by B. V. Larson
There was a blur in the air, a ripple in space. Just as Claver had done before him, the squid winked out in the middle of it.
A gleam of residual radiation was all that remained behind where he’d stood a moment before. That and a puddle of black ink.
I hoped that ink-spot meant he’d pissed himself in terror.
-5-
Veteran Weber was banged up, but he was still able to hold a weapon. I got him to his feet, and we did a sweep of the floor. There were no more squids to be found.
That was a bit embarrassing. All this time the hog guards had been talking about an army of squids attacking this floor. The fact they’d been bested by a single commando… well, it didn’t speak well of their fighting ability.
Just as we reached the last office in line, a full platoon of hogs in body-shell armor finally arrived. They threw flash-bangs at us, and we were almost shot down before they recognized us.
“Hold your fire, you damned trigger-happy hogs!” I shouted at them.
“Identify yourself,” demanded the centurion in charge.
“Adjunct James McGill, Legion Varus.”
They moved forward in a surge, shoulders hunched, weapons aiming everywhere they looked. Laser dots and flashlights played over every wall and carcass.
“What are you doing up here, McGill?”
“Saving lives and killing squids,” I said. “Veteran Weber and I cleared the floor. You might want to check the other levels.”
The centurion looked me over unhappily. “I’m the man in charge of this counterinsurgency effort. You and Veteran Weber are away from your posts.”
Weber was trying to look small, but I stood firm and snorted.
“You’re late to the party, Centurion. We did your job for you. What about the other levels?”
“The attack was limited to this floor.”
“What? Well then, why the hell did it take you hogs so long to—”
“Centurion,” said an adjunct as she hustled back to us to report. “McGill’s right. The floor is clear.”
“Body-count?” demanded the Centurion.
“We’ve got at least forty dead. Aides, senior officers and even a few janitors that were unlucky enough to—”
“I don’t care about that. What’s the alien body-count?”
“Oh…we didn’t find any aliens, sir.”
The centurion lowered his weapon and turned back around to face off with me again.
“McGill, are you full of shit or what? Was this some kind of prank?”
With a sweep of my arm I referred him to the dead people all over the floor, the kicked in office doors and the general destruction.
“Yeah,” I said, “I killed them all. They wouldn’t validate my parking.”
“You’re going down to be debriefed. Veteran Weber, you’re going with him. Adjunct, escort these men to the detention center.”
I knew the drill. I didn’t resist, although I felt like doing so. I had to keep reminding myself that the enemy—the real enemy—had been run off. My only lingering worry was the possibility they’d be back in force.
After about two hours of bullshit, during which I was prodded and interrogated by amateurs, I finally met up with someone who I respected.
None other than Centurion Graves stepped into the room.
“McGill?” he asked when he sighted me. “I might have known. They called me on the emergency channel and demanded I report to Central immediately. They wouldn’t say why. You owe me sky-cab fare from Cincinnati, Adjunct.”
“Good to see you too, sir,” I said. “I’d salute if I could.”
He sighed and pulled up a chair next to the stool I was sitting on.
My hands were strapped behind my back, and my neck was tied down to a stainless steel table in front of me. He tilted his head to one side, and he looked me over.
“All your teeth are still there. Why’d they strap your neck down? Did you bite someone?”
I rolled my eyes. “That would be juvenile behavior unfitting of a Varus officer, sir.”
Graves nodded. “Right…you bit someone. Where did your shirt go?”
“It’s hot in here.”
He nodded again.
“Why don’t you just tell them what happened?” he asked.
“I have sir, multiple times. Unfortunately, hogs are by nature unimaginative.”
“They didn’t believe your bullshit… is that it?”
“An offensive mischaracterization. The truth is the truth, sir. I can’t help that.”
Graves frowned and leaned back in his chair. He seemed unconcerned that I was positioned so I could hardly turn my head enough to look up at his face.
“Tell me the story,” he said.
I did so. I repeated my mantra, word for word. All about how I’d come to meet with Nagata and afterward had gone downstairs to the flight deck when the alarm went up. Afterward, I led a search and destroy, clearing the floor of enemy combatants.
Naturally, I left off the part about finding Nagata dead earlier, and the part about discovering Claver going through his office. I also left out why I’d come to report to him in the first place.
Graves didn’t miss any of these details.
“Okay…” he said. “I can see why the hogs are upset. They’ve got a floor covered in dead brass. When the rescue team goes in, they find only you, and one other off-post noncom wandering around. No squids. No electronics showing vids of what happened. No nothing.”
“Revive Nagata and ask him about it.”
“He’s been permed. They all have. I think that’s part of the reason they’re so upset.”
That did bother me. Rossi had suggested that would happen, and it apparently had. I’d only just met the woman, and she’d died in my arms for good. Perma-death was a strange thing to contemplate for a man who’s lived so many times.
I swiveled my eyes up to look at Graves. “There’s ink, sir. The squid pissed himself when I took him out.”
He tossed down a computer scroll he’d been nonchalantly perusing while I talked.
