[05] Elite: Reclamation Read Online Free PDF

the air, shattering pavements, ornamental statues and marble colonnades. Rockets streaked with ear-splitting shrieks, terminating their flights in lurid flashes of colour and destruction.
    Then the rapacious fire found softer targets; skin, flesh and bone. Dozens of slaves were cut down, many trampled underfoot as those that had yet to be hit stumbled away in blind fear. This was no orderly retreat; men, women and children fought wildly to escape in the dreadful rout.
    The lethal barrage continued, indiscriminately targeting the slaves as they tried to flee, ripped banners, shredded flags and bloodied bodies littered the edge of the Piazza, yet still the onslaught continued. One wretched family cowered in front of blazing guns as they tracked around. They were caught in the firing line and slain as they huddled in terror; the parents first and then their child thrown through the air to join the wretched mass of bodies …
    ‘Stop. Enough.’
    The vehicles froze motionless. The people stopped moving, some of them in the act of falling to the ground. Bullets hovered mysteriously in mid-air. The sound was abruptly silenced.
    ‘Dufus was a good man, I knew him from childhood. He deserved better than to die in this manner, for a mere slave revolt.’ A wispy silver-haired, elderly gentleman stepped carelessly through the holofac recording making it blur and flicker, unaffected by the frozen carnage around him. He was thin almost to the point of emaciation, his pale flesh and skin seeming to barely hide the skeleton within. His cream and gold braided toga swept past the crushed and bloodied bodies unstained. A pair of optical enhancers perched precariously on his nose, looking remarkably like a pair of spectacles from ancient days.
    ‘Patron Zyair, I think you can see from this footage that the slave revolt is incidental. If there is blame, it lies elsewhere. The slaves have no access to explosives of that magnitude. That was clearly technology from off-world. The Federation is behind this, supporting these Reclamist rebels.’
    The second voice was owned by an exceedingly large gentleman, also wrapped in copious quantities of fine linen. Despite this, his girth was barely constrained. He reclined in an ornately wrought chaise longue, lazily consuming fruit from a nearby bowl, belching on occasion in appreciation and then wiping his lips with the back of his hand. An immaculately trimmed goatee beard completed the visage, adequately concealing a series of flabby chins. Gerrun was no beauty, but a fierce intellect resided within the vastness of unappealing flesh.
    ‘And what do these confounded Reclamists want, Patron Gerrun?’
    ‘They’ve made no formal demands,’ Gerrun replied. ‘Remnants of the original colonists we suspect. Those that didn’t have the decency to perish three years ago when we reclaimed this moon. They leave their usual calling card, an anonymous text transfer moments before …’
    ‘Reclaiming what is ours,’ Zyair nodded as he quoted from memory. ‘I’ve seen it. Needlessly melodramatic.’
    ‘One assumes they regard this moon as theirs,’ Gerrun added. ‘It’s difficult to convince those who lack an appreciation of the law.’
    ‘Perhaps they are unhappy with how the law was applied.’ A third voice spoke from the back of the room. Zyair turned with a glare, but Gerrun raised his hand in greeting, before adjusting his position and resuming his consumption of fruit.
    ‘Ah, Patron Dalk.’
    ‘They could have been evacuated rather than murdered,’ Dalk finished. He was a tall man, bald and tanned with an erect, almost military, bearing. He held his head high, with what most considered was a haughty and arrogant look. His dress was in sharp contrast to the other Patrons, a thick and heavy dark grey trench coat that gave the suggestion it concealed more than it revealed. The skin of his face was leathery; clearly a man who’d lived much of his life outdoors. His hands remained gloved