But they did hold.
My heart beat again and I forced myself to look away from my wife dangling forty feet up by one hand, and saw with relief that Shahdi had caught onto a fan mounted into the bulkhead she had slipped down.
I heard a quickly suppressed grunt of pain, followed by the unmistakable sound of snapping bone. Sel-en-Sek had not been so lucky.
There hadn’t been a half-caught net of droids to slow his fall this time.
I was bio-engineered to drop from orbit with minimal mechanical assistance. Other branches of the human family like to say that Assault Marines are gene spliced with Neanderthals. It’s fighting talk, of course, but when the dust settles and the bruises heal from any friendly disagreements the insult raises, the inkling remains that it could well be true.
Sel-en-Sek was a maritime sailor, so I guess his body was designed to float on water. Not to fall forty feet onto a hard surface.
Neither was Silky’s.
I left Sel-en-Sek to Chikune and Shahdi, who were rushing to his aid and looked up. I’d never felt so useless in my life.
“Don’t worry,” Silky called down to me. “I can still get to the hatch.”
“Got to stop worrying so much about you,” I said under my breath. The Kurlei had reattached herself to the overhead and was moving cautiously toward the nearby hatch – never more than one limb off the surface at once. I checked the droids but they still showed no sign of stirring. Once she’d thrown down the ropes, we’d be okay.
“What happened?” I called up.
“I think the compartment de-magnetized,” she replied.
“Hurry,” I urged her, as speculation about why it had de-magnetized began to twist my guts.
The frustration as I watched passively atop a heap of deactivated robots was so maddening that I did more than clench my fists: my whole body curled in on itself like the petals of a flower with severe stomach cramps.
High above, Silky reached the hatch, but no amount of throwing her weight around would open it.
“Blue Star Logistics is a premium freight operator,” said a man’s voice through multiple speakers set into the bulkheads. “Our hold compartments can be set to many configurations to carry specialist cargo.”
“If you want to live,” I shouted, “re-magnetize the compartment immediately.”
“Okay,” he replied, a tremble in his voice. “I was only kidding.”
A faint buzz came from above and Silky was falling.
“Oops,” said the man’s voice. “You forgot to tell me which polarity…”
Silky’s limbs flailed uselessly at the air.
“…so I set it to oscillate between both.”
I hesitated before acting because I was so used to Silky’s preternatural ability to crawl, leap, kick or contort herself out of any difficulty.
Not this time.
I leapt off the droid heap and ran.
She was going to land headfirst and snap her neck.
I threw myself along the deck beneath Silky’s impact point and rolled.
My motion didn’t stop until I slammed into a baffle. I unwrapped my arms and found inside a slightly dazed Silky and a bruise forming on my chest the shape and size of a certain alien’s head.
To be honest, I have no idea how I managed to catch her, and I don’t ever want to try again.
Someone had done this to us. That someone would pay.
My blood boiled, condensing into a red mist that stuffed my eyeballs.
I couldn’t help it; this was how I had been made.
Robots were natural hazards of war, even cheeky ones with attitude.
But that was a man, a flesh and blood person who was trying to hurt my friends.
The roar of an enraged animal filled my ears. As inhuman as it sounded, that fearsome blare had to be me. My fingers curled into high-tensile claws, the thumbs pushing forward as I imagined pressing them through the eyeballs of the man behind the voice and ripping his skull apart.
A high-fidelity image forced itself out of my short-term memory buffer – a gut-wrenching snapshot of my wife about to hit the deck. About to break her neck.
Talking of which, a muffled voice reached me through the red mist and the growl that rumbled deep in my throat.
“Come back to me,” called Silky. “That’s better,” she said when my eyes could focus on the alien standing before me. I frowned when I realized she was waiting with a cable in her hand.
Then she plugged it into my neck.
