I had to face it, though. I had done all I could out in the real world. My body now belonged to the crabs, but my mind was still my own for a little longer.
I closed my eyes and withdrew to the comforting embrace of my ghosts.
Except, the moment I got properly inside my head, I picked the biggest fight I could.
Now I’m about to die, I told Sanaa, we need to talk.
I sensed my other ghosts scramble for cover.
I’m listening, she said, in a voice littered with broken glass and flenser mines.
I wasn’t afraid of her now. In my current predicament, I explained, I have decided to believe decisively in the existence of an afterlife. In which case, I will soon be reunited with you and… I swallowed hard. This wasn’t easy to say.
You’ll meet our daughter, she said for me.
Our daughter. Yes. I think now is the time to give her a name.
For some reason, instead of plucking at the nerve endings that would light up my body in agony, she gave me the ghostly equivalent of an embrace while she searched for the strength to speak.
We stayed wrapped in each other until she was ready. Before I died, she said, I had been toying with the idea of ‘Phaedra’…
——
“Lay down your weapons!”
The voice arose from the sea, but I barely noticed because Bahati was assaulting Sanaa and me with reasons why our daughter’s name should be ‘pretty’, and I was fuming at her interference on the one matter that absolutely did not concern her. In. Any. Way.
But when the saltwater splashed in my face, I snapped open my eyes and brought two salient details to my immediate attention.
Firstly, the sea had advanced during my mental absence, and now lapped around my thighs.
Secondly, around a hundred humanoid figures were emerging from the waves all around me. Several of them pointed weapons in my direction and fired.
Grenades sailed over my head and gently popped as they landed behind me on the shelf of dry sand. I felt an instant of agony as red hot needles skewered the lumps along my spine. Then the pain vanished.
EMP munitions, said the Sarge, speaking as if he still had teeth and was determinedly gritting them. Low grade. Probably homemade. We’re safe.
I couldn’t turn my head to see behind but, from the volume and panic of the shouts coming from the dry sand near the cave, I guessed the Levelers and HUBsters on the beach were outnumbered around 10 to 1. There are no prizes for guessing what they did next.
The line of wet people fired into the air and the Levelers ran. I worried at my lower lip and suddenly realized that what the HUB man who’d tied my wrist had said about his family applied to me too. I didn’t know who these people were, but with Silky having at most five people with her, it wasn’t my home team. These new players were unlikely to be friendly. And I did have a living family to go back to now. I wanted to live. I tested my full strength against my bonds, but they only tightened.
I could picture part of the scene behind. Their personal comms fried by the EMP, the Levelers would be running to the cliff entrance up above the tide line to bring their fellows down and start a fire fight on the beach: a hail of metal, ceramalloy and plastics in which I would play the part of ineffectual soft cover.
What I couldn’t picture were the HUB people. Whose side would they take?
Shots rang out, fired into the sand in front of the cave from high above us on the clifftops. I heard the familiar sound of bodies crumpling, the wounded screaming, and those screams cut short by more fusillades. So far, it was my enemies retreating into the cave who were taking the punishment. I didn’t expect the balance to remain so one sided.
Then the screams ceased.
A couple of the HUB people who had bound us to the poles now had a change of heart. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t like it if my boss had sold me out to a gang of revolutionaries. In any case, they rushed out of cover and over to undo Lazheet and Caccamo. I hoped I was next.
The woman undoing Lazheet asked who the hell these amphibious invaders were who hadn’t fired a shot in anger. “They could have swept the entrance of our cave with ease,” she said, “but didn’t. Apart from the snipers on the cliffs. Everyone else has fired into the sand.”
I was equally perplexed. What kind of people assault a defended position with guns they didn’t use to kill?
I gasped.
Took you long enough to figure it out, said Sanaa. Dumbass.
“It’s the Catholic Army,” I said out loud, and then cursed myself for following Sanaa’s line with such a dumb comment.
