After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  Volk’s groans resonated with defeat, though he could have been faking it.

  Mrs. Gregory worried me. She hadn’t been exaggerating – some things the Earth people could do were practically magic. She didn’t look bothered in the slightest that Silky was covering her and Volk with a gun.

  “Delighted to meet you, my dear,” purred Mrs. Gregory from her seat. “You will make a welcome addition to this afternoon’s entertainment.”

  Silky and I exchanged glances and then without needing to say a word we kicked Volk in unison. It didn’t make me feel better, though, because Gregory wasn’t worried enough.

  I stepped back from Volk and readied to fire at his boss.

  — CHAPTER 65 —

  Now what?

  I’d spent my time at Camp Prelude accepting that my role with Revenge Squad was to be a filing clerk with fists. I was here at Universal Agents to discover little accounting discrepancies.

  And now here I was with a gun trained not on the target of our mission but his Earthborn mistress with the disarmingly nice name and skin like a balloon long past retirement. Silky told me she had called Denisoff, and he had told her Revenge Squad backup was on its way. She was standing with one foot on Volk’s prone body, brandishing his combat knives, and when I say brandish, I mean she was twitching their viciously sharp tips as if consumed by a fierce hunger to slice into flesh. I don’t know what Volk felt but she sure scared me.

  With a stroke of luck, Revenge Squad back up would arrive before too long and someone at the right pay grade could decide whether I was a hero, or responsible for a horrendous blunder.

  Mrs. Gregory looked mildly irritated, as if all this life or death struggle was a minor inconvenience. By contrast Volk didn’t look like he was going to play nice and wait. He was rubbing the side of his mouth but I could see in his eyes that he was weighing up his chances. What had I been thinking of? I should have stomped on his head harder while I had the chance.

  Gregory saw this too. “Wait!” she cautioned Volk. “No sudden moves. Not until Kavislev-Mez joins us.”

  “The disinterested witness?” Volk’s face was squashed against the floor, which made his words squashed too, but the surprise was obvious in his voice. “Why?”

  “Never you mind,” snapped his mistress.

  Volk’s reply was to bare his teeth like an animal. Whatever control Gregory had re-established over her creature, it was fraying fast.

  I switched my weapon’s aim from Gregory to Volk, but gave Mrs. Gregory my best scowl. “Tell this Kavislev-Mez to stay away,” I told her. “Anyone walks through that door I don’t like the look of and I’ll shoot them.”

  “Is that so?” The crazy woman rose from her chair and stepped toward me. She kept on coming.

  I backed away and switched aim back to Gregory.

  “Stop it!” I shouted.

  “Stop or what?” she demanded, picking up the pace. “Stop or you’ll shoot? I don’t think so. I’ve been reading up about you while you’ve been wasting time. You won’t shoot. Not with your endearing psychosis.”

  Volk moved.

  “Stay down, Volk!” Gregory shouted. “I don’t think McCall has it in him to shoot, even if you attacked his wife.” She halted a pace away from me and raised an eyebrow. “I would be intrigued to find out, but that is an experiment we shan’t conduct today. Not with my people coming to my aid. Would you like to prove me wrong, Mr. McCall?”

  I shrugged, trying to hide the gut-numbing realization that she could be right. I inched toward my wife. “Maybe,” I said, “but she has no such problem with killing.” I threw the gun to Silky.

  It was a risk, but Silky was smart enough to read my intentions correctly. She dropped Volk’s blades and he only managed to raise himself as far as a kneeling position before Silky put a warning round just past his shoulder.

  “If either one moves again,” I told her, “kill them.”

  We locked into a new equilibrium. “Oh dear,” said Gregory with a smile. “It seems I didn’t anticipate this development. How could I have been so stupid?”

  I grabbed Volk’s blades, but I didn’t trust myself to kill with them either, so I threw them far out of reach to clatter behind a row of chairs.

  What was with this psychotic Earthborn? I thought I had a few problems myself in the mental department, but I had nothing on Mrs. Gregory, who talked as if we were pieces in a jolly little game she was playing. As I pondered whether she really was insane, a pale-brown humanoid knocked on the door to the bunker and walked in, hands high.

