After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  The moment I had all four limbs out and stuck to the wall, my heart jumped when I heard a bat call out a territorial challenge. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was laughing at me.

  Suddenly, an explosion of adrenaline shot through me and the bat was utterly forgotten.

  I’d lost my grip!

  If my heart had jumped at the bat’s call, now it leaped right up to my eyeballs. I slid down the wall ten feet before ramming my fingers into the wall so hard that the tendons in my wrists stood up like ultra-steel cables.

  The extenders converted the energy of my grip into a static charge that attracted the gloves to whatever surface I found myself on. Zero-g boots use a similar technique to stick Marines and Spacers to the hulls and walkways of starships and orbital stations.

  So far so good. Problem was, some surfaces are easier to charge than others, and Assault Marines are designed to fall, not hover.

  Instinct cut in, insisting that if I moved a muscle, I would drop. So I clung there.

  Meanwhile, Chikune was getting away.

  I looked down but saw only darkness.

  I willed myself to take one hand off the wall, to start climbing down after the veck.

  But I couldn’t. A monkey-brain instinct was screaming at me that the idiot monkeys who clambered around the forest canopy in the dead of night were the ones who never got to contribute to the next stage of evolution.

  Come on, Bahati encouraged. You’ve dropped from orbit. How difficult can it be to climb down a building?

  She was right of course. My fear of falling was letting this opportunity slip away. I’d climbed down higher walls than this before, for frakk’s sake. If I just believed in myself, I’d be fine. It was all in the mind. I wouldn’t fall.

  Keeping the rest of my body absolutely still, I lifted my hand a millimeter off the wall.

  And fell.

  — CHAPTER 47 —

  I pushed in with fingers and toes and arrested my drop. Then I slid twice more in quick succession, ramming my fingers against the wall so hard that I could feel my nails being torn to shreds inside the grip extenders.

  I decided to simply drop to the ground and have done with it. But when I looked down I realized that I still had another forty feet to fall, and I was getting too old to bounce.

  I would survive the fall, but I would make a dent in the path. And a lot of noise. When an Assault Marine makes a hard landing, it’s not like a snowflake settling onto a quaint winter landscape.

  I lurched down another few feet. Another unhelpful primitive monkey instinct made me ram my boots into the wall. But I wasn’t a monkey. Heck, I didn’t even have gripping feet, which would have been helpful right about now. The reaction force flicked me off the wall.

  Instantly, my drop training cut in. I kicked away from the wall, twisting to present the shoulder that hadn’t been shot as recently as the other. I curled into a ball and waited for the ground.

  I could manage that, no problem. Falling is the easy part.

  The trick to landing is to redirect as much as possible of the force of impact away from your body. Do it right and a controlled landing looks balletic.

  I didn’t get it right.

  All I knew was a confused blur of moons-lit shapes.

  As I rolled along the path and out away onto the grass bank, flashes like gray fusion bombs kept popping in my head, whether I closed my eyes or not. And they were mostly closed because if I didn’t keep eyes, mouth and every other orifice clamped as tightly shut as they could, I would scream with the pain.

  I burned with agony.

  I hurt from the battered shoulder that had led my fall, to the agonizing echo in the other where my bullet wound had reopened. A newly cracked rib and a battered knee added to the roar of protest from a score of wounds that had never properly healed.

  The world was stretching to a narrow cylinder – I was going to black out. I couldn’t let myself go. Must not let Chikune get away.

  Then I remembered to breathe.

  Turned out that had been my problem because the world rushed back into my head, but that brought fresh waves of pain crashing against me.

  Five minutes! That’s how long I lay stunned in the grass before I took in my surroundings.

  I’d climbed out a fourth-floor window, fallen about thirty-five feet, but I rolled about fifty. I was proud of that. Plus, I was now cloaked in the night. I remembered to activate the scent camouflage Conduit had given me a few days earlier, solving my final challenge: how to evade Goat’s nose.

