by Nick Cole
“Because he shot it. It’s dead. To him. What a tool. That ain’t management. Just ignore the fact that it’s still out there moaning and bellowing. ’Do you hear anything, everyone?’ asked the Monarch. None of them did even though I could, Orion.
“So I stalk off into the night, which I won’t lie to you is pretty dangerous after dark up there in the basin, and I find Stink and finish him off. Used these rounds that’ll do the trick. Did it from five meters away because he was thrashing around so badly in the lotus grass. Wanted to make sure I put Ol’ Stink out of the misery that had been his last hours. Then I went back and listened to them drink and shoot stuff all night long, half hoping they’d cause a stampede and kill us all. But they didn’t. Three days later I got ’em back to the outfitters stockade and they left in a big expensive dropship. Gold of course. Turned around to my pa and told him I was done. Couldn’t do it anymore. To his credit he understood and just let me go. Now that I think about it there was a heartbreak there too. His, Pa. And this local girl… Sue. Her… we were gonna get married eventually though no one had said anything. We just both knew it. Everyone did. She and her family were guides too. Specialized in river snakes down in Sukoy Shallows. Beautiful things. Deadly poisonous though and about thirty feet long. They have these eggs that are like the biggest most luminescent pearls you’ve ever seen. Last I heard, her and my cousin got married after my pa died. But we were on Blue by then, and they’d already had kids that were grown.
“Time’s funny, Orion… you ever notice all the people you once knew, from your home world, the one you came from, they’re always young in your head? Forever. Even though with sub-light they could be anywhere from twenty to two hundred years old and long dead. In my mind Sue is still nineteen and good lookin’ in a pair of tight blue jeans. She had long, straight blond hair. Never wore makeup, y’know. Saw a dancer on Siligo when we hit the bazaar there that reminded me of her when we were on leave. Went back to that place and blew all my money on her there until I was flat broke. Thought about hiring for the night, but that felt wrong, I guess. So we just listened to the music in the club and I paid her to just stay and talk to me. She wasn’t Sue, but… y’know how it is… close enough, right Orion?”
I knew.
I remember you, estrangier.
“So that’s my story,” Boom said. “Funny, I never thought it was one, Orion. But I guess I had one all along and I didn’t know it.”
The Kid finds the tarp in the Mule and we roll Boom Boom up after we lay the tarp out on the ground. I take his rifle and ammunition because I have a feeling we’ll need it where we’re going. We roll him up and strap him to the back deck of the Mule.
“Ya’z all can bury him out here, Little King,” hisses Stinkeye, who’s woken from his coma. He stands up in the Mule where all this has been going on, hitting the totem flask by which the company measures its fate.
Sometimes I wonder if he knows that.
“It’s a good place,” continues the ragged old Voodoo operator. “I wouldna mind bein’ left here for a thousand years. Nice place to wait out the heat death of the whole mess…”
Then he wandered off and it was just me and the Kid. I looked at the wrapped bundle that was our brother and then looked up at our newest recruit. Surprised the Kid had survived where so many had not in the last forty-eight hours.
I wondered if the company would make it. We were close to meeting a bad ending. Close to there being nothing left of us. But then I knew, somehow, some way, it would. Even if there was just one of us left on the other side of this dog of a contract. The company would go on and I hoped it wouldn’t be me. Because maybe if it was, then maybe the company wouldn’t. And it couldn’t be Amarcus because he’d ruin it all and turn us into petty tyrants on some world. And then all our deaths would have been in vain.
Regardless of what John Strange wanted or not.
“Company tradition is,” I said to the Kid who’d helped me with Boom Boom as we stood there, “is you can tell the company log keeper your story before you die. Who you were, before you joined. Confess your sins. Make a last request. Whatever. And the log keeper puts it all down without judgment. You don’t have to, Kid. But you can. Whenever you want. I’ll listen and get it in, okay?”
