Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  The leather glove ran into the leather sleeve of a flight jacket, a conservative brown with a corporate logo on the left breast. It was identical to the logo on the chests of the other three men with him and they seemed cut from the same mold: all of average height for natives of a world with near standard gravity, all medium build, all clean-shaven and wearing the short-ish hair of a typical corporate spacer crew. Only a slight difference in complexion, the smallest variation of bone structure in their faces separated one of them from another, but the first through seemed to be in charge.

  He waited for the others to board before he moved his hand away from the sensor and stepped into the car, nodding a curt greeting to the other occupants before checking the control panel, seeing what destinations were already chosen and refraining from selecting anything different. Logan didn’t pay them much attention except to squint at their logo patches to try to figure out who they worked for. It was some combination of stars and a ringed planet and stylized script he could barely parse without context. He thought it read “Logotech,” but it could have been any one of hundreds of corporations who did business within and between the Dominions, their cargo ships and transports crossing borders unmolested.

  Why didn’t we try that? he wondered. He shrugged the question away. Because we couldn’t have taken anything we found back with us.

  The door hissed shut and the car jerked into motion, slowly at first as it climbed up the spoke toward the central hub. Once it got there, the perceived gravity of centripetal force would be gone and they’d be in free fall all the way to the docking bay. In anticipation, he began searching for the nearest unclaimed hand-hold.

  “Kammy’s missed you,” Osceola told Lyta, his voice subdued. “He keeps asking me when we’re going back to Sparta for a visit and I keep having to remind him we’re still wanted there for that whole business with the customs inspector.”

  Logan heard the peel of laughter, knew it couldn’t have come from anyone but Lyta, but still couldn’t quite believe it was a sound she’d ever make. He glanced back at her with eyes wide. That was the only reason he saw one of the corporate freighter jocks sweep his jacket aside and wrap his hand around the butt of a compact pistol holstered at his waistline...

  7

  Logan acted without thinking, knowing instinctively he wouldn’t have time to grab for his own weapon… or perhaps it was just that his instincts were more those of a brawler than a gunfighter. He lunged across the meter-and-change separating him from the closest of the corporate pilots and slammed the man into the wall of the elevator, jamming his gun-hand back behind him, trying not to let him have the room to draw his pistol.

  He should be trying to warn the others, should be using the opportunity to grab for his gun, he knew it on some level, but he reverted to the most familiar training, unarmed self-defense. Knee strikes, elbow strikes, target the soft spots, stay close and don’t give your opponent room to counter, room to escape. The gunman was strong and well-trained and managed to block the knee to his groin by twisting his hip around; Logan felt a flash of pain in his knee as it impacted bone but he couldn’t afford to stop. Instead, he retargeted the thigh and slammed his knee into the common peroneal nerve. No matter how tough you were, getting hit in the nerve hurt like hell, he knew from personal experience.

  The guy didn’t cry out, but an involuntary gasp of pain betrayed how badly the strike had affected him and his guard slipped for just a fraction of a second. It was enough. Logan saw the opening and punched him in the throat. There was a sound he’d never forget, the sound a man made when you crushed his trachea, when he was fighting to breath but couldn’t, when he was beginning to panic because he knew he was going to die. The man’s eyes went wide, the whites so big the irises seemed lost, and his face began to turn red, all thoughts of drawing his gun forgotten.

  Logan froze for just a heartbeat, not hardened enough to be inured to the sound and sight of a man choking to death on his own blood, until the deafening crash of a gunshot in an elevator brought him back to reality of the fight to the death going on just behind him. He spun around, finally drawing his gun and nearly putting a round into a man who was already dead. The leader of the four corporate crewmen who’d boarded together tumbled backward into one of the asteroid miners, missing the left side of his skull, his blood splashing across the face of the tall man—or woman, he still wasn’t sure.

  The asteroid miner screamed, the sound high-pitched enough for Logan to finally decide she was female, and tried to squeeze into a corner of the lift car as she wiped blood and brains from her eyes. The dead man crumpled to the floor, his pistol falling from nerveless hands.

  That was two, some small part of Logan which was still thinking rationally and logically decided. Two down and two to go, and he needed to get a bead on them before one of them put a bullet in him. People were moving, muzzle flashes were doing their best to blind him, and the sound of the gunshots seemed muffled, as if he could barely hear them. Suddenly, everything came into focus, as if he were watching a video of all this happening to someone else.

  One of the asteroid miners was down, clutching at his leg, blood welling from what looked to be a flesh wound in his outer thigh, his companion still screaming, though her cries and the man’s painful moans were as muted as the shots had been. Lyta was nearly to the other side of the elevator, almost ten meters away, locked in a hand-to-gun struggle with another of the gunmen disguised as corporate spacers. The man had his sidearm in his right hand and he was trying to use his superior weight and upper body strength to power the muzzle toward her against the hand she had wrapped around his wrist.

  He let his eyes slide off her fight, confident in two things: first, he had no clean shot, and second, Lyta Randell was the most dangerous and competent soldier he’d ever met. There was no way she was going to lose a one-on-one fight against this guy, whether he was a corporate freighter pilot or a bounty hunter or a hired gun. As it turned out, it was the right decision.

