Still in the guise of just some drifter freighter jockey on his way to a contract drop-off, Rechs passed by all the march-toward-conflict battle-rattle, all the while subtly observing where command was and how everything was laid out inside the military-held sections of the Docks. Ahead lay a massive razor-wire fence at least five stories tall. Beyond this came the inevitable kill zone and a smaller razor-wire fence just to let people know how many steps it took for things to get really serious. The marines had their prefab spotter towers up. Each emplacement bristled with the marine-variant SAB and more dead-eyed killers watching the growing street mob behind the razor wire.
It was late afternoon by the time Rechs reached the emplacement fencing, or at least as close as he was allowed to approach. There was no way he was getting through that without a fight. And though he’d tussled with the Republic military in times past, he was not here to fight the marines.
He walked the fence’s length, more to observe the rioters beyond than to find out anything more about the marines. The Soshies had flooded the streets even here near the marine-held Docks. They moved in both small and large mobs, like herds of jackals and other pack hunters, hurling debris over the wire at random intervals, or even into the wire, cheering like this was some victory gained on a hardened objective they’d managed to overrun. Small moments of heroism in their own eyes. Occasionally someone would toss an incendiary cocktail or gas bomb, but those things fell into the kill zone and did no damage as the flames spread out and the marines hit the spot with water cannons on standby.
Rechs also noted how keyed up the hullbusters were. They were ready for a fight and just looking for an excuse to make it one. If the rioters decided to push, the marines were going to give back with interest until their superiors could rein them in. There would be mass casualties. Definite fatalities. It would be a massacre, no two ways about it. And massacres went down in the history books.
Rechs knew that from personal experience. Like the time at Sayed. And there were no winners. That would be the last thing the marines, or the House of Reason, would want to live with.
But even that wasn’t entirely true. There were probably some who’d love a solid massacre with lots of dead bodies in the street. The optics would play, as they say. And no crisis ever went to waste with that bunch. Nothing was too low for them to abstain from profiting off. Even the dead lying in the streets. The younger the better.
The pretty little liar… she’d want something like that. It would be her moment to get more camera time. More coverage. More her. No crisis wasted.
You could read that in those calculating eyes she’d tried to make big and trick the cameras with. It was when no one was looking that they got narrow and mean. Hateful. Convinced of her own certainty that she alone was right in a galaxy of wrongs.
It was a pattern of evil he’d seen countless times.
He’d seen it in the Savages.
And…
In the Dark Wanderer. A being he’d been chasing the ghost of for almost fifteen hundred years.
But that was a story for another time.
Dusk was coming on soon, and the wind off the desert plain beneath Detron was starting to pick up and howl through the great canyons and rusting starships below. Far out there in the distant desert, great dust storms swirled up and turned the end of day to blood red like some kind of warning or promise. Mixing with the smoke, and then blowing it away for a time… all of it seemed like the end of the world.
Again, thought Rechs. Who’d been to the end of the world a time or two in all his journeys across the galaxy. Who’d even been born and raised at the end of a world.
15
Almost thirty-six hours on the ground for Puncher and Baldur. A day and a half of following the faintest of trails while trying to stay clear of the roving Soshie mobs that seemed to move and flow with no clear sense of purpose. That committed random acts of violence and theft for some greater indefinable purpose. Because that was easier than calling a heart bent on hurting others what it was.
Puncher saw what he considered the sane and sensible citizens of Detron, too. Most were hiding behind their shuttered businesses and blast-door-sealed homes and apartment towers. Holding out. Some were forced to see the face of the mob up close, pulled from their homes for a bit of looting. The Soshies called it redistribution. And it didn’t matter how hard they’d worked or who it was passed down from. If the mob fancied what one of their citizens had, it was the new civic duty to take it for themselves.
Blast doors were pried open by teams with hydraulic tools. Sometimes even plate-cutters. Puncher had seen the suddenly displaced standing in the streets, beaten and bloody, their children crying and clinging to their shaking legs, as strangers clad in red and black carried their possessions out into the street, taking what was worth taking and burning whatever wasn’t. Just because. Laughing like it was some kind of circus. Instead of the crime it was.
The dog, Baldur, would growl and whine, and Puncher had to keep them moving and away from these scenes. Because even the dog knew it was wrong. It had a better-developed sense of what was just and unjust than most humans Puncher knew.
The dog was a Malinois from Schwarzenwald, that dark, strange, and once-lost colony world. He was semi-telepathic, as all dogs of his breed were. Which made them perfect for working with the Legion. Once they bonded with their handler.
That took time. But Baldur had been starting to get
