After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  Now it was Imelda’s turn to be stared at by both of us humans.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “There is a plague afflicting the humans on the southern coast,” said Imelda as if that explained everything. When it was clear it didn’t, she blew a stinking breath through her lips, making the rubbery flesh ripple. “There is no cure as yet. The internal organs of the victims liquefy. Death is not certain, but paralyzing agony is unavoidable.” The Hardit barely reached up to my chest but that didn’t stop the old alien from standing toe to toe and blowing its meaty breath out of its clenched fangs in an unmistakable sign of confrontation. “If your organs were to liquefy I would not care in the slightest. No, old one, I do not care.”

  “Sounded like it to me, Imelda,” said Mowad, and the thought that she was now taking my side felt good, even though the idea that humans would ever do anything other than stand together against Hardits was difficult to process.

  “Do not apologize,” Imelda told Mowad, who evidently had no idea that she had apologized, given the way she frowned even harder. “You are young. You will learn, which is why you must protect this old one. I do not care for the old human, but Goat does. I have never seen Goat bond with a human the way he did with this one. For Goat’s sake, please care for him.”

  Imelda walked off without another word.

  I exchanged bemused glances with Mowad.

  “I don’t believe her,” she said. “I think Imelda does like you.”

  I studied Mowad’s face. I got a jolt of recognition when her proud nose, ripe lips and bright whiteness of her eyes reminded me of a young Sanaa. But the young girl who became my wife couldn’t help but flick her ears when she was teasing, and Mowad didn’t do that. In fact, she seemed to have only three modes of expression: angry, sad, or closed. She was currently on the last one of those.

  I shrugged. “Seriously?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said earnestly. “You’re right in there with Imelda, pal. I don’t expect your wife will be pleased to hear of you engaging in horizontal maneuvers with another alien female, but, hey, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. And even a Marine of your advanced years needs to practice his grappling with new partners from time to time.” She peered at me inquisitively. “I bet even you’ve never been pleasured by a partner with a tail, right? Just think of the possibilities.”

  My mouth dropped open. I had socks that were older than this girl, but whether I had any that were filthier I wasn’t so sure.

  She studied me as if I were a specimen in a med lab, looking as cold and heartless as Denisoff. Then her shoulders gave a little shake and she burst out laughing.

  “For Goat’s sake,” she said, “you didn’t think I was serious?”

  I gave a great belly laugh in reply. She was all right, this girl.

  I slapped her on the shoulder. I was only being friendly, but I knocked her to the ground and sent her slithering along several feet. Guess she was still built like a little girl.

  She only laughed harder.

  ——

  Credit to Mowad, we didn’t waste vital time figuring out which one of us was giving the orders.

  I wanted to dig a recon pit and that’s exactly what we did, getting out the entrenching tools we had been given and setting to work without another word. She might not carry much body mass, but Mowad was strong and clearly no stranger to physical work.

  Don’t be fooled by the name. Our pit wasn’t much more than a shallow grave. A real one would be more of a bunker with escape holes and chambers to keep a team alive, and linked to a sensor network for days or weeks without needing to emerge, reporting on – and sometimes killing – whatever passed nearby at ground level.

  The problem was to make the pit so convincing you could walk over the lid and never know there were heavily armed Marines below your feet, while not making the pit so tightly sealed that the occupants suffocated.

  And I knew just how we could solve that last problem.

  “We’ve only been issued junior carbines,” I told Mowad during a break, “but they are close enough to the real thing to have a few secrets.”

  Mowad’s eyes flashed in annoyance. “That’s insulting, McCall. Our guns are lethal weapons, not a junior anything. Don’t patronize me just because I wasn’t in the military.”

  Ouch! What was her problem?

  Tread carefully, advised Efia.

  “Reservists like me call them junior carbines,” I explained to the farm girl, “because they’re a stripped-down copy of the SA-71, the mainstay of the Marines. The railgun and ammo feeds are essentially the same.”