  Catty-corner to the asteroid miners, Donner Osceola was on the ground, his gun centimeters from his hand on the floor of the car, a pressure cut above his eye already welling blood. The last of the crew of assassins stood over him, steadying himself, the muzzle of the gun he’d just used to club the spacer Captain to the floor coming up, ready to shoot.

  The recoil of his handgun took Logan by surprise, just the way the instructors always said it should. He was only dimly aware of the muzzle flash, felt the report more than heard it, a pressure somewhere in his sinuses, but he saw clearly the gunman tumbling backward, the leather of the jacket over the left side of his chest charred and smoking, the dress shirt beneath it turning a dark crimson.

  The dying man’s gun slipped out of his grasp and Logan turned back to Lyta just in time to see her twist the pistol out of her opponent’s grasp with a combination of leverage and technique executed nearly too fast for him to follow. The gun was in her left hand and her right was chopping into the man’s temple. He staggered, stunned, and she jammed the muzzle under his chin and fired.

  There was the sound of a balloon popping and brains exploded out of the top of the assassin’s skull, painting the wall of the elevator in blood and cerebral fluid. She brought the gun to low ready and scanned around her, nodding to him when she saw the threats were down. She stepped over to Donner Osceola and grabbed him by the front of his jacket, pulling him to his feet…

  And then they were in free-fall. It was hard for Logan to believe the gunfight had lasted only seconds, not even long enough for the lift car to make it to the hub, but the evidence was flying at him, micro-globules of blood suddenly spinning around the elevator in DNA spirals toward the air vent. He grabbed at one of the safety straps on the wall and pulled himself out of the way, hoping against hope the tiny, red meteors didn’t impact on his exposed skin.

  “Are you all right, Don?” Lyta asked the starship Captain, still holding onto his arm, somehow braced into a corner well enough to hold both of them station
ary.

  “My damned face hurts,” Osceola complained, a palm pressed against his cheek.

  “Who the hell were these guys?” Logan demanded.

  He was frustrated and terrified at the idea their operation had been compromised before it began, sure the dead hitmen were Starkad Intelligence operatives, their notorious Committee for State Security or Com-Stat as they were known to their own people. Lyta didn’t have the chance to answer; Osceola beat her to it.

  “They’re bounty hunters,” he declared with sullen certainty, snatching his gun out of the air, where it had floated up from the floor. He shoved it into his shoulder holster, then grabbed at one of the hand-holds beside him on the wall and gave Lyta a significant glance. “And there’ll probably be more of them.”

  The wounded Belter was still moaning in pain and now that he could hear again, the sound was starting to grate at Logan’s nerves. So much so he nearly missed the connotations of what Osceola had said until Lyta brought it home for him.

  “God damnit, Don,” she sighed, closing her eyes for just a beat as she visibly brought herself under control. “What did you do?”

  “It was the fucking New Saints,” Osceola admitted, unable to meet her accusatory glare. “They caught me running illegal VIRware to the locals on Canaan.” He shook his head, jerking against the hand-hold as it set him teetering in the microgravity. “You know how fanatical those assholes are.”

  Her expression was flat and unconvinced, and so was the tone of her voice.

  “No matter how fanatical the New Congregation of Saints is,” she said, “there’s no way they’re sending bounty hunters after you way out here just for peddling contraband porn to their teenagers.”

  “Well…” He stretched the word out as if he were putting off what had to come next. When it did, it was with a wince Logan sensed had nothing to do with the bruise on his cheek. “There was also the matter of one of the local militia who came after us and managed to get himself killed trying to stop us from getting to our shuttle. He… might have been the nephew of the Chief Deacon of the church…”

  “I need a doctor…”

  The wounded Belter said, a pleading note to his voice, desperation on his face. His companion was less than solicitous, curled up in a corner of the room, staring in horror at the whirlwind of blood and the grotesque, boneless dance of the corpses. There was an emergency call button on the lift’s control panel, but she hadn’t even made a move for it.

  Logan sighed, holstered his weapon and pushed over to the lanky, impossibly tall man. He gently moved the Belter’s hands away from the wound and looked it over with all the expertise a handful of first-aid classes could give you.

  “Are there security cameras in here?” Logan asked, waving blood away from the ragged hole in the side of the Belter’s leg. “Do we have to be worried about the station cops mobbing us the minute we get out at the port?”

  “Bit late to be thinking about that, youngster,” Osceola pointed out, snorting in dark amusement. “Maybe you shoulda considered that before you went after one of these guys in a damned elevator.”

  “He was going for his gun, asshole.” Logan ground the words out through annoyance bordering on rage. He was a mech pilot; gunfights in elevators weren’t in his job description. “You’re welcome for saving your fucking life, by the way.” He met the eyes of the Belter, trying to project confidence. “You’re going to be fine. It didn’t hit an artery; as long as you get to a medical center when we get to the docking bay, they’ll fix you up fine, okay?”

  “Answer his question, Don,” Lyta snapped, apparently having lost patience with the man herself. “Are they going to be waiting for us when we get off this car?”

