by Rick Partlow
Ranger medics were picking up the worst cases in stretchers as he watched, hauling them out somewhere away from the overwhelming stink of burnt flesh and vaporized blood. Flash burns seared skin and blackened even fireproof clothing and some of them were in bad shape, but he thought they would live if they got treatment quickly enough. Others were walking on their own, a few sobbing as they were led out of the building. Some were stopping to thank him, grabbing at his hand or offering shaky salutes.
He tried to mumble something comforting, but couldn’t find the words. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from one of the victims of the laser shot, the one directly in front of Hardrada, the one he’d likely been about to kill when Paskowski had made what would likely be the hardest decision of his life and killed a handful of his own people in order to save the others. The man’s chest had been obliterated by the burst of coherent light, but part of his face had survived, a stretch of skin the color of hardwood and tightly-curled hair and just the edge of his familiar, snarky grin, probably when he’d seen Paskowski’s mech come up at the doorway and realized someone was about to put paid the Jeuta warlord.
He’d met Marc Langella at the Academy and fate, or perhaps the machinations of his father or Colonel Anders, had thrown the two together after they’d graduated from mech training. He’d dated Langella’s older sister for about a month until he decided his friend’s snarky wit wasn’t genetic and the woman just wasn’t interesting enough without it.
He crouched beside Marc’s body, trying not to breathe, trying not to smell the sickening burnt-meat stench.
“I’m sorry, bud,” he whispered. “I should have been able to get you out of this.”
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, eyes closed, dimly aware of survivors and victims being carried out of the room by the Rangers. No one disturbed him, even though Lyta’s people had lost friends of their own and it wasn’t fair for him to be monopolizing the grief. He only glanced up once the room was empty, even Marc’s body removed, and everything had gone quiet. Quiet enough for him to hear the sobbing.
At first, he had the wild thought he was the one who was crying, that he’d been bawling the whole time and not realized it, but he quickly realized the sound was coming from behind him. It was Paskowski. He’d climbed down from his mech and was leaning against the doorway, hands balled into fists, hunched over as if he were about to throw up, sobs wracking his body. Jonathan felt uncomfortable around the naked emotion.
“I didn’t want to be a company commander,” the man said, finally getting control of himself. “I volunteered for this mission,” he went on, his voice shuddering and unsteady, “because I wanted a strike platoon, but also because I didn’t want to be a company commander.”
His eyes met Jonathan’s and there was infinite pain inside them, down through to his soul.
“I didn’t want to be the one making decisions that could get my own people killed.”
“You did the right thing, Gerald,” he told the platoon leader. “If you hadn’t taken out Hardrada, he would have killed everyone.”
“The Rangers…” Paskowski started to protest, but Jonathan cut him off.
“The Rangers were too far away. You did the right thing.” Jonathan emphasized every word, trying to hammer the point through the guilt and self-doubt his subordinate was feeling. He stepped closer, putting a hand on Gerald Paskowski’s shoulder. It was skinny, boney even. Paskowski was a small man who wanted to drive big mecha. “Now get in your Scorpion and get your platoon back to work.”
Paskowski nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, just before he turned back to his mech. “I know he was your friend.”
Jonathan didn’t know how to reply to that, so he said nothing. He needed to get back to work himself. The mission wasn’t over. He looked back to where Marc Langella had died and had to correct himself.
It’s over for some of us.
9
“She doesn’t look that bad,” Terry said softly, eyes glued to the screen.
The Jeuta destroyer was drifting, unpowered, her drive inactive, but her hull was mostly intact, except for the ugly burn-through where the deflector dish had been.
“She’d be good salvage,” Osceola agreed, shaking his head, regret in his voice. “But she’s still got a shitload of momentum taking her outsystem and it would burn up a lot of fuel to match her.”
