by Adam Bennett
The young man shook his head, “It looks like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, Jackson. My name is Gillar, Axel Gillar. I’ve been searching for you all over this thrice damned moon. I came to Denhe from Hirt and Yoran before it. I’ve followed you from rumour to legend, from whisper to hint. I’ve come for your story, and I’ll pay well to have it. Anything else isn’t an option.”
The grizzled man nodded. “It seems you’ve followed too many rumours and not enough fact, Axel. Name’s Gerran. Always has been, will be for some time to come. I never met Jackson, I don't know where you can find him, but no one in this bar has any story worth the telling, let alone the buying.”
Gillar nodded and made to stand. “I see. Obviously, I’ve made a mistake. Please excuse the intrusion. Oh… perhaps you can explain this before I go?” He reached into his back pocket and pulled a sheet of paper free. He unfolded it and placed it on top of the tankard full of flat stout. “You certainly look like Jackson. Oh, older, definitely, and a fair bit more scarred and beat up, but there’s no mistaking the face in this picture is yours. The jacket is a dead giveaway too. It's as beat up as you are, but that’s Jackson’s leather, or I’m going blind.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“This picture came from Simmo Jackson’s classified personnel file. The picture and the name are the only two things that haven't been redacted. You can imagine how hard it was to get my hands on. Hopefully it conveys how serious I am to hear your side of the story everyone already knows.”
Jackson said nothing in response. He reached forward and took the sheet of paper from atop the tankard. He stared down at it for a long time, silently contemplating the handsome young man it depicted.
Eventually, he crumpled the page and pocketed it. He gave a short nod. “I’ll speak to you only.”
“Fair,” Axel said and turned to his two friends who hadn't left the table in the middle of the room but were listening with rapt attention. “Remember the brothel down the street? I’ll meet you there when I'm done.” He tossed another platinum round through the air and the taller of the pair caught it as they stood and left the bar without comment.
Axel turned to the barman. “You can lock up behind yourself. I’ll pour my own beers.” He threw a third coin and the barman snagged it deftly from the air.
“I’ll just head upstairs if you don't mind.” He came out from behind the bar and locked the front door. He walked to the rickety staircase at the back of the room and ascended from sight.
Axel shrugged and turned back to Jackson. “It’s just me.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to learn if I tell you my side. Why do you even want to know? You’re not some kind of journalman are you? I don’t hold no truck with the journals.”
Axel shook his head. “No, I’m just bored and obscenely wealthy. I like to buy things no one else can afford. I like to own things that people assume aren’t to be bought regardless of the price. I grew up hearing stories of Jackson’s Revenge. But that story is missing parts… Jackson’s Revenge they call it, but I’ve heard the motivation ten different ways, and the end result ten more. I want the truth. And I’m willing to make you a rich man to hear it.”
“You won’t like the truth. That story doesn’t go the way you think. It’s been warped over the last forty years. Warped in ways that make no sense.” Jackson snorted in disgust. “Jackson’s Revenge. Ha. Not even close. Honestly, I have no idea how the story took on such a life of its own. No, this is not the kind of story you think it is. You aren’t going to like what you hear. Best you leave and keep believing the rumours...”
“I’ll be the judge of that. You tell the story. Like it or no, I’ll give you a credit slip for ten thousand platinum rounds and you can fly so far into the outer reaches that when you stop to look around, no one will have ever heard of this guy Jackson, or his so-called Revenge. You can spend your last years sitting in bars all over the galaxy, sober as you like.”
Jackson just nodded. He reached out, took the tumble of whisky and dropped it into the tankard of stout. None of the beer spilled but it did rebuild the head. He lifted the depth charge towards Axel in silent cheers and downed the drink in one long, surprisingly swift draught. He dipped the glass half way through as the tumble within slid towards his face, arresting its momentum so it came neatly to rest against his face as the last drop of whisky spiked stout was drained.
