As I told you at the start, Silky purged our minds of these thoughts with the psychic equivalent of a nuclear sterilization. What I didn’t mention, though, was that I knew they would return to torment me.
Fortunately, this was the moment Nolog and Shahdi picked to come clanging through the hatch, Little Tin Bastards in hot pursuit.
Which left me with what seemed at the time to be a much simpler problem.
How to get off this ship alive.
— CHAPTER 3 —
I winced as Nolog slammed the hatch shut; the door’s impact made an echoing ring like my old regiment’s funeral bell.
The death toll wasn’t ringing for us, though. Not yet. The combat droids had chased us along three compartments toward the ship’s stern, but we were still alive.
“Stand clear!” Shahdi called out as she activated the last of our shaped charges, hoping that would blast the hatch controls into oblivion, keeping us locked in and the droids out. I was already standing clear. I was doing more than standing: I was looking around trying to think of the best way out of this mess. Same as everyone else.
“Why are we still alive?” asked Silky as a loud crack pierced the compartment when Shahdi’s charge went off.
It was a fair question. If we had faced frontline combat droids, we would have been riddled with holes two compartments ago. But that’s not what we were facing. “They’re LTB-10s,” I explained, “a much earlier model than you faced in the war. The Sarge said the tens never made it past field trials due to multiple flaws, one of which was poor multi-thread collaborative processing.”
Her eye ridge raised to maximum, and I didn’t blame her. I didn’t know what that meant either: I was just channeling the Sarge. So I fished inside my head for more understanding and tried again. “These droids can think, shoot and move, but to do two at the same time is a stretch – all three is completely beyond them.”
“Recommendations?”
I pointed at one of the hatches in the overhead. “That’s our way out. Only problem is that I doubt we can get there before the droids cut through the bulkhead or break through the hatch Shahdi locked.”
“We have to try,” she said, and threw herself against the bulkhead, landing with all four limbs splayed more like a lizard than a human. She hung there for a moment, while the settings in her grip extenders optimized, before scurrying up the vertical bulkhead.
It was dumb, I know, but I couldn’t help but watch, entranced, for a moment or two, marveling at how easily she made her vertical ascent.
Remember the unit she deserted from.
Bahati’s love-hate relationship with Silky was clearly not on a good day, but my ghost’s words sunk home. Silky had been an officer in a Kurlei special forces unit, and that made her good at sneaking around. And as a deserter from that unit, it had also been my duty to report her to the authorities for court martial and execution.
Now remember yours, Bahati added, and shift your lumbering ass.
That was unnecessary, I snapped as I stood against the bulkhead and allowed my grip enhancers to activate. We had been Assault Marines, tasked with dropping from orbit. We didn’t climb things. If obstacles got in our way, we blew them up.
I felt the sucking sensation through the enhancers and followed the others up the wall.
The sucking was an illusion. You worked the grip enhancers by squeezing and releasing a ball in the palm of your hand that charged the gloves in such a way that stuck you temporarily to the surface you were climbing. There was a power pack to amplify your efforts, but you still had to work the devices hard, especially if a few months of comfortable living had added a few dozen pounds around your middle.
The good news was that like most ship compartments, the surfaces of the hold were magnetized so that little maintenance robots could access every inch of the hold without needing to give them costly flight capability. This significantly boosted the power of the grip enhancers and I was soon making good enough progress for me to check on the others. Despite his much heavier build, Nolog possessed a grip like hydraulic jaws and was ahead of me, as was Shahdi who had the kind of power-to-weight ratio the young take for granted.
Silky was already halfway along the overhead to the hatch, scampering at high speed in defiance of gravity. “Shahdi,” she said, “any update from the wheelhouse team?”
“I can’t raise them,” the teenager replied. “Sel-en-Sek’s last update reported that they had piloted the ship halfway out into the bay, and that he and Chikune were trying to shut down the droids remotely.”
“Don’t fear the worst,” said Silky. “These hopeless comm units keep cutting out, and there are many reasons why our teammates may have chosen to run silent.”
Shahdi said nothing. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t believe Silky either.
You’re right to doubt, said Sanaa. You’re moving much too slowly. If the droids catch you while you’re still glued against the bulkhead…
“On the other hand,” said Silky, “maybe they’ve tried to solve our problems by tossing EMP bombs around, which NJ and I can tell you will soon blow our comm systems.” As she spoke I could see she was checking out her team, assessing our rate of progress. Nolog and I were beginning to lag behind. “May I remind you all that equipment damages come out of our mission bonus.”
A crunch of gears and protesting metal came from the sealed hatch. The Little Tin Bastards on the other side looked like a scaled-up model of a toy drone, but the suckers that extended from their motors could grip with much more strength than I could. And they would have something on one of their body discs that could cut through the bulkhead. Maybe the hatch was a distraction. I switched my eyes to infrared and scanned the bulkhead for signs they were cutting through someplace else.
Get off that wall, the Sarge ordered me. Take the Tallerman with you. Draw off the enemy so the others can escape.
