Second Strike

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Tell me again how you managed to hack the LBT-10 droids.”

  Diplomatic mode, my ghosts reminded me. I sat next to Silky, set my mug on the floor, and engulfed her hands in mine. “You’ve been interrogating me all night. Leave it until tomorrow. Please.”

  Her face pinched inward. “I want to understand now. You’re damaged and need fixing, NJ. More than you realize. You need to open up your mind.”

  “I’ve let you inside many times and I will do so again. But not tonight.”

  “I need to go deeper,” she insisted, her face flushing lilac. “And I need you in a coma. It’s important.”

  “And it will still be important tomorrow,” I answered, trying hard not to get caught up on the word ‘coma’.

  A cheer rang out from the bullpen. I strained to hear why but all I heard was the absence of music.

  The door burst open and Shahdi and César appeared, wide-eyed with excitement. “Come quickly,” she said, before slamming to a halt when she noticed Silky’s hands were in mine. “There’ll be time for that stuff later. The news bulletin is about to run. We’re on it!”

  I shot to my feet. This was what I’d been waiting for. Asking Nolog-Ndacu for a dance, fending off a wife wanting to give me unconventional brain surgery, dancing around an interspecies confrontation and ending up being invited to an underwater Littorane concert – all this good fun was just the opening for the big event of the night: seeing ourselves talked about on the AV news feeds.

  — CHAPTER 8 —

  We were on after the kind of depressing report on the rise in disappearances, murders, and inter-species conflict that was all the provincial and city news seemed to carry those days. We saw a perfect shot of Spirit of Progress erupting in a fireball that spread burning debris high into the sky. Searing light reflected on the calm water in the harbor, stoking the excitement in my heart.

  “Yes!” I pumped my fists into the air. “That’s what you get for messing with my friends. Next time I won’t hold back.”

  I had a celebratory roar primed and ready to launch in my throat, but an unwelcome thought defused it. The report on our Spirit of Progress adventure hadn’t come after the sequence on violent crime’s escalation – it had been a part of it.

  My comrades didn’t care. They sent a cheer echoing off the bare brickwork of the Slaughterhouse’s walls.

  “What about the pig-licker who tried to suffocate you?” asked Lazheet, one of our deadliest agents. “Would you like me to bring him in for a chat?”

  I grinned at the former Marine. Lazheet would never do such a thing without Caccamo’s approval, but she could if she wanted to. This woman was wonderfully dangerous. Then I remembered the man’s voice taunting us over the bulkhead speakers as he settled down to watch us die. My mood soured.

  “If you do,” I told Lazheet, in a loud voice for everyone’s benefit. “I’ll rip out his tongue with my bare hands and make him swallow it whole.”

  I meant every word and all the humans there knew it. They began chanting my name.

  I closed my eyes and drank in the sound. I was no hero, but my whole body tingled with the delusion that I was – just this one time. My ears picked up a discordant voice layered above the chants. I opened one eye and saw it was Silky, whose high-pitched voice was gleefully screaming my name with such force that her face was turning lilac.

  I could tell her enthusiasm because her nose flared to three times its normal dimensions, her upper lip rolled up like a cigar to expose her teeth, and her kesah-kihisia flattened tight against her head. She’d dropped the human veneer she usually adopted to fit in, and revealed her true nature: a ruthless inhuman assassin.

  Only Caccamo appeared thoughtful. I didn’t care. I was on top of the world.

  — CHAPTER 9 —

  An hour later and by now the party was well underway.

  The drink was flowing freely, and so was the laughter. Faces rarely spotted at a Slaughterhouse party were in evidence. Dave, our Hardit chief engineer, sipped water alone in a far corner. No one talked to him, but that was okay. He explained to me once that he loathed conversation. To him, being sociable was important, but that only meant silently mingling his scent with ours. Another colleague of his race had once told me that as an identifier, a Hardit individual’s scent is far superior to a human’s spoken name, because it tells not only your story, but also echoes that of your family. So I think our engineer was telling the truth about wanting to mingle scents, especially when in the next breath he told me if I ever called him Dave again he would kill me. Which is a shame. Dave suits him much better than his Hardit name.

