Part 25: The Boundary of Maiden and Mother, Phase B

Angkor, Siem Reap Province

Kingdom of Cambodia

February 28th, 2004

"Sergeant? Sergeant, it's Cao..."

Bai Jingli opened an eye sluggishly. "Mmph?"

Private Cao squatted beside the reclining non-commissioned officer as Private Tang looked on. "We've finished our sweep. No direct contact."

"Humph." Bai sat up with grudging patience. "Any new taunts?"

Cao shook his head. "Just the usual. It's been quiet for about one and a quarter hours now."

"All right." The sergeant pulled himself up, leaning against the weathered stone wall he'd been sleeping beside, and stretched his limbs. His watch indicated he had been asleep for just over three hours. It felt like three minutes. "Rest easy," he offered sardonically, picking up his rifle. Leaving the two behind, Bai checked on Privates Kang and Liang and found them already awake. "Perimeter walk," he ordered. "Five minutes."

Kang simply nodded, smoothing mussed hair with a grimy hand before she placed her field cap over it. She stopped just long enough to collect her submachine gun before marching away, Liang following meekly behind. The pair's presence weighed heavily on Bai's mind, as it did on many days now, while he made his way to the west end of the rectangular island. Behind him the ruined towers of the Angkor Wat temple complex stretched jaggedly towards the heavy clouds that blanketed the sky overhead, savage reminders of why he and his comrades doggedly held their ground here.

Kang Li was sixteen years old. She'd joined the PLA ground forces after being rejected by the marines, her age overlooked when she passed through boot camp with high scores. The girl from Shanxi arrived in Cambodia a fervent patriot, and four merciless months on the front line only shaped her into a vicious, unrelenting fighter. If anything, she was too effective – Bai now loathed to send her out, even though her efficacy as a raider had provided Angkor's defenders with many of the implements which prolonged their wretched lives. If he didn't rein her in, the sergeant told himself, he might wind up with a budding sociopath on his hands.

Liang Yongwei was barely a year older. He was Kang's only real friend in the unit, having served with her since basic training. He also worried Sergeant Bai: whereas Kang was brash and outspoken, Liang was quiet and brooding. The boy was hard to read, but the NCO suspected that the cruel rhythm of attack and defense, of skirmishing day and night, was wearing Liang down close to his breaking point. He might have fallen apart already were it not for Kang, and the pair had been utterly inseparable since the night a trio of cutthroats managed to slip across the moat unseen. Their blades had been sharp, but Kang's was faster.

Those kids were too young for this madness. Too young, but there was nothing Bai could do about it. His company had numbered a hundred and ninety men and women when it landed in Siem Reap at the end of October, and now the total strength stood at seventeen including himself. Unrelieved, stretched thin, open to attack from any direction, and with the only orders from above being a futile demand to hold their ground, those who were still alive became increasingly brutal in their manners and methods. There was no longer any pretense of civilized conduct in this war, no quarter given and no prisoners taken.

Today a heap of QBZ-95s lay quietly rusting in the shade of a collapsed wall, cast aside in favor of larger-caliber weapons seized from the enemy. The last of the company's medics, a brawny corporal named Feng, now pulled double duty as a sharpshooter and as such had armed himself with a pot-bellied, dog-legged .303 that bore British Raj markings and heavy battle scars. The machine gun deployed at the western entrance and the one rocket-propelled grenade launcher that still functioned were both prizes of the hit-and-run missions Bai authorized only with the highest reluctance. The RPG, like Kang's Vietnamese-reworked Shpagin clone and most of the Kalashnikovs which the others had appropriated, was made in China. The fact added a bitter irony to their situation.

Bai wasn't even sure who he was fighting anymore. Jemaah Islamiyah? Abu Sayyaf? The devastation and upheaval brought by the global catastrophe of 2000 caused an exponential rise in the number of fanatics willing to go out with a bang for their seventy-two virgins or whatever. Displaced fundamentalists flooded into Indochina from the ruined archipelago nations, joined by out-of-work veterans of the latest Indo-Pakistani conflict and the ethnic feuds in central Asia. In Cambodia, already reeling from the cumulative damage of Pol Pot and Second Impact, the militants sought a haven to build their strength. They showed their respect for the locals by murdering them wholesale, and their respect for the culture by burning and blasting its relics.

