Hurt U Back Read online

  HURT U BACK

  Book 1 of REVENGE SQUAD

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2016

  Cover image by Vincent Sammy

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  Also available in paperback

  All Rights Reserved

  HumanLegion.com

  Join the Legion today at humanlegion.com to download the Revenge Squad novelette, Damage Unlimited, which is exclusively available in eBook form to enlisted Legionaries.

  * * *

  The author wishes to thank all those who work-shopped, proof read, or otherwise supported the making of this book. In particular, Paul Melhuish for allowing me to raid the vault of filthy Skyfirean vernacular he invented for his Terminus sci-fi horror books, my editor Donna Scott, the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group, my loyal friends and supporters from humanlegion.com and all signed up Legionaries. Finally, a big thank you to Jim Butcher, who has been entertaining me with his marvelous Dresden Files novels ever since I picked one up out of curiosity a year ago. His writing inspired me to create Revenge Squad.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  — CHAPTER 2 —

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  — CHAPTER 4 —

  — CHAPTER 5 —

  — CHAPTER 6 —

  — CHAPTER 7 —

  — CHAPTER 8 —

  — CHAPTER 9 —

  — CHAPTER 10 —

  — CHAPTER 11 —

  — CHAPTER 12 —

  — CHAPTER 13 —

  — CHAPTER 14 —

  — CHAPTER 15 —

  — CHAPTER 16 —

  — CHAPTER 17 —

  — CHAPTER 18 —

  — CHAPTER 19 —

  — CHAPTER 20 —

  — CHAPTER 21 —

  — CHAPTER 22 —

  — CHAPTER 23 —

  — CHAPTER 24 —

  — CHAPTER 25 —

  — CHAPTER 26 —

  — CHAPTER 27 —

  — CHAPTER 28 —

  — CHAPTER 29 —

  — CHAPTER 30 —

  — CHAPTER 31 —

  FOLLOW NJ McCALL IN REVENGE SQUAD

  — CHAPTER 1 —

  My name is Ndeki Joshua, but you can call me NJ McCall because a drunken man in a bar once told me that with a new name you can make a fresh start. As drunken wisdom goes, his name reboot idea has served me surprisingly well, though not without a few disasters along the way.

  I tried to forget those disasters as I joined my five comrades in the rear compartment who were all peering out the truck windows at the unfamiliar streets of Port Zahir on the last few miles to our new billet. The Revenge Squad truck – which I was absolutely not permitted to call an armored personnel carrier – was about to deliver me into my third restart since becoming NJ McCall.

  This time would be different.

  You may laugh, but I almost believed that.

  I’d just traveled halfway across the world to escape the attention of a homicidal berserker called Holland Philby. All I had done was humiliate the man and bring his branch of Revenge Squad to the brink of ruin, and yet he acted as if I had wronged him.

  I’d seen and done a lot in the three centuries since I’d been born a slave soldier in a galaxy on the brink of civil war, but I’ll admit my heart tripped with anticipation as the regional headquarters of Revenge Squad Incorporated swung into view.

  Now that I could see with my own artificial eyes the setting for my latest restart – and more to the point, I could smell the thick odor of fish and feces with an underpinning of ripe swamp – I launched frantic re-calculations for my chances of patching things up with Philby over a few beers. If Port Zahir was the big sagging butt of Hy-Nguay province, then Revenge Squad’s local HQ was a modest wart smeared across an inner cheek – nestled in the city’s business end that was out of sight but not out of mind.

  Plus, the area reeked of sewage.

  I know! I know! In a just world there would be a court order denying me access to metaphors because the results are never pretty.

  But this was not a just world. This was Klin-Tula, a frontier system where millions of former Legion soldiers from a half-dozen races had been redeployed as colonists and told to play nicely with each other.

  And I was an Assault Marine with a reinforced skull that left no room inside for the brain parts that string words together into fancy sequences.

  At least, a Marine was what I had been. Now… let’s just say I was a work in progress.

