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  ARMOR WORLD

  (Undying Mercenaries Series #11)

  by

  B. V. Larson

  The Undying Mercenaries Series:

  Steel World

  Dust World

  Tech World

  Machine World

  Death World

  Home World

  Rogue World

  Blood World

  Dark World

  Storm World

  Armor World

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Report: The Dangers of Economic Expansion

  Authored by the Hegemony Economic Directorate

  Possibly the greatest genius of the Empire is its economic design. The system is simple and therefore easily understood by even barbaric races. It is also crushingly effective.

  Every world must produce a single product to sell in the Imperial marketplace. There is one and only one allowed product per planet—that’s the genius of it. Once each monopoly is established, it is locked into place for all time. Unless another world proves they can produce a better version of the same product, they are not allowed to do so. In practice, this rarely happens. There is therefore no competition, no advancement, and no strife. The result is a dramatic slowing of technological progress among all the non-core worlds. This dampening effect has kept the peace along the frontier provinces for generations.

  Recently, Earth scholars have begun to comprehend the very different set of rules under which the Galactics operate at the center of our galaxy. Unlike the quiet frontier provinces, they have free and open economic interchange. Any of the twenty-odd elder species are free to buy and sell, to arrange treaties, place embargos or make any other arrangements they wish with one another. Essentially, they have the sort of relationships humans once endured in Old Earth’s past.

  A century ago, nation-states ruled our planet, and humans struggled chaotically just as the Galactics do now. This author shudders to contemplate those bygone days. There were countless ad-hoc trade agreements which inevitably resulted in countless wars. The same state of confusion now exists among the Galactics.

  Out here on the frontier, for all the complaining one might hear about stifled development, unemployment and poverty, at least we have peace. There is almost never a war between two member civilizations in the non-core worlds.

  Why not? For one thing there is very little to fight about—but even if we did dare launch fleets at one another, we would be rightfully subject to extermination by our wise benefactors from the Core.

  What could be more pleasant than our sedate pace of life? Those who wish for the old days are thinking only of the benefits, not of the horrors.

  In recent times, however, the Hegemony government of Earth has seen fit to move past the old model. They’re actively expanding Earth’s borders and influence. The Empire looks the other way because they are weak and need local military support. It is this author’s opinion that we are on a dangerous pathway. We are breaking the rules, and others are sure to follow our shameful example of wide-open capitalism and expansion.

  Do we dream the saurians of Cancri-9 will be content to mine and sell metals forever? What about the ingenious engineers of 51 Pegasi who produce all our AI goods? Already, the Skrull have been slighted. We build starships with abandon, destroying their economy without a care. Will they remain placid forever, or will they build warships for other planets that fear our growing strength?

  Our future is dark and unknowable. Already we face barbaric aliens at our gates—Rigel, the Wur, and all the others still lurking. Infinitely worse, we will soon have to look to our flanks, where former friends have been turned into enemies by our greed and neglect.

  “I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways!”

  —Touchstone, of Lord Frederick’s Court.

  -1-

  The sky was a golden hue. The sun was going down over the land out to the west, and a warm night was setting in.

  Down in Georgia, when the sun sets in late spring, people like me go outside to sit on porches and enjoy a beer. That’s what I was doing now.

  Etta met me on my porch. That wasn’t unusual. We’d finished dinner, and we’d helped my parents clean up. There were always a lot of chores to do around the old place, and Etta was really pulling her weight these days.

  To tell the honest truth, there was a slightly haunted look in her eyes ever since she’d returned from Dust World. I could see it, and my mom could too—but nobody had dared say anything. Etta had come back to the nest, but since she was old enough to make more huge mistakes, I figured that just having her home again was good enough for now.

  But… that light in her eyes.

  I’d seen it before. It was the light of the stars. An odd, glazed-over expression people get after they’ve traveled to other worlds and had their minds blasted open.

  Normally, when I saw that expression it was on the sad-sack faces of legion recruits. In some cases, new people never did adjust to the grand dance of life and death, both of which were cheap when you traveled off-world. Soldiers that couldn’t get used to dying had to be kicked out of the service entirely, returning to Earth bewildered and ashamed.

  Fortunately, nothing that dramatic seemed to be happening inside Etta’s head. She wasn’t broken or abused. But she clearly had seen things… things she’d never forget in this life or the next.

  As a father, I naturally wanted to pry. She was our family’s only child and only grandchild. She was all the family’s eggs in one basket, and we naturally felt protective.

  But despite all this, I’d contained my curiosity for weeks. I kept telling myself that Etta was a grown woman now. If she wanted to talk about things, she’d do so.

  On that hot Georgia night, she climbed up my creaky old steps. I kind of expected her to set up her autoscope on the porch to look at the stars—but she didn’t. I guess she’d seen enough of those cold, glittering points of light.

  Etