Don’t act rash, said the ghost of Sergeant Chinelo in my head. Could be a coincidence.
I ignored the Sarge and spoke to Sel-en-Sek. “I don’t get it. When we set off on the journey to Port Zahir, you couldn’t get here soon enough. You were so brimming over with enthusiasm it was practically leaking out of your orifices. Now you’re acting as if this is the worst place you can possibly be on the entire planet.”
“It is. Why isn’t important right now. You asked if I had contacts. I don’t, but I’m a senior stockholder in Klin-Tula Maritime, the shipping corporation.”
I was so surprised, I reckoned my eyes widened as much as Silky’s sometimes did. “No. Not you, Sel-en-Sek. You’re as un-corporate as you can get. If you wore a business suit, the shock would kill you.”
He laughed. “True enough. NJ, I like you. True, you talk to the ghosts of your fallen squad, and you’re trapped in a slow-motion love affair with an alien–”
“Hardly,” I corrected him. “It’s no shame to be friendly with an alien, even one as annoying as Silky. But I’m not an…” I was going to say alien-faggot, but for some reason the words felt uncomfortable on my lips.
“Of course you aren’t,” he soothed. “And I know I got distracted for a moment back there, but you have full-on psychotic episodes.”
My muscles flushed with anger. I had thought Sel-en-Sek was my friend. Someone I could trust.
He’s right and you know it, pointed out Sanaa.
He doesn’t know the half of it, said Bahati.
“Hey, steady on, friend,” said Sel-en-Sek. “I mean that as a compliment. I prefer my companions to be uniquely weathered and aged, like a mature brandy. And you, my friend, have been wonderfully aged. But you still have a lot to learn about port life.”
“That’s great. But we’re not chewing fat at a bar now. Can we advance rapidly to the relevant part of whatever you have to say?”
Sel-en-Sek turned into a deserted side road.
The gray car followed. That was definitely not a coincidence.
“We’ve got company,” I said, cursing Silky’s order that we weren’t to take firearms. But she hadn’t said anything about knives.
I drew out my combat blade and activated the poison feed. Glistening green fluid oozed over the tips of the crescent blade.
“Put that away now,” snapped Sel-en-Sek. “This isn’t an ambush. I asked for their help.”
“They? You mean Klin-Tula Maritime? The corporates?”
“Yeah, the corporates. Come on, NJ. Who’s gonna get us intel fastest? Chikune with his computers, or the organization that runs the wet docks?”
I sheathed my blade as Sel-en-Sek pulled over and parked behind a gray car identical to the one that pulled up behind us.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
I debated briefly with my ghosts. We didn’t have much choice. “I do trust you,” I said.
“Good. Then get out. They won’t talk with outsiders present.”
My door opened automatically. “You owe me, pal,” I growled at Sel-en-Sek, but I stepped out onto the sidewalk with the feeling I was doing something very stupid.
I took a last glance at Sel-en-Sek before the door shut. He was tying on a cravat of all things. It was gray and plain other than a single red stripe down its middle, and had the crumpled look of having been stuffed down the bottom of a kit bag for many years. I suddenly appreciated that his disheveled salty dog appearance took a lot of effort on his part. His curly hair looked so sea-bleached that you should be able to taste the salt, and yet it was never matted, never stank and I can tell you from experience that hair can hold a host of odors. His natural fiber jacket too was artfully distressed, but that cravat was different. It was genuinely tatty.
Then the door closed and the Revenge Squad truck sped away, bracketed by the two gray cars.
I activated the Aimee electronic assistant on my wrist, and queried it to find where the hell my partner had dumped me. I was about two miles from the Star Shift Freight warehouse I’d visited a few hours earlier. This was a commercial district of retail stores, commercial logistics, and small office blocks. What was I supposed to do? Grab a bite to eat to kill time while HUB disposed of the bodies of Caccamo’s team?
