“He’ll kill us all,” I shouted. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the dart just millimeters from my chest. “We all know how he tortured Mrs. Gregory. How he murdered all those people in the police cells. He’ll kill you too, Silky. Go out with dignity.”
“Oh, no,” said the mayor. “You are rather missing the point, Mr. Marine. Yes, I fed those vagrants and thieves to the parasite within Mrs. Gregory, because it pleased me to watch her destroy them. Yes, I ordered the murder of Governor Lawless. And, yes, I will kill all of you here. Why else would I incriminate myself unless I was absolutely certain neither you, nor any evidence you may be recording, Lieutenant Silverberg, will ever leave this building intact. And yet…” He breathed in my fear, which gave him such a rush he once again started to tremble. “And yet your faithful Kurlei cannot help herself but do anything to save you. Literally helpless. She is bound to you.”
He leaned back and inspected the clockwork mechanism. “Eight seconds left, more or less.”
“Stop!” screamed Silky.
Without the merest hint of urgency, the mayor gave her a disappointed look and raised an eyebrow.
“Please,” my wife begged. “I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt him.”
“I think ‘please’ will do for now,” said the mayor, switching off the mechanism and moving in close to engorge himself on another deep breath of me.
I fought against the demon’s grip, intending to snap my head back and head-butt him, but she was too strong. The mayor grabbed my ears, pulling and twisting them so violently that I had to fight back a wave of nausea.
“The fear in you tastes divine,” he said, and then kissed me, sucking at my lower lip, but moving smartly back before I could bite him.
“Put the policewoman in holding block ‘A’,” he ordered his guards.
He opened another drawer in the wooden wall-mounted cabinet, and took out a different clockwork timing mechanism, which he slotted into the rear of the one the demon was already wearing. “Thirty minutes on this one.”
He activated the timer, starting up the music of reeling miniature cogs, which accompanied the slow exhalation of wound springs that would eventually kill me.
He gently took Silky’s hand, hesitating when he saw how filthy it was, but then he laughed and kissed its back anyway, as if this were a formal dance. “My dear, you have thirty minutes to amuse me. Thirty minutes to beg for his life. If you succeed, I extend his life for another half hour. Would you care to wager how long he will last?”
“No, sir.”
“Hmmm.” He regarded her, his face flushed with hunger as he ran his gaze over her kesah-kihisia, down her slender neck, and then back up to the dark pools in which her eyes gleamed like black opals. He licked his lips. “Let us retire to…” His sentence drifted into incoherence, his words drowning under a sea of lust.
I tried to catch Silky’s eye, to share a spirit of resolve as we had so many times before. But she wouldn’t look my way. The putrid stink of abject defeat oozed out of her mind, drowning out the physical stench of the sewers by far.
So many times I had turned to Silky for strength. So many times I’d needed to see that resolve and remind myself that I could still be a Marine.
But not now. Philamon Dutch was right. He’d sliced open her resolve to reveal her fatal flaw.
Me.
— CHAPTER 62 —
Almost half an hour passed in the demon’s embrace. Tick… Tick… said her arm as it counted down my final moments. The beautiful sneer on her not-quite human face felt more contemptuous by the moment.
It was just the two of us in the Morning Room. Marine and demon.
Initially, I thought leaving me alone was overconfidence on the mayor’s part. I fought hard. I writhed, overbalanced, wriggled and squirmed. I was battling an over-complex ornament and I was a proven survivor. How hard could this be? But the mayor was no fool. I was strapped in tightly, and the demon’s legs had been bolted into the floor. No doubt hidden eyes watched my struggles too.
When the door finally opened, I tried to appear relaxed. I was determined that Dutch would kill me with as little pleasure as I could manage.
“Ah, Mr. McCall. There you are. Forgive me. I had intended to pay you more attention on this visit – there are so many ways my demon likes to grip her prey – but, alas, your wife is such a pleasure that I wish to return to her without delay.”
