Why We Fight

[RobertMason]

I put this up on Dark Lord Potter today, since maybe i'm just tired did not, ahem, hit off too well over there (and I can certainly see why, even if they're the first to think it horrible*), and I thought that I may as well put it up here, too. I'll try not to put too much stuff up here ever. I'll certainly never put a fic up here when there's maybe i'm just tired and a second fic being actively reviewed, but even so, tell me if I'm starting to push things a bit much.

*And please, be brutally honest even down to the littlest detail which you don't like. Sometimes DLP just has different tastes, and other times they're the only folk who are calling it like it is.

As a side note, since Glory's name is a tad close to being a Sueish-sounding name, now that I think about it: It was actually drawn from a list of actual names, back from when you could call your kid Abstinence or Tribulation or He-Came-Into-This-World-To-Save without your kid hating you for life because of how humiliating it is. Given her background, the name seemed like one which would be rather preferable to, say, Meek Cheshire or Peace-of-God Cheshire.

Anyways, here it is. Take it apart, dissect it brutally, and tell me how it's a piece of horrible crap. I have another story which almost got accepted by a publisher (it was too long, and they had too much of that particular genre) but I think that this one is better.

___

She had to knock for nearly two minutes before he appeared at the door, looking exasperated and with a young child attached to his leg. A thin man with mixed features, mostly Middle Eastern but with a tinge of chestnut, Jacob looked like he couldn't have been more than forty years old, but Glory Cheshire knew that his appearance couldn't be trusted on this matter.

His cheery grin would have been infectious, had Glory been coming here for a more jovial purpose.

"I'm sorry about the wait, miss. How are you doing today? Brr... It's an awful cold that's out today, isn't it?"

"I'm doing fine," Glory answered.

"And you are...?" Jacob leaned his head forward.

"Glory Cheshire." She blinked. "And you're Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of the Yellow Army."

He drew his head back, and looked behind him before he responded, in a hushed voice. "What are you doing here? I still have a year of lea— Oh God. Oh." Jacob's left hand moved of its own accord, but of course he wouldn't have any weapons on him. He had been playing with his children just now; that wasn't the best time to be carrying a gun or knife.

"Don't pray to people you outrank, Myriad-officer," Glory responded, frowning at him, and she looked down at the young girl, still tugging on her father's shirt in an effort to get him back to their game. "Your father and I have some business to discuss. You go run and play now, okay?"

The little girl just stared right back at her, until her father put a hand on her head, ruffling her hair. "Go on, Sarah. I'll... I'll..." He swallowed. "Go tell your mother that I just got picked up. It's an emergency, and I'm sorry that I couldn't tell her."

"Okay papa!"

Jacob closed the door behind him, and he and Glory were all alone in the cold and the falling snow. He shut his eyes. "Can we do this somewhere else?"

"I just tried to get rid of your daughter so that she wouldn't have to see, Myriad-officer. I'm not going to leave your corpse on the front step for your wife to find." Glory started to walk off.

"Thank you," he said, before he began to follow after her.

"I'm slightly surprised that you're not trying to kill me. I always am. I'll never get used to it, I think."

"We don't operate all that differently, Mi— I suppose you don't have a rank I can use?"

"Military man to the end, Myriad-officer." Glory smiled. "I was a sergeant before I got drafted into the special corps. If you must, it'd be nice to hear someone call me that again."

He nodded to himself. "Right. Sergeant Cheshire." There was a hint of a smile on her face when he said that. "If you operate anything like my people, there's got to be at least seven other people who could snipe me out right now. I'm usually quite humble, but it would be foolish to deny that I'm important. I'm actually quite surprised that you found me. And that you managed to remove anyone who was assigned to keep an eye on me."

There was a fork in the path they were walking along, and Glory took the one which led into the woods near Jacob's house. She removed a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and handed one to the myriad-officer before she lit two of her own, and then placed it back. "Last smoke before you die. It's harder to kill like this, you know."

"Excuse me?"

"Killing like this. All close and personal. Having a chat with the person you're going to kill, moments before you're going to do it. Assassinating isn't normal warfare," Glory explained as she looked at the trees. "I'm a warchild," she continued, speaking softly. "I was, aheh, I was conceived in the trenches outside Crisseroon, about two hundred years from now, and a decade later, objective time, I was born in a Green Army hospital while my father was dying half a mile away in Big Barrel.

"I was disassembling guns soon after I could walk, and it's harder for me to sleep in perfect quiet than amid the sound of screams and gunfire, because gunfire was something you had to deal with in the trenches, but my mother's platoon spent the sixth and seventh years of my life in a jungle where silence meant that there was a predator in the area, and I never lost the instinct that associated silence with possible danger. I still have a habit of talking just to make noise, so that I don't get unnerved. My aunts and uncles were Gygax Platoon, and half of them weren't human, and I had siblings enough, even if none of them were blood kin. It wasn't a bad life. Mom died when I was twelve, and when I was fighting off in the Deller Ridge I met another instance of her. What are the odds? She never had me, never even met Dad, got into the War in a completely different manner, and we talked for twenty minutes before my group had to move on. She wasn't really my mother, but she was still proud of me, and that was..."

