by J. F. Holmes
“Our kind of scum?”
“Like I said: more than you’d think.” Robert scratched at a bug bite on his forearm where bright, fresh Nordic tattoos marked his skin. Prison tats? Milo wouldn’t have been surprised. All kinds of rumors circulated the camp. One said he’d been a wealthy exec’s son who’d spent his life in boarding schools and one day just rebelled, murdering his teacher and headmaster. Another said he’d been sent to a religious school for proper indoctrination and had been abused by the faculty. If this rumor was true, castration was only one of the horrors he visited on his former masters before killing them. Whatever the truth, he had come to Vorcha as purchase from a privately run prison camp as slave labor and had a very tainted past for someone so young.
“So, Robert,” said Milo. “What makes you so…blood thirsty?”
Robert looked him with those demon eyes and leering smile that chilled Milo’s blood. “You really wanna know?”
No! “Sure.”
He raised an eyebrow as if to say “if that’s what you want.” His smile fell into something less pleasant but just as intense. “I was—”
There was a rustle in the brush and the two men turned to face the noise. Li Kim stood in the dying light of the clearing. Milo smiled and said in a low voice: “You know your scum.” Robert replied with a low chuckle. “Mr. Li!” Milo said. “I’m so delighted to see you.”
Li’s smile was muted. “We were sorry to see Virk turn down your gracious offer.”
“We?”
Li’s smile broadened. “Daljeet Virk does not speak for all.”
Milo had heard that Li resented his father’s legacy being passed onto Virk. Still, he played it cool. “So, you are divided.”
“Perhaps,” said Li. “But martyrs make great unifiers.”
Milo traded glances with Robert. Our kind of scum, indeed.
Chapter 5
Abayomi Olatunji sat in the command chair of his Dynar Industries GA-30 assault skiff, reading the holographic displays above his head. The mountain was no mountain. It was a long, low north-south running ridge. He gazed at it through the multi-spectrum display. The large, dark ridge crawled with human-shaped flares of light moving over it like a great ant mound. Tiny flashing UV beacons dotted the elevation, marking the secret passages into the subterranean fortress. The face visor of each member of his company was programmed to capture the beacon that was otherwise invisible to the naked eye. They were also visible to the skiff’s targeting scope.
A glance at the lidar display showed the larger, more distant Xiang ships assume holding patterns along a broad perimeter, waiting for his word to move in. His troops were ready. “Pilots, target UV beacons. Fire on my command.”
He toggled off the radio and grinned at Zhu, strapped into the chair next to him. “Virk killed by his own people last week. Now, we get the big fish.”
“Virk commanded more troops. Farkus is hardly the big fish.”
“Troops who throw rocks and insults. We’ll see how scary they are after we choke off their weapons.” He flipped the comm set back to life. “All units, fire, fire, fire.”
* * *
Milo stood under the canopy, oblivious to the noose tightening around his neck. “The Witch sends word.” It was Robert. “Forward base is established and running. Our people up and in position. Kim’s fire teams are scattered through the plantations waiting for word.”
He nodded and glanced at Andie, stooping to tie her bootlace in the doorway to one of the caverns.
Robert grabbed him by the shoulder. “One other thing: Li’s intel is correct: the mercs are a group of Nigerian nationals called the Black Mambas.” Milo looked back to Andie. Andie Watusi. Watusi! Was that Nigerian? Was that because she knew it had been? That she was the source?
“I say we leave it. We don’t need outsiders to win this war.”
Saundra’s face gazed out from his memory: “She’s jealous.”
Andie broke his train of thought. “If you have nothing further, Commander. I’ll head down the forward base.”
Milo took a long, hard look at her and sighed. “Give us a minute, Robert.” The man looked at Milo, nodded, and moved away. Milo waited until he was gone: “What’s going on with you, Andie?”
Her eyes darted away. “You don’t want to hear it.”
No one was around. He reached out and touched her face. “Try me.”
She moved her deep brown eyes to look into his. “You’ve changed, Milo. This isn’t what we were about.”