The battle had been an anticlimax. Two more shots from the Shakak’s overpowered railgun had convinced the commander of the destroyer to cut thrust and maneuver his deflector shield into the line of fire. The Jeuta had probably thought he was being clever, but two sustained bursts from the laser batteries had shattered the deflectors and pierced right through them into the reactor. Thermal readings told the story: the plasma had flushed into the ship, burning through the shields and killing everyone on board. They were already decelerating towards the moon now, prepping shuttles with medics and repair crews, but Terry couldn’t help watching the destroyer drift away behind them.
“Now we gotta take care of our other problem,” Osceola said, yanking the quick-release for his acceleration couch and standing slowly, deliberately…perhaps reluctantly. Kammy nodded and powered his seat back from the console, following his captain.
“You have the conn, Tara,” Osceola said to the woman. His eyes settled on Terry. “Come on, kid. You too.”
“What?” he asked, blinking incomprehension.
“You were a witness,” Kammy explained. “You have to be there.” He waved toward the hatch to the hub and the lift banks.
Terry still didn’t understand what the hell was going on, but his throat hurt too much to argue, so he followed the Captain and the First Mate off the bridge. He was hoping for the lift bank since they weren’t in combat, currently, but groaned softly and followed when Osceola chose the hub instead. The drumbeat of feet on the metal grating of the steps was an ear-splitting racket in the enclosed cylinder of the hub, but at least they didn’t go all the way down to Engineering this time. Instead, Osceola led them out of the stairwell at the main cargo deck, circling around the maze of the hold, past five-meter-tall storage bins for raw soy paste and spirulina powder, past barrel after barrel of powdered metal for the fabricators, crate after crate of replacement parts and ammunition for the mecha.
He was still trying to puzzle out where they were heading when he saw the security guards. These weren’t the Spartan Naval Security attached to the ship; they were the more rough-and-ready ship’s security called together from other departments to handle matters before the Spartan troops had come aboard. Wihtgar’s co-workers, four of them. Big, broad-shouldered men and a single woman, and two of them had guts matching their shoulders but Terry still wouldn’t have wanted to face any of them, even with a weapon in his hand. Each carried a stun baton and looked eager to use it on the Jeuta traitor, but Wihtgar made no move to fight against his restraints.
It would have been futile anyway: the cuffs around his wrists and the hobbles at his ankles were made from the same metal as a starship hull, and the cable joining them together was a weave of carbon nanotubes. They weren’t taking any chances with the Jeuta.
“Why is he down here?” Terry wondered. “Are you going to put him a shuttle down to the moon?”
“He might wind up on the moon,” Kammy mused, “depending on gravity and trajectories, but he won’t be taking no shuttle.”
That was when Terry noticed the proximity of the utility airlock. It was used for maintenance and emergency repairs rather than cargo transfers, the hatches only three meters on a side, just large enough for a work party in suits and the equipment they would use. It was only useful when the ship wasn’t boosting, as it was now. Anyone or anything that went out the lock while under boost would fall away, still following the same direction of travel but no longer accelerating or decelerating.
“You’re going to just kill him?” Terry asked, his voice breaking in the middle, perhaps from the damage to his throat. “Shouldn’t Captain Slaughte
r be the one to…”
“This is an independent shipping vessel outside territorial space,” Osceola reminded him, voice as grim as his face. “According to agreements between the Dominions, the captain retains the right and responsibility to convene judicial hearings and dispense appropriate punishments in accordance with maritime law. Appropriate punishments for murder include banishment, imprisonment or execution.”
He nodded to the security detail and the woman, who Terry thought worked in the cargo loading area, hit the control to open the inner airlock door. It swung inward toward them with a metallic grinding of old servomotors and, when it was open far enough, two of the others shoved Wihtgar inside with the business end of their batons. One gave him a shock and the Jeuta jerked away, muscles spasming, sharpened teeth visible in a feral snarl. The woman touched the control again and the door motors complained loudly about having to shut the hatch they’d just opened. It slammed with a finality Terry could feel in his chest, the Jeuta only visible through the thick, transparent aluminum porthole in the hatch.
