The courage to kill my characters

I'm moving towards the big fight scene in my novel this week, and I know that I'll have to kill some characters at the end of it.  And  that always causes me problems with the writing.

This is one of the reasons why I can't take to galaxy-spanning space opera with scenes of grand destruction which killl billions.  I'm a fan of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta books, but even there I find some parts of the story hard to take.  There are major viewpoint characters in the series who enjoy killing, and in some scenes they're shown enjoying having just killed someone.  This I find hard to accept,  especially as those characters are the good guys in the series.

I need to see the consequences of killing acknowledged in books I read.  And to be fair, Elizabeth Moon does have those characters struggling with the knowledge that they enjoy killing.  That makes them understandable, but it also makes them characters I can never fall in love with.

I much prefer characters like Gareth Powell's Trouble Dog,  a sentient ex-warship. She is trying to atone for being involved in, what was in effect, a genocide.  This is much more my kind of morality.  As is the idea that humans will be troubled by having killed someone.

In my own work the military is usually engaged in conflicts off the page.  Unless the fundamental nature of human changes in the future, the chances are we'll still have wars and dictators. So we'll still need military organisations, and my characters, who are usually civilians, will still get caught up in the aftermath of those conflicts.

But I still don't relish killing my characters, even if they are the evil ones, and even if it's necessary sometimes.  I don't think I've ever killed a major viewpoint character, and when other writers do that I feel angry.  I guess that means the suspension of disbelief contract I've entered into with the author  contains the clause that all major characters will survive,

But I have killed non-viewpoint characters in my work.  In one of the Darius Shipyard novels I sent a young tech to his death when an escape pod airlock opened onto vacuum.  And the big set-piece scene at the end of Combined Cognition resulted in hundreds of people being hurled out into the vacuum of space.  My characters are always clear that the killings are morally wrong, and I always ensure the killers are brought to justice.

They doesn't always happen in the real world, of course, but my choice is to do that.  If I'm going to kill characters, those deaths have to matter, and to me that means making sure the killers suffer at least some consequences for their actions.