Winter Growth

“Winter Growth”

By Jeffrey Van Dell

“Never trust to the natives.” That was the first practical rule I learned after graduation from the Company school. The first marine I ever worked with, Sergeant Johnson, taught me that. At the Company school you learned navigation, stellar cartography, fission theory, paired neutrino transmission, and calculating probabilities in what was once known as “Hyper-space”, but is now called “Foam”. School knowledge kept you from harm ninety-nine percent of the time, but if you didn’t know the other one percent it would kill you one-hundred percent of the time. You needed someone with experience to tell you what that one-percent was.

Master Sergeant Rollins, for instance, showed me how to tie the Company issued bandana properly so the good citizens of Thrax wouldn’t mistake you for a partisan in their civil war and skin you alive. Duncan Yarol taught me how to set a grenade trap so that you could run through it unharmed. He demonstrated this when we lead the bi-pedal canines in the Gulan forest to their explosive deaths. We escaped with our lives and wrote to each other twice a year. I found out last month that Duncan was killed while doing routine maintenance on a fusion reactor. School knowledge had its uses.

I was currently walking through a verdant forest whose green canopy stretched two thousand feet above us. Trees with trunks an over an acre in diameter created claustrophobic walls of brown bark. They grew close together with gnarled roots underfoot at every step. It was dark. Even at noon it was dim as twilight. The continent we traversed was filled with almost nothing but these titans, broken up by rivers which ran narrow, dark, cold, and deep. We longed for a stretch of prairie with open sky, or even a clearing where we could walk without following the curve of these behemoths. The constant turning around the trunks of the trees was making us dizzy, and skittish.

We lost two men one morning when they ambled onto a primitive dead drop into a pit of sharpened sticks. There were pink vipers at the bottom of the pit. The stick punctures could have been healed but the vipers’ bites were agonizing and fatal. The lieutenant hit the soldiers’ remote euthanasia units and they drifted off to Valhalla in an eye blink. We took their identi-tags, mumbled a few prayers and swears then moved on. Since then we’ve taken turns at the front and no one is allowed to walk less than three meters behind the point man. I would never be the point man. 

“Mister Winter, are you ready to commence with the transmission?” The lieutenant asked me, checking his chronometer. The only thing that could punch through the weird atmospheric conditions was the device that deep space transports used to communicate back to earth in real time.

“Yes sir, shall I set up here or go into the clearing?” I asked, nodding back to an area that was almost flat for six square meters.

“No, do it here. The clearing isn’t all that clear and the device can punch a signal through a wall of lead four light years thick. Carry on Mister Winter.” He strode off to take a dead reckoning with a gravity meter and a topographical survey map.

Because of a peculiar atmospheric condition our spacebound signals went astray by millions of kilometers. The scientist assigned to our mission said it was because of the extra ozone layers in the planet’s upper atmosphere. One of the older marines hinted that the trees themselves had been genetically engineered by the natives to block electronic transmissions.

“It’s the same thing I saw on Yurka.” He told me in a furtive voice our first night there. “The natives used them to block our communications.”

The lieutenant disapproved of gossip and superstition and nipped such talk in the bud. “Never trust the natives.” He whispered to me when the lieutenant wasn’t looking.

“All set sir.” I said as the lieutenant came back from his navigation task. Technically I didn’t have to call him “Sir” since I wasn’t a marine, but I was brought up in a strict family and old habits died hard. “Shall I transmit now?”

“Proceed Mr. Winter.” He backed away from me in long even strides. Anyone not trained in the art of paired neutrino transmitting thought it was unnatural at best, black magic at worst. I was one of the few who could tolerate its effects, lucky me.

“Transmitting in five, four, three, two, now.” I said. I disappeared for a brief second and winked back into existence facing the other direction several meters away.

