If I’d known it was coming, I would have laid on popcorn, pizza and beers, because the entertainment I was putting on for the Levelers went on for a very long time.
— CHAPTER 16 —
Back in the real world, something had changed.
I extended my senses out from my mental bunker. The beating had stopped and I was being dragged along a dark passageway.
I emerged into a body seething with pain but which appeared broadly functional. It might not stay that way for much longer, and that thought fueled a burning need to see Silky again.
Letting out a long groan, I clutched at my chest. They ignored me.
I put my hand to my neck and gave them a groan of pain, which they also ignored.
Then I inserted the memory chip I’d palmed from my chest pouch into the port in my neck and I ignored them as I settled back to experience Silky’s report that Shahdi had handed me in the car.
Full sensory memory recordings are not a gentle experience. They drive about ten percent of people insane when they first experience one, and there’s no way to tell if you’re in the safe 90% until you try. The Legion kept developing the technology though, because a scout’s report is so much more valuable if you can see what they saw through their eyes, free of their interpretation. Infinitely more so if the scout never made it back alive to report.
I shuddered at the memory of reports made by my dead soldiers.
To start with, being inside someone else’s memory is unsettling. I’ve thrown myself out of orbit wearing little more than blast shielding, and pummeled through atmosphere thick with aerial mines, incoming fire, and enemy attack drones, but in comparison with a memory recording, that’s sitting on a comfy armchair bolted to the ground floor of a safehouse in a geologically inactive area, and with the floors piled high with the hides of fluffy kittens and soft wool lambs.
For me, the worst part is the shattering realization that your comrade, who you thought sees, talks, and thinks like you, doesn’t do anything of the sort. We each exist in an independent interpretation of the universe, and those interpretations vary radically. Memory recordings are like burrowing through reality into a parallel dimension where the laws of nature are profoundly different, and you have to fight hard against the conviction that it is your perception of reality that marks you out as the visiting freak from bizarro-world.
Yep, we are all aliens to each other. I’d like to buy evolution a drink one day and congratulate it on the illusion of kinship it spins to fool us into co-operation.
Then there’s Silky. If I patted evolution on the back for creating her, it would look up from its drink and shake its head. No, mate. She’s not one of mine.
You’d think that slipping into the mind of an alien species would drive anyone absolutely woofing mad. Not with Silky, though. At least, not for me, and I suspected that if anyone else inserted this chip into their neck, the psychic shock would kill them. As I settled into Silky-World, her mind felt hot and stable, like baking desert sands on a windless day, and there was a sense of connection like an eight-lane military highway, that this intimate link was unique to Silky and myself.
Unlike the battlefield recordings I had experienced from human legionaries, I also felt Silky’s presence, her thoughts and emotions. It wasn’t as strong as when we linked our brains via cable, but it was almost as if Silky were there with me: a conversation and not just a monologue report.
As she waited for me to attune to my new mental location, I felt her easy familiarity with authority – she had been an officer in the war – mixed with a kind of imposter syndrome that told her she wasn’t fit to lick the dirt from our boots. I understood why. Silky was a deserter.
She cleared her throat and began. “This is a briefing prepared by Assistant Squad Leader Sylk-Peddembal for Acting Unpaid Auxiliary Troublemaking Cantankerous old Dweezer, NJ McCall.”
I laughed. We had only linked minds a handful of times, but every time Silky revealed more of a playful side to her nature that I never saw in real life. I liked it.
“Hello, Ndeki,” she said, and I could feel the human-like smile behind her words of welcome. “Here’s the summary in case you’re in a hurry. We flushed out our observers without taking casualties. The team were from the Levelers, and we think the lone sniper from HUB. Both were keeping our HQ under observation, but we suspect the HUB observer was also keeping eyes and ears on the Leveler team without their knowledge. I can’t be certain, but I think Caccamo and our missing comrades are still alive and maybe held at the HUB base. We don’t understand the connection between HUB and the Levelers, but it’s time we found out and so we’re headed there without delay. Nolog-Ndacu thinks he’s found a secret way in, and you’re going to take it and go do some recon.” I felt her hesitation. “I don’t think you’ll like our route much, but I’ll be with you every inch of the descent.”
“You’re right there,” I whispered, “on both counts.”
“I’ll speak to you in person when we arrive. As you hear my words, Mowad should be driving you there, so you should have time for my edited memories. You might learn something you ought to know.”
The sense of heat dipped suddenly, as if the night had come abruptly to the desert sands of her mind. Then the warmth flooded back.
Uncertainty, said Bahati. That’s what you experienced. She’s going to tell you something she isn’t sure you want to hear.
Oh, you’re here too, are you? I didn’t think you liked Silky. At least, that’s what you tell yourself.
I don’t. I can’t. She’s alive, and however hard I try to move on, I can’t forgive her for that. Not yet.
I understood. Dear Bahati. Whether I was happy, enraged, or in love, if I felt emotions then the ghost of Lance Corporal Bahati Chahine would be there with me. I make her sound like a psychic vampire, but it was her way of looking out for me, just as she had done in life.
