Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

“Good question,” he said, and without even pretending to go through her, he got on his throat mic.

  The throat mics replied primarily on subvocalizations, so Michi couldn’t hear more than a murmur, but from lip-reading, she could see him trying to raise the gun teams. He gave up and looked to Michi, shaking his head.

  “Damn pieces of shit probably broke down,” he said. “I told Jessep to get the KU-300’s from Gentry. But he wanted to save a few credits, and look now. Well, it is what it is, and we may not have any supporting arms.”

  “Do we need them?” Michi asked.

  She swore Hannrahan was about to roll his eyes, but he answered, “No, we don’t need them. But casualties will be higher without them.

  The head count came back to Michi then. Only 348 men and women had made it back to the depression that protected them now. Michi gulped. That mean 59 people had not made it. They were just over the lip of the road bed, wounded or dead.

  A sudden thought hit her. “Will they be shooting our wounded? They’re still firing!”

  “Wouldn’t put it past the bastards,” Hannrahan conceded.

  “Well, shouldn’t we do something?” she asked with concern.

  “Do what? Get more people hit? That’s a kill zone there, just like we knew it would be. Let our river team get in before we sacrifice anyone else.”

  Michi looked at her watch, then asked, “But shouldn’t they already be assaulting?”

  Hannrahan looked at his. “Yeah, they should. But walking on a river bottom can be tricky. You can’t see anything, so it’d be easy to get turned around,” he said.

  He put his hand to his throat mic, though, and contacted someone. Michi wasn’t even upset anymore about him bypassing her. She just wanted answers.

  “Uh, we’ve got some garbled messages from the breaching team. Command is trying to find out what’s going on, and they’ll get back to us in a moment.”

  “But they should have gotten in at least to the algae farm, right? The Marines won’t attack in there.”

  “No plan lasts beyond the first shot in a battle. We have to be ready to improvise, and I’m guessing we’ll be pulling back about now,” he said.

  “Pull back? But what about the Marines?” she protested.

  “The fucking Marines are why we might have to pull back. If the breaching team failed, we can’t conduct a frontal attack.”

  “Don’t give me can’t, colonel!” Michi screamed at him. “We’ve got almost 2,000 soldiers who came here to win, not to slink away with their tails between their legs! And if you don’t have the balls to take the Marines on, I sure do!”

  She stood up, ignoring the round impacting on the edge of the roadbed and showering the two of them with dirt.

  On the far south side of her line, firing broke out. She slowly turned to look and saw a dozen or so combat-suited Marines emerge from the river, firing their weapons at her soldiers. She could see some of her men and women firing back, but only those at the very end of the line could fire without fear of hitting the others.

  “Well, colonel, do you have any balls?” she asked before turning and starting to run down the line towards the fight.

  “Follow me!” she screamed, her anger mounting. She would crush the Marines, then focus on the refinery.

  Alongside her, soldiers were jumping up and running, a mass of unstoppable humanity. More of her men and women started pouring out of the forest to join them. There had to be 600 or more of them rushing down the 40-meter-wide open area between the road and the edge of the forest.

  Something hit her in the arm, knocking the rifle out of her hand and almost spinning her around, but she regained her feet and continued to run. Soldiers were falling around her, but she led the charge. They would close with and destroy the enemy. It was their destiny!

  Suddenly, Michi was lifted into the air, heat and sound enveloping her. The sky, her soldiers, and the road rotated several times in her vision before the ground filled it one last time as she slammed down, and all went dark.

  Chapter 32

  A burst of pain forced its way into Michi’s consciousness, pulling her from the depths to which she had descended. She struggled to make sense of her world, and another blow almost knocked her back into nothingness.

  “Hey, the bitch’s back with us,” a voice registered.

  Michi opened her eyes. A jack had her by the collar having pulled her to a sitting position. His arm was cocked back to hit her across the face again. She knew she wasn’t dead. She hurt too much for that. The smell of blood, sweat, and shit was too strong for that. Michi might be in hell, but she wasn’t dead.

