After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  I was surprised by the intensity in her eyes. I saw raw pain too.

  Your new wife’s rubbing off on you, said Sanaa. When you needed to look into my eyes, the most you could tell was whether I was alive or dead, and even that was a stretch.

  Shut up, said Bahati. We are all having to adjust to Silky. May as well do so gracefully, even you, Sanaa.

  “I think they were an offshoot of a much larger organization,” I told Mowad. “Their leader is missing a few fingers. His thugs referred to him as Timberwolf or Volk. Chikune claims he knows the same bastard.”

  Wow! That name sparked a reaction. Mowad’s face twitched from wide-eyed shock through pinched anger to settle on coldness.

  “Volk burned my farm too,” she said in a monotone. “And then his gang killed my parents and brother.”

  Oh, boy. You see? This is why I don’t do the talking thing.

  I’m not Bahati. If I see a friend is hurting, I sit with them, get drunk and talk about anything other than what’s bothering them. Maybe we seek solace in a flesh shack. And if that doesn’t work, we do something stupid together. Like testing the shallowness of the sea by diving off a cliff and seeing whether our heads crack open. Been there. Done that.

  But I was in too deep to fall back now. I put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  She half-heartedly tried shrugging me off, but I persisted, and she accepted my attempt at connecting to her. “You got away,” I told her. “That’s the important thing. That’s what you must concentrate on.”

  I got her glare full in the face. The fury in those tear-flecked dark eyes wasn’t actually directed at me. Shahdi Mowad was seriously pissed at the universe, and I just kind of got in the way.

  “I escaped,” she said. “But my family didn’t. That is the important thing. That’s what I concentrate on.”

  “You’re wrong,” I told her. When I saw the hurt and anger in her face, I nearly stopped there, but I gathered my courage and pressed on. “You got away. And that is important, because it means you can take revenge.”

  I was there when Lake Tanganyika drained. It was a pool of water on Earth easily big enough to be visible from orbit. The surface of a large body of water can look so placid, but its potential for violence is impossible to imagine. You have to see it with your own eyes, to feel the protest of the planet beneath your feet as its surface reshaped. The channel carved out of the lake’s mountainous boundary was just a deep scratch in comparison with the breach the lake punched out of its valley wall once it started to flow in force. About one tenth of the fresh water on the planet flashed through the Great Rift Valley, scouring away the enemy defenses – an impregnable stronghold defended by over a million troops – as it made its rapid progress out to the sea. And with the tsunami that followed, that was just the start of the destruction. I’ve seen a lot of death, but I still have nightmares about that day.

  Shahdi Mowad was like the Tanganyika Megaflood. Once she started talking, the words spilled out in an unstoppable flow. I trusted Bahati’s judgment that she needed to spill, and so I hunkered down and let her talk without interruption.

  — CHAPTER 25 —

  Minutiae flowed from Mowad about life as a little girl growing up on a farm. It sounded idyllic compared to my childhood, but she stumbled in her recounting to avoid any mention of her family.

  But then she paused and her mouth raised a little at one corner – I could hardly call it a smile.

  “I never thought for a moment that you were trying to paw at me,” she said. I wasn’t convinced that matched her reaction earlier, but then she whipped out a knife I’d never even noticed from the shoulder of her jacket. “I’d have cut you if I did. I wanted to trust you because you remind me of my father, NJ, and he was always… physically boisterous. Mostly around my ma, but even as teens he’d pick me up and little Jacob too and whirl us both through the air and carry us on his broad shoulders as if we were still little children. If I’d had any friends, I would have found that so embarrassing.” Her glance slid into powerful memories. “They were like you, Mom and Pop, former Marines and from opposite sides of the war too. I guess you knew my heritage, seeing as I have all the sleek lines and grace of an armored blockhouse.”

  I laughed. “Not a chance. I figured you were from that wee pixie stock the Navy uses to crew their ships.”

