by Madeilaine D'Anjou
- "Sleep will come when thou art fled,
Soon, too soon!
Death will come when thou art dead.
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, Beloved Night.
Swift be thy approaching flight -
Soon! Come soon!"From "To Night" Percy Bysshe Shelley
~ "But hear this, mister," Colonel John Colquitt got right in the face of the unresponsive Marine. "Whether you accept this assignment or not, this mission does not exist.. it will not have existed. If you go, the other members of the 58th are to have no information as to your whereabouts, and will have no knowledge of the nature of your disappearance."
The kid just glared at him. Colquitt had talked to sullen and unresponsive kids before, particularly the hellish six months he spent on the recruiting tour, but this one took the trophy. He wondered if it was because the kid was a tank.
Colquitt sat back on the table and studied the young In Vitro; he thought he'd found the key to the kid when he read in his service record that a judge had sentenced him to the Marines. Looks like he was wrong. "That piece of paper doesn't mean much to you, does it, kid?"
Cooper Hawkes finally spoke. "What good is it to me? So I get out. Then what? Go back to Philly?"
Colquitt gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Not exactly my favorite city, either."
"At least on the 'Toga I know when the meals are," Hawkes amplified, "and where I can sleep without getting hassled."
Colquitt wasn't quite sure he believed what he was hearing. Surely the kid wasn't claiming that before his tour he had no HOME, was he? In 2063? Impossible.
Hawkes stood up, laying aside the honorable discharge papers he'd been studying. "Why didn't you just ask me to volunteer for this mission? Why did you come in here thinking you needed to bribe me?"
Colquitt was stunned and a little embarrassed. In truth, he had just assumed that he would need some incentive... it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get a tank to do somthing, there had to be something 'in it for them'. If he didn't know any better he'd think... oh, hell, admit it, Colquitt, he thought. He'd hurt the kid's pride. "OK, Lieutenant," he started over. "The Brass thinks this is one important mission, and I need a volunteer."
"OK," Hawkes said, and that was that. He turned to leave the room, then said, "Colonel? Your regular partner? What happened to him?"
Colquitt felt his face freeze into a mask. "That mission was as classified as this one is, Lieutenant, and you have no need to know the details..."
"I didn't mean that," Hawkes interrupted. "I just meant... what did they do to him?"
Colquitt studied the floor for a long minute. "What you ever seen what Chigs do to the humans they kill?" he asked at last.
"Saw a guy once with his eyes cut out," Hawkes said. "That's kinda what made me ask."
Colquitt sighed. "Stupid AIs... they gave the Chigs some cock-and-bull story of humans' belief in an afterlife..."
"I don't think there's any such thing," Hawkes said.
"Well, now the Chigs do," Colquitt snapped. "They think if they don't dismember our dead and scatter them, and cut the hearts out and the heads off, that we'll come back to life and keep fighting them. I didn't know that... not till I saw Jack..."
"That's OK," Hawkes stopped him. "I just wanted to know." He started toward the door, without the discharge papers.
"Kid," Colquitt called him back. "You may think now you don't want this," and he handed Hawkes the discharge. "But keep it in your hip pocket anyway...You never know when you'll need an ace in the hole."
~ On board the ISSCV en route to Tigris, Colquitt sat back and checked his list. He'd briefed the kid in detail on the plan for the mission, and they'd gone over the satellite protocols two or three times. What else? He studied Hawkes for a minute.
"Kid, that hair's gotta go," he said at last. He dug through the supply cabinet until he located the recruiters' standard buzzsaw. Setting the guard, he handed it to Hawkes. "Here, run this through your goldilocks once or twice."
As Hawkes complied, he said, "What's the big deal? Hair doesn't slow you down."
"Yeah, but in hand-to-hand, it gives your opponent something to grab onto," Colquitt explained.
"So what?" Hawkes grinned. "If you thought giving your opponent nothing to grab onto was good, you'd fight stark naked, wouldn't you?"
Colquitt laughed. "Well, then what would you use for pockets?" he asked. "Anyway, you'd still leave them a convenient handle." At this, Colquitt grabbed his crotch and grinned.
"Yeah..." The kid was done with his impromptu barbering, and returned the razor to the cabinet.
Colquitt inspected the tall young man standing in front of him. "You know, that judge really did you a favor, whether you realize it or not."
The shutters descended, as Hawkes shut off his friendly grin and turned into the sullen and unresponsive punk once again. "Oh yeah? How you figure?"
"Hey, I just meant that he could have sent you to prison... Kid with your face would never last in prison." Colquitt said.
"What's my face have to do with anything?" Hawkes growled.
Is this kid for real, Colquitt wondered. Sounds like he doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about. "Just that you'd be real popular in prison... all the guys'd want a piece of your ass. You'd either have to be fighting all the time, or you'd become the sweetheart of Sigma Chi." God, he STILL doesn't get it. "Good-looking guys in prison get raped, Lieutenant," he finally spelled it out. "REPEATEDLY."