My ancestors, who were given up as slaves back in the 22nd century, were baseline human. Since then, alien bio-engineers have had centuries to adapt us to better serve the needs of our former masters. But it was a work in progress, and it didn’t stop when we switched sides and joined the Human Legion. The cerebral access port beneath my left ear was one such recent modification. I had mostly used it to house my AI, Conteh, but it could also be used to receive memory recordings from other Marines. It was a messy and dangerous business – around a fifth of people plugging in a memory recording for the first time were driven insane by the shock of experiencing another person’s perspective on the world. But for those who survived, the ability to receive orders directly from the mind of your commander, or to experience a scout’s reconnaissance without the filter of interpretation, could be vital.
My Kurlei wife was an empath and, although she was not human, she possessed the same access port designed for her alien psychology and physiology. Until a year earlier, I would have told you that direct mind-to-mind communication was lethal risk-taking between humans, and mental suicide to attempt such a thing across a species divide.
But evolution had shaped Silky to be an empath, and our White Knight masters had bred her people to optimize that trait over hundreds of generations. When it came to linking across minds, impossible didn’t apply to her.
But possible and painless are not the same thing. And Silky was in a hurry.
Imagine a drill piercing your skull. Not the kind a combat engineer might use to break ground, but something no wider than a pin head. You’d barely notice it going inside your head. At least, not in comparison with what comes next. Now, a capillary tube is inserted through the hole – you’d grit your teeth at that part, but it’s bearable.
Then your brains are sucked out through that tiny tube.
Time stretches. The forced extraction of your mind continues forever, because the tube’s end point is over a light year away and the slurry that was once your brain matter is traveling at a relaxed walking pace. You feel every second of the millions of years this takes.
That is what it felt like to mind-link with Silky when she wasn’t being gentle.
I emerged back into a semblance of lucidity in what resembled the CIC of a Legion starship. It was no use to know that Silky had come inside my head for a chat, and that my consciousness had taken a half step to the left, but was still located between my ears.
I blinked. And was properly in the room.
My ghosts had prepared a meeting environment. We were in an Archon-class troopship and the CIC displays were shouting that the ship was crippled and under attack. My ghosts were waiting for us there in resplendent Spacer uniforms: black with gold piping and silver suns on the lapels.
As in real life, Silky was dressed in her mesh combat blouse with the red ribbons tied to her hair-like fronds. I think she was still a little shaken, because it was Sanaa who spoke first.
“Welcome aboard, NJ. You too, Sylk-Peddembal. Before you begin, I’ll fill you in, NJ, with what you missed while you were berserkering out. It’s not much but we’re in trouble. Even a minor detail could…” She frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Sanaa and I had hooked up when we were cadets. We’d been married for almost two centuries – and had a daughter, though she’d never been born. She knew me too well for me to evade or lie.
I sighed, which seemed ridiculous in this overtly unreal environment. “Spacer officer uniforms are usually worn
by Spacers. They look good on them, but much as I respect them, the Spacer physique makes them little, wee pixies. You’re a Marine woman, my love. You make the uniform look good in a whole new way.”
I recognized the way Sanaa rolled her eyes. It was the good kind of eye rolling; the indulgent kind.
“Danger makes him angry at first,” Bahati explained to Silky, “but you pulled him out and put him into this mental time-out. You need to understand that when the danger’s over, all Ndeki can think of is Operation Grab Ass. He was always like this. It’s just that the only ass he’s got to grab these days is in his head.”
My mind could be an uncomfortable place to inhabit, and this was a typical example. Bahati was jealous of me casting Sanaa an admiring look, so she was taking it out on Silky. In Bahati’s mind, my three wives had a seniority based on chronological order of our marriage, and as the middle one Bahati was jealous of both. She loved them both too. Sometimes.
“What did I miss when I was seeing red?” I asked. “Show me.”
Normally, Silky would rise above Bahati’s jibes by pretending not to understand them. With her dark eyes set into black pits, the Kurlei possessed a deeply unsettling stare in her armory, and she deployed it to the max on Bahati.
