After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  AFTER WAR

  The REVENGE SQUAD Prequel

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2016

  Cover image by Vincent Sammy

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  Also available in paperback

  All Rights Reserved

  HumanLegion.com

  Join the Legion today at humanlegion.com to download the Revenge Squad novelette, Damage Unlimited, which is exclusively available in eBook form to enlisted Legionaries.

  * * *

  The author wishes to thank all those who work-shopped, proof read, or otherwise supported the making of this book. In particular, Paul Melhuish for allowing me to raid the vault of filthy Skyfirean vernacular he invented for his Terminus sci-fi horror books, my editor Donna Scott, the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group, my loyal friends and supporters from humanlegion.com and all signed up Legionaries. Finally, a big thank you to Jim Butcher, who has been entertaining me with his marvelous Dresden Files novels ever since I picked one up out of curiosity a year ago. His writing inspired me to create Revenge Squad.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  — CHAPTER 2 —

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  — CHAPTER 4 —

  — CHAPTER 5 —

  — CHAPTER 6 —

  — CHAPTER 7 —

  — CHAPTER 8 —

  — CHAPTER 9 —

  — CHAPTER 10 —

  — CHAPTER 11 —

  — CHAPTER 12 —

  — CHAPTER 13 —

  — CHAPTER 14 —

  — CHAPTER 15 —

  — CHAPTER 16 —

  — CHAPTER 17 —

  — CHAPTER 18 —

  — CHAPTER 19 —

  — CHAPTER 20 —

  — CHAPTER 21 —

  — CHAPTER 22 —

  — CHAPTER 23 —

  — CHAPTER 24 —

  — CHAPTER 25 —

  — CHAPTER 26 —

  — CHAPTER 27 —

  — CHAPTER 28 —

  — CHAPTER 29 —

  — CHAPTER 30 —

  — CHAPTER 31 —

  — CHAPTER 32 —

  — CHAPTER 33 —

  — CHAPTER 34 —

  — CHAPTER 35 —

  — CHAPTER 36 —

  — CHAPTER 37 —

  — CHAPTER 38 —

  — CHAPTER 39 —

  — CHAPTER 40 —

  — CHAPTER 41 —

  — CHAPTER 42 —

  — CHAPTER 43 —

  — CHAPTER 44 —

  — CHAPTER 45 —

  — CHAPTER 46 —

  — CHAPTER 47 —

  — CHAPTER 48 —

  — CHAPTER 49 —

  — CHAPTER 50 —

  — CHAPTER 51 —

  — CHAPTER 52 —

  — CHAPTER 53 —

  — CHAPTER 54 —

  — CHAPTER 55 —

  — CHAPTER 56 —

  — CHAPTER 57 —

  — CHAPTER 58 —

  — CHAPTER 59 —

  — CHAPTER 60 —

  — CHAPTER 61 —

  — CHAPTER 62 —

  — CHAPTER 63 —

  — CHAPTER 64 —

  — CHAPTER 65 —

  — CHAPTER 66 —

  — CHAPTER 67 —

  — CHAPTER 68 —

  — CHAPTER 69 —

  — CHAPTER 70 —

  — CHAPTER 71 —

  FOLLOW NJ McCALL IN REVENGE SQUAD

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  By putting one knee on the wooden deck and moving my head just so, I could make the ghostly daytime smears of all three moons line up inside the grease-stained lid handle of my barbecue griller.

  On a scale of one to nightmare, this was a seriously bad portent. I mean, yes, when the moons aligned, the meteorological effect was dramatic enough to make the planet of Klin-Tula famous. But the truly worrying sign was that I’d completely forgotten the alignment was due.

  Sanaa kept nagging that it was doing me no good to isolate myself out here in back-of-beyond’s lesser known cousin; that I was detaching from the world. I was fighting hard against the idea my late wife could be right, but it felt increasingly like a desperate rearguard action.

  Still, the weather thing was the more immediate concern.

