Wholesale Slaughter

by Rick Partlow

  And this was the thanks he got. The sky of Clew Bay still glowed a raw, angry violet, as if the world itself had been bruised in the thermonuclear assault. The reminder hung over their crude tent city, stoking the anger and fear of his people… and firing their resentment. True, most of their military gear was shielded against the EMP, but the damned lights wouldn’t work inside the tents, because who thinks to buy EMP-shielded lights? The darkness had scared people, and here and there, bonfires crackled, fed with scrap paper and cardboard.

  It was a damn good thing he couldn’t sweat, though, because he would have been sweating now.

  “We can’t let them get away with this,” Sungurlu said, standing at the forefront of the group of sub-leaders he’d called to what he called, with a bit of admitted vainglory, the “command post,” a canvas roof slung over a foldable metal frame. You couldn’t use wood here on Clew Bay; what passed for trees here were useless for building anything, with a thorny bark as tough and hard to work as iron. “We could tell one of the Dominions… Modi, maybe, or Shang. If they found out some non-aligned colony was using nuclear weapons, they’d stomp the shit out of them.”

  Magnus scowled at the ugly, bearded troll of a man, and not because of his looks. Mehmet Sungurlu was one of Magnus’ most reliable allies, but he was hesitant, tentative in the face of hard decisions. He wanted to label Sungurlu an old woman, but that would have been an insult to the old women he’d known.

  “And once Shang ‘stomps the shit out of them,’ what then?” he demanded, taking a lumbering step forward from the raised hump of dirt he used as a stand to look down on his troops when he addressed them. “What will be left for us? Remember, Mehmet, we chose Arachne because we need what they have. Have you forgotten what happened to Cai Quian on Ramman? We needed his tribute and we received nothing, because he was stupid enough to let Sparta find him. If Shang or Modi strips Arachne of anything useful, this was all a waste of time and resources.”

  If it had been anyone but Sungurlu, he wouldn’t have tried to explain, would have simply mocked the other man’s weakness. Or taught them all a lesson about doubting him to his face. Because when you gave a centimeter to ruthless bastards like this…

  “If we’d just killed them all and taken their shit when we first landed,” Reyes snarled, shoving Sungurlu aside, “we wouldn’t be in this position, would we, Captain?” He gave the title a sardonic twist and Magnus barely restrained himself from smashing the man’s face.

  Reyes was a big man, nearly as large with natural muscle as Magnus was with bulky metal, and it was easy for a big man to forget he might not be the strongest or most dangerous around. It might be time to remind him, as well as the others. If this was going to be a theater, he’d have to set the stage.

  “Yes, Jessie,” he growled low in his chest, taking another step forward, less than a meter from Reyes. Close enough to catch the musty odor of the wolf-skin cloak he wore as if he were some sort of sword-wielding barbarian out of Old Earth legends. “If we’d killed their leaders and burned their factories and destroyed their machines, we could have taken what was there. But you know what dead people can’t do, Jessie?” He was bellowing now, leaning forward, the force of his breath blowing Reyes’ bleached blond hair out of the big idiot’s face. “They can’t make more shit we can steal! How many worlds do you think are out there, you fucking moron? Do you think if we burn every single one of them down that we won’t fucking starve to death, drifting through space with no fucking fuel because we were fucking stupid enough to listen to your advice?”

  Reyes’ normally corpse-pale skin was beet red now, his teeth bared as if he were emulating the poor animal whose pelt he wore over his shoulders.

  Damn dog was probably smarter than he is. There should be a wolf on some colony world wearing Reyes’ skin for a cape.

  “Maybe if you’d listened to my advice about Ramman,” Reyes snapped back at him, “Cai Quian wouldn’t be dead! I told you months ago that place was too close to the Spartan shipping lanes for his people to put a damned base there! They were bound to be found out and you let them sit there and get slaughtered!”

  The others had stepped back now, giving the two of them room. Sungurlu watched intently, always ready to hang back and watch for an opportunity to advance himself. So far, Magnus had been able to channel the man’s instinct for self-preservation into support for him, though that could change at any moment. But there were more people to think about than just the half-dozen gathered beneath this pitiful overhang.

