Second Strike (Revenge Squad Book 2)

by Tim C. Taylor

  After just three days? What can I say? My bloodstream carries more than hemoglobin and alcohol; I have the equivalent of a microscopic field hospital in there too, complete with fast-heal pods. Hey, I’m a Marine, and that makes me different in so many ways from the people born on Earth. Go ask the frakkers! They’ll insist I don’t even qualify as human.

  My blood also pools during prolonged inactivity, building deposits of twitchiness, and making my muscles burn with toxic levels of restlessness.

  When I came here, I had been on the run. Technically, I supposed I still was, but I had changed. The K’Teene compound had served us well as a hideout, but now I was thinking of it as a forward operating base from which to launch a fight back.

  Silky had already made contact with Shahdi who relayed Caccamo’s reminder to stay clear of the mayor so that he could deal with him. The only way I was going to manage that was by burying myself in our other dilemmas: Sel-en-Sek’s gambling problem, and how to restore Silverberg’s reputation. The Littoranes had been gracious and welcoming, but the longer I stayed here, the more I risked them offering me that damned tea again.

  Which is why I found myself looking at my reflection in a polished copper disk I’d propped up in the windowsill of my room to use as a shaving mirror. I assumed it had a religious significance, given that I’d prized it out of the shrine built into the passageway outside, but I figured I had just redeployed it to do the work of the Goddess, so that was all right. Probably.

  A few cuts, but not bad, I thought, running my hand over a smooth chin that hadn’t gone clean-shaven since the late 2500s.

  The sight was so unfamiliar that I didn’t notice the Littorane pad into my room – doors being an alien concept to them except for use in airlocks and defended entry points.

  Lack of privacy was no big deal for me, having lived in barracks and bunkers most of my life, but I sensed something was very wrong and whirled around to see a female Littorane in a deep stance with teeth bared and muscles ready to spring at me.

  Her nose – I now recognized its crusty sulfur color indicated her gender – was flaring so widely in fury that I wondered whether it would burst.

  “Drop your knife,” the speaker at her collar shouted electronically, “and kneel, you bakri-chodding wixerer, or I’ll rip out your stupid human windpipe and defecate into the gap.”

  I could tell by the flick of tail tip that she wasn’t kidding around. Very slowly, I placed my knife onto the windowsill.

  “Who the frakk are you?” she demanded.

  “I’m Ndeki. Who the frakk are you, you stubby-tailed, dry-scaled talking newt? And who taught you to curse like a Spacer?”

  The alien blinked and then shook the aggression from her body. “Silly human,” she said. “You know perfectly well the answer to both questions.”

  She lifted her body and I allowed her to stroke my face, trusting her to hinge up her claws before touching me. I flinched when she made contact but kept steady as she traced the scar that ran diagonally across my face.

  Before being adopted by my amphibian foster family, if I’d ever speculated how a Littorane’s touch would feel, I would have assumed it was scratchy with all those scales – or slimy. The reality was so smooth it was almost frictionless, which would have been pleasant if an identical looking Littorane foot – with claws hinged down in attack mode – hadn’t almost killed me three days earlier.

  After withdrawing her hand, she used it to trace the line she had painted across her own face, even though I’d asked her not to. It matched my scar.

  Yeah, I got the message, fish girl. Littoranes had been gracious and welcoming, but none more so than K’Teene-Imesty Clesselwed.

  “It is a wonder of nature,” she said. “Your appearance is transformed, Ndeki.” She looked away. “I thought you were an intruder.” Her body shuddered. “I feared my cousin Ndeki had been murdered. Your murderer’s death would be prolonged and agonizing.”

  I regarded my new friend. She was a talking teenaged newt with a crush on an older male who was so inappropriate that I didn’t know where to start. It would have been easy to dismiss her as a joke, but her body was throbbing with adrenaline-analog that hadn’t found a release. If I really had been an intruder, then I’d have soon learned that her violent threats weren’t idle. Littoranes had been the fearsome claws and battle tail of the Human Legion in its early campaigns, as I knew well – I’d fought against them on the wrong side.

