Or was he?
I looked up and noted the status lights on the door’s control panel. “We can hack our way out the door and then use the Aimee to contact Silky.”
For that we need a cyber specialist, said Sanaa.
“Exactly,” I said with a grin because even in the lowlight conditions of my cell, I could make out a universal access port in the door mechanism. “Like Marine Tech Specialist Zawditu Sy.”
Just what are you suggesting? Bahati sounded worried. I guess she had a right to be. I knew where this was headed.
Wake-up Zawditu! I shouted inside my head. Tech Specialist Zawditu Sy, report your status!
My heart thumped or maybe my spine did as I felt a stirring. Sy had been one of the first to die. Bahati had carried her for many years before I cut Sy out of Bahati’s spine and placed her into my own. She hadn’t spoken for a long while, but I needed her now.
Come on, Specialist Sy. Attention to orders. Attention!
If Sy had truly stirred in the depths of… wherever the ghosts dwelt, I couldn’t feel anything now.
Come on, ghosts! Help me! I need you.
You gotta be kidding, said Bahati.
I felt disapproval from Sanaa and Efia. The Sarge told me this was a bad idea, but I wasn’t listening.
Bahati, I begged. You were always close to Zawditu. Can you try to persuade her?
Zawditu Sy and I haven’t spoken for a year, she replied. Not since you took on your alien female.
But you used to talk all the time. Best buddies. She was the squad cyber specialist and you were her backup.
I never passed the qualifications.
I’m not asking for your frakking résumé, Bahati. I just want to get out of this door. Are you going to help me or–?
The ghosts screamed at me in rage, realizing that I really did intend to go through with this a fraction before I did.
Sorry, Bahati, I said. I love you, and I know this will hurt, but lives depend upon us. Do your duty!
I raced to strip off my shirt before Bahati could stop me, though ‘racing’ doesn’t quite capture the full ineptitude of my graceless motion.
More accurately, I groaned and cursed as I moved my bruised and bloodied arms to peel the fabric from my skin, reopening wounds that were only just starting to scab. A few seconds in, my arms suddenly seemed to gain lead casing. I can think of many explanations: the pain passing a threshold beyond which my body refused to operate, my muscles exhausting their final fuel reserves, maybe a paranoid episode. My money, though, is on my ghosts acting in alliance to stop my heinous design in its tracks.
They failed.
I’m a stubborn veck when I need to be. The unofficial nickname of my old unit was the Mulehead Marines, and I was the biggest mule brain of them all. I might be dying, insane, in extreme exhaustion, and in a life or death battle against my ghosts for control of my mind, but if I want to take off my shirt, that’s what I’ll damn well do.
It’s what I had to do next that was hard. Not many things made me squeamish but this did…
If you don’t know Marines, you would notice our orange-tipped teeth and fingernails and think it was decoration or poor hygiene. Or fungal infection. It’s none of those. The orange-red comes from the iron content of our metalized nails and teeth coatings. Scuttlebutt says our ancestors were gene-spliced with rat DNA, and when I was posted to Earth I could see that rat incisors there did indeed look suspiciously similar to Marine teeth.
The Levelers had taken my combat knife, so guess what I used to go through the hardened Ndeki-hide covering the topmost lump running down my spine?
Yes, those lumps… I don’t like to talk about them much. The physical reality of my spine is a painful embarrassment to those who dwell there.
The lumps running down my back are specialized data ports. The combat AIs we’d grown up with were modified to store recordings of the Marine they were paired with, in anticipation of the moment when the Marine would die. Something of that person would continue inside the AI. Indeed, by the time we were cadets, our relationship with our AIs was so intimate that the boundary between machine and human had long since been too fuzzy to discern clearly. All of us in my squad gave ourselves these alterations before we shipped out for our first combat mission, but only I was left alive for my back to play host to my dead comrades.
