After War

by Tim C. Taylor

And as for this Silky, spat Bahati, if a ghost could be said to spit, this deserter chances across you in a vulnerable state, and in just over a year, she’s wrapped you around her pallid little fingers. You didn’t listen to your brothers and sisters, but you listen to her!

  Easy, Bahati, I said, mentally standing my ground against the ferocity that was Bahati when jealous. Silky is useful. She’s like a heart defibrillator – what I need to get me out of my funk. But it’s you I love. I haven’t forgotten those nights we spent gracing the underbelly of Port Tir-ek-Nameste, the expedition on those pack lizards through the rad swamps… I still dream of you, dear. Please don’t feel jealous.

  I know you do. I hear your dreams. But that alien watching us is all limbs and warmth and a beating heart. Go to her, Ndeki. Listen to her. Be with the living.

  Bahati vanished, departing with an imaginary slap to my mouth that made me instinctively wipe away blood that wasn’t there.

  “They back me up, don’t they?” said Silky out in the real world, her expression settling into a human sneer that could have graced Chikune’s face. I’d never seen her look at me that way before. I scanned around and saw the other faces staring back at me in a range from concern through fascination with this spectacle of a madman who was rumored to talk with voices in his head.

  Frakking vecks, the lot of them. “My first wife is angry because I listened to you – a frakking alien – when I didn’t heed her advice.” I answered Silky loudly. Most people at the range had such acute hearing that they would have overheard a whisper, but when I get angry, I get loud. “My second wife is crying from such a well of sorrow that she is flooding my head with tears.”

  Don’t exaggerate, snapped Bahati.

  “Shut up, Bahati. I’m making a point here, and you’re supposed to have gone off in a huff.”

  I felt that icy chill when I know I’ve screwed up. Everyone had heard me cross an invisible barrier when I went from someone who heard voices to someone who had conversations with them out loud.

  A few minutes earlier I had been considering walking out of the gate.

  Not now.

  “I might be mad,” I shouted, “but I’m not insane. Inside me are personality captures based on former combat AIs, echoes of my fallen brothers and sisters. You’ve all seen my spine.” I ripped off my shirt and slowly rotated to present my back. “See! What do you think those data ports cut into my spinal column were for? Decoration?”

  The faces that had watched me in fascination now turned away in disgust.

  “Don’t you dare be ashamed of me!” I shouted. “You see that stupid scoreboard? Well, study it every day. Every frakking hour, because I’m going to overtake the lot of you. I’m not just going to qualify as an agent. I’m going to come top. Do you hear?”

  “Enough!” barked the instructor. “Put your shirt back on, McCall, and either calm down or get out. I’ve got a lot to get through with you recruits and on a reduced timetable. We don’t have time for this.”

  I complied, glaring at Silky who had stood there silently as I had ranted. Her sneer had vanished the moment I’d started mouthing off.

  Then I caught myself and thought more clearly. Venting off like that – it was like a storm that had been building since the day we arrived at the camp and had now blown itself out: a necessary outburst for calm to be restored.

  I replayed my short-term memory (about the only mental augmentation that still functioned) and realized the alien had provoked my outburst. Silky had played me. She was the rainmaker who had summoned my storm.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “I do,” I mumbled through a jaw clamped shut.

  “Good. Now get to work, Marine.”

  For a second I thought she was contradicting herself. Hadn’t she told me I was in no fit state to fire a gun? But then I did get to work. With my brain.

  Now, I know, I like to talk about my philosophy as if all I want is to hit things. I mean, I do and it is a salve to my feelings, but that is not the entirety of my philosophy.

  If you saw me with my bulging arms coated in scars, my hair that looked as if it had been granted semi-autonomy after a brutal civil war, and the angry stare that spoke of sights you really didn’t want to hear about, then you would regard me as a brute. If you’re brave, then I’m the guy you crossed to the other side of the street to avoid, but if you’re sensible, then you’d move to another town to keep out of my way.