He reset the clockwork timing mechanism. “Another half hour, and then you shall have my full attention. See? I am good for my word. Don’t go away.”
I didn’t say a word. Didn’t want to give the veck the satisfaction.
His next word, though, gave me whole planets filled with the sweetest delight.
“Shit,” he said, with feeling.
“You’re finished, Dutch,” Silverberg told him. Sounded like she was by the doorway, but the demon wouldn’t let me move my head to see. “Your guards are disabled. You have incriminated yourself with your own boasts, and as soon as we get out of your cyber jamming, I shall pass on the evidence of your crimes and your career will be at an end.”
“Yes, it does appear that you have bested me,” said the mayor. “On the other hand, I could simply kill all of you before you can cause me discomfort.” I didn’t like the confidence in his voice.
“You shall not,” said a high-spec translator voice.
Clewie! It had to be.
“Really?” the mayor sneered. “You lose, Littorane. I am shielded from your interference.”
“You want to hide behind your personal shield?” taunted my alien friend. “Be our guest. We can bring your shield with you into custody.”
Dutch gave her a withering look. “Not that shield.”
The ground rumbled, a sound I’d heard once before. The big shield was about to come down. It shook us to the floor.
The mayor recovered the quickest and ran straight at the window. He didn’t stop, the frame shattering as he pushed through the narrow gap.
Silverberg freed me from the demon, and I ran to the window. We were twenty feet above graveled path but Philamon Dutch had been an Assault Marine, like me.
I watched him get to his feet, and with only a slight limp run away in the direction of the ornamental lake and the pavilion beyond at the far extent of the force bubble’s shimmer.
Clewie started shouting orders into her radio comms. Three Littoranes burst out the ground floor of the mansion in pursuit, but Dutch had a hundred-meter lead on them, and it quickly became apparent that the incredible Littorane speed over short dashes turned into a lumbering lope over longer distances. I was about to jump out the window and follow Dutch down, but Clewie held me back with her tail. “Leave it to my juniors.”
The pursuing Littoranes jumped into the ornamental pool and slipped just below the surface, three bow waves that now made rapid progress against Dutch.
It was close, though. The fastest Littorane flew out of the lake’s far end, dashed toward the fleeing mayor and launched herself into the air.
But Dutch jumped higher than should have been possible for such a heavy man. The Littorane just clipped his lower foot leaving her clutching at air before she barreled away along the grass.
The next Littorane was about to grab for his leg, but the entrance to the pavilion slid open. Dutch threw himself through, and the Littorane slammed into the unyielding surface of the quickly resetting door.
I magnified my view of the pavilion. It looked like a little fortress, with no ground-floor openings other than the door which easily resisted the small arms fire directed by the Littoranes.
Clewie ordered her cousins to bring all the plasma pistols and burn a way in.
“Do it,” I told her. “But it’s unlikely to work. We need the Fermi drills from the sewer team.”
We had questions, but we didn’t interrupt as she communicated with her team as we followed the Littorane downstairs to where to the mayor’s staff were being held.
We found a dozen prison
ers huddled into one corner of a formal dining room, glaring at two Littorane kids armed with pistols.
“Where’s the rest?” Silverberg asked Clewie, who ignored her until she had finished issuing her orders.
“I have six brave cousins and the three of you. We are few in number but we shall prevail.” She raised her tail high and there was threat in the way she swished it. “Do you lack faith, human?”
I rested a hand on Clewie’s head. “Easy, cousin. Just explain what’s happening.”
Her tail slumped to rest flat long the polished wooden blocks of the floor. “The force bubble extends beneath the ground. Honored Uncle Schaek and the Fermi drills are on the wrong side. We’re cut off. Isolated.”
“No,” insisted Silverberg. “Not isolated. United. Littorane, Earther human, Kurlei, and Marine. Individually we are strong, but if we can combine together we will be invincible.”
I wasted several seconds staring at the police officer. For a moment there I’d though she was going to spring reinforcements on us. I shook my head. “We make a helluva team,” I said. “But are we amateur night special ops or a comedy act? I can’t figure that out.”
