[HG-PBEM] Re: Not at the party...
- From: Robb Neumann <robbneu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: apaworks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:08:54 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
> Now, Juliette found herself working side by side with one of those
> same super-soldiers. Were they so very different, she and the GREL?
> Both drifting, looking for purpose in lives that had become empty.
> The desert was home for outcasts of all kinds, it seemed. For a
> moment Lemanz almost felt a twinge of empathy for the woman in front
> of her. "You're... alright?" she finally managed. "I know the doctor
> checked you out, but being held captive couldn't have been a very
> good experience."
"We were treated well," Tina replied, turning her attentions back to her work,
"to the best of my knowledge."
She clicked on her datapad, preparing it for a download of the race data and
performance envelopes still held inside the computer minds of each of the
Gears. Considering the number of laps that each of the machines had run, there
would be a sizable amount of data to sift and quantify, before she could
actually begin working on performance corrections. She should have been at the
track, monitoring Gear performance real-time, but then, her adventure in the
tunnels beneath the city had made that impossible.
She stopped, turned to face Juliette, and asked, "You fought in the war. You
were a soldier?"
[...]
"There were rules that we followed," the GREL started to say. "We may have
tried to kill each other... tried for the eradication of our foes, but there
were still lines we would not cross, even if it meant fulfilling our
objectives. There was a kind of trust between our forces. I do not
romanticize it. We were trying to destroy every last trace of one another. We
killed one another even when we were defenseless, asleep. We were not gallant
adversaries, but I could count on you, just as you could count on me."
The GREL woman clicked her datapad off again, tossing it onto a nearby table,
and returned her gaze to the Southern woman standing before her.
"Here and now, those rules are gone. The Badlands are no place for battlefield
honor," she continued to explain. "These children we are allied with do not
understand. They accept it. They accept that dirty tricks are the law of
action, but I cannot."
She stopped. All Kassandra-class GREL were given training on human relations.
They often served as "battlefield liaisons" between GREL and human soldiers,
but none of her training prepared her to speak as she was doing now. Still,
even with the difficulty of trying to describe her vague, foggy thoughts, she
thought that maybe another soldier in the war would understand what she was
saying.
"We should still be adversaries, you and I," she continued. "I would trust you
as my enemy. I cannot trust the jackals the Colonel has pitted us against."
She wanted to explain more, but she wasn't even sure she understood it,
herself. She had been designed not to fear, to be able to simply act, pushing
emotions aside, but she was troubled. The twins, with their pompous smiles and
arrogant unknowingness, did something to her. She knew that. The fact that
the doctors had cleared her didn't give her any comfort.
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