That was all the Leveler had to say on the matter before his voice was lost under the bulk of his assailant.
His body collapsed to the ground under the assault.
“Shoot first,” said my Pavnix rescuer. “Gloat second. Dumb drellock.”
I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. It was a fine philosophy, even though I was having a little trouble at present with the shooting part.
The Pavnix looked at me. “It’s a paralyzing venom,” it explained. “He’ll live. For now.”
I shrugged. “Dead would have worked just as well for me.”
We stared at each other, the alien and I. Its hairy little paps rubbed together, and then flicked out toward me.
Was it trying to tell me something? I had no idea. I struggled enough with human body language, so I cut to the chase. “Are we working together now, or what?”
“It would seem so,” said the alien, the whisper coming from behind its paps sounded like leaves in a breeze, but the translation through the voice synthesizer embedded in its throat was clear enough.
“Hey!” called out Caccamo. “Less talking, more arming.”
“The former squadron leader is correct,” said the Pavnix. “I am escorting your Revenge Squad colleagues to the secondary armory. I assume you can see in these light conditions?”
“Yes.”
The alien grabbed my wrist and did something to my Aimee. “I have given you the route and the access codes to unlock the armory and the weapons within. Now go, lead your people.”
“Fine,” I replied “what will you do?”
“I have other means to even the odds.”
“Well, maybe I do too, pal. My comms are blocked, can you get a signal out?”
“Yes. Though not here and now.”
Damn! I wanted to call Silky. I guess had to take this one step at a time.
Caccamo was stumbling toward us. I took pity, walked over and linked arms with him as if we were a courting couple. “Hold on to me, old man.”
He gave a forced little laugh and then started organizing my new colleagues back into line, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front.
As the Pavnix grabbed two of the Leveler rifles, I asked it, “What’s the plan after we get armed?”
“I have discussed this already with your – old man. We meet at the central chamber. In practice we don’t know what’s going on. You arm yourselves and then we respond to events as they unfold. Just remember, that not all HUB people have sold out to the Levelers.”
“I understand,” I replied. “Good luck.”
Me and my big mouth.
Before the Pavnix could get away and my shambling line set off, we heard shouts and saw lights from the tunnel up ahead.
“Stay where you are!”
“Lay down your weapons!”
The Pavnix dropped one rifle and readied the other to meet the oncoming storm. It sounded like there were dozens of people headed our way.
“That’s not going to achieve much, is it?” I told the dumb alien veck. “Let me take the heat for freeing the Revenge Squad people. You need to get away.”
I know I just said I don’t understand Pavnix body language, but I had the impression that the Pavnix was speechless.
I wasn’t much different. Twice in the same day I’d stayed behind so an alien could get free. That was twice more than I’d ever done before. “Reckon we are all on the same side when all is said and done,” I told it. “HUB and Revenge Squad… We’re rivals. That’s all.”
I unstrapped my Aimee and handed it to the alien.
“Call my boss,” I said and then hesitated when Caccamo growled. “My assistant boss. Name of Silky. If I know her, she’s got a wild plan she’ll be working on right now. Assuming she’s still alive. Work with her, please.”
“Too risky and time consuming,” said the alien. “If she’s any sense she won’t trust a word I say.”
“Which is why you need to tell her that NJ sends his compliments to the Maid of Meskilot.”
Shots rang out down the corridor.
“We surrender!” I shouted.
The Pavnix dropped its rifle and ran off, clutching my Aimee. A human would have acknowledged what I’d told it, but aliens…? They are such hard work.
The Levelers rushed us and quickly separated us into groups.
“You! I nearly believed you could be one of us.”
It was the space rat woman who’d played tag team with the Hades Division interrogator.
I decided she and I were not going to be good friends.
I should have punched her. Hitting things generally makes me feel better, but my exhaustion and beating had finally crept up on me. I was a spent force for now. And it didn’t look as if there would be a later, when a pair of Levelers grabbed each of my arms and frogmarched me back against the wall for them to present their rifles, a rough and ready execution squad.