I heard the lieutenant take in a sharp breath when he turned to look at me. Some glow from the transmission was still on my skin. I looked like an apparition. The units sometimes malfunctioned and the operator would reappear with his femur sticking out of his neck, or her dermis and epidermis reversed. People who suffered those accidents lived for only a few agonizing seconds. Paired neutrino transmitting was science on the edge of what we could barely understand, but it worked and we took the risks. I’d never felt any ill effects from being a transmitter but I knew the statistics; one chance in fifty thousand that an “event” would happen. So far I had successfully completed three hundred transmissions. My pay grade from the company was double that of any technician, but no death benefits would accrue to my loved ones in the event I died or winked out of existence during a transmission. I was set to move back to earth in a year. I wanted to work in the JAG office and this was a way to earn money and move ahead on the waiting list for the law program the Company offered.

“Excellent work as usual Mr. Winter, stand down and prepare to make camp.” The lieutenant said as he breathed a sigh of relief.

 I’m pretty sure that he was terrified of me dying. Not because he had any interest in my well being, aside from my usefulness as a team member, but because the lieutenant, who was no coward, was next in line for transmission duty. His left eyebrow twitched uncontrollably whenever I pointed that out to him.

The lieutenant assigned two marines to night watch and they began setting a perimeter of laser and filament defenses. The soldiers and Company men worked together to get the two large habitats up and running. They were really just glorified tents, but they kept the bugs out and we were allowed hot showers once every three days on a rotating basis.

Since nothing could be dropped through the canopy accurately we had to carry all our food. We used a wheeled cart packed with “just add water” meals. JAW’s were the Company’s invention. One tablet the size of your thumbnail would spring into an entrée with the texture of a sponge and the flavor of whatever it said on the package when you added water and shook the thing. Some of the men liked them. I couldn’t stand the texture but the artificial flavors were indistinguishable from the real thing.

“Hey Winter, trade you a kim-chee for that duck you’ve got.” Said McIntyre, the weapons master and closest thing I had to a friend during this assignment.

“How about you throw in that slice of key lime pie you won it from Corporal Husson in last night’s match.” He said.

Husson and McIntyre had a chess tournament going and the whole platoon was betting on who would win more matches by the end of the mission. I thought McIntyre was a better strategist and bet on him.

“Ok, I’ll throw in the key lime pie if you lend me your pipe.” He said.

 “It’s a deal.” I said and we shook on it.

Later in the night I smelled the expensive tobacco he was sucking through my clay pipe. We weren’t allowed to light any fires. Fire was a no-no and could compromise the mission. The men sucked pipes for the flavor and, in my case, to remind me of home.

Our house was always rich with the scent of my father’s and uncles’ pipe smoke. My family owned a large organic pig farm. Unaltered corn-fed pork fetched an exorbitant price when it came to market. I would have stayed on the farm and been happy if it hadn’t been for a trip through Foam for high-school graduation. That one trip, a lark on my part, altered my destiny. Upon my return home from space I realized how big the universe was and how utterly revolting pigs smelled, which in retrospect explained all the pipe smoking.

Our mission on this world was search and rescue. A Company botanist and her family had been dropped here to study the trees, collect and analyze genetic samples, and describe their niche in the planet’s overall ecosystem. The science division of the Company wanted to grow the unique flora on Mars to help enrich the atmosphere and cut down on ultra-violet radiation. They thought the lighter gravity on Mars would cause the trees to grown even taller.

The botanist and her family had seen and interacted with the natives and reported no problems. Trouble reared its ugly head when a scheduled transmission from them was garbled and the botanist didn’t follow proper communications procedures. At first the Company thought it was because of the atmospheric conditions. When they completely missed their next two scheduled transmissions we were dispatched to find out what happened.

Normally we would have just turned on their transponders from space and swooped in to do an evacuation. But we couldn’t find them that way. We had to get within a kilometer of their actual location before any electronic transmission would work. To make matters worse they seemed to be on the move. We found traces of their journey from their base camp across the landscape as we went, a shoelace here, a JAW pack there.

