Storm Front
by Josh Nolan



I followed Randel through the maze that was Perdition Base.  He wasn't 
looking back at me or anything.  It was like I'd riled him and him leading 
me was somehow his way of getting revenge.  His pace was only something I 
could describe as a march, and to my chagrin I kept finding myself in 
lockstep with him.  I felt undressed and exposed without weapons - I even 
would have welcomed one of the orderlies' stunners - so the stormie 
compensated by upping my paranoia.  My head snapped around at the slightest 
hint of movement, my pulse on overdrive.  God help anyone who bumped into 
me, even by accident.

Randel led me into a turbolift, meeting my gaze coolly as I walked in after 
him.  Once I was inside, he stuck his thumb on a reader and the doors 
hissed shut.  There was the sickening sensation of the ground dropping 
away, and we were moving.

"So where are we headed?" I asked, trying to broach the silence that had 
fallen between us.

"The darker side of Perdition," he replied.  "You need to see some of our 
prisoners."

"Look, Randel, if I've pissed you off..." I began.

He turned to me, his face grave, and I trailed off.  Then he flipped me the 
ghost of a wink.  "It's called a game face," he said in the same cold tone 
he'd been using.  "I can take a while to get into character. Don't worry."

He turned back to face the lift doors as they slid open.  "Come on."  He 
marched out, and I followed him, feeling very much out of my depth.

It wasn't long before we were stopped at what looked like a blast door - 
stopped by an honest-to-goodness NR trooper.  The trooper looked us up and 
down, then checked Randel's ID.  "Name and station?" asked the trooper 
boredly.

"Warrant Officer Randel Nax, Psych Specialist.  This is my patient, Captain 
Joshua Nolan. NRI."  His game face was well and truly on by now.

"Reason for entry?"  I began to feel sorry for the trooper.  This was 
likely going to be the highlight of his working day.  The stormie, on the 
other hand, was disapproving of his laxity and pointing out three ways he 
could be silently killed in his current posture.

Randel's game face cracked a bit out of sympathy with the guard's doleful 
tone.  "To show him the zoo.  Other reasons are need-to-know." He went 
stonefaced again, as if he'd never smiled.

"You're cleared.  In you go."

The blast door opened unnervingly fast, and Randel marched through it 
without batting an eyelid.  I followed, but since the trooper was the 
nearest armed person, I locked gazes with him as I did.  He winked at me, 
and then turned back to his post as I went inside.  The stormie urged me to 
punish such undisciplined behaviour, but I clenched my teeth and kept 
going.

Inside was an observation room.  A few technicians sat along one wall at 
consoles of indeterminate function, but the dominating feature of the room 
was a large window overlooking a durasteel courtyard.  Randel had moved all 
the way over to the window and was staring down at the people below.  I'd 
only taken a few steps into the room when Randel said loudly, "The door's 
about to shut."

The blast doors slammed shut with a clang, and I was in a fighting stance 
facing it before the noise had stopped.  I straightend up, forcing myself 
to relax, taking deep breaths to lower my heartrate. After a few moments I 
made my way over to where Randel was standing, and had a look through the 
window.

The courtyard wasn't the prettiest place I've ever seen.  It was 
essentially just a durasteel box, thirty metres square and maybe ten metres 
tall, with textured beige plastic coating the floor and the walls to a 
height of about four metres.  It was devoid of any decoration, and apart 
from the square of crashmats in the centre of the yard, was utterly 
featureless.  The illumination was a harsh, artificially white light from 
glowpanels set in the ceiling.

The occupants of the yard were all male humans, perhaps thirty in all, aged 
from their late teens to maybe their early forties, all apparently in 
excellent physical condition.  All of them were dressed in orange prison 
fatigues, with only small black Aurebesh markings telling them apart.  And 
almost all of them were excercising.

On the crashmat, several pairs of men were sparring, apparently in a brutal 
close-combat style.  Elsewhere in the yard, individuals were excercising, 
some alone, others working off each other - I gathered these men did not 
have much in the way of excercise equipment.  But not all of them were 
excercising.

Dotted around the edges of the yard were men who were simply doing nothing.  
They stood, arms by their sides, staring blankly at the opposite wall.  It 
was almost like they were deactivated droids, except I could tell they were 
still breathing.  Part of me wondered why they bothered.

"Tell me what you see," said Randel softly, his eyes still on the courtyard 
and its occupants.

I opened my mouth to reply, when a few things struck me.