Lusala was the oldest. He’d been in my back for nearly two centuries, during which time my body had claimed the lump, layering my flesh over the port until the bump had transformed into a smooth mound. But my second wife, Bahati, was not quite twenty years dead if you counted only life lived out of cryo.
My red thumbnails sliced into my flesh. It was tough work, and my arms protested loudly at the contortions I subjected them to, but I would not accept defeat. I cut out the circular flap of skin, reached in, twisted the AI casing clockwise through two full turns, and pulled Bahati out.
My ghosts died.
I died.
Not that I keeled over or something, but I knew I wasn’t me any longer. You know how there’s a constant stream of thoughts and words and music and memories playing in your head, the sonic backdrop to human life?
All I heard was white noise. And not in the background either.
NJ’s body gushed blood and gore out of the deep wound I had gouged from his back. That AI of his second wife had grown into an integral part of his flesh. Turned out that removing an AI was not as simple as flipping out a battery.
I noted this with mild curiosity, but NJ was no longer me.
I could not care what happened to him.
I stood motionless, lacking any sense of direction.
After a while, a deep, fleshy sense of self-preservation made me reach behind to test NJ’s wound. Tangles of squishy flesh hung from the gaping hole, but the blood loss was stemming from geyser to a river of blood flowing down NJ’s back, soaking his clothes and pooling into red paste on the dusty floor of the cell.
I wanted my ghosts back. I needed to be part of the team.
But still my head was crowded with white noise.
A memory floated by of the way Shahdi looked hungrily at César, of the feel of Silky’s mind caressing mine. People I cared for depended on me whether I was fully integrated into this Marine flesh or not.
That call of duty was enough, though barely. I remembered enough of myself to claim back NJ’s body and his identity. “I am Ndeki Joshua McCall,” I shouted, “and in my hand I hold the AI I cut from the corpse of Lance Corporal Bahati Chahine.” I grinned. “And I’ve some revenge of my own to deliver.”
It sounded as if the words were being spoken by someone else, but I felt sufficient compulsion to insert the AI casing into the universal port of the door lock, and ordered Bahati to hack the lock on the door. I got no response. The device was still processing Bahati’s AI.
Holy frakk, what had I done? I was back in my body but it felt as if I had pulled the power plug in my mind. My ghosts were dead and I’d killed them.
Lights flared in the door control as it began to acknowledge the AI inside. Now I was making progress…
I was used to talking with my ghosts as if they were the sole inhabitant of the AI casings. But that was a polite falsehood. The truth was that the personality patterns of once-living Marines had been absorbed by their own combat AIs. The thing about growing up with an AI, training, combat, falling in love and all the rest of it with your AIs so intimately linked, was that the AIs were so familiar to us that we often forgot that they were serious pieces of combat technology.
The Earth dwellers are proud of their technological prowess, but the AIs of the type I’d pulled my spine were hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than anything produced on Earth.
So why was this taking so frakking long?
I spoke into the door. “Bahati, are you there?”
There was no reaction. By this point I was hoping the combination of Bahati’s personality and the AI she had grown up with would work digital cyber
magic, and the door to my cell would spring open, accompanied by some witticism from Bahati. And then we could race to rescue the good guys and warn Silky of what was happening.
Unfortunately, that’s not how real life decided things would be.
I was out of ideas. Maybe the door was too old to accept the AI. I could have broken the AI when I ripped it from my body, or maybe Bahati was too angry to cooperate. Whatever the answer, I was getting nowhere and my spirit was aching with a Bahati-shaped absence. I think removing her had taken away the part of my mind that held my passion, and I needed that passion to get things done.
I realized that I’d zoned out for an unspecified duration. I had lost the ability to care once again. So I used Shahdi and Silky as motivational talismans, telling myself that I was doing this for them.
Truth was, I wasn’t achieving anything. I gave up and ordered the door to eject Bahati’s AI casing. I held my hand, waiting for Bahati to be ejected, and praying that the mechanism would recognize my voice. Surely everything was voice controlled, but I considered – a little too late – that not everything would pay attention to a human voice.