Then I put my hand on Boom Boom one last time and said goodbye to the guy who taught me how to do reloads. I whispered something. But I can’t remember what it was as I put this down. There were too many dead lately.
“It’s best to do it before…” I said to the Kid. “You know.”
He looked at me and adjusted his sling. Like he felt some shadow pass in front of the sun of this world.
“I don’t have one, Sar’nt,” he lied. Like they all do. Even if they don’t know it yet.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Three hours later we were looking down from a ridgeline of broken red rock as the bright sun of this world beat down on us. The morning cold had faded to intense heat as our journey took us lower and lower into the hell-bowl of the eastern Wastes.
We had a problem in our way, and we needed to solve for escape.
From here atop the ridge, you could still look back and see the dim image of the massive Battle Spire hovering over the remains of the capital. Beneath it, storm fronts of black smoke drifted over the capital city and out to sea, mixing with high white boiling cumulus clouds and a golden miasma of sunlight, plus the vent-boil off many of the starships now streaking in to begin to plunder this world on behalf of the Monarchs.
“The bank ship will be coming in soon. After that, if the locals put up any more resistance, they’ll go to endgame.” The tall and beautiful Monarch sat next to me while Punch went upslope to the top of the ridge to scout a chokepoint we needed to get through. Her prediction sent a cold chill down my spine. Endgame meant a lifeless rotting shell of a fractured world with the remaining survivors desperately fighting for the little that was left. It meant melted cities and vast stretches of burning desert where there had once been fields and rivers. It meant being marked as a no-go hazard on the stellar charts. It meant strangulation and slow endless death until there was nothing but the bones of everything that no one ever knew.
The rogue Monarch and the rest of us waited down by the Mules. Some eating. Some smoking. Stinkeye moaning and hunched over, drinking from his hip flask more than usual. He was suffering for sure. That trick he’d pulled back at three-roads junction had done a number on him like I’d never seen before.
To hear him tell it, he was dying.
I’d asked him if there was anything I could do for him, but he just waved me away like he was going to be violently sick, muttering curses as promises against those present, and against some I’d never heard of, but who he wanted dead even more.
But that was Stinkeye. He always did that. Someone was always gonna pay for the wrongs and injustices done to him since time immemorial. He assured retributive death on others like some people eat popcorn. By the handful.
So it was honestly hard to tell if he was really sick and dying, or just drunk and Stinkeye.
“Endgame?” I asked her as we both stood there watching the enormous ship. From here it was beautiful, but it left a cold in your bones you knew even a hot bath couldn’t ever shake. I hadn’t had one of those in nine months. A hot bath. If we got back to the Spider, I’d hit the saunas in the gym on the upper crew decks and stay there for a week just to get the blood and dust of this world, and burnt cordite, out of my skin. And the cold out of my bones from having ever come so close to the Ultras.
Remember, surviving the experience was a privilege held by few in the galaxy. And it was not an experience I’d ever want to repeat. We’d passed their handiwork a few times while threading Highway Eighty-Eight, the main artery out into the desert cities. Convoys of refugees taken out by Monarch airstrikes or Ultra close-air teams out in hunting packs. Flames still guttering in burned-out and blackened vehicles ravaged by Mo
narch door gunners, the charred bodies within forever screaming silently in the clear desert morning.
At one point, off the main road, we found where an Ultra executioner team, their version of special operators, had taken out a Resistance armored cav unit attempting to get out into the desert and away from formal combat operations. We drove through burned out a-grav fast tracks and the remains of cycle scouts. There’d been a big ambush and a firefight. Lots of small arms and explosives in every direction. The wounded survivors had been double-tap-stabbed all along the carnage we had to weave through just to follow the chalky desert trail littered and splattered with dried blood.
“Estimating all this took place less than eight hours ago,” said Hauser stoically. “We should be careful.”
“Really, Captain Obvious,” snorted Choker. “I was pretty sure we’d hit easy street and these psychopaths had somehow tired of killing everyone and were just gonna let us go now.”