The sparrers were aggressive in a way I found familiar.  They sought to 
injure their opponent first, defend themselves second.  There was a kind of 
solemn intensity to the way they fought...

The routines of the excercisers were also familiar.  They were building and 
maintaining certain muscles, certain responses, certain flexibilities...

Something about the positioning of the motionless ones made me check their 
'fields of fire' - and I realised that, though they were weaponless, they 
were actually <i>standing sentry</i>...

And all of them, without exception, wore the stony lack of expression I'd 
felt on my own face before.  None of them showed any sign of enjoyment, or 
of any thought beyond the grim necessity to do what they were doing.

The stormie owned them all.

The words I was going to say collided in my throat, and I gagged on them.  
I stumbled back from the window, unable to tear my eyes from the automatons 
below.  And all the while, the stormie whispered his approval in the back 
of my mind.  What I saw in the courtyard was my greatest fear come to life.  
The stormie would devour me, strip me of all that made me <i>me</i> - and I 
would be consigned to that courtyard, training for an escape that would 
never come.

<i>They are your brothers in arms,</i> whispered the stormie.  <i>You are 
bound by your devotion and loyalty.  Nowhere else will you find soldiers 
like yourself.  You have a duty...</i> 

'They're not..." I whispered to myself, backing away, trying to shut the 
voice out of my mind.  "I'm not like them..."  I still couldn't prise my 
eyes away from the courtyard.  "You can't..."

"Josh."

And the worst part was, they <i>didn't feel</i> anything, they just did it, 
not knowing the horror they were living...

"Josh.  You're safe."

They were nothing more than robots, just waiting for the opportunity to 
kill, keeping themselves in readiness...

"Josh.  Don't make me hit you.  Because you'd hit back."

Randel was in front of me, looking me in the eyes.  I wondered for a moment 
how I'd missed him.  He was standing just out of easy reach.  I could tell 
that the techs had scrabbled for cover, but I couldn't say how long ago 
they'd done it.  I drew a deep breath, and slowly raised my hands.  "I'm 
okay," I said.  "Just... can we get the hell out of here?"

Randel nodded, his game face breaking, letting through concern and a hint 
of apology.  "Sure.  You've seen all you need to, by the looks of it.  
We'll get you a bite to eat, and then we'll talk about it, okay?"

"How about a drink?  I'm not sure I'm up to eating, right now."

"You got it."

******

"You know, I'm really not sure I should drink anything that does that." I 
was looking at the goblet Randel had just put in front of me.  Steam, or 
some sort of vapour, at least, was pouring out of the goblet and down its 
sides.  Randel had just brought it over to the table from the tiny bar that 
serviced the hospital's staff mess.

"Relax.  It's just a bit of dry ice.  They stick it in there to keep it 
cold.  Doesn't dilute it like water ice."  Randel sat down across the table 
from me, and I noticed his drink was simply a spirit of some sort, over 
what looked like water ice.  It wasn't foaming, at any rate.  He noticed my 
glance at his glass, and raised it in a salute.  "Some things, though, need 
a little bit of dilution.  Corellian whiskey, for one."

I raised my witch's brew in answer, then we both took a sip.  We both began 
coughing in unison, though I suspected Randel's teeth didn't feel like 
they'd snap-frozen.  "That's... stronger than I expected..." I finally 
managed.

Randel nodded mutely, his eyes watering.  "And that's no Whyren's Reserve," 
he croaked, gesturing with his own glass.  "Damn cost-cutting..."

Masochistically, I took another swig of the brew, and once my teeth had 
thawed, asked, "I take it you don't do an awful lot of drinking?"

Randel shook his head.  "Used to when I was younger, but grew out of it 
fairly quickly.  Need to keep a clear head, in my job."  He looked at his 
glass.  "I'm not sure if having your sinuses blasted out counts as having a 
clear head, though."  He took a sip, and continued, "And then there's 
getting married. Tends to cut down on the chance for really serious 
drinking."  He smiled at me.  "There are compensations, though."

I chuckled, saluted with my brew and froze my teeth again.  "Been married 
long?"

"Twelve years," he said with a distant smile.  "Two kids."  His face fell 
as he re-entered the present.  "And six months before I'll be able to see 
them again.  But that's life in the NRAF."  He pronounced it 'en-raf'.  He 
took another sip of his Corellian paint-thinner, put the glass down, leaned 
back in his chair and looked straight at me.  "So what'd you think of the 
zoo?"

