The room is small, just the overhead light, a toilet, and the bed in it. Her bedroom back home in Atlanta was smaller still, but not by much. Jackson checks the bed and sees that it’s bolted to the concrete floor in typical welfare housing fashion. She throws aside the thin blanket covering her and sees that she’s in a set of military issue underwear that aren’t the ones she put on when she left for this fucked-up drop. Both her ankles are tied together with polyplast restraints, and there’s a strand of it connecting her shackles to the bed frame. At the far end of the room, there’s a steel door, but Jackson doesn’t even have to try to know that her tether is just long enough for her to use the toilet, but too short to let her reach that door.
She sits up, ignoring the pain that shoots up her side, and clears her throat. There’s nothing in the room she can use as a weapon, and without a good knife, she can’t get rid of the plastic shackles that keep her feet together.
She clears her throat again. Her mouth is so dry that it feels like she’s gargling with wood splinters.
“Hey,” she shouts toward the door. Then again, louder. “Hey!”
She doesn’t have to wait long. On the other side of the steel door, there’s shuffling, someone getting out of a chair maybe. Then the door opens, and a surly civvie in combat fatigues looks at her without expression. He doesn’t say anything, just studies her for a moment. Then he closes the door again.
Jackson sits and waits.
Two minutes later, the door opens again, and someone else walks in.
The man who steps into the room is tall and lean. His skin is almost as brown as Jackson’s. He wears his hair in a military cut, shorn close to the skull on the sides and left just a little longer on top. From his bearing, the economy of his movements, Jackson knows that this man is a combat trooper.
“Good evening, Corporal,” he says to her, and it’s the same voice she heard over the security feed in the residence tower before things went all to shit. It’s silky and sonorous, and it carries the air of authority.
The man carries a plastic cup. He walks up to the bed and hands it to her, along with a handful of pills. She takes them without taking her eyes off his face. He has a closely cropped beard and mustache, shaved so thin it’s barely more than a black circle around his mouth.
She takes a sip from the cup. It’s water—warm and with a slightly rusty smell to it, but liquid to get the tissues in her mouth and throat back into speaking shape. Jackson downs the contents of the cup briskly.
“Where’s my squad?” she asks him.
He regards her with a faint smile.
“No ‘where am I’, no ‘who are you’, or ‘how long have I been under.’ Just concern for your troopers. I appreciate a combat leader with her priorities in the right order.”
She doesn’t reply, just looks at him without expression. She has already sized him up to see if she can take him down, and concluded that she can’t. He has stepped back just enough out of reach that she won’t be able to launch a surprise attack, as if he doesn’t even want to tempt her into trying. Jackson can tell that this man is as tightly wound as a steel spring underneath his clean fatigues. He radiates a sort of latent, barely restrained energy that reminds her of Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s always half a second away from unleashing violence.
“Your squad fought well, but they got the short end of the stick in the exchange,” her visitor continues. “Five were killed in action. The other three should be back with their unit right now.”
“Bullshit,” Jackson says flatly.
“We took their guns and gear and let them go,” he says. His clinical, calm tone tells her that he doesn’t give a shit whether she believes him or not.
“Why would you do that?” she asks. “Let them go when you know they’ll be back with new guns soon.”
“Because we don’t kill people unless we have to, and because I have no interest in going into the prison business. Too many mouths to feed around here as it is.”
Five dead, Jackson thinks. Because I told them to fight, and they listened.
“What about the rest of the platoon?”
“A mixed bag,” her visitor says. “Most were let go. A few of them accepted our invitation to stay. Nobody was harmed. We had a full company in the atrium, and crew-served weapons. Your platoon commander had the good sense to recognize an unwinnable scenario, unlike you.”
He clasps his hands in front of his chest and pauses briefly.
“I do admire your initiative and your fighting skills. After you turned down my offer, you managed to keep an entire platoon busy trying to flush you out. And your squad killed seven of my troops and wounded eight more. But you pissed away the lives of your troopers for nothing at all.”
“Not for nothing,” she says. “Can’t just surrender to everyone who asks. Sets a bad example.”
He looks at her with that intense gaze, his face perfectly expressionless.
“I suppose it would,” he says.
He takes the chair out of the corner of the room and puts it next to the bed. Then he sits down, just out of her reach, and folds his hands.
“Where did you serve?” she asks him point-blank. He doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, just smiles faintly.
“Marines,” he says. “2080 to 2106.”
If he served four terms, he must be in his early fifties at least. He doesn’t look that old, even if his short hair has a lot of silver in it. He looks at least ten years younger than that, which is unusual for a career space ape. That lifestyle wears a body out fast. Could be he’s bullshitting her, but somehow Jackson knows he doesn’t feel the need to lie to her.
“Officer?” she asks, and he nods.
“I was a Lieutenant Colonel when I left. Never did get to pin on those eagles.”
He leans forward and studies her face, his chin perched on his steepled fingers. Then he gestures to the area under his eyes.
“Your facial tattoos. What do they mean? I don’t recognize that pattern at all.”
Jackson shrugs.
“Saw it in a manga when I was a kid. Thought it looked bad-ass. Thought I needed to look bad-ass back then.”
He nods at her explanation.
“You’re going to let me go, or kill me?” Jackson asks.
“I’m not going to kill you. I will tell you that the sergeant whose squad you mauled was ready to finish you off on the spot in that staircase. We don’t run things like that around here. But I can’t let you go just yet either.”
“He the one in charge of the people that shot it out with us?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Then you should have let him. I get the chance, I’ll finish him off.”
Her visitor shakes his head, slowly, like he just heard some kid say something outrageously dumb. Then he gets up from his chair and carries it over to the door, out of her reach.
“You were out for a while. You’ll be hungry soon. I’ll have someone bring you some food. It’s not military chow, but I suspect you’re no stranger to welfare rations. I’ll be back later, when you’re fed.”
He walks out and closes the door from the outside. The snap of the deadbolts seems loud in her nearly empty room.
A little while later, someone else brings in a meal tray and puts it on the ground without saying a word. Jackson watches him unblinkingly until he is out of the room again. She gets out of bed—slowly and carefully—and retrieves the tray. It’s the standard generic soy-and-shit chicken they put into the welfare meals with various flavorings. After she enlisted, Jackson told herself she’d never eat another welfare meal, but she has been famished since she woke up, so she eats everything on the tray and washes it down with the box of bug juice that came with the meal. If she wants to get out of here in one piece, she needs to give her body something to burn.