And if the mayor’s asteroids grew full at the thought of girls with a dash of the inhuman, then his dirty secret was free from the prying eyes of anyone who wasn’t prepared to scale the roof of a tower block and arm themselves with binoculars. His residence was a perfect retreat for a person of stature, cut off from the sight of lesser mortals. If we could get inside then I could turn that isolation into an advantage, but getting inside didn’t look simple.
But I was running ahead of ourselves. Caccamo had consistently reminded us to stay well clear of the mayor while he sorted him out. But Silky’s scouting orders frightened the crap out of me because I feared that meant she was preparing to offer herself to him as bait.
Maybe if I had my SA-71 carbine, and lost this mental blockage that made me the comedy ex-Marine who couldn’t pull the trigger, then I would misinterpret Silky’s instructions as a reconnaissance in force, and simply shoot the mayor. Then there would be no more need for stupid talk about bait. But my gun had been impounded together with all the other toys the police had found, and even I would think twice about assaulting this position armed with only a knife and a pair of binoculars.
Especially since the external perimeter was looking impregnable to any intruder without serious kit.
This first barrier was a twenty-foot high razor fence that led to a minefield finished off with antipersonnel laser pods every thirty feet.
The views from the residential area in the center of the compound looked out onto trees, fake ruins, and stone women with tridents, but beyond them we had so far identified four half-sunken bunkers that looked out across an open killing ground onto the triple-layer perimeter.
Sel-en-Sek was still going through the motions of sketching the interior of the grounds, but we all knew that once we checked out the target from every direction we would find the bunkers had a clear view of the entire perimeter and interlocking fields of fire.
“The main gate is how we’ll get through,” I told Sel-en-Sek. “There’s no point trying to sneak in. We have to assemble overwhelming firepower and–”
Movement… behind us!
I rolled along the damp plas-crete, reaching for my knife and was a heartbeat away from throwing it but… it was just a bird.
Sel-en-Sek had his pistol drawn at the intruder but managed not to fire.
It was a gaibolga gull: a sea bird with a vicious beak and a telescopic barbed tongue that it could use to stab fish out the sea, and pastries out of your hand. The thing was only a foot high, but the way its red eyes looked down its beak at us, it seemed to be weighing up whether we would be good to eat.
“I think you’re outgunned this time, my friend,” I told the bird. It agreed and flew off giving a raucous warning call that made us both duck out of sight beneath the low wall.
We crawled thirty feet along the roof and waited before showing our heads again. As I did I thought of how that bird had the freedom to ignore such silly human concerns as razor wire and bunkers.
“They’d shoot drones out the sky,” I said, “but what if we attached a camera to one of those birds?”
“Save it for later,” said Sel-en-Sek. “The little boss will do worse than kill me if we’re spotted. Told me she’d bite off my balls, cook them, and make me watch her eat.”
“Tell you what,” I said, getting comfortable with my back laid flat along the roof, “do you a deal. I won’t recruit a gaibolga to the cause if you explain why you think we should keep our distance from Silverberg.”
The sigh he gave in reply was taut with anger.
“I saw her influence on that cop, Frennan,” I told him. “She still commands loyalty and after learning what the mayor was getting up to in her station house, she hates his guts.”
Sel-en-Sek regarded me wide-eyed, as if I’d answered my own question. “Have you asked yourself why someone’s trying to discredit Silverberg? Why go to that trouble when a dart or a bullet would do the job?”
“Of course I have,” I snapped. “They don’t want to risk what a murder inquiry might turn up.”
“Precisely. A popular officer starts talking about corruption and gets herself murdered. That sort of thing challenges the honest cops to take a stand, to ask questions. But if a corrupt cop starts whining after it emerges that she was literally in bed with gangsters, who would risk all to back her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get that. But you’re not naming suspects.”
