Second Strike

by Tim C. Taylor

  I couldn’t breathe until I felt her presence had truly gone, the locked blast door out into the station house delaying her passage for only a few seconds.

  I’d met the human Bishop of Port Zahir, and the Jotun regimental chaplain who I’d demoted seconds ago to rank as the second most fearsome being I’d ever encountered. But despite the admonitions of these priests, I’d almost never sought divine intervention.

  I did then. I prayed for the souls of the police officers who’d arrested me, even that Pavnix captain.

  I soon stopped, berating myself for thinking too small. I prayed instead for everyone in Port Zahir, because if the Grotesque was abroad in the city, cloaked in her mantle of divine rage, then its citizens would need help from every quarter.

  — CHAPTER 24 —

  Ten minutes later, Silverberg freed me.

  “You look surprisingly calm,” she told me as she unlocked my cage. “Did you not hear me? I’ve authorized releases for both of you. Sooner or later you’ll be rearrested, but right now everyone’s a little preoccupied. Wake up and disappear before they remember you.”

  “I’m not calm. Numb. The Grotesque. What happened? Are many dead?”

  She peered at me. “Dead? There’s a mad panic and my commanding officer has had whatever passes for a Parvnix ass handed back to ser. The station house up top has been reduced to a heap of rubble, and there are plenty of injured officers but none seriously. No one dead, except… that gang of officers whose injections I switched for a placebo have vanished. Are they dead, NJ?”

  I didn’t reply. I was too busy mouthing silent thanks to the heavens, but I soon shifted to more practical matters.

  “What about the state of emergency?” I asked as I walked out of the cage. “Can’t K’Zoh-Zhan walk up to me and shoot me?”

  “Is that what sie told you? It’s not a full state of emergency,” she said but her voice lacked conviction. “It’s more a legal bending of the rules so the mayor can get what he wants more easily.”

  I halted, remembering the nightmare of seeing the mayor getting what he wanted from the Grotesque.

  Stupid! Stupid! Why hadn’t I thought of this before? The fact I was there to hear the Grotesque’s screams had to mean the mayor wanted me too.

  “Right from the start, I was never meant to leave the station house alive, was I?” I said in accusation. “Nor was Silky.”

  “Perhaps,” Silverberg replied unconvincingly.

  “And if the mayor can bend the law to get what he wants, he can always bend it more to get us back. Rachel, this suppression of rights isn’t over. It’s barely begun.”

  Silverberg went pale. “Don’t get stupid ideas. Stay safe, NJ. Run far away. That’s the best way you can help now.”

  Mader Zagh! I grabbed her shoulders in my excitement. “But we can stop this, Silverberg. I can. I have evidence.”

  She frowned, prying away my grip. “Let’s be very clear before you get us all killed. Precisely whom are you accusing and of what?”

  My ghosts were screaming to keep my mouth shut. Someone – no, many someones – had let the mayor abuse the Grotesque inside the station house. This was the last place on the planet for me to deliver evidence about the abuser. Hell, Silverberg didn’t even know about the corpses heaped up not thirty feet away in the secret room. Not yet. And if I told her, it would delay my exit long enough for the mayor’s people to twist the facts and pin the deaths of the officers on me.

  I banged the nearest cage. Dammit! “Where’s Silky?”

  “Next floor up. We’re going there now.”

  Mention of Silky must have affected my brain, because I thought before I acted. “Make sure Silky gets me back to the Slaughterhouse,” I told Silverberg, and then fell into her arms.

  — CHAPTER 25 —

  I like to think I was too heavy for Silverberg, that I knocked her over and crushed some of the arrogance out of police lieutenant. But the truth is, I don’t know what I did.

  I’ve been known on occasion to push myself so far beyond the limit of endurance that my body gives up and shuts down.

