I closed my eyes, not that that made a lot of difference in the deep dark, and initiated well-used calming mental drills to suppress my rising panic.
They worked. I took my mind away to a safe place. The only problem was that as soon as I brought my focus back to the world around me, I knew I would scream. I was entombed within living rock, certain I would die here. I would like to see you experience that without screaming.
It was about then that my back started to spasm.
Silky was a little lower and to one side of me. She took advantage of her lighter frame to hurry over to my position.
“Close your eyes,” she said, not realizing they were already squeezed shut, and then switched on a light. She took a second to assess my predicament before adding, “Keep calm. I’ll free you.”
She climbed up above me and then dangled herself upside down. My back was stuck fast but my head had a little free play and she leaned her head tentacles over me from above. I felt a little prickling in my scalp and then she calmed me. That was it. One moment I was on the verge of panic, and the next I was as calm as a picnicker. Amazingly, the spasm in my back stopped because I knew she would save me. I just knew it like I knew the sun would rise the next day… or, at least, it would for those not buried underground.
Then she used a laser cutter to slice the rock from behind my back. I could feel the heat and hear the rock protesting its dismemberment. One slab of stone clattered down the fissure and out of our hearing, but she managed to remove the other rock fragments silently and slip them into her backpack.
I could never have made the descent without her and kept my sanity, but with Silky at my side I endured an endless succession of cramped gaps and squeezed through abyssal holes never knowing whether the darkness beyond hid another segment of our complex path down, or the narrow point that would trap me, perhaps forever. Several times, I had to extricate myself and try a different route down, but persistence revealed solutions to the obstacles that we tackled as we encountered them: one at a time.
After one particularly long drop, I scouted for the next way down and realized that my boots were on a flat surface dug by tunnel engineers. We were in!
A light figure dropped to her feet alongside me. “Remember, NJ, we’re here to locate our missing Revenge Squad colleagues, and not to hit people. Understand?”
I frowned. What was I to her? A dumbwad little child? Then her amusement tickled my head. The stupid alien was teasing me.
“Quit fooling around,” I told her. “Douse your flashlight and follow me closely.”
The passageway was unlit but a dull gleam came to us in the distance. We didn’t know what sensor systems HUB had installed, but avoiding shining our lights seemed a good idea, and I had the advantage that the infra-red sensors in my eyes allowed me to dimly make out our surroundings.
The passage was narrow here because a section of wall had fallen out to form a ledge that almost blocked the way. Once we were beyond, the going would be much better.
I felt Silky’s tap on my shoulder to indicate she was ready to follow me.
I headed off in search of the light.
— CHAPTER 15 —
We encountered small, empty rooms and narrow, winding passageways. It could take days to search the entire base, but we had supplies to keep us going that long if we needed them. It wasn’t our supply state that began to bug me, but something else I hadn’t considered before. My experience of warfare had been inside combat armor. Spending up to weeks at a time with a pipe up my ass and a tube over my penis doesn’t sound dignified, now that I’m settled into the kind of comfy civilian lifestyle I’ve been describing, but carrying your personal bathroom into battle with you is undoubtedly a convenience.
Then we struck lucky. We burst into a room the same dimensions as the others, but the way it was kitted out made me think it was a control room for this area of the facility. There were low tables, couches and chairs with holes cut out of the backs that led to padded flaps, perfect for the Hardits who had annexed this planet to rest their monkey tails. There was even a food dispenser, powered but empty. The writing on it was in Hardit script. Probably dispensed raw meat. Human flesh, possibly, if the stories of the Hardit New Order occupation were true.
Luckily the Hardits hadn’t frakked with the information console that Silky was starting up. It looked to be the imperial standard model that had been commonplace on a hundred worlds since the days when Homo sapiens was still the annoying baby cousin of Homo neanderthalensis.
I let Silky get on with it. She was the infiltration specialist after all. Within seconds she was shizzing her way through screens of alien script.
