Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (41 page)

Chapter 39

With the Victorian Assault Force in Dominion Space

There was a long moment of silence as everyone digested her words, then Captain Zahiri laughed out loud and slapped her knee.  “Gods of Our Mothers, I like it!”

“Preposterous!” Captain Hillson protested.  “We’ve already acknowledged we don’t have enough ships to attack the Duck Fleet occupying Victorian space and now she proposes that we attack the Duck home world instead?  Rubbish!”

Captain Eder rapped his knuckles on the table.  “Quiet!”  He glared about the table, pausing for a moment on Captain Hillson.  He turned back to Emily and nodded.  “Continue, Commander.”

“The fundamental thing we are trying to accomplish is forcing the Dominions to abandon Victorian space,” she said mildly.  “I think we can all agree to that.”  There was a cautious nodding of heads.

“We don’t really care
why
the Dominions leave Victorian space, just that they do it.  If the Dominion High Command thinks that its home world is vulnerable to attack, they will recall their fleet from Victoria.  It is as simple as that.”  She looked about the table.  Some of the faces were hostile, some confused, and some were thoughtful.

“And you don’t think attacking the planet, with all of its defenses, is more risky than attacking their assault force in Victoria?” Captain Hillson asked coldly.

“We don’t have to take Timor,” Emily replied.  “Heck, we don’t even have to actually attack it, we just have to give the impression that we have the
ability
to attack it.”

“May I remind the Commander that we have only
six
warships, plus a little over one hundred gunboats, with which to attack Timor,” Hillson countered tartly.

Emily shrugged.  “The Dominions don’t know that.”

One by one, the others at the table began to smile

* * * *

              The carrier
Rabat
had been designated as the primary medical facility for the assault force for the simple reason it had the largest and newest surgical suite. Cookie and Wisnioswski had been moved there to tend to their wounds.  Cookie’s leg wound had been repaired and the regeneration specialists had begun the laborious process of growing Wisnioswski a new pair of hands.

              Both of them had also had a full psych scan.

              Doctors and nurses bustled around Cookie in an endless blur.  They studied her blood and urine, took countless EKGs and EEGs and scanned and probed.  They found broken bones poorly reset, old bruises and scars.  They studied readouts, reports and charts.  They learned that gynecologically she was a mess, with numerous infections, tears and two badly healed punctures.   Bit by bit, her physical needs were taken care of and the process of healing her wounds begun.

              What the doctors didn’t know, what the scans could not tell them, was that now that she was safe and no longer had to keep up her guard, Cookie’s emotional world was a tumultuous dark storm speeding across a barren plain, a swirling wall of fear and doubt and self-loathing all embraced in a silent scream of horror.  For months and months Cookie had stood at the edge of the abyss, and for a time she had even sought refuge in it.  Now she was safe and for the first time she had little to do but stare into the mirror of her mind and try to cope with everything that had happened.

              And inside, deeper than even she herself could see, she was falling…falling…

              Hiram Brill sat in the small office of Rear Admiral Martha Wilkinson, the Fleet Senior Surgeon, who had insisted on accompanying the Task Force into Dominion space.

              “Commander, you and Sergeant Sanchez are close, correct?”

              Hiram nodded.  He still hadn’t seen Cookie and now Admiral Wilkinson had insisted on speaking to him before he did.  He had been nervous before; now he was scared.

              “I don’t mean to pry, but when I say close, what I really mean is; are the two of you emotionally intimate?  Physically intimate?” she asked softly.

              Hiram nodded again.

              “Okay, then” she said softly, but firmly. “You’ve got to know that Cookie has been treated harshly, extremely harshly.  She’s been sexually abused for an extended period of time, beaten, subjected to psychological and physical abuse that would have killed most people.  Physically, she should recover.  She has a wound to her leg, but that will be healed within a week.  There are two fractures in her left humerus, one bad break in right radius and a number of torn ligaments.  The humerus is a bone in her—“

“I know what the humerus is,” Hiram said.

Wilkinson nodded.  “Cookie had extensive damage to her vagina and uterus from tears and two rather nasty puncture wounds, and a serious infection.”

Hiram closed his eyes.

“Commander!”

He opened his eyes and stared at her.  Wilkinson frowned at him.

“Commander, I know this is not easy for you, but if it’s not easy on you, think what it must be like on
her
.  But she’s going to need support, a lot of it.  That means you, Commander Brill.  The physical damage to her vagina and the infection almost killed her, but surprisingly enough the Dominions repaired the worst of it.  We’ve got her on drugs for the infection, which should clear it up.”

              Hiram blinked.  He had feared that Cookie would be treated badly, but hearing it, all of it, was heartbreaking.  “Will she be able to have children?” he asked.

              Wilkinson smiled.  “Yes, but not yet.  The damage to her uterus has to be further repaired or she will not be able to carry a fetus to term.  I think we can repair that, but if worse comes to worst, we can always harvest some of her eggs and the fetus can be carried in a med-pod.”

              Hiram breathed a sigh of relief, but then caught himself when Wilkinson shook her head.  “I’m not making myself clear, Commander.  I think Cookie has been deeply traumatized, but she hasn’t been able to admit it to herself.   She spent most of her time in captivity trying to keep Private Wisnioswski alive.  They used his vulnerability to control her.  She…she had to do things…”

              Hiram closed his eyes.  All the time he had been searching for her, he had thought that if he could just get her back, everything would be alright.  Now…now it all seemed to be getting away, slipping through his fingers.  And he didn’t know what to do.

