“We can shoot these people?”
“They’ll be shooting at us. Yes, we shoot back.”
“My momma and the preacher, they always said death belonged to God, God and the doctors. That’s why the gangs were wrong. Now you’re saying it’s okay to kill. You sure, ma’am?”
Kris had grown up a politician’s daughter where you did anything you had to do to win the next election. Grampa Trouble had come in like some knight in shining armor when she was so far down there was no up. She’d loved to read the history books about what he’d done in the war. He and Grampa Ray. Even Great-grannys Ruth and Rita were in the history books, fighting for what was right. Of course, Kris had learned “Thou shalt not kill.” But for her, it had never been absolute. True, rather than kill a spider, Harvey would take it outdoors to keep his wife happy, but he’d fought side by side with Grampa Ray at the Battle at the Gap and was damn proud of it.
“As I hear it,” Kris began slowly, hunting for the words that would release the safety on her troopers’ souls, “there’s a time to build and a time to tear down. A time to live and a time to die. I say if those men up there shoot at us, it’s their time to die. Or they can throw their weapons down and their hands up. And hang after the courts get done with them.”
Kris turned in her seat to study the three young recruits behind her; they were pale. The guy in the middle licked his lips nervously. The girl fingered her weapon as if to see if it was real. The hero-to-be glanced at Kris, then went back to staring out the window. “What those men did back there took them outside the bounds of humanity. If they shoot at us, we kill them like the wild dogs they’ve become. Those are your orders. You will execute them. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the one that stands trial, not you.”
“But they’ll be just as dead whether a court says you were right or wrong,” the middle said.
“Kind of like the Colonel,” the woman agreed.
This was not going the way Kris had expected. In the history books, there were no reluctant soldiers. Then again, these were Navy types, hardly out of boot camp. Maybe Kris ought to have the marines pull their truck up closer to the front.
Maybe I ought to rethink this whole thing.
Kris swung around in her seat. While she’d talked, the open fields had given way to mangled trees and scrub. Some trees were down, big root balls standing in the still waters. Kris eyed the road ahead of them and what stretched out behind them. Just road and water. Probably a ditch alongside the road. How could she turn this parade around? Couldn’t even if she wanted to. Licking her lips, she put that option aside. For better or worse, this convoy went forward.
Kris concentrated on what lay ahead in the next few minutes. Had she done everything? What had she forgotten? That was supposed to be the perpetual question of the commander. What’s left undone? She felt a rising panic. What had she missed? She didn’t remember that being mentioned in the history books.
Kris checked her gun, eyed the trees growing closer and closer to the road. She activated her mike again. “Crew, we can expect our targets to be hiding behind trees. Your rifles have range finders that automatically set the charge for your darts. They’ll set them too low to shoot through tree trunks. Turn your selector to maximum.”
“Ma’am,” came a shaky voice. “Which switch is that?”
“The forward one,” Kris answered, then thought better. “The one closest to the end of the barrel. Ahead of the selector for sleepy darts.”
“Thank you,” the automatic civility seemed out of place at the moment. Anything smacking of civilization seemed wrong just now. Kris started to say that, then swallowed hard as the truck came around a curve. The trees that had blocked her view ahead now fell away to Kris’s right. Ahead, two, maybe three hundred meters, a tree lay across the road.
Kris took the scene in quickly. There was no root ball on this downed tree; a freshly cut stump stood beside the road. Kris switched the sights on her rifle to thermal. Yes, three people lay behind the downed log. Kris quickly scanned the woods to the left and right. Yes, more thermal images: a dozen, twenty. A lot. Kris remembered the man’s story, people rising up out of the water. She tried to scan the ditch alongside the road. Some of the water seemed warmer than that around it, but the current in the ditch formed it into a long blur.
Beside her, Tom was slowing. “How close do you want to get, Longknife?” he asked through gritted teeth.
