Battalion 4-P

4-P: Registrant is not acceptable for military service due to being genetically or psychologically prone to PTSD. To be eligible for Class 4-P, a registrant must have been found not qualified for service by a Military Enlistment Processing Station (MEPS) under the established LOW OrbIT genetic or psychological standards.

The rage of the last candidate still echoed in my ears. What had given me the right? Silence had served as my only answer as I’d condemned her to her fate. I hated my job. A necessary evil. A useful task for a handicapped fighter like me.

I wanted to light a nic-stick but knew I had to wait. I wanted to pour a shot of whiskey into my coffee but knew I must resist. The day was too young, the faces across from me too fresh. I needed to confront this reprehensible task without alcohol’s numbing comfort.

The soft thud of the mortars drew closer. Like the distant boom of fireworks before the Revolution. The Greens had begun to push back down the peninsula and once again surround our enclave. The bridges and causeways would soon been cut. Then this fiction of evaluations would end. We’d just start handing out weapons and hoping for the best. Even then, Battalion 4-P would draw Lt. Freeman’s 3D jobs: dirty, difficult and dangerous. We needed the best and the brightest, but the best and the brightest had fled. So we opted for the ones no one else wanted, the ones who wouldn’t break.

Recruitment had taken over a squat, two-story prefab building because of its proximity to the bridge. Other self-defense militias screened the refugees before they entered the hospital complex. Ours was the battalion of last resort.

We’d turned the beneath-building parking structure into a collection point for volunteers. We funneled small groups through the adjacent ground floor entrance where the security station still served the same function it always had, a measure of protection through inspection and isolation. From there, recruits assembled in a staging area that had once been the food court at the top of the main stairs.

Mine was the last in a series of suites that had been repurposed into testing and examination rooms lining one branch of a central hall. The room itself had once been a windowless administrative space, perhaps a tiny office in an onsite bank. All of the desks and chairs and other standard business furnishings had long ago been requisitioned to feed the 3D printers which transformed them into items more vital to resistance.

I straightened two piles of archaic hardcopy files stacked on either end of the backboard that served as my desk. Occupying a hospital complex meant we had odd bits of improvised furniture. Pairs of empty medical supply cases doubled as supports. I sat in a wheeled shower chair with a lattice of drainage holes in the hard, composite seat. Across from me, a molded waiting room chair had been raggedly cut loose from its line of companions.

“Next,” I called out the open door.

A slight, young woman in low-tech urban camo pants and a gray tee-shirt stepped in. She tried to appear confident but was obviously uncertain and didn’t want to make a mistake. She had an equally low-tech rifle slung over one shoulder, serviceable if it’d been maintained.

I was better at judging the age of men than women, but she couldn’t have been even fifteen. Was that what we were down to now? But she must have passed all the other tests to get to me.

“Secure your weapon and close the door,” I instructed her.

Deliberately yet slightly delicately she opened the chamber of her rifle and engaged the safety. She leaned it by the door which she carefully snicked shut.

“Name?” I turned my attention to tabs on the stack of folders to my right.

“Dagmar Hara,” she replied, standing rather than sitting.

Hara was an unusual surname on Darwin. Hers was only one. I wondered where her family had originated. From her exotic but not quite Mocha features, I suspected she been touched by the rising sun. Blue, perhaps? Or were they members of the nikkeijin, or some later Japanese diaspora. Though, like all of us, the trail of her lineage was long confused. She appeared to be trying to live up the Scandinavian origins of her given name. She looked so young, so defiant. Like a dark, diminutive Brunnhilde. The image broke my heart.

I retrieved her file and flipped through the small sheaf of papers within. What I wouldn’t give for a scanner and tablet. But this primitive lookup crafted more of an impression and encouraged them to lie. Hara, Dagmar. Female. 19. Registered and tested 4-P. A genetic predisposition to PTSD rather than a demonstrated condition.

“Date of birth?” I asked, my words clipped and disinterested.

