Sean-Michael Argo - Carrion Duty

The sharp staccato sounds of needle rifles were suddenly coming from both his left and right. In front of him people started jerking back or collapsing as blood blossomed from multitudes of wounds.

A hard round struck Rhett in the chest, failing to punch through his armor, but hitting him hard enough that he went to his knees. His heart fluttered in his chest and the trooper sucked in his breath.

In basic, the hand-to-hand instructor always insisted that the real fighters were the ones who could rise up and win after that first hard hit to the face and that what you did after that hit was what made you a soldier or a casualty. Rhett had always been good at the brawl once things got started. As it had many times before, his training took over and before he was fully aware of what he was doing the trooper surged back to his feet and fired his rifle into the crowd.

He did not see the shooter, but knew that whoever it had been was out there in front of him and before his full awareness could catch up, Rhett engaged the enemy.

Rhett squeezed the trigger and his rifle spat a high velocity needle round into the chest of an older man who seemed to be swinging something at a trooper near him. Whether it was a walking stick or some kind of weapon Rhett couldn’t tell. By the time the man fell into a heap on the broken ground, the trooper was sighting in on another protester. Rhett moved his rifle in search of threats. It was nearly impossible to tell who was a combatant and who was simply a protester. What had been a noisy gathering of angry Dunhills had become a bloody melee as troopers and VTOLs unleashed death upon them.

A trooper suddenly went down beside him and Rhett saw a young Dunhill woman wielding a stubby shotgun rack the slide to chamber another round. She was close, perhaps having used the chaos to appear non-threatening until the formation marched over the fallen to reach her.

By the time Rhett got her in his sights, she had blasted another trooper off his feet, a man named Blaine, who had graduated from academy in the same class as Rhett. The woman screamed in pain as needles from another trooper ripped through her leg. The sound was short-lived as Rhett’s own needle hit her just behind the ear.

More shooting caught Rhett’s attention and he spun around to face the sound, bringing his rifle up and taking a knee.

Moving through the crowd, was a young man carrying what looked to be a semi-automatic pistol. The man fired at the trooper formation again before attempting to flee, which proved a fatal mistake as Rhett and several other troopers sent a salvo of needles into the shooter and three other protesters unlucky enough to be near him.

More of the crowd dropped their weapons and attempted to escape from the troopers.

“Weapons free! All Dunhills considered hostile!” called Proctor Usef over the unit channel and Rhett could feel the bile rising in the back of his throat.

“They’re running away, sir, we don’t have to-,” protested Rhett before the proctor cut him off.

“Management just authorized a purge order!” snapped Usef, his words punctuated by a VTOL that sped over them as it strafed the crowed with devastating accuracy, mowing down dozens of fleeing protestors. “Do your job, Calibos, or get retired!”

Rhett stood still for a moment, the bloody chaos surging around him. Suddenly, he was struck in the back of the head, but the helmet absorbed most of the impact. He stumbled, but didn’t go down. Swinging his rifle around, he looked for a target.

Behind him was a young man, a boy really, who couldn’t have been more than twelve standard years old. In the boy’s hand was a rock breaker. Had the child known how to properly ignite the hydro-trigger, the tool would have easily shattered Rhett’s helmet and pulped his skull.

Perhaps it was the hit to the head added to the dull pain in his chest from having been shot already, the sight of Blaine dying next to him, or perhaps it was all of those things combined.

Kid or not, as the youth raised the breaker to resume his attack Rhett fired his needle rifle from the hip. The first needle hit the boy in the stomach. The next three speared his chest and sent him to the ground in a heap.

Rhett turned to finish off another wounded Dunhill who had been crawling towards a discarded pistol, then took stock of his position. His units had already advanced without him. He looked around him as the VTOLS wiped out entire groups of fleeing people while columns of marching troopers pushed others further and further back into the caves.

A tactician possessed of the coldest of hearts might have ordered the Dunhills forced into the caves so that napalm loads could be dropped by VTOLS through the entrances and exits. Burning them out would be easy, and save individual troopers the grisly task of rooting the red listers out of their cave chamber by chamber.

Rhett knew that was a fantasy, and when the order came from Proctor Usef to pursue the protesters into the caves, the trooper bitterly acknowledged the terrible wisdom in the strategy.

The barion was still of value, though it was unstable and highly reactive. By taking the caves with infantry the raw materials would be preserved and mined for profit once the more valuable substances had been depleted. Rubicon would probably tap and cap these caves once they’d taken what was needed to clear a path for the pipeline, allowing them to sit silent for decades before opening them again to resume extraction.

Progress was as merciless as it was unstoppable.

He squeezed the trigger again and a protester went down with needles in her throat, followed by another who hurled a spanner at Rhett before being pierced. Rhett shrugged off the impact of the spanner and marched forward, firing into a cluster of Dunhills attempting to traverse the rugged terrain towards one of the cave entrances. He did not waste his time aiming, simply allowing his instincts, his enraged primitive side, to guide him.

He hated the Dunhills at that moment, for their defiance and their unwillingness to bow. Most red list communities were haggard, temporary things, not functional settlements like this, and the events of today were a reminder why. If there was any patch of dirt worth owning it been claimed by a corporation or soon would be. Any red list tribe that attempted to give up the nomad life inevitably ended up at odds with corporate interests.

He wasn’t sure how many of the Dunhills he’d killed in the madness of these last few minutes, following orders without question, seeing the abhorrent gusto with which some of his comrades hurled themselves into the needless slaughter.

His left hand began to clench and unclench as he looked around him, more bodies falling to the ground every second, unaware that he had stopped firing.

Gun clutched against his body, finger still on the trigger, he moved forward, stumbling over the twisted bodies of dead and wounded protesters, their shrieks and cries of pain and anguish louder than the gunfire.

Rhett saw Proctor Usef and two other troopers exchanging fire with a handful of armed protesters. The Dunhill fighters had found a decent vantage point in the rocky terrain, one that kept them somewhat out of sight of the VTOLS. It was a difficult position to assault and a trooper’s corpse lay on the ground between the two groups.

“Calibos, engage!” shouted Proctor Usef before going back to peppering the enemy position with needle fire.

Rhett found that he could not bear the sight of the Proctor. That he hated Rubicon as much as the Dunhills.

The callous arrogance inherent in the idea that this tragedy was business as usual, that the displacement of an entire people was an acceptable way to reduce the cost of industrial expansion. The pipeline could have been re-routed and the Dunhills left alone, but that would have come at an increased cost. Slight as it would have been, the expense over time was deemed unacceptable to the Bottom Line.