Boabdil
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 7
Corinn woke as if to a dream, her dream. She heard the voices first, soft, familiar voices, female voices; women, not men, and speaking with that odd lilting accent that was so familiar and so odd at the same time. She edged her eyes open just a crack, trying to see where she was without revealing that she was awake.
The last thing she remembered was the fight and that man with the strange gun, the light that burned ... Herzerr wounded, Borromeo riding for his life, her staring death in the face. Then the giants had saved her. Had they saved Herzerr, too? What of Borromeo? They seemed strange creatures, but somehow very familiar, bigger than any man and with lightning in their hands. That voice, a woman’s voice, had come from the one that had knelt beside her.
Now she lay in a room on a bed, a comfortable bed, more comfortable than any cot or straw tick she could remember sleeping in. She tried moving slightly. Even Clan Lords don’t have beds like this, she decided. She ought to know, she thought bitterly. One of her earliest memories was of being bedded by a Clan Lord as he attempted to get a child on her.
Everything she could see in this room was white. The walls, the shelves, the ceiling, even the thin blanket that covered her were white. She turned her head slightly. There was a door. A figure in white clothes, hard to see in the brightness of that room, appeared and disappeared briefly. There were more voices. Then footsteps and a figure bending over her ... Corinn closed her eyes hastily.
“No sense in pretending you are asleep,” the voice said to her gently. It was a rich voice, warm, amused, and soothing; a woman’s voice, definitely a woman’s. “I know you’re awake.” The accent was familiar, almost like what she was used to hearing every day.
Corinn opened her eyes all the way. A woman smiled down at her. She had a lean face, fringed with short dark hair, and those eyes; they were smiling eyes. Even without asking, Corinn knew she was a star woman. So familiar, but her eyes didn’t have that cautious, guarded look Corinn knew from friends and others. There was something else about this woman, something Corinn could not put a word to. She seemed to have no fear at all. That was dangerous, like a newbie who didn’t know the Rules.
“Where am I?” Corinn asked. Her voice sounded weak, as if she had been suffering from some wasting disease, but she did not feel any pain. Even her feet—which normally were cold and hurt all the time—even her feet didn’t hurt.
She remembered the blow of a bullet hitting her. She remembered fire eating at her legs. She should hurt. What had they done to her? She looked around. Other women walked past the door to her room, some of them looking in on her with curiosity plain on their faces. All of them were star women. Some wore white, some wore ... some wore green. Green? The realization hit her hard. Some of these women wore green just like they did in her dream place.
“Is this ... is this a ... a dream?” Maybe she was dead after all. She knew she should be. Maybe that was why she felt no pain. Had she gone to that world of her dreams?
“This is no dream,” the woman in white told her. “Nightmare, maybe, from the looks of what you’ve been through, but no dream.” Her clothes made a stiff rustling noise. They must be fresh off a loom and very new. The woman smiled at her. “No, this is no dream at all, though to you it probably looks like one. You are safe. You are among friends, you are among family.” She added a peculiar emphasis to that last word as if it was more important than all the others.
Corinn looked up at eyes that showed no distrust, no hard-edged hatred at a world that could not change, a world that killed you and yours slowly except when it killed you quickly. The bed was soft, the blanket surprisingly warm. In some indefinable way she truly did feel safe. She turned her head to look at those women in green again. There was something about them, about their faces, about the way they walked. They reassured her. They all wore a hard, serious expression she had never seen on a woman’s face on this world. It was a look that told her that here and now she was safe, safer than she had ever been before.
She wondered what had become of Herzerr and Borromeo, most importantly, Borromeo. No, that was for later. Right now, she was tired. She was so tired. Her body did not ache as it always did, whether after a long day in the fields or a long day fleeing death. Corinn smiled, then. It was just a slight one, but a smile nonetheless. Then the tiredness claimed her.
“What happened?” Marine Second Officer Elisa Davenport asked. “Just the high points, Corby. I’ll read the details in your report.”
