After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  César realized what I was doing before I had. He dropped into a combat stance.

  Xeene saw through me too. “Can it, McCall. You’re not impressing anyone and I don’t want to kill you, so winding me up won’t achieve anything. Now, shut up and listen good. There are dark places in everyone’s history here. Mine and César’s does not threaten you, your wife, or Revenge Squad. But I won’t hesitate to kill to protect our secret.”

  I nodded respectfully. I liked Xeene, understood her, and believed every word she said. I’d met a lot of Wolves but never one who was a good liar. A Wolf either didn’t care what you thought, or they did, which usually meant they would be trying to kill you. Deception never really comes into a Wolf’s worldview.

  “I honestly couldn’t hear a word,” I said neutrally, “but I can’t say the same about Revenge Squad. You do realize they have surveillance? The place is thick with nanoscale spybots.”

  César gasped at my lie, but Xeene smiled. “That will not be a problem,” she said, her eyes wide and nostrils flaring with challenge.

  Revenge Squad knows our secret and doesn’t care. Was that what Xeene was implying?

  I’d only meant to wind up Xeene to see what shook out, but I was getting the impression that I was the one being shaken here.

  If I pushed my way past the Wolves and into the embrasure, would I find a discarded cloak?

  I weighed up my prospects if I tried. Either of them could be the Skulk, but I was far from sure. On the other hand, if I tried then there was a hundred percent chance I would get into a fight with two Wolves at the same time, and I might not live to tell that tale.

  Xeene’s eyes were beginning to bulge. The berserker juices were flowing inside her pretty parasite-infested skin. I hurried away up the stairs before she went out of control. As it was, I was going to sleep tonight with one eye open and with my hand on the knife I had liberated on my first day.

  — CHAPTER 37 —

  I made it to our dorm without pursuit from the Wolves. Most of the recruits hadn’t yet returned from the Great Hall but a handful of older or more diligent ones were bedding down for the night. I wasn’t surprised to find our Littorane there, settling into her puddle. (I’d asked her gender and it turned out she was a girl.) I hadn’t met many Littoranes, but I’d met several Marines who had. The amphibians had formed the backbone of the Human Legion in its early years and were still its major producer of starships. Those ships spent most of their time flooded with water. I didn’t know how Jo managed to cope with being out of water nearly all the time.

  I supposed I ought to ask her.

  I’d been taught not to disturb animals when they’re eating or settling down to sleep. I decided to apply that to the Littorane too. But I made a mental note to have a longer talk with her one day.

  Making sure to avoid eye contact with anyone, I stopped off to grab my knife from its hiding place, not trying too hard to keep it out of sight. Then I stripped off and slid into my bunk.

  Silky lay above me on the upper bunk, asleep.

  I could easily reach up and touch her. She was so close to me in so many ways that I gave serious consideration to waking her and asking her advice. But I’d already decided to keep her safely away from my curiosity, so I settled for listening to my wife’s breathing.

  You’d think lungs are lungs, but the pattern of breathing varies enormously from species to species, and I was very familiar with the way Silky sounded because the calming sound of her gentle breaths settled me into sleep most nights.

  The resting breathing pattern for Kurlei is a deep breath followed by two shallow ones. Raise the activity rate and the Kurlei takes more of the shallow breaths. A Kurlei asleep only has the single deep breath.

  I listened to Silky’s pattern of a deep breath followed by two short ones.

  Everyone had their secrets, it seemed. Silky was feigning sleep.

  I didn’t know what she was up to but whatever games she was playing were the least of my worries tonight. As I settled into a watchful half-sleep, as I’d been trained to so many years ago, I had the usual sensation of floating through the day’s memories. I still couldn’t explain why my trigger finger had frozen in the woods, but other than that dark spot, today I’d been shot, threatened repeatedly, kicked, lied to, deceived, and given glimpses of several dark conspiracies. And if I’d pissed Xeene off too much, I was unlikely to live as far as dawn.

  My face creased into a sleepy smile.

