Breach of Conduct

Private Enn Taroth had already accepted that he was pretty much fucked. As soon as he slid shakily into the chair provided for him by the inquiry board, he could feel it. There was no way around what they were going to ask and how he'd have to answer. As much counter-interrogation training that the Kalasian Outer Worlds had given him, dodging the questions wasn't going to cut it. He wasn't being interrogated by the enemy; he was being interrogated by his own side.

Well, interrogation was a strong word. Probably inaccurate too. The point of the inquiry was to determine if he was lying about what was stated in his after action report and clarify any discrepancies or unclear points contained within. It wasn't really the fact that Enn had lied, per se, but more that he had glossed over several extremely relevant details that were quickly lining up to be clarified.

Maybe they didn't notice the supply cabinet stores, he thought in vain. Of course they did, you idiot! That stuff is expensive! It's like, what, half a million bar down the drain because of your greedy ass.

"Private Taroth," said the inquiry board head as he opened the folder containing what Enn guessed was his after action report with a tanned hand. His stony features, sun-soaked from a lifetime of military service, hardened slightly. It was time to talk.

"Yes, sir," Enn answered as evenly as military professionalism had taught him to. He sat as straight as his back would allow. It hurt to sit down. Void, it hurts to do anything but sleep at this point.

The board head looked idly at a few papers in front of him on the desk and glanced to his left at a woman across the office, keying away at the notepad at her wrist. She glanced up, nodded, and then continued. Apparently, whatever they needed to figure out between themselves was understood. To the board head's left, two captains waited in silence, looking on with professional diligence and attentiveness.

Yeah man, you're screwed. They've got captains. They've got somebody from logistics. And they've got this guy in front of you who looks like he's the carbon copy of General Greaves. Enjoy your court-marshal for misappropriation of expensive military resources.

"We have your after action report here. Rather, we have a copy of it; the original was filed digitally a few hours ago. Your report has been read by every member of this board: Captain Hukyai, Captain Lestos, Miss Dan, and myself. After reading and reviewing the contents, we would like for you to explain the course of events from the 207^th to the 213^th at fueling station 2 in more detail. Your statements were found to be insufficient regarding certain evidence from the subsequent investigation."

"Yes, sir," Enn answered obediently.

At that, the board head gave what appeared to be a slightly amused sigh. "Before we begin, I would like to inform you that you have been given an official commendation for your actions in the defense of fueling station 2 under extremely unfavorable conditions."

"Thank you, sir." It was all Enn could say. An official commendation? Doesn't that only happen when someone saves a ship? Or captures a platoon by themselves? That's some big name stuff there.

"However, this board has certain questions about the injuries you received before being evacuated to the hospital by Recon 7. It appears as if your report does not detail when or where you were injured during the confrontation eight days ago with what we now believe now to have been a pirate crew."

Enn felt all four pairs of eyes focus on him with sudden scrutiny. There was no way he was going to lie to any one of these people. They wouldn't even begin to believe anything but the hard truth. That went double for the robo monitoring every measurable physiological feature from the heat of his breath to how hard he blinked from across the room.

"Sir?" Slithy, Enn. Real fucking slithy.

"Your physical examination at Linpo Hospital revealed over fifty bruises across your entire body, one hairline fracture in your right radius, a stress fracture in your right femur, several lacerations on your back and buttocks, and even more perplexing, a number of burst blood vessel networks across your pelvic region. In its entirety. None of these were noted in your after action report."

Enn took in the astounding completeness of it all. Somehow, the fact that they hadn't mentioned the wound he knew was under his right arm didn't seem like much of a victory. They had him in static orbit here every way you could look at it. His original assessment held about as true as he'd expected: pretty much fucked.

Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Enn gave each of them a brief glance with a sweep of his eyes. "I would like to reply off the record, sir."

"Request denied," came the response almost immediately.

"Alright then," he began. "I'm sure you're all well aware that I was the second occupant of the fueling station when the firefight started. The first was Private Anahu."

