After War

by Tim C. Taylor

  Have you asked your question yet?

  No. I was wondering whether you’re hearing my emotions. Can you see inside my mind?

  I felt giddy. I didn’t want her inside me and I could still feel the waves of horror emanating from my silent comrades.

  Don’t worry, NJ. I can only hear your words. We should be able to send each other sensory recordings, but I do not recommend we do so at first. To see the world through another person’s eyes is unsettling at the best of times, but to see the world through the perception of a member from a different species – that might be psychologically dangerous.

  I jerked, suddenly slapped by a sensation of a lilac-and-white maw, glistening with mucus, clenching spasmodically around my head. I understood instinctively that this was my mind’s way of interpreting the shock Silky was feeling in her own mind, recoiling at something she had just learned in mine. What she had seen and why my mind chose to convey this through an image that belonged to a bad sex dream gone wrong were questions I didn’t want to explore.

  In any case, her horror turned to pleasure, a sense of hidden openings presenting themselves and begin to widen in invitation.

  I think at this point it would be better all round if I leave the pictures in my brain to your imagination. Suffice it to say that at the same time as my open eyes saw Silky’s face, the visual decoding element of my brain was simultaneously mixing it with some very lurid interpretations of what might be going on inside her mind.

  Silky was an empath. I knew that. Not only could she read emotions across species boundaries, she could induce them in her prey. This could all be an elaborate ploy, every feeling carefully scripted and planted just where she wanted it to be. That cable could be the final act in her hacking of my brain.

  But there were other interpretations. Perhaps I could feel something inside her mind precisely because she was a natural empath. She couldn’t feel me because the brain architecture to transmit my feelings back to her was absent.

  I desperately wanted the advice of my ghosts. The brain-hacking interpretation sounded much more likely to me, but my ghosts were now cautiously emerging from hiding. Did that mean they felt more secure from Silky’s prying eyes, or had they been summoned, unable to resist her command?

  This second-guessing was driving me mad. Unlikely as it seemed, the idea that Silky had told the truth at every stage had one thing going for it.

  It was simple.

  And it carried hope. That was the clincher.

  I chose hope.

  I unclenched.

  I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. My fists, jaw, shoulders, and sphincter had been wound up tighter than a Jotun’s sense of honor, and announced that fact by abruptly relaxing.

  It’s okay, said Sanaa. He’s come to the decision that you’re not actively trying to kill him.

  Er, thank you. I don’t mean him harm, nor you… Sanaa, isn’t it?

  It is, stated my latest late wife to her living counterpart.

  Silky’s voice felt deeply troubled, almost panicking, but I had no sympathy. It was bad enough having my late wives discussing me. At least they were dead. Can you imagine the living and the dead discussing you, inside your head? Trust me, you cannot.

  Bahati seemed to share my sentiment and I knew why: she was so jealous of Silky I could feel my spine burning.

  This is only a truce, the Sarge told Silky. I swear on my honor I will watch you like a hawk, and if you turn on our boy, then you will feel his blade across your throat before you hurt a hair on his body.

  Silky’s reply was clothed in billowing black clouds of such profound sadness that I almost wept. I understand, she said. And I hold you to your oath. If you see me change, do not hesitate. Discard any friendship we might have. You must strike me down without mercy.

  There must be another way, I said, fed up with staying silent in my own head.

  Stay out of this, Ndeki!

  Wow! The Sarge hadn’t called me Ndeki since he died. On this matter, he added, you are compromised.

  Silky and my ghosts struck up a conversation of sorts. Maybe parley is a better term. Deeply awkward and tentative to begin with, it grew worse when Sanaa began to shove me away, wanting privacy. Sanaa was trying to advise Silky on what I needed but I couldn’t follow the detail of what she was saying. I didn’t want to. The idea of my late wife giving marital advice sounds almost amusing in the light of day, but at the time the idea was so unbearably sorrowful that I kind of tipped myself backward and fell deeper into my mind, anywhere so long as it was away from my friends.

