by Rick Partlow
He leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him on the table, grinning without humor.
“As for us fucking things up and losing to those pirate trash, well… losing implies you’re playing a game, fighting a battle. We are not here to play games and we’re not here to fight battles. We are going to exterminate these bastards like the vermin they are.”
Samantha Garrett didn’t reply for a moment, and Jonathan wondered if he’d overplayed his hand, bought too far into his new, bloodthirsty mercenary persona and left too much of Logan behind. He had to suppress a sigh of relief when Arachne’s Chief Councilor leaned forward and offered him a hand.
“In that case, Captain Slaughter,” she said, “I believe we have a deal.”
13
“We need to hit them where they live,” Jonathan declared. “We need to get to them before they head back here to finish the job.”
Terrin—damn it, it’s Terry now, I keep slipping up—watched his brother—No! Cousin by Mithra’s horns!—Jonathan, with an odd fascination. Back home, he’d only ever been around him away from the Academy, away from his military assignments, in a family atmosphere where what his father called “shop talk” was not allowed. He’d never thought of him as a leader, though he knew he was considered so by his military peers. He’d just been family.
Pacing back and forth in the Palacio’s second-largest conference room, Jonathan Slaughter seemed a man possessed, consumed with the task of getting this job done. Terry wondered if it was just to further the aims of their mission or maybe it had more to do with the woman sitting at the table two seats down from him.
She was pretty, from just a pure external, physical point of view. Not his type, too tall and athletic and intimidating, but he could see the attraction. Sometimes she seemed an engaging, pleasant, good-humored person and sometimes there was a hardened edge to her personality, though he didn’t know her well enough to tell if it had been there all along or had grown like a shell after what had happened to her on Ramman. Was it the engaging, pretty woman who attracted Logan—Jonathan!—or was it the hard edge, the raw anger?
“I’m not so sure,” Lyta Randell said, shaking her head.
She was someone else he’d known forever but rarely saw in action. She’d been the fun-loving aunt who would take him and his—he rolled his eyes this time and forced the word into his thoughts—cousin for ice cream or out to chase the dogs around the park when things were bad at home, when his father was in a dark mood, especially just after Mother had died. He’d entertained the notion, just recently, that perhaps she and Father had been involved back then, that he’d turned to her for warmth and a shoulder to cry on. He couldn’t quite make himself believe it. About her. Father, yes.
“You don’t trust that intelligence ‘everybody knows’ about the pirate base?” Osceola asked. The captain was lounging across a hand-carved wooden chair, his leg hanging over the arm rest, casual and irreverent no matter what the setting. Terry couldn’t help but like the man, for all he was a bit oily and shady, with the vibe of a used-flyer salesman.
“The intel is probably accurate,” Lyta acknowledged, shrugging. She wasn’t pacing, but Terry thought she seemed as agitated as Jonathan, in her own way. “You saw the video—this Captain Magnus character doesn’t seem the type to go in for counter-intelligence. Besides, he doesn’t think he has anything to worry about. The planetary government here doesn’t have so much as an armed shuttle to throw at him.”
“Then what is it?” Jonathan wanted to know. “You think we should just sit here and wait for him?”
“He’s coming here anyway, isn’t he?” Terry pointed out. Five sets of eyes turned to him and he shrank in on himself a bit. He felt as out of place here as he had the one year he’d tried out for the baseball team. “I mean, that’s what he told them.”
“He’s got a point,” Katy said, technically the most junior officer present, but not shy at all about speaking out. “We’d have more time to set up a defense.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Osceola stated, likely more direct than the others would have been. “Guys like this Magnus, they’re not smart, but they’re clever. They have a sense for threats, it’s how they keep from getting skragged by their own people. They’re slippery, and they can feel a trap. We build up defenses around Piraeus, they’ll spot it, no matter how careful we are.”
“If they run,” Terry asked, frowning in confusion, “isn’t that just as good?”
