Colony One by E. M. Peters Page A

her hesitate. When she focused on it, she saw a child, age nine or ten, standing a few meters away in the space between the two buildings. He was a slender child with hair closely shaved to his head. He looked disproportioned in a malnourished way. He wore rags for shorts and nothing else – not even shoes. The alleyway was otherwise abandoned, scattered with rubble and filth.
    She stopped, causing the rest of her unit to stop. “Keep moving!” The point man commanded. Alexa ignored him. She couldn’t, in good conscious, leave the child.
    “Hey!” She waved with one arm while the other cradled her rifle. “Come with us,” she called out and when he didn’t move, she broke away from her group to jog towards him. His eyes were wide like he was seeing ghosts.
    “Lieutenant, stop!” she heard someone call from behind her just as she saw the boy’s arm come out from behind his back. He raised it to point a pistol squarely at her face.
    Alexa froze, her grip tightening on her rifle but could not bring herself to point it at the child. She stared at the boy in paralyzing shock. Child soldier, she registered in her mind. He is a child soldier. Taught to murder in the same way you would teach a child their alphabet.
    He pulled the trigger.
    She flinched and felt the air get sucked out of her lungs.
    The gun had jammed.
    The boy looked simultaneously frightened and angered that his attack had not worked.
    She heard the boot falls behind her, which is the only thing that snapped her out of her trance. Gunshots erupted. She was in their line of fire – she guessed they were just trying to scare the boy but a ricochet winged him. The boy went down with a scream, cupping his neck as blood poured from the wound.
    “Stop!” Alexa screamed and dropped her rifle. She fell on the boy to protect him from further assault and ripped open one of the pockets on her vest to get to a wrap of gauze. The gunfire stopped as she pulled the boy’s hands away from his neck and shoved the thick ball of gauze into the wound to help stop the bleeding. From pain, shock or both, the boy passed out.
    “The fuck do you think you’re doing, Lieutenant?” The group leader asked as they circled with their backs to her and the fallen pair to guard against any potential ambushes.
    “He’s just a boy!” Alexa exclaimed as she frantically checked the wound. To her brief relief, the ricochet did not seem to hit anything vital. “We cannot leave him.” She said forcefully.
    “He tried to kill you!” He shouted the obvious.
    There were tears in Alexa’s eyes, “He doesn’t know any better,” she said, trying to wrap the wound tightly with shaking hands. She struggled to get to the back side of his neck, fumbling a few times before she was joined by one of her unit. James Hunter had released his rifle so it hung at his side, and helped lift the boy so the wound could be dressed.
    “I’ll carry him,” James told her in a soft voice.
    “I can do it.” Alexa insisted, and with a reluctant sniffle, wiped her face on her sleeve to clear the tears from her eyes.
     
    The boy had lived and was successfully rehabilitated, but Alexa was never the same. She knew for every child saved from that despicable environment – which were far too few – there were countless more. Saving child soldiers was not even an objective of the Confederation and no one outside the military knew about them, so no one could care. The military made all members sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding speaking out about anything they had seen or done while in the service, and it carried severe penalties.
    It was an impossible burden everyone who fought in the war brought home – especially those forced to defend themselves against the child soldiers. Those who witnessed horrors worse than she had were simply not able to cope with the moral injury.
     
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    The unexpected encounter with the boy on Colony One triggered a thousand different emotions in Alexa and