NOT Holiday Related (Sorry!)
And now for something completely different - a five-page-long Galactic fic!
“She said... she said... she said... I had to!”
“Stop it. You’re making a scene.” Jupiter glared down at the girl lying curled up on the floor. The grunt had come staggering in through the doors of the Eterna building and collapsed almost immediately. “I don’t know what you’re playing at. You don’t look injured. Are you injured?”
“She... she said... I had to... at all... at all co-” Her words were swallowed up in her sobbing.
“If you are, tell me and I’ll get you help. Otherwise, get off the ground and act appropriate.”
“And I... and I... and I...” Tears streamed down her face leaving saline tracks on her cheeks. Snot collected on her upper lip.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I would be.” Jupiter’s voice was calm, but her visage was furious. “Everyone is staring at you. Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?”
“And I panicked!” the girl wailed, finally managing to swallow the lump in her throat. She pulled herself up into a kneeling position and looked directly at Jupiter. “It was all wrong and I panicked and I-”
“What’s going on here? Why’s everyone standing around the entrance?” The throng of onlookers parted as the other grunts stepped aside in deference to Commander Mars, who came in close to get a good look at the crying girl. “White? Eva White, isn’t it?” Eva cringed at her voice, then nodded without turning around to face the speaker.
“She’s one of yours, then?” Jupiter asked.
“Yeah, one of mine,” Mars said. She knelt down beside the younger agent, who still refused to look at her. “Did you get it?” Eva hesitated a moment, then nodded again. “Would you like to show me?” Hands shaking, the girl opened up the satchel hanging at her side and withdrew a hard disk, which Mars took from her with a small sigh of relief. “It’s not so bad then, is it? Nothing could have gone seriously wrong if you managed to-”
Eva began sobbing again. Her whole body shuddered and she fell back to the floor.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jupiter demanded. “Can’t you see what a stir you’re causing?”
“I don’t think that’s going to help, Commander,” Mars told her gently, then turned back to Eva. “Is there something you need to tell me, sweetie? Do you want to come with me to my office?” She did not wait for an answer, but helped the girl to her feet and led her away.
“What are you loitering around for?” Jupiter asked the confused bystanders as the two women left. “Don’t you have better things to be doing? Get moving!”
Mars sat Eva down in the visitor’s chair and held her hand until the sobbing stopped. She waited to make sure that the girl was calm before going around the desk and taking a seat herself. “There, now. Do you want to tell me what upset you?” The girl bit her lip and shook her head. “Why not? Don’t you trust me?”
Eva’s gaze wavered around the Commander’s hands where they lay flat on the desk, folded over the compact disk. She looked as though she were trying to make eye contact but would really rather be staring at her own boots. “I don’t want you to be angry with me.”
There was a childlike undertone to her voice, Mars noted. “How old are you, Eva?” she asked.
“Nineteen.”
Well, that went some ways towards explaining it. “And I believe you’ve been here for just a little less than half a year, yes?”
“Yes. I was in the pre-initiation program for a while before that, though.”
“Most recruits are. We have very rigid screening requirements, you know.” This much was true; it was never easy finding people with just the right mix of blind idealism and zealous obedience. “Making it in was quite an accomplishment in and of itself. You should be proud.” The girl’s shoulders sagged and began to quiver. “What? What’s wrong?”
Eva burst into tears once more. “You shouldn’t have picked me,” she squeaked.
“Don’t say that. Look, you got me this, didn’t you?” Mars patted the disk.
“At all... at all... at all...”
“Don’t start that again, sweetie,” Mars said, just a touch reproachfully. “Take your time and say what you mean to say.”
Eva took a deep breath. “At all costs! That’s what you said! I had it and I was about to leave, when... when... got in the way. And... and... I panicked.”
“What got in the way?” Then it clicked. “A person? Was it a person, sweetie?”
The girl nodded miserably. “I had my zubats out and I said... I said... I said...” But all that she could manage after that was an unintelligible wail.
Mars looked down briefly to hide her relieved smile. For a while she had thought that there might be a real problem. “Is someone dead? Is that it?”
“Oh God.” She shuddered violently. “Oh God, oh God.”
“Eva, sweetheart, if someone is dead, I need to know about it.”
The girl at last managed to look her superior in the face. “I... I think so.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
“I... I didn’t check, or anything. I didn’t dare. But... there was a lot of blood.” Her gaze fell and she shuddered again. “So much blood.”
She knows, Mars thought. She just wishes she didn’t. And that was good, because otherwise there might be someone still out there to say, “Some kid from Team Galactic tried to kill me.” Now there was just one problem. “Did anyone else see you?”