  “I know how it works, McCall. I know its correct designation too, the NJ-2, manufactured under license from the Human Autonomous Region Firearms Licensing Department by N’Jeez-Gion Corporation at Jai Dang-6. Fit an extended ammo bulb to the SA-71 you used in the war, and you could spray a burst of a thousand rounds a minute with barely a trickle of recoil. My mom said laying down sustained fire felt like blowing bubbles. Firing the NJ-2 takes more skill than you needed. Sustained automatic fire would take your shoulder off, and waste your time because you would never be able to fire with accuracy. Plus the barrel would melt if you were lucky, and if you weren’t, the rails would warp and the whole gun would explode in your face. Feel free at any point to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m just a civilian girl.”

  “No, wouldn’t dream of it.” In fact, her words had set me dreaming of something else entirely – my SA-71 that hopefully was securely locked up in the camp armory. It had blown bubbles many times in the war.

  Mowad seemed to mistake my daydreaming for deep thought. “Good,” she said. “Now tell me what I need to know without patronizing me.”

  So I did. I explained about the laser. In theory, the laser was the same as the SA-71’s, which was powerful enough to punch through armor in void combat. Although the junior carbine had the same power, it lacked the fancy heat sink which was also where the recoil dampener dumped its energy in the real gun.

  Thick clumps of reeds grew at the margins of the pond, clattering together in the occasional breeze. The growths were thick and solid and certainly not what you could breathe through, but that’s where the NJ-2’s laser came into play. Using a fallen log as a makeshift workbench, I secured reeds and shot down their length, while Mowad fetched water to cool both gun barrels and the reeds. We only set one alight, the rest being transformed into crude but serviceable ventilation tubes for our recon pit.

  There was another trick the junior carbine shared with its grown-up version. But this one I decided Mowad didn’t need to know. Surreptitiously I grabbed handfuls of dirt when she wasn’t looking, and shoved them into a special feed in my NJ-2’s stock. Inside the gun, gears ground and slurped and fed makeshift dart rounds into the internal ammo feeder. This was an emergency ammo resupply facility. Shardshot, as it was called, was unreliable, prone to jamming, inaccurate, but better than an empty click from a spent ammo bulb.

  I had no intention of firing upon anyone, but carrying a gun without ammunition was a crime against nature.

  ——

  “I don’t like it,” said Mowad as we began stuffing the tubes through the lid we had built. “We need to remove some of the cover on the roof. It wouldn’t take much to block the tubes, and then we would suffocate.”

  I stopped what I was doing and considered Mowad’s complaint. “I think you’re right,” I said. We’d spread heavy wet clay over the roof before strewing it with the same leaves and branches and ferns that covered the area. Already the clay was beginning to bake in the warmth of the day.

  Mowad began digging away the clay.

  “Stop that immediately!”

  The farm girl blinked at the fierceness of my command, but she soon recovered, stood up and planted her hands on hips. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But we mustn’t reduce the cover.”

 
She blinked… and then she got it. I was impressed. “We’re not going in the pit,” she accused, “are we?”

  I grinned. “No. It’s bait. We’ll be up trees catching anyone who comes sniffing around the pit in our crossfire.”

  “You don’t get it, NJ. We’re supposed to be a team, but you order me around like a raw recruit and don’t tell me anything. How do you expect me to contribute? How will I learn?”

  “I’m sorry.” This time I said it with more meaning. “I’ve been on my own for years now. Before that I was an NCO, and during the war–”

  “We’re not in the frakking war,” she shouted. “Stop living in the past. And…” She shook her head in dismay. “I can’t believe you said you’re on your own,” she added quietly. “Are you ashamed of your own wife? What the hell is wrong with you, NJ? Or is there something wrong with her?”

  Aside from the obvious?

  It didn’t look as if Mowad was joking. That’s the problem with the youth of Klin-Tula, they don’t know how to relate properly to aliens.