The board head nodded, glancing down at the paper in his tanned hand. "Yes. It says in your report that your presence there at all was an...administrative oversight."

"That's correct, sir."

"Go on," came the response like a noticeable increase in air pressure.

"After the firefight, Private Anahu inflicted the wounds on me. I don't believe it was intentional, however."

There was a short silence. Maybe they wouldn't ask why. Maybe Taga had managed to spin some kind of story they found believable and this was just some kind of formality. Maybe he was about to get a billion bar for a job well done. Chondrite's chance in the Void, genius.

"And this is where your injuries came from? This...incident with private Anahu?"

What the fuck. Maybe Taga had actually managed to convince them it was some kind of PTSD-fueled attack and gotten them off the hook.

"Yes, sir," Enn answered unwaveringly.

"All of them?" the board head pressed, more stating fact than asking.

"Yes, sir."

"And afterwards?" This can't be real. Gerushit. Somehow, that non-answer too was good enough for every member of the board.

"The reconnaissance squad made contact with us and requested evacuation to a medical facility."

The board head looked down at his papers again, this time rifling through them until he had the page relevant to his interests. "It took six days to evacuate the two of you?"

"No, sir. We were evacuated on the 213^th. The same day the recon squad made contact with us."

"So there is no clerical error in your report, then. Confrontation on the morning of the 207^th. Contact with Recon 7 and evacuation via skimmer on the 213^th."

"Yes, sir."

"What happened in the six days between, Private Taroth?" There was a very slight softening in his tone as he continued, similar to the way a parent's might when teaching their child a life lesson from a simple mistake. It made Enn feel even more unsettled than when he'd arrived.

They know, man. Just tell them and get it over with.

Despite everything, he held onto the blind hope that somehow, he wasn't going to have to damn himself into a court marshal.

"The event in question happened, sir."

"And then, afterwards?" Seriously? Is this a trick?

"That's it. That's all that happened."

The board head looked at his colleagues and sighed, seeming disappointed. "Then can you explain how sixteen stimulant doses, eight adrenal injections, six metabolic catalyst regiments, and three tranquilizers were expended in the remainder of the six days? If not on potential undocumented wounds received curing the confrontation on the 207^th, then we are forced to conclude that it was either during or after the time in which you and Private Anahu had sex."

Busted.

Enn realized at that moment that there was absolutely no way around it. They knew everything. He knew they knew everything. And they knew he knew they knew everything. That much was obvious. Enn leaned back in his chair and allowed his head to fall back, earning a nice pop from between his sore shoulders.

An amusing bit of speculation about what Taga's own inquiry board flickered around in his mind. Just how much detail was she going to go into about blowing a platoon's worth of military-grade recharge drugs on a good time? Regardless of her situation, he'd already accepted that the board in front of him was going to drop the hammer hard by the end of the inquiry. Between the two of them, her version of things was probably a lot more entertaining, given her foul mouth.

He leaned forward again with a grin, feeling his split lip come back open despite the stitches trying to artificially force his amusement in check.

See if you can top this one, Taga.

When he spoke, he almost couldn't contain the visceral pleasure of near-perfect recall, thanks to the military-grade chemical cocktails still ebbing out of his bloodstream.

"You ever fucked a rilo for six days straight, sir?"

----------- Eighty-Nine Standard Days Prior ------------

------------ Enn Taroth, on Destrec, orbiting Mi Kho ------------

Enn gave a slight nod to the right and brought up his e-suit's oxygen supply in the corner of the HUD. Thirteen percent. That wasn't the worst thing that could have happened, but it wasn't particularly good either. He had just enough clean, breathable air to make it back to the fueling station without having to turn on the suit's internal air recycler.

The heat would make him throw up at this point, dehydrated as he was. As much as their e-suits helped regulate temperature and pressure, they were mostly designed with keeping heat in rather than out. As a result, here on the veritable desert world of Destrec, heat was always just hanging around like an oppressive blanket full of sunshine and lip-chapping breezes.

