Hurt U Back

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Your despair is fully warranted, McCall. I was in the military police and I still have contacts there. If I can discover her record, so can others. Her past will eventually come back to claim you both.”

  “She ran because she was about to be murdered by her own unit,” I protested. “She didn’t desert the Legion, the Legion deserted her.”

  “I see,” she said, and appeared to mull over my words. “So the defense you have prepared for her tribunal is… Let me see if I have this right… Life isn’t fair.”

  I hung my head. I was utterly without hope and with the reaction analyzer, Silverberg could see inside my head and calculate my despair to the nth decimal place.

  “You cannot possibly protect her,” she said in a more comforting voice. “On the other hand, I can.”

  I looked up. “How?”

  “It is possible to hide records. I cannot delete your wife’s record – nor would I want to, because then I would lose my hold over you. But I could bury it under layer upon layer of misdirection. I could hide her record so that only those who knew exactly where to look would find it… A narrow path of discovery that would only become illuminated should anything suspicious lead to my death or disablement.”

  “What must I do?”

  She leaned back again and smiled. It was the look of somebody content to have organized and shaped the world according to her design. “I’ve already explained your role. You will be my eyes and ears and data snout within Revenge Squad.”

  “I’m to be the mole you will use to bring in Revenge Squad’s scalp?”

  “You overdramatize.”

  “Have you any idea of how dangerous that would be?”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “Some say life is not fair, Mr. McCall, and yet life does occasionally offer breaks such as I am offering you now. You can choose to work with me – and I accept this would be highly dangerous – or I can take your wife in now. She will be executed, and you will enjoy a brutally short sentence of hard labor. I offer a slim chance as an alternative to certain and ignominious death for the both of you. A true Marine would not call that a choice at all.”

  I clamped my jaw hard and bunched my fists. This woman had enslaved me, but no matter how much I wanted to punch her, I daren’t. And she knew it. “What. Specifically. Do you want from me?”

  “I want you, specifically, to not die for the next few days, during which time you will learn the fate of your former Revenge Squad companions. Furthermore, if you discover any signs of political insurrection, you will report them to me immediately. Frankly, I think the next time we meet will be at your autopsy.” Her face softened. Not by much, but probably as much as she ever could. “The way you stood by your wife is admirable, even if she is so… unconventional. I like you, Mr. McCall. Try not to get yourself killed.”

  She flicked a control on a screen and the policemen she dismissed earlier reappeared. “I would say it’s been a pleasure,” she told me, “but it hasn’t. Now get out of my station house and don’t come back.”

  All three of them escorted me out the building, and it surprised me that she would bother. Perhaps Silverberg had invested more in me than she cared to admit.

  Her presence was a delicious irony, as it turned out, because as we moved down the central corridor downstairs, I did a double take when a strange party approached us in the corridor. A sergeant led three naked men, manic grins on their faces, wrists cuffed behind them, and what I can only describe as excitement written on more than just their faces. Most bizarrely of all were the ribbons tied in a neat bow around the base of their eager manhoods. No, scratch that. What was weirdest was that the pattern on those ribbons looked awfully familiar: a complex pattern in striking iridescent colors.

  The sergeant couldn’t help but explain. “Found them in this state wandering outside the station house. Probably some stupid prank.”

  Despite the prisoners’ glee – which had to be chemically induced (I hoped) – they were scrawny fellows, which made me sad and angry. I recognized regimental tattoos on now-shrunken chests that would once have swelled with pride to have earned such cherished ink.

  They probably deserved better, but… What the hell? I couldn’t resist.

  “Hey, Captain,” I said cheerfully as we passed the men. “Looks like your afternoon entertainment’s arrived.”

  Silverberg acted like she hadn’t heard.

  “Gotta admire a healthy sexual appetite, Rachel. I guess someone like you in an extremely responsible position deserves a little in-work tension relief.”

  “Sergeant,” she called the policeman escorting the nude men. “Haven’t we something to cover these deviants?”

  “Trauma blankets I suppose, ma’am. Figured these losers didn’t deserve wasting our stores upon.”

  “Fair enough,” replied the captain. “But keep them out of sight of the other prisoners.” She glared at me while adding, “Rumors have a habit of spreading out into the public. Though anyone with something to hide would have the sense to keep their mouth firmly shut.”

  I shut my mouth into the shape of a sly grin and made my exit, intrigued to discover what the city would hit me with next.

  — CHAPTER 9 —

  For once, Port Zahir’s surprises took a benign turn in the form of the carefully gnarled features of the old sailor who had abandoned me in the street to enjoy playtime with the police.

  “Did you learn anything?” asked Sel-en-Sek, not waiting for my answer before setting off along the sidewalk.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Apparently, I’m a despicable degenerate, and the city of Port Zahir would be a better place if Revenge Squad and all who sail aboard her were to vulley themselves to death, never to be heard of again.”

  “You do realize they are right?” he said when I caught up with him.

  I didn’t know Sel-en-Sek well enough to be sure whether he was joking. Fortunately, before I was required to ask that dumb question, we had other matters to occupy us. Around the corner from the front entrance of the station house, the street was shrouded in shadow. It wasn’t just the shade that made the small clumps of people hanging around the street seem threatening.

