Tap-Dancing the Minefields Read online

  “No holds barred, sir?” Cantone asked.

  “Do you bar holds in actual combat?” John asked.

  Cantone’s smile grew wider.

  “Hey, just remember if you break me, you will so not be getting any mashed potatoes for dinner. I mean, breaking the enlisted man who works in the kitchen? First, not so impressive. Second, not so smart if there’s no one left to cook.” If all else failed, Staff Sergeant Powell would put Ex-Lax in this schmuck’s dessert if the guy broke him. Being one of the only dishwashers in a base full of dirty dishes had its perks. Confusion darted across Cantone’s face. “I mean, beating John—that would be impressive. I’d be asking for a test for performance-enhancing drugs, but I’d be impressed.” Cantone followed as Tank slowly retreated around the room. Clusters of other trainees scattered as Tank came through. “You know, usually people have attacked by now, and I’m running out of banter, so feel free to get this started,” Tank suggested.

  “Afraid to start something yourself?” Cantone taunted.

  “Potato peeler versus big, bad, warrior-type soldier. Um, duh. No secret superpowers here, so I’m pretty much terrified to start something.”

  Again, Cantone had a flash of confusion. Tank took advantage of the moment and the fact that a particularly slow classmate didn’t move out of his way. Grabbing a guy that looked like a small walking mountain, Tank shoved him toward Cantone. Mountain stumbled forward, and Cantone reached out to catch him before he fell. Tank darted under Mountain’s arm and planted a punch low on Cantone’s back before dancing away.

  “Sir!” Mountain said, turning to John.

  John tilted his head. “Were you committed to Private Tankersley’s side in this battle?”

  Mountain looked around, not sure what he should answer, but Tank figured that no one in this room was on his side—with the possible exception of John. Tank still couldn’t get used to having a training officer who approved of his attempts to avoid getting dead.

  John continued, “Are you an innocent bystander?”

  Tank snorted. “Innocent bystanders run for the hills. Innocent bystanders want to avoid getting creamed. Anyone left to watch a fight is taking one side or the other, even if they’re big old liars about it.” Again, all the others kind of tittered over that, but Tank knew he was right. Marie’s father had slimy bastards tripping over themselves to be part of his organization. People just sucked, and when they saw a chance to grab a little power, they sucked harder.

  “Usually that’s true,” John said, “but you have to remember that the aliens keep humans as research subjects, sometimes for a long time. Some of those experiments are emotional, and humans can end up too damaged to know who to side with. You’re going to run into victims who won’t know where to run or who are so afraid of change that they’ll fight for the aliens that abuse the fuck out of them. Try to avoid killing victims.”

  Wow, Tank hadn’t thought of that. Clearly the rules changed some when going from demons to aliens. “Um… okay. Sorry about that, then.” Tank wasn’t even surprised when Cantone took that moment to counterattack. Tank darted behind two women and then over a bench to the relative safety of the weight-lifting area where he could hide behind the tall machinery.

  Cantone glanced over toward John. “Sir, this sort of fighting does not win battles.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Yep, Tank’s one and only supporter was now jumping sides. Traitor. “George Tankersley, what is your objective?”

  “Me? Now? Avoiding hospitalization, sir,” Tank answered. That earned him a few laughs. Laughs were good. People who appreciated your jokes were less likely to break your bones.

  John tilted his head to one side. “And if you pulled this in the field, what would be your goal?”

  “Oh.” Tank kept an eye on Cantone as he answered. “Time. I may not be the ass kicker of the group, but I can avoid being the ass kickee until the rest of my team gets back from wherever they are, and maybe I can keep a couple of enemies distracted while my friends do something really clever on the other side of the gym. Or the battlefield. You know… wherever you’re fighting.”

  “That works.” John sounded like he approved. He turned to Cantone. “Not everyone on your team is going to be equally good at combat.”

  Cantone dropped out of his fighting stance and backed away carefully, keeping an eye on Tank. “Sir, aren’t we all soldiers here?”