Enn believed he could finally understand what went through the mind of a sack-roast's spiritual essence as its corporeal link to the galaxy was cooked for hours until meat sloughed off bone in steaming clumps. Patrol was probably the most awful assignment on this planet, including the endless shoveling duties out on the Far Marker by the colony. Keeping the solar dishes clear of sand seemed leagues better than this slow-cook oven-trudge of a patrol.

Stop thinking about the heat, genius. It'll only make you feel worse. Enn knew that was a lie. There was no way he'd feel any better or worse thinking about something else. The heat was going to be there until he got back to the bunker and get enough time in the cold box to recover. Maybe Alir would actually clear out a space for him to lie down before he got back.

Not terribly likely, considering the circumstances. His HUD chronometer told him that there were still eleven hours on this shift. That meant he could get to spend at least a few hours cooling off with the cold rations and meds before anyone actually needed him for anything.

So far, their entire month-long shift had been punctuated by a fuel run from a civilian salvage trawler and a single request for a weather update and forecast from Rocanto, the planetary capital and space port. Both tasks had been uneventful.

Enn tapped the zoom for his optical lens and his HUD blurred away, enlarging the center of his field of vision as requested. In the distance, his suit highlighted the weather drone pad's outline through the haze. A light sandstorm had managed to obfuscate everything from about six meters out, but the orbital satellites managed to keep Enn's location on the virtual HUD up to date.

He trudged through the sand toward his objective and managed to reach drone pad in good order. It was still hot, but at least the sand whipping around him was blocking a significant portion of the sunlight. His suit idly told him that its solar cell was receiving twenty-seven percent effective sunight, which meant all of him was receiving twenty-seven percent effective sunlight.

I wonder what it must say about this planet for indirect sunlight due to overhead sandstorm cover to be considered a stroke of luck? Void, I would kill for a canister of water right now too. Enn brushed the control panel of the drone pad clear and shielded it with his body. Keying a few commands, he watched the structure light up around the joints and then begin cleaning procedures. Jets of air blasted particles of sand a few microns in width out of the machine's insides.

Enn waited quietly as each joint unlocked in sequence, ejected a mass of compressed air and dust, and then lit up green that everything was clear. One by one, each strip of light blinked from yellow to green, followed by an approving chime from Enn's HUD. I see auto-confirmation is already patched and updated, the soldier thought sourly. Every annoying tick an e-suit had somehow managed to make it through to the next software patch.

They'd have to send an open letter to Councilor Tellur asking him to kindly address the unending stream of useless features making their way into every new version of the e-suit's virtual architecture. Maybe someone would listen once the man at the top of the food chain started putting boots in asses.

Enn muted the chime and confirmed it when the instant 'unrecommended status toggle' message appeared. The last two cleaning jets fired and the pad itself signaled that everything was done. Enn thanked whatever higher power was watching that he didn't have to dig up the trap door to go fix the damned thing from the inside like last time. That had taken the better part of three hours to clean out the compression deck with a manual suction hose and then test all the air compressors and get a green light for everything inside. Protocol out here was about as stringent as trying to get into a sergeant's pants on duty.

Enn gave a virtual signature from his notepad and the drone pad confirmed it with a separate, but equally-annoying chime that the suit played directly into his ear. He muted it spitefully and took a few moments to get his bearings. Time to head back to station and get a nap in before we suit up for unload.

His HUD bloomed with spectral arrays and he settled on the simple coordinate grid with an arrow showing him his current direction. He turned about twenty degrees to the right and started walking, putting a vector out into the desert that intersected with fueling station two.

Somewhere along the way, he managed to get lost.

The storms usually didn't come in as fast as this one. Weather systems on Destrec were usually slow, taking hours to days to move in their languid way across the landscape between mountain ranges. In the two hours it took for Enn to realize he was going to be caught in a storm of worrying severity, it was on him.

