The Butcher of Anderson Station, Page 3

  “The problem with you,” Dawes said, his voice calm and conversational as if they were sitting in a bar somewhere sharing a beer, “and I don’t mean this as a criticism of you in particular. It’s true of anybody who didn’t grow up in the Belt. The problem with you is that you are wasteful.”

  “I’m not a fucking coward,” Fred said through his rapidly swelling lip.

  “Of course you are. You’re smart, you’re healthy. Maybe a few hundred people out of forty billion have your combination of talent and training. And you’re trying to waste that very valuable resource. You’re like the guy who delays replacing his airlock seals when they start to leak. You think it’s just a little bit. It doesn’t matter. You’re one guy. You get killed, no big loss.”

  He heard Dawes walking behind him, but his gaze was still on the rifle. Dawes grabbed Fred’s collar and hauled him back to kneeling.

  “When I was growing up, my dad used to beat the crap out of me if I spat someplace other than the reclamation duct because we needed the water. We don’t waste things out here, Colonel. We can’t afford to. You understand that, though. Don’t you?”

  Slowly, Fred nodded. Blood was seeping down his chin even though Dawes and the woman hadn’t laid an angry hand on him. He’d done this to himself.

  “When I was about fifteen, I killed my sister,” Dawes said. “I didn’t mean to. We were on this rock about a week from Eros Station. We were going out of the ship to get some survey probes that got stuck in the slurry. I was supposed to check her suit seals, but I was in a mood. I was fifteen, you know? So I did a half-assed job of it. We went outside, and everything seemed fine until she twisted sideways to pull up a rock spur. I heard it on the comm link, and it just sounded like a pop. We had the old Ukrainian-style suits. Solid as stone unless something broke, and then it all failed at once.”

  Dawes shrugged.

  “You’re a fucking piece of shit, then, aren’t you?” Fred said, and Dawes grinned.

  “Felt like that, yeah. Still do sometimes. I understand why someone could want to die after a thing like that.”

  “So why not kill yourself?” Fred asked, then spat a dark red clot on the deck at his feet.

  “I’ve got three more sisters,” Dawes said. “Someone’s got to check their seals.”

  Fred shook his head. His shoulder vibrated with sudden pain.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Builds rapport,” Dawes said. “How’s it working?”

  Fred laughed before he knew he was going to. Dawes gestured, and the woman put up the rifle, walking back to her doorway.

  “So. Colonel,” Dawes said. “What information did you get on Anderson Station that you ended up here talking to a sad sack of shit like me?”

  Fred took a long breath.

  “There was a message sent to us as we went in,” he said. “A message I didn’t see until it was too late.”

  * * *

  “Let me see it,” Fred said.

  “There are a couple things here,” the lieutenant said. “Got a partial that was never sent. And one that looks like it’s being sent to the command ship on infinite repeat. Also, a running feed that looks like a straight dump of the security cameras.”

  “Do the unsent partial first.”

  The video started, and the man in the mining jumpsuit stared out of the screen. For Fred, there was a surreal quality to watching a man alive and speaking while his corpse lay cooling on the floor behind him.

  I could have told him this would happen.

  The dead man said, “Citizens of the solar system, my name is Marama Brown. I’m a freelance mining technician for Anderson-Hyosung Cooperative Industries Group. I, and some like-minded individuals, have taken control of the company resupply station.”

  Fred hit pause and turned to his lieutenant. He had a sinking feeling in his gut. The dead man had expected this to get out. Even though he had to know they were jamming, he’d expected the message to be heard.

  “Where was that security camera feed going?” Fred asked.

  “I’ll check on that right now, sir,” the lieutenant replied, and called up the electronic warfare people back on the Dagmar. Fred tuned their conversation out, and hit play again.

  “I believe—we all believe that this action is justified by what has been done here. A man named Gustav Marconi, the station administrator, recently implemented a three percent surcharge on supply transfers. I know that doesn’t sound like much to some of you, but most of us are living on the ragged edge out here. Prospectors, wildcat miners…you strike it rich or you starve. That’s the game. But now a bunch of us are going to have to buy three percent less supplies because it just got that much more expensive. You can eat a bit less food. You can drink a little less water. You can fly a little slower and stretch your fuel, maybe. You run life support at bare minimums. But—”

  “Sir?” said the lieutenant, and Fred paused the playback. “Sir, the transmission, at least some of it, got out. They’d left a tightbeam receiver and broadcast transmitter anchored to a rock just outside our jamming range. We missed it. But the e-war geeks have triangulated its location and are sending a Phantom to frag it.”

  Too late, Fred thought, and hit the play button again.

  “—what if you’re already running at the bare minimum? How about every year, you just don’t breathe for three days? That would about cover it. Or you don’t drink any water for three days. Or you don’t eat for three days when you’re already on the brink of starvation. When there’s nothing left to cut back on, how do you make it up then?”

  Marama turned away from the camera for a second, and when he turned back he was holding his hand terminal. He held it up to the screen. It was displaying the picture of a little girl. She was wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit that had “Hinekiri” hand stitched on the breast, and grinning with small crooked teeth.