Silence and the sound of the Mules’ engines for a moment.
Hauser the combat cyborg. “Then that would be unwise of you to arrive at such a conclusion, Sergeant Choker. We are still—”
“I know. I was being sarcastic, Hauser. We’re probably gonna die. I get it. Tell the orphanage I went out like a man.”
When Punch suggested we try to scavenge for more ammo, something we weren’t great on, or even extra fuel cells since the lead Mule was bleeding energy by the hour, Hauser stopped us.
“Not advisable at this time. Standard executioner protocols indicate ambushes are to be booby-trapped with high explosives and plasma mines during the after-action phase of neutralization of all enemy combat units. They excel at these types of operations. They’re moving fast to find more units to terminate now. This tactic creates a second ambush as probability indicates other units will search a terminated unit.”
I waved us on, and we weaved through the twisted wreckage sculptures in charred black. I was glad to be off the road and back out in the desert deeps after that. That cav unit had been too close to the Eighty-Eight, and that’s how they’d gotten themselves tracked and ambushed. Yeah, I told myself. They’d brought that on themselves. Now I could hyperventilate easier.
Two hours later we were looking at one last chokepoint on the Eighty-Eight to cross and then we’d head southeast along old smuggler trails to reach our rally point near the Crash.
Punch came downslope with the Kid and Choker to where we’d parked in the shadows of low and jaded mountains. Punch had Boom Boom’s rifle. He’d been using its advanced target acquisition features to download intel into the sand table flexy Reaper used for planning.
“This is what we got, boss.” He unrolled the digital mapping tool and spread it out on the hood of the shot-up Mule, tearing off a ragged piece of fibre-armor that had reacted with a micro-explosive to redirect incoming fire. The piece interfered with laying the map flat so we could all study it.
“That Reaper executioner team is down there all right. I’d bet your life on it. They got the checkpoint on the other side of the bridge all secured and everything. We ain’t gettin’ through no how, no way, boss. That is unless you’re up for shooting our way through, and I ain’t Hauser with the facts and figures processor he got… probability and statistics hurts my head and makes me less optimistic. But I don’t rate our chances of success none too good if we try to run and gun.”
I studied the map. I sensed the beautiful Monarch hovering over me, studying it too. She smelled nice in the dry desert air.
What I was looking at on the sand table flexy was a tactical layout of the terrain on the other side of the broken volcanic rock ridge we were hiding behind. All the terrain out here was steadily dropping down to an elevation of about four thousand feet below sea level at its lowest point way out there. But that would come much later on as we got nearer to the Crash site. Right now, we were on a high shelf deep in the Wastes looking at what the map called the Apocalypse Descent. A steady drop in the land bisected by a deep fissure that ran for several hundred miles. It was called, hilariously enough, the Crack of Doom.
Fun times, huh? Some scout had a real sense of humor naming features on this dog of a world. Or at least I assumed it was a scout. If I ever became one, a scout, I was gonna think up nice names that reflected what was really there. Even for horrible places. Because it’s horrible either way, but at least the name is pleasant. Might as well enjoy yourself even if it’s your funeral. Or at least that’s my reasoning.
Anyway, just beyond the ridge, downslope from our position, the highway came to a huge span that bridged the Crack of Doom fissure. This was one of three highways where crossing the fissure that ran north and south, roughly, was possible in land vehicles. The bridge, like the fantastically wide highway, was beautiful and elegant as it threw itself across the ragged fissure in the land. The fall below was deep—at least two miles according to some of the elevation markers—and the bridge was just under three thousand meters long. On the far side, where Punch, using Boom Boom’s rifle, had tagged the execution team, was a small settlement that had grown up around the desert marshal’s station that watched over the bridge and used it as a base of operations in this area to run interdiction against smugglers and scavengers working the Crash Wastes for forbidden alien tech.