  “She doesn’t look so tough now, does she?” another jack said as he came up to stare at her.

  Michi focused on the second jack’s bulging belly, which pulled open his shirt, leaving gaps between the buttons. She realized the guy’s clothing didn’t matter, but she needed an anchor on which to focus in an attempt to gather her thoughts.

  “What . . . what happened?” she managed to get out.

  “Ha! What happened? Derrick, she wants to know what happened!” the first jack said, the one who had slapped her face.

  The second one stepped forward, and with a gloating smile creasing his face, said, “Well, Miss Red Athena, what happen was that you tugged on superman’s cape and got your asses handed to you. The current count is that over 1,300 of you fucking rebels were killed, another 600 captured.

  “What, you thought you might actually win?” he asked as he saw her jerk at the news. “You never had no chance. We had loyal people who infiltrated your vaunted NIP. We knew everything you were going to do. We wanted you to attack, in fact, once we had the Marines here. That way we could get you out in the open and stomp on you like cockroaches. Hell, with all those who got zeroed, you’re lucky to even be alive.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” the first jack said with an evil laugh. “About being lucky and all. Now that she’s awake, she’s got some ‘splaining to do, and I don’t think that’s going to be pleasant, no I don’t. She’ll wish she had bought it with the rest before Fordyce and his team are done with her.”

  “I think you’re right, there, Gunter, my man. I think you’re right. I’ll go tell Fordyce she’s ready for him.”

  “Hey, ask him if we can watch!” the first jack asked his retreating friend.

  He shifted his grip to Michi’s hair and pulled her head up until she was only centimeters from his face.

  He looked deeply into her eyes for a moment before saying, “You fucked up, girl, and now you’re going to pay the price.”

  He let go, and her head thudded back onto whatever she was lying on. Sharp lances of pain radiated throughout her body as her head bounced.

  She almost cried out, but she knew that was nothing. Whatever awaited her would be much, much worse.

  Chapter 33

  Michi was trying not to cry. Was he telling the truth? Did 1,300 soldiers really die? All of this had been her idea, all because the company murdered Franz. But her anger had cost 1,300 more people, people who had loved ones, people who had their own lives.

  When the man who had to be Fordyce finally came in the little cell in which she was held, she merely looked up at him in resignation. Whatever his plans, she probably deserved them.

  “Ah, you are awake, Miss MacCailín. Good. You and I are going to have a good time, together,” he said, actually rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “I have some things to ask you, and you are going to give me the answers. I won’t lie to you, though. Whether you tell me easily or hard, it won’t make much difference to you because,” he leaned forward to whisper into her ear, “I just enjoy it too fucking much.”

  The two previous jacks had evidently received permission to watch as they followed Fordyce in as did one other man. The one called Derrick had the decency to look nervous and uncomfortable, but the other three looked at her with unbridled eagerness.

  Michi was lying on a metal table. Her right arm, the o
ne that had been hit during the assault, was cuffed to one of the table supports. She didn’t struggle as the four men surrounded her.

  “Chen, you and you,” he said, pointing at the other jack, Gunter, “take off her clothes.”

  Both men jumped forward, hands quickly stripping her down. With her arm attached to the table leg, they jerked on her shirt a few times, eliciting a gasp from her as they jarred her injured arm, before grabbing a knife and cutting the shirt off.

  She had expected something along these lines, and she tried to ignore the growing feeling of vulnerability as the men gawked at her body. She tried to send her mind elsewhere. That worked in books and flicks, but it wasn’t doing too much for her. She was very much rooted in a small cell, naked on a cold metal table.

  “OK, my dear. My first question is where is the man you call Jessep? He wasn’t captured, nor was he among the bodies. The many, many bodies, I might add. So where might he have gone?”