  I saw our truck parked up ahead. A Littorane was leaning against the passenger door, intent on the device it was holding in its stubby little arms.

  It thrashed its tail in delight when its tool succeeded in breaching the truck’s defenses, and it opened the door.

  We quickened our pace but before we could reach the Littorane, three humans – ex-Marines all – stepped out of nowhere to block our path.

  “I haven’t time for this,” I snarled.

  And it was true. Caccamo and his team were probably dead. But if these hoods deprived us of our transport, their deaths would be even probablier.

  I think they saw the truth in my eyes, because they stepped aside with bad grace, giving us the merest shove as we passed through their gauntlet.

  The Littorane open the door fully and bowed to us.

  “Nice valet service,” Sel-en-Sek told the alien as we got in and drove away.

  “We got lucky,” he said once we’d put a couple of blocks between us. “If it had been the backstreets then they would not have stepped aside.”

  “But you were parked alongside the station house building. Are the police really that weak?”

  Sel-en-Sek seemed to consider the best way to reply as he took a turn in the direction of the space docks. “Listen, NJ, you need to learn how cities work. There are always police and there are always criminal gangs. Think of the city as a large living organism and the police as part of its criminal immune system. There is always a dynamic equilibrium in play. Gangs get stronger and they’ll hang around the front door of the station house, just to prove they can. Police get stronger and they drive gangs away from the block. Stronger still and they drive criminals underground throughout the entire district.”

  “By which point, they’ll stop turning a blind eye to Revenge Squad and stick us all in jail.”
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  “You got it. Don’t think of them as criminal scum, trying to thieve your property. Think of them as your job security.”

  “That’s going to take some getting used to,” I replied. “Now, spill. I can tell you found something – something to do with the docks that your cravat-wearing docker pals told you.”

  “Been taking mind-reading lessons from your wife, eh? Well, you’re right. Klin-Tula Maritime is a player in this town, like everyone else, so it will have placed its spin on everything they told me. Important part is they gave me an address. ‘Scratch the surface and you’ll get answers’, they told me.”

  “Any idea what that means?”

  “Nope. But there was something else and you’ll like this bit, NJ. They showed me evidence that I believe in. These people we’re about to pay a visit will transport anything… and anybody.”

  My body jerked with a bolt of disgust. Slavers!

  I looked down and saw my fists were bunched so tightly the bones were threatening to burst through my skin.

  — CHAPTER 10 —

  If you’re ever called upon to board and seize a spaceship, one of the things you’ll most hope to find in your pre-action equipment check is a healthy supply of breaching charges.

  You need to be careful tossing heavy blasting power around in a pressurized gas canister – which, by the way, is all a spaceship really is, no matter what ship rats might try to tell you. Hence you want the stick-to-anything breaching charges that can shape their blast to punch a hole through bulkheads without inconveniently opening up the hull to space.

  (By the way, if any Navy personnel are reading this, then I humbly apologize for calling you ship rats, you wixering goat chodders. Force of habit.).

  Although there are far easier means to knock down walls on a planet’s surface, breaching charges work here too, and they leave a distinctive debris pattern as the fragments of the wall are carried along by the blast front before losing out to gravity and dropping to the ground.

  When Sel-en-Sek and I stepped through the hole in the warehouse at the address the dockers had given us, guess what debris pattern I saw painted in the rubble on the floor?

  Breaching charges are seriously illegal pieces of kit. Whoever had blasted their way in was heavily armed and hadn’t bothered to cover up what they used. Then there is the other thing about breaching charges. The blast shape is very concentrated. In other words, they blew through the wall with ease, but left the walls structurally sound.

  Odd that…

  Inside, the evidence of explosions and gunfire was clear. Metal shelving units reaching high into the warehouse ceiling were twisted and warped with blast damage. Loading machinery was melted to slag. Whoever had hit here hadn’t been as gentle on the inside as they had with the load bearing walls. The far wall from the hole grabbed my attention because it had been whitewashed very recently. The other walls were white too, but carried a pattern of dirt and chemical staining, although they too caught my interest. There were white rectangles on each of the walls that hadn’t been whitewashed where the dirt and staining were absent. Something had been mounted on those walls until very recently. As we took in the sight of this warehouse, a man walked in from the loading yard driving a wheeled loader.

  “What went on here?” Sel-en-Sek called up to him.

  In reply, the warehouse loader halted his vehicle, pointedly took up the metal bar stowed behind his seat, got down and faced us.

  “Leave or I call the cops,” he advised.

  “We are cops, you wixering slag,” I yelled at him.

  That shut him up. Sel-en-Sek glanced over at me and raised an eyebrow, as if to ask what the hell was I thinking of impersonating the police.

  I thought he was grossly unfair. I’m still learning on the job. You learn through your mistakes, my old drill sergeant used to tell me, just before she assigned me a punishment.

  “Listen, mate,” I told the loader, who was caught between caution and violence. “You get the cops who wear uniform. And then you get those who don’t. Those who don’t are at liberty to do this–”

  I lunged at the loader.

