by Rick Partlow
She knew that face; she’d seen it when she’d studied the intelligence report on Wholesale Slaughter and cross-referenced it to Spartan military records. Major Lyta Randell. Decorated, twenty-year veteran of the Spartan Ranger Corps. Her file said she’d been disciplined for irregularities in her supply chain, suspicions of dealing with the black market for weapons and military equipment. She’d resigned her commission and signed on with Wholesale Slaughter almost immediately.
Of course, given what she knew about Wholesale Slaughter, the whole thing was probably a fiction and she’d simply been assigned to the mission by the Spartan Intelligence Command.
“Shit,” she hissed the word aloud. Wholesale Slaughter was here. Sparta was here. How the hell did they get here before the Sleipner?
She started walking back the way she’d come, a stride at first, then a jog, and finally an outright sprint, arms flailing, breath chuffing like an ancient steam engine. She kept whipping her head around, searching one way then the other for Lyta Randell, convinced the Ranger was going to spring at her from some shadowy corner and slit her throat. There was nothing. Some civilians finally noticed her as she came out onto the main street, watching her with wary suspicion, convinced she was the precursor to yet another swooping raid, another family pulled from their house.
She began to slow, out of breath, out of shape after so many months with no real exercise. Her stomach heaved and she thought she might throw up, but she kept moving, jogging then walking, then jogging again until she reached the raised sidewalk to the city hall/jail/police station. The Marine guards posted outside the front door stared at her from beneath the rims of their helmets, their visors raised to let in air on the dry, hot day, but neither said a word.
She threw open the front door and lurched inside, limping now, through the waiting room and into the government offices. Captain Gerhardt was sitting at a table they’d turned into a makeshift command post, surrounded by monitors with the feeds from the helmet cameras of her platoon and squad leaders, snapping orders and listening to reports as she micromanaged their movements.
“Where’s the Colonel?” Laurent gasped, still trying to get her breathing under control.
“Back in the holding cells,” Gerhardt snapped, barely looking at her. “Supervising interrogations.”
In one corner of the office, a pair of locals sat face to face in chairs pulled out of the waiting room, their hands flex-cuffed behind their back. They were a man and his wife, she was sure just by the way they looked at each other, older like most of the couples she’d seen here. Everyone above their teens and below their sixties was on Trinity, forced labor. The man was balding, his forehead perpetually sunburned, while the woman had grey streaks through her hair. They both looked deathly afraid.
A scream filtered back from the jail, a woman’s voice she thought, and the old couple flinched, sheer terror on their faces. The man was sweating, great, salty drops falling off his brows and into his face and he couldn’t wipe them away. Laurent felt an absurd urge to go wipe his face for him but she shook it off and moved slowly, hesitantly toward the heavy, metal door to the city constable’s office and the holding cells beyond.
A single Marine guard blocked her way, but relented and opened the door for her at Gerhardt’s impatient nod. Sweltering, oppressive heat met her as she crossed the threshold. The government offices were air conditioned, comfortably cool, but the constable’s offices and the cells beyond had been left to simmer as a psychological measure.
The Constabulary’s front desk was left empty, not even a Marine stationed there much less a local cop. The problems Revelation City had now weren’t going to be solved by a citizen’s complaint. The screaming again, louder this time, echoing down the hallway to the holding cells. She passed by the first pair, their access slots left open—probably so the occupants would be able to hear the screams even more clearly.
She paused at the first of them, peering through. Josephine Salvaggio squatted in a corner, seeming more annoyed than forlorn and not at all disturbed by the racket. If Grieg thought he could rattle this woman, Laurent had a feeling he was mistaken.
The next cell, though, held locals, another older couple, their clothes slightly more ornate and expensive than the ones in the waiting area had been. City government officials, she remembered from the briefing. The former Constable, pushed out when Salvaggio had arrived, a man named Kraft. He was borderline obese, with heavy jowls and sunken eyes and she wasn’t sure how he could ever have policed anything since he sure as hell couldn’t police his weight. His wife was his polar opposite, physically, a beanpole with a face narrow enough to cut cheese. What they had in common at the moment was fear. It wafted off of them like the smell of death.
