Luckily the battle in my head was pre-empted by the Sarge. Hostile sighted, he announced.
It was Chikune. And he was on his way to talk to me.
“Don’t worry, Sanaa,” I mumbled under my breath, “you got your way.”
I rolled out of my bunk and evaded Chikune, chancing upon Magenta who had paused in her assault on César while she rethought her tactics.
We exchanged a few words. They weren’t important, but that didn’t mean we didn’t communicate.
Being up close to Magenta was like looking into a mirror.
Some of the superficial details were different. She was a woman for a start. Younger too. Also, she lacked my scars and the series of AI ports running down my spine. Her eyes were the ones she had been born with and I reckoned her skull still had all its original parts. I had granted my hair its independence many years ago, but Magenta’s was coiled and entwined in a complex fashion that was far beyond my vocabulary to describe, other than to say it was reminiscent of Silky’s head thing but a hundred times more attractive.
There had been a time, long ago, when such details would not have seemed so superficial to me.
That version of me had died long ago.
But that was all right because Magenta was a Marine like me. That was all that counted. We hadn’t made up our minds whether we liked each other yet, but we understood each other. We knew that if we ever decided we were part of the same team then we could trust the other with our lives. I wasn’t sure that would ever happen, though, because the other thing we recognized in the other was that we were both running. Magenta didn’t have my stegosaurus spine, but she was carrying her ghosts in her own way.
Maybe the aliens who bred us mixed us up with some Kurlei genes, because we didn’t need words to learn all these details about each other. In unison, we gave each other a half nod of respect and moved on.
I tried talking with Xeene, the older Wolf but she held herself aloof which didn’t surprise me. My gestures of small talk were rebuffed. It was all a performance on both sides, but Wolves were powerful allies and dangerous foes, and I think she appreciated the respect I showed her by my attempt to make conversation.
In my experience, fraternizing with Wolves was a powerful experience of high intensity rack time that left you with bruises and other minor injuries, but a smile on your face. If you didn’t take the right protective measures, you might be left with a contagious alien skin parasite too, but what you were never left with was a friend.
Stories were told of Wolves who did forge bonds of friendship, even love, with non-Wolves, but they had the feel of ancient Earth legends of immortals who loved mortals, usually with the result of giving birth to cursed monsters. I only knew of one true example of a Wolf falling in love with a Marine, and that Marine wasn’t me, in case you were wondering.
“Come spend some time with me,” said Leading Spacer Conduit, the former damage control specialist I knew from Dulnthorpe. I allowed her to lead me away from Xeene.
“Good to see you, Leading Grocer Conduit,” I acknowledged. A flash of steel showed beneath Conduit’s demeanor that was normally so very easy going, so very nice. “I’m not sure it’s good you’re here though,” I said. “What happened? Those thugs I paid a visit to didn’t come back did they?”
She shrugged. “Those thugs are yesterday’s news. Small fry compared to what’s circling Dulnthorpe these days. Figured it was time to move on.”
I placed a hand on her shoulder. “Revenge Squad would be insane not to take on someone with your talents.”
“True,” she said cheerfully. “Whether they are as perceptive as you remains to be seen. Now, let us move on from the wixering frakkup of a past we wish to leave behind, and on to the good we brought with us. Your wife’s a Kurlei. Where you found her I have no idea, but it’s wonderful that you did.”
“Wait, you know about Kurlei?”
“Sure I do. Even picked up a few words in one dialect. When I served on the Lightning, we were assigned a Kurlei Marine contingent for about forty years. And you married one?” She shook her head. “I never thought you had that in you.”
I didn’t care for the way she glanced at my crotch as she spoke those words, nor for the way she then abandoned me and started up a conversation with Silky.
I didn’t care that Conduit preferred the alien’s company to mine, but when the leading grocer abandoned me, she left me exposed.
Chikune saw his chance and appeared at my side.
“I know why you’re here at Camp Prelude,” he told me.
“Oh, really. That’s very impressive because I’m not sure myself.”
“You don’t seem sure of very much at all, McCall. Perhaps I should have chosen more precise words to compensate for your limited vocabulary. I know the proximate cause of your presence. What you don’t understand is the root cause, which is fine because I don’t care about that.”
“I don’t know what your game is, Chikune. If this is an attempt to make conversation, then don’t waste our time. I don’t want to talk to you, but you want to tell me something. So let’s cut the crap and you tell me what you need, and then you get the hell out of my face. Deal?”
“You are more perceptive than you appear,” he said.
I was more restrained too, because I didn’t smack him.
“Very well,” he continued. “You were made an offer by a gang boss known as Timberwolf or Volk. You turned him down. I don’t know the details of Volk’s response, but it is apparent that you are no longer a farmer.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You know more than you should do.”
“No, McCall. I don’t know nearly enough. You have a score to settle with Volk. I have many scores to settle, and he is one of them.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Volk is also part of a trend,” said Chikune without a pause, “a very suspicious trend. There’s a sudden increase in crime that’s driving vulnerable people into the arms of Revenge Squad and its peers.”
