“You can and you will,” she said, more forcefully than she meant to. Her Hard Face was slipping. She dragged it back into place. “He and I are more than friends, General, and by law I am allowed to know what he has done.”
Skuar shook his head. “That would be true if he was a civilian or a Diplomat, but he is a soldier of the Rebellion, therefore falling under Military Law. As you are well aware, that is very different than civilian Law.”
He was not going to stop her that easily. “And as a Senior Diplomat, I am allowed access to criminal cases involving military members, in order to give them legal counsel.”
Skuar tilted his head. “That’s not how that works. If…” He trailed off, evidently thinking through the intricacies of the Military Law. And yet, as complex as that was, it paled in comparison to the civilian Law. The military liked things nice and simple, Lyrh had told her. They won’t concern themselves with minute details of law, they liked things broad and left to interpretation. Easier to make it go their way, Lyrh had said.
Skuar stood, seemingly having come to a decision. “Very well,” he said, “there is no point in denying you information. What do you want to know?”
He had given in far too easily. Every other time Jaein had argued with him, few though those times were, he had fought with everything he had, doing his best to win. It was in his nature. Even when the Swrun outnumbered his armies a hundred to one, a thousand to one, he still fought on, finding ever more creative and devastating ways to hurt them. Now, he just gave up. Very unlike him. Jaein was wary of a trap, but she continued anyway.
“Why is Clint in chains?”
Skuar paced the room. He did that when he got agitated or he was bored with sitting in his chair. “He killed a soldier under his command.”
She blinked. That was not like Clint. He only killed those who deserved it. And he had confided in her that he did not like it even then. The only time he had truly enjoyed killing someone was when he destroyed the Thieves’ Guild. He had not told her the specifics of why he killed them, but she had guessed that it was because they killed someone special to him. “Killed him? Directly or through his orders? Because that would not be his fault. If we persecuted every officer who lost a soldier, we wouldn’t have any left.”
“He smashed the soldier’s head in with his fist,” Skuar said, his voice resigned. That was why Clint’s hand had been bandaged.
“What did he do?” Jaein asked, her voice steady.
“I just told you, he killed-”
No, not Clint,” Jaein said, waving her hand to the side. “The soldier. Clint would not kill him without reason. He must have done something bad to get his head smashed in.”
“He tried to rape a young girl,” Skuar said, his face twisted in disgust. Jaein felt her stomach turn. Her Hard Face shook for a moment, but she maintained it with effort.
“Then he deserved what he got. Clint should be thanked, not punished for killing him.”
Skuar shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works. Regardless of what he did, Koruk was still one of us and he deserved a trial and just execution if it came to that. Right though he may have been, Clint took the law into his own hands and that is why he is under arrest, not because he killed a would-be rapist.”
“But you agree he did the right thing?” Jaein prodded the General.
“I agree that Koruk should have been punished for his actions, but Clint was not the one who should have carried them out.”
“Would you have done the same thing in his place, General? If you happened across the scene in the middle of battle, your blood up and seeing one of your comrades, someone just like you, supposedly fighting on the same side, committing that vile act, would you have waited for justice to be served by a jury? Or would you have dealt with it yourself?”
Skuar hesitated. “No thinking about it,” Jaein said. “You just walked in on it, no time to think.”
“I suppose I would have a similar reaction,” admitted Skuar grudgingly.
“Then you can get Clint off,” she said. “You’re the General, you can pardon him.”
“No,” said Skuar, his face growing stern. “Do not presume that you can order me about, Diplomat. Regardless of who your father is, you still cannot have everything you wish.”
Jaein was shocked. Why had he brought her father into this? She hadn’t spoken to him in almost a year and she certainly did not use his position on the Council of Six to bully her way through the Rebellion. “This is not about my father,” she replied. “This is about what is right.”
“What’s right is that Clint Stone faces justice for what he did, right or not.” Skuar’s stern expression softened a little. “I do this not because I have any animosity towards him. I very much respect him for what he has done as a Captain and before, but I cannot set a precedent of committing crimes and then being forgiven for the circumstances. And he came quietly when we ask him to return, even though he could have ran. That shows at least a little remorse for his actions. We would not have learned of his actions otherwise, way off in Empire space.”
Clint had turned himself in? What was he thinking? He and Jaein were going to have words when she went to visit him in the cells. Strong words.
“Since you cannot get him off, what would the punishment be for his crime?” she asked, twisting the word crime, making it sound like a vile word.