  “But not all soldiers are warriors. Some of these guys are thinkers.” John gestured toward the group gathered in the gym. “We have people who study machines and human motives and alien motives. If you have a scientist on your team, you’d better hope he’s this effective at avoiding direct contact, and you’d better be good enough to get to him before he runs out of places to hide.”

  “And if not possible? What are we supposed to do if we have scientists who don’t fight?” one of the others demanded. He aimed a glare in Tank’s direction, making it very clear that he never wanted Tank on his team. That was fine. Tank’s goal in life was to wash dishes and mop floors for four months before getting back to something approaching normalcy. His heart would hurt when he lost Lev, but Tank knew he didn’t fit into this world.

  John studied the complainer. “Private Tankersley was helping turn off the broken system when we all got dosed with hormones. Where were you, Captain Nelson?”

  Captain Nelson’s face slowly reddened until he looked like an overripe turnip. Yep. The captain had been getting some nookie, probably some gay nookie, considering how few women there were in this place.

  “You can’t shoot at every problem,” John said loudly. “You can’t shoot at most problems. You kill an alien and you’re going to have a world of pain land on your head.” His words came out so vicious and angry that Tank took a step backward. “You need thinkers to find solutions that don’t involve killing, and running away can be a great one if what you need is a distraction. Nelson. Rosetti. Begin.”

  Walking to the side of the gym, John watched as Nelson, a tall man with a still-red face, squared up against Rosetti, a woman who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She looked like Marie, so Tank wasn’t surprised when she kicked Nelson’s ass. She was small enough to dart under his arms. Now that Tank had used the entire gym to make his point, the other bouts ranged out into the gym proper, and more than one person looking for a quick workout scampered out of the room.

  Tank fought three more individual rounds, two with men and one with a woman. He tricked one of the men into reaching through a machine to grab him before falling to the ground and cracking the guy’s elbow against the weight plate. That one spent the rest of the lesson sitting on the side with an ice pack. The second guy couldn’t get his hands on Tank, and the woman clearly didn’t have her heart in picking on him, not until he punched her in the nose. Then she not only caught him but took him down so hard he saw stars.

  By the time John called for the training to end, Tank was panting from exhaustion.

  “Tomorrow we evaluate you on alien weaponry,” John said, and Tank groaned with the rest of the trainees. He hadn’t hurt this much since the last time he’d worked out with Marie.

  “My bruises have bruises,” one woman complained to her friends as they all drifted toward the door.

  “That’s not like your momma’s sergeant taught you,” Nelson joked, and he got a few laughs from the other pseudomountains.

  Tank faded back toward the bathrooms as the others wandered out into the hall. He wanted to check himself in the big mirrors and make sure he didn’t have some big old piece of wood sticking out of his ass or something. He’d long ago learned that he didn’t always notice an injury. After heading into the handicapped stall with its own low sink and large mirror, Tank locked the stall door and started stripping to check for damage.

  Bruises covered his back, and one hip had a nice blood flower started, red streaks where the woman had thrown him onto the raised strip that separated the practice mat from the carpet. Not too bad. After
using the bathroom, Tank washed up and headed out into the gym. With everyone gone, it was oddly silent, and John stood there staring at nothing.

  “Hey, John,” Tank offered as he headed for the door. “Thanks for not suggesting that I’m a total idiot for the running and hiding thing.” Tank shifted nervously for a second before adding, “Good night.”

  “Your strategy was sound.”

  Tank did not hear that every day. “You know, I really appreciate you saying that. Sometimes I feel like me and the military are definitely on different wavelengths. It’s nice to know that someone thinks I might not be totally stupid.”

  “I do not believe you stupid at all. Lev Underwood is quite impressed with you.”

  Tank could feel all the blood rise to his face. He so hoped that meant impressed with engineering skills, because if Lev was discussing other things with John, he was so dying for it. Dying slowly. Tank would kill him and then wilt away from embarrassment.

