by Tim C Taylor
One of the genuine problems with the first Revenge Squad novel (After War) was I decided after writing it, that the book was really a prequel. It shows NJ at his lowest state and how he got involved with both Revenge Squad and a mysterious partner called Silky.
I thought it was good. So did my recon team. But I realized later that it would have been a better idea to have started with NJ already established in Revenge Squad. That’s why, when I republished the books at retailers beyond Amazon, I relegated After War to be a prequel, and re-labeled the second book (Hurt U Back) as the first one.
Such a simple change, but it seems to be responsible for a much better reception at stores such as iBooks and Kobo.
Incidentally, NJ’s initial partner, Silky, is named after the sidekick for the resistance fighter Bill Savage in the 2000 A.D. comic strip Invasion!, in which the Soviet Union conquers Europe in 1999 and occupies Britain. (At the last moment before publication, the publishers insisted on the Soviets being relabeled the ‘Volgans’). As you might imagine, back when I was reading this as a boy in 1977, the Invasion! story had a powerful effect on me.
I didn’t want my Silky to follow the TV trope of an alien who is a beautiful human actress wearing a lot of weird make up and bumps on her head, but who remains beautiful.
My initial visual design for Silky had a sensory band running all the way around her head in which multiple eyes and other sensory devices seem to float before coming to the surface. That’s the guidance I gave to artist Vincent Sammy, but his initial design was of a beautiful girl with dreadlocks that look like the tentacles of an undersea creature.
Vincent wasn’t convinced by my idea. He persuaded me that people relate visually to human-like characters, and since Silky was on the cover, she needed to look more human. I’m sure he was right. They’re great covers.
[Show the design from his initial sketch show].
So far, I’ve written twenty-one novels. I’m proud of all of them, and each one has sections to give me a thrill to re-read. Passages that make me think: “Wow! I wrote that. I must have been clever at some point.”. But like most novelists, I’m a perfectionist at heart, and most have a few aspects that didn’t quite work the way I intended, although for the most part readers will never know. I do have favorites, and I rate the last Revenge Squad to date (Second Strike) as the best novel I’ve ever written. It’s got humor, exotic aliens, villains and adventure, compelling characters, and balance and pacing, shade and tone.
It all came together so easily that it almost wrote itself. I’ve experienced that before with individual scenes and dialog, but not with an entire novel. It’s the work of which I’m proudest, and the benchmark I set myself to beat. (And I will).
Of my nineteen novels that have been published so far (I’m including Chimera Company), Second Strike has sold the least. I guess that’s just the way it works sometimes :-)
Tim C. Taylor – April 2020
5773AD/ FL-3028. Further stories – CHIMERA COMPANY: The Hero of Azoth-Zol
A rebel fighter walks into a bar and makes an offer to the Legion's decorated hero propping up the bar. What could go wrong?
1
The Parade of Heroes started up on the holo projecting from the cantina’s back wall.
I puffed furiously on my clay pipe, shrouding myself in clouds of synth-tobacco, but I could no more hide from the propaganda than the owners of Cantina Crymona could choose not to show the fed-sanctioned programming.
I tipped ash from my pipe bulb into the stone-lined hollow recessed into the wooden counter, and gestured for a top up to my whiskey.
The Parade of Heroes would play for one hour.
I didn’t expect that hour to pass quickly.
The show began by glorifying local industrialists before moving on to politicians and other career parasites who were spun into heroes.
The rowdy banter around the cantina’s tables sank into sullen whispers.
Common people were aired to break up the otherwise constant adoration of the rich. There was balance too between humans, near-humans, and more exotic aliens. Gender and other representations were carefully considered in order to sell the fiction of a prosperous and united Far Reach Federation. Some of the heroes’ stories might actually have been true.
“And now we present the Hero of Azoth-Zol.”
But that one wasn’t.
I shifted round on my barstool and saw the Hero of Azoth-Zol waving from a marbled portico at the cheering crowds of Federation patriots below. He was grinning like a buffoon.