“Port Zahir PD was deliberately starved of money for decades. Suddenly, money and resources are no problem. Who’s behind that? The mayor. It’s his big policy initiative – his vote winner. Who’s so confident he’s got the police department on his side that he plays his sicko games in their cells? Whose need to own the department is threatened if it contains even one honest cop prepared to speak out whatever the cost?”
“OK…” I started but it was not okay. My mind tried wriggling off Sel-en-Sek’s hook but his accusation added up too well to escape. All fingers pointed to the mayor, and he would have a target lock on Silverberg, ready to take her out the moment his calculus concluded that she was less risky dead. She would be interrogated first, and Rachel Silverberg knew many things I wanted hidden.
What could we do? Could we gather evidence on the mayor? Maybe we were jumping to conclusions because we hated the skangat. I wanted to ask Sel-en-Sek, but I noted the way his jaw was grinding like a millstone and decided to leave my friend be.
We returned in silence to our surveillance, but I had to fight to concentrate because it was pointless to carry on. We’d picked out two more positions overlooking the grounds, but all we would achieve by using them would be to increase the chance of our being spotted. And I was a wanted man with a price on my head. I didn’t want to think about why Silky had thought it worth the risk to order me out of the K’Teene compound. Was she keeping me out of the way so I wouldn’t see something? So I wouldn’t hear the details of how she would surrender herself to the mayor?
“Front gate,” I said, forcing Silky from my mind. “That’s our route in. Place three people with missile launchers on this roof. A few salvos with shock warheads will pulverize the gate to dust. Place a GX-cannon where I’m lying and another on the first observation post we used, and rake the interior with covering fire while an assault team on the ground goes through the ruined gate and enters the main residence. The dirty skangat will probably be in his basement tormenting women.”
“His tame police impounded our gear, remember?”
“Only the gear they found.”
Sel-en-Sek stared at me with something between wonder and dismay on his long face. I’d finally gotten his full attention. “What the frakk don’t I know, NJ? And why don’t I know?”
I shrugged. “We’ve all liberated gear at some point in our careers. There must be something stashed away.”
My friend’s eyes narrowed into twin sensor beams that swept me with their scrutiny. It has been said by many people and on many occasions that NJ McCall is not a good liar. Now that I thought about it, Sel-en-Sek had been one of those people.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Keep your secrets. I’m sure in your thick head you think there’s a good reason.”
He settled down to sketch his layout of the target’s defenses, his base layer of sullenness now overlaid by fresh resentment at the secrets I was keeping from him. But they were LISTS’ secrets, not mine.
Knowing that I was doing the right thing didn’t help to endure the impenetrable cloud of silence that hung over us for the next five minutes.
And then I spotted movement, my motion-sensitive eyes sending a jolt of pain directly into my brain that their sadistic designers knew I couldn’t ignore. They automatically magnified a section of the razor fence forty feet west of the main gate.
An intruder was breaching the perimeter.
— CHAPTER 48 —
I watched a disgusting lump of brown flesh slither up the razor fence, raining slime down onto the ground below. It was as if a warlock, casting his
vengeance on a germaphobe rival, had animated something flushed into the sewers. But this was a real creature – a slime hound, and a female one at that.
I looked on, entranced, as it crested the fence and extruded slime over the bladed barrier, waiting for its secretions to harden before proceeding over the lethal obstacle.
Then it did something to prove beyond all doubt it was a female. It didn’t bat its eyelashes or flaunt a raunchy wiggle to its hips – the creature possessing neither hips nor eyes in its bulb of a head – no, the creature confirmed its gender because instead of waiting for its slime to harden and provide a safe bridge over the razors, it set off anyway, cutting its belly to ribbons. Blood and gobbets of flesh mixed with dripping slime as it descended the far side of the fence in just a few seconds. Once a female scented a male on heat, nothing would deflect the slime hound girl from reaching him before a rival beat her to it.
The love-struck creature showed no sign of distress as it slithered across the minefield, leaving a trail of blood slime in its wake.
We only thought there was a minefield because the mayor’s people put it around that he was protected by one. If the slime girl was really crawling over mines to get her boy, she wasn’t heavy enough to set them off.
