File 9.5 - Enemies without Lines

Strange sounds worked their way into her ear. Shizuka passively listened, still not fully awake, trying to figure out the noise. It sounded like scraping or something moving, but a softer effect. She listened to it for a while, not sure what was happening. Her mind wandered, falling in and out of consciousness.

Eventually, she came to, snapping awake to see evening almost arriving. There remained enough light still that she could see. However, things looked a little different than she remembered from before. “Where?”

Alerted to the sound of Shizuka moving, Schir turned still holding a metal crate. She quickly focused on Shizuka moving and dropped the grate in the sand. “You’re finally awake! I was worried you might have a concussion.”

Taking it all in, Shizuka tried to figure out if she knew the woman, maybe someone part of the rescue team. Dressed in work overalls and dirty, she could have passed for someone that worked on the AESIR, but that wouldn’t make any sense for a rescue team. “Who are you?”

Schir helped Shizuka up to her feet and brought her over to the makeshift camp she put together. “Schir Mille.”

“Schir?” It definitely didn’t sound familiar. Shizuka wondered where they came from, though with all of the crates and pieces laying about she had a bit of an idea.

She nodded to the girl trying to shake off some of her unease. ‘I’ve seen plenty of them around the cities, but never talked to one directly. I can’t let her know about me…’ Schir didn’t share the same degree of hatred for them as Wells, but they still scared her. All of the stories she heard as a kid made it difficult not to be nervous. “And you?”

“Shizuka Ki…Hiraoka.”

“Shizuka, huh? So what’s a girl like you doing out here?” Schir looked over her clothes again trying to figure it out. “You seem a little out of place.”

Taking in her clothes, Shizuka remembered that she was wearing a military uniform. Though since she had left her jacket behind, there was no other identification on her as being part of the military. She simply had slacks and a light blue t-shirt on. While checking herself out, a dull pain popped up in her shoulder remembering the wound. Her right hand touched it, noticing it wasn’t bleeding. “My shoulder…”

Schir pointed over to the medical kit on one of the crates. “I patched you up. I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know if it’s very bad.”

“Thanks…I got stuck in the life pod. So I ripped my arm out.”

The image made her swallow a little roughly. “That sounds dangerous, what if it had been dug in further or something worse?”

“I would be missing my arm I guess?” Rubbing the wound, she hadn’t really given it a lot of thought at the time. She just wanted to get out. ‘I guess that might have been a little reckless of me to do…’

“I’m not sure I would have been able to do that,” she laughed sheepishly.

The woman seemed a little strange. Shizuka didn’t fully pick up on her nervousness, but sensed something from it. “Are you a salvager?”

“Salvager?” Schir looked around at all of the cargo that they lost. Locating it with nothing more than stumbling through the island had been stressful. She couldn’t lose the supplies and she needed to get back to the team quickly with them. They couldn’t get the mission going without the last bits for the plan. This accident ended up with more trouble than she counted on. ‘I hope Lt. Rinn finds me soon…’ She adjusted the crate she sat on thinking about her story. “No…I’m…well…um…”

Showing little fear, even though she probably should, Shizuka leaned in more with more questions. “Pirate?”

“What?! N-no! Definitely not!”

“Then what?”

Stress and worry over ruining the plan finished piling up on Schir. “The Commander is really going to kill me over this…”

“Commander?” Hearing that made her think that maybe the woman was part of the HOPE military after all. Then she remembered Edgar. “Are you a mercenary or some freelancer?”

“Eh? Oh? Sort of?”

“Sort of?”

Crossed arms and a wrinkled brow, Schir tried to figure out her story while being buried in worry. “I was hauling supplies.” Internally, she nodded to herself. She wasn’t used to lying to cover up something so important. ‘That’s pretty close without spilling things.’ It gave her a little more confidence in her story. “I sort of crashed the ship here…”

“Crashed…” She looked around the area not finding a ship or even any sort of signs of debris, though she also didn’t see her ship either.

Quickly becoming hesitant to reveal her mistake, Schir held back for a moment. “The ship’s on a different part of the beach. I might have hit another ship and lost the cargo I was carrying.”

“You hit us?”

“It wasn’t my fault! The storm! This big flash of light came out of nowhere and I got scared. I lost control of the ship and…this happened…”

Shizuka looked out at the ocean wondering if Edgar might be out there somewhere. He could also be the island. But she found the cause of the explosion. “Never known an adult woman to be scared of lightning.”