  I meant it as a compliment, not that I’ve got any beef with the little ship rats. If someone shoved Shahdi Mowad off the top of a tall building, she would bounce. I mean, she’d have broken bones and internal bleeding and all that drent, broken the pavement too no doubt, but her injuries would heal quickly. I wouldn’t want to be in the boots of whoever shoved Mowad when she caught up with them. I admire that in a woman. If I were a hundred years younger, I’d be admiring this girl quite a bit at this stage. I briefly debated telling her as such, because she seemed to have no idea how attractive she was, but I had just enough sense to keep my mouth shut.

  “Tell me about your family,” I said instead.

  She shook her head. “What’s to say? They met here as reservists, had me and my younger brother, Jacob. I’m not sure they ever loved each other as such, but they were fiercely loyal to one another. Everything they did, they did together. Even going into town to get provisions, they went together. Always.” Her face fell and she added darkly, “They even died together.”

  “You got away,” I reminded her gently.

  Energy cracked through her body, and her eyes went wild. “Yes, I fucking got away. Do you want to know why?”

  I grimaced. Served me right for trying to connect with another human being. “Tell me.”

  But she couldn’t.

  Several times her lips moved and her larynx hummed, but she didn’t manage a single word.

  I felt warm with guilty relief, until Efia and Bahati both told me that Mowad needed to speak her memories, and I needed to let her.

  I wasn’t convinced, but then I was a freak who carried his memories around with him on his back, and Bahati had always been better at this kind of thing than me.

  “I want a piece of those vecks myself,” I told her. “And I reckon I’ll get that chance. Denisoff gave me a retrospective Revenge Squad policy for my farm, and told me I might be part of the team taking down Volk. I’m gonna kill him and as many of his thugs as I can. Anything you tell me about them might prove useful. Knowing your enemy helps you to kill them. Besides… I figured you had the same plan.”

  Her body unlocked a little of its rigidity, but she said nothing.

  “Tell you what. I’ll do a deal. If you tell me what happened, then I’ll do everything in my power to let you pull the trigger or cut with the blade that kills Volk. I’ve done my share of killing. I don’t need to do the deed so long as I see that bastard dead. Deal?”

  It worked. She began to tell me a halting account of the night the gang came, almost a year ago. She didn’t even know why, although her parents had seemed deeply troubled for their last few weeks. She told of the despair of realizing from the moment Volk announced his arrival that their defense was hopeless. The family was outnumbered and outgunned, and that was before a furious barrage of explosions announced the shelling from the artillery pieces had begun. The worst aspect of that hopelessness, she told me, was seeing the despair in her parents’ eyes when they realized they could not protect their children.

  “When Volk’s people came into the farmhouse and took me, I didn’t fight too hard. What would have been the point? I saved my strength for what was coming next.”

  “What you mean is that you kept a hidden reserve.”

  She gave a wistful smile. “My mom was like you. She couldn’t understand anything in life without first reframing it in military terms. But, yeah, I kept a reserve, just in case an opportunity presented. The gang had some discipline while the shooting was going on, but once they took the farm they were a rabble. They got drunk on the contents of my parents’ cellar, and saved me for their late-night entertainment. Some of them
decided not to wait and came for me early. They got a little ways into their fun. Not much but more than I cared for.”

  “You killed them!”

  “Not exactly.” She grinned and her eyes filled with bloodlust. “Let’s just say that what they wanted to do with me, they won’t be able to do to anyone else.” Shahdi’s face soured. “Except the woman. Her, I killed. I stole one of their hex bikes and fled. They came after me, but I knew the land and knew how to lie low. Besides, they were drunk. I abandoned the bike ten klicks out, and then hid in a cave behind a waterfall for a month. My food ran out after two days and I had to… Hold on, did you say Chikune had also fallen foul of Volk?”

  Before I could answer, a look of understanding flashed across her face, and then she was back to her tale.

  I must be getting old, because it took a few moments before the same understanding hit me.

  It was all about coincidence.

  I’ve met a lot of people over the years who swear there are no such things as coincidences.

  That’s crap.

