Chapter 28: Arts and Crafts

In the end, they'd had to recycle James Corbell. His psychological profile indicated that he was dangerously unstable, and CAP scoring proved to be impossible. Simply put, Private Corbell had been stressed by the events at Hesperus to beyond the breaking point. Fleet Auxiliary Corporal Henri Cournoyer happily adopted mother and child. The AI agreed that his less aggressive nature would allow Mary-Jane and her daughter to heal more quickly, and the Governor happily signed off on the request for permission for a supernumerary.

Samantha now sat in the Unassigned Concubine Quarters, facing the other Corbell concubine. Callee was a scared 23-year-old with fiery red hair and an equally red-haired one-year-old son named Jason. The young boy was confused and too young to understand what had just happened, and tended to cling to his mother as a result. He cautiously examined the teen with his big green eyes as he tried to ease himself around to place his mother between him and this stranger.

The newly-promoted Sub-Decurion reflected that this had been one hell of a birthday so far: getting her CAP score, her first concubine and her first sexual experience, and now dealing with the most common function of a Civil Service officer, picking up the pieces of a metaphorically shattered pod.

"What happens next?" the teary-eyed Callee asked in a thick Irish accent.

"You've been out here how long?" Samantha probed gently. Behind her, a somewhat sleepy, nude Vickie arrived for work. "You probably have seen this before, I should think, and have an idea about how this works."

"We arrived on the last transport, I think. Maybe six weeks." She glanced at Vickie, who had removed from the replicator a cup of "double-double" coffee and a white concubine shift which bore on its breast pocket the veterinarian's symbol of a gold Rod of Asklepios superimposed by a black "V". "Is she being punished?"

"No, why?"

"She's nude..." Callee was clearly confused. Her late sponsor had used nudity as a punishment.

"All of us are at some point in the day, like when we're getting dressed." She held up a finger. "First, we'll reassess your CAP score to see if you're now sponsor material, and give you a general health check. We'll do a health check on Jason, here, at the same time."

"And if I don't get a six point five?"

Samantha had been doing a rough evaluation during the conversation, and concluded Callee was an unlikely candidate for anything higher than four point nine. This concubine's inability to actually come to any sort of logical conclusion militated against a sponsor-level score. "Then you work in the Civil Service brothel until you get picked by a new sponsor. That, frankly, shouldn't take long." With a lot of the officers and NCO's getting rescored to the next level and thus able to handle another pair of concubines, plus the sheer volume of kids from that hockey tournament extraction turning 14 and getting sponsor-level scores, Thule was running woefully short of concubines again.

They left little Jason with Gladys, who had arrived to open the Beauty Saloon for the day. As she escorted the Irish lass across the dome to the medical tubes for a CAP rescoring, Samantha reflected on a suggestion that Sergeant-Major Blondell had made. "Go for the standard Marine package," she had advised the petite young Civil Service officer. "First, the Marines will look on you as a fellow Marine, which will help when you ask them for help. Second, when you are facing the Board of Inquiry, you'll look more mature than you currently do – you barely look 14 as it is." The more Samantha thought about it, the more sense it made.

As they passed by a playground near the school, Samantha and Callee passed a mother and her young daughter, who looked about five. The mother, who was breastfeeding a newborn, had her ugly grey concubine shift lying on the bench next to her, whereas the five-year-old wore jeans and a T-shirt that advised the reader she was a Concubine Lover In Training. "Mommy, mommy!" the breathless child was reporting. "There's a couple over there, and they're fucking." She regarded her beloved mother with big, round, serious eyes.

"She can't possibly know what that word means..." began Callee, innocent of the knowledge level of children of the Diaspora.

Unfortunately for Callee's comfort level, the five-year-old had heard her. She turned to the redhead, and explained with an exasperated rolling of eyes and a deadly monotone, "They're breeding." You could almost hear the unvoiced complaint of "Stupid adults!" through gritted teeth.

"Are they enjoying themselves?" asked the girl's mother, as she calmly breastfed her baby.

"Yes, Mommy. You can almost hear them from here!"

Callee's ears were quite pink as she followed the Sub-Decurion onward.

Callee's education continued apace as she walked with Samantha toward the Medical Inspection Room. A large Marine, wearing matte-white body armour and corporal's stripes, pointing an RLA-1 laser rifle in one hand and his body armour's helmet in the other, intercepted the pair.

"Sub-Decurion Samantha Redburn!" called the two-metre-tall specimen, as Callee's gaze went up ... and UP...

"Ah, Corporal Roger Bachelor, congratulations on your promotion!"

"Thank you, Sub-Decurion, and congratulations on yours as well! Would you like to join us on the rifle range? Instead of the usual training exercise, the sniper class is going to carve some pumpkins."

"Pumpkins?" a blinking Samantha asked.

"Yes, well, it is almost Halloween."

In all the excitement of the past two months and with the complete lack of advertising on Thule, Samantha had completely forgotten Halloween's existence – and Callee had had other things to worry about than keeping track of the date. Both were surprised at the reminder. "AI, please arrange a meeting of the Concubines' Council this afternoon and invite the Governor to attend. Let's see what we can do about celebrating Halloween. That should prove good for morale." She looked up at the dome, which showed the external weather at the moment to be twilight with heavy winds and blowing snow, not exactly the ideal weather to carve a pumpkin outdoors – not that the temperature was ever all that conducive to carving pumpkins outdoors. The snipers' rifle range was located some distance from the dome, pointing toward an out-of-bounds sector. "Now, Batch, what's this about carving pumpkins on the rifle range?"

"Well, by now they should be nicely frozen through and ready to go. The snipers and some of the Corps of Cadets are going to have a competition, to see who can put the scariest face on their pumpkins. We've got a couple of dozen from Hydroponics."

"I was wondering where you got them from. I take it from the weapon in your hands you're not carving them with a K1, but with an RLA-1?"

"Sir, yes, Sir. Promises to be a load of fun."

"Ma'am," interrupted a thoroughly confused Callee, "What's a K1?"

"Show her, please," begged Samantha.

Nodding, Batch tossed Samantha his helmet and pulled a wicked-looking, steel-handled knife from his web belt. Like all items of kit worn by Frozen Chosen marines, the 30-centimetre-bladed weapon had a matte-white finish. "That's a K1." He re-sheathed the knife. "This," he patted the blaster in his hands, "is an RLA-1."

"The first shot will blow them to smithereens," Samantha advised Batch. "You won't be carving pumpkins; you'll be reducing them to soup stock."

"We're using training rounds," explained Batch. "They put out just enough energy to boil away the topmost layer of the pumpkin's surface."

"This should be good," nodded Samantha, still slightly bemused at the thought of using a laser rifle for what was essentially an art project. Maybe it could be called a martial art project? Just then, though, an urgent summons came through her subvocal implant from the AI.