It was my eighteenth mission for the Company and my seventh in the company of marines. The marines were combat professionals and I felt completely safe with them around us. I was treated with a greater degree of respect than the other technicians, no doubt because of my ability to use the transmitter. I would never share the easy camaraderie the marines enjoyed but I was allowed to yell “Semper Fi, Do or Die!” whenever I completed a transmission. It seemed like gloating and I only did it once.

We covered about twelve kilometers a day, although with all the turns we took because of the trees’ diameters, we actually walked twenty-five. Sky drones launched to cover us crashed four times on our first day of travel because of the atmospheric conditions. The Company stopped sending them after that to save on expenses so we didn’t know what was ahead of us. The gravity was slightly less than earth’s and that made the walking easier. I still got blisters. That night I asked McIntyre, “Do you expect any trouble with the natives?”

He said, “The problem with trouble is it always comes when you’re taking a piss.” We both laughed, but it was a prophetic utterance.

No one heard the natives abducting me the next morning at dawn. Whatever perimeter defenses we had set up failed or were bypassed by the “friendly” natives. I was standing near a tree with my gear pack down by my feet; zipping up and watching the steam rise from my urine. The creatures’ smell gave them away before they came into view. They reeked of ripe bananas. One of them grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back, two others held my legs while a fourth picked up my pack. I was carried along like a sack of hog feed, traveling three times faster than any human could run. I could only see the backs of the creatures that held my feet.

They were eight feet tall with two arms and legs. Their brown skin had the texture of tree bark. On their heads were flat vertical plates, like a stegosaurus’s back plates. They were giving me a surprisingly smooth ride, gliding rather than bumping over the rough terrain. Far from being scared or angry I was calm. I detected a hint of evergreen behind the banana smell.

“Maybe something in their scent, some pheromone, is tranquilizing me?” I thought during those first few moments of captivity.

There was a procedure I should have followed but didn’t. If I could have somehow reached it I could have killed them all instantly with the pistol strapped to my leg. I was a decent shot, almost up to basic marine standards. However, at point blank range any moron with a gun could have killed this group. Shooting them would have been an execution, not self-defense. Their grips on my body weren’t crushing me. I could have slipped my hands free. I should have tried to get away, but they were taking me in the direction of the botanist and her family at a much greater speed than my platoon was making. The botanist had a child and I wondered how she was, if she was scared or injured, or even alive. At any rate if the natives wanted to kill me they would have done so already, maybe. I decided to go along for the ride. I would use deadly force if my life or the life of the botanist’s family were in danger. This attitude of mine was why I didn’t enlist with the Company’s marines.

Later, when it was all over, McIntyre helped me draft my testimony for the board of inquiry. He sat behind me, staring over my shoulder as I typed the report.

“So, you must have been scared out of your wits, right?” He asked me.

“No, actually I was…” I began.

“No no! Winter. You were scared out of your mind, terrified.” Snap! He kept snapping mint gum between his teeth. “You were out of your mind with fear.” Snap, snap!

I turned to look at him and he pointed to the keyboard.

“You were scared Winter.” He said

            “I was scared out of my mind?” I said.

“And you were held strong by their amazingly powerful alien arms.” He said.

I typed. Snap! Snap! Went the gum between his perfect teeth.

“Umm…Yes that’s right. Too strong to escape.” I could smell the mint in his gum. “Umm..”

“And your sidearm must have gotten lost somewhere in the forest, otherwise you would have used it to blast them to kindling. No, scratch that. The aliens must have confiscated it when they took you, right?” Snap! Went the gum.

“Yes, exactly that way sir…” I said.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me sir. Call me ‘Mister’, I’m not an officer and you’re not in the Corp.”

Snap! Snap!  Went the gum.

He put a hand on my shoulder and got me through my statement, phrase by phrase. He probably saved my career.

There was no reprimand in my permanent record and I even got a bonus for making first, and sadly last, contact with a new species. Why the botanist didn’t get the bonus is a matter of record.