One of the figures emerging from the waves took off his goggles and wetsuit hood. He had the diminutive stature of Navy personnel bred for life in the void.
“There is a perilously thin line between intimidation and violence,” the Impressively Reverend Bishop of Port Zahir told me. “However, I feel confident we have not crossed it.”
“What?” groaned Caccamo who was just coming to after his beating. “I must be hallucinating. They broke my shades. That can bring out hallucinations in a fellow. I’ve got to be hallucinating because…” He cleared his throat and his voice rang loud and clear. “Hot Sauce? Is that you?”
“Been a while since I went by that call sign, Squadron Leader.”
Hot Sauce?
For once, I was with the amphibious monks and other religious weird types in staring incredulously at the Bishop of Port Zahir. What the hell did he do to earn that kind of moniker?
Then one of the monks barked an order and the group fired up the beach. If my guess was correct, no one sentient was getting hurt, and what the Catholics didn’t know about the devastation they were wreaking on the sand crab population could wait until later.
“The arm didn’t grow back, funnily enough,” the bishop explained to his former squadron leader, “and the leg had to be cut even shorter. So I’ve been keeping busy doing other things for a while. I’m a Catholic bishop now. These stout-hearted men, women, and others are my flock, and volunteers from friendly rivals.”
At the talk of ‘others’ I looked again at the dripping figures. There were aliens amongst them, including a few amphibious Littoranes, but so far I couldn’t see anyone with Kurlei headlumps. I kept looking.
Shots came out from the cave, sending rounds tunneling through the water. They were answered by automatic fire from up in the cliffs. The fire from the defenders faltered and took on a ragged quality. But I’d seen their numbers and knew we had to get off this beach now before they rallied.
“They’re going to be your dead flock soon,” Caccamo pointed out.
“Don’t worry, Cacco,” replied the bishop. “We have a plan.”
— CHAPTER 23 —
“What?” I said as a pair of wetsuited women of the Catholic special forces began to free me from the post. “How?” I added for good measure. Never mind the bishop reminiscing with his old Navy buddy, I wanted to know what the hell was going on.
The bishop answered with a voice that could cut through ceramalloy plating. “If you get in with the Episcopal Alliance, Ndeki, you will be surprised at how far our fingers of influence extend.”
With a laugh, one of the women working to free my wrists said, “He means one of our flock is the quartermaster of the Port Zahir Sub-aqua Society. Or, she was. I suspect her club membership might soon be revoked.”
I stared at the bishop, still too stunned to trust that I wasn’t hallucinating. The evidence hung in the balance. Where was the bishop’s cane, for example? His stance and gait as he waded through the swell suggested he was still using prosthetics in place of two missing limbs, but he normally limped bent over his cane like an ancient, wizened creature from pre-history. Then there was Silky, who I had spotted a little to my left talking with Caccamo. As a nicely surreal touch, she had tied ribbons to her fronds. Very pretty they were too in iridescent russet brown, and rich green and blue: this season’s combat attire. Matched Caccamo’s searingly bright shirt, I su
pposed.
Some of the bishop’s assault team were dragging equipment crates out of the waves. I couldn’t identify their contents, but they were heavy enough to gouge deep channels through the wet sand. When they reached the top of the beach, just below the dip, Team God opened the crates to reveal what looked like industrial heaters ripped out of some poor defenseless building, and proceeded to attach them to portable zero-point batteries.
And there was more: snipers in the cliffs above the beach were continuing to pour a steady fire onto the opening into the base, and were using high-spec weapons to do so. I guessed they were the cause of the Leveler corpses. Given how much better armed Revenge Squad seemed to be than just about everyone else except the Civilian Defense Force, I dared to hope that the snipers were Shahdi, Nolog-Ndacu and my other friends.
I was rubbing the circulation back into my arms, and trying to figure out why anyone would bring heaters to the beach, when Silky began splashing over to me. She was waving her arms as if trying to tell me something. She was shouting too, but although my wife had many fine qualities, a voice that can cut through the noise of gunfire and waves like a plasma torch through flesh was not one of them.