She hesitated just a fraction of a second too long before rattling it off. That confirmed she wasn’t who she claimed to be. Not that it mattered. Her identity wasn’t critical. But useful information to test her resolve nonetheless.

“Draft status?” I made a show of cross-referencing one of the sheets with my right ring finger, giving her a good view of scars where the first two fingers should have been.

This time she did not reply. Clearly this wasn’t an answer she’d rehearsed. I saw in her expression she was thinking of making something up but decided to double down on her silence. She focused on the wall behind my shoulder.

I leaned back and fixed her chest with a calculating stare as if evaluating it for a bra fitting. She tried not to squirm. Uncertainty and fear began to emerge in her expression. Perhaps there was hope.

“I’m up here, sir,” she finally said as firmly as she could in a slightly quavering soprano voice.

Initiative, I was impressed. Most of the girls who stood before me never showed it. I slowly dragged my eyes up to hers.

“Where’d you get the rifle?” I asked. “Did you steal it with the name?”

“I inherited them both from my father,” she responded, her eyes flicking away from mine in a manner they all thought was expected. As if refusing to issue a challenge. They’d all watched too many holo-vids that romanticized their situation.

 I tried a new tack to rattle her. “Does your father know you brought it here?”

“My father died in the May 8^th Raid,” she replied evenly, still looking past me.

“A brother?” She shook her head. “A husband, then?” She looked at me aghast.

“How old are you really?” I used a tone that said I knew that she was lying.

“Old enough to bleed is old enough to bleed for us.” She defiantly held my eye. “Isn’t that what Sub-Commander Z says?”

I lowered my gaze, even more deeply saddened by her bravado. I responded quietly, “We are not the Greens.”

I moved her file to the top of a second stack on the opposite end of the backboard and folded my hands. “There’s no place here for you.”

Her smooth, uncreased brow furrowed. “Why not?” she demanded.

I shrugged as I retrieved a nic-stick from the packet I pulled out of my breast pocket. I wriggled out a match from a box tucked inside the wrapper and struck it with the remaining fingers of my right hand. After a long, calming drag, I shook out the match and dropped it to the floor. She watched my hand with horrified fascination. I let that sink in.

“You’re too young,” I finally answered, exhaling smoke directly at her. “Too small. Too frail. Too weak. Take your pick. You are useless to me.”

“You need fighters,” she replied, resolute. “You can’t afford to be choosey.”

I smiled slowly, ruefully. “We need people our fighters can rely on with their lives. Just as yours would rely on them. Not a girl playing dress-up pretending to be her older sister.”

“I’ll join another militia,” she said, undaunted. As if I were her father and we were arguing over her wearing makeup or going on a first date. Which was the discussion she should have been having if the universe had any sense of decency. We both knew those days for her were gone.

“No, you won’t.” I shook my head. “No other self-defense battalion accepts girls. Especially ones listed as 4-P.”

That I knew that from the ancient printouts shocked her. Blind Mouth Bay was low-tech and cut off but as former LOW OrbIT veterans hospital, we were not without resources. How many like her had I seen sitting or standing before me? How many had I lost? Too many.

“Even knowing you are not your sister,” I continued after another drag when she didn’t call out my statement as a lie, “I can’t overlook her genetic tests. The coin is in the air whether your genes follow hers. That’s a risk we can’t afford to take.” She would be devastated if her genes ran true, as I somehow knew they would.

“It’s not fair,” she said, as petulant as the child I suspected still lurked inside.

There. I’d done it. I had broken her. A rare victory. I quarantined a smile before it could spread across my face.

“This life isn’t fair, youngling,” I replied as gently as I could.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. Her sudden ferocity startled me.

“Why?” I asked before I could suppress my curiosity.

She glared at the plascrete floor which I could almost see smoldering beneath her gaze. “That’s what they called me,” she whispered, trailing off, “when they…”

I closed my eyes as if that simple, childish act could hide me from her pain. When I reopened them, I found her laser focus fixed back on me. I suspected that my triumph had begun to slip away. But I continued playing role this life assigned.

