Merciful

Author: MidnightWyvern

Original post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R7exoRtbzjGiDjZL0Lyz2b3z9b7Zqhla5SI7FqIbmxg/edit

Entry for the YC114 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.

The aircraft screaming overhead had hurt his ears as a child, making him clamp his hands over them so the noise wouldn’t distract him from the acrobatics they pulled. He had jumped up and down, screaming in glee as the Matari pilots had shown their skills for the clamoring audience below. That airshow had made him decide at only five years of age that he was going to be a pilot. There wasn’t a doubt in his young mind that he would one day be soaring through the sky like them.

His eyes still closed, the soldier dismissed the memory. His ship was going to be the last one to touch down, but there would still be enemies, and he needed to focus. The roar came back, but now it was from outside; the sound of the large dropship’s engines, and the sound of fighting.
His eyes didn’t open until he felt the distinctive thump of the dropship touching down. Its engines lowering in pitch as the weight of the men they’d carried from orbit was relieved by the landing skids. The noise never bothered him anymore, not even when he was standing beside the ship at full blast. It was part of the routine now.
As he walked down the ramp, the thunder that had seemed muted and distant before began hitting him in waves, bringing all the sounds of war into the aircraft. He and the rest of his unit quickly unstrapped themselves from their seats and sprinted down the ramp, thethe sound of their boots stifled by the conflict outside. His eyes quickly picked out such details as the lack of angular, brown body armor amidst the many white-robed and gold-armored bodies spread across the courtyard where they had landed, and the sharp reports of combustion weapons rather than the quieter and higher pitched whines produced by Amarrian weaponry. The fires around them provided the only illumination in the moonless night. They were winning.
The buildings around their landing site were built of unassuming stone, the only really noticeable detail being the sigil of the Amarrian faith emblazoned in gold on nearly all of them. There were a few signs clarifying where the dirt paths between them led, but he ignored the foreign script and focused on the map he had memorized before leaving the ship in orbit far above. As the group split into fire teams to cover each of the many paths, he shouldered his weapon and took point, all of them alert and surveying their surroundings as they moved.
His pulse had been elevated before his boots hit the dirt, but it was heightened further as a glint of gold slid out from behind the corner of a house in front of him. His rifle was up and the trigger squeezed before he had time to think about it, and the gold fell to the ground. As always, he balked at the audacity of a culture that would use polished gold plating on their infantry armor.
He moved alongside his unit and quickly swept the compound, the enemy soldiers becoming more sparse as they spread out, a sure sign that some they were retreating rather than facing the better trained force of Valklears which was currently trampling them with relative ease. Eventually they all separated, the soldiers dead and the only remaining task being the “mop up”. They had only ten minutes at most before reinforcements would come from the nearby city, so they each went off solo to cover as much ground as quickly as possible. His rifle held to his chest, the soldier wandered among the small single-story structures around the perimeter, stopping suddenly a few minutes later as he heard something.
The sound was small, and it was brief, but it stuck fast in his head, bringing him to a sudden halt. Nothing in this place was familiar to him, but this noise changed that. The word had been unintelligible, but the voice was one he recognized. The soldier turned toward where he’d heard the noise, and moved slowly in that direction, rifle up and ready now, trying to figure out why that noise was striking a chord in his memory. After a few moments, he heard it again, hushed, quick, the originator obviously trying not to be heard. It was maddening, a scrap of recollection that dangled out of his reach. It drew him closer to a small one-story structure indistinguishable from the others. Moving slowly and silently now, he saw a shadow dart from within the building from out of the corner of his eye.

The voice was pleased as it called out to the others in gold around it. They seemed unperturbed by the smoke from the burning homes in the distance. He was coughing his lungs out, but now he could see that they had put on masks to protect them. No clouds of smoke would prevent them from crowning their victory to the skies they would soon ascend into. He rubbed at his burning eyes with small hands, but not all of his tears were from the smoke.

He blinked, the sound of a muffled cough bringing him back from his recollection. He leaned up against the wall beside the door, and listened carefully again. For several minutes, he stood there motionless as periodic gunshots could be heard in the distance as the remaining resistance was dispatched. Rather than the voice he was still trying to put a face and a memory too, he heard footsteps. They were very rapid and light, like those of a child, and then there was silence once more.

His footsteps were only slightly faster than his breathing, trying to force his small legs to move faster, trying to find his mother.

