— CHAPTER 41 —
Now, I know Chikune has had more than his fair share of tragedy, and I know he’d backed me up more than once in recent months – he even liked to put about that he’d saved my life – but none of that changed a crucial fact about the former army lieutenant.
I loathed the chodding veck. I still do.
Which means his words taste worse than Littorane tea, and so instead of repeating the words of his report, I’ll just tell you what was going on inside the gambling den in my own way.
And for that, you need to understand something about games of chance.
After the impulse to develop better weapons than your neighbors, the desire to cheat effectively at gambling is the greatest stimulation to innovation throughout the known galaxy. It’s my belief that the ingenuity applied to this problem by humans, Pavnix, Littoranes and all the rest is not a result of our big brains, but rather that we have evolved large brains precisely because of the need to cheat at cards.
You might sneer at my model of evolutionary biology, but if you think you’re so smart, explain why we are all so damn good at cheating.
For that matter, we’re pretty good at guarding against cheats too. It’s just that those with an interest in honesty are always one half-step behind in the evolutionary race.
The card tables at the Woodland Redoubt were secured within null cages: charged superconducting cages surging with bursts of electricity that were randomized in real-time response to its occupants’ brain patterns. Radio communications and spy devices couldn’t see through, and an optical shimmer shroud distorted the view just enough that you couldn’t see the cards from the outside.
In theory.
In practice, even though the house was theoretically neutral on the tables it provided, in practice the games were rigged whenever the house wanted them to be. Courtesy of an imp – an alien species whose multiple eyes running in a band across its head could see far beyond the visual spectrum. Our former alien masters had used selective breeding and direct genetic manipulation to enhance the imps’ naturally superior perception, and they had been employed as military scouts or adjuncts to artificial surveillance. The imp sitting quietly in a dark corner could see the unique sequence of energy flashes emitted by each card in a marked deck. She in turn bounced a microwave comm signal off the ceiling to other covert house employees, who gave visual signals instructing the house players at the tables how and when to win.
Very smart. Which is why I can only assume it was Silky who figured it out.
Give him his due, though; being a slimy data thief gave Chikune some usefully disreputable skills. The oaf bumped into the ring of security around the imp deliberately, rather than due to his normal clumsiness, and dropped an EM pulser into a jacket pocket of the nearest heavy before apologizing and walking away.
In their weaponized form bred by the White Knights, imps can be incredibly useful, but pushing them into preternatural levels of sensitivity has also left them notoriously unreliable. The one employed by Woodland Redoubt was suddenly overwhelmed by such an intense migraine that she couldn’t even see the EM pulses that were causing her distress.
She fled.
Silky couldn’t see the cards of rival players but she could glance inside their heads. It was an edge, and that was all she needed.
She began her winning streak, backing away from time to time and losing to hide her advantage.
By the time she was up two thousand shillings, some members of the crowd began taking an interest in the mysterious hooded woman, who was made up to look like a Wolf with hexagonal scales of yellows and greens.
True Wolves – not fakes such as César – are half-lobotomized humans with the aggression dial turned beyond 10, designed by alien geneticists who had wanted to create a terror weapon. The result terrifies me, all right, and the subsequent Wolfish ritual of deliberately infecting themselves with an alien skin parasite only reinforces that Wolves are beyond badass, and deep into the realms of the psychotically insane.
So why anyone lucid would want to ape the distinctive coloration of alien skin parasites was beyond me, but apparently for some human women, going about Port Zahir painted as a Wolf was a thing. And given the grin that wouldn’t leave Silky’s face while Shahdi painted her, this bizarre fashion was not unique to humans.
Despite or because of her bizarre look, when this wannabe Wolf had cleaned out one of the initial competitors at her table, there was a rush to fill his place at the seven-player skat table. The lucky newcomer’s appearance suggested he was a successful middle-aged businessman, and his frequent glances at the daring young hooded woman betrayed his ignorance that she wasn’t a woman at all.
