Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  “Lord Guardian,” the Captain said respectfully.

  Logan fought against the frown trying to make its way across his face, not wanting to give the man the idea he disapproved of his uniform or his greeting. What he disapproved of was the idea of a Captain saluting him, a Lieutenant. He rebelled in his own, small way by coming to attention and returning the salute crisply, as was appropriate to greet a superior officer. He had to release it first, though; otherwise, the Captain would have stood there until hell froze over.

  The sunglasses came off, secured in a thigh pocket of his mottled green-and-grey utility fatigues as he passed under the Arch of the Restoration, which served as both the entranceway to the Palace and a work of art commemorating Jaimie Brannigan’s victory over his cousin Declan Lambert and the faction of the Sparta Guard under the rebel’s command. The figures were carved into the stone archway by hand, stylized into creatures of myth with wild, flowing hair tossing in the wind and eyes wide with battle madness.

  Dad hated the damn thing, but Mother had commissioned it before she died and he refused to have it torn down.

  Beyond the arch, the artwork became less commemorative and more decorative, also a legacy of his mother. The world might be called Sparta, but Maggie Conner had insisted the atmosphere of the house where she lived was not going to be Spartan. His favorite was a five-meter tall bronze copy of Michelangelo’s “David” standing like a silent sentry at the mouth of the hallway to the sections of the palace closed off to casual visitors and tourists, the part where the actual work was done.

  He paused for a moment beside a tour group of school children and listened to their teacher describing the provenance of the piece and the history of the original.

  “…was originally commissioned as one of a series of statues of Biblical figures,” the young woman was reciting to the group of what he judged to be ten-year-olds, “meant to be positioned along the roofline of the cathedral at Florence, a city-state on Old Earth. Instead, it was placed in a public square outside the government palace in the year 1504 CE in the calendar of the time, what we would call year 2686 of the Pre-Imperial period.” The woman smiled with a touch of sadness he thought she might actually feel. “Of course, the original was lost in the Final War and the great exodus of year 367 Pre-Imperial…”

  He left them, dragged down himself by the loss despite the centuries gone by. Old Earth was a distant memory, even its location lost to the years and he wondered sometimes if they were a different species now than they’d been before they left it.

  Another set of guards were stationed only a few meters past David, flanking a biometric security scanner, but there was nothing ceremonial about these men and women. Their armor was functional and camouflaged and their weapons were always held at the ready. He knew they were just the visible deterrent to anyone who might choose to trespass in a restricted area.

  They knew him as well, but they said nothing, faces concealed behind visors as if they were the war robots of lurid science fiction. They watched him just as closely as they did any minor, anonymous functionary, weapons tensed until a scan of his retina proved he was the same Lt. Conner his name tape advertised. Only then was he waved through, and he supposed the whole spectacle was intimidating to the school children watching from the shadow of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, but to him it was just an annoyance.

  Beyond the checkpoint, he took a branch to the left and the well-appointed dress suits of the government service began to outnumber the military uniforms, the quality and expense of their wardrobes climbing higher the closer he came to the offices of the Guardian. Conversely, the decoration seemed to become sparser and plainer as he approached his father’s chambers. The man had little use for frivolities, and if he kept the art his late wife had favored out in public, he made no such effort in the spaces where he worked.

  His private offices could have been the workspace of the city comptroller for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding it. The doors were polished oak, but unadorned with as much as the family crest, and the single receptionist sat at a desk about as large as his own back in the platoon area of Guard Headquarters.

  Where I need to be in two hours, he reminded himself, son of the Guardian or not.

  “Good morning, Lt. Conner,” the receptionist piped up with bland cheerfulness. Logan had known the little man for years and still wasn’t sure if his upbeat attitude was his real personality or an act he put on. “Your father is with General Constantine, but he said to send you in when you arrived.” He motioned behind his desk where his one affectation, a leafy potted fern squatted forlornly. “You can leave you things here.”

  “Thanks, Phillip.”

