Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  “Not everyone can afford to pack up and move their life to another system, Don,” Lyta Randell’s words were barely audible over the roar of the shuttle’s jets and the buffeting of the thick atmosphere.

  Jonathan craned his head around to his right; he was in the first row of seats behind the pilot and copilot’s stations, even with Terrin—No, Terry now—while Lyta was seated across from the Shakak’s captain.

  “Maybe in the old days, it wasn’t so bad here,” now-Major Lyta Randell went on, still peering at the projection on the main view screen. “Maybe the Empire had the technology to alter the weather patterns here and after the fall, the people left here were just stuck.”

  Jonathan couldn’t see Osceola’s shrug, but somehow, he felt it, heard it in the man’s words.

  “I’ll take your word for it, love. I still don’t know why you dragged me along on the price negotiation. You’ve known me long enough to figure out I’m not much of a businessman, and God knows I don’t want to be drinking the soup that passes for an atmosphere down there.”

  Jonathan answered that one, having had it explained to him in detail by Lyta just a few hours ago when he’d asked the same question about bringing Osceola along.

  “We’re an unknown quantity. These people couldn’t even afford to hire us if we weren’t, and they might not bother if we didn’t have someone whose background they could check to prove we’re legit.”

  Osceola barked a laugh, sharp and harsh.

  “By God, this must be the first time anyone has accused me of being legitimate!”

  “We’re coming up on Piraeus,” Katy announced, her voice clear and pitched to carry, as if she’d been ignoring the conversation going on behind her. “We should be touching down at the port in ten mikes.”

  “Ten mikes,” Osceola scoffed. “Leave it to the Navy to complicate something as simple as a minute.”

  “Weren’t you in the Navy?” Terry asked him, frowning.

  “Doesn’t mean they aren’t full of shit, kid. You ain’t never been in the military, or you’d know they’re full of shit most of the time.”

  Jonathan tuned the man out, watching the morning light bleach the buildings of Piraeus white. The city was strangely fascinating, built on platforms of concrete, with pilings sunken deep into the muddy ground in a heroic effort to brute-force itself out of nature’s tenacious grasp. It seemed to him the embodiment of the human refusal to surrender in the face of the chaos and violence of the fall and the Reconstruction, and he began to feel an affinity for the people who forced this inhospitable place into something homelike.

  As they circled around to the west side of Piraeus, the affinity turned to pangs of sympathy. A block of what might have once been factories or warehouses were charred and blackened and partially collapsed, whatever might have once been produced inside or stored behind their walls now just ash under piles of rubble. They’d been hit by raiders, and fairly recently.

  He shaped a low whistle at the damage.

  “They didn’t bring us here to have a parade through downtown,” Lyta reminded him, her voice grim. “We wouldn’t be here if they weren’t desperate.”

  The spaceport was grandly named for what it was, a square of flat concrete on a raised platform, connected to the city by a causeway broad enough to haul loads of freight from heavy cargo shuttles. A flyer waited for them already, parked only ten meters or so from the edge of the pad, a demonstration of confidence in Katy’s ability as a pilot, which was, of course, warranted though the people down on Arachne couldn’t know that.

  She justified their confidence and his own, bringing the bird down in a narrowing spiral until the airspeed was slow enough to switch thrust to the belly jets. Most Navy pilots, in his experience, liked to show off during a landing, hitting the jets at the last second, kicking the passengers in the ass and touching down hard enough to send the bird pogo-sticking on the landing gear hydraulics. She set them down as gently as a step off a curb, as expertly as a civilian passenger flight, barely a jolt.

  “Welcome to Arachne,” Katy announced with the casual, bantering tone of one of those commercial pilots. “It’s a comfortable thirty-three degrees outside and skies are sunny. We know you have many choices for your transportation needs and we thank you for choosing Wholesale Slaughter.”