I could feel a stab of dismay from Bahati, but I ignored the voices in my head and the sounds of forced entry from the hatch below me. Instead, I tried to buoy Shahdi’s spirits. “What are you trying to say, Section Leader Sylk-Peddembal? I hope you’re not going to charge me for our blown comm headsets. It was you who blew them out when you–”
I heard something above me, and looked up just in time to see the hatch in the overhead opening.
Damn. I hadn’t expected the droids to sneak ahead of us.
I pushed off from the wall and landed on a pile of crates, rolling off onto a small stack of sacks, and then onto the deck with my gun out and aimed above, not that I expected my weapon to do much good.
But it wasn’t a combat droid that emerged through the overhead. It was Sel-en-Sek’s bald head. “The young lady says you’ve been inconvenienced,” he said with an upside-down grin. “So we decided to sneak down here and offer you a helping hand before Shahdi told us not to.”
The old sailor’s body suddenly jerked in astonishment when he noticed Silky. He would have fallen out too, if Chikune hadn’t reached down and grabbed him. My wife was only ten feet away, hanging from the overhead by her ankles with her gun aimed at his head.
Shahdi laughed. If anyone else had called her a young lady, they would be looking forward to the prospect of several broken limbs, but for some reason Sel-en-Sek seemed to have a license to speak to her however he wanted, although the rope he and Chikune were feeding down to us through the hatch helped his case.
I let out a sigh of relief. This wasn’t the time and place to learn whether Nolog and I could crawl along the ceiling like flies. Now we wouldn’t need to.
A mechanical crunch rang out behind me from the bulkhead hatch we’d sealed. It wasn’t loud, but the significance of the sound rang out through the compartment like cannon fire. The noise repeated, no longer a random or desperate attempt to force entry, but taking on a deliberate quality, as if confident that it would proceed inevitably to an open door and the LTB-10s flooding through to protect the ship and its contents by exterminating the vermin infesting the hold.
“Silky,” I called out. “Nolog and–”
The Sarge silenced me with the mental equivalent of a slap to the back of the head. Ask the wheelhouse team if they’re carrying flares, he ordered.
I’d been about to suggest to Silky that Nolog and I should draw away the robots when they came through. The two aliens were staring at me – waiting for me to finish my sentence.
I bit my lip. Uncertainty was an unfamiliar burden but a few minutes earlier I’d ignored the Sarge’s orders for the first time in my life, and that had nearly proved fatal.
Crack! The wheel that opened the hatch rotated a little.
I decided to place my trust in the Sarge. “Sel-en-Sek, you got those flares for signaling César?”
“Of course,” he said, still playing out the rope. “You have an ingenious idea?” He sounded dubious.
“Ah…” I replied. “It’s the Sarge’s, actually.”
Normal people would display reluctance to put their life in the hands of a disembodied voice inside a man’s head who – and let’s be honest here – would rate as needing expert assistance in most models of mental health.
Just as well my Revenge Squad team were anything but normal.
“Thank the stars,” Sel-en-Sek said with feeling. “You had me worried for a moment.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Silky. “And quickly.”
I relayed the Sarge’s plan, which was an easier form of communication than it sounds because the Sarge had become a part of me.
My ghosts had been resident in my spine for decades, slowly fusing with my mind. But I had changed profoundly in the past year, and I was only just beginning to realize by how much. I rarely had conversations with them these days; I didn’t need to. I knew what they knew, felt what they felt.
It was, in fact, almost as if I had Conteh, the AI I had grown up with, back where he belonged in my neck. We had trained together, laughed and loved together, and went off to war asleep in the same cryopod. Centuries ago, the boundary between Ndeki Joshua and Conteh had become at first blurred, and then unimportant.
After so many years in which the Sarge had decayed into incoherence, now he was approaching the intimacy of Conteh.
Silky had been deeper inside my mind than I had myself, and she had developed a strange friendship and a not-so-strange respect for the Sarge. She accepted his tactical advice without question and now rapidly took charge herself, issuing orders to implement the dead sergeant’s plan.
She didn’t have to say much. We understood how to work together. Even little Shahdi Mowad – nineteen years old and never been in the formal military, let alone gone to war. Shahdi was smart enough to see that for the advantage it was.
All the while: click… click… the sealed hatch reminded us all that the enemy was coming. Each time the noise was less like grinding gears and more like a smoothly operating mechanism.
Bring ’em on. I wasn’t worried.
I was happy for the first time in many years. And this was why. I was part of a team. And as a team, we were becoming very good at kicking ass. Those droids wouldn’t know what hit them.
— CHAPTER 4 —
The droids flew through the hatch, spreading out to seek and destroy the intruders with minimal damage to the ship or its cargo.
I’d been surprised by the depth of contempt the Sarge had radiated when describing the limitation of the LTB-10s. I hoped his doubts were well placed because now all our lives depended on them.
There was only one humanoid still in the location where the droids expected to find us. Nolog-Ndacu was half-heartedly hiding behind a row of flat pack boxes.
The droids closed up and swarmed in his direction.
“A ghost told me you’re no-good losers,” the Tallerman began to taunt.
“Hurry up,” I murmured. Even if they were reluctant to fire on the move, the droids would be within touching distance of the alien within seconds.
