by Rick Partlow
“I’ve kind of gotten used to Terry,” his brother admitted, shrugging.
“Logan,” Katy interrupted, gently turning his face toward hers, and once again he could see the pain in her eyes. “You were dying.”
The words seemed to wring themselves out of her, which shocked him. She was so forthright, so brutally honest, but this hurt her to talk about. He felt a sudden pang of guilt for putting her through it.
“You were really fucked up, sir,” the medic agreed, his rugged face bleak with the memory. Sgt. Campion was his name, Logan recalled. “Third degree burns on sixty percent of your body. Out here, with just field surgery available, we’d have had to amputate your legs at the knees, and it’s a fifty-fifty shot you’d have even been a candidate for cloned tissue transplants later as bad as your nerve endings were fried.”
“Shit.” The word went out of him with a breath, taking the strength in his legs with it and he nearly stumbled again. “Okay, I got it. Have you been able to use them on the rest of our wounded?”
“Yes, thank God,” Katy said, finishing pulling his shirt on. “Otherwise, we’d have lost about half the crew of the Shakak. Even though it wasn’t in time for…”
She winced, blinked as if something was in her eye.
“In time for who?” he wanted to know. He shook his head, pulling away from her and Sgt. Campion. “Can someone tell me what exactly happened?”
Kamehameha-Nui Johannsen gnawed half-heartedly at the protein bar for a few more seconds before tossing it down on the wrapping he’d spread out like a plate on the table. The mess hall was deserted but for him, the lights obscenely bright, like the waiting room of a hospital. He’d always hated hospitals, whether it was the little clinic back home or one of the giant medical centers in Argos or one of the other Dominion capitals. Hospitals reminded him of where his mother had died. He should have gone to visit Jonathan to see how he was doing, but the little med-lab reminded him too much of that hospital.
“You should eat that.”
He didn’t look up at Lyta’s entrance. He’d heard her footsteps and recognized the pace. She walked like a cat, every step intentional and balanced.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, staring at the unappealing lump of brown nutrients. “And even if I were, this sucks.”
“Get used to it. It’s all we’re going to have until we get back to settled space.”
She slipped into the chair beside him. The chairs, the tables, they were so much like what people still used, despite the centuries and the advanced technology. Maybe people just liked to hang onto home-like things.
He finally met her eyes. She looked older, he thought. She was older than the first time they’d met, of course, but somehow, he hadn’t noticed it before. Just a few thin cracks around her eyes, where she’d squinted into so many alien suns, a few more around her mouth where she scowled far too much.
“How’s the ship coming?” he asked her, changing the subject, hopefully steering it away from what he knew she’d come to talk about.
She cocked an eyebrow, knowing what he was doing but, thankfully, letting him get away with it.
“Slowly,” she admitted. “We don’t have much in the way of an engineering staff, though the fact everything is basically plug-and-play with the Imperial ship has helped.” She sniffed, not quite a chuckle because there was no humor in the words. “It’s a good thing Lt. Cordray was able to get that drop-ship up to rendezvous with Katy in orbit, because if she’d landed the thing, we’d never have gotten it off the ground again. The antimatter fuel stores were totally spent.”
“Who you got working on it?” he asked, curious in spite of himself.
“The drop-ship crews, what’s left of Engineering…including Terry, about half the time, but right now he’s down here on base since they called and told him Jonathan was awake. Also, the mech salvage and repair crews.” She paused, eyeing him meaningfully. “They could use your help.”
“I’m not a nuts-n-bolts kind of guy,” Kammy demurred, shaking his head. “Especially when it comes to trying to bang together fusion reactors with shit from five hundred years ago. You really think it’s going to work?”
“I think it’s going to be a lot easier trying to replace the antimatter reactor on the Imperial ship with the fusion reactor from the Shakak than it would be to patch all the wholes in your hull and re-route the main power trunk.”
“That stardrive isn’t going to work without the power from the antimatter, is it?” He was dubious, though he didn’t know if he had a right to be, given he’d just admitted he wasn’t a technician.
“I’m not an engineer,” Lyta qualified, “but from what Terry’s been telling me, he thinks he can get it to run at a much lower efficiency. Not enough to boost at a hundred gravities and run us faster than light, but enough to get by as a sub-light engine to get us to the jump points.”
“Can it even use jump points?” he asked, surprised.
“Apparently. Don’t ask me how, Terry’s the genius and even he has a hard time explaining the mechanics of it, but you can use the stardrive to access the jump-points just like a Kadish-Dean field generator.” She paused and he could feel her staring at him even though he was studying the blank surface of he table. “The ship’s going to need a captain, Kammy.”
He glanced up sharply, shock and then anger running through him in quick succession before the overwhelming sadness beat them both out by its weight and persistence.
“Get someone else, Lyta,” he told her. “I’m not a captain. I just drive the boat.”
“You were his First Mate,” she reminded Kammy, gently chiding. “He trusted you to have his back. He’d want you to take us home.”
