Duty, Honor, Planet

“Murderer!” Carmella screamed at Huerta. “Butcher!”

“Back with your children, puta,” Huerta snapped at her, motioning threateningly with his weapon. “Unless you wish for them to lose both their parents this night!”

Carmella hesitated, not wanting to leave Jorge’s side, but Huerta took a warning step forward, and she slowly made her way back to the kitchen. Anna and Elisabeth were watching her from there with haunted eyes, both of the little girls too terrified to move.

“Filipe,” Huerta ordered, motioning at Jorge’s body, “take this trash outside.” One of the men, the one Jason assumed had hit him from behind, slung his weapon—an Invader autorifle—and dragged the corpse out of the front door by its feet. Jorge’s eyes were open wide, still staring into eternity with that same look of shock and surprise.

Valerie had stopped struggling and was simply staring at Jorge’s body. Her face was pale, eyes filled with abject terror: a rabbit caught in the headlights. She seemed not to notice the way her ripped blouse exposed her, but Huerta hadn’t forgotten. Turning back from the door, the farm council chairman stepped back toward her, all faux smiles and conversational patter gone, his eyes glowing with the predatory hunger of the wolf.

“Take her to the table,” he grunted.

Huerta’s bodyguards pulled Valerie between them back to the kitchen table, laughing coarsely as they let their hands travel across the expanse of skin exposed on her chest. Valerie didn’t make a sound, too paralyzed with fear even to scream, as she was dragged back onto the flat surface. Huerta calmly, matter-of-factly moved between her legs, shoving her skirt back around her hips as he held the knife at her throat.

McKay struggled frantically against his ropes, feeling the adrenaline of desperation pumping in his blood. He was getting ready to call out, to try to draw their attention away from her; but in the second between making the decision and carrying it out, Carmella Mendoza appeared in front of him like an apparition, a wicked-looking carving knife clutched in her fist, face screwed up in a mask of rage.

“No.” He shook his head, brain too scrambled to find the words to tell her that her husband’s death wasn’t his fault. But she just knelt at his feet and used the knife to slice through the ropes securing his legs together. Jason let the breath he had been holding trickle out in a quiet sigh of relief, as he twisted around to expose his wrists to her. He felt the ropes part to the blade, then touched the crude, wooden handle of the knife as it was pressed into his right hand.

Rolling to his knees, he took in the scene before him, trying to channel his rage and prioritize his targets. The first had to be the closest of the gunmen: he’d kept his autoshotgun in the crook of his left arm while he held Valerie down with the other. The other thug had his weapon slung—he could wait. But Huerta, while he’d returned Jason’s service auto to his belt, still held a knife to Val’s throat as he ripped at her panties with his free hand. And, of course, Filipe was outside and could return anytime. Best to deal with the ones inside as quickly as possible.

Feeling the pins-and-needles beginning to fade in his extremities, Jason hopped to his feet and lunged across the room, hammering downward with the carving knife and burying it in the base of the closest gunman’s skull. The big man’s back arched, his hands clutching in the air behind his head, mouth open in a silent scream as he staggered back from the table. His shotgun clattered to the floor, but Jason hadn’t the time to retrieve it. Huerta and the other bodyguard snapped around, the older man’s knife coming off of Valerie’s throat and giving McKay the opening he needed.

 Jason’s forearm caught Huerta across the throat, throwing him off his feet and sending his knife clattering across the floor. The second bodyguard struggled frantically with his slung CAWS, but Jason was already wrenching his service pistol out of Huerta’s waistband. He was bringing it up in line with the second gunman when Filipe burst in through the front door, autorifle blazing wildly.

With slugs chopping into the walls and floor all around him and no cover to be found, Jason risked a forward barrel roll under Filipe’s point of aim and came to a stop on his butt between the Central American’s legs. Firing one-handed, he punched three shots up through the man’s groin, sending Filipe collapsing backwards with an agonized scream, his intestines flopping out of the gaping hole in his lower abdomen.