  Eventful days were the most satisfying.

  — CHAPTER 38 —

  Holland Philby had told us at the feast the night before that our training would accelerate, but I hadn’t expected the hammer blows of change that hit us throughout the day that followed.

  I jogged into the training block at 07:17, delayed because I had first to be checked out by Doc Battery, the gaunt old ship rat and official chief medic whose office reeked of pipe weed. Her medical diagnostic gear looked modern enough, though, and after she had played the equipment over my body, she gave the predictable prescription that was no different to the field medic the day before: no physical exertion for a week while my body repaired itself.

  “You Marines like to pride yourself on being able to keep going when you’ve been blasted away to nothing more than a handful of bones strung together by ragged sinews. That kind of dumb attitude is antithetical to my profession.”

  I shrugged. And immediately proved her point when my wounded shoulder protested. “I can’t help the way I was built, Doc.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Precisely. You make my point for me. You were built for a single purpose, and it’s not just your body that was honed to make you a battlefield killer.”

  “I know, Doc. I’ve heard it from your type before. My brain is designed to insist any wound is ‘just a nick’ right up until the point when I keel over from blood loss. We used to rely upon our squadmates to read our med signs on BattleNet honestly, because we couldn’t be trusted to read our own.”

  Battery laughed. “Of course you’ve heard it all before. If you were human, you would have died from your wounds at least a dozen times in your career. Your body is aging, McCall. It can’t do half the things it once did, and the half it can…” I didn’t like the dismissiveness of her shrug. “We all slow down in the end. Even Assault Marines. You’ve the potential for a good few years of misadventures left in you, but only if you take care of yourself. The only reason you’re not undergoing emergency surgery now is because your body is still so good at self-repair that anything I could do to intervene would just frakk-up your accelerated healing systems. That doesn’t mean you haven’t been shot.”

  “Roger that, Doctor. Don’t get shot again this week and I’ll be right as rain.”

  She sighed. “I’m wasting my breath, but I took an oath once. I have to at least try to talk sense into that Neanderthal skull of yours. Your mind still believes you’re in your twenties. It’s telling you to be flippant about your injuries. But your body is much older. You were hit with low-velocity slugs, but the trauma they’ve wrought on your flesh is still horrific. If I had been in your shoes out in the woods, I’d still be there, under the ground with my ID badge dangling from a twig for a tombstone.”

  She waved me away with angry gesture. On my way out she added: “You’ve admitted that I can’t trust you to take care of yourself. Therefore I shall explain your condition to someone in higher authority whom I can trust. Now get out of my sight.”

  I hated being late. We were supposed to assemble at the parade ground for physical training at 07:00, but when I got there at 07:14, the place was deserted. A check on my Aimee redirected me to a room in the office and training block, the same low-rise jumble of buildings where I’d had fun and games the night before.

  “Glad you could join us,” said Zeb, the instructor.

  There were no weights, no stretching, no mats. Everyone was sitting at a desk. “What is this?” I asked.

  “Forensic Accountancy 101.”

&
nbsp; “Excuse me?”

  “No, you are not excused. Listen up, all of you. Some of you might never rise above the role of hired killer, but even if your ambition stops at being a corporate cudgel, think again! The more you grasp what your accomplished specialist colleagues are doing in their roles, the more you understand the layout of the battlefield you will be fighting over.

  “Make no mistake, the big money Revenge Squad earns requires us to go after organized crime. Also, corrupt corporations are often in the pay of even more corrupt politicians. Then there are the religious cults and revolutionaries. Let’s face it, Klin-Tula is a frakked-up world, and if that bothers you you’ve no place here at Camp Prelude because it’s living in this drentball of a world that pays our bills. We get paid the big bucks to hurt these organizations hard in payback for the pain they cause to our policyholders. We fight primarily in cyberspace, courts, punitive tax code adjustments, detective work, calling in our more expendable associates only when brute force needs to be applied.”

  He regarded us coolly.