***
I fought in the taking of Denhe, you know. It was a bloody and brutal fight. The Talisker Regime held this planet for two decades before we ever arrived and they fought to keep every damn square metre. Back in those days the Union allowed soldiers to claim land in conquered territories and after a long time deep in enemy space I was discharged. I made my way back here with my transport credit and I settled down with a huge swathe of land full to bursting with thousand year old denhe trees.
You’ve heard of denhewood, I’m sure. It’s tough as steel, waterproof, fireproof, bullet proof, lighter than carbon fibre, and near indestructible. The only way to shape it is with acid. But with the right kind of acid and the right tools, it’s a surprisingly easy wood to use. And it fetches an excellent price.
With my military service over and done, and only twenty seven years under my belt, I was set to make my fortune. All that was left was to find a wife, and start a family of little Jacksons to share my life and my land with. I was one lucky man. Denhe was chock full of beautiful women back in those days. I often found myself with a dozen female suitors looking to take me to husband. You see, it was a strange time. Plenty of men owned land here, but most were off fighting the Regime on Guaros or Finnik Prime, and more yet were dead, buried in an unmarked grave on a hostile planet. All of which meant that most of the land was owned but was otherwise vacant and unworked. I’d fulfilled my ten year contract with the U.S.F.A.D and come out more or less intact. As such, I was highly sought after by the women of Denhe.
I remember once a young woman kicked in my front door the afternoon she found out her husband was dead. The women who’ve settled Denhe for the Union are a force to be reckoned with. If the provision rebanning women from combat hadn't passed in ‘23 we’d have beaten the Regime five years earlier in my estimation.
In any case, she demanded that we sleep together there and then, and worry about getting the marriage arranged once the consummation was over and done with. She was beautiful. And hard to refuse. But refuse her I did. You see, I only had eyes for one woman. I’d had eyes for her since I was ten, living on a different planet entirely.
Sauen Driscoll.
She was one hell of a woman. Funny. Brilliant. Astounding. Adjectives do her no justice. There is a perfect woman out there for every man, and she was mine. I met her growing up on Farre Reach. Before I started my ten year stint with the Armoured Division, I made her all the promises in the universe. I would return home to her a war hero. I’d come back with money, and land, and carry her off to a new world, far from there.
I think she thought I was never coming back. Sure enough, the casualties in the war between the Union and the Regime were brutally high. Very few men returned from their service, and the Union was calling for more and more troops to throw into the meatgrinder.
You can’t even fathom what it was like. The Hundred World Draft was in full swing, with a fifteen year term guaranteed for all draftees. If you signed up before you were drafted you only had to serve ten. So I did the only thing that made any sense. I kissed Sauen goodbye, promised to return, and signed up, age seventeen.
I was offworld within the hour.
The campaign took me across half the galaxy. I fought Talisker marines on Garne and Trentine. I weathered the Siege at Antioch and the Battle for Brahms Downs. I held friends as they died, tried to put them back together with my hands as their innards fell out; tried and failed. Sometimes I saved them but the medics fixed them up good as new and sent them back into the fray. Too many times I saw that happen. I saved a kid on his first day
in the mud, and they threw him back down less than a week later, ready to die once more.
During this decade of fire and blood, I took my fair share of human life, and then a fair bit more. The number dead by my hands is unknown to me, but it must stand in the hundreds, if not thousands. Death was my constant companion for ten terrifying years, never far, always looming.
But somehow I made it through.
I survived, virtually unscathed. It must have been luck. It must have been. Because I watched dozens of men much more skilled than me lose life and limb to rid the galaxy of our most hated enemy. While death reigned all around, I strode unharmed through the balefire of battle after battle, fight after bloody fight.
And through it all, the only thing that kept me going was Sauen Driscoll.
When we took Denhe eight years into my campaign, I finally allowed myself to believe that I might make it out alive. I used my U.S.F.A.D allotment to take a swathe of land filled with the famous denhetrees and swore that I would bring Sauen across the stars, and together we would spend every day of our lives making up for lost time.
