Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  For once in his life, Jaimie Brannigan seemed at a loss for words. Logan couldn’t recall him looking so nonplussed even when Mother had died.

  “He’s my son!” the Guardian of Sparta insisted, almost spluttering. “How will people not recognize him?”

  “He’s been making a concerted effort to not let anyone find out who he is since he got to the Academy,” Anders reminded him. Logan was beginning to feel that the lot of them had forgotten he was even in the room. “People know, of course, but it hasn’t been reported widely in the news nets and we’ve never allowed any unofficial news stories to get out. And General Constantine controls the official records.”

  Logan took a deep breath and finally spoke up.

  “There’d be no way for them to connect my face to you, Father. And I could go by a fake name; Intelligence could build a history behind it, something that would match the story we’d be telling.”

  He trailed off, feeling he was talking too fast, like he had when he was a kid trying to convince Mom and Dad to let him do something against their better judgement. Constantine saved him, filling the awkward silence.

  “There’s are identities we have on file in Intelligence,” he said, tapping his lower lip with a long, almost delicate finger. “We keep them up to date with full histories, personnel files, social media updates, the works. Just in case, you know?” He punctuated the words with a flicker of the same finger toward the others. “I think I remember one that would suit.”

  “You have them memorized?” Lyta raised an eyebrow, then seemed to remember who she was talking to. “Sir?”

  The General shrugged diffidently. “Not all of them,” he clarified. Knowing Constantine, Logan had the sense if he didn’t have them all memorized, it was only because he hadn’t bothered to read them all. “This one stood out when I audited the report. A young mech pilot, a Captain with a fairly good combat record but a bad temper, a sense of entitlement and a problem with authority.” Another casual wave of his hand. “The file only stands out because it was being kept open to set up a possible double-agent to let Starkad think they’d turned one of our officers, so we could feed them bogus intelligence.” He snorted a sharp laugh. “That and the name.”

  “The name?” Jaimie Brannigan repeated, still seemingly stunned by the concept of Logan going on this mission.

  “It seemed on the nose for a mech pilot,” Constantine explained. “Or for a traitor.” The corner of his lip curled upward. “It was Jonathan Slaughter.”

  “Ha!” Jaimie barked the laugh, the irony apparently enough to clear the haze from his wits. “And what the hell would you call the mercenary company? The Slaughterhouse?”

  “No,” Logan said, feeling this was his chance.

  He stepped forward into the center of the group, grinned broadly to hide the terror in his gut, arms folded across his chest.

  “I’m going to call it Wholesale Slaughter.”

  6

  Gateway was a city turned inside-out and sliced into a spiral, dizzying in the mind-bending curves of the horizon as it twisted around the distant hub, a grey cylinder colored a light enough grey to nearly blend into the clouds.

  They have clouds, Logan thought, dazed and trying not to rubberneck like a tourist. They have clouds inside a fucking space station.

  He bumped into a chair and forced himself to keep his eyes straight ahead lest he knock over someone’s table in the tiny, open-air café and make a huge spectacle right in the middle of his first undercover assignment.

  “How do they have clouds on a fucking space station?” he muttered aside to Lyta Randell, earning a baleful glare.

  “Because it’s a fucking huge space station,” she explained just as quietly. “This thing used to be an asteroid, you know?”

  He looked up again at the interior of the gigantic, hollow cylinder, inset with cities, parks, trees, even streams and lakes and then shot Lyta a look of utter disbelief.

  “I’ve never heard of an asteroid shaped like this. And wouldn’t it have taken years to hollow it out?”

  “It did take years,” the woman ground out, annoyed enough to actually stop in the middle of the café and face him, hands on her hips. “And no, it wasn’t shaped like this, it was a damned sphere like most asteroids. They used fusion bombs to drill a hole down the center of it, filled the hole with water, set the asteroid spinning with more fusion bombs, then constructed mylar mirrors kilometers across to focus the sunlight from Olympia onto it. Can you guess the rest, or do I need to draw you a picture?”

