Free The Butcher of Anderson Station by James S. A. Corey Page A

are,” he said, then bent low, his head almost level with Fred’s. “Look at me, Colonel.”
    Fred unscrewed the cap from the bottle and poured two fingers into the new glass. He put the cap back. The bartender didn’t move. Fred met the pale brown eyes. He was about to say something, not even sure what it was besides cutting, belittling, and mean. In the mirror, something moved. Men, behind him.
    Fred had a moment to brace himself for the knife or the bullet or the blow that didn’t come before a black bag dropped over his head.
     
    * * *
     
    Three years before, everything had been different.
    “ Dagmar in the pipe, ninety seconds to contact, all green.”
    “Roger that, Dagmar. I show you go for breach in ninety—”
    Fred chinned down the volume on the pilot’s band, reducing their exchanges to faint background music with lyrics about positionals and vectors. Ninety seconds before the breaching team went in.
    An eternity to wait.
    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