After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Medical diagnostic says no vital damage, trauma minimal and already self-repairing.”

  “What medical diagnostic?”

  “His.” She nodded toward Denisoff who was standing over one of the fallen intruders, employing a combat blade to intimidate her into speaking.

  “You’ll live,” Shahdi insisted. “You’re a tough old beast. Denisoff reckons it wasn’t the rounds that felled you, it was the memories they awoke of far more serious wounds in your past.”

  “You mean I’m making it up?” I noticed that I was sitting up already. That wasn’t normal behavior for someone who’d just taken multiple gunshot wounds. I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of these jokers shooting us with weapons that can’t kill us?”

  “They don’t need to kill, just disable you,” said Denisoff. “Then they finish you off with their blades, just as they did with Walksi, Tang and Magenta. The intruders’ guns were optimized for silence and portability, not for killing gnarled old warriors like you with a toughened hide protected by scar tissue six inches deep.”

  I pulled on Shahdi’s hand and hauled myself to my feet. I let go of her, and I didn’t fall over, which was good enough for me. I was fit for duty.

  Then it hit me. Three dead. And one of them Magenta…

  I couldn’t get over that. Magenta had been pissed at me when I last saw her, but not too annoyed to turn down my offer of a drink tonight.

  I pictured the Marine as I’d last seen her, striding back into the woods in her high visibility yellow clothing that screamed: here I am! Had I gotten Magenta and Tang killed by lighting them up as targets?

  I shut down that thought. I’d been down that road too many times before, and it never led anywhere but hell.

  “Are there more intruders?” I asked Denisoff.

  “I doubt it, but I can’t be sure. Which is why I’ve been interrogating this one while Mowad was fussing over you. I told her she was wasting her concern. It takes more than a bullet to put a cyborg like you out of commission.”

  I bit back my reply. Mowad was the same breed as me. As my self-repair and hardened physiology was demonstrating, neither of us was truly human, but I’d accepted that a very long time ago.

  “What about Chikune and Nolog-Ndacu?” I asked.

  “They both took a few hits, enough to make them sitting targets for a knife through their throats, but they will recover.”

  Denisoff blanked me and returned to his interrogation.

  I checked over our foes. Uda’s brains were spilling over her corpse, and Karim’s skull was caved in. The three others were bloodied and battered. Their wrists were tied against them and they wriggled like camo-colored slugs on their backs as Denisoff casually sliced into them with his crescent blade.

  “Didn’t you kill two?” I asked Mowad.

  “No need. I only had to threaten them.”

  I felt less dirty to hear that. When I told her to make sure the intruders didn’t get up again, it hadn’t occurred to me to let them live.

  I watched her worrying her lower lip with her teeth as she tried to absorb the sight of the trussed captives dancing under Denisoff’s ministrations. I don’t think she needed to try too hard because she showed no other signs of being worried by the casual torture, but I was glad she wasn’t as numb to it as me.

  “It’s no use,” said Denisoff, “they aren’t going to talk.” He drew his handgun and fired a round between the eyes of all three.

  Unlike the guns the intruders had used, Denisoff’s sounded deafeningly loud.

  I threw my arms up in dismay. “How could you do that?” I shouted “We needed to make them talk. Are you mad? You idiot, we don’t even know who they are.”

  “Don’t ever call me an idiot,” Denisoff replied. I noted that he wasn’t bothered about being called mad. In fact, he was completely calm, and that is not normal when you’ve just killed someone. Killing these people was no more emotionally difficult for him than lacing up his boots. Typical berserker. I was just thankful that he appeared to be on my side at the moment.

  “I know exactly who they are,” he said, “and why they are here. Answers later, now we need to flush out the woods in case there are any others. Unlikely, but we need to be certain.”

  He proffered the gun he’d used to shoot the captives. “I have a spare plasma pistol. Here, you take this–”

  I stretched out my hand to take the weapon.

  He hesitated, and then handed the weapon to Mowad whose face had gone unreadably cold since Denisoff had killed the three intruders.

  “Apparently, I’m not about to die,” I told him. “Give me the weapon. You know I’ve got the experience to use it.”