Jonathan sighed in obvious frustration and Terry wasn’t sure if it was with him or with the argument. He moved to his chair—well, theoretically his, he hadn’t sat in it once the whole meeting—and grabbed the back of it with a grip so tight, Terry thought he wanted to break it into pieces.
“No,” he ground out, not a patient type at the best of times. “If he runs, he can wait us out. He knows mercenaries won’t stay here indefinitely, that it’s too expensive. He’ll go hit someone else and come back here at his leisure, and he’ll kill everyone when he does come back, just to make a fucking point.” He spun on Lyta, his glare almost accusatory. “But doesn’t that mean we have to take the fight to him?”
“You’re in command,” she said, and her words seemed to Terry to be chosen very carefully, “and I’ll support whatever decision you make. But if you want my opinion, our best bet is to get him so riled up, he makes a mistake and comes in here blind with rage.”
“What?” Osceola asked, laughing sharply. “You gonna give him a bad review on the Online Bandit Registry?”
Lyta didn’t crack a smile.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit more drastic than that.” Her face was grim, her voice doubly so. “None of you are going to like it.” She met Terry’s eyes, almost seeming apologetic. “Especially you.”
“I don’t see the point,” Acosta said again. “Their anti-missile defenses are going to shoot this thing down before it gets within twenty kilometers of their base.”
Katy rolled her eyes and tried not to lose her temper. She found herself doing it a lot around Acosta and she wondered if maybe she could convince the other shuttle crew to trade co-pilots with her before she killed the man.
“That is the point,” Terry said from behind them, his voice sullen and resentful. And yet he came along. He could have stayed on the Shakak.
It was easier for her to think of him as Terry than it was to think of Logan as “Jonathan.” Maybe because she hadn’t known him as well, or maybe because he seemed more of a “Terry.”
Jonathan had tried to argue him into staying on the ship, back at the jump-point where it was fairly safe, but Terry had insisted he needed to be on the shuttle in case there was a problem with the delivery vehicle. “Delivery vehicle” was an obscenely workaday euphemism for a missile, something a civilian would come up with to assuage his guilt for designing it.
I don’t know why he should feel guilty. “Jonathan” or Logan or whatever you wanted to call him, had it right. Bandits were vermin and they should be exterminated, not treated like lawful combatants in an honorable war.
She chuckled at how the term would horrify her parents: “honorable war.” She could hear her father’s dismayed clucking, his face pinched in righteous indignation as he lectured her about how no war was honorable, it was just useless, pointless slaughter. She wondered if he would have said the same thing if he’d been on the Atlas, if he’d seen the depths to which humanity could sink.
She imagined a targeting reticle floating over the pearl-blue world ahead of them and tried to feel guilty. She couldn’t.
“Two minutes to firing range,” Acosta said, finally making himself useful. “They’ll have spotted us by now,” he added, as if in an effort to make up for it. “Hope they don’t have patrol shuttles out here.”
“I hope they do,” she contradicted him, eyes still fixed on the moon. “Then I get to kill them.”
She could feel Terry’s stare; his face horrified the way her father’s would have been.
“Anyway, there’s n
othing coming,” she elaborated, waving a hand at the sensors. It felt strange burning along at one gravity as if it were a leisurely stroll instead of a combat patrol. “We’re just one shuttle. We can’t be carrying anything that would hurt them.”
The gas giant was behind them, over the starboard wing of the shuttle, and the forward view made the water moon of Clew Bay seem so isolated and vulnerable, so harmless. It was an illusion. There were spy satellites, little black spots against the blue oceans, warning drones scattered in various orbits around the gas giant and its other moons, and, somewhere out there, the bandit’s ship. They’d keep it hidden, powered down as much as possible and stuck in some hard-to-detect orbit probably around one of the other large satellites.
She wondered if the bandits would bother to hail them or just wait for them to get close enough for a railgun shot. No legitimate military would use railguns in an inhabited system, but these bastards were pretty far from legitimate. She waited, one eye on the tactical display, one on the main screen, but only silence greeted her.