Nolog shook his head in irritation. I felt a pang of sympathy as he abandoned his speech. I knew him. Nolog would have been rehearsing his words and intending to recite them endlessly at the Slaughterhouse tonight.
The Tallerman shut up and flash hibernated instead.
He didn’t do the famous Tallerman thing by sinking into the deck and mineralizing most of his organs – that would have taken him months – but he could switch off the power to his metabolic processes just like that. The moment before he went offline, Nolog detonated the flares Silky had wedged into an overhead ventilation grille.
The Sarge had been confident that the droids would be irresistibly drawn to this shiny new heat source.
As always, he was right.
The air churned beneath me as the droids flew at the flares in such haste that several bumped into each other en route.
Ah, yes. The ‘beneath’ part. Aided by the rope, which we had now drawn up into the compartment above, everyone but Nolog was clinging to the overhead – in my case, in desperate fear of falling at any moment.
But falling was what we were about.
As we’d hoped, the droids took the direct path from the hatch to the flares, right underneath the cargo net we were holding.
“Go!” screamed Silky.
Shahdi, Sel-en-Sek, Chikune and my wife dropped from the overhead, holding on tightly to the corner of the net in their hands, and just as much to the hope in their hearts.
I waited a second and then jumped too – directly onto the droids who were now thrusting against the mesh like fish in a landing net. I tried to ignore the machine guns mounted on the central rotating discs, a mental exercise that became suddenly easier when I yelped with pain as I slammed into the pointed nose cone that topped one of the droids.
“Cheers, pal,” I told the robot, whose attempts to push itself out of the net had slowed my fall.
It seemed to understand because it turned to regard me, not with shiny robot eyes but with a 0.3 caliber machine-gun.
A burst of gunfire rang out, but not yet from the droid I was riding. I didn’t seem to be dead, so I warned my ghosts to take care and steeled myself to activate my bomb jacket.
I hoped this wouldn’t turn out to be a suicide vest. I’ve seen people – well, Hardits mostly, – blow up suicide vests in battle, but my version was rigged with our remaining arsenal of EMP charges. Humans, Kurlei and Tallermans should be safe, but… I was no longer only human.
I hit the button.
Barbed spears of white noise thrust through my artificial eyes, my disappointingly human ears, and embedded themselves in the access ports that connected directly into my spinal column.
I feared for my dead friends.
Whatever the current nature of my ghosts, they had started off as combat AIs embedded in the armor of my squadmates. Having grown up and trained with them, we took our artificial companions for granted to such a degree that we forgot they were the most advanced piece of military equipment our masters entrusted to humans. The AIs plugged into my spine were as far advanced beyond the LTB-10s as the combat droids were from a flint hand axe.
Even so, this hiss and swash of the EM pulse reamed my body, forcing my ghosts inside the deepest bunkers of their AI casings. And, as I had discovered the hard way during my first trip out in Port Zahir, when my ghosts shut down, so did my psyche.
Seconds passed.
That doesn’t sound long, but is an age when someone or something’s firing a machine gun at you from two feet away. But as the tsunami of white noise ebbed, I realized that a large part of the noise left behind was coming from the droids’ fizzing death rattles.
I opened my eyelids, but the eyeballs within had rolled up in their sockets and gone offline.
“Hey, NJ,” called Silky.
I tried to reply, but all that came out was a lot of breath and a little drool. I tried again. “I’m okay,” I groaned.
“Of course you are. I wasn’t asking after your health, I want you to get off your fat ass and stop playing with the toy robots. We’re
acting on the payroll here, and we’ve got a job to do.”
I took another moment for my brain to reassemble and my eyes to roll back into active service. I didn’t need them to know everyone else in the team would be grinning at me.
“You just wait, Kurlei,” I said under my breath. “You’ll get yours.” I meant every word, but I couldn’t help but grin along with everyone else.
The pitifully buzzing LTB-10s were scattered around like toys dumped out of a sack because their power cells had exhausted.
They hadn’t, of course. At any moment, they could reboot and start killing, but I hadn’t anything with which to reliably finish them off. Better to get out of here. Fast.
Silky was already scurrying along the overhead, with Sel-en-Sek and Shahdi not far behind. All they had to do was drop the rope back down to Nolog, Chikune and me and we’d be back on course.
I kicked one of the Little Tin Bastards as I waited, gratified by its feeble buzz of protest.
There is another reason why the LTB-10s were abandoned, said the Sarge.
I glimpsed the Sarge’s idea. But it was just as likely to kill us as the robots. I ignored him this time, and took a moment to admire Silky’s assured movement across the overhead. Her physicality was so lithe and nimble, the complete opposite of my own. If only she didn’t move her limbs like a gecko, I told myself, and have the face of a malign fish demon, I could watch her all day.
Not to mention all through the night.
Wherever my thoughts were headed, they crashed and burned when Silky let out a shriek that could pierce armor, and dropped off the ceiling.
She threw out an arm and managed to get those long fingers of hers around a fire suppressant head mounted in the overhead. I winced as he body swung down and she groaned as those fingertips took the strain of her entire weight.
Second Strike Page 3