As one, the monks all took a sudden attitude of prayer, hunched over with mouths open, eyes clamped shut and hands over ears.
Had Silky joined the priesthood?
And why had the snipers stopped firing?
Dammit, boy, said the Sarge. They aren’t praying.
I copied the bishop’s people a second before the upper slopes of the beach erupted in a firestorm of light and sound.
My hearing wasn’t what it once was – and was going to be even worse now – but I could hear the bombardment had come from two or three pieces firing a smoke and concussion mix, although I thought I’d heard a pico-nuke or two in there.
Sure enough, there followed a brief exfoliating deluge of sand, flung up by the explosion.
Definitely a pico-nuke.
The sand rain slackened and I followed the others in un-clasping my ears and turning my attention to advancing up the beach. The chain-link fence had been blasted flat, and the upper slopes were filled with black smoke that hung in a solid mass. It was more than dumb smoke: this was Smart Smoke. Any targeting systems the HUB base used wouldn’t see through the barrier and had probably been fried by its EMP component. Talking of which…
You okay in there? I asked my ghosts.
We’re buried under Ndeki-hide, replied Sanaa. Not much can penetrate that.
We were in the shallows now, wading up the beach with Silky splashing the last few steps to me.
I know technically this was a battlefield, but I threw out an arm to embrace her. I was wildly impressed that she had recruited the bishop’s special forces, and organized this rescue party. I was even more delighted that she’d gotten away from the cliff unscathed.
Whether it was the shock of a company of wetsuited monks emerging from the waves, the command and control issues of pushing two groups of people in a direction some didn’t want to go, or simply because they were hopelessly inept, we’d been let off lightly by the weakness of the defenders’ response to this beach invasion. But that couldn’t last.
Now the defenders rallied.
A hail of rounds spat through the smoke, skimming along the sand and fizzing into the shallow waves. A metallic ping announced a bullet ricocheting off the post I had been tied to minutes earlier.
From close by I heard three thumping impacts and then a sigh that sounded like a musical instrument of perfectly tuned crystal at the moment it shatters. I know that’s a hopeless description, but the sound was alien.
My alien!
“No!” I screamed. “Not again!”
I blinked back tears but it was a hopeless exercise so I shut them tightly, sealing me off from the outside world. But when I opened them, Silky was still lying inert on the beach, rocking gently in the swell’s edge, sandy brine flicking over her from the hail of bullets and darts coming thick and fast.
Then the nature of the heavy equipment dragged along the beach revealed itself when the devices hummed into life and seemed to swallow all noise and motion in front of them. They were force shunts, the energy-sucking defenses that turned the Legion X-Boat squadrons into battle winners. Caccamo must’ve liberated them from the Navy, but I was too angry to be impressed. Safe behind our shields, the flailing fire ceased, and my ears cleared enough to hear Silky groan.
“Why couldn’t you have set these shields up faster, you wixering maggots?” I screamed at the pretend army, but no one could answer.
I knelt in the waves and pressed a hand to Silky’s throat. Still a pulse. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. She gave me a pained grin and mumbled something, but not loudly enough for me to hear.
“Why?” I bellowed at the people around but they wouldn’t meet my eye.
“Easy, Ndeki,” said the bishop.
It was all I could do to keep my fists from smashing into the priest’s face. “Help her!” I ordered him. “Don’t leave her to die alone.” I jabbed a finger in his face. “I hold you accountable for that.”
“NJ, listen. I don’t think…”
Whatever the bishop said, I was not listening. I tuned him out, dismissed Silky from my mind, and turned to face the incoming fire.
Despite the order I had just given the bishop, there was no chance she would survive multiple gunshot wounds. I had many skills but resurrecting the dead was not one of them. What I could deliver was revenge. And this time it was personal.