Thinking of food made my stomach growl. Actually, grabbing some food did make sense. If I found somewhere basic enough, maybe I could learn something about the Levelers. Not here, though. This area was too upmarket. I walked back to the main avenue and headed west, away from downtown. On the way, I looked up Klin-Tula Maritime and admitted that I was impressed. Klin-Tula was a world of many large islands. A cooperative of ex-Navy sailors had pooled their retirement grants into setting up new port facilities and shipping lines. Now Klin-Tula Maritime dominated bulk carrying between the islands.
I rang Silky to update her, but she wasn’t answering. Then I remembered: she’d said she was going to talk to the people staking out our HQ. And one of them had a sniper rifle.
Silky can handle herself better than you, said Sanaa.
Doesn’t mean she’s safe, I replied.
I tried not to form the words: you could handle yourself too, Sanaa, but you’re still dead.
She must have heard my thoughts anyway, because she replied: Exactly. I died. There’s no power on this planet can keep any of us hundred percent safe. I died, but only after we were married for two centuries. Man up, Ndeki! Make the most of your time with her. It was your choice to enlist in– Hey! Watch out!
I let my ghosts direct my muscles without wasting time waiting to learn what had spooked them. They were useful like that.
I pivoted on one heel while readying the other leg so I could push down and leap out at a figure striding purposefully out of a fancy delicatessen.
It was a human man armed with a pistol. Ephemeral wisps of exhaust gases snaked from the barrel.
He fired again and this time I felt the pinch in my chest as the round hit.
I looked down and saw two darts sticking out of me.
“Big mistake, pal,” I growled at my attacker. “Gonna take more than that to stop me.”
At least, that was what my brain signaled my mouth to say.
Dimly, I realized that what had actually issued from my mouth was a little mumbling and a lot of drool. My next thought was to wonder why no one had thought to invent soft paving slabs as my skull impacted the sidewalk.
Then I was all out of thoughts for a while.
— CHAPTER 8 —
Cold.
Cold!
I hurtled out of darkness and into a chair that was rattling and shaking… And it was shaking because I was shivering from the frigid cold that was being shot out from my spine like a battleship firing point defense icicles. I shook myself right out of the chair and landed on a cold and smooth surface. But it was a few notches warmer here… once I’d curled into a ball.
I was easing back from the precipice of panic when I realized I was blind. Deaf too.
I lost it. I screamed. My cries were quickly swallowed by whatever hellhole I was incarcerated in, but I could hear the muffled noise of my own despair and so I screamed at the top of my voice, grateful for any sign that I wasn’t deaf, that I was still alive.
Then someone removed the suppressor hood from my head.
“… And then for frakk’s sake give the guy a cup of coffee. And for the love of all that is holy, McCall, will you stop that infernal racket?”
I decided that screaming like a baby was no longer such a great idea, and stopped my infernal racket.
I blinked some sense into my eyes.
I was lying in a room designed to be brutally simple. Small and low ceilinged and with a dry acoustic that sapped the warmth from every word spoken. Across the table sat a woman studying me with professional interest. Two standing men flanked her. All wore forest green tunics with a double gold stripe down the right side.
Police.
“The cold will wear off quickly,” said the woman. “It is a common
side-effect of the tranquillizer we used on you.”
She wore a captain’s bars sewn over her breast, right above the name Silverberg. My eyes hadn’t fully rebooted but I could see she was slender and had eyes too blue and skin too white to be a product of the White Knight military. She was from Earth then. If she had chosen a less stressful career – Navy test pilot, for example – she would have looked beautiful. Instead, she had worn the cares of her profession on her face for too long, and now the hard demeanor and worry lines were baked in. I guess that made her an honest cop.
“For Christ’s sake, McCall. You’re not exactly subtle in your current state. The way you’re staring… it’s like being sniffed by a geriatric dog. I’ll save us both the bother. My name is Captain Rachel Silverberg, and I am not from Earth, despite what you lot always assume. I was raised on the Earth colony of Mberaxis-3. Like most Earth natives, I do have effector triggers implanted in my wrists but had them disabled as a requirement of police employment. That means if I touch your flesh, I cannot inject you with nano effectors that will make your hormonal system my plaything.”