He kicked in the door, rifle at the ready, sweeping the room beyond the doorway with his flashlight. It was a sitting room, nothing out of the ordinary. He moved further into the small dwelling, trying to move silently so his quarry wouldn’t know where he was in their home. He checked the rooms off the short hallway. Inside a bedroom was a pair of tablets on the floor by an unmade bed, one with the screen still lit with an Amarr Certified News article. Down the hall he heard a sharp intake of breath. He turned and ran toward the room. He broke down the door, ready to fire. Inside was just another bedroom, sparsely furnished like the last, but his attention was drawn to the open window, and the sound of panting and footfalls from fading outside. Cursing, he ran back outside and tried to follow the footprints in the dark with the now bouncing circle of his rifle flashlight. He should have circled the building and looked for those windows. He was letting himself get distracted, making stupid mistakes. He could barely hear them ahead of him now, keeping pace entirely thanks to their footprints in the soft dirt. His own footsteps were making loud thumps as they hit the ground, the impacts a sensation he’d come to enjoy during his training.

He could hear their heavy boots behind him, accompanied by voices yelling in an unfamiliar language. He had to find her before they caught him. If they caught him he’d never find her. He had to find his mother.

He shook his head, catching himself on a wall. He felt ridiculous. He needed to get a handle on himself before these memories got him killed. He followed the footprints until they passed the outskirts of the settlement, and saw that they continued beyond into what he knew, from looking at the map board on the ship, to be a flat plain. Smiling now, he raised his rifle, narrowed the focus on his sight, and put the stock to his shoulder. He could see what was now a single figure in the distance. He gave it no further thought, shot the running figure, hitting them in the leg, sending them tumbling to the ground.. He lowered his weapon to his chest again, walked quickly to his quarry.

He heard the scream in the dark, and ran toward it even faster than he had before, his lungs burning as he tried to outrun the thundering boots behind him.

He ignored the flash of memory this time, approaching his target triumphantly, only to discover that the single silhouette was actually two.

Where he expected to see his mother, there were two silhouettes. One of them stood over the other, and now he could see that the standing one wore gold armor.

As he came up to the two of them, he could hear the one on the ground yelling at the smaller figure next to him, telling it to run. It didn’t move, and the desperation in his voice grew. Finally, the smaller shape began to move slowly away as he came to stand before his target.

He could see it was her, facedown in the dirt. He could smell the blood, but stronger was the acrid scent of burning flesh from the laser weapon in the man’s hand. He could see it was a man now. As the man turned to look at him, he could see his face.

The shape on the ground turned to look at him, revealing his face.

That face sneered at him and laughed at his tears as he and others were dragged aboard their ship and flown away from the world he called home.
That same face had introduced him to what he would someday learn was called Vitoc.
That face commanded him, and he obeyed with glee, eager to please his master.

He knew now why the voice had distracted him the way it had.

He had seen that face running from him as the mist rained down from the sky, as he fell asleep in the middle of the wheat field he had been harvesting from so happily mere moments ago.
He remembered the man with dark skin like his that had helped him up after his mind had cleared. He could think now. The man said it was Insorum, that it had set him free from the drugs of the enslavers.

The man on the ground wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was still shouting at the child to run away. The soldier didn’t pay attention to that. His focus was entirely on this man before him that he now remembered.

He remembered the cuffs on his hands as the police took him away. He was guilty of four homicides. They didn’t care that the men were Amarrian, or heavily drunk, or that they had insulted his dead mother.
But the man with the Sebiestor tattoo on his arm that came to him on his fourth day in prison did. That man offered him a choice: service or life behind bars.
The answer was obvious.

The face he had seen in his nightmares when he was a child, and that had taunted him in his dreams as an adult, turned to face him once more, but this time the terror was in its eyes. This same error the soldier himself knew quite well, having felt it so many years ago.
He shouldered his weapon once more, the pupils of his target contracting in the blinding beam from the flashlight. The face looked even more pale now that the light was focused on it, almost ghostly so.
He squeezed the trigger again.
The face and its body fell still.
Only now did he turn to look for the child, which he could see clearly now. The child’s long hair was dragging in the dirt she sat in, her face turned away from him, her eyes on the corpse bleeding onto the ground around it. She sensed him looking at her, and turned to stare up at him. Her blank face, a mask for her emotions, could not contain a rapidly forming stream of tears. The only thing the soldier saw clearly in those eyes was confusion.
She didn’t understand. He held her gaze for a few moments longer, and then turned to walk back to where he could hear the dropship’s engines spinning back up again, preparing to lift off from the monastery.
As he left the child alone in the dirt her father’s blood was spreading out to claim, he mentally stopped to examine what had been pushing its way into his mind over the last few minutes. He could still remember falling asleep as a willing tool of this man he’d killed, and waking up again with perfect clarity of all that had happened to him. Those memories left him unable to simply reintegrate like so many of his fellow slaves did, and drove him to kill four drunken men for slandering his mother.
Now, though, the soldier felt like he had them under control. He heard what sounded like a sniff from behind him, and the sound of dirt being scuffed underfoot as the girl crawled back over to her father, and sat looking at him on the ground.
One day, she would understand.