  Rarest sighting of all was our eight-foot tall Jotun, Aeslingir, who handled legal affairs. Jotuns had officered the human Marine Corps. I’d known them all my life, but never had a social conversation with one. I was debating whether to start now when Lazheet put an arm around me and steered me in a half-circle until I was facing Shahdi. The girl was happily chatting away to a pair of junior associates, but when she glanced my way, I noticed bruising around her eyes that was an ironic echo of the darkness around Silky’s.

  “What happened to your little waif?” Lazheet asked me.

  “Shahdi? She annoyed my wife.”

  “You’re a brave man to be with a woman like that.”

  “Silky’s not a woman.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Looks like one to me.”

  The individual under discussion was ensconced in debate with Qyn and Siyuk. Her white, scaly skin was far closer to the Littoranes’ than to mine, and the tentacles sweeping back along her head were nice enough to stroke, but would suit the hairless Littoranes more than they would topping my skull.

  “A little,” I admitted to Lazheet who, by contrast, was not only all human, but an all-Marine woman with battle scars decorating her dark skin, her cornrows, and gold-flecked eyes that were humanly gorgeous unlike Silky’s obsidian gems sunk into dark hollows.

  Most entrancing was the trail of copper DNA helixes that swept out from the corner of one eye, ran around the back of Lazheet’s ear and then down her neck to disappear beneath her blouse to destinations that were unknown, but which invited discovery.

  “Look deeper,” Lazheet said. “Silky acts like a woman and actions speak to me more clearly than any words. Take you, for example. What you did today on that ship was so NJ – brave, loyal, and I would rate you at least fifty percent mad.” Lazheet grabbed my head, and I allowed her to draw me in until we were close enough that our noses were almost touching. “I could use a man like that for myself,” she said in a hungry growl.

  Her gaze clawed at me but I didn’t pull away. She was like me, or as I used to be. Seen too much of the galaxy and lost too much along the way to dance around when she wanted something. She was playing her sexual tractor beam over me on full power, and I shifted my balance uncomfortably while I tried to remember why I should resist. I hadn’t gotten any rack-time with woman, man – or alien for that matter – since I’d been retired to Klin-Tula. I’d never admitted that to anyone, but judging by the predatory look in Lazheet’s eyes, it was so obvious it might as well be tattooed on my forehead.

  My skin started tingling.

  If not for Silky, I would be doing the horizontal dance with Lazheet in about sixty seconds’ time, probably on those chairs Qyn and Siyuk had shifted together in Caccamo’s ready room.

  I don’t suppose that was a secret either.

  “Hey, crank up the volume,” called someone in the room. “We’re on the news!”

  “Tell us something we don’t know, dumb drellock,” answered Alonzo, who led Section ‘B’.

  “No, this is new. A suit talking about us. A politico.”

  “That’s not any old suit,” said Sel-en-Sek who was enjoying the party despite the cast on his legs and the pain on his face. “That’s the mayor. That’s Philamon Dutch.”

  Someone lifted the volume and everyone else listened in to what the mayor of Port Zahir had to say about our fun and games
that afternoon.

  I only half noticed, most of my attention still caught in Lazheet’s sex beam.

  “Stay with me,” she challenged.

  You might think me disloyal to Silky to be humming with the desire to follow that copper tattoo trail wherever it led across Lazheet’s body, but you’d be wrong. I was committing the far worse crime of indecision.

  After Bahati’s death, the last of my original squad to die in the war, I sank beneath habit and decay until by the time Silky discovered me, I would black out for weeks at a time, my ghosts minding the shop while my mind was AWOL.

  Back when I’d been fully alive, the last thing anyone would accuse me of was indecision.

