“Master Faust,” the woman said with a slight curtsey. Not that Stacia was sure “woman” was the right word for her. Her age was difficult to tell, but Stacia gave it a fifty-fifty chance that she would be old enough to legally work in a place like this on any other planet. “What can I do for you?”
“We have a new recruit to the cause,” Faust said, gesturing at Stacia. His words felt just as dull and practiced as the decree he had read from the leather. “You can take care of her needs while I discuss her oath of fealty with the Lord Commander.”
“Yes, Master Faust,” the woman said with another curtsey. She had long brown hair pulled back into ponytail and a delicate frame. She also wouldn’t meet Stacia’s eyes. Stacia thought that might be a blessing. Something about the young woman inspired a deep sense of shame in her that she didn’t want to confront yet.
“Come on,” Faust said to Stacia as he went up the stairs. The woman followed behind them, utterly silent.
At the top of the stairs, there was a long hall with several doors on either side and one at the very end. Stacia heard various moans and grunts coming from behind some of the doors. Faust went up to one, listened for a moment, then knocked to see if anyone was inside. When he was sure it was unoccupied, he opened the door, and gestured for Stacia and the woman to go on in.
“Wait here,” Faust said to Stacia. “I’ll discuss you with the Lord Commander first. I think she’s going to have a particular interest in you. I’ll be back in half an hour…” He paused, looked the woman up and down, then said, “make that forty-five minutes. I don’t want to rush you. You may not have any choice in pledging your loyalty, but it’s important that you realize all the perks that come along with it. As long as you keep in line, you’ll find that you’ll be well taken care of.”
He closed the door, leaving Stacia and the woman alone.
Through habit, Stacia scanned the room for any dangers or potentials weapons. The room, however, seemed designed specifically with enhancing Galactic Marines in mind. There was a bed, a table, and two chairs made from the remains of a drop pod crash couch. Everything was stripped down to the bare essentials, giving Stacia little to work with if she needed to make an improvised weapon.
Not that she thought she would need one with this woman. Stacia turned to her to see that the woman still kept her head down, even as she reached for the crotch of Stacia’s armor.
“Wait,” Stacia said, grabbing the woman’s arm as gently as she could. It would be far too easy for Stacia to crush this fragile, naked woman by accident.
“Is there something wrong?” the woman asked. “Would you prefer to have someone else?” Even though she tried to hide it, it was obvious that she sincerely hoped this was the case.
“This is unnecessary,” Stacia said.
“It is?” the woman asked. “Is there something new in your armor that takes care of your needs for you?”
“No, that’s not… Listen, would you like to sit? I would.”
“Oh. Um, okay?” The woman sat down on the bed in a way that she must have thought looked sexy. Even if Stacia was interested in that sort of thing, she doubted she would have found anything about the trembling young woman attractive at the moment.
“What’s your name?” Stacia asked.
The woman blinked. “Name?”
“Yes, your name.”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
“No, your actual name.”
“Skins don’t have names.”
“So I take it that’s what you call yourselves? People without armor are Skins?”
“Yes. Uh, no. You’re confusing me.”
Usually, Stacia didn’t have the patience for this sort of thing. Give her a gun and a target and she knew exactly what to do. Give her someone obviously in need of comfort, and it baffled her. Still, this entire situation made her skin crawl, no pun intended. She knew exactly what her mothers would have told her to do. Keep everyone safe who had less power than you. But they weren’t here.
“Let’s start again,” Stacia said. “You call yourself a Skin? So what would that make me?”
“You are a Galactic Marine.” It was a rote answer, like something memorized from a textbook.
“I am not a Galactic Marine. Not anymore. No one on Leviathan is.”
The woman put a hand over her mouth, then moved to put the other one over Stacia’s before she jerked back, realizing she had been about to touch without permission. She looked around at the walls as though she would see some spy hole that she was being watched through. Stacia had already scanned the room for any such thing and found none.
“You shouldn’t say that,” the woman said. “Not where anyone might hear you. Someone might think that I’m the one that said it, and then…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“They’re not, though,” Stacia said. “Every former marine here was tried and convicted of something that disgraced the Galactic Marine name. They lost the right to be called that, whether they admit it or not.” Despite herself, Stacia heard a bit of melancholy creep into her voice. To the rest of the galaxy, that now included her, whether she had felt justified in her actions or not.
“Isn’t there something that the, uh, Skins call them?” Stacia asked. “Behind their back, when the Skins don’t think they can here?”
She shook her head vehemently. “No.” Then she stopped, thought for a second, then turned her head away with a shy smile. “Shellheads.” As far as derogatory terms went, it was pretty tame, but Stacia couldn’t help but notice how the woman looked thrilled by that one tiny rebellion, and yet scared of some unknown retribution at the same time.
All those tin-foil hat activists were right all along, Stacia thought. There really are sentient rights abuses happening on Leviathan on a scale the bureaucrats don’t want others to know.
“What are you so afraid of?” Stacia asked. “What would the Shellheads do to you if they knew you were talking like this?”
The woman’s reaction was swift and startling. She practically fell getting off the bed and racing to a corner, where she pulled her knees up tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around them in what was probably the only defensive posture she knew. “Please, you can’t tell anyone! I’ll do anything to you that you want! Just don’t say what I said!”
Stacia followed her into the corner, moving as slowly and unthreateningly as someone could in battle armor. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise. Just tell me what would happen if someone decided you needed to be punished.”
“You promise you won’t tell that I called them Shellheads?”
“I promise.”
“They would give me to an Elite.”
“What’s an Elite?”
“A Shellhead that’s not going to be a Shellhead anymore. A Shellhead that’s going to be a Skin.”
Stacia puzzled over this for several seconds before the true horror of what the woman had said set in. She remembered the armorless people downstairs who had apparently held more sway than the others. That was because they weren’t true Skins, not really. They were convicts like the rest of the former marines. But a marine had to have armor. There wasn’t enough of their own skin left underneath to live without.
Unless they got it from somewhere, or someone, else.
Stacia had seen many horrible things in her time with the Galactic Marines, but this was the first time she felt like she honestly, truly needed to vomit.
Chapter 6
The Woman with Half a Face
At Stacia’s behest, the woman pretended she had performed the intended services when Faust came back to the room. To the woman’s confusion, Stacia had even made her do jumping jacks to work up a sweat. Faust came in, saw that the woman had obviously been strenuously exercised, and sent her back downstairs without a second thought. Stacia didn’t need him thinking anything other than the normal sexual activity had been going on in here, and the last thing she wanted now was for anyone to think the woman wouldn’t do her job and was in need of punishment. Stacia knew that she was going to return to this problem, and very soon, but for now, she had a meeting to keep.