  Well, you’d be right to do so. I am a brute. But that doesn’t mean I’m dumb. You don’t get to make sergeant just because you have bigger muscles or a longer service record than the next candidate.

  I don’t say all that because I came up with a plan that will astonish you in its cerebral complexity and awesome level of inspiration. It’s more that my thinking engine was booting up after years of being mothballed.

  “Instructor,” I called out, as Zeb moved between pupils.

  “What is it, McCall?”

  “Medic’s orders, sir. I have to give my body a chance to recover from its gunshot wounds. Recoil from an NJ-2 is going to damage me.”

  “Understood.” Zeb nodded, grudgingly giving me the respect for making the right call. “Okay. Sit this session out and keep out of my face.”

  “With respect, sir, you said you are short of time on this course. I was a gunnery instructor for the Civilian Defense Force, and before that for the Legion.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me earlier? What do you think this is here, you choddering maggot? Cadet school? We are grown-ups. Now get over here so I can go over the training program with you.”

  Zeb’s program was designed to first teach beginners how to shoot a gun without killing themselves or their comrades, and then proceeded to more advanced challenges: such as hitting a target, and making sure the barrel didn’t melt. Most of us were so familiar with guns that they were practically an organ of our bodies, but being good at a thing doesn’t mean you can teach it to others, and there were several recruits whose gunnery skills weren’t up to scratch. But that was all right; I had taught basic shooting skills hundreds of times, and I was damned good. In fact, I was better than Zeb, a fact he accepted graciously.

  And at the end of the session, I gained a bonus twenty-five points to my score for helping him out. I was still bottom of the pack, but it was a first step to closing the gap.

  I was going to make agent if it killed me.

  — CHAPTER 40 —

  The day was a blur of instruction. And that made my old brain hurt to keep up. Holland Philby himself gave us a lecture on the background of what Revenge Squad was up against: the sinister consolidation of organized crime, the widespread corruption and the inevitable intolerance along racial and religious fault lines. That kind of thing.

  Philby spoke as if it were a given that Revenge Squad were the good guys, rough around the edges and aggrandizing themselves with plunder as they went, but nonetheless fighting the good fight against the forces of evil.

  I wasn’t buying any of that drent, except the bit about the money motive. I’d searched through public records, and if you were as cynical as Chikune, you could look at the expansion of protection agencies, such as Revenge Squad, and conclude that they had started to ramp up shortly before the crime wave that had swept the planet in recent months.

  I did believe Philby, however, when he said that Revenge Squad was currently caught between being too small for the big players to bother about, and being large enough to protect ourselves. We had to expand rapidly or be crushed. Already the regional criminal overlord had declared her intention to exterminate Revenge Squad.

  Mrs. Yannine Gregory was the name of this ganglord, and she was expanding her operations by the hostile takeover of smaller gangs. If you declared allegiance to her then you could continue to lead your gang as a franchise within her larger organization. Alternatively, you could all die, which is probably the course I would pick if I were a minor ganglord, because I’m not sure I could prostrate myse
lf before someone with a name like Mrs. Gregory. I mean, come on, with a name like that she wasn’t even trying. To be honest, I was barely taking anything in by that stage but I paid sharp attention to Philby’s account of Gregory when he let drop the name of one of the local ganglords who had been subjected to this hostile takeover.

  Volk.

  And when Volk had come to Sijambo Farm, I now assumed he had done so under the orders of his big boss.

  The team roster of villains I wanted to kill had gained a second name.

  ——

  That night, just before lights out, when surely the day’s surprises were finally over, Silky took her turn at delivering bombshells.

  I was by my rack, stripping down for some serious shuteye when she suddenly twisted and punched me hard in the gut.

  “You should have involved me,” she fumed, using her own voice, which had a shimmering, crystalline ring to it that won my immediate attention. Probably because I’d never heard her speak a human language with her own voice before. “We are in this together. Separation is unthinkable, but that is what might happen if you don’t qualify as an agent. If there’s any sneaking around in future, then we do it together.”

