Second Strike

by Tim C. Taylor

  “The place is a mess,” I told K’Teene Schaek, “and we’re fresh out of cold beer and fish.”

  “But you are welcome here,” said Silky, unlocking the rear door.

  “Caccamo sent me,” said the Littorane as he padded inside on all fours. He began flicking his tail alarmingly. “For a human, Caccamo… resonates strongly with the song of the universe.”

  I blinked, not understanding.

  Silky helped me out. “K’Teene Schaek means that Director Caccamo is one who makes shit happen.”

  “Indeed,” the Littorane agreed. “Such individuals are to be admired from a distance. Get too close, though, and the strength of his song is… bruising of my internal organs. I apologize if my human translator fails at this point.”

  “No.” I nodded. “I got it now. For an old geezer, Caccamo has some impressive moves.”

  “Quite so,” said the Littorane. “Now, pay close attention because what I am about to ask is of vital importance. I understand your affiliation to your Revenge Squad comrades, and have some inkling of what Ndeki has mounted in his spine, but beyond that do either of you have family?”

  We both replied without hesitation that we didn’t.

  “Good. Therefore, the K’Teene clan formally invite you to form a junior cadet branch of our family.”

  For a second, shock gripped me. I’d seen a lot of strange stuff, but playing happy families with amphibians was off the scale wacky. Horror came next, swiftly hardening into anger. While I weighed up whether to hurl my best insult at the alien or simply break its frakking jaw, I felt my ghosts rein me in and make me confront the dire situation we faced.

  After all, I had married an alien – or strictly speaking not protested too violently when she decided she had married me. Compared to that, calling another alien ‘poppa’ was child’s play.

  “I wish you to understand,” said Schaek, “that we have been searching for candidates to invite for some time. This is a big leap for us, but our city faces a crisis of violence and we must encourage new singers if we are ever to achieve harmony on this planet. You have proven your worth, and your needs are immediate and great. Only the godless would not see that we are destined to take this path.”

  “Do you mean that Littorane citizens across the planet are backing you?” I asked.

  The Littorane hunkered close to the floor and raised the tip of its tail. “Hardly. To many who do not listen carefully to the divine song, it is we who are the godless. This union would be perilous for all of us.”

  Silky and I looked at each other. “Tomorrow’s dangers can take care of themselves,” I told her. “We need help today.”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “Okay, Mister K’Teene,” I told the Littorane. “We’ll enlist as your embarrassing cousins.”

  Schaek straightened his naturally bowed legs and tapped me on the shoulder with the tip of his tail. “I name you, K’Teene-Joshua Ndeki. And you…” He touched Silky. “…are K’Teene-Joshua Sylk.”

  Silky’s eyes narrowed to pips. Ouch! She didn’t like that.

  “And you shall refer to me as Uncle Schaek and treat me with respect if you value your lives. I am…” He thought a moment. “In the family TO&E, I am your commanding officer.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” said Silky. “We are honored.”

  “Okay, Uncle Big Guy,” I told him. “Now that you’re on the case, how are you going to get us out of this mess?”

  “You are hunted. Your faces are on wanted posters. This would be a good time to withdraw from human areas and introduce you to your new family.”

  “Great,” I said. “Beer. Nibbles. More beer. Dancing. There will be a party, won’t there? Please tell me there’s a party.”

  “Perhaps. That remains to be seen. First, the family must decide whether to accept you.”

  “And if not,” said Silky. “Let me guess. They will kill us.”

  Schaek wobbled his head from side to side. “Don’t be absurd. Have you not seen the posters? There is a 25,000 shilling reward for your capture. We K’Teenes are a proud and respectable family, but not a wealthy one. Our warehouse at Coffman Wharf is dilapidated. The roof leaks for frakk’s sake, and 25,000 big ones would go a long way to fixing that embarrassment. What is it to be for the K’Teenes? A new cadet branch of the family, or a new roof? The answer is down to your performance when you meet. Here…” He parceled out bundles strapped beneath his chest.

