Wholesale Slaughter Read online

  WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER

  ©2019 RICK PARTLOW

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Filip Dudek.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  1

  The guard huddled inside the heater coils of his jacket and muttered curses into the teeth of the north wind. Captain Lyta Randell couldn’t see his face, couldn’t quite make out the words, but she knew exactly what he was thinking. It was there in the shudders running through him, in the way he had his rifle slung over his back instead of held at the ready because his hands were stuffed into his pockets. It was universal.

  He was cursing the cold, cursing the wind, cursing his sergeant for putting him on guard duty in the first place. He wished he was inside the main compound, impermanent and slapdash as it was. He had to see it teasing him—he was even closer than Lyta to the floodlights piercing the midnight darkness, turning snow flurries into a meteor shower, warmth and comfort hidden behind walls of aluminum sheeting. He was undoubtedly upset about missing out on the entertainment as well. On a world like this, barren, barely habitable, with nothing around for three jump-points, entertainment was hard to come by, and there was a fresh batch of new prisoners on the other side of those walls. Women, men, children, whatever he was into and his superiors would let him get away with.

  A feral rage surged upward from Lyta Randell’s gut to her chest and she had to force herself not to give in to it, not to bring the muzzle of her carbine up and put a burst through the guard’s head. It would have been easy, quiet even with the integral suppressor… but there was always the chance the floppy hood the man was wearing would throw off her aim, that she’d hit off to the side instead of right in the brainstem, that he’d get off a warning on the radio.

  So, she waited, knowing what was going on inside those walls, what the captives would be going through. She tamped it down like a powder charge and saved it for later. A hundred meters away, on the other side of the perimeter fence, there was nothing, no activity all the way from the wire to the compound. On the far side of the cluster of buildings, she saw the faint motion of a pair of bird-legged mecha shuffling back and forth on a security patrol, while more of the ten-meter, bipedal tanks stood motionless and unmanned nearby.

  “Shadow One in position,” she subvocalized into her throat mic.

  The answer was deep and male and nearly operatic in its smooth timbre.

  “Roger, Shadow One. You are go in two mikes.”

  “Two mikes, roger,” she echoed automatically.

  Two minutes. The guard wouldn’t wander off in just two minutes. She thought it at him, a mental command not to move, to stay right where he was and shiver. It was an old soldier’s superstition, and she was a very old soldier. Old enough to count the two minutes down in her head without resorting to checking under the sleeve covering her wrist computer.

  “Shadow Three,” she murmured. “Take him out.”

  I used to do this sort of thing myself, she complained silently, to the only person who cared.

  Still, Sergeant Marini was pretty good as a second choice. He made no sound, appearing like a wraith out of the blackness and snaking an arm around the sentry’s throat, silencing him in the spare moments before his knife plunged upward into the man’s armpit, a necessary weak-spot in the sort of cheap, basic armor the pirate troops could afford. The guard thrashed, trying to reach the rifle he’d slung for comfort, clutching through his heavy jacket for his equipment belt and the combat blade useless beneath it.

  Blood spattered inky black on the powdered snow, Rorschach test patterns on the virgin white until the galvanic drumming of the dying man’s heels scratched them away. A long thirty seconds before all movement stopped and Marini dragged the lifeless body out of the glow of the security lights and into a stand of skinny, balding trees.

  The rest of the squad was moving without having to be told. Scherer was still attaching the alligator clips of the dampener to the fence wires when Lansdale yanked out the cutters, slicing through the first strand of fence just as the green indicator glowed in muted cheerfulness on the dampener’s display. Captain Randell grinned beneath her face hood, unfolding from her spider-hole with a clicking and cracking of stiff, overworked joints, and waving the bulk of the platoon forward.

  Off to the side, she made an approving note of Marini stripping the magazine and loaded round from the guard’s rifle and tossing the weapon aside.

  6mm caseless, Lyta judged with clinical precision. Easy to fabricate the gun and the ammo even out here in Shitsville.

  Lansdale flashed a thumbs-up back to Lyta, pulling back the section of wire fence she’d cut as Marini prepared to crawl through, waiting for her signal. She thumbed the switch for her throat mic.

  “Shadow One has a breach. I say again, Shadow One has a breach.”

  There was a long silence, and for just a heartbeat, she had the paranoid notion the Gomers had twigged to them and were jamming their signals. But then…

  “Shadow One, execute.”

  She made a slashing motion at Marini, and the Rangers began scrambling through the hole in the fence, scattering to cover positions on the other side.

  About damn time. It’s been way too long since I killed some pirates.

  Kathren Margolis shoved her hands tight against her ears and tried to shut out the screams. The walls of the storage closet were pressed particle board, the door hollow plastic; they might as well have not been there, yet they were her only defense from the fate looming on the other side, the only fate she could imagine worse than what had already happened. The screams were high-pitched, inhuman, but she thought it was the Captain of the transport. She’d spoken with him once on the voyage from Nike and recognized his pleasant tenor somewhere underlying the agonizing wails.

