Commercial Handoff
Halshire Remnant border, near Ves Karrow — Day Twenty-Two
Major Halvard Reyes-Kant had a rule he had made for himself the day he took the company private, six years ago, and had kept ever since with the discipline of a man protecting the one thing he had left: he did not ask what was in the crates.
It was a good rule.
It had let him sleep.
Tonight, standing on a low ridge above a farm track with a night-vision monocular in one hand and a radio in the other, watching two trucks and a flatbed idle at a crossroads in the dark, he found that the rule had stopped working sometime in the last hour, without his quite noticing when.
The contract, as briefed to him eighteen hours earlier by a broker he had worked with four times before, had been simple: perimeter security, six hours, a “commercial handoff” at a crossroads eleven kilometers from a town called Ves Karrow, whose name meant nothing to him when he heard it and which he had placed only later, on the drive in, when Corporal Anwen Fisk, who read the newspapers more carefully than he did, mentioned it had been shelled flat ten days before and that the Halshire Brigade had been photographed handing out bread in the ruins the same night, to considerable local gratitude.
He had not connected the two facts until the flatbed’s tarpaulin came loose in the wind and he saw, for three seconds through the monocular, crates stenciled with a manufacturer’s mark he recognized from a dozen other contracts, and men in mismatched jackets — militia, not regulars — unloading them under the direction of a man in a leather coat who moved and spoke like someone used to being obeyed by people poorer and more frightened than himself.
“Major.” Fisk, beside him, had gone very still.
“Those are Halshire Brigade markings on the trucks.”
“I see them.”
“Sir, that’s the outfit that’s been running the checkpoints outside Ves Karrow. The ones on the news broadcast.”
“I know who they are, Corporal.”
He said it flatly, and Fisk had the sense not to say anything further, and the two of them lay on the cold ridge and watched thirty crates change hands between a broker’s flatbed and a militia that fed the starving with one hand, by all accounts, and armed itself with the other.
He had gone private for the money.
He told himself this so often, in so many different rooms, in so many different countries, that it had long ago stopped sounding like an excuse and started sounding like a fact about the weather.
He had been Compact special forces for fourteen years, had commanded men he respected, had believed, in the early years, in the things he had been sent to do.
Then the contracts had come, quietly, through an old colonel turned broker, and the money had been very good, and the work had been, at first, the same work under a different flag: training, escort, the odd extraction.
A man could tell himself, doing that work, that loyalty was simply a longer-term arrangement than a salary, and that the distinction between serving a nation and serving whoever currently held his contract was a technicality for lawyers. This chapter was copied from novelping(.)com without permission.
Six years in, on a ridge above a crossroads, watching a broker he had trusted arm a militia that had, by his own corporal’s account, shelled or been shelled alongside the very people it now fed, the technicality had stopped feeling like one.
He did not know — could not have known, lying on that ridge — that the crates in front of him were paid for from two directions at once, by an Accord broker in Halveth who had sold the same shipment’s existence to two different buyers within the same hour, and that the militia receiving them was, by any honest account, less an army than a wound the war kept reopening in the same town for different reasons each time.
He knew only what he could see.
Thirty crates.
A leather coat giving orders.
His own men on a ridge, paid, professional, watching.
“Command,” Fisk said quietly.
“Orders, Major?”
Reyes-Kant lay a long moment with the monocular at his eye and said nothing.
The contract was perimeter security.
It said nothing about what was being secured, or for whom, or why, and it had been written, he understood now with a clarity that arrived far too late to be useful, precisely so that a man could read it and still tell himself, afterward, that he had not known.
“Hold position,” he said at last.
“We watch the perimeter. That’s the job.”
“And if someone comes for them?”
“Then we do what we’re paid to do.” His voice, when it came, sounded to his own ears like it belonged to someone else.
“That’s the job, Corporal.”
Below them, the last crate went onto the flatbed, and the trucks pulled away into the dark toward Ves Karrow, and the money that had been very good for six years sat in Reyes-Kant’s chest that night like a stone he had swallowed and could not bring back up. Get faster updates on novelping . com.
They drove out before dawn, the company’s four vehicles in a loose column on a farm track that would meet the main road in twenty minutes, and for most of that time nobody spoke.
Reyes-Kant sat in the lead vehicle’s passenger seat with his rifle across his knees and watched the black shapes of hedgerows slide past, and beside him Fisk drove with both hands correct on the wheel and her eyes on the road, and it was Fisk, in the end, who broke the silence, because she was twenty-six and had not yet learned which questions a soldier was supposed to swallow.
“Major. Can I ask you something.”
“You can ask.”
“When you were Compact special forces. Did you ever — ” She stopped, started again.
“Did you ever watch something happen that you knew was wrong, and not stop it, because it wasn’t the mission?”
He was quiet long enough that she glanced sideways at him, checking whether he’d heard.
“Twice,” he said finally.
“Once in a war I still believe was worth fighting. Once in one I’m no longer sure of.” He looked out the window at the hedgerows.
“The difference didn’t feel like anything, in the moment. It only felt like something afterward, lying awake, trying to work out which one this was going to be.”
“And this one?”
“I don’t know yet, Corporal. Ask me in ten years.”
She didn’t ask anything else.
The track met the road, and the column turned south, away from Ves Karrow, away from the crossroads and the flatbed and the thirty crates now somewhere in a militia’s hands, and Reyes-Kant sat with the old contract folded in the pocket of his jacket — perimeter security, six hours, no further questions specified — and understood, with the particular clarity that comes at the end of a long night, that the folder had never once, in six years, told him a lie.
It had simply never told him the whole truth, and he had signed it every time without checking which parts had been left out, because the money had been good, and because a man who does not ask does not have to carry the answer.
He was carrying it now anyway.
He supposed that was the part the contract could never actually protect him from.