              “Cookie is extraordinarily tough,” Wilkinson continued.  “That will both help her and hurt her.  She’s going to think that she can handle this all on her own, that she
should
handle it all on her own.  She’s used to being in control, in control of others as a sergeant in the Marines and in control of herself.  But she’s been forced to feel humiliated and helpless.  Cookie can accept a certain amount of humiliation, but helplessness?  Being made helpless is like being forced to drink acid; it eats you from the inside out.  For someone like Cookie, helplessness is worse than death.”  Wilkinson paused.  “Is she religious, Commander?”

              Hiram considered it.  “Yes, but she is very private about it.  I’m not particularly religious, so we haven’t really talked about it very much.  But yes, she’s religious.”

              Wilkinson nodded.  “Sometimes it helps,” she said.  “Then again, she just might be very angry with the Gods right now for making her go through this.  We’ll see.”

              “What can I do?” he asked her.

              “The psych scan gave me less information than I had hoped, but it does suggest that she’s struggling badly.  If I’m right, she is going to have sudden bouts of depression and moments of utter rage.  Big mood swings set off by little things that normally wouldn’t matter.  Somebody doesn’t get out of her way when she’s in a hurry.  Somebody laughs near her and she thinks they are laughing at her.  A loud noise.  Whatever the trigger is, it may trigger a severe emotional response or it could even set her off into a full blown flash-back.  It’s all hard to predict, but given what she’s been through, none of these things would surprise me.  You just need to be there if she reaches out for help.”  Wilkinson’s tone of voice and the look on her face told him that it was going to be very hard. 

              Hiram left her office and went to Cookie’s room in the sick bay.  The nurse stationed there told him Cookie was still sleeping and that he should come back later. He wandered out of sick bay preoccupied, his mind in turmoil.  For lack of anything else to do, he decided to grab some dinner.

              Later, he would wonder if it all would have been different had he stayed.

* * * *

Cookie woke a few minutes later.  She got dressed into her uniform – no way was she going to wear hospital johnnies – and strapped her knife to her forearm.  Since her return she had always gone armed when she was awake, and kept the knife under her pillow when she slept.  She could not bear to be without it.  Wearing a sidearm was mandatory since the Tillekes had created the transporters and a ship could be boarded at any time.  In sick bay they wouldn’t let her wear a pistol, but she had borrowed a small fighting knife from one of the Marine guards and never went anywhere without it.  If the nurses saw it, they didn’t say anything. 

When Cookie left her room, the floor nurse called to her.  “Sergeant Sanchez, Commander Brill was here a few minutes ago and I asked him to come back when you were awake.”

Cookie felt an odd combination of elation, disappointment and…dread.  She pursed her lips.  “Did he say where he was going?”

“Dinner, I think,” the nurse replied.

Cookie nodded her thanks and began to walk slowly to the mess hall.  Her leg was still stiff from the flechette shot she took on the
Tartarus,
but mostly she was hesitant about seeing Hiram again.  He wouldn’t treat her like damaged goods.  She knew that.  She did.  He would be kind and considerate and patient and all the things that made her fall in love with him in the first place.

But she wasn’t the same woman Hiram loved.  That woman was gone; that woman had been degraded and
used.
It wasn’t right that Hiram should ever be with her again, or even want to.  But how would she explain that to him?  How could he understand?

Without conscious thought, she turned away from the mess hall and wandered down corridors, not really paying attention to where she was.  She limped along, people stepping aside to get out of her way.  She was marked; they could see it, even if they didn’t understand what they were seeing.  When some of them looked at her there would be a flash of recognition, immediately followed by a look of pity or, sometimes, revulsion.

She understood the look.  She saw it in her mirror every day.

Then at an intersection a Marine MP held up a hand, stopping everyone.  “Wait a moment, please,” he said without further explanation.  But then two more guards appeared from the other corridor, leading a line of perhaps thirty men dressed in black uniforms.  They carried no arms, wore no armor or helmets and each wore a shock collar to prevent escape.  They were Dominion Security Forces, prisoners captured on the
Tartarus.

And fifth in line was Schroder.

There was no conscious decision, no deliberate thought. One moment Cookie was looking at the line of Dominion prisoners, the next her arm was around Schroder’s neck, her fighting knife was at his throat and she was pulling him into a corner.  The guards were screaming at her, “Let him go!  Let him go!  Stand back!”  But they were armed only with neuro-batons and the trigger for the shock collars, and of course Cookie wasn’t wearing a shock collar.  And she wasn’t about to let him go.

Schroder struggled for a brief second, then Cookie pushed the knife into the skin of his throat, just a quarter of an inch.  He went very still, his eyes rolling in his head.  The assault had been so fast that he didn’t even know who it was who attacked him.  One of the guards was talking urgently into his radio, while the others pushed people back until Schroder and Cookie were alone in a small space.

One of the guards stepped cautiously forward.  Cookie tightened her grip around Schroder’s neck. 

“Hey, Sergeant, let’s be cool about this.  This man is a prisoner; you know the rules, we can’t mistreat him.”  Cookie looked at him without speaking.  Something in her look made him flinch back a step. 

Cookie felt oddly elated.  She should feel nervous, she knew.  Guards were shouting at her, her career was over, Hiram was lost to her.  But Schroder was here, right
here
, and Cookie knew that whatever else might be, the Gods loved her, for they had delivered to her the one person in all the universe that she needed the most.

The guard gave her a lopsided grin and tried a different approach.  “Sergeant, com’on now, help me out here.  Something happens to this guy, I’ll be filling out paper work for the next month.  He’s a
prisoner,
Sergeant.”

“I was his prisoner,” Cookie shouted.  “I was
your
prisoner, wasn’t I Schroder?”  She put her mouth close to his ear.  “Remember when you beat me, Schroder?”