“They say the Blue Line is collapsing.” She turned to pleading with me, conspiratorially, like an adult. “This is my last chance at citizenship before LOW OrbIT comes. You have to let me fight.”

I felt sorry for her then. The Haras must have been unlucky refugees before the Revolution. Doubtless unlucky refugees again, whatever was left of them. I wondered what unfortunate economic opportunity might have brought her family here just before the Greens. But that wasn’t my concern.

“If someone told you this life was fair, child.” I held up my three-fingered right hand. “They lied.”

Her façade began to crumble. She was young, still uncertain how to resist authority. Yet I could see the knot of determination that anchored her to the floor.

“You may go.” I flicked the remaining fingers of my broken hand toward the door, initiating my last gambit. “But leave the rifle. That we can use.”

She shot me a glare of pure loathing. Her face hardened. “Like I’m giving my rifle to a maimed militiaman.”

“You think I’m maimed because of this?” I laughed, looking at my mangled hand then lowering it. “No, I’m handicapped by my beliefs.”

Her face clouded over. Then I saw recognition break across it like a reluctant yet inevitable dawn. “You’re KenZen, aren’t you?”

Defeated, I nodded. She was clever. Even without alcohol, I’d said too much.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, astonished, as if we all meditated in temples wearing saffron robes like she’d probably seen in holo-vids.

“Where else would you have me?” I spread my palms. “Where better can I serve?”

From somewhere deep within, the Hara in her spoke. “You were just testing me, telling me you had nothing to offer, nothing to teach. Like the old ways.” A statement, not a question, so I gave no answer.

“How did you really lose your fingers?” she finally asked. I stared back at her. “The Greensicks don’t leave able-bodied fighters behind. Not willingly.”

I studied her a moment. Something in her expression demanded that I tell the truth. I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of kinship with her, more than any other recruit who’d stood before me. Perhaps I had something to teach her after all. My final hope.

“Let me see your rifle,” I instructed.

She hesitated.

“It’s ok. I’ll give it back,” I reassured her. “You have my word.”

Reluctantly, she passed it across the improvised surface of the desk. I accepted it as I once would have, now awkwardly, right-handed.

“Like you, I was forced to serve the Greens,” I said as I examined the weapon. It was beaten up but reliable. A simple design imported from Scorn from early in the Green Revolution. Easily adapted to Darwin’s local materials and 3D printers. “When my mind finally snapped at the horror of what they demanded, they took my fingers to shame me so that I could never fight again. They left me as a burden, a useless mouth to feed.”

I shifted the rifle from my right hand to my left with practiced ease and sighted down the barrel with my left eye. Smooth yet still unnatural. “They didn’t think that, just as a man can learn to fire a weapon left-handed, he could also learn to fight without picking up a gun.”

I lowered the weapon and offered it back to her. She accepted it without a word. “I have the gift of choosing others who will not break based on what I know about myself. That is my KenZen.” And my curse.

I don’t tell my story to strangers, much less recruits. I don’t know what I expected as a reaction, perhaps a gasp or a shocked expression. All I got was a simple nod.

With a heavy heart, I nodded back. She had mistaken my lesson. But it was not one I could explain. She would have to learn it for herself, though my compassion hoped she never did, not the way I had. She was young and full of passion. I could see she wouldn’t break. Though eventually she’d pay a heavy price. Just as her sister would have. I could only hope the seed had been planted.

“See the quartermaster downstairs,” I said, returning to a professional tone, my duty to the battalion done. “Leave the door open as you go.”

As she slung her rifle and turned away, her face broke into a triumphant smile. I had lost again.

I watched her narrow back recede through the door. I felt drained, exhausted. I stubbed out my nic-stick beneath a boot then took a sip of cold, stale coffee. Its bitter bite did not revive me. I sighed and tried to arrange my face back to neutral before I called in the next recruit. Perhaps this one I could save.

 © 2016 Edward P. Morgan III