Clewie lifted her tail off the floor. “Let us discover the answer, Cousin Ndeki.”
— CHAPTER 63 —
We were over-extended and operating on our enemy’s home territory.
With one of Clewie’s gang searching the main residence for a way to turn off the main force field generator, just two guarding all the prisoners and themselves against anyone they had missed, that left Clewie and three other Littoranes taking cover behind ornamental bushes and statues, keeping their captured weapons trained on the upper windows of the pavilion in case the mayor should present a target. Meanwhile, Silky and I shot balls of plasma at the pavilion’s reinforced door frame, trying to weaken the material. Every so often I gave the door an exploratory kick, and each time I did, I was rewarded with a crack as something began to rupture.
What was going on inside?
I could be about to face an army of Little Tin Bastards, or maybe the mayor had fled down a trap-filled underground labyrinth, and opened up a portal to allow in the guards stationed in the bunkers outside the force bubble.
There was no point worrying about what I couldn’t possibly know, so I concentrated on kicking down that bastard door.
But I did worry, because I knew that deep inside, Philamon Dutch was like me. Sitting still would not be an option for him. He would have a surprise left; I was sure of it.
Suddenly, an explosion burst over our heads. Silky and I took cover in the doorway and looked up to see the pavilion roof had shattered and an armored figure jumped high into the early morning air.
It had to be the mayor, and in an ACE-series combat suit too. Marvelous! Littorane gunfire raked the powered armor, but they were wasting their time.
In a gravity well, the suit couldn’t fly but its motors were powerful enough to slow the mayor’s descent from a headlong fall into a graceful dismount.
“Keep back,” I told everyone. “If we mass our firepower, we might be able to punch through the armor. But we’ll need our people back at the mansion too. Make your way back there now. Run! Swim!”
The Littorane kids had done well up to this point. Too well. They hadn’t failed enough in their lives to know when they were beaten.
I’d started running for the mansion, but I stopped and turned back in horror as the mayor grabbed one Littorane by the tail, picking him up in one hand and hurling him through the air to crash senseless against a tree. While he seemed distracted in gloating at this result, Clewie’s other two cousins timed a simultaneous attack with their tails, driving the meat of them against the mayor’s ankles.
You brave idiots, I said to myself, but I’d underestimated the Littoranes and the sheer force of their tail strikes. The mayor’s feet bent backward and he began a slow-motion fall devoid of the normal arm-flinging, as if he were a stone statue toppled from its plinth.
Clearly in great pain from the hurt in their tails, the two Littoranes poured shot after shot into the base of the mayor’s neck, where the helmet joined the torso armor. They thought it was a weak point.
It was not.
The mayor was on his knees. He’d stopped falling but seemed to be having difficulty controlling his suit.
“Stop it!” I shouted. “Aim under his armpits.”
The Littoranes hesitated, but before I could join them, the mayor reached behind and dragged the aliens through the grass, gouging deep channels of mud with their bodies.
He used their slumped forms to push off against the ground and then casually tossed them into the lake.
“Clewie!” I shouted in warning at the Littorane girl who had also approached the armored figure, but now saw sense and was trying to retreat. Dutch’s control of his suit was clumsy, but the powered exo-muscles outpaced the Littorane as she ran for the lake. The mayor would follow, but at least she would be more nimble in her most natural element.
They passed just a few meters from me, a helpless bystander to the horror unfolding. My teeth were set in a snarl of rage but I was out of ideas. I was armed, but even if my mental blockage would let me fire, against that combat suit my gun would be as effective as a water pistol against a battleship.
I needed another form of weapon. But what?
Then all thoughts stopped as the mayor seized Clewie’s tail and swung her around in a blur about his head.
“Clewie! No, stop! Please!”
The mayor launched her skyward.
“No!”
Clewie’s wonderfully ridiculous little limbs flailed feebly at nothing, until with a hefty crunch she impacted the underside of the force bubble high overhead.