“Right, I got that part from your story. The centurion in charge of the sweep mentioned it in this report, and they did find a puddle of liquid that might fit that description.”
“There’s got to be other evidence of a squid presence though,” he said.
“I’m sure there will be.”
“We’ve got their DNA samples,” Graves said. “We’ll sweep the floor and find every centimeter they touched. The problem is there are no actual cephalopod bodies. How did they escape?”
“First off, there was only one that I saw. The hogs shit themselves and ran from a single commando. As to how he got in and out—”
“Ah of course,” Graves interrupted, “the magic teleportation suit. Damn, that’s a good one, McGill. I have to admit it, when you lie, you like to go big.”
“It’s not a lie, and it wasn’t magic, either. The squids have tech we don’t. Is that so hard to believe?”
Graves lowered his face to my level on the tabletop. He watched my eyes, which were angry. I couldn’t hold that back any longer.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going to give you a break. I’m going to check your story out personally, rather than dismissing it as total crap from the start.”
He stood up and hammered on the door. Guards soon released him.
“Should we untie him, Centurion?” asked one of them.
“Nah,” Graves said. “He likes it that way. Don’t you, McGill?”
“I think this table has fixed my bad back, sir,” I agreed, my chin rubbing against the steel table top as I spoke.
The guards closed the door, shaking their heads.
About an hour later the door opened again, and I snorted awake.
“Don’t tell me you fell asleep like that?” said a new voice. It wasn’t Graves, it was Imperator Turov this time.
“Varus Legionnaire’s sleep with rocks for pillows,” I said. “This table is smooth and cool.
”
She came close to me and ran her hand over my back.
“Sweaty... What kind of mess are you in today, McGill?”
“Graves went to investigate my story. Where’d he go?”
She shrugged and paced around me in a circle. Mostly, I watched her butt as she walked by. I did make the effort to lift my eyes to check out her expression on her third time around, however. She looked thoughtful, rather than pissed off.
“You must have read my report by now, sir,” I said. “Do you have any questions?”
She stopped strutting around and lowered her face right into mine.
“Oh yes… plenty of questions. But I have to get you out of here first, so you can answer them.”
I almost blew it and claimed I didn’t know anything else. But in truth, I was getting tired of having my neck strapped to a table, so I shut up and looked at her.
She nodded knowingly.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Guard!”
About seven minutes later, I was limping along behind the Imperator like a bad dog on a leash. She walked me through a half-dozen checkpoints and glaring hogs. You would have thought I’d shot all their uncles by the way they looked at me.
When we got up to the flight deck at last, I recognized her personal air car. It looked as flashy and expensive as ever.
Climbing stiffly inside, I took a deep breath and eyed her rudely.
“We’re heading back to the woods?” I asked hopefully.
She glared back. “Certainly not. You cost me a lot of political capital today. I’m not in the most forgiving mood.”
I shrugged and leaned back. I found a bottle of water and upended it, chugging for a good twenty seconds. She grabbed it out of my fingers and put it on her side of the cab, out of my reach.
“All right,” she said, “I got you out of there. Now, start talking.”
“You’ve got my story. Everyone does. I took the initiative during an attack, and I repelled the enemy with only two supporting—”
“Cut the bullshit. Talk about the parts of the story you left out. You went up there to meet Nagata. What did he say?”
“Uh…” I said, feeling a half-dozen lies run through my head. I’d almost settled on one when I realized I needed to give her something good. For one thing, she deserved it for helping. For another, she wouldn’t buy an easy “nothing to see here” response.
“He didn’t say anything,” I told her. “He was dead on his desk when I got up there.”
She looked at me in alarm. “What? And you didn’t sound the alarm? You tried to walk out?”
“I didn’t know he was permed at the time. I figured they’d blame it on me.”
“Well, you were right about that. They’re blaming you for everything. They don’t really believe there were any squids. The only witness you have is this Veteran Weber. His story matches yours—almost like you two rehearsed it.”
“Or almost like we’re telling the truth.”
“Okay, let’s say I believe you. When you got to Nagata’s office, you found him dead, so you panicked.”
“I didn’t say I panicked.”
“What the hell would you call it?”
“A strategic withdrawal.”
She chuckled. “Fine. You retreated from the scene of the crime. That does sound like James McGill. Later, you met up with the squid commando, and you managed to kill him single-handedly.”
“See? There you go embellishing and misstating the facts. I found the squid, sure, but all I did was get in close and twist the dial on his chest. That must have activated the suit he was wearing, and he was transported somewhere else.”
“I should have let them keep you,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Your story is hopeless. No one will believe it without direct evidence.”
“Well… I think they might.”
“Why?”
“Because that space-jumping squid isn’t done yet. He tore up Nagata’s office. He was clearly looking for something he didn’t find. He’ll be back to try again, that’s my prediction.”
Turov squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. “I don’t like not knowing what’s going on, McGill. You’d better not be withholding critical information from me.”