“Our sensors had reported movement in that sector,” Senior Corby Makarova said. “The indications were of horse-sized animals, which meant probably riders, too. Control sent us on a sweep of the area. We were supposed to do just a quick check from a distance, not jump right into the middle of them.”
“And you came across a fight instead.”
“Aye, Ma’am. Our sensors went nuts with the side discharge from a laser pistol, so we went to full combat mode. When we got there, we found eight men, one woman, and maybe a dozen or so horses. Nearly everybody was down, some dead, some not quite.”
Second Officer Davenport nodded. “You intervened with lethal force. The Standing Orders were for stunners. What prompted your decision, Corby, and what made you shoot the target you hit? No criticism, I’m just curious.”
Corby swallowed, suddenly feeling nervous. Of course, Officer Davenport wasn’t criticizing her, and the sun rose in the north twice a day.
“It was just the scene of it, Ma’am. Here was this one person down, but she was reaching for a weapon. And this other one was standing over her, shooting at her with a laser pistol. I saw something like that at Setosha. Shoot to wound, shoot to wound, shoot to wound, toy with them, drag it out. And then, when they think they’ve got a chance, then you kill them.”
“The other two girls with me had been on the ground at Setosha, too, and they’d seen something like that a couple of times. No thinking about it, Ma’am. All three of us opened fire with our power rifles set on maximum. And we aimed for the one with the laser pistol.”
“And it turned out you’d rescued someone from the Families.”
“Pure luck, Ma’am, but I’ll take it.”
“All right,” Second Officer Davenport said, “given your experience and the tactical situation, I think you made the right decision. You used lethal force because of the energy weapon and the situation. I will note that in my report for the people upstairs.”
“I know we should have used stunners, Ma’am, but--”
“But nothing. Animals toy with their victims, people don’t. And if someone gives me any grief about this, I’ll remind them that you can theorize all you want while you are in a nice safe office on Home, but you had a situation in front of you, and you handled it promptly and expeditiously.” She made a note on the pad in front of her.
“How did the impellers work? They’re new.”
“Better than I expected, Ma’am. I much prefer them to those jets we used to use. Whoever came up with this should be thanked.”
“I’ll pass that along, too. It’s always good when we can give someone a report on how things work in the field. Have you checked on the other survivors?”
“Terri made a pick-up on the man wounded with the crossbow bolt, and I picked up the one who’d been shot with the laser. Vikki’s team stunned the wounded man on the horse and brought him and the animal in a few minutes ago. The medtech from the PSK was going to check over the men. I don’t know where he is with that, though.”
“Go find out for me, will you? I’m going to check on our wounded girl. Good work, Corby. And you can stop sweating, I told you I only wanted to hear what happened.”
“I wasn’t sweating, Ma’am.”
“Uh huh, and I’m my own aunt. Did you make a vid of the fight?”
“Aye, Ma’am.”
“Get that taken care of, too. Now go find out about those men for me.”
Second Officer Davenport went back to her work. Somebody back home was going to complain about the way Senior Makarova had acted, but that was too bad. In a combat situation, you didn’t have time for nice, measured, precisely calculated reactions, a lesson politicians had never understood. An hour later, she went to the clinic to see how their unexpected patient was doing.
“She’ll make a full recovery from her wounds,” Fourth Officer Doctor Sylvie Reboullet said moments later. “I expect it’ll be months before she’s completely recovered, though. I had to cut out a rib. That damned soft lead bullet shattered the bone. There were splinters and sepsis everywhere. She won’t be ready for a replacement rib until I see her put on about five kilos, she replaces all of the blood she lost, and I know her immune system has things well in hand. I also had to do some cutting and splicing in her legs. Whoever carved her up with that laser managed to abrade the femoral artery so she nearly bled out. We were lucky.”
Second Officer Davenport shrugged, accepting the luck. “The Marine who brought her in said she kept pressure on the artery the entire trip back. Even so, two minutes more and we might have lost her. What do you suggest we do in the future?”