  I wasn’t sure what was going on between Silky and me, but we were becoming a team. Everyone I’d ever cared for had been cut down, and now they were calmly discussing her own death in exchange for my life.

  Dammit! I should have shot her dead the day I saw her, because that way I would never have cared.

  Now bear with me here, because this brain-to-brain connection was something no natural being should ever experience. I can only express a fraction of it, and then only in metaphor and imagery that has a strange fixation on mucus. But as I drifted metaphorically away from this parley with the alien, that same alien advanced further inside me in pursuit.

  I gasped and my heart pumped, the natural reaction in that split second before a predator’s strike. Before I could react in the physical world, Silky snapped her mental presence around me. I was enveloped.

  And that, as it turned out, was a good thing. Maybe I should have phrased that differently, because when she snapped shut around me I felt a profound calm. I knew at a deep level claimed only by poets and the most naive of young lovers, that I could trust Silky. She would wrap me in her highly conditional love and unconditional protection until the very end. Not the end of time, mind you, but the end of our marriage – to that point when her nature would drive her to kill me. Any lingering doubt that she would one day try to kill me now evaporated.

  But for someone like me who thought that planning for the day after tomorrow required an arrogant assumption of survival bordering on hubris, this gritty detail of her future betrayal was not an issue in the slightest. It was the certainty of her death that cut so deeply into my resolve. I’d been dancing around this ever since we’d met, but I still wasn’t sure I could let myself get close to her.

  Once she had me safely in her embrace, Silky drew me back into myself, into my normal place in control of my mind. My ghosts watched silently as she withdrew her presence back to the port behind my ear, tarrying there.

  My eyes had remained open this whole time and now my visual interpretation of the physical world reasserted its primacy. I bit my lip and realized I had been staring for a long while at the mounds of Silky’s breasts, which now both swelled and softened under my gaze, the kind of weird biological response that normally repelled me in its alienness, but now felt warm and inviting, despite those obsidian nipples so hard and pointed they felt almost like thorns when they scratched insistently at my chest.

  A deeply buried instinct drew me to her, a powerful memory of how Sanaa used to calm my nightmares long ago. I turned my head and nestled my head between her breasts, moving slowly so as not to pull out the cable that still connected us so intimately. In her turn, Silky had to rest her head atop mine to keep within the cable’s reach.

  I closed my eyes and wept. It wasn’t just the loneliness, the loss of all I’d ever cared about – and maybe one more death to come. Nor was it being stranded on this broken little world. It was all of those things and more: horrors I had witnessed, committed, or buried so deeply within me that I could not even name them.

  I sobbed until my tears ran dry. And when I was fully spent, I clung to Silky, surrounding her in my bearish arms and squeezing her tear-soaked flesh to me as tightly as I dared without crushing her. I floated in the warmth of her chest, rocked gently by the beating alien heart and the lullaby of her inhuman breathing, until at long last the voices in my head fell not merely silent, but I could sense my dead friends abse
nt themselves.

  Thank you, my love, I whispered at Sanaa’s departing presence.

  Just for tonight I was alone inside my own head, and I found a semblance of peace for the first time in years.

  I knew no more until daylight.

  — CHAPTER 41 —

  There was a time when I could record memories with more durability than my short-term memory buffers. Silky still could, and I recognized the value of that faculty. Outside of the species-specific interface layer to our natural brains, the wetware modules and data pipes stuffed inside the heads of vassal race slaves were the same throughout the old empire. Our alien overlords were right ones for component standardization, whether starship airlocks, weapon power packs, or the way they frakked with the insides of our heads.

  Last night Silky had plugged her brain directly into mine. How else did you think that had been possible?

