Flash Fic Redux - Pale Warriors All

"Your presence is greatly appreciated, Jack," hummed Vudro. "This is not a situation which we have a great deal of experience with. And the potential...complications due to the patient's unique status are more than I care to think about."

Hartmeister nodded as he looked through the subject's service file. Several interesting facts stood out. "Vudro, I know it wasn't your doing, but could you tell me what the hell your brass was thinking? This guy shouldn't have been anywhere close to the front lines, let alone that far behind them."

"Situational expediency. The mission was hastily assembled, he had the requisite technical skills, so they detached him for temporary duty."

"The right man at the wrong time," Hartmeister sighed. "Don't expect miracles, old buddy."

"I will not object to a miracle should it occur," Vudro said with a thin smile. "But I will settle for a good start."

Nodding in understanding, Hartmeister rapped twice on the door of the subject's temporary quarters. "Tech Specialist Balve, may I come in?"

A brief pause, then a voice trilled softly. "Just you. Nobody else." Hartmeister glanced at Vudro, who in turn nodded and walked down the corridor. Once there was sufficient distance, Hartmeister opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him.

The bat-like Theolrai were prized as pilots and acoustic sensor technicians. Moreover, one in two hundred had a highly developed empathic ability. Unit cohesion and morale among the Theolrai were consistently high because of a policy which put those empaths into officer positions. Because of their evolutionary origins, they tended to sleep in the highest place in a room, often in a hammock or suspended bivy sack. Yet this room looked far more like something Hartmeister would expect in a human barracks or hospital room. A sleeping bag, flat on the floor. Improvised melee weapons close by and subtly hidden, unobtrusive to the untrained eye. A simple noisemaker near the door jamb to alert anybody sleeping. And sitting in the corner, opposite the doorway, sat Balve. It was the first time Hartmeister had seen a thousand-yard-stare on a Theolrai, and he felt oddly at ease.

"Mind if I sit down?" asked Hartmeister, pointing to the chair next to Balve. The Theolrai tech nodded, a slender arm gesturing in a sweeping motion. Hartmeister sat down, propping his elbows on his knees. "My name's Jack. Ordinarily, I'm with Terran Naval Intelligence, Section 4. We handle xenology analysis and xenopsychology profile requests. Vudro does pretty much the same job for your Combined Service, and he asked me to have a talk with you."

Balve kept his eyes on the door of the room as he spoke. "Are you another therapist?" he burbled.

"Not exactly. I do have a background in xenopsychology, but not xenopsychiatry. Before I got shanghaied into NavInt, I was attached to a number of different infantry, armor, and Special Forces units as an intelligence specialist. Usually on about ten minutes notice." Hartmeister gave Balve a crooked grin. "Sound familiar?"

Balve's head turned slightly towards Hartmeister. "Is that so?" The skepticism was palpable.

"Certainly is. And I've picked up some bits of ribbon here and there to prove it. Though I'm gonna be honest, none of them were as prestigious as yours."

"I don't care about that!" Balve snapped. "I just want to be left alone."

"I know that feeling, too. And I've known too many good hands who wanted it so bad, they did some very self-destructive things to get it. But I am kinda curious. You had a lot of time to be alone on Kiribati 3. And from what I was reading, you were...highly productive. Unusually so."

"You weren't there. You don't know anything about what happened!" Balve's vestigial wings rippled and pulsed in agitation.

"Not firsthand, no. But I've read the records, and they're pretty damned informative. I've been out in the bush, and I've done my share of pellet work. And not to put too fine a point on it, nobody else in this facility has. So if there's one person on this planet who has even a slim chance of at least relating to what happened, it's me." Hartmeister shifted, looking Balve straight in the eye. "I'm not your shrink. I'm not your priest. I'm not your wife. Right now, I'm just another guy who's up for swapping war stories. And I'd like to hear what happened with you and the Kumori."

Balve shifted in his chair, then took a deep breath. "I was passing through Camp Langdon. Routine change of station, just laying over before catching a shuttle to the next troop transport. Next thing I know, my commander is ordering me to accompany this human unit going on a deep penetration mission. They needed someone with a diverse technical skill set, and I fit the bill."

"Units like the Kumori sometimes do that," nodded Hartmeister. "They don't like it, because the pickup guy isn't generally trained the same way, but they do it because the mission requires it."

"They complained about it, saying they didn't like having to babysit a tech weenie, but I told them I'd try to stay out of their way. So we went off, riding a VTOL out into the wilderness."

"What happened when you reached the target zone?"

Balve's nose wrinkled a little. "That was the easy part of the mission. The Kumori neutralized the guards, called me up to deal with the electronic security systems, and we recovered the package we'd been sent to obtain. It was trying to get to the exfiltration point that everything went wrong.

"Black Sun guerrillas were on our trail within an hour. At first, we held off easily enough. After about the third firefight, Major Ryback told me he'd be putting in the papers to have me transferred into the unit." A broad smile came briefly over Balve's face. "Somewhere along the way, I stopped being baggage and started being a comrade." The smile dropped as Balve shuddered. "The falls is where it all went wrong. They hit us with company strength forces, and they just kept feeding them into the breach. We missed the pick-up. And the second pick-up. And the last one after that." Balve began to whimper. "I felt them die, Jack. One by one, I felt the Kumori die. I shouldn't have been able to do that!"

 "You didn't have any empathic ability before this?"asked Hartmeister, blinking in surprise.

"It generally expresses itself during maturation," Balve keened miserably. "I was well past that point, and I'd been in for eight years on top of that.  And I didn't realize it started happening until the falls, when Dufresne went down first. Sixteen soldiers, sixteen people who grew to consider me one of their number, and I couldn't save them and I couldn't stop feeling their deaths happening!"

"So what happened after?"

"I can't recall much about how I broke contact with the Black Suns. I think it was Marlowe that made that happen. But after I had a bit of time to gather my wits, it was like I had them all in my head. I could hear Ryback coming up with a strategy, Marlowe talking about the best placement for explosives, Xu reading off windage figures for sniper shots. It was so surreal. The entire unit, guiding me out, and hand delivering a shit ton of payback through me."

Hartmeister noted the human colloquialism distantly. "Hell of a story."

"Except it's not over, is it?" asked Balve. "They're still in my head and they're always talking and it's just too much because I'm still able to feel everyone around me on top of them!"

"Has anything like this ever happened among your people before?"

"There's stories of great warriors, bolstered by the spirits of their fallen comrades, going on to accomplish impossible feats of valor. But I just thought they were old myths from long ago."

"And I bet they don't tell what happens after the war's over," Hartmeister said ruefully.

"I shouldn't be around people anymore," whispered Balve.

Hartmeister squeezed Balve's shoulder firmly. "No, you absolutely should. But we need to put those ghosts of yours to rest first. They did their part to bring you home. Now you've got to do your part to let them go." Balve nodded as he brought a hand up to cover Hartmeister's, whistling softly as he wept. 

(Originally appeared in r/humansarespaceorcs)