Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  Mithra alone knew how, but he managed to hit the bandit pilot, a visible impact in the upper chest. The tall man flopped backward off the rope ladder, mouth opening in pain and shock. Not dead though; he twisted in midair, again with more agility than any mech-driver had a right to, and rolled to absorb the impact before he hit about five meters below.

  Logan cursed again, realizing the bandit's tactical vest had absorbed at least some of the round's energy.

  I’m cursing an awful lot today, he thought as he jumped after him.

  He tried to roll with the fall, but came to the conclusion about halfway down he was not as accomplished an acrobat as the bandit pilot. The impact half-knocked the wind out of him, would have probably broken his shoulder if it hadn’t been for nearly half a meter of fresh snow. In the seconds it took him to stumble to his feet, the bandit opened up again with his machine pistol.

  The burst of tiny tantalum bullets struck Logan in the left chest and he grunted, fell back heavily as a sharp stinging shot through his left arm, a tiny probe of fire burning into him. One of the rounds had missed his armored tactical vest and buried itself in his left bicep—not deep, thanks to the ballistic cloth of his fatigues, but it still hurt like hell. It didn’t hurt so bad he couldn’t hold onto his gun and he fired convulsively in the Scorpion pilot’s general direction, two rounds, three.

  The bandit tried to turn and run and Logan sighted the aiming laser carefully, fired. This time it kicked, this time it was loud. The 12mm slug smashed the pilot's right forearm in a spray of blood and the tall man screamed, dropped his machine pistol and stumbled to his knees, hair whipping around in the wind. Logan struggled back to his feet, blinking snow out of his eyes, and stepped cautiously up to the man, covering him with his sidearm. He knew he should just blow the pilot's head off, but shooting an unarmed man face-to-face was a few factors harder than shooting into a cockpit.

  “You want to die quick," Logan said, his throat dry and raspy, "this is your one chance. Otherwise, you can come back to Sparta and stand trial—then be executed. Your choice."

  By way of reply, the tall man lunged for his fallen weapon. He was fast; he had already wrapped his fingers around the grip before the 12mm slug slammed into his temple, exploded out the other side of his skull in a spray of blood and brains. The bandit dropped, twitched once and then lay still. Logan took a deep breath, fell heavily to one knee, his arm on fire with pain. He bit back the wave of agony, looked up in time to see Marc Langella walking toward him from his downed Golem, pistol drawn.

  "You okay?" The Sub-lieutenant offered him a hand and he took it with his left, not wanting to put that much weight on his wounded arm.

  "I will be." Logan nodded slowly. He shoved his sidearm into its shoulder holster, pulled off his helmet and let the snow cool him down. "You'd better call the Colonel, Marc. Looks like we're going to need a ride.”

  2

  Logan Conner winced as the utility vehicle jerked to a halt in front of the main hangar. He was grateful the driver wasn't piloting a mech.

  "This is where you get off, sir," the corpsman who'd put a field bandage on his injured arm announced. "They've set up a field hospital to take care of the civilians from the ship."

  "Thanks." Logan nodded, stepping carefully out of the back of the truck. Langella had remained at the battle site to oversee the repair and salvage of their mecha, but Colonel Anders had insisted Logan get his arm checked out back at the camp. The Colonel had actually complimented him, impressed with Logan's successful attack on the strike mech, which had freaked him out a little.

  He walked slowly across the open ground to the hangar, snow crunching beneath his boots. The storm had ended before reinforcements had arrived at the battle site and without the wind, it didn’t seem nearly as cold anymore. The compound had been surrounded by arrays of spotlights, and was secured by the rest of Captain Danaan’s company of assault mecha, including the half of his own platoon that still had functioning machines. A crew of workers were clearing the landing pad to allow their shuttle to jet in from the isolated valley where it had originally landed.

  This would be a good mission for salvage, he reflected. The Scorpion was mostly intact, and at least half a dozen mecha and five heavy-lift shuttles were untouched. And, of course, anytime the Guard got to take out a bandit cabal, it made Sparta and all the Dominions that much safer. That was what Father always said.