As I sat there in their arms I tried communicating with them. I thought through the little ritual we were taught by the alien sociologist back at school. I couldn’t touch my body so I imagined making the little motions in my mind: eyes, mouth, feet, shoulders, belly and fingers. Since I couldn’t make a head gesture or eye contact, I spoke to them in English.

No response.

I sang the little song we were taught and again got no response.

“Doesn’t say much for my singing ability does it boys?” I mused.

My back was starting to hurt and I let out a string of colorful swears in Mandarin Chinese. A girl at my high school had parents who were missionaries on furlough to earth for a year. She was in my chemistry class and sat next to me in homeroom. The girl, who I had a crush on, failed to convert me and I failed to woo her. I did learn some useful swears and phrases from her younger brother.

The native behind me let out a high screech that changed pitch over the course of a minute into a low booming sound. Listening hard, I realized that it had imitated my Mandarin curse words. I spoke another phrase in Mandarin which meant, “Meat sauce noodles with scallions please.” It was my favorite dish. The native holding my left leg imitated this almost perfectly and for the next hour they took turn saying this phrase back and forth to each another.

The sun was setting and my back was killing me. Although they didn’t jostle me, my spine was bent in a “C” shape that only the worst mattresses allowed. I reconsidered blasting them with my piece. Just when I thought my spine was going to break, we stopped.

They put me down gently and I lay on the ground, feeling my spine regain its normal alignment again. The one with my pack used its huge hands and spindly fingers to open the top and handed me my canteen. I guzzled the water/vitamin mix greedily. He, she, or it reached into my pack and delicately lifted out a JAW pack. It was lasagna and I had to eat it dry. I had no more water to mix it with and the silly stuff expanded in my mouth. With every tiny nibble my cheeks expanded like a chipmunk’s and I almost choked until I figured out exactly how much to bite off at one time. After feeding, I took stock of my captors.

I looked up into their faces and my heart stopped. I was expecting a humanoid, tree-like face, but what I saw froze my blood. There was a single large pool of liquid or gel where their facial features should have been. It was covered with an ivory colored membrane, like our corneas, that glistened in the dim light of the setting sun. The aliens knelt down around me and locked their arms together. They each produced a pitch that started low and became higher than any human could produce. The sound pierced my chest. My body became numb. I fell into a deep dreamless sleep and my hand never made it to my holstered weapon.

I awoke before dawn, made my toilet, and was given more food and water. I’d let the natives live another day but quietly transferred the gun and holster to my sleeve. As soon as the sun broke over the horizon we were off and running again. Instead of being carried like a sniper victim I was lashed on to the back of the largest alien with some long vines. This was more comfortable in the long run for my back, but my hands and forearms were getting chaffed and blistered from the creature’s hide.

The natives were more vocal than they had been the day before. Maybe they knew we were well out of earshot of my troop. I wondered when they would catch up to us. I calculated that they were more than a day behind us. The alien language was an enigma. I had no advanced training in alien languages and what I learned at the Company school wasn’t helpful in this situation. Sometimes they grunted sub-sonic tones, which I felt rather than heard. At other times they made sounds like a pair of parakeets my parents owned when I was a child. I spoke to them and told them all the usual things we were supposed to in situations like this; a kidnapping that is. They didn’t respond unless I spoke my Chinese phrase.

I tried to sleep but my face scraped against the creature’s rough back every time I drifted off. His head plates would whack me on the head and shoulders whenever he looked up to the canopy of green far above. At one point I thought I saw the metallic glint of a drone following high above. I saw a sneaker and several JAW packs on the ground as we sped by. The sneaker was pink.

On the third day of my captivity we made it to the cleaning on the other side of the continent and found the botanist and her family. I was so happy to be in a clearing I let out a “whoop” of joy. My carrier walked towards the botanist. She was standing on a rock in the middle of a meadow speaking Chinese to a group of thirty or forty natives. They were kneeling in front of her and repeating back everything she said in their gravely voices. The giant who was carrying me put me down. I stretched my legs and looked in one of my pockets for some salve to put on my face and hands. I sat on the grass and applied some of the topical ointment to my raw flesh. It stung but the Company said it would prevent infection on over thirty known worlds. Maybe I could write the Company’s pharmacy division and let them know it worked on thirty-one?