There were more civilians in the cells across from them, but she stopped looking. She didn’t want to see them. At the end of the hall, on her right, the door was open. Grieg stood outside the threshold and watched, arms crossed, face impassive, a spectator at a chess tournament. She stepped up behind his right shoulder, wishing she didn’t have to look.
She started at the floor and worked her way up, trying to steel herself for what she’d see. The woman’s wrists and ankles were flex-cuffed to the legs of the metal-framed office chair and rivulets of blood ran down the backs of her hands from yanking against the bonds. Her clothes were well-made, perhaps fabricated instead of homespun, which put them a step up from most of the people who lived here. Her jacket was stained with vomitus and her face was so wracked with agony Laurent could barely discern her age at first. She was old, older than any of the civilians she’d encountered on the street, and Ruth Laurent vaguely recalled her as one of the major business owners in the town, one who’d done well under Salvaggio.
“Please,” she rasped at the woman standing before her. “I’ve told you everything I know…”
The Marine had stripped away her armor because of the heat, the sleeves of her fatigue top rolled up, but she still wore insulated gloves to handle the stun prod. The prongs at the end of the weapon sizzled with electricity at the touch of her thumb to the activation switch, and her square, hard face twisted into a leering grin when the captive flinched away from the crackling discharge. There was a stench in the air, something noxious, a mixture of fear and sweat and urine. The woman’s clothes were dark-colored, but Laurent figured she must have soiled herself during the interrogation.
Laurent realized she was breathing hard again, as if she were still sprinting across the street, but this time with empathy for the old woman rather than exertion. Surely, this woman must have done something, must be dangerous or valuable.
“Is she not talking?” she asked Grieg quietly, nearly forgetting why she’d run here in the first place.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said with a dismissive snort. “She screams nicely, and it’s working on the nerves of the others.” He motioned for the attention of the Marine with the stun wand, nodding curtly.
The Marine NCO jabbed viciously into the captive’s side and thumbed the trigger. Laurent glanced quickly away, but was unable to spare herself the image of the woman’s face spasming in uncontrolled agony, her body shuddering with the surge of an electric shock. She didn’t scream until the Marine let off the trigger and her muscles could work again, but when she did it was loud and painful and piercing.
Grieg glanced back at Laurent, mild curiosity in his eyes.
“Was there something you needed to tell me, Captain?” he wondered.
She shook her head, an unnatural, jerky motion, and turned to leave.
“No, sir,” she replied, heading back down the hallway, desperate to get back to the cool, fresh air of the main office. “Nothing important. It can wait.”
“You’re sure she’s in there?” Lyta asked, pulling her borrowed hat lower to hide her eyes as she scanned the city hall structure carefully. The three of them, her and two teenage girls, were tucked in behind the water tank beside the shut-down bar across the street, but she didn’t want to a
ttract any attention. Yet.
“Of course I’m sure,” the girl Chloe had introduced to her as Julia snapped in return, not at all intimidated by Lyta, which the older woman found refreshing. “She’s only been the boss of this town for the last three years, I know what she freaking looks like.”
“Lunch is in how long?” She was repeating that question as well, and she saw Julia tug at her long, dark hair and roll her eyes in frustration, but she answered anyway.
“About a half an hour.”
“I’m going in with you,” she declared. “Chloe, you said you could get ahold of a car?”
“It’s just an open-frame runabout,” the girl qualified. “But it’ll seat four people.” She chuckled. “Five if they really like each other.”
“I want you to pull it around behind the jail in exactly forty minutes.”
“What if the Starkad assholes see me?” Chloe demanded. “They’re not like Salvaggio’s idiots, they’re real soldiers.”