“What are the chances of you tipping off the HUB people?” I asked. It felt disloyal but you have to ask the dumb questions sometimes.
“Low,” she replied.
“Just checking. Can you bring up live security footage?”
“That’s what I am doing! Shut up and guard the door.”
“No. If someone walks in, we’re screwed anyway. Better I see what you see. My interpretation could be important.”
“Fine, but stop asking dumb questions.”
“Ma’am, yes, Ma’am General Silky.”
She kicked me in the shin, and then shouted excitedly: “Got it!”
She pivoted up a screen set into the equipment console. It showed an image of an empty room identical to the ones we had just seen. But Silky insisted this was live footage.
“Does this mean they’ve been watching us all the way here?” I asked.
“Negative, the camera network is small and clustered around the main loading bay. The HUB base is like a Dark Age village squatting in the ruins of a fallen civilization. Most of the original facility has been abandoned to the rats.”
“Can we see the loading bay?”
She brought up an overhead view of a large, rectangular area. This was the main ammunition loading bay from which a labyrinth of much smaller tunnels and storage rooms spread deep into the cliff. The place was a wreck, with sand blowing in from the opening to the beach, rockfalls and debris everywhere. But there was organization in the crude defensive walls built from the rubble, and there were people. HUB people, I assumed. No one who looked like a prisoner.
Silky showed me how to change the display and left me to it while she got down on the floor and started to work her way into the innards of the equipment bank, mumbling something about piggy backing the local comms network to get a secure signal out to the team up top.
I left her doing her tech-spy stuff and moved on to another feed, and immediately blinked in bewilderment. It was another sector control room with the same empty food dispenser, empty tables, and an imperial standard equipment console. The only difference was that at this console sat a bored looking man who, frankly, could have done with washing his hair.
Given the way his eyes widened and jaw dropped open, something had cured his boredom. He looked up at the camera mounted at the top of the console, which made his eyes look as if they were staring out of the screen in our room. At me.
I raised my eyes and stared into our own camera that I hadn’t realized was there.
“Holy wixering chodder,” I cried, and shattered the lens with my fist.
“Horden’s buttocks!” agreed a muffled voice from the ground.
“Horden’s…? Seriously, Silky, we’re going to have to work on your language skills.” An alarm sounded in the distance. “Later,” I added.
We fled back toward our ingress point.
The alarm was distant, but the sound of pounding footsteps was much closer, and I heard a motorized vehicle headed our way from the central part of the base.
I thought we might make it, but a few hundred meters from our fissure, we heard voices from ahead. Close and getting closer.
“I’ve an idea,” I said.
“Better be a good one.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“NJ, I trust you.”
“
Really?”
“Yes, really.”
Hmm. I wasn’t sure about that but I made my move, grabbing her and scooping her under one arm while barely missing a step.
I’ve heard people say that underneath all our powered armor, Marines are such reedy lightweights that we need mechanical assistance to lift our coffee cups to our lips.
Not true.
I led a heavy weapons section for many years. How do you think we moved our heavy gear across the battlefield? By post? I imagined Silky was the barrel of a disassembled GX-Cannon under my arm and ran like we were back on Owuke-4 shifting to a new firing position to pound the Hardit redoubts at the Siege of Camulodunum.
“If they hear only one pair of footsteps,” I explained, “they won’t know you’re here. The camera saw me and not you.”
Me and my big mouth. She’d trusted me implicitly… right up until the moment I’d explained what I was up to.
“I’m not leaving you, NJ.”
“We’ve no choice. They’re too close. For us both to clamber back up the fissure is one helluva challenge, but to do it before the sentries find us is impossible.”
“We face our fate together.”
“No, Silky. You told me when we first met that Kurlei women have to obey their husbands. Well, it was your stupid decision to marry me – I wasn’t even consulted – but as your husband I’m ordering you to leave me behind.”
