Sweet Romance14 min read
Starship Warrior Turned Village Girl: The One That Won't Be Starved
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I woke to the smell of porridge and the world split back into halves: a half that had fought beside me for a hundred light-years, and a half that smelled of wood smoke and old cloth.
"My child, you nearly scared me to death!" Aunt Haisley cried, her voice folding over me like a blanket.
"She's breathing," Uncle Julian said, sitting down hard. "Thank the heavens, she's alive."
I tasted rice before I could form a thought—the warm, milky porridge sliding down my throat like a small mercy. The hunger that had pulled all the edges from the original girl's life loosed its grip for the first time in days.
I blinked the war fog from my eyes. The room was low-ceilinged, the furniture plain. Faces leaned over me: Honest, worn, familiar in a way I could not name.
"Wake up," Everlee muttered, more impatient than cruel, and shoved the bowl toward me. "If you were any dumber from books, you'd starve on purpose."
Their hands on me, the human noises—grief, fussing, relief—pulled a tide of memories into my chest. I had been Faith Colombo not just now, but before: a commander of a star squad, a war officer who carried the nickname of an undefeated war god. Ten minutes ago I had been ripping a razor-demon in the Soraka system. Then the star dust burst, the world went white, and I crashed into this girl's life.
No time, thought-worked in me. Assess, survive, find leverage. Before I could step out of the haze, a soft light brushed my fingers.
"Space interface activated," the voice in my head said—familiar, curt, annoyingly bureaucratic. "User: Faith Colombo. War-God Space operational."
I let my hand seek the phantom and found it: a cube of carved light, hovering in my mind. It opened like a little city. Food, utility caches, small toys; two crystal bears the size of thumbs; an unhatched egg that pulsed cold and faintly dangerous. My mouth watered. The space had everything I remembered bringing back—except a notice, blinking in stern yellow.
"Battle-God Space status: Limited," the space said. "User merit points negative three hundred and seventy. Temporary access: one hundred grams."
"Wait," I hissed at no one and at the interface. "You can't be serious. I used this without limits before."
"Previous user Faith Colombo had earned merit through military service. Rebirth required transfer fee: five thousand merit points. Remaining accessible merit: negative three hundred and seventy," the space replied.
I laughed once, a bitter sound. "So I died to pay someone else's birth fee? That's rich."
"Balance due," the space said. "Earn merit. Temporary reserve: one hundred grams of consumables available."
That one hundred grams was not much, but it meant a hot bite, and hot teeth make the world slightly kinder.
"You're awake?" Grandfather Cornelius asked, his voice both a scold and a comfort. He had a soldier's posture even bent with age. The old man's hand trembled as he steadied me. I kept my inner face neutral. A war heart does not flash its plans.
"The porridge helped," I answered in the low voice I kept for myself. "Thank you."
"Don't think you can starve us to salvation again," Aunt Haisley said, and there was nothing but worry ahead of her mouth and eyes. "Work or marry, little one. That's what I tell myself."
"Don't talk like that," Grandfather Cornelius said. He looked at me with a sharpness that made me feel seen. "You are not just a girl for others to move. You are our blood. Choose your path."
That flicker—his certainty—made me more sure I could not be cowardly. I had space and a limited kit, and my war memory. The world had been made small: a town that smelled of coal and boiling cabbage, a family that held itself together on borrowed flour. My options thinned, but they were still mine to use.
Later, after I had eaten and my head cleared, I stood in the yard watching my cousins leave for the factory. The rhythm of the town was a tight knot: work, coupons, hunger; and the factory master held the knot's ends.
"I'll go dig tonight," Everlee said, "the west fields. We can scrape together something."
"It'll be thin," Jaxson said, tying the laces, voice flat. Francisco slung an extra bag over his shoulder and shrugged. "Still better than nothing."
I thought of starships and plasma and the way a mission would map every variable. I had a map now—small, local—and I could engineer a route through it.
The space offered me a tool: scan. Not the frozen ecology I craved, but a small, practical skill: local-scanning five meters around me for edible plants and medicinal herbs.
"Super-scan: service active," the interface chirped.
I laughed outright. "That's the size of my hand. Thank you for your imagination."
But the scan worked. It told me which plant was edible, which seed would rise in clay, and which leaf would staunch a wound. In the city I had healed battle victims with nanografts and triage, but here, banded with no tools, knowledge was enough.
"You're useless, you know," Everlee said as she found me bent over a clump of greens. "You get sniffy looks from the whole lane and you can't even fish right."
"I can," I said. "We just need to practice."
She eyed me, and I would have liked to say that the star soldier in me had no softness, but I was tired enough to be grateful. For all the fight-scar shine in my mind, my hand held a child's gentleness. I let the greens collect. Every harvest I saved from wasting would be a small loan to my house.
