That was clear to me now, so why had I been so reluctant to kill?
I had told myself that by destroying their equipment but sparing their lives, I was sending a message that I wouldn’t be bullied without consequence, and that in showing restraint I encouraged them to do the same. But now I had sent that message, it was blindingly obvious that my justification was utter drent.
Volk’s group was like a swarm of killer hornets, and I’d just made them really, really angry.
They would show no mercy. They would come after me, never tiring until they had killed me, terminating my existence in an uncomfortably inventive fashion. I was too old to die gruesomely, I decided.
I looked over at Silky. She had done well, and her face lit with elation at our victory against overwhelming odds. She even held out a palm for me to slap, but I couldn’t share her feeling of victory.
She sensed why straightaway.
“We don’t know what they have hidden in the back of their trucks,” she said without conviction, “and we don’t know how sophisticated their targeting systems are. It’s possible this group are more style than substance, in which case we can simply shoot them with the cannon. I think it would be best if we kill them all.”
“True.”
“Killing these people would be the logical course of action.” I sensed her growing frustration with me. “NJ, these are not nice people. I think the world would be a better place without them in it.”
I punched the gun shield in frustration. “I know!”
Frakk it! How many people had I killed in the war? Hundreds? Thousands? It had been more than thousands. Most of them had been caught on the opposite side of the war, and most of them had not deserved to die – well, some of them – but Silky was right – this lot were up to no good.
So why wouldn’t I fire on them?
I punched the gun shield again, hard enough to make my knuckles bleed.
Death from above, screamed the Sarge in my head.
“What is it?” asked Silky.
I shushed and listened.
It was faint but growing louder… The drone of engines in the air. As they grew in volume, I could tell they lacked the whine of an atmospheric jet. This was a multipurpose air/void craft. The ground shook. A big bugger, then. Maybe even one of the huge Stork shuttles configured for ground attack.
If I had Conteh, my AI, I would have had a chance to shoot this beast out the sky with the GX-cannon, air defense being one of the weapon’s primary roles.
I hesitated. Could I risk taking one of the AIs from my back and linking it to the GX-cannon? It was more likely to self-destruct the gun, but I had no chance hitting the gunship without an AI.
The hill exploded.
A geyser of soil, vegetation, rocks and other debris spewed from the hillside. I was a part of that flying debris, as was a white alien form tumbling through the air nearby. And when I say tumbling, don’t think of graceful acrobats. I was whirring through the air, no idea which way was up, flailing my limbs but the ground kept not being there. My eyes were filled with dirt, and so too were my lungs which no amount of coughing seemed to clear. I think the quantities of dirt blown up into the air softened the aerial blows from the rocks, turning a lethal stoning into a mere bloody battering.
Everyone experiences being shot at and blown up differently, but for me some senses dull to irrelevance, and others are heightened. My sense of timing slowed – it seemed I was in the air for an age – but my sense of tactical awareness sharpened to new heights. As I was still being tossed up, I heard the crack of the gunship’s cannon catch up with the supersonic round that had hit us. From the delay, I put the aircraft about six miles away, but closing fast.
I decided the range must have saved our lives, because the spine-mounted railgun had fired at a spot twenty feet below the ledge where we had placed the cannon. The ledge had probably been there for a million years, but when the debris settled, there would be no trace of it, or of our cannon.
Then the ground hit me with, frankly, unnecessary violence.
I rolled away the impact as best I could and shouted: “Run!”
Silky didn’t need to be told. By the time I’d gotten back to my feet, she was already scampering away with that comical splayed-feet gait.
I felt another explosion, followed swiftly by the bark of the gunship railgun. I was concentrating on running away rather than analyzing why I wasn’t dead, but it eventually dawned on me that the explosion had come from the farm.
The air seemed to be torn apart as the heavy gunship screamed overhead, banked and begun strafing.
She was a Stork all right. Big enough to carry several squads of Marines when configured for troop transportation, but it was currently set up for applying entropy to ground targets. The muzzle of the gunship’s main armament flashed with fire, and instantly the barley in Zone B took a direct hit.
It probably sounds a little ludicrous – the idea of shooting up a field of plants – but if you could see what that kinetic dart did to the ground, you’d be terrified too. The dart didn’t have an explosive tip; it didn’t need one. By the time it came to rest, deep below my fields, it was over a hundred feet down. Think about how much energy is needed to do that, and all of that energy hammered into the ground of my farm.
A big chunk of that energy transformed into heat. The ruined field caught fire.
As the Stork banked for another run I noticed an eerie blue glow coating its armored underbody – the enemy defenses that would scramble any surface to air missile I cared to fire its way.
I pressed on after Silky. If I could get to the far side of the hill, away from the farm, maybe we had a chance.
The next explosion sounded different. I turned and saw why. The farmhouse was gone, pounded into a dust cloud with a single shot. My home!
Keep going, said Bahati. If you die, we’ll go with you. Do this for us!
Look on the bright side, said Sanaa – and I’m serious about this – you’re terrified by this bombardment.