  “I’m lucky you’ve got my six, Clewie. Don’t ever imagine I don’t appreciate that.”

  “In that case…” She lowered herself to the ground and couldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Go on, Clewie. Spit it out.”

  “Ndeki, may I stroke your head again?”

  I shrugged and sat down to make it easier for her. She traced a finger along my jawline.

  “Wait!” I said. Grimacing at her hesitation, I readied to air a delicate topic with the utmost discretion. “Clesselwed, this isn’t some perverted sex thing is it?”

  A gurgle came from deep in her throat and she looked away. “No,” she said in her own voice.

  I rolled my eyes but let her hand resume its roaming of my facial features. Hey, I’m NJ McCall, and I’m irresistible to women. Alien women.

  I sighed and gently disengaged her hand from my head. She looked so downcast that I tickled her snout. As always, it brought a smile to my face to see her splay out her legs and collapse to the floor in response.

  “Level with me, Clewie. I want to be a good cousin, a valuable member of the clan, but to do both I have to understand more about your people’s ways.”

  I nodded at her to talk to me, but she insisted on pretending that she couldn’t see me.

  “All right,” I said. “Let me kick off a topic we need to discuss. If Littoranes are like every species I know – other than Tallermans and Pavnix – then baby Littoranes come about because a daddy Littorane meets a mummy Littorane–”

  “No!”

  “O-kay…”

  “It never starts with just two people,” she explained. “First, a senior clan member must express public approval in an individual. Those who had a latent attraction to that person are now enabled to feel full-on sexual allure. It is more than simply an enabling factor, the more senior the clan member who displays approval, and the stronger that endorsement, the more attractive the individual will become. A person who is publicly acknowledged as worthy by a senior clan member can be swamped suddenly with simultaneous sexual offers from many un-mateds.”

  “And Schaek is as senior as they get, right?”

  “That is correct.

  “And he publicly sponsored me.”

  A gurgling came from Clesselwed’s throat. “Yes. And then Lady Viraladunesh bowed to you. Bowed! Despite your alien physique, and your impractical long legs – it is a testament to the bio-engineering design prowess of the Goddess that you humans don’t constantly fall over – despite all of your strange alien shape, even before the time you confronted the Honored Tail, it was as if you were wreathed in sexual fire that warmed many of us to our…” She shuddered. “To our deepest core.”

  I didn’t like the look of the way she began bobbing her head. She’d been doing that a lot recently. “So some of the girls, incredible though it seems, have developed a sudden crush on me.”

  “Young males too, Ndeki. Soeb-Zhuein the sex god is beyond gender. He-she visits every Littorane once they have experienced their first awakening. You might wear alien flesh but the entire clan acknowledges you as a manifestation of Soeb-Zhuein. But what you did in facing down the Tail of our clan calls especially to our womenfolk. Makes us… tingle.”

  “But much of this is true of Silky too,” I said desperately. “Is she swarming with admirers?”

  “We are impressed with her, Ndeki, but she made no such public statements or confrontations with senior clan members. Therefore she remains what she is – an interesting individual I am eager to learn more about and welcome as
a friend and cousin – nonetheless an ugly, land-locked alien with tentacles on her head. How you put up with her appearance is beyond me.”

  I’d asked myself the same question more than once, but kept that intel to myself. “Yeah. Okay, about all this. I’m really honored and all that, and…” Had she really said I made her tingle? “See, Clewie, I think you look–”

  She pressed her tail-tip to my lips. “Say no more. I do not expect us to mate.”

  I almost fainted in relief. “Oh, Clewie, for a moment there–”

  “Not when you clearly have yet to make that step with your own wife.” What the hell? Did everyone on the planet know that? “I have never felt sexual attraction to anyone before,” she explained. “For frakk’s sake, Ndeki, I am twenty-three years old. I began to think I never would. Do you have any idea how humiliating it feels to be left behind by my brood sisters? Year after year I feel nothing but numbness, and now I feel a special excitement when I am near you. I’m not ashamed and I want more. You make for excellent…?”