I relaxed a little. Those freaks from Earth could enslave you with a touch. Silverberg wasn’t exaggerating.
“On the other hand,” she said. “I can still make you my bitch by legally legitimate means. Or illegitimate. Such as blackmail, for example.”
I suppressed my shivering, took my seat and rested my elbows on the table. “Why is the state police interested in a former Marine Sergeant like me?”
“You’re here because you are a member of Revenge Squad, a third-rate protection racket set up by unscrupulous financiers, who don’t need to get their hands dirty because they exploit dumb old soldiers like you to cross the line set by the law.”
I didn’t like this at all. Frankly, I preferred the part when I had woken up and thought I was dead. At least that way I wouldn’t have to deal with somebody who knew a lot more about me than I did about them. “I reject your description of me as a dumb old soldier,” I told her.
She steepled her fingers and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
“I may be nearly 300 years of age,” I said, “but I’m not old. I shall concede the other two elements of your assertion.”
She flashed me a frosty smile. “Very good, McCall. Maybe you’re not quite as dumb as you look.”
The door to what I assumed was an interrogation room opened and another policeman dipped inside, leaving a cup of steaming coffee for me on the table.
I gulped it down, burning my throat on the way but I was desperate to warm up my core. I needed my ghosts but they were still asleep. Perhaps coffee would wake them.
“Better?” asked the policewoman.
“A little.” I frowned. “Hey, you guys are proverbial for having no budget. This is great coffee. How can the police have good coffee?”
“Because this is Port Zahir, the biggest port on the planet. Trade goods pass through ports, Mr. McCall. Goods such as coffee.”
“So the deal is, you skim a little sample of your favorite goods, and the traders don’t get hampered with trumped up charges and police harassment. What’s that make Port Zahir police? A second-rate protection racket?”
The two policemen flanking the officer looked about ready to punch my lights out. She waved their aggression away with a gesture. Silverberg wasn’t so easily wound up. Looked like I wasn’t going to talk myself into an unmarked grave this afternoon.
“No, McCall. It makes Port Zahir police an institution that earns the respect and gratitude of the citizens it serves. You know, I actually get paid to sit here and listen to you make an ass of yourself. You’re the one in a hurry, what with mislaying your entire organization.”
“You know where Caccamo is?”
“No, I don’t. The smart money says that your friends are dead, taken out by your HUB rivals before you became a threat. As far as I’m concerned, gang-on-gang shootings are a blessing, they make my streets a little safer. I wouldn’t bother talking with you at all except this whole deal smells suspicious to me. On the off chance that you aren’t dead by this time tomorrow, that this incident goes deeper than it looks at first, I want you to be my eyes and ears inside the local professional retribution industry.”
“You want me to become a police informant?” I shook my head. Was this woman insane?
One of the policemen handed his officer a folder from which she took a photograph. Silverberg looked at the image, stared at me as if I were a sick pervert, and then slid it across to me.
“Do you recognize this individual?”
I glanced down at the photo. “Never seen them before in my life,” I said, which wasn’t strictly true. I had trained in interrogation techniques for both sides of the interrogation table. From my current side, you are supposed to take an element of truth and pour all your belief into that misleading snippet.
It was true that I did not recognize the image, and I fixated on that half-truth. Well, sixteenth-truth. As for the individual… I recognized her all right. I’d left her at Revenge Squad HQ before setting off with Sel-en-Sek. This photo of Silky was different, though. She wore a military uniform I didn’t recognize. Black leather with skull emblems in the lapels. Metal sheathed her head tentacles. This was before she deserted the Legion, before she had adapted her appearance to look more human. A faint crest ran down her forehead, her ears were more angular, and strangest of all the dark pits that housed her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were as white as chalk.