"A horrorshow.  What was the point of taking me in there?"  I'll admit my 
tone was a little snippy.

Randel leaned forward in his chair.  "To show you what you're not."  I 
waited for him to go on, but he just kept staring at me.

"And?"  I asked.  He just raised his eyebrows slightly, so I clarified, "So 
what am I, then?  I looked at those guys and... I've seen them in the 
mirror.  I understood what they were doing, and part of me wanted to 
<i>join</i> them.  They were mindless freaks who're preparing for a fight 
they'll never have, and I could sympathise!  So if I'm not them, what the 
hell am I?!"

Randel's expression hardly changed.  "You're the guy I'm having a quiet 
drink with.  You're the guy who was asking how long I've been married. 
You're the guy who turned his back on the zoo.  You're still a person, not 
a machine."

I slumped back in my chair.  "Maybe - but I don't know how much longer I 
can keep it up.  What happened with Syl... I <i>was</i> a machine.  She 
came at me and I just smacked her down, doing my level best to kill her. 
<i>Her</i>, of all people..."

"What does she mean to you?"  The question was delivered lightly, but it 
hit me with all the impact of a supersonic elephant.  It even felt 
<i>unfair</i>, since we hadn't talked about her or anyone else on the team. 
Now I found myself faced with trying to untangle the confused knot that my 
feelings had wound around her - and rediscovering the thorns.

"She..." I began.  A promising start, but I failed to follow it up. "When 
we met..."  was my next attempt, but it didn't serve me much better.  "I 
barely know her," was my next try, which could almost be the entire answer, 
but one glance at Randel told me it wouldn't be enough for him.  "She's my 
teammate.  So I need to look out for her, because that's what she's 
supposed to do for me.  And even though I didn't get much of a chance to 
talk to her, I'd like to think we're friends, so I'd be looking out for her 
anyway."  I took a mouthful of Dent-O-Chill to help me look the next bit in 
the eye.  "But... I've <i>noticed</i> her, you know?  She just seems to 
hang around in my head.  And some of the things she's said, and done... the 
way she looks when she smiles..."  My verbal momentum deserted me, and I 
took another gulp of toothfreeze.  "I barely know her," I repeated, and 
once it was clear to me I had nothing more to say, my mind rewarded me with 
another replay of the rock crashing into her head.  Joy.

"And how do you think she feels about you?"  Oh, cheers, Randel.  I really 
need to think about this sort of thing right now.  It's not like I don't 
have enough to worry about...

"I don't know.  She doesn't seem to hate me for what I did, but I guess it 
just hasn't sunk in yet. I think she might be suffering amnesia about it - 
wish I could. As for anything more... she might, but I don't know how much 
of that's wishful thinking.  Of course, once she comes to her senses she'll 
hate me, just like her brother does, and she'll be right to."

"And how does that make you feel?"  What is this?

I drained the last of the toothfreeze before answering him, trying to 
phrase it just right.  "Makes me feel fucking ashamed of myself," was how 
it came out, surfing on a wave of bitter anger.  "All the good intentions I 
might have had are completely fucking washed away by what I did.  She'll 
never forgive me, and a fucking good thing, too, because no-one should be 
able to be forgiven for what I did to her."  I glared at him.  "What's with 
the third degree?  Are you her father, or something?"

He didn't get angry, or even noticeably upset.  "You've just searched your 
feelings for an answer.  You've come up with emotional responses to things.  
You got angry at me because I asked about whether you liked a girl.  Tell 
me," he said, leaning closer, "can you see any of those things in the zoo 
responding like that to <i>anything</i>?"

My anger evaporated in an instant, leaving me feeling foolish. I'd been 
out-maneuvered without even knowing that I was trying to maneuver.  My jaw 
flapped for a bit, then I finally managed to croak out, "Good point."

Randel leaned back in his chair, raising what was left of his turpentine in 
a salute.  "And you didn't believe me, did you?"

I nodded in concession.  "You're right, I didn't.  So where do we go from 
here?"

Randel gave me a crooked half-grin.  "I think we've made enough headway for 
today.  We're not under any time pressure, or anything.  I just thought you 
might appreciate knowing that there's hope."

"Don't know how much there is, though."

"A little's all you need."

"True."

A droid rolled up then with another drink for us both, and we drank them in 
silence. Apart from the renewed bouts of coughing the drinks themselves 
brought.