  Silky was glancing up at the news screen with her alien pals. I knew I was lucky to have her, but there were itches that alien could not scratch.

  Whereas Lazheet…

  Silky frequently urged me to mate with my own kind for the sake of my emotional well-being, as she put it. She meant what she said, although I suspected that if I did have flesh-rubbing fun with someone else, she might suddenly realize that my throat needed slitting.

  I put my finger to the corner of Lazheet’s eye and gently traced the copper path across her face and down her neck.

  My fingers stalled in the depression above her collarbone. What held me back? I didn’t care about Silky’s jealousy, and when I looked into Lazheet’s eyes, I saw only impatience.

  I tried to take a calming breath, but it only fueled my urgency. There was nothing to hold me back.

  I felt my face tighten into an expression of sheer hunger.

  Nothing!

  “Loop that back again,” roared Caccamo, his every word dripping with lethal venom.

  Lazheet switched off her tractor beam and my attention stumbled into the big screen showing the newsfeed. Into the mayor’s arrogant face.

  “… is more than just another case of the violence spreading like a disease through our city. A city that is under threat. I’ve been saying in Chambers for months that one of the greatest threats of all comes from the professional vigilante groups. They are not a cure but a cause of criminality. And today it got personal. The worst, most venal, corrupt, and arrogant criminal gang in the region was responsible for the willful destruction of my personal assets.”

  “What’s that veck talking about?” I said. I didn’t like the way that even though it was nighttime, the police were still swarming over the dockside. I couldn’t see what that would achieve other than to be seen to be taking this seriously. Someone high up had placed a big whip across their backs.

  “That ship in pieces at the bottom of the harbor was mine,” said the mayor, as if answering me. “Its cargo was my responsibility.”

  Aeslingir cleared his throat. “Naturally, I ran background checks. If the mayor owns Blue Star Freight, then he was going a long way to hide the fact.”

  “Well, he ain’t hiding it now,” said Caccamo.

  Mayor Dutch removed his brimmed hat to scowl close in at the camera lens. His was the kind of lived-in face that had come within a whisper of being died in. Angry lines radiated from one eye like a starburst tattoo, but they were painted in scar tissue, not ink. “If any of you scum in Revenge Squad are watching, know this. Now it’s personal. No longer will I allow blind eyes to be turned your way. Run, hide… do what you like because nothing can help you now. I’m coming for you, Revenge Squad. You’re frakked!”

  — CHAPTER 10 —

  Caccamo shouted, “You stay calm, McCall!”

  I ignored him and stormed off to arm myself.

  Lazheet blocked my way. “Where do you think you’re going, mister?”

  “To grab something useful–”

  “In the armory? Your brain doesn’t work, remember? You can’t pull the frakkin’ trigger.”

  I loomed there, glaring at the woman, but however much I snarled, I couldn’t kill the sense behind her words.

  Damn her!

  My entire world centered on killing that veck in the newsfeed with his stylish brimmed hat, and fragged cheek, before he got Silky killed. My life beyond that achievement currently had no meaning.

  Of course, I didn’t lie down on a couch and attempt to articulate my feelings – I mention this because I want you to understand that I’d been designed and trained to eliminate any critical danger without delay. I simply couldn’t see myself as Lazheet did – as I truly was.

  Even though I knew that was monumentally dumb.

  You see, more than once over the past year, I’d caught someone in my gunsights who I dearly wanted to kill and… like the lady said, I couldn’t pull the trigger. Hadn’t stopped me shooting at those droids earlier today, so maybe my psychological block was weakening. Whatever my issue was, it didn’t seem possible that it could stop me now, because there wasn’t room in my head for anything but the need to kill the mayor of Port Zahir.

  I snarled at Lazheet like an enraged bull. Droids didn’t count. I knew damned well she was right.

  “Fine!” I fumed. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”

  “No,” said Silky, pulling at my shoulder. “Don’t be an idiot. I forbid it.”

