“My God, Jack,” Kris breathed.
The scene was enough to make even a Longknife resort to prayer.
In front of Jack, an old, gray-haired woman stood. She held a knife to her throat as if ready to drive it up into her skull.
Behind her, over a dozen children, ranging in age from maybe twelve to at least three, stood. Each of them held a knife at his or her throat, just like the woman.
Some of the bigger kids helped the smaller kids hold their knives.
There were tears running down the cheeks of the kids.
There were no tears in the old woman’s eyes. The face she presented Jack overflowed with rage and vicious hatred.
~Vermin will never touch us,~ she spat in a dialect that was just barely understandable.
Jack struggled to remember what Kris had said. What she’d say in this situation.
He signaled his Marines to hold their ground, chinned his mic to the speaker in the suit and thought. SAL, YOU AND YOUR MOM BETTER HELP ME GET THIS RIGHT.
WE’RE ALL ON IT.
WE ARE NOT VERMIN, Jack began thinking and Sal translated and spoke. WE ARE TALKING TO YOU. WHAT VERMIN CAN USE YOUR OWN WORDS?
The woman actually seemed surprised, but that did not stop her rage. ~Vermin may mouth the enlightened words of the people, but it is still an animal,~ she spat.
YOU HAVE FOUGHT US IN NUMBERS FAR MORE THAN WE EVER HAD, BUT IT IS YOU WHO HIDE HERE, LICKING YOUR WOUNDS.
The woman’s eyes grew wider, but the knife never wavered from its place at her throat.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Kris whispered softly on net. “Marines, prepare to fire sleepy darts on my word. Keep going, General.”
IT IS WE WHO HAVE COME TO SEEK YOU OUT. IS THAT THE PATH THAT VERMIN WALK?
“Fire,” Kris ordered.
Jack felt the pressure from the volley of sleepy darts. Maybe some of the soft pop did come up through the soles of his feet.
Now the old woman showed shock. She tried to drive the knife up into her skull, but her arms would not obey her.
Obey her full will.
When the knife tumbled from her grasp, there was blood on the tip.
One or two of the older children tried to follow their elder, but they were less ready to kill themselves, or maybe less enthusiastic at the prospects. All of them collapsed on the floor, with no blood on their knives.
“Kris, we need a doctor here. Doc Meade, how fast can you get in here?”
“I’m on the outside waiting,” came the woman’s soft voice. “Can I use this hatch?”
“Have a combat engineer check it for booby traps.”
A minute later, the doctor was in the room, checking one patient after another. She extracted the sleepy darts from the youngest children. Marines had already policed up the sharp stuff and bound the hands and feet of the older kids and the old woman.
The children were evacuated, youngest to oldest, in survival packs that looked like nothing less than an oversize beach ball, one Marine towing a pack.
Doc Meade came to the elderly woman last. She checked her vitals, then left the darts in her and checked her bindings. “This one is very vexed, even under sedation. Keep an eye on her.”
“They will all be on suicide watch,” Jack said.
“If we can, try to get some of the youngest kids off to another ship. We don’t want them running into any of the older ones. The big kids might kill the little ones.”
“You think it’s that bad?” Jack said.
“I think she had a lot more she wanted to spit at you,” the doc said. “I think you interrupted her grand exit. I suspect she and these kids were intended to send us a message that you interrupted. By the way, I guess our grasp of their language is as good as we thought.”
“Thank Nelly and her kids for that,” Jack said.
“You’re welcome, my mother says,” Sal said.
“Well, let’s get the kids where they’re safe; and then let’s get the hell out of here,” Doc Meade said. “This place gives me the willies.”
58
Kris shivered as she studied the pictures Jack was sending from the station. She’d would never succeed in wiping them from her mind’s eye.
What must it be like for Jack? She’d need to hold him tight tonight.
So she was a bit surprised when Jack called and said she needed to come down to the brig. “The old woman’s awake. At least as much as we’re willing to let her wake up. She’s babbling a lot. It’s hard to make out, but I think she wants, no demands, to talk to our Enlightened One. Or as she puts it, ‘the vermin with pretenses of enlightenment.’”
“I’m on my way,” Kris said, and, unbuckling from her desk chair, launched herself at the door.
The Wasp was back at Condition Able, big, roomy, and easy to get around in. Assuming you knew the latest configuration.
Nelly directed Kris, and today, she directed her correctly.
The brig, however, was nothing like it had been. Now it consisted of several annexes, with no admittance from one to another.
Kris took the grand tour.
Lieutenant Commander Sampson had her own wing of sorts. It was more like a hospital than a prison. She was still in bed, sedated, and slowly recovering from her brain surgery. Kris might have ordered her to sick bay, but she had no idea what the new normal would be for that woman.
Sampson would stay in the brig until a new baseline for her behavior was established.
Another annex had the youngest children that had been brought aboard. There were five of them. They were likely somewhere around age seven down to three. Now they were bouncing off the walls, literally, in one large room under the close supervision of five young Sailors and Marines and one surprisingly matronlike chief.
The children didn’t know it, but the standing orders for their guards was to spoil them rotten. No surprise, the kids were enjoying it and going along solidly with the program. Presently, they were having a pillow fight with the grown-ups and burning all kinds of energy that they had from a lunch mainly of cookies and ice cream.
No doubt, a nap would be next on the schedule.
Jacques and Amanda had been put in charge of designing a program for the seduction of these children from the dark side into the light.
Kris allowed herself a smile. The gray-haired alien woman would gnash her teeth if she knew what was being done to the children she’d intended to have drive knives into their own brains.
The bigger kids, eight to twelve years old, were getting a different approach, one closer to what Jacques was using for the kids from the tribe Kris had rescued, drafted, enlisted, whatever.
The brig for these five kids had been divided into five roomy cells. Each kid shared it with a young Marine or Sailor who came from a large family and had been their age not long ago.
Each room had one young alien, one young human, and two computer games. The human had started off playing the game by him or herself. Inevitably, or at least in four of the five cases, the kids had come to look over the player’s shoulder.
Two of the boys were now lost in games involving racing around tracks or over wild country while the animal drivers or passengers tossed fruit at each other. The boys were laughing uproariously.
Two of the girls had joined their guards playing something involved with directing different sparkly things into forming a wall. Then they’d wreck it, if possible, with one swing of the wrecking ball, and do it all over again.
The oldest girl was the one holdout. Instead of coming to look over her guard’s shoulder and get involved in a game, she’d launched herself at the bulkhead, headfirst.
The guard had not been so lost in a game she’d grown out of years ago that she missed the move. She intercepted the girl on the fly. Now the girl was cuffed to her bed.