The Butcher of Anderson Station (2 page)

Once the skirmishers had finished sweeping the corridors for stragglers, a detachment of marines escorted Fred into the conquered station. He paused at the fallback position they’d set up just outside the airlock doors. Marines were beginning to return there from other assignments. They were hopped-up on adrenaline and twitchy with post-combat fear. Fred let them see him. He put his hands on their shoulders and told them they’d done a good job.

Some of them came back on stretchers. Yellow dots made flesh. The corpsmen hurried among them, plugging their hand terminals into ports in the downed soldiers’ combat armor, reading the diagnostics, then assigning their place in line for surgery based on the severity of their wounds. Sometimes they tapped a button on their terminal and one of Fred’s yellow dots shifted to black. His command software flagged the fatality and sent a message to the appropriate squad leader and company commander to write a letter to the family. His own task list received a matching entry.

It was all very clean, very organized. Centuries of warfare in the electronic age had distilled it to this. Fred put his hand on the arm of a young woman whose suit was reporting severe spinal injuries, and squeezed. She gave him a thumbs-up that felt like a punch to the solar plexus.

“Sir?”

Fred looked up and found his first lieutenant standing at attention. “Are we ready?”

“Yes, sir. Might be a straggler or two, but we control the corridors from here to Ops.”

“Take me there,” Fred said.

They covered the ground it had taken his marines hours to win in just a few minutes. The post-combat cleanup teams were still in the breaching ships, waiting for the all clear. Scattered along the corridors lay the bodies of the fallen enemy. Fred looked them over. Other than a noticeable lack of OPA insignias, they were pretty much what he would have expected. Long, thin men and women blasted open by explosives, or repeatedly punctured by small-arms fire. Most were armed, but a few weren’t.

They rounded a corner into the main corridor and then came to the barricade he’d ordered destroyed. Over a dozen bodies lay around it. Some wore makeshift armor, but most were in simple environment suits. The concussion rocket his marines had used to clear the corridor had burst them like overripe grapes. Fred’s vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point.

A small pile of weapons and makeshift explosives lay nearby.

“That’s what they were armed with?” Fred asked.

His escort nodded.

“Pretty light stuff, sir. Civilian grade. Most of it wouldn’t even make a dent in our armor.”

Fred bent over and picked up a homemade grenade.

“They threw bombs at you to keep you from getting close enough to realize their guns wouldn’t work.”

The lieutenant laughed. “And made us frag the lot of them. If we’d known they were packing peashooters, we could have just walked up and tased them.”

Fred shook his head and put the grenade back down.

“Get a demolitions team to come clear these explosives before this homemade shit goes off and kills someone.”

He looked at the nearby life support node that had been wrecked by their concussion rocket.
Enough bystanders have died today.
Fred called up the station status report his cyberops team was updating by the minute. They showed a total loss of life support in the section he was in, and in two neighboring sections. Just over eleven hundred people with no air and no power. Every door he could see might have a family behind it who’d gasped out their last breaths banging to get out because a bunch of idiot Belters had built their barricades where they did. And because he’d chosen to destroy it.

While his lieutenant called for a bomb-disposal unit, Fred walked toward the command center. Along the way he saw a few more Belter corpses. They’d tried to hold the corridor even after his people had blown up the first barricade, hiding behind makeshift barriers and throwing their bathtub-brewed explosives. Buying time, but for what? The final result had never been in doubt. They’d been undermanned and grossly underequipped. The only reason his soldiers had taken three hours was that Fred had insisted on moving cautiously. Looking at the unarmored bodies on the floor, he realized they could have had men in the command center in half that time.

They had to have known it too, these people spread across the floor around him.
The idiots made us kill them.

His lieutenant caught up with him just as he was entering the command center. Corpses filled the room, easily twenty of them. While most of them wore some form of environment suit or another, one man in the center of the room wore only a cheap blue jumpsuit with a mining company logo on the shoulder. He’d been shot dozens of times. A small-caliber pistol was glued to one hand with his own blood.