“The worst that would happen is Clint would be imprisoned for several years. But that wouldn’t happen,” Skuar said after he looked at her face, “the Rebellion needs every soldier it can get and Clint is far too valuable to sideline. What will happen is Clint will likely be demoted and given a stern warning.”
“Can you be sure?” she asked. Skuar nodded. “I can.”
“Then why this whole trial process and imprisonment? If you know what is going to happen, why even keep him here? Surely he can be useful elsewhere.”
Skuar walked close to her and placed his hand on her shoulder. “I cannot allow an untried killer leading my men. It would set a bad precedent. Other officers would think they could get away with killing those who, in their eyes, deserved it and the army would descend into chaos. I do not need to tell you what a bad thing that would be.”
“But-”
“Enough,” Skuar said it quietly, peacefully, but the full weight of his authority as General of the Rebellion fell behind it. Jaein closed her mouth. “Clint Stone will stand trial and that will be the end of it. Good day, Diplomat Night.”
He returned to his desk and began to type his letter. Jaein stood there for a moment, trying to think of a way to refresh the argument, but she could think of none. She turned to leave and had her hand on the door handle when she remembered that she was to have another assignment. She swung around to face Skuar. “Sir, wasn’t I supposed to be given an assignment?”
“Hmm?” he murmured, looking up from his letter. “Oh, yes. You will represent Clint Stone at his trial. I think the two of you should be convincing enough to sway even the most hardened judge. Good luck.”
Mor-oik pulled himself up from the mud once again. His opponent, Drill Sergeant Kri-lul, smiled again. It was not a happy smile or a nice smile. “You get knocked down, you get back up. Were you any other race, that would be commendable. But you are not any race, you are SWRUN. AND SWRUN DO NOT FALL. AGAIN!” Kri-lul roared before he charged Mor-oik.
Undersized, weak, and untrained, Mor-oik did not stand a chance. He dodged the first blow, blocked the second one by some miracle, but the third one came out of nowhere and landed square on his jaw. Pain shot up his face, leaving a starburst in his vision and knocking him back into the mud.
“Disgraceful,” Kri-lul hissed. “You are a pitiful excuse for a SWRUN, a member of the galaxy’s greatest race. Get out of my sight before I saw your other tusk off.”
Mor-oik forced himself to focus and concentrated on lifting his hand, planting it in the ground, and pushing himself to his feet. He held his head high and kept his back straight as he walked away from the circle with as much dignity as he could manage. It was not much.
The mud dried on his clothes as Mor-oik made his way the nearest shower, trying to conceal his limp, caused by a particularly vicious kick from Kri-lul. While he walked, he could feel the eyes of the other recruits, as Kri-lul called them, on his back. They were not truly recruits, but conscripts, forced into the Army against their will. When the soldiers had come to “recruit” Mor-oik, his grandfather had told him to never show weakness in front of the other soldiers.
They would eat him alive, Grandfather had said. And he had been right. One of Mor-oik’s squad mates had fallen during an endurance run and he refused to get up, despite Mor-oik’s insistence that he would be punished. When Kri-lul arrived and the recruit had still refused to stand, Kri-lul had strung the boy up by his feet and beat him to death with a steel pipe. No one did anything, just stood in orderly rows and watched Kri-lul kill one of his own people.
Mor-oik had tried to stop it. All he got for his trouble was a savage beating, one that took him weeks to recover from, and his tusk sawn off. That was by far the most grievous punishment. He could heal from the beatings, but he would never grow back his tusk. He would be known as one who was but half a Swrun for the rest of his life. That wasn’t likely to be long.
Mor-oik ignored the eyes on his back and he climbed into the shower, fully clothed. He let the luke-warm water pour over his aching body, feeling the wetness seep down his back, washing away the mud and blood. He closed his eyes, turning his face up into the stream of water. He released the burning tears then, let them flood out from behind his carefully constructed walls, designed to keep out the pain and the shame and the humiliation.
This was the only time he dare do it. For a Swrun to show such weakness as to cry, Kri-lul would kill him for sure. But Mor-oik could not contain his emotions all of the time like the rest seemed to be able to do, so he was forced to release them when he could hide them. But there might come a time when he would not have to worry about that. Mor-oik knew why he had been conscripted, he knew why hundreds of thousands of Swrun had been conscripted. There was a war coming, a new galactic war with the Rebellion.
And that was Mor-oik’s only hope. He had to survive Basic Training long enough for him to find a way to escape and join the Rebellion against the Swrun Empire.