“I am fully aware of NJ’s nature,” she told my late wife, “and of yours. So let me offer you some friendly advice. If I were a recorded personality fused with a combat AI, I would not draw attention to NJ’s impulse to seek intimate physical contact. In case the implication evades you, I draw your attention to the word ‘physical’.”
“For frakk’s sake,” I screamed at them. ‘Shut up, all of you, and show me what I need to know.”
Between them, Bahati and Sanaa brought up a bulkhead view screen that showed an audio-visual recording of what had been going on while I had been mentally AWOL.
As they worked the controls to bring the sights and sounds into focus, Silky interrupted. “I can do much better than that.”
I glanced her way. It was difficult to be sure with her inhuman face, but I swear a look of triumph came over Silky in the moment before I tumbled into her memory.
The alien didn’t experience the world the way I did. It was as if someone was playing silly buggers with my eyeballs and inverted the feed to the optic nerve so that everything was upside down. But I wasn’t in the pilot’s seat, this was the pilot’s memory. I forced myself to remain a passenger and went with the flow.
“We shall speak later, once you are dead,” I heard the bastard in the walls say in Silky’s memory. “Your corpses will tell us much. We will not take this intrusion lightly.”
“You wouldn’t want to piss off our employer,” Chikune shouted.
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” the man replied.
“We’re connected,” added Chikune.
Laughter wafted from the man like a gentle summer breeze. “That’s funny. You’re connected. Man, you’re killing me. See you on the other side.”
There was a brief electronic buzz as the connection cut and we were on our own.
Then came the angry sound of powerful motors starting up, the vibration shaking the hold so violently that Silky threw her hands out to keep her feet. A violent wind lashed the compartment that built swiftly into a hurricane. I felt the gut-churning moment when Silky realized what was happening. The Spirit of Progress was a high-end freight ship, capable of carrying any cargo, including those with specialist environmental requirements. Such as being housed in a vacuum.
The air was being sucked from the hold.
I tried to keep to the surface level of Silky’s memory because experiencing someone else’s emotions is deeply disorientating. I couldn’t fight back the fury that surged through her. I myself had imagined ripping the veck’s skull apart, but Silky’s mind had touched upon deeper memories of far longer-lasting tortures she had inflicted upon members of my species.
I shuddered. Then her emotion flicked onto a new setting of disdain and concern as she regarded my real-world self through unflattering inhuman eyes. I was a half-broken old war cyborg, bunched over and with my fingers curled as if rending flesh. Through the protective film that coated my eyeballs she could see the weave of wetware attachment points and the model and serial numbers stamped at their bases. My eyeballs had rolled up in my head. As for the noise issuing from my throat, if an animal had uttered such a sound I would be moved to put it out of its misery.
But Silky was not me. Her anger ceased to be, leaving no residue. Her concern for me drove out every other thought, and she advanced on my pitiful figure, readying her cable and radiating calming thoughts through her kesah-kihisia, the empathic tentacles that topped her head.
Mercifully, I was dumped out of her memory and back into an acceleration couch in the imaginary CIC.
“Can we block the air extractors?” asked Silky.
“Perhaps we can use something in the cargo,” Sanaa suggested. “But what? Machine parts? Cables?”
I asked the obvious question. “Why not simply blast the mechanism with gunfire?”
“We should try to,” the Sarge answered, “but as a secondary action only, as it is unlikely to succeed. Have you not looked properly at the surfaces to this compartment, NJ? They are not merely hardened against very high and very low pressure, but its insides are armored. If this compartment is designed to imprison dangerous guests, I do not think that a tickle with our machine pistols is likely to accomplish anything but dangerous ricochets.”
“The sacks over there – I saw some that looked the same in another compartment. They held a white clay substance.”
“What is it?”
“No idea.”
“My guess,” said Silky, “raw material for fabrication engines, which would make it some kind of resin base.”