“The leader, we think,” his escort said. “He was doing some kind of broadcast. The others fought to the last man to buy him time. We tried to take him alive, but he pulled that little gun out of his pocket, and…”

Fred looked at the carnage around him and felt a disquieting sensation in his belly. It lasted only a moment, and then was replaced by a white-hot anger. If he’d been alone, he would have gone to the dead man in the cheap blue jumpsuit and kicked him. Instead, Fred gritted his teeth.

“What the fuck was wrong with you people?” he demanded of the dead.

“Sir?” his lieutenant said, looking at the comms station. “Looks like he was trying to broadcast right up to the last minute.”

“Let me see it,” Fred said.

“What happened on Anderson Station was that I did my duty,” Fred said.

“Your duty,” Dawes echoed. He didn’t make it a question. He didn’t mock it. He just repeated the words.

“Yes.”

“Following orders, then,” Dawes said.

“Don’t even try it, asshole. That Nuremberg crap won’t work on me. I followed orders in that I was instructed by my superior officers to retake the station from the terrorist forces occupying it. I judged that order to be legal and appropriate, and everything that came after was my responsibility. I took the station, and I did so while trying to minimize, first, loss of life to my people and, second, damage to the station.”

Dawes looked at him. Tiny frown lines competed with his acne. Something in the ductwork clacked, hissed, then clacked again, and stopped.

“You were told to do something. You did it,” Dawes said. “How is that not following orders?”

“I gave the orders,” Fred said. “And I did what I did because I judged it to be right.”

“Okay.”

“You’re trying to give me wiggle room. Let me say that the Belters who died on Anderson died because the guy above me made a call. That’s shit.”

“And why would I be doing that?” Dawes asked. He was good. He seemed genuinely curious.

“Build rapport.”

Dawes nodded, then frowned and looked pained.

“And then we’re back to the skull-fucking?” Dawes asked with a grimace. Before he could stop himself, Fred laughed.

“This isn’t what I’m here for, Colonel,” Dawes went on, “and I don’t want to get sidetracked, but doesn’t that go the other way too? You didn’t fire a shot. You didn’t touch a trigger or key in a launch code. You gave orders, but your soldiers judged them to be just and legal.”

“Because they were,” Fred said. “My people did the right thing.”

“Because you told them to,” Dawes said. “They were following your orders.”

“Yes.”

“Your responsibility.”

“Yes.”

The woman with the antique rifle coughed again. Dawes lowered himself to the cheap flooring, sitting with legs crossed. Even then, he was half a head taller than Fred. His skin was pale where it wasn’t red. Between the zits and the gawky-elongated build, Dawes looked like a teenager. Except around the eyes.

“And the terrorists,” Dawes said.

“What?”

“The men who took the station. You think it was their responsibility too, yes?”

“Yes,” Fred said.

Dawes took a long breath, letting the air curl out slowly from between his teeth.

“You’re aware, Colonel, that the assault on Anderson is one of the best documented military actions in history. The security cameras broadcast everything. I’ve spent months playing those streams. I can tell you things about the assault you don’t even know.”

“If you say so.”

“When the barricade blew, eleven people died in the blast. Three more stopped breathing in the next two minutes, and the last two survived until your people came.”

“We didn’t kill the injured.”

“You killed one when he tried to bring his pistol up. The other one had a collapsed lung and choked on her own blood before your medics looked at her.”

“You want an apology?”

Dawes’s smile was cooler now.

“I want you to understand that I know every action that was taken on the station. Every order. Every shot fired, and from what gun. I know everything about that assault, and so does half the Belt. You’re famous out here.”

“You’re the one who asked what happened,” Fred said, shrugging as best he could with bound, numb arms.

“No, Colonel. I asked what happened to
you
.”

