When she wasn’t soldiering, Corporal Jordes was either sleeping, like a good trooper should, or reading data-slates, a habit her squadmates found curious and her superiors found troubling. Few members of the 51 st Columbian, at least those usually found on the sharp end of things, could be said to be particularly educated, even the non-coms like Jordes. Compulsory education on Columbia started at age six and ended when the schola functionaries judged any given individual had learned as much Low Gothic script and basic arithmetical functions as they were likely to need in their vocations, vocations prescribed from birth.
Some Columbians escaped even that much learning. The indelible Arbites tattoo on the back of Jordes’ neck marking her a recidivist indicated to most of her fellow troopers that she’d probably never spent as much as an hour making obeisance before a tutelary cogitator, rotely murmuring back the same lessons generation upon generation of Imperial subjects had unthinkingly consumed.
When she’d been “assigned” to the 51 st ’s founding by judicial fiat, narrowly avoiding a ten-year term cutting tunnels in the hard vacuum of Columbia’s second moon, Jordes couldn’t really read at all. But something unexpected happened when that surly, malnourished, ignorant young woman was delivered into the hands of the drill sergeants in the belly of an Imperial Guard transport vessel. She thrived.
Jordes discovered that the missing ingredient in her life had been discipline. And once she embraced it, whole new worlds opened up to her. Every aspect of military life, from weapons drills to marching to small unit tactics to equipment maintenance made sense to her in ways that nothing ever had before. She was marked for leadership early, but then a delay came when she was handed a data-slate and told to familiarize herself with the command structure of the dominates they were tasked to fight upon their arrival in theater.
She’d taken the data-slate from the Commissariat adjunct handing them around to those selected as potential squad leaders, shot a surreptitious glance at the trooper next to her so that she would know how to power it on, and then made her mistake. She asked a question.
“A dominate,” she wondered aloud. “Is that a kind of xenos?”
The others all stared at her for a moment, then laughed. Half of them seemed to think she was joking, but there were others whose laughter was mean-spirited. One of those mocked her, “Somebody didn’t spend too much time accessing the news feeds back home.”
The Commissariat adjunct, though, hadn’t laughed. He’d narrowed his dark eyes and held out his hand, indicating that she should return the slate, then dismissed her back to barracks. She’d been at her bunk, field-stripping her M36 lasgun, when one of the men who’d thought she’d been making a joke with her question approached her. He had a data-slate tucked in his belt.
“You’re going to clean right though the ablating on the barrel if you keep scrubbing that hard,” he said, not unkindly.
Jordes threw him a look that said she wasn’t in the mood for small talk, but he met it with an open smile. He held his hands apart, palms down, in a manner she’d seen many times before. He was saying he wasn’t armed.
“You low-hive?” she asked him. He didn’t look it. Didn’t sound it, either, his accent decidedly mid-strata. A working man.
He shook his head, and sat down on the empty bunk opposite hers. “My dad got out. But I have cousins in the Crobon Stacks of Fallows Hive. An aunt still lives there, too. Or she was still living when we shipped out, anyway.”
Jordes had grown up on the opposite side of Columbia from Fallows Hive, but the reputation of the Crobon Stacks had stretched all the way around the world. “Your dad must have been a hard man to crawl out of there,” she said.
He shrugged and pulled out the data-slate. “Pretty hard,” he said. “But that’s the past, right? We’re not low-hivers and manufactorum workers anymore. We’re soldiers of the 51 st Columbian.”
Jordes lay her gun across her knees and leaned over to dip the greasy cleaning rag in a tin of polish. She used the moment to wonder what this man wanted with her. She decided to answer in the way she’d been taught. “Emperor protect the 51 st .”
The man had nodded. “Yeah, let’s hope he does,” he said. “And let’s protect ourselves while we’re at it.”
Her patience coming to an end, Jordes said, “What do you mean?”
The man indicated her M36. “I’ve seen you on the range. You’re pretty good with that. You’re pretty good at just about everything they’ve thrown at us.” He held up the slate. “I think you could be pretty good with these, too.”
Jordes didn’t answer. She was used to waiting people out.
The man surprised her by laughing low. “They’re going to make me a sergeant,” he said. “And that means I need good people around me. And I think,” here he thumbed the rune on the data-slate that brought its screen flickering to life, “I think that we can help each other.”
For the second time in an hour, a man she didn’t know handed Jordes a data-slate, but this time she recognized what it was showing. Marching slowly across the screen were the letters of the Low Gothic alphabet.
“I’m Trilby,” the man said.