Kris went through her options fast. Drive into the trap and stop, let the bad guys shoot first, then take them. She had more people…Correction: she had recruits. Her targets were desperate killers. Kris eyed the water ahead; riflemen coming from the water had gotten the drop on the farmer.
“Stop here,” she ordered. Tom braked slowly to a stop in the middle of the muddy road a good two hundred meters from the downed tree. For a long minute, Kris watched the roadblock as nothing happened.
“Throw down your guns and nobody gets hurt,” blared over the swamp, sending birds squawking and flapping into the leaden sky. Kris scowled; she was about to say the very same thing.
Well, that settled the question of intent. Kris sighted her rifle at the right-most thermal shadow behind the downed tree. She chinned her mike. “Open fire, crew.” Obeying her own command, Kris sent a long burst into the tree, walking the darts from right to left. Someone tried to get up, run away. He didn’t get very far.
Kris switched her concentration to the ditch to the left of the road and sent a long burst into any water that looked warm. A man stood in a shower of bubbles and spray, started to aim at Kris. He fell backward as her rounds took him in the chest.
Forms were slithering from the ditch to crawl up on the road to Kris’s right. She slapped the door. As it came open, she dropped through it to settle into a squat beside the forward tire. She fired a quick burst at the closest of the gunmen, lying prone on the side of the road. He slumped over his rifle.
She took aim at the next one. He tossed his gun away, rolled over on his back, and held his hands up in the air. “Throwaway your guns, and you live,” Kris heard her voice boom over the swamp, amid the rattle of guns. “Keep them, and you’re dead.”
Five, six people along the road edge were on their knees, hands up. Kris swept her rifle sights along the trees to her right. People were standing, hands waiving high in the air. She glanced over her shoulder. The left-hand side of the convoy looked the same.
“You,” Kris snapped at the woman recruit still in the backseat of the truck. “Put those prisoners under guard.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman voice was a ragged whisper. She stumbled as she got out of the truck. Kris flinched away from her rifle, then realized that was the least of her fears. The woman still had the safety on her weapons.
“Unsafety your rifle,” Kris whispered. She got a blank look in reply. Kris reached across, flipped the safety off. “Now it will shoot.”
The spacer recruit glanced down. “Oh,” and went back to waving her weapon unsteadily at their prisoners.
“You in the swamp, walk to the road slowly,” Kris ordered. “No sudden moves. Those of you on the road, get up here in the middle of it and lie down.” Kris glanced in the truck. Tom was just getting his rifle out of its holster on the door. The would-be hero and his friend were frozen in place, eyes and weapons covering the left side but doing nothing.
“Are you okay?” Kris asked. When they didn’t respond, she repeated, “Are you okay back there?” The hero-to-be blinked twice…and was violently ill.
From the back of the convoy, two marines advanced with their weapons at the ready. At least their boot camp seemed to have taught them to take the safety off their weapons. “Cover this side,” she shouted to them. They waved fists in agreement.
Switching around to the left of her convoy, Kris found three marines coming forward, keeping their weapons leveled at the slowly moving prisoners.
“I got that one,” a marine chortled.
“No, I got him,” the one beside him disagre
ed.
“No, I was shooting at that bunch in the tree.” The marine indicated a clump of trees. One body was flung backward over a low snag.
“So was I, buddy boy. I got him.”
“You both got him.” Kris cut off further debate. “Keep the others covered. I don’t want any getting away.” One of the prisoners picked that moment to trip. He went over with a splash. Kris waited for him to get back up, but he didn’t. Switching to thermal sights, Kris searched the water, but it was too mixed up to give any kind of target.
“I think one of them is getting away,” Tom observed as he dismounted the truck.
Kris scowled. “You prisoners, be careful. The next one of you that trips gets shot on the way down.”
“But they’re unarmed,” the woman spacer behind Kris said.
“They’re escaping,” Kris pointed out “And until we check them out, we don’t know who’s unarmed. You spacers in the trucks get out here. I need some hands to pat down the prisoners for weapons.” The rest of the trucks began to empty.
