Second Strike

by Tim C. Taylor

  “So it will be the three of us,” said Silky, “plus any of our Revenge Squad colleagues we can summon, against the mayor’s private army. What do you propose, that we flee the city under cover of your escort?”

  “Not exactly,” replied Silverberg, brightening.

  “Wait! Wait!” I said, an itch building in my mind. “The new governor – Hamidou – I’ve heard that name. Can we get a visual of her?”

  Schaek brought up a magnified image of a no-nonsense human woman of military bearing who would look as hard as granite if not for the undeniably cute dusting of freckles. I wouldn’t dare mess with her, though. This was Brigadier Joiedeeve Hamidou, agent of the Legion Intelligence, Security, and Termination Service.

  “You know her?” asked Silverberg.

  “No. Never met her before in my life. But I know someone who is very familiar with her.”

  “Caccamo,” she replied, deflating my excitement at being ahead of the game. “I already know. You need to see this video message.”

  She handed Schaek a data wafer, which he used to summoned the cheery face of the boss of Port Zahir Revenge Squad.

  Good morning, Rachel.

  Cheer up! I come bearing bounteous good news. By now, you are FIA, and your precinct is under federal investigation after we showed tampering of the evidence regarding the death of your unfortunate young friend, Connor. Your station house has been ordered to give you every support it can because you have been assigned a personal mission from FIA Director Naish. I expect your colleagues will now despise you forever, but I hope you will feel some, slight compensation when you hear that the agency badge that will be with you in a few days will get you half-price discount at RimjarDINE Cheese Restaurants and a free cup at Virunptan & Burnt Limb Coffee Houses.

  It’s only the last part that I’m making up.

  Good fortune comes at a price, of course. But you already know that. Your price is cheap. Go find NJ and Silky and show them this message. Simple.

  Are you there yet, kids? Good. Look, we’ve done all we can at this end. I can’t be expected to do everything for you and we certainly can’t move openly against the most senior elected official on the continent. To be honest, the political backlash will be so intense that this federally appointed governor probably won’t last a month. Hamidou is running interference for you, not solving your problems. Interference is all you need, though. It’s time for you to get your asses motoring and finish the job we’ve started. If you perform a valuable public service, I’m sure Hamidou will look favorably at the idea of granting you pardons while she still can. I will warn you, the brigadier does not grant favors easily, and she does not look kindly upon those she judges to have let the Legion down.

  You will receive no help from the other members of Revenge Squad. Everyone has been arrested or obeyed my orders to disperse. I myself appear to have been shot. Gangrene. Nasty business. Going to lose the leg, it seems. It’s a blessed nuisance, but means I shall be forced to take the rest of the week off.

  You know the objective. Get it done. I expect a get well soon message once you’re through. And maybe a cake. Definitely a cake.

  I shan’t say good luck because you won’t need it. Make your own.

  We are Revenge Squad, people.

  Take revenge!

  Caccamo out.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said.

  “Hold it,” warned Silverberg. “I’m a Fed now. I can’t believe it, and I sure don’t like it, but even Feds have responsibilities. I can’t let you run around the city killing people, even those who deserve it. It’s martial law the brigadier is bringing, not vigilante playtime.”

  “What?” I shook my head. “You’re going to stop us?”

  “I have a company of CDF says you do as I say or else I arrest you.”

  “I can’t figure you out, Silverberg.”

  “Her sense of duty is less flexible than yours,” Silky tried to explain, “but you two are very similar in many other respects.”

  “Your alien might have a point,” said Silverberg. “Or she might be talking out of her tentacles. I don’t really care. Here’s how this plays out. I run the operation. I can deputize who I want. You two are deputized as of now. My orders. My rules. I am in charge. Is that clear?”

  I laughed. “You mean you want to join our gang.”

  Silverberg fumed.

  “Enough human talk,” said Schaek. “We have a mission to plan.”

  All three of us looked in surprise at the old Littorane.

  “You do wish to kill the mayor?” he queried.

