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CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

City of Kórinthos

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

Free Worlds Alliance

January 25, 2553


At least they hadn’t shot him yet, he thought as he followed the major who’d come to collect him from the barracks in which Baker Company’s surviving officers and senior enlisted had been confined.

That had to be a good sign, given the coverage the Odyssians had been careful to make available to all their prisoners. From the drumhead court-martials he’d seen broadcast, Terrence Murphy and his associates—and, for that matter, the government of the Cyclops Sector—had chosen to pay a lot more attention to the letter of the law than Alaimo ever had. But if the Free Worlds Alliance showed more concern for actual justice than Alaimo and his butchers, they weren’t mucking around with the guilty, either. And thanks to the fact that idiots like Steinbolt had recorded their own criminal acts in loving detail, there was no shortage of evidence against them.

The firing squads had been busy, and Ahmet Yildiz expected they’d stay that way for a while. God knew there were enough bastards who needed shooting, anyway. He was totally prepared to acknowledge that, although he’d really, really prefer not finding himself among the ones being shot.

He and his people had been subjected to less brutality than he’d anticipated, given what they and their fellows had inflicted upon Odysseus. Their captors hadn’t been precisely gentle with them, but they’d been treated in accordance with the Articles of War’s stipulations for POWs. Precious few League prisoners got that sort of treatment from the Federation, which was why he wouldn’t have expected his people to get it from the Odyssians, either, especially after everything that had gone down here. They’d been denied comms, but they’d been allowed download access to the system datanet, which was how he knew about the tribunals Terrence Murphy and Konstantinos Xeneas had impaneled. And they’d been allowed showers and the dignity of their uniforms, rather than the orange prison coveralls people like Steinbolt had modeled during their brief appearances before the aforesaid tribunals. At the moment, Yildiz was not only un-manacled—which he really wouldn’t have expected even now—but wore fresh, crisp fatigues, with all of his ribbons, and somehow as a prisoner he felt far cleaner than he had as a fearless defender of the Federation against the vile treason of the Free Worlds Alliance.

That probably said something unfortunate about his internal loyalty meter. On the other hand, that meter had taken a beating over the last week or so.

His guide—or his guard, depending on how one chose to look at it—led him down a hallway, then paused outside a large, old-fashioned, unpowered set of double doors. He knocked.

“Enter,” a female voice called, and the major opened one door panel and nodded for Yildiz to step through it.

The captain obeyed the nod, and the door closed quietly behind him.

He found himself in a moderately spacious office. To his right, wide, latticed windows looked out over Ochi Square. From the angle, they were on the far side of the enormous square from Ithaca House, in one of the older sections of Kórinthos. Sunlight poured into the office through those windows, pooling on a mosaic floor patterned with the white-on-blue emblem of the BSDF. Old-fashioned oil portraits of uniformed men and women hung on the walls, and another pair of double doors were set into the wall opposite the doors through which he’d entered.

A woman in the uniform of a Marine colonel sat behind a desk that faced the windows, and he marched across to her, cap clasped under his left arm, made a sharp left face, and braced to attention.

She regarded him thoughtfully for several long seconds, and he looked back levelly. Her uniform was immaculate, textbook perfect…aside from the silver-tree-and-balance-scale patch that had replaced the Federation’s shoulder flash, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about her brown hair and eyes. But something dark and still looked back at him from the depths of those eyes, and the fruit salad on the left breast of her uniform was headed by a red-white-red ribbon he’d seen exactly five times in his career. He might not have any idea who she was, but that ribbon told him a lot about what she was, because the Federation Marines didn’t leave too many Lions of Lucerne lying about in used ration tins. The Lion was second only to the Grand Solarian Cross among the Federation’s medals of valor.

After a long, still moment, something seemed to warm slightly in those brown eyes.

“Captain Yildiz, I presume,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am!” he responded crisply.

“My name is Barr,” she said. “I imagine you’re curious about the reason you’re here?”

“I believe the Colonel may correctly assume that, Ma’am.”

“Well, the truth is that you present something of a problem, Captain,” she told him. “Frankly, it hasn’t been too difficult to decide what to do with most of the Army pukes—I hope you’ll forgive me my parochial loyalty to my own service branch—the Five Hundred sent out here. I won’t use terms like ‘scum of the earth,’ however fitting they may be, but I suspect you saw quite enough of the sort of people I’m talking about. The kind who’ll be guests of honor for firing squads sometime soon.”

Discretion, Yildiz decided, was the better part of valor in this instance, and he simply looked back steadily.

“Some of Thirteenth Corps’s personnel, however, comported themselves with at least a modicum of honor and discipline,” she continued after a moment. “According to at least some reports, you may have been one of them. Would you care to comment on that?”

“Ma’am,” Yildiz said after a moment, “that’s what we call a leading question back home on Izmir. No matter how I answer it, I’m potentially screwed.”

“Really?” She cocked her head. “Why?”

“Because if I tell you that, hell yeah, I was one of the good guys, then I’m setting myself up as one of those lying bastards who’ll say anything to get their asses out of the crack they damned well deserve to be in. And if I say that I don’t think I was one of the good guys, it may be all you need to flush me right down the crapper.”