  He felt warmth rising in his cheeks and shut up. It was obvious when she put it like that. The reflected sunlight heated up the exterior of the asteroid, making it molten, at the same time as the water inside was heated to steam and expanded, hollowing out the rock. The fact it was spinning at the same time had elongated it into a giant, hollow tube, several kilometers long and then they’d just had to cap off the ends.

  “That’s pretty smart,” he admitted, following Lyta as she led them deeper into the café, to a certain table in a certain corner. “But it had to cost them millions of credits… tens of millions. Why would they do that?”

  She rolled her eyes. She looked so damned different in civilian clothes; still dangerous but more… criminal somehow, less military.

  “They didn’t do it, if you mean the people who run it now.” She fell casually into a chair and waved for him to do the same. “Whoever the hell made it did it back before the Empire fell, and probably as a commercial operation. The Choe brothers stumbled across the place prospecting for water and turned it into the biggest pleasure station in the Five Dominions… and the biggest place to do business without having to worry about any particular government’s laws applying to you.”

  “And how the hell do they manage that?” He sat down carefully, adjusting his jacket, not wanting the butt of his concealed pistol to bump against the back of the chair. “I mean, technically, we’re still in Spartan space.” It had only taken two jumps to get to the system, devoid of any habitable worlds but rich in jump-points.

  “Because it’s in everyone’s best interest for them to manage it,” she said. “Governments have to do deals under the table, just like corporations and criminals. Having this place as a giant magnet makes it easier to keep track of the latter two groups as well… better they do it here than somewhere we couldn’t watch, like Shang or Starkad.” She clucked at him, shaking her head. “For Mithra’s sake, Logan…” She rolled her eyes. “Jonathan,” she corrected herself, “stop sitting so damned straight and stiff. You look like you’re carrying a concealed weapon for the first time.”

  “I am carrying a concealed weapon for the first time,” he reminded her. And the bribe she’d had to give the Port Authority controllers to allow it had made his eyes bug out.

  Every eye on every face seemed to have turned his way, every one of them an accusatory stare seeing through his leather jacket to the holster above his kidney. He ran a hand through his hair and scowled. He still hadn’t had it cut, and according to Lyta, he shouldn’t. Mercenaries, she’d told him, tended to be individualistic and rebellious, which included non-regulation hair length. It was getting on his nerves; he’d worn it buzzed since he was twelve and he was starting to feel like a dirty civilian.

  Just another thing I’ll have to get used to. I asked for this.

  He’d asked for it. But he’d been more surprised than anyone when his father had said yes. Oh, it hadn’t happened immediately; there’d been ranting and raving and screaming and yelling, but Jaimie Brannigan hadn’t spent twenty years as Guardian without figuring out when it was time to compromise. His closest advisors had badgered him until he’d finally given in, though he hadn’t been happy about it.

  He’d been even less happy once Constantine had explained to him that not only could no senior officers be in charge, none could even go on the mission. Logan had insisted on choosing his own mech company, starting with Marc Langella and whoever from his platoon would come along
, and Lyta Randell had declared she was going along with a hand-picked short company of Rangers and there wouldn’t be any discussion.

  Which had left just one thing to sort out.

  “You’ll need a warship,” Constantine had pointed out. “Or at least a lighter, an armed freighter, something big enough to carry a mech company and the heavy-lift shuttles to take them down from orbit, at least well-armed enough to protect itself from pirates.”

  “We obviously can’t just slap a new paint job on one of ours,” Logan’s father had snapped, probably the only one there who could have gotten away with being snarky. “What did you have in mind?”

  “We’ll have to find a privateer,” Colonel Anders had suggested. He glanced at Constantine. “Do we have any already staffed by our Intelligence assets, sir?”

  “Nothing large enough,” the senior staff officer had admitted. “Our spy boats are small on purpose, trying not to attract attention.”

  “I think,” Lyta Randell had put in, her expression thoughtful and perhaps just a touch reluctant, “I might have an idea.”

  Which brought us to this place.