“We need better emergency medical training and equipment for your Marines, Ma’am. I’d like a fully equipped Medical Team and lander on call at the Station and a spare as well. I sent a message upstairs describing what I want. As soon as I hear what they’ll let me have, I’ll tell you so we can coordinate. The sooner Louis Pasteur arrives, the better. That laser pistol means your girls are going to need emergency help one of these days. Did they find out how she was wounded?”
“Senior Makarova said they heard shooting and detected energy weapon discharges in their patrol sector. That energy weapon got their attention right away. They approached in full combat mode and came across what looked like a small battle.” Officer Davenport gave the doctor a sour smile. “From her description, it sounded like one of those fights where everyone ends up killing everyone else. The woman was down and bleeding. There was some butcher standing over her shooting at her. You know the story. Just like Setosha, a shot in the leg, another shot in the other leg, shoot her again and again, torturing her.”
“I saw that happen during the Raid on Home,” Dr. Reboullet said quietly. “They hit my clinic and did that to one of my patients.”
“What happened?”
“Reaction Force girl cut him in half with an accelerator rifle. If she’d been two or three seconds slower, I’d have stuck him with 10 cc’s of sleepy juice out of a hyposprayer. Would have been cleaner, and he’d have answered lots more questions. Took us the better part of three days to clean up the mess she made. The Reaction Force girl was kind of apologetic about it. She said he rushed her. She’d just meant to shoot him in the leg, but when he pointed that thing at her, she aimed just a little high and scattered most of his insides across my new magnetic resonance equipment. I forgave her; she meant well.”
Second Officer Davenport nodded. “Those things happen in combat. It’s hard keeping our girls from picking up bad examples from some of these animals, especially when we catch one that toys with his prey. The best I can hope for is that they make the kill quick and clean. Sometimes they surprise everyone and take him alive for questioning, but not this time. Senior Makarova said she made a vid of the fight, if you’re interested. I’ll warn you, from her description, there won’t be that much to see.”
“What happened to the man shooting her?”
“Heavy power rifles from close range from three different girls and three different directions.” The Marine shrugged. “Not really much left of him. What they could find of him afterwards, I think they buried with a hand shovel.”
Dr. Reboullet sighed. “Like I said, I’m anticipating a full recovery with her.”
“Despite her wounds. Have you heard about the men?”
“I know we had four of them dead at the scene, Ma’am. One more died before they could bring him in. I looked at the body: soft lead slug in the stomach. I doubt if I could have saved him, even if I’d had an operating theater on the spot. Medic Maxwen, the PSK medic, said the other three are pretty banged up. The one on horseback who was clearing the area is probably in the best shape. He took a bullet to the hand and an arrow nicked him in the back. You’d never know it from his face, though. He treats the wounds like they were nothing. Judging by the scars he’s carrying, this probably was nothing.”
“Warfare here is primitive and brutal, doctor.”
Dr. Reboullet scowled. “I won’t comment on that, Ma’am, other than to say that from a medical point of view, all warfare is primitive and brutal. What you want to know is that the three men we picked up are alive and will likely stay that way, although they’re pretty much in a continuous state of shock. We’re keeping them separated for right now. It seems to be the best idea until we figure out what the sides were in that fight.”
Second Officer Davenport chuckled. “I would expect so, given the status of women on this dirtball. Being captured by us has to be fairly traumatic for them. For the time being, I’ll have one of the PSK officers look after them. No sense in totally ruining their view of the Universe, at least not yet. We have plenty of time for that later.”
Dr. Reboullet smiled and looked out the window. In the 13 days since their initial landing, a lot of work had been done. Drills had tapped into the aquifer below them, a power unit was dug in and running, the first crops were already being put in, and the fast-growing trees had been planted and were already putting out leaves. New buildings were going up all around the compound. Most of them were pre-fabricated, and their walls were in the process of being assembled. At least enough were already completed that nobody was sleeping aboard the landers anymore.
“Do you really think this will work?” she asked, gesturing towards the window.