  “I was going for bring to justice,” said Silverberg, “but shot resisting arrest works for me too.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Schaek. “We are on the cusp of civil war and must do everything to work against that. We need to promote the rule of law, not undermine it.”

  Silverberg stood. “With all due respect, sir, we’ve got this.”

  “I doubt it. Even if you had, these two members of the K’Teene family are under my authority. Your talk of deputizing them is mere words that hold no meaning unless I say they do.”

  I whispered to Silky, “I think Schaek wants to join the gang too.”

  All three glared at me this time, but all of a sudden, I wasn’t enjoying the looks on their faces; I was thinking of a hormone-fueled amphibian with a crush on an alien that was so scandalously inappropriate it broke the scale. Sewers. Clesselwed had talked of sneaking me out the city through the sewers.

  “Caccamo tried to go through the mayor’s defenses,” I said, “and didn’t make it despite all his toys. So let’s try something different. Let’s go underneath.”

  In response to Silky’s blast of surprise, I added, “We have the remnants of an amphibian Marine Engineering battalion here. Seems a shame not to make the best use of the talents given them by the Goddess.”

  The Fates know I’m not good at reading human body language, let alone alien. Nonetheless, I sensed a distinct smugness in the way Uncle Schaek jiggled his head in response, as if finally believing at long last he had done the right thing to invite these desperate aliens into his clan.

  — CHAPTER 55 —

  Dripping onto the latticed floor, I emerged from the flooded levels where the eve-of-battle party was in full swing. The music was muffled up here in the air, but the floor pounded with the alien bass line, sending ripples skimming across the top of the water hatch.

  Silky was all precision and neatness as normal, having already hung up her breather tank and was now proceeding to efficiently towel herself dry.

  I shrugged off my tank and gave myself a shake without bothering with towels. We’d only bothered to wear quick-dry unisex humanoid briefs, and that only because I’d had premonitions of Schaek going all enraged alien on me if Clewie developed a fascination with my alien genitalia. I’d been avoiding her at the party, which I had found surprisingly easy, but I silently vowed to seek her out later and do the comically inept human equivalent of dancing with her later. But for now my attention was on Silky, and the temporary access code Schaek had given us to the privacy of his office, with no explanation or elaboration regarding what he expected us to do there.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure myself, but if Caccamo’s assault on the mayor was anything to go by, we stood a high chance of being killed tomorrow. And if we weren’t killed, we’d probably be captured and then killed later.

  I wanted a little time with Silky first.

  She looked surprisingly vulnerable as she dried her face and kesah-kihisia before removing her face mask.

  Okay, so she’d been threatened before, attacked, shot twice, and I’d felt her vulnerability and tried to protect her – just as I would have with Shahdi, Nolog, or even Chikune – but never before had I ever formed the idea of her being delicate or exposed as I did when she carefully removed her mask.

  I shook the foolishness out of my head. I had no need for a facemask. If a chemical attack reduced the rest of my body to a puddle
of liquid flesh, you’d find a pair of OR/H Mark 5.1 eyeballs lying in in the flesh-slick, in full working order. They were the toughest organ of my body – even more resilient than my ceramalloy pelvis.

  I decided to surprise her and extended my heavily scarred right hand as if a courteous gentleman of old Earth. She took it with a crystalline, carefree laugh, but then pushed it away abruptly.

  My hand was a reminder of my past, the scars resulting from pressing my unprotected hand against my first wife as she lay dying on a world of toxic smog. But I realized it was only me troubled by my hand. Silky was tilting her head as if listening out for a threat.

  What had she heard? Were the mayor’s people here to arrest us already?

  “Can’t you hear that?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Music,” she explained. “There’s another party out there. She clasped her hands over mine and pulled. “Come on, let’s join in.”

  — CHAPTER 56 —

  In the courtyard we found Littoranes dancing to a thumping beat. The aliens formed a circling ring of heads and torsos and tails entwined into a solid torus of amphibian flesh, which glowed orange in the light of the glowing coals. Laughing, Silky and I stood hand-in-hand as the ring of scaly flesh opened and swallowed us whole.