  Mowad had never had to stand at attention and watch a young cadet being disemboweled by alien claws for some misdemeanor.

  She probably thought of aliens as neighbors, for frakk’s sake.

  She’d learn soon enough, but not here and now. And with that look of defiance in the upturned tilt of her head, she wasn’t in a mood to learn anything, least of all from me.

  I spread my hands and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’m a bad person, Mowad, made worse because I’m not used to the company of people.”

  She snorted at that.

  “Not used to human people,” I corrected. “But there is something you should understand about being as old as me. I didn’t stay alive all this time without listening and adapting. If you think I’m not listening properly, just smack me in the head until I pay attention.”

  There was a flash from her eyes again. “Is that your answer to everything? Hitting anything that doesn’t operate to your liking?”

  “Pretty much. It’s an effective and therapeutic philosophy. You should try it sometime.”

  Without warning, she kicked me in the shin, hard enough to make my knee buckle. “You’re right, it does make me feel better. Next time, tell me your plans first. Now get up, old man. We’ve got work to do.”

  I rubbed my leg as Mowad got back to finishing the pit. That girl had a kick like a mule with a missile launcher. I warmed with pride. It was probably an inappropriate thought, but if I’d ever had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be like Shahdi Mowad.

  — CHAPTER 24 —

  The lure was set, the hot ventilation tubes rapidly cooling, the spoil carefully transferred to the pond. We hadn’t yet covered our traces with leaves and twigs, but already to anyone not paying close attention, they would never know we’d just dug a chunk out of the ground.

  “Let’s test out our handiwork,” I said, hauling the lid half-off the pit.

  Mowad just scowled. I didn’t need her to tell me what she was thinking.

  “Look,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory for once in my life, “I know I told you we wouldn’t use the pit, but we need to make it convincing. Besides, if we could use it as genuine cover, then that would give us more tactical options, and always keeping your options open helps to keep you alive when the drent starts flying.”

  In reply, Mowad planted her hands on her hips and settled into a stance that said she was going into that pit over her dead body.

  Well, of course, I couldn’t resist a challenge like that. I lowered my head and charged at her like a bull, laughing as I scooped her over my shoulder, doubled back and launched us through the air and into the rich mud of the pit in a jumble of limbs.

  It dawned on me that only one of us was laughing.

  All this recruit nonsense, this boot camp thing – it was a little like being a cadet back on Nanatsu-7. And Shahdi Mowad, with her pristine appearance that seemed to promise an eventful future, reminded me of how we had been back then.

  Despite the brutality and death that was ever present during my youth, there had been happy moments, and the memories drew a desperate kind of laughter out of me.

  Most of all, Mowad reminded me of Marine Cadet Sanaa Diallo.

  Mowad still wasn’t laughing with me.

  My bulk had wedged her against the side of the pit. She was trying to push at my shoulder to get herself more space, but the cramped dimensions of our pit weren’t helping.

  I pushed myself upright, my hand grasping something warm and with a little fleshy give. I looked down and saw I had gripped the meat of her thigh. I thought nothing of it at first, but then remembered that Mowad hadn’t been a mass-produced slave soldier living cheek by jowl with the comrades in her batch, and I knew that there were situations in which touching someone’s thigh meant more than the physics of levers.

  “I’m, sorry,” I told her. “I swear I’m not trying to touch you for my own pleasure.”

  She gave me an unconvincing grunt in response. What was that supposed to mean?

  “Look, Mowad, I’m not exactly an innocent when it comes to the decadence of the flesh, but you don’t get to survive decades crammed into tight quarters with your brother and sister Marines without learning there’s a time and a place for humping and rubbing – and this ain’t it. You got nothing to worry about from me on that score. Not now, not ever.”

  “Don’t think I can’t defend myself, McCall, just because I wasn’t raised as a Marine.”

  “I never said that. I–” Sanaa shut me up with a fierce electrical shock before I could dig myself deeper into the metaphorical mire.