  He dropped his bag behind the desk, returned the smile, whether it was genuine or not, and pushed the door open almost simultaneous with the audible click of the electromagnetic locks disengaging. The door did not squeak, didn’t make a sound, either because of the impeccable maintenance in the palace or perhaps because it was afraid to disturb the Jaimie Brannigan in his den.

  General Nicolai Constantine was a dangerous-looking man. He was tall, even sprawled out in the comfortable-looking chair across the desk, with the look of a coiled snake or a crouching cat ready to spring. He was in a dress uniform, which Logan really should have taken the time to change into, pressed and starched until every tan crease seemed a razor suitable for slashing throats. His face might have been put through the same laundering process, all hard, straight edges and harsh lines. Eyes as dark as a taxman’s heart stared out from thick, black brows and someone who didn’t know the General might have mistaken the natural intensity of his gaze with a murderous turn of mood. Logan had known him long enough to recognize it for boredom.

  “Thank God you’re here, boy,” Constantine murmured, waving a hand. “If I had to go over production numbers for Navy fusion thrusters one more time…”

  “Good morning, General,” he said with a respectful nod. Training made him want to come to attention and salute the man, but you couldn’t do that when the other man in the room was the Guardian of Sparta himself.

  “Son!” Jaimie Brannigan exploded with the joyful exuberance of a grizzly bear finding an elk carcass. He rose from his leather office chair and kept on rising.

  The Guardian was a giant of a man, half a head taller than Logan and Mithra alone knew where those genes had gone because neither Logan nor his younger brother even approached their father’s height, nor his width, nor his breadth. He seemed the sort of man who should have the wild, free-flowing mane of hair the artists tended to give him, but in reality, he was a soldier and a mech pilot and had always kept his hair regulation even after he’d made the transition from military officer to civil leader. He still wore a uniform of sorts, though not the one he’d worn when he’d piloted his Sentinel against Declan Lambert’s Titan on the steps of the palace thirty years ago.

  Jaimie Brannigan swept his son into an embrace strong enough to make Logan’s ribs creak. The younger man did his best to return it, knowing he’d never be able to no matter how many hours he spent in the gym.

  “I saw you take out that Scorpion, boy!” Brannigan enthused, holding Logan out at arm’s length as if he were still a five-year-old. His father’s face was always ruddy and flushed even at rest, and seemed positively inflamed at that moment. “God damn, that was a hell of a move, using your jump-jets that way!”

  “It was smart,” Constantine acknowledged with a diffident shrug. “This bandit trash, though, they have no discipline, no tactics, all brute force because they’re usually fighting local militias with little to no armor.” He raised a hand to forestall Brannigan’s protest. “It was impressive to take out a strike mech one-on-one with a Vindicator, no mistake and nothing taken from your son, my Lord Guardian.” He shrugged again, as if there were no other expression to convey his point. “I am only saying if I had been in that Scorpion, things would have turned out differently.”

  “I hope never to have to face you anywhere but the tra
ining simulators, sir,” Logan told him, realizing he actually felt grateful at the General downplaying the fight. He’d been firmly convinced everyone was making too much of it.

  “Not to imply I’m not happy as hell to see you, son,” Brannigan said, big, meaty hand still resting on Logan’s right shoulder, “but you don’t usually run straight to the palace after a patrol without even reporting back to base first. Is something wrong?”

  “Sort of,” he admitted, falling into an “at ease” position automatically. “I kind of had a, well…” He hunted for the right words. “A policy question to ask you. For the future, you know.”

  “You mean when you’re sitting behind this desk someday,” his father deduced with his usual canny intuition. He cocked an eyebrow at Logan. “Don’t make any assumptions, boy. Just because you’re my son doesn’t mean the Council will automatically choose you to succeed me when the time comes. Military experience is fine, for a start, but eventually, you’re going to have to dip your toe into the politics of this game.”