I believe that the normal human reaction at this point would have been to rush to Silky’s side, to ease her pain, to be with her at the end. But I wasn’t human. I was an Assault Marine and that isn’t how we are built, not how we are designed. I did the only thing I could think of: I picked myself up from the sand, passed through a gap between the force shields and charged the cave, leaving Silky for dead.
I scrambled up the slope and carried on toward the cave mouth. On my way, I picked up a weapon from a fallen Leveler. Just as well I chose that moment to do so, because as I stooped down to grab the junior carbine, I felt my hair singe as a missile flew overhead into the Catholic army.
Horden’s bones! This was getting serious, I thought, and immediately corrected myself. This had already gotten serious.
Go through. Go deep, urged the Sarge.
Run! screamed Bahati and Sanaa in uncharacteristic unison.
A grim smile flashed on my face. Whatever my ghosts were by now, at the point I inserted them into my spine, they had been a fusion of stored Assault Marine personality and combat AI. We were all of us engineered for a single purpose, and that meant there was only one direction we understood: forward!
I sprinted through plumes of sand thrown up by small arms fire and the choking clouds still hanging in the air from our Smart Smoke munitions.
I may be of an age when I can foretell the coming day’s weather by the ache in my joints when I wake, but I can sprint fast when motivated enough. And I was super motivated. It wasn’t so much a sense of running for my life, as running for other people’s death, that squeezed every ounce of strength from me and put it into my charge across the deadly sands.
These people had shot my Silky. And I would not suffer them to live.
— CHAPTER 24 —
I leaped over a section of chainlink fence flattened by whatever heavy weaponry Silky had called in, and kept going, trusting the Smart Smoke to hide me.
It wasn’t until I reached the cave entrance, and the smoke thinned to the level of burning toast, that the stupidity of what I was doing hit me. If I’d pulled a dumb stunt like this during the war, I’d be in a thousand pieces of wet meat by now, scattered along the gleaming sands of the beach.
But this wasn’t the war. On Klin-Tula we restricted ourselves to toy guns, lest the authorities banned us as an illegal militia and went to war against us. And we didn’t have our combat AIs nor the ACE series combat armor with all of its tar
geting and sensor systems.
In other words, this was strictly amateur night. A determined idiot, temporarily blessed by the gods of outrageous fortune, could achieve the impossible. I kinda liked that.
And then I was out the smoke and inside the base.
A little late, I remembered the low walls of piled rocks angled back from the cave mouth, designed to catch me in enfilade fire.
Without slowing my pace, I took in what I was up against. The Revenge Squad prisoners were a hundred meters away – too far to help – backed up against the wall with rifles trained on them. I faced the defensive walls alone and I could see the Levelers had bolstered their defenses, because the walls bristled with barrels trying to shoot through the smoke and between the force shields on the beach.
They hadn’t noticed me. Yet.
I made my choice and shifted direction, aiming for the open end of the nearest defensive wall.
I felt a rumble of heavy machinery underfoot, but didn’t have time to check out this development because I was leaping for the rock wall.
One man on the far end of the wall spotted me, and swung his weapon around. But before he could shoot, I was in the air and my boot snapped his neck around sharply. Then he was falling and I was hurdling clear of the rocks. I kept on running.
Go deep, the Sarge urged again, but I needed no such encouragement. I kept charging ahead and threw myself over a fringe of rocks scattered another twenty paces deeper inside.
Pain stabbed mercilessly as I landed amidst a sprinkling of small rocks, metal debris and other assorted crap with sharp points and cruel edges. I had fallen upon HUB’s equivalent of the sweepings under the carpet left over from the war. I frowned. The detritus I had landed on looked too recent and too extensive. This looked more like the trash from significant engineering work carried out very recently. My bruised ribs agreed, but I ignored them, putting the mystery from my mind and allowing myself only three scant breaths to return some rigidity to my limbs before I looked out from my new cover for a split second. It was time to see how many enemies were coming to get me.
Hurt U Back Page 14
