Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  “Captain Jonathan Slaughter, President and CEO of Wholesale Slaughter LLC, at your service, sir.”

  There was just a hint of a grin beneath his perfectly serious face, as if some inner part of what was still a young man enjoyed the ludicrous, over-the-top nature of his cover.

  “And how long have you been in the business, Captain Slaughter?” He knew the answer, of course, both the real one and the one they were using as a cover, but interrogating an enemy operative was similar to cross-examining a witness at a trial. You never asked a question you didn’t already know the answer to.

  “Just a few months,” the man calling himself Jonathan Slaughter told him. “Though I’d been planning and raising funds for the company for months before that, of course.”

  “Yes, I believe I heard you are especially passionate about the plight of independent colonies suffering the predations of bandits and raiders.” He waved a hand, inadvisable as a gesture in free-fall but for his magnetic boots. “An admirable sentiment, I suppose, though one wonders how it became such a passion for a Spartan military officer.”

  The cool, genial demeanor the younger man had been projecting curled away in a puff of smoke like paper singed on a fire.

  “I’ve lost people I cared about,” Slaughter told him, his voice suddenly harsh. “I’ve had people I love hurt very badly. I have more than enough passion for this subject, Colonel Kuryakin.”

  “I believe you do, son,” Kuryakin acceded, nodding slowly, almost unwillingly. And he did. The hatred in the young man’s voice could no more have been faked than the apathy in Osceola’s demeanor. “Surely, you could have done more with the resources of the Guardianship military behind you, though?”

  “The Five Dominions don’t see bandits and raiders as a threat to their national security, Colonel.” Bitterness too, astride the anger. “They use them as political tools against each other, and no one is truly interested in hunting them down. Other military contractors even, they’re more interested in jacking up their fees and protecting their assets than fighting.” Grey eyes flashed in the dim shadows of burned out light panels. “I am in business to kill bandits.”

  Kuryakin regarded the man he knew to be Logan Conner, uncertain for the first time since he’d left Jormungandr. He’d felt sure this was some sort of intelligence-gathering mission, something desperate for Jaimie Brannigan to risk the life of his oldest son on it, but he had the sense now this was something else, something even bigger. Definitely something more personal to Logan Conner.

  He felt the weight of his ‘link in his pocket, knew he could order the Marines to arrest the crew and end this now under the watchful eyes of the Valkyrian. He left it in his pocket. This required flexibility.

  “Well,” he said, clapping his hands together with cheerful finality, “I think our work is done here. Everything seems in order.” He turned and shot a significant glance at Laurent. “Captain, if you would go see to the bill of lading for their records?”

  It was a code phrase, one he’d given her in the briefing, and he hoped like hell she had a good memory. The glint of realization in her eyes told him she did.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, nodding firmly. She headed back out the bridge hatch, raising her hand to stop the First Mate when he tried to escort her. “I can find my own way, thank you.”

  Kuryakin gave her a moment to clear the bridge, hoping she’d be smart enough to use a secure text message instead of making a voice call someone might overhear over the ship’s intercom pickups.

  “I understand your next contract is in the Shang Directorate,” he told the man calling himself Jonathan Slaughter.

  “That’s right,” he confirmed, just a hiss of breath escaping his nostrils to indicate the relief he was hiding. “It’s actually on Mingtiao, a colony near the border. Nothing profitable or populated enough for Shang or Starkad to care about their ore shipments being raided by bandits.”

  “These people can’t be paying you much, Captain Slaughter.” It took every ounce of self-control Kuryakin possessed not to imbue the name with the scorn he felt for it. “How can you afford to pay your pilots, the crew of this ship?”

  “I have enough cash reserves to work at a small loss until we build a name for ourselves.”

  The answer was well-rehearsed but unconvincing.

  “You’re certainly on your way to that. And what a name it is.” The sneer wouldn’t be repressed this time. “Wholesale Slaughter indeed.”

  “It’s memorable,” the younger man argued. “Potential customers will remember it now…and pirates will know it pretty soon. When we come into a system, they’ll leave without a fight.”

