The Winter Palace

For God and Country, I Leave You All Behind

A QUICK WORD OF INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Winter Palace. If you're new to this free, serialized sci-fi fantasy novel,

So where're we at in our story?

Carmen has kidnapped the Red Duke Salvador Inness, leader of a wicked empire called the Glaive. After that, under instruction from her handlers at the CIA, she faked assassinating the Red Duke. Now, she sits in the brig on a Forward Operating Base in Siberia awaiting her fate.

For God and Country, I Leave You All Behind

She hadn't felt regret since the war began. Not until today: the sense of betrayal in Michael's eyes after she'd 'shot' the Duke tore her to pieces.

Her knuckles tapped on the brig's cement wall:

Dot-Dot-Dot

Dash-Dash-Dash

She continued tapping in Morse to herself:

I'll never see you again. I'm sorry.

The shock in Michael's eyes after they'd all wrestled her to the ground. Then, peace as they sprayed sleeping gas into her lungs.

I betrayed you, but I didn't. You're all gone.

She had watched only Michael after the chopper landed.

For God and country, I leave you all behind.

Then she had stared into space as they led her down the ramp, handcuffed.

Goodbye.

The whispers from the armed guards as they led her to the brig: "It's her! She shot the Red Duke!"

Now, she was here: a seven-by-seven cell, all cement, steel door with forty-seven rivets and no window. When she hit it with her fist, it gave off a tone in E-flat.

Why was she here?

For the most audacious kidnapping in human history.

She was here because the Red Duke had to die.

That's what Playwright had communicated to Carmen, in Morse code, the night before as the team crept toward the Glaive airbase. A remote-controlled glider with newfangled night vision had delivered supplies—parts for Whistler rockets, food, grenades, a Walther PPK handgun, a box of blank ammunition. Playwright had gone on to give Carmen additional instructions: get the Duke, proceed to the extraction point, pretend to kill Salvador Inness.

Playwright had even told Carmen the words to say, had written a play for Carmen to perform.

Was this all a joke?

"'I am the weeping millions—the men, the women, the children,'" Carmen had said.

Why had Playwright asked her to say that? To put fear in the Duke's heart? To make Playwright feel better? The words were so elaborate and over-the-top. It wasn't like how Carmen spoke at all.

"'I am my mother, my father, my sisters, my cousins, my country.'"

Carmen had recited her lines and then gassed the Red Duke.

Then they escaped.

Finally, the Duke had to 'die,' his assassination captured by Awkward Arthur's film camera.

"See the abyss in my eyes, you warlord, you Antichrist."

As a postscript, Carmen had to become the villain of the piece. The "team," Playwright's team, would spin Carmen as a psycho-in-waiting. Carmen Herja, the freedom fighter whose family was murdered in the Glaive nuclear assault on the western United States. Carmen, who couldn't control her emotions. Carmen, whose file was being clandestinely rewritten—then leaked—to included made-up instances of losing control while on the battlefield. What fool would send Carmen onto the battlefield? What idiot would make her point-woman on a mission as sensitive as this?

Heads would roll. Playwright's "team" had a plan for that, and a narrative, too. Officers as high up as Commander would be reassigned to cargo ships and listening posts at the bleeding edge of the war. The story would be that Carmen's superiors (handlers was probably a more accurate term than superiors—she had technically never joined the military) had done the right things, made the right decisions, but failed to see the "warning signs" that Playwright's people would write into Carmen's record after the fact. Some great officers would lose their careers. Some would be bitter into their elder years.

It was the right thing to do.

Carmen reflected on her closeted righteousness, stared into the caged light bulb on the ceiling, tapped on the brig wall:

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

She'd memorized that Bible verse as a child, didn't know what it meant, didn't care to. It just put words to her feelings, somehow.

Her fingers brushed her hair. It didn't feel like hair anymore; it felt like a crust. For the first time in months, she could smell herself. She missed her rifle.

Carmen tapped:

You made the bed, and I laid in it. Or is it lied?

Quaker, and Playwright, and all of them—rot-eaters at the CIA, she guessed—they had beamed orders into her ear, and she followed them, and her success was rewarded with shame.

It was the right thing to do.

It was right.

She was off the battlefield for the first time in her adult life. She'd captured the villain. She'd avenged her family.

What next?

Carmen hadn't thought to ask. Maybe they'd follow Playwright's little skit to its natural conclusion and hang her for war crimes. She'd be dead on a tree while the Red Duke sat in a safe house—probably a mansion in Europe—and gorged on pheasant under glass.

She couldn't help it anymore; her fighting spirit collapsed. The war was over, right? If Playwright and Quaker hadn't put the last nail in the coffin of this holocaust, then Carmen had done it all for nothing.

Ding-dong, the Duke is dead, Carmen tapped on the wall.

They could end the war today, end the killing. But how many lives was it worth?

CLANG! A latch flipped. The steel door opened. It was an MP, his eyes obscured by his helmet.

"Ma'am, I need you to come with me."

The thought hit her: I'll never be on the battlefield again.

I haven't felt this safe since my parents were alive.