  He tried not to swivel his head around, and make it obvious he was looking for someone. He let his eyes scan back and forth casually, as if he were just people-watching in a new place, like any other tourist. It was easy enough to fake, particularly when the people here were so damned strange. He didn’t think of himself as parochial, but he had to admit the colonies and outposts where he’d traveled for training and on operations were backwoods compared to this place. And Sparta, well… Sparta was Sparta, not severe or harsh but a bit pragmatic and utilitarian by heritage and tradition.

  Gateway was not Sparta, and if any part of it was even close, it definitely wasn’t the sector Lyta had called Bartertown, a cluster of bars, restaurants, coffee shops and various other gathering places where contacts could meet, deals could be made and money exchanged face to face for the sort of commerce neither party wanted recorded electronically. The tamest fashions walking through those twisted streets would have raised eyebrows in the wildest bars of downtown Argos, resplendent with leathers and furs and feathers in impossible colors, showing way more skin than he was used to and most of that skin tattooed. Even some of the faces were tattooed, which would have horrified any of the priests or matrons of the temples of Mithra at home.

  And so many of the people here seemed unnaturally tall and skinny, most of them probably born on lower gravity worlds, moons or asteroid habitats, some of them towering over him and Lyta. Watching them walk even in the half-standard gravity on Gateway was like watching giraffes in a wildlife preserve, their gait long and stilted as if they were about to topple over with each step. One woman in particular seemed to have legs all the way from the floor to geostationary orbit, teasing through the broad central slit in her polychromatic skirt and he hadn’t realized he was staring at her until he felt the smack on the back of his head. He turned with surprise to see Lyta smirking at him.

  “Want me to tell Katy you were leering at some long-legged floosy?” she asked with what he hoped was affected anger, her right eyebrow rising. “She might decide to just leave your ass behind here.”

  A sting of lingering guilt reminded him one of his first command decisions had been to get his girlfriend returned to duty early enough to go on this mission so she could fly the civilian shuttle to Gateway from their ship. But she was certainly qualified and really wanted to get off Sparta for a few days after being cooped up for the last month, attending daily counselling sessions.

  “How long before this guy’s supposed to be here?” Logan wondered, eager to change the subject.

  “He’s not known for his punctuality,” she told him, waving down a server. “Coffee,” she told the pale, skinny man, who dutifully tapped the order into a flimsy tablet. “Black.”

  The hairless skeleton of a waiter eyed Logan expectantly, but he shook his head. Pale-face shrugged and headed off to the back.

  “He’ll be here when he gets here,” Lyta expounded, settling back in her chair.

  “How do you know this guy? Did you serve together?” She’d been less than forthcoming back on Sparta, simply insisting the man was suitable for their purposes, and curiosity had been eating at him the whole flight.

  “Something like that.”

  An olive-skinned hand, thick-fingered and laced with old, white scars, set a coffee mug on the table in front of the woman, definitely not the hand of their skeletal server.

  “Howdy, Lyta.”

  The voice was a boulder crashing on a field of gravel, and it hardly seemed possible it came out of the gaunt, raw-boned, singularly unimpressive man standing behind them. Maybe four centimeters taller than Logan, he must have weighed ten kilograms less, lean almost to the point of malnutrition, his faded T-shirt and age-worn leather jacket hanging off of him like a tent. His face was lean, leathery, sunbaked skin stretched over high cheekbones, all angles and sharp edges right down to the crook in his nose from a badly-set break, and he could have been anywhere between forty and a hundred and forty. Stringy dark hair hung loose and wild to his shoulders, strands of gray mixed in here and there.

  His only prepossessing feature was his eyes; they were black, swirling storm clouds, perpetually angry despite the neutral expression on his face. They were eyes that seemed out of place in this man… until he leaned over and Logan noticed the big, black handgun dangling in a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit.

  “Hello, Don.” Lyta Randell rose slowly from her seat, uncoiling like a snake about to strike, not necessarily an angry motion as much as wary one. Her face, her stance, her eyes were guarded, as if she didn’t trust herself around the man. “It’s been a while.”

  Logan stood up, too, mostly because twisting around in his seat was making his gun dig into his back.