  All right, I’ll be honest. Swooning like a little girl happens so often to retired Marines that it’s a sore point we don’t often talk about. We’re designed to live, breathe, and fight with our intimate buddies – our combat AIs. When serving personnel talk about Marines, listen carefully and you’ll realize they’re referring to the meat part and AI as a single individual; that’s how close we are. As fatigue cuts in, the human part of the Marine makes progressively worse decisions, and so the AI part takes more control. It’s just common sense. In extreme cases, the AI can switch off its human partner to prevent them killing themselves from overexertion. In other cases, it can do the opposite: the AI working its partner to death if doing so fulfils legitimate orders.

  But when you retire from the Legion, they take your AI partner away, and several bodily systems that relied on that AI go haywire as a result.

  So this wasn’t swooning, okay? And it wasn’t exhaustion either. I collapsed into Rachel Silverberg’s arms as an act of calculated revenge against the sadistic, bastard mayor.

  If I could copy my memory of seeing inside the mayor’s hood and seeing the shock on his disgusting face, then that would be admissible as evidence. But within about twenty minutes it would be recycled, and then if I accused the mayor it would be my word against his, and that would never end well.

  The answer was simple in theory. If I stopped having new memories, the buffer would last longer before being recycled. In the months before I first met Silky, I had been experiencing lengthy blackouts; sometimes weeks would go past during which I would remember nothing. And that’s what I did now. I told Sanaa she was in charge, then went AWOL.

  I didn’t explain what I wanted of Sanaa. Didn’t have time. I didn’t need to. Sanaa was my life partner, and even as a digital echo, I trusted her with my life.

  Whether all that falling into Rachel’s arms was really necessary, or Sanaa’s idea of a joke, I’ll never be sure. Sanaa swore after the event that it took a moment to take control of my body, but I could hear the teasing in her words. I wouldn’t hesitate to trust Sanaa with my life, but even after death my first wife was the most annoying person in the galaxy.

  — CHAPTER 26 —

  I didn’t know where I was. Or what I did. I still don’t.

  It wasn’t like going on vacation and not recognizing your surroundings – I was AWOL. No memories means just that.

  All I know is that Silverberg passed me onto Silky, and with Sanaa seizing the pilot’s seat in my mind, the two of us left the station house unhindered and headed back to Revenge Squad HQ.

  The first memory I did have was a vague sense of unease that quickly grew into a promise of violence that I couldn’t ignore. I heard the metaphorical bellow of distant guns, which felt okay because I was marching toward them.

  I’d spent the last year trying to make NJ McCall of Revenge Squad a different person, better suited to this new life than Sergeant Ndeki Joshua of the 801st Muleheads. Some things, though, are hardwired into my design.

  I can’t run from a fight.

  I opened my eyes and found myself crouched in the street watching Silky peer out from behind a car parked up on… it looked like Langbian Avenue, a road on the border between human and Littorane districts that boasted restaurants with a fantastic fusion of cuisines.

  I shut my eyes and tried to close down my mind.

  The more details I took in, the faster my evidence would flush away.

  But there was fighting going on – a baying mob jeering every time they landed a blow on their victims.

  My muscles itched to be unleashed.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered.

  Silky came close. “Go back inside your head,” she said in her gentle singsong voice. “There is an obstacle. We shall retreat and take a different route. Sanaa explained what you’re doing. Leave this to us.”

  “Who’s getting the kickin
g?”

  Silky pushed her kesah-kihisia against my forehead and sent me calming thoughts. “They are only aliens. Not your problem.”

  I tried to fold myself back inside my mind. I had to. If the mayor took out Revenge Squad, he’d strip away Silky’s refuge. She needed my evidence.

  “Are they badly hurt?” I asked, wincing because I couldn’t afford to ask, think, see or do anything.

  “No. But they are disabled, and the human violence is escalating. I think the aliens will be killed.”

  I opened my eyes again. Silky was gazing at me from her black eyes, looking so trusting, but I’d let her down again. I brushed her kesah-kihisia with my fingers.

  “But… they are only aliens,” she said. I didn’t like what the confusion in her voice said about me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I can’t walk on by.”

