“They’re more concerned about his injuries than in trying to live beyond the next few moments.” She shook her head – a human gesture she’d learned from me. “You’re an alien,” she accused me. “Explain why.”
But I couldn’t.
In any case, reason temporarily left my building when our tormentor’s voice came back over the bulkhead speakers. “Do you know I have a fresh cup of coffee in the kitchen that’s going cold because I can’t tear my eyes away from the monitor? You idiots are priceless.”
I drew my gun and shot out the speaker above my head, which burst into a satisfying shower of sparks.
The bastard laughed through the speakers mounted in the bulkhead behind me. “This compartment was built to hold far more dangerous cargo than you, old man.”
I sought out the remaining speakers. But my vision was clouded by anger, and my body shook too much to see clearly, let alone aim my fire.
Silky suffered no such handicap and shot out two more speakers, but that did nothing to calm me. The others might have given up but I could not. I wasn’t built that way. I scanned the hold looking for something solid to fit into my hands so I could spend my final moments smashing as much of the cargo as I could. If I couldn’t smack my fists into that smug veck’s face, then this would have to do.
Before I set off, Shahdi tapped me on the shoulder.
I looked into her face that reminded me so much of a young Sanaa. She bit her lip, as if undecided whether to tell me something.
I waited for her words, but she thought better of it and grimaced. It was the exact same look she had when she was trying to suppress a laugh, except in the circumstances it must have been tears she was holding back. The girl had a wicked sense of humor but a beautiful laugh, soft with innocence, life, and hope. No matter how often we explained why we loved her laughter, she hated the suspicion that it made her seem like an ineffectual child.
The fight left me.
No, that’s not quite right. The rage still roiled away inside me like high-pressure steam, but I denied it an outlet because I didn’t want to make Shahdi cry. Stupid, I know, to lay down and wait to die to avoid such a small thing as a girl’s tears, but Shahdi was the only person to ever fill a yawning chasm in my heart: the emptiness of what might have been if my daughter had lived. This was all so new to me that I hadn’t developed a defense against her ability to drive all reason from my head with a single pained glance.
When even the Sarge didn’t yell at me to keep fighting, I knew it was time to yield. I turned away from Shahdi, and took a last look at Nolog and Chikune, who were kneeling by Sel-en-Sek and throwing enigmatic sidelong glances at me and Silky that I no longer tried to interpret.
I cast them all from my mind and put an arm around Silky, taking care that my control didn’t slip and make me accidentally crush her to death.
I sniffed the air. It was cold and thin, but no more than the wind-lashed summit of a mile-high mountain top. We had a little time left to us.
Maybe a minute or two before the end.
— CHAPTER 5 —
I held Silky in a loose embrace. She nestled her head against my collar bone.
“Are they diseased?” I asked her, trying to keep a lid on my anger. “I can’t understand why they’re just sitting back. What do their minds tell you?”
“NJ,” said Silky. “Your fight to live is so deafening I can’t hear anything else. Let them be. It’s time. I want to die in your arms. It is just as well that our lives will soon cease, because I don’t wish for this to become a habit.”
I laughed at her attempt at human gallows humor. She was right. We’d done this before when we thought we would die in the smoke inhalation along with a ganglord with the unlikely alias of Mrs. Gregory.
I took calming breaths, said goodbye to my ghosts, and held her. She let me rest my head in her kesah-kihisia – the human name she’d invented for her head tentacles, which felt cool and soothing to the touch. I’m sure my mind appeared stunted to a Kurlei, but in our crude way, our minds held each other in an embrace that meant at least as much as our physical one.
Words were unnecessary, which suited me fine.
In fact, the moment was so perfect that time appeared to dilate, stretching to accommodate our goodbye for longer than the laws of nature would normally permit.
Silky being a lot shorter than me, my neck was beginning to protest, so I shifted to a more comfortable position from which I began to nuzzle her head lumps.