  He wasn’t the first. They’d started with the Navigator three days ago, then the First Officer yesterday. She hadn’t seen it, but she’d heard every last, excruciating second, and still she’d preferred to concentrate on the screams than what was happening to her in that closet. But the screams wouldn’t stop and she couldn’t shut them out and the floor was ice-cold and rough against her skin and she was shivering and scared and she felt so dirty she might never feel clean again, and if that closet door opened again, she was going to just make them kill her.

  The closet door opened.

  Light flooded in from behind
the man, but she knew him by the massive shoulders, the heavy gut that might have been absurd on someone who was less of a sadistic animal. They called him Sergeant Kuschel, but she’d never met a sergeant with a gut like his, or an unkempt beard. They seemed afraid of him, and with her right eye swollen nearly shut and the bruises on her arms and legs, she understood that part well enough.

  She scrabbled back from the door, leaning against the wall. Disdain battled pleasure across his scarred face; he liked to intimidate women, she’d seen it from the first.

  Not this time.

  She pushed away from the wall and lunged forward, intent on punching him in the balls, hurting him badly enough for him to lose control and beat her to death this time. Her legs betrayed her, wouldn’t support her weight after three days without food or sleep, and she fell half a meter short, landing on her side hard, the wind gushing from her lungs.

  Stars filled her vision and she couldn’t see Kuschel’s twisted, filthy smile, but she heard the laugh and she knew the loathsome smirk accompanied it. She heard his heavy footsteps as he circled around her, toying with her, and she tried to move away from them, bringing her knees up to her chest. He kicked at her, not hard, not like he had the first time, just a jab to sting her shin with the steel toe of his combat boot. He was playing with her, a fat, stupid cat to her mouse.

  “What did you think you were going to do, flyer girl?” Kuschel mocked in an accent that was harsh, grating, metal scraping on metal. “You going to beat me up and fly away?”

  His laugh was sharp and ragged and devolved into coughing. He coughed a lot; he’d probably damaged his lungs and never had access to advanced health care to get them repaired. She wished it had killed him.

  “You won’t fly away from this, little flyer girl.” He bent over her, grabbing her face between the roughened fingers of his beefy hand. “After we’ve had our fun, then you get to be the last one.” He jerked a thumb back toward the door, toward the screams.

  But the screams had stopped. Kuschel seemed to notice about the same time she had, and he straightened slightly, twisting around to look behind him. She tried to use the opportunity to wriggle free, but his fingers tightened on her face. She felt the painful compression on her cheekbones, the dull pain in the bruise over her right eye, and she couldn’t see past his bulk, past the unwashed grey of what had once been a uniform from one military or another.

  “What the…” Kuschel’s exclamation was cut short and suddenly something warm and wet splashed across Kathren’s face. She tasted copper and salt and spat reflexively. It was blood, but not hers.

  Sgt. Kuschel toppled, an ancient oak felled by one storm too many, his fingertips scraping across her face as they slipped free. Kathren desperately wiped at her face, trying to get the big man’s blood out of her eyes. A tall, black-clad figure stood in the doorway, a faint curl of smoke rising from the muzzle of a suppressed carbine still trained on Kuschel’s inert form. Kathren’s first thought was this was an attack by a rival pirate group and she felt a surge of hope they’d just kill her outright.

  A long-fingered hand left the fore-grip of the carbine and pulled up the featureless black hood and night vision goggles, revealing the sharp-edged, not unpleasant face of a woman, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties, her hair dark brown and cut short and spikey. Her eyes glinted green in the faint light filtering in from outside the room, and a grim smile played across her lips as she finally concluded Kuschel was really dead. Behind her, other black-clad commandos spread out into a defensive formation, stepping over the corpses of the pirates to reach the captives they’d brought out of their cells. She saw one man pulling open a nylon bag marked with a small, subdued red caduceus, a medical kit.

  “I’m Captain Lyta Randell, First Spartan Rangers,” she announced, her voice slightly raspy, as if she’d spent too many years yelling at the top of her lungs. She extended a hand, a clear offer to help Kathren to her feet. “Are you all right?”

  Kathren stared at her, at the hand, then down at herself, at the torn and filthy rags left from the Navy uniform she’d been wearing, the bruises and dried blood… and other things less pleasant. Gratitude and relief suddenly transformed into hard-edged anger.

  "I was kidnaped," Kathren growled with surprising ferocity, "watched people around me killed and tortured, and I've spent the three days being… being… Of course," she screamed her throat raw, "I'm not fucking all right!"

  "Good," the female commando smiled, grabbing Kathren’s hand and pulling her up. "Realizing that's the first step."