A girl of ten or eleven years ran over to me, speaking in rapid fire Chinese. I spoke the only phrase I knew that wasn’t a curse. She tilted her head and said in prim British English, “You want some meat sauce noodles and scallion pancakes? Where am I supposed to get that here? We can’t get that and we’re Chinese! Are you here to rescue us? You’re with the Company right? Why are you so dirty? Oh, my name is Penelope Thatcher, what’s yours?” She stuck out her hand and I shook it.

“My name is Winter and I am with the Company. They send a troop after your mother’s last transmission was er…confused sounding. Where’s your father?” I looked around the clearing with trepidation.

“He’s around. Collecting herbs probably. Mama told him that his place in the new society would be as a healer. He didn’t want to at first but mama told the tree people to not give him water until he did it. My job is to use the recorder to copy all of mama’s teachings.” She took out a pocket recorder, both voice and image, and played back some of what her mother was teaching.

“Where did you learn to speak British English?” I asked. She had beautiful Chinese features but blue eyes.

“Papa’s British.” She said. “Come on, let’s go find him.” She ran ahead and led me to the edge of the woods. None of the “tree people” stopped us. The botanist was still speaking and I noticed now that her eyes were glassy looking and her skin had beads of sweat pouring off of it. It wasn’t from the heat.

We found her father, Derek, in a clearing processing some leaves with a portable lab. He looked at me with both concern and relief.

“Are you from the Company? Thank God! I was worried the last transmission got lost and we’d have to wait a month longer. Is there anyone with you?” He asked.

“Yes Mr.Thatcher, there’s a troop of marines and Company men on their way here. I was abducted three days and brought here by the natives. What’s going on?”

Derek had bags under his eyes and hadn’t shaved in days. “My wife, bless her heart, found an edible weed that tasted like asparagus. It’s a distant relative of the giant trees here. She cooked some, after checking it for toxins of course, and had some with lunch. An hour later she was raving that she could talk with the natives. I don’t know if they really understand her, but as you can see they listen to her every word. I don’t think they even understand. We followed all the first contact procedures but they just ignored us until my wife started speaking Mandarin to them. I’m a chemist by training, not an exo-biologist. We don’t usually deal with natives. Anyway, she must be able to communicate with them on some level because they do what she tells them. I’ve been put in charge of building her utopia. Can you get us out of this? I tried giving my wife an anti-toxin but I missed with the dermal patch and I can’t get near her now.” He put an arm around his daughter and looked embarrassed more than frightened.

“Sure, we can do that. My troop should be here a few days. Can we hang on until then? The creatures don’t seem hostile, but they’re aliens, you know? I’ve got a standard issue pistol if they decide to get aggressive but I can’t get them all. Where’s your weapon?” I asked.

“Marie threw it in the river. I thought about diving for it but the tree people are faster than they look, and anyway I’d probably die of hypothermia before I found it.”

 I asked him, “Have you eaten anything besides JAW’s recently?”

            He hadn’t. I was hoping for a home cooked meal. Nevertheless I got some stuff from my pack and traded my Boston cream pie for his spicy pork roast. Apparently the “asparagus” his wife had eaten contained a hallucinogen akin to LSD which hadn’t shown up on her scanner because she forgot to tell it to look for them.

Derek said, “Human error is the bane of all our perfect machines.”

After we ate he went back to cataloging plant specimens. A native checked in on him every half-hour or so. Derek swore at it after making sure Penelope was out of earshot. I activated the homing beacon in my pack. The one in the botanist’s habitat was working.

Penelope helped me set up my one-man mini-tent. Theirs was “full sized”. It had three small but comfortable rooms and inflatable furniture. Afterwards she sat next to me doing schoolwork while we talked.

            “Mama gave a prophecy that if the marines came here they’d kill all the tree people. Is that going to happen Mr. Winter? She said I might die too, but I know The Lord will protect me no matter what.”