“I don’t see why not.” Second Officer Davenport stood, stretched, and joined the doctor at the window. “The strategy is, well, I thought it was crazy the first time I heard it, but I have to admit now that it makes a lot of sense. The more I see of this place, the more I think about our strengths and theirs, and it just makes sense.”
“It’s not what I pictured.” Dr. Reboullet rubbed the back of her neck; she was still tired from the six hours of surgery on her new patient. “I had imagined, well, I don’t know, conquering the place, I guess, guns, fighting, taking our people back and leaving as fast as we could.”
“As in armies and battles, all over the planet?” Second Officer Davenport nodded slowly, watching several girls and a power lifter finish tipping up a building’s fourth wall. They moved quickly to bolt it to the foundation. “I did, too, back when I thought about it at all. And that was the trouble, nobody really thought about it. But this...”
She waved out the window. “For me, just planning this settlement stood the whole problem on its head. I realized we couldn’t think about this planet like it was an Idenux base. There are people everywhere here, and ours are mixed in with them. We can’t conquer the place without killing some of the very ones we want to save. This way is so much better. It turns everything inside out and makes them come to us, at a place we choose, where we have all the advantages. Do you know who came up with it?”
Dr. Reboullet laughed. “I heard. It’s a crazy idea, and it’s working, which means it could only come from one person. Mark another one up for ‘Crazy’ Corey. I wish I knew where she got her ideas.”
“I was in a briefing once where somebody asked her that,” Second Officer Davenport said with a laugh. “Captain Andersen said there was an address in First Landing. You write to them, send them the right amount of money, and they send you an idea.” She grinned as Dr. Reboullet laughed with her. “She said the crazy ideas cost less, which is why she uses them so often.
“She certainly got her money’s worth on this one.” In the distance, a drill pulled back, and a crew slipped another fruit tree into the ground. “The more I think about it, the more I realize it really isn’t such a crazy idea after all. It just seems crazy the first time you read through it.
“At the Commander’s Review before we shipped out, Captain Andersen reminded us that we farm better, build better, trade better, and grow families better than any Clan on this ball of dirt. Just look at them. We started with a rock. They started with a functioning ecosystem. We had to create that on Home. These idiots are already poisoning theirs. In another few generations, they might have been paying us to come in and fix their mess. This just accelerates the process. We take over the marginal land, land we know they can’t use. We bring in the best terraformers, agrarians, and other specialists we can find. We’ll make this land so rich they can’t ignore us.”
“And what do we do when they attack us?” Dr. Reboullet sighed. It always came down to that. Building and creating were never enough. The Families had learned through long and painful experience that they had to defend what they built.
“The locals outnumber us by some hideous number. That’s the part I’ve never understood. They have hordes of raiders on their side. Eventually, they would wear us down. We can’t count on them having no modern weapons at all. Even their gunpowder weapons could hurt us. We know the way their minds work. Their Ship Lords taught us that much in the last thirty years. They’ll try to take what they want.”
“Of course, some of them will try to steal it.” Second Officer Davenport smiled with eager anticipation, her gaze flicking across the girls in powered armor training just beyond the compound’s fields. “Old habits die hard. That’s one of the things ‘Crazy’ Corey told us she was counting on. She said there’s nothing like greed to spread the word about what we’re doing here.
“Just between the two of us, that was the part that really struck me as crazy. If I were doing it, I’d have this compound fortified and dug in deep before anybody finds out we’re here. She wants them to see it grow from a handful of prefabs into the sort of Families’ residence we would be proud to tell our kids we started. She wants them to see how much better their own lives could be. Then she reminded us that when the raiding starts, we have a few advantages that aren’t as obvious as powered armor and air support. I don’t know if you ever heard this part.” Dr. Reboullet shook her head, and the Marine continued.
“First, you have to remember that the Clans here are not a united people. There are hundreds of Clans on this world. Some are big, some small, but all of them work constantly to get an advantage over each other. They fight and kill each other all the time. That mess in the hills to the east of us is just one small example.”