“No. At least, I’m pretty sure not.”
“Well that’s good. It should be all right, then.”
“All right?” Eva’s head shot up. “How could it possibly be all right?”
“Eva, sweetie...” Mars tried to think of a delicate way to phrase it. “These things... they happen sometimes.”
The girl stared at her blankly, unable to comprehend. “These... things... happen?”
Come on, White, Mars thought impatiently. I know you aren’t the cleverest, but you aren’t stupid either. It isn’t that difficult to work out. You know that most of the things you’ve been doing since your initiation aren’t exactly legal. It isn’t that big of a cognitive leap. “In our line of work-” she began slowly.
“Oh my God.” Eva jerked backwards so suddenly that the chair tipped over and she fell. Mars started to get up to help her, but the girl was back on her feet in a flash. “Is that what we are? Is that what we do?” She backed up until she was pressed against the door.
“Sometimes,” Mars admitted. “But always for the greater good.”
“I’m not hearing this.” The tears had dried up now, but her salt-scrubbed face had more of a look of panic than ever. “Oh God, I’m not hearing this.”
Mars was beginning to get worried. This was not a typical reaction, and the whole affair seemed increasingly less likely to end well by the second. “Really, sweetie, you shouldn’t be this shocked.”
“But-
“After all,” Mars continued, determined to retain her authority, “you barely batted an eyelash the first time I sent you off to steal something.”
“But-”
“And you must have had some idea, to have done what you just did. Six months ago, would that have even occurred to you?”
“But w-”
“With that in mind, it’s good news, isn’t it? That I understand what you did and why you did it? If it was necessary to complete the mission, you have nothing to fear. Like I said before, these things ha-”
“BUT WHY?!”
Her shout filled the room to the last square inch, and the silence that followed seemed still to be ringing with it. Mars flinched. Eva herself looked a bit taken aback, but, having seized the opportunity to speak, she did not let go of it lightly. “Why?” she asked. “Why do ‘these things’ have to happen? What for? What’s it all about?” The words had a power all their own. They carried her forward, toward Mars’s desk. “All you ever say is clever, pretty phrases that have no meaning. You say the world is sick, and I agree. You say we have to fix it, and I agree. But what sort of cure do you have? What is this ‘greater good’ you keep talking about? If it’s so great, why do you have to hide it behind all of the generic charity shit we did as pre-initiates?” Before Mars could stop her, she grabbed the hard disk and waved it above her head. “What is this? Why is it so important? Why did you have me steal it? What did I kill that man for? Why, why, why?!” She slammed her fist against the desk three times for emphasis, then, her tirade over and her courage spent, slumped to her knees and sat silent.
Mars closed her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself...
“That disk is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. It’s just information. What sort of information, Cyrus would know better than I do. As for saving the world, well...
“We’re going to do something completely new. We have to; nothing that’s been tried so far has worked, and over the millennia people have tried almost everything.”
“Killing isn’t new.”
“Just hear me out, sweetie, I’ll get there. What we’re going to do is start over. We’re going to give the world a redo. Cyrus has found a way: he’s going to capture the gods of space and time and have them unmake the universe. What happened today won’t matter then, because then everyone, absolutely everyone, will die - everyone except for Cyrus, the other two commanders, and myself.”
White looked horrified. “But that’s-”
“-only the beginning. It will all be okay, you see, because we’ll have the power of God. We’ll rebuild everything, make it better than before. And we’ll bring back everyone we’ve killed; I’ll see to that personally. In fact, I might just get rid of death altogether. What good has it ever done anyone?”
“But the population-”
“-won’t be a problem. We’ll have control over the very nature of space. We’ll be able to create square circles if we want. It will be easy enough to make sure that there’s always enough room for everyone.”
“No more death...” The girl looked up at her, and a smile spread gradually across her face. “That would be incredible!”
Mars smiled back. “No more death, no more war, no more sickness or pollution. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. You have to trust me though, Eva, because I need your help. Do you trust me?”
White nodded emphatically. “Always.”
...and exhaled slowly.
“That information is strictly need-to-know,” she said. She really hated that rule, but she was sure that Cyrus had his reasons for it.
Eva rose to her feet, slowly and shakily, and looked her superior in the eye. “I need to know.”
“No, you don’t,” Mars replied matter-of-factly. “And since you seem so prone to hysteria, it’s probably better that way.”
There was a long silence. Then, without a word, Eva turned and began to walk away. “Where are you going?” Mars demanded.
