The Butcher of Anderson Station Read Online Free PDF

panicked screech. “We just needed some time! We’re surrendering!”
    The message immediately repeated. Fred stopped it and turned it off.
    “Sir.”
    Fred took a long breath to fight back the vague nausea he suddenly felt.
    “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
    “Phantom reports a clean hit. The relay is toast. But, uh…”
    “Spit it out, soldier.”
    “It was no longer broadcasting. Whatever they sent, they were done sending it.”
    Fred pulled up the comm logs, and confirmed what he’d already suspected: Marama Brown had never gotten to send his manifesto. Fred had been ordered in, and Marama had been busy trying to stay alive. But his last tightbeam to Psych Ops had gotten through just fine. They’d known.
    “Sir?” the lieutenant said.
    “Doesn’t matter. Call up the cyber wonks and have them strip the computer core. I’ll go find the liaison officer and start the civilian aid phase.”
    His lieutenant chuckled.
    “Here, kiddies,” the lieutenant said. “We blew the shit out of your station, have some free MREs and UN Marine sticker books.”
    Fred didn’t laugh.
     
    * * *
     
    “You had to have known that they were desperate out there,” Dawes said.
    “Of course I did,” Fred said. “It was in all the reports. Hell, it was on the news feeds. Increased overhead. People struggling for the basics. You hear it all the time. Turn on a feed now, you’ll hear it again.”
    The blood had stopped flowing from Fred’s mouth, but the inside of his lip tasted raw. His shoulder was settling into a low, radiating ache. There was a dark circle of blood on the decking in front of him.
    “But this time it was different?” Dawes said. He didn’t sound sarcastic or angry. Just curious.
    Fred shifted. His legs were dead lumps of meat. He couldn’t feel anything. If someone put a knife into his thigh, it would have been like watching it happen to someone else.
    “That man had a crippled baby girl,” Fred said. “I killed him.”
    “The UN would just have sent someone else,” Dawes said.
    “I still killed him.”
    “You didn’t pull the trigger.”
    “I killed him because he wanted her to have enough air to breathe,” Fred said. “I killed her daddy while he was trying to surrender, and they gave me a medal for doing it. So there you go. That’s what happened on Anderson Station. What are you going to do about it?”
    Dawes shook his head.
    “That’s too easy. You’ve killed lots of daddies. What made this one different?”
    Fred started to speak, stopped, tried again.
    “They used me. They made it about sending messages to everyone that you don’t fuck with Earth, because look at the shit we’ll do just because you spaced an administrator on a nowhere station. They made me the poster boy for disproportional response. They made me a butcher.”
    Saying the words was painful, but there was a strange relief too. Dawes was staring at him, his face unreadable. Fred couldn’t meet his eyes.
    Dawes nodded, seeming to come to a decision, then put a hand in his pocket and took out a utility knife. When he opened it, the blade was old and scored. Fred took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was ready. Dawes walked behind him. A fast pull across the neck, and Fred could bleed out in four minutes. A stab in the kidney could take hours. Cut the cords that were tying his arms, and it could take years.
    Dawes cut the cords.
    “This wasn’t a trial,” Fred said. “You’re not here to pass some kind of judgment on me.”
    “I wasn’t expecting to,” Dawes said. “I mean, if it really had been just that you’d been boning one of your marines, I’d have dropped you out an airlock, wasteful or no. But I was pretty sure I was right.”
    “So what happens now?”
    Dawes shifted Fred forward. The pins-and-needles feeling was starting in his hands. Dawes cut the binding on his legs.
    “If you want the easy way out, you go kill yourself on your own damn time and stop setting the OPA up to take the blame for