“Is that—“ Schir caught herself before she slipped up. ‘Lightning? So that’s what it’s like? Textbooks don’t do it justice…I thought I was going to die…’ Severe weather had no place in the finely controlled weather systems of the colonies. Earth weather had only ever been the things of dreams or effects seen in movies. Even in the time being on the surface, she managed to avoid anything more than rain. A thunderstorm was more than she could take. “I was really close! It’s scarier than being on the ground.”

“I guess that makes sense.” She found the turbulence more problematic than the thunder, but everyone was different. Shizuka couldn’t really fault her for it, especially if it did end up striking so close to the ship for her.

Seeing the woman’s full abandon of composure and raw nerves exposed, Shizuka felt bad for her. The experience sounded pretty traumatic and now her cargo was scattered everywhere. Shizuka stood up from the makeshift chair and looked around as the mess still remained. “Did you need help cleaning up?”

Schir jumped forward to stop Shizuka. “But your arm!”

“I’ll lift more with the right. Two hands are better than one, right?”

“But making you help after I crashed your ship and completely ruined your day.”

Shizuka didn’t pay her worry much mind, already starting to lift one of the tossed crates. It forced Schir into acquiescing or watch Shizuka injure herself further for delaying. “You didn’t really ruin my day. I didn’t really want to go where I was headed anyway.”

“Then why were you going?”

“Because I was ordered to.”

“By who?”

“My father…” she reluctantly gave, not a completely inaccurate statement.

“Your father? Why?!”

“Because he’s a bastard that doesn’t care about his family.”

Schir felt like she stepped on a landmine and not a small one. Her hand slipped on the crate they carried when she heard Shizuka talk about him. “Sorry, my hand…” Recovering her grip, she pulled herself back together. “He can’t be that bad, right?” She just walked into more land mines. ‘She is a teenager, she’s probably just rebelling and hates everything being at that age.’

“He ordered mercenaries to kidnap me from my home. Forced me to work on his project, which I don’t know how much he’s hiding about it. And makes other kids work for him as well.”

She stalled completely in stunned shock. ‘Ok, maybe it’s not rebellion.’ This left her in an awkward position. There was nothing she could do to change a complete stranger’s life. “Maybe you should report him to the police?”

“He works for the government.”

“Oh…” This was more than she counted on for light conversation.

“I’m a little responsible. I did run halfway across the world from him.”

‘And it just gets more complicated… Should I have even opened my mouth?’

“But he got so obsessed with his work after mom died, not that he really seemed to care that much before. And it took him a few years to even notice I was gone. Even now I can’t understand him. It’s like he doesn’t even look at me when he sees me. He can only see numbers and problems, not people. Everything is just something that can be solved. But he’s completely out of touch with reality and people. Just seeing me as a part to insert into the problem and not even his daughter.”

“I see…”

Shizuka stared at Schir for a moment seeing how troubled the woman was for everything that she just dumped on her. “I’m not sure why I told you all that. It’s not your problem.”

“N-no, it’s okay. Sometimes you just need a good rant.” She started to wonder about the girl’s safety. ‘We can’t exactly take her with us, but I’m not so sure how I feel about letting her go back to such an environment.’

“Maybe you’re right. I do feel a little better, I guess. We still got plenty more crates to move.”

“Right!”

A couple more crates through the work, Shizuka looked over to Schir. “What about you? I spilled my guts. What’s your story?”

“Story? It’ll sound pretty boring.”

“My life is a little too exciting these days. I could use boring.”

“I don’t have a lot. My father isn’t crazy or anything.”

“Do you mean that kidnapping your children isn’t a normal thing that happens to everyone?” she teased.

“They did disapprove of my career choice.”

“That’s something to rock the boat.”

“Yeah, I guess I did shake things up when I decided.” She thought back to the day that she enlisted. Her mother was firmly against it from the beginning and she thought her father would support her. But even he yelled at her. The war was already over by the time she joined, by nearly four years for her. So they didn’t understand why she would want to do it. There was no more glory to be found fighting, especially now that they were part of the Federation.

If she had been born five years earlier, they would have been fine with her enlisting even supporting her. The call to arms ten years ago drafted large numbers of the young adults into the war effort. Now conquered, they still resisted the idea of being part of the Federation. The state government may have surrendered and given military support behind their actions, it didn’t mean that the citizens had to support it. At least, that was how her family felt.

“I guess they saw it as a betrayal. But I didn’t want to stand in the past. I wanted to move forward. I hoped that they would see that, but they’re still old fashioned and refuse to accept how things are now.”

“Sounds like parents to me. See you've got to drama too.”

“Nothing compared to you.”

“This is a competition I would gladly lose.”