But it wasn’t to be.
I had a choice, you see. I was discharged after my term and given a ticket to any world behind the front lines. The war would rage on for another six long years and civilian transport was prohibitively expensive. So I had to decide. I could travel back to Farre Reach, back to Sauen, with my meagre pay in hand, and not much else. We’d need to work to get to Denhe where my fortune in land and denhewood was waiting to be reaped.
The other option was to use my transport voucher to go to Denhe, work to get enough money for a ticket to Farre Reach, and two more back to Denhe. I decided this was the best option. Contact between worlds was restricted during the war so there was no way to tell Sauen of my plans. I just had to hope that she’d be waiting for my return. I hoped it would only take me a year.
It took five.
War taxes were growing almost daily. I had a ten thousand square kilometre swath of pristine denhe trees and no one to help with the labour. I couldn't find anyone to teach me how to cut, cure, and prime the trees. I had no way to transport them offworld. I was sitting on a goldmine and I didn't own a pick.
Eventually, I learned enough that I was able to harvest a tree or two each day on my own. I learned to cure and prime the wood so it could be used commercially, and I was soon making enough money to feed and clothe myself.
War taxes took the rest. Some of the days when I took down three trees I was able to put some money away, but the war effort that had taken ten years of my life was now eating up my chances of ever returning to Farre Reach, to Sauen.
And then Harridan died.
He’d been on the way out for a long time, but the war had kept him going for more than twenty years. He was an excellent warmaster but, like most warmongering bastards, he couldn't see that he’d already won. Rather than mopping up and taking the victory, he tried to push the war to new fronts and, what had been projected as a ten year fight—and had already lasted twenty—was looking to blow out into the quarter century range.
And he’d have kept us fighting if President Decker hadn’t given him the ultimatum to wind the war down. A week later he was dead. Whatever the medical reason given, it was clear to me that he’d died as soon as he admitted to himself that his war was finally over.
He died and Scarpiello took over as Union Warmaster. Taxes were dropped back to more reasonable levels, more than halved overnight. More and more troops were let out of their drafts and allowed to settle the lands they’d taken, or return home.
I quickly built up a crew of returned soldiers to work my denhewood and within three months I had enough money to buy a used interstellar freighter.
I was finally going home to see Sauen.
I returned to Farre Reach early in ‘46 just as the war was wrapping up, and more than five and a half years later than originally planned.
And by that time, Sauen was already dead.
***
Jackson stood and wiped a single tear from his weathered cheek and walked to the bar to pour himself another drink. He drained the large beer in a single draught and filled the glass anew before returning to his seat.
“What happened to her?” asked Axel.
“She married a politician. She never received any word if I were alive or dead, but she waited. She waited ten long years, all through the communications blackout, all through my contracted service with the AD. She waited.” Jackson rolled his shoulders producing an audible crack. “And even after my ten years was done, she waited. She didn't marry for another four years, all while I was failing to turn a profit on one of the most profitable resources in the entire galaxy. She waited fourteen long and lonely years before she finally decided I was dead, buried in an unmarked grave on an unnamed planet.
“And so she married Franko de Longue.” Jackson spat as if the very name were poison. “He was a reformist. He worked hard to keep the war effort afloat, to keep the people of Farre Reach sending their innocent boys off to fight a pointless war against the innocent draftees of other worlds, as if what planet you were born on had any bearing on who you were. The man was a menace. He was a big part of why I’d had to leave Sauen in the first place.
“And I could have forgiven him for all of that… but for what he did to her…”
***
I made landfall in February ‘46 and it didn’t take me long to find out what had happened. The rumour was all over Farre Reach. It was too juicy not to become gossip. Learning Sauen was gone broke me. Learning how drove me over the edge.