  “Do you want to challenge me, Jessie?” he asked, not backing up; he was determined he’d force Reyes to back away first. “We got eight people with their eyes burned out, we got radioactivity about to fall down around our ears the next time it rains, and we got about enough food to last us all another three weeks, maybe four if we shoot the blinded ones. If you think it’s my fault, if you think you can do better, let’s go out there…” He pointed with a shining, segmented metal finger at the crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered in their “town square,” the courtyard between the canvas and nylon tents where their food and water were stored. “…and decide this right now.”

  Reyes’s right hand twitched, and Magnus thought the big man might go for the gun he carried in a crossdraw holster at his waist. That could complicate things. Magnus had a lot of metal, and hitting the parts that weren’t would be tough, even at close range. But bullets were democratic little fuckers, and they’d take down a leader with a lucky shot just as well as a follower.

  He was hoping he could goad Reyes into facing him unarmed, work the man’s monstrous ego. You had to be able to see people’s weaknesses to lead them, to bring them to heel like the dogs they were, and you couldn’t show them the fear you were feeling. Reyes was vacillating between a healthy respect for Magnus’ raw, physical power and the rage he felt for the insults Magnus had so carefully hurled at him. He’d have to tip the balance.

  Magnus strode past him, shoving him carelessly out of the way and walking into the center of the courtyard. Clay crunched under his boots, dried and desiccated from weeks with no rain. Angry red clouds gathering in the dawn light told him the rain would come soon, bringing radiation poisoning and death with it. He had to work fast.

  Dozens upon dozens of eyes followed him, men and women but more men than women by a factor of two, and some of the women were pillage, or had started out that way. No children though. It was his rule. He’d allow children when they had a world of their own to rule, someplace nicer than this fetid shithole, where it was always too hot, or too cold, or too wet, or too dry. At least he didn’t have to worry about one of them getting up the balls to shoot him in the back; he didn’t allow anyone except his sub-leaders to have guns in the camp. Even his foot soldiers only got issued the weapons in the drop-ship.

  He stood in the center of the courtyard and turned in a slow circle so that they could all see him, all meet his gaze.

  “Red Brotherhood!” he yelled, hands raised to the glowing sky. “We have been attacked by our enemies, by the ungrateful bastards on Arachne, who mistook our mercy for weakness! I won’t put up with this shit! I am going to lead you back to their miserable swamp of a world and march into their city with our mecha, with our foot soldiers, and burn it to the fucking ground!”

  There were cheers and blood-thirsty whooping from the audience, some of them raising their hands to imitate his stance. Fucking cattle.

  “But before we board our landers, before we call our ship and begin the journey of vengeance, it seems as if there are some here who blame what has happened on my leadership.”

  His hands drifted downward until both forefingers were pointed at Jessie Reyes, just emerging from beneath the command center awning.

  “My lieutenant here, Jessie Reyes, a man I thought was my friend and ally, has decided you would all be better off if he was the leader of the Red Brotherhood!”

  There were boos and catcalls at that, but not as many as he would have liked. Some of the
onlookers appeared thoughtful, which was bad. None of them were smart enough to be thoughtful or they’d be the leader and he’d already be dead.

  “So, I am going to challenge Jessie for the leadership of our little band!” he roared. “I am going to make him prove in front of Ahriman, the Dark Lord, that he is the man who should be leading us!”

  That Dark Lord shit had been Sungurlu’s idea. He came from some cult of devil-worshippers on some backwoods colony, morons who bought into bullshit myths and even bigger morons because they bought into the losing side of a bullshit myth. At least the sheep who worshipped Mithra figured He was going to win the struggle in the end. But whatever got the cattle moving…

  Reyes started to say something, something that seemed way too close to an attempt to defuse the situation, and he couldn’t have that. Reyes was an asset, but he needed to deal with the unrest the nuke had caused before he took his people into battle.