“I should tell you to go to hell.” He smiled, or as much of a smile as he could muster. It felt like trying to move during a high-gee acceleration…but he’d done that, too. “But he loved you.”
“And I loved him.” Lyta Randell was as hard as a starship hull, but a tear was trailing down her cheek and she let it make its way down the unfamiliar territory, either not aware it was there or not ashamed of it if she was. “But he died doing something he believed in, and I think he’d want you to see it through to the end.”
Kammy nodded, both in agreement and in resignation.
“All, right, ho’onani. I couldn’t say no to you any more than the Captain could. I just hope they’ll remember him.”
“He’ll have a star on the wall of heroes in Argos,” she promised, finally wiping at her eyes. “I’ll put it there myself.”
23
Snow crunched under Logan’s boots and he pulled his jacket tighter against the morning chill, struggling to keep up with his father’s long-legged strides down the old path. A gust of wind blew a shower of sparkling flakes out of the line of balsam firs lining the edge of the property and he brushed them off his neck before they could melt their way down his back. Fifteen meters tall, the firs hid the rustic lines of the family home, and hid them from anyone who might be passing by on the road. Beyond the gentle impact of their footsteps, the morning calls of winter birds were the only sounds.
“Why did you have me fly out here, Dad?” he asked, wincing at his own voice, loud and intrusive out here in the rural stillness of mid-winter. “I thought I’d just report to the palace.”
“Too many prying eyes at the palace,” his father tossed back over his shoulder, still walking.
The path, a dirt road when it wasn’t covered in half a meter of snow, led from the old barn out through a forest of spruce and fir and bare, threatening oaks all the way out to the ponds. They’d been watering holes back when the place had been a ranch, but Logan’s great-grandfather had sold the stock off decades ago, and he’d never even seen a cow or bison or aurochs out here.
Jaimie Brannigan stopped at the edge of the biggest of the ponds, hands tucked into the pockets of his leather greatcoat, staring at the thin film of ice and snow on the surface as if he were considering whether it would hold his weight
.
“I used to take you hunting out here in the fall,” he said, the cold turning his breath into a fog blowing backwards across his beard in the breeze. “You remember?” A glance backward with the words, the big man’s eyes soft with the recollection. “We’d take our fill of deer and elk. You even bagged that moose once.”
Logan laughed softly, thinking of how much work it had been to gut and skin that damned moose…
“You remember,” he asked his father, “that time we heard the rumors about a mastodon straying down here from the plains in the north and I made you come out here with me every day for two weeks to see if we could bag it?”
Jaimie Brannigan rumbled a low chuckle and he squeezed his son’s shoulder in a one-armed embrace.
“I could never get Terrin interested in hunting.” The big man sighed his lament. “Lord knows I tried. But he always thought it was more efficient to let others kill for his meat so he could stick to his strengths.”
“Thank Mithra he did,” Logan said fervently. “We’d all be dead without him…and Katy.”
“And I wish your brother and your…” His father cocked an eyebrow questioningly. “Girlfriend? Fiancé?”
“Oh, Horns of God, father, that is a complicated question.” The words had come out in a moan and a memory of a long and ultimately pointless argument. “Probably best discussed some other time.”
“Well then,” the Guardian went on, waving a hand in acquiescence, “I wish your brother and Commander Margolis were here to receive my thanks and congratulations in person.”
“That’s Lieutenant…,” Logan corrected him automatically, then paused, seeing the glint in his father’s eyes. “Wow.”
“Indeed. We may not be able to hand out medals at a ceremony, but as the head of the Spartan military, I can and most certainly will issue promotions. Including yours, Colonel.”
“Fuck!” Logan blurted, unable to hold the exclamation inside, his eyes bugging wide. “Colonel? What the hell, Dad? What happened to Major? You know what this is going to look like…”
“Like I am showing nepotism.” Jaimie Brannigan held up a palm to halt his son’s rant. “Calm yourself. There’s a reason, and I promise to make it clear, soon. First though, I need some details and I had no wish to get them through channels.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “And I didn’t wish to have to ask General Constantine. Where is the ship now?”
“In the Aubergine system, at a drydock facility around the moon of the gas giant there. It’s a secret Military Intelligence base, pretty remote.” He chuckled maliciously. “We didn’t even stop to ask for clearance when we blew through the Starkad systems on the way back. Without a fusion drive flare, they couldn’t even see us. We didn’t get off the drop-ships there at Aubergine, just left Terry and Katy and the engineering crew with the ship and transferred over with all our mecha and equipment to a Q-ship heading in to Clan Modi space, to Gujarat. We left the equipment with the Q-ship to take on in for refitting and the rest of us chartered berths on a corporate cargo hauler back into the Guardianship.”
“Good tradecraft,” his father said, nodding approval. “Lyta’s work, I assume.”
“Of course. I’m not a spy, as I’ve been reminded.” At least not a good one.
“Now the bad news,” Jaimie Brannigan prompted, motioning for him to go on. “Come on, I’ve read the technical data your brother put in his report, but I want it in layman’s terms from you.”