  Inside I found a cloak and a blackened data monocle.

  “Get those on and shift your alien butts,” said my new uncle. “We need to get outta here.”

  — CHAPTER 37 —

  “Normally this ritual of welcome and testing would be conducted underwater,” said my new Uncle Schaek, “but in deference to your limited physiology, we will perform the ritual in air. This is a rare honor. I have never performed on land.”

  “Performed what?” I asked.

  “Flippancy is ill-advised, Ndeki. We shall sing, of course.”

  I glanced around the inner courtyard of the K’Teene clan building and the eighty-odd Littoranes studying me in silence, their thoughts inscrutable behind those flat heads. They looked so serious, so preposterous that a belly laugh brewed inside me.

  Normally, the amphibians wore flexible plates made from a rubbery plastic, but in honor of the occasion, they wore heavy fabric robes. Silky and I wore humanoid versions in a bone-white color, same as Schaek. But the Littoranes looked like overgrown lizards some drunken jokers had dressed in bathrobes for a laugh. To cap the image of lizards relaxing on vacation, there was even a deep pool at the center of the courtyard.

  “But I don’t know the words,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Or the music.”

  “Neither do we,” said Schaek with a vigorous flaring of his nostrils that I think meant he was trying to be nice to me. “This is not a human song. We channel the Goddess, which means there cannot be a right or wrong way to sing so long as you allow Her into your heart. Express yourself. Channel the divine through you. Do not think about what you are doing and soon it will not be you singing, but the Goddess singing through you.”

  Silky tapped me on the shoulder. “Stop fretting. Like Uncle Schaek says, you’ll be okay because the Goddess is above reproach.”

  “The Goddess reveals all,” Schaek said firmly, which didn’t exactly reassure me as much as Silky’s version.

  A bell rang out and the waiting was over. The first Littorane drank its tea.

  Did I mention the alien ritual for checking out potential new clan members was a tea ceremony as well as freestyle singing?

  Before each alien took its place in the choir, it first drank from a metal cauldron of steaming liquid.

  Schaek called it tea, but it smelled more like warm urine than something you would ever drink for pleasure. And I don’t mean a faint whiff of incontinence: the pungent aroma of this tea was so caustic that the back of my throat was on its knees begging for a swift execution – anything but have that torment poured down it.

  I didn’t understand how the K’Teene clan could use a tea and singing ceremony to determine whether Silky and I would be better as allies or as down payment on fixing their warehouse roof, but being married to one had cured me of any lingering notion that the doings of aliens could ever make sense.

  As each Littorane assembled and took their place on the tiered platform that took up one end of the courtyard, I noted three dominant colors weaving through the gathering crowd like a pattern in cloth: white, red, and blue-green. Schaek had said he was part of a triumvirate, and I realized that in wearing the same color as him, I was marked as part of his chain of command.

  My speculation about unit structure came to a halt when the singing began. The first voice sang a simple tone, wobbling a little to settle into the right pitch. I could do that. I’m no singer, but I’m not tone deaf. Give me five pints and the right company, and I can belt out a tune with the best of them.

  When half the Littoranes had take
n their place in the choir, a melody sprang into brief existence before we were back to the single tones marking out a harmony.

  With more singers, the complexity now grew exponentially until with a flash of brilliant harmony, the melodies began shifting and swooping like a flock of Earth birds – or, I corrected myself, like a school of fish.

  The song split and circled, twisting this way and that with an oily slipperiness that dared me to give chase. In the brief moments when I drew close enough to the song to glimpse it in detail, it appeared to be no more than random notes, but then the music would pull away from me to reveal emergent complexity and astonishing beauty. How could they communicate these rapid changes and keep those harmonies synchronized? How could they possibly be doing this without decades of constant practice? It was impossible, and yet like a school of fish or a flock of birds the harmony was there.

  I swallowed back a gulp. My spirit tingled with the sense that the universe was granting me teasing insights into a deeper level of reality. Maybe this Goddess drent was right; maybe they really were channeling the divine.