  Back when I was a cadet, I had more gizmos upstairs. Timers, numerical calculators, translators, an updatable subset of the Imperial Infopedia, and the Legion equivalent that superseded it. There was a time when I could look at a piece of equipment out in space, and just know a ballpark figure for its inertia. If I applied this force at this point for this length of time, I could see the resulting path the object would take, its axis of rotation and the angular and linear velocity. Very handy.

  Take the time my unit was caught in the open on Maeroo-6 when we came under air attack. We had orbital superiority, but the enemy blinded our orbital assets just long enough to put some atmospheric bombers overhead. We knocked them all out but not before they launched lazy dogs, clusters of ballistic darts that soon reached terminal velocity on the way down to the target below. Very clever little devices that borrowed a little of the planet’s gravitational energy and redirected it, in this case, at the 132nd Assault Marine Division.

  The sky went black with thick, hard rain. But there were gaps. I looked up at the sky and stared… We all did – we must have looked like a religious cult gazing in rapture at the heavens – but the truth was we were shutting down unnecessary functions and shunting all our brainpower into assessing the incoming trajectories.

  Then we scattered. We didn’t think; we just moved to where our brains told us we would be safest.

  The lazy dogs missed me. Admittedly, their impact threw me into the air like a child’s doll – or more accurately like the top few feet of trees, animals, dirt and rocks and blacktop over an area of many square miles.

  Like I said, very handy these brain gizmos.

  But there are always ways to die. I’ve never felt safe in my life, except perhaps when Bahati, Sanaa, and now Silky made me temporarily forget my vulnerabilities.

  The lazy dogs might have missed me but the fragments of shattered rock that passed through my head did not. Along the way they scooped a channel through my brain and burst my eyeballs, so when I hit the ground all that remained were the bloody outer skins, dangling by optic nerves.

  After I was patched up with replacements, I can probably see a whole lot more than you. Also, never challenge me to a staring contest. Nonetheless, the damage ruined many of my other mental augmentations. That didn’t matter too much during the war because Conteh could cover for most of what I had lost, but my first serious head wound had other consequences.

  Sanaa said it ruined my personality.

  They patched my head back together but I came back from the hospital angrier, less trusting, and acting far more on impulse. Sanaa was horrified, and for a while I felt sure I would lose my wife and best friend. But for once, this little tale had a happy ending.

  Sanaa told me later that getting my head blown out was the best thing that ever happened to her, because it gave her the chance to fall in love with me all over again.

  And that’s why I can’t bring myself to picture Sanaa for more than a few seconds at a time. Her loss is still too raw. One day I’ll be able to think of her and draw comfort from the love and fun and tears we shared.

  I had been telling myself that for 102 years, 7 months, 3 days.

  I’m sorry. No one wants to hear of an old soldier’s private grief. I try hard to seal it in, but it keeps burning through.

  When the Legion retired me and took away Conteh, I learned what a huge mental crutch my AI had been. Without him, I had a short-term memory buffer that functioned, but filled quickly and was regularly flushed. And a journal.

  This journal allowed me to dictate thoughts as text and store them indefinitely. My guess is that this was an early faculty superseded by the memory recording augments, but never taken out of the design template they used for my generation of Assault Marines.

  I had gathered over two centuries of journal entries. After Bahati died, I told the Sarge’s ghost to bury my journals deeply, to hide their very existence from me but to keep them safe. I didn’t think I would ever want to review them, but neither could I bear to lose them.

  On the night after we had brain linked, with Silky asleep in a bunk above me, I shut my eyes and explored my journal facility for the first time in many years. I cautiously checked there weren’t any entries left from my earlier life and then started afresh. It was Silky’s influence, of course. I was inspired by her to think in new directions and to revisit old ones.

  After many decades of my head being a crowded and noisy public area, I found my journal making to be a refreshingly private experience. My ghosts wouldn’t go anywhere near that part of my head, as if it were the equivalent of a rad-hot nuclear wasteland.

  It wasn’t a good sign that my head was so toxic, there were no-go zones even for the ghosts who haunted me.