“Oh, now you remember we’re married! You don’t get to order me to do anything. I told you that civilian Kurlei females have to follow their males. I meant that we cannot abandon you, no matter how much you deserve it. I can only leave you when I’m ready to kill you, and that requires major hormonal changes we don’t have time for.”
Luckily we had reached the rockfalls close to our fissure and I had stopped to clamber over a boulder. I was never much good at marital conversations, and to conduct one with my partner under one arm and running for my life was not something even the good Sergeant Fofana had trained me for.
You dumb lunk, observed Sanaa. Don’t let her talk to you like that. Explain that she wouldn’t be abandoning you.
I was back on the flat and sprinting the final section, still carrying Silky under one arm. It would be so much easier if Sanaa and Silky could have this discussion between themselves while I got on with the running away business, but we didn’t have time to connect the mind-link cable. “I’m not… not asking you to abandon me,” I panted.
Finally, we were there. I flung Silky onto the rock ledge near our exit point and elaborated. “I’m telling you to go get help. I’ll wait here and let them capture me. They don’t know you’re here.”
“What if they shoot you?”
I shook my head. “They won’t shoot me, I swear. I’ve got a lovely smile and they would never shoot a face like mine.”
I demonstrated my sweetest smile. She peered at me through eyes so narrowed she probably couldn’t see me in the glow of her flashlight. She switched it off. “Really?” she said, shrugging. “I suppose you know your species better than I do.”
“I promise, now let me lift you up into the gap.”
But she shook her head. “I can’t do it,” she squealed. “I can’t leave you. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you frakking well can. I’m too fat to get up and you know it.”
I half-expected her to argue. She didn’t. Instead, she head-butted me, and I didn’t expect that at all. The movement wasn’t to hurt but to thrust me inside the cool protuberances on her head so I could feel her emotions full blast. How she felt about me. Hoo, boy! I wouldn’t call it love – not in a human sense – but there was an imperative need to reunite with me that burned inside her like nuclear fire. Without me, she would be incomplete. Dumb alien!
I should have let her go, but I couldn’t. Not yet. Instead, I burrowed my head into her head lumps, which added another zero onto the end of the emotional intensity I was soaking up.
I was so stunned by the strength of her feeling, that I’d hoisted her up through the ceiling and she was out of sight before I came to my senses.
I’d had nothing but grief since I’d taken Silky in a long year ago, but it felt good to be appreciated.
“Wow,” I whispered, still in a daze. “Those tentacle things are awesome. It’s about time I gave them a better name.”
Sanaa laughed.
What’s so funny?
Your timing is as bad as ever, Ndeki. Right to the end, and it looks like this is the end.
Shut up.
Cheer up, she said. Seriously, I’m glad you once again have dreams to be shattered, and people to fight for. It’s better to end this way than to slowly rot away on your farm. And that would have been your fate if not for her.
That’s pretty skewed thinking, Sanaa. But it makes a sick kind of sense.
Of course. She hesitated. Bahati is struggling to come to terms with dying again, but I know she feels the same way.
I took a deep breath. Thank you for keeping me sane, all of you. Appreciate it. Now keep my frakking head clear. You might have given me up for dead but I still plan on staying alive. I have to. Otherwise I’ll never know what Silky calls her head things.
I slapped my forehead. Hard. I didn’t have time for this crap. I needed my firefight face on.
The voices were seconds away from my position, so I took the only option. I lay flat on the rocky ledge and drew my pistol.
It was a low-tech civilian piece that fired chemically propelled ceramalloy slugs. With low power, limited range, hope-for-the-best accuracy, and zero armor-piercing capability, compared with the mil-spec guns I was used to, it had the stopping power of a hesitant gnat.
Nonetheless, my toy gun should be more than enough to make a ragged mess out of an unarmored person at point blank range.
I flattened myself into the rock as I watched them pass me. There were three and moving swiftly. Only three! I could take them out and climb back up to Silky. Or better still, kill this group and then lead those who followed away from Silky’s egress point.