Her lip trembled for a fraction of a second, and the myriad-officer barely caught it. "'Bittersweet' is probably the best way to put it." She swallowed. "I don't want to do this, really. Part of me is glad that I got put in the specials, because I can serve The Green so well, and Dad would have liked that, but... a bigger part of me wants to fight like my parents and my dad's parents did. I miss the old platoon. I miss fighting on the Fringe, where we're never supplied well enough and half of everything is scavenged. I feel like I'm betraying them in some way, going beyond what they did. It's a whole different battlefield that we fight on. It's hard to kill people like this."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I want to be..." She shook her head. "You're going to die. We both know this. I can give you a few minutes to come to peace with this before we move on to the formalities, can't I?"

"I don't mind." He lit up the cigarette with the proffered Bic and inhaled slowly.

"Why do you fight?" she asked him.

"Excuse me?"

"We all have our reasons. Barely any of us kill specifically for The Green or The Yellow. Too few of us know enough about the War to possibly be patriotic or whatever term you'd like to use."

He inhaled again before he answered. "I blundered my way into it. I was already military before I joined the Yellow Army. They say that they still don't know how the battle wound up on my world, although I suspect that it may have just been a test on their part. My world wasn't due to enter the War for another forty-eighty years. But they saw what I could do, even when, without warning, I was up against weapons and monsters nobody on my world had conceived of, and two weeks later, my commanding officer is telling me that they got a request for my transfer to a different base. Next thing I knew, I was getting my introduction into a war across time and space."

"You've been on leave for long?"

"A little more than a year."

"She had your eyes," Glory pointed out.

He folded his hands behind his back. "This world, and this period, happens to be valuable to The Yellow. They have timepaths running up and down all over this century and the next. I made a deal with my superiors, when they recruited me, and with every fifty years of service, I get two years of leave here, starting one month after I last left, subjective to my wife's time. She thinks that I work occasionally for an intelligence agency, so it won't be totally unexpected if she gets a notice of my death."

"Smart."

"You're tired," Jacob observed.

"I prefer to kill people with a jury-rigged rifle, not a ceremonial handgun."

"How long have you been fighting, Sergeant Cheshire?"

"Twenty-eight years since I picked up a rifle," Glory answered. "I don't know how many people I killed when I was poor bloody infantry, but they don't ask you to remember their faces. I don't feel bad about not keeping count. I've carried out eighty-nine assassinations that I can remember, and there are two-hundred-and-twenty days since I joined the specials for which my memories can't account, because not even I had enough clearance to know what I was doing on those missions. It's funny how everything becomes so painfully precise with the specials. I don't try to keep count. Even so, I somehow manage to do it."

"I think that I fought against Gygax Platoon a few times in the past, Sergeant Cheshire. They would have been part of the Chamber Regiment, yes?"

Glory nodded as she nursed her cigarettes. She was on her third pair now. "I'm surprised that you know that."

"I always had a head for details. I could even name off a few of the squads in Gygax if you gave me time to think about it. I fought Chamber a few times over my many centuries. Every last member was a credit to The Green. And you're a credit to Gygax Platoon, make no mistake about it, Sergeant Cheshire. We get asked to do things by the Colors, and often they're things we aren't fond of. But you have an important job, one that's indispensable."

"Why are you doing this?"

"My men— and women and beings of various other genders, when they had genders— looked to me for an intelligent word on more than one occasion. And not just an intelligent one, but a wise one. A comforting one. I wore many hats, and one of those hats was being the provider of words to settle their minds. I see no reason to not help you, even though you're soon to kill me. After all, when it comes to it, the only difference between you and me is the color of our uniforms on the battlefield. When it comes to it, we're both just as clueless about what the War is being fought for. Just like everyone else, we have to come up with our own personal reasons for fighting it."

He turned to her. "It's not your fault, or mine, that we're where we are right now, with me soon to die, and so there is absolutely no reason for me to not attempt to give some comfort to a good soldier. I would have been honored to have had you under my command."

"Thank you, I suppose."

"Think nothing of it."

Glory looked away, looking into the trees. He wasn't too far off when he made his guess on the numbers. There were twelve people, actually, all through this area, both to make sure that nobody could interrupt the assassination, and to make sure that the good myriad-officer, should he suddenly decide to make a futile attempt at resisting, would have more bullets than brain matter in his head in the second that he tried to attack his appointed executioner.

The pair of cigarettes in her mouth had been burnt down to stubs now. She let them fall to the ground, and pressed a boot down on them. "You've been responsible for dozens of successful campaigns. You've been a myriad-officer of the Yellow Army for eighty years, but the lack of promotion isn't due to a lack of opportunity. On the contrary: you were offered a promotion no less than seven times before they got the picture and stopped asking, and each time, it was turned down because you felt that you wouldn't be able to handle a larger command as well as you can handle what you have right now. Brilliant, simply brilliant, but that brilliance peaks with about a thousand people under your command. You can handle more than that well enough, but not as well as with just a thousand."

