The Butcher of Anderson Station Read Free

looked them over. Other than a noticeable lack of OPA insignias, they were pretty much what he would have expected. Long, thin men and women blasted open by explosives, or repeatedly punctured by small-arms fire. Most were armed, but a few weren’t.
    They rounded a corner into the main corridor and then came to the barricade he’d ordered destroyed. Over a dozen bodies lay around it. Some wore makeshift armor, but most were in simple environment suits. The concussion rocket his marines had used to clear the corridor had burst them like overripe grapes. Fred’s vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point.
    A small pile of weapons and makeshift explosives lay nearby.
    “That’s what they were armed with?” Fred asked.
    His escort nodded.
    “Pretty light stuff, sir. Civilian grade. Most of it wouldn’t even make a dent in our armor.”
    Fred bent over and picked up a homemade grenade.
    “They threw bombs at you to keep you from getting close enough to realize their guns wouldn’t work.”
    The lieutenant laughed. “And made us frag the lot of them. If we’d known they were packing peashooters, we could have just walked up and tased them.”
    Fred shook his head and put the grenade back down.
    “Get a demolitions team to come clear these explosives before this homemade shit goes off and kills someone.”
    He looked at the nearby life support node that had been wrecked by their concussion rocket. Enough bystanders have died today. Fred called up the station status report his cyberops team was updating by the minute. They showed a total loss of life support in the section he was in, and in two neighboring sections. Just over eleven hundred people with no air and no power. Every door he could see might have a family behind it who’d gasped out their last breaths banging to get out because a bunch of idiot Belters had built their barricades where they did. And because he’d chosen to destroy it.
    While his lieutenant called for a bomb-disposal unit, Fred walked toward the command center. Along the way he saw a few more Belter corpses. They’d tried to hold the corridor even after his people had blown up the first barricade, hiding behind makeshift barriers and throwing their bathtub-brewed explosives. Buying time, but for what? The final result had never been in doubt. They’d been undermanned and grossly underequipped. The only reason his soldiers had taken three hours was that Fred had insisted on moving cautiously. Looking at the unarmored bodies on the floor, he realized they could have had men in the command center in half that time.
    They had to have known it too, these people spread across the floor around him. The idiots made us kill them.
    His lieutenant caught up with him just as he was entering the command center. Corpses filled the room, easily twenty of them. While most of them wore some form of environment suit or another, one man in the center of the room wore only a cheap blue jumpsuit with a mining company logo on the shoulder. He’d been shot dozens of times. A small-caliber pistol was glued to one hand with his own blood.
    “The leader, we think,” his escort said. “He was doing some kind of broadcast. The others fought to the last man to buy him time. We tried to take him alive, but he pulled that little gun out of his pocket, and…”
    Fred looked at the carnage around him and felt a disquieting sensation in his belly. It lasted only a moment, and then was replaced by a white-hot anger. If he’d been alone, he would have gone to the dead man in the cheap blue jumpsuit and kicked him. Instead, Fred gritted his teeth.
    “What the fuck was wrong with you people?” he demanded of the dead.
    “Sir?” his lieutenant said, looking at the comms station. “Looks like he was trying to broadcast right up to the last minute.”
    “Let me see it,” Fred