  Logan limped slowly into the hangar—Damn leg hurts worse from where I jumped out of the mech than my arm does from getting shot—and made his way to where a line of folding examination tables had been set up. The civilians and the transport crew were a ragged lot, most sporting at least minor injuries. Here and there, he saw a man shivering uncontrollably, or a woman hugging a blanket around herself and staring vacantly into space, or the pair of young, teenage girls holding each other and crying. He was suddenly glad he'd killed the bandit leader instead of capturing him.

  Logan hesitantly took a seat beside a young woman who would have been beautiful if not for the haunted look in her eyes… her eye. One of them was swollen shut, the whole side of her face black and blue. Her short-cut hair was matted with dirt and blood, her face and neck scratched and every exposed centimeter of flesh bruised and coated with dust. Beneath the blanket she clutched around her he thought he saw the remains of a Naval uniform. He tried not to stare, tried not to attract her attention. He wouldn't know what to say to her if she tried to talk to him.

  And then she turned, looked at him. She didn't say anything for long moments, stared at his face, then at the blood-stained bandage on his arm.

  "You got shot," she said, more of a statement than a question.

  "Uh, yeah." He nodded.

  "Who shot you?" There seemed to be genuine curiosity in her voice.

  "'Nother mech pilot," he shrugged. "Turned out to be the head of this whole bunch of assholes."

  "Did you kill him?"

  "Yeah." He nodded. "Didn't have much choice."

  “Good," she said, her voice ruthless.

  Logan looked away from her eyes, uncomfortable with the abject hatred he saw there, noticed her arms shaking, her hands clutching tightly at the blanket around her.

  "Hey, are you okay, miss?" he asked her, starting to bring a hand to her arm to support her, but halting it in mid-reach as he saw her flinch away. He awkwardly pulled back the hand, let it fall into his lap. "Sorry."

  "You know," the woman said, fixing him with a stare cold and frightening enough to make him wish he was back in his mech, "you're the second person who's asked me that question tonight. I was a little less than polite to the first. Since I'm a bit calmer now, I'll try to be a little more civil. How to put this..." she trailed off thoughtfully, staring into space.

  "Say you'd just graduated from the Military Academy on Nike. You're twenty-one years old and all you’ve ever wanted to do is fly assault shuttles. You don’t care what your parents or your friends think about the military, you just want to fly. You’re heading for your first assignment after one last awkward visit home with your pacifist father and your doctor mother and thinking that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to you.” She cocked her head to the side, staring at him the way he might look at some weird insect on some far-off planet.

  “Then you find yourself shut away in a closet, listening to innocent people being tortured to death, and feeling their pain with every scream, wanting it to be over for them but also not wanting it to end because you know when it does, you’re next. Unless you’re ‘lucky’ enough for them to sell you as a slave on the open market instead, because if they’re not going to kill you, there’s only one other use they have for you.”

  A long, steadying breath, as if she were fighting back against something, a memory that wanted to take her over.

  “And then, when you have the incredible fortune to actually be rescued, you have a man's brains blown into your face. After this series of events, would you, by any stretch of semantics, call you
rself 'okay?'"

  Logan's ears burned and he felt a hot flush in his face, his after-battle elation fading away to a kind of emptiness. He got to his feet, his stomach twisting.

  "I'm sorry," he said helplessly, then turned, heading for the hangar's exit.

  "What about your arm?" the woman asked.

  "It's not important," he mumbled, not turning back.

  It wasn't important at all.

  The Vindicator towered over Logan a monster forged from metal so black it was nearly swallowed by the shadows of the darkened mech bay. The damage from days ago was gone, scraped down and patched and smoothed over as if it had never happened. Just like the bullet wound in his arm, nearly gone but for a small scar. Some damage, though, wasn’t quite as easily repaired.

  “Been a busy few days, Lieutenant.”

