End of Women: Part Four

On A Pale Horse

Nate's Airship came to rest on a spare patch in amongst the wreck of three others. His lungs filled with the inert gases of the pulse trails dissipating in faint clouds all across the battlefield. Even an airship round leaves only a slight haze on a bright day; there, in Mars Valley, the sky had been thickened and made dark by a ghostly green canopy.

"So many rounds." Said the squadron commander beside Nate. "So many lives."

If the sky was heavy, the ground was a neutron star. It was not the number of bodies that turned Nate's guts to rancid meat, it was the smell of them. The incinerate shots used by the Arrowheads turned flesh to charcoal. The skeletal ash faces that stared up from the sand at him reeked like roasted hogs. The scent reminded Nate so strongly of pork chops that he began to salivate, and the disgust he felt at that was too much. He hunched over and spewed onto the gangplank.

"It's alright sir." The squadron commander patted him gently on the back with a kevlar-gloved hand. "Nobody will have seen that."

Nate straightened up and wiped his mouth, breathing fast.

"I hope they did."

Two shapes were forming in the green glow, moving between more wrecks and winding amongst more bodies. Nate put a hand on his man's shoulder.

"If anything happens to me, destroy the station. Use the Ender if you have to."

The squadron commander jerked a stiff nod, his lips thin as he turned back into the airship. Nate took a deep breath and walked out onto the plain, trying to quieten his heart.

Alex Mendes came first, thin trails of green whisp making wake around him. He wore a white leather jerkin and long brown pants. He squinted at Nate, no doubt trying to sense out who he was.

"You are the leader of Bluenorth?" He called out when Nate closed in.

"I am the CEO of Bluenorth Corporation." Nate cried back. 

"You see, Alex?" Said Rathers, thumbs tucked into a belt that Nate was surprised to see was free of weapons. "They still talk in the old way. The way they did before the Collapse. Corporation talk. No wonder they cherish their cunts so dearly."

Rathers pulled up to a stop, folding his enormous arms and locking eyes with Nate. Those eyes, Nate saw, were full of contempt. Nate was surprised to find that even if everything he suspected, everything he knew about Chairman Rathers was true, he could not find it in his heart to hate him. Why, he could not say. 

"Gentlemen." Mendes stepped forward, standing side-on to speak to them both. "We must talk before more men die."

"So let's talk." Nate said directly to Rathers. 

"Do you want me to parlay with this traitor to mankind?" Rathers scratched his pallid face with a thick finger and shook his head. 

"Then why have you come?" Nate asked.

"Because I trusted this young man once." Rathers pointed an elbow at Mendes, who looked at the ground for a moment. "I trusted him even after he killed your Troopers. I trusted him when he brought our justice to his homeland. I trusted him right up until he told me I had to make peace with the bastard who tries to tear down my work."

The great pyramid of Mars Station made a triangular shadow behind them in the mist. Nate looked at it, and then back at Rathers. He laughed through his nose.

"Your work?" Nate took a step forward, and Mendes drew closer as well, his arms almost raising to keep distance between the two men. "You made a big dungeon in the desert, Chairman. You taught men to do nothing but torture and slaughter. You make them make their lives about what they do to women. You enslave them to hatred. That is your work."

"And your man paid us in flesh," Rathers opened his arms as if in thanks, "and we gratefully accepted. Bluenorth surrendered the high and mighty path when Gene Wilkes handed us thirty thousand women for the price of... you know, its been so long, I can't even remember what he asked for." 

"You incinerated him at Albuquerque." 

Nate threw it at Rathers to see what he did. The big man's small eyes drew smaller, like two little turtle-heads. Mendes looked at Nate, then at Rathers.

"You think you have knowledge." Rathers snorted, folding his arms again. "You have nothing."

"A hundred radicals were captured two weeks after Albuquerque. We interrogated them and they gave us everything. Neurodownloading is new tech but it got us what we needed, and the Senate gave us the rest." Nate took another step closer just to watch Rathers flinch for the smallest fraction of a second. "The Goldsboro bomb best estimate location. You used a North Carolina chapter to excavate the bomb and when they had it for you, you gave it to HERO."

"You can't prove-"

"And when they had it, you told them exactly where they needed to be in order to do the most damage." Nate spoke louder, determined to make Rathers understand he knew the truth, even if no-one else would believe it. "It wasn't too difficult to find your scapegoat. You'd been tracking Millie Slate ever since we cleaned out the first Nova target. We pulled out her implant when Degan hauled her in for us."

"How is Degan?" Rathers leant into the question, pressing a smug smile.

"You broke Millie's mind and had her deliver the bomb. Chaos was what you wanted, and you got it. Twice as many men died in that blast as women have died at the hands of Arrowhead. How many of your men know what you've done? How many have already put it together, and decided they would rather anaesthetise their minds with torment and flaying and fuckery of every description than to face the truth?" Nate turned to Mendes, and part of him wished the young man had never been an Arrowhead himself. Perhaps then he might have heard, or understood. "You are a plague on mankind, Rathers. Your men are trapped by you."

Mendes slowly turned his head back in Rathers' direction. The Chairman sniffed, raised his brow and coughed.

"Its certainly an interesting theory." 

"Albuquerque..." 

It was the first time Mendes had spoken for a few minutes. Both Nate and Rathers looked his way. A burning airship crunched into pieces behind them with an almighty crash, and when silence came back, Mendes was staring into space.

"You... you told me..."

"Shut up, boy." Rathers snapped, jerking his head irritably.

"Sir... you said that it was a Nova target... that they stole the bomb, not us!"

"He has lied to every one of you." said Nate.

"Truth is not something you spend all at once." Rathers said with a dry bore to his voice. "Men require more than truth in order to do what is necessary."

 Mendes' eyes fell on the wrecks, the bodies, the airships in the sky and the cresting sun behind the pulse clouds. 

"All of this... it was all your doing."

Rathers turned to face Mendes and opened his mouth just before Mendes pulled out a gun and shot him square in the head.