Verdant Ink 🏳️‍🌈 (wlw)

8: The Hairbrush

General-four limped to the dias. Her left eye was padded by a gauzy cushion of bandages that partly covered a lurid scar along the left side of her face.

"Yesterday, the Miranda herself was attacked. A large heavily-armed Karinja diversion drew our warships into the interstellar arena to engage in combat, while a small fighter unit of three Karinja individuals focussed on the Managerial Office Complex."

The General paused, her hand white-knuckled and trembling on the lectern. Apparent agony had her mouth twitching for brief moments, before her usual impassive mask slid back into place. For some reason she had been refused a culture bath, and was clearly suffering for it.

"We lost Agents 282, 295 and 312 to warship shelling by the Karinja. We commemorate the loss of our brave colleagues."

ID numbers Pelin didn't recognise. She wondered what their names had been. She certainly couldn't remember their faces.

"It is assumed that the Karinja were searching for terraforming and colonisation plans in the offices. They are becoming desperate."

The urge to laugh overcame Pelin. Surely nobody believed that the Karinja could even read human terraforming and colonisation strategy documents. The General was perhaps too exhausted to bother with keeping up pretence. Pelin knew exactly what the Karinja had wanted to pluck out from the Miranda.

Pelin scanned the perfect lines of Agents, searching for shiny laser-straight hair of deepest black. 301 was nowhere to be seen. They had parted ways the night before, Pelin still watery-eyed, a white orchid cradled to her chest while 301 ran to Medical. So close to losing her precious Amine X, the General had probably kept 301 hidden since.

Row after neat row of Agents slipped out of the mess like sand from a timer. The General hobbled over to Pelin, aided by her scarred guarding officer. Wordlessly Pelin followed the General to the nearby laboratory offices which had been cleared to create a makeshift set of meeting rooms and office spaces. The lab bristled with lightscreens commandeered from elsewhere on the Miranda.

"We'll need to dock in the Shiva Colonies soon to restock. Blasted insects didn't leave a single lightscreen intact." General-four waved away her guarding officer, who stood to attention outside the lab door. "Now, 251. Please report."

"Report, Madame?"

The General sat heavily on a crate. Evidently, not even her office chairs had been spared the Karinja female's axe-bites. "You did not arrive at the hangars to be assigned to a warship. You were seen running to the Managerial offices. You did not aid a guarding officer with an axe in his leg. Where were you?"

"Madame, I..."

301's warning hung over Pelin like a Karinja axe-head. The merest hint that Pelin knew what 301 was, where she was being kept, what was being done to her, and the General would throw Pelin into the brig.

Or perhaps the General knew it all. There was little point in hiding from General-four. Like the Karinja, she had multiple eyes.

"...I went to stop the three Karinja fighters who infiltrated the Managerial hangar."

"And how did you know they'd be there?" Suspicion didn't colour the General's tone. She sounded exhausted. The responsibilities of pushing colonisation ahead in the face of so much death, the aches of old age nipping at her heels. Perhaps the General was tired of War.

"It's the least protected internal hangar when the warships are being deployed. It's an ideal place to attack."

The General chuckled under her breath. She knew exactly what precious thing Pelin had gone to rescue. Perhaps she knew that Pelin had set the three Karinja free. The fact that Pelin hadn't been arrested and thrown into the brig, and was somehow allowed to roam the Miranda freely, was more terrifying than being imprisoned. As if she was expected to go about her day with a mounting sense of dread, waiting for the axe to fall.