  I’ve stumbled across plenty of ’em. I was in a squad once that had three riflemen all called DeSouza. They swore they weren’t related. When I was stationed on Khallini, Sanaa dared me to indulge in a death-wish sex-affair with a Wolf woman. Forty years later, I was drinking at a bar on Earth with a Marine who had enjoyed the company of the same Wolf. Now, Wolves might all look equally weird to you, but the markings resulting from their skin parasite make each one unique, and the way this Marine knew the highlights of this Wolf’s markings, from every part of her body… I’m certain we’d known the same girl.

  That’s the kind of coincidence you come across if you live long enough. And we must be scratching the surface when you consider all the coincidences that we never notice.

  But Mowad, Chikune and me, all wanting a pop at the same gangster, and all recruited by Denisoff – that’s the other kind of coincidence. The kind that someone has engineered for their own purposes.

  “Revenge Squad must want Volk badly,” I said as she paused in her explanation of why she had agreed to sign up with Denisoff.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Well, yes, of course. But like you suggested, Volk is a cog in a bigger machine. I might not have joined the military, but I get the feeling that I’ve signed up for a war.”

  “Talking of which,” I reminded her, “in less than an hour some people will be coming our way with guns. It may only be a wargame, but I’m in the habit of being the one to come out alive in a firefight. What do you say to talking later and concentrate for now on killing our fellow recruits?”

  It was guarded, but the grin Shahdi Mowad gave me felt like the greatest accomplishment I’d achieved since setting foot on this crazy, mixed-up planet.

  — CHAPTER 26 —

  Our pit lure was both cruder and hotter than I’d hoped for, but nonetheless serviceable. The tree line thinned out as the ground sloped down to the pond, turning to ferns and brambles, all covered in a thick leaf litter colored the purple of an old bruise. Only someone who knew exactly what to look for would see the breathing tubes poking through the mud and leaves, but the clue was left dangling by the residual heat in the tubes and coolness of our lid, the legacy of the wet mud we’d smeared over it.

  Mowad had surprised me by adding a touch all of her own: a half dozen homemade radio mikes she’d hidden along the trees. There was a lot more to this kid than I had imagined.

  “Where did you learn to make the surveillance gear?” I had asked her.

  “My annoying little brother bugged my room. Naturally, I learned to jam his devices and bug his room. It escalated from there. Jacob soon surpassed me. He would have been in high demand as a bespoke surveillance designer.”

  I left Mowad to memories of her brother as we took up positions in trees overlooking our lure. We added baffles of cut branches thick with leaves to mask our IR signatures, and settled down to wait.

  An hour later, Magenta came by with her training partner, a quiet guy called Tang who had served in the artillery. Magenta caught sight of the trap straight away and waved at Tang to take cover. Through our microphones, we could hear a whispered conversation – though not what was said – after which they melted back into the cover of the thick trees.

  Damn, but Magenta was good. Straight out the gate and already this was the outcome I dreaded. Without my wartime AI, Conteh, integrating with battlesuit sensors to interpret every faint footfall, the whiff of unnatural scents, and the negative space left by the absence of birdsong and animal movement, I was reduced to eyeballs, my IR viewer, and Mowad’s surveillance setup. Even though we weren’t shooting to kill, my heart was pounding enough that it must surely show up like a pulsar for anyone who cared to look my way in infra-red.

  I checked in with Mowad, switching our radio comms off and on according to a pulse code called SPC that I’d been taught as a cadet, and Mowad’s parents had taught her. We could hear the faint electrical pops of the switching, but we couldn’t be overheard.

  Mowad signaled back that she was fine and told me not to panic.

  Not to panic. The cheek of youth!

  But I was nervous. Were we now hunters or hunted?

  The answer came five minutes later.

  Magenta and Tang had retreated into cover only to re-emerge at the tree line a little ways farther along the clearing. First, they played their guns over the lid of our pit, and when the game system integrated with their weapons didn’t register any kills, they advanced purposefully but silently. With Tang’s gun aimed at the pit, Magenta hauled back the lid.