  Michi couldn’t tell them even if she wanted to. She didn’t know. She suspected that Fordyce knew that she didn’t know, too. But he smiled, took a short, wicked looking knife, and put the tip a centimeter from her left eye. Lowering it to her cheek, he lightly traced a line down her face and neck, over her clavicle, across her breast, and down her belly. He lingered with the knife tip alongside her inner thigh, and despite her resolve, Michi flinched. He almost chuckled, and then started the knife moving again. It went down her thigh. Michi couldn’t tell if he was actually cutting her or not, but when he passed her knee, the pressure eased.

  Michi let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She started to relax her muscles, which she had involuntarily tensed, when fire sunk into her calf as Fordyce plunged the small knife up to its hilt. She let out a screech of pain.

  “Oops! Sorry about that,” he said with a laugh, a laugh echoed by at least two of the others. “It must have slipped.

  “So, where were we?” he asked, pulling the knife out of her leg.

  He moved in front of Michi and slowly licked her blood off the blade. If he was trying to unsettle her, it was working.

  “Oh, I think I was asking you about Jessep. But we can come back to that. I see you have beautiful hands, and I want to play before we get to work.”

  Michi raised her head as he pulled out a pair of pliers from the bag the fourth man, Chen, held out for him. They were simple, ordinary household pliers. Michi had used similar ones a thousand times, never thinking about how evil they could be.

  “What say you, right or left?” he made a show of asking the other three. “What, left you say? I am at your command.”

  Michi started breathing hard as Fordyce grabbed her free hand and held it up, admiring it as if it was a piece of art. Michi twisted and brought her arm forward, breaking free of his grasp. She punched out, but Fordyce ducked back out of the way.

  “A fighter! All the better. Fighters last longer. You two, grab her arm and hold it down,” he said.

  Gunter and Chen stepped up to grab her arm. Michi struggled, and she managed to land a punch to Chen’s nose, starting a flow of blood. Within seconds, however, they had her arm pinned to the table. Chen licked at the blood on his face, then with a smile, pushed his face onto her left breast, wiping some of his blood off.

  “Ah, yes, now we have the hand trapped like a dove. And look, no ring on the finger. Wasn’t she supposed to be married? What was his name? Franz Galipili? Did that man leave her at the altar?” he asked in mockery.

  “Fuck you, you bastard,” Michi blurted out, knowing she was playing into his hands.

  “That’s some mouth you have there, young lady. I was going to offer you to Chen here as a wife since you seem to be missing a man, but I don’t know if he’s going to want you now.”

  “Oh, I ken teach her manners, never you fear,” said the man holding her arm down. He leaned forward and licked her face, from chin to eyebrow.

  Michi tried to headbutt him, but he was too quick, and he jumped back out of the way.

  “Temper, temper, Miss MacCailín. That will get you in trouble sometime,” Fordyce said.

  His play-acting was infuriating Michi, and she wanted to lash out. Then, somehow, the absurdity of that hit her. She’d been shot. Her calf was on fire after being stabbed. She was naked, and two men were holding her down while a third was threatening her hand, and she was worried about the personality game her torturer was playing? She actually laughed.

  “Oh, something funny? I can assure you that nothing is,” Fordyce said, suddenly serious.

  Have I hit a nerve? she wondered.

  She didn’t have time to wonder for long as Fordyce reached in and wrenched her ring finger up, grabbed it with the pliers, and twisted. She let out a blood-curdling scream as her universe descended into a maelstrom of pain.

  “Please . . . please,” she called out. If she had known where Jessep was, she was afraid that she would tell them before enduring that again.

  It took minutes for the intense agony to fade to an aching throbbing that kept time with her pulse. She didn’t want to imagine what her hand looked like. It wasn’t until she finally began to get control of her thoughts that she noticed the other jack, Derrick, had left.

  “‘Please?’ You said ‘please.’ Please what?” Fordyce asked her.

  “Just, please, what do you want?” she whispered, ashamed of herself.

  “Oh, we’ll get to that later. Now, I’m afraid you’re going to have to pay for your sins,” he told her.