  “And, yes, our enemies are doing the same to us all the time.”

  I raised my hand.

  Zeb scowled, getting the measure of me. “Go ahead, McCall.”

  “I was shot yesterday. Others didn’t make it back. Was that the result of our enemies doing detective work and cyber stuff on us?”

  “Yes. Probably.”

  I thought of the Ninja Skulk. “But it could be a spy, couldn’t it? I mean enemy boots on the ground. It might be one of us here.”

  The instructor fixed me with a stare. “If one of you is a spy, then I advise you to kill yourself without delay. It’s not that I have any sympathy, but what Holland Philby does to traitors he catches alive… I still have nightmares. Are you implying that I’m wasting my breath talking with you, McCall?”

  “No,” I replied tentatively. I glanced around and saw the suspicious faces of my fellow recruits staring at me. Even Silky looked cold. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m asking you whether you are a spy, McCall.”

  “No, of course not.” But the accusing looks said I wasn’t believed. “What don’t I know?”

  “I’ll let Chikune explain, seeing as he seems to think he’s the officer here. Go on, Chikune. I know you want to.”

  Chikune got to his feet and looked at me with a sneer across his pale face. I think he was attempting an impression of a Jotun demeaning itself by explaining something to a lowly human. If so, he blew it when Zeb snapped his fingers and Chikune hurriedly began. “Assistant Squad Leader Denisoff briefed us at 07:00 hours. You were bred on Nanatsu-7, McCall, but I was born on Tranquility-4 where we had a different means for selecting victims of the Cull.”

  The Cull. A tithe of souls claimed by our alien overlords, the cruelest reminder that humans are a low-ranking vassal race in a galaxy that plain doesn’t care. Or we were… Even now, despite the claim that we had won the war, we had still not freed ourselves from the Cull. Not yet.

  The mere mention of the term froze everyone’s face in a mask of hatred. In their alien ways, the Tallerman and Littorane reacted the same way because they too had been subject to the Cull. Only Chikune looked pleased with himself, relishing the power he had unleased with that single word.

  “On Tranquility we used a scoreboard,” he explained to a room of people who didn’t want to hear. “Each depot battalion aggregated the individual training scores of its cadets and the lowest ranked battalions at the end of each season… Let’s just say that if your battalion was in the scoreboard’s cull zone, you trained as if your life depended on it.”

  I noticed Silky and Nolog overtly tapping their Aimees. I took the hint and started exploring mine while Chikune enjoyed his speech.

  “ASL Denisoff liked the scoreboard idea when I mentioned it to him,” Chikune continued. “If you wish to be an agent, you must get near the top of the scoreboard. He’s been scoring us ever since we got here. That’s right, McCall, it’s on your Aimee. What place do you think you’re in?”

  When I finally brought the scoreboard up on the device around my wrist, the room chilled and I could feel my face go as pale as Denisoff’s.

  Yes, really. It was that bad.

  The scores ran from César at the top with 62, down to Jo the chubby-tailed Littorane at only 18. Then there was me. Not so much taking up the rear, as buried deep beneath the rear’s foundations.

  My score was minus 125.

  I drilled through the details. I’d scored quite well in some exercises but Denisoff had made good on his promise to dock me points, and added another 100-point demerit with the descriptive tag of ‘sneaking around outside at night’.

  “Goat went wild this morning,” explained Chikune. “Turned out he could smell the blood someone had smeared all over the office block roofs. At first they thought they had found a traitor but your scent wasn’t inside. From the dents you made, it looks like you were actually doing midnight calisthenics. Was it the twin moons bringing out your animal nature, McCall?”

  Chikune would have gone on all day, but Zeb gestured for him to be silent.

  “If you’re not planning on slitting your throat this morning,” the instructor told me, “then shut up, and open that smartscreen on that desk in front of you. Get your head down and start learning. Quickly.”

  And that was my introduction to forensic accountancy.