  “This is my little girl, my Kiri. She’s four. She has what the medics call ‘hypoxic brain injury.’ She was born a little prematurely, and instead of the high oxygen environment she should have had, she was in my prospecting ship where the air is a little thinner than the Everest base camps back on Earth. We didn’t even know anything was wrong until we realized she wasn’t developing normally.”

  He turned away from the camera and put the terminal down.

  “And she’s not the only one. Developmental problems arising from low oxygen and malnutrition are becoming more and more common. When this was explained to Mr. Marconi, his reply was, ‘Work harder and you can afford the increase.’ We complained to the Anderson-Hyosung head offices, but no one listened. We complained to the Outer Planets Governing Board on Luna.

  “This isn’t… We didn’t start out intending to take over the station. It all just sort of happened,” the man said. For a moment, his voice seemed to waver. As Fred watched, the man forced himself back into calm. “We want everyone to know that, other than Mr. Marconi, whose crimes would have led directly to the deaths of thousands of Belters, no one has been harmed in our taking of the station. We don’t want anyone else to get hurt. We’re not violent people, but we have been pushed so far that there is nowhere left to retreat to. We’ve been in discussions with a UN military negotiator for almost two days now. In a short time, we will be surrendering the station to them. We’ll send this message out prior to handing the station over to make sure our story is heard. I hope no one ever feels like they have to do something like this again. I hope, after all of this, that people can begin talking about what’s happening out here.”

  The video ended. Fred queued up the tightbeam that had been sent to the negotiation team during the assault.

  Marama Brown again, this time holding a pistol, his face twisted with fear.

  “Why are the Marines attacking?” he said in a panicked screech. “We just needed some time! We’re surrendering!”

  The message immediately repeated. Fred stopped it and turned it off.

  “Sir.”

  Fred took
a long breath to fight back the vague nausea he suddenly felt.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “Phantom reports a clean hit. The relay is toast. But, uh…”

  “Spit it out, soldier.”

  “It was no longer broadcasting. Whatever they sent, they were done sending it.”

  Fred pulled up the comm logs, and confirmed what he’d already suspected: Marama Brown had never gotten to send his manifesto. Fred had been ordered in, and Marama had been busy trying to stay alive. But his last tightbeam to Psych Ops had gotten through just fine. They’d known.

  “Sir?” the lieutenant said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Call up the cyber wonks and have them strip the computer core. I’ll go find the liaison officer and start the civilian aid phase.”

  His lieutenant chuckled.

  “Here, kiddies,” the lieutenant said. “We blew the shit out of your station, have some free MREs and UN Marine sticker books.”

  Fred didn’t laugh.

  * * *

  “You had to have known that they were desperate out there,” Dawes said.

  “Of course I did,” Fred said. “It was in all the reports. Hell, it was on the news feeds. Increased overhead. People struggling for the basics. You hear it all the time. Turn on a feed now, you’ll hear it again.”

  The blood had stopped flowing from Fred’s mouth, but the inside of his lip tasted raw. His shoulder was settling into a low, radiating ache. There was a dark circle of blood on the decking in front of him.

  “But this time it was different?” Dawes said. He didn’t sound sarcastic or angry. Just curious.

  Fred shifted. His legs were dead lumps of meat. He couldn’t feel anything. If someone put a knife into his thigh, it would have been like watching it happen to someone else.

  “That man had a crippled baby girl,” Fred said. “I killed him.”

  “The UN would just have sent someone else,” Dawes said.

  “I still killed him.”

  “You didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “I killed him because he wanted her to have enough air to breathe,” Fred said. “I killed her daddy while he was trying to surrender, and they gave me a medal for doing it. So there you go. That’s what happened on Anderson Station. What are you going to do about it?”

  Dawes shook his head.

  “That’s too easy. You’ve killed lots of daddies. What made this one different?”

  Fred started to speak, stopped, tried again.

  “They used me. They made it about sending messages to everyone that you don’t fuck with Earth, because look at the shit we’ll do just because you spaced an administrator on a nowhere station. They made me the poster boy for disproportional response. They made me a butcher.”

  Saying the words was painful, but there was a strange relief too. Dawes was staring at him, his face unreadable. Fred couldn’t meet his eyes.

  Dawes nodded, seeming to come to a decision, then put a hand in his pocket and took out a utility knife. When he opened it, the blade was old and scored. Fred took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was ready. Dawes walked behind him. A fast pull across the neck, and Fred could bleed out in four minutes. A stab in the kidney could take hours. Cut the cords that were tying his arms, and it could take years.

  Dawes cut the cords.

  “This wasn’t a trial,” Fred said. “You’re not here to pass some kind of judgment on me.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to,” Dawes said. “I mean, if it really had been just that you’d been boning one of your marines, I’d have dropped you out an airlock, wasteful or no. But I was pretty sure I was right.”

  “So what happens now?”

  Dawes shifted Fred forward. The pins-and-needles feeling was starting in his hands. Dawes cut the binding on his legs.

  “If you want the easy way out, you go kill yourself on your own damn time and stop setting the OPA up to take the blame for it. I’ve got enough bad press without slaughtering the hero of Anderson Station.”