“Don’t worry. If they give you a hard time, take off and try circling back around. But I think they’ll be too distracted.” She waved in a dismissive gesture. “Go, now.”
Chloe made a face at her, but did as she was told. Julia eyed Lyta sidelong.
“You’re awfully bossy.”
“I get that a lot,” Lyta admitted. “Let’s go grab the food.”
The front entrance to the diner was boarded up, but Julia led her to a back door, knocking on it in a coded pattern. The man who opened the thin, whitewashed wooden door looked as haggard and weather-worn as the outside of the old building and he glared at Lyta with suspicion in his beady, black eyes.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked, barring the door with his body.
“This is Lyta, Uncle Geoffrey,” Julia said quickly. “She was brought in by the Starkad people from Riverton Farms along with her family, and they’re stuck here until the questioning is over.” She shrugged. “They told her to help me bring the food.”
“Sweet Mithra, they’re pulling folk from all the way out at Riverton now?” Geoffrey murmured, shaking his head. He stepped out of the way and gestured for them to come inside.
“They won’t stop till they’ve found who they’re looking for,” Lyta said, playing the part Julia and Chloe had come up with for her only a few minutes ago. “I’m just hoping they’ll believe my husband when he says we don’t know anything about it.”
“Well, here’s their damned food,” Geoffrey said, handing each of them a heavy tray full of covered dishes. All metal. Not much plastic on this world. “I spat in it,” he added, scowling deeply, “and I’d have pissed on it if they wouldn’t have tasted the difference.”
“It’s the thought that counts, Unc,” Julia said, laughing and giving him a kiss on the cheek before they left.
“He’s not going to get into trouble, is he?” Julia asked her in a whisper halfway across the street to the city hall facility. “For what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t think so. But you will. That’s why you’re coming in the car with us.”
Julia said nothing, but Lyta sensed nervousness from the girl for the first time. She and Chloe were full of a teenager’s conviction of their own immortality, but they lacked the overdose of testosterone males of their age were blessed with, so she was frightened. Sensibly so. Which was why teenaged boys historically made wonderful soldiers and lousy spies.
The tray of food was heavy, but not quite as heavy as the items weighing down the pockets of Lyta’s borrowed cloak. Would they be searched? If they were patted down or scanned, this could all fall apart. She was taking the risk because she knew this Grieg, by reputation if not personally, and knew he tended toward heavy-handed sloppiness. He had a Supremacy Marine’s disdain for civilians, particularly backwoods civilians.
It’ll work.
She repeated it like a mantra, the only prayer she was willing to make. Mithra might be on their side or He might not, but He worked in mysterious ways, and she’d been in the game too long to count on Him tipping the scales.
The guards at the front entrance checked the trays, went so far as to sniff at the food beneath the sheet metal covers, but barely spared the two of them a glance. Well, the male did, not a glance but a predictable leer at Julia. Starkad Marines had a reputation of their own when it came to civilians, particularly female ones. He let them through unmolested this time, though, and Lyta allowed herself the luxury of a relieved sigh when they were out of earshot of the guards.
Julia shot her a look, just a slight widening of her eyes, apparently alarmed that Lyta had been worried. Lyta nodded forward, giving her a stern frown in reply.
Get your head in the game, girl.
“We got your lunch,” Julia announced to the woman seated at a desk in the office.
The Marine captain didn’t look up, absorbed in directing troops via a multiscreen video display, just waved toward the door to the Constabulary. Lyta stifled the snort of disdain she felt for an officer who sat back in the headquarters building and micromanaged by remote control. Any company commander who tried that shit on her watch would be relieved in a hot minute.
The two Marines at the door laughed as they slung their rifles over their shoulders and took two of the plates from Julia’s tray, setting them down on one of the desks and pulling off their helmets, ready to dig into the eggs and chicken sandwiches.