At night, while the family slept, I studied the space and its cold ledger: the death fee owed, the record of offenses, the long list of deductions. It had once told me I had enormous merit for my service. Then, buried inside, were penalties: malicious strikes on Corte planet, the mutiny near Dalai Ridge, charges of theft and sabotage across sectors—these were the shadows burned by old campaigns, the kind of blackmarks that survive even when the soul doesn't want them.
"I didn't—" I argued into the dark at the interface.
"Privilege requires responsibility," it said. "Earn merit. Aid local life. Your use is allowed by merit."
The space tightened its logic like a noose. I had to earn merit, and the world needed immediate help.
The first crisis came like a punch. Uncle Julian fell at work—an accident of loading—his spine bruised and out of place. The factory said, "If he cannot show up, he cannot be paid." The foreman told them to bring their papers and go wait.
A freight of nerves lit inside the house.
"We can't leave him lying and go to the factory," Aunt Haisley said, hands full of worry.
I went into the room and scanned him. The interface painted blue lines across his back, mapped the stiff places. It suggested a reposition, a pressure point, a lever of joints. My military skill—a lifetime of battlefield trach and hinge—came up like a tool.
"I can try," I said.
"You're a child," Everlee protested. "The hospital said—"
"Hospitals mean money," Jaxson said. "We don't have money."
I had no time for debate. I turned my hand along the curve of his spine. Scans glowing, muscles tensing and giving, I manipulated like a patient mechanic. There was the sound: a tiny click, and Uncle Julian's breath changed from jagged to smooth.
"I can feel my legs," he said, and the room became a loud, wobbly world of cheering and tears.
A week later, hope ran cold when the factory refused to grant him leave. The foreman, a slim man with a permanent sneer, told them the boss said: no excuses.
"It is average practice," the foreman said in the office door. "We need men to fill shifts."
"It was an accident at work," Grandfather Cornelius said through teeth. "He got hurt in service."
"Accident is inconvenient," the foreman said. "If they will not work, they will not be paid. You know our rules."
The foreman folded his hands like a blade. A will to starve built in their faces. Our world is a machine, and the machine has parts with cold edges.
I thought of the word "justice" and realized I had no power to plug it into a system that considered wages a bargaining chip. But I had other resources. The space responded to a different currency: merit. Helping people earned it. Healing people earned it. So I worked.
I gathered herbs. I learned the old women's methods and stitched them with battlefield triage. The two injured men got cloth and boiled herbs and slowly improved.
One evening, while I was on my knees stitching, a neighbor woman named Evelynn—sharp-tongued and wealthy-feeling—came by with a businessman's offer in her mouth: marry your girl to a man who can "help." She raised her chin like a bird.
"Why starve and make trouble?" she said. "A good match would fix your cupboard. Why not fix what we can with a groom who brings a roof?"
Aunt Haisley stiffened. "We won't sell her."
Evelynn shrugged as if she had just returned change.
I felt anger like a low heat. The plan formulated: leverage what I had. I would not be bought. I would use every currency at my disposal to build an advantage.
That week, word came that the state wanted "knowledge youth" to go to the southern fields: a relocation, an assignment, perhaps a road out. It was an official program with grain allowances, with a promise of returning priority in city jobs. Everlee and the others argued and fought. In the end, I volunteered.
"You're going?" Aunt Haisley said, a mix of relief and sharp worry cutting through her face.
"It is the best lever," I said. "If I leave and our house gets the relief allowances, they will have time. If the proposed groom is impatient, distance will test his patience."
Grandfather Cornelius gave me a look that said I had marched through worse. "Do well," he said. "Be a soldier even in the fields."
At the station, Leonardo Dougherty—tall, blunt, a boy with a grin like a challenge—ran up panting, waving two faded bills.
"I grabbed this," he gasped. "Take it. Don't think I want to be bought, I—"
I took the money. "Promise you won't sell them back when you regret it," I said.
He blushed. "I don't plan to regret it."
I pressed my pendant into his palm before boarding: a shattered little jewel I had taken from space once, purple and star-like. "A token. If I'm gone, write me. If you like, keep it."
He looked at the pendant, then up at me. "I can take care of you," he said, suddenly brave and foolish and real. "I will try."
"I'll try first," I told him, and I boarded the train. The fields called to me with a nakedness I could repair.
On the route south, my war-toughness was a useful armor. I kept mostly to myself and trained in quiet hours. I learned the language of the soil, the rhythm of the hills, the names of poisonous plants by taste and mark.
On the seventh day, the train car filled with men and women selling food. We were crowded and hot.
"White bread?" a plump merchant offered.
I shook my head. A thief reached for pockets in the dark, smooth and practiced. The man expected easy pickings. He did not expect me.
