Breakout (The Dred Chronicles) - Softcover

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Slaughterhouse Six

Chaos reigned in Queensland, and Dred was too tired to come down with an iron fist. There were occasions when even the Dread Queen couldn’t salvage a situation. As Dred surveyed the damage in the main hall, she concluded this was one of those times. There were only twenty men left, and half of them were already wounded.

If they were in better shape, they’d probably argue about the alliance with Vost. But making a deal with the merc commander offered the best chance of surviving Silence’s retaliation. She reflected that the chances still weren’t good, considering that Vost only had two soldiers left.

Currently, they’d set up a microcamp on the other side of the room. Her own men gave them a wide berth as the unwounded ones tried to clean up. The smell of blood was overwhelming. I’m so tired. But she couldn’t show her exhaustion as Tam strode up; over the past turn, she had relied on him for intel.

“Report.”

“Casualties were steep, and our defenses are compromised. We can’t hold here long term.”

So they needed to consider a strategic withdrawal. Strange, not so long ago, she was struggling to hold the territory she’d claimed. Now she had to cede it.

“Any word on how Silence fared in the last battle?”

Tam shook his head. “I’m sure there are more than I saw on my last run, but many of her killers have gone to ground.”

With a sigh, Dred beckoned the rest of her advisors though calling them friends was probably more accurate. Calypso reached her side first. The former mistress of the circle was bloodstained, but she looked as steady as ever, filling Dred with gratitude. Martine came next, a small, sharp-toothed woman that Jael called “bright eyes” because even Perdition hadn’t been enough to break her. Jael strolled up last, and her heart twisted at how weary he looked. Somehow, his exhaustion was harder to bear than her own.

“We’ll work on it more tomorrow,” Calypso said, surveying the wreckage.

Jael glanced around the hall. “We’ve done what we can for now.”

Martine traded looks with Tam, then said, “I’ll leave a skeleton crew on watch. Tam, dismiss the rest. They need sleep, or they won’t be able to fight later.”

“On it,” Tam said, moving toward the men who looked the worst.

Dred registered the way Vost watched, almost as if he could hear what they were saying even at this distance. “Warn the sentries to be wary of the mercs.”

“Roger,” Martine said.

“Everyone report to my quarters once you’re finished here.”

A series of nods came in response, then Dred headed off. She wanted first crack at the san. It felt like forever since she’d bathed, longer since she’d slept. Jael followed her, a quiet guard at her back that gave her more security than she’d cared to admit. Vost watched their departure with a laser gaze, but Dred didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning.

That’d be like acknowledging he’s a threat.

By the time she finished, the others had assembled. Dred checked the lock on the door, then she settled on the bunk. Jael flung himself next to her while the rest took turns in the san. She started a little when he rested his head in her lap, unaccustomed to his unfaltering affection. Dred stared down at his fair hair, then, slowly, she lowered a hand to rest on the nape of his neck.

“Sweet,” Martine teased, but the other woman was smiling.

Tam sounded tired when he admitted, “I don’t have a contingency plan.”

The door chime sounded before she could respond. Keelah was outside, slightly wounded but bearing up better than Dred expected after the loss of her mate. “May I come in?”

“Of course.” She stepped back and activated the lock again.

“I wanted to waste no time in lodging a protest against this alliance. Vost and his thugs cannot be trusted,” Keelah said calmly.

Calypso and Martine were nodding.

“He has docking codes.”

The debate went on for an hour, and Jael dozed off in the middle. Finally, Dred said, “Enough. The decision’s made. I won’t recant or apologize.”

Keelah stirred, as if to leave, but Dred shook her head. “It’s safer here. Get some sleep while you can.”

Despite her own advice, she was the last one to doze off—and the first to awaken at the sound of shots fired.

Since there were so many people crashed out on her floor, it took longer than it should to arm up and stumble out the door. At first, she thought her men were attacking the mercs or vice versa, but in the corridor, she recognized the thin, silent shape of Silence’s killers. Dred chased one down the hall, chains ready, but the man slipped away into the dark. Every which way she turned, the murderers retreated, refusing to do battle.

The others joined her, rubbing sleep from their eyes.

Vost and his men had chosen to sleep in the main hall, so they’d downed a few of the assassins, but the dorms . . . as Dred stepped in, her stomach turned over.