“See here…” Punch moved in and expanded the map around the settlement. “They’ve got a sniper in the control tower. I tagged him. I don’t know where the rest are, but if I was running the defense, I’d have myself here with assaulters and support from these buildings.”
He pointed to two structures that made sense for these elements to operate from. He shifted the map with the hand that had lost a finger in the terminal yesterday. I saw where he’d cut that finger off his worn assault glove and the thermaplast showed underneath. Enough money and he could have the finger re-grown. If we got off this world alive and reached a planet with that tech capability in the medical sciences. Stranger things have happened. Some of the platoon had even bet against themselves on the outcome because that was the easy money, and you could wager hard because how was anyone gonna collect if you were dead?
“So here’s what they’re doing…” continued my assistant squad leader.
I didn’t need to be told what the Ultras were doing. I’ve seen massacres before. And yeah, I’ve even participated in them. That’s war sometimes. I could see the bodies the flexy was showing. But Punch told the rest of us anyway. Because that was the situation.
“They’re killing anyone who approaches the checkpoint from across the bridge. Most likely they’ve disguised themselves as desert marshals or are running holograms until whoever it is gets close enough for them to open up and capture the survivors. Then they either drive the vehicles off into the canyon or take them back to this lot behind the settlement. And those are…” Punch pointed toward the bodies stacked in the shade of a small garage near the back lot showing on the flexy’s feed. “…what they are.”
I looked at the Monarch.
“Why?”
As in, why are they doing this. And also, why is a thing like this even ever done. Whoever these people had been before they became bodies stacked like pallets, they were just trying to escape with their lives. Point made. The Monarchs ruled the galaxy. Got it already. They rule everything and always will. There was nowhere you could go that the boot of the Ultra couldn’t be felt next to your carotid artery. Got it. Why the senseless slaughter then, like what the flexy was showing me?
She just watched me with those cool blue eyes and seemed to read every unholy thought inside my head. Anger, and all the rest of it. Even the bewilderment. But her voice, when she spoke, was gentle, and I found myself letting go of a breath I’d been holding for longer than I could remember. Longer than I’d admit to.
“We called them squirters when I worked with the executioner teams. We would set up these chokepoints along identified escape arteries to catch high-value
targets for interrogation and intel development. There’s most likely an executioner Inquisitor operating in the garage with a mobile cyber-rack. So we know, when we catch the senior and mid-level military officers who are out in front of the escaping units and trying to save their skins by being first off-world, we know a variety of information ranging from underground networks, doomsday plans, off-world bank accounts they’ve skimmed from war funds, and even actual valuable intel regarding the troops they’ve abandoned. It may seem like slaughter, and it is, but the ones this far in front of the general exodus, they aren’t the angels their stacked bodies might paint them to be.”
She stepped back.
The big problem facing us was crossing that bridge undetected. And that didn’t look possible. Not with an Ultra sniper in an elevated position watching the approach along the bridge. Coming in by land vehicle, there was absolutely no chance of surprise attack. Even a drop might have trouble if we wanted to come in, fast-rope all over the settlement, and shoot it out with an Ultra executioner team. Which we didn’t. Ultras were known to have excellent man-portable anti-air cap.
And then there was the problem of shooting it out in the settlement itself. There was a main street and a few buildings. Not a lot of cover and most likely all of it was set up to their advantage. We didn’t have the numbers for a direct assault. I studied the layout. Probably a bar and a general store of some type for desert traders. A couple of living spaces, a garage and refueling station. The refill would be great for the Mule if we had the time. But to stick around and make that happen under fire from a high-speed team of some of the best the Ultra war machine could put together was gonna get real lethal, real fast, for Reaper.
To be honest, blasting our way through at high speed and trying to bypass the fight was gonna shorten our longevity too. Mines. Traversing fire. It’d be about ten seconds at eighty miles an hour of what hell looks like.
So we couldn’t get close without getting bloody.