  “I know,” she said. And kissed me. “Use this line of cars as cover to work your way around their flank. Then wait for my signal.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I didn’t like spitting up, but she’d served as a special ops officer in the war. Me, I’d commanded a squad in full battle armor with enough firepower to turn these thugs into chum in under a second. I guessed this was more her kind of fight.

  I crept along the line of closely parked cars as quietly as my big feet would go, listening in as I went. The baying mob was incoherent, the taunts and jeers drifting into a Port Zahiran patois I couldn’t follow, but it was unmistakably human.

  To kick a man when he’s down is a hateful sport, but there was plenty of hate to go around that day on Langbian Avenue. In the few multi-word sentences uttered by the mob, they made clear that their hatred was of humans for Littoranes.

  An example was going to be made. A lesson taught. Frennan had spoken of severed human heads wrapped in seaweed. This was going to end badly for the aliens.

  Yet as I listened to the crowd, I found the sentiment sickening, but nonetheless encouraging. The mob was justifying its actions to itself, and that meant it still harbored doubts. Silky and I were going to turn this one-sided entertainment into a battle. Fighters who doubted could be beaten easily.

  At least, when the two sides were otherwise evenly matched they could. There was an entire mob out there.

  As I drew close to the commotion, I risked a glimpse through the windows of a blue sports car, committing the sight to my short-term memory so I could analyze it as I pressed on.

  Anything I could have used as evidence against the mayor was wiped out in the process.

  Langbian Avenue ran north-south, and on this day of the week would normally allow southbound traffic only. The road ahead was blockaded with a line of pickup trucks. Facing out from the trucks were big men with folded arms bulging with muscles decorated with military ink. So far, this sight was subduing the snarl of angry motorists building up to the north.

  At night, the street pulsed in every spectrum with food bars, flesh and data shacks, night pods and data runners, but now the place appeared deserted, every door closed and shuttered. Many windows were also barred or boarded-up, scars set into scorched façades wounded in the recent riots. Away from the road it looked as if the inhabitants had fled, but I wasn’t so sure. I felt hidden eyes in my back but could do nothing but hope that the rabble on the road was as unruly as it appeared, and hadn’t posted snipers in the windows that looked out over the street.

  To the south of the blockade congregated a crowd of humans, spectators cheering on the entertainment. Two Littoranes were on the road, their pitiful twitching no difficulty for the men and women holding onto their tails, so that the punishment team could show off their martial prowess by raining down punches, kicks, and the thudding impacts of crude wooden clubs set with nails. One attacker was flailing a defenseless alien with the buckle of his belt that raised a spray of blood every time it flew into the victim’s flesh, bringing cheers from the onlookers.

  The mob might have its doubters, but I was sure that if we didn’t intervene, the Littoranes would end this day as a bloody pulp smeared across the avenue, identifiable only by genetic samples.

  I counted six men raining down blows, six more pinning down the Littoranes, four enforcing the blockade and a crowd of another twenty-five.

  For a moment, I wondered what the hell I was doing to go up against these odds on behalf of strangers. Alien strangers. I do not like aliens, and if you’d lived my life you would feel the same. I make exception for a few individuals – obviously – but for the Legion to dump different species together on Klin-Tula and expect them to manage the planet peacefully was madness. But mob execution was an even fouler obscenity. Had those frakkers forgotten we’d fought a war to stop this kind of thing?

  I hesitated, waiting for my ghosts to chime in, as they did when I was about to do something supremely dumb. Silence. Balance. They kept quiet and did whatever the hell it was they did to keep my mind and body ticking over efficiently without complaint.

  I took a deep breath and calmed my mind. I already knew what I was going to do.

  The humans had aligned themselves with the road axis. The stars of the punishment beatings faced north, displaying to the south-facing crowd.

  As Silky had seen, this meant they presented flanks. I took up position on the eastern sidewalk, close enough to the Littoranes to smell the blood on the road and hear the bubbling in their alien lungs.

  Silky was somewhere out of sight on the opposite sidewalk. I prayed for her to make her move soon, or we would be too late.

