“I’m Cameron Alvarez.” I motioned towards Vicky. “This is my wife, Victoria Sandoval. We own the farm next door.” I motioned behind us.
“Well, it’s our pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mister Alvarez,” he managed to turn the sneer into something almost friendly. “Suppose you tell us what you saw on board our shuttle?”
“Just the dead and the dying.”
“Nothing else, huh?”
He didn’t sound convinced and I wasn’t much of a liar. If I’d been a better liar, I probably would’ve been able to make a living on the streets of the Trans-Angeles Underground as a con man instead of a thief. Of course, then I would probably have wound up dead in some pointless beef with a bunch of criminals.
God must have a very ironic sense of humor.
“We weren’t looking for anything else,” Vicky said.
“Captain Eld!” It was one of the two he’d sent into the wreckage, the man he’d called Gregor. “We got Jared in here, hurt pretty bad. The rest are dead.”
“Get him loaded in the hopper,” Eld directed. “We’ll fly him back to Hellnick’s farm, treat him there. The rest can wait for the trucks.”
“Trucks?” Clines repeated like a big, stupid parrot.
What part of ‘shut up’ does this guy not understand?
“Yes, Mr. Clines, trucks to take our property off your property. That’s what you were bitching about just two minutes ago, wasn’t it?” Eld took a step toward Clines, just one, long stride, yet it seemed to carry him well over a meter, bringing him almost within arm’s reach of our neighbor. “Or would you rather try something different? Maybe we should think about making your property our property?”
“Is there a problem?”
The voice was nothing I’d ever heard before, nothing that had evolved to speak English or any other human language. I frowned, squinting against the light from the hoppers’ landing lights, trying to make out the tall, broad-bodied figure walking up from behind the aircraft.
“No, no problem, Zan-Thint,” Eld said, his tone shifting subtly, nothing most people would have noticed, but I’d heard the like before. It was the way a high-ranking subordinate spoke to someone who scared even him. “Just ironing some things out with the locals.”
Zan-Thint? What kind of name is…
The tall shape blocked the glare from the hoppers, visible just barely in the light from the fires, the features oh, so close to human but not quite.
“If there is a problem,” Zan-Thint said, his accent sing-song, “then maybe we should, as you humans say, sort things out.”
He was a Tahni.
5
I hadn’t panicked before, hadn’t felt the fear I’d expected, but it hit me now, smashing into me like a wave. Criminals, I could deal with. I’d spent my formative years talking down people who wanted nothing more than to kill me, or at least beat me to a pulp. Tahni, I only knew one way to deal with, and that was to blow the shit out of them with a plasma gun while I was encased in a BiPhase Carbide battlesuit. As my current suit was nothing more formidable than an insulated, synthetic fiber and my hand held nothing deadlier than a flashlight, that option didn’t seem open to me.
“Who are these…people?” Zan-Thint asked, staring at me with black, piggish eyes. “And why do we tolerate their interference?”
“Your kind tolerated quite a bit of our interference during the war,” Vicky said, finding her voice where I could not. I stared at her, shocked, but her back was straight, her chin stuck out in defiance. “In fact, between the two of us, I’m pretty sure my husband and I interfered our way through every major battle, including the invasion of Tahn-Skyyiah.” She sniffed. “Though I gotta admit, I’ve never heard one of you try to speak English before.”
“Things change, do they not?” the Tahni said, coming even with Eld, even more visible now.
There was something different about this one from the ones I’d seen during the war, even from the ones I’d just seen in town. He wore human-style clothes. Oh, tailored to his form, surely, but he eschewed the tightly-wound strips of his people, going instead with loose, grey trousers and a heavy jacket of the sort I might have worn back on the frozen wastes of Hachiman. Of course, to him, a temperate night on Hausos might have felt just as cold.
“There is a human saying I have learned in my pursuit of your language,” Zan-Thint told her. “To the victors go the spoils. And so, I must learn to speak as you in order to forge a new way in life, as so many of us have had to do. Just as you have learned a new way. For none of you are warriors anymore, no longer Marines, but simply farmers now.”
“Another saying we humans have,” I interjected, finding my voice somewhere in Vicky’s courage. “There is no such thing as an ex-Marine.” I arched an eyebrow, noting the queue of braided hair wrapped around his neck, the sign of a Tahni soldier who has killed in battle. “Is it the same for a warrior of your people?”
“Sadly, no,” he replied. His command of our language was masterful enough to even include the emotional inflection I would have expected from a human. He even cocked his head toward us. “Once you humans proved quite conclusively that our Emperor was not a god and that we were not undefeatable in battle because of his existence, many of us had to seek out other vocations.”
I nodded toward the weapon strapped in a rig across his chest that was half tactical sling and half holster. It was the Tahni equivalent of a handgun, and the only ones I’d ever seen carrying one were senior officers.
“Doesn’t seem like it’s too far afield from your old vocation. Captain? Major?”
The terms didn’t translate exactly, since the Tahni military organizational structure wasn’t the same as ours. They had something close to the equivalent of our squads, but their next largest element was about the size of a company and from there it just went all to hell. But I knew if he’d gone to all the trouble of learning our language right down to the inflections, he’d understand the reference.
“A direct translation,” he told me, nodding, “would be ‘Ten-Lenon-Zan-Karan-Thint, the Emperor’s Own Hand Over the Souls of 128 Octuples,’ but Colonel Zan-Thint is close enough.”
“Colonel.” I nodded. “Let me guess, Shock Troopers? Combined Infantry?”
“Just so. And you have the sockets in your temples…you were both Drop Troopers, no? Though your mate has grown her hair to try to hide them, you still keep yours cut short as if you were ready to step back into the suit.” He offered an expression that might have been an attempt at a smile, though it failed spectacularly. “It is a funny thing how in the Tahni military, the High Guard who wore our version of your battlesuits were the most elite and respected soldiers, yet in yours, the Drop Troopers were the rejects, the criminals, the ones fit for nothing better. Perhaps that is why our High Guard killed so many of your Drop Troopers for every one you killed of us. You won simply because you had more cannon fodder than we did. Your dregs outbred our elite.”
Anger smoldered behind my eyes and I endeavored to contain it there, knowing he was trying very deliberately to anger me, either to shake me up and get me to reveal something or simply because he found it amusing.