After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Keep calm,” I signaled to Mowad. “Stay in position.”

  We retained one advantage they did not suspect. Their advance was stealthy but Mowad’s homemade surveillance system picked up their movement. We couldn’t see our enemies, but we could hear them and track their progress as they swung slowly around the pond.

  Suddenly, our mikes went silent. Perhaps our opponents had gone to ground, motionless while Nolog-Ndacu sniffed us out.

  Then Mowad’s devices found a target of interest to home in on. I heard a man’s voice. “Hold-up!” he said. It didn’t sound like Chikune. “Uda thinks she’s seen something.”

  “Uda is always seeing things, and half of them aren’t really there. That’s why the boss sent her here in the first place.”

  I’m not good with names. It’s not because my memories are shot to pieces; it’s just that I find it difficult to care. But I didn’t remember an Uda amongst the recruits. Was that a nickname I wasn’t connected enough to know?

  “I don’t need alien eyes to see someone’s disturbed the ground over by that pond,” said another voice.

  “Who are they?” whispered Mowad over our comm link. We’d agree to stick with SPC. Was she panicking?

  “Don’t know,” I replied in SPC.

  “Quiet!” Mowad signaled. “They’re headed your way.”

  I slowed my breathing, lowered my pulse and made like I was a natural part of the tree.

  A few seconds later I heard the intruders with my own ears.

  I’d never seen them before, but I recognized the type instantly from the way they stalked the ground, from the way they held their guns as if they were another organ of their bodies.

  Killers!

  If they shot me, I wouldn’t turn yellow. I’d turn red.

  — CHAPTER 28 —

  The intruders halted almost directly underneath my branch. I carefully drew back some of my leafy screen to get a better look at what we faced. Four of them were humans, dressed in standard camo pants and jackets and carrying rifles of a model I didn’t recognize. The fifth intruder was different. This one they called ‘Uda’ was humanoid, but no human possessed sensory organs like this. A mess of fine hairs sprouted from her hands, including her matted palms. Uda ‘heard’ through her hands. I could see why, too. This creature had a wide sensory band that covered 300 degrees around her head, including the area where most humanoids had ears. I could hear a faint slurping sound as the alien constantly adjusted her array of filters and protective membranes over the band that was her equivalent of eyes.

  Uda was an Imp.

  With their naturally freakish sensory organs boosted still further by millennia of selective breeding and augmentations, Imps were employed as sentries because they could see through the most advanced stealth technology in a way that even AI-controlled sensors could not.

  I had never seen one so close up, but I had felt their effect during the war.

  And they hadn’t fought on my side.

  “You should run, Uda,” one of the men said to the Imp.

  “My fate was sealed when he found my family, Karim. Being here is my choice.”

  “You of all of us could hide. He would never know the truth of what’s about to happen here.”

  “Do you think the boss cares? He lives to cause pain. My kin are doomed to death or slavery whatever I do, but if the merest hint that I escaped reaches his ears then the torture that my dear ones would endure…”

  The Imp’s face sucked inward as if her flesh were a leaking balloon. The others waited impatiently until the Imp reflated her flesh and spoke: “We do this. No more talk of running. The pair we are tailing… one is a male Tallerman. I can see his odor. It is very likely that he will smell us before we can get close enough.”

  Karim nodded at the Imp and turned to two of his colleagues. “Bonnier, Poonah, we’ll have to risk the EMP grenades.”

  I’ve given plenty of tactical orders in my life, and even through the obscuring branches that kept me safe – for now – I could see the hesitation ring loud and clear through their body language as they grabbed grenades from pouches on their hips, and slotted them into the launchers slung under their gun barrels.

  “You all knew the score before we got here,” said Karim. He sounded disgusted. “No one gets out alive. So let’s finish this as the soldiers we once were, and forget what we became. If that’s too hard for any of you, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Bonnier and Poonah didn’t say anything in reply, but I could see they carried themselves with a little more conviction after Karim’s words.

