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Brannigan shakes her head, and I think there’s a hint of hurt, of pain there. It’s a presumptuous thing to think, and I would never dare ask, but it makes me feel better in the moment.
“It’s the most important duty any of us will undertake,” she reiterates, though I think she sounds less certain this time. “There is no military tier without the breeding program to continue it. And without the military tier…”
“There is no Mercenia,” I say. Without us, who would keep out the insurgents, who would stamp out the dissidents? All the people who can’t be content with their place in Mercenia’s system - they’d destroy it for everyone else. Plummet us back into the anarchy and destruction that Mercenia saved us from.
I know what I’m supposed to believe. That my sacrifice is worth it to preserve the system as it stands. That it’s the most important duty because of the lives it protects, the billions of people around the globe that it helps to keep safe. What’s my temporary discomfort compared to that? Who am I to consider myself more important than any other part of Mercenia’s population?
I try to hold on to those thoughts, to let them fill me the way that honour and purpose always have before.
But it falls flat, leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“Find a way to find peace with it, Brooks,” Brannigan says, and I know from her tone that this is a dismissal, that I’ll get no further with her. “Just like the rest of us have.”
I’m walking down a corridor, one in a long line of military tier women. The men are nowhere to be seen, but I know they’re somewhere close. That the room we are marching towards is where we will be paired off, instructed in our duty. I close my fingers around the drug packet in my pocket. There’s a roaring trade for it in the barracks these days.
“Insemination isn’t always successful the first time round,” we’ve been warned. “It might take multiple attempts.”
I wonder how the science tiers haven’t managed to perfect this process the way Mercenia has always striven to perfect everything.
Because this is easier for them? Cheaper?
Mutinous thoughts. I’ve never questioned my superiors this way before, and I fight to keep my face neutral, afraid they might read something in my expression.
Ahead, I see Brannigan marching down the corridor, her features hard, focused. When she sees me, she angles towards me, grabs me by the arm.
“With me, Brooks,” she snaps, moving ahead and expecting me to fall into step behind her. I do, even as the others in the queue look round, murmuring the same questions running through my head.
Where is she taking her? What’s going on?
Brannigan doesn’t speak until we’re several corridors away from the breeding program zone.
“You’ve always reminded me a little of myself, Brooks. Wondered a few times if you were perhaps one of mine.”
One of hers. One of the children she was forced to bear for the good of Mercenia and the Military Tier. A sizeable lump forms in my throat, and it catches me off guard how much I like the idea of being one of hers, even as it horrifies me that she doesn’t even know. The babies are taken away as soon as they’re born, I know that. I grew up the way all military tier kids do - in a unit, brothers and sisters in arms, not blood. But part of me figured I’d know my own mother if I ever saw her.
Except she might have been in front of me this whole time, and I wouldn’t have had a clue.
Brannigan rounds on me, stopping us outside a closed door in part of the complex that I’ve never been in before.
“I’ve found you a chance, Brooks,” she says. “It’s up to you to take it. They’re looking for competent and capable soldiers for a high priority mission. I told them you are one of my best. Didn’t think they’d bite, honestly. They rarely do for female soldiers, but for whatever reason, you’ve piqued their interest. So go in there, answer their questions. Get yourself assigned to this mission. Maybe it buys you a couple more years. Maybe it buys you more than that. It’s the best I can do.”
If she weren’t Brannigan, feared and respected commander, I might think the shimmer in her eyes tears.
“Thank you,” I say, snapping her a salute that I feel with every bone in my body.
Brannigan nods. “Good luck, soldier.”
The board hearing. Probing questions about my military record, my mission history. The sense that the commanders found me dull, were disinterested. Thinking that I’d fucked up entirely, wasting the chance that Brannigan had so generously given me. The surprise when I was accepted into the program, the only woman in the unit. Training programs, mission briefings. My shock when I learned I wouldn’t be travelling to some mountainous area to root out an insurgent stronghold, but to a whole other planet.
The commanders talk a lot about resource harvesting, expansion, but never specifically what. It doesn’t matter. I have a mission, and that is to protect the research team who will be advancing Mercenia’s agenda. All I have to worry about is the wildlife, the locals.
Big, green aliens with fangs and claws and tails. Preliminary observations put them at hunter-gatherer levels, primitive societies. Basic weaponry, but superior numbers. We were supposed to go undetected as much as possible, continue observations of this alien species, so that should the time come that we would need to interact, we would understand them better. Know their true numbers, strengths. Weaknesses.
It seems like no time at all before I’m strapped into a seat on a spacecraft, rising up into the sky, getting rattled down to my atoms as we leave atmosphere, gliding towards a much bigger ship. The interstellar craft that will take us to our destination.
I didn’t even know Mercenia had a space program.