  At first I decided the newcomer was the most imminent threat. It took a moment to work out what I was seeing. I decided it was probably a human female. Her skin was the muddy brown of the silt-laden run-off that filled the moat around my farm and her clothing – thick scarf bunched around her neck and a plain dress with a modest ankle length skirt and hugely flared sleeves – was programmed to exactly match her skin tone. Her jet-black hair stood up perpendicular to her skin. Not just on her head but the hairs of the neck and arms also stuck out like a cat in perpetual crisis. The way she walked and the slightly slumped way she held her body suggested this was someone who had only ever fought with their mind. This would be the disinterested witness: Kavislev-Mez.

  As she closed and sealed the hatch, I downgraded the newcomer’s threat level, but upgraded Mrs. Gregory whose pale skin changed before my eyes, first becoming mottled, and then the mottling joining up into red sheets like furious sunburn. Her eyes hemorrhaged, the whites becoming a sea of demonic red. Her hitherto immaculate attire now seemed to choke a beast within her as she pulled at the neck of her blouse, ripping the fabric and pinging a few buttons into flight.

  I sighed in relief when this travesty of a human being lowered her eyelids across those hideous eyes, but as she did so, Silky screamed. The empathetic array antenna on her head stood up in echo of the disinterested witness. I felt her pain as well as heard it, and then as an after-shock I felt Silky’s agonizing realization that she had let me down.

  The moment she screamed, I naturally ran to her aid, or more specifically to grab the gun off her.

  But I was too slow.

  Volk now cradled the gun in his arms, while I made do with cradling Silky’s slumped body.

  “It would appear we all have weaknesses, Mr. McCall,” said a guttural voice from Gregory’s mouth. “The psychic shock I sent her will do no permanent damage.”

  “Unlike the darts I’m going to enjoy putting through your skulls,” said Volk. “That will be very permanent.”

  “Put the gun down!” screamed Gregory.

  “What? Are you mad?” Volk’s eyes lit up, though in a more metaphorical way than Gregory’s had. “You are, aren’t you? Your parasite is finally taking you over.”

  “Volk, Volk! Really, have you learned nothing about paying respect to your superiors? Shall I order you to snap off another of your fingers? Perhaps to prove your loyalty, I should remove another appendage of your body. Or has your loyalty been an illusion all along?”

  The veins stood out like cables on Volk’s neck. His fists pumped.

  “Know your place! You are a worthless psychopath, but these two could be valuable to my organization. Yes, I think I shall remove your tongue,” Gregory taunted in a voice that was becoming more human. “I’ll chop it up and coat the meat in flour and a masala of roasted Indian spices. I’m not a monster, Volk. I would wait for your mouth to heal before I made you eat my cooking.”

  “You disease-ridden pox whore. You’ve lost your mind to the thing inside you, given into its degenerate obsessions.” I could almost see the cogs whirring in his head. “Which means you are no longer legally human. And there’s no reason for Mez to witness me killing these two to keep your hands clean. Leave us, witness.”

  “Poor Volk,” said Gregory. “It’s not their deaths I wish to be witnessed.”

  I almost felt sorry for Volk. He looked utterly bamboozled. Then he worked it out at the same time as me. M
ez was here to witness someone else’s death. Volk’s.

  “Why, you alien filth,” Volk growled as he hung the gun by its strap from his shoulder and then came at her with his bare hands, the better to snap her neck.

  Mrs. Gregory spread out her fingers at the onrushing berserker as if about to cast a spell.

  Volk slumped to the ground, his momentum carrying him forward just enough to lap against her feet.

  My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I just saw.

  Gregory knelt and grabbed Volk’s head by his ears so she could look him in the eyes. “Traitor!” she screamed and spat into his face. “I thought it was mere incompetence on your part that forced me to take your operations here under direct control.”

  When Volk only groaned in reply, Gregory rubbed her wrist against the man she named traitor. Volk jerked in response, his bloodshot eyes suddenly pinned wide open. What had she shot inside him, hellfire? “Don’t you dare die on me until I’ve finished,” screamed the Earthborn.