Wihtgar might have been glaring at them or might not. Kammy stepped over to the airlock panel and switched on the intercom speaker between the outer and inner lock.
“The accused,” he said, his normally jolly voice suddenly stiff and official, “is Wihtgar, machinist’s mate third class.”
“What are the charges?” Osceola asked with equal formality.
“Two counts of murder, two counts of assault with intent to commit murder, one count of sabotage with the intent to commit murder, and one count of espionage.” Terry’s ears pricked up at the last charge and Kammy expounded, breaking from his officious prosecutor mannerisms for a minute. “We found tools and spare parts hidden in his cabin and we’re pretty sure he rigged some sort of beacon on the Trojan Horse to let Hardrada know it was a trick.” Back into his imitation of a lawyer voice, Kammy quickly and efficiently summarized the events of the day, as if Osceola had no knowledge of them and needed a briefing.
“Are there witnesses?”
“Myself,” Kammy informed him, “Mwai Kenyatta and Terry Conner. Kenyatta is still under emergency medical care and won’t be able to testify.”
“First Mate Johansen, do you confirm the statement of charges as accurate?”
“I do.” Kammy didn’t seem to take the answer lightly. He inclined his head as if he were at a funeral.
“Machinist mate third class Conner,” Osceola continued, eyes settling on Terry, “do you confirm the statement of charges as accurate?”
Terry nodded, then realized he had to speak the words for it to be official.
“I do.”
Osceola placed a hand on the bulkhead beside the airlock and leaned in toward the intercom speaker.
“Does the accused have anything to say in his own defense?”
Wihtgar stared at him and Terry thought the Jeuta would remain silent as he had since security had hauled him away from the engine room. Instead, he spoke, short and to the point.
“I wish you had left me to die. It would have been more honorable than the lie I have been living among you humans.”
Donner Osceola said nothing for a moment, eyes closed almost as if praying. When they opened, he’d made his judgement.
“The accused is found guilty of his crimes. The sentence…”
For the first time since they’d left the bridge, Terry thought the Captain seemed uncertain. Osceola looked between him and Kammy and slowly shook his head.
“I’m too close to this,” he admitted. “Bringing him here with us was my mistake. I’m just as to blame for the deaths of Cheryl and the Chief as he is.”
“I backed you up back then,” Kammy declared stoutly. “And I still think it was the right thing to do. If you can’t make the decision then neither can I.”
Terry suddenly, horribly realized they were both staring at him. The security detail was, too, as if they knew more about the process than he did.
“You witnessed the crimes,” Osceola explained. “You were one of the victims. You’re part of the crew and with Kenyatta out of commission, you’re probably the only engineering tech we have left on duty.”
“And you didn’t know them all,” Kammy interjected. “Not the way we did. You can be more objective.”
“I’m so Goddamned angry I want to kill him right now,” Osceola explained. “But I can’t know if the fact I’ve known Duncan…” He paused, closing his eyes again before he could go on. “I knew Duncan for fifteen years and feeling as if his death is my fault is clouding my judgement.”
He flipped up the safety gate for the outer lock control. It was flashing red, a warning to all that pressing it would explosively drain the air from the chamber.
“If you push this button, Wihtgar is dead. He deserves it, there’s no question about it. But this is my ship, and I don’t like killing people.” He shrugged. “I’ll do it, when I have to, and I won’t lose any sleep over it as long as they were trying to do me in first, but a cold-blooded execution is a bit harder on the conscience. So, I’m leaving it to you. If you think he should die, you push the button. If not, we’ll fly him down to the moon and leave him there. I doubt anyone’s going to find him there, but your people probably left enough supplies untouched for him to live, at least for a while.”
“The only other option,” Kammy said, “is to turn him over to the Dagda government, but they’ll just tell us to put a bullet in him and add it to our bill.”
