by Rick Partlow
“If they heard about it,” Constantine corrected her, leaning into the hard-packed dirt on the hillside and peering down at the farm’s long-shore facility. “I only see one truck down there. God knows if anyone was even working when the Jeuta hit orbit.”
The three of them made quite the pitiful trio, Katy thought. Constantine could barely use his hands after burning his palms badly getting her out of the truck after the blast, Corporal Beck’s left arm was splinted and bound to his chest with a makeshift sling and Katy, beside being three months pregnant, was nursing a splitting headache from what might have been a slight concussion.
And yet I’m the only one who can handle a gun at the moment.
The holster chafed against her left breast and shoulder after two days of walking, but she hadn’t begged off the duty of carrying it. The weight of the Ranger’s service pistol was the only comfort she had against the bug-on-a-plate feeling of exposure dogging her whenever they walked across open territory. There was nothing to do be done about it, of course. If the Jeuta had satellites up, they might spot them walking…but, on the other hand, there had to be a lot of displaced people walking on the planet and the satellite would have to be focused on their immediate area to resolve such a small image. She knew the Jeuta were even less sophisticated in their computer systems than the post-Imperial Dominions, which likely precluded any automated searches.
Still, she touched the gun like a talisman every few minutes. If she couldn’t be in the cockpit of an assault shuttle, the pistol would have to do.
“Well, we’re not going to find out sitting up here waiting for enlightenment,” she decided. She yanked the handgun out of its holster and pushed herself to her feet. “Follow me, gentlemen.”
Katy picked her way down the hill slowly and carefully, conscious not only of her own footing but of the two men behind her. Constantine was helping Beck, but either one of them would have a rough time if they fell. The ground was uneven, cracked and splitting from the weathering of endless sunbaked days in summer and cool humidity in the winter, and it crumbled beneath her boots, giving way to softer soil below and sending mini-landslides streaming down the hillside ahead of her. Her instinct was to ride the slide downward, to skid and ski the slope as she had the snowy hills of her home in winter, but instead, she picked her way slowly and left a trail for the men. It seemed to take forever.
The closer she got to the warehouse, the fewer details she seemed to be able to make out, as the lower levels were swallowed in shadow, the moonlight blocked by the high walls. She’d told Constantine she’d never seen the place, but the truth was, she’d never visited any food production plant. She wondered if that made her shallow, one of the city-dwellers she’d always despised who thought food appeared by magic at the downtown dispensaries.
Logan had been raised on what had once been a working ranch, and if he hadn’t slaughtered cattle, he at least had hunted game. He’d told her stories of gutting and skinning elk and deer out by the old barn, cutting steaks and freezing them for holiday celebrations. That was kind of a gentrified way of getting exposed to food production, but it was still more experience than she’d had.
She wondered if he was still alive, if his crazy plan to ally with Starkad against the traitor Rhianna Hale had worked, or if he’d wound up executed on some world dozens of light-years away and neither of them would ever know what happened to the other. The thought clenched at her chest, squeezing her heart, and she had to struggle to push it back into the tiny, locked box where she’d been containing her stress and worry over him and Terrin and Franny and Kammy and all the others. They’d either made it or they hadn’t, but she couldn’t count on them reaching her in time to help. She’d have to save herself.
Closer now, stepping into the shadows, she hesitated and looked back to make sure Constantine and Beck were keeping up. The Ranger was stumbling a little, perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from pain. The trip down the hill couldn’t have been pleasant with a broken arm and they’d run out of pain medication from the first aid kit about twelve hours ago. Hopefully, there’d be some medical supplies inside.
When she turned back toward the building, she was looking straight down the yawning muzzle of a shotgun, only a meter from her face. She froze, keeping her gun-hand very still. She was no kind of close-quarters battle expert and there was no way she was going to get off an accurate shot before whoever was holding that shotgun blew her head clean off her shoulders.
“Drop that gun slow and careful, girl.”