Rolling onto a knee, McKay saw that the second bodyguard had finally freed his shotgun and was swinging the muzzle around toward him. With no time to bring his sights to eye level, Jason fired instinctively from the hip, the double-tap impacting the shotgun’s receiver and wrenching it from the man’s hands. Unarmed and desperate, the Central American seized Valerie around the neck and hauled her off the table, holding her in front of him as a shield.

Not wanting to give the man a chance to use Val as a hostage and not trusting his shaking hands to attempt a headshot, Jason threw himself across the table and took them all three of them to the floor in a heap, with Valerie sandwiched between the two combatants. Letting his pistol drop, Jason managed to grab the bodyguard’s left forearm and force it away from Valerie, then raised up on his knees and threw the senator’s daughter out of the pile.

That action, unfortunately, left him open for a punch from his opponent’s free hand that grazed across his cheek, snapping his head around and throwing him back off balance. The bodyguard immediately tried to press his advantage, hooking a leg around Jason’s arm and throwing him halfway across the room. McKay used the momentum to roll back to his feet, taking up a low, wide-legged stance just in time to meet the man’s headlong charge.

Running on training, instinct and endorphines, Jason responded to the assault just as his unarmed combat instructor in Basic Training had taught him. Sliding slightly to one side, he lashed out and drove a heel into the bodyguard’s knee, shattering the kneecap with an audible crunch. His balance gone and his leg buckling beneath him, the thug collapsed forward, directly into Jason’s upward palm strike. The meaty part of McKay’s hand caught his opponent across the bridge of the nose, shattering the bone and driving one of the larger fragments into the man’s brain.

McKay stood there, his palm still frozen at shoulder-level, watching through a haze of pain and lingering rage as the bodyguard collapsed in a heap, eyes rolling back into his head, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his nose.

“Mericon.” He spun at the malediction and found himself staring into the bore of his own pistol, held in the shaking hands of Miguel Huerta. The farmer cum revolutionary had recovered from the blow to his throat and taken possession of the weapon after Jason had dropped it during the fight.

Jason was tensing for a desperate leap at the man when Huerta stiffened, an explosion of breath escaping his lips and his face twisting into a mask of agony. One hand left Jason’s weapon to feel around behind his back, and then the pistol seemed to become too heavy for his other arm. It slipped from his suddenly-nerveless fingers and struck the floor with a plastic clatter; a heartbeat later, Huerta joined it, the breath going out of him as he crashed to the ground like a felled oak. Imbedded in his spine up to the hilt was his own knife, and standing over his lifeless form was Valerie O’Keefe.

Jason just stared at her for a long moment, mesmerized by the wide-eyed, savage visage into which her face had been transformed. With her hair tangled in a spikey mess and her clothes in tatters, she brought to mind some ancient Amazon warrior just stepped through a time machine.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. She didn’t reply, staring at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. Jason staggered a step, feeling his pulse echoing in his pounding head. “We’ve got to leave,” he told Valerie, trying to penetrate the trance into which she’d fallen.

“You can’t leave me here!” Carmella Mendoza ran up to him, clutching at his arm so violently that he almost fell over. She motioned at Huerta’s body. “Their friends will come. They will kill me and my children as a lesson to the others. Do not leave us here to die!”

Jason looked her in the face, searching her eyes, curious as to the ratio of self-interest to concern for her children. In the end, he found it didn’t matter; either way, he couldn’t fault her.

“All right.” He sighed, grinding the gears in his brain as he tried to plan their next move. “Get together all the clothes you’ll need, and as much water and food as you can carry, and meet us outside in fifteen minutes.” She nodded gratefully and hustled back to the kitchen to gather supplies, while Jason turned back to Valerie. “Are you okay?” he asked her again.

“I’ll be fine,” she told him quietly, making a futile effort to straighten her ragged clothes. She looked far from