“Prep the missile,” she told Acosta.
She’d let him do it, but she watched from the corner of her eye, just to be sure. The process was nearly fool-proof, but fools were so ingenious…
“This is a living planet,” Terry reminded her, pain and doubt in his voice. “Even if this works just the way we think, we’re still committing a war crime.”
“This isn’t a war.”
She saw the range display counter reach zero and her hand went to the physical switch Terry and the shuttle techs had rigged up on the central weapons console, large and awkward and obvious, a silver lever covered by a red, plastic flip cover. She tried to think of something momentous to say, but nothing came to mind. She thumbed the cover open and snapped the lever forward.
“Launching.”
A bang vibrated through the shuttle’s fuselage, the concussion of explosive bolts blowing along the bird’s belly, kicking free a missile as long as the shuttle itself. It would drift away a few hundred meters before the main engine ignited but they should see it within ten seconds or so.
“There it is,” Acosta pointed at the drive flare lighting up on the main view screen, as if they couldn’t all already see it.
They were still accelerating at one gravity, but it left them behind as if they were already braking, boosting at twenty g’s, streaking out against the darkness. She cut thrust to the shuttle’s engine and free-fall left them drifting against their harnesses. Terry made a quiet retching sound behind her; she hoped to hell he’d remembered to take his motion-sickness meds, because there was nothing worse than globules of vomit floating around a cockpit.
She gently nudged the control yoke, a steady push instead of the jerky, hesitant maneuvers a lot of even well-trained Navy pilots resorted to in space flight on small birds like this. Instead of jolts and banging hammer blows, the steering jets were a faint rumble, a gentle push until she let up and gave a slight correction to keep them aligned one-hundred-eighty degrees from their course of travel.
“Secure for heavy boost,” she warned, pausing for a beat before she opened the throttle.
Now this was a combat maneuver. Six gravities, burning for endless minutes until you thought you’d always weighed five hundred plus kilograms and always would. The main screen was showing the view from the nose camera, since the rear would be washed out by the plasma flare of the drive, but she was watching the tactical display. It had a laser link to the missile’s telemetry, guiding it in via the sensor readings from the warhead, and a corner of the display showed the view from the nosecone camera. The ocean moon filled the screen, the island chains stretching across the southern hemisphere visible now, green and lush.
Clew Bay was pretty, from a distance, though she didn’t imagine it would be a pleasant place to live, long-term. The files Arachne had shown them said the background radiation from the gas giant wouldn’t be lethal immediately, but it would eventually start causing cancer without energy shielding, which bandits wouldn’t have, and all that beautiful blue water was filled with radioactive minerals. More cancer. The sea life had been engineered to survive the exposure, and the Jeuta could probably live there—maybe it had been intended for their use when the Empire had terraformed it, but if so, they hadn’t stuck around after their uprising.
Maybe the Jeuta just don’t go for surfing.
She couldn’t feel the difference in the thrust, but a quick glimpse at the displays showed they’d burned off their momentum and were accelerating back toward the jump-point. You couldn’t trust your body in microgravity, which was why even veteran pilots preferred flying in atmosphere. She dialed back the thrust, bringing the acceleration down to a more-comfortable one gravity. Breath rushed out in sighs of relief from Acosta and Terry and she fought back a sneer. Boost had never bothered her, but she tried to have sympathy for other people less gifted. It was hard.
“They’ll be firing anti-missile defenses soon,” Acosta said.
“It’s got enough shielding and enough maneuvering fuel to get through the first wave,” she told him.
Her words might have been prophetic, or maybe she’d just been timing the flight instinctively; fireflies swarmed upward from the island, rockets from the anti-missile battery rising into the upper atmosphere. They’d be radar guided, but they’d planned for that. The space in front of the missile seemed to shimmer as clouds of electromagnetically-charged chaff erupted from canisters strapped to the warhead, scattering the radar signal and sending the rockets pinwheeling off out of control.