  I edged into a crouch, concluded nothing was broken beyond one rib and I wasn’t bleeding out. The fall had shredded my grip extenders, though. All this pain had been to avoid passing through the blockhouse entrance. Now that my grip extenders were ruined. I would have to go back through that front entrance anyway.

  What a frakk-up.

  Just to brighten my mood, rain began to sheet down.

  May as well get on with it, I mused.

  My ghosts confirmed my assessment: I was bruised, foolish, and in serious drent if they caught me on the way back. I’d better capture Chikune, then, so I could return a hero.

  I took slow and wincing steps over to the office block. Last time I’d snooped around here, I had been fueled by alcohol, curiosity, and I suspect happy drugs too, courtesy of Revenge Squad. This time I was tooled up with homemade spy gear to open things that should remain locked and hide myself from prying eyes and noses. I walked there brazenly and scouted the outside. Of Chikune there was no direct sign, but I found what I’d hoped to. Footprints below a window on the west wall.

  The window was unlocked.

  Perfect. I slid back the window, squeezed through and was in.

  As soon as I had penetrated the target building, I knew I’d made the right choice by not caving in to my nightmare.

  Admittedly, in my case penetrating the building’s perimeter meant falling flat on my face onto loose carpet tiles beneath a window that I could only squeeze through after I sucked my gut into my spine.

  So what if I lacked grace? I was getting the job done. I’d spent all that time farming – trying to forget what I’d been and who I’d been with – and forgotten that this was what I was meant to do. I still felt naked without my SA-71 in my hands, and orphaned without Conteh in my ear, but even in my isolation, my muscles forgot their bruises and became chemically fueled power plants, my tendons ultra-steel cables, and my mind… I would like to say my mind resembled a 100 petaflop super-AI, but I think an automated waffle toaster was a more realistic comparison. The key point was that I felt alive!

  Karim’s corpse in the woods – Silky with her magic brain cable – Volk calling in an air attack on my Sijambo Farm – they had all been defibrillator shocks to revive me from my stupor. Now I was finally alive.

  About time, said Bahati, and I could hear her beautiful smile.

  — CHAPTER 48 —

  I was in.

  Journal off, tooled up with ninja gadgets, and doubts beaten into submission, my body flushed with the illicit buzz of rifling through hard-paper records in the office block. So far I had tried and failed to locate Chikune, but he was a sneaky bastard and so I wasn’t entirely surprised. He was here somewhere, I was sure.

  I decided to be sneaky too. I had a hunch that Denisoff knew dirt about Volk and Philby, but I left his office for later. I started instead next door in the archive room, courtesy of Denisoff’s birth year that had gotten me through the locked door.

  Until I came to Camp Prelude I’d never heard of hard-paper. Armed with the training Revenge Squad had given me, I fiddled with the viewer device on the desk with near competence as I took some hard-paper sheets at random out of a cabinet whose physical security was no barrier to my new lock-picking skills, and read their microscopic hard-burned information that was theoretically tamper proof.

  I stopped.

  I had spent weeks fixating on how to sneak in here without alerting security. Now that I’d done so (apparently), a
nd I literally had what I wanted at my fingertips, I wasn’t sure where to start. I had a host of mysteries and conspiracy theories. Should I explore them or uncover details about Volk so I could kill him?

  What you need is an officer, Sanaa told me.

  You’re kidding me. Those days are over.

  It’s true, she said. You were always brilliant at making things happen. So long as someone else set your objectives and parameters.

  I sighed. I suppose you have someone in mind.

  You know I have.

  You’re not my boss, Sanaa.

  No, but you could be my sidekick. Just until you’re settled in with Revenge Squad. And that’s why you should forget Volk. We’ll be meeting him soon enough. You should be finding out what we’re getting into with this Revenge Squad operation.

  You know, I told her, I do listen to you ghosts sometimes. Efia told me once that if caught in a choice between two paths in life, I should choose the more positive one. Killing Volk is surely a more positive thing to do than dig up dirt on my employer. Dirt that might be nothing more than Chikune’s mind games.