  “The Enforcers?” Osceola shook his head. “No, they don’t give a shit what you do to each other unless you’re paying them for protection.” He gestured at the dead bounty hunters. “The rest of these guys? Yeah, they’ll probably be waiting.”

  “Get their guns, Jonathan.”

  It took Logan a second to remember she was talking to him.

  I’m never going to get used to this, he thought ruefully.

  The assassin’s weapons were floating free, tumbling around the car, ricocheting from one wall to another. Logan cringed as he waded through the rings of orbiting blood, trying to cover his face with a hand. Wet droplets splashed at his palm and teased the skin of his neck, but he gritted his teeth and grabbed the handguns anyway. They were all identical, chemical slug-shooters fabricated in a workshop somewhere, maybe right there on Gateway; it was probably easier to buy guns on the black market once you got there rather than trying to bribe your way past the Port Authority the way they had.

  While he retrieved the guns, Lyta patted down the corpses and came up with spare magazines, distributing them among the three of them and then handing out the bounty hunter weapons, keeping the extra one for herself.

  “Shoot with their guns first until you run out of ammo,” she instructed as if she were running a class of Rangers through the training lanes he’d attended back on Sparta. “Then ditch them.”

  “They won’t know you’re with me,” Osceola reminded her. “You two should use me as bait to draw them out.”

  “Thanks, I think I will,” Logan assured him, wiping blood off of his neck and pushing across the car toward the elevator doors. He pulled his ‘link off his belt and keyed it to the communications net for their shuttle. “Katy, this is…” He winced. “This is Jonathan.”

  A pause, but no reply.

  “Katy, this is Jonathan, please respond. We have a situation.” Again, only silence, and he shot a worried look at Lyta. “Could they be jamming us? I mean, they couldn’t be because they don’t know it’s us, right, so they’d have to be shutting down all the ‘links on the station.”

  “Or just this elevator, genius.” Osceola’s retort was dry and casual, as if this sort of thing happened to him all the time. And Logan didn’t know, maybe it did. “I’d put my money on just this elevator; even the price the New Sainters have on my head, it’d cost them way too much to bribe enough people to shut down the whole damned station’s comms.”

  “They’re going to be posted at your shuttle,” Lyta said to the spacer Captain. “We should head for ours, that’ll make sure their forces are split up.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” Osceola declared, making a slashing motion with his left hand, his right filled with a pistol appropriated from the dead bounty hunters. “I’m not hanging Kammy out to dry… once they twig to me not heading to the shuttle, they’ll go after him.”

  Logan expected Lyta to dress him down with the same sort of cold anger she would have used on an argumentative Lieutenant, but instead she just sighed and nodded.

  “All right.” She nodded to Logan. “When this car arrives at the bay, Don’s heading out and we’ll move two seconds after him. These guys,” she gestured at the corpses with the barrel of one of their pistols, “are groundpounders just like us, so they won’t be thinking in three dimensions. They’ll stick to the courtesy railings aligned with the shuttle docking berths horizontally and figure we will, too. I want you to go high, to the overhead bar.”

  He could picture what she meant; he’d noticed the peculiar arrangement of the port when they’d arrived. It was a cylinder ten meters across, flattened at the bulkheads to an octagon shape, with berths for passenger shuttles aligned on one axis along either side, while the crew access ports for the much larger cargo transports were on another, but only on one side. The reason for this was psychological: people raised in gravity liked having a surface they could designate “the floor” in their minds to help orient themselves.

  In practice, this meant there was a line of handholds along the “ceiling,” where the transport docking berths were spaced at broad intervals, but most people would never notice them.

  “You stay even with Don,” she told him, “and I’ll come in behind him.” She craned her head around to the Belter woman, who was staring at them
all wide-eyed, her head motions furtive like a cornered animal. “Hey, scream queen, you want to do us and your boyfriend here a favor and push the emergency button when the car stops so someone can haul him off to the medics?” The woman didn’t respond, still curled up in the corner. “Are you tracking me, sugar? Do you read?” Lyta jabbed a finger toward the control panel. “Push the fucking button when the door opens!”

  The Belter still couldn’t speak, but she nodded. It seemed to be enough for Lyta, or least as much as she expected to get. Her eyes went back to the display above the door, to the flashing indicator showing them where the car was and how long until it reached its destination.

  “Ten seconds. Get in position.”

  Osceola moved to the far end of the car, bracing himself against the wall, ready to push off, and Lyta squeezed in beside him after pushing one of the bodies out of the way. The man’s clouded and unseeing eyes stared in silent accusation, blood still slipping from his slightly-open mouth, trailing away to join the spiral galaxy spinning through the center of the car.

  Shit. Logan tried to get his breathing under control. He was coming dangerously close to hyperventilating from the adrenaline pulsing through his body. This was a different sort of experience from fighting in a mech cockpit, isolated from the reality of the violence. Even when he’d left his mech to kill the bandit pilot back on Ramman, it had all ended in seconds and the post-fight jitters hadn’t been more than an inconvenience. This time, it could get him killed.

  What was Colonel Anders thinking? What was I thinking? I’m just a Lieutenant, I don’t belong on this mission.