The Butcher of Anderson Station

Fred let out a long exhale that fogged the inside of his helmet for a second before it cleared. He tried to stretch, but the crash couch wouldn’t let him extend his limbs fully in any direction. The command console showed eighty-three seconds to contact with Anderson Station. Breathing and stretching had burned only seven seconds.

He switched his display to the Dagmar’s forward airlock. She was a Marine landing craft, built to lock on to a ship or station and cut a hole, and the display showed two hundred marines strapped to vertical crash cages, weapons locked into quick release clamps next to them. The airlock was designed to iris open once the breaching charges had made an opening and the exterior seals were latched on.

It was hard to tell when they were all in vacuum-rated combat armor, but the marines looked calm. They’d been trained on Luna until maneuvering in light or null gravity and vacuum was second nature. They were put in cramped ships until advancing down claustrophobic metal corridors with blind corners at every intersection didn’t scare them. They were told that marines doing a full breaching action assault could expect as high as 60 percent casualties until that number stopped meaning anything.

Fred looked over his people in their cages and imagined six out of ten of them not coming back.

The readout said thirty seconds.

Fred switched his console to radar. Two large blips flanking the Dagmar. Her sister ships, each with two hundred marines of their own. Beyond them, the small, fast-moving escort ships. Ahead, growing closer by the second, the massive rotating ring of Anderson Station.

Everyone was in place, his troops were ready to go, diplomacy had failed and it was time to do his job. He opened the command channel to his squad leaders, ten variations on background static suddenly piping into his helmet.

“All squads, ten seconds to breach. Sound off.”

Ten voices responded with the affirmative.

“Good hunting,” Fred said, then pulled up his tactical display. The layout of Anderson Station appeared in a misleadingly crisp 2-D floor plan. No way to know how much fortifying the Belters might have done when they took over the station.

His soldiers showed up as six hundred green dots, hovering just outside the station.

“Breach, now! Now! Now!” the Dagmar’s pilot yelled into the comms. The ship shuddered as the airlock claws sank into the metal of the station itself, a metallic shriek that Fred felt right through his padded chair. Gravity returned in a sideways lurch as the station began carrying the breaching ships along on its 0.3 g rotation. A series of high-pitched bangs sounded as the breaching charges went off.

Above his tactical display, ten smaller screens flickered on, his squad leaders activating their suits’ helmet cameras. The marines poured through the three new holes in Anderson’s skin. Fred flipped to the tactical floor plan, his fingers tapping against it.

“All squads establish beachhead and fallback position in Corridor L, from Junction 34 to Junction 38,” Fred said into the comm, surprised as always by how calm his voice sounded during a battle.

Green dots moved through the corridors marked on his display. Sometimes new red dots appeared when a marine’s HUD detected return fire and marked the individual as a threat. The red dots never lasted long. Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective.

Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out on a piece-of-shit station at the ass end of the Belt. Sixty percent expected casualties. Four green dots for every six yellow, and each one of them his.

He watched the assault play out like a high-tech game, moving his pieces, reacting to threats with new orders, keeping score by tracking how many green dots stayed green.

Three red dots appeared. Four green dots stopped advancing and took cover. Fred sent four more green dots into a side passage, moving them into a flanking position. The red dots disappeared. The green dots moved again. It was tempting to get lost in the flow of it, to forget what all the glowing symbols on the screen actually meant.

The squad leader for his point team broke his reverie by calling him on the command channel.

“Overwatch, this is squad one actual.”

Fred shifted his attention to the helmetcam view from squad one’s leader. A makeshift barricade squatted at the other end of a long, gently sloping corridor. His tactical display marked a dozen or more hostiles defending it. As Fred watched, a small object hurtled over the barricade and detonated like a grenade just a few yards from his squad leader’s position.

“Overwatch here, I read you, squad one actual,” Fred replied.

“Heavily fortified position blocking access to the main corridor. Could clear it with heavy weapons, but there would be significant structural damage, and possible loss of life support in this section.”