“I don’t know. Somewhere else. Preferably somewhere far, far away.”
“You’re leaving?”
Eva stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I can’t do that again.”
That was when Mars knew how this episode was going to end. She had guessed it much earlier, but had pushed the thought to the back of her mind. Now it seemed all but inevitable, and she could not ignore it a moment longer. Still, she had to give the girl one last chance. “But you’re a felon now, sweetie,” she said gently, opening the top drawer of her desk and rifling through without looking down. “Who’s going to protect you if not me?”
“I... I guess I’ll have to find a way to protect myself.”
Mars nodded, resigned. Her lungs seized up for a moment, but she forced herself to keep breathing. It was just another day and another little loss. In the long run it would not matter. “All right, sweetie, you’re free to go. But before you do...” She stood up and held out her hand. “...I think you should give back that disk. Remember? You’ve been clutching it since your little outburst.”
For one brief second something besides tears shone in Eva’s eyes, and Mars was suddenly afraid she would take the disk and run. But then it passed, and the girl nodded meekly and obeyed.
When she was close enough, Mars wrapped an arm around her and pulled her over the desk and into an embrace. The commander heard her shout in protest, then felt...
...White’s arms wrap around her as well. The girl began to weep. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I shouldn’t have said those things. I was wrong. I need Team Galactic. More than that, I want to be a part of it. It’s hard sometimes, but it’s all for the greater good. What we’re doing here is important, and I shouldn’t question it.”
Mars smiled and petted her on the head. “It’s all right,” she said indulgently. “We all make mistakes sometimes."
...the blood spilling over her hands. Eva began to twitch spasmodically in her arms and an unearthly gurgle rose in her throat. But Mars held tight, and only when the girl was still and limp did she remove the knife from the back of her neck and let the the body fall to the ground.
Mars quickly sat down and worked on steadying her breath. This time, at least, she had no nausea to fight back. That was a definite improvement. It did get easier with practice, she noted. She probably should have told Eva that. But, then again, Eva probably would not have believed her.
She’s not gone forever, she reminded herself. She’ll come back in the new world. I’ll make sure of it. And then she’ll see what it was all about, without me telling her anything. And then she’ll have to forgive me. She nodded in self-affirmation. It was all for the greater good.
Steadying herself against a dream of resurrection, Mars picked up the phone and called for clean up.
“She said... she said... she said... I had to!”
“Stop it. You’re making a scene.” Jupiter glared down at the girl lying curled up on the floor. The grunt had come staggering in through the doors of the Eterna building and collapsed almost immediately. “I don’t know what you’re playing at. You don’t look injured. Are you injured?”
“She... she said... I had to... at all... at all co-” Her words were swallowed up in her sobbing.
“If you are, tell me and I’ll get you help. Otherwise, get off the ground and act appropriate.”
“And I... and I... and I...” Tears streamed down her face leaving saline tracks on her cheeks. Snot collected on her upper lip.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I would be.” Jupiter’s voice was calm, but her visage was furious. “Everyone is staring at you. Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?”
“And I panicked!” the girl wailed, finally managing to swallow the lump in her throat. She pulled herself up into a kneeling position and looked directly at Jupiter. “It was all wrong and I panicked and I-”
“What’s going on here? Why’s everyone standing around the entrance?” The throng of onlookers parted as the other grunts stepped aside in deference to Commander Mars, who came in close to get a good look at the crying girl. “White? Eva White, isn’t it?” Eva cringed at her voice, then nodded without turning around to face the speaker.
“She’s one of yours, then?” Jupiter asked.
“Yeah, one of mine,” Mars said. She knelt down beside the younger agent, who still refused to look at her. “Did you get it?” Eva hesitated a moment, then nodded again. “Would you like to show me?” Hands shaking, the girl opened up the satchel hanging at her side and withdrew a hard disk, which Mars took from her with a small sigh of relief. “It’s not so bad then, is it? Nothing could have gone seriously wrong if you managed to-”
Eva began sobbing again. Her whole body shuddered and she fell back to the floor.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jupiter demanded. “Can’t you see what a stir you’re causing?”
“I don’t think that’s going to help, Commander,” Mars told her gently, then turned back to Eva. “Is there something you need to tell me, sweetie? Do you want to come with me to my office?” She did not wait for an answer, but helped the girl to her feet and led her away.
“What are you loitering around for?” Jupiter asked the confused bystanders as the two women left. “Don’t you have better things to be doing? Get moving!”