"Hands off," I said, voice low. I caught the wrist before his pull finished and planted my palm on the point that made small boys cry.
He went down with a wheeze. His comrades took a step back. "Who are you?" one said.
"Someone who doesn't like thieves," I said, and the thief's knife clattered from the floor.
They backed off. A fat man with the nervous title "Xu" put two loaves on my lap like a token of alliance.
"You can stay on this car," he said, half-proud, half-relieved. "We have rules: no stealing."
That night a small gang went faster, trying to push terror through the car. Someone else reached for a knife. I moved like a shadow with teeth. My hands—trained for tighter, deadlier things—did not cut; they limited, they frightened, they broke the gesture of violence. The gang left with a few bruised faces and no pride. I sat back, closed my eyes. My actions were small; their merit, real.
When we reached the southern station, the party split us across several production teams. I was placed with the Seventh Team, where the leader had no cart or ox. The land was steep and green, and children watched me with curious eyes.
"Will you stay?" the leader asked, pointing at the stilt-house they'd made for me.
"I will," I said.
The mountain's days were sun and sweat and the whisper of new crops. I chopped and planted and healed. Kids ran with me; they thought my hands were magic when I caught a rabbit barehanded.
Then the real test arrived.
A pair of hunters came in, carried by two men. One bore a gash that cleaved from shoulder to chest, the other had his windpipe torn on one side. Blood was everywhere, and the village's breath stopped.
"There are wolves in the Ridge," they whispered. The leader's face went pale.
I scanned with what the space allowed: wounds, blood flow, the child's marrow. The options mapped themselves like mission commands. I could leave them as the villagers expected—death and ritual—or I could try.
"Boil water," I said. "Stitch. Keep him breathing."
They looked at me like I had asked them to fly.
"We'll do as you say," the village leader said, the words heavy with the weight of a people used to fate. "We will do everything you ask."
We set to work. I guided hands unaccustomed to surgery. We used bamboo and strips of cloth for splints. We rinsed wounds as best we could. We made a makeshift tracheal support with bamboo and bandage, and we fed a thin gruel into a man who could barely swallow.
Hours passed like centuries. Men who had only ever farmed touched the work like students to a master. When the first man's chest rose and fell without a ragged choke, the whole cluster of villagers sighed and began to cry in relief.
That night, while the villagers watched the two men sleep, the space pinged.
"Merit award: one hundred credits for moral uplift. Life saved: +20 merit," it said. "Temporary access increased to two kilograms."
I closed my eyes, and for the first time since I woke, a quiet ache threaded through me: guilt, joy, the world's large and small loops of debt. I had earned a little breathing room for my family.
I worked hard. I stitched scarecrow-level repairs into scaffolds and dug trenches and taught the children to sew. I practiced on the staircase of rice terraces: push, pull, angle. I guided the planting of short-cycle crops and persuaded the village council to try a mixed bed where herbs and vegetables shared space. I traded the rare two kilograms I could take free from my space for seed and a metal kettle.
Then word came back that the factory foreman in my home town was pushing even harder. He was rounding up people who complained. He hired a pair of goons to threaten the family. The thin, relentless violence of the town's rule reached like a vine toward us.
This time I would not let the injustice simmer. The foreman—Mr. Alfonso Takahashi—was sharp and slick with the sort that dresses in clean shirts and quick lies. He had power in the factory and in meetings. He liked the idea that he could twist wages like a creekbed.
I had two instruments: local good will and the ability to make messages. The space still had archives buried behind the ledger: logs and old data from my ship. Among them were voice captures and an old negotiation from before my death. I could retrieve some recordings and a segment of a ledger that proved collusion: Alfonso had been told to bust a shift and lay off injured workers rather than pay compensation. It was paper and voice and malice.
I took those files back to town.
The public square in our little city is two streets crossing with a small stone platform and a speaker meant for public announcements. Tuesday market drew dozens. I walked into the square with my finds.
"You're going to get arrested," Everlee hissed.
"Better than letting them eat us," I said.
We set up the old portable battery and a borrowed radio. I had to hack the interface just enough to push a sound clip to the loud units. It was brutal: Alfonso's voice bargaining with an agent to avoid paying for accidents, the line that said, "Let them hurt; it's cheaper," his laugh in the background.
I started the public broadcast.
"Attention!" I shouted into the microphone when the recording finished. "Listen to what men say about us."
The crowd tensed. Market stalls paused. A woman dropping grain looked up. Men who had been beaten by factory policy came close.
The square filled in minutes.
"Alfonso Takahashi," I said, my voice steady. "You have treated my family and many families like disposable parts. Here is your voice."
The loudspeakers replayed the clip. Alfonso's face, thirty yards away, went from smug to red.