Just at the moment I felt a faint hum of power through my hand, and saw Bahati being ejected, the lights went out.
I heard a click, swiftly followed by multiple thuds – the kind of noises a secure locking system might make…
I pushed the door and it swung open easily.
I stepped outside my cell and stretched behind to reinsert Bahati into my spine.
“Thanks,” I told her. “Just in case it was you. Let’s go.”
I didn’t move. I sensed my mind begin to reassemble itself, but Bahati’s contribution was still lacking. If she were in place I would run to Silky and Shahdi, but as it was I stopped and thought first. Yes, I know that is highly uncharacteristic of me. I decided that there was one slender chance and very little time. I sensed how the Pavnix had finally found it impossible to deny the truth: that the HUB leader had sold out their organization to the Levelers. The Pavnix was my only hope. I couldn’t rescue Caccamo and the other Revenge Squad prisoners on my own, but maybe I had a chance if I teamed up with the HUB loyalists who were prepared to stand up and fight against the Leveler takeover.
Those HUB loyalists who might not exist except in my hopes.
With my brain still in disarray, my body so badly beaten I could move only in a painful stumble, my eyesight reduced to infrared only, and no idea of who to trust other than a large blob of an alien with a wedge of a head that looked like a drawing by a child with no artistic aptitude, I set out into the unknown, hoping I would stumble on to somebody who wouldn’t shoot me on sight.
I imagine you would just see the long odds and think I was mad, but I felt so cheerful to be on the move and acting that I had to work hard to stop myself from whistling.
Who would I chance upon? HUB loyalist or Leveler?
Turned out it was neither.
— CHAPTER 19 —
I froze.
I was thirty meters short of the crossroads when I heard shuffling from the branch to the right. It sounded like a herd of confused cows.
Which didn’t make much sense. The Levelers were political agitators, not a frontline combat unit, but even so I had to believe they had some means of illumination on them. Why would they stumble through the dark?
I strained to listen in on the people imitating cows but, unlike my artificial eyes, my hearing hadn’t been upgraded since my cadet years. And I’d been blown up a few times since then.
As I rerouted all sensory power to my ears, I was surprised when my eyes alerted me to a new development. A beam of light was picking out the glassy debris from a partial roof collapse up ahead ten paces.
More beams of reflected light licked at my confused eyes, which yelled in discomfort because they were attuned to infrared only.
The lights were coming from behind. Was this friend or foe?
Faced with the real prospect of actually encountering someone, my headlong dash out of my cell was suddenly seeming a little optimistic.
The crossroads was still thirty meters ahead. The shambling convoy was just about to hit the intersection and the lights from the party behind me would find me within seconds.
If I ran, I might evade both groups, but my legs had taken the brunt of my beating and I could barely walk. My upper body was another matter…
I glanced up and, sure enough, recognized structures in the overhead that I had been familiar with all my life: ventilation, system fire retarding system, air scrubbers.
Bless the White Knights and their evil alien hearts.
Our former alien masters – or current ones if you believe the government’s realpolitikal spin – were exceptionally wedded to the idea of equipment standardization throughout their empire. Starships, barracks, underground mining bases: we saw the same layout and design everywhere. This cliff face hideout had once been a White Knight approved ammunition store. Standardization applied here too.
I sprung up to the ceiling using unexpected power reserves in my legs that I was sure to pay for later. Being six foot seven helped too. I found a finger hold and pivoted up until I had one foot braced against a smoke detector, one hand stuck into a ventilation grill and the other wrapped around a fire retardant pipe.
If someone started a fire, my fingers would freeze before shattering like icicles. Otherwise I was laughing.
I slowed my breathing, tried not to think about sneezing or any other bodily noises, and craned my neck to watch who passed beneath me.
