The Weapon by Michael Z. Williamson

Author:Michael Z. Williamson [Williamson, Michael Z.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science fiction
ISBN: 9781416521181
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2009-04-30T18:03:21+00:00

Chapter 12

Many of us flipped out on Mtali. I wasn't the first.

Maybe "flipped out" is the wrong term. I didn't go insane. I did get outraged, furious, angry beyond words at the waste and stupidity of the human race. I became convinced of my own superiority to the point where I no longer thought of the locals as a combination of poor and/or stupid, but as less than human, filthy animals to be exterminated.

The UN was posing in the cities for PR shots for the "stability" they'd brought. Meanwhile, we got stuck with every nasty, gritty real military mission. They were all the same—some group of assholes would shoot up a school bus to "punish" that faction for blowing up a church, who'd done that in retaliation for someone spitting on someone else. With the Muslims, it went back to who was the proper heir of Muhammad some 2000 years ago. With the Christian Coalition, it went back to which version of scripture was correct and whether God was a trinity or a sole deity. With the Feltsies, it was still a debate over whether "fags" should be castrated or just killed, "adulterous" women stoned or simply exiled, and nonbelievers killed or only beaten. We and the few real UN troops left would go in and separate them like scratching children, and it would start all over again. It was tiresome.

The trigger for me was a call we got regarding an Amala village. It seems that some locals lost contact with the village and went to ascertain the situation. When they got there, they puked at what they saw and called the Unos. The Unos heaved their guts and called us to join the party. We got rather ill, too.

The village was a razed, smoking ruin. It takes a petty child to raze a village. All the rude huts were torched, every possession destroyed or defiled and the occupants were missing. It wasn't hard to figure out where they were. There was a roughly filled and mounded pit behind one of the hovels. The first responders had started digging, then called for help.

I stared into that hole, dark and earthy and filled with the disgusting stench of rotten flesh. Local and imported Earth refuse eaters were turning the bodies into a gooey, slimy slush of indistinct blobs melding together. But I could see enough to make me choke vomit, and I've eaten things and seen things that would gag a maggot.

The bottommost corpses were adult men, all with severe wounds. They'd fought and died. Above them were the women, growing younger as the depth grew shallower, until the topmost of them was around ten Earth years. The tattered clothing told me all I needed to know. They'd been raped and worse. Some of the violations were out of Jack the Ripper's legend, and bespoke a mind gifted in its sickness. And above all those, in decreasing age, were the children.

They'd killed the adult males, who were a threat. They'd raped and tortured and slowly killed the women, who culturally and spiritually were far less so.

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