Unfinished Business

Chapter Twenty One

“There is an inspector coming,” Colonel Chen said, his Alliance boots making a distinctive clang as he paced slowly but purposefully in front of the Browncoats he had ordered assembled as ordered in the Gymnasium. Colonel McNab, as was his want, stood in the middle of them, at the front in a visible position of leadership, while the Colonel paced. Some tried to hold to a semblance of a formation, but there were just too many for the space, and a few hundred clung to the sides of the ancient, rust-stained walls like human residue.

It bore little resemblance to a real gym, of course. It was merely an unfinished cargo container, once used to move atmo plants to the Rim. It had been gutted of everything but a floor during the retrofit that had converted the Suri Madron. It was just large enough to play football in, if you weren’t too picky about field size regulations, and you could run around and do calisthenics to your heart’s content. Some of the Chinese played catch in their spare time, and there were classes in Tai Chi and yoga every couple of days. They’d even had a cricket game going for a while before the makeshift bat was confiscated as a “weapon”.

But while it lacked typical recreational amenities, it was also the only place large enough to assemble any large number of prisoners. When the call went out over the intercom to do so, anyone who wasn’t on a work assignment was required to drop what they were doing, and right now that put nearly twelve hundred people in the place. All of them nervously watched as Colonel Chen – flanked by two squads of heavily armed Alliance guards – addressed them.

“There is an inspector coming,” the purple-uniformed man repeated, more loudly. “An Alliance inspector. Needless to say, we want to make a good impression on him. To that effect, work crews will pull double shifts until every spot of rust is shiny.” There was the expected chorus of groans – no one in any military anywhere liked preparing for an inspec