On paper, the Chinese government's decision to intervene on humanitarian grounds had probably looked like a great idea. If nothing else, it should have deflected foreign criticism of the way Beijing handled the Xinjiang separatists. In practice, the operation started to come apart in less than six weeks. Siem Reap finally fell on the last day of January, forcing the remnants of the company to make a fighting retreat into the ruins of Angkor and wait for a rescue which seemed more and more distant.

All Bai could do now, as the highest ranking survivor, was to try and hold things together until rescue arrived... or until the militants came to finish them off once and for all. They didn't hide their presence, but skulked about on the far shores of the moat, jeering and baiting in Malay, Arabic or broken English. There had been one insurgent who spoke passable Hakka, but he was one of the few foolish enough to not relocate between taunts. The soldiers hadn't heard anything from him for a while now, and the general feeling was that Feng had either managed to cap him in the dark or else placed a bullet close enough to scare the punk into silence.

Feng himself had no comment on the matter. The medic was whittling a short stick when Bai completed his roundabout trek to the western lookout post: a crude shiv to add to the pile he'd studiously fabricated for his comrades. He was already preparing for the final stages – in which each shiv would be fire-hardened and then coated in a cocktail of antiarin, strychnine and brucine – and was accordingly drafting plans to send Kang into the jungle to collect the raw ingredients he didn't yet have.

Bai took a dim view of the enterprise, but let it go for now – the shivs might still come in handy against all odds. "How goes it?" he asked quietly, bending low as he traversed the shallow trench which slashed across the path, its outer edge crudely fortified with logs and piled earth.

"Only two left," Feng reported. "I have just enough wood."

Bai made a noise of acknowledgment and turned his attention to Corporal Shen, presently manning the machine gun. "Anything to report?"

"Nothing." Shen picked up one of the Degtyarov's magazines. "It's quiet," he muttered. "Too quiet."

Bai nodded. "And when it isn't, it isn't quiet enough." He frowned slightly. "What are you doing there?"

"Mao told me there was some kind of trick to these things," Shen replied, fiddling with the flat pan. "I wish he'd written it down."

Bai could say the same about a lot of things. In addition to being a competent trooper, Private Mao had been the last one alive with a mechanic's background. There would be no more of his brilliantly improvised weapons or traps now that he lay in a shallow grave near the middle of the temple grounds. "Better not mess with that," the NCO advised. "We're short enough already."

"Yeah." Shen returned the magazine to its box. "I wish we hadn't spiked that mortar."

"We couldn't have dragged it all the way here," Bai pointed out, feeling very strongly that they'd gone over this before.

Shen let the matter drop, and they sat in silence for several minutes. Bai used the time to listen for signs of the enemy, of which he found none, and to inspect the trench and bulwark for erosion from the last rainfall, of which he found very little. He was about to leave and make an inspection of the northern flank when Cao came running towards him.

Running meant trouble: the sergeant rolled aside to make room as the private leaped into the trench. "Are we under attack?" he demanded.

Cao shook his head. "Liang... Liang raped Kang," he panted.

"What!"

"He came into camp crying, saying he 'hurt her' or something. I went to look..." Cao grimaced. "She was bleeding, I couldn't tell how bad."

Oh, shit. Of all the possibilities Bai hadn't been counting on..! "Where are they now?"

"At the camp. Tang's watching Liang."

"All right... You stay here and watch the perimeter. Feng, on me – sharp!"

"Right behind you," the corporal grunted, grabbing his weapon and medical satchel on the way out. "Cao, don't touch my stuff!"

The two men made their four hundred meter dash in record time. The tableau which greeted them around the last corner made Bai's stomach lurch in a way that, somehow, even Major Meng falling into the sergeant's lap with half his face blown off hadn't. Liang was curled up in a corner, sobbing weakly. Tang stood over him, the bayonet of his Type 56 extended and held ready to strike the offender. Kang sat on the bedroll nearest the wall, staring at the ground. Her fatigue pants had been partly slashed away and hung off her legs in tatters. Her thighs were stained with red and white fluids, fast turning sticky as they dried on her skin.