It was only at the line of laser pods that the love-hungry creature paid the ultimate price for her ardor.
Three laser beams lashed out, ending her journey in a flash of superheated inner flesh that geysered out of her hide. Her steaming carcass joined a dozen others heaping up around that portion of the perimeter.
“He must smell seriously hot,” Sel-en-Sek commented.
“Borrowed your aftershave, probably,” I suggested. “But a dozen females dead so far? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Normally the males don’t survive this long. If I were a male slime hound, safe inside the mayor’s gardens is exactly where I’d want to be.”
“Agreed,” I said, shrinking inside at the thought of the male’s fate. The poor little guys, tiny in comparison with females, were not the winners in these sexual games. If a female trapped one on heat, she would crawl over him and suck him up through an opening in her underbelly, where his flesh would be consumed and his seed used to fertilize her eggs.
As I contemplated a horrible death at the hands of a murderous alien female, my wife raised us on our radio comms.
“Guinshrike to Stoop One, how do you copy?”
“This is Silly Name Number One,” I replied. “I read you.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe, you pig-shitting hairless baboon. Frakk you! I’ll talk to someone sensible. Stoop Two, how safe are your genitals feeling right now? Do I need to prepare cooking facilities?”
“I’ve kept your big lunk out of mischief so far, ma’am,” replied Sel-en-Sek. “Mind you, he’s been talking about other people’s feelings, so I suspect he’s experiencing the early stages of a psychological meltdown.”
“Keep it professional, humans,” Silky said. “Your humor is misplaced. Being dead with a grin on your face is just as dead. I’ve an update. Not sure if it’s of any significance, but our digging is throwing up results. We’ve found connections between Mr. Big and… hell, pretty much everyone. Most notably, Hardit-Frakker.”
Lee was Mr. Big according to Silky’s imaginative code, and Hardit-Frakker owned the palace we were surveilling. I tried to understand the implications of a link between them.
“Stray Sheep has made contact,” Silky continued. “Says the robber who put Stoop Two’s friend into hospital was also working for Hardit-Frakker.”
“Is that the Stray Sheep who’s my colleague’s ex-lover, or the Stray Sheep who keeps arresting me?” Honestly, I wasn’t just winding up my wife for the hell of it. These codenames were confusing the hell out of me.
“The first one,” said Silky. She sounded annoyed for some reason. “Mr. Big also received a large payment from Hardit-Frakker, and we think that was to fabricate evidence to make it seem that Stray Sheep’s Friend was working for him.”
I sighed. If anyone was listening in on us, the codenames wouldn’t throw them for long, but I had to translate them as I tried to slot the pieces of new information into the puzzle.
The mayor had arranged for Kelker-Jay to be beaten up and robbed of the money he needed to pay back Mr. Lee. He’d also paid Lee to make it look as if Silverberg’s ex-lover had worked for the gangster – which fitted with Sel-en-Sek’s suspicions. Discrediting Silverberg I understood, but the rest of it? Maybe the mayor was hoping Revenge Squad and Lee’s organization would war on each other, making it easier for him to destroy the survivors. Dozens of other possibilities fought for my consideration, but all of them placed me and my friends as pieces in a lethal game being played by the man with a garden full of dead slime hounds.
I looked across at Sel-en-Sek. His jaw was grinding so hard, I expected sparks to leap out.
“Mr. Big has gotten too big,” said Silky, “and crossed us too often. We need to take revenge out on his ass. Once and for all.”
“Negative,” I said, annoyed that Silky was forcing me to be the sensible one. “Mr. Big is under protection.”
“I don’t like her either.”
Mrs. Gregory wasn’t my best buddy, but even thinking about her made me shiver with fear. “Are you mad?” I snapped. “If there’s one person in the city who’s able to listen in on our encrypted comms, and have the team of cryptographic experts it would take to break our secret codenames, then it’s her. If you’re listening, Your Ladyship, ma’am, I heard your second strike instruction loud and clear. Back away from her, Guinshrike.”
