MP is back with the gauze. With it, the colonel approaches Rayne. Carefully but smoothly, but not like Rayne’s a rabid animal but like the colonel doesn’t want to make him feel too trapped. ‘Careful’ looks natural on him.
“Easy,” he says, apparently seeing Rayne tensing up before Rayne even felt it. “Name, rank, and identification number, soldier.”
That musical voice makes gooseflesh erupt all along Rayne’s skin. The colonel commands like it’s a reasonable inevitability, like Rayne would want to obey. Rayne’s not fond of that command-voice being turned on him, and he’s even less fond of being touched, after that search. But he has no say in the matter. One hand presses gauze to Rayne’s nose; the other cradles the back of his skull, gently maneuvering him.
He tucks away the petty impulse to bite the hand wielding the bandage. Lets himself be maneuvered, but also makes sure to hack up an aesthetically displeasing clot of blood, coughing it out of his throat like a cat with a hairball. He spits it to the side, and is rewarded with a brief look of disgust from his stupidly charismatic caretaker.
“Rayne,” he says. “Derek. Major. N190989MC.” His voice is raspy. Enemy captors are entitled to that much. If only for the sake of future prisoner exchanges.
The thought, and the implications of that thought, make his blood run abruptly frigid. Holy shit. Holy fuck, he’s been captured. He’s out of the fight unless he escapes, but he’s probably not going to escape, he’s headed for a prisoner of war camp on Earth or Luna and maybe a tiny shot at being sent back to Mars in an exchange, in how long? He’s gone from command of an elite unit to a total lack of control over his fate in an instant.
Makes him feel like he did before the war even started.
“You a marine?” asks the commander. Behind him, one of the MPs ducks out, no doubt to run the name. One disadvantage of being the guys that are rebelling: there’s all these citizenship records that Earth still has.
Rayne snorts. Winces, because of the blooming bruise across his face. Flattering, to be mistaken for a that kind of combat specialist. Was it the knife throw? Probably was the knife throw. It was pretty badass.
“Take that as a no.” A shift of his hand on Rayne’s skull, and somehow he’s directed Rayne’s gaze straight at him. Electric, and terrifying. Angilo’s eyes are a remarkable grey-blue, like Earth’s ocean, or its sky. The color of blue that shrouds infinity. Rayne’s wrists shift aimlessly against the shackles. “I’m Colonel Alessandro Angilo. Want to tell me what a Martian officer is doing on Eros?”
He’s trying to be a good captive, really, but the look he shoots Angilo is totally involuntary, and pure are-you-fucking-kidding-me. Is this interrogation? Is this supposed to make him want to open up?
“One-time offer,” says Angilo. “You surrendered. If you come clean, and work with our forces, you can have restored UN citizenship. Guaranteed place to live, on Earth. Basic living stipend.”
He says this like it’s a good offer. Like Rayne would actually want an excuse to ditch the Martian rebellion. Like Rayne never saw the ships coming down over Mars Prime. Never saw the Earthers opening fire on the crowd. Like Rayne didn’t join this of his own free will, and like Rayne doesn’t want to see it through to its bitter, bloody end.
Rayne twists his head, shaking off Angilo’s hands. Even though there’s still a trickle of blood coming from his nose. Quite sincerely, he responds, “Go fuck yourself.”
Angilo’s expression flickers, cycling through something Rayne can’t identify. It’s not the condescending disappointment he’d expected; the Colonel’s reaction is more complicated than that. It eventually settles on something like bemusement, puzzlement. And maybe a little regret, though Rayne could be imagining that.
He should regret. Angilo blew it, making his offer so fast. Not exactly a trained interrogator, is he? You’re supposed to start off with little requests, little concessions. Someone skilled enough never would have let Rayne draw that line in the sand.
“Get a medic in here,” he says to one of the MPs. To Rayne: “How dizzy are you right now? Can you name the Secretary-General?”
Rayne tries for a smile and ends up somewhere closer to baring his teeth. “The Prime Councilor,” he says, “is Tegg Ritchie.”
“Traitor,” snarls one of the soldiers, surging forward. Someone young, new to fighting, because he too-easily lets his fellows block the way, back him down. Rayne doesn’t even afford the speaker a glance. Whoever he is, he doesn’t matter. Angilo is in charge. Angilo matters.
Angilo doesn’t speak. He’s busy returning Rayne’s examination in full measure. An unnamed, tense emotion thrashes in the pit of Rayne’s stomach. It’s Rayne who breaks the gaze first.