I had no wish to die, but I had cheated my demise so many times that I felt an inevitability when mine finally caught up with me. It was just my exhaustion telling me that, of course, but I felt grateful to die with my back against a tunnel wall rather than rotting away on my failing farm amidst my barley ravaged by the Meskilot parasite. The Levelers hesitated. It’s not as easy as it sounds to kill a person in cold blood.
“Shame I never got to hear your stories, Squadron Leader Caccamo,” I called out, taking advantage of their hesitation because it wouldn’t last long. “This is Ndeki Joshua McCall, signing out.”
The Leveler executioners lifted their weapons.
“I’ll be joining you soon,” I whispered to my ghosts.
“Hold your fire!” said the lead Leveler. “He shall live.”
“But I’ve just given my exit speech,” I protested. I sighed. “Can’t deny it’s good to feel more use alive than dead. It isn’t a great statement of my worth, but it’s a start.”
I didn’t like the way she laughed. “It’s not so much your life that is worth something, but your death. Gunning you down is not good enough. You’re to be put to death in a more satisfying fashion. Him too,” she said, pointing at Caccamo. The Levelers moved to separate Caccamo from the rest of the bunch.
“As for the rest of you,” she said, addressing the other Revenge Squad people. “You are going to watch your leader and your wisecracking buffoon as they die. And then you will join us, because if you don’t, your deaths will be next.”
— CHAPTER 20 —
They kept me in isolation for the big event: a show trial starring yours truly and Caccamo, to be swiftly followed by a show execution. The place was a maze of little tunnels and small rooms, so it wasn’t exactly taxing the logistics to keep Caccamo and me separate from everyone and each other.
I ventured the opinion, in what should have been the privacy of my own head, that the HUB people kept us isolated because they were afraid I would say something to embarrass them in front of the audience while they were prepping for the big show. My ghosts took this opportunity to demonstrate they had rallied by laughing until my head rang. They insinuated that the only people who would be embarrassed by my big mouth were NJ McCall and his dead friends.
I was still smarting about this lack of moral support from my dead comrades – whom I expected to join soon – when I was marched from my cell through corridors now lit, and out into a vast cave.
It wasn’t exactly a natural cave and it wasn’t that big, but ammunition dumps like this favored narrow winding tunnels and widely dispersed chambers, and in comparison big cave covers the main loading bay nicely.
I waved at the crowds as I was marched toward a circle in the cave’s center. The sand had been cleared away here to reveal a flooring of scorched tiles on which a symbol had been painted that I recognized from the Leveler literature: arrows compressing a horizontal line.
If Silky was daft enough to go for a frontal assault, the front door of the cave would be the route she would take. I didn’t think Silky was stupid, but she was
an alien, and that made her thinking so different that sometimes it was indistinguishable from stupidity.
A rectangular opening in the cave led out to a shelf of dry sand, which dipped steeply into a sweep of pristine beach, gleaming in the morning sun, that extended over half a klick to the waves. I realized with a start that somewhere along the way, today had become tomorrow. Which meant Silky’d had more time to prepare whatever madness she was planning than I realized.
I looked out at the beach but there was no sign of her, but the view was obscured by a chain-link fence that marked the base’s perimeter a short way out into the sand. Back inside the entrance, two low walls of piled rocks and rubble swept inward from either side of the opening, angled to enfilade any attacking force. These walls were only manned by a handful of armed guards, but then I reminded myself that if Silky advanced through that defended opening, she would have only four other people with her. Five if you included Chikune, which personally I didn’t because he was such a useless drellock.
I could see tracks running along the top of the rectangle and I would bet my life that buried under the sand directly underneath would be a matching set of tracks for the sliding blast doors, long since scrapped.