Once they’d passed, I shuffled forward to get a clear view. Unsportingly, they didn’t wear uniforms to identify who they were, but their guns were just pistols, and the clothing was too civilian and not showy enough to be mercenaries. I was sure these were Levelers rather than HUB people.
I picked the one in the middle, aimed, and pulled gently on the trigger.
Nothing.
Not again!
Shoot or Silky dies, I told myself, but I knew immediately that no amount of admonishment would do any good.
“Damn!”
The three Levelers snapped around at my cry. Before they had aimed their pistols and flashlights at me, I had thrown my gun down in abject disgust.
Rush them, urged Bahati in clouds of red mist.
No! Here’s your Plan B, said Efia. Think! Who’s to say the Levelers are in the wrong?
“I can’t do it,” I said aloud, understanding Efia’s hints for once. If I joined the Levelers, they wouldn’t kill me. “I had you all in my sights. Could have taken you out easily.”
“But you didn’t,” said one of the Levelers, advancing with his gun aimed at my head until he was confident he couldn’t miss. Horden’s Helmet! The guy must be blind.
“Why didn’t you?” said another.
Well, thank the stars one of them was curious.
“You’re Levelers, aren’t you?” I said.
They looked a little shifty. If I were wondering around in an armed group of social revolutionaries in the headquarters of money-loving mercenaries, that’s how I would look.
“What if we were part of the movement?” enquired the second Leveler.
I rolled my eyes as if I were disappointed with this stupidity. “I’m an ex-soldier, abandoned here after three centuries of service. I have no home, no money. I have a job of sorts but the bastards don’t even pay me. They just give me scraps of food and shelter, and expect me to be grateful. And guess who got sent to scout ou
t this place? I’m with you brothers. I want to join the Levelers.”
“Those vecks who treat you so bad – who are they?”
“We are the replacements who were on our way to the city before this situation blew up.”
“You mean you’re Revenge Squad?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” said a new voice from behind.
Before I could roll away, I felt the gun barrel against the small of my back, and heard the three vecks in front of me snorting with laughter. They didn’t seem to notice the handful of stones clattering down onto the ledge from the fissure overhead.
“Cross your hands behind your back,” said the woman behind me, “and maybe you’ll live a little longer.”
I complied.
My face was crushed against the rock. I used the privacy this afforded me to grin. The Levelers seemed very pleased with themselves, which was a good thing because they showed no sign of pressing on to search for Silky. The more of their attention I consumed, the better her chances of escape.
When my captor had done cuffing me, she rolled me off the rock. I had planned to grunt with pain when I fell onto the rock-strewn ground below. As it was, I didn’t have to fake it because I cracked a rib against a rock.
I was hauled to my feet and marched away.
Other than the pain in my rib – which was bearable so I downgraded the break diagnosis to a bad bruise – this wasn’t so bad. With me cuffed they didn’t see me as a threat.
Nice Plan B, Efia, I told my ghost of Lance Corporal Jalloh. I didn’t get knocked out this time, not even shot with a tranq dart. Makes a nice change.
I should have known better. A few moments later, the vehicles we’d heard earlier pulled up. More Levelers spilled out of the miniature trucks. Where were all the HUB people? But before I could figure that out, my original captors tripped me up and began kicking me as I sprawled on the ground. I stayed down. The newcomers hurried over to join in the fun.
I seriously hoped that Silky had gotten away, because if she hadn’t I was going to have stern words with my sort-of-wife for making me put up with this unending rain of kicks and punches for no good reason. Then one of the jumped up vecks found a metal bar and thought it would be fun to hit me with it. My pain shunts hadn’t worked for years and I was too old to be taking this kind of punishment. I couldn’t switch the pain off, so I did the next best thing. I folded my consciousness away and placed it in a safe place for later. From a deep bunker inside my mind, huddled with my ghosts, I observed my own beating.
Hurt U Back Page 8