  Two hundred miles away on the Bay of Bundy shoreline, citizens would be moving to the shelters, the desperate and greedy watching their marks for a high-risk burst of looting in the moments before the storm clouds opened, and the tidal waves crashed over their heads.

  No storm here, though. Not yet. I could still feel the sun burning the back of my neck, but the horizon was an ominous purple bruise, and I tasted a tang of electrical potential in the air.

  It’s just your imagination, said Sanaa. Your taste can’t even distinguish between whiskey and brandy these days, unless you bother to read the label on the bottle first.

  I ignored her, looking instead at the foothills of the Mantis Mountains that rose beneath the battered sky to the east. I didn’t have time to argue with Sanaa because I had an important decision to make.

  The question I faced was this: did I have time to barbecue my dinner before the flood water hurled itself down those slopes to the east?

  I’d fought in the silent dark of the void in the Second Battle of Khallini, cleared the enemy from the defensive warrens dug into the Great Rift Valley of Africa, and lost every last one of my comrades along the way. But that was my old life.

  To barbecue or not? It would be my toughest decision of the month, and that was just the way I liked it – why I’d selected my parcel of land 30 miles from nowhere and spent the last of my demob money setting up Sijambo Farm. On my own. No one to give me orders. No one to feel responsible for when they got killed.

  Hurry up, already, Bahati urged. I’m salivating like a dog.

  I tried to smile but it wasn’t easy. Bahati and I went way back to novice school where we’d shared a dorm. She’d been obsessed with food even then. We used to joke about her insatiable appetite during the war, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Bahati had been the last of my original squad to leave me, a mortar bomb attack on the mess hall. I had kept my tears frozen inside and led the team out to take our revenge on Bahati’s killers. We eliminated them, all right. But it had been a sneak robot attack, just mechanized nuisances sent to wear down our spirits. I had needed to hit something hard with a soul inside. I still do.

  “You’re mad,” I said. I aimed the words at Bahati for talking so zestfully about food when she’d died decades ago, but as soon as I’d uttered them I wondered whether they suited me even better than poor Bahati Chahine.

  I decided to risk going ahead with the barbecue. The rain would batter my property but the thing about moons is that the egghead freaks know exactly how they move and what the effect of their gravitational alignment will be. Hence, half the demob grant the Legion paid me when I was discharged went on the artificial gully. Floodwater would flow around the outside of the farm, and away to feed into natural water courses. I’d have a moat for a few days. And then it would be over.

  And not a moment too soon. The damndest thing about the flooding was that my crops would be parched. My farm would be an island lifted above a sea of floodwater. Sounds ultra-dumb to talk of parched land, but the water supply for my irrigation came from the big desalination plant at the Bay of Bundy, and that would be on emergency shut down for a week. The water engineers who’d built my gully had tried to explain the advantages of installing an underground tank to store the floodwater, but I’d had a falling out with them by that point.

  First things first: the barbecue. I turned on the grill but, of course, the pow
er was on the fritz again. I used to cook with gas, and charcoal, and coals, but supplies out here weren’t always easy to come by. So, when my money ran out, I’d persuaded the manager of a grocery store in town to do a few jobs around the farm, including fixing me up with a limitless power source for my barbecue. In return, I took my fists and paid a visit to some local small-time thugs and dissuaded them from putting the squeeze on her store. The grocer was embarrassed to need help, but I could see she wasn’t too clever on her legs these days. Hell, I love a little clear-cut morality that leads to fisticuffs. I’d have helped her out for free, but my brain chemistry was on just the right side of healthy that day to keep that detail to myself.

  Anyway, this grocer had been Navy – a damage control team leader – which meant she’d spent a lifetime taking smashed up stuff that didn’t work and turning it into useful things that did… at least for a while.

  And that’s why the heat for my barbecue comes from a zero-point battery. That’s right, the same technology used to mine quantum foam for the energy powering the engines of the troopships that had transported me from one warzone to another. It’s not strictly true to say my barbecue is powered by a starship engine, but it’s close enough.

