About sixty miles from Elran a small desert mining village, life in the abandoned pump house fell into a daily routine for the odd threesome sheltered there.
Nalina still treated Orin with wary aloofness, but she didn't seem as frightened of him as she was fifteen days ago. Maybe it helped that he took the trouble to learn some Zevian from them. Now Orin could talk directly to her without needing the little boy to translate.
Their days were busy. They foraged for fresh food from the cultivated fields and tried to coax some scrawny bushes to bear fruit by carrying water to them. The previous bombardments had knocked out the automated irrigation system, the house and the other outbuildings. Many of the plants were dying for lack of water in the scorching desert heat. So the three watered as many plants as possible to keep them producing the food, they needed to survive.
During the evening meals in the darkened pump house, they each talked about their past lives. They never dared to look toward the future because it didn't seem very promising for any of them.
At barely twenty, Nalina was orphaned during the bombardments at Lake Lessat. The village had been razed while Nalina was working at Mikal's agricomplex. She lived there with him and his two young wives, serving as governess for Lanimer. Mikal's two wives worked---Lania as an interpreter at Medrin Starport, and Merris worked in the mine outside of Elran. Mikal had been a Master Technician at the Elran Medical Clinic. He'd been hoping one day to complete his physician's training so he could become a physician like his old friend Hankura.
"All those dreams are gone now," Nalina's voice was thick with emotion. "He and his wives were all I had left. I think Mikal was beginning to care for me---maybe enough to make me his third wife. I could have been housemate for all their children. Merris' baby would have been born just before the winter solstice. Maybe next year I could have born a third child for Mikal." She sniffled. "Now they're all dead. No one even buried them."
"I buried them---side by side," he told her. "I'm sorry they died. I thought they would make it, I wanted them to make it."
"So you buried them to salve your conscience?" Nalina's tone was sarcastic.
"I'm not like them! I hate them!" Orin asserted.
"If you hate the Tregans so much, why do you wear their uniform? Why do you look like them? What makes you different from those murderers?"
"My genes may have been strung together in the same pattern as theirs, but Nalina, I wasn't raised as an animal and conditioned to become a ruthless killer from childhood as they were.”
"I grew up on Veldis Lar before the Tregans took it. My host mother and her mate raised me with the same love they would have given a naturally conceived son. We were warned in time for my parents to escape, but the soldiers found me. Because I looked like the other soldiers, the Commander General had me dragged from my home in chains. They tried to break me on Tregas. Two months of brainwashing and survival training and they thought they could make me into a soldier. Ha! That kind of brainwashing only works with the young ones before the mental shield is fully matured. They figured pain would work instead."
Orin shuddered. "I pretended to be like them so they wouldn't kill me. I didn't want to die. Then, they sent me here to kill people who never did anything to me. But, they're the ones who made my life hell, so I killed them."
He fell silent for a time, staring out into the darkness through the doorway of the bunker. The things he had seen since he came to Zevus Mar gave him many sleepless nights. He could still hear that Zevian girl screaming in his dreams as Damon tortured her. He should have killed Damon then---before he had the chance to hurt anyone else. But then, they would have killed him on the spot.
Orin wished he could stop feeling guilty. At least he had saved Nalina and Lanimer. They were safe now, and they could take care of themselves.
"You won't have to worry about me anymore, Nalina. I'll be gone by sunset tomorrow," he said abruptly.
She gasped. "You're just going to leave us here?"
"Do you want me to stay?" Orin's eyes mocked her, and he laughed. "It's been two weeks, and you're still terrified of me. You've been scared so long; you see only a soldier---not a man. You'll be glad to see the last of me."
Even in the darkness, Orin could see that she wasn't glad at all. But she was too proud or too stubborn to say so.
"Do you want me to stay, Nalina?"
"I don't know," she murmured with a defensive shrug.
She gave a sharp cry as Orin seized her arm and forced her to look into his eyes with his other hand. "Don't you, Nalina," he demanded in a hushed whisper? Her eyes went wide with fear, and she shrank from his grip.
Orin let her go before his emotions took control of him. He jumped up and stalked out of the bunker into the cool night air. What had he expected? He might as well face it now as later. That's how they would all feel about him.
As a deserter, he was a lost man with nowhere to belong and no one to care.