  And that progress had sent me across the ocean to Port Zahir with a truck full of reinforcements for the local Revenge Squad branch.

  Who Revenge Squad really was – now that’s a question I intended to find out. In theory, we were a paramilitary insurance company. Someone does wrong by a policy holder and we visit revenge on their ass. Simple. Except there was something else lurking in the corporation’s dark heart, a connection to a shadowy organization called the Phoenix Cabal. Those mysteries were moot for now, because there were no signs of life as the truck parked up in the lot of half-cleared rubble alongside the old warehouse that now served as a base.

  There was no greeting, no challenge, and the only other vehicle parked in the lot was rusting and had one of its sides staved in by an explosive blast.

  Troubled glances flashed between the six of us in the back of the truck.

  City law stated that only civilian-spec guns could be carried, and then only on private property. I didn’t hesitate to unclip my faithful SA-71 carbine from the bracket on the truck’s inner bulkhead. A military-grade weapon for sure, but on the long list of things we hoped the authorities would turn a blind eye to. The portable railgun was the mainstay of Human Legion personal weapons, but this was far more than just another gun to me. This was my gun. The only friend still with me after the centuries-long war.

  Perhaps this is just a hazing, said Bahati, though my late wife’s voice lacked conviction and I didn’t blame her. You’d think after so many years of war that my combat instincts would be honed to preternatural sharpness. They weren’t. But every other aspect of my being had been eroded away so there wasn’t much else left, which amounted to the same thing. My nerves throbbed with an urgent need to move, to seek out those who threatened us, and make them go away with extreme prejudice.

  Ahh… Bahati… I suppose I should have mentioned that when it came to wartime buddies I had more than just my old carbine. My mind was home to the digital shades of fallen squadmates whose personal AIs I had plugged into sockets along my spine.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and a sense of calm broadcast into my mind.

  Our detachment’s commander, Silky, shook her tentacle-topped alien head. “No, NJ. I know you care more about your carbine than anyone on this world. I’ve seen the way you caress your SA-71 when you think no one’s looking. I’ve watched you run your hands along her lightly oiled body, enjoying the heft of her in your hands. But while we all know your connection is romantic in nature, those unfamiliar with you might see the military-grade weapon and conclude you look threatening.”

  I frowned, my instinct to go hit something or someone deflected by the strange way Silky was speaking. Granted, she frequently made no sense. Her brain was sharp enough, but her experience of human society was limited. Worse, it was mostly limited to me. But there was normally a pattern to her strangeness, and her little speech did not fit.

  I looked for a reaction from my travelling companions, the men and women – and Nolog-Ndacu – who were supposed to be my comrades. They merely smirked at Silky’s words, and especially at the way she injected jealousy into her sibilant alien voice. The whole thing was frakking hilarious, apparently. Probably because they thou
ght Silky was married to me. Well, she was. Sort of. I just wasn’t so certain that I was married to her.

  I wasn’t feeling like there was anything to laugh at. I had expected the Port Zahir branch to give us a security check and a debriefing, followed by food, beer, and sleep. I’d read up on the branch commander during the long journey. This Laban Caccamo was half-Marine and half preening Navy fighter dolly but he seemed all right for all that. He was one of the founders of the Human Legion for frakk’s sake, and that was a tale I was dying to hear one day. I felt I knew enough about him to know that Caccamo wouldn’t play silly games with his reinforcements.

  Something was wrong. Those nerves started tingling again. I had to get out of this truck. Now.

  But I’d do it Silky’s way.

  “Fine,” I said. “They’re probably busy watching the ball game. I’ll go rouse them. Unarmed.”

  “Negative,” replied Silky. “Chikune, you’re with me. The rest of you, stay here. And get prepared.”

  The slender alien with the stumpy appendages flowing back from her head looked almost childlike beside the former army sub-lieutenant, but Chikune followed Silky obediently out the rear hatch, clanging it shut behind him.