  “You’re a brave man, McCall,” he answered. I found it difficult to tell, but I fancied Denisoff squeezed a little extra hardness into his voice. “But if I want to rely on someone in a firefight, Shahdi Mowad here has proved her worth.” He narrowed his eyes. “As you have yours, McCall.”

  Denisoff left us alone for a while as he checked in on his companions combing the woods for any more shooters.

  Mowad apologized to me. Her face grimaced in sympathy, and it took me a few moments to grasp that she was embarrassed by my humiliation at not being offered the gun. I got the impression that watching Denisoff kill the captives was a done deal for her. Nothing she could do about them now.

  “You should take the gun,” she said. “It’s not right.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “it is.” But my words didn’t ring true. I didn’t mind about the gun. It was Mowad’s lack of reaction to the cold killing that didn’t feel right.

  “No, NJ. You froze for a moment, but it was you who spotted the killers. You who knew what to do. You couldn’t fire but you rushed at the enemy to save us anyway. You’re a hero, NJ.”

  I clasped her shoulder, and it seemed to calm her a little. She was a good girl, and I couldn’t help but smile with pride. “Heroes don’t live long,” I explained to her. “And when they fall, they can no longer protect the people they care about.”

  I saw doubt and pain flicker across her young face. I hadn’t meant to draw a parallel with the death of her parents, but I saw her make the connection. It slammed into her like a heavy gauge bullet. Right through the heart.

  I hugged her, and immediately winced as pain shot through my wounded arm.

  I don’t know why I hugged her, but I don’t understand the half of why I do what I do. She’d flinched at my proximity earlier and I was certain she would hate me for embracing her so closely. I should have broken off the contact but it felt too good. Not in some sordid sex way. Shahdi was young and had so much to learn, and she seemed to care about me almost as if she respected me. It was such a precious feeling that I didn’t want to let go.

  I eventually drew away, grunting as my wounded shoulder shifted position. “You did well,” I told her. “This is your time, Mowad. Take the damn pistol and stop jabbering about how you don’t deserve it.”

  “But you know so much, NJ. You know war.”

  “The war is over, Shahdi. There’s still fighting but I’m glad you were spared the war. I can teach you tactics and marksmanship, though I’m guessing your parents have already done that job well.”

  She nodded, mournfully.

  I settled my palm on her chest. “It’s what’s in there that counts. That’s where you show your true quality. That’s where you impress me most, not with your gun skills.”

  If the hug was a little too intimate, what I was doing now was probably over the top badness. I flinched. “Oh, I’m… I’m sorry.”

  “No worries,” she said coldly.

  But I was worried. I sputtered and stuttered, at first in apology but then in, well, in-coherently. Everything was far from well with the world but the reasons why were fast slipping away from me like soapy water.

  Floundering, I grabbed at her shoulders, but Mowad shoved me away to rock on my heels.

  Angry words spilled from her. “One mom
ent you make me feel good about myself, NJ. The next… What am I? A porcelain doll who needs protecting? As for you, I can’t decide whether you’re full of drent, a creep, or took a brain injury that’s never properly healed. NJ! NJ, look at me! NJ…?”

  I didn’t particularly like any of Mowad’s character assessments of me, but if I had to choose, I would go for the brain damage. After being burned, blown up, and shot so many times, I knew half my cognitive augmentations no longer functioned, and that was only the surface damage I knew about. Frankly, I’m amazed that I can walk and talk at the same time without dribbling.

  Sometimes I can’t even manage that. And this was one of those times.

  They told me later that I’d had a brain seizure, although that sounds suspiciously like a catchall phrase to mean something is wrong with your head, but we don’t know what.

  I remember falling and the ground reaching up to catch me. It seemed to suck me down into the dirt, and I was thrashing around trying to shout a warning. Don’t worry about me, I tried to shout. There might be more shooters. Take cover.

  All I managed to get out of my mouth were a few grunts and a lot of drool before my brain redeployed me into my past.

  — CHAPTER 30 —

  The rich woodland scents of Klin-Tula were ushered away by the sweet tang characteristic of the smog that choked Aries-6, a corrosive taint that even a combat suit air filter couldn’t entirely remove.