The recruits brought their weapons, but about half of them still had their safety on. Most of the other guns didn’t look like they’d need cleaning. Now Kris realized why the fight had seemed so quiet around her. She and the marines had been the only ones shooting. Them and the bad guys.
Pairs of Navy recruits went down the slowly forming line of prisoners. While one kept a rifle on a prone figure, an unarmed recruit frisked the captive, making sure they were no longer armed. “Hey, this one’s a girl,” a spacer said, taking two steps back from the muddy figure he had started to pat down. The woman’s response was in no way ladylike.
Kris waved a female spacer over to frisk that prisoner and paused to watch as the pile of gear taken from the prisoners slowly grew. No communications gear, no computers; plenty of knives and usually one gun each. Little ammo, though. The prisoners, stripped to their shorts in most cases, showed thin and hungry. Not the starvation level of the farm people, but even the bad guys had been on short rations.
Bad girls, too. Four of the fourteen were women.
Kris turned from the live ones to study the dead. Behind the roadblock, two lay, insects already settling to feast. Kris swallowed hard to keep her own stomach where it belonged. One face was contorted in death. Rage, anger, agony, Kris could not tell, and the dead were not likely to answer her question. The one next to him seemed asleep on his side, quietly drawn up like a child; he provided the only commlink among them. The third rifleman was gone, just a pool of blood showing he’d been shot. Back in the trucks, a medic was caring for his wound. He’d be in fine shape for the hanging.
Kris walked back up the road. Two more bodies lay between the ditch and the roadbed. “You and you,” she pointed at two prisoners, the youngest among them, hardly more than boys of fifteen, fourteen. “Pick up these bodies. Hang them by their feet from those trees,” she said, pointing to the four standing next to the freshly cut stump.
Tom was at her side in a moment. “It’s not right to dishonor the dead.”
“And leaving them down here to be gnawed by whatever wanders by is better than hanging them up there as a warning to the rest? I am not taking time to dig a hole here and bury them.” She glanced up and down the road. “No place to dig, anyway.”
Still, Tom shook his head. “Kris, this is out of bounds.”
“You two, start doing what I told you. Marine, see that these two do what they’re ordered.” The assigned marine nudged the two boys to their feet with his rifle. They’d been dead-fish-belly pale before. Now they were almost ghostly white. Terrified ghosts.
Kris turned to Tom. “Tape the live prisoners’ hands and load’ em on the trucks. Once they’re down, tape their feet to something on the truck. I’m not losing any prisoners.”
“Yes ma’am.” Tom snapped to a caricature of attention, threw her a parody of a salute, and stomped off to comply.
“And send me any wrapping tape or rope you’ve got free.” Kris called after him. If it was possible, Tom stomped harder. Half an hour later, the convoy moved slowly past Kris’s stark message to the denizens of the swamp. A new team was in town. Get out before you join these.
At least, that was the message Kris wanted them to hear.
****
The next farm on their list was empty of life. A few bodies still lay where they’d fallen or been cast aside. “Guess this is what happened to a farm that fought,” Kris observed dryly to Tom as they slowly drove through the farmyard.
“Maybe she isn’t such a bitch?” someone muttered on a live mike. Kris chose not to hear.
The next farm was a repeat of the first. Kris distributed the food quickly, neither asking how they had come to be in this fix nor offering to listen to the silent screams behind dry eyes. She did refuse to let any of her troopers turn their backs on their prisoners long enough for the farmers to get quick vengeance. “They are Navy prisoners. I will turn them over to local officials at Port Athens. You can get your justice there,” she snapped when the knife-wielding wife of the farm owner had to be forcibly hauled from one of the trucks.
“You think you can get them back there?” her husband asked.
“I captured them. I keep them.”
“Good luck. You know, they’re not the only band out here.”
“How many?”
“Couple of hundred.”
“Who are they?” Tom asked. “What turned them rogue?”
“Ask them,” the owner spat.