"What is this?" he shouted and tried to step to the speaker. People moved like water and stopped him.
Suddenly he was not a back office manager but a man. He turned toward the crowd, and the first variant of his face—victory—burned out. The second face—denial—arrived fast.
"This is fabricated!" he cried. "This is slander, someone is setting me up!"
"No, it's your voice," a woman from the third stall said. She held up a phone she had turned on and shown the clip. "We recorded you last month trying to shift compensation. We thought we were dreaming."
The crowd began to murmur. Phones whipped up like flocks of birds. Someone started recording on live feed. The square's small publicity became a roaring net. People edged closer, hungry for truth.
Alfonso's face changed again, the third phase: panic. He lunged for the control box and tried to snap the battery cable.
Hands seized his wrist—two fathers, one mother—and held him back. The crowd chanted now, a simple, angry tide: "Justice. Justice."
He spun like an animal, trying to claw his way out. "You're lying! You're lying!" he shouted, but calls from his favors fell short. The factory crew who had once been his pillars shuffled uncertainly in the back. When the boss's own deputy looked at him and turned away, Alfonso's knees went soft.
"I didn't—" he stammered. "I was told—"
"Were told by whom?" I asked. My voice cut through and the sound stopped. "Who told you making them walk back on their feet was cheaper than paying their medicine?"
He looked at the ground. He looked at the faces that had come to the market. He knew now how small grounds were and how mute power is when scorned in a square.
"You're defaming me," he said, and shook his head as if to dislodge the word.
"Tell the families," I said. "Tell them you authorized their distress."
He sputtered and made a thin attempt at denial. People laughed, which cut him deeper.
One man from the factory, a clerk Alfonso had once used to deny paid leave, stepped forward, eyes bright with a new courage. He spoke low into the microphone: "He told me to do it. He told me to avoid payouts. It was cheaper. He told us to keep the injured away."
The square roared. People pulled out money and phones. They recorded everything. A woman slapped Alfonso's face and then shoved a paper into his hands: a public complaint form. He staggered, dignity unstitched.
"Alfonso, kneel," someone said. It was not a violent command so much as a ritual that had become a public test.
He fell to his knees in the dirt with a protest that bled into a whimper.
"I can fix this," he said finally, voice thin. "I'll pay them back. I'll—"
"You will do now what you should have always done," the eldest man called. "You will make compensation. You will apologize in front of town. You will sign the complaint and accept our judgement before the magistrate."
He wavered, then nodded, face wet and ashamed. "Please. I didn't know—"
The crowd's mood changed as if by current. People took out their phones and began to chant in the old way of people scolding their leaders, calling for him to be held to the claim. They recorded his kneeling posture, his pleading mouth. Some recorded it to send to their children like an old story. Some clapped when the magistrate's clerk wrote the claim.
He went through the stages I have seen in a hundred fought men: smugness, shock, denial, plea, breakdown. He curled into a small thing, the last of his bravado gone. He begged for mercy out loud, his words thin and repeated. The crowd did not strike him—this was not a beating—but watching him shrink is a punishment because it is social and lasting: his name burned into their record, his reputation carved away. Someone uploaded the clip; it flooded the nets. The foreman left on foot, shoulders bent.
The families received immediate partial compensation. The workers' union—small but vicious—demanded that the magistrate arrange for checks and ensure workman's loans were processed. The spectacle had done what legal papers could not: it exposed, publicly and permanently, what he had done.
As people left, a mother stepped to me and wrapped her arms around my waist like I was a child's savior. "You saved our men," she said, voice cracking like the earth. "You did this with your hands."
I let her lean. I thought of Leonardo, of the purple pendant tucked into his shirt, of Cornelius's steady gaze, and of how a star-swept warrior can end up doing small things that are huge to a single house.
That evening the space hummed.
"Merit earned: 500 for public moral upheaval," it said. "Access level increased."
I rested a long time that night, no longer running but standing in the center of a new loop: I could help and I would.
Days passed. Letters came from Leonardo—stupid, honest letters that made me grin and remember the taste of the purple pendant. I wrote to him back when I could. Everlee sent maps of how the crops did. Grandfather Cornelius wrote in a hand thick as bales.
I had thought myself iron. War built me rough. But out here, I learned a gentler ferocity: that a life saved is a kind of war won, and that standing in a mountain field, teaching a child to count the seeds for the next spring, can be the only fight you are allowed for a season.
I still dream of ships and the cold burn of the Soraka stars. I still hold the space like a small, strange heart inside me. But when I close my eyes at night now, it is not war battle plans that course through the blood. It is the sound of a woman's voice a village over singing, the smell of boiled rice, the little weight of a man's hand gripping mine at the square.
For now, I am Faith Colombo: former war-god, student of green hills, and a girl who will not be starved.
The End
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