  Which was all a load of bullshit, and they both knew it. His father had never spent one second worrying about politics prior to the coup, and the Council had picked him to take over from his late father because he was the man who’d stopped the Lamberts from seizing the government. If Jaimie Brannigan was still breathing and gave up the Guardianship willingly, it would damn well go to the successor he hand-picked.

  “Yes, sir,” Logan said anyway, because arguing with his father was about as useful as head-butting a bighorn sheep. “That’s sort of what I’d like to talk about, the politics of it.”

  “Well, then, pop a squat, lad!” Brannigan motioned to the chair beside General Constantine and fell heavily back into his own seat, the ancient office chair groaning in protest as it nearly wilted under his bulk. “Tell your father what’s on your mind.”

  He hesitated, trying to come up with a way of putting his feelings into words without making it seem like an emotional appeal. His eyes darted around the office, as if there were some clue to how he should proceed concealed on the mostly-bare wood panel walls. His mother’s picture was the only personal item in the whole office, a video clip of the four of them—Mom, Dad, Terrin and him—together in one of the nature parks outside Argos, along with the German Shepherd they’d once had until it came out on the wrong side of a debate with a cougar. In the video, Mom was laughing, leaning into Dad’s shoulder while he and Terrin wrestled in the dirt and the dog barked ceaselessly at the two of them as if scolding them to stop.

  Be strong, Logan. He heard the words in her voice, the adjuration she’d given him before she’d gone out with her husband to do battle for their world with the Lambert usurpers. She’d been a scientist, a researcher, but there’d been no special mercy for civilians in that battle and she’d left them in a bunker with their nanny and gone off with a rifle in her hand.

  She’d never returned. Logan had taken her last name when he joined the military, partially as a precaution to prevent special treatment by those seeking to curry favor with the Guardian, and partially to honor her sacrifice.

  “It’s the bandits, sir,” he plunged into a murky pool with no idea how far down the bottom might be. “This Red Brotherhood we keep running into. We’ve got to do something about them. Something besides stumbling onto them by luck,” he amended, just in case either of the men got it into their head to point out the battle from which he’d just returned. “Ramman, that base we raided, that was right on the edge of our settled territory and we didn’t even know it was there.”

  “I agree in principle,” General Constantine put in, “but we barely have enough ships to patrol the jump-points in our core worlds. How would you propose we monitor every barely-habitable rock between the Shang Directorate and Jeuta space?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Logan said, pulling out the ideas he’d been kicking around in the long days of transit between jump-points. “I was thinking automated drones, like the kind our warships launch into systems to gather intelligence.”

  “That still doesn’t solve the problem of not enough ships, Logan,” his father objected. “Someone has to launch the drones and monitor them.”

  “Yes, Father,” he went on, grinning at his own cleverness. “That’s the thing; I was thinking we build a few automated ships, just a fusion reactor and a Kadish-Dean jump drive and some communications gear, and let them drift dark and cold in the border systems. We launch drones to all the mapped jump-points in the systems, and if they catch a bandit or a Jeuta raider, they transmit to the automated starships and then the ships jump to the next system over and transmit to the nearest Spartan warship.”

  Jaimie Brannigan shared a grin with Nicolai Constantine and Logan felt a sudden anger burning inside his chest. Were they dismissing his idea so easily?

  “Son,” Brannigan said, not with the mocking tone he’d expected but with a gentleness, “that’s a very well thought out plan, but there’s only one problem.”

  “Money,” Constantine supplied, his voice laden down with cynicism. “You think you’re the first bright boy to ever think that up? The problem is, building that many Kadish-Dean drives takes money.” He shrugged. “Money we could spare, if it would work, but not money that would go unnoticed.”

  “Starkad has spies in our government, Logan,” his father said. “We try to root them out, but it’s damn near impossible to find them all. If we were to divert funds to a project such as the one you suggested, it would be picked up on and Starkad would act against us, sending mercenaries to attack our production facilities, fomenting political unrest amidst our rivals, or simply waiting until we put the unmanned starships in place and then sabotaging them.”