I remembered that day. I couldn’t recall the name of the planet, but I remembered my handler explaining the consequences if I didn’t take my role as hero seriously.
Turning back to the bar, I regarded the pipe and glass in front of me. Which one should I hide behind?
I caught movement reflected in my glass of whiskey. Another fool wanting to congratulate the Hero of Azoth-Zol.
“I came here to forget,” I growled at the bartender.
The Zhoogene shrugged her waxy green shoulders in reply, and I wondered why I was only now realizing she was a looker. I spied a few fading yellow petals in her head foliage— a sad residue of the glorious spray of flowers she would have boasted a few weeks earlier. Although her season was finished for this year, I breathed deeply of her resinous scent that would drive humans wild with desire when she was in full bloom.
I remembered Sarah.
The Zhoogene shrugged again.
“Heard it all before, eh?” She rolled her golden eyes. “Well, you can hear it again.”
I sighed. “Oh, what’s the use?”
I glanced at the reflection in my tumbler again, wondering why the admirer hadn’t approached me, and discovering that the joint was clearing out fast. It seemed it wasn’t a hero worshipper I’d attracted this time. It was a hit squad.
But that was fine. I’d been waiting days for them.
“Here we go again,” I muttered. But I was grinning.
Alcohol dulls my reflexes. Melancholy is even more of a drag. But I’m so fast that even after two hours sipping liquor, I’m faster than anyone you’ve ever met. In a flash, I seized the man behind me before he’d gotten the chance to utter whatever dumb-skragg line he’d prepared for me. My hands gripped the collar of his expensive leather jacket, and my knife pressed against his neck.
The guy had glossy hair styled in soft curls and he wore expensive faux-smuggler chic. Plus, I wasn’t dead. All these details identified him as a leader of the Pan-Human Progressive Alliance. Or as we knew them, a Panhandler.
His three accomplices covered me with their snub-nosed blaster pistols. One of them grabbed a control from the Zhoogene’s side of the counter and froze the holo-feed at a closeup of my face.
Except that wasn’t me. Not really. That was me playing Jonathan ‘Bronze’ Marquez who had accidentally become the Hero of Azoth-Zol. If all had gone well, then a few months and a face change later, I would have become someone else.
But Azoth-Zol hadn’t gone well.
I eased off with the knife a fraction.
“Isn’t it glorious that the Federation shows us its heroes to encourage us all?” said the hotshot rebel.
“That show lasts for an hour,” I replied. “Nonstop. Ad free. But you’d be lucky to find one person that deserved the title of hero.”
“And you, Bronze? Don’t you deserve to be admired?”
I had to look away. If they’d wanted to kill me straightaway, even Panhandlers knew enough to fire through the windows. They wanted something out of me first, which meant I could afford to look lax. I put away the knife and sat back at the bar where I took a slug of my drink.
“Is that your answer? Are you too ashamed to speak?”
“I’m not ashamed,” I growled. “But the only reason they paraded me around the Tej Sector is because they needed a hero to cover up the mess on Bisheesh. I don’t deserve to be called hero.”
“We know.” The swagger left his voice
. A little pain crept into its place. “You were never the hero. Sarah was.”
The world stopped spinning. The bar receded. I was left with the roar of flowing blood in my ears and the darkness of my memories. I could smell blood, sulfur, and fear. I heard the screams once more. My screams.
“What do you want with me?”
The rebel took a neighboring stool and gestured to a canister of expensive Illinquan brandy. “I haven’t decided yet. Perhaps a way out for you.”
“I’m a legionary. We both know the only way I’m leaving this cantina is in a corpse wrap.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said in the kind of smooth slickness a conman might use to separate elders from their life savings. “I know you see right through federal lies. You don’t need to support them.”
“The Federal Senate is filled with scum-sucking vipers,” I replied. “Militia officers pay fortunes to buy their commissions and make every effort to turn a healthy profit. I despise them all. But you won’t tempt me, Panhandler. I’m Legion. That’s all you need to know about me.”