  “Eye candy?” I suggested hopefully.

  She looked away, questioning my vocabulary with an implant or an AI I could not see. “Exactly so,” she responded. “Does this disturb you?”

  I thought that over for a moment, and found to my surprise that I couldn’t find a good reason why it should. “I’ve been around for centuries, married three times, but no one has ever called me eye candy before. Go ahead, K’Teene-Imesty Clesselwed. Tingle all you want.”

  I considered the amphibian. From her eyes of gleaming obsidian to the oily sheen of the scales not covered by the harness of hexagonal plates she wore as clothing, she looked simultaneously magnificent and completely inhuman. I’d meant what I’d just said, but I felt kinda awkward about a six-foot long newt explain how the crush on you makes her zing in places I didn’t want to know existed.

  So I changed the subject. “Now, Clewie, I want you to be brave. Can you be brave?”

  “Of course. I am of the Head’s faction, but all members of the K’Teene clan are renowned for our steadfastness.”

  “Good. Now keep your tail and claws away from my windpipe. And… hold fire on that defecating thing too. I’m going to do something dramatic but it’s still gonna be me afterwards. Okay?”

  She stared at me, and I imagined wonder in her eyes. I took a deep breath, because I really did not want to do this, but anything was better than tingle talk. I took my knife off the windowsill and attacked the hair on my head.

  She waited patiently until I’d finished, and then stroked my bald head.

  “Now you almost look like a Littorane, Ndeki, but there are still patches of stubble. We must do better.”

  “I don’t want to slice my head open.”

  “Nor do I wish to ruin your face. Wait there.”

  She left me, but only for a few minutes before she returned bearing a towel, a bowl of steaming water, and a jar of ointment she smeared onto my scalp.

  “Depilation cream,” she explained. “Your hairs will grow back, eventually.”

  When the treatment was done, and she’d washed and patted my head dry with the towel, she pushed me down into a seated position so she could stand over me and massage my scalp.

  “This will speed the removal of toxins,” she explained.

  Yeah, I know. Her excuse was so lame it broke the dial, but I closed my eyes anyway and found the gentle pressure of her fingers to be wonderfully soothing. If I opened my eyes and watched her I’d probably run screaming but, oh, she knew how to massage. I was debating whether I should risk asking her to move her fingers down to my neck when my ghosts couldn’t resist any longer. They rose to the surface and began to make inappropriate suggestions.

  “Later,” I told the Littorane, opening my eyes to escape the visions of lifting Clewie’s tail that Bahati was forcing down my optic nerve. “It’s time to act. I need to see Silky.”

  Her body sank little. “Of course,” she said. She looked away to query a hidden implant. “She is in the signals room, which is in the flooded levels. I will provide the breathing apparatus you will need. Follow me.”

  As I allowed her to lead me through the labyrinthine Littorane home, I tried to ignore the way she swished her tail, but my ghosts wouldn’t let me.

  — CHAPTER 40 —

  With Caccamo giving strict orders via Uncle Schaek that we should keep far away from the mayor while he sorted out that problem – whatever the hell that meant – we still had Sel-en-Sek’s gambling issues to sort out. All we had to do was win a lot of money in the next three days and we could pay our way out of trouble: two-hundred thousand shillings worth of trouble, to be precise.

  Our go-to man for card games was Sel-en-Sek himself, but with him mired in a losing streak and refusing any help, the rest of us in Section ‘C’ decided to invite ourselves over to Woodland Redoubt, his favorite gambling haunt.

  The gambling den was set up in an abandoned warehouse in a failed industrial zone where the parking lot was a hazardous proposition for town cars, due to its re-conquest by the bordering woods whose pathfinder trees and bushes were cracking the surface into an apocalyptic state of disrepair.

  Entrance was not through the ruined shell of the warehouse but through a blockhouse of a secondary building, which was covered in graffiti from every one of the main species resident in Port Zahir, including some languages I felt sure had been made up.

