Bravo - Day Two, Late Evening

At this hour, Lunar Veil was a ghost town. Several of her crew were away, either with business or some recreational plans involving the Unification Day celebrations taking place. Vas was fired.

The kids had become invisible since her ultimatum. Not the kind of relationship Marisol wanted at all, but when push came to shove, she had no intention of dying over the prejudices of an eight year old.

Riley was about, most like closed up in her cabin. So was Kate, but the quiet gasps and moans that escaped her room told Marisol that the masquerading widow had chosen Leo to offset the interminable boredom of her chosen cover. *More power to her,* the mechanic thought as she dragged her final scrap to the cargo bay ramp.

She’d spent this Unification Day as she had those past, purposely buried in a torrent of work. The new gaskets were in place. She’d also gone into the reactor with a fine toothed comb and a thorough cleaning. The bottom coat touchup hadn’t come a moment too soon. She’d actually found some burn through which required spot welding fresh hull plate.

The final bit of time killing labor was the mystery of the Denta-Kiln-Twenty-Five-Hundred. Sleuthing out this case was solved by a physical search and trace of the primary power conduits. What she found was one of the most disturbing jury rigs, worthy of a capture record. Wedged between decks was a run of heavy gauge feeder cable, its’ three phases bonded down to a single line by a series of inline transformers. They’d been reverse wired to modify and increase the power is it flowed into a single piece of conduit.

For just what purpose this had been concocted she was clue free. The fact that it was a major fire just waiting to happen was a certainty. Two out of three transformers were already burnt; the constant high voltage cooking had blackened and caramelized the entire contraption. Thoughts of just how long this particular bomb had lain in wait made her shudder.

A simple dinner of canned fish, beans and rice did little to stir her dormant appetite, another casualty of the day itself. Soon after, she’d donned her usual sleepwear of panties and tee shirt. The bed was still a tumbledown wreck by Haddie’s mischief. Marisol couldn’t bring herself to care. In the darkness, she curled up on her mattress, the tiredness of her body begging for sleep, only to be overruled by the memories of all those faces. “Bravo Company, Fifty-Second Battalion,” Marisol whispered into the unforgiving darkness. The hundreds of young women and men who’d died in that valley…just to hold a gorram bridge.

When surrender was announced, Bravo consisted of twelve survivors. Marisol entered Serenity Valley as a Sergeant. On that first Unification Day, she found herself brevited to Captain, commanding the tragic remnant. In a week’s time, having seen what lay in store for their surrendered comrades in arms at Alliance hands, Captain Marisol Chavez adopted a new title…terrorist. Stripped of insignia and hooded in brown, Bravo Company became a phantasm, hiding by day, slipping through the valley by night to dispatch a cruel justice on Alliance and collaborators alike. Their exploits took them beyond the valley rim, through heavily guarded lines to put any sign of purple reign to the torch.

It was on one such raid that their mission was sidetracked by the burning of Adler house, a well known field hospital. They were too late. The house was a raging ball of flame, beset with the screams of those trapped within. They were too late. A lone survivor…Doctor Adler’s boy, barely out of his teens, was shooting purple bellies as a man sleepwalking, until her unit finished the job.

“Cap’n, what do we do with him?” The boy stood between Killrain and M’talla, pistol at his side, eyes stricken as he watched the burning timbers of his home collapse into the root cellar.
“Cap’n? We gotta move.”

“What’s your name?” she demanded from beneath the leather hood.

“Dorian.”

“Can you ride?”

“Where?” he asked of the hooded apparition.

“With us,” she said as her horse was drawn close. “C’mon…climb up behind me. Hang on.” As she spurred the big bay into the surrounding darkness, Marisol could feel the boy’s cheek resting upon her shoulder. “You’re with us now,” she attempted comfort.

“Shoulda killed me,” young Dorian Adler muttered. “Shoulda killed me.”

In the bloody two years to follow, Marisol often pondered just who and what he meant. Tonight, as another anniversary of that bloodletting passed to memory, her thoughts moved from the horrors of the past to what she knew was soon coming. There’d be no sleep.