  “And otherwise?”

  Dawes sat back on his haunches and closed the blade with one hand.

  “I don’t waste resources, Colonel. If you want to die, it will do that girl and her father absolutely no good. If you want to make it up to her and all the people like her, I could use your expertise. You’re a rare resource. You’ve got knowledge and training, and as the man who is famous throughout the whole system for killing Belters, you’re in a position to be our strongest advocate. All it means is walking away from everything you know and love. The life you built for yourself. The admiration of everyone who looks up to you. All the things you’d have lost anyway.”

  “This was a recruitment, then.”

  Dawes stood up, sliding the knife into his pocket. His smile reached his eyes this time.

  “You tell me,” Dawes said. Then, to the woman, “Recanos ai postar. Asi geendig.”

  “Aiis,” she said, shouldering the rifle like a professional.

  The pair walked out together, leaving Fred on the deck, massaging the agony out of his legs as the feeling started to return.

  Meet the Author

  James S. A. Corey is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They both live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Find out more about this series at www.the-expanse.com.

  Also by James S. A. Corey

  THE EXPANSE

  Leviathan Wakes

  Caliban’s War

  If you enjoyed THE BUTCHER OF ANDERSON STATION,

  look out for

  LEVIATHAN WAKES

  BOOK 1 OF THE THE EXPANSE

  by James S. A. Corey

  Prologue: Julie

  The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.

  It had taken all eight days trapped in a storage locker for her to get to that point. For the first two she’d remained motionless, sure that the armored men who’d put her there had been serious. For the first hours, the ship she’d been taken aboard wasn’t under thrust, so she floated in the locker, using gentle touches to keep herself from bumping into the walls or the atmosphere suit she shared the space with. When the ship began to move, thrust giving her weight, she’d stood silently until her legs cramped, then sat down slowly into a fetal position. She’d peed in her jumpsuit, not caring about the warm itchy wetness, or the smell, worrying only that she might slip and fall in the wet spot it left on the floor. She couldn’t make noise. They’d shoot her.

  On the third day, thirst had forced her into action. The noise of the ship was all around her. The faint subsonic rumble of the reactor and drive. The constant hiss and thud of hydraulics and steel bolts as the pressure doors between decks opened and closed. The clump of heavy boots walking on metal decking. She waited until all the noise she could hear sounded distant, then pulled the environment suit off its hooks and onto the locker floor. Listening for any approaching sound, she slowly disassembled the suit and took out the water supply. It was old and stale; the suit obviously hadn’t been used or serviced in ages. But she hadn’t had a sip in days, and the warm loamy water in the suit’s reservoir bag was the best thing she had ever tasted. She had to work hard not to gulp it down and make herself vomit.

  When the urge to urinate returned, she pulled the catheter bag out of the suit and relieved herself into it. She sat on the floor, now cushioned by the padded suit and almost comfortable, and wondered who her captors were—​Coalition Navy, pirates, something worse. Sometimes she slept.

  * * *

  On day four, isolation, hunger, boredom, and the diminishing number of places to store her piss finally pushed her to make contact with them. She’d heard muffled cries of pain. Somewhere nearby, her shipmates were being beaten or tortured. If she got the attention of the kidnappers, maybe they would just take her to the others. That was okay. Beatings, she could handle. It seemed like a small price to pay if it meant seeing people again.

  The locker sat beside the inner airlock door. During fli
ght, that usually wasn’t a high-traffic area, though she didn’t know anything about the layout of this particular ship. She thought about what to say, how to present herself. When she finally heard someone moving toward her, she just tried to yell that she wanted out. The dry rasp that came out of her throat surprised her. She swallowed, working her tongue to try to create some saliva, and tried again. Another faint rattle in the throat.

  The people were right outside her locker door. A voice was talking quietly. Julie had pulled back a fist to bang on the door when she heard what it was saying.

  No. Please no. Please don’t.

  Dave. Her ship’s mechanic. Dave, who collected clips from old cartoons and knew a million jokes, begging in a small broken voice.

  No, please no, please don’t, he said.

  Hydraulics and locking bolts clicked as the inner airlock door opened. A meaty thud as something was thrown inside. Another click as the airlock closed. A hiss of evacuating air.

  When the airlock cycle had finished, the people outside her door walked away. She didn’t bang to get their attention.

  * * *

  They’d scrubbed the ship. Detainment by the inner planet navies was a bad scenario, but they’d all trained on how to deal with it. Sensitive OPA data was scrubbed and overwritten with innocuous-looking logs with false time stamps. Anything too sensitive to trust to a computer, the captain destroyed. When the attackers came aboard, they could play innocent.

  It hadn’t mattered.

  There weren’t the questions about cargo or permits. The invaders had come in like they owned the place, and Captain Darren had rolled over like a dog. Everyone else—Mike, Dave, Wan Li—​they’d all just thrown up their hands and gone along quietly. The pirates or slavers or whatever they were had dragged them off the little transport ship that had been her home, and down a docking tube without even minimal environment suits. The tube’s thin layer of Mylar was the only thing between them and hard nothing: hope it didn’t rip; goodbye lungs if it did.