How is that a frakking good thing? I snapped at the insane AI as I puffed my way away and around the hillside. God, my body hurt everywhere!
Oh, I’m mad, am I? There were many years when you are too numb to be frightened, NJ. Part of you used to welcome a bombardment. Remember that?
Annoyingly as ever, Sanaa had a fair point. Perhaps, somehow, I had managed to rediscover a fragment of my humanity – just in time to be blown up.
I didn’t think I’d make it to the far side of the hill – and even if I did, we couldn’t outrun the gunship. But as it turned out, the Stork fired six rounds in all before speeding off to disappear behind the horizon.
“It seems they have air assets,” commented Silky when I reached her position. “We didn’t plan for that.”
I frowned, but decided this was her attempt at dark humor. I laughed with her because the whole thing was a joke from start to finish. The moment we fired our first shot, we’d run out of our plan. I’d hoped to piss them off for a bit longer, but no matter what we had done, they would always escalate until they outgunned us. This whole stand and fight nonsense was nothing but a futile and deadly gesture. It was me saying to the world that I was NJ McCall and I was not a slave. No one told me what to do.
Like the world cared.
I looked down at the ruins of Sijambo Farm. The whole area was shrouded with clouds of dust, but it was starting to clear. Fires were raging in several of the fields but already most of them were shifting away from producing astonishingly high flames and into converting my crops into a black pall of smoke that thrust high into the sky.
“Come on,” I said. “We’d better put some effort into staying alive. Probably make no difference but it’s the principle.”
Silky nodded her head in agreement, but before we moved off, something very unusual occurred.
My phone rang.
Until my discharge from the Legion, I spent my whole life communicating across long distances without ever kno
wing how it worked. All I had to do was think about wanting to talk to a particular individual and Conteh would make it happen. I just spoke into the air and he did the rest. I never liked my phone, which is why the only person who had my number was Captain Elhaym, and that was only because I was required to let her have it.
I grabbed my phone from my pouch and placed it to my ear, feeling self-conscious as I’d never answered a phone call before. I remembered to press the ‘accept call’ button and then shouted into the microphone. “You’ve frakked-up my farm!”
“And you have inconvenienced my artillery battery, Mr. McCall,” replied the gang boss who was still standing outside my farm.
“My heart bleeds.”
“And there is the difference between us, Mr. McCall. Mine is entirely unmoved by these events. You have made your show of resistance – very impressive it was too given your limited circumstances – and I in turn have demonstrated that we hold you in our hands – and are able to clench our fists and crush you if you do not comply. I have studied you and your record. I realize now is not an easy time for you to back down. Luckily for you I do not require your humiliation. What I need is your food supply, and I need it to be reliable.”
“You’re insane. You’ve just destroyed my farm.”
“Money has already been paid into your account. More than enough to rebuild and expand as I require. Your intransigence must be seen to have consequences, however. Your tithe has increased from twenty-five percent to thirty-five. Nonetheless, this is still a manageable quantity.”
“Not a problem,” I replied cheerfully. “I will happily give you thirty-five percent of nothing.”
“Look again, Mr. McCall.”
He spoke as if I was a frakking idiot. I didn’t get why until I looked again at Sijambo Farm. The dust had cleared enough now that I could see what he was driving at. The fields were cratered and smoldering, and the pigs were squealing in terror, but not in pain. The grain silos, the outbuildings – all stood unscathed except one silo that leaned at a crazy angle.
“As you can see,” said Volk, in a tone that said he didn’t trust me to see my hand in front of my face, “we have spared your farm this time. The damage is entirely superficial. Other than accidental damage to that silo, none of the essential elements of your farm have been damaged.” I could hear his triumphant smile at this point. “We shall be in touch soon.”
He cut the call, waited for the gun crews to pile into the backs of the trucks, and then my unwelcome visitors drove off to the north. We descended the hillside and I inspected the ruins for myself.
I was unaccountably pleased that none of my pigs had been hurt, which is ironic because I bred them to be killed.
None of the essential elements of your farm have been damaged.
I could hear his sneer pulsing through my brain as I traipsed through the pulverized ruins of my farmhouse.
Volk would pay for this.
— CHAPTER 15 —
Sitting in the comfortable chair on my deck, I looked down and surveyed the smoldering ruins of my farm. From time to time my sight was taken over by ghostly visions of a possible future in which I went down fighting when Volk returned. My mind ran through how the battle might play out, but I left my mind to it. Tactical planning was practically an autonomic process for me.
It’s a strange thing but sometimes there’s a sense of relief in letting go of the things you lose. You fight hard to save something you prize but then when it’s gone… there’s nothing left to fight over.
And Sijambo Farm had gone, whatever Volk might think. Even if I patched up the damage, the idea of Sijambo was broken beyond repair.
“I am disappointed in you,” said Silky. “You fought back but then… At the first setback, you roll over and die. Where is your fighting spirit?”
She’s right, you know, said Bahati. I hate it when she is.