  Silky remembered something you’ve forgotten, pointed out the ghost of Lance Corporal Efia Jalloh, who tended to chime in when I’d frakked-up socially or needed spiritual guidance. Which was frequently.

  I knew what Efia meant. Several times I had frozen when I had a clear shot at a target. The first time was back in the war, when I had sudden doubts whether my targets deserved what was coming their way. More recently, I’d found I couldn’t pull the trigger on people who very much deserved to die.

  Have you ever heard expressions of uselessness such as ‘the ship that never sails’ or ‘a bell that never rings’? How about ‘the Marine who never pulls the trigger’? That’s who I had been. But was I still?

  I thought I was fixed now, I told Efia. To be honest, ‘hoped’ would be more accurate, but I’d recently pulled out a painful memory that had laid half-buried in my psyche for years like a rotten wisdom tooth. If there was any justice in the galaxy, the experience should have cleared my mental blockage.

  We won’t know if you’re fixed until you need to pull the trigger in anger, Efia replied. And Silky is convinced you’re still broken.

  She stopped just short of pointing out that it had been those doubts that prompted Silky to speak strangely in order to make me hesitate, to stop me arming myself, and to do all of that without humiliating me in front of the team by pointing out why.

  Shahdi Mowad, the young orphaned farm girl who sometimes looked out for me, came over and sat in the seat alongside, a machine pistol lying across her lap.

  “Relax, old man. I know it can’t be easy to doubt yourself, but try to remember all of us here know we’re lucky to have you.”

  I gave her a curt nod, embarrassed that anyone should try to be nice to me, especially someone so young. “I’m good.”

  Without haste, we reinforcements grabbed the limited equipment in the truck. No one touched my carbine, the others arming with low-powered rifles and auto-pistols, non-lethal grenades too. I made do with an old double-tipped combat knife in the shape of a crescent. It was lethal in trained hands such as mine. There was only one way to find out whether my hands would obey orders when it came to killing.

  While we made our equipment checks, our driver – an old sailor called Sel-en-Sek – raised the blast shutters over the windows in the back and switched on their view screens. Now we had a wraparound view of the abandoned parking lot. I didn’t like it. True, the truck carried a decent amount of armor, but my tactical indoctrination had been to move, move, and keep on moving, always keeping the enemy off balance and never giving them a chance to regain their feet.

  We all studied the view of the outside. If there were bad guys there, they weren’t showing themselves.

  I was used to waiting, but not to waiting in the wrong position. Fortunately for my state of mind, Silky’s soft voice soon reported in over the comm net. “Set the vehicle to auto-defense mode and then haul your backsides over here. NJ, you’re in tactical command.”

  “What have you found?” I asked.

  “Nothing. There’s no one here. We’re on our own.”

  — CHAPTER 2 —

  All seven of us assembled in what the map described grandly as the central control room, but which was in practice a two-story brick-lined hole that had been colonized by a few equipment-laden tables.

  There was Shahdi Mowad the farm girl, two aliens, and four other squad members who were on the run or pretending to be something they weren’t, myself included. If Shahdi with her tender years should rightfully be at college, most of us were of an age when we ought to be rotting underground or slowly desiccating in deep space.

  I hadn’t much hope that we could operate effectively in a crisis.

  I caught Chikune’s eye, which was a first, since seeing eye to eye with the devious, lying frakktard was unthinkable. We might not have Silky’s headlumps, which could read and broadcast emotions, but we humans can also communicate without words.

  Chikune’s look told me that the two of us were thinking the same thing. We should be scouting out the area and maybe setting some kind of perimeter guard, not clumping like a group of schoolchildren at a candy factory. But if we truly were on our own, it would be best if Silky corrected her mistake before we were forced to tell her to do so, because we needed a commander on top of her game if things turned ugly – as I felt sure they would.

  I was surprised by this lack of leadership from Silky, or Leading Agent Sylk-Peddembal as it said on her Revenge Squad wage receipt. She’d been a special ops officer in the war, although to be fair to her, she hadn’t led human troops.