  “A business model I can appreciate.” Kuryakin offered a hand, stripping off his black leather glove first. Logan Conner’s grip was firm and dry. “Good luck in your endeavors, Captain.”

  “And you in yours, Colonel.”

  There was something in Logan Conner’s expression…or maybe it was Jonathan Slaughter he was talking to, after all. Something knowing, something challenging. He could read the words as clearly as if the man had spoken them: you don’t know why I’m here and you can’t stop me.

  We’ll see about that, boy.

  “I will take my leave then.” He motioned to the First Mate, Johansen. “Lead on.” A baleful glare back at Osceola. “Captain Osceola, your ship is a pig-sty.”

  “Yeah, nice meetin’ you, too, Colonel Crackalackin,” the ragged man murmured.

  Kuryakin didn’t bother answering. He had the answers he’d come for.

  “What are you supposed to be? The zero-g ballet?”

  Lyta Randell ignored the question, concentrating on her form, bouncing off the gym’s padded overhead and twisting her body in mid-air to bring her feet back beneath her before she impacted the deck. She clicked the heels of her magnetic boots together just before she hit and the heels stuck to the deck, leaving her standing, facing the Supremacy Marine standing in the hatchway.

  He was wearing standard body armor except for the helmet, which was hinged back off his head, resting negligently against the emergency air supply in his backpack. He carried a Gyroc carbine, meant for use in zero-g, a recoilless weapon that fired spin-stabilized mini-rockets. He had it slung across his chest, one hand resting on the optical sight atop the receiver. She immediately loathed the man—helmets were meant to be worn and weapons to be held at the ready, especially on a ship potentially full of hostiles. She loathed him even more when she saw the captain’s bars etched into his chest plate. Captain Jeffries, Pasqual R.

  The man’s an officer and this is the sort of example he’s setting?

  “Did you want something?” she asked, retrieving a towel from her belt and wiping away the sweat persistently beading against her skin in the microgravity. “Or have the Supremacy Marines never heard of free-fall combat training?”

  Pasqual Jeffries had one of those faces, too handsome for his job and cocky enough to know it. She saw it in the smug tilt of his head, the way his eyebrow twitched up as he looked her over.

  “Seems like an odd time to be training,” he judged, “right in the middle of a customs inspection.”

  “Not so odd,” she told him, tucking the towel away. “You’re a waste of our time, and I don’t like to see time go to waste. You never know how much of it you have left.”

  “Is that a philosophical observation or a threat, Ms…?” That tilted brow again, as if he thought he was being clever, or possibly even charming.

  “Major,” she corrected him, stepping over to the lockers set in the wall. “Major Randell.” She pulled her fatigue blouse on, sealing it down the front. It didn’t say “Spartan Rangers” anymore, the sign and the seal replaced by the Wholesale Slaughter crest. For the time being.

  “Major of what?” Jeffries wondered. “You aren’t a mech jock. You can always tell a mech jock by the way they walk, the way they stand. You’re a crunchie, like me.”

  “We’re private military contractors,” she reminded him,
stomping up to the hatchway, magnetic boots clacking loudly on the deck. “Gotta’ be versatile. Versatility starts on the ground.”

  “Ooh,” he mimed clutching at a shot through his heart. “I think I’m in love.” He laughed at his own joke, another sure sign of a narcissistic asshole. “Any chance you got time for a little unarmed combat with a Marine?”

  She was almost nose to nose with the man, only a few centimeters shorter than his meter-eight. She could smell the overly sweet musk of whatever he was using for cologne.

  Just douchebag alarms sounding everywhere.

  “I already told you, Captain Jeffries, I don’t have the time to waste. Now if you wouldn’t mind moving out of my way?”

  He fixed her with a stare, hard and humorless. She thought perhaps she’d pushed past his limit for rejection and began formulating ways to take the carbine away from him and put a round through that high forehead.

  “All right, Major Randell,” he said, finally, stepping back a pace to let her through. “But I get this feeling we’re going to see each other again.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” she assured him, then cupped her hand like a gun-sight and put it to her eye. “I’m not sure you’ll be seeing me.”