The wind, his HUD told him, had been over a hundred kilometers an hour. That would explain why it was so hard just to stay above the sand, the soldier thought sourly. Four hours of fighting his way to the top of a shifting dune with the wind trying to bury him in sand had worn him down enough to collapse from exhaustion.

In the three subsequent hours lying half-buried over the crest of a dune, his suit had managed to recycle enough water off his body to keep him from sucking his lips with thirst, although the taste of his own perspiration was still somewhere in there. Water recyclers never got rid of the weird tastes the human body imparted on sweat.

He was still hot, but bearably so. The only real benefit of being covered with sand was that the sun couldn't bring the full might of its fusion-fire skin to bear. Luckily, the solar cells for his suit managed to get the thing to full charge after the storm cleared. Silver lining.

Regardless, the main issue here remained that he was off course to return to station. Very off course. In four hours, Enn managed to get further from station 2 than the last drone pad. Not only that, but the walk back was going to take approximately three more hours. If he hustled.

Enn debated abandoning trying to get back to station in favor of tapping into the emergency supplies at the nearest drone pad. A few gallons of purified water and a single ration pack with enough calories to get him safely to station. Unfortunately, that would bring him out of any feasible timetable to return in time to leave with his squad. He thought about his drill sergeant's words from five years ago in Kalasian Ground introductory training.

Hustle doesn't kill you; it kills the other guy.

He toggled the HUD chronometer off and started the long trek at as fast a pace his body would allow. Even with three hours of sleep, he was sluggish and still drowsy. His suit, emptied of stimulant doses, chimed annoyingly that it had nothing to administer but mild sedatives. He chinned the mute function and again dismissed the confirmation message that followed.

I'll do my best, Sergeant Ximen, Enn thought as he picked up his pace a fraction.

He'd get there.

He wasn't about to spend another half an orbit in station fucking 2, that was for sure.

------------ Taga Anahu, on Destrec, in orbit around Mi Kho ------------

She heard him before she saw him.

On the station narrownet channel, a faint rhythm started up across the main comm system. Taga reared up on both pairs of hind legs and craned her neck toward the sensor display picking up the signal. The comm log confirmed that she wasn't the only one plugged into the station. Below her ID information and tag, a second name blinked with intermittent transmissions.

Private Enn Taroth. Taga walked over to the display and stared at it for a while, trying to figure out why command had sent a second member for the garrison. She tapped the private's name twice and it automatically brought up several screens detailing his identity and deployment period and location. As things stood, he should already be gone.

He hadn't been attached to her squad, as his name was still under the Garrison Squad Three box on the display, while she had her own beside it, demarcated by a thick vertical line. Garrison Squad Three had already shipped out, basically the second she'd stepped off the skimmer. They transferred control of the station over to her verbally, hopped aboard the skimmer, and left without so much as an offer to fill her in on the situation.

Not that there was much to detail; two events in the log for the past hundred and eighty days. Both uneventful and short. Regular, standard patrols and maintenance. They hadn't even opened the tool locker since they got here.

Aside from the storm blowing across the continent toward Rocanto to the east, there was nothing else moving for a thousand kilometers.

Taga went to the bunks and looked at the ambient temperature for each. Thermometers read mostly the same, except for the one closest to the exterior wall, which was four degrees higher than the rest. Looking at it though, the room appeared to have been forgotten about during the previous garrison's quick exit.

Two uniforms still lay folded in the open metal footlocker. A rifle and magazine belt hung on the wall. The bed was made, but only so that one could throw back a quarter of the sheets and slide in easily. At the desk, a small book lay with a pen hooked into the stretch-band across the center to keep it closed.

She took the book up and opened it, idly flipping through it as she collected the uniforms in a bundle and deposited them in the next room over. The pages were filled with notes on a surprising amount of subjects, hundreds of stanzas of poetry, and riddles from a decent amount of cultures.