  Volk it was.

  While Sanaa seethed, I searched for information on the ganglord, but I could find nothing on him.

  Then I remembered one of Magenta’s killers referring to their boss as the ‘wolf’.

  Nothing there either, but under ‘Timberwolf’ there was a file of hard-paper sheets as thick as my thumb.

  Timberwolf or Volk. He didn’t have any other names, and that fitted his vintage with a date of birth listed as unknown but estimated at early 24th century. Tours of duty in his original incarnation: unknown.

  I wasn’t surprised. The soldiers of Volk’s era had been regarded by their alien masters as surplus to requirements, a failed model of human in the years before the Human Marine Corps was formed. Volk was meant for the recycling vats, his cryopod to be used to store a higher quality model of soldier. But clandestine preparations for the civil war that claimed most of my life were well in train by Volk’s day. Officially he had been recycled. In truth, he was stored in secret, a military asset waiting to be discovered by the Human Legion many years later.

  Probably.

  A lot of that was guesswork, based on the experiences of others, including some very unreliable witnesses.

  More important to me was what happened to Volk after his discharge from his second military life, after resurrection by the Legion.

  He officially became a reservist in 2727. Ahh, now that could be significant. Volk hadn’t been discharged to Klin-Tula. He’d been dumped on Esoba-3, which at six light years away was our next door neighbor.

  The Legion’s final posting for me had been to the frakk-up mess that was Klin-Tula, but the idea of moving to another star system had never occurred to me. The cost of passage was immense, but not impossible for someone who put their mind to it. But no one did. I guess it felt like deserting our posts.

  Volk had, though. Arrived on a passenger freighter in 2746. That marked him as unusual.

  In 2747, he started to get mentions as a rising gangster in the region.

  There was a lot of detail. Plenty of drug running but also protection rackets, murder, affray. Volk was a very bad man. But that didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. What happened between 2756 and 2758? There was no detail. Nothing. There should be something but it had been wiped. Then I remembered Holland Philby explaining that Volk had been forced to work for an even bigger gangster: Mrs. Gregory.

  I shook my head. I’d been learning about her for weeks, but I still couldn’t get around the most feared villain on the continent having a name like Mrs. Gregory.

  Bartok the slayer. Dua’lk the Impaler. Slimehouse Sleen. Those were good names, but Mrs. Gregory? Anyone with that name should wear uncomfortable shoes, a handbag without a concealed weapon inside, and she wouldn’t wear a hat because she would wear a bonnet.

  I pulled Gregory’s file. She was a civilian, which made her unusual, and from Earth, which made her rarer than a Hardit’s smile.

  There was a lot about her. Too much. I could spend all night learning about Mrs. Gregory and her bonnets, but I couldn’t see a hidden connection to Revenge Squad, and as for her connection to Volk. He hated and feared her.

  I skimmed references to Volk in Gregory’s file, and found details of associates, applications, and legitimate business fronts. If I grabbed my SA-71, or better still my SA-70 sniper rifle and hid along a road he frequented, I could probably take him out with a well-aimed shot. That wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted to take out the people who had ransacked Mowad’s farm and killed her family. I wanted the thugs who had ruined my farm. I wanted to hurt them. And for that, I would need Revenge Squad at my back. Killing Volk was a good Plan B, though.

  I looked more widely. There were staff records here too. The prospect enticed: Chikune? Silky? Mowad?

  I reached for Silky’s file. I actually brought it out but then thought better of it. I knew more about Silky than they did. What I wanted to know now was about Revenge Squad.

  They didn’t seem to have a file labelled ‘Revenge Squad’s Darkest Secrets’, so I picked on Docking Tube, the primary executive officer.

  Why had Philby been so frightened of her?