There was a sharp intake of breath, and then Feng darted past Bai. "Lie down," the medic instructed. "Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"My head," Kang groaned, sinking onto the bedroll. "The back..."

"He clubbed her," Tang supplied without turning around. "Knocked her down and did her from behind."

Air hissed past Bai's clenched teeth as he watched Feng examine Kang's head. "Well..?"

"Possibly a mild concussion," the other answered. "I'll need to monitor her for changes." Moving down to the foot of the roll, he produced a pair of scissors and cut away the remainder of the ruined pants. "Private, can you spread your legs for me? ...Good." Feng beckoned over his shoulder. "Sergeant, I need an extra hand here."

Bai was at his elbow in an instant. "What do I do?"

Feng handed him a penlight, then set about pulling a rubber glove over his right hand. "Shine it here," he instructed, pointing to the patient's nether region. "A little lower... That's good." He went to work with cool detachment, his expression a mask even when his probing drew a whimper from the supine girl. "Private, I understand you're in a lot of pain, but I don't have any analgesics that I can give you. Please try to bear with it."

Bai felt his jaw muscles tightening again and looked away from the center of trauma. His unwilling eyes missed no detail: the way Kang's exposed lower belly quivered, the short rise and fall of her chest, and the distant, empty look in her eyes when she turned her face towards her trembling assailant.

The quiver developing in his own hands didn't go unnoticed either: "Steady, Sergeant," Feng prompted.

The NCO took a deep breath. "Is it serious?"

"Slight tearing of the lower vaginal wall," Feng reported clinically. "The bleeding has mostly stopped." He straightened briefly, wiping sweat from his forehead. "It should heal, so long as she can avoid stress. The short-term priority will be to prevent infection." The medic pulled off his glove and reclaimed the penlight. "Let's check the head again... Pupils look all right. Do you feel dizzy or nauseous, Private?"

"A little dizzy..."

"Blurred vision or ringing in the ears?"

"No."

Bai followed the interaction with growing impatience. "Is that good or bad?"

"The signs are promising," Feng hedged, "but it's too early to be sure."

"How long until we know, then?"

"If her condition doesn't worsen in the next – "

"Allahu akbar!"

The shrill cry was repeated on one flank, then another, as the fanatics worked themselves into a savage, mindless frenzy. They were greeted by the chatter of the Degtyarov and a yell from Shen: "May all your children be born with imperforate assholes!"

"Wonderful," Bai muttered, pushing himself off the ground. "Tang – " He broke off, listening intently as more gunfire heralded a second attack. "Tang, reinforce the east trench. Feng, you stay here and keep working." Striding over to Liang, the NCO hoisted him up by the front of his shirt. "Come on, boy – here's your last chance to be a hero!"

"...Liang was last seen rushing at a group of insurgents with a grenade in each hand. Bai told me he was screaming, but the words were indistinct." Kang sat back in her chair, her expression contemplative. "I wonder..."

"What?"

The Chinese woman shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "The helicopters finally came for us two days later. By that time there were only eight left... In retrospect, I was very lucky."

"Lucky?" Renaril had listened to most of the narrative in rapt silence, but this finally moved her to speak out. "What part of this was lucky?"

"I survived," Kang replied matter-of-factly. "With no pregnancy, no infection and no injuries I couldn't recover from. There were women in other units who suffered far worse."

That really wasn't what the Arume wanted to hear about, though she had enough tact not to say so. "What happened after that?"

"I was in hospital for a few days, and then we were assigned to another unit as replacements. Sergeant Bai died on the first patrol."

Renaril's impression until now had been that Bai possessed a knack for staying alive. "The very first?"

"During an ambush, he lost his legs to a mine and shot himself so that he couldn't become a burden." The memory was evidently a painful one for the colonel. "The People's Liberation Army continued to hemorrhage lives and material in Cambodia for another eighteen months, then withdrew and turned the fight over to Vietnamese and Thai troops under a UN mandate... By then Corporal Feng and I were the only ones left who knew what had happened at Angkor. Feng left the army and settled abroad, while I... I think you know where I went from there."