The voice was female, older, and as her eyes adjusted to the lower light, the features of the woman began to come into focus. She looked weathered and worn and, on a world out here on the Periphery, without access to the best medical care, she could have been anywhere between forty and fifty standard years old. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back into a long braid down her back, and her clothes were rough and practical, the dress of someone who worked hard for their living. Her firm stance and steady hands meant she knew how to use the gun and might have aimed it at a live human being before.
“Take it easy,” Katy said and immediately regretted the inanity of it. “We’re friends. We’re part of Wholesale Slaughter.”
“We’ll decide whether you’re friends or not after you put down the damned gun.” The declaration was flat and brooked no argument. Katy bent slowly at the knees and set the pistol on the ground, pulling her hand away and keeping both of them raised as she stood straight again.
“You two,” the woman called back to Constantine and Beck. “Stay right where you are and keep your hands where I can see them if this girl’s life means anything to you.”
“I can’t move my left arm,” Beck said, still at least ten meters or so behind Katy by the sound of his voice. “It’s broken.”
The woman grunted with what might have been skepticism but didn’t reply.
“I put the gun down,” Katy pointed out. “So, let’s talk. I’m Katy Margolis, Logan Brannigan’s wife. This is General Constantine and Corporal Beck. We were trying to evacuate the city when the nuke detonated. You know about the nuke, right? You know about the Jeuta?”
“Yeah, I heard about ’em.” She sneered. “So did my whole crew. Bastards ran off and took about all my work vehicles with ‘em. Like the silly fuckers know somewhere safe to go.”
“Ma’am, we’ve been on the run for two days and nights,” Katy told her. “We’re all hurt, I’m pregnant.” Not that it had actually slowed her down or affected her at all yet, but anything to get some sympathy from the woman holding the big gun. “And our water and food ran out yesterday. Do you think you can help us?”
The woman was silent for a moment, her face screwed up in concentration, as if this were a complicated engineering problem she had to solve.
“All right,” she said, nodding, letting the muzzle of the shotgun fall a few centimeters, the stock coming away from her shoulder slightly. “But I’m taking the gun.” She stepped forward and picked up the pistol, tucking it into her belt. “You all may be who you say you are, but desperate people do bad things, even when they weren’t bad to begin with.”
You don’t know the half of it, lady.
“My name’s Lila Saville,” the woman added, pulling open a door Katy hadn’t even noticed in the deepness of the shadow. “I own this place.”
She motioned for them to precede her into the building and Katy hesitated for just a moment before obeying. Inside was pure darkness without the slightest hint of electric light, nothing to give any indication the place was occupied.
Smart. But also, creepy. Katy felt her way along the inside of the door frame, probing forward with a foot slid across the floor to make sure she didn’t run into anything as she stepped inside and made room for the others. Muted breathing and scraping footsteps from behind her were the only indicators they followed, but then the door slammed shut and it somehow became even darker, though she hadn’t thought it possible.
“I can’t see a fucking thing i
n here,” Beck muttered from just over her right shoulder.
“Antonia,” Lila said from a few steps further back, “switch ‘em on.”
Katy squeezed her eyes shut at the painful brightness of the sudden lights, raising a hand to shield her face when even her closed eyes didn’t seem to be enough. She had a sudden flashback to the detonation of the nuclear airburst and felt a nearly uncontrollable urge to curl into a ball on the floor. She fought it, forced her breath back to normal, and when she opened her eyes again, she realized the lights weren’t nearly as close or as bright as she’d thought. They were up high above the factory floor, regular work lights, only blindingly bright because of the utter darkness they had replaced and because of how well her eyes had adjusted to the night.
The interior of the place had a rough, patched-together look to it, with bulbous storage tanks bolted into cradles welded together from what looked to be scrap metal. Driers and sorters and furnaces were all connected by meter-wide pipes snaking around and through everything until she couldn’t even be sure where the output was. She followed the whole setup down from the lights, past the machinery and to the far wall, where a teenaged girl stood next to a bank of switches Katy assumed was for the lights.