“What do you mean? This is what we’ve always tried to do.” A nostalgic smile touched his face. “To fight the power together, to stand up to oppression and tyranny.”
“By aligning ourselves with another tyrant? To sell out our cause?” Her voice dropped. “To have rival allies assassinated?” His eyes widened. “Don’t look at me like that! You think me stupid? That’s why you stayed behind, you and your lap dog, isn’t it? Did you set this up yourself or did you conspire with Li? Do you think I would just stand by and meekly go along with you?”
Milo clenched his fist. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” But she did know, and they both knew she knew. Shoomp! The mountain rumbled and shook, casting the whole eastern face in a shower of rocks and trees. The sky became thick with dust and smoke. Milo and Andie reached for each other, their quarrel put on hold by the arrival of mortal danger.
“Get down!” he said and leaned backwards. The two fell down the steep western face of the ridge, bouncing off rock and log and tree trunk as missile after missile riddled the doomed base. Rock and dust and shattered tree rained down on them from above, chasing them down the hill as they toppled out-of-control. He stopped first, his belly striking the tree with a pained “oof.” Andie rolled a few meters farther to the edge of western gorge. This was not a forty-five degree roll, like they had just experienced. This was a twenty meter shear drop into a rocky stream.
Milo scrambled down the slope, his bruised and battered belly screaming in agony. “Andie! Andie!”
She had already sat up and was backing away from her near-death experience. “My god!” That was so close!”
He grabbed her and pulled her close, kissing her head and caressing her with frantic, hysterical affection. “Oh my god, Andie!” She clutched him, like he was the only thing keeping her from tumbling to her death. They moved as one, drawing their open mouths together in a long, passionate kiss. He let go a hungry sigh, wishing he had time to throw her to the ground and take her right then and there. More explosions rocked Witch Mountain. The ground beneath them trembled, sending sand and tiny rocks over the lip, below them. They broke their kiss and he drew a long sweet breath of her hair. I was such a fool to suspect Andie. A fool!
“Go,” she said.
He pulled back and looked at her. “What?”
She wouldn’t look at him. “Just go. I’ll stay here.”
“Stay here?” he glanced up, could see the suggestion of a combat skiff flying over the wrecked ridge. “They’ll get you.”
“I’m finished. The dream…our dream is dead, Milo. There’s nothing to be done.”
The words were a sledgehammer on his fragile heart, breaking the floodgates on his memories.
“…this op is compromised…We don’t need outsiders to win this war.”
“She’s jealous!”
“…some kind of mole…Someone in your inner circle.”
“It is you!”
She recoiled from his demeanor change. “What do you mean: it is me?”
“They needed a rat, someone to tell them where I was, someone jealous of my success, someone I had left behind, someone very, very close to me.”
Andie looked at him with wide, terrified eyes. “Milo? Milo, what are you saying? You think I—I did this? You think I betrayed you?”
“Of course!” He stepped closer. “You were there when Saundra’s ship crashed but you wanted to undermine us, to leave—” A horrible thought occurred to him: “Did you tip them
off? Are you the reason she got shot down? Did you give them some last second notice?”
“No! No! Milo, don’t be crazy!”
But Milo wasn’t crazy. He was certain. He gripped her by the throat, squeezing with all his strength. Her struggle was useless against his rage-fueled grip. He pressed his foot into the rising slope behind him, braced his whole body, and tossed her like a shotput down the hill.
“Milo,” there was a sad, desperate quality in her hoarse voice. She toppled backward down the steep slope, her legs scrambling and arms groping. Her feet went out from under her, toppling her head-over-heels towards the rock ledge and over the lip.
He took a long, angry breath as her scream faded in his ears: “They are all jealous!”
Chapter 6
The Ram Chu Plantation was still burning when Milo reached the forward jungle base nineteen hours later. Unfamiliar pickets let him pass as he approached the command center. He found Saundra and Li standing in the center of the room. Their faces were serious and concerned. Saundra’s blue eyes moved to meet Milo’s brown ones, and a warm smile swept the tension away. “You survived!”
Milo could only stare, unsure what he was supposed to feel or say. Saundra said something to Li and moved to Milo, concern on her face. “Are you ok?”