Kurlei don’t possess hairs or feathers: they’re covered in scales. But those scales can be hard or soft, and the plates come in many shapes and sizes. As my nose and lips brushed against her kesah-kihisia, I reveled in their velvet-soft covering of tiny, elongated scales, softer than any fur. Without breaking contact, I magnified my eyesight to study the intricate details of these scales.
I was shocked that I was still noticing new details about Silky’s body. True, I’d been with her for two years and only just thought to look, but as Sanaa would have told you, that was nothing more than standard male inattentiveness. No, the most surprising thing about the feathery scales on Silky’s head was that I was still alive to notice such things.
I cautiously raised my head, half expecting that if I remembered to notice the universe, I would summon it back into existence, upon which it would promptly kill me.
Lined up a few feet away, sitting on or against hastily repositioned crates, Chikune, Shahdi, Sel-en-Sek, and Nolog-Ndacu were watching us intently.
Chikune gave a nonchalant half-shrug. “Not my idea,” he said.
I looked around. The empty sacking was still being sucked against the extraction unit.
“Why are we still breathing?” I asked Chikune. I knew what he’d just said, but I couldn’t believe anyone but him was responsible for whatever the hell was going on.
“Force barrier,” he said cheerfully. “Like you get on a ship to seal a hull breach.”
“I know what a force barrier is,” I replied. “Where is it coming from?”
“Caccamo of course.” A puzzled look clouded his face. “Oh, did no one think to tell you that help was on its way? I clean forgot that you blew your comms earlier. You must have thought we were about to suffocate. That’s awful.”
I looked from one face to another. The humans were all grinning as much as each other, and the Tallerman was tilting his head from side to side in amusement.
“You’re all maggots,” I told them. “My revenge will be merciless.”
“It was my idea,” admitted Shahdi. “I’m sorry… no. No, that’s a lie. I’m not sorry. It was so funny that I couldn’t resist.”
“Home time, people,” said the voice of Laban Caccamo, the Revenge Squad branch boss. I looked to the origin of his voice and saw a circle punched through the hull, just large enough for a Tallerman to squeeze through. The boss wasn’t there in person, but he would be watching and listening. So I was even more surprised when, instead of obeying Caccamo’s instructions, Shahdi folded her arms and said, “Nolog-Ndacu, Chikune, pay up.”
I watched in disbelief as they adjusted their wrist-mounted Aimees and performed a credit transfer.
I loomed over Shahdi. “Pay up what exactly?”
She looked me in the eye, though I could see she needed all her courage to do so. “I bet the others that the prospect of imminent death would lead you and Silky to your first kiss.”
I roared at her and she shrank away. “Like I said,” I growled, “maggots the lot of you.”
Sel-en-Sek raised his hand. “I would have bet too,” he said, “but sadly I am low on liquid funds.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Which way would you have laid your money?”
His reply was only to raise an eyebrow.
Secretly, of course, I was delighted. For a start, I’d seen far worse stunts pulled during the war, and this gave me an invitation to plot my revenge. And, besides, it was better than being dead.
“Well?” I growled at Sel-en-Sek.
Before he could reply, a cry of female human pain grabbed my attention. Shahdi!
I saw Silky standing over her, the Kurlei’s boot on the human’s chest, and a serrated blade a hair’s breadth from her face.
“NJ says you are very beautiful,” said my wife in her most singsong crystalline voice. “César mates with you with his eyes in the intervals between mating in the flesh. I think it would be funny to cut a word from my language into your pretty face and see whether the people of your species still find you attractive. Especially when I explain the depth of the insult I will have carved in your flesh. Would anyone care to bet on their reaction? Five seconds and then I cut her. Will the men still find her attractive? Lay your bets now.”
I could reach Silky within two seconds, but I daren’t leap at her. She was playing the blade close enough to Shahdi’s face to exfoliate the skin. And Silky was a trained assassin: in a tense situation her every instinct was to kill.
