clearing the ship

The doctor, the nurse, and the six sailors who’d helped the rescued men down here lay sprawled inside. Each of them had small black dots on their foreheads or in the centers of their chests. Sometimes more than one.

Hanzo felt his heart judder to a stop in his chest, and his whole body went as cold as the icy seas that slapped against the hull. His mind, sharp as it was, slipped a gear as he tried to navigate through the seas of impossibility. All eight of the people in that room were dead.

They had all been shot.

There hadn’t been any noise of gunfire, but there was brass on the floor.

There was so little blood, but Hanzo knew that dead people do not bleed. He also realized that the head shots had not exited.

There was no blood spatter.

Only death.

The three survivors were gone. Their heavy coats and gloves were on the floor, but they were gone.

What had been beneath those bulky coats?

He stood where he had stopped, one foot inside the sick bay, one in the hall. Hanzo looked down at the little camera transmitter in his hand.

“God help us,” he said.

He did not hear the footfall of the man who stepped up behind him. He barely felt the feather-light pressure of the sound suppressor of the pistol touching the hair over his ear.

The shot was a soft thup, which he did hear, though only as a fading afterthought as the .22 slug punched through the bone and began ricocheting around inside his skull, expending its foot pound of force by destroying his brain utterly. Lacking the force to exit the skull.

He fell into the sick bay.

Captain Hanzo did not hear the screams and yells as the rest of his crew died.

There were fifty-three scientists and forty-four crew aboard the 'Shirase'. There were weapons aboard, but the lockers were never opened, the guns and rifles never handed out. There was no time for that. The three Fixers swept like a storm through the ship, from stem to stern, deck to deck, killing silently, killing efficiently. They disabled the radio room. Hanzo, who appreciated tough men working at peak efficiency, might had been impressed. He might also have been terrified, because these men moved much too quickly than was reasonable. In instances where a crewman was able to mount some kind of defense, they swept the counterattacks aside. For all the toughness of the sailors aboard, they might as well have been toddlers.

It was a massacre.

A quick, quiet massacre.

In under nine minutes, all ninety-seven people aboard the 'Shirase' were dead.

'INTERLUDE 10

SALES PRESENTATION VIA SHOWROOM

FOUR MONTHS AGO'

Mr. Sunday froze the image on the face of Captain Hanzo. The officer had twisted as he fell so that his face was visible, and there was a look of profound surprise stamped on his features.

“Now that,” crowed Mr. Sunday, “is entertainment!” He chuckled as small windows opened on the screen, each one showing the feed from cameras placed throughout the 'Shirase' as the Fixers moved through it. Each man had a pouch of the camera transmitters, and they activated as soon as they were pressed to a hard surface. The video feeds showed the slaughter.

“Ninety-seven hostiles taken down,” said Mr. Sunday, “by three enhanced Fixers. And ladies and gentlemen, that is an average of 32.3 kills per Fixer. No explosives, no air strikes, no booby traps. Small arms only. Oh, and watch this … this is really fun.”

He cued up one clip where a petty officer tried to rally a group of men on the forward deck of the ship as two of the Fixers emerged. The sailors had oars, improvised clubs, and knives, and there were enough of them that sheer weight of numbers should have carried the fight.

The Fixers stood back-to-back, each holding two .22 automatic pistols with ten-shot magazines. Forty total shots without reloading. Eighteen men charged at them, circling them, trying to crush them in a brutal rugby scrum.

The Fixers began moving in a slow circle, firing and firing. The attackers came at them, and the Fixers had a target-rich environment. Their hands were rock steady, and they emptied their guns into the ring of sailors. Only one sailor—the chief petty officer—made it all the way through the storm of lead and managed to strike a Fixer across the jaw with a three-foot length of pipe. The blow whipped the Fixer’s head to one side, tearing open the balaclava and ripping a red gash along his jawline. Blood splashed out. However, the Fixer neither cried out nor fell. Instead, he walked up to the petty officer, who was about to swing again, buried the pistol in the man’s chest, and fired three shots.

The petty officer grunted and sank to his knees, swayed there for a moment, and fell over.

Mr. Sunday turned to the wall of screens showing the faces of sixteen potential customers. Some of those people would have been appalled had they known who else was watching this sales pitch. Some were sworn enemies who had lost loved ones to the attacks of the others. Some were overtly cruel, others merely desperate in fights against enemies they could not hope to defeat in any kind of standard battle.

“These men here are prototypes,” said Mr. Sunday. “We expect the first batch of our enhanced private military contractors to be ready to board planes to your locations in under six months. Oh, wait, I see we have a question. Let me read it for the group. ‘When did this take place?’” The salesman grinned and looked at his wristwatch. “Just under thirty minutes ago. If this wasn’t in the Antarctic, the bodies wouldn’t even be cold yet.”

-Relentless pg. 165-167, Kindle Edition.