  — CHAPTER 39 —

  We were due more theory and mental practice to come in the afternoon, a lecture from Philby himself. With some people there assuming I was a traitor, that was not an encounter I was anticipating with relish. Before then, though, was something more hands-on: the shooting range.

  My mood lifted from a sense of utter hopelessness to mere deep despondency. Marksmanship was something I was still good at.

  No one had told us when the agents were to be selected, but I was banking on having several weeks to make up the lost ground on the scoreboard. Actually, only a part of me was seeing this as a challenge, because dark thoughts were swirling around the back of my mind. I had assumed Revenge Squad was a bunch of predatory paramilitary insurance peddlers, but as I began to peel back the surface layers, I sensed something darker underneath. And for that matter, when I asked myself why I should stick around with Silky, I couldn’t think of a solid answer either. Maybe the best thing would be to walk out the gate and leave both Revenge Squad, and the alien behind while I still could.

  I was clinging on to Revenge Squad by a handful of threads: revenge for Mowad, the worry of how Silky would cope on her own, but most important of all I wanted to prove Denisoff wrong. Not only did I want to dig up everything I could on Volk to piss off my assistant squad leader, but climbing back up the scoreboard when I was so far behind everyone else looked an impossible challenge.

  And that was one I found irresistible.

  So it was with an eager thrill that I picked up the junior carbine at the outdoor firing range.

  I was holding it gently, caressing its familiar heft, when Silky walked over and took the carbine off me. “You’ve a gunshot wound to your right shoulder,” she said. “Treat your wounds with more respect.”

  “Fine. I’ll shoot like a left-hander. Maybe I’ll get bonus points that way.”

  “Heal first, shoot later. You have multiple gunshot wounds to your arms, torso, and legs. For frakk’s sake, NJ, you’ve been shot! The medical officer said you’d act like this.”

  “Oh. So you’re the higher authority the doc talked to. You are not my commander, Silky.”

  “Listen to yourself! You’re like a petulant adolescent. Do you wish to fail? When Denisoff selects his agents, he will not choose you unless you have a radical change of attitude first.”

  “Why should I care? They might still offer me a job.”

  “A job? NJ, you’re nearly 300 years old and you’ve never had a job.” She glanced over at Zeb who was busy unlocking carbines and handing them out to his students. With the coast clear for now, she go
t in my face and gave me a high-pitched hiss. “To what do you aspire, NJ? Repairing sensor grids? Cleaning out Goat? Sweeping the floors?”

  “Why not? Someone’s got to. I’m not ashamed of honest labor.”

  “But not you. You were born for action, for watching your flanks because you never know where the next threat will come from. NJ, your heart needs its regular dose of adrenaline or else your arteries will coke up.”

  “I’m not sure that’s how the human vascular system works.”

  “I’m serious, NJ. I don’t mind if you wish to sweep the floor, clean the latrines… Or sell your hogs at local farmers’ market, but if that is all you do, then it will kill you through slow suffocation. Revenge Squad is giving you your last chance. Seize it!”

  Something in Silky’s words reminded me of Sanaa, the way she used to speak to me when I was being an idiot.

  I sought the advice of my ghosts. She’s talking drent, right?

  They didn’t reply in words, but the waves of dismay coming off them unsettled me.

  Tell me she’s not right.

  Sanaa hurled back an accusation. I can’t believe you’re asking that.

  Why not?

  Sanaa wouldn’t answer, but Bahati did. I know you don’t mean to, she said, but you can be so hurtful, Ndeki. Your alien is only telling you what we’ve been trying to tell you for years. You were dying on the inside, fading away little by little, no matter what we tried. We nearly lost you. It’s not that I don’t want her to make you happy, but…

  But what? Spit it out, woman!

  We care about you, NJ. I love you. Even after death, we’ve still got your back because we are your brothers, sisters, and wives. That night before our first posting when we swore an oath to stay together – that still binds us to you just as much as you are bound to us.

  Bahati paused to gather her thoughts. I glanced at Silky, the instructor too. The world outside was watching me, waiting for me to get my head together.