She’d still been just as lovely at thirty one as she’d been at seventeen. Maybe more so, growing into her womanhood with a grace and elegance that drew attention. And for fourteen long years she’d ignored it. Eventually she’d managed to part with the memory of me, and had finally married one of her many suitors.
De Longue was thirty years her senior, but with enough money and influence, age is a very subjective thing. When I met him he could have been my own age, or even five years younger, rather than nearly twice as old.
Just one of the many privileges of being obscenely powerful, I suppose. In any case, he courted her, and when she was ready, when she had moved past me, they married. It was the celebration of the year, perhaps the decade. Everyone of any social standing attended, and all remarked on the bride, such beauty from one born so low, and all that jealous noise.
I never found out why he did it. Maybe she was distant. Maybe she hadn't truly gotten over my ‘death.’ Maybe she told him ‘no’ one too many times. Maybe he was just that way inclined. It made no difference to me. He killed her, and his wealth and power protected him from justice.
Oh, people talked, and maybe if I had truly been dead, his crime wouldn’t have gone unanswered. Maybe the pressure from the public would have eventually come for him. As it was, we never found out.
I learned of her death, waited long enough to confirm it was my Sauen, and that this all hadn't been a case of mistaken identity, and then I made my move.
I bought a TR-640 laser assault rifle on the black market, along with a standard issue AD pistol, and enough concussion grenades to fell a battalion, and less than a week after landing on Farre Reach I made my assault on his palatial manor in the hills overlooking Farre Prime.
Oh, certainly, I did some research and planning. I scouted the area, and even considered enlisting some other discharged soldiers to aid my efforts. In the end I decided that I was in no position to ask that of them. I didn’t know anyone on planet from my own days in the Armoured Division, but I felt sure that anyone I asked would join me without hesitation. That’s the AD code. You look after your brothers, even if you’ve never met them before. I couldn't ask it of them for fear they’d say yes.
So I went in alone, trusting on whatever luck had gotten me through ten years and more than fifty different planets to get me through this one last assault. I only needed it to hold out long enough to get me inside. I
didn't need to make it out again. I only planned on a one way trip.
I attacked at 0400 local time because two hundred years of conventional wisdom says that is the best time. Something about the ebbs and flows of a sentry’s body clock. Even knowing it is your most vulnerable time doesn't seem to change the fact.
I attacked from the high ground to the west of the manor, drawing the sentries to me with carefully aimed concussion grenades amidst the power couplings. Soldiers can tell the crushing whump of concussion grenades, but civilian security has no idea that what they’re hearing is a weapon discharging. I hadn't chosen frag grenades for this very reason. A guard who is unconscious for twenty minutes—and bleeding from the ears for a further hour—is just as good as a one riddled with tiny fragments of jagged metal. Better, because his fellow guards just hear a loud unusual noise, and see the power go out and they all converge to investigate.
My plan went as well as it could have. They say no plan survives the first shot fired, but this one did. I suppose I never fired that shot. A dozen guards materialised around the smoking power coupling and I took my chance. Three more concussion grenades dropped right in their unsuspecting midst.
Sixteen men down and out for the count. Four grenades expended. I moved forward, weapon raised and ready to fire at any stragglers, but it seemed the entirety of de Longue’s security force was face down in the dirt, sleeping it off.
I borrowed a security pass and made my way inside. The place was opulent. Marble flown in from Goldar, gold leaf on everything, denhewood throughout. I was sickened by the thought that some of my denhewood might have gone into the construction. It took me ten minutes to figure the layout and make my way to de Longue’s bedroom. He was sleeping, undisturbed by the chaos his men had faced outside.
I sat on the end of his bed for a time and watched him sleep. Perhaps I was biased, but I disliked the man from that one impression. He slept greedily somehow. I can't explain exactly what I didn't like, but even in his sleep he seemed to exert some kind of sick control over the room. I was too focused on my rage to take it in, but a lesser man might have turned back, leaving him unmolested.