“They blasted the whole base. The whole mountain is gone, just gone.”
“Survivors?” Milo saw Andie topple over the edge of the cliff and shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Milo.”
Saundra withdrew her hand. “Their sacrifice was not in vain. While their forces were concentrated on you, we counterattacked all over the settlement. Half the plantations are burning. The other half have been turned into battlefields. The Vorchan Colony is hemorrhaging to death.”
“Yes,” said Li. “We struck them down.”
Something about the way he said ‘we’ bothered Milo. He looked for some sign of betrayal. Had Li been in on it, too? Did he really want to share his father’s legacy with Milo? Milo feared the answer to that question, but he knew one thing for certain: I won’t share mine! “That’s quite the intel you had, Mr. Li.”
Li looked at him in a way that implied he didn’t like Milo’s tone. “Thank-you. I am happy it helped.”
Milo’s smile was more of a leer. “Helped, yeah.”
Li continued to study him. His hand creeping one deliberate millimeter at a time towards the pistol on his hip. “It has been a long day for you, Milo. Perhaps you are not well.”
“You’d like that. Wouldn’t you. Go lay down someplace and not wake up.”
Real fear crossed Li’s features. “What are you talking abou—”
“What is it you said to me? Martyrs make great unifiers? Do you really think I believe you killed your boss to be my second-in-command?”
Those unfamiliar guards appeared at Milo’s back. That’s what I thought.
Robert Lingal entered the room behind the guards. He obliterated their heads with simultaneous blasts from his twin, slug-throwing pistols. The sentries crumpled. Li was still processing what had happened when Lingal leveled the pistol in his right hand and pumped four rounds into his chest. Lingal watched the man die and glanced at Milo. “Our kind of scum.”
Both men erupted into laugher.
* * *
Abayomi Olatunji was a walking contrast to the luxury corporate manse through which he walked. Dirt and blood fouled his black battle dress utilities, combining with the sweat to create a noxious cloud of nasty human and death. His soft-soled boots left sooty, bloody tracks on the plush crème carpet of the second floor hallway. The twin doors at the end were guarded by a pair of large Xiang security officers in full combat kit. Olatunji passed through the threshold and beheld a tall blonde sitting at the large board table, across from grim, defeated faces of the Xiang officers. He met Zhu’s gaze. “You sent for me.”
Zhu nodded. “We have called you here to introduce you to our new partners. This is Michelle Wilson-Dupree of WilCorp. They will be assisting us in eradicating the insurgency. We have elected to terminate our contract with you.”
He smiled. “Terminate? Terminate?” He looked to Wilson-Dupree and back to Zhu. “We have crushed the soul of the insurgency! Their mountain has become their tomb! The advantages they’ve gained in their counterattack have been lost along with heaps of dead they’ve left behind. My company has fought night and day, sweeping them back into the jungle. We’ve hounded them relentlessly. Giving up now is madness!”
Zhu was unfazed. “There are broader concerns.”
Olatunji smiled: “They’re threatening to out you to the UN!”
Zhu made no move to confirm or deny. “The decision is final. We will pay you what you’re owed, which is nothing. Yet again, you have failed us.”
“That isn’t our agreement.”
“Take it up with the UN.” Zhu motioned to an assistant who rushed over and took sheets of real paper from him and handed the packet to Olatunji.
He skimmed the papers. “Again you betray us,” he said to Zhu. “That makes this so much more ethical.” He looked at Wilson-Dupree. “I wish to accept the option you offered.”
Wilson-Dupree smiled. “That’s fantastic, Warlord Olatunji!”
“Your intel is solid?”
“It’s been our intel from the beginning.”
Zhu looked at Wilson-Dupree. “What do you mean your intel?”
She met Zhu’s anger with cool indifference. “We made sure you had enough to hurt them, but we needed them all together and vulnerable before moving with our—offer.” She looked at Olatunji. “The mercenary had no idea. Though we were acquainted with him after his performance on Ghada and made it known we’d be happy to work with his Black Mambas on some future endeavor. When we found out he was working here to protect your illegal Gorax operation—well, we just had to reach out to him and give him an option to work for us—if ethics would permit such a thing.”