  I was all for letting them embarrass themselves for a few moments longer. To be honest, I derived a certain anticipation at watching Magenta in action. The more I got to know Shahdi Mowad, the fonder I grew of her, but it was a bizarrely parental kind of affection.

  Magenta, on the other hand, was definitely not a kid. She was beginning to awaken another kind of affection in me, the kind I hadn’t experienced in many years.

  Unfortunately, Mowad didn’t share my interest and shot both of our opponents from her position in the trees.

  Upon their game deaths, our rivals’ jackets and pants instantly changed from woodland camo pattern to bright yellow, indicating their new status as kills.

  “Damn,” shouted Magenta.

  Actually, the veteran Marine said a lot more than ‘damn’ but much of the cursing was highly specialized and inventive. Suffice to say Magenta was somewhat vexed, and expressed this in such a colorful and ferocious fashion, that Tang felt no need to add any comment of his own.

  Since I’d have to break cover anyway to reset the pit lid, I wasted no time in dropping down to the ground and sauntering over to our kills.

  It is conceivable that I might have been grinning.

  “You’re a sneaky bastard, McCall,” said Magenta. There was grudging admiration in her voice.

  “Thanks.” I basked in her praise. It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this and it was good to feel competent for a change.

  There were slappings of shoulders and no hard feelings, especially when I promised them both a drink when we got back. Magenta and Tang were my kind of people and shooting them dead was like breaking the ice. I looked forward to that drink – especially with Magenta – but I also wanted to reset the trap before our next victims came, so I told them to frakk off sharpish, hauled the lid back over the pit, and returned to my perch in the trees.

  Just as well I did, because the next figure appeared only a few minutes later.

  My guts churned with excitement.

  This was a high value target indeed. It was Chikune.

  — CHAPTER 27 —

  Chikune’s pale face and pinched nose took on a glossy sheen through the artificial view of my gunsights. I didn’t hate him enough to plug his brains with one of my shardshot darts, but my finger twitched in eagerness to register a kill and send the veck back into the woods with his clothes bright yellow.

  I hel
d back. I couldn’t remember who Chikune was paired with, but if his partner was still in the game, killing Chikune and leaving his buddy at large could prove fatal. And I wanted to win one of those agent positions for myself.

  So I waited, all the while keeping Chikune in my sights.

  Suddenly, a gunshot rang out across the clearing before being swallowed up by the trees. Instinctively, I shifted my aim to this new threat.

  The gunshot had the characteristic papp of a railgun, though muted slightly. I recognized the sound of a shardshot round.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that my rivals for an agent position would play for keeps, but kill or be killed was not exactly new to me.

  I heard another shot.

  This time I saw its effect too. Halfway around the pond, too deep into the trees for me to see who had fired, I saw the dart’s trajectory was near vertical, ripping chunks from branches and rustling leaves.

  So the shooter wasn’t firing at me, they were creating a… I looked back to the empty patch of ground where Chikune had been a moment before… distraction!

  Idiot! I couldn’t believe I’d been so easily duped.

  “Should we radio for help?” Mowad asked in code.

  “Negative,” I replied. “They’re only firing shardshot.”

  I started explaining to the farm girl about the emergency form of ammunition, but with the awkwardness in communicating through SPC code, I didn’t get far before I was interrupted by a voice from the trees.

  “Nice try,” shouted Nolog-Ndacu, “but you’ve had your chance.” His words were computer-generated English cranked up to maximum volume, which so distorted his speakers that I had to strain to understand. “I bet you’re difficult to see but my nose is nearly as sharp as Goat’s. I’ll sniff you out. We’re going to turn you yellow.”

  As curses went, turning someone yellow wasn’t up with threatening to disembowel your loved ones and making you eat their entrails, but I took the Tallerman seriously. Could he really sniff us out? I didn’t know. He was an alien and aliens can do strange things. I mean, look at Silky with her head tentacles for starters. All I knew about Tallermans was the cliché that they were excessively cautious, and that made me doubt Nolog was bluffing.