  Man, I was a mess.

  But now, I was a mess with a journal.

  — CHAPTER 42 —

  JOURNAL ENTRY.

  DAY 1.

  SCOREBOARD. Me: -84. Top-ranked: César, 75. My next target: Jo the Littorane, 21.

  I expected my new friends to give me serious hell for sobbing away in Silky’s arms last night. Turned out, no one even hinted at those events.

  Chikune hasn’t held back his sneering comments, but that’s just him trying to push down the heads of his rivals so he can climb to the top. Nothing new there. Of my tears, he’s said nothing.

  Guess it’s like the Navy. If you pick up a mayday call from another ship, you go to their rescue. Man overboard on a maritime ship is not something anyone ignores, any more than a crewmember with a suit leak in the void of space. It’s an unwritten law – you leave a buddy to their tears even if you hate them, because next time it might be you.

  Best of all, Silky said nothing.

  What happened with the cable – it is a big deal – but I’m not ready to process it yet.

  So it’s a good thing they kept us busy in training today. We concentrated on infiltration, layering secrets, encryption and detection. Suits me fine. My last attempt at sneaking around Camp Prelude was pathetic. I need to skill up!

  We were trained by Nardok Caedower – the cyber specialist I had called the typist. I made myself apologize to him for shooting off that name, but he said not to worry. Said his own name sounded too much like a Tallerman’s and that typist has a certain nerdy chic – whatever that means.

  Doesn’t matter. He’s okay is Nardok the Typist, and having a security specialist for a pal is going to be a useful asset.

  Made another friend today… I think. Which is weird because it’s Xeene. Only a few nights ago I thought she was going to kill me.

  For the first time we’ve been granted free access to the bar. I shoved my head through the door to see and be seen briefly. It’s a weird place, but I’ll find out more another time because today my brain was too exhausted and I turned in early. Think the doc had it the wrong way around when she said my mind is younger than my body. With the switch in emphasis to desk learning, I’m racing to keep up with the younger ones, and my brain aches with the strain.

  Xeene is much older than me, and she’s a more primitive breed of human, which means her body doesn’t ha
ve my unnatural endurance. She looks more tired by the day, and she turned in for shuteye straight after our evening chow.

  When I came into the dorm and saw her already asleep, I tried to keep as quiet as a stealth ship, but I needn’t have bothered because Xeene was making enough noise for two. Whatever she was dreaming were not sweet dreams. Tired though she might be, Xeene rarely sleeps soundly. I think sleep is the only thing that scares her.

  I came to her rack. I was mesmerized for a few moments, staring at her. She’d kicked off her bedding and was naked – if you could ever truly call a Wolf naked. Long time since I’d seen a Wolf this close. Her skin parasite had given her thick scales in tan brown, but with iridescent red and blue trails that looked as if a cat had trekked across her torso. Natural human sweat does not function beneath the hard carapace of the skin parasite that defines the Wolves, but instead the scales were leaking that oily froth which performs the same function. Foaming buckets she was.

  Xeene looked utterly inhuman but her voice was very human. And scared. She was screaming that she was sorry and begging not to be made to do it again. I didn’t want to know what it was she had done, but Xeene was old enough to have committed atrocities at the behest of our alien overlords before the Wolves got their skin plating, even before the days of the Human Marine Corps. They say Wolves are without conscience or scruples. I know that isn’t true. Whatever Xeene did in her past, she is paying for it now.

  I left Xeene to her nightmares but when I heard her jaw clamping shut so hard that I feared she’d shatter teeth and choke on the fragments, I held her hand and told her that it would be all right, that this was just a bad dream.

  She calmed a little – and then whipped a hidden blade out to cut my throat. Obviously, I was expecting that, and caught her knife hand in time.

  ‘You’ve a good heart, NJ,’ she told me when she had woken properly. ‘Don’t let her break it.’

  ‘Who? Silky?’