Penelope was completely guileless. I wondered if she’d ever been away from her parents. Her reference to “The Lord” was disturbing. The Company had an entire division dedicated to preventing the dangerous religions from influencing earth and the colonies.

            “No,” I lied. “They have ways of diffusing these kinds of situations without violence. Your mom just needs to be lifted back to the ship and given something to take away the effects of the stuff she ate. They might have to fight though. I’ll tell you what to do in any case, and I promise to protect you if things go to he…if things get bad.  You didn’t eat any of the things your mother did, did you Penelope?”

            “No, I thought it smelled bad, like asparagus. I only like broccoli. You’re not telling the truth about the marines though. I saw them on our last assignment kill thirty natives because they tried to steal the rock samples we took.” She frowned. “I wanted to share the Gospel with them but Mama said not to.”

Like most people of my generation I had mistaken innocence for naivete. I often mistook purity for vapidity. A fine man I was. I pondered how to get her and her family safely through the fighting which was sure to come.

            I helped her with her long division problems then knelt down and put my hands on her shoulders as I spoke to her. “Penelope, I want you to drop to the ground when the marines come. I’ll yell out a word or phrase…maybe the meat sauce noodle order? That should be easy to remember.” She laughed and nodded. “Drop to the ground and don’t move until me, your father, or one of the Company men comes to get you. If you remain perfectly still you’ll be fine.” I gave her a pat on the back and put a safe patch on her tunic. It would identify her as a good guy to the marines and warn them away from her if they had to shoot. I’d already put one on the mother and father.

            From what I could glean of her teachings, Marie, the botanist was convinced some kind of utopia of aliens and humans could co-exist in peace and usher in a new age of agrarian bliss. She must have heard some Marxist teachings in her youth because her phrases sounded like the stuff they espouse on the moon colonies of Jupiter.

“Where do all the communists live?”

“The big Red spot!” Went the old joke.

“You can be a communist right here by us never paying you.” Was what my parents said when I mentioned I might like to move there.

 I hoped Marie wouldn’t be too embarrassed when she came out of whatever fugue state she was in. Maybe I’d make sure the recording of her teachings went in the river with their gun?

            I was curious as to how she was communicating with the natives and how much they understood of her speech. Was telepathy involved? Since humans had colonized worlds with sentient life we’ve found no evidence that any creature, including man, could read one another’s minds. Derek thought they were giant idiots. Penelope didn’t think they were fully sentient.

“They’re like big dogs.” She said.

  She probably saw more than I had at eleven years old and I told her so.

            “Oh, I’ve only been to six worlds so far. I want to be a missionary like my grandmother. I’m learning all the old earth languages so I can bring the Gospel to the colony worlds.”

            “Are you a Christ follower?” I asked. I didn’t see the mark on her but she was kind of young for it. I didn’t tell her she’d never be allowed to share that kind of information on the colony worlds.

            “Yes, my grandmother introduced me to him. Would you like to know him too?” She dug through her pockets for a tract and held it out for me. She had painted tiny ladybugs on each of her fingernails. Kittens were painted on her thumbs.

            “Um, no thanks. Not yet anyway. Thanks for the offer.” She put the folded up tract in my hand. I just couldn’t refuse. “Ok, thanks.” I mumbled. I’d have to get rid of it later.

            “Jesus love you.” She hugged me and walked back to record her mother’s rants.

            That night Penelope, Derek and I ate together while her mother meditated on her rock. The natives didn’t need to sleep and just repeated all of Marie’s teachings through the night. I managed to say a few words to her before I went to sleep. “Stay down Marie, stay down.” The patch on her back was gone and I didn’t have any more. I hoped that my troop would get here soon. Penelope prayed aloud for everyone’s safety before we turned in.