“Really?” He took a languid sip of the brandy the Zhoogene had served him. “Then why are you drinking alone at this cantina, three jumps from the nearest Legion base?”
“Because I’m tired of all the games. And I am already tired of you. Not all of us are going to walk out of Cantina Crymona. Either you die, I die, or we all do.”
“Your arrogance is actually kinda embarrassing,” the rebel scoffed. “As if you could kill me! Don’t you know who I am? I’m Cato Jarvik.”
“Oh!” I feigned an impressed look, even though I’d never heard of this jerk. “Not the Cato Jarvik who carries a grenade around in his jacket?”
“I don’t—” Jarvik stopped abruptly and felt the bulge in his fancy jacket.
“Type-6 fragger,” I pointed out. Then I placed my left hand on the counter and turned it palm up, so the rebels could see the flashing black ball I was pressing my thumb into. “And this is a dead man’s switch. I recommend you consider the two items as a pair.”
I enjoyed the stunned silence that followed.
Oh, you’ve underestimated me all right.
I suppose, to be fair, I’d pulled off a pretty slick move for Corporal “Bronze” Marquez of the 62nd Brigade. But although the word Legion was stamped into my bone marrow, I wasn’t a legionary. I was Hines Zy Pel, Special Missions Operative.
No need for the Panhandlers to know that.
“Sorry, lady,” I said to the bartender. “I like this place, but you picked the wrong bar to work at. Time to make your exit.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she answered hotly. “For one thing, I don’t just work here, I am Crymona. I own the place. If you blow it up, you might as well take me with it. And secondly,” she pointed a long green finger at the rebel, ignoring the blasters redirected at her head, “he hasn’t paid for his brandy.”
I laughed. I’d been expecting a federal hit squad, not these timewasting jokers. Crymona obviously didn’t rate them either, but I was starting to rate her. “Fine!” I smiled at the hotshot. “Why don’t we skip to the part where you explain in simple language what you want?”
He swallowed hard, staring at his brandy while he found his words. “Tell me how Sarah died.”
I growled. Giving up anything to the rebels was something that pained me to my core, which is why I resented Sarah so much.
Because I owed her.
And for that reason, I became Bronze once more, rewinding four months back to the Bisheesh System. And the Caverns of Azoth-Zol.
2
The Caverns of Azoth-Zol stank of sulfur and fish. And I do mean reeked so strongly that I was gagging inside my helmet, despite its air filters. As my section descended further into the heart of the caves, the walls of naked rock shone brightly in my IR overlay.
A deep gurgling rumbled far below our feet. It sounded like a clearing throat, but it was not a living creature that flowed through the roots of Azoth-Zol.
“Hey!” cried Redwing. “Which one of you animals pissed off the mountain god?”
The others laughed, but not me. I was thinking about the tunnels on the map marked as impassable because they had been plugged by last month’s lava flows.
We pressed on, advancing into the stink to take up our flanking position in readiness for the operation ahead.
The reason for the fishy smell became clear.
Cracks began opening up in the rocky path, steaming vents that had been plugged by obsidian drying funnels on which last night’s catch from the Bay of Chels was drying, acquiring the brimstone tang the locals enjoyed so much.
If not for the hideous events that were about to occur there, Azoth-Zol would have been a fascinating place to explore. But we weren’t there to sightsee. We were there to kill rebel scum, and we were eager to be about our business.
That’s how we saw things, anyway. Not everyone agreed. Not even our CO. His call sign was Crunch. SOP encouraged use of call signs in informal situations, because the bad guys never seemed to ask permission before listening in. But in the weeks since I’d joined the company, I’d never heard him called by that name. It was as if the legionaries of Bravo Company still acknowledged their CO as being Major Korzybski, but whatever characteristics had earned him the name ‘Crunch’ were no longer present.
Something was very wrong with the major. No one talked about it, but they didn’t need to. His change of personality had been sudden enough to wave a forest of red flags at Sector High Command.