  “Do we have to stay in the shuttle?” the copilot asked, a whining undertone to the question. His name was Acosta and he was a Sub-Lieutenant just out of the Academy; he’d been sent by Colonel Anders as one of the support crew. None of them had worked with Acosta before, and Katy had already told him she didn’t like him. “It’s gonna be hot as hell in here with the engines shut down.”

  Katy rolled her eyes at the man, but Jonathan controlled himself; he was a captain now, and a commanding officer, and he had to be an example.

  “Someone has to stay with the shuttle,” he reminded the man, “and Lt. Margolis outranks you.”

  “I’ll stay with you, Francis,” Katy assured the man. “We can take turns patrolling outside the bird to get some air.”

  She shot Jonathan a look and he knew her well enough now to know she was staying because she didn’t trust Acosta not to do something stupid. Lyta powered her acceleration couch around and led the others out of the cockpit, slapping the control for the belly ramp while Katy began shutting down the turbines. The fading whine of the engines nearly drowned out the grinding motors of the ramp, but there was no mistaking the blast of heat washing up from the opening. It was wet and suffocating, a waterfall of steaming humidity slamming into him with an almost physical blow, staggering him as he took a step down the ramp.

  “Holy shit,” Osceola muttered from behind him. “Let’s get in the damned flyer and hope they have air conditioning.”

  The side door of the ducted-fan helicopter was open and waiting for them, the interior seats arranged facing each other limousine-style. The pilot didn’t look around, didn’t acknowledge their existence; but as he ducked under the clamshell hatch, Jonathan saw a petite, dark-haired woman sitting in the center of the rear couch, legs crossed. She wasn’t beyond middle-aged, if he was any judge, though she was probably somewhere north of sixty, and had the air of a professional politician. He’d met enough of them in the palace at Argos to know the type. The suit told the story, not expensive or well-tailored enough for a corporate executive but still tasteful and attractive.

  He recognized the expression on her face as well; he’d seen it on his father’s closest advisors just after the coup. Stressed, overworked, the weight of the world on her shoulders. He decided to go with his instincts and take the chance of looking foolish for the reward of being taken seriously.

  “Prime Councilor Garrett,” he said, bowing slightly and offering a hand. “I’m Captain Jonathan Slaughter.”

  He saw the slightest twitch of the older woman’s eyebrow and he knew he’d scored the point. She took his hand, nodding in return.

  “Captain,” she said. She eyed the others as they climbed into the flyer, blinking at Osceola, as if in recognition. “Jenkins,” she said to the pilot, “close the doors and get us in the air. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

  “We are not a weak people.” Samantha Garrett stared at the pale, amber liquid in her wine glass as if the answers to her problems lurked under the surface. “Arachne is not a world for weak people. We drill oil from the depths of the jungle, collect duerte-fruit from the sides of steep, jagged mountains, raise aurochs in the grasslands in the face of a dozen species of predators. People die for this each year, but the work continues because it is all that keeps our colony alive. We live close to the edge out here in the non-aligned systems.”

  “At least you get a nice view out of it,” Osceola said, masking a dry smile behind a sip of his wine.

  It was a nice view from the balcony of the Palacio de Gobierno, overlooking the river valley. The palms and cypress choking the banks seemed picturesque from here, far above the clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies, away from th
e stalking jaguars and Titanis terror birds. A riverboat chugged along, chopping through underwater growth with a wheel at its bow, while on the banks, massive aurochs grazed in a scene that might have come from the earliest days of pre-Imperial colonization.

  It was less humid up here, the spinning blades of a ceiling fan stirring the air beneath the shadow of an overhanging section of roof.

  “When Captain Magnus first came here,” Garrett went on, ignoring Osceola’s barb, “he sent down a representative to demand we pay him tribute or his forces would destroy our crops and drilling rigs, kill our livestock, and slaughter our militia, then sell the rest of our people into slavery.” Her brown eyes flickered upward to meet Jonathan’s, glancing aside to Lyta’s before she shielded them with a sip of wine. “Because we live so close to the edge, with so little surplus from our paltry share of trade to Sparta and Clan Modi, we agreed. The Council decided it would be easier and cheaper to push production, to work the people harder, than to take the risk of trying to fight them.” She sniffed at the thought, her lip twisting in what might have been disdain.