  All of which made for a fascinating spectacle, but hadn’t stopped me from lowering Silky to the floor and edging toward Volk’s gun.

  “I sometimes wondered why you and Holland Philby didn’t simply shoot each other,” said Gregory. “Now, thanks to a few minutes inside your data citadel, my team tell me what has been in plain sight of my eyes for years. You both work for the Cabal. Did they tell you to coerce farmers in remote areas? Did they? Preparing for a coup? All this time and–”

  I lunged for the gun.

  Gregory saw it coming, grabbed the carbine and aimed it at me. Volk’s head crashed to the ground.

  “Back off, soldier!” she said. By the way she handled the heavy gun, she was very familiar with weapons, and stronger than seemed possible for an Earthborn. I backed away.

  With one hand, Gregory yanked up Volk’s head, but he had escaped her revenge because even when she rubbed her wrist against his neck, he remained lifeless.

  She slammed his face against the floor with a crack of shattering bone and cartilage. I watched, wondering whether our turn was next, as she smashed Volk against the ground again and again until his mouth and nose were reduced to pulp. There was no overt anger to her violence, her movement efficient, her face a blank.

  “No matter, Volk,” she said calmly. “I will secure others who shall not escape the consequences of their treachery with such ease.”

  Gregory stood rocking back on her heels for a few moments before a little warmth returned to her cold countenance. “Kavislev-Mez, what did you just see?” she asked.

  The disinterested witness replied in an unhurried voice. “Volk threatened you and you shot him. I note your digital weapons are licensed and that this is an open carry zone. It is my professional remit only to witness, not to interpret. Nonetheless, it is my amateur interpretation of events that you killed Volk in self-defense.”

  “I see. And my final words to the dying man. What were they?”

  “Ma’am, I regret that I am of a somewhat nervous disposition. Violence disrupts my memory. The horror of Volk’s death so affected my state of mind that I cannot trust my recollection of events after you shot him, and therefore I regretfully decline to offer what must be regarded an untrustworthy account of what happened next.”

  “Thank you, my dear. I am sure your witness account will be enough to persuade the courts to compensate me for this unprovoked attack by legally passing this traitor’s business interests over to me. Now, did you seal the bunker as you came in?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Gregory seemed to remember Silky and I were still in the room. She regarded us for a moment. Her skin was growing pale again and her eyes looked merely bloodshot.

  “I imagine your Revenge Squad friends are on their way here. I know my friends are, and–” She kicked Volk’s corpse. “–his lot probably are too. I suggest we wait here and pass the time with a little chat. I would offer you coffee, but I fear my imported beans, freshly ground, would be wasted upon you. And that would offend me. By the time I am finished, I am sure we will all be best friends.”

  Even bat shit crazy people have their uses. I was happy for Mrs. Gregory to bide her time while Silky recovered her strength.

  Then my eyes caught movement at the rear of the bunker and I doubted we would have as much time as Gregory thought.

  Smoke was billowing in through one of the ventilation grills.

  — CHAPTER 66 —

  While I was consulting with my ghosts as to how we could turn the smoke to our advantage, our glorious Revenge Squad combat accountant, Cadman Rivero, reminded us of his continued existence by coming to and choking on the smoky air. To be honest, I’d forgotten he was there, and by the violence of his coughing I worried he might not be with us much longer.

  “Oh, do stop that performance,” spat Mrs. Gregory. “This is a bunker. I know its specification because it was built to my requirements. This area is armored and sealed against nuclear, chemical, biological, and cyber-attack. There is enough food and water to last entire lifetimes. I am quite certain it can cope with a little smoke blowing our way.”

  Even so, Gregory moved to an equipment console, brought up what looked like a status display and began activating controls that did not seem to tell her what she wanted.

  “Mez,” she ordered, nodding at the entrance we had all used, “check the door status.”

  Mez obeyed, hurrying to the door and examining the door controls. With the robe-like flare to the arms of her dress, and its color and pattern indistinguishable from her skin, she looked like an organic machine.

  “I can’t,” squeaked Mez. “They’re locked, ma’am.”

