Sean-Michael Argo - Carrion Duty

The pistol held seven rounds, the first he’d ever been blessed to be the guardian of, and all of them were fired point blank into the cockpit. Drago didn’t have a good angle on the pilot, but the rounds were so small they couldn’t penetrate the reinforced plexiglass of the cockpit, instead, they ricocheted furiously inside the tight space until finally all seven of them were buried in the flesh of the pilot.

Rhett ignored the fighting below them, he knew that Andromeda could survive for a short time in hard vacuum, as did she, and the table girl had wisely avoided holding her breath when they hit void. Her breath crystallized against his faceplate as she let it out at a steady and measured pace to avoid causing further damage to herself.

There was a stinging sensation in his back suddenly. Rhett felt Andromeda’s body shudder as if from an impact, not so much the cold that began to grip her.

The mech warrior turned is spinning auto-cannon away from the scrapper and the table girl as they tumbled into space and focused it on the conflict below.

Drago saw the mech descending and leapt back and down behind the dead mech he’d mounted. The cultist’s movements caused the dead mech to spin to face the oncoming war machine, and that maneuver saved the cultist from a salvo of mag rounds from the beast.

The explosive projectiles chewed into the ruined mech, and drove both machine and man downwards towards the base of the main deck. The hostile mech continued to pound the metal carcass with fire as it lashed out with its autocannon, catching Dante in the arm.

The cultist’s left arm went spinning as the autocannon’s round bit through armor, flesh, and bone. Dante reacted quickly, aiming his pistol at the beast’s back and firing as he rushed for the cover of a slagged airlock. No sooner had he reached cover then the cultist blacked out from the shock of his wound, the only thing keeping him from floating away being his mag-clamps.

The war machine ignored the hits to its back as it turned both of its mounted weapons on the dead mech and the man who killed it. The hurricane of rounds caused the cultist and the dead mech to spin over and over, each of them suffering from the devastating firepower. The full fury of the Coyote class mech rained down on Drago and the shattered corpse of the beast, and the pair smashed into the floor plating at the bottom of the main deck. The hostile mech landed near the wreckage, its weapons cycling on empty. The hostile mech stood over the remnants of the dead mech and the splattered remains of the cultist, its clawed hands making fists.

A signal flared inside the mech’s cockpit, and the war machine pushed off the floor, using its onboard thrusters to carry it up through the hole in the hull and out into the void to rendezvous with its master.

Rhett’s vision swam and he blinked his eyes, realizing that the station was behind Andromeda now instead of him, and then it changed again rapidly, making him realize that he and the table girl were tumbling away from the station into space. He looked down and watched with horror as the void seals on his armor knitted together to cover a massive exit wound in his midsection. The table girl had no such armor, and he could see where a sizeable projectile had passed through his body and punched gruesomely through her fragile form. As they spun through the void he could see the glittering fields of red ice spiraling behind them, sparkling against the darkness as they reflected and refracted light from the dying station.

Her eyes were open when he looked back at Andromeda, her face oddly serene in death. He could feel her body stiffen as the liquids inside her rapidly froze.

She stared at him, unblinking.

Rhett felt his own consciousness fading. His eyes locked on Andromeda’s, his arms tight about her body, and he let the darkness swallow them both.

Sokol ate in silence. The modest tray of bland protein cubes and rehydrated vegetables comprising what he assumed would be the last meal of his life.

He sat alone in the community’s mess hall, since every hand of Fiat Lux was set to one task or another in preparation for the fight that was coming. He found himself thinking of the fire roasted squash he often ate as a child, the fresh crunch of it a nearly forgotten sensation. The way fat would bubble and run from the meat of rabbits or quail that he and his father sometimes shot with low velocity game loads when they walked the fields. They were good memories, even if much of the pleasantness of them was the ignorance young Sokol had of the perfect cage he’d grown up in.

Endless fields of golden crops and seemingly limitless fresh water that came down from the mountain streams just beyond the valley he’d called home. He was keenly aware of the stale recycled air he was breathing, and it held little in comparison to the fresh breezes that used to sweep across the valley as winter changed to spring. Out here, in the black it was always winter in its own way. The freezing grasp of the void always clutching at whatever bits of light and warmth humanity dared bring with them.

He felt no guilt for his deeds on Andromeda Station, and he paused in the eating of his meal to take a deep breath. The life support system had been installed only a day before, and none too soon, as the commune was less than twenty-four standard hours away from a gasping death.

One dies so that the other can live, thought Sokol as he breathed out and took a bite from his tray, the chewy and tasteless vegetables seeming to him a fine metaphor. They might not have the vibrant flavor of what he remembered from his days as a Helion citizen, but they were his by right of arms. No bureaucrat had approved his ration, no funds changed hands, only that the ravagers had seized an agri-hauler years ago, and since used the seeds to grow their own produce. Nothing grew hearty and strong in space, but the commune did what it could, and he’d rather take his own meager yield in freedom than a feast that came with a slave collar.

The cost of such freedom was blood, and any who said that was not so, knew little of life out here on the ragged edge.

Sokol thought of Morgan and Gregory, along with a surprising number of stormers, who had paid that price on Andromeda. The station had put up much more of a fight than Kochi or the rest of the ravagers had anticipated. Gage reported that while the stormers managed to push back cor-sec and the civilian defenders at every choke point, it had been a grind.

A mounted ship’s gun in the hangar deck had obliterated Gregory and his loader just after he’d stowed the last section of the life support components. Despite being disabled by torpedoes from Fatalis , there was someone inside left alive and in possession of enough skill to re-route power to the gun for a parting shot.

Sokol himself, had witnessed Morgan’s death at the hands of some bounty scrapper, as several of them had impossibly given the two mechs quite a bit of trouble on the main deck. He’d seen the Vulture jam a pistol into Night Witch and empty the magazine into Morgan. The sight of it had filled Sokol with something, a feeling of emptiness perhaps, a void that needed filling and the only thing that would do was to obliterate both mech and man. Regardless of how he felt about Morgan, even if those feelings themselves were a tangled mess, he could not leave Night Witch for enemy salvage. It was one of the few Helion philosophies he had held onto.

Fiat Lux would live another day thanks to the actions of Fatalis and its crew. Sadly, it might be just the one day, thought Sokol as he dabbed his mouth with a thin paper napkin before pushing away from the table, our lives are about to be measured in hours, if not minutes. The commune was buzzing with activity everywhere but the mess hall, and Sokol finally felt ready to begin his own preparations.