  “We paid them and, three months later, they were back.” Her eyes came up and locked with his. “This time, the tribute demands were doubled.”

  “Predictable,” Lyta commented, the first words she’d said since they’d exited the flyer just outside the Palacio.

  “Indeed,” Garrett agreed. “And I had predicted it.” Her shoulders shifted with uncomfortable memory. “We tried to buy time, tried to tell Magnus’ emissary we hadn’t built up the surplus to meet his demands, asked them for another six months.” A hissed-out breath. “Three days later, Magnus landed a platoon of mechs and destroyed a city block with most of the fabrication facilities we were using to try to produce weapons to arm our militia, killing over two hundred people in the attack. He sent us this message.”

  She reached out to the center of the table, to a small display screen mounted there, and touched a control beneath it. The face filling the screen was as much metal as flesh and Jonathan sucked in a sharp breath almost involuntarily. Cyborgs weren’t exactly shunned in Spartan society, not the way they were in other places in the Dominions; after all, soldiers badly injured in battle often needed cybernetic replacement of lost limbs or eyes. But it was common practice to make the replacements as lifelike as possible, so as not to offend Mithra, who had designed humans in His own image. Those who purposefully flaunted their bionics with bare, silvery metal were usually trying to make some sort of religious or social statement… or simply to look intimidating. He had a sense this was the latter.

  “I am,” the cyborg said with a voice gravelly and hoarse, probably from the same injury that had cost him half his face, “Captain Magnus Heinarson of the Red Brotherhood, and I wait for no one. You have one month to meet my demands to the last credit, or the death and destruction you just experienced will be visited upon every part of your capital, upon every one of the pitiful cities on your pitiful world.” The half of his mouth on the cybernetic side of his face seemed frozen in place by nerve damage, but the biological half curled in a sneer. “You say you don’t have the ‘surplus’ to give me what I ask, as if I care about your trade deficits or your economic stability. I don’t give a shit if your children starve! You will give me what’s mine, or the ones of you who aren’t already dead will fucking wish they were!”

  The recording froze again on the scarred, bifurcated face and Garrett punched the button again with a fierce, violent motion, as if she wished she could do the same to the man in the video.

  “That was two weeks ago.”

  “Do you have any intelligence about where the pirates are based?” Jonathan asked her.

  “We do.” Her voice deepened with what might have been bitterness. “It’s not exactly a secret, since there are no governments willing to ferret him out in the non-aligned systems; none of them consider it their problem since there’s nothing out here worth exploiting.”

  She fished a dataspike from the pocket of her suit jacket and inserted it into a receptacle on the table beside the screen. A star map snapped to life on the viewer, with the Minerva system haloed in green and another, only one jump away, highlighted in a deep and angry red.

  “There’s no official name for it on the Imperial maps, but we’ve taken to calling it Clew Bay, for historical reasons.”

  Jonathan had no idea what those historical reasons might be, but the question didn’t seem relevant, so he didn’t ask it. Garrett enlarged the system in the image, showing them an F-class star with a rocky planet far too close for life, an asteroid belt and two gas giants. The closer-in of the giants had ten satellites, two of them nearly the size of a planet; one of the two was fringed in red.

  “This moon is habitable, barely. It’s mostly water.” She zoomed in again with a spread of her fingers, showing the blue surface of the satellite. “But there are a couple large islands where you can grow food. It’s not worth a colony; not enough land and nothing worth exporting. The old maps say the Empire terraformed it, probably just because they could. It’s a damn fine place to put a pirate base, though.”