“Are we Revenge Squad,” she raged, “or are we Lift-Our-Hindquarters-in-the-Air-and-Take-Whatever-Gets-Shoved-up-There Squad?”
Sel-en-Sek tapped me on the shoulder and pointed down at the approach road that swept up the hill to the mayor’s compound. Three heavy trucks were approaching, surrounded by a cloud of outriders. The angry wail of their get-out-of-our-way warning sirens floated up to our position. I magnified my view of the middle car and saw the provincial crest of Hy-Nguay mounted above the windshield. It was the Deputy Governor, now the Acting Governor of Hy-Nguay.
“Later, Guinshrike. Things are hotting up.”
“Stay safe,” she said.
“Caution is my middle name,” I answered.
“Is it? You never said.”
I sighed and cut the connection, just in time to see two humanoid figures scramble over the outer fence, taking the exact same route the love-struck slime hounds had taken.
I blinked and the intruders were gone.
But they had been there all right.
And they had been armed.
— CHAPTER 49 —
“Keep your eyes on them,” said Sel-en-Sek. “Governor’s party are waiting at the main gate… no, one car headed for the main building. Anything on your uninvited guests?”
“Can’t pick them out. My ghosts are reviewing what I saw.” I felt Sanaa ready to report and channeled her through my voice.
“We caught a glimpse of their outline,” she said through me. “We don’t know why they didn’t die at the perimeter and the outlines are distorted, so you’ve got to understand this is educated guesswork. However, we agree one of them is a human Marine, and slight fusing of the spine suggests he’s old. Everything we see matches Caccamo’s size and build.”
“Figures,” said Sel-en-Sek. “Caccamo did tell us to leave the mayor to him. And his friend?”
“Most likely an early generation of Marine. Possibly a well-built contemporary Earther, and most likely male.”
No one in Port Zahir Revenge Squad matched that description. If one was Caccamo, the other had to be a fellow LISTer. I was watching Legion covert ops. Neat.
“The governor’s getting out the car,” Sel-en-Sek reported.
“Acting governor.”
“Right. He’s walking across the gravel to the mayor who’s standing on the front steps. Mayor’s making the acting go
vernor come to him.”
“Found them,” I said triumphantly. “Movement in the fake ruined temple. It’s got a clear line of fire to the mayor.”
“Mayor’s slapping the governor on the back. Body language rings loud and clear. The mayor is in charge here.”
“An SA-72 rifle and SA-71 assault carbine just materialized in the Roman folly. Still can’t see through their owners’ stealth gear.”
The moment I finished speaking, hell visited the entrance to the mayor’s palace.
Unprotected human bodies were turned into unrecognizable chunks by supersonic railgun darts. The acting governor had two security guards with him wearing bullet-proof jackets. Against this serious war gear they were as much protection as a silk handkerchief.
The familiar soft wine of the SA-71 reached my ears a few moments later.
I had no sympathy for the politician. Even if he hadn’t personally ordered the assassination of Governor Lawless, by allying with the mayor he’d sold his soul to the very devil.
The security detail shot to shreds – yeah, that did bother me. Especially since they died for no reason.
The attack had failed.
Purple flashes lit up around the mayor, merging into one another to outline the cone-shaped force shield that protected him. Incoming darts made a pretty light show, but slowed and bounced off to leave a growing heap of debris on the steps.
Portable force shields were risky and unpredictable but exactly what had frustrated Mrs. Gregory’s attempt to shoot the mayor, and what I had relayed to Caccamo. So it couldn’t be my boss down there in the folly, wasting his time on an attack that he already knew couldn’t succeed.
Or so I thought. But then the rifle opened up. Instead of darts, the SA-72 fired specialist rounds that formed thumb-sized discs when they hit the force shield before sprouting thin antennae.
“What the hell are those?” I wondered.
Second Strike (Revenge Squad Book 2) Page 23
