Seeing his bayonet thrust had had no effect the soldier twisted his rifle, making the wound bigger and more ragged. He then withdrew the rifle and plunged it once again into the alien’s back. This thrust must have literally struck a nerve as the Darhel screamed and threw his head back before pushing harder to get at Suarez’s jugular.
Suarez managed to divert the thrust to his shoulder, which the Rinn Fain began to gnaw on, ripping blood vessels and muscle and making the colonel scream once again, this time from the pain.
This was almost too much for the young soldier. Nearly vomiting at seeing his colonel’s shoulder mangled, he once again pulled his bayonet out of the Darhel’s back. He raised the rifle over his head, muzzle down, and took a brief moment to aim it at the alien’s head. Maybe the vital bodily organs were some place the bayonet couldn’t reach.
The soldier thrust downward again. The point of the bayonet sliced aside the skin covering the skull, then wedged itself through the skull and into the brain.
“Holy shit!” the soldier exclaimed. Even with a bayonet lodged in his brain the Darhel was still chewing on Suarez. “Motherfucker!” The soldier threw his weight against the rifle, twisting the alien’s head and teeth by brute force. Even in the open air, those predator’s teeth kept up a steady drumbeat, chomping on air as if on some kind of autopilot. The soldier held the rifle down to the ground, fighting against the Darhel’s death spasms.
Suarez, almost sobbing with the butchery that had been done to his shoulder began to wriggle out from under the Rinn Fain. He was careful to avoid the gnashing, blood reddened teeth while he did.
Two more soldiers ran up, also with bayonets fixed. Seeing how ineffective a single bayonet thrust had been, they began to stab downward again and again. With each violation the Darhel’s body twitched until, practically exsanguinated, with nearly every vital organ including the brain punctured, the alien finally subsided.
Breathing with relief, one of the soldiers took a long look at the Rinn Fain’s face. By God, the bastard looks like he just came. Too fucking weird.
A medic came up and began to bandage Suarez’s shoulder. When he also took out a syrette of Demerol, a powerful painkiller, and held it up in front of the colonel’s face, Suarez waved him off. “I’ll need my wits, for now, son,” Suarez gasped out. “Later, perhaps, I can take the drug.”
The medic shrugged, and began tying off the thick bandages that held in place a shrimp-shell-based anticoagulant. No matter to me if you want to suffer. My job is just to keep you alive. Pain’s your problem.
Patiently, trying not to wince, Suarez let the medic finish with his ministrations. Then he waited a few minutes longer for the soldiers to finish separating the prisoners. He stood only with difficulty, then swayed for a few moments, light-headed with pain and blood loss.
“Doc,” he told the medic, “come with me… help me walk to the prisoners.”
Wordlessly, the medic slung one of Suarez’s arms — the one that led from the unshredded shoulder — over his own. The two began to move toward the new prisoners when Suarez stopped and said, “No. Take me to the prisoners we just liberated.” His finger pointed at a spot where Boyd and some others sat, under a broad tree.
“Are you all right?” Suarez asked of the group.
Boyd answered for all. “Except for that one woman, Digna Miranda, we are fine.”
Suarez straightened, taking his arm from across the medic’s shoulder. He swayed again, but only for a brief time, before being able to stand well on his own. To Boyd he said, “We’ll have to talk soon, General. For now, I have some work to do. For the moment, at least, consider yourself my prisoner. I am sorry for that, but I have my reasons.”
“Take care of the woman, Doc,” he ordered a medic doing triage on the “war criminals” before walking off, somewhat unsteadily, with his own.
Suarez stopped at the second group, the one composed of women and children. His eyes scanned across them, steely and unpitying. He noticed two female politicians in the group. One of them he had once thought rather well of. The fact that they were here indicated his trust had been misplaced.
A sergeant was in charge of the guards on this group. To the sergeant Suarez said, “Those two. Have them brought to the other group.”
The sergeant saluted, answered, “Yes, sir,” and directed a guard to do as Suarez had ordered. One of the women had a satchel, a heavy bag, that she refused to leave behind until the guard prodded her with a bayonet. Indignantly, muttering curses, she dropped it and went as the guard directed.
Suarez ordered the bag opened. When it was, and its contents dumped, he saw nothing but precious stones and Galactic seed nanites, a large fortune’s worth.
The women, hustled along by the guard, reached the final group before Suarez did. Looking worried, they took seats on the ground with the others.
The company commander met Suarez near the last group, with a hand-selected guard in tow. “Are you sure about this, sir?” the captain asked. “This is a serious step.”
Suarez didn’t answer immediately. Instead, his eyes wandered over the angry looking group while his mind made a head count. Nineteen, he summed up. Nineteen traitors. Nineteen enemies of the Republic that I must not think of as human beings, as men and women.
He continued to think. Seventy-one in the legislature. Forty-two of them are scum. Subtract these nineteen and it is fifty-two, enough for a quorum. Any vote would be twenty-nine to twenty-three. That will work for what I have in mind.
To the captain he said, “Do it. Kill them.”
The guns began to rattle and the political rats to scream at about the time Suarez reached the butchered body of the Darhel. The body had been stripped and searched. Atop a small pile of ripped, blue stained, iridescent clothing sat the alien’s personal effects. Stooping, painfully, Suarez examined them. For the most part, he had no clue what any of the items meant. One item, however, did catch his interest. He had seen something just like it before, attached to the Armored Combat Suit of Captain Connors, the gringo Mobile Infantry company commander. He reached to pick the Darhel’s AID up.
“Don’t touch me!” screeched a disembodied voice. Suarez was startled at first, but ignored the screeching.
Turning the small black box end over end, Suarez was at a loss as to what use he could make of the thing.
“Don’t touch me!” the thing screamed again. “It is not permitted.”
“Fuck off, machine.”
A rustling of gravel caught the colonel’s attention. He looked up at a disheveled gringo officer, naval he thought.
“Can I have that?” McNair asked. “My ship has an AID, an unusual one. She might be able to get something useful out of this one.”
Shrugging, Suarez tossed the AID to the gringo. “More than I am likely to get out of it,” he answered.
In the distance, the automatic fire had been replaced by single shots, the screams by moans that, one by one, went silent.
In a tented hospital ward, Paloma sat silent in a chair next to the cot on which Julio Diaz lay. The machines next to him made gurgling and whirring sounds. The girl had no idea what they meant.