“I wouldn’t call it bad news,” he protested, but then shrugged. “It’s going to take a while, Dad. Reverse-engineering the weapons, the armor, Terry thinks we can do that in a few years, max. But those are just incremental improvements. Most of the really revolutionary stuff requires antimatter power, and we are not even close to producing it in quantity or being able to store it safely anywhere outside a laboratory.”
“But the ship works.” His father was staring out across the pond again, dipping beneath the frozen surface of his own thoughts.
“Yeah. It’s not as fast as it would be with antimatter power, and the shields can’t take quite as much of a pounding, and the weapons are only about half their normal effectiveness, but it works.” Logan blew out a breath of frustration. “And in another ten years, we might be able to build another one just like it, if we can figure out how to manufacture the exotic elements in its drive core.”
“It’s a tool, son.” His father’s words were gently chiding. “In the military, we use the tools we have.”
“Use it for what? Sir?” he added, sensing the conversation had taken a turn into something official.
“You asked how I could get away with promoting you to colonel without seeming as if I were engaging in nepotism. And I’ll tell you how: because no one will know. I’m going to give you the greatest reward a military officer can receive for a job well done: another, even harder job.”
“Father,” Logan said slowly and carefully, “are you saying…”
“What I am saying, son,” Jaimie Brannigan interrupted him, “is this isn’t the end for Wholesale Slaughter.” He grinned, as if he were getting used to the name. “It’s only the beginning.”
Epilogue
Heinrich Brunner slung the twenty-kilogram sack of rice over his shoulder, grunting involuntarily and bending his knees against the weight. It wasn’t quite as much here as it would have been on his homeworld back in the Supremacy, but neither was it insubstantial, and for the hundredth time in as many days, he wished he could afford a powerloader. Or an elevator.
But Guajarat wasn’t a world where powerloaders could be bought by every small-time restaurant owner, and Nashik wasn’t a city where those restaurants were modern buildings with convenient freight elevators. And lunch was in two hours. He leaned into his load and the wooden steps up from the cellar storage room creaked under the combined weight of 120 kilograms of man and rice.
The dim light of the cellar gave way to the mid-morning glow through the rice-paper windows of the dining room and he kept his head down, trying not to let the sunlight dazzle his eyes before he stepped through to the kitchen. He stopped midway between the cellar and the kitchen. There was a shadow stretching out across the floor, a shadow he’d not seen in the five years he had run this place, in the five years he’d made the trip up from the cellar twice a day, every day.
He moved quickly for a man his size, ducking out from under the weight of the sack of rice and sweeping the curved blade of the karambit out of the sheath at the back of his belt, turning…and staring into the barrel of a gun. He couldn’t see past the muzzle, couldn’t see beyond a silhouette until the short, slender shape moved forward, just slightly, enough for the light to come in from the side instead of behind.
She was wearing a cloak of dark grey, the hood covering most of her face, and the only way he could tell it was a woman was the hand wrapped around the butt of the gun. It might have been delicate once, but he could see a keloid burn scar running up the sleeve of her robe, months old at most, and untreated.
“I don’t keep any cash on hand before business hours,” he warned her, letting the knife dangle by its loop from his little finger.
“I don’t want your money. I want passage back to the Supremacy.”
His lips skinned back from his teeth in a feral snarl, the knife swinging back into his palm.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Your commitment to your cover is commendable, Agent Brunner,” she told him, her tone strained and desperate but with something beneath, an undertone of hesitance and officiousness. “But also unnecessary.” She paused as if trying to make sure she recalled something exactly. “What is the most direct route to the city’s central bank?”
“Main Street,” he responded automatically, then scowled, beginning to relax. “You know, the point of a passphrase is that you can use it casually in a conversation without everyone knowing what you’re saying. All this,” he waved at her gun with his knife, “kind of defeats the purpose,
don’t you think?”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, her voice muffled by the folds of the hood. She shoved the handgun back into her belt beneath the robes. “I’m afraid I’m new at this.”
“All right,” he said, slipping the karambit back into its sheath and waving her forward. “Let’s get on with it. Who are you, and how did you get here?”
She pulled back the hood as she approached and he stifled a curse at the hideous network of burn scars running red and livid across the right side of her face, the empty socket where her right eye used to be. Her hair had been burned away along with the skin and she’d shaved the other side to match, but he could tell by the untouched half of her face she’d been pretty, once.
“I’m Captain Ruth Laurent,” she told him. “And as for how I got here…it’s a long story.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thank you for reading Terminus Cut, book two in Wholesale Slaughter.
We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. We just wanted to take a moment to encourage you to review the book on Amazon and Goodreads. Every review helps further the author’s reach and, ultimately, helps them continue writing fantastic books for us all to enjoy.
If you liked Terminus Cut, check out the rest of our catalogue at www.aethonbooks.com. To sign up to receive a FREE collection from some of our best authors (including one from Rick Partlow) as well updates regarding all new releases, visit www.aethonbooks.com/sign-up