She didn’t just look more alien; she looked deadly.
“Let’s try again,” said the police officer. She drew a smart screen from a folder, spent a few minutes setting something up and stood the display up so I could see it clearly. This was a reaction analyzer. A lie detector, if you like, though it did both more and less than that. It showed the various segments of my head firing in real time as I spoke, and as I thought.
“Nice try,” she said. “You fought it for about two seconds, which is about two seconds more than I expected. Nonetheless I know you lied. Try again. Tell me what you know about Revenge Squad.”
I did, but left off any mention of the Phoenix Cabal. If pretending I didn’t recognize Silky was a sixteenth truth, this was a three-quarters one. I didn’t know anything about Phoenix except that the name came from a passenger starship that had carried several prominent individuals to Klin-Tula from the neighboring star system. My former Revenge Squad boss, Holland Philby, had been one of them.
“That’s all I know.”
“Maybe. Maybe not but it’s insufficient.” Silverberg tapped the photograph of Silky. “Try harder, alien-faggot, or she will suffer.”
“There’s no shame in having an alien companion,” I protested. “It’s a big galaxy.”
“You misunderstand,” she said. “You are part of a protection racket that likes to call itself quasi-legal. It’s either legal or it isn’t, and no amount of corrupt politicians will persuade me that you are anything other than a criminal, Ndeki Joshua McCall. I don’t care whether you hump a Hardit, in comparison with that. I would take a thousand law abiding alien-faggots over one sexually vanilla criminal any day, and you are both a criminal and a deviant. What I do care about is that she is my lever against you. Do better and quickly. Luckily for you our priority at this point is with revolutionaries not gangsters, and the Chief Commissioner has given me the flexibility to turn a tactical blind eye. I’m not so inclined. The law is the law. Pervert it in one place and you corrupt it everywhere. I am against such a policy of flexibility. Persuade me otherwise, or she will suffer.”
“Speech over?” I growled. “Like you said, my clock is ticking. Hurry up.”
Silverberg tapped again on Silky’s picture. “Is she married?”
“Yes.”
The police captain looked crestfallen, probably because the reaction analyzer was inconclusive. “Oh dear, Mr. McCall,” she said.
“Ask me if she is married to me,” I suggested.
She
raised an eyebrow. “Very well, is she married to you?”
“She is,” I replied. This time the analyzer was very positive.
“Interesting. Do you believe that if you ask her to follow your direction then she is obliged to obey?”
I felt chilled again. I’d never heard of Kurlei before Silky sought me out a year ago. Silverberg had done her homework on Silky’s species, and I had the sense of being corralled.
“Answer the question!”
I didn’t see I had much choice. “Yes. Her biology will compel her to follow me until such time as she rebels and kills me. Sounds insane but I am convinced she believes it.”
Silverberg leaned back in her chair, hands behind her head. Did she know that Silky had already killed one husband and the countdown had begun on her second?
She glanced up at her assistants. “Frennan, Jones. Give me five minutes, will you?”
The two policemen glared at me before trooping out of the room.
“Now what?” I said once they’d gone. “Is this the point where the torture starts?”
Silverberg locked her gaze into mine, leaned forward and tapped the photo once more. “What is her name?”
“Silky.”
“Sub-Captain Sylk-Peddembal of Delta-Two-Indigo Commando.” She stared at me but I didn’t give her any reaction.
“I have her military record,” she said. “It ended abruptly. It ended illegally.”
I looked away and bit my lip. There was no point pretending that I was in control here.
“The penalty for harboring a deserter is severe, former Sergeant Joshua. The penalty for being a deserter is death.”
I held my head in my hands. We’d been in the city less than a day. If this policewoman had already discovered Silky’s secret in so short a space of time, then her position was hopeless. Even if I struck a deal with this Captain Rachel Silverberg, there would be someone else. And then another. I couldn’t do deals with everyone.
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