He shifted, moving to one side. Bringing his hand holding the M1911 into a two-handed standing position. The one who had laughed was next. Nothing petty, but that one wanted to shoot, Barclay had recognised the type. Two rounds. He went down.
He moved, crossing behind his chair. Don’t stand still in a gunfight, bullets will come looking for you. Two more rounds. He was sure he had just winged the gunman closest to the door but he went down and didn’t start firing.
The last two had started firing now. Inexperienced as they were, they had at least managed to react. Bullets blew splinters out of a desk more than two hundred years old. His crystal decanter exploded, spraying him in whiskey. He was still moving to the side. He fired twice more and a gunwoman went down. The final gunman was firing the Feline, spraying wildly as he made for the door. Barclay registered the look of panic on the gunman’s face. A round caught Barclay in his left shoulder, knocking him back. He took aim. The gunman saw his death coming and he couldn’t understand why the gun bucking away in his hand wasn’t going to save him. The round caught the gunman in the head. He walked another step, still firing and then collapsed to the ground.
Cordite smoke filled the room. Then the pitiful whining of the wounded started. It was just like any other battle. It was the one closest to the door who was still alive. He had just winged him. The slide on his M1911 was back, the gun empty. No, he thought, not a battle, a gunfight. One of the things that Barclay had always liked most about the stories of Bat Masterton was that the gunfighter had apparently been a genuinely good shot. Not a spray and pray merchant.
He heard them first. They came charging through the double doors. Barclay let go of the empty M1911. He fast-drew the Peacemaker from his waist band. Oh, how long I practiced that. They started firing. He fanned the hammer on the single-action revolver rapidly, firing from the hip. The M1911 hit the desk. The hammer on the Peacemaker clicked down on an empty chamber.
Somehow he’d hit all three of the entering gunmen. With six rounds, fanning, firing from the hip, admittedly at close range, he’d hit all three, as it mattered in a gunfight.
‘Can you see me now, Bat?’ he said to himself and smiled, and then he staggered back and sat down hard in his chair. The one in the gut hurt the most but he was sure it was the round in the chest that would kill him. Breathing was difficult, like there was some kind of obstruction to it.
All the warrior philosophy was bullshit. Eight dead young men scattered around his house, sent by cowards, proved that. If he had managed, somehow, amongst all that bloodshed, to be a decent man then that was something his father had taught him. It hadn’t come from a book. But he had taken two things away from all that bullshit. Sometimes questioning and disobedience were the most patriotic things that you could do. The Founding Fathers had taught him that.
He could hear vehicles skidding to a halt outside. Footsteps, running. There was shouting outside.
The second thing: when a samurai disagreed with his daimyo, his lord, the ultimate protest he could make was to take his own life. This ritual form of suicide by disembowelment was called seppuku.
That was bullshit as well, Barclay thought as shaking fingers managed to put one more round into the Peacemaker. I just want to make the decision on how I go out. He had never felt that anybody owed him anything, not the country, not the people, not the marines, not the government — well, maybe the government sometimes — but as a reward for more than thirty years of service: frankly, this sucks ass.
As he put the barrel of the gun to his head and cocked the hammer he thought about Susan. He thought about his father.
They burst into his office brandishing weapons and shouting. There had always been shouting in his life, ever since he’d joined the Corps anyway.
‘Semper Fidelis,’ he told them. He squeezed the trigger.
None of them noticed his final act of “treason’. The camera in the plant pot in the corner, broadcasting to the Macronet.
‘There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I’ll swear I can’t see it that way.’
William Barclay “Bat” Masterton, New York City, 1921
Refuse/Resist
Captain Cyrus Harper stared at the hardcopy of the order. He glanced over at the holographic image of the target. He could see the thermal imagery of the forces gathering amongst the ruins of Yonkers. He also noticed that part of the image had been redacted. The part of the image that would have shown exactly what was going on NY. The image had been shot from orbit. He guessed it had been shot by one of the CELL satellites linked to the Archangel orbital weapons platform. Why didn’t they just use that? the cowardly part of him wondered.
‘Sir,’ his executive officer Commander Stevens demanded. ‘We have our orders.’ Harper looked up at his XO. The man was tall, very thin and had a predatory aspect to his features. This had earned him the nickname “the ghoul” amongst the men. He was one of the breed of men that Harper had come to think of as “corporate” officers.
Next to his XO was Lieutenant Zinah Talpur, the commander of the small complement of Royal Marines on the Robin Hood. She looked less than pleased to be involved in this. Not so long ago, it seemed, an XO would have never dared to question — let along try and strong-arm — his captain like this, but things had changed. The navy had been privatised. The CELL Corporation, the monopolistic economic superpower in its own right, had bought the military from an increasingly close-to-bankrupt country.
Many of the officers in the navy had attempted to resign their commission only to find that their “contract terms” had changed. Harper hadn’t been one of them, but then the maiden voyage of the HMS Robin Hood was going to be his last voyage. He had joined at the turn of the century. Now in his mid-fifties, they would either try and give him a desk job or assign him to a training post. The latter appealed more than the former but neither appealed enough for him to stay. He had not renewed his term of service before the buyout. He was still able to leave. The Navy was, if nothing else, an enormous bureaucracy. Once something was done it was very difficult to undo it.
‘Sir!’ His XO was even more insistent now. Harper’s eyes flickered up to see him. He had not liked Stevens from the moment he had met him. He didn’t like his attitude, his style of command or the way he treated the men. He could see the hunger in the XO’s eyes. CELL ownership meant opportunities for the right kind of people. Stevens wanted Harper to refuse the order from their new owners, the order to fire on another sovereign nation to secure corporate interests, so he could take command. For him, career advancement was more important than anything else, even honour.
Harper, however, had misgivings. He didn’t care if the American government had okayed it. He didn’t care that it would be part of what passed for a combined-arms operation under the auspices of CELL. A company with this amount of power didn’t sit right with him. He had always assumed that anti-capitalist sentiments were for hippies and dropouts who couldn’t or wouldn’t play the game. Now he was less sure. CELL seemed like capitalism taken to such extremes it had started to resemble feudalism. That said, he had never disobeyed an order in his life and he wasn’t keen to start now.