  I looked down, already knowing what I would see: a figure in broken armor sprawled in a lake of her own blood that slowly seeped into the scorched hilltop.

  She was inside one of the new ACE/3(N) combat suits, but even this uprated model had taken so much damage in the initial blast that it had failed to staunch the blood flow when her leg had been sliced off by a heavy flenser round.

  I had staunched and cauterized her leg myself the old-fashioned way with a med kit, but we both knew she had lost too much blood before I had stabilized her.

  Carefully cradling the back of her head, I removed the helmet and looked upon the face I had known so well, trying to capture every detail before the sight was lost to me forever. The heavy cheekbones like bull bars, the dainty jeweled studs that brought a feminine touch to her nose and ear lobes. I laughed at the ouroboros snake tattooed around her left eye. (We’d gotten the same tattoos the night before we married. Mine was still proudly emblazoned on my left chest, but Sanaa had always been more hard-core than me.) And the glassy eyes that had once been so white against her dark skin, when that young skin had been free of scars and burns and calluses and the pallor of blood loss.

  “I’m sorry,” Sanaa said.

  I shook my head. “Nothing to be sorry for,” I told her. “We’ve taken the position, medevac is on its way. They’ll fix you up with a fancy leg better than new. Just make sure to dodge better next time.”

  Her eyelids began to lower. I squeezed her hand trying to will my life force into her. I wanted to give her my strength so that she might live and I die in her place. For a crazy moment, I almost convinced myself that if I believed hard enough then we could make this exchange. A life for a life. Gladly.

  But of course the galaxy doesn’t work that way. I watched as Sanaa slipped away.

  “No!” I shouted as I felt a vibration in the heavily armored chest section of Sanaa’s armor. “Stay with me, Sanaa. Don’t leave me, damn you. Hold on until help comes!”

  “You’re sweet,” Sanaa said as she ignored me, and continued to eject her suit AI crystal through her chest so that I could retrieve it more easily for the collection growing along my spine.

  “That’s why I love you,” she whispered. “We’ve had over two hundred years together, you and I, NJ. I never stopped loving you. We’ve been such lucky fools, don’t you dare spoil it by being sad.”

  They were the last words she ever spoke in life. And this was a scene that had played out endlessly in my mind for a century.

  Which is why, even during my brain seizure, I was surprised at what happened next.

  The AI crystal surfaced above her armor, the same as it always did in this sequence of my nightmare memory, but this time the story hadn’t finished. Sanaa had more to say in this version.

  “You’re also such a drellock, NJ. That’s another thing I love about you. I said I was sorry and meant it, and since when have I ever apologized for something I was not responsible for?”

  She was right. It wasn’t like Sanaa to apologize for getting shot, but I had assumed dying could make even her act out of character.

  “I’m apologizing for something that I am responsible for, dongwit.”

  I waited for her to explain.

  But instead she faded away into insubstantiality.

  “Don’t leave me,” I wailed.

  I felt a little jerk of clarity and realized I was on my knees stretching out my scarred hand to a tuft of grass. A heavy teardrop slipped off the end of my nose.

  I looked up and saw Mowad staring at me, the glistening at the corner of her eye only emphasizing the pity written all over her young face.

  And behind Mowad, Denisoff saw everything through his cold gray eyes.

  — CHAPTER 31 —

  That night we feasted at the Great Hall and, man, was it a ball!

  The blockhouses numbered their levels from Level One at the top, blessed with anti-air cupolas and picturesque views of the surrounding grasslands, down past the three other levels above ground, and beyond to at least another three underground levels.

  Everyone had congregated in what was officially known as Blockhouse ‘A’, Room 603, but I’m sure you’ll agree, Great Hall made for a better name. And not just better, but more apt. It was a large space that functioned like a parade deck on a starship but was kitted out in the style of a barbarian warlord’s great hall, with fake burning torches illuminating a windowless space, long feasting benches made from real wood, and the skulls and stuffed heads of beasts and people mounted on the walls like barbaric battle trophies, or mementos of the hunt.