The situation was so desperate that I deployed my last-ditch option. I tried talking. “Silky. No, it isn’t worth it. Put the knife away.”
“Easy, NJ. I won’t kill her and this is so funny that I couldn’t resist.” She let Shahdi’s words echo around the group for a stretched moment before adding, “Last chance for any bets. Five… four… three… two…”
We no longer needed Caccamo’s force barrier because no one there dared to breath.
Silky flicked the knife around Shahdi’s head too fast to track. It emerged, unbloodied, but having scooped up Shahdi’s comms headset. Silky sheathed her knife as she stepped off Shahdi’s chest, choosing a route that required several crushing footsteps across the girl’s face.
“It is good for all your sakes that I have developed a human-compatible sense of humor,” she said and walked off, reporting in to Caccamo via Shahdi’s headset, while its owner probed fingertips at her face, trying to assess how badly she’d been damaged.
Did I ever mention that my wife was kinda scary?
She’d told me many times that one day, when she’d tired of me, she would kill me. Wished she didn’t have to, but her biology would force her into my murder and it was useless to try fighting your own nature because you could never win.
I have seen inside her mind and I knew every word was true.
“It’s no use,” said Caccamo. “I know some of you have tried to convince me we need a Knife Night for a regular Slaughterhouse social event, but this demonstration has not changed my mind. Also, young César has already exfiled after reporting the police are swarming over the docks. So time to get a wixering move on, ladies and gentlemen and others. Now!”
Professionalism snapped back onto the others and they headed out through the hole.
But not me. Now that I wasn’t staring death quite so closely in the face, I could no longer control my anger.
My friends had been hurt and nearly killed. And the echoes of that veck’s taunts coming through the bulkhead speakers were still ringing in my ears.
There was no way in the galaxy I could walk away from that.
— CHAPTER 6 —
I walked over to the heap of inactive Little Tin Bastards.
“Hurry up,” shouted Silky from the escape hole. “We mustn’t be captured.”
“Just making sure the droids don’t follow,” I replied, which was sort of true although something much darker than caution was driving me. Someone had tried to kill my friends. I’d gone way beyond caring about contracts or paid-up premiums. I wanted revenge, and I was going to get it. Simple.
I had learned many surprising things about my body since I’d been posted to Port Zahir, my relationship with my ghosts for one. I rarely spoke with them these days except to occasionally chew the fat over an imaginary beer with my dead comrades. I didn’t need to: I’d absorbed their abilities and that meant more than mere knowledge. I could even project them outside of my mind. After the events at the Hurt U Back base six months ago, I’d learned never to rip them physically from my body, but I didn’t need to.
I had a cable.
I listened for signs of life from the combat droids, and immediately identified one that still emitted a hum. It was a feeble sound, but definitely there. I tipped over the machine and plugged myself into one of the ports in its central rotating discs.
Tech Specialist Zawditu Sy had been a cyber combat expert, and Bahati her backup. Channeling both their skills, I swiftly gained mastery over what remained of the droid’s control systems. It wasn’t enough, though. Many of the low-level systems were still functioning, but the service interface I needed to access them fizzled and cut out.
I unplugged and searched for another victim.
“Hurry the frakk up,” shouted my section leader, “or we’ll leave you behind.”
I ignored her. Silky would never leave me behind to be captured, because that would contravene mission parameters. On the other hand, if I annoyed her enough I had no doubt she would shoot me dead. But Silky loved me in a weird alien way, so I was counting on at least one more final warning before she killed me.
“One moment,” I shouted, praying the next droid I selected would yield what I wanted.
It didn’t. The Little Tin Bastard hummed with power but its brain had been completely wiped.
I tried a third droid, and this one had to work.
I jerked in surprise when Caccamo’s voice spoke right into my ear. “There is a thin line between eccentricity and liability. Trust me. I have a great deal of experience on this matter.”
I tried to ignore the micro-drone hovering silently by my head, relaxed my brain and let my dead squadmates hack the droid.