  She was all blazing fury, and white skin flushed with lilac veins, and taut legs, and underwear, and that exotic voice, and breasts… And if my thoughts sound blurred it’s partly because Silky had landed such a solid punch that I was bent over double and struggling for breath, but mostly because if Silky were human, I think I would have fallen in love with her at that point. I tell you, that realization came as quite a shock. Two days earlier I hadn’t thought I was capable of feeling that way about anyone again. Then I’d had a hint of that with Magenta, and now this!

  She was amazing. For an alien. I looked down at my stomach and saw a red mark spreading where her fist had landed. For frakk’s sake, she had actually hurt me! That was a mean punch.

  Like I said, I was suddenly in awe of my wife. If you’ve never met a Marine of my batch, you might not understand, but I’m an Assault Marine. I’m rated for sustained 8g acceleration and sixteen vertical gees for up to three minutes with only a forty percent chance of losing consciousness.

  In other words, it takes a lot more than you’ve probably got to wind an Assault Marine with a single punch.

  “I’m sorry that I had to hit you,” she said, “but I am increasingly concerned that violence seems to be the only language you understand.”

  “Fair point,” I gasped with what little breath I had available.

  The anger drained from her black eyes, which I thought a shame because the look suited her in a scary kind of way. She took on a businesslike demeanor. “Now I have your attention, we need to talk more without being overheard.”

  After drawing something from under her bedroll on the upper bunk, she shoved me down to park my butt on my own mattress, and then straddled me. As she shuffled up my thighs, until our flesh pressed close together, conjoined from our hips to our naked chests, I tried to tell her to back off, but I still couldn’t do more than gasp. I was uncomfortably aware of the underwear that pulled tightly around her hips, bulging with warm flesh that I was definitely not ready to explore. But she was so forceful that I would have had to throw her off me to slow her down.

  And that was precisely what I was gearing up to do when she touched me in my most intimate place.

  With a practiced air, she undid the flap of false skin behind my left ear to expose my cerebral auxiliary port and plugged in the stubby cable she’d secreted under her mattress.

  Keep her out of here, Sanaa screamed.

  She mustn’t see, Bahati said at the same time. Please!

  Sarge and the other ghosts simply wailed in terror.

  But there was such speed and determination from Silky that I lacked the resolve to fend her off. I was barely beginning to bring up my arm to unplug the cable from my head when she plugged in the other end behind her own left ear and my whole sense of reality shifted.

  I was still in the room – it wasn’t as if I’d been transported to a virtual reality – but the taste, the quality of reality had altered. Imagine if you had been born with only one functioning eye, and now you were seeing in 3-D for the first time after the medics added a second orb. Let’s add in an upgrade of your sight from monochrome to color, and now we’re getting there. The world had suddenly acquired more depth.

  In my thirties, I switched sides in the civil war. I became a free man, a volunteer soldier for the Human Legion. But even that didn’t stop my superiors tinkering with my body’s design. This cerebral port was a Legion addition that had long been filled by my combat AI when he wasn’t inside my combat armor. But the port’s uses were manifold. Ever since childhood, we had possessed the ability to record images, sound recordings, and snatches of full-sensory experience, and store them in the not-so-natural portions of our augmented brains. The port behind the ear made it much easier to transfer those recordings.

  More than once I had studied vital reports made by scouts after the data they had recorded was retrieved from their corpses. It was an eerie and deeply personal experience that drove some mad.

  But this?

  I’d never heard of plugging brains together. And with an alien?

  Answer with your mind, NJ. Can you hear these words?

  I did. I heard them in my mind, Silky’s words voiced by a standard toneless computer voice. Other than the accent, the feeling of conversing through thought had the familiarity of all those years spent with Conteh, and more recently with my ghosts. Speaking of which, the shades of my fallen comrades spouted a constant stream of horror at this intrusion, trying to drown out Silky in their cacophony of wailing.