In complete silence, her people had been slaughtered. The tongueless killers had cut so many throats during downtime that the floor was awash in red. Most died clean, but a few held on for hours after, choking on their own blood. There was no medicine, nothing to ease their pain, and Dred moved among them with grim determination, performing so many executions that she thought her name hereafter must surely be Mercy-Killer.

I have lost everything.

When the dying stopped, there were only a handful of survivors. In this instance, Dred’s favor had literally saved their lives, so Jael, Tam, Calypso, Martine, and Keelah lived while good armor, reflexes, weapons, and mods saved the mercenaries. Everyone else is gone. If she weren’t so numb, she might be brimming with self-recrimination, but the sentries had no chance against such practiced stealth. Before, there were traps and mechanisms left from when Ike set defenses in place, but the mercs had destroyed or disabled them all. It was hard not to hate the surviving mercs when they emerged a few minutes later. She bit back a curse and went to do what she must.

The clanging of the pipes had never seemed so loud to Dred before. With so many voices permanently silenced, her territory felt cavernous. Dealing with the dead was excruciating, exhaustive work, and they struggled with it for hours. Many of the bodies, she shoved down the chute without knowing their names or stories, if they’d left families behind or whether those they’d known before had forsaken them when they were judged too dangerous to walk free.

Beside her, Jael swiped a trickle of sweat and left behind a dark streak that was part corpse blood, part grime from the murkiest seams in the station. “Almost done.”

She nodded. There was a stack of ten dead Queenslanders behind them, and she heaved silently alongside him until the last of them disappeared. Dred dusted her hands, knowing she wouldn’t feel clean even after she showered. Certain things crept down beneath your skin, leaving a stain that could never be scrubbed away.

“What now?” he asked.

It was a good question.

While they’d added Vost and his two mercs to their numbers, it was still laughable when she considered the scope of the turf she’d claimed. “We have to pull back. Find somewhere defensible while we’re looking for parts.”

“You think he really has launch codes for the secondary docking bay?”

Though Dred had spoken up for Vost in light of Keelah’s objections, she lifted a shoulder. “If he doesn’t, he’ll die alongside us.”

A wry smile quirked one side of his mouth. “That’s scant comfort, love.”

“Sorry, was I supposed to dip the truth in treacle for you?”

“Nobody ever has, can’t imagine I’d enjoy it now.”

“Then stop complaining.” Though her words were sharp, her tone was almost . . . affectionate. That was the wrong word, maybe. She shied away from stronger ones.

For an instant, he looked as if he wanted to touch her, but she would’ve knocked his hands away. She knew exactly where they’d been, and she didn’t want the decaying cells of a hundred dead men caressing her cheek. Exhaling slowly, she led the way back to where the others were camped out; nobody cared to separate after the bloodbath. That seemed like an invitation to let Silence’s tongueless assassins pick them off one by one.

Dred found the survivors in what had been the common hall. From the holes blown in the walls showing tangles of wire along with scorched flooring, it looked like a war zone. Her gaze touched on the few she had left: Keelah, Tam, Martine, and Calypso. Vost and his men had retreated to the other side of the room, as if they didn’t trust their new allies. She didn’t blame them, as the converse was certainly true. Their situation was born of convenience and mutual need.

“How’s everyone doing?” she asked.

“Tired,” Martine answered.

“Hungry,” Calypso added.

“I’d like to let all of you rest more, but we don’t have that luxury. Pack as much food and gear as you can carry. Queensland is—”

“Lost,” Tam said.

Not what I was going to say, but there’s no point in playing the Dread Queen anymore. With a wider audience to impress, she once would’ve fixed a hard stare on Tam and rebuked him for interrupting her. But relief swelled when she realized that was done. Considering it came at such cost, that was unworthy of her, but she couldn’t deny the truth. With only six people left from her former kingdom, including herself, there was no point in maintaining the persona. Vost and his men wouldn’t be impressed by such chicanery, either. If she earned their respect, it would be through good decisions and martial prowess.

“Agreed,” Jael said.

“I know somewhere that might be safe.” Keelah’s soft words were barely audible over the hum of aging mechanisms that kept Perdition in orbit.

“Show us, please.” Dred wouldn’t have added that a day before.

The alien female nodded. “Let’s meet back here in a quarter hour. Don’t bring more than you can carry through the ducts.”