I looked behind and it wasn’t difficult to see what had transpired long ago, when the Legion assaulted the world under the command of Xin Lee, one of the few Legion commanders I had ever wholeheartedly admired. Her command would have melted a hole in the blast door with a modified and repurposed starship engine, and then fired a volley of plasma warhead missiles through the resulting gap.
Those missiles would have blown a hole at the back of the loading bay and set off such a powerful explosion that it opened up fissures in the cliff wide enough to drop a Marine down – though only barely wide enough in the case of a middle-aged Marine suffering from girth spread.
The HUB inhabitants had made a home from this, moving boulders of rock that had fallen in that cataclysmic blast, and arranging them into rudimentary tiered seating in an arc around the central circle. They had even tidied up the rubble by painting the rocks white.
If I had an artistic sense, I would have thrilled to the way a crude but functioning amphitheater had been constructed from the wreckage of war.
But I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. To me, it was a heap of white rocks. For sitting on.
Evenly space single stones ringed the cleared circle. I was placed on one and told to shut up. Caccamo was sat upon a rock opposite. I waved at him and he gave a thumbs up in reply.
Out in the bay, gaibolga gulls suddenly erupted into a raucous squabble so loud that the cave echoed. It wasn’t just their piercing cries that impressed me about the red-backed gulls. They were armed not just with sharp beaks that could chop through flesh like plasma cutters, but they had a telescopic barbed tongue that could reach down into the water and spear several fish at once. I enjoyed a fantasy of an air wing of gaibolga gulls under Silky’s command, flying through the enfilading fire at the cave entrance and onward to skewer the necks of my captors.
Now you’re getting ridiculous, Bahati told me. Impress me this one last time. Despite all your antics over the centuries, I’ve admired you since the day we met. Don’t make this day different.
Ouch! I never could act cowardly in front of Bahati. Duly shamed, I finally turned to face the crowd.
Their numbers were wiltingly few. If I had to go through the charade of a show trial, I wanted a baying crowd of thousands, and for the spectacle to be beamed to a multitude of millions if not more.
I counted sixteen Revenge Squad prisoners, my would-be comrades whom I had pretended to break out, though really the Pavnix had done so. To either side of them were clumps of about thirty HUB people, glaring at everyone and looking even more nervous than the Revenge Squaders.
Hovering in the background lurked the Levelers. A lot of them. Several hundred at least and all armed.
I guess that the execution of Caccamo and his Assault Marine buffoon playmate was not the only act on today’s bill.
These Levelers look even more nervous than the HUB people, Bahati pointed out. I’m guessing they signed up for revolution, not to take part in executions.
Don’t get your hopes up, guys, I replied. Armed struggle is always messy and ugly. Unfortunately, they know that as well as we do.
Reluctantly, I cast my gaze over the Revenge Squaders. Shame had kept me from looking properly at my would-have-been Revenge Squad colleagues. I was their rescue party and – well, it had all gone to drent and we all knew it. I had let them down.
They were mostly human in various subspecies, a few Littoranes, two Hardits, something I couldn’t recognize, but… there was one Marine female I did recognize. So unexpectedly that I stared at her until she rolled her eyes in irritation.
Magenta. There had been a woman in our Revenge Squad training camp. I had barely a chance to get to know her before she was killed before my eyes. Not saying we would have been lovers, necessarily, but we had gelled easily.
There she was looking back at me. Ten years older perhaps, but looking all the better for it. Yet I’d seen her die.
I forced myself to look away. Who was this woman? That was a mystery, but one I would need to solve another lifetime because HUB and Leveler dignitaries now emerged, each with a heavily armed entourage. The HUB boss and the Leveler boss. I could tell the difference easily enough. One of them had plasma burns to his face and a calloused ridge along his neck that spoke of years wearing a combat helmet. The other didn’t look as if she could lift a helmet, let alone wear one.