Shut up, said Sanaa. Can’t you see he’s got a lot to come to terms with? He’s not a young cadet anymore. Someone of NJ’s years needs a few moments to get over a shock.
I let the living and the dead slug it out amongst themselves across the battleground they made of my outer mind. I withdrew to a deeper level, battened down the hatch and let the arguing and haranguing and (worst of all) the comforting words wash overhead.
They meant well. Even Silky. But all those pep talks and exhortations to regroup and rebuild were meaningless, coming as they did from digital simulations of ghosts, and an alien deserter… Even if she was an expert in mixing manure.
For once, I’d had a profound realization all on my own – well, with the assistance of the heavily armed gunship that had shot my farm to drent. You see, I’d told myself for years now that Bahati had been the last to die – that there was no one left for me to lose. They say you don’t appreciate something until it’s gone, and that was true now that Sijambo Farm had been wrecked. Not so much the fields and building damage, which I could always repair given enough money. It was what Sijambo had represented to me that couldn’t be fixed so easily.
Bahati had been my last connection to the people I’d grown up with. My war hadn’t ended the same day that Bahati’s had, but instead of brothers and sisters in arms, the names and faces who came and went after Bahati did so without leaving a lasting impression in my life. Sijambo was my last attempt to belong somewhere, to have a place where I fitted, where I mattered.
The farm had been my last gasp, and even if the physical aspects were repaired, the sense of belonging would not.
Only a madman would cling to a static position at all costs, thinking a trench here and a bunker there somehow made you safe, despite the enemy artillery batteries zeroed in on your position, and the orbital platforms raining kinetic death down from space.
I know I talked to dead people who weren’t even real, and the closest thing I had to a friend looked like a sea slug tortured on the rack, but I wasn’t mad enough to stay here now there was nothing left to fight for.
No, I already knew what I would do. Once the voices in my head had exhausted themselves, I would grab what I could and move out, away from Dulnthorpe. Maybe go to Port Bundy and seek passage across the ocean.
I’d figure out where I was going when I got there. And if I didn’t, then I’d keep moving until I dropped.
I savored the mental taste of letting go, just rolling the idea around my mind, flowing around practicalities such as how a man like a stegosaurus could disappear from CDF attention without being listed as AWOL.
Worries are for the future, something I tell myself more and more as I grow older. Escape across the sea tasted increasingly tempting. The details could look after themselves.
But not this time! An irritation kept nagging at me, like a sharp stone in my boot. And like said stone, my doubt was a foreign object that had no right to be there.
Irritating though this doubt was, it was nothing compared to the electric shock that shot up my tush, a wake-up call sent by the memory of my loving late wife.
There wasn’t any physical shocking, of course, but try telling that to my nerve endings which were convinced someone had rammed a shock stick where the sun don’t shine. When I’d finished yelping and rubbing my violated butt, I noticed Silky hovering over me.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she said. “When I couldn’t reach you, I asked your former wife to intervene.”
Damned alien’ll take from here to forever to get to the point, said Sanaa. So hear it from me. Quit your funk, Ndeki. We need your head back in the game. We’ve got company.
— CHAPTER 16 —
‘Company’ turned out to be old friends of mine. Three heavy-duty pickups, sporting Revenge Squad symbols, pulled up outside the ruins of my farmhouse. Two of them had GX-cannons secured onto the cargo beds, and served by two-man gun crews. If they were trying to impress me with the open display of their firepower, they had left things a little late.
I was still standing on my deck, and the idea of shouting down from my tower to the invad
ers below felt a little too mediaeval for my liking. So I grabbed a pair of combat blades from the hidden compartment in the wall, and descended the stairs. I didn’t burden myself with a carbine or rifle this time. I decided that if I was about to go for a permanent vacation, then I would go out with a little close quarters work.
I sheathed my blades across my chest. Souvenirs from a period in my previous career when I’d tagged along with the berserkers of the 7th Armored Claw, the blades were actually a lot older even than me. Each weapon was a crescent-shaped blade whose tips oozed with a lurid green slime from the poison reservoir in the hilt (although my poison stocks had dried up and my tips oozed with home-made slime cut with green food coloring). If you didn’t know better, you would think these wicked-looking blades were just for show. Those Revenge Squad vecks, though. They would know better. They were ex-military.
“Mr. McCall,” said Denisoff as I walked up to him, my hands in front readied to draw my blades. “We heard you’d had a spot of bother. I dropped in with my associates to see whether you wanted to reconsider signing up for a Revenge Squad policy.”
I didn’t reply until I was standing three paces from Denisoff. He had balls, letting me approach so close. I gave him that. Everyone had guns drawn at that point. Everyone, that was, except for me with my blades, and beside me Silky was weaponless, but her stance suggested she was ready to fight. How she would do that, I did not know. Perhaps she planned to confound our enemies by taking off her shirt.
“You’ve a nerve, coming back here,” I told the Revenge Squad man, my fingers itching to draw. “But you’re too late. My farm is destroyed as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing left to insure. I don’t know if you are in league with the lot who shot at my farm or not, but at this stage I don’t care.”
After War Page 11