  And then I realized with a shock that all the Littoranes had assembled on the tiered platform, and it was my turn to join them. All thoughts of divinity fled. First, I had to drink the tea.

  I stooped to pick up the wooden cup carved in Littorane script, and peered into the steaming metal cauldron. The drink was local seawater reduced to concentrate the flavor. How bad could it be? Everyone kept trying to convince me that local ingredients were healthy, and in this case I expected that meant seaweed, a little plankton, oil and exhaust waste, minerals, concrete flakes, and fragments of the Little Tin Bastards I’d blown up on the Spirit of Progress. Delicious.

  I ladled a generous measure into the cup and necked the bastard.

  The back of my throat puckered so violently, it collapsed into a spasming singularity that sucked all that was good out of the universe. I begged my body to vomit up this salty hell, but some smartass alien bioengineer had decided generations ago to remove our vomit reflex, on the dubious grounds that preventing Marines from vomiting in a spacesuit was more important than the ability to sick up Littorane tea.

  I wanted to die.

  But that would have to wait because I had a job to do. I was here to impress so I put on my best diplomatic face and smiled as if this were the best taste in the world, and not distilled urine samples from seafood addicts, mixed with lava. Besides, I admitted to myself as the tea began to lay waste to my stomach, I’d tasted worse.

  Thinking about channeling goddesses through my ruined throat, I took my place in the choir.

  I sang a note, and thought I was doing okay because it didn’t immediately ruin the Littoranes’ harmony.

  Then the choir swooped in another direction, leaving me exposed. I changed to a different note that sounded in the right key, but the song shifted again and again, far too quickly for me to catch up. It was like a human diver trying to swim with a school of fish: so far out of their league that in no way could they be considered a part of the school. One after another, black Littorane eyes turned my way. They did not look sympathetic.

  The song lost cohesion. It became aggressive, choppy. Instead of graceful sweeping it was the wild swinging of a blunt axe.

  I was breaking their song, ruining their ritual of welcome and testing. I was being found wanting.

  Silky was the last to join the choir. Come on, I urged her. You’ve got to make this work or we’re dead.

  She sang a tone that was light, high and fluting. It would have been beautiful if not for one thing: it was completely off key.

  Then she did something incredible. Without attempting to join the Littoranes she began singing in her own miniature choir: resonating in her head, her chest and her larynx in three separate voices with three distinct rhythms. Then her main singing voice deployed multiple sub-voices, like a crystal whose gleaming facets reflected multiple views of the same melody.

  I’d never heard anything as beautiful as that crystalline song.

  I was so entranced by Silky’s sublime singing, that I stopped singing myself. She waved at me frantically, without missing a beat of her own mini choir.

  I tried to sing a deeper note beneath hers, but I could no more support her than an armored division could perform zero-g ballet. She waved at me ever more frantically. Go on! Go on! You must sing!

  I was human. A Marine half-cyborg engineered for war. I stopped trying to follow these inhumanly beautiful singers, and filled my lungs ready to give them a full blast of NJ McCall as himself.

  Except I couldn’t think of a tune.

  Quick, I said inside my head, give me a song.

  My ghosts deployed a vocal formation and welcomed me within. I closed my eyes, and I could see my friends there with me at an ephemeral echo of the many bars where we had drunk together in life. The Sarge kicked off and the rest of us joined in. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t subtle, but belting out a tune with the hint of a glass in my hand and the camaraderie of my friends in my heart was as easy as breathing.

  We sang a ditty called The Sergeant had an Empty Bulb.

  You’ll have to guess what the song was about. Partly because it was offensive to more people than those embarrassed by an empty ammunition carousel at a critical juncture, but mostly because some of the phrases are technically illegal.