Renaril nodded slowly. "Why... Why wasn't this on your service record?"

"We covered it up," said Kang plainly. "Feng and Bai had some connections..."

"But why? Such a terrible thing happened to you, so – "

The soldier lifted a hand. "You must understand," she continued patiently. "It was not popular for a woman to choose a military career, especially at a time when common feeling was that women should concern themselves with... making up for population loss. The situation would have given those superiors who were of such mind the perfect excuse to discharge me." She tipped her head back, her dark eyes seeming to gaze right past the ceiling. "I had to keep fighting, to stay with my comrades and ensure the fallen didn't die needlessly... Besides that, Liang Yongwei's parents were good people. To be told what their son did – it would have crushed them."

"You've really... never told anyone?"

"No one," Kang confirmed. "Not even Schuhart knows this."

"But why?" the alien repeated. "You said other women suffered worse. Couldn't you use your experience to help them?"

"How would it help?" The colonel cocked her head. "There were women who were assaulted more than once, whose attackers walked free, who didn't have comrades with the courage to support them... And what of those who were captured by the enemy? How would my story do them any good?"

"..."

"There are more effective paths of justice." Kang folded her arms. "Let me tell you about one case which involved me personally," she went on, her voice softening again. "When I was a major in Liberia, there was a lieutenant among our troops who raped a woman in his platoon. His friends helped him cover it up, and they beat the victim when she tried to report the incident. When they threatened to rape her again, she committed suicide... The perpetrator might have gotten away with it, had he been more careful about whom he bragged to." She wrinkled her nose. "After his crime was discovered, I was drafted to take part in the court-martial, which returned four death sentences."

Renaril squirmed a little. Suddenly she was seeing both Schuhart's demonstration and Kang's reaction it in a whole new light. "I'm sorry," she whispered at last. "It must be very painful to revisit this..."

"Twelve years is a long time," the elder woman replied. "Time enough to move on."

"That's, um... That's good, isn't it?" Once again Renaril found herself contemplating her toes. "Colonel, when I was little I was taught that sacrificing one's own... one's self for the sake of others was the most beautiful thing one could do." She raised her head slowly. "If you were an Arume, I think what you did would be considered very noble." The alien turned her face to the side. "But I... I can't see anything beautiful in this suffering..."

"That's trite propaganda," said Kang bluntly. "There's nothing beautiful about it." She leaned forward in her seat, resting her elbows on her knees. "As a child, I loved to hear my grandfather's stories of the old wars. Three of my great-grandparents were in the communist army, and another was with the nationalists. They fought against each other in the civil war, joined together against the Japanese invaders, fought each other again and then faced the Americans in Korea. To hear that old man tell it, they were fearless, flawless heroes... Some of the stories were probably true, but the rest was pure hyperbole." There was a gentle sigh. "I suppose learning the truth has been painful for both of us."

"I guess," Renaril agreed hesitantly, trying to revive her courage. "Um..."

"Yes?"

"Do you... prefer women because of what happened to you?"

"Ah." The question was not unexpected, it seemed. "No, my orientation has always been the same." This time it was the Chinese woman who averted her face. "I denied it for a long time, convinced I was merely being influenced by the preferences of the men around me... And then I fell in love."

"With Zheng Mei?"

"Yes..."

"Schuhart told me a little," the group commander confessed. "He said it was too bad you couldn't be together."

"He sounds more sentimental about it than I am." Kang sat in silence for several seconds, then squared herself. "I'm sorry, Renaril. I came here thinking I should cheer you up, not swamp you with old ghosts."

"It's all right," the alien assured her. "It might be better this way."

"Perhaps," the other conceded. "Now you know the truth. If you've changed your mind, I won't hold it against you."

Renaril gulped. "What if I haven't?"

Kang held her arms out from her sides. "Then the next move is yours."

"I – " The Arume bit her tongue and considered her next words carefully. "It... doesn't seem right to do it now," she began nervously, "so... maybe we could stay together tonight and see how things are in the morning?"