  Her file revealed that despite her ship rat name, Docking Tube was a native of Esoba-3, born to colonist parents. Her background wasn’t in flying pressurized gas canisters: she was an accountant. A little cross-referencing confirmed Philby’s story that Revenge Squad had been formed by four accountants back in 2756, Docking Tube being one of them.

  There was no dirt here, but there was a coincidence. Volk had come from Esoba-3 too. Was the planet so bad that even Klin-Tula sounded like a utopia? I checked the date when Docking Tube had arrived on the planet: 2746, arriving on a passenger freighter called Phoenix.

  Several ships arrive from Esoba-3 every year, Sanaa pointed out, but I could tell she scented blood, same as me.

  I was trembling with excitement as I searched for records on Holland Philby. Had he come from Esoba-3 too?

  I glimpsed a light.

  It was just a blip. Gone before I’d fully been aware of it. But although my head is largely broken, I can still do short-term memory. I replayed the optical data feed from my eyes and sure enough, there had been a light outside for about a second. I looked through the window but saw nothing there but rain.

  Reflection off the raindrops, said the Sarge. The layout of this area means that light probably came from next door in Denisoff’s office.

  The Sarge was getting good at stuff like that. I didn’t doubt he was correct, but I had Philby’s file in my gloved hand and I wanted to know his secrets.

  Be smart, Sanaa said. You say you want positive? Think how positively your new employers will view you if you catch who’s next door.

  I hate it when Sanaa is right. I glanced longingly at Philby’s file and then, quiet as could be, I put everything back in its place and resealed all the locks, feeling fortunate that I’d heard Philby was having difficulty in recruiting a forensics expert.

  Chikune was good at digging up dirt on people. Either he would tell me what I wanted to know about Revenge Squad secrets, or else I would capture him and hand him over as a traitor. I was in a win-win situation.

  Either way, Chikune wasn’t getting away this time.

  ——

  I found him with his back to me in the office Denisoff shared with the other assistant squad leaders, huddled over a hard-paper document. He wore a form-concealing cloak. This was the Ninja Skulk all right. Caught red-handed. By me. Which would make NJ McCall a hero.

  I crept toward Chikune. He was mine. I would pump him for info and then turn him over to Denisoff for the extra scoreboard points that would surely follow.

  My injuries were temporarily forgotten as I sprang at the intruder. I clamped my arms around his neck in a choke hold while twisting him enough to keep him off balance but not enough to snap his neck, however much Chikun
e might deserve it.

  I caught him completely by surprise. No scream, no attempt to throw me out of the hold. But there was a reaction. Oh, yes! A blinding stab of panic in my head. It wasn’t painful, more deeply disorienting.

  If you’ve ever been in a deep sleep when some skangat prankster throws a bucket of icy water on your face, while simultaneously applying electrical current to selected nodes on your body, then you’ll know what I felt like.

  I had no idea what was going on, so I reacted instinctively by tightening my chokehold.

  Instantly, the blast in my head faded, choked away as I struggled the life out of… Out of…?

  The person I was throttling was smaller than their cloak made out.

  “Silky?” I whispered.

  I released the hold and Silky dropped to her knees, clutching her throat through which she was squeezing heaving gasps.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, but she could only gasp in reply.

  “And Chikune? Are you in league with that bastard?”

  She struggled to her feet. “I don’t know anything about Chikune,” she wheezed. “But I know I told you not to go sneaking around without me. You frakktastic dog chodder, NJ. What are you playing at? Did you even stop to think at all?”

  Something snapped inside me. I bit my lip until the blood gushed, but I barely noticed because I was so utterly sick of being treated like an idiot. As for having a go at me for sneaking around, no matter how incompetent Silky’s cursing… Hypocritical frakking alien! I was snorting like an enraged hippo.

  I know I’m not easy to get along with, but by that point in my life there had only been four occasions when I’d exploded in incandescent rage, which works out at less than two per century. That moment would have been the fifth.

  Except the voices stopped me.

  Not the ones in my head, but the human ones out there in the office block.

  The voices were hushed.

  They were excited.