The view from the camera began to shake, thickening atmosphere buffeting the warhead. The readouts showed her the boost stage of the missile had fallen away and it was running on gravity and maneuvering thrusters now, coming down directly over the spot where thermal sensors had pinpointed the bandit’s settlement.
Not too much longer now.
Prescience again, or was it just training?
The first coil-gun round missed, fooled by the radar jamming, but it wasn’t alone. Nickel-iron slugs were cheap and easily-fabricated, and fusion energy was just as cheaply obtained and they sprayed the anti-missile turret fire in negligent waves of metal like an arrow-storm in a battle from ancient Earth. The warhead was only a few kilometers up now, but it would be destroyed long before it reached the ground.
It didn’t need to.
The picture from the missile’s camera disappeared, as did the telemetry, long before the bandit jamming should have killed it. The view from one of the shuttle’s rear-facing external cameras replaced it, showing a second star rising on the day side of the moon, a pinpoint of brightness spreading slightly like a flower blooming.
She tried to picture the detonation from the ground, the way the bandits would have seen it. Those who’d been looking straight at it would likely never see anything again unless they found a good medical lab somewhere—there surely wouldn’t be one there. The blast itself wouldn’t do much to the base, would barely cause the background radiation to rise in the long run when measured across the whole planet. On that island chain though, there would be a noticeable rise in radiation levels, as well as an electromagnetic pulse which could fry unshielded electronics.
It wasn’t the electronics they’d been aiming to disrupt, though.
“Do you think anyone died?” Terry’s voice sounded agonized.
She turned in her seat, almost ready to snap at him but tamped down the impulse at the expression on his face. He was a scientist, not a soldier. They’d made him build them a nuclear warhead and delivery vehicle from spare parts, since nukes weren’t something even a civilian ship would be allowed to have, even one carrying around a mercenary unit. He’d probably spent his whole life being taught of the evils of nuclear weapons, how they’d been used by the Jeuta to sterilize Imperial worlds in revenge, how they’d ended the Golden Age and ravaged Earth.
“No,” she said, voice soft and carefully neutral. He was smart; if he thought she was just trying to
comfort him, he wouldn’t believe her. “The detonation was too high. All it’ll do is make them very, very angry.” She grinned, lips skinning back from her teeth in a feral expression. “And angry people make mistakes.”
14
Magnus Heinarson didn’t sweat. Getting burned over sixty percent of your body would do that to you. Some nights he woke up gasping for air, reliving the unspeakable agony over and over, watching the timbers of the rough-hewn house collapse around him and his wife and their little girl. He’d scream the way she’d screamed, and thrash about, but he wouldn’t sweat. He couldn’t.
He never knew if it was a Starkad or a Spartan missile that ended the night in fire, but it was Spartan troops who found him, Spartan field medics who’d treated him… Spartan surgeons who’d cut away what couldn’t be saved and replaced it with bionics. Theirs had been cheap plastic, nothing more than prosthetics; he’d paid for the overpowered metalwork himself, later, after he’d begun to exact his revenge in lives and treasure. He’d paid for the reinforcement of his spine and shoulders and hips he needed to ensure the new cybernetic limbs wouldn’t rip themselves right out of his body the first time he used them, paid for the isotope pack to be installed to power them, paid for the security to watch over him while he was in recovery, to make sure none of his new enemies took advantage of his weakened state.
And after, he’d never paid again. He’d made them pay, Starkad, Sparta, Shang, Modi, and Mbeki, all of them for bringing their fights to his world, to all the fringe worlds and all the colonists who had the bad luck to make their homes in disputed systems. He’d never looked back, never regretted an instant of it. Oh, sometimes things got too hot and you had to pull back from raiding the Dominions, and then, well, what was a man to do? His people had to eat. It wasn’t as if he enjoyed stealing from independent worlds, which was why he always gave them the chance to pay up without getting hurt.