  I suddenly wondered whether she had led her unit against human soldiers. It wasn’t a question I wanted answering.

  “Silky…” I began.

  She seemed to realize my thoughts and held a hand up to silence me. “NJ, take Sel-en-Sek and scout out the area. Mowad and Nolog, check the roof. César, guard the front entrance. Chikune, I need your hacking skills. All of you, check-in every two minutes. Go!”

  That’s more like it, said Bahati, whose initial jealousy of Silky was tacking round to a new bearing bound for adoration, which was funny because Bahati didn’t realize that yet.

  Sel-en-Sek had been a maritime sailor in the war. Personally, I’d done my sailing between the stars, mostly in deep sleep and always with the prospect of being dropped from orbit into the enemy defenses at journey’s end. You’d think our backgrounds were totally different, but our alien masters were so obsessed with standardization that we automatically settled into the exact same tactical drill to scout around outside. We kept moving, each looking for threats and covering as the other investigated the terrain.

  As a defensive approach, ours seriously suffered from the lack of bullet-proof combat armor, but it was all we knew.

  The former warehouse backed onto a canal that was choked with weeds and gently bubbling away to form pockets of green-tinged froth that clutched onto passing debris.

  The original wooden jetty was rotted down to its metal fittings, but partially replaced by a smaller one to which a speedboat was moored, proudly bearing our corporate logo of a hollow red square with ‘RS’ or equivalent alien script inside. The boat probably carried our sign in scent form too. All I could smell was mud, industrial effluent, and whatever was bubbling from the canal bottom.

  The Revenge Squad building once had sibling warehouses to either side, but they had been crudely demolished and bulldozed to form the parking lots. I could see this denied an attacker the opportunity for close cover – or would have done if a proper job had been done of clearing away the rubble – but I didn’t like the thick vegetation on the far side of the canal and the dangers that might lurk there. A few minutes with a GX-cannon firing plasma rounds should sort out that little oversight.

  But tha
t was all theoretical. In terms of explaining the absence of the Revenge Squad team, we had nothing. No blood, no scorch marks, and no spent shell casings. All we could see were tire marks to show that trucks had been here recently.

  “Local weather archive reports a heavy storm blew in across the bay two nights ago,” said Sel-en-Sek as he peered through the windows of a prefab hut that stood isolated in the middle of the lot.

  I thought at first that nerves were making him spout nautical gibberish, but then I caught up with what he was telling me. The tire marks were too fresh to have been laid down before a storm. Whatever had caused Caccamo’s team to abandon their post had happened in the past two days.

  I opened a comm link and reported our status back to Silky.

  “We’re going to inspect the hut next,” I told her, “and then the boat.”

  “No, NJ. Come back here. We’ve discovered a message. I want you both with me when I play it in full.”

  “Can’t you just feed us the audio?”

  “No, NJ. I need to see your face as you hear this, and I must hear your mind. This message is too human for me.”

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  “If that’s you, Sylk-Peddembal, then listen good. I’m branch director Laban Caccamo and if you are hearing this then I’m dead. We’re all dead. Now turn around and fuck off!”

  Caccamo’s image looked a challenge at us from the screen tacked against the wall. “You’ll have one of two reactions to what I’ve just said. Maybe you will feel an immediate urge to run and hide – in which case, frakk you, you cowardly, useless, frakkwit, skangat, wixering goat-frakker. I hope the hole you crawl into never lets you out again. You can die there for all I care. Bastards, the lot of you.

  “Or you want to come and find us. To be heroes and rescue us. In which case you are a deaf, disobedient, frakktard, amateur wixerer because you didn’t pay me the courtesy of listening. Listen up now! We’re dead!

  “Unless you’re some kind of deviant necromancer, there’s no way back for me and my team, and if you did bring me back from the afterlife, then I’ll rip your skull off and feed on your spinal juices because I’ve lived a very long and full life and I deserve my rest.