  The voice was casual, conversational, but it nearly made Logan Conner jump right out of his skin. It took every ounce of self-control he had not to spin around and go for his gun, or alternatively throw himself down into the shadows and cower like a dog beaten too much. Neither would have been a good idea with Captain Lyta Randell. Her shoulders were wide and strained against the seams of the regulation Ranger Corps utility fatigues, narrowing at the waist and then solidifying once more into legs as big around as his. She always went armed, but he knew she wouldn’t need a weapon to take him down if she were of a mind.

  “That it has, Captain,” he responded as if Ranger officers stalking through darkened mech bays under acceleration were a normal operating procedure on the Spartan Guard warship Manannan Mac Lyr. “Lots of salvage, lot of repair, lots of civilians to babysit.”

  “Not just babysit either,” she corrected. “The Dominions are going to need intelligence, and they’re going to have to run through us to get it.”

  “Oh, I think Starkad has all the intelligence they need on this one, Captain,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his tone. His eyes darted back to the Vindicator. “After all, they fund these bandits, don’t they?”

  “There’s no actionable evidence of the Starkad Supremacy’s involvement in piracy.” He didn’t even need to be watching her to tell her tongue was planted firmly in her cheek. “As I’m sure your father has told you. Officially, this cluster of loose nutsacks is part of something called the ‘Red Brotherhood,’ but that’s more of a loose association than a real paramilitary organization. Their ‘boss’ is somewhere out on the Periphery and has probably never heard of these jokers. All we could dig up on the one you shot was an old wanted notice from the Shang Directorate. His name was Peter Che back in the Directorate but I understand he’d taken to calling himself Captain Cai Quian.”

  He snorted softly but still didn’t turn. The lines of the Vindicator drew his eyes to them, the gaping emitter of the plasma gun, its electromagnetic coils a spiral nautilus shell turned inside out, the jutting barrels of the Vulcan. Beside it, secured in their cradles for space transport, the Golems of the rest of his platoon stood stalwart, ready to support their leader.

  “What good is all this,” he blurted, giving voice to the thoughts plaguing him, keeping him awake most of the last three nights, “if we can’t use it to keep our people safe? People like the crew of the Atlas?”

  He’d thought she’d chew him out, disabuse him of the childish notion it was even possible to keep anyone safe anywhere in the Dominions, but when she replied, her voice was almost gentle, understanding.

  “We did the best we could for them, Lieutenant… Logan. Most times, if a crew is taken by pirates, there is no just-in-time rescue.”

  “Not in time for the three men they killed,” he shot back, being insubordinate and just not caring. “Not in time for the poor bastard they tortured nearly to death.” His mouth worked silently and he felt bile rising in his throat. “Not in time for those two little girls, that pilot…”

  If she objected to his tone, she gave no indication.

  “We saved those people from horrible deaths, or from lives even worse than death.”

  "It's not enough!" Logan shook his head, his voice filled with the fierce conviction burning up from his gut. "We should have hunted down that bandit trash and all the others like them years ago. We should have gone after the governments that supply them! Instead, we fuck around with meaningless raids, fighting for worthless pieces of rock in battles that nobody really wins. We leave our troops garrisoned on the frontier, sitting on their asses in case the Jeuta decide to attack. And the whole time, bandits are chipping away at everything we try to build, slowly tearing down anything we have left from the Empire." He stopped, took a deep breath, his hands shaking.

  "We all feel that way, Logan," she tried to put a comforting hand on his arm, "but..."

  "No, Lyta!" He spun away from her hand, fists clenched, and tried to bring himself back under control. "Sorry,” he corrected himself. “Ma’am. I know we all feel that way, but no one else can do anything about it! Someday, I'm going to be brought before the Council and they’re going to vote me Guardian in my father’s stead, and I'm going to have all your lives in my hands. I'm going to have the power to actually do something. But I," he emphasized each word, "don't know what to do." He shrugged helplessly. "I see the face of this woman I talked to back in the hangar on Ramman, and all I can think is that I don't know what I could tell her I'd do to keep it from happening again."

