Taya looked sick at Saxon’s brutal dispatch of the villager. Junebug could remember a time when such a thing would have shocked her, but that was many years and many plasma bolts ago now. She felt a kind of hollowness inside of her as her mind ran through the possibilities of taking children hostage to guarantee safe passage to the ship. It hardly seemed necessary. These people were beaten and broken. There was a grim calculus to it all, the lives they had taken would be very difficult to replace.

“I can’t believe you slept with him,” Taya muttered, eyes locked on Saxon.

“Watch your sector,” Junebug snapped, it was merc slang for mind your own business, but it was practical advice in this context also. The villagers were running but it only took one sniper to ruin your whole life. Junebug didn’t glance at Neil but she hoped he hadn’t heard that. The last thing she needed was for him to get all mopy about something that was long over and done with.

“Move out,” Junebug ordered and the trio broke into a jog heading back west towards where the Highlander lay waiting.

 

 

The cathedral tower smoked sullenly, a quarter of its height sheared away by three precisely placed plasma bolts from the Highlander’s main battery, the mass of plasteel and masonry had crushed several more houses. Smoke drifted up from several smaller fires where flying debris had set fire to houses but Sayeeda had permitted the locals to form bucket brigades to extinguish them. Even if she decided to ice the lot of them afterwards, it kept them occupied for the moment. The Highlander itself had been shifted to a ridge with a line of sight on the village, its heavy guns able to bear on the whole area. Runners had been sent to the other villages along the valley, warning them that any attempt to intervene would result in complete obliteration. Sayeeda hoped that they would take the warning seriously. She wouldn’t take any pleasure in slaughtering a bunch of hapless peasants if they were stupid, but she had done worse, and more than once.

“You must understand our perspective,” Brother Gerome bleated. The priest looked pale, waxy and unhealthy, eyes sunken and with the slight tremble common to poorly preformed cryostasis proccedures. Junebug was kitted out in her full battle dress, battered breastplate and combat helmet with visor down. The boxy brutal form of her disruptor rifle hung from a patrol sling, pointed forward but not aimed anywhere in particular. If the villagers had rushed her all at once, it was possible they might have overwhelmed her, but Junebug didn’t think there was much chance of that. Several of the young men were in the process of heaving they cryopods out of the cathedral on hover dollies, sweating and muttering from fighting with the inertia of the things.

 

“For gods sake at least leave the ones who are with child, those children have fathers here and…” Gerome’s entreaty ended in a grunt as Junebug swung the butt of her rifle into his face, sending him reeling back in a spray of blood from a broken nose. She followed him, kicked his legs out from under him and gave him another blow across the back of his head, dropping him senseless to the dirt. Cries of alarms went up and she drew her pistol from her belt and turned so that her rifle covered the villagers while the side arm pointed at the unconscious priests head.

 

“Keep moving,” she said in a tone that was so without inflection it seemed to come from a robot rather than a woman. The pods resumed moving, heading down the road towards the distant highlander.

 

“That is the last of them,” Taya reported, glaring down at Gerome with hatred as hot as Sayeeda’s was cold. That was understandable given how close she had come to joining his little breeding program. Junebug lifted the pistol and offered to to Taya, nodding her chin towards Gerome. The blonde woman shook her head.

“Your loss,” Junebug said, tucking the weapon back into her belt.

 

“My father said that revenge is rarely good business,” she said quietly, eyes following a cart loaded with bolts of shimmer cloth as it rumbled down the road following the pods. None of them saw any sense in leaving the villagers with any valuables, though they hadn’t bothered to search individual houses. Junebug grinned and though the expression was vicious it at least had a hint of humanity to it.

“I suppose that rather depends on the business you are in,” she replied philosophically.

“Lets get out of here, I think I have all the bucolic pastoral scenery I need for the moment,” she told Taya. As she turned and began walking down the track, her mind turned to Neil and their next destination, thoughts of burning villages dwindling away in her mind.