            All hell broke loose the next morning. The aliens were listening and mimicking whatever Marie was saying. Penelope was getting water by the stream. Her father was processing plant specimens. I felt the stunner rounds come in before I heard them, and heard their whistle before I saw the red explosions. They were aimed with pinpoint accuracy and two-thirds of the aliens fell dead on the ground. I hit the ground, covered my head and hoped the marines would not kill us or be killed themselves.

            Another volley of rounds went off and a fist-sized piece of broken rock hit me in the ribs. White spots exploded before my tightly closed eyes. I couldn’t take in a breath and for one terrifying minute I thought I would suffocate. I heard someone screaming, took a deep breath that hurt like hell, and glanced towards Penelope’s position. I hoped she stayed down. I took another agonizing breath, heard another round of explosions and then passed out.

            A marine was yelling in my ear. It was all over. I stood up, tasting blood in my mouth. I’d bit my tongue. I looked around the meadow. The natives had been killed. Derek was holding the Botanist Marie by the arm, pulling her away from something. A medic gave them both shots and they slumped to the ground. I saw Penelope and ran over to her. She was lying in the cover position I told her to go into. A long, thick branch was sticking through her chest and coming out her back. Her beautiful eyes were open and lifeless. Smeared blood covered the kittens she had painted on her thumbnails.

            I vomited my breakfast and then sat on the ground. McIntyre and a medic came to get me.

            “Come on buddy, get up. It’s over. We got two of the three hostages and all the natives are dead or running. We’ve got a flight to catch.” They helped me up and walked me over to the extraction point.

Things move quickly in the Company. The next day I was de-briefed and given a

sketch of my next assignment. McIntyre helped me write my report as we left orbit for Foam. It was only after he was done telling me what to write that he told me exactly what happened.

He said, “The natives we didn’t neutralize in the first volley moved in a threatening manner towards you and the others. You know how fast they can move. I thought you were all going to die. We picked some off with our guns but their hides are really thick. We got off our second volley and knocked most of those down, but a few of them were almost on you. The little girl saw them and stood up. She tried to distract them away from you by waving her arms wildly. You were out cold. One of them got her with the stick before we got our third volley off. The parents were unharmed, physically, although the botanist is going through a full detox. I’m sorry Winter. Did you get to know her at all? What was her name?”

             “Penelope. No, not at all. She kept to herself. A real loner.” I said.

            He looked at a spot above my ear. “Just as well. You know, in our business it doesn’t pay to get too close. You’ll be notified of the verdict. I think you get a first contact bonus.”

“Great, I’ll buy your unit a few rounds next time we’re at an outpost.”

“How are your ribs?” He stood to go.

I winced. “Four were broken, three were cracked. They still ache but it’s nothing to complain about.”

 He smiled knowingly. “You got two days hardship leave. Try and have a good time on your leave ok?” He shook my hand and slapped me on the back, gently. He was a good guy and I hoped I worked with his unit again.

            The lieutenant was waiting for me outside. He handed the few things I’d lost between the time I was captured and the trip up to the ship.

            “I thought you might take these too. The parents are freaked out. She was their only kid. The father wanted you to have these. I told them it was illegal but… I just couldn’t refuse him. If anyone asks I’ll deny everything of course.” He handed me an English-Chinese bible printed on honest to goodness pulp paper and a journal the girl had written poetry in. Some of the poems were written in ancient Chinese pictograms, the rest were in English.

            “Thanks. ” I said. “I’ll keep them for the parents in case they ever want them back.”

            I leafed through the bible. What did anyone see in it? Maybe her grandmother should get the bible? I put it in my pack. The lieutenant walked with me to the section of the transport that quartered the Company’s civilians.

            “Don’t forget Mr. Winter. You can’t get close to the natives.”

            “Thank you sir.” I shook his hand then gave him the best salute I could manage which to my surprise he returned. I went to get my leave papers and new assignment orders.

After dinner that night I lay on my bunk and read Penelope’s English poems, some of which showed promise. A bookmark in her bible led me to a passage she had highlighted in yellow and circled in red and blue ink.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

Before sleep I prayed to be a better man because, on this subject, the Company had no written policy.

The End