Sit with me, I asked her. Watch with me? I don’t want to be alone.
My dead wife said nothing, but as Silky’s vague and bewildering mindscape hardened into the sights, sounds and odors of her memories, I felt an ephemeral presence beside me. I tried to put an arm around Bahati, but her form was too insubstantial. Still, I felt her nourishing presence and was glad to have her with me.
I jerked in shock when violent motion erupted around me.
“Don’t move!” screamed Shahdi.
“Stay where you are!” boomed Nolog in a rumble so deep it seemed to emanate from below the planet’s crust.
Silky was ninja quiet, skipping gracefully around the two unarmed men before ramming her gun into the gut of the only one who was armed.
I looked down at her barrel and saw it was a flenser gun. Inaccurate and low fire-rate, but when those flenser rounds opened up inside flesh, the results were horrific.
Not only did the man’s wide eyes betray his fear, but his mind broadcast his terror into Silky’s head lumps. As humans, we’ve all kidded ourselves that we can sense what someone else is thinking, but in truth all we do is infer. Not so with the Kurlei, who evolved an organ of empathy and limited telepaths to confuse their prey before they strike. When I say Silky felt the man’s fear, I meant I was sensing it via an organ humans don’t have. I looked inside this man’s head and felt simultaneously godlike and disgusted with my own deviancy. I knew I wanted to feel this power again.
The target knew nothing of my presence. He squatted down slowly, and deposited his carbine on the floor, followed by the cigarette he’d been smoking.
Silky still hadn’t said a word.
I whooped. Go, girl!
I imagined I felt her irritation at what she would think of as a patronizing tone. Well, nuts to that. I was proud of her and I’d say it however I wanted in the privacy of my own mind.
Hey, I’m here too, Bahati reminded me.
Sorry, my sweet.
Back in the recording, the prisoners had been secured but were refusing to answer Silky’s questions. A visual check of the room rev
ealed little. It was on a floor of an office block that looked as if it had never been let out. There were inflatable chairs, a coffee maker, litter in one corner, and tripod-mounted binoculars trained on Revenge Squad HQ.
But my girl had her special ability, and I was fascinated to finally see it in action.
With Shahdi covering the prisoners with her carbine, the rocky outcrop that was Nolog-Ndacu pinned the arms behind each one in turn and thrust them toward Silky who would then lean into them from the side. Alien, tentacle-topped head touched human, and once she had eased into the contours of their mind, she repeated her questions.
After the exhilaration of feeding on the man’s fear when she burst into the room. The results were disappointingly inconclusive.
Fear isn’t just strong, said Bahati, it’s infectious. Even on Earth, alarm calls transcend species boundaries.
I frowned. Isn’t that the kind of thing Efia normally tells me? Maybe Sanaa?
She didn’t say anything but Bahati radiated guilt at near-lethal levels. I needed to be with you, she said cautiously.
I let it drop. I didn’t fully understand how my ghosts worked, but I guessed that as my most recently deceased wife, she’d pulled rank and taken the condemned man’s watch. My first wife was still not fully over the emotional trauma she’d experienced before we left Tata-West.
The recording of the interrogation was not over. We had underestimated Silky, who issued orders to her team.
“Nolog-Ndacu, guard them. Mowad, strip them.”
Poor Shahdi. She blinked. “Strip them? All the way?”
Silky had been reaching for something in her jacket, but she jerked in response to Mowad’s hesitation and blinked herself. “Yes, of course. Naked. Nude. No clothing, jewelry or footwear. Is there…?”
I could feel the memory of what Silky had been about to say – to question whether there was a language problem – but I also felt Silky’s own embarrassment for not understanding Shahdi’s reticence. “Forgive me. I forget you are at peak mating age and your biology has been optimized to increase your rate of reproduction. Are you able to follow your orders without being compromised by your sexual impulses?”
I winced. Shahdi was not going to like that!
By way of answer, Shahdi set to work. “Not gonna be a problem, ma’am.” She drew a knife and sliced their clothing away double quick and in a hurry like, only pausing when Silky drew the hypo-gun from her jacket and injected all three prisoners in the neck.
“It’s a euphoric,” Silky explained. “They will be excitable and eager to please.”
Yeah, about that eagerness. Now they were naked, I recognized these men, and their regimental ink. They were the three guys in the police station house, minus the decoration: ribbons that I realized were still in Silky’s jacket.
“Smart move,” I told Silky. “No one will believe what these guys say, and by the time they get out of jail, this business will be over. One way or another.”
I imagined Silky saying, “Thank you.”
I wasn’t so convinced Silky was being smart about Shahdi. The men were naked except for socks and boots that they were removing themselves. Shahdi appeared to be embarrassed about being embarrassed, because she was going out of her way not to look at the men’s genitals.
“If she can’t carry out such a simple task, I’m not sure if Mowad is suitable for active duty,” Silky mused. “Is she a sex obsessive?”
“No,” I answered. “Shahdi’s just… innocent.” It wasn’t difficult to see why. Her Marine parents were so protective, and so heavily armed, that if anyone of Shahdi’s age had taken a shine to her while growing up, they would have kept very quiet.