“Resin,” I said. “Gooey, gummy, resin. Throw it at the fans and will goo up the works.”
“Agreed,” she said. “I’ll fire at the fans. Everyone else to… throw dust in the air.”
“The data points are sketchy,” said Efia, “but I estimate that once you are back in the physical world, you can rely on only three minutes to fix this situation before oxygen starvation hits you hard.”
Lance Corporal Efia Jalloh had functioned for many years in my spine as the voice of insanity before finding God, and then serving duty as my spiritual and emotional advisor. Her comforting presence never left me, but she rarely spoke these days.
I sensed Silky reading a level of meaning in Efia’s words that were beyond me. She hesitated and then placed her hands on one of mine. Our minds produced accurate facsimiles of our real-world selves – or at least how we perceived ourselves to be. Compared to mine, her hands managed to be both strong and delicate, with slightly elongated index fingers.
The scientific name for the Kurlei meant mammal-like alien, and her hands were indeed not only mammal-like but almost human. Except for being covered in white fish scales.
Out of the corner of my imaginary eye, I caught Bahati and Sanaa looking away.
“Take care,” Silky told me.
Such simple words, but there were layers of meaning within.
In reply, I rested my hand gently on her head fronds. They felt cool and peachy smooth. Vital, alien life pulsed beneath my hand. I should probably have replied, but I had no room in my head for words; I needed to act.
She nodded to let me know that was okay and then disappeared as, in the real world, she pulled the plug.
I fell back into my body to find that we’d been away for only a moment. Nolog and Chikune were en route to test the hatches and the bulkheads, but Silky ordered all of us to form a line between the sacks and one of the air extraction units hidden behind layers of armored grilles.
She put her gun inside the extractor and fired the contents of a full ammo bulb inside.
The whine of the fans took on a slight crunching quality, but that was the only evidence of Silky’s efforts. She fired a second ammo bulb, and a third, with no obvious effe
ct.
Sel-en-Sek watched this activity, propped up against a baffle. He was still pale, but med-drugs had chased away the pain from his eyes, and replaced them with a twinkle, as if he knew a hilarious truth to which we poor fools were not yet privy.
By Efia’s estimation we should have only seconds left, but the fight still pulsed through my muscles. You always were a pessimist, Efia.
There was still time.
By now, Nolog-Ndacu had picked up several sacks and tossed them halfway across the deck to Chikune who threw them a more modest distance toward Shahdi. The orphan girl hurried across to me and dumped the first sack into my hands.
I stood before the fans and ripped the sack apart. White powder exploded into the air, but before it could spread into a cloudburst, it was sucked through the bulkhead, the sacking joining its contents but flapping against the grille without being sucked through.
That was it! If the powder didn’t work, perhaps enough bags could stem the loss of air.
I took a second sack off Shahdi and repeated the process.
“Keep it going!” I yelled.
“It’s not working,” Shahdi protested, a look I didn’t recognize in her eyes.
“She’s right,” said Chikune and dropped his sack.
Even Sel-en-Sek joined in. “Throwing clay at the bulkheads isn’t the way we’ll get out of this drent,” he said with a giggle.
“Nolog,” I shouted, “just you and me, buddy. Don’t give up.”
Tallermans are renowned throughout the known galaxy for what is considered either steadfastness or psychotic levels of stubbornness, depending on your perspective. When Nolog too threw his sack down, causing an explosion of white powder as it burst on impact, astonishment burst from Silky’s kesah-kihisia like an air-burst nuke. I couldn’t understand why the others hadn’t flinched as I did, but then I remembered that I was far more attuned to Silky’s head lumps than anyone else.
The only reason I didn’t shout at the cowardly skangats for giving up was to give our section leader the chance to do so herself. But Silky didn’t. Instead, her anger fizzled out, replaced by confusion as we watched first Chikune and then Nolog hurry over to Sel-en-Sek.
Second Strike Page 4
