It’s a fight not to sigh. You wouldn’t believe how offworlders can go on and fucking on about urban sprawl. “People like to live near the beach.”
That gets a ripple of amusement from the platoon. As far as these guys are concerned, humans can’t swim. Take a squid to a dive shop, he’d probably laugh himself into a stroke.
Mmmm, interesting thought. I file it away, cracking out a fresh stick of gum before I close up my mask.
At the strip mall we check a liquor store and a magazine shop. Both are empty, eminently dustable. Troops poke into a third, bored. All routine until there’s a flash and a series of whumps—modified car airbags, from the sound. Three squid race out of the shop. A black cloud follows: toner from photocopiers, almost certainly. The stuff gets everywhere, burns their skin, infiltrates their delicate gills.
“Why didn’t you say there was a print shop?” Loot, furious, hitches two tentacles into my armpits and takes a full taste of me.
“I didn’t know!” My pulse goes haywire as he hoists me to my tiptoes. “It says Office Furnishings.”
He runs a tentacle around my forearm, checking blood pressure, suspicious. I wait, chewing my gum furiously and trying to get my breath under control. When they’re calm they’re decent lie detectors, but you never know when a squid might decide you’re stringing him along, not because you are but just because he’s upset.
Calm. Focus on concrete things. I watch the remainder of the squad heading back into the shop. They come out a minute later carrying what’s left of Harpo, webbing up the dead fry in grim silence. My runaway heart slows as the wounded lift him gently and start limping to the rear.
“Down to half strength now,” Kramer grumbles.
“Pull back.” Loot still hasn’t let go. “We’ll dust the retail block.”
Bluto asks: “We’re moving on to the single-family dwellings?”
“Perhaps.” He shakes me. “Are there signs, Cantil? What do they say?”
“People don’t put signs on their houses. Numbers, names, sometimes, but—” I glance ahead. The other squads’ demolition ships are fifteen to twenty blocks ahead of us.
“What about that?” He unfurls an anger-white tentacle, pointing. Definitely worked up now, not so keen to believe the copy shop thing’s not my fault.
I swallow. “It’s an old ‘For Sale’ sign—the owners tried to sell the house.”
“And that?”
“Beware of dog,” I translate. “Look, pick any house. Any street. I’ll go in first.”
“And lead us into a trap?”
“You’ve seen my file, Loot.” I press my face mask against his armor, glaring into his cap. Sweat flows off me, soaking the sticky tentacles holding me up. “You know I hate everything Fiendish.”
Gollum scoffs. “Easy to say.”
“You want me to take point? I’ll take point. Fuck, you can take my vest off. Pick the house, Loot, send me in.”
No response. I let fury take over, popping catches on my protective vest. “I’ll go naked, how’s that?”
“Wait.” Finally releasing me, Loot knots a couple tentacles in a ritual gesture of apology and presses them against my shoulder.
“Cantil in front works for me,” Gollum snarls.
Ignoring him, Loot says: “Let’s move on.”
Five houses into the next block, we find a family chained to the pipes in their basement.
There are four of them: mama, papa, grandma, and a daughter who’s maybe twelve. They’re white, old Euro from the looks of them. This probably isn’t the first time they’ve been displaced.
The old woman shrieks in a foreign tongue.
“What is she saying?”
“Not sure—I think they might be Greek.”
“You don’t speak Greek?” Bluto asks accusingly. As if, you know, I’m a moron.
“American, Spanish, Mandarin, French, and Kabuva.”
This gets me the usual response. “But Greek’s just another Euro dialect, isn’t it?”
Sighing, I try the girl. “Come on, honey, you must’ve been born here. Speak American? ¿Habla Español?”
She does a burrow into Mama’s leg.
“We’ll cut them free,” decides Loot. “Apply taser patches.” Gollum gleefully presses the patches against the back of each human’s neck.
“One wrong move, we zap you into a coma,” he warns. I make gestures, trying to get the idea across via charades. Granny waves her evil-eye pendant oh so theatrically. The squid, forced to crowd together in the low-ceilinged basement, are nevertheless relaxing their guard. It’s cooler out here than in the sun.
Only Loot remains sharp.
Toady shoves Papa away from the end of the pipe, brandishing a mini-saw. Meanwhile, Bluto unrolls the first body restraint, his tentacles roiling fluidly as he flaps the net out like a rug.
The mini-saw bites into the pipe, sending up a stream of sparks. The whole family starts wailing and shrieking; you’d think they were being murdered.
Loot turns to me in exasperation.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s all Greek to me.”
Just then Toady’s saw breaks through the pipes. Gas belches out. Loot reacts quickly, jerking Bluto and Gollum away from the billow of white fog.
The gas is high-end stuff, no improvised booby trap this time. Toady and Kramer collapse like punctured balloons. Granny and the girl fall atop them as Loot hits the tasers.
Mama and Papa Fiend must have ditched the taser patches somehow. They’re loose, armed and firing.
Quarters are close. Bodies, human and offworlder, are surging everywhere. I’m drawing a bead on Papa when four Fiends in sensor-clouding capes drop out of the T-bar ceiling. Gollum clamps his shell shut, a hair too late. The caped human drives a firespike into the carapace before it locks. A whoosh of heat—the smell of grilled seafood fills the air.
Nerve gas and flame spikes, I think. This little operation is well funded.
I’m aiming at a caped Fiend when I feel a flamespike against the nape of my neck.
“Guns down.” It’s Mama Fiend, speaking American.
“She’s telling us to surrender,” I say.
Loot and Bluto grope at each other, tentacles twining in the squid equivalent of nonverbal communication.
“Now,” Mama says. “Or I burn your head off.”
“Come on, they’re going to waste me.” I stare across the room at Loot. He’s a good-enough guy, in his way, but we’re not the same species. He’ll clamp his armor and take his chances. It’s what they do, every time.
But no. Flesh darkening with frustration and fear, they surrender.
“What now?” I ask, feeling oddly giddy. She thumps me upside the head, just a warning, no real damage. Loot, bless his weird offworlder heart, fluffs his cap protectively.
“It’ll be all right,” he tells me. “Tell her she has three minutes before our backup takes the roof off this dwelling.”
Before I can translate, we hear the whump of surface-to-air packets. A high-pitched shriek and a thunderclap follow; a few seconds later, the ground shakes. Upstairs, windows shatter.
“That’d be your air support biting dirt,” explains Mama Fiend unnecessarily.
Loot’s strange, moist skin mottles in an unreadable roil of emotions. “Tell her we’ll send missiles.”
“He says they’ll bomb you from orbit.”
“They aren’t going to dust their own people,” Mama Fiend says. Her pals are gleefully using the squad’s own restraints to bind the surviving squid onto wheeled palettes. One of them is setting up a webcam, pointing it at Loot’s face as they wrench off his mussel shell and the hydrator that keeps his skin moist.
“It seems Intel was right for a change,” he says calmly.
“Sir?”
“A new-hatched fry could see this neighborhood really is Fiendish. What do you suppose their plan is?”