  “It has,” the tall mean agreed. “Years.” A grin tugged the corner of his mouth upward. “They’ve been good to you, though.” His accent was hard to place, but Logan thought maybe it was from Mbeki, or the borderlands near there.

  “And you look like a hot mess, as always. How’ve you been?”

  “Up and down,” he replied with a philosophical shrug. “Over and out. Never over you, though.”

  Logan cleared his throat, beginning to feel invisible.

  “Jonathan Slaughter,” Lyta introduced him, and he swore he saw her eyes roll at the nom de guerre, “this is Captain Donner Osceola.”

  “Captain.” Logan offered the man his hand, but the spacer eyed it as if his palm was smeared with cow-shit, looking the younger man up and down with a critical eye.

  “Mithra’s swinging cod,” Osceola swore casually, “I think I have fucking underwear older than you, boy.”

  Anger and irritation welled up inside Logan’s gut and he nearly gave way to them, but he tamped them down instead. This had the earmarks of the sort of tests the instructors threw at you in the Academy, and even if it wasn’t one, he had the sense this Donner Osceola wouldn’t be impressed by a temper tantrum.

  “I believe it,” he conceded instead, trying to keep his voice cold and calculating. “You look old as shit. The question is, did getting that old make you wise or just a wise-ass.”

  He wasn’t sure if he’d managed cold and calculating, but at least he’d avoided spluttering rage. He thought he saw a barely-perceptible nod from the spacer, as if acknowledging the touch. Lyta hadn’t said a word, and he wondered if it was because she approved or just didn’t want to undercut him.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Osceola said. “The question is, what does a young smart-ass like you want with an old wise-ass like me?”

  “We need a ship, Don,” Lyta told him. “Your ship. And we’re offering a long-term contract. Weeks, probably months. There’s good money in it for you and yours.”

  “And a good chance at getting killed, I bet.” He shrugged. “But what the hell, I’m here. Buy me a drink and make your pitch.”

  “Not here,” Logan
insisted, shaking his head.

  “We’d rather discuss it on board the Shakak,” Lyta explained.

  Osceola seemed as if he was about to object, but she moved a step closer, hand going to his chest. He glanced from the hand to her face, an expression passing across that craggy, angular face with the fleeting transience of a breeze over a field of grain, a look that spoke of longing and memory and pain.

  “Please, Don,” she said, her voice husky with feeling. Logan wasn’t sure if she actually cared about the spacer or if she was just as good at manipulating men as she was at killing them. “It’s important, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that, darlin’,” he murmured. He closed his eyes, sighed out a breath. Something, perhaps resolve, seemed to run out of him apace with the breath. “All right,” he conceded. “My shuttle’s at the antipodal dock.”

  Osceola turned and headed toward the lift station, hands stuffed in his pockets, chin downward, as if he didn’t care if they followed or not. Logan shot Lyta Randell a wide-eyed glance. Whatever he’d expected, this hadn’t been it. She ignored his expression as she’d ignored his earlier questions and trailed after Osceola without a word. He realized she hadn’t paid for her coffee and he hastily dug a few Tradenotes out of his pocket and fed them into the payment slot on the table; they didn’t take the currency of the Dominions out here, though they offered exchange on the way into the station for an exorbitant fee.

  Logan barely caught up with them before the doors to the lift car slid open. He tried not to get caught staring again, but it was difficult. The lifts ran up transparent, evacuated cylinders all the way to the central hub like the spokes of some world-sized bicycle wheel, changing direction when they reached it to head to the station’s poles and the docking ports there. It was impressive enough even before his mind pushed the picture into perspective, realizing the hub was a kilometer away and adjusting everything else to scale.

  He jogged to keep pace with Osceola and Lyta Randell, slipping into the lift as the door stated to close. There were two other riders in the car, both long-bodied belters with their characteristic mohawk haircuts and skin-tight clothing; he thought one was a female, but you could scarcely tell the difference. He thought for moment they’d be the only occupants of the car, but a gloved hand stopped the door only centimeters from closing, causing it to recoil open.