Mars sat Eva down in the visitor’s chair and held her hand until the sobbing stopped. She waited to make sure that the girl was calm before going around the desk and taking a seat herself. “There, now. Do you want to tell me what upset you?” The girl bit her lip and shook her head. “Why not? Don’t you trust me?”
Eva’s gaze wavered around the Commander’s hands where they lay flat on the desk, folded over the compact disk. She looked as though she were trying to make eye contact but would really rather be staring at her own boots. “I don’t want you to be angry with me.”
There was a childlike undertone to her voice, Mars noted. “How old are you, Eva?” she asked.
“Nineteen.”
Well, that went some ways towards explaining it. “And I believe you’ve been here for just a little less than half a year, yes?”
“Yes. I was in the pre-initiation program for a while before that, though.”
“Most recruits are. We have very rigid screening requirements, you know.” This much was true; it was never easy finding people with just the right mix of blind idealism and zealous obedience. “Making it in was quite an accomplishment in and of itself. You should be proud.” The girl’s shoulders sagged and began to quiver. “What? What’s wrong?”
Eva burst into tears once more. “You shouldn’t have picked me,” she squeaked.
“Don’t say that. Look, you got me this, didn’t you?” Mars patted the disk.
“At all... at all... at all...”
“Don’t start that again, sweetie,” Mars said, just a touch reproachfully. “Take your time and say what you mean to say.”
Eva took a deep breath. “At all costs! That’s what you said! I had it and I was about to leave, when... when... got in the way. And... and... I panicked.”
“What got in the way?” Then it clicked. “A person? Was it a person, sweetie?”
The girl nodded miserably. “I had my zubats out and I said... I said... I said...” But all that she could manage after that was an unintelligible wail.
Mars looked down briefly to hide her relieved smile. For a while she had thought that there might be a real problem. “Is someone dead? Is that it?”
“Oh God.” She shuddered violently. “Oh God, oh God.”
“Eva, sweetheart, if someone is dead, I need to know about it.”
The girl at last managed to look her superior in the face. “I... I think so.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
“I... I didn’t check, or anything. I didn’t dare. But... there was a lot of blood.” Her gaze fell and she shuddered again. “So much blood.”
She knows, Mars thought. She just wishes she didn’t. And that was good, because otherwise there might be someone still out there to say, “Some kid from Team Galactic tried to kill me.” Now there was just one problem. “Did anyone else see you?”
“No. At least, I’m pretty sure not.”
“Well that’s good. It should be all right, then.”
“All right?” Eva’s head shot up. “How could it possibly be all right?”
“Eva, sweetie...” Mars tried to think of a delicate way to phrase it. “These things... they happen sometimes.”
The girl stared at her blankly, unable to comprehend. “These... things... happen?”
Come on, White, Mars thought impatiently. I know you aren’t the cleverest, but you aren’t stupid either. It isn’t that difficult to work out. You know that most of the things you’ve been doing since your initiation aren’t exactly legal. It isn’t that big of a cognitive leap. “In our line of work-” she began slowly.
“Oh my God.” Eva jerked backwards so suddenly that the chair tipped over and she fell. Mars started to get up to help her, but the girl was back on her feet in a flash. “Is that what we are? Is that what we do?” She backed up until she was pressed against the door.
“Sometimes,” Mars admitted. “But always for the greater good.”
“I’m not hearing this.” The tears had dried up now, but her salt-scrubbed face had more of a look of panic than ever. “Oh God, I’m not hearing this.”
Mars was beginning to get worried. This was not a typical reaction, and the whole affair seemed increasingly less likely to end well by the second. “Really, sweetie, you shouldn’t be this shocked.”
“But-
“After all,” Mars continued, determined to retain her authority, “you barely batted an eyelash the first time I sent you off to steal something.”
“But-”
“And you must have had some idea, to have done what you just did. Six months ago, would that have even occurred to you?”
“But w-”
“With that in mind, it’s good news, isn’t it? That I understand what you did and why you did it? If it was necessary to complete the mission, you have nothing to fear. Like I said before, these things ha-”
“BUT WHY?!”
Her shout filled the room to the last square inch, and the silence that followed seemed still to be ringing with it. Mars flinched. Eva herself looked a bit taken aback, but, having seized the opportunity to speak, she did not let go of it lightly. “Why?” she asked. “Why do ‘these things’ have to happen? What for? What’s it all about?” The words had a power all their own. They carried her forward, toward Mars’s desk. “All you ever say is clever, pretty phrases that have no meaning. You say the world is sick, and I agree. You say we have to fix it, and I agree. But what sort of cure do you have? What is this ‘greater good’ you keep talking about? If it’s so great, why do you have to hide it behind all of the generic charity shit we did as pre-initiates?” Before Mars could stop her, she grabbed the hard disk and waved it above her head. “What is this? Why is it so important? Why did you have me steal it? What did I kill that man for? Why, why, why?!” She slammed her fist against the desk three times for emphasis, then, her tirade over and her courage spent, slumped to her knees and sat silent.