She waved her hand in a gesture that vaguely encompassed the rest of the planet. “If anybody tries to attack us, there will be clans who will deliberately interfere with them because somebody stole a cow 200 years ago and they hate each other now. Anybody who does decide to attack us will have to split his forces at the very beginning because he can’t trust his neighbors. He has to leave a big enough garrison behind to guard his holding. Maybe some of them will begin to work together against us, eventually, but that will scare the others into working together, too, and working on our side.
“That’s the part that took me by surprise, until she made us all think it through. We want them to work together. There’s no centralized government for us to deal with today. There’s no single governor we can threaten or bribe to get our kin back. Just by staying here and doing what we do best, we cause them to create the kind of organization we can negotiate with to get our people back. And by then we’ll be so much a part of everything that happens on this planet that we’ll probably be part of that organization, too. You know how our Eldests work in Council. Do you suppose your Eldest could teach these Clan Lords a few things about organization?” The doctor grinned.
“As soon as we can, we’ll offer them trade and technology only we can provide. Not guns, of course. Think about what your skills mean to these people. What would our drilling rig over there bring us if we rented it out to people who have to dig a well by hand? What would it bring to the Clan Lord who needs a secure supply of clean water? Things like that make friends slowly, but those friends are more apt to become allies. I know, it’s really difficult thinking of the kin-stealers as allies or friends, but we have to. This whole strategy depends on us becoming a functional, necessary part of the culture on Boabdil. Keep reminding yourself. The Emperor paid them to steal our kin, and had to give them the means. It’s not like they could have done anything to hurt us on their own.” She nodded as she watched the doctor struggle with that idea.
“It won’t be easy. We only think we know what motivates them. There won’t be time to study them properly, though I expect some girls will be doing that. Some of us will have to deal directly with the Clan Lords, with men. They will have guns and knives in their hands and we will be making decisions that could get a lot of people killed in a hurry. We will find a lot of these men acting out of habits we don’t even begin to understand. That’s one reason the PSK officers are still here. I know what the girls think of that, but it can’t be helped. We need the sort of insights only they can give us.
“If Captain Andersen’s right, and we’re all betting she is, it won’t be long before dozens of lesser Clan Lords approach us. Maybe some of the powerful ones will too, all looking for a better deal, better protection, better guns and maybe even a taste of the wealth they see us create. They’ll get some of what they want, but on our terms. We don’t try to conquer the whole planet all at once. We do it one Clan at a time, from the inside. We make them conquer themselves for us.”
Dr. Reboullet nodded. “When you look at it like that, we do have all the advantages. We changed the rules on them; they just don’t know it yet.”
Second Officer Davenport looked at the crew outside as they started raising another wall. “When it does come to a fight--and you know some of the idiots will be that stubborn--with modern weapons, modern communications they couldn’t even dream of, and total command of the air, that can only end one way. Their Ship Lords can’t do anything about us, either. They can’t even afford to try. Our Navy has this system sewed up tight with mines and fighters, and we control the Ship Lords’ futures right here on the ground. They’ll recruit no more crews on Boabdil, not unless we let them.
“The Clan Lords will learn fast that we will use our reach to make it very unprofitable to fight us. What do you think happens if they attack us, and in the middle of the night, a lander drops a few of our Marines in to wreck the walls they build around their towns? Think what a dozen small grav imploder bombs would do to a wall made of stone. There’d be nothing left except gravel. It takes a lot of resources and time to build those walls. If you lose them, you have to find a way to rebuild them quickly before some hostile neighbor moves in to take over your suddenly defenseless town.”
Dr. Reboullet laughed. “I can imagine a Clan Lord trying to explain what happened to his subjects and neighbors.”
“Precisely. And after a few tries that end embarrassingly like that, anyone who continues to attack us will grow too weak to hold his own lands against his more rapacious neighbors. Of course, that assumes any of our neighbors would let them attack us in the first place. They might not like the idea of armies marching across them to get at us.”