"And that's worse that getting shot at for a living?" Hawkes snorted. "Give me a break."
"Well, most guys would have a problem with it," Colquitt said, puzzled.
"Hell, I've fucked guys before," Hawkes said, offhandedly, "and been fucked... it's no big deal. It can be a lot of fun." The grin was back.
Now Colquitt WAS surprised. "You have?"
"Sure; at the training facility for In Vitros. What else was there to do? We ate, slept, learned how to kill things, and fucked each other... I don't know about girls tho'. Sure would like to learn." Hawkes sighed, then said conversationally, "You wanna fuck me?"
"LIEUTENANT!" Colquitt barked, shocked. Then in gentler tones, "You really should not be offering that to people... not many people are going to be able to say 'no' to you."
"I just thought you might wanna... with you losing your buddy and all..." Hawkes looked contrite - why was the Colonel MAD at him?
Did this kid think he and Jack were a pair of pervs? Colquitt thought, his anger flaring. Did he actually think that they... Something took hold of John Colquitt then; he thought it was rage at first... rage at the Chigs that did that grizzly number on Jack, rage at this kid, looking so innocent and downcast, for being here in Jack's place, for making that outrageous offer... Without thinking, he grabbed Hawkes by the wrist and twisted his arm behind his back, forcing the kid to his knees.
No, it wasn't rage, he realized, as his penis pressed against his zipper... pushing Hawkes onto his hands and knees, he reached for the kid's back zipper, the one strategically located to allow a guy to take a dump in the bush... Jack had always called it the "bomber bay doors". Unzipping the kid's suit, he exposed his buttocks and ran his hands over the firm cheeks. Hawkes hung his head, not resisting what the colonel was doing, just waiting.
Colquitt had one brief flash of sanity...what am I doing? And then he had his own zipper down, and his penis was hard and straining. Without prelude or preamble, Colquitt sheathed himself in the boy's tight, dry asshole, and knelt there gasping. Oh shit... what has gotten into me, he thought, as he began pumping himself in and out of the kid. He was relieved to see no blood on his rigid cock - god, he'd rammed it in like a piledriver... maybe the kid really has done this before.
Colquitt had done boys (and too-young girls) before, in Bangkok and HCM City, but his rigidly compartmentalized mind had always let him pass it off as 'stuff done on liberty'. This was different. He was en route to an important assignment, there was a crew a dozen feet away on the flight deck, and the boy he was fucking was his partner. God, it felt good, though... he felt his excitement rising towards a peak.
No, it's too soon, Colquitt thought, slowing down. Can't come yet... I don't want to come yet... wanna keep fucking this pretty boy for a long time... He moved slower and slower, trying desperately to hold back his incipient orgasm. Not yet, too soon... he was barely moving at all now... no, not yet!
"Aaaaah, Jack!" he cried, plunging as deep as he could into the boy's compliant body. Two hard, spurting thrusts, a third, and it was over.
Now he could be ashamed of how he'd treated the kid... just a convenient fuckhole... Shit, Colquitt, he said to himself, you used the poor kid like a cheap whore. Zipping himself up, he did the same to the boy, and sitting back on the floor, pulled the boy roughly to his chest. "Hey, kid, I'm sorry..." he said.
"What for?" Hawkes was looking at him with puzzled eyes. Why was the Colonel apologizing, he thought. He'd just taken what Hawkes had offered him...
"I'm sorry if I hurt you, OK?" Colquitt said gruffly.
"You didn't hurt me," Hawkes said - shit, he was smiling a shy, tiny smile!
"Then I'm sorry I called you 'Jack'," Colquitt offered.
"'S okay," Hawkes said. "My callsign in the Wildcard's deck is Jack anyway, so I coulda pretended if I needed to..."
"If you needed to?" Colquitt was mystified.
"If I needed to pretend that it was me you wanted."
Colquitt was speechless. He felt his eyes filling up...
"No, really, it's okay," Hawkes touched the older man's cheek with hesitant fingers. "I know who it is you're really missing..."
Colquitt squeezed his eyes shut, pulling the kid's head down on his shoulder and stroking his shorn head. "Then you know more about me than I knew about myself 'til about a minute ago," he said. "Here," he said, reaching for the kid's front zipper this time, "let me give you some."
~ Cooper Hawkes had finished the shallow trench he had scratched out using the Chig's scythe-shaped weapon, and stood looking at the scattered bits that were all that remained of Colonel John Colquitt. Damn, he thought... I'm glad I had heard they did this ahead of time - seeing it was bad enough, but at least I'd been expecting it. What the Colonel must have felt, seeing his best buddy like this...