“Hello? Control to Chikune’s brain. Is anybody in there? We’ve just been recruited, you drellock. It’s called cause and effect. There’s nothing suspicious.”
“Cause and effect. A very impressive concept for such a limited person. But you’ve gotten it ass about face, McCall. Revenge Squad and the other protection agencies started growing as fast as they could months before the crime wave began. Almost is if they were readying themselves to take on the increased demand they predicted for their services.”
“You’re one cynical bastard, Chikune.”
He didn’t answer. He just stood there studying the effect his words were having on me.
Damn him. It was a cynical universe. Maybe Chikune was right.
I shook my head. “Still not interested.”
“Perhaps. Not yet. But you are interested in Volk because that’s personal. Look, I’m a generous man, so permit me to share some valuable intel. Camp security is largely outward-facing to stop intruders getting in. Inward-facing security is a pain that no one wants to deal with. I’m sure that spy bots and motion sensors and roving AI security will be forthcoming eventually, but the work to set that sort of thing up is considerable and everyone is busy all of the time. For now, at least, information on potential Revenge Squad targets is easy to access in the administration block. Volk’s details will be there, I’m sure.”
“That’s very helpful. Now go break-in and steal what you want.”
“I didn’t say it was entirely without risk. And I have higher value targets than Volk.”
“Do I look like the kind of ninja who can steal into any room unnoticed?”
“Do you know what year Denisoff was born?”
Chikune didn’t look the sort to throw out random non sequiturs, so I decided to play his game. “The second half of the 24th Century.”
“Very good. 2378 to be precise. That is also his pass code to the secure rooms in the office block. I watched him use it this afternoon.”
“A
four-digit code? I’m not buying it. It’s too easy.”
“More digits are difficult to remember. Denisoff is a much more primitive form of human than we are, McCall. His mental faculties have been deliberately curtailed by his bioengineering. He is similar to Volk in that regard. They are both cunning, ruthless, and capable of extreme violence without warning. But they have no head for numbers and rely upon others for planning and logistics.”
I took a deep breath. The earliest Marines had half their brains hacked away to hone them into brutal murderers. The stories from the earliest days of the Human Marine Corps disgusted my generation, but we all know those outrages were perpetrated by our direct ancestors. Denisoff was a later model of soldier, not quite so crudely lobotomized, but still with limited capacity to question orders or the morality of any slaughter he inflicted. My ancestors were berserkers who would commit genocide against entire populations without a second thought. I shuddered. The natives of Earth were right to think of us as something other than human.
The legionaries of my generation dealt with our sordid heritage the only way we knew how. We never discussed it. Chikune was breaking a serious taboo, and I felt it was my duty as a morally responsible adult to point out his faux pas.
“Go vulley yourself, Chikune.”
He smiled, a gesture entirely without warmth, and left me to my thoughts.
The party continued, but it felt more distant to me with every passing moment because my thoughts were on Volk and the code Chikune claimed to know. I didn’t trust the former Army officer, but my desire to punch Volk’s face until his bones caved in plucked constantly at my attention.
For all we talked of having fought for and won our freedom, I guessed we would never free ourselves from the shadow of our brutal heritage. We tried to pass our berserker ancestors off as shameful aberrations we had left behind, but as my head filled with lush fantasies of violence, I had to admit that my generation hadn’t progressed very far.
Viktor Denisoff was a berserker through and through. It was a repellent thought, but when I was in his presence I was not at all repelled. Far from it, I found his primeval nature to be intoxicating. I feared the dark passions that man might unlock in me.
I looked down at my bunched fists and willed them to unclench before Silky saw me in this state. She was trouble enough without her head fronds tasting my fascination with violence.
— CHAPTER 22 —
Combat drill, physical training, unarmed combat, parade call, chow time with my comrades and off time with beers and grumbling over distant memories of battles gone cold and the Human Legion’s occasional manifestations of utter stupidity. (Don’t get me wrong, we were proud to have served in the Legion but any bureaucracy commanding tens of millions of personnel, and operating over an area it takes a century to cover, is bound to do some supremely dumb things.) Yeah, all in all you’d think I was in my element.
To an extent, I was. Denisoff and his merry little band of Revenge Squad associate helpers didn’t give me time to stop and think. I don’t like being pushed, manipulated, or told what to do – but set me boundaries, objectives, structure, and a commander in the form of Denisoff who seemed at least competent, and I found myself relaxing after the pressure of trying to make it on my own as a farmer.
I’d feared the barracks life would draw in the thousands of ghosts I had shared quarters with, driving out the living from my mind. Although old memories sometimes stabbed me unawares like an ice blade between the ribs, Camp Prelude was different enough that I could function. It helped that we weren’t about to ship out to another campaign in the war, and Viktor Denisoff helped too. Behind those cold eyes and launch tube cheekbones was a resolute personality of a strength I had rarely seen. He was too full of life to be overwhelmed by memories of the dead.
But this life wasn’t easy. Oh, boy, was it hard. I was doing the same laps of the field and press ups I’d done as a cadet, but I’d put a few centuries on the calendar since then. The training was brutal.
