Read Online Brother Death by Steve Perry - Free Book Online

answer easier than snapping your fingers. At any given time there might be a pool of fifty or sixty people, mues surely, who could move more weight than could he; then again, maybe he could outlift them. So he might not be the strongest guy in the galaxy, but then again, maybe so. In any event, it gave him a certain perverse pleasure to make the machine blink when he went past its boundaries.
    The battle on Tembo was confined to Raion and most of the action, such that it was, to Leijona and the surrounding countryside. Tembo was a frontier world, sparsely populated, and the Confed presence consisted of a few companies, mostly conscripts and a few career officers. Even after the small infection of revolution grew into a killing plague, it came late to Tembo. The career men mostly saw which way the winds of change were blowing and stacked their weapons and commands. Confed policy wouldn't allow any significant number of local boys and girls to person the garrisons, for fear they wouldn't behave like soldiers when they knew or were related to the locals they might have to shoot at. Still, a lot of the troopers had been onplanet for years, and they had commerce and person connections with the natives. The trouble with an occupying army is that it will eventually be absorbed by the culture it resides within, and some of that had happened on Tembo. It was hard to point a carbine at the man who served you drinks with dinner every time you got liberty, or the woman you'd been sleeping with for a year, or the brother of the man married to your quad's sub-loo.
    So, when the voices grew louder, the local Confed troops mostly behaved like people and not soldiers, which was a failure for the military but a victory for humanity.
    Not all of them put down their weapons, however.
    Since the Confed frowned upon an armed populace, there weren't a lot of folks with guns. Sure, there were permits available, but mostly those were for hand wands or stunners or sublethal dart guns, spetsdods and the like. And the few people who had those licenses tended to be fairly individualistic types who would protect themselves and their families if attacked, but not offer organized resistance to an army.
    That left the cools.
    That was why Tazzimi Bork found herself holding her service pistol in sweaty hands, her back against the rough permaplast exterior wall of a hitter repair shop on the southern edge of North Docktown, waiting to shoot it out with a military quad approaching her position. The magazine and loads in her pistol were reds. If she had to shoot, it would be to kill. Killing a Confederation soldier was a galactic crime, and depending on the circumstances, worth full brainstrain or lengthy incarceration.
    "Yeek, Taz, you set?"
    She glanced across the alleyway at Jerlu. If he looked as nervous as she did, they must be a pair to see.
    He clutched his shotgun to his chest and his face was beaded with sweat, his tan uniform soaked through where his flesh touched it.
    "Yeah. Set."
    Taz was a cool, she enforced the laws of the city and the country, and such laws did not normally come into conflict with Confed regulations. Being as how the Confed frowned with greatly wrinkled brow on any planet daring to naysay it in any way. They enforced the stuff that concerned them, left the rest of the local regs alone. Still, it was a dilemma. While she'd never considered herself political, what the Confed did and stood for was wrong. She'd seen the replay of the 'cast where the black woman matador had called for a revolution. They'd never met, but she knew the name. Knew too her brother Saval would be right in the middle of it, and whichever side he had chosen, for whatever reason, she would not fight against him. Saval was sharp, he had an IQ that tested out far above the average, though he took pains to pretend it was otherwise. If he'd signed on with these folks, he had thought long and hard about it before he'd done so. Da was gone; the mining disaster had