  In any case, there was more to the words than you’d think. They spoke of loss for the friends we had left behind, of hope for the loves in life we would find in the future. It was a riotous celebration of being alive. The song was all that and far more to me because the Sarge, Efia, Bahati, Sanaa and all the others had sung the song with me so many times when we were alive, and now they sang it with me once more in death.

  Then something impossible happened. A new voice joined in. A beautiful, alien, crystalline voice of aching beauty that sat in perfect harmony between Sanaa’s voice and Bahati’s. If such a thing weren’t impossible, I would have said that Silky could hear the sounds inside my head from my dead friends. Maybe she could. I’ve seen many things in my centuries journeying through the galaxy, but on very rare occasions I’ve encountered something so profoundly strange that it was beyond explanation. This was one of those incidents, a sublime moment when the universe contemplates itself and temporarily permits glimpses of the impossible.

  Normally I put such cases down to drunkenness, but this was different – a unique moment in time never to be repeated.

  A shoal of Littorane voices joined Silky, cautious at first but then rapidly increasing in adventurous darting in and out of the melody of our bar room song. Alien harmonies swirled in musical motion far too rapid and random to perceive any form, and yet a pattern surrounded my simple song, making it something more even than Silky and I could accomplish on our own.

  I can’t say how long we sang. It sounds trite, I know, but time stretched and ceased to have meaning. We continued until I could sing no more, my throat being so dry I could only croak with the husk of a voice that remained to me. And when I stopped, the song vanished like fairies in the beam of a searchlight.

  No one spoke or moved. I’d long ago given up trying to understand aliens, but I knew with absolute certainty that we all in that courtyard felt we had glimpsed something profound, a fleeting reminder that there was more to the universe than we experienced in the everyday.

  And to add one small additional miracle, I saw damp splattering my boots and realized that I was weeping.

  The leader of the blue-green faction made her way toward me through the ranks of her clan members. This was Lady Viraladunesh, the so-called Heart of the triumvirate, according to Schaek.

  As she reached me she raised her torso up in the centaur pose and then bowed deeply. I returned her bow.

  She said nothing, but her gesture – which I took to mean thumbs up, all systems go – released the mood. The Littoranes erupted into loud chatter and hissing, agitated motions of their bodies that involved a lot of tail swishing.
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  I wasn’t worried. I didn’t know what the excited Littorane babble meant, but if the boss lady said I’d done good, I assumed the others would follow her lead. Still, Littoranes were big brutes and their tails made effective melee weapons. After Silky had to duck beneath a tail swinging over her head, we made our way out of the excited crowd and down to the relative safety of the ground.

  The red triumvirate leader intercepted us, drawing his impressive bulk close. Schaek had warned me of Koelb-Ndo, the Tail of the clan. As far as I could make out he was a combination of war leader and rearguard who watched out for any strays, gathering them up lest they be lost to the many dangers of the galaxy.

  The scarred old Littorane seemed to regard me warily in stark contrast to the other two triumvirate members. Schaek hadn’t explained in much detail, but if this Tail was responsible for the watchful security of his clan, I guessed that made him the sergeant major, and like the human equivalent it wasn’t in his job description to hug newcomers too readily.

  I gave him a crisp nod.

  “Your presence here is an insult,” the Tail told me in reply.

  I bunched my fists but kept my tongue in my head, hoping this was no more than an unfortunate translation.

  “You humans are worse than vermin. It was my people who saved yours from extermination in the war, and that was the greatest mistake the Littorane people will ever make.”

  Nope. This really was fighting talk. I squared my chin and try to weather this verbal storm without hitting someone vital.

  But the Tail had not finished. “As for that disgusting creature you brought in your wake – the mutant with the tentacles on her head – not only is she an affront to the Goddess, but it is all I can do to keep myself from vomiting at her foul stench, and clawing out my eyes at the sight of her.”

  “That’s enough,” I told him. “I get insulted every day of the year – no big deal. But you insult my wife and that’s a different matter. And if we are to be accepted into the K’Teene, then by insulting Silky, you insult the entire clan, and that I can never accept. Retract your insults, sir.”