  He swung his bar at me, but I was expecting that. I grabbed the bar from his hand and slapped his face very hard, but with the palm of my other hand. I didn’t want to break him, despite my urges to punch him properly.

  The fight went out of the little veck and he decided to tell us something. “Look behind the shelves. Section Beta-2-C. We were hit a few days ago. We’re just a shipping company specializing in space freight. We got caught in a turf war between two criminal gangs. We were paying one lot protection money. Fat lot of good it did us.”

  I glared at him, keeping him quiet while Sel-en-Sek went to investigate. He soon came back carrying a plaque the exact same shape as the clean holes on the walls. The plaque had three letters: HUB inside a stylized border. I’d seen this HUB protection logo on display around town, more commonly than I saw our Revenge Squad equivalent. Do anything bad to somebody with this plaque and HUB would make you regret it. As Sel-en-Sek advanced toward us, his face suddenly changed, became enraged.

  The docker went white in the face.

  “Slaver,” growled Sel-en-Sek, spitting on the floor for good measure. Then the sailor charged at the docker who broke and ran for the loading yard.

  And what was I doing? I was looking like a stuffed dummy, not sure this was an act or whether Sel-en-Sek had really lost all control.

  “Laszlo! Jardine!” yelled the docker – presumably calling for reinforcements from the yard.

  I joined Sel-en-Sek and gave chase. We heard running feet, but they weren’t headed our way. It seemed Laszlo and Jardine were not willing to stand and fight.

  I’d like to say the dockers were sent packing by my imposing physique, or some clever drent that I’d said, but I knew the reason was simpler.

  The world of Klin-Tula was stuffed with former soldiers who had either been born to a brutal form of slavery, or born during the fight for freedom (of a sort). It would be nice to think that such heroes had transformed Klin-Tula into a heroic world, but the reality is that we often tolerated the evils of extortion, theft, murder, drug running, even the theft of body parts for sale on the medical black-market. But if you were fingered as a slaver, the planet was not big enough to hide you from your fate.

  And yet the trade persisted. No one would suffer a slave in their own species, of course, but if you forced servitude from an alien, could that be said to be slavery? Some species saw no moral difficulty in enslaving others not of their kind. I would like to have thought that my own species was not included in that group.

  Sel-en-Sek yelled curses at the vanished dockers, but they were long gone. “We lost them,” he said dejectedly.

  “Then let’s make the most of their absence,” I said, though to be honest I would rather be burying my fist into those slavers right now. “Let’s see… They were HUB clients until someone hit them hard.”

  Sel-en-Sek gravitated toward the freshly painted wall, as did I. “Who would go against HUB so openly in challenge?” he said.

  I scratched the fresh paint from the wall with my thumbnail. It was soft, not yet fully cured, and beneath the white were flecks of red.

  I stared at the accusing spots of paint on my nail. It was a very specific shade of red. Revenge Squad red.

  We searched the area and soon found paint solvent and the backpack spray canisters that had been used to whitewash the wall – cleaned up but not yet stored away.

  We set to work clearing away the white paint, and sure enough underneath we saw crude but unmistakable Revenge Squad logos that soon ran and merged with the white to form pink puddles on the floor.

  “If I were to muscle in on a rival,” said a woman’s voice from the yard, “I might seek to discredit them. Perhaps to perform an ill deed made to look like it had been perpetrated by that rival.”

  “Yeah,” I replied while assessing this new threat. “Someone made it look as if Revenge Squad
had attacked a HUB client, and HUB attacked a Revenge Squad client. I worked that out myself, question is who?”

  All the while I spoke, we edged away toward the hole in the wall we’d entered by. Away from the cowled figures entering from the yard. Then more of these newcomers entered through the blast hole. They didn’t look like dockers. I didn’t know what they were but I knew I didn’t like them. We were outnumbered but only a few of them had come through the blast hole. That was the weakest point of their line, and so where Sel-en-Sek and I charged to make our escape.

  I threw one of the people to the ground; she barely resisted me. I heard Sel-en-Sek drop one too.

  Then we were through their line, out through the hole and were free.

  “I am sorry if we scared you,” shouted the woman from inside who had first spoken.

  Sel-en-Sek’s feet slowed, and I found I was slowing too. We stopped and looked at each other in confusion.

  “You ever heard the bad guys apologize before?” he asked.

  “That scenario never seemed to come up in training,” I replied.

  We turned and edged back toward the warehouse, allowing the group of robed figures to emerge in numbers from the warehouse, though in a peculiarly unthreatening formation.

  The two that we had hurt making a hasty exit now rested on the arms of others, rubbing bruises. The injured pair looked at us stoically but without rancor.

  I didn’t like this. Didn’t like it at all. I preferred it when people shot at me. At least then I knew where we all stood. We had allowed ourselves to be suckered into a position of vulnerability, because I didn’t think they were about to draw hidden weapons on us. They were about to do something far worse. They were going to talk.

  — CHAPTER 11 —

  “Please don’t go.”

  The cowled woman didn’t merely speak apologetic words, she sounded remorseful while she was at it.