“My name is Mayrik and I welcome you, friends,” announced the HUB leader, gesturing to all groups in the cave theatrically. I could tell the drellock was loving this performance. Meanwhile, the Leveler leader perched her butt on one of the other rocks at the circle’s perimeter.
“I do mean friends,” said Mayrik. “You–” he pointed at the Revenge Squad audience. “You can be friends and comrades with us. Or… we can be enemies.”
You might think me insane, but I warmed to the guy because he didn’t mince his words. ‘Join us, or I’ll kill you.’ That’s what he’d just said, and that was a perfectly reasonable statement that needed no embellishment.
“Today we shall learn which side you choose, and these two…” Guess who he pointed out? “Shall be the first to determine through their actions whether they live or die.”
— CHAPTER 21 —
The HUB leader, Mayrik, was a former Marine like me – though in common with nearly all Marines still living he was significantly younger. I will be proud to be a Marine until long after the day I die, but even I have to admit we weren’t the most eloquent of people. Outsiders call our staccato speech machine-like. I call it concise and information dense, free from the annoying clouds of verbal drent vented by lesser forms of humanity. Mayrik was that rarest of rare beasts: a Marine who fancied himself an orator.
There’s a reason why that’s a rarity, and it’s why I can’t report the early part of his speech. I zoned out. Sorry. In my defense, I had experienced a very trying day and simply couldn’t concentrate.
My interest perked up when his narrative – which seemed to begin at the creation of the Universe, and continue in real-time commentary until the present day – eventually reached his description of HUB’s formation.
“I was impressed to see the former wet navy sailors organize themselves and try to take control of their destiny, rather than accept scraps of work from the shipping corporations that then dominated. I wanted to earn a living for myself and out of work former soldiers, and I wanted to feel I was doing some good too. To begin with, we did. We never pretended to be angels, but we brought a semblance of order to the toughest areas of the city, and then wider into the province. People slept soundly for the first time in years. But our success only upped the bribes we had to pay to carry on our business. Eventually those who run this province demanded more than money, they wanted in on the board. Financial and politica
l backers took over control and installed their own people. Those who run HUB today don’t care about the people I wanted to protect. Nor do they see former soldiers as anything other than a cheap and expendable resource. They do not care about you.” Mayrik toured the seated rows of Revenge Squad and his own people as if a general inspecting his troops before battle.
“HUB has become an amoral means to extract money from civilians. I have evidence that the shadowy figures behind us are also behind the wave of murder, thieving, and rape sweeping through the city. How better to drive custom our way than to terrorize people into signing up for a HUB protection policy? We need to take a deep breath and remember while we still can that once we were heroes. In the war, we stood and many of us died for what was right. We need to do so again.”
The captive Marine who resembled Magenta interrupted Mayrik. “Hey, HUB Man. We’re recruiting at Revenge Squad. Why don’t you join us rather than ally with these clueless revolutionaries?”
Mayrik strode up to her, and the Magenta lookalike rose to her feet, ignoring the armed Levelers motioning for her to sit. Her Revenge Squad comrades coiled like an angry spring. The atmosphere in the cave felt like a minefield. One misstep and… boom!
“Join up with HUB’s competitor?” said Mayrik. “When I learned Revenge Squad was setting up in town, I began to prepare a hot reception. I took your team’s arrival, Laban Caccamo, as a declaration of war. You might expect HUB’s new board of control to feel the same, but no! The puppet masters jerked my wires and ordered me to stand down. Revenge Squad was not to be hampered. I was even ordered to task my deputy, Lieutenant Xamajeeli-Lek, with befriending Revenge Squad so sie could quietly offer assistance. The local Revenge Squad branch was to be up and running, earning money for their masters as quickly as possible.”
It felt as if the ground were crumbling beneath my feet. He talked sense, this Mayrik. Although we had little more than guesswork so far, Silky and I were stumbling toward the same conclusion about Revenge Squad: we were working for the bad guys.
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