  ——

  I focused every sense onto the line of parked cars directly opposite me, waiting for Silky to jump out.

  I hadn’t expected her to emerge as far north as she did, driving a wedge between the beatings and the watching crowd.

  And I definitely hadn’t expected the mode of her entrance.

  If that had been me, and I had been properly attired for battle in combat armor, I’d have de-stealthed and walked out over the top of the car, flattening it in a whine of my exoskeleton’s amplified muscle and the comforting odors of vaporized lubricant and exhaust fumes. Then I would have shouted at the mob loud enough to blow their ear drums.

  Silky was clad in something less aggressive. She sauntered into view, swaying her hips, all pouting lips and sexy challenge on her pretty face. She’d even reprogrammed her shirt to open at the top, revealing enough smooth flesh to make my gaze want to follow the feminine contours as they swelled beneath the fabric.

  At any rate, that was the effect Silky had on me.

  But I had to admit that despite her expert mimicry of human sexually provocative behavior, too many details jarred. The skin she bared bore too many similarities to the Littorane victims, and the collar bones on display were flatter than a human’s, and angled back like glacis armor.

  But… I was overthinking. Unlikely as it seemed, Silky was sexy as hell, and the crowd showering her with catcalls and obscene gestures obviously knew it.

  Everyone there was looking at Silky. Talk about a diversion!

  I edged around the front of the car shielding me, and readied to spring at the mob… and was immediately spotted.

  The bigger Littorane caught my eye just long enough to make sure I knew he’d seen me, and then looked up at one of the women pinning down his tail. “Wait!” his translator speaker shouted in a male voice.

  She laughed and spat in his face, but I didn’t think the alien had been talking to her.

  I melted back into cover with a new respect for the Littoranes.

  I’d spotted old weals on the base of their necks. Nothing to do with their beating; these were old marks, the telltale sign of a life spent wearing a combat helmet.

  They might be aliens, but they were also Marines. Like me.

  I’d grown up a slave soldier of the Empire, knowing that Imperial Marines who were lost, sick, old, or simply surplus to requirements were abandoned or killed, but the rumor had spread like a virus that the Human Legion we’d been order
ed to fight had a saying: no Marine left behind.

  Turned out they meant it too.

  Well, so did I.

  “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I heard Silky say. “Or aren’t you man enough for that?”

  I risked a look out from cover. Silky was standing with a hand on an outthrust hip in front of the largest beater, a bearded man-mountain with lightning tattoos shooting out of his eyes.

  “I’m man enough for you, slug face,” said lightning eyes. “You’ll soon learn that, girl.”

  “Really?” Silky raised an eye ridge. “I’ve heard the human mating prong is a ridiculously inadequate organ.”

  A gale of laughter blew out of one of the women, who walked over from the crowd of spectators. “I don’t know who this alien bint is,” she said, “but she definitely knows you, Malcolm.”

  The mostly female laughter from the crowd shrank the men back into themselves, but I knew they would soon came back angrier.

  “Mind you,” Silky addressed the woman, “human females are notorious the galaxy over for ugly faces like stretched worms, and their scent of stale feces.”

  The human woman smiled and shook her head. “Gotta work a lot harder on your insults, fish-face. Hold her arms, Malc.” She brandished her fists making sure the chunky rings adorning her fingers were on prominent display. “I’m going to soften her up a little before you have your fun.”

  Come on, Silky. I desperately wanted the Sarge to tell me to get my ass in gear and move out, but I listened to his silence and waited.

  Silky helped. She didn’t just look defiant, her kesah-kihisia radiated martial confidence. Just as well – I’d have intervened otherwise. Timing was everything, and she had said something about a signal…

  I gasped as a sudden burst of disgust slapped me in the gut. It was like swimming in fresh vomit while licking the guts out of a half-rotted corpse. And the psychic blast Silky had just sent hadn’t even been directed at me. The mob would be getting this on eleven, but I didn’t wait around to see.