  Her fingers tapped on the table, the nails clicking like the night calls of some mating insect. She pursed her lips as if she were carefully considering her next words.

  “If you weren’t new to the business and willing to work cheap, we couldn’t afford you. Some members of the Council think we still can’t afford to hire you.”

  “Our fee is going to be a lot cheaper than what you’d have to pay this Red Brotherhood,” Lyta pointed out.

  “Not the money,” Garrett explained, shaking her head. “They think it’s too big of a risk. If you screw this up, Magnus and his people will kill us all, leave this place a ruin as a warning to his other victims.” She held a hand out, palm up, as if weighing their options. “Or, if you are good enough to do the job, you might just decide you should be the ones to demand tribute, and we are still, if you’ll pardon my language, fucked. That’s the problem with living in the cracks between the Dominions, in the systems no one else wants. Everyone’s happy about the freedom and self-determination until you need to call a cop. No one’s military is willing to risk a war to help some dead-end squatter colony deal with pirates or bandits.”

  “I understand,” Jonathan said, leaning back in his seat, regarding the woman.

  He wasn’t sure he did, not to the extent he should have, wasn’t sure what the point of bringing them here had been if the Council was afraid to hire them, but he had the feeling this was some sort of test, and one he’d have to pass without help from the others.

  “Do you know why I resigned my commission from the Spartan military, Prime Councilor Garrett?” he said. “Why I sold everything my parents had left me and invested it in this company?”

  “I’d assumed,” she ventured carefully, “that there’d been some trouble. That’s usually how people wind up starting your sort of business, a court-martial or some such disciplinary problem.” She frowned, forehead curling in thought. “Of course, usually the officers who become contractors are a bit older…”

  “Usually,” he agreed. “I was one of the most highly-decorated officers of my rank in the history of the Spartan military. I’d been on a dozen combat operations since graduating the Academy and had commendations for every single one of them.”

  The words were flowing naturally now, without filter. He was quoting his cover back-story for Jonathan Slaughter, but he could just as easily been talking about Logan Conner… which was why it was the perfect cover identity for him.

  “Our patrol ship received a distress call from a civilian passenger ship taking colonists from Nike to one of the border settlements, one of the newer ones set up in just the past few years. The ship had been hit by pirates and, by the time we caught up with them, they’d already hauled the survivors back to their base on some worthless planet with a couple of degrees of habitable area in an ocean of ice and snow.”

  The ice filled his veins, set the
hair on the back of his neck standing on end and he was back in the snows of Ramman, with the Scorpion pilot shooting at him.

  “They were working their way through the crew, torturing them to death one at a time. They intended to sell the passengers on the slave markets… after they’d gotten some use out of them.” The words seemed to be coming from someone else, someone standing behind him, narrating while he shivered in a cold so unlike the warmth on Arachne. “It ended about as well as it could have for those people: we showed up and most of them lived. They’d be scarred for life, nothing would ever be the same, and it would take them years to recover, those who ever would.”

  His lip twisted into a snarl.

  “And everyone seemed to consider it a win, something to be celebrated, a good enough reason for promotions and medals and slapping each other on the back for a job well done.” He saw Katy’s face the way it had been in the infirmary, swollen and bloody, her eyes dead and full of hate and he thumped his clenched fist against his thigh so he wouldn’t slam it against the table. “When I didn’t, when I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut about it, when I said the wrong things to the wrong people, I was given a choice: get out with my record clean, or face a court-martial.”

  He shrugged, not so much a motion of indifference to his fate as one of a weight coming off his shoulders.

  “I was lost, didn’t know what I was going to do, when Lyta…” He nodded toward her. “…Major Randell here, came to me and told me she felt the same way about the bandits, the pirates, the outlaw trash. And she knew a lot of other people like her, people who’d be willing to give up everything to go do something about it. So, you don’t have to worry about us turning bandit and taking your livelihood; we’d likely do it for free if you couldn’t afford to pay us.”