  “And since I am the challenger,” Magnus went on, shouting over Reyes’ dithering, “I will allow Jessie to choose the weapons we use. I think he’d have to agree, though, that neither of us should use a gun, seeing as how all of you good people are so closely gathered around.”

  Well, he’d have to agree now, anyway. Magnus could tell by his sour look that Reyes would have chosen a gun if given the choice.

  “And,” Magnus went on, knowing he had to sell this hard, “since some people might say I already have an advantage…” He flexed his bionic hands tightly and there were a few chuckles and grunts of appreciation. “…whatever weapon Jessie chooses, I will only use the weapons Ahriman and a well-paid team of surgeons gave me.”

  Laughter. Maybe a bit nervous. Hooded eyes flickered back and forth between Magnus Heinarson and Jessie Reyes, waiting for the response, and probably waiting to see if he’d play by his own rules.

  Reyes’ expression had gone from doubtful through fearful and circled back around to rage. Magnus had thermal vision built into his bionic eye, but he didn’t need it to see the heat building up inside the big man’s head.

  “I accept your challenge, Magnus,” he growled. And he smiled, the sort of smile you saw on an incredibly stupid person when they think they’ve finally had a great idea. “And for my weapon, I choose a power breacher!”

  Well, shit. That is a pretty good idea.

  Wilhelm Krieger brought the tool up for him through the gathered crowd. Krieger was a snot-nosed little pissant who followed Reyes around like a lost puppy and Magnus could see in his face who he was pulling for in this fight. The breacher was a heavy weapon… well, a tool, really. He’d heard from the old-timers it had started life as a rescue tool for freeing crew trapped in sealed compartments after battles, but for much longer than he’d been alive, it had been used by boarding parties to breach spaceship airlocks after their drives had been disabled… and for breaching body armor once you got through the lock.

  It looked like half a fire axe had a mutant baby with a wrecking bar, and it was wielded two-handed on a pair of insulated grips—insulated because it also had a powerful electromagnet built into the business ends, which you could trigger from the grips to repel metal. Metal like him. Using the meter-long breacher, the dumb bastard actually had a chance against him.

  Well, if it wasn’t close, no one would be convinced, he reasoned.

  “This thing’ll peel you like a fucking grape,” Reyes said, holding the weapon up across his body, feet squared.

  “I’m gonna’ stick that toy up your ass sideways, Jessie,” Magnus assured the man, falling into a ready stance at the center of the courtyard. Usually, in matters such as these, the spectators would form a ring around the opponents; but no one wanted to be too close to Reyes while he was swinging around a power breacher.

  There was no referee like he’d seen in the cage matches they put on in the pleasure stations, no signal when to start. One second, they were standing there, watching each other jockey for position and the next everything was in frantic, violent motion. Magnus was faster than people usually figured, and he knew it; he was counting on a wild swing, on the chance to duck inside and lock Reyes up. Once he had his hands on the man, the fight was over.

  But Reyes knew it, too, and the wild swing with the axe head was a feint; he speared backward with the prybar end, his fingers jammed down on the electromagnet trigger. Magnus felt the brush of the field, felt it twisting his hands, pulling them inward, and he threw himself backward with all his weight. Outside the pull of the field, his arms flopped to his sides and he pushed down with them, throwing himself backward into a barrel roll.

  Back on his feet, he set his stance and waited for the rush he sensed was coming, but again Reyes surprised him by holding back, circling around to the left, closer to the center again. There was a low cunning in the set of the big man’s eyes, and it worried Magnus. He didn’t like surprises, particularly in a fight.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to give up on a weapon of my own.

  He’d let Reyes take the first swing last round, but this time he played it aggressively and faked a punch before lashing out with a low kick at the other man’s ankle. It was close; the edge of his left boot brushed the back of Reyes’ calf as he hopped backward, barely a touch yet the big man seemed to be favoring the leg slightly. When he took his fighting stance again, it was with renewed caution, the power breaker held like a shield.

  Magnus came out of his ready crouch and smirked at the man.