  What about me, though? Where was my conviction?

  A group of killers was just a few feet below me and bent on killing Chikune and Nolog. The two weren’t my comrades – we’d barely met, and I wouldn’t exactly shed a tear if Chikune died – but there was a principle at play. Or maybe it was more of a habit. I didn’t know, but I did know that I couldn’t sit, watch and do nothing while someone crept up on my team members and killed them.

  I realized with a shock that it wasn’t my dislike of Chikune that made me stop and ask myself these questions, but the leader of the killers, Karim. He looked like me, sounded like me. When the Legion dumped me here, I caught myself and bought Sijambo Farm before I drunk away all my demob money. If I hadn’t, that could have been me down there, caught up with the wrong crowd and ending my days leading a doomed suicide mission.

  Too bad. You roll the dice and whatever numbers come up, that’s what you get to play with. Karim’s little band had to die.

  While I was still questioning my loyalties, the Imp whispered targeting advice to the two grenadiers, who then braced and fired, their weapons giving a phutt as they launched grenades across the pond. I saw very little of the detail, but my brain filled in all the gaps because I’d seen this scene so many times before, and from both sides of the fence too.

  All I could see of the grenade impacts was a slight rustle in the undergrowth, but I could hear the grenades going off, followed by a sequence of pops as Mowad’s homespun surveillance devices died one by one.

  Luckily the radio comms with the farm girl were hardened enough to survive at this distance from the EMP blast – as was my gun – but I didn’t have any hope for Chikune and Nolog. They couldn’t radio for help and their guns weren’t hardened enough to be anything more now than a collection of military components that no longer talked to each other. Turned out that the Imp wasn’t military-grade either. She writhed on the ground, hands over her eyes. I figured the little creature must be able to see into parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that I couldn’t. If Uda had watched the grenades land, it must have been like looking into the heart of a fusion blast.

  A strange sound swept through the ground beneath me, as if a sudden gust of wind was blowing through. It took a moment to realize that this was the sound of gunfire.

  I know what you’re thinking. They had guns. What the hell had I thought they would do with them? But what stunned me wasn’t that they were firing so much as the sound, or rather the lack of it.

  Gunshots are loud. They do not sound like wind.

  True, there is advanced military gear that genuinely silences gunshots, such as the SA-71 carbine paired with ACE-series combat armor in full stealth mode. But there’s a wealth of complicated stuff going on there, with the sound, recoil, and heat diverted away to a weird loophole in the physical universe called the Klein-Manifold Region. Do not ask me to explain.

  But these guns were home-grown civilian fare. I’d never heard anything like them.

  Whatever they were, across the clearing leaves and branches were being ripped apart by the volleys coming from below my position.

  There was no return fire.

  I couldn’t sit here and do nothing.

  Of the attackers, I could now only see Karim and the Imp. The others were hidden under cover. Quietly as I could, I raised my NJ-2 against my shoulder and aimed at Karim.

  After digesting the dirt and wood e
arlier, my carbine’s ammo bulb reported four rounds available of shardshot. There were five intruders, maybe more I hadn’t seen yet. If I fired, there was no way I was going to survive.

  Guess I’ll be seeing you soon, I thought at my ghosts.

  I heard a reply, but it didn’t come from my dead comrades. “What do we do?” asked Mowad over our radio comms.

  I sent back the SPC code to maintain radio silence. I wanted Mowad out of this.

  Damn!

  I lowered my gun. If I were one of the assault group, the moment I identified a threat up in the trees then I would systematically spray the nearby trees until that threat went away. It was only a lack of discipline meant we hadn’t been seen in the first place. If they remembered their training… Mowad’s gun shot a laser that was no more than an irritant. Her weapon’s main armament was a camera. If I shot Karim, then I’d be condemning the farm girl to death.

  The intruders ceased firing.

