Free FORT LIBERTY: VOLUME ONE by M Orenda

closed.
    Why? Why say it? Damn fool. Stupid—
    “What’s the matter with you?” Clara’s staring up from the pilot’s console like she can hear the train wreck from where she’s sitting. “Not even pretending to read the reports I give you anymore, and the crew’s down in the hold doing whatever they please, and no one to give orders to make ‘em do any different, and you’re up here, staring at bulkheads like they got something to say. You can’t go crazy, Petra, because we both know you already was. Impossible to go from crazy to crazy, so let’s have it. Tell your pilot where you are.”
    “I’m here,” Petra mumbles. “Busy with other ship matters.”
    “Will you at least look at me when you’re lying?”
    Petra cuts her gaze across the flight deck. The older woman peering back at her, eyes bright in the muted glow of the screens, expression highlighted in electric blue, deep creases framing her mouth, brow furrowed with worry. Wisps of violet hair float at her temples.
    “I… ” Petra looks toward the shields. “Men make for tough cargo.”
    “That Assaulter giving you trouble?”
    “Not so much giving it.”
    “Ahh,” Clara says, one eyebrow rising. “Just causing it.”
    “Told him some things.”
    “What?”
    “My name.”
    “ And? ”
    “And other things, plainly not meant for him… personal things.”
    Clara makes a frustrated noise under her breath. “’Ere we go.”
    “Go?”
    “Clearly established, wild thing—more than once—that you’re just fine with employing a man, directing a man wisely on a crew, hating a man, even killing a man, but liking one too much is damn near impossible.”
    “Didn’t say I like him.”
    “Only you like talking to him… about personal things.”
    “I was drinking, and he got in the way.”
    “Just crashed in, nothing you did to invite him?”
    Petra frowns.
    “You know that’s actually the normal way of things, don’t you?” Clara returns her gaze to the screens. “Choosing a man you like and talking to him… telling him your name… ”
    “Didn’t know you were set to be amused.”
    “No, I’m not. I know… ” Clara looks up again, hesitating, choosing words like it’s all coming from guilt and awkwardness now. “Few of your personal things got triggers attached.”
    “Oh, is that what gets said?”
    “No one says it. No one has to. Everyone knows you walked out of Red Plain with blood t’ween your teeth and rumors flying which you say nothing about, and none of us got the guts to question. All I know is what murder is in your heart got there for a reason, wild thing, and the years of living with it got you worn thin, drawing on anger because it’s the power you know. It’s a poison too though. And whether it’s vodka, or big sky, or that one moment where truth comes easy… what comes to the surface is what needs to be let go. And so what if you let a little slip? You don’t think an Assaulter, who’s surely got plenty of anger and untold reasons of his own, would understand that?”
    Understand? Petra hisses through her teeth.
    What Assaulters understand, and what horrors they see, have got different context. They’re the powerful, dropping from the sky in full armor, with such weapons as can blow up entire city blocks, gnashing teeth and taking on whatever monsters rear up in front of them.
    The anger they’ve got, the anger of the strong, of the righteous, of the team and the purpose, is different from the anger she’s got… the anger of criminals, always alone when that monster’s at the door, and usually the one who brought it bearing down in the first place, fear turned to rage of the type unexplainable, of things done which defy understanding.
    “If t’were me… ” Clara shrugs. “I’d go on the offensive. Go talk to him, try and find out something personal which makes the two of you even, or at least find out what secrets he’s holding close but got some obligation to tell… like why the