  Made up was the operative concept here.

  If you pushed at the heavy blast door that was the blockhouse’s only gateway to the outside world, then you could brave the unlit corridor beyond that was rank with mold and droppings, and peppered with spy holes. If the gambling den’s security team decided you were their kind of thrill seeker, they would open the inner door so you could descend bare concrete steps before emerging into an underground nirvana of light, noise and illicit pleasure.

  What kind of warehouse has an entirely separate undercroft, you might ask.

  Why, none of course.

  The whole thing was fake from the ruined parking lot to the abandoned shell of a warehouse that had never existed, but which provided César, Shahdi and me with cover to watch the blockhouse entrance.

  The illusion of illicitness was a huge success, drawing customers from hundreds of miles away, all eager to pretend they were doing something illegal.

  So it seemed only fair and public spirited that we embraced their desires and did something that really was illegal. We were serious about paying off Sel-en-Sek’s gambling worries, and that meant cheating.

  Unsurprisingly, Sel-en-Sek was already there that evening, crutches and all. Beneath our feet, the sailor must’ve had the shock of his life to see Chikune visit his favorite haunt with a young woman in hooded clothing and heavily made up, but who nonetheless matched the build of his alien section leader.

  Of considerably less surprise were the sidelong glances I was forced to see Shahdi and César throwing each other, the accidental brushing of flesh against flesh.

  I mean, come on! If you believe the news media, we were supposed to be ruthless vigilantes preying on the innocent and blowing up the shipping interests of elected politicians. As for NJ McCall, he and his mysterious alien accomplice were wanted for the assassination of Governor Lawless, but instead of a desperate fugitive from justice, I felt like an elderly relative chaperoning horny kids.

  I interposed my body between the two of them. Unsubtle, I know, but they needed to keep their minds on the business at hand.

  “Oh, for the love of Fate,” Shahdi exclaimed. “You two are doing my head in.”

  With my brain fully engaged trying to understand why anyone would think I was part of the problem, she turned to her boyfriend. “César, Grandpops here isn’t as dumb as he likes to make everyone think. He saw through you almost from the day you met at Camp Prelude.”

  What the hell was she playing at? César’s hand went to his knife hilt and my fists got ready to fly, but Shahdi stayed César’s hand. “It’s
all right. Really. Grandpops won’t tell.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said. “Not until I know what the frakk his secret is.”

  She grabbed my shoulders and locked gazes with me. Her eyes gleamed with the glossiness of youth, but for one so young I could tell she had seen too much. Not that I had been any different at her age. “César told me everything” she explained. “He’s running from an injustice. You of all people know what that’s like, NJ.”

  I could tell Shahdi believed what she said, and she was a smart kid all right, but she was also infatuated with César with his cocksure swagger and the colorful alien scales covering his human skin.

  Shahdi raised an accusing finger and jabbed my nose. “Really?” She sounded so damned disappointed. “You think my intelligence melts into a gooey puddle just because he looks so hot? I don’t need your wife’s kesah-kihisia to read you like diagnostic code, Grandpops. César’s mind is more closed than yours, but don’t you think I can see beneath his cute exterior and read him too?”

  I gave her a shrug. “Of course you can,” I lied, which proved that although I was old, I could still learn. Hell, this month I had become a multi-species liaison officer, and a manifestation of an alien sex god. And all that meant I had acquired diplomatic skills that I now deployed to the max.

  I reached out my right hand to César, the former Void Marine now coated in the alien scales of a Wolf. He hesitated, but shook my hand.

  I drew him in, close enough to pat him on the back and whisper into his ear. “If you ever hurt her, I’ll rip out your throat and shit down the hole.”

  “I know,” he whispered.

  I let him go, beaming at my newfound cosmopolitan identity that allowed me to deploy xeno insults.

  I returned my attention to the blockhouse entrance and was idly speculating how Clewie would react to the news that I’d borrowed her taunt when César stiffened suddenly.

  “Standby,” he warned. “Update coming through from Chikune. Silky is about to make her move.”