“Interesting.” Barr frowned thoughtfully. “I had a bet with my boss that you’d answer that question. He thought you wouldn’t. Damn.”

Despite himself, Yildiz felt his eyebrows quirk, and Barr chuckled.

“The reason you present something of a problem—or may, at any rate—is that the Odyssians aren’t very fond of any of you at the moment. Absent some pretty significant extenuating circumstances, they regard all of you as one shallow step—at best—above war criminals. I’m sure you’ve been watching the HD broadcasts about how the FWA is dealing with war criminals, but the Bellerophon System undoubtedly plans on confining even the non-war criminals amongst Thirteenth Corps’s personnel under rather…stringent conditions until such time as there’s a prisoner exchange with the Heart. I’m sure,” the colonel continued in a desert-dry tone, “that you can appreciate that that’s likely to take some time to arrange.”

Yildiz nodded, trying to keep his sinking sensation out of his expression, and she stood.

“Come with me, Captain,” she said, and led him through the other set of double doors.

The office beyond them was larger than the one they’d just left, and a black-haired, mustached man, also in Marine uniform with the same shoulder flash, turned from his own set of windows to face them. At 185 centimeters, Yildiz wasn’t exactly short, but this fellow was a good eight centimeters taller and built on the lines of a Terran bear. He also wore brigadier’s insignia, and he raised an eyebrow at Colonel Barr.

“You won,” she told him wryly. “He didn’t waffle, but he didn’t go around blowing his own horn, either.”

“Told you he wouldn’t,” the brigadier said, then looked directly at Yildiz.

“My name’s Atkins,” he said. “I’m the senior officer in Admiral Murphy’s ground combat component. As such, he’s tasked me with deciding what to do with you, Captain Yildiz, and I don’t have a lot of time to do that deciding in, because the Admiral’s pulling out of Bellerophon within the next few local days. And that’s a problem, because I’ve got two contradictory narratives about you.”

He clasped his hands behind him, gazing at Yildiz thoughtfully, then shrugged.

“One set of reports says you personally arrested the head of the Potamia Valley Evacuation Center and handed him over to be systematically tortured by General Alaimo. And, not content with that, you personally captured Erasmia Samarili, President Xeneas’s personal aide, dragged her through the middle of a firefight, and then handed her over to Alaimo to be water boarded…just before he did exactly the same thing to Governor Ramsay. And those same reports say that you and your Battalion CO—a Lieutenant Colonel…Lopez, I believe—were so desperate to save your asses that you tried to shoot your way through Alaimo’s personal security detachment to grab him as a token you could trade to get those asses out of the ‘war criminal’ crack you’d wedged them into.”

He contemplated Yildiz, obviously waiting for him to respond, but the captain only looked back steadily.

“Now, that’s one set of reports,” Atkins resumed after a moment. “There’s another set which paints a somewhat different picture. For example, it suggests that what you were really trying to do in Potamia Valley was to get the people in that evacuation center the hell out of the way before Alaimo could murder them, too. Interestingly, a fellow by the name of Masson, who otherwise isn’t incredibly fond of you for some reason, thinks that’s what you were doing. And then there’s the fact that you were directly ordered by the acting system governor to bring in Ms. Samarili and given a damned narrow time window to do it in. That didn’t leave you a lot of wiggle room, but you managed to mount the operation in the time you had—and to avoid killing everyone else in her uncle’s house when you executed it. And at least some of the Odyssians I’ve spoken to are of the opinion that what you were really trying to do in Alaimo’s case was to grab him before he could disappear and evade us.

“As you can see, the information available to me is…conflicted.”

He strolled across the office to the large desk at the far end, sank into the chair behind it, and pointed at the one in front of it.

“Sit, Captain,” he said.

Yildiz obeyed the order and sat with his cap in his lap, facing the brigadier.

“I decided the best way to approach this was to lay it in April’s lap,” Atkins said, nodding at Colonel Barr. “She’s been around the block a time or two, and she’s hard to bullshit. So she sat down with Masson, walked him through that entire operation, and found out that even though Masson does carry a thoroughly understandable grudge, he also admires you…a little. ‘A tough, no-bullshit bastard,’ I believe he said.”

Yildiz felt his lips try to twitch and strangled the incipient smile stillborn.

“Given what he had to say about you, the Colonel had the tac records pulled from your armor’s computers,” Atkins continued in a more serious tone. “Not the after-action reports written to cover your ass with your superiors—which, by the way, would have buried your ass with me, if I’d taken them at face value—but the raw records. And she says—and I believe her—that you’re the only reason Ms. Samarili is still alive. In fact, she told me she doesn’t know many Marines who could’ve gotten her through that firefight in one piece. And she also went through the tactical data—and the recorded comm traffic—from your raid on Parnassus Tower. She says there’s nothing in any of that data, or any of that traffic, that suggests you were simply trying to cover your ass.”

He tipped back in his chair, and his expression was somber.