  I felt guilty for ignoring my friends, but this mind-to-mind link could be useful. I can hear you, I thought back.

  “Can you hear my words now?”

  Silky spoke her words aloud in English with her alien accent, and simultaneously the standard computer translation voice she had always used before came directly into my head.

  I felt sick. My eyes watered profusely. My nose started to run. But she didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

  “I heard you,” I whispered. “Both times.” I thought and spoke simultaneously: “Can you hear me on both channels?”

  We quickly established that she could not. Instead of words, she heard only white noise through the link. It seemed we had only one-way communication, from her to me. A case of shut up and listen. Great! It wasn’t a surprise, though. I had taken so many head wounds over the years that I already knew half my brain augmentations were fried.

  We waited a few minutes for our minds to relax into this link.

  My brain settled. Even my ghosts had gone silent, fleeing to the deepest recesses of my spine. I tried to make sense of what had disturbed them so much. If they had been warning me against the danger of allowing direct access to my brain, then I would have understood. But their fear was that Silky would see them, not that she would hurt me.

  I decided that was a mystery for another day, preferably when I wasn’t pressed up against the body of this nearly naked female, an aspect to this situation that was becoming a real distraction. With my arm I wiped away some of the drying fluids from my face, and cautiously pulled back from Silky until all too soon the cable pulled tight.

  I stared into the darkness of Silky’s eyes. It wasn’t because I was looking for a connection there so much as I was trying not to think about the way her nipples scraped my chest in time with her breathing.

  You want to kill Volk, she said through her mind. This time the word shapes were English, but there were flickers of meaning and emotion behind them that were entirely nonhuman. Just listening to her talk was unsettling, but darkly thrilling at the same time.

  Well, NJ, am I correct?

  “Yes,” I replied. “And I suspect that if you asked that question of all the recruits, you would get the same answer.” Either we’re the squad recruited specifically to take Volk down, I
thought to myself, not daring to voice this, or we’re the dumb twonks set up to provide a diversion and take the hits while the real crew takes him down.

  I agree, she said. I asked Shahdi Mowad what secret had passed between you in the woods. She explained what Volk did to her family and I heard the truth in her hurt.

  Oh, just wonderful. Now I’ve a jealous wife checking up on everyone I talk to.

  Funnily enough, I didn’t voice that thought either, but that didn’t stop Silky saying down the mind link: I am not jealous, NJ, but I need to understand your interactions in order to keep you safe.

  The cable seemed to fizz with surprise as we both realized at the same time that she could hear my thoughts. It seemed that my ghosts had drowned out my words. Armed with this privacy, we talked openly with our minds about all we had learned and suspected about Revenge Squad and the people here. Well, mostly. I didn’t want to let on about the Ninja Skulk. The more Silky spoke, the more I heard meaning beyond mere words. I glimpsed flashes of what it felt like to be this separate individual and that carried infinitely more richness than words could ever convey.

  I prayed she couldn’t see inside me the same way.

  I’d lived cheek by sweaty jowl with soldiers nearly all my life. I’d fought a war with a tube stuck up my butt, trapped with my own stink inside combat armor for weeks on end. Modesty and privacy had never been part of my life, but we had always had our secrets. Oh, yes!

  I wanted to believe in Silky. I wanted someone by my side, even though I was terrified that if I grew too close, she would die like all the others had before her. Maybe I was willing to take that risk if only I knew I could truly trust her.

  Can I ask you a question? I asked.

  I couldn’t believe I said that. I sounded impossibly shy, but this was something new in my world. I wasn’t used to new.

  Of course. Silky sounded surprised. Or maybe she felt surprised. Between the empathetic tentacles glued to her head, her words, and the sensations that were coming across the cable between our minds, I couldn’t tell how I was sensing her feelings, or indeed whether I was making this all up.