Silky wasn’t satisfied. “I have noticed the excessive attention she pretends not to pay to the young Wolf male, César. He is only a little older. Is he similarly innocent?”
“No he frakking well is not. I don’t trust him.”
“But he can cure her of this innocence.”
“Oh, yeah. He’d love that. There’s a right way and a wrong way to lose your innocence, and César is the wrong way.”
Silky turned and gave me an angry glare full in the face. Her eyes were black and set in deep black orbs, so I guess I was getting her anger broadcast direct from source rather than seeing it in her face.
“You are overprotective,” she said. “I think I understand why, but Shahdi won’t thank you for it and neither will I. What’s more, if you’re obsessively trying to protect innocents rather than follow orders, that makes you a liability too.”
“Well, you’re half right,” I admitted, “I spoke with Shahdi and she didn’t take too well to my interference at first, but I had to say something about César and did. She’s mature enough to appreciate my efforts, however clumsy. I hope she is… anyway…”
I ground to a halt, staring at Silky who had frozen with a look of confusion written on her face.
“Okay, what’s going on here?” I demanded. “How am I having a conversation with you?” I thought through the possibilities. “Are you an AI construct encoded with Silky’s personality and embedded in the recording?”
“No,” she replied, unfreezing and taking a few steps toward me. “That is a very interesting idea, though.”
“Then what’s happening?”
She sighed. “You do realize you’re not actually talking with me, don’t you? I’m only a dumb recording. There’s just you and the ghosts in your head.”
I considered the implications. “That’s not a good sign.”
“Perhaps not. Talking to yourself has an undeservedly bad reputation. There are plenty of insights and memories stashed in your subconscious that your conscious mind cannot readily access. Some could be vital.”
“So, you’re saying if I look deeply enough into my mind, I can draw out the hidden knowledge to build a high velocity railgun out of rat feces, dust, and my boot laces?”
“Ndeki, you’re not taking this seriously. Look, you plugged me into your neck because you wanted to be close to Silky.”
I nodded.
“Then make the most of this. Face facts, Marine, it’s probably your last chance to be with her. Even if some of this is real and some not, do you really want to see the joins between the two?”
I scowled, but I felt like a petulant crècheling doing so.
“Shall I continue?”
“Go on,” I said.
She gave me an encouraging smile and returned to the interrogation, repeating the procedure of a few minutes earlier, but this time when she eased her awareness into the minds of the prisoners, they embraced her presence as if reuniting with a distant lover. It wasn’t like the mind link to me through the cable that allowed words to be spoken, but she could feel the truth in the answers they gave to her questions.
They were part of the Levelers, which I’d already guessed. Caccamo and the others might still be alive, imprisoned at HUB’s base. Or they might not. Silky had overdone the dosage, and the prisoners had flipped from resisting her probing questions to telling her whatever they thought she wanted to hear. Silky put the chances of Caccamo being alive at the HUB base at a little more than fifty-fifty. But that was too much to ignore.
She advised Chikune over the comm net to stop what he was doing and investigate the other observer, the sniper on the far side of the canal.
Then Silky tapped Nolog-Ndacu on his shoulder and explained her next step. “I believe public nudity offends humans for some reason, though I do not understand why they should be so ashamed of their bodies. They are not to blame for the unfortunate way evolution has shaped them.”
“I understand,” said the big alien. One by one he smacked each of the prisoners on the back of the head. “Disgusting perverts. I hope the police arrest you.”
He was smart, Nolog.
So was Silky, I realized that with a start when a feeling of playfulness came over her. The little terror! Silky wanted me to hear this, to feel what she did. Minx!
“I do not like
the male genitals of your species,” she said. I couldn’t tell any more whether this was a memory of something she’d said in the real world, or thoughts she added later. Either way I knew she was addressing me. “These things look unlovely and unfinished. But we can fix that.” Sure enough, out came the ribbons she’d bought to tie around the base of her head lumps. She tied them instead to the root of the prisoners’ genitals in elegant little knots. “There,” she said, “that is a slight improvement.”
Shahdi giggled, and from my distant vantage point I joined with a chortle of my own. There had been so much death and despair in my life – in Silky and Shahdi’s too. It pleased me no end to see this frisky side to them.
I felt Silky redirect the full glare of her curiosity on me. She had never looked at me like that before. I hadn’t realized she could. “Perhaps even you could benefit from a ribbon and the application of a little make up.”
I know I wasn’t really there but that proved no defense, and I squirmed in embarrassment. For months I had known of Silky’s obsessive compulsion to be with me, but she’d never revealed sexual curiosity.
I scrambled to my feet. I wanted out.
Before the true horror of Silky’s sudden interest wormed into my brain, she wiped it away. I saw from the inside as Silky shrugged away those feelings and replaced them with her natural emotional state: a resigned acceptance of perpetual disappointment. Aching loneliness too. She might have imprinted upon me like a hatchling, but I obviously didn’t make her remotely happy.
“It is of no consequence,” she said mournfully. “My curiosity about humans was quenched after the events of Tata-West Province.”
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