  I opened up the base of the barbecue, unsnapped the battery and used my ‘advanced’ tech skills to inspect it. The status light that should be green was red. This was a fault. And with that diagnosis, I had exhausted my tech knowledge.

  Did I mention I also like hitting things? Combine that with the sublime ignorance of all things engineering, and my next move to fix the battery was obvious.

  I hit the bastard with the side of my fist.

  This is one of the many reasons why I recommend the solitary life. If you’re likely to blow yourself up, in that split second before you die, you won’t feel so guilty if it’s just you that’s going to hell.

  Of course, if you were to talk with anyone who knows me, they’d say: That NJ McCall… yeah, he’s a little too much in love with telling a good story. Don’t believe everything he says. Hell, that’s not even his real name.

  We’ll get to the name thing in good time, but the salient admission here is that I did know a little more about why the battery was frakked. It’s a common problem. Water gets in and forms salts that prevent the internal connectors firing, or was it the capacitors… See? I don’t know that much.

  The status light on the battery turned green.

  Works every time. Until the one time it doesn’t, and then… boom! You don’t care no more.

  I reinserted the battery – with difficulty because the fingers on my right hand were playing up again – and set the heating controls until I was satisfied the bars were warming just the way I like them.

  I brought my hand up to my face so I could get a good look as I tested its movements. I should know better than to slap something with the side of my right hand. The flesh was discolored and lumpy, as if long ago I’d soaked my hand overnight in a vat of acid. The old war wound was as healed as it would ever get, but it still bothered me from time to time. Mostly because I had no memory of how I’d gotten that injury.

  But the war was over and some of us had to live on. I cooled my mood by patrolling the perimeter of my deck, checking for trouble.

  Habit of a lifetime of war. To me there will never be more than a nanometer of separation between enjoying the open air and inviting anyone for miles around to shoot me.

  I loved to spend my downtime on the deck, relaxing in the all-weather chairs and recliner, and surveying my solitude. The great thing about having my property built to my own design was that everything was to hand, just the way I liked it. There was the barbecue, of course, and the low wall on the opposite side housed a little cool store for beers and snacks, and the speakers I never used. When I saw the decking brochure, I’d bought into the idea of listening to music late into the night. My nearest neighbors were twenty miles away, after all. I’d tried relaxing to music out here, but the truth was that I found music too distracting, and I like to be aware of everyone and everything around me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that distractions get you killed.

  I’d carefully specified a number of other conveniences for my deck: bracing points for my guns, ammo stores, and the best fields of fire for miles around, plus a few more amenities we’ll probably get to later. It should be a little special, because my deck had cost me more than half the money left over after building the gully. For starters, the deck was sunk down into a natural hollow in a sandstone outcropping. Stairs were cut into the rock and most of the hill cut away to leave a column of rock with my deck at the top.

  To be honest, most folks I know would probably call it an observation post rather than a deck. They might have a point. After all, rather than butting directly onto my farmhouse, it was in the middle of my fields.

  And that was a problem right now. I groaned. I’d brought the meat with me, but left the basting sauce in the farmhouse fridge.

  The comfortable lounger beckoned but I didn’t succumb to its soft temptations. I sighed. If I sat down now, I’d never get the sauce in time to cook before the floods came.

  You’re always going on about wanting to be alone, said Sanaa. See what you get as a result? No help. Serves you right.

  I gripped my thoughts tightly. I wasn’t prepared to get into the argument about how Sanaa wasn’t really my wife, but I was sorely tempted.

  I keep telling you, NJ, she pressed. Being alone is the worst thing you can possibly do. You need a team to fit into – to belong. You always did.

  “Well, I can’t, can I?” I shouted.

  Oh, excuse me for being dead.

  “I’m sorry, Sanaa.”

  Well, you can both shut up, said Bahati, because we’re not alone now. We’ve got company.