  “Did we get them?” Karim asked the Imp.

  “Difficult to see clearly from here, but I think one is badly wounded. One other alive but sticking by its comrade.”

  “That’ll be the gnome,” said Karim in disgust. “Frakking Hardit-made stealth rifles. Can’t do more than tickle a Tallerman. Right, follow us,” he told the Imp. He gave hand signals to the others to advance.

  The time for stealth was over. The intruders now relied on the speed of their advance. I looked again and saw the reality was more dangerous. Poonah was firing at Chikune and Nolog’s position while Karim and the Imp advanced on our recon pit. Meanwhile, Bonnier and the other killer were keeping hidden under the cover of the trees and circling around the pond to take the Revenge Squad recruits unawares.

  The two hidden killers would pass just a few feet inside of Mowad’s position.

  “Stay out of this,” I told Mowad, abandoning SPC Code. “You’re not armed.”

  “I have shardshot ammo,” she replied. “Thirty rounds.”

  “What?”

  “I saw you make some. Figured if you needed to be armed, so did I.”

  I was horrified. I was bursting with admiration. It was a confusing jumble and I didn’t have time to be confused. “Are you certain you can fire at a live target?” I checked.

  “Yes,” she answered. The quiet resolve in her voice convinced me.

  I was about to give her instructions but the words caught in my throat. Shahdi Mowad was a farm girl dealt a bad hand in life, and that wasn’t the same as being the latest replacement fed into the meat grinder of war. Did I have the right to order her to do anything but hide?

  She’s not a little girl, urged Sanaa. She signed up for this. We never had that choice.

  Don’t hesitate, growled the Sarge. Either commit fully or withdraw. No half measures.

  They were both right. I didn’t like it, but that was nothing new.

  “Okay, Shahdi,” I said, momentarily wondering why I’d switched to her first name. “Get down quietly as you can and follow the two moving through the trees.”

  “Roger that. Don’t do anything too dumb, NJ.”

  The cheeky crècheling! Shahdi’s warning didn’t deserve an answer. I knew how to do this. Shahdi could have no idea how good I felt to finally slip into a mode of well-honed competence after so long pretending to be something I was not.

  Outsiders often refer to Marines as cyborgs, as barely human killing machines.

  That barb can sting because it’s true: that’s exactly what we are. But some machines have feelings and I felt charged with purpose as I landed with a soft thud on the ground and brought my gun to bear.

  Killing was my function, and killing was good.

  Inside my head, my ghosts were giving me constant advice and updates and words of encouragement and warning.

  I blocked all that out, disappointed. They’d never distracted me in a fight before.

  I stalked the shooter in the trees, trying to work behind her. While I did so, Karim and the Imp checked out our recon pit, Karim training his gun on our lure while the Imp stared at it, with her super sharp eyes apparently back to full operational effectiveness. When the alien shook her head, Karim waved the shooter I had been hunting out of cover to join them.

  They clearly didn’t see Chikune and Nolog as a threat, but they hadn’t accounted for NJ McCall, and I was something very different.

  I had waited long enough for Shahdi to get into position. Still shielded by the trees, I raised my gun to my shoulder and aimed at Karim.

  Karim, Poonah and the Imp rushed at Chikune and Nolog’s position. Somewhere in the trees, two more attackers must be close to my comrades now.

  The clearing was gripped by a temporary silence.

  My scarred right hand itched.

  Shoot! urged the Sarge.

  But I couldn’t.

  My body refused to fire.

  I locked up.

  I cursed myself and threw every iota of will at my trigger finger to force myself to fire.

  But I might as well have tried to bench press a starship.

  With my hands frozen into immobility, I watched helplessly as the intruders knelt and put shot after shot into the trees where my fellow recruits had been.

  While I did absolutely nothing.