“Do you miss being a soldier?” Silky asked me one night as I was drifting off to sleep.
I gave a negatory grunt and allowed my eyelids to grow heavier.
I heard a splash as Jo settled down into its pool, and smiled. If I wasn’t so exhausted come night time then being in a mixed dorm would have weirded me out. As it was, there had been a few curious peeks at the unclothed bodies of my new comrades for the first few days before exhaustion claimed me and I was too tired to notice.
We were ten days into training and selection, and we were all long past caring that we shared a dorm of mixed species with one exception. Shahdi Mowad was our young farm girl, and to her, mixed dorm meant something completely different. The rest of us humans had lived in gender-mixed environments our entire lives, but she clearly hadn’t. She was young and attractive, but I didn’t feel comfortable dwelling on why she looked so good because I was old enough to be her grandfather – or an even more distant ancestor depending on how you counted. I had always wanted children one day, and the absence in my life had clung to me since my retirement, clawing deeper with each year. If Mowad had been a young man, I would have put my arm around his shoulders and told him I was proud of how he was shaping up; that he would amount to great things if he stuck with his training. I didn’t think Shahdi would appreciate that somehow, but Magenta and Xeene had taken her under their wing and were doing a better job than I ever could.
And then there was my wife who took the bunk above me. She made a point of stripping to the buff in front of me every night. I don’t know how things worked in her society, but in the human regiments of the Legion, we saw each other naked every day. It just wasn’t a big thing – not even if my wife was the most attractive man or woman on the planet. It was when someone you liked climbed into your bunk – that was when the fun rubbing flesh together started. So I ignored her.
As it was, Silky was changing, becoming more human every day. She was now halfway between the stretched white slug she had been when I first met her, and a body-painted human who cleansed herself by rolling in the bottom of a dried-up riverbed. Already it was a tossup who was the most humanlike in their outer appearance: Silky or the Wolves.
“The CDF has a core of regulars,” said Silky from the upper bunk.
Wonderful. I’d hoped by ignoring her she would go away. “It does,” I replied sleepily.
“And they have training posts. When you’ve worked through your contract here, would you consider signing up full-time with the CDF?”
This CDF is a federal outfit, practically an extension of the Human Legion… the people who wanted to catch and execute my wife for desertion. They would give me hard labor too for harboring a fugitive. In practical terms, hard labor meant doing something very useful and very dangerous in space. My sentence would not last long.
“Nah,” I answered. “This Revenge Squad training feels a little like the military, but this is just a vacation. Once we’ve qualified as agents, things will be different. We’ll be filing reports, sneaking around spying on people, and breaking limbs to order. And that’s how it should be. Me moving on. I spent my entire life in the military. Done that.” I shivered. “I don’t want to go back.”
My ghosts haunted my nightmares that night. They’d been quiet for a while – enough that I began to believe what Bahati had told me: the more comfortable I became with the other recruits, the less my ghosts appeared during the day.
That night, though, they kept dying in my dreams. So did Silky. She died endlessly. While my former comrades died in the way they had ended their real lives, a constant they could never escape, the details of Silky’s demise evaded the need for detail in the annoying way dreams have. It was the impact of her death that felt vividly real. It cut me to the bone.
I tried acting normally the next day, but Silky knew something was bothering me. So too did Chikune, who by then had established himself as top dog amongst the recruits on the basis that no one could be bothered to shut him up any longer
.
Chikune knew too much… He kept nagging about the administration office with its lax security. He hinted at the truths that lay in easy reach past that door. The more he pushed the more I was adamant I wouldn’t do his dirty work for him.
As we paraded that morning, Denisoff gave us welcome news. Today was to be our first off-site exercise, two days of concealment and observation. This time I was paired up with Mowad.
The moment we inspected our Aimees, Silky began broadcasting an emotion I hadn’t felt before from her. Jealousy.
— CHAPTER 23 —
Imelda led Mowad and me through the dense woodland to our starting position and told us we would be disqualified if we moved more than 200 meters from this point until the hunter-killer phase of the exercise began in just over five hours. Our spot lay in a clearing that sloped down to a large, reed-choked pond.
Instead of walking off without saying a word of farewell – which was as much as I could expect from a Hardit not actively trying to kill me – Imelda stared at Mowad. It was not a comfortable exchange. I was still struggling with the idea that Hardits could be anything other than targets to be shot on sight. As for what Imelda’s scrutiny meant, I had no idea.
“Stop it,” I told the alien. “That’s disrespectful.”
Mowad and Imelda glared at me in unison. It was a tossup which was more malevolent. The indignant anger beneath the ‘V’ of Mowad’s frown, or the three sulfurous eyes staring down the Hardit’s long snout.
“Butt out,” growled my fellow human.
“Please make allowances for the old human’s behavior,” Imelda told Mowad.
Well, that was new. I’d never heard of a Hardit sticking up for a human.
“He is a machine built for war,” continued Imelda. “Without that war he serves no obvious purpose and he finds this psychologically traumatic after a life of usefulness. His actions will frequently be inappropriate or suggest his mind is broken. But give him time and he may reward you with some limited function.”
After War Page 15