I thought of Claver immediately. Not just because I was withholding everything I knew about his part in all this, but because of something he’d once told me.
Never give them everything they want to know at once, he’d said, because if you have more to tell, they’ll have to bring you back to life again later to get it.
It was his idea of an insurance policy. There had to be wisdom in those words, because a lot of powerful people had wanted Claver dead over the years, and he was still very much alive.
-6-
Sure enough, Turov didn’t fly me to the woods for another love-making session, which I found disappointing. She didn’t take me to her house, either. Instead, she dropped me off at the public sky-train station and flew away.
I’d been ditched, and I was uncertain as to what I should do next. I was pretty sure the boys at Central would want another piece of me if I went back there, so that was out of the question.
In the end, I bought a cheap seat on the sky-train and spent the night with my head lolling onto other passengers. In the early morning, we’d arrived in Georgia Sector.
I took public transport all the way back to my parents place near Waycross. After hugging my folks and lying about how great everything was for their newly christened adjunct, I headed to my shack on the back of their land.
Home sweet home.
Checking the fridge first, I found the milk had gone bad and there were only five beers left. I dumped out the milk, drank all the beers, and crashed.
My dreams were haunted by squids and the dying eyes of Primus Rossi. I hadn’t liked the woman at first, but she’d come around to understanding me during the few hours we’d spent on Earth in each other’s presence.
I figured what was bothering me about her was that she’d been permed. I wasn’t used to that. For sure, people did get permed now and again in my business. But to meet someone, forge a connection with them, and then lose them all in one day… that was disturbing.
Something woke me up a few hours after midnight. Maybe I had to piss, or maybe one of my floorboards had creaked.
A figure stood over me. I couldn’t see the face, but I recognized the saggy-pants, multi-limbed look of a man standing in a suit made for a squid.
“Claver?” I asked the intruder.
Reflexively, my hand dug in my couch.
Claver lifted a laser pistol and aimed it at my forehead. I could see the red glow of the aiming dot. It played over my skin, catching a few stray hairs and making them shine. The dot was hot enough to make my skin uncomfortable. It was like being too close to a heat lamp.
“What did you tell them about me?” he demanded.
“The hogs?”
“No, you idiot. I’m talking about the squid agent. How does he know I was in Central before he was?”
“Maybe he noticed Nagata was already dead,” I suggested. “Or maybe he noticed the item he was looking for was missing.”
Claver made an angry noise. “I’m going to burn your eyes out of your sockets, so you don’t see anything else.”
“Don’t you want to know the rest?” I asked him.
All I could see in the red-lit dimness was his snarl. I had that effect on a lot of people.
“You don’t know crap,” he said. “I’m wasting my time.”
“I know you stole a squid jump-suit. And I know how they work.”
“How could you…? Doesn’t matter,” he said. His weapon shifted slightly and he fired it. My wrist stung.
“You shot my tapper?” I hissed.
“Yeah, I have a scrambling field up, and your data back at Central has been erased from the core. I’m afraid this is the end of the line, McGill.”
I knew what he was talking about. My tapper tracked my min
d hour-by-hour. Using the data core, they could reconstruct my memories as well as my body. But without a backup copy in Central, and with my tapper dead—well, they could bring back my body but not my mind. They wouldn’t even bother. I would be permed if I died now.
It was high time I made my move, so I did it. My left hand had been digging in my couch since I’d first realized there was an intruder in my shack.
Now my hand came up with a well-oiled machete in its grip. The blade flashed as I made a lateral cut across my body.
The laser snapped, but Claver must have been rattled. He burned a dime-sized hole right through my couch cushion near my left ear.
The machete caught his wrist, but it was stopped by the squid jump-suit. They were made of woven metal, after all. The edge sparked, and the gun was knocked away.
Although I hadn’t managed to sever his wrist, I had managed to break it. Cursing, he scrambled for the gun.
I dove after him, machete raised high.
“Kill me and you’ll never know what’s in store for Earth!” he shouted.
“You came to the wrong shack, Claver!”
With that, I sank the blade into his face. It was the only part of him that wasn’t covered by that tough squid-suit.
Standing over my kill, panting, I immediately began to curse.
He’d performed his little trick on me, I realized. He’d given me a reason to bring him back to life. Even as he drew his last breath, the man had been scheming.
Dragging the carcass to the garage in the dark, I shoved it into the backseat of the family tram.
My dad must have heard something. He came out hesitantly with a shotgun wrapped in tight fingers.
“James?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, Dad.”
“Don’t tell me that. Something’s up.”
My mind worked fast. Some would say I’m at my best when caught red-handed, and I couldn’t deny it.
“Uh… Della called,” I said, “I need to borrow the tram. I’ll have it back to you soon, okay?”
“Della?” he asked hopefully. “Is this about the trip?”
My dad was talking about a trip we’d been planning—to go see Etta, my daughter. She was my folks’ one and only grandchild, and they’d yet to meet her. I felt kind of bad lying about that, but I was in a bad place now.