Silky led the infatuated businessman by the nose until he had convinced himself that he had tamed the girl made up like a Wolf: he offered her a 3000-shilling side bet.
Electricity must have arced through the charged atmosphere. The optical shimmer shroud only extended a short distance above the table, which meant the crowd could see the challenge in the businessman’s leer, and Silky’s response of the innocent human smile I had taught her when she first stumbled into my life.
She lost the hand.
It’s just as well I wasn’t watching from Chikune’s perspective because I would have groaned in despair. Humanity is a diverse family of fractured tribes, but the game of three-player skat is a universal part of the human experience except, bizarrely, on Earth itself where it’s been forgotten. This was the seven-player version with non-human card symbols and complex betting rules. Silky may have lost the hand, but the businessman lost more, and his side bet with it.
Over the next few hands, she cleaned him out without mercy. My guess is that Silky saw in the businessman’s mind what he wanted the pretty Wolf girl to do to win back her initial losses, and she didn’t like that one bit.
The businessman left, humiliated, but there was jostling and money changing hands to take his place.
Somewhere beneath my feet, Silky was gearing up to hustle these new entrants.
“It’s too easy,” I mumbled. “And she’s too aggressive.”
“Trust her,” said Shahdi. “She’s up over twenty grand. At this rate we’ll have won back the debt by morning.”
I wasn’t interested in a debate. Shahdi idolized my wife for some reason that escaped me. In my long life I’d seen too much that was good taken away from me to trust in anything but backup, my friends, and constant preparation.
I made another equipment check on our Fermi drills. If Chikune and Silky got into trouble, the bunker-busting drills I’d borrowed from the K’Teene engineers would cut through the ground into the underground gambling arena within seconds.
If we had to rescue them, we expected to be outnumbered, but we would sure have the advantage of surprise.
Without any visuals, I had to imagine how Silky was acting. I pictured her black lips pulled back into a half smile that hinted at dimples on her painted face, perfectly calculated to look overconfident yet not mocking. I was still trying to figure out my wife. She like to put about that she was as hard as armor plating, but I could see the scared person within, cast by fate into an ocean of loneliness and desperate to find a safe harbor, or at least a calming respite from the buffeting winds.
But give her a mission with defined parameters, and she had balls the size of planetoids, and was as cool as the deep void.
If it had been me down there, I’d be sweating and twitching as if I’d swallowed nerve gas. But at least I’d be fretting less than I was up here.
I was about to make another equipment check when our luck ran out.
The security heavy Chikune had ‘accidentally’ bumped into earlier, marched inside the null cage around Silky’s game and slammed the EMP device down onto the blue baize table.
Chikune had just enough time to warn us that Silky had been rumbled before he too was surrounded by large people with an unfriendly demeanor.
Within seconds, the tip of my Fermi drill w
as glowing in ethereal blue, and I was silently gouging a hole into the ground when Sel-en-Sek reported in. Chikune must have slipped him a comm device too, proving that even idiots can have good ideas if you wait around long enough.
“They’re heading north,” Sel-en-Sek said. “I’m in pursuit.”
I turned off the drill. Shahdi and César looked up in surprise. “Whether they’re gonna shoot them or interrogate them first,” I explained, “they’ll do it away from the public area. Better to drop in over their heads than to jump down into the main gambling area and proceed from there.”
“We won’t know where to dig,” César protested.
“I will,” I replied. “I can hear her.”
I bit my tongue because I wasn’t as sure as I made out. I mean, I could hear her call for help and sense that she was moving north toward the woods, but that was a far cry from the echolocation we had used to pinpoint and then map out the gambling area.
The other two knew better than to argue and so we cooled our drills, unhitched our ropes, and set off in a pursuit that took us north through the fake ruined parking lot and out into the very real wood.
— CHAPTER 42 —
When the point of origin of Silky psychic cries slowed its motion, I ordered my team to fasten our ropes to the trees and readied to drill down to make a dramatic underground rescue.