“We gotta get in there,” Julia told them, nodding toward the door to the Constabulary. “We got food for the guards in there, too, and the prisoners.”
The girl’s voice was firm and steady and Lyta was impressed by her composure. The two Marines looked at each other and shrugged. The ones closest to the door, a man barely out of his teens with barely a stubble of dark hair left on his freshly-shaven head, sighed heavily with the bother of it all and slid off the edge of the desk.
“I don’t know if the Colonel is going to let them prisoners have any food,” he said, an undertone of malice in his laugh. “If you got any left, you bring it back out to us, okay sweet thing?”
He unlocked the heavy door with a magnetic key and pulled it open, waving invitingly before he hurried back to his breakfast plate. Lyta bit down on the feral grin fighting to make its way across her face, forcing her expression carefully neutral despite the wide-open door and the opportunities beyond. She slipped a hand into the left pocket of her cloak and wrapped her fingers around the lump of malleable putty, finding the one hard, plastic square in the center of the mass and mashing down the single button there. There was an unoccupied desk just inside the connecting door to the Constabulary, and she brushed by it casually, pushing the self-adhering mass up under the edge of it.
She would like to have been able to pretend this sort of thing didn’t wind her up as much as it had when she’d been a young soldier, but the trip-hammer beat of her heart put the lie to the conceit. The truth was, it wasn’t the risk to life and limb that quickened her pulse anymore as much as the risk to the mission from the choices she made. She was a Colonel now, and Mithra knew, when she’d enlisted as a teenager, she’d never envisioned having so much responsibility. The freedom of action it awarded her was tempered by the knowledge every single choice she made could kill her whole command or scuttle a mission and cost thousands or even tens of thousands of innocent people their lives.
Like now. She’d made this decision in the spur of the moment, trusting a gut instinct she’d relied on from private to colonel, not knowing if Logan would have made the same call but confident he’d trust her judgement. If she was wrong, the consequences would be horrific.
“Food for the guards and prisoners,” Julia announced just ahead of her.
Saul Grieg stood at the end of the hallway, speaking in low tones with a female Marine dressed in sweat-stained fatigues and black, insulated gloves. He was just as harshly ugly in real life as he was in the file photos and videos she’d seen of him, though more intimidating in person with a certain massive physical presence live that he’d la
cked in two dimensions.
Grieg looked away from the Marine, frowning impatiently, and nodded to the armored trooper posted at their end of the hall. The guard shifted his weapon down on its sling, getting the barrel out of the way as he pulled the magnetic key cards off his belt and began sorting through them, stepping over to the first cell on their left.
Julia caught her eye and nodded with the barest of motions, confirming this was Salvaggio’s cell. Neither she nor Chloe had understood the why of this, the reason getting her hands on Salvaggio was so important, and Lyta hadn’t taken the time to explain it, but they’d both accepted it was important. Lyta hoped they were right to trust her.
The ‘link was in her hand, concealed under the tray, pressed against it with her fingers, the forefinger hovering over the control. The second the key met the lock, she pushed the button and the charge blew.
She hadn’t been able to cover her ears—they would have seen it, and it was crucial they not suspect her. She’d had her mouth halfway open, but her ears still rang and the concussion threw her and Julia against the wall, the heat washing over her, making her skin prickle and the hairs on her arm disappear in tiny curls of smoke. She went with it, sliding down to the floor, covering her face, screaming in feigned terror and real pain. The food was splattered across the floor in smears of yellow and brown and bits of soggy biscuit, and the trays were bouncing soundlessly, their clanging drowned out by the hollow whistling that was all she could hear.
Grieg’s mouth was open and she presumed he was shouting, but no sound came out. He pointed, pulled a pistol from his belt and shoved the guard ahead of him, racing forward out into the main office of the Constabulary. He motioned back at the unarmored Marine with the gloves to stay where she was and she nodded her understanding. Then he was out the door to the cell block, pushing it closed behind him, and Lyta Randell was in motion.