“Enlightened self-interest.” Dr. Reboullet nodded her head in approval. “As a rule, I’m a bit skeptical about any fancy, complicated strategy. But this, this could work. I can see how it all holds together. It’s simple enough, where it has to be, and as complicated as an Eldest’s scheming where that works. This plays to our strengths and their weaknesses, and it is as underhanded as can be. If Captain Andersen ever gets to be an Eldest, she’ll be a good one.”
“I understand that when the Eldest of the Council, Marie Andersen, heard the summary, her jaw dropped. This is just her kind of thinking.”
“My Eldest says Eldest Marie Andersen thinks ‘sideways,’” Dr. Reboullet said, smiling. “Eldest Shawna should know. She’s always looking at things that occur to nobody else. And when she plans something, she’s always two or three steps ahead of everyone else. Eldest Shawna has worked with Eldest Marie Andersen for years. I can see where this idea would appeal to both of them. We make ourselves more valuable as friends than as enemies.”
Second Officer Davenport nodded. “And do you know what’s the best thing of all? This is the part that wraps it all up into a neat package for me. We trade with them every chance we get. We hook them on our technology and our wealth. We let them know they can have the same quality of living we do. We even show them how, but to actually do it, they have to trade with us. Our terms are simple: they want our wealth, we want our kin. We don’t go hunting our missing kin, at least immediately. We will do that with the big cats, coyotes, and hawks. Eventually, we’ll send out trade caravans when there are Marines and air cover to spare for it. But long before that, we’ll entice the Clan Lords to bring our kin here. We’ll make them rich for giving back what they stole. Some of them will think we are idiots, but after a while, they’ll be falling all over themselves to return our people to us. We hope.”
“We hope,” the doctor echoed soberly. “That part I understood from the first briefing.” She nodded. “I thought that was much better than fighting our way into every stone fortress on this planet and trying to rescue our kin by brute force.”
“In some cases, it may still come to that,” Second Officer Davenport said. “We’ll have to use the mailed fist from time to time, if only to remind them that we have it. Some of the locals will believe we are weak or soft or stupid. After all, we’re just women, aren’t we? They won’t believe any different until some girl breaks a few skulls. There won’t be any shortage of volunteers to go on those expeditions, I can tell you.” She chuckled. “I expect to volunteer for a few of those jobs, myself. After all, the temptation to knock a few Idenux heads together is pretty strong in every Marine. It will help in negotiations, too. Those Clan Lords will have much more respect for someone who actually tears one of them down and smashes him into the dirt.”
She turned back to the work on her desk. “So, all that aside, have you found any evidence of that damned memory-wiping RNA drug in this woman?”
The doctor nodded. “It was there in her blood work-ups. Not much, which means the last dose was administered some years ago. Working on the traces, and assuming the Idenux gave her what we think is a standard dose, I would say it’s been at least 10 years since she was captured, maybe longer.”
“When are you going to administer the antidote?”
“Not for another few days,” Dr. Reboullet said. “Her vital signs are still not as stable as I want. I want her body chemistry and metabolism better recovered before I give her back her past. That will be a shock to her, you know, probably on the order of a severe concussion.”
“Do you have any ID on her yet?”
“Some. We don’t have a copy of the genebank yet, so I can only give you generalities now. I think her family is from Home, not Weon or Setosha. I don’t have much real proof of that, mind you. Blood type, high-level body chemistry, bone density, and a few other indicators have blurred a lot. That tells me she hasn’t been wherever Home is in a very long time. Until I have access to the genebank, that’s just a hunch, though. Without those tools, I can’t tell you much more. We’ll have to wait until she has her memories back. I have no idea how much she’ll recover, either. No idea at all.”
“Let me know when you decide to administer the antidote,” Second Officer Davenport said. She flipped open another folder. “I’ll want to be there when that happens.” She shook her head. “That’s one lucky girl.”
“I still don’t see why you won’t tell me who you are and where this place is.” As near as Corinn could guess, she had been lying in this comfortable bed for several days. She wasn’t sure how many days, but this morning she could see greenery covering the fields outside her window. Those fields had been freshly turned when she had first seen them.
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