"As you like." Kang rose and bent to remove her shoes, placing them beside Renaril's own.

As she turned back towards the bed, Renaril pulled in a long breath, reached up to the collar of her uniform and slowly unzipped it down to the navel opening. Please, she thought, her self-assurance dipping too low to sustain another verbal request. Please understand...

The object of her desire did understand: Kang turned her back, unfastening the buttons of her ever-standardized white shirt one by one. Renaril meanwhile averted her eyes reflexively, focusing her attention on wriggling out of her suit and folding it to a passable standard of neatness. Kang was already finished when she looked up again.

Renaril's heart started jackhammering almost immediately. Despite their proximity during work hours, she and Kang still maintained largely isolated personal lives: the Chinese woman rose before dawn, showered at odd hours and ate either on the fly or in the company of whatever troops or staff she happened to be working with when lunch break rolled around. This lifestyle had gone a long way towards thwarting the Arume's attempts to get closer to her colleague, but it didn't matter any more – here, in this little cabin aboard the massive station orbiting high above the planet's surface, the two women could see one another in their entirety for the first time.

Communal bathing and changing had been ordinary events in Renaril's academy days, and the experience of appearing nude in front of others was in no way strange to her... Yet now it was somehow as if none of that had ever happened, at least if the heat rising in the alien's cheeks was a reliable indicator. She swallowed again as she lifted her eyes to meet her opposite's.

Kang herself was blushing faintly as she examined her prospective bedmate, the unexpected sight of which bolstered Renaril. It was impossible not to compare the woman who faced her with the woman of her dreams: the skin was not quite so dark, the unconfined breasts a little bigger, the belly not perfectly flat but sculpted in a way the Arume found no less appealing. The only real cause for disappointment was the patch of unruly brown hair which concealed Kang's most intimate place, but Renaril thought of it only for a moment or two before she was distracted by other details.

She'd taken it for granted that the colonel would have scars somewhere on her body. If Kang were been horribly maimed in some fashion, the slender alien had reasoned, surely she would mention it. The pale marks Renaril saw were not particularly gruesome individually, but their number and placement elicited an unpleasant shiver. Going by just the obvious blemishes alone, the woman she was inviting into her bed had been shot through the shoulder, hip and thigh, and bore unmistakable traces of a curving blade cut running across her flank almost parallel to the bottom of her ribcage.

More unsettling even than that wound was the faint but not inconspicuous bite mark on the outer left part of Kang's collarbone. "The fanatics attack their enemies in any way they can," she explained, catching Renaril's stare.

Renaril shuddered. "That must have really hurt."

"It did." Kang cleared her throat. "Shall we..?"

"Erm, yes..." The Arume sat back on the bed and stretched out, taking care to leave plenty of space. She kept her eyes on the goal this time, as Kang padded forwards and laid herself beside the smaller female. "Comfortable?"

"I'm fine." Kang smiled – a rare enough thing in and of itself. "Good night."

"G'night," Renaril mumbled, tearing her eyes away from the fascinating expanse of skin before her. "Lights out." She waited as the room's automated circuits enacted her command, leaving the pair lying in darkness. "One last thing..."

"Hm?"

"When we're alone, can... can I call you 'Li'?"

"Mm-hm."

"Li?"

"Mm?"

Acting on the hope that Kang hadn't moved significantly since the lights dimmed, Renaril pushed herself forward until her upper body touched her opposite's warm flesh, craned her neck and gently pressed her lips against her elder's. Coming in the wake of her earlier ambitions, it seemed a strangely chaste form of contact. "...Thank you."

There was no answer, and Renaril began to fear that she had crossed an unspoken boundary. Her fear was swept away when Kang's arms slid around her and drew the alien into an embrace which, in all probability, neither of the two had ever experienced before.

The Arume no longer cared that her extravagant fantasies remained unfulfilled: this, however plain it might be in comparison, simply felt right.

Renaril awoke with a dreadful feeling that something was not right. The cabin was dark and quiet, and an outstretched hand confirmed what the group commander had already assumed: she was alone on the bed. Fuck, she thought furiously, rolling over and burying her face in her pillow. It WAS too good to be true!