“The ethics of a mercenary!”
Wilson-Dupree’s smile was pure sugar. “Perhaps you’d like to take it up with the UN.” She turned to Olatunji. “You’ll find them in the valley as promised. Show no mercy.”
Olatunji saluted and turned, leaving his former employer to gawk.
* * *
Milo stood in the mouth of the cave staring out at the driving rain, wearing nothing but his cargo pants. The cave wasn’t like the tunnels from Witch Mountain. It was a larger, open mouth hole in the hillside, looking out at the camp that housed the tattered remains of his army. Saundra’s naked form was sleek and cat-like under the old, faux wool blanket atop his bed of Krakka Plant and Harma Leaf. She was reading the comm pad in her hand.
“Li’s old spies were right,” he said into the driving rain. “Pax saw the markings on the ships from her spotter position in the western mountains: it was just as his people said.” They were supposed to be Milo’s people, now, but he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to trust them. “WilCorps,” the word tasted like ash on his tongue. “We’re gonna have to scatter and make for the hills.”
“You seem to have little choice.”
You? He shared a glance at Robert Lingal. The man had stayed in his smaller bed closer to the mouth of the cave, even during the intense passion Milo and Saundra had shared the night before. He was indestructible and had saved Milo’s life too many times to be far away for any length of time. “We’ve been weaker.”
“Hardly,” Saundra slipped out from under the covers and into her panties. She pulled a loose-fitting cotton shirt over her head. Milo paid the motion no mind. The woman walked barefoot across the cave. “You’re not faced with one determined corporation, but two.”
“You know, sometimes it think you don’t talk like an indie operative, at all. I might even be tempted to think you’d been working for WilCorps th—” The words died in his throat and he turned to face her.
“Upsize…nothing is so important as a united command. I can think of a good candidate to unite it under.”
�
�This woman is making you crazy!”
“What did I do? Andie!”
Robert struck him from the left, his arm leveraged into Milo’s armpit, lifting him and pinning him against the rocky wall to his right. He never saw the blade, but he felt its impact, striking again and again in underhanded blows to his back, his side and his leg. He struggled and tried to move, screaming and pleading, but Robert was young and strong and merciless. He drove the knife again and again and again. Saundra’s bright blue eyes watched in cold indifference as Milo’s blood splashed her white shirt. He slipped free of Robert’s grip and kept himself from falling by grabbing the course cavern wall. But Robert was relentless. He closed on his wounded prey, his thrusts coming over hand, punching holes in Milo’s back and shoulder.
Blood burst from the wounds and vertigo fell on him. He poured sweat. His stomach rolled. It was getting hard to breathe. More blows fell and more blood flowed. He didn’t know how many times Robert stabbed him, but he knew it was enough. He fell onto the rocky floor, his skin slick with sweat and blood, his body shuddering with a rattling cough that filled his mouth with the taste copper. The whole room spun, and his wide eyes gazed up into Saundra’s cold detachment and Robert’s manic bloodlust.
“You—were—my—bodyguard,” he whispered between gasping breaths.
Saundra’s lips curled with a trace of a smile. “He was mine long before he was yours.”
Milo shut his eyes and let the darkness close in. And, as he felt himself falling into that dark tunnel of death, the sound of battle being joined echoed from beyond the mouth of the cave.
_____________________
Greetings! I'm T. Allen Diaz the author of several dark science fiction novels, including the dark sci-fi adventure, The Proceena Trilogy and the sci-fi noir, Lunatic City Series. I'm also a contributing author to the Four Horsemen Universe with stories in both The Good, The Bad, and the Merc and the upcoming Luck is Not a Factor: More Stories from the Lion's Den due out in October of 2018. The first book in my new flintlock fantasy series, The War of the Gods is in post-production and I'm shooting for a December release. Join the T. Allen Nerd Crew to stay abreast of all the latest happenings and get your free copy of the Procytihan Reign prequel, The Consultant.