Hawkes picked up an arm and carried it to the trench, then looked around for the torso. What would this feel like if this were someone real close to me, he thought, trying to empathize with what Colquitt has recently lived through. What if I were doing this for... his mind shied away from one direction.
OK, start slow... What if this were... his mechanic? It's be pretty awful, but he could do it. He went back for another body part. What if this leg belonged to... the Commodore? Still awful, but he could handle it. What if it were... no, don't go there.
He couldn't bring his mind around the concept that he might someday have to perform this duty for one of the Wildcards. Oh well, he thought - he might get lucky and be the first to go...
He started piling the dirt back over the trench containing the human remains of John Colquitt. If he believed in anything, he'd know something appropriate to say... well, I'm glad I let him fuck me, anyway, he thought.
~ NO RESPONSE....
SATELLITE NOT IN RANGE
Well, shit, Hawkes thought. Why doesn't it just say 'please place your call again later.' He remembered all the sequences that would cause one of a few commands to be transmitted to the covert communications satellite, but he didn't know a thing about its orbital parameters - they expected to be long gone by now. Now what?
He tried to think, but his mind felt fuzzy and slow. The covcom satellites were tinier than small sats - they tossed them out like popcorn for missions like this; would the receiver even know if the bird it was looking for had been destroyed? Probably not - they made thousands of the things, and none of them had much smarts. They flew low and slow, so it could be a while before it came back into range, if it ever came back... Dig in, he decided. Dig in and wait.
~ Hawkes paused, puzzled. He had been ready to plunge his k-bar into the body of the unarmed Chig; he knew he had enough strength left for THAT, at least. What was stopping him?
With nothing more than its raised hands, the helpless Chig was managing to prevent Cooper Hawkes from killing it. Am I getting soft? he wondered. First the Chig that he had right in his sights, and now this.
But Hawkes recognized the Chig - he knew what the enemy was feeling. He knew somehow that this particular chig was just a grunt like him, stranded on a chessboard that he couldn't control. The two pawns were in the hands of the Old Men on either side, being moved here and there without consideration for their own wishes. What would happen if the pawns decided not to play?
The Chig had removed his insignia and was holding it out towards Hawkes. Is this some strange Chig protocol that I'm gonna mess up, he thought, or is it just what it looks like... a guy trying to be friends?
What's the worst that could happen, Hawkes thought. He could somehow kill me... big deal - I'm probably dead anyway. I'm gonna trust someone this once - in honor of the Colonel's buddy Jack Whatshisname. He grinned at the thought of the man he never met driving his decisions. Taking the proffered token, he considered what to give in return. His dogtags? Nah, then he'd be just another Unidentified... His ring. He dug it out of the pocket he kept it in when he wasn't wearing it, and held it out.
It was the right thing to do; the Chig took it. GI Geeque meets Jack-Chig, Hawkes thought. Good thing I can't tell anyone about this mission; they'd never believe this part. He gestured to the Chig - you go that way, I'll go this way. Hope we never meet again... He watched as the Chig started off, then began climbing the hill, shaking his head in amusement. Never believe it in a million years...
~ Tired... he was getting so tired. That damned satellite was still not speaking to him, and that weird ghoul lady was showing up every time he turned around. He knew - at least he thought he knew - that she wasn't really there, but part of him really wanted her to be real. Wanted to go with her. Did he want to go with her because she looked a lot like Shane or did she look like Shane because he wanted to go with her? He knew she was bad news, but... maybe he could rest if he went with her...
~ Hawkes shook his head, trying to keep upright, trying to shake off the dust of the recent hand-to-hand, and get some sensible thoughts flowing through his head again. Another three Chiggies bite the dust... was he in some strange form of hell where he had to kill every Chig in the universe one at a time? Why couldn't it just be over?
He looked down at his latest casualty, and froze. No insignia. Were there Chigs so lowly that they weren't issued insignia at all, or was this the same Chig...
He looked around for what a Chig might use for a pocket... there. Yep, it was his ring. He had just killed Jack-Chig. Damn. What a rotten deal...What's the point, anyway? He took Jack's insignia out of his pocket... sorry, Jack, he thought. You broke the contract first, but I'm sorry as hell I had to kill you... he replaced the Chig's token.
What would the Colonel think if he knew he'd had to kill Jack... wait a minute, Jack-Chig was a chig. He couldn't be the Colonel's partner. Could he? Why did I think I just killed Jack? Hawkes wondered. I don't even know Jack. I don't think I do. Would I remember? Or was that me?
Now what? Who cares?
Either the satellite would reappear, or death would. I guess it doesn't much matter which, Hawkes thought. The bird or death... death or the bird... first one on the scene wins the prize... He collapsed exhausted to the ground, surrounded by fallen Chigs, to sit and wait.
~~~~~~~~~~~ THE END ~~~~~~~~~
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