"We don't execute prisoners unless they attempt escape," Stake intoned, quoting regulations.
"She looks like she's gonna make a run for it to me" remarked another unit member, leveling his bulky, multi-barreled assault engine.
"She was picking off our officers," Cortez said. "You would've been next, man!"
"I mean it," Stake told them. "Just get some restraints on them."
"Sir," said Private Henderson, calling him over to examine the sniper gun they had confiscated. He pointed to some Ha Jiin characters etched or burned into the weapon's stock. "Can you read this?"
"What's it say?"
Henderson met his eyes gravely. "'The Earth Killer.'"
Overhearing this exchange, Cortez bounced on his feet and jerked his gun at the woman, raging anew. "It's her! She's the Earth Killer! That's what they call her! She's snuffed I don't know how many of us, Stake! We need to riddle this fucking bitch now!"
"I told you to back off, didn't I?" Stake snapped. "Don't argue with me or it goes in my report."
"The corporal's gunning for general," wisecracked another man, but he ignored it.
The Earth Killer. Her own people had dubbed her that. A legend, almost, even to them. And it had worked its way to the ears of the Colonial troopers. A cold-blooded little beauty, carrying a gun almost as big as herself, with a patient trigger finger and an instinctive eye for drilling solid projectiles and various types of ray beams into enemy soldiers at great distances, even through the intervening chaos of jungle vegetation.
But Stake wanted to know her real name, and he stepped closer to her. He asked her, in his crude fumbling attempt at the native language. She said nothing, staring at him unblinkingly. He edged closer, to intimidate her. But not too close, because he was intimidated himself, though she was five feet tall at best, slim as an adolescent boy, and had had her wrists banded together in front of her. Those cat-like eyes. He stared into them. He repeated his question.
"Thi Gonh," she answered this time, in a voice surprisingly dark and strong for her small frame. And then she gasped. And Private Cortez broke into laughter.
"You're starting to mimic her, Stake," he said. "And she looks like she just saw a ghost!"
Stake realized he had been looking at her too intensely, and severed his eye contact. But he hadn't been able to help himself. The young woman was indeed a beauty, as the rumors had indicated. The shape of her face was delicate, with fine cheekbones, the mouth feminine but hard with a kind of composed arrogance. Her nose looked like it might have been broken at some point, but this-like the black mole below one corner of her mouth-rendered her beauty more individual, gave it a flawed humanity to blend with the ethereal loveliness. There was a fold of skin over the inner corners of her eyes in what is called the epicanthus, giving them the slanted look of the Asian peoples for whom Stake felt the Ha Jiin were this dimension's analogue.
The woman's flesh was the robin's egg blue that made these people so eerily lovely, like ghosts. Her waist-length hair, parted in the center and gathered loosely behind her head, stray strands hanging in her face, was midnight black-and yet, it had a metallic red sheen where the light slid across it. Similarly, the pupils of her eyes were black as volcanic glass, but when they caught the light a certain way glowed a bright, unsettling red. Demons, some of the Earth soldiers called the Ha Jiin. It made it easier to kill them.
Stake had the woman patted down for secreted communication devices or weapons, a blade or such. When he saw the soldier give her chest a double squeeze, thinking that the corporal didn't see him grin in the woman's glaring face, Stake growled, "Show some professionalism, you stupid fuck! Put her in one of the rooms we can lock. Stand guard outside it."
"Leave her cuffs on?"
"Yeah, for now."
This private and, at Stake's urging, the more professional Henderson escorted the woman away. Stake thought better of it and had a third man follow them, gun ready. Even without weapons, the Ha Jiin could fight like panthers.
Stake went on to check the medic's progress with the wounded boy, who had been taken to one of the tiny bed chambers-containing little more than a thin mattress on the floor-that each of the monks had been using before the Earth soldiers had corralled them all into one large room where they could be guarded. The boy had spoken English when the two Ha Jiin had been captured, and Stake had hoped to question him, but the medic had put him out in order to safely work on him.
Instead, he made contact with his superiors and gave a report of his unit's status. The loss of the two commanding officers and two infantrymen, the seizure of the monastery, the capture of the Ha Jiin fighters. He mentioned the words etched on the female's Earth-made weapon. And he was commended for his work.
Stake was told to hold the monastery until another ground unit rendezvoused with them in a few days, and then together they would go onward to the next X on the map, the next block on the chessboard. Since none of the Colonial Forces soldiers were so badly wounded as to require that a medevac fly in and transport them out, a flier wouldn't be sent in just yet to collect the prisoners; probably not until the joined units were ready to move onward together to their next destination. Due to the sensitivity of their operations, Stake as yet had no idea where that destination might lie, or what his people were to do when they got there.
He was ordered not to harm the clerics, as it could make for bad press. They would not be taken away when the flier eventually came in. Though small probing bands of the Colonial Forces wormed their way through this part of the jungle, officially they were not even supposed to be here due to the area's great religious significance. (Here, the valuable subterranean gases that certain parties wanted to harvest leaked from occasional fissures, coiling into the air like spirits to be worshiped.) Stake felt that his superiors wanted to digest the situation better before sending in any conspicuous aircraft. It might even be that the joined units would be required to bring the prisoners along with them on foot. When the orders came, whatever they were, he would obey them.
Ultimately, as night began to fall, Stake checked back on the captured woman. The guards were rotated, and Henderson reported that he had managed to exchange a few words with the reticent prisoner in her own tongue, aided by the up-to-date translation chip he wore in his head, programmed with the Ha Jiin language and so many others. Smiling, he told the corporal, "You really spooked her. She called you a Ga Noh. That sort of means a chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil."
"Did you tell her that I'm only some Tin Town freak?"
"No sir. It could be useful if she's in awe of you." "Just like you are, right, Henderson?" "Exactly like that, sir."
Stake looked at the closed door of the room she was kept in, a thick panel of blue-glazed wood. "I'm going to go in and have a look at her."
The woman was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, her wrists bound in her lap. She and the boy had reverently kicked off their sandals when first brought into the monastery. Stake's eyes took in her bare feet, the spacing and stunting of the big toe (did the thong of the sandals do that, over time?) making them look somewhat prehensile, and there were even little spurts of coarse black hair on their knuckles. Monkey feet, the Colonials joked about the Ha Jiin, to dehumanize them further. The woman's feet were small, like those of a child. Self-consciously, he lifted his eyes from them to meet her gaze. Her own eyes presently flashed that disturbing red color, as if lit from within.
Stake knelt down in front of her, at the edge of the mattress. "I'm Corporal Jeremy Stake," he told her, touching his chest. In halting snatches of the Ha Jiin language, he tried to tell her that he was the commanding officer, though surely she knew that already from the insignias on his blue-camouflaged uniform and from observing him take charge of the others. He had no doubt now that it was she who had picked off the lieutenant and sergeant, and that she was only too familiar with reading insignias of rank in her rifle's magnifying screen.