  “None of them get the realities of this situation,” John continued. “They think they can win. They think the aliens will play by some human rules they have in their heads.”

  “They expect less flailing and scrambling,” Tank translated.

  John snorted.

  After walking over to a weight bench, Tank sat down. “I want to ask something, but I don’t want to sound really odd when I ask it.”

  “You’re not as strange as the rest of these morons,” John said bluntly.

  “I’m pretty sure these morons are the best the military has to offer.”

  John looked right at him. “Your military sucks.”

  “That attitude must win you a lot of friends.”

  “I don’t need more friends. Ask your question.”

  “You lived with the aliens a long time, right?”

  John’s expression was cold and intimidating as hell.

  “Did you see them?”

  For a long time, John sat silently. Tank waited and chewed on his lower lip and tried to figure out a way to ask his most important question—assuming that the rumors he’d heard in the kitchen were true.

  Finally John said, “Not them, but I saw their avatars plenty. Fought them sometimes.”

  “Did you ever kill them? Or hurt them? Hurting them would be good.” Tank figured that with the IF policy of avoiding escalation of violence, killing was probably a verboten subject.

  “Killing them was better, and I did both,” John said, his words so rough that they were almost a growl.

  “Right.” Tank played with the hem of his T-shirt. He really didn’t want to sound like he was being insensitive, but he’d learned that he had to know his enemy. Zhu was scary brilliant, and Marie had superpowers that put her up with Spider-Man, and Ellie had been all human, but a genius sort of human. But Tank and Roger had survived by being scrappy and knowing how to make their all-too-human hits count. They had learned which spells could be blurted out while running for their lives, and which demons hated silver, and how to cast a gold spell without having any gold. They had scrambled after every bit of information—although clearly Tank had scrambled more, since he was alive and Roger wasn’t. The memory of blood flowing over pale skin, of a familiar hand wrapped around the curved ceremonial knife. Tank’s eyes burned with the tears he refused to shed. Crying didn’t fix anything.

  “We’re practicing fighting each other—fighting humans. I want to know how we fight aliens.”

  John gave Tank his full attention now. His eyes were two different colors, which wasn’t actually surprising given his patchwork skin. One was a hazel green; the other, light brown. The difference wasn’t striking, but Tank was fascinated.

  “The first rule is that you get hurt. A lot. They’re slow to kill, but you have to let them hurt you and hurt you bad before they’ll get close enough for you to get in an effective hit.”

  “How bad?”

  John leaned forward. “Worse than most of these idiots are willing to suffer for the sake of training.”

  Quite frankly, Tank disliked pain, but he disliked being captured by aliens or being killed in the crossfire even worse. Pain faded. Death didn’t. Probably. Zhu had this whole reincarnation speech, but Tank wasn’t willing to trust something he couldn’t see.

  “Are we talking the sort of pain that can lead to death and the permanent loss of limbs?”

  “They prefer to hit us where we can heal without medical help. That way, when they capture you, they can throw you in a cell. A subject that requires medical treatment isn’t as much fun to play with.”

  That was all kinds of disturbing. And if the rumors were true and John had grown up on those alien ships, it meant the man had lived all his life with that sort of clinical sadism. “You figured out how to hurt them.”

  “Didn’t help me much, not until Aldrich and Underwood got captured. I could hurt the aliens, but I couldn’t make a ship’s system work. I couldn’t get myself free.”

  “So if we’re captured, fighting the aliens and knowing the systems are steps one and two.”

  “About right.”

  “Would you be willing to teach me how to fight aliens instead of practicing fighting people?”

  John lifted his chin and gave Tank a very odd look. “It means I’d hurt you.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “A lot.”

  “Got that too. I’m quick like that. If you say something clearly and multiple times, I usually get it.”

  John stood, his hands curling into fists. “And if you go whining to someone that I’m being unfair, I’m going to hate you for the rest of my life.”