“Who are they, ma?” the teenager asked, sounding more curious than scared.
“They’re from Wholesale Slaughter,” Lila told her. “Or leastwise, that’s what they say.”
“Hey, I recognize her!” the girl she’d called Antonia said, pointing at Katy. “She’s been on the gossip nets. She’s that pilot who’s married to Logan Brannigan!”
Katy wasn’t sure if she was more surprised that she was a topic on the gossip nets, that a place like Revelation even had a gossip net, or that workers out at one of the algae farms paid attention to it.
“He’s a total dream, by the way,” Antonia confided.
Lila snorted dark amusement, but she set the shotgun and the pistol down on a table up against the wall just inside the door.
“All right, I guess you are who you say you are, since Antonia confirms it.”
“Call me Toni,” the teenager added, scowling at her mother.
“Please don’t,” Lila implored. “Anyway, Antonia, go find our guests some food and water and bring it to my office.” She waved at Katy and the others. “Come on, there’s comfortable chairs in there, not like out here.”
The “office” was a section of the factory up against the far wall, blocked off on two sides by storage crates, with a desk fashioned out of a thick, metal workbench, a computer display bolted to the center of it. A pair of battered and patched couches sat opposite the desk chair and Katy fell into one of them gratefully, days of pent-up breath leaving her in a sigh.
“I must stink like hell,” she reflected.
“Oh, you do,” Lila assured her, “but you’re still not as bad as your friends here.”
“Ms. Saville,” Constantine said, ignoring the jab, leaning forward in the other couch, “we thank you for taking us in, but honestly, this place isn’t safe. The Jeuta might think it’s abandoned simply because you’ve kept the lights off and turned off your machinery, but they won’t take it for granted. Even if there are no signs of occupation, they’ll eventually send a patrol to check it out.”
“Then we’ll hide until they leave,” Lila insisted. “They won’t stay forever. Hell, they probably intend to get off this rock before your husband…,” she nodded towards Katy, “…comes back and sorts them out.”
“That’s not how the Jeuta work,” Constantine told her. “They don’t take a look and then move along whistling a merry tune. They’ll blow this place to shreds with their mecha to make sure no one else can use it. Strictly a scorched earth policy. You won’t have anything left to come back to.”
“And what do we have to run away to, General Constantine?” she asked him, her tone taking on an edge of frustration. “You’ve been wandering out there for two days and came in here near to collapse and begging for help. Is that what you’d recommend for me and my daughter?”
“We were heading for the Run,” Katy said, keeping her voice gentle and soothing, trying not to annoy the woman, who was quite obviously used to being in charge. “We sent some people ahead with supplies before the warhead went off. We think we can hold up there until the Jeuta leave the planet.”
“And what if they don’t leave?”
The question came from Antonia, who’d entered the office carrying a tray loaded down with flatbread sandwiches and mugs of something that might have been ale but definitely didn’t look like water. The question had been casual in tone, but the girl’s dark eyes were troubled. Katy’s mouth watered at the smell of the food, but she forced herself to think about the girl’s question.
“If they don’t leave,” she said, “then Logan will come back and kill them all.” She took one of the sandwiches from the tray as Antonia brought it closer, shoving it into her mouth with undisguised eagerness. It was chicken, but it might as well have been the finest cut of steak from a sacred aurochs led to slaughter by the temple priests in Argos.
Which, I mean, I’m a Christian, but the priests of Mithra do have the best steak…
“We do have the one truck left,” Lila mused while her daughter passed out the food to Constantine and Beck. “We could load up all our food and whatever water containers we have and try to take it up the coast road.”
“We’ll have to travel at night, right?” Antonia asked, sounding excited at the prospect. “Like, with no lights?”