We never had the chance. Silky’s head screams were moving topside – toward us at the surface.
Sure enough, a concealed hatch opened out of the woodland floor, and Silky and Chikune stumbled out to the surface with their hands bound – he with a pistol against his back, and she with her hood down, revealing her kesah-kihisia head lumps that even the dimmest individual would recognize from the wanted posters.
We faced four opponents and three would-be rescuers. Of Sel-en-Sek there was no sign or contact.
It was an affront against nature but I prioritized Chikune over Silky. I told myself I was going for the only gun on open display. I jumped out from hiding and tapped Chikune’s guard on the shoulder.
“Can I help torture him?” I asked, hopefully.
I admit I feel a little guilt about this, because the guard might’ve been about to say, “Yes, of course you can, sir. Please be my guest.”
But before I gave him a chance to make that reply, my fist smacked so hard into the side of his head, that by the time I shattered his arm and relieved him of his pistol, he was already senseless.
I looked for a target to threaten with the gun, but two of them were already subdued and on their knees, and Silky was scything a kick to the back of the knees of the only one left standing. Not bad for someone with her wrists bound.
What can I say? We were Revenge Squad and we were very good at hitting people.
But maybe we needed more work on our tactical awareness. As we undid the bonds of our two companions, Sel-en-Sek revealed himself. He emerged, gagged and hands bound, from another concealed hatch twenty meters away, covered by three human men and one Pavnix. The humans had shotguns, the alien an SA-71 carbine – a serious weapon indeed. The firepower had just escalated several orders of magnitude and we didn’t stand a chance.
I dropped the pistol, and those of us unbound raised our hands high, which prompted one of the men to rush over to retrieve the gun and then check the slumped figure of the man whose arm I’d broken. His friend was still alive – what more did he expect? – but the rage in his face when he glared up at me didn’t bode well. “You’ll pay for this,” he snarled in case I couldn’t figure that out for myself.
“Oh, but he will,” said the Pavnix. “Never mind about Daniel. Don’t you know who we’ve found? The Kurlei is worth ten grand, but that’s NJ McCall, and with the latest update, he’s worth seventy thousand. We’re rich.”
“Sorry, darling,” I told my wife. “But I’m worth seven of you. I’d complain if I could but I don’t choose the numbers.”
Yeah, and I knew why too. I was the one who could connect the mayor to the Grotesque and her escape. I knew far too much to be allowed to live.
I told myself that while we were alive we had a chance. Caccamo had pulled some surprises out of the hat before and maybe he would do so again. But once my hands were clipped behind me, my hope drained into the woodland floor.
This was it. We were completely in their power. These jerks only wanted the reward money on us, but soon we would be passed up the food chain to somebody whose main wish in life was to see us dead, and as quickly as possible.
Shadowy figures approached through the trees, reinforcements I assumed, ready to spirit us away to our deaths.
Back when I’d misunderstood Uncle Schaek’s tea-and-singing ceremony, and challenged Koelb-Ndo to combat, I’d been surprised by his speed. But the Tail of the K’Teene had been a grizzled old warrior. Now I learned that Littorane youngsters are faster still.
My adopted clan cousins emerged from the trees in near silence, their legs splaying out to either side in a manner the looked ungainly but shifted them from cover to striking distance at lightspeed. And when your main melee weapon was a five-foot-long tail, you close quickly.
The first wave of Littoranes stamped down with one front foot and swung their rears around like a synchronized heavy truck display team on black ice. The woods cracked with sonic booms as they flicked their tails to send metal-wrapped tips slicing through wrists and ankles.
Four seconds later, the second Littorane wave hit, no less fast but with time to pick their targets carefully. But no targets were left.
My gaze never left the SA-71 which dropped to the grass – accompanied by a severed alien wrist and an arm removed at the shoulder.