  The alien red flooded back into Gregory’s eyes, but she caught and controlled the parasite this time. The red flood receded.

  “Everyone relax,” she said in a voice calm enough to make an enraged Wolf apologize and go home. “We are temporarily incommoded. Nothing more.”

  I looked at Silky. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means we’re stuck here,” said Cadman, before coughing for emphasis.

  “Don’t interrupt!” yelled Gregory, or not-Gregory because that manic growl was back in her voice. She pointed a finger at Cadman who promptly slumped back down to the floor from which he had so recently risen, shot by something that flew out of Gregory’s finger.

  “Just a stun round so we have some privacy,” Gregory said.

  I went over to Cadman and checked. He was alive and unconscious.

  “What are those things?” I asked.

  “Why, they’re my digital weapons of course.” She wriggled her fingers.

  “How do they operate?” Silky asked. “I didn’t see any flashes or darts.”

  “Indeed, you did not. It is possible that if you make the correct sequence of choices, you will live through this encounter and under my employment. You will forgive me if I choose not to list the many ways in which I could kill a potential future employee.”

  “We’re wasting time,” I said. “You can’t kill us with the witness here.”

  “Really? Don’t be so sure.”

  “And we need to get out anyway because that smoke isn’t clearing. And if this bunker was properly sealed then not a single particle should have penetrated inside.”

  The slap of shock to Gregory’s face told me she hadn’t thought of that. Clearly she was of the class of otherwise impressive people who need dumb minders like me around them because they’re too clever to notice the blindingly obvious. “Regrettably you are correct,” she admitted. “I instructed my assault auditors to establish direct control of Universal Agents, and I fear they have concluded the only way to improve the security of this building is to raze it to the ground. This is what one must do if one discovers a nest of traitors, one must burn them out.”

  “And given the way we’re locked in and the bunker isn’t sealed properly, those traitors altered your spec,” said Silky.

  “So it would appear.”

&nbs
p; “Which makes me think the fire was set to kill you,” added Silky.

  Gregory shot us both a look of hatred, but it was human hatred.

  “Let us see if Revenge Squad can make their own alterations on their way in,” said Silky and brought out her handheld comm.

  “Don’t!” warned Gregory.

  Silky ignored her.

  Gregory swung her gun around to aim to me. “Don’t or I kill him. And that would be such a waste of a good body.”

  What was all this obsession with my battered old body? Had someone been slipping irresistibility pheromones into my coffee?

  “A body like his is built to soak up punishment and that would allow me such deliciously extended tortures of his flesh… I would enjoy him for a long time before he could take no more.”

  The Earther fired a round at my feet, the dart denting the floor and showering me with a tiny debris pattern.

  NJ-2 carbine, observed the Sarge, and with modifications.

  Yes, look at the sabot, added Bahati. That’s mil-spec.

  Gregory thumbed a control on her junior carbine. A fierce cherry red line cut a path through the smoke that ended over my heart. Even though it wasn’t on full power, I could feel its heat pressing against me.

  And that, I informed my ghosts, is a laser.

  “Don’t make me kill him,” said Gregory.

  Silky stopped thumbing her comm, but made no move to put it away. “You’re bluffing,” she said.

  “Are you willing to take that chance with your husband’s life?”

  Silky looked at me for a moment before giving me a human smile.

  “Yes,” she said, and called Denisoff.

  — CHAPTER 67 —

  Mrs. Gregory powered down her carbine and dropped it to the ground.

  My heart felt confident enough to start beating again.

  “I don’t need this clumsy thing to shoot you dead if you threaten me,” she explained. “You made the correct call, my alien friend. I am interested in you, and for the same reason as my colleagues at Revenge Squad. You’re a Kurlei and that makes you a very rare and valuable specimen in the Klin-Tula system. Thanks to that traitor, Volk, my people have been forced to complete a hostile takeover of this subsidiary. I have complete confidence that they will be here very soon. As to whether they shoot you like dogs when they arrive depends on how much I enjoyed chatting with you. And, once again, I can only apologize for the absence of tea or coffee.”