2954-10-07 – Tales from the Service: The Prisoner Enclosure
While we have erred on the side of combat duty personnel in Tales from the Service episodes up to this point, this account from a prisoner guard in one of the transfer camps on Håkøya is an exception.
We should not forget that for every person at the tip of the spear, there are dozens of others in support roles, making that combat possible and removing problems from the responsibility space of those frontline troops and crews. Their service may not wear the glory of those at greatest risk, but it is nonetheless essential to the war effort and should not be forgotten.
The prisoners shuffled past Sorab Bokori's guardhouse in plodding ranks, their worn and in some cases torn silver uniforms hanging off their slouching frames. He watched them with little interest; he'd seen five groups march into the encampment so far, and every soldier had looked essentially the same.
He'd read his briefing material, of course. Incarnation field personnel carried no visible rank insignia; their implants identified who was an officer, and settled seniority concerns instantly. The equivalent of a colonel would, save for age and service weapon – confiscated long before they boarded a prisoner transport of course – all enemy troops were visually indistinguishable.
That silvery uniform, so impractical looking at first glance, was almost a weapon in its own right. It could slow or halt bleeding from all but the worst wounds, and it was somewhat resistant to laser and plasma weaponry. It reduced the thermal signature of the wearer to nearly nothing, when combined with the standard issue helmet with its drop-down face-mask. When configured by Incarnation officers, it even had a limited ability for adaptive camouflage.
Inside the enclosure, each trooper would be issued new clothing, of course. Their uniforms and any other items deemed a potential security risk would be packed away in personal effects tubes, to be returned at the end of hostilities. The prisoner-of-war uniform, which was made of standard Reach spacers' smart-fabric, could be programmed to numerous trim configurations, and accept an infinite array of decoration patches without recourse to a needle and thread. Within a few days, those prisoners would be wearing a riot of colors and styles.
Their slumped and slouching posture was, at least according to the briefing, because each one was still feeling the loss of the peer-network communication system mediated by their implants. Incarnation military personnel spent their days with a reassuring hum of voices in their heads, which vanished in stages after their capture, both because of Incarnation security routines and Confederated electronic disruption. As with the loss of the uniforms, these disruptions were theoretically temporary, subject to restoration at the end of the conflict.
Sorab doubted the war would ever end, personally. There seemed no way the foe would surrender; it was certain to devolve into a permanent insurgency, such as the Rahl Hegemony dealt with in the portions of its territory which had once been the Rattanai Imperium. Even five generations after that empire's cataclysmic collapse, bands of holdouts deprived of a central authority waged war for their doomed cause. No doubt Incarnation bandits would be prowling the Sagittarius Frontier for at least as long, and these prisoners faced a dubious and uncertain future.
Whether they guessed this too or no, Sorab didn't know, nor did he particularly care. He was a prison guard, not a counselor. His job was to keep them in, and to keep anything hostile to them out. Anything else was another person's problem.
As he shifted in his guard-post chair, Sorab saw one of the prisoners in the nearest file peering through the windows at him. He sat up and met that gaze reflexively, sizing up the prisoner who was examining the guard-post as if checking for weaknesses in security.
It was a woman, perhaps thirty years old, dark, clever eyes, hawk's-bill nose, and black hair cropped close in unisex Nate trooper fashion. She wasn't attractive, but it was the sort of face you could remember easily. Sorab decided to remember it. He was fairly sure it would be the face of trouble.
He watched the woman until she was out of sight in the ranks filing into the camp's mess hall, then settled back down to the rest of the day's tedium, sending off a quick message to his compatriots about a possible troublemaker in the new prisoner group, just to be on the safe side.