“I’m Martian,” he tosses at the soldier who spoke.
“You’re human,” snaps the man back. “Humans are from Earth.”
He has a point. Human lungs can’t breathe the bitter, caustic emptiness in Mars’s atmosphere. Human bodies are soft, and full of water, and Earth is soft, and full of water. To people who grew up on Earth, Mars’ rebellion must seem a particularly vicious, violent way of cutting the umbilical cord.
No, umbilical cord isn’t the right metaphor. It’s what a Martian would say, because umbilical cords are meant to be cut; Martians might respect the origin-place of humanity, but they don’t want to be tied to it forever. What would an Earther say? Severing a vein, maybe. A limb. Earthers can’t imagine being parted from their precious blue-and-brown marble. Rayne might be made of the same water and salt brimming in Earth’s oceans, but his bones are iron and frozen dust. Pink-grey sunsets. Bleak, endless deserts, swallowing the unwary. Mars is sharp and dangerous, hostile and blooming with human color in all the wrong ways. Precious, fleeting, wrong ways.
Rayne can’t find a comeback. He wants to say something pointless and insulting, like: if you’re human, I don’t want to be. Something to cut them to the quick, something witty. But he can’t grasp for anything clever enough, and why is he antagonizing the people with all the guns? He needs to shut up, is what he needs. And hope they don’t leave him here when the algae goes off.
He burns with the urge to speak, but he silences himself.
Angilo watches him, another moment, then glances to the other soldiers. “ETA on the medic?”
Blood from Rayne’s nose slips ticklish down over his lips. Angilo’s eyes track the renewed bleeding, and Rayne resists the urge to swipe the blood away with his tongue.
Angilo releases a breath. He crouches in front of Rayne, and brushes the already-stained gauze over Rayne’s lips, dabbing the blood away. Rayne flinches, and then allows it, half turned away, tense as a wild animal. He tries to breathe in, through his nose, but it’s mostly blocked. Swelling, he thinks. Feels tight and painful and it throbs with his heartbeat.
Angilo is close enough that Rayne can see subtle lines at his eyes. Smile lines, not frown. Angilo’s real smile must be something lovely, Rayne thinks.
This is not something he wants to know about his enemy.
The medic rescues him. An Earth-military medic, not Red Cross, but Rayne will take what he can get. She shows no surprise at the fact that a fully uniformed Martian is chained in a drunk tank in front of her, asks no questions of Angilo or the other soldiers, just sets her kit down and kneels by Rayne, brushing Angilo aside.
“What do we have here.” This is not a question; it is a warning. She takes hold of Rayne’s head with impersonal and experienced hands, notes the angle of his nose. Makes him uncurl, briskly.
Rayne abruptly remembers wolves and jungle cats and how they show their bellies and throats. Which looks more like a surrender to an Earther? Tight in a ball, or open and exposed? For a Martian, the answer is easy: whichever makes you smaller.
“Broken,” she says. He looks sharp at her until he understands she means the nose. There’s a light shining in his eyes, and then something stuck in his ear. “Concussion. Slight; you’ll feel better soon.”
Oh, great, what a comfort.
Then she takes hold of his nose, and Rayne tenses in alarm. “On the count of three.” This is also a warning. “One,” and then she pops his nose back into place with a wrench that he feels from his forehead to the base of his skull.
He makes no noise, again. Maybe he should be proud of this: the stoic, arrogant Martian, in the crowd of captors. But, promptly ruining any dignity he might have gained from his toughness, he turns to the side and retches, swallowing against the heave in his throat, holding back the limited contents of his stomach. He does not vomit. He comes pretty close, but he does not vomit.
“Mother,” says Rayne, carefully, in English, ”fucker.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but Rayne feels, somehow, as though she approves of his reaction.
But she does feel all over his skull, and then, inevitably, her fingers brush just pass his hairline on the back of his neck. “The hell?” she murmurs, and shifts up to look.
And there it is. A purely Martian invention, the very simple interface that allows Rayne to connect with the khilik that he wields. He has some fuzzy idea that it was also used to help put his brain into a receptive hypnotic state when he was going through basic training.
Angilo’s caught a glimpse now.
“What is that?” Says someone, from behind him.
The way they stare, Rayne thinks, now doesn’t look so much like soldiers confronting an enemy combatant. More like Rayne is a victim.
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