  He took the piers and put them against her lips. She clenched them tight.

  “No? No teeth? OK—I don’t want anyone to accuse me of being uncaring,” he said, back to his facetious attitude.

  He brought the pliers lower off her face and started down to her belly when he stopped, then brought them up to her right nipple. He closed the pliers, slightly squeezing the nipple, but not too hard—yet.

  Michi tensed up. She knew what was coming, and she tried to fortify her will.

  “You seemed to be proud to flash these around for everyone to see in your oh-so-clever camcordings. So how about it if I just yank this bad boy right off, huh?” he said, moving slightly to get a better angle.

  “No!” shouted Gunter.

  “Excuse me?” Fordyce said with mock incredulity.

  “You said, for me helping you, I can, you know, have her.”

  “And so you will, but later.”

  “But if you take that nip off, well, I don’t like that none. I want her whole when I do her,” he protested.

  Michi took in a deep breath. She had rather expected this as soon as she woke up in captivity. She thought she had steeled herself to the inevitable, but when faced with it, she realized that she was not the strong one to just shrug something like that off.

  “Well, never say I’m a man who doesn’t keep his word. Please, my dear companion, take your prize. I can always play later.”

  “What, here? With you looking?” Gunter asked.

  “It’s up to you. You can take her or not, but none of us are leaving,” Fordyce told him as Chen laughed.

  Michi had a moment of hope while Gunter stared at the two other men first, then at her.

  That hope was dashed when Gunter shrugged and said “Well, fuck it. If you want to see me and her getting it on, be my guest.”

  He pulled off his shirt first, bloody from either Chen’s nose or any one of her wounds. Next came his boots, then his pants. Last were his undertights. He stood there, naked and rampant with excitement. Not that there was much of a penis there. He was decidedly under-sized.

  He looked like a bull moose in rut, though, almost snorting in his eagerness. Michi knew what was going to happen, and the act itself didn’t upset her as much as the helplessness, the knowledge that this piece of shit was going to do to her what he wanted without regard to her as a human being.

  She still had her mouth free, and that was the only way at the moment that she could strike back.

  She looked
at him as he panted with lust. With her best attempt at disdain, she said, “Oh come on. If you are going to use rape to try and break me, you would do better to give me a man with a big enough tool to do some damage.”

  “What?” he screeched! “I’ll show you damage, you bitch!”

  He started stepping forward, but Chen was laughing uproariously. “She’s got you there. My three-year-old’s got a bigger dick than that!”

  Gunter stopped and glared at Chen. “Shut the fuck up! I’ll show you! I’ll fuck her until she begs for more!”

  “Uh, maybe not,” Fordyce said, pointing to Gunter’s penis which had started to go flaccid as he lost focus.

  With an animal grunt, Gunter rushed Michi, threw her legs open, and pushed himself between them. Except he had nothing left. He had lost it.

  “See, nothing there. You might as well get back to your pliers because this little boy can’t perform,” she said to Fordyce, trying to inject as much of a dismissive tone as she could.

  “You fucking bitch!” Gunter screamed. He scrambled off her and pulled his fist back.

  As Fordyce yelled “No!” that big fist came forward with the full weight and emotion of Gunter behind it, smashing into Michi’s nose and sending her mercifully into the darkness.

  Chapter 34

  Michi slowly came to. While still in the murky state of semi-consciousness, she wondered if she’d been raped. She tried to feel if she had what she imagined that trauma would be like, but with the rest of her pain, she couldn’t tell.

  It was only then that she realized someone was there, someone touching her body. With a start, she willed herself back into full consciousness.

  She was still on the table, whether moments after Gunter had hit her or much later, she had no idea. A man in black utilities stood over her, running his hand across her body, manipulating her. Instinctively, Michi tried to scooch away from him, but without seeming to notice her attempts, the man kept a firm hold on her as he continued his groping.

  “Add a broken clavicle,” he said to another black-clad man Michi just noticed standing behind him, PA in hand.