"Renaril?"

"Wuh..?" The alien blinked. "Lights medium slow."

Rolling over, she found Kang standing at the bed's edge. "Sorry," the soldier murmured, squinting a little as her eyes adjusted to the rising illumination. "Did I wake you?"

Renaril turned her eyes downward, praying her guest hadn't caught on to her irrational blast of despair. "I thought you'd... gone..."

"Only as far as the bathroom." The Chinese woman climbed onto the bed, aiming to return to her sleeping position.

The Arume had a different idea. She pushed herself sideways, occupying the middle of the bed: when Kang hesitated, Renaril leaned forward, took her by the wrists and tugged her onward until the smaller woman lay on her back, the larger looming over her on hands and knees. Renaril topped off the maneuver by impulsively pulling her partner-to-be into a second and much longer kiss. "Li," she breathed, feeling the familiar heat rising within herself as she sank back onto the mattress, "I... I'm ready."

"Now?"

"I want to do it before you leave," Renaril pleaded. "We might not get another chance."

"Very well..." Kang pushed herself up and backwards, so that she knelt between Renaril's spread thighs. "I don't have much practice," she warned, flexing her fingers. "If you feel discomfort, tell me."

"I will." Renaril closed her eyes and focused on taking deep, regular breaths. "...Eep!"

The colonel pulled her hand back. "Too hard?"

"N – no..." The Arume's hands each grabbed a fistful of the sheet underneath her trembling body. "Don't stop..." Try as she might, she couldn't stop the little squeaks and moans which slipped out as Kang developed a steady rhythm to her careful strokes. What's wrong with me? Renaril wondered faintly. Do I feel so good just because it's her touching me?

After a few minutes in this groove – or maybe it was closer to several minutes – she pulled herself together enough to speak out. "In – inside..."

Kang looked down at her slick fingertips. "You're sure?"

Very sure. "Please... Oooooooooh!"

"You like that," Kang inferred. She let her index and middle fingers rest for a few moments, then made a gentle scissoring motion. "How's this?"

"That's... Aaahn!"

Renaril didn't last much longer: her partner's experimenting led her to the alien's sweet spot, pushing the petite woman over the edge. "Li, I – I'm..! Kyaaaaaaaaaa!"

The Chinese female slowed the pace of her ministrations as Renaril's inner muscles squeezed her fingers, the Arume's taut figure beaded with sweat droplets. Feeling the receiving body slacken, she withdrew her hand with the same restraint she'd exercised throughout. "Was that all right?"

"It was really good." Renaril was in truth far too inexperienced to call it great, but right now she wouldn't go back to lonely masturbation for anything. "I just wish I could, um... hold out longer."

"We can work on that next time," Kang pointed out, confirming – to Renaril's great joy – that she didn't view their encounter as a one-time affair. "Are you satisfied for the moment?"

"Yes..." Renaril sat up, rocking one way and then the other as she folded her legs under herself. "It's your turn now, Li."

"Me?" A dab of red crept into the soldier's cheeks. "I don't need – "

The group commander placed her hands on Kang's shoulders, preventing the latter from pulling away. "I want you to enjoy this too," she said firmly. "It's not fair if I'm the only one feeling good." Impatience began to get the better of her once more as she saw that Kang wouldn't budge so easily. Her dominant hand relaxed its grip, slipping off the shoulder, gliding down over the collarbone with its jagged bite scar and settling on the taller woman's breast. "Trust me," the Arume pleaded. "I promise I'll stop if you really don't like it."

Kang shivered, the motion resonating through the soft mass under Renaril's palm. "...Be gentle."

Renaril took the request to heart. Squeezing just a little rewarded her with the gratifying sensation of her opposite's brown nipple hardening against her own fair skin. All right, she thought, I can do this! Encouraged by the response, she started to slowly draw the fingers of her other hand down her elder's side.

And then the cabin door, which she had absolutely, positively locked at bedtime, opened with a cold pneumatic hiss. Beyond the threshold stood the very last person Renaril wanted to see right now.

"Mom!"