“We’ve always known there are decent human beings in Federation uniform,” he said. “Hell, all of us once wore the same uniform! And there are sick Fringer sons-of-bitches just looking for the opportunity to commit atrocities of their own. I shot more than a few of ’em in Jalal, and the Admiral executed even more of them after we secured the Station. Problem is that sometimes good people find themselves doing shitty things because that’s the job and those are the orders. It takes a special kind of ‘good people’ to do even shitty things with as much humanity, as much decency, as they can manage. People who haven’t had the opportunity to examine your record the way Colonel Barr has may not think you’re one of them, Captain. But she does—and so do I.”

“Brigadier—Sir,” Yildiz said after a moment, “I’ve got a lot of blood on my hands. And I’ve always thought ‘I was just following orders’ is a piss-poor way to excuse what you’ve done. Yeah, I tried not to kill anyone I didn’t have to, but I killed plenty of Odyssians anyway in firefights, in the drone strikes I called in to support my people. And I knew—nobody’d told me, but I goddamn knew—what someone like Alaimo was going to do to Masson and Ms. Samarili. I can’t pretend I didn’t, but I handed them over anyway.” His jaw clenched. “God help me, I thought long and hard about just letting her go after the BSDF brought down my bird. About telling higher command she’d been killed when we went down. I thought about it…but I didn’t do it.”

“If you had, and assuming she hadn’t been killed in the firefight—which she probably would’ve been—she still would’ve been killed when Alaimo dropped the K-strike in the middle of town,” Atkins pointed out. “And you had to make your decisions then, Captain—right then, in the middle of the shit-fest. Been there, done that.” He shook his head. “All you can do is the best you can, and that’s what I think you did.”

“But—” Yildiz began, his expression troubled.

“You say you killed a lot of Odyssians,” Atkins interrupted. “I imagine most of them were soldiers, or at least shooting at you at the moment?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“When someone’s shooting at you or your people, you shoot back. Wasn’t your decision to come to Odysseus in the first place. Wasn’t your call about putting Alaimo in command. And one thing every Soldier or Marine learns early is that the shit always flows downhill.”

Yildiz fell silent, looking back at the brigadier. Then, finally, he nodded.

“All right, here’s the deal,” Atkins said. “The truth is that moral integrity is sadly lacking in far too much of the Army’s officer corps. You know that as well as I do. Sure, I was a Marine, so a certain degree of intramural hostility is inevitable, but you know the Five Hundred and the Oval have always seen the Army as the club to beat down the Fringe. And because they do, that’s how they recruit it, staff it, and train it. So when someone in Army uniform does display integrity, especially in a rolling clusterfuck like this one, it’s worth taking note of. Admiral Murphy’s aware of that, and he’s going to need good people. People who’ve demonstrated that kind of integrity. So he’s authorized me to offer you a choice. You can spend the rest of the Alliance’s war against the Federation in a prisoner of war camp, or you can join the fight.”

Yildiz stared at him, yet deep inside, he’d wondered if—hoped, feared—that this was where the entire interview had been headed.

“I’d think it over carefully,” Atkins continued. “First, because if this goes south on us, or if you end up in Federation hands for any reason, they’ll shoot your ass as a traitor in a skinny instant. And, second, because if evidence ever comes to light that you were involved in the extrajudicial killing of civilians or intentionally harmed noncombatants, you’ll be shipped back here on a slow boat to face an Odyssian court.”

“I’ve done no such thing,” Yildiz said flatly, then furrowed his brow. “But what about my company? What happens to my people?”

Atkins smiled slightly.

“Are you in or not?” he asked.

“What’s next, Sir? Tell me what the Admiral’s planning so I know I’m not signing up as a foot soldier for the next Alaimo.”

“I don’t have the full skinny this instant myself,” Atkins said. “I know the Admiral’s been adamant about reforming the Federation, but that was before Bellerophon. Before he found Alaimo’s orders. I don’t know how that’s going to affect his thinking, but I do know he’s no Alaimo. He does what needs doing, and sometimes he hates it, but that won’t stop him from doing it. And at the end of the day, however it happens, he’ll see to it that another ‘Bellerophon Expeditionary Force’ is never sent out in the Federation’s name again. If I didn’t believe that—if I didn’t know that—I wouldn’t be wearing this uniform.”

He thumped the breast of his crisp fatigues.

“No blanket get-out-of-jail-free amnesties for his people?”

“The Free Worlds Alliance is still teething, but the Admiral’s made it damned clear that its soldiers and Marines are required to act like decent human beings, and the Uniform Code and Articles of War all apply. Really apply, in our case.”

“Then I’m in,” Yildiz said. “But my people, Sir. My company. They’re—”

“You go to them and offer the same deal,” Atkins said. “Sit out the war in a POW camp or join the fight. The Admiral’s not leaving any of Alaimo’s people here—not the innocent ones, at least. Odysseus is out for blood, and they deserve to get every drop of it, at least from the guilty.”

“Can’t disagree there, Sir,” Yildiz said grimly. “But Lieutenant Colonel Lopez, Brigadier. He’s good people, too.”

“He’s waiting for you downstairs,” Atkins said, smiling broadly at last. “Already switched jerseys. In fact, I thought the two of you might go have a word with his entire battalion.”



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