  “What is this?” I asked one of the heads that emerged from the torus even as it circled with the others. “Clesselwed? Is that you?”

  I assumed it must be because the young female had painted scars over her face to match mine. But then the head disappeared in the blur of scaly flesh and other young Littorane heads, male and female, temporarily broke the smoothness of the dance. Every one of those faces wore the same scars, a freakish echo of the day when Corporal Ndeki Joshua, as I then was, had his natural eyes blown out of the front of his face.

  The circling aliens were wearing the same fabric robes they had at the tea and mortal combat ceremony. One of them, whom I’d marked out as high on something, given the way they were twitching, now upset the rhythm of the dance even more to lift their robe to bare the upper flesh of their thigh.

  There was a mark, a scar I thought at first with a jolt of fear, because it was in the same spot where I’d embedded a throwing knife into Elder Koelb-Ndo’s leg. This, though, was a tattoo: a silhouette of a horned grazing beast.

  “You like this?” asked Clewie, for it was surely her.

  “It’s beautiful it’s…” A series of connections hammered home and exploded in my head. “It’s an Impala. My symbol. How did you…? Silky must have told you, but how did she know?”

  “Your first human wife was Sanaa,” said the young Littorane.

  “Yeah. Married for two hundred years.”

  “And Impala was her pet name for you. I do not fully understand how Aunt Sylk converses with your dead wife, but I believe that they do. Sanaa gave me her blessing, via my honored aunt. It was her idea.”

  Well? I asked my late wife while I watched the circling aliens watching me.

  Of course, Sanaa replied. When Silky plugs into your mind via that cable, you don’t think she only talks to you, do you? It took me a long time, Ndeki, but I’ve decided I like your new wife sufficiently to tolerate her for the time being. So for frakk’s sake, Marine, show her you appreciate her while you still can.

  I held up my hands. “Enough already. Nice tattoo, Clewie. Feels a little like I’m being stalked by a hunter, but I appreciate the gesture. I think. I still don’t understand why you’re shaking like a junkie, and why the frakk are you kids having a separate party on land?”

  “My blood is pumping hot and fast,” she told me, her translator conveying a sense of her breathlessness.

  “This isn’t the time or place to talk about your special tingling,” I told her firmly.

  “No, dear Ndeki. I have killed. The warrior craze is upon me – upon all of us.”

  I went very still. “Killed who?”

  “Mr. Lee.”

  The dance music twisted and solidified into cold lances of dismay that stabbed at the corpse of my hope.

  Hope.

  I hadn’t even realized I’d dared to believe there would be an after to tomorrow’s operation until Clewie took away that hope. If Gregory took her revenge, everyone dear to me would suffer torture, degradation and death.

  “You have done well,” Silky told Clewie.

  “No,” I said. “No, she hasn’t. Why, Clewie? Why?”

  The young Littorane’s only response was to snap her jaws triumphantly. She was obviously high on adrenaline, or whatever went through her fishy veins. Oh, what had I gotten her into? She had been the one who had urged Silky and my Revenge Squad comrades not to provoke Mrs. Gregory.

  “Is this indeed worthy of our initiation?” Clewie asked me.

  I could only shake my head. I was surrounded by aliens. Even my ghosts couldn’t explain what was going on.

  “We wish to bond fully between our families,” Clewie said. “We wish to join Revenge Squad. Have we proven our worth to you? Dear Ndeki, do not fear for us. We killed all witnesses and burned our evidence trail, and Mr. Lee had a great number of enemies. Mrs. Gregory will not discern our claws in his murder. She will not have cause to seek revenge on you. We have succeeded!”

  An armory of insults readied themselves for me to launch at the stupid alien. I took a deep breath to ready my lungs for the shitstorm I was going to unleash upon her, but then I halted. I had been young once. I knew how passion worked and it was useless right now to fight the blood boiling in her veins. Such passions can be steered but not extinguished.