“Actually,” Constantine said around a mouthful of sandwich, “the Jeuta will be using thermal imaging from orbit and aerial drones, so we’d be better off traveling in the heat of the day and lying low at night. We’ll blend into the background heat reflected back by the rock and sand at the worst of the morning heat. By truck, driving say, three hours a day right around noon, it shouldn’t take us more than another two days to reach the end of the canyon system.” He paused, swallowing a bite and washing it down with what had turned out to be ale after all. “Assuming we don’t run into any Jeuta patrols along the way.”
“What if we do?” Lila murmured, then shrugged the question away.
She knew, Katy thought, exactly what would happen if they ran into a Jeuta patrol armed with a shotgun and a pistol. Katy saw indecision passing over the woman’s face and felt a stab of guilt for putting her in this position. She reminded herself that Constantine was right and the Jeuta would have found them here, or else destroyed the place and left them stranded. They didn’t have to go with Katy and the others, but they deserved to know what was coming.
“All right,” Lila said. “We’ll go with you.” She shot a look at Constantine, as if she blamed him for the situation. “You think we can afford a day to pack up the truck?”
“I don’t know if we can afford it,” Constantine said, “but I think we have to take it. I don’t know that the three of us could head out of here again without some rest.”
Katy grunted her skepticism. Nicolai Constantine had soldiered on with the nasty burns on his palms, acting as if it hadn’t been agony for him. And he’d stepped out of a Starkad black-site prison after months of psychological torture and chemical interrogation and went right back to negotiating a protection agreement with the Imperium of Mbeki. She was fairly certain the man could keep going right up until he died.
“I’ll hunt up our medical kit,” Lila offered, “and see if we can’t do something about those burns. Antonia, you go get that spare cot from the storage closet. Two of you can take the couches while the other sleeps on the cot.” She snorted. “I’ll let you fight over that yourselves while we’re gone.”
Katy waited until the woman and her daughter had left the room before turning to Constantine.
“Should we risk the truck?” she asked him in a low voice, hoping it wouldn’t carry out to the civilians. “Maybe we’d be better off on foot.”
“We could make it up the coast on foot, but once we turn inland…
” The older man shook his head. “I didn’t say anything earlier because I was hoping we’d run across a vehicle at one of the facilities along the ocean, but there’s no way we could carry enough water on foot to make it to the Run.”
“Thanks for sharing that with us, sir,” Katy murmured into her mug of ale and Corporal Beck stifled a chuckle, trying to hide it behind a cough. Constantine spared her a baleful glare before he went on.
“The girl asked the right question, though. What if the Jeuta don’t leave?”
“What do you mean, sir?” Beck wondered. “Why would they stay? You think they want this planet for some reason?”
“I think this place is far enough away from any of the Jeuta strongholds that there’s only one reason they’d be here. Us. Wholesale Slaughter. Logan Brannigan.”
Katy blinked in stunned surprise, staring at him and trying to work her thoughts around his point.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are they trying to get revenge for us killing those Jeuta back during the mission to Terminus?”
“Nothing quite so petty, Commander Margolis.” Constantine ran fingers through his beard in an instinctive gesture of thought, then winced as the motion caused the burned skin of his palms to crack again. “Sparta is in the midst of a civil war, and even the Jeuta must have noticed it.”
Horrified realization crept through Katy’s mind and across her face.
“You think they mean to invade? You think they were here to take out Wholesale Slaughter to make it easier?”
“I think they were looking for Logan. And when they don’t find him, I think they won’t be going anywhere. They brought a lot of ships, what constitutes a fleet for them. I think they want him to come back and try to retake this place.”
“Well then,” Katy said, snarling defiance at an enemy that couldn’t hear it, “I hope the bastards get what they want. We’re not just Sparta, General, we’re Wholesale Slaughter. Kicking ass is what we do.”
2
Donnell Anders stared at the bulkhead of his cabin, wondering how it had come to this. A year ago, he had been the strong right arm of the Guardian of Sparta, Jaimie Brannigan, as constant as the stars. No one would have doubted his faithfulness to Jaimie or his family. When Rhianna Hale had arranged Jaimie’s death and captured Anders, he’d been ready to die rather than turn traitor and work for Hale.