Sweat trickled down Jonathan’s back despite the sterile chill of the cargo deck. He rubbed at the bruises on his neck, still raw and chafed, and tried to search the cold, dead, black eyes on the other side of the airlock porthole for any sign of compassion, empathy, anything he could call human. There was nothing, not even hatred.
Terrin Brannigan would never do this. Terrin Brannigan was a scientist, an advanced graduate student, a teacher. He would never have considered taking the life of anyone, human or Jeuta. Terrin Brannigan had stayed on Sparta.
Terry Conner pushed the button.
Wihtgar was strong, perhaps strong enough to have clung to the handles built into the bulkhead for use in free-fall had he not been bound hand and foot. The atmosphere trapped in the airlock compartment rushed out into space and took the Jeuta with it. Terry turned away from the darkness beyond, barely noticing the keening of the alarm or the flashing of warning lights or Kammy leaning over to close the outer lock.
The big man was saying something, calling after him, but Terry didn’t bother to respond.
There was nothing left to say.
“Who’s going to notify the families?”
Jonathan didn’t look up from his drink. The answers were in there, lost in the opaque amber of the bourbon, he was sure of it. It was disappointing when the amber was gone and only clear glass remained, which was why he’d kept refilling it. Yeah, that was the reason.
“I am,” he declared. The bourbon approved. It didn’t say anything negative, so he assumed its approval. “It won’t mean a damned thing to them; they don’t know who the hell Captain Jonathan Slaughter is. But they’ll get a nice, fat check from Wholesale Slaughter, LLC and maybe after all this is over, I’ll get to visit personally and explain what really happened.”
And won’t that be a wonderful experience for the Langella family, finding out their only son followed his friend Logan off on some damn-fool secret mission and died on a nameless, unimportant moon hundreds of light-years from home?
“This wake sucks,” Donner Osceola said.
Jonathan finally diverted his attention from the hypnotic darkness of the bourbon, squinting at the ship’s captain. He was sprawled across the chair, long legs stretched out halfway into the aisle between their table and the next. Jonathan had considered taking a shot every time someone tripped over the man, but he didn’t want to get alcohol poisoning.
“Yeah, I’ve seen better,” he admitted. People were huddled together in small groups of two or three, subdued and depressed and dr
inking heavily. “I remember General Aberdeen’s wake.”
“Do you?” Lyta wondered, lubricated enough by a third of a bottle of tequila to crack a grin. “I don’t.”
She chuckled, leaning into Osceola’s shoulder. He wished Katy were here, but the medics wanted her to stay in sick bay another day for observation because of her concussion. She wouldn’t have let him get away with being this morose.
“I was still in the Academy,” he recalled, “and there was wall-to-wall brass in the palace banquet hall. I was scared shitless, sitting at attention and saluting anything that moved. About four glasses of rum later, me and two Colonels and an Admiral were standing on a table singing Reconstruction War-era marching songs”
“Not much table-singing going on tonight,” Osceola observed. The man should have been drunk as a skunk in a funk, given how much vodka he’d downed in the last two hours, but instead he simply seemed mellow.
“You got two crews mashed together,” Lyta said, “neither of which trusts the other completely, a third of our people are still in sickbay, and we can’t even tell stories about the ones who died because most of what they did was classified.”
“Like I said,” Osceola agreed, “this wake sucks.”
“Well, at least Mr. Vasari was happy,” Lyta said, downing the rest of the tequila in her glass. “He even okayed paying for the repairs to our drop-ships and assault shuttle without blinking an eye.”
“And we got to keep the cargo we found at the Jeuta base.” The captain shrugged, laughing softly, “whoever the hell it used to belong to.”
“We salvaged quite a bit from the strike mecha the Jeuta had stolen.” She was pouring herself another glass, which made five but who was counting? Certainly not Paskowski, who was snoring loudly, cheek resting on the next table.