  I kept pace with her, walking clockwise in time with the rotating ring and reached down to stroke the top of her head. She threw her head up to push against my palm, relishing the touch. “Yes, Clesselwed. You have done well. I must talk with human Laban Caccamo and Uncle Schaek, of course. They must be warned of the possible consequences.”

  I stopped and watched the dance’s momentum take Clewie away. Withdrawing to the ring’s center, I hissed at Silky. “Did you put her up to this?”

  “No, Ndeki.” She put her hands on her hips. “You did.”

  I growled deep in my throat. There could be repercussions for this act, but I was used to facing a future filled with danger. Clewie was not. “Welcome to my world, Clewie,” I said, but I knew she wouldn’t understand what I truly meant.

  Silky did. She rested a hand on my shoulder. “There is more to our fight than clearing our names, NJ. We are at war. A fight for their future. We can’t expect to keep the young out of their own war.”

  She was right, but she also made me curious. “Which are you, Silky? The old preparing the way for the future, or with the young who will inherit what my generation will leave behind?”

  “NJ, NJ…” She laughed. “You’re beginning to think ahead. I’m very pleased that you are, but tomorrow we bring revenge to the mayor of Port Zahir. Let’s wait to see if either of us survive to the day beyond.” She grabbed my scarred hand and squeezed tightly. “I’ll give you my answer on the other side. Now, we left the underwater party for a reason…”

  — CHAPTER 57 —

  The moment we shut the door to Schaek’s office, I scooped up Silky in one arm so her hips were wrapped around mine. She, in turn, had already plugged in the cable below her left jaw and was waiting for me to settle before plugging into me.

  Normally when we cabled into each other, she spooned into my embrace because that placed the least tension on the short cable. But Schaek’s cable was a little longer, and a deeply human instinct told me that tonight I needed to meet my partner face to face. I wasn’t hearing any complaints from the Kurlei corner.

  I carefully dropped my butt onto Schaek’s desk, which was a long way down but sturdy, and drew Silky into me, halting halfway to a comfortable position when my gaze suddenly snagged on Silky’s lips.

  At a distance they looked almost human – full and plump and with a deep indigo color that suited her, but at this closeness their texture wa
s all wrong: the flesh mounting an array of raised dots like a high grip plastic inlay for an equipment crate.

  Her lips were too alien to be attractive. Honestly, they didn’t do anything for my libido at all, but they looked right for her, and although inhuman they were still kind of sensual. Without really knowing what I was doing, I put an exploratory finger to her lower lip and pressed gently.

  “You wish me to be quiet?” she asked.

  “No. I was just curious how you felt.”

  I smiled at her grin because I remembered it was the first human expression I’d taught her. “And how do I feel?” asked Silky.

  It was a good question. It seemed foolish to describe her lips as full, or warm and sensuous, or any such evocative term. They were two strips of specialized flesh that bordered her mouth, and no more.

  Or so I tried to tell myself.

  Silky raised an eyebrow quizzically.

  “Human,” I answered. “You feel human.”

  “That’s funny,” she said, and brushed one of her own slender fingers across my lips. “Yours feel Kurlei.”

  We kept our fingers to each other’s lips for an attenuated moment before I gently withdrew mine.

  She didn’t.

  My Kurlei wife leaned forward, closing the gap between our mouths.

  She advanced only an inch, but the escalation that tiny distance represented reached nuclear proportions. I felt as if she had penetrated hundreds of miles behind my outer perimeter, operating at will deep within me.

  I stared at Silky’s mouth, at the way her lips opened fractionally as if asking a question.

  She had talked long ago about my doom, about inescapable destiny. I saw then that my future was bound to those lips. I would taste them one day.

  But this was not that day. First we had the little matter of arresting the mayor to get through, and it was bad enough that Clewie harbored alien sex fantasies. I couldn’t afford to do the same.