“Clewie,” I groaned.
“You know, McCall, I think we are not are so dissimilar in our taste in women.” The mayor watched the Littorane’s descent without bothering to look my way. “You clearly like the amphibian girl. And then there’s your alien wife. You merely lack a sense of adventure.”
My friend was about to hit the lake. At her speed the result would break every bone in her body. But at the last moment, she recovered her senses enough to face the water head on and she entered the water as cleanly as a gaibolga gull diving for fish.
“No matter,” said the mayor. “If she survives. I’ll just toss her up into the shield and keep on going until she stops moving.”
“We’re not the same,” I growled at the mayor. “I can still remember what it is to be human.”
“I live on the edge,” he sneered. “That’s why I’m mayor, and why I’m going to be governor. Why you’re all going to die. It’s not power that drives me. Nor sex, not really. Not even the look of fear in my rivals’ eyes when they know they’re going to die. It’s the thrill of danger that gets my juices flowing.”
“You’re mad.”
“Of course I’m mad,” he shouted through his suit speaker at a deafening level that made my head ring and my intestines knot. By the time my skull stopped humming, the mayor had drawn a flenser pistol on me. “We were Assault Marines,” he said quietly enough for me to understand, “bred for danger. We were meant to die. What happens to us after the war? That was never a consideration in our design. Oh, I’ve researched you, McCall, former Sergeant Ndeki Joshua of 801st Assault. If not for your Kurlei woman, you would have sunk into a hole and faded away like so many others.”
“Probably. Well, bad news for you. I’m better now.”
“Better, are you? Let me show you how much better you are. Give him that pistol, policewoman.”
While Silky looked on, Rachel walked across the grass lawn, a weirdly polite setting for this early-morning extreme violence, picked up a plasma pistol discarded by one of the Littoranes, and handed it to me.
“Are you carrying handcuffs, Silverberg?” the mayor asked. When she nodded, he continued, “I imagine they’re a little small for my arms now that they’re inside this suit. It would be a waste for you to
bring them all this way and not use them. Cuff yourself and then stand back. You keep away too, Kurlei.”
“Now then,” the mayor said to me, once I had the pistol in my hand, “would you like me dead, McCall?”
“I would.”
“Then kill me!”
The mayor undid his neck seals and lifted off his helmet, keeping his gun trained on Silky. “Pass your weapon to anyone else and I will shoot your wife. But you, I invite to kill me. Burn my face to melted flesh with your plasma pistol. How difficult can it be? You’ve taken many lives, McCall. How many did you kill in the war? Hundreds? Thousands?”
“More.”
“More? Splendid! Then what’s one extra, and in defense of your loyal comrades?”
I raised the pistol.
“Yes. Go on. You want it so much.”
I flicked off the safety.
His eyes blazed, daring the universe to finally take his life.
I couldn’t pull the trigger. Not yet, but I hadn’t expected this to be easy.
His mouth opened in a grin of triumph.
But I wasn’t finished yet. I pictured his head melting in a ball of plasma, but I still couldn’t fire. I asked my ghosts to fire for me, but they explained they were only a part of my mind and couldn’t operate without my consent. I gave them that consent, big time, but they said it didn’t work that way. They couldn’t, no matter how many times we ran through this cycle they still could not shoot. How difficult could it be? Just a little pressure… Nothing really. Sweat beaded on my brow.
“No?” the mayor taunted. “Oh, dear. And you call me mad?”
I added my other hand to the gun – two fingers on the trigger. But I couldn’t shoot. Whatever mental blockage afflicted me, I couldn’t defeat it.
“Last chance, McCall.”
I reapplied the safety, dropped the gun to the ground and sank to my knees.
“Who’s insane now, eh?”
Insanity? Yes, I’d brushed against it many times, but with Silky and Revenge Squad’s help, I had emerged – well, not exactly normal, but differently sane.
Second Strike (Revenge Squad Book 2) Page 29
