Peacekeepers. It just didn't make any damn sense.
Unlike the usually ironic name that some species gave their wartime armies, the Exile Peacekeepers were exactly that. They had a strict non-interference mandate given to them by the tribunal which exiled us. Peacekeeper ships weren't allowed to carry real weaponry, just EM bolts which could disable a ship but not kill anyone. They were called upon to mediate border disputes, create a safe area around chaotic war zones, deliver humanitarian aid, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that I couldn't see Katie doing at all.
I'd mentioned this to her, and she reminded me she'd signed up for the bounty hunting. While it wasn't officially sanctioned by the tribunal, there was a long list of rebels, terrorists and war criminals out there, and the Peacekeepers usually found themselves responsible for getting them back. That explained, the fact that Katie would choose to fight with only non-lethal weapons made a whole lot more sense. It was a challenge.
She casually mentioned some of the names she'd brought in. I recognized a known pirate leader, which impressed me. Leaders of piratical groups tend to operate in an organized crime sort of way. Those in charge rarely make public appearances, so it was quite a coup for the peacekeepers in general and Katie in particular.
Other names she dropped included a few war criminals from the Yotia conflict. The exiles naturally had an interest in hunting them down, as they hoped it would help redeem them in the eyes of the galactic community. Katie had found some of the higher-up folks who'd been missing for a while. Higher-ups in the military at the time had almost uniformly ran; only those who were honest had turned themselves in immediately. Ironically enough, with public sentiment as outraged as it was, those were the criminals whose sentence was toughest. Luckily for me during the time of the incident I was a low-paid technician working with a team on a crappy Resonator knock-off that refused to work in ways the physical universe dictated it ought to. Considering how that turned out, of course, it wasn't that great, but it was certainly better than being branded a war criminal.
When Katie had appeared on board my ship, she couldn't seem to repress a wide, knowing grin. She'd obviously taken the job before she'd even taken me to lunch, and was at this very moment reveling in her continued ability to pull one over on me. Upon reflection, she'd seemed to have a lesser version of this sly smile during lunch, but I'd put it down to her being mysterious. Even when she's not keeping any secrets she looks like that, so it's somewhat hard to tell when she's not telling everything.
I'm not used to having someone on my ship. Providing transport to people is notably harder than doing the same for cargo. For one, they expect you to talk to them. Katie and I had spent most of the day before talking, and yet I was still going to feel acutely embarrassed if I failed to come up with something to converse about. Thankfully, the two of us can be comfortable in silence. I hardly ever take personnel missions like this one because I don't know the people I'd be transporting, and I don't especially want to. It's not that I'm unapproachable, it's just that someone who needs someone else to pilot them somewhere is not going to have a whole lot in common with someone who pilots for a living.
That did raise a good question, though. I turned to Katie as soon as the thought had crystallized in my mind: Why did she need me to drive her around? Last I knew she had a perfectly good ship.
"I do have a perfectly good ship. I just like yours better. It's quaint, undeveloped; it has this whole primitive feel to it."
Very funny. I'd like to know the real reason, though.
"They won't let me take my ship with me. When I signed up with them, I lost the right to fly my ship until I'm not with them anymore. My ship's got weaponry, after all, the real stuff. Even if I offered to retrofit their weapons onto it - and Alan, I was so desperate that I did make that offer - they can't be sure I haven't hidden extra bits of explosives around the ship."
That's because she had, in all likelihood, done exactly that.
"So I keep a few secondary cannons around in case of trouble? Does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to bring my ship, who I've known longer than I've known even you Alan, with me?"
Apparently so.
She scowled and it occurred to me only then, stereotypical dense male of my species as I am, that she was honestly angry about this subject. Had I'd been giving it any rational thought, I'd have realized it far earlier. If someone wanted to take my ship away, after all, they'd do it only after I'd drained the battery out of every last blaster I owned in an effort to stop them. I'm only slightly exaggerating. Katie was just as attached to her ship as I was to mine, perhaps more so. I wondered what it was that could make her willing to give it up.
"It's the work, Alan. You know me, I've freelanced as long as you have. But I don't have the heart for it. I do it because I love to fly and I love the feeling of accomplishment, but there's no greater goal. The bounty work I'm doing, it's important. We're finding some genuine bad people. I just wanted to work for a reason, you know?"
I knew. I didn't feel the same way, of course, for me the freedom of being able to go anywhere I wanted was what kept me in the business. I had everything I wanted as a pilot-for-sale. I'd done the military thing, and while as a researcher I was allowed a certain degree of freedom, even the smallest restrictions started to chafe me after a while. With the tribunal's order for the exile army to disband, I took the opportunity and never looked back. It was this difference between us, more than anything else, which was insurmountable.