Then the third wave approached, bearing tourniquets and emergency med-kits. Also in that wave was Clesselwed.
I was rooted to the spot – my heart beating 10,000 per minute and my jaw open but too shocked to scream. The sight of Clewie allowed me to breathe again. Man, I was pleased to see her.
She hissed at me, flicking her armored tail in a rapid side-to-side motion. I sucked in a sharp breath. Clesselwed was not pleased to see me.
With a hard shove here and a tail slap there, the Littoranes lined us up beneath the trees, the guns they’d retrieved not exactly trained on us but not exactly pointed away either.
Clesselwed cut Silky’s bonds and then padded back and forth before the Revenge Squad section, trooping us in silence as if we were disgraced soldiers who had brought shame to an entire army. Five minutes earlier, I would have burst out laughing at this disgruntled young amphibian whose legs turned to rubber when I rubbed her head. But there was nothing amusing about the severed body parts littering the woodland floor.
I gave her a minute to work out her anger and then I was going to broach a human topic of conversation. Like, for instance, shouldn’t we be getting the hell outta there?
But she dashed behind me, pushed against the back of my legs to make me stumble, and then slapped me on the back of the head hard enough to suck the color from my vision.
I heard a shattered-crystal cry beside me. When the spinning stopped, I glanced across at Silky who, sure enough, was wincing as she rubbed the back of her head.
The others didn’t receive the same punishment, probably just as well in Sel-en-Sek’s case who was swaying without his crutches.
“Uncle Schaek told you to keep unobserved,” Clewie accused. “You have both transgressed. It is good that he will not officially learn of your disobedience because your punishment would be severe, and your expulsion probable.”
She came around to our front and glared up at us while we stood at attention. “We give you aid and new meaning in your time of need and you repay this with insubordination.” She rose up and shoved her snout in my face. “Did our welcome mean nothing to you?”
“Forgive us,” said Silky, “but Revenge Squad is also a tight-knit family, and Honored Uncle Schaek wishes us to be the bridge between both families.” Clesselwed turned her glare on my wife. “We are here be
cause one of your new Revenge Squad cousins is in great danger, and we cannot abandon him despite the peace and safety with which the K’Teene have privileged us.”
Clesselwed drew her head back in surprise when Silky suddenly began fumbling at her clothing, throwing her hooded robe to the ground and pulling her shirt up to her shoulders to reveal the flesh beneath.
“Inspect my wounds,” said Silky. “The people you fought with are a danger to my family.”
The Littorane inspected the naked torso presented to her, flicking her long tongue mere millimeters above Silky’s skin. Was it really only four days since I’d been forced to watch her receive the message from Mr. Lee? Against her pallid skin, the yellow and lilac bruises were still vivid enough to make my muscles twitch in rage.
“They taste painful,” said Clewie. “These humans did this to you?” she asked, indicating with her tail the security team groaning, unconscious, or kneeling with hands on heads.
“Yes,” Silky lied.
Our Littorane family transformed into a frightening sea of hissing and aggressive tail flicking.
“What are you playing at?” I threw at Silky. “You’ve just seen what this lot can do. Do you want to start a war?”
“Explain,” Clewie demanded of me.
“The people who attacked Silky work for Mr. Lee. He loaned the money to Sel-en-Sek’s friend and Sel-en-Sek has been trying to win the money to pay off the debt. The people who were holding us prisoner work for Woodland Redoubt.”
“What I say is true,” said Silky hotly. “The matters are linked. I was attacked because that gambling house beneath our feet has been cheating Sel-en-Sek, our family member.”
“Your wife has a better grasp of logic than you,” Clewie told me.
I was surprised at how much her accusation burned. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see, according to fish logic, we should burn down that building and kill everyone inside. Is that what you want?”
“Don’t be absurd,” snapped Clewie. “We have K’Teene observers inside. We should extract them first, and then we shall kill everyone else.”
Second Strike Page 20