  “You were full of big talk a few seconds ago, Jessie. You already losing your balls? Maybe I’ll rip them off and let the boys have you as a new toy, give the pillage-girls a rest, huh?”

  That got him. There was red behind his eyes and he advanced quickly, passing his weapon through an intricate figure eight. It took some strength to handle a breaker that way, he had to admit—the man had skill, and technique. When it came, the shot was lightning-fast, an uppercut with the prybar, the field activated for the space of a second, just long enough to force Magnus to acknowledge it and step away from it. The axe head followed through nearly too quickly to follow, slicing through the air and scoring a white scrape across the metal of Magnus’ left arm. The metal-on-metal skritch set Magnus’ teeth on edge and he fought an urge to shake the arm out, as if it were still biological. If Reyes had kept the field activated on the cut, it might have torn the arm right off, but he’d drained the capacitor with his upswing… and left himself open.

  Reyes was still holding the shaft of the breaker ahead of him to block anything Magnus could throw, but he had to hold the thing and physics were still physics. Magnus slammed his massive right fist directly into the shaft. Had Reyes been able to trigger the magnetic field at that exact moment, it would have been suicide: Magnus’ arm would have been torn from his shoulder and likely taken his spine along with it. But he was a fraction of a second too slow, and the punch to the bar tore it out of his hands and smashed the heavy weapon into his face.

  It wasn’t a fatal blow, wasn’t even enough to incapacitate an experienced fighter like Reyes, a man used to the feel of taking a hit. If he’d had a second, a half a second, he could have recovered, grabbed the bar before it fell and been ready to hold off any follow-up attack. Magnus didn’t give him the half-second. The cyborg was feeling the flux; the flow of the battle had fallen into a rhythm and he was moving with the beat, running just a half-step ahead of his opponent.

  Reyes’s face was a mask of rage and pain and desperation, blood flowing across his white-blond beard from his smashed nose, his eyes focused on the shaft of the breaker, every ounce of concentration spent on trying to get his hands back around the weapon. Magnus’ first instinct had been to smack the bar out of the way, get it out of the equation, but his gut had rejected the idea without bothering to ask his head, knowing without thinking it would have cost him too much time, too much leverage. Instead, he chose the shortest distance between two points, straight into Reyes’ chest.

  It was a huge gamble. One touch on the electromagnet�
��s trigger and the breaker could have ripped the metal right out of Magnus’ torso, and stopped his heart. Somehow, he just knew it wouldn’t happen, knew Reyes couldn’t reach the switch in time. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he wondered if he actually intuited what would happen during a fight or he’d just been lucky so far and had only assumed it was because he was so smart. There was an old saying among pirates though: “better a lucky captain than a good one.”

  This time he was lucky and good. Reyes’ fingers didn’t close on the breaching bar, just clutched at air, and Magnus’ palms struck his opponent square in the chest, launching him backward as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. The breaking bar fell straight down to the clay at Magnus’ feet with a massive thud, as if it had been laid down in surrender. Reyes’ landing was less graceful, though no less of a surrender. He hit flat on his shoulders, his scapulae breaking with a snap like a tree limb giving way in a storm, then rolled twice before winding up on his back.

  The wolf cloak had fallen away, a shapeless lump on the ground meters away. Without it, Reyes looked almost normal, unremarkable in work pants padded and reinforced at the knees, and an insulated vest. The outer garment concealed the damage to Reyes’ chest, but Magnus had felt the ribs giving way under the sledgehammer blows of his hands. Reyes coughed fitfully and red droplets sprayed with the expelled breath. His feet kicked as he tried to roll over, tried to get up, but the shattered ribs and broken shoulder blades left him immobile.

  Magnus breathed in deeply, savoring the chill in the air. Air, water, food, liquor, sex… it was all better after you lived through a fight. He bent over at the waist and picked up the breacher, careful not to touch the triggers. He couldn’t feel weight, not the way he’d used to be able to before the bionics. There was a pressure, a sense connected to his surviving nerve endings, but the experience was qualitatively different. He wished he could feel the weight; it would be more satisfying.