Something I didn't know was why she'd gotten into the business to begin with. Initially, I was too busy getting captured to ask, and then I was too busy with courtship and other activities (I will spare you the details of how our species goes about these activities, as it is no doubt disgusting to your species) to bring the subject up. Since our split, the topic had never arisen; I may be dense, but even I can tell when something is a sore subject. Well, after a while I can tell.
"You want to know why I got into this whole thing, then, don't you? Doesn't make much sense, after all. If I not-so-secretly crave order, why wasn't I military? Why did I go freelance?"
She was, on the other hand, pretty damn good at reading me.
She smiled briefly at this admission, but it was a cursory expression. She was either still upset by my mentioning her ship or she was preparing to be upset by this new topic which, no doubt, I would be blamed for bringing up.
"We've got a while until we get home, so I guess I now's as good a time as any."
It wasn't home.
She sighed. "I know that. I can't help saying it, though. I'd chide you for depressing me but I'm already in that mood.
"I wasn't in the military because I was a protester. I opposed the war."
Given what I knew about her proclivities toward violence, this did not seem entirely likely. Given those same proclivities, however, I wasn't hurrying to point this out.
"I wasn't exactly a pacifist." she offered by way of explanation. "I definitely wasn't one of those peaceful protesters, picketing government buildings or starting letter-writing campaigns. You know me, I could never settle for something as inactive as that. Instead, I took a ship - the very same ship as the one that's sitting in storage at Exile - and I did everything I could to disrupt the war effort."
I stared. She really hadn't been a pacifist; she'd been a terrorist!
"I was not a terrorist! Nobody ever got hurt, after all. Hell, I stopped people from dying. And I didn't play favorites; I did what I could to stop either side from getting where they needed to go. If they couldn't get there, I figured, they couldn't fight. I used the typical dirty tricks; my favorite tactic was to launch probes that looked like ships in need of rescue. If I wasn't feeling that subtle, I'd just broadcast enough static to jam every system of every ship anywhere near the area. That made it a little easier to track me down, though, so I didn't do it often. Never got caught."
I found it surprising that her new employers apparently didn't mind this history. That is, if they knew about it.
"Oh, they know about it, they don't care. Hell, half of the peacekeepers' tricks date back to stuff we did to disrupt things. They figured I was experienced in exactly what they needed done. Plus I was 'fighting against an unjust war' and all that."
She was using a phrase that the tribunal had; they'd praised the protesters by saying exactly that. I, on the other hand, had been 'following illegal orders' and 'dooming an entire star system'. Here I thought I'd just been a techie. While neither I nor the rest of the low-level flunkies were punished beyond the rest of the species, we still had some pretty harsh words said about us, then and now.
"I seemed like the perfect recruit for the Peacekeepers when they started up, I suppose. But after what happened at Yotia.... I could have stopped it. We knew, all of the protesters knew there was going to be a weapon demonstration. It was supposed to end the war, though. A weapon to be used on an uninhabited planet, nobody getting killed, yet an impressive enough display to stop all the fighting right there. A number of us wanted to stop it from happening; divert the team delivering the weapon or something along those lines. I wouldn't let them. I wasn't exactly a leader among them, I don't think we even had a leadership, but they knew me and all the things I did, and if I said that this would end the war, then it was going to end the war. I didn't know then how well it would do at exactly that.
"I didn't see any point in joining the peacekeepers when they came around. I didn't see much of any point in anything, really. Despite everything I had tried to do to stop the war, an entire star system was gone. Six billion people, and I made the call. So I drifted for a while. After some time, it became habit. I like freelancing, Alan, I do, but now I've found something I can believe in again. I have to do this. It's like I'd been running away from anything real my whole life after Yotia, and I'm just now getting back to it."
There was a silence after this. I didn't know what to make of it. She couldn't possibly blame herself for the lives lost - even if she had been successful at stopping the weapon, which was very unlikely given its heavy escort, the army would have just created another one. Knowing her like I did, though, I knew she did blame herself. Every single one of those lives lost was her fault, in her mind. Nevermind the facts.
I awkwardly moved forward to hug her, and she smiled and nearly seemed to laugh before motioning me away.
"Thanks for the thought, but I came to terms with this a long time ago. I've known I was drifting for years. I'd been looking for this opportunity for a while; with contacts like ours, I figured that freelancing was a good way to find it. Guess I was right."
My incompetent attempt at reassurance appeared to have its desired effect, though, as she seemed to have cheered up. She stood out of the chair she'd taken and stretched. "So now you know my sad story. Freelancing was really quite uneventful, the perfect way to just let your mind go. Until, of course, I met a certain Captain. He's the one who got me thinking about all this, you know." With that, she went to the door. Turning and winking at me, she added:
"Good night."