  “What?”

  Sensor grid just blipped. Bearing 015. Range 768 meters. Single intruder, on foot.

  Target detected, said the Sarge, sending a stab of emptiness and loss that cut through my guts. I had spent decades in secret awe of Sergeant Chinelo Fofana when he’d been my squad leader. Now his shade’s vocabulary was shrinking fast, along with the strength of his memory.

  “Roger that, Sergeant.” There was no point trying to keep the catch from my voice. They all heard it.

  Training and habit rescued me, letting me slip into a familiar routine as I reached into an all-weather compartment beneath the base of the barbecue, the kind that you might call an optional extra, courtesy of my friendly damage control grocer.

  It was where I kept my guns when I was outside.

  Naturally, I went for my SA-71 carbine. I say naturally because it was my gun. I must have fired hundreds of weapons in training as a cadet and then during the war, but this particular SA-71 was mine, practically another organ of my body that had kept me alive through campaign after campaign.

  I shook my head. Who was I kidding?

  I needed accuracy, not enough firepower to take out an entire squad. I put the SA-71 back and grabbed my SA-70 rifle instead.

  Without the powered battlesuit to amplify my muscle strength, the SA-70 weighed a ton. No matter, I flipped out the bipod stand, and secured it in one of the bracing points built into the wall around my deck.

  Even without my AI link, the rifle’s targeting system understood my requirements and automatically locked onto the intruder as the only target of interest.

  It was a stinking alien.

  The figure approached on foot, crossing the outer edge of the Zone B fields close to the gully. It looked to be scouting the area, with many glances at my observation post. I didn’t expect it could see me at that distance, not through my firing port. If it had weapons, they were concealed.

  A frakking alien on my farm!

  I didn’t recognize the species, which was odd. It was the height of an Earthborn, long-limbed, slender, and with stubby lumps like half-severed tentacles sweeping back from its bare head. Its deathly pale skin resembled the white powdery
moonscape of a battlefield pulverized by artillery crossed with something dredged from the ocean floor. It wore a thick knee-length coat, hardwearing calf-height boots, and a backpack with a bedroll. All was soiled and dirt spattered. The creature looked as if it had walked far from its base to get here, or was simply homeless.

  Hold on! Let me backtrack in my description of this alien, because I might have snagged you on ‘stinking’.

  We are all aliens.

  Strength through diversity.

  We’re better together.

  I’ve heard all the slogans telling us to hug each other as we rebuild this part of the galaxy. Well, I can tell you now, it’s not going to work.

  Take me for instance. Why do I detest aliens so much?

  Maybe because every alien I’ve ever known has either murdered my friends, brutalized me, patronized me, or just plain shot at me during the war. I’m an easy-going guy, but after a while, that kind of abuse clouds a person’s opinions.

  I was born a slave to aliens. Don’t expect me to forgive them now I’ve won my freedom.

  That’s not an uncommon point of view, and not just with humans. Most aliens feel the same way about us, as far as I can make out. So what madness drove the Legion authorities to mix up the races on this crazy planet and tell us to play nicely together as colonists?

  This will not end well.

  Hey, I’m not a bad guy here. Aliens have just as much right to a peaceful and prosperous life as we do. I mean that. I just want them to be peaceful and prosperous someplace else.

  Take that fella with the head lumps skirting the edge of my fields, for instance. I badly wanted him to be someplace other than my property.

  Of course, I wasn’t sitting down with pipe in one hand and drink in the other, having myself a debate on species politics. This has been a catch-up service for the laggards who don’t already know me.

  No, what I actually did was fire my rifle at the trespasser.

  Twice.

  Imagine a brace of hypersonic darts drilling through the air between the gun muzzle and the intruder’s head, moving so quickly they might as well be travelling at light speed – the momentum behind each dart point more than enough to penetrate alien skull, brain, skull again, before leaving the exploding alien head behind and wreaking horrendous damage to the rok-crete cladding of my gully.