  He was laughing as she stomped away, just a bit too loud to be genuine.

  “There they go,” Aleksandr Kuryakin said, watching on the main screen of the Valkyrian’s bridge as the Shakak disappeared in the rainbow ring of a jump-point transition.

  His voice sounded a bit wistful to his own ears. Had he made the right decision? It would have been so simple to seize the ship, arrest Logan Conner and presented him to Lord Starkad as a gift, the ultimate bargaining tool to force concessions from that loud-mouthed clod Jaimie Brannigan. Aaron Starkad would have owed him, perhaps enough to write his own ticket.

  His gut had told him no, and he’d learned over the last thirty years to listen to his gut.

  “Are you certain the trackers won’t be detected?” he asked Laurent. It was nerves; he knew what she’d say.

  “Not unless they make a visual inspection of the hull,” she replied, nodding toward the blank spot in space where the tramp ship had been a moment before. “There are enough transponder drones to leave a trail for the next four jump-points.” She shrugged diffidently. “Though it may take a while to check every possible jump-line…”

  “Time well spent, Ruth,” he assured her.

  Captain Kessler was trying not to stare, trying not to look resentful and failing miserably at both. The woman didn’t care to have her cruiser hijacked by some flakey military intelligence spook and it couldn’t have been more obvious had she worn a sign around her neck. She’d like what came next even less.

  “Captain,” he told her, “have your navigator draw up a grid search up to four jump-points out.” He grinned at her discomfort. “I’m afraid we have a long trip ahead of us.”

  Donner Osceola didn’t spend much time in the ship’s gym if he could help it. Lyta kept bugging him to stay in better shape, telling him he spent too much time sitting around and drinking on his off hours, and his reply was always “that’s feature, not a bug, darlin’.”

  But the message on his ‘link from the kid, Jonathan, had asked to meet at the gym. Why the hell he wanted to meet now was the question. Every hour was a working hour on a starship, but he kept track of the sleep cycles of the crew—it was part of his job—and he knew the kid should have been sleeping by now, snuggled up with that hot pilot girlfriend of his.

  Osceola snorted. Least the kid had good taste.

  The gym was deserted, the lights turned off and this time not because he’d had his crew rip the circuits out for the benefit of the Starkad inspectors. The glow of chemical strip-lighting was pale and ghostly, throwing shadows across the padded walls and floor, but nothing moved inside.

  “Well, fuck,” he muttered, checking the time on his ‘link. If the kid was messing with him…

  Donner Osceola had felt the business end of a gun against his neck before, so he had no trouble figuring out what the cold, metallic pressure just beneath his right ear was. He froze in place, keeping his hands in front of him, fingers spread, careful not even to breath too deeply.

  “Hey now,” he said slowly and calmly, “let’s not do anything we’ll regret…”

  “Shut up.”

  He frowned. His first thought had been another traitor or a Starkad plant, his second a disgruntled crewmember and his last a jilted ex-lover. None of those thoughts had involved Jonathan Slaughter putting a gun to his head.

  “Kid, what the fuck are you…” He tried to jerk around, but a grip stronger than he thought a mech-jock would have jerked the back of his flight jacket and kept him in place, the barrel of the handgun jabbing painfully into the bone behind his ear.

  “I said shut up.”

  Osceola was many things: a gambler, a drunkard, a womanizer, a liar, a thief, a smuggler…

  Hold on. Where the fuck was this going? Oh, right…

  …but he wasn’t an idiot and he recognized a serious threat when he heard one. He shut up.

  “Osceola,” the kid went on, his voice low but as hard and unyielding as the muzzle of his large-caliber handgun, “this is your ship. I won’t tell you how to run it. If you want to hold your little kangaroo court in the cargo bay and chuck one of your own crew out the airlock, I don’t give a shit as long as it doesn’t interfere with my mission.”

  A harsh rasp of breath and the grip on Osceola’s collar tightened with a cracking of knuckles.