I had been their response.
“You’ve got company,” warned Flare. “Rebel scout. Seek cover.” Flare was in Blue Squad which was advancing along a parallel tunnel about 300 yards to our left.
Luckily there was a rockfall up ahead in our tunnel, and I waved my section to sprint for this cover. Extending a fingertip worm camera out of my gauntlet, I waited a few seconds until the rebel came into view.
It was a squid woman. The eyes that tipped her ring of rubbery head tentacles gave her excellent visibility. She wore civilian gear: a vest top stretched over a plump body, six-legged shorts, and what passed for walking boots in a species that didn’t actually possess feet.
Bizarrely, she was playing the innocent tourist, snapping photos, sniffing the drying fish, and studying a printed map I recognized from the tourist center in town.
I recognized her name too. The briefing had identified her as Vaanesh Zill, and if she decided the coast was clear, the rebels would move in to do whatever had kept them coming to these caves for the past four nights.
We wanted to find out what that was.
And once we’d done that, we’d kill them all.
Vaanesh Zill literally had eyes coming out the back of her head, but she failed to see the legionaries hiding behind the rocks. It wasn’t the low light because this deep into the cave network, the rock glowed brightly with bioluminescence that cast a hellish red glow. She was just another incompetent rebel.
Zill continued on her way. After a thirty-second wait, so did we.
“That squid girl got me thinking,” said Empties as we set up shop covering one of the routes out of the central cavern, “we should slice her up and put her on one of those fish smokers. By the time this op’s over, she’ll be delicious.”
“You’re not honestly thinking of eating her?” shot back Redwing. “Have you seen the way she was sweating?”
“That’s mucus, not sweat,” Empties replied.
“No one is eating the squid girl,” I told them. “She’s a rebel, and that means her brain has got to be riddled with disease.”
“Fair point, Bronze,” said Empties.
His words reminded me of who I was supposed to be. Corporal “Bronze” Marquez, so called because of the tinted metal plate where I had left part of my neck behind in the Defense of Station 11. Officially, the real me had died there. Bronze was fake, but the bronze-colored plate, that was as real as it gets. Pulling open the synth-skin on my n
eck to reveal what lay beneath made for a powerful party piece.
But this wasn’t party time. Bronze was supposed to be keeping this fire team together.
“I know it’s difficult to take the Rebellion seriously when you see its footsoldiers,” I reminded the three legionaries I was responsible for, “but that’s exactly what you’re gonna do. You can underestimate them when you’re dead.”
We readied our position and waited for our enemies to appear in number.
Of course, at that point, we still thought the real enemy we faced was the Rebellion.
Ignorance is bliss, I read somewhere once.
Bullshit.
It was ignorance that got Bravo Company killed.
* * *
The planet Bisheesh. In the backwater end of the Tej Sector, four jumps from any place honest folk would want to be. The main export comes out the backsides of the manta bats— huge insect-munching transparent rubbery sheets that float through the skies in such huge numbers that nearly five percent by mass of the planetary crust is estimated to be manta guano. And it’s that guano that gives an incredible pep to plant growth that no one has figured out how to synthesize.
Officially, though, the Anori, as the locals are called, claim the guano mountains are sacred places.
If outsiders dig up the hills, they’ll barbecue you.
If you even visit the mounds without permission of the local priests, they’ll garrote you.
But if you place an order through the correct intermediaries—the Militia mostly—then the Anori will cheerfully dig up guano at night and return to defending the sanctity of their hills by daybreak. And if anyone points out that the poop mountains appear to be shrinking, the priests will spend all day explaining why anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of basic meta-psychodrent hypershite can see that they are, in fact, actually growing.
The Anori resemble humans except for a dew claw and arms long enough to drag along the ground. Oh, and their hide is transparent. No, I don’t just mean pale. I’m not one to pass judgment on other species, but personally, I like to keep my arterial flow and bladder contents private.