  "That woman's name," Lyta told him softly, "is Kathren Margolis. She told me about you. She feels bad about coming down on you so hard—she wants to talk to you. She wants to thank you for rescuing them."

  "You and your Rangers rescued them, ma’am.” He dismissed the words with a negligent wave of his hand.

  "And how long do you think we could have lasted against nearly two full squads of light mecha, plus a fucking Scorpion?" Lyta Randell shook her head. "Katy's already seen the holo of that fight from your mech's mission recorder—everyone has." She smiled. "They're already comparing it to your father's fight in the coup."

  "Oh, God," he sighed, shaking his head. "It wasn't that big a deal."

  "Who do you think you're kidding, Kel?" She laughed. "Look, don't torture yourself. You've done all you can." She put a hand on his arm, and this time he didn't flinch away. "Maybe, someday, you'll be able to do more, do something to actually bring a change. I think you will. You're a lot like your father. But for now, you need to go talk to Katy. She's in the sick bay and she needs to see you."

  "I..." he trailed off helplessly. "I wouldn't know what to say."

  "Just be yourself." She squeezed his arm. "Trust me, she needs this more than you do. She's a fighter, but she's going to need friends to get through the next few weeks."

  "All right," he said, surrendering with a shrug. "I'll try."

  "Don't underestimate yourself, Logan Conner," Lyta admonished him. “Let the enemy do that.”

  "I've got a lot to live up to," he admitted. She jabbed a finger at him.

  "You believe this, Conner: a hundred years from now, when your oldest child takes the throne, they'll be worrying about living up to your legend, not your father's."

  With that, she turned and left him alone in the dark, speechless.

  Logan Conner had dined with diplomats and Generals, been dressed down by Colonels, and sent to his room without dinner by the head of a government, but he couldn’t remember ever being quite as nervous as he was stepping into the Manannan Mac Lyr’s medical bay. He’d waited three hours and might not have come at all if Marc Langella hadn’t kept bugging him about it.

  “You know we’re going to be at the jump point soon,” the younger man had said, stretched out on his bunk, eyes closed. As junior officers, they shared one of the smallest class of cabins on the cruiser, which usually didn’t bother him except for Langella’s tendency to snore in free fall, but now… “We’ll lose gravity when they cut thrust and then it’ll be harder to get around.”

  Logan had glared at Langella with as much antipathy as he could collect into one expression, but th
e Sub-lieutenant had studiously ignored him, pretending to be “resting his eyes.” In the end, he’d decided to go through with it in the hope the woman might be on a different sleep schedule and at least he’d have an honest excuse to give Captain Randell if she asked about it.

  No such luck. The medical bay wasn’t crowded; it was designed to treat hundreds, and there had only been a handful of survivors from the Atlas. They were scattered here and there amidst dozens of unoccupied beds, some lying down, some sitting up and a few shuffling back and forth to the head. The giveaway was the glow of the active sensor display above each bed, showing the vital signs of the person assigned to it until they were officially checked out. And they were all being kept to ship-time during the four-day burn to the next jump-point, so the lights were on and patients were being encouraged to stay awake and active until the official bedtime.

  He found her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the sickbay bed, reading intently from one of the folding tablets you could get out of the data-docks in any compartment on the ship. The white, ankle-length hospital gown Kathren Margolis wore reminded Logan of the matrons of the Temple in the hills back home, a marked difference from the last time he’d seen her. It wasn’t the only change.

  Her hair was blond. He hadn’t been able to tell before; it had been matted with dirt and dried blood. The bruises and scratches and gouges were gone, faded to a faint, yellow-tinted memory after three days of treatment, and the zombie vacancy was gone from her eyes as well. Scrubbed clean, she could have been a university student… or a young officer, which was, he reminded himself, what she was.

  She glanced up from the tablet as he approached , and she smiled.

  God, she has a beautiful smile.