I approached the body of one of the dead seditionists who had made a run for it just as the firestorm touched down. His momentum had carried him into the grass, and tendrils of black smoke curled up from the scorched husk of his armor. As a Xeno, I’m not required to do survey work with my fireteam, but I couldn’t abide being that kind of soldier. I had no intention of ducking any military responsibility. Of course, that’s easier said than done when you’re about to inspect corpses that have been burned alive inside suits of armor.
I set my rifle down and gripped the seditionist’s ankles when I heard a panting noise and froze. I looked up to see a wild-eyed, robed figure crouched at the head of the body, his hands inside the helmet’s shattered faceplate. Startled, I stumbled backwards with a shout. In immediate response, there was squawking over the com, a jumble of voices, and a burst of rifle fire. With a small cry, the robed man collapsed back into grass with a rustle.
Rauder sprinted to my side. “Kiernan, what was that? Are you all right?” she said, her voice tinged more with irritation than concern for the hapless Xeno.
“I didn’t see him at first, he was hidden in the grass,” I said catching my breath. “He was standing over the body.”
“Was he armed?” Rauder asked. She still held her rifle at the ready, waiting for the slightest movement in the grass. My viewscreen showed Marsten and Finnel approaching from behind at a run, but no combatants in the field.
“No,” I said regaining my feet. “He wasn’t even wearing any armor.”
Marsten pulled the armored body into the clearing as I lifted the robed man from the grass, whose chest had been caved in by Rauder’s shot, and laid him out beside the seditionist. His dead eyes still had a frantic look to them, and the glossy sheen of his flesh had already begun to fade. I drew his lids shut, then noticed something peculiar. His hair had been shaved into a triangle, one point at his forehead, the other two over his ears. We’d seen plenty of locals on the planet, but none who had fashioned their fine white hair like this.
“What do you make of it?” Finnel said.
“Who cares?” Rauder replied, then asked me, “Who you calling, Kiernan?”
“Adriassi, of course,” I said under my breath, ignoring her exasperated sigh. Invariably, Rauder never liked the cultural contacts I appointed, finding them all to be simpering, fawning twits, and I was sure she felt Adriassi fit that description perfectly. She refused to accept that a Xeno needed someone reliable to help decipher the bewildering maze of local customs for his daily reports. Most contacts, as in Adriassi’s case, turned out to be friendly, intelligent, and helpful. What was more startling than the surface differences between cultures were our basic similarities; it never ceased to amaze me how much humanoid species resembled one another, both in appearance and characteristics. If it hadn’t been for their waxy complexion and long, droopy earlobes, Adriassi’s kind could almost have passed for one of us.
“Kiernan here,” I said as the connection opened. “We encountered something strange. Adriassi, can you help?” I said, remembering the seemingly random rule of local etiquette: during telecommunication conversations one should start each question with a person’s proper name as a sign of respect. I initiated a visual pathway between our armors’ viewscreens, so he could see what I was looking at. He blanched the moment the image of the robed man became clear on his screen, and ran a nervous hand over his bald head.
“Adriassi, who is this?” I continued. “Why does he dress this way, and cut his hair so? I found him near the body of a terminated seditionist.” I turned the corpse’s head down to give Adriassi a good look at the pattern on his skull.
Adriassi stroked his earlobes as he spoke. “He’s a priest,” Adriassi said, “Conducting rituals for the deceased.”
I watched his lips move and there was a lag before his voice came through the com, meaning our translation device was struggling to find cognates between our languages. “Adriassi, what kind of rituals?”
“It’s complicated,” he answered. “As we have discussed, the seditionists have strict beliefs. They think the soul can be trapped in the body after death and left to rot if not properly freed. They believe souls leave through the mouth, so the priest conducts a mouth-opening ceremony freeing the souls to rise to heaven.”
The lag between his moving mouth and the translation was severe enough to be disorienting, so I shut down the visuals as he spoke. I relayed the information to the rest of the team.
Rauder snorted, then patched into the conversation. “Is that so? Check this out,” she said. Adriassi’s face soured, insulted either by her intrusion or her failure to address him properly. She opened her own visual pathway with Adriassi as she lifted the priest’s body and ripped off the wide hood of his robe.
“Rauder,” Marsten said, sounding tired. “Knock it off.”
“Just doing a little soul catching for Fireteam Bravo,” she said as she dragged the corpse of the armored seditionist away from the group a few paces, then thrust the hood inside its helmet and made as if she were capturing the dead seditionist’s soul inside. Then she twisted the hood shut like it was a sack and held it over her head, waving it at the grassland.
“She did this how many times?” Adriassi asked, his glassy eyes veering away from mine to scan the front room of the eatery where we sat. He had difficulty relaxing in public, even in his armor. Like him, I’d removed my helmet as a gesture of fostering openness in our conversations; like him, it made me uneasy. Confed armor could repel most of what the seditionists could throw at us, but diagnostics showed that their plasma rifles were strong enough to penetrate our armor’s weak points—the flexjoints at the wrists, elbows, the thinner material under our arms, behind our knees. The armor’s weapons detection sensors would give me enough time to slap on my helmet before an attack, but Adriassi had no WDS in his armor so he would far more vulnerable. I had no doubt that some seditionists were gunning for him specifically because he had chosen to cooperate with us, but regulations prevented me from offering to upgrade a native’s armor or conducting meetings in a Confed-secured zone. At each of our cultural exchange meetings, he was taking a significant risk. He knew it, and so did I.
Of course, such conditions make the work of filing accurate daily reports difficult, sometimes impossible, and antagonistic behavior like Rauder’s only compounded the problem.
I let out a sigh. “She did it fourteen times, once for each dead seditionist. Do you think her gesture will mean anything to someone watching?”
“Oh, yes,” Adriassi said, shrugging his shoulders, his people’s equivalent of a nod. “It most certainly will. But why would she do such a thing? It certainly cannot help?”
“I can’t explain. Maybe she thinks it will demoralize them, or that they’ll become more reckless in their attacks if they’re angry.” I left out that Rauder’s actions seemed tame compared to some of the atrocities I’d heard about on other planets. The Confed investigates allegations of improper conduct, but with an infinite set of diverse planets and cultures, the circumstances are always extenuating apart from cases of indiscriminate slaughter. Besides, the prosecution would rely heavily on the attendant Xenologist’s reports and I had no desire to stir up a bureaucratic mess that would ultimately lead nowhere. Attempting to explain this to Adriassi would be next to impossible, so I made the best excuses I could.
I waited for the explanation to filter through, as the translator had gotten hung up on the words demoralize and perhaps reckless. The translator parses about eight million known languages in order for us to communicate with the alien species we encounter, cross-referencing grammar, syntax, and phonology, uploading and downloading lexicons even as we spoke. It handles the structure of languages incredibly well, but it was dicier when it came to semantics, the actual meaning of what we want to say. The more specific a word or phrase, the more difficult it was for the translator to get it right.