Rechs thought of them as maggots. Wherever the corpse of the Republic was rotting, they would be found. Consuming the decay, spreading the breakdown. He could never understand why they felt the need to destroy society. To ruin what he and Casper and many others over the long years of the Savage Wars had forged through sacrifice. A dam to keep back the darkness and make the galaxy a safer place for civilization to flourish. A place with room to grow. To spread out. And to somehow avoid the fate of the Ancients, whatever that fate might have been.
This mob had no idea what lay out there in the darkness beyond the civilized worlds of the core and mid-core. No idea how fragile the Republic really was when it came right down to it.
He’d spotted the kid, the earner, near the front of some action going down along a side street. Some local citizen, not connected with the riots but rather altogether tired of them, had come out to try and keep the front of his building free of protesters. It seemed like he was trying to get a sick older person into a sled and maybe make it off to the last running hospital in the city limits. Most of the residents had barred themselves indoors, determined to hole up inside their towers, floors, and even stores, until the Republic decided to establish control of the streets. They were hoping their taxes meant something.
But this citizen took a stand. However small and limited. And a fight had broken out between him and a group of jackals in red and black looking to vent their frustrations on whomever they could now that the marines had pulled back behind the Docks and their wire. This citizen provided a convenient target for their taunts, insults, and even a couple of punches.
A media crew filmed the whole incident. They didn’t bother to de-escalate it or render aid in the slightest. To Rechs, they were as bad as the jackals in black and red.
That was when Rechs spotted him—the earner. He looked like one of the kids—he was a kid himself—but he came in like a predator. From behind. Like a shark attacking from an unconsidered angle. While the citizen, a large beefy man, was fending off the group of youths spitting in his face and trying to work up the courage to rush him, the pro who was just a kid came in from behind and smashed a bottle of yellowish liquid all over the man’s shining bald skull. Instantly the man was down and the jackals he was facing were all over him, kicking, stomping, and throwing useless punches with nothing behind them. Not because they wouldn’t have punched harder if they could. They’d just never learned to.
Brave, thought Rechs sarcastically as he tagged the earner in the armor’s HUD and moved off into the shadows.
What marked the kid as a pro was how he attacked and then quickly darted off into the crowd. The media crew hadn’t been fast enough to capture a clear image of him. To focus on the agitator who’d made the sudden spree of violence possible. Instead they’d seen the blur and then the sudden melee on the ground, and of course they focused their attention there as some hero-journalist tried to act like he was reporting live from a war zone. Pretending to be in personal danger despite the team of private armed contractors watching over him and the crew.
But again, none of that was Rechs’s concern. The earner was everything. The kid was already off and moving through the crowd. Tossing pyrotechnics and pushing groups of kids forward to go after some other resident, or to target the minimal police presence that was, despite orders to stand down, trying to guard some of the higher-profile buildings surrounding the central protest if only because there ought to be at least one small part of the city that didn’t fall to madness.
Rechs hit the street and followed the kid for an hour. The earner was busy like a mummy-bee looking for corpses. Moving everywhere. Stirring up trouble and never sticking around long enough to see the end of it.
Starting it was enough. “Starting” was probably the extent of his orders.
The earner had long loping strides, and his backpack seemed to be a never-ending bag of trouble. Small explosives. More bottles. Even a collapsible iron pipe he handed off to someone who was about to go to work on a storefront in full view of the police and over a sonic background dominated by a speaker talking about things like “basic human rights” and “alien fairness.” And of course, wealth redistribution.
The people here, surmised Rechs as he followed the oblivious kid through the crowd like a shark swimming through dark waters, looking for its next victim, liked to think they were fighting for some kind of system of justice where everything must be given to them. Their outrage was over the fact that they had to demand it in the first place. It was a right. A basic right.
That was the political veneer, as far as Rechs was concerned. But really, he concluded, they were just fighting to take something away from people who had something.
He’d seen a lot of it in his time. It was cyclical. Had been there leading up to the downfall of old Earth, before so much history was lost to time and the chaotic nature of the Great Migration. Tyrus Rechs knew the inevitable outcome. The only variable was the body count.
Thousands if you were lucky.
Millions if you kept it to a single city like Detron.
Billions if it spread across systems.
Untold losses during a galaxy-wide war.
And each time it started over, it was because of a proud certainty that this time, they