  Many of us were feeling the familiar post-battle chill. None of us knew Magenta, Tang or Walksi very well, but that didn’t help me because I wasn’t mourning the memories of the brief time I had spent with the dead recruits. Not even Magenta.

  Instead, I was feeling the loss of something else: hope.

  All this weird drent that had happened to me over the past year – what with Revenge Squad and Silky – it had almost felt as if the universe was signaling that it was time for NJ McCall to move on. A fresh start. A new beginning.

  Not anymore.

  This low-powered signal of hope was now being jammed by the definitive truth of my life: if I like someone, they get killed. I think I would have grown to like Magenta – maybe a lot – and now she was dead. The familiarity of that old story didn’t make it any less mournful.

  The reactions of my fellow recruits to this afternoon’s attack ran the gamut from indifference, exaggerated boisterousness, to glum introspection.

  Not so the experienced Revenge Squad personnel who were buzzing with the prospect of catching up with Volk, and delivering some kick-ass vengeance to his organization before getting personal with Volk himself. They knew that wouldn’t be easy, but they were utterly convinced that Volk was going to pay and they were the people going to collect.

  The Great Hall had been laid out for a feast, one table for agents and senior staff, another table for the recruits and associates, and a high table, draped in a rich purple textile laid out for the big bosses. The big hats even had candlesticks.

  Everyone else was mingling and drinking – even Silky who never usually strayed far from me.

  Me? I never mixed drinking with talking. Hadn’t for a long time. I had gotten drunk with Silky a few times back on the farm and that had been nice. It had also been silent. I left the others to their noisy carousing.

  As I drifted away from the various tables, I became fascinated by the wall decorations: weapons, framed pictures, pieces of twisted metal and charr
ed cloth that meant something to someone, but looked like junk to me.

  The feast proper hadn’t yet begun, and I took advantage of the wait to drag one of the benches over to a wall and stood on it to inspect one of the mounted human heads close up.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised to conclude that the head was real.

  I looked into the dark pupils of the eyes. Preservative treatment had hardened and lacquered the eyeballs, but I did not doubt that behind those orbs was an optic nerve that had once fed information to a brain trying to make sense of an immensely complicated universe, same as all the rest of us.

  I took a step back and assessed this gruesome trophy. The head had belonged to a woman of perhaps thirty years of age with dark brown skin and gunmetal dreadlocks. What was her story? Why was she here? At least she was really dead. I’ve heard stories about alien heads kept alive, able to perceive their enemies gloating in their victory in perpetuity, kept as an amusement for thousands of years, long after they had descended into madness, and their names forgotten.

  I felt a hand clasp my shoulder. It was the head boss guy: Holland Philby.

  “Michelle–Leanne Odeku, her name was.”

  “Was her death the result of a Revenge Squad policy activation?” asked Silky. I’d forgotten about her, but she was hovering a few paces away. She looked at me and the heads in distaste.

  “No,” said the man cheerfully. “This all happen before Revenge Squad. Michelle was a traitor.” He shifted his grip on my shoulder until his hand was over one of my bullet wounds. Then he tightened his hold. I gasped in pain, feeling the scarring and recently knitted tissue unstitching. He whispered into my ear with an undertone of menace. “I killed her myself.”

  Even by Marine standards, Holland Philby was a bull of a man. The paleness of his skin was emphasized by his bald pate in a natural camo pattern of freckles and liver spots, but unkempt mutton chops tumbled down from his ears before descending into a beard that must be nearly two feet long.

  I often think of we slave-born Marines as mass-produced genetic designs, but we weren’t all the same. It wasn’t just Philby’s grayish skin; his features were all subtly different from the people I grew up with on Nanatsu-7. He resembled one of the Earth dwellers of Northern Europe crossed with an angry rhinoceros. For the most part, his beard was as white as the recreational powders available for a small fee on every shady street corner on Klin-Tula (unlike my own beard which was only now starting to show a few white strands after 300 years) but he had dyed his beard with yellow streaks that looked as if he had spilled copious amounts of mustard. I tried not to stare at his beard while he dissected me with a gaze adorned with casual menace.