The lives of the red list were nothing, it was more cost effective to displace them and when the protests erupted, cheaper still, to purge them.
Orders were orders. The Proctor wouldn’t have questioned them or given a damn about the consequences.
Rhett raised his gun and fired, driving a needle round through the base of Proctor Usef’s skull.
“Nobody gets away clean,” he growled over the unit channel.
The Proctor sank to his knees, the weight of his armor pulling him down, face first, onto the rocky ground.
The two cor-sec troopers next to him stopped shooting at the Dunhills, their weapons slack in their hands, gaping at what their comrade had just done.
Seeing the cor-sec leader gunned down by one of his own men had stunned everyone, both troopers and Dunhills, halting the momentum of pitched battle.
Rhett knew the Dunhills would fight till the last, now that they’d seen the truth of Rubicon’s worldview, but he would no longer have any part in it.
Rhett let the needle rifle fall from his hands as he walked past the dumbfounded troopers and made his way towards the position the Dunhill shooters had been holding until moments before. By the time he reached it, the fighters had escaped, leaving behind only the bodies of those slain in the exchange before Rhett interrupted by killing his superior officer.
The trooper looked at the broken and bleeding bodies of men and women, their eyes open, many of them still clutching their meager weapons.
How long he stood there he had no idea. Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he went to his hands and knees and lay down among the corpses. Resting his back against the rocky ground he stared up into the swirling gas clouds that passed for the sky on T4.
He wept then, his chest racked with sobs as his mind began to catch up with his body. The adrenaline was wearing off, and the madness of battle gave way to the crushing awareness of his actions.
He put the pistol to his temple and willed himself to squeeze the trigger while he still quaked with fighting energy, yet found he could not muster the fortitude to fire and finally let the pistol fall to the ground.
They found him like that, several hours later, lying among the dead, the shell of a man who had fled the atrocities of his own hand.
2. BOUNTY SCRAPPERS
Rhett flexed the armored fingers of his right hand, memories of the Dunhill Massacre still fresh in his mind even with ten standard years between now and that grim day.
It was always right before the deployment that they came flooding back, crisp in their detail as if he’d just been there yesterday.
The trooper shifted in his grav-couch and tapped his finger against the smooth metal of his combat assault rifle, the steady beat giving his awareness something to focus on instead of the horrors of his past. It was a little trick he’d learned in the Ma-gur penal colony while serving out the sentence he’d been given after being court-martialed over the death of Proctor Usef.
Those two troopers had lied for him, claiming that the Proctor’s death was a friendly fire incident, which was all that had kept him from the firing squad. While the living standards had been modest to say the least, there was a staff counselor who specialized in rehabilitation techniques.
Rubicon might be as ruthless a corporation as any of the others, yet the value of human life was at least considered as something marginally more than a simple asset. Unlike some corporate societies, most notably the nearly medieval and pitiless Grotto Corporation, once an individual with an otherwise clean record entered the penal system there was a modicum of effort placed upon enabling the convict to return to society in some capacity upon serving their due sentence.
I served it and then some, Rhett mused as he continued to tap out a steady rhythm with his finger.
The warning light went purple, and a voice in Rhett’s comm-bead said, “Thirty seconds to drop. Last looks, Calibos.”
Everyone has a different lighting scheme, Rhett observed as the seconds ticked by in the dull purple light, but the process is always the same. The trooper looked around the small compartment and did a visual inspection of his squad, each of them encased in the same patchwork body armor he wore. No two of them were alike, as every piece of equipment they possessed had been bought or bartered from dozens of different sources on an individual level. The only requirement from their employer was that their composites could handle void seals.
Bounty scrappers spent most of the time conducting their affairs in hard vacuum, so their employer had determined long ago that uniformly high quality void seals were a justifiable expense. The individual scrappers might be debt-bonded low lives, but each one of them represented some level of investment on the part of their employer.
Rhett silently moved his gaze from one scrapper to another, looking for the telltale signs of improper seal lock and making sure nobody had incorrectly threaded the fast-release straps on their grav-couches. Rhett’s three main cutters were Vader, Doak, and a woman everyone just called Sparks.
All of them had properly strapped themselves into the low seats of the grav-couch and all were sealed. Their welding tools were clipped to their chests and it looked as if all of them had remembered their sidearms this time. Sparks especially was terrible about remembering her weapon. It had been a long time since the crew of Vulture Six had encountered a hostile salvage, but Rhett knew from experience that the moment they lost their vigilance was when people would start to die.
With the thought of pending combat nagging at his mind, replacing his fiery memories of T4, Rhett stopped tapping his finger against his rifle and flexed his hand as he continued his inspection.
Dante and Drago, twins who hailed from Aegis Corporation, were his combat overwatch team. While everyone aboard Vulture Six, other than the pilot and captain, was one kind of trouble maker or another, the twins were unique in that regard. Both were former members of a Fenrir gun cult, having been raised as extremists and firearms fetishists since childhood. The group was purged by Aegis cor-sec, the inevitable fate of all such radicals, and the two youths were placed into a rehabilitation program.
Rhett took note of the dual sidearms riding each man’s thighs, the extra magazines that were slotted into nearly every available space on their armor, and the customized combo-guns that each carried as a primary weapon. Clearly, they had chosen recidivism, though for the purposes of carrion duty in the depths of necrospace, their presence was most welcomed by the squad.
Lastly, Rhett inspected Quinn Eros, the squad’s engineer. She had a knack for fabrication and had created most of her own armor, outfitting it to be ideally suited for her tasks during salvage ops. Her sidearms were in place, her void seals were good, and the case which contained all her various diagnostic and appropriation tools was secured.
Rhett may have been her squad leader, but he had not been granted access to any of the background files on these people. Most of them wore their sins on their sleeve, just like he did, though Quinn had never let on to whatever calamity had led her into this life of debt-servitude.
The universe was a hard place, Rhett reminded himself as he double checked his own void seals and settled his shoulders in preparation for the pending deployment. Anyone could end up out here in necrospace hunting for scraps.
“Vultures, ready,” said Rhett into his comm-bead, his voice chiming inside the helmets of the squad and into the headsets of the staffers on the bridge of the ship.
“Good hunting,” came the traditional response from Captain Estrada, which also served as their launch order, and as the words were spoken the hatch of the dropship blew open.