Mars closed her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself...
“That disk is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. It’s just information. What sort of information, Cyrus would know better than I do. As for saving the world, well...
“We’re going to do something completely new. We have to; nothing that’s been tried so far has worked, and over the millennia people have tried almost everything.”
“Killing isn’t new.”
“Just hear me out, sweetie, I’ll get there. What we’re going to do is start over. We’re going to give the world a redo. Cyrus has found a way: he’s going to capture the gods of space and time and have them unmake the universe. What happened today won’t matter then, because then everyone, absolutely everyone, will die - everyone except for Cyrus, the other two commanders, and myself.”
White looked horrified. “But that’s-”
“-only the beginning. It will all be okay, you see, because we’ll have the power of God. We’ll rebuild everything, make it better than before. And we’ll bring back everyone we’ve killed; I’ll see to that personally. In fact, I might just get rid of death altogether. What good has it ever done anyone?”
“But the population-”
“-won’t be a problem. We’ll have control over the very nature of space. We’ll be able to create square circles if we want. It will be easy enough to make sure that there’s always enough room for everyone.”
“No more death...” The girl looked up at her, and a smile spread gradually across her face. “That would be incredible!”
Mars smiled back. “No more death, no more war, no more sickness or pollution. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. You have to trust me though, Eva, because I need your help. Do you trust me?”
White nodded emphatically. “Always.”
...and exhaled slowly.
“That information is strictly need-to-know,” she said. She really hated that rule, but she was sure that Cyrus had his reasons for it.
Eva rose to her feet, slowly and shakily, and looked her superior in the eye. “I need to know.”
“No, you don’t,” Mars replied matter-of-factly. “And since you seem so prone to hysteria, it’s probably better that way.”
There was a long silence. Then, without a word, Eva turned and began to walk away. “Where are you going?” Mars demanded.
“I don’t know. Somewhere else. Preferably somewhere far, far away.”
“You’re leaving?”
Eva stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I can’t do that again.”
That was when Mars knew how this episode was going to end. She had guessed it much earlier, but had pushed the thought to the back of her mind. Now it seemed all but inevitable, and she could not ignore it a moment longer. Still, she had to give the girl one last chance. “But you’re a felon now, sweetie,” she said gently, opening the top drawer of her desk and rifling through without looking down. “Who’s going to protect you if not me?”
“I... I guess I’ll have to find a way to protect myself.”
Mars nodded, resigned. Her lungs seized up for a moment, but she forced herself to keep breathing. It was just another day and another little loss. In the long run it would not matter. “All right, sweetie, you’re free to go. But before you do...” She stood up and held out her hand. “...I think you should give back that disk. Remember? You’ve been clutching it since your little outburst.”
For one brief second something besides tears shone in Eva’s eyes, and Mars was suddenly afraid she would take the disk and run. But then it passed, and the girl nodded meekly and obeyed.
When she was close enough, Mars wrapped an arm around her and pulled her over the desk and into an embrace. The commander heard her shout in protest, then felt...
...White’s arms wrap around her as well. The girl began to weep. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I shouldn’t have said those things. I was wrong. I need Team Galactic. More than that, I want to be a part of it. It’s hard sometimes, but it’s all for the greater good. What we’re doing here is important, and I shouldn’t question it.”
Mars smiled and petted her on the head. “It’s all right,” she said indulgently. “We all make mistakes sometimes."
...the blood spilling over her hands. Eva began to twitch spasmodically in her arms and an unearthly gurgle rose in her throat. But Mars held tight, and only when the girl was still and limp did she remove the knife from the back of her neck and let the the body fall to the ground.
Mars quickly sat down and worked on steadying her breath. This time, at least, she had no nausea to fight back. That was a definite improvement. It did get easier with practice, she noted. She probably should have told Eva that. But, then again, Eva probably would not have believed her.
She’s not gone forever, she reminded herself. She’ll come back in the new world. I’ll make sure of it. And then she’ll see what it was all about, without me telling her anything. And then she’ll have to forgive me. She nodded in self-affirmation. It was all for the greater good.
Steadying herself against a dream of resurrection, Mars picked up the phone and called for clean up.