  “But you don’t involve my fucking brother in your little mind games. Terry might be working in your engine room, but he’s part of my company, part of my mission. Maybe you think you’re giving him closure, giving him a chance at revenge for his friends, toughening him up as a man, whatever…I don’t give a damn. It’s not your place. Maybe you’re a famous war hero or maybe you’re just a tramp freighter captain and a part-time criminal, but you don’t get to be his mentor, or his teacher or his father figure.”

  Jonathan spun him around, slamming him back against the bulkhead, the very, very large-caliber muzzle shoved directly between his eyes.

  “This is the only warning you get. You fuck up my mission, our contract is void, we part ways and you lose all that money and all that salvage. But you fuck with my family, I don’t care if I have to fight my way through your whole crew afterwards, I will put a bullet right through your forehead. Am I making myself clear?”

  He wanted to be angry. He wanted to shout the kid down, gun or no gun, wanted to tell him no one threatened him on his ship. He wanted to try to explain he hadn’t done it to play any games with Terry, he just…

  Shit.

  “I’m sorry, Jonathan,” he said instead.

  The muzzle of the gun lowered a few centimeters, the furl in the kid’s brow evidence that whatever he’d expected Osceola to say, an apology hadn’t been among the possibilities.

  “I mean it,” Osceola insisted, chewing on his lip. “I wasn’t trying to hurt your brother.” Hadn’t he called the boy his cousin? Just another bit of cover story, I guess. “I trusted Wihtgar, I liked him. I made a mistake and I was afraid I was going to make another if I decided what to do with him.” He shrugged, misery dragging down his face. “I let him choose because I thought he’d be more likely to do the right thing than me.”

  Jonathan Slaughter, or whatever the hell his name really was, lowered the pistol slowly, almost reluctantly, as if he didn’t want to give up on being furious. But the anger seemed to slide away from him in a sigh. He shoved the handgun back into its holster.

  “I believe you. It doesn’t make it right.”

  “No,” Osceola agreed. “I guess…I like the kid. He knows he doesn’t belong here, but he came along anyway.” He waved a hand helplessly. “I’ll let him alone, you have my word.” For what it’s worth.

  “No, you don’t have to do that.” Jonathan had relaxed, but now his expression hardened again. “But I’m in charg
e of this mission, and of my people. I need you to tell me you understand that.”

  “I do. You’re the boss.”

  The words were sour, but he had to say them. He had to mean them. Not for Jonathan Slaughter, but for Lyta. He’d screwed up a lot of things in his life, wasted a lot of chances. He wasn’t going to waste this one.

  12

  “You know,” Donner Osceola said, pausing to spit a stream of brown liquid into a flip-top bottle, “I have been sailing longer than Junior there,” he nodded at Jonathan, “has been alive, and I don’t think I have ever been anywhere this far from settled space.”

  Lyta scowled at him, gesturing at the spit bottle in a secured cupholder fitted to the captain’s acceleration couch.

  “When the hell did you start chewing again?” she demanded.

  “When you dragged me through fucking Starkad space on a spy mission,” he retorted, giving her the same stink-eye back, “and then out here past the middle of nowhere and right up to the very ragged edge of anywhere.” He leaned back in his chair and propped a leg up, draping his elbow across it. “Tends to put a man on edge.”

  “You bring that shit to bed you can find somewhere else to sleep,” she warned him.

  Jonathan tried to shut out their banter, staring at the flashing yellow line on the navigation display. It was a searchlight leading them on, through three jump-points and nearly a hundred light years past Starkad space, beyond the Periphery colonies, and well into the Shadow Zone, the inner reaches of the old Empire where kinetic-energy strikes and nuclear weapons had sterilized all living planets in the senseless and spiteful destruction of the Reconstruction Wars.

  “How many more systems?” he asked, speaking to a point somewhere between Kammy and Nance. The two were huddled together, trying to mesh the data from the Communications console with the navigation computer. “How many more before we reach the source of the signal?”

  You’d think it’d be easy, he grumbled to himself. We know how old it is, we know it was... traveling at the speed of light…