  “So, we just give up?” Logan demanded, half-rising from his seat. “We let the Red Brotherhood rob and pillage and kill and rape unchecked? Why can’t we farm this out, have every one of the Dominions except Starkad go along with it? If we isolate them like that, they’ll be vulnerable to diplomatic pressure.”

  “Or they’ll become even more openly aggressive,” Constantine countered. “And in that case, this little cold war we’ve been dancing around between the Guardianship of Sparta and the Starkad Supremacy will become damn hot, damn quick.”

  “We aren’t ignoring this problem,” his father assured him. “It’s just something without a simple solution. We keep putting pressure on the rest of the Dominions to crack down on the bandits using their own forces. It’s not perfect, but it will, eventually, put the squeeze on the bandit armies without forcing Starkad into a corner.” Logan was about to explode again at the idea, at how it wouldn’t work fast enough and people would die, but his father forestalled it with a raised hand. “I know. I know it’s not right, and it’s not fair, and it’s not fast enough. But these are the sorts of realities you’ll have to deal with when you have this job.”

  Logan let his head hang for just a moment, the energy gone out of him.

  “Yes, sir,” was all he could think of to say that wouldn’t get him in trouble. He pushed to his feet. “I need to get back to Laconia, sir. I’m supposed to report to Colonel Anders for the new training schedule rotation in an hour or so.”

  His father rose and grasped his shoulder, squeezing with what passed for gentleness from hands capable of crushing a man’s skull.

  “Don’t lose heart, son. We’ll get those bastards. It’s just going to take some time.”

  Logan saluted and left the room, ears burning from the anger he couldn’t show, blowing past Phillip, pausing only to grab his duffle bag before he stormed back out into the corridor… and nearly ran headlong into his younger brother.

  “Whoa, what’s the hurry, Logan?” Terrin stopped his blind bull-charge with a slender hand on his arm.

  Terrin Brannigan was his opposite in many ways, thinner, slightly taller, with dark hair worn long and tied into a ponytail, but he knew you could see the clear resemblance in the cut of his chin, the high cheekbones they shared. The eyes, though, were
the biggest difference. Terrin had a softness to his grey eyes, a reflection of a deeper softness Logan had once despised.

  “I have to get back to base,” he grunted realizing he was taking his frustration out on his brother but too pissed off to care. “If you’re looking for Dad, he’s in his office with General Constantine.”

  “I was looking for you,” Terrin said, a tinge of hurt feelings in his tone. “I heard you were in, and one of Dad’s aides told me you were coming to the palace.”

  “Sorry.” He wasn’t, but he also didn’t have time for an argument with his brother. “What’s up?”

  “I’m going to be spending a few weeks up at the observatory with Dr. Kovalev,” Terrin explained. “I thought you might want to get together for dinner tonight if you don’t have duty.”

  Logan was ready to blow Terrin off automatically. He wasn’t in the mood for small talk now and doubted he would be this evening. The two of them had very little in common. Terrin would drone on about astrophysics and wouldn’t give a shit about Logan’s war stories, and it would wind up being either boring or contentious… and then he thought about the message from Katy. She wanted to see the city, she wanted out of the hospital, and Terrin wanted to spend time with him for some damned reason.

  “Sure,” he said, and there might have been surprise in Terrin’s smile. “As long as you wouldn’t mind if I brought a friend along.”

  4

  “I did say I wanted to see the city,” Kathren Margolis admitted, laughing softly. He liked to hear her laugh. She’d managed to have some civilian clothes fabricated somewhere, a simple but tasteful white chiton, knee-length and sleeveless and it was difficult for Logan to take his eyes off of her.

  She leaned forward in her chair, elbows on the table, and stared down at the lights of Argos spread out in the darkness of the Treska River Valley, a mirror of the starscape above, separated by a faint, glowing haze on the horizon. A chill wind tugged a strand of hair across her eyes, warring with the warming blast of the heaters beside their table for supremacy on the restaurant’s covered patio.