Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

The uniforms differed, the faces-human, Shikazu, Drac-differed. It was the eyes. The eyes were always the same: the glazed, stunned, defeated stare of a cornered, confused, exhausted animal that had lost its will to resist, its will to live.

The Drac lander hovered at the foot of the mountain for a moment, then slowly reduced its altitude until it came to a steaming halt upon the mud flats below.

She thought of the tapes she, had seen of the interrogations of the seven Dracs captured at the battle of Chadduk Station.

Their uniforms were filth-covered red; Tsien Denvedah, the Drac infantry elite. They did not look so damned elite as they slumped before the interrogation officer.

The hands had only three fingers each; the heads and faces were devoid of hair, the deep yellow skin smooth. The noses were little more than openings in upper lips. Foreheads sloped back, chins receded, yellow eyes stared blankly from beneath prominent brows.

All intelligence officers had learned the rudiments of the Drac language, and the interrogator in the tape had explained to the Drac before him how hopeless its position was. Things could be made easier if the Drac would cooperate.

A three-fingered hand rose and was placed against the Drac soldier’s breast. It clutched something hanging beneath its uniform. The human interrogator walked over, slapped the Drac’s hand away from its breast, then reached his hand inside the uniform. The human’s hand withdrew holding a small golden cube attached to a golden chain that hung around the Drac’s neck.

"What is this?"

"It is my line’s Talman."

Talman. The bible of the Talmani. The human tightened his hand around the golden cube.

"What would you do if I snapped this chain and threw this luck-charm away, maphrofag? Hey, Dragger?"

The Drac stared for a moment at the human’s fist, then it closed its eyes.

"I would have to go to the expense of buying another."

The fist drew quickly away from the Drac, breaking the chain. The human studied the Drac as though he expected the alien to tum into a gibbering column of jelly at the removal of its Talman.

The Drac opened its eyes and stared blankly at the floor. The interrogator dangled the broken chain in front of the Drac’s face.

"Here it is, you two-sexed shit! If you do not cooperate, I will throw it away."

Slowly the Drac’s gaze lifted from the floor until it was looking into the eyes of the interrogator. The Drac’s eyes filled with glitter, then its mouth formed into a grin, exposed the solid white mandibles that served as teeth.

"So, humans are as stupid as they appear. I am encouraged."

The interrogator stuffed the cube and chain into his pocket.

"Dracs are the prisoners here; not humans."

"It is not the first battle, human, but the last that decides such matters. You have just told me that the Dracon Chamber will win the last battle."

The interrogation had gone on for much longer, but Joanne Nicole’s head was filled with the conviction in the Drac’s words. That and the look in the creature’s eyes.

The will to fight, to live, had returned.

As the lower bay doors on the Drac lander opened, she wondered how she would appear to the Drac intelligence service. How she would appear to herself.

She reached into her sleeve pocket and felt for the tiny pronide capsule. Once her fingers had found it, she pulled the capsule from her pocket and studied it. Half pink, half blue, it carried the colors of innocent childhood.

Nkruma had been in the throes of a hysterical calm. He was issuing the death drops in fistfulls to everyone who would take them. As he handed a capsule to her, she shouted to him.

"Nkruma, what do you think you’re doing?"

"All of us know things that the Dracs want to know. Duty will tell you what to do."

Duty? The USE Force knew about Catvishnu falling. Before the battle was over, USEF computers would change codes, tactics, equipment, priorities, and anything else that depended upon the knowledge of any person or group of persons.

The USEF assumed that everyone would be captured alive, and that everyone would talk their heads off. Experience makes pragmatists out of us all. It also removed the need for mass suicide.

Nicole had held the capsule in front of Nkruma’s face.

"What are you, Nkruma? Some kind of Jonestown-Masada freak? Die rather than have the courage to face defeat?"

She watched in horror as he stuck the capsule into his mouth, crushed it with his teeth. and swallowed. After a weak cry, he was dead. Many of those with capsules died with him.

She watched a human in strange blue robes emerge from the lander’s bay. He paused at the foot of the ramp and looked up at the remains of the Storm Mountain Irregulars. He studied the faces for a moment, turned to speak to someone within the bay, then turned again and began slogging through the mud toward the ragged assembly.

Joanne Nicole watched him. His concentration appeared to be centered on his footing, his robe held up out of the mud’s reach.

She looked down at the capsule.

Pain.

Training had covered pain; the kind of pain made to endure until the sufferer began jabbering-saying anything-to make the pain stop. It had lent a sense of drama to an occupation that was essentially nothing more than filling out reports, sifting bits of information, solving puzzles, and using the known points of a graph to try to predict the unknown points.

Intelligence personnel were "back yard" soldiers; pain was for those filling out the front lines. Intelligence was a job like any civilian job. But there was some disagreement.

That sergeant in intelligence recruit training:

"It don’t make a damn bit of difference what your job is, Nicole. If you’re in the Force, your assbottom-line occupation is to sit in the mud behind a rifle and kill the enemy. First you’re infantry. You get to do something else only when the infantry doesn’t need you."

Puzzles.

She had always been good at puzzles. And statistical analysis and languages were nothing more than puzzles. And the peacetime Force offered puzzles with real challenges to them: alien languages, devising and breaking sophisticated codes, devising strategies to counter alien tactics.

It was supposed to be a clean-collar, predictable, desk job; that’s what it had been for nine years. Then, in 2072, the second year into the war with the Dracon Chamber, Joanne Nicole found herself sitting in the mud, behind a rifle, killing Dracs.

The training sergeant had been right.

Damn him to hell.

Sit in the mud, sight through the rain and drizzle down that weapon, and fry anything yellow. No puzzles there; just primitive survival.

The human in the blue robes came to the first of the soldiers, bent down, and talked to him. The soldier pointed listlessly back up the slope. Joanne Nicole studied the man as she held the capsule between her thumb and forefinger and licked the end of the capsule with the tip of her tongue.

The human slogged up the rise and stopped three meters away. The gold glitter of his Talman peeked from between the folds in his robe. He spoke in English.

"We are here to pick up those who surrendered." He seemed to be in his late forties-greying hair above a dark brown face lined with years.

Nicole lowered her hand and looked into the human’s eyes. "What’s it going for these days?"

He looked confused. "What’s what going for?"

"Treason."

The man laughed. His laugh was the infectious variety born from genuine mirth. Several of the whipped soldiers around him also laughed, not really knowing why. The human shook his head. "Are you the commanding officer?"

"Yes."