One of the mercs muttered, “Is she serious?” and Vost cuffed him on the side of the head.

“Guess that’s our cue.” Calypso shoved to her feet.

Walking down the hall toward her quarters for the last time felt so strange. When Artan was alive, this was the worst place in the world, but after she took Queensland, it became a sanctuary of sorts, space she’d carved out with blade and wit. Now I’m leaving. It’s funny how so little can come to feel like home. Jael’s hand on her shoulder drew her attention, and as she glanced back at him, she realized at once how dear and familiar he’d become, a necessity even in hell. A shiver went through her.

“We can endure this,” he said. “We’ve been through worse, both of us.”

“Done worse, too.” She keyed in the code, and as the door swished open, he wrapped a hand around her arm.

“Are you saying we don’t deserve to get out? Because that’s a poor argument for anything, right? I never heard of anyone in this life getting what they have coming.”

Dred smiled. “Except Artan.”

“The way I hear it told, you did for him. That’s not the same thing as being struck by lightning for your crimes.”

“Let’s not wax philosophical. The others are waiting for us to pack.”

“It won’t take long, I only have what I’m standing in.”

“More than you had when you came in.” She studied the charred spots on the merc armor. The damage told a compelling story about the pain he’d suffered, fighting for a few meters of rusted metal.

This place’ll hurt you worse before it’s done, grind you up and spit you out. Truth was, Jael wasn’t invincible as he’d been when he arrived on station. Because Jael had given her a primitive blood transfusion in saving her life, Dred now had half his healing swimming around her veins, somehow, and while that was good for her, it also chewed a foreboding hollow in her gut. She suspected there would come a point when he regretted saving her because there was always, always a cost for kindness. Especially in a place like this.

In the end, Perdition always wins.

·   ·   ·

JAEL could tell something was eating at Dred, but she wasn’t talking. Instead, she silently bundled some gear into a blanket and created a makeshift pack with enough proficiency to make him think she had experience sleeping rough. Now that was a sweet mental picture, imagining her free and easy beneath a night sky. The constellations wouldn’t come into focus, but that didn’t matter. The abstract was enough.

Once she was done, he followed her back to the others, keeping one eye out for an ambush. This would be the perfect time for Silence to finish them off, but he hoped she had been sated by the recent slaughter. If I’ve any luck at all, she’s reveling in her triumph.

Everyone else was ready to go when they got to the common room, and Keelah led the exodus. They passed through what used to be the eastern barricades, now just a jumble of shrapnel. Blood spattered the walls, and biological material had dried in crusty chunks. The stench was similar to massacres he’d survived, and the smell carried him back to the killing fields on Nicu Tertius, where the marshes sucked at his boots and swallowed the dead. That fast he was lost, fog everywhere, separated from the few mercs who had survived the butchery some idiot noble called a battle, and a child’s face leapt out of the whiteness. He bent to check for signs of life, but this girl was more than two days dead; her eyes didn’t blink at his retreat, the mossy foliage, or the large, green-backed fly that landed to sample her remains.

He stumbled forward, and Dred was in front of him, eyes narrowed. “You sick?”

Only of the killing. The dying. The dead. Their ghosts were always with him. Sometimes it felt as if he had a spectral army at his back, and now it wasn’t just the ones he’d murdered but also the ones he’d chosen not to save.

“Not exactly,” he said.

She aimed a hard look at him and let him pass her before she fell in at the rear. Guarding my back. The idea filled him with so many conflicting reactions that he couldn’t name the emotions, and it was enough that some of them were good. Keelah took them into the ducts before any of Silence’s people attacked; that didn’t mean they weren’t watching, of course. But once they vanished into the walls, they could reappear anywhere.

The route was dusty and winding, and the lack of footprints made Jael think the aliens hadn’t used these passages much. He lost all sense of direction along with concept of time; the narrow space, people ahead and behind, it hadn’t seemed nerve-wracking before—when they had a whole settlement waiting for them to return. Now, everything was different, not a recon mission but a group of refugees fleeing for their lives.

At last, Keelah guided them into a small room hidden in engineering. At least, that was how it sounded, soon confirmed by a glance at a faded Monsanto sign, left from the days when this place was used for deep-space mining. There was machinery everywhere, but the noise came as a welcome change from the echoing silence in Queensland. Space woul...