  Logan Conner cinched his harness tighter, clenched his teeth and stomped heavily on the jump pedals. Pressure slammed him down into the gimbal-mounted “easy chair,” the padding of the headrest and the interior padding of his helmet warring with acceleration to keep his skull in one piece. The roar of the jets filled the mech’s tiny cockpit, air sucked into turbines on the Vindicator’s shoulders then superheated in the fusion reactor before screaming out of the exhausts in the machine’s “backpack” at thousands of meters per second.

  Forty tons of vaguely humanoid assault mech soared through the night sky, lifting over the dark line of the low ridge on streams of glowing fusion fury. Logan forced himself to ignore the confused jumble of lights and snow and steam outside his cockpit canopy, concentrating instead on the clarity of the Heads-Up Display and the well-demarcated lines of the fence surrounding the bandit compound. Logan’s teeth clicked together with the impact as the Vindicator landed just inside the wire, only a hundred meters from the two Hopper scout mechs on night patrol.

  “Hopper” wasn’t a production model or a military designation, not like “Vindicator.” The design was too old for that, older than the Dominions, older even than the Empire, so simple even bandit trash like this could fabricate the parts to slap them together out in the middle of nowhere. They were named for the curious gait their ostrich-like legs imparted to the ten-meter tall machine, distinctive and unmistakable even in the scant seconds his mech had been in flight.

  Not waiting to see whether the rest of his squad had followed, Logan immediately targeted the right-hand Hopper with a laser designator and launched a flight of Fire-n-Forget missiles from the pod mounted on his mech’s left shoulder. The high-explosive warheads slammed into the light mech, covering the machine in a cascading series of fireballs and sheering armor away from its chest and legs. Smoke shrouded the machine, hiding it from view, and while Logan didn’t exactly forget it, he suddenly had more important things to think about.

  The pilot of the mech to his left had heeded the warning flare of the Vindicator’s jump jets and used the time to spin his chin cannon around and line up a shot. The 25mm chain gun thundered and flashed, and a hail of tungsten slugs, each the size of a man’s thumb, smashed into the chest plastron of the Vindicator and drove the assault mech back a step… but didn’t penetrate. The bullets were big but slow, intended more for anti-infantry or anti-vehicle use, and they barely cracked the surface armor on a mech the size of the Vindicator.

  Wincing at the jackhammer blows ringing through the cockpit, Logan squeezed a control and felt a shift in his machine’s stance to compensate for the 30mm Vulcan firing off the right shoulder, nearly un-aimed, a desperation shot to distract the Hopper pilot. It would have been too much to hope for to score a hit on the Hopper’s cockpit, or even its hip-mounted turbines, but luck was with him and two slugs from the ten-round burst sliced through the missile pod on the bandit’s right shoulder. The shots didn’t ignite the warheads, but they did jam the launcher before it could get off a salvo… and bought him the seconds he needed.

  The Vindicator’s primary weapon weighed down the right arm like some ridiculously outsized pistol, the electromagnetic coils connecting it to the fusion reactor covered by layered scales of flexible BiPhase Carbide running all the way up the arm. The aiming reticle for the gun floated over the cockpit of the Hopper and Logan touched the trigger pad on the mech’s joystick. The Vindicator rocked ba
ckward, absorbing the recoil of a coherent packet of plasma shooting out of the muzzle at thousands of meters per second, a microsecond of sunrise in the darkness of midnight, polarizing the canopy surface to nearly opaque for nearly a second.

  The HUD still showed him the view from the exterior cameras, images of the Hopper tumbling back, the cockpit incinerated along with the pilot and the gyros that could have stopped its out-of-control crash. Tons of charred, smoking metal slammed to the ground, gouts of steam rising up from snow sublimated directly into water vapor by the excess heat, joining the smoke and radiant heat from the plasma gun blast and the missile explosions in a roiling cloud, impenetrable to eye and sensor alike.

  From the cloud emerged the first Hopper, a mutilated zombie rising from the grave. Its left arm was gone, along with the left-side turbine and most of the armor on its left chest and leg, but amidst those torn, charred, and ragged strips of metal, the cockpit was intact… and so was the missile launch pod on its right shoulder.

  “Shit!” Logan blurted, simultaneously twisting the control to swing around the Gatling turret, taking a step to the side and trying to decide whether he should slam the jump pedals.

  Before he could complete any of it, something streaked out of the night from behind him and slammed into the Hopper’s missile launcher. The pod erupted with a starburst of secondary explosions as the propellant cooked off, followed closely by the warheads. A huge secondary blast tore what was left of the light mecha apart and sent debris spattering off the Vindicator’s armor like a hailstorm. Bits and pieces of burning metal rained down across the compound, lighting up the night and throwing monstrous shadows from the huge Sentinel strike mech plodding up from behind him. The slender barrel of the Electro-Thermal Chemical cannon jutting out across its right shoulder still glowed red from the hypersonic round it had fired to take out the Hopper.