I counted four humans armed with crude rifles and flashlights. The people were too small to be Marines and too big to be space rats. Probably they were a more primitive form of slave soldier like my former Revenge Squad trainer, Denisoff.
I watched them continue beyond my position, and take up station a few meters ahead using the debris from the roof collapse as cover.
I’m not as cocky or competent as I was in my youth, so I didn’t roll my eyes in contempt until they doused their flashlights and waited in ambush for the herd of cows. Yup, they didn’t think to look up.
No matter what fun and games I get up to for amusement in my retirement, I will always be an Assault Marine. I’m proud of that. Damned proud. But although we are the best of humanity, I learned over many years a healthy respect for the many other forms of humanity, even the little space rat pixies.
But I draw a distinction between veterans of void war who lived aboard starships, and those who lived and fought on the ground. We lived, thought, and fought in three dimensions. Ground dwellers did not. It is not racist to say that we are superior because of this; it is simply a fact.
I was debating whether to use my advantage to advance on the ambushers or to evade them, when the cows hove into view. I could see in infrared, but for the cows there was absolute abyssal darkness. Only three of us seem to possess the gift of sight in this situation. Me. One of the Leveler ambushers using binoculars, and the barrel-like blob with the sticky-out wedge of a head leading the blind humans, who I assumed was the Pavnix I had met earlier.
The alien was leading a blindly stumbling Marine curiously dressed in short-sleeved shirt, baggy short trousers, and with the rhythmic slap of beach sandals on his feet.
That had to be Caccamo. And if my boss was alive, I supposed I had better rescue him.
The rest of the shambling herd followed behind and the numbers matched the holes in the Revenge Squad TO&E.
Did you turn out the lights? I asked Bahati. Or was that the fat alien?
Bahati wasn’t speaking to me. None of the ghosts were, but the white noise that had drowned out my thoughts in the cell had gone, to be replaced by the comforting sense of my mind knitting back together. But I was on my own for now.
Quit stalling, Joshua, and get on with it, I imagined the ghost of Sergeant Fofana yelling at me.
I gave a reluctant sigh. At my age, and after what I’ve been through so far today, I should be tucked up in a comfortable bed
with a large glass of cool beer. And a whiskey chaser.
At a whispered command from the Leveler with binoculars, the ambushers rose and caught the escaped Revenge Squad prisoners in the beam of the flashlights.
I crawled towards the Levelers.
One of them fired at the ceiling and yelled: “Lie on the ground face down. Now! Anyone got a problem with that, I’ll shoot you.”
If Fate had chosen to smile on me, I would have dropped down in the midst of the Levelers. But they were positioned within the debris from a collapsed roof, so there was no roof to hold on to. I dropped about ten meters away and advanced on them in my best approximation of a run.
By the time the rearmost Leveler had swung around to meet me, I had the barrel of his rifle in one hand and my other hand clenched into a fist buried into his face.
I yanked the rifle out of his grip, swung it around and clubbed the nearest Leveler.
I kept on swinging, batting one rifle to the ground and clubbing its owner senseless. I had dropped three of them without any of my foes letting off a shot. Useless vecks.
As I was turning back around to tackle the man that I punched at the start of the fight, a powerful flashlight on maximum blinded my eyes. I squinted into the light beam and saw it was held by the man I had punched. He’d retreated a short distance, away from the roof collapse, and stood with his back to the wall, his rifle aimed at my chest. He was too far away for me to rush.
I squeezed my eyes shut, looked over to my right and reappraised my Revenge Squad colleagues. They were back on their feet but confused.
Seriously? This Revenge Squad team needed better eyes – they were no use to me at the present.
But there was movement. Something stood out from the Revenge Squad herd, by virtue of its deliberate and coordinated movement. A large blob of heat was quietly scurrying along the overhead in my direction.
“Now you die,” the Leveler told me, bracing his weapon for the kill shot.
The fast-moving blob descended from the overhead, smothering the Leveler.
“My eyes! They’re burning!”
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