  You gotta fix this, insisted Bahati. For once, Sanaa let her speak. My first wife was always the mouthy one, and my second the fiery one who shot from the hip, but Bahati knew the words to heal people. After Sanaa was killed, I went a little crazy. Only Bahati knew how to get me through. Hell, she did such a good job that I married her.

  She won’t last long with a chip like that on her shoulder, said Bahati. Besides, she can make a good ally, although you’re more likely to scare the poor girl if you talk to her at the moment.

  I gave it my best shot anyway. “The best teams have a range of specialists,” I told Mowad, feeling my way to a comforting spiel that didn’t sound like utterly false drent. “That’s why the sections of a Marine squad have automatic rifleman, grenadiers, cyber monkeys and tube lovers mixed right in with the regular riflemen. That way you can always deploy the right kind of firepower for the job at hand.”

  “Can’t you think of anything without trying to frame it in military terms?”

  She had a point. “Yes,” I replied, “but with difficulty. But that’s my point, don’t you see?”

  I grinned, pleased with myself for turning my random words into a coherent argument.

  She flinched, and edged away.

  Don’t smile at the poor girl, snapped Sanaa. You’re scaring her.

  “What I’m trying to say,” I explained, “is that too many of us here are military, and one thing I’ve worked out so far about this Revenge Squad outfit is that it’s about more than shooting at people. Denisoff is breaking us old soldiers in gently with this fake boot camp, but we’re going to see more of these disinterested witnesses and forensic tax ninjas that scuttlebutt keeps talking about, because that’s where the money is going to be, not with breaking the legs of petty thieves. With my background, all I’m good for is to be hired muscle, and a decoy target with a health plan so flimsy I wouldn’t wipe my butt with it.”

  She nodded. “I think you’re right. But I’ve not had my head frakked around by the feds to turn me into a dis-witness freak, nor do I have any affinity for bookwork. I’m less qualified than you vets.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We need people from a diversity of backgrounds. You’ve also got a different way of thinking about things because you weren’t bred and raised under military discipline. One day that might save my life, so you need to get your shit together, Mowad. I’m
depending on you.”

  Finally, my clumsy words seemed to be hitting home. She worried at her lower lip while she appeared to reconsider my status. “Careful,” she said with the ghost of a smile, “sounds like you’re buying into the benefits of cultural and racial variety. Next thing you’ll be telling us to love aliens, except… oh, yes, you’re already leading by example on that front.”

  As Mowad teased me, her body relaxed a little. Inwardly I started punching the air. I sensed inside my spine that Bahati and the others were proud of me.

  “What did you do, before coming here?” I asked. When Mowad’s face hardened up again, I added quickly, “I don’t mean your backstory. I just mean what skills do you have?”

  “Farmer. I grew up on a farm near Grahnsburg.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I tried farming when the Legion retired me here. Thought I’d find peace being closer to nature, or some such drent.” I shook my head sadly.

  “Not as easy as it looks, is it?”

  I nodded in agreement, but was annoyed at the sneer in her voice. “Turns out there’s more to growing crops then planting seeds and then putting your feet up for a few months until they’re ready to harvest. I figured it out eventually, though, with help from my… my Silky. We were winning quite the reputation by the end.”

  She looked up at me, puzzled. Hell, she looked so young. “What went wrong?”

  “We attracted the wrong kind of attention.” I sighed, debating whether I should explain. I didn’t want to appear weak, but on the other hand, I was about as subtle as a Hardit in a bad mood, so I opted for the truth.

  “We were visited by a gang. Wanted us to supply them with food off the register. I said no, so they shot up my farm with a gunship. They paid me to rebuild the farm, but I don’t like being made to dance to someone else’s tune, so when Denisoff turned up on my smoldering doorstep, I signed up for Revenge Squad.” I added, as an afterthought, “Silky came too.”

  “Do you know anything about the gang?”