She closed her eyes for a second, inhaled, exhaled. "We sent twenty thousand crack troops to take a starport town and with your help, a single myriad, a single force a thousand soldiers strong, made sure that a small town of twelve hundred people would be immortalized forever in the minds of both armies, but especially The Green's, as the killing fields of Canterbury. The Yellow knows as well as we do just how important you are. We spent fourteen years figuring out where you were and how to get to you."

The myriad-officer smiled sadly. "Canterbury? I never heard of it. I suppose that this is why I'm dying today."

"Only four hundred of our people survived those killing fields and we still didn't get the starport. You pulled an Atlantis out on us and, if anything, you did it better in Canterbury than we did in Atlantis. We needed to take the town in order to keep The Yellow from reinforcing that region. We needed to keep those reinforcements away so that we could take that region, so that we could split the continent down the middle. Once we took the continent, we would have taken nearly the entirety of that world's industrialized zones. Our victory on that world, Brahe, would come with the taking of Canterbury, and after that..." Glory sighed. "With that foothold, and another three hundred years, we could have taken an entire spiral arm in that galaxy."

"How long from now?"

"The killing fields began five years from today, subjective to your time. You would kill all but four hundred of us over the course of two months." Glory lit up another pair of cigarettes and inhaled deeply. She let her breath out slowly. "Now? Brahe's a meat grinder. Neither of us can afford to give up there. We may win yet, but literally millions of soldiers will have died to do what would have, without you, needed only two hundred thousand deaths. We thought that that would be the worst-case scenario, but we never knew that they had slipped Myriad-Officer Jacob Bindan into Canterbury."

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire. For letting us do this away from my family."

"The only difference between you and I is the color of the uniforms we wear on the field of battle," she repeated back to him. "This is standard protocol, in the end; when there's nothing you can do to stop it, the least we can do is not kill you in front of civilians if we can manage it."

"Still, thank you."

A pause.

"An operation like this is going to have three components," Jacob said. "We're the first one. The second one is laying down a temporal anchor, so that no matter what The Yellow does, no amount of time travel will change the fact that, on this day, I was terminated by your side. The third one is a distraction, a diversion. An assault on a scale large enough to give The Yellow no choice but to divert their forces from trying to stop my death, and the temporal anchor, in order to keep this entire world under their control." Another pause. "An entire planetary invasion, all for the sake of a single assassination. Of course, you'll be leaving once you're done, unless you were intensely successful. Where are you attacking?"

"We're setting up sun-bombs in Angelou City and Trilhaum. One of them will go off in..." Glory looked at her watch. "Two minutes ago, actually."

"No." He looked about ready to take her neck in his hands, even though he would die before he could move them a foot. Only his absolute stillness was keeping the others was sniping him out right now, no doubt.

"Don't worry. No more than one of them is going to be going off. Prematurely. Not nearly at full power and, again, only one. We don't want to boil this world any more than you do. But The Yellow, even though they know this, won't be able to risk it. Maybe we accidentally put The Psycho in charge. Maybe one of them will accidentally go off, and with the first one already detonated, the second will have an exponential effect. So they will choose between you and this whole world. They will choose between Canterbury and this world."

"They'll... choose this world."

Not simply a statement. A plea to be reassured that, as valuable as he was, they wouldn't choose him. He had his children on this world, after all.

"They'll choose this world," she told him. It was true, after all.

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire."

"Are you ready?"

He nodded. She put out her cigarettes and stowed them in a pocket for later.

The gun which she pulled out was a three-chambered revolver made from the sort of alloys which could only be made in zero gravity. The bullets were inscribed with prayers, written in a font so small that the naked eye would barely be able to tell that they were there.

"Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of The Yellow, you have done honor to your Color. You have done great things. No soul, Green or Yellow, could reproach you for your deeds. You could have done no better than you have done in your life." She pressed the gun to his forehead. "We honor you by giving you a clean death, and giving you the reason for it, and it is an honor for me to be your executioner. Go forth and prepare a place for us, if there is a world beyond this which we have not reached."

There was a sound like thunder, and the myriad-officer fell to the ground.

"Doco le verish, da Jacob Bindan," she muttered and then she turned and walked away. Past the crew moving in to verify his death and send word to activate the temporal anchor. Past the snipers set up to make sure that everything would go cleanly. Past the little road leading to the little house in which he had lived, and where his wife and his children lived, and did not yet know that he was dead, and were just now learning that a city of tens of millions was bathed in flames.

Within the hour, Glory would be on her way home again, home again, centuries and timelines and galaxies away, and be fast asleep, dreaming of her own young son, and of a time when she didn't have to talk to people before she killed them.

[Sibling DavidH]

That is magnificent.