  — CHAPTER 29 —

  Sarge was shouting loud enough to make the inside of my head ring, and some of the others I rarely heard from were screaming incoherently. I couldn’t even think because the cacophony in my head was so loud. Then a sudden sense of calm descended on me. A loving and embracing sense of calm I recognized and missed terribly. It was Bahati clearing the others away so she could have a quiet word with me.

  Just take a deep breath, she said in a creamy smooth voice. My muscles slowly loosened. There, she said, that’s better. Don’t think, just do. Squeeze the trigger.

  I still had their leader, Karim, in my sights. I readied and… nothing!

  What was wrong with me?

  Take another deep breath, said Bahati, and we’ll try again.

  My breath was rasping, my head was pounding, but my muscles weren’t locked up any longer. I just couldn’t shoot the bastard for some reason, like that incident that got me court-martialed all over again.

  But I could still be useful.

  I thundered out of cover in a spray of ripped foliage and raced at the attackers. “Hey! You wanna fight? Forget about those weasels, pick on someone your own size!”

  I dove for the ground and rolled, just before a volley of bullets came my way. I felt a scald of pain in my left shoulder as I went prone and raised my carbine.

  In that slow motion way you get when things are moving fast around you, I already knew I was too late. I was a sitting target, and these intruders were showing no hesitation in pulling their triggers.

  More shots came my way. I was hit, multiple wounds, but I couldn’t feel them. Their weapons were trading stopping power for stealth. Not military grade stealth, but instead of the crack of gunshot thunder it was more of that breeze through the trees I’d heard earlier. Even so, gunshot wounds are serious business. If I wasn’t hurting, then it was because my body, with all its rewirings to optimize me for a life as a soldier, had decided the sense of pain was no longer helpful. That was a very bad sign.

  And the reason I was pondering this in such detail? Isn’t it obvious? I was about to die.

  Suddenly, the characteristic whine and scream of a railgun shardshot round came from the trees to my left. Then another, accompanied by a scream of pain.

  Of the three intruders in the clearing, two spun around to face this new threat, while the third, the little Imp, hit the ground and started crawling for cover. Full marks to the alien for remembering to stay alive first and shoot back second. Didn’t help it though. The next railgun round went straight through her eye band in a spray of goop. Two more whines in quick succession felled the other two intruders.

  Go Shahdi! At least, I was making a working assumption that it had been the farm girl firing
. I hoped I was right because I was already on my feet and stumbling over to the fallen assailants.

  The two humans were showing signs of stirring. I wasn’t surprised. If that was Shahdi firing shardshot out of her junior carbine, then the barely charged lumps of compressed dirt had all the stopping power of a flying ant. “Shahdi!” I shouted. “Make sure the two in the woods don’t get up again.”

  The leader, Karim, was already back on his feet, though swaying groggily. I wasn’t surprised, his build said he was a former Marine, same as me, and I was up on my feet and still active, although my limbs had gone completely numb.

  I swung my frozen right arm like a club, smacking him hard in the nose. I couldn’t feel anything, but I heard small bones breaking. He collapsed.

  I heard two railgun whines from the woods. And I felt them almost as if I’d been shot myself. I know, call me an idiot, because it was me who had told Shahdi to take care of the two intruders in the woods, but I hadn’t meant for her to kill two assailants who were already down. She deserved better than the grimness of endless killing that had been my life.

  The last intruder was stirring. Some sensation and control was returning to my limbs, so I punched Poonah hard, just in time for my world to go spinning around.

  I blinked.

  It wasn’t like when you blink something out of your eye. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again some time had passed. I wasn’t sure how long. Between blinks I caught glimpses of Sanaa when she was alive, the first time we met, the tattoos we got when we got married, Sanaa dying… When I came to, I was looking up into the face of a very serious-looking young woman with eyes so white they sparked painful memories of my youth. Shahdi reached down to pull me up.

  I stayed down. “Negative,” I said. “Leave me. I’ve been shot.”

  “Only a bit,” she said.

  Only a bit shot? Had she gone loopy?