Two farms later, the trucks were sitting higher on their axles, but Kris was no closer to understanding the dynamics of what made someone a killer and another the starving victim. She didn’t like that.
She also was getting a bad feeling about her route back to Port Athens.
The last farm was the smallest on her list, but it had three times the people of the others. They seemed less brutalized; at least, there was no effort to knife her prisoners. Two women even went from prisoner to prisoner, giving them a drink of water, a taste of the rations.
The owner was a lanky, middle-aged man who stood aside and let his people organize themselves to quickly unload the trucks into bunkhouses and several small houses, including one he shared with two other couples and a dozen children. By now, Kris’s team had their drill down, so Kris and Tommy joined him watching.
“Much appreciate the food. We’ve been down to eating grass and leaves.”
“You’ve got an awful lot of people,” Kris asked, not quite knowing what the question was.
“Yeah, I didn’t let go of my indentured workers when the crop failed. Where would the poor bastards go?”
“Indentured workers?” That was the great thing about being a boot ensign, all the time you were learning new stuff.
“Yeah, New Eden slashed its welfare budget a few years back. Get a job or get a ticket to Olympia or a couple other new colonies where the fields aren’t big enough for agribusiness.”
“And they’d work for you,” Tommy said.
“No, they’d work to pay off their ticket. For one year’s work, I’d pay for a seventh of the ticket. Seven years and you’re free and clear.” The man squatted down to pluck a blade of grass. He eyed it like someone might a vintage wine before sticking the end of it in his mouth. “Of course, the poor damn workfare types got no grubstake, no cash. The lucky ones end up working in town at the processing plants.”
“We’re feeding them out of soup kitchens,” Kris told him.
“I wondered how they were making out,” the man said.
Kris did a quick count around the farmyard. Lots of kids, lots of old, lots of in between. “You had a lot of firepower when the gunmen came.”
“Gunman didn’t come here.”
“Smart of them.” Kris grinned.
Tommy frowned. “Then how come you went off the net?”
“Windmills died. No power.” The man shrugged.
“We’ll leave you some batteries,” Kris said. Tom nodded. “But why were you the
only farm not attacked?”
The guy looked at Kris like she was a very slow learner. “Woman, you still don’t know who the swamp runners are, do you?”
“You kept your indentured workers,” Kris repeated slowly, then saw where that led. “The other farms didn’t.”
“Yep.”
“The folks in the swamps are unemployed field hands.”
“Yep.” He kind of smiled.
Tommy blinked rapidly for a long moment as his mouth slowly opened. “So the raping, the stealing, the killing was all done by folks that had worked for the farm owners?”
The guy looked up at Tommy. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Kris stooped down beside the farmer; he offered her a strand of grass. She sucked on it; there wasn’t much taste. Probably not much food value. Then, she’d eaten a full ration in the truck jostling along between farms. Lack of food was not her problem. People were.
As Tommy sat down, his eyes wide with puzzlement, Kris shook her head. “You can’t tell me that a bunch of ex-welfare types who’ve been doing grunt work out in the fields here stole the IDents, fenced them off world, and in some cases sold entire farms.”
“For a Navy type, you’re not too dumb, kid.” The farmer smiled. “Cops on Eden sweeping up welfare flakes maybe pick up a few extras. Punks, thugs, mafioso wanna-bes, troublemakers they’d like to be rid of. Problem child wakes up on the ship, already under boost. That’s one that won’t bother those cops again. Bright boy lands here, we put him to work along with the others. Maybe he works, maybe he sets up a floating crap game. Somebody always has something to risk. Then he brings in the alcohol, maybe some drugs, too. No matter how poor folks are, they seem to find money for that.” The man shook his head.
“And when all hell comes calling,” Kris took up the story, “the likes of him can see their ticket out of here.”
“Right. Collect some tough henchmen, some guns, go find the folks starving in the swamp, promise them a meal if they’ll help you get back at the folks that put them down in the mud. You know the rest of the story.”
Kris Longknife: Mutineer Page 18