General Jasira’s private office was decorated like somebody’s idea of a British gentleman’s club. The furniture was all dark oak and darker leather. The heavy desk smelled like lemons and tung oil. The pen set and globe of Earth on top of it were both made of brass. The bookshelves were filled with real paper books and other souvenirs from a long lifetime of constant travel. There wasn’t an electronic device more complex than a lamp anywhere in sight. If it weren’t for the 0.17 lunar gravity, there would be no way to know it wasn’t an office in London in the early twentieth century.

The general was waiting for him to speak first, so Fred swirled the scotch in his glass instead, enjoying the sound the ice made and the harsh smell of the liquor. He drained it in one swallow, then set it back on the desktop in front of him, an invitation to be refilled.

As Jasira put another two fingers into it, he finally gave up on waiting. He said, “I imagine you’ve had some time to review the video the terrorists transmitted from Anderson.”

Fred nodded. He’d guessed this was the reason for the after-hours invitation. He tried another sip of scotch, but it had taken on a sour taste, and he put it back down.

“Yes, sir, I have. We were jamming radio all the way in, as per protocol, but we didn’t detect that little tightbeam relay they’d left—”

“Fred,” Jasira interjected with a laugh. “This isn’t an inquisition. You aren’t here to apologize. You did
good
, Colonel.”

Fred frowned, picked his glass up, then put it back down without taking a drink.

“Then to be frank, sir, I wonder what I
am
here for.”

Jasira leaned back in his chair.

“A couple of little things. I saw your request for an investigation into the negotiation team’s work. The declassification of the negotiation transcripts. That surprised me.”

As he spoke, Jasira rolled his shoulders, though in the moon’s fractional gravity they could hardly be tense. He must have spent a lot of time dirtside, and the habits died slow.

“Sir,” Fred said, speaking slowly and picking his words carefully, “because of the relay, the public has already seen the battle footage. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle. But no one seems to want to talk about the tightbeam they sent to us at the end there. We—”

“And how will this information change anything? You did your job, soldier. The negotiation team did theirs. End of story.”

“As it stands, sir, the people who took Anderson look like they’re insane, and we look like executioners,” Fred said, then stopped when he realized his voice was getting loud. Quieting down, he said, “There was some kind of mistake. That second message makes it clear that they thought they’d surrendered. A lot of people died over that miscommunication.”

Jasira smiled, but there was no humor in it.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You barely lost anybody,” the general said. “Anyway, the request’s denied. We have no reason to do any investigation on this matter. The battle footage is out, and as it stands that works in our favor. The simpler the message is, the more people will understand it: Take one of our stations, and we take it back. Hard. We can only confuse the issue by turning it political.”

“Sir,” Fred said, all warmth gone from his voice. “I killed 173 armed insurgents and over a thousand civilians in this action. You owe it to those people—you owe it to
me
—to show we did the right thing. What if we can avoid this happening next time?”

“There isn’t going to be a next time,” the general said. “You’re the one who saw to that.”

“Sir, you’re making it seem very much like this wasn’t a mistake at all. Who gave the order to ignore their surrender and send me in? Was it you?”

Jasira shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You did what we needed you to do. We won’t forget that.”

Fred looked at his hands. He rose to his feet, a little too quickly, bouncing in the low g, and snapped a sharp salute. Jasira poured himself another glass of scotch and drank it off, leaving Fred standing as he did.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

Jasira gave him a long, resigned look.

“They’re giving you the Medal of Freedom.”

Fred’s arm turned limp, and his salute collapsed under its own weight.

“What?” was all he could manage to say.

“I’m going back down the well. I’m too old to suck vacuum anymore. They’ll pin you with the UN Marines highest honor, then shortly thereafter give you your first star. You’ll have a seat here at OPCOM before the year is out. Try to look happy about it.”

The silence stretched. Fred focused hard on nothing about ten feet in front of him. Dawes watched him for almost a full minute, then gave up.