“NJ, I shall cut the docking tube in five…”
My ghosts didn’t possess me; it was more a case of me having absorbed them. Whatever constituted ‘me’ had grown complicated enough to keep philosophers busy for millennia. More to the point, it meant I could see inside the LTB-10’s service interface simultaneously with glaring at Caccamo’s micro-drone, and pointing out to Sanaa that she had been wrong all those years when she despaired of my inability to multi-task. And I still had enough juice left in the mental-processing tank to relish every drop of satisfaction from my revenge.
“Three…”
What happened to four?
You were too busy being smug to notice, said Sanaa with the virtual equivalent of a wink. I could feel her pride in me.
Job done. I unplugged and was racing for the exit before Caccamo reached ‘two’.
It had been a team effort. Zawditu was the cyber wizard, but it was the Sarge who had been part of the LTB-10 trials, and knew the fault that was so fundamental that the weapons designers had started again from scratch for the replacement LTB-20s. Their biggest weakness was a vulnerability to cyber-attack.
As I tried to run through the flexible docking tube to Caccamo’s waiting submersible – I say ‘tried’ because the tube material was so stretchy and transparent that it was like crossing an assault course on a micro-g planetoid after drinking for two days solid – my anger receded enough to reveal doubts. I began to wonder whether my revenge would taste quite so sweet if it killed me and my friends into the bargain.
When fitted out in full military mode with multiple railguns or directed energy weapons, the LTB-10s would generate so much heat that they would soon melt or explode if it weren’t for their heat sinks. The sinks were clever bits of kit, because they didn’t so much absorb energy as redirect it to a dimension called the Klein-Manifold Region.
The vulnerability in the LTB-10s I had just exploited was to switch the heat sinks from blow to suck. How big would the bang be? Now, that I didn’t know.
I boarded the sub, the airlock hissing shut behind me, and immediately the craft set off.
I blinked.
Then I stared at the others to check they were having the same dream. They must have been because their eyes were as wide as mine. The branch boss had a knack of pulling his teams out of the fire using equipment we’d learned not
to enquire after.
We were inside a bubble made from the same transparent material as the docking tube. It was a lumpy bubble too because I could faintly make out lines of tension in the hull where it stretched beneath the feet of its occupants.
Caccamo was working a simple joystick and control console that topped a central column. It was the only solid part of the vessel. There was no sign of propulsion.
I looked behind. There was no sign of the airlock either.
“McCall!” Caccamo barked. He glared at me in silence before whispering menacingly, “Do you have something to tell me?”
“Yes, sir. I recommend maximum thrust.”
I could see through Caccamo’s glare to the smile beneath. “And why is that?”
“We are Revenge Squad, sir. Like any good employee, when someone tries to kill my friends, it encourages me to embrace the corporate mission statement. You mess with my friends and I’ll mess with you. With interest.”
Caccamo’s eyes went wild and he pushed the sub’s invisible engines to the max, throwing all but him to the deck. The means of propulsion were still unclear. What I could see was the wake we were cutting through the murky harbor water, and the hull rippling like a gossamer pennant in a gale.
Then it occurred to me that the reason I could see the hull ripple was because the transparent material was turning white, the peaks and troughs of the ripples hardening into solidity.
I leaned over Shahdi and tapped Silky on the shoulder. “Just wondering,” I said to her. “Can you swim?”
She squeezed her eyes to pinpoints, but before she could reply, a shockwave crashed into the submersible and sent us bumping and scraping across the underwater harbor wall. Every time we smacked against an obstacle the hull whitened like fast-freezing ice.
The sub stabilized and the lurch in my stomach told me we were ascending to the surface.
“On the positive side,” said Caccamo, radiating calmness, “Mr. McCall has escalated our response by destroying the Spirit of Progress and her cargo. Bravo!” Caccamo gripped the control console as its support column rose up inside. He folded the console up until it was reduced to a small zip-locked pouch that he stuffed into his pocket.
Second Strike Page 5