  I squared off against her. “Listen carefully, Silky. I want you to lie low and as safe as you can within Revenge Squad. Listen to Caccamo.”

  “Or why don’t I follow your example and ignore him?”

  I tried to push past her, to make my way out to the street. I didn’t need a gun to kill the mayor. When I told Lazheet I’d use my bare hands, I wasn’t being over-dramatic. But Silky blocked my way. If it came to a fight, I’m not sure which of us would prevail, so I played dirty.

  “I want you to let me go,” I told her. “Stay here and stay safe.” Harnessing every iota of authority I could round up, I added, “I insist.”

  When we had first met, Silky explained that Kurlei wives had to follow their husbands’ wishes. Sounded like a throwback to ancient times on Earth, but it wasn’t that simple. Of course it wasn’t.

  She was coy about spelling out how this worked, but as far as I could make out, it was as if Kurlei males play the part of a sector general, laying down the strategy for the operational commanders and lower echelons, who would loyally follow the strategic plan, but would tell the general to go vulley himself if he tried to micro-manage its implementation. And if the operational commanders didn’t like the strategy in the first place, they would mutiny, murdering the general and replacing him with one of their own number.

  Silky wasn’t sure herself whether my authority over her was real or just a habit because, obviously, I was only a filthy alien. However, she was damn sure she would murder me one day.

  Aliens! Go figure.

  Alien women – don’t even bother trying.

  I wasn’t in the mood for xeno-gender politics; I wanted her out of my way and I wanted her safe.

  “Don’t impede me,” I told her, willing my single-mindedness to burn into her like an x-ray laser.

  “Killing him won’t solve anything,” she countered.

  “Out of my way!”

  “Not that you’d get anywhere near him.”

  “MOVE!”

  She jerked in shock, and with her eyes stretched inhumanly wide, she stepped aside. Kesah-kihisia throbbing with fury, I was grateful she looked at the floor because the disgust she felt at herself for stepping aside was nothing compared to the searing revulsion directed at me.

  In normal circumstances, I would hate myself for confronting her, but these were not normal times. She’d get over it.

  But not if the mayor had his way. Silky was a deserter from the Human Legion. She hadn’t run in the face of the enemy; she’d fled her marriage sisters who wanted to murder her. Alien sexual politics could get pretty ugly, but in the case of desertion, the Legion allowed no mitigating circumstances. Nor, incidentally, for anyone found guilty of harboring a deserter.

  So when the mayor declared war on Revenge Squad, he was pronouncing a death sentence on my wife.
/>   I pushed her aside and stormed away.

  That’s brought forward the day she’ll knife you, observed the Sarge.

  I didn’t care.

  Kill the mayor, urged Bahati, her bloodlust redoubling my own.

  Sanaa felt pensive but said nothing.

  “Why doesn’t anyone stop the fool?” called Silky, but Caccamo waved her into silence.

  “My dear, some things just have to play themselves out. Let nature take its course.”

  I didn’t exactly have the full support of my ghosts, but it was good enough for me. I marched out of the party room, intending to walk through the main entrance and straight to the docks where I would kill the mayor – live on the newsfeeds if needs be – but Caccamo blocked the doorway, arms outstretched.

  I’d fought in the War of Liberation for over two centuries but hadn’t even been born when Caccamo had been involved in the first action of the civil war that preceded it.

  I eyed him warily. Liver spots bloomed across his bald pate like a barrage of defensive munitions. The furrow that ran between his eyes was so deep that space-time must surely curve around it, but it was his eyes that made me hesitate. They possessed an aura that told of witnessing far more than most human minds could encompass. The big boss had lived long, hard and well, and the old man was still a force to be reckoned with.

  “You’re going to have to go through me,” he said grimly. “Have you got it in you to hit an old man?”

  “I don’t need to,” I said. I glanced behind. Everyone was watching. I could feel anguish and impotence from Silky, but the others… I couldn’t understand why they weren’t getting involved.