  There was a story there, but Tank knew when to avoid pushing hot buttons. “Do the aliens fight fair?”

  John’s snort was his only answer.

  “Then I wouldn’t want you to fight fair. I want to learn how to survive if one of these assholes targets me. I don’t want to play it safe here and then end up in real trouble if they find us.” Yes, this ship was buried under ice, and it had crashed several decades ago. Tank still had to assume that the aliens had a way to find their own lost shit—and if they ever wanted to retrieve it, the base was screwed in so many different ways, Tank couldn’t even count them. They couldn’t even evacuate. The damn base was surrounded by ice, ice, ice, mountains, and fucking bears and wolves that would eat your body after you died.

  John held out a hand to help Tank to his feet, but Tank had fallen for that trick a few dozen times already. He got up and started backing away. John grinned. That was the most terrifying expression Tank had ever seen in his life, and he’d met demons.

  “You might not be useless,” John said, and that actually sounded like a compliment. Tank didn’t have time to answer, because John flung something that hit Tank in the chest, and he went down screaming in pain as his nerves turned to fire. But when John grabbed for him, Tank got onto his back and planted a knee in John’s groin.

  John cursed vividly. “Great strategy with humans, but the aliens either don’t have genitals or they’re as hard as rock. Try to punch the center of the chest, two or three inches below the neck.” John stood and backed off while Tank pulled a small metal sphere off his shirt. The thing was covered in prickles.

  “What the hell?”

  “Shock ball.”

  Tank opened his mouth, but electricity ran through his hand and up his arm. Tank screamed in pain again, and his right arm fell to the mat, limp and feeling like it was covered in flowing lava. When John attacked, Tank managed to get his left arm up and hit John’s chest, but he couldn’t get much power behind the hit.

  “Good aim. We need to work on you focusing on the fight and not the pain.” John pulled him to his feet, and Tank edged to the side, eager to get away from the shock ball and John. They were both dangerous.

  “How do you work through pain that bad?” Tank had suffered concussions, cracked ribs, a broken arm, and one really nasty case of magical rash that had made about half his skin fall off. None of it had hurt so much. Even now his
right arm ached as if the damage went all the way down to the bone. He worked the fingers to get some use back.

  “Practice,” John said without much emotion. “Eventually it didn’t even slow me down.”

  Tank had no idea how much practice that took, but he was starting to hate these aliens even more.

  “Do you still want to train?” John asked.

  “Fuck, yes,” Tank said without hesitating. John’s grin turned wolfish. Yep, Tank was going to call this a class in getting his ass kicked, but it would be worth it if it gave him the ability to fight back.

  Chapter Five

  CLYDE WAS talking football with Lieutenant Washington when Deborah and John walked into the cafeteria minus Lev. Great. Lev was probably nose-deep in alien slime and gears. It never failed to amaze Clyde just how single-minded the man could be. Some days, he interrupted Lev only to have the man just about knock him over as he dashed for a bathroom. Lev would honestly forget about peeing.

  Clyde had never been that focused about anything in his life. Snipers were like that, but his eyesight had never been exceptional enough for that sort of work. As far as Clyde was concerned, when a man had to pee, he had to pee.

  “Hey, kids,” he greeted them. Deborah dropped into a seat on the far side of the table next to Washington, while John offered a grunt before going to get food. Leaning closer, Clyde studied Deborah. “Sadler, is your nose growing, or is the rest of you shrinking?”

  She offered him a withering stare. “I got hit, sir.”

  Clyde leaned back. “You? Come on, Sadler. You’re getting slow if you’re letting the trainees get in a hit.”

  She glared. For a career officer, she did know how to give an insubordinate stare. Luckily Clyde didn’t really hold with some of the regs. “So does that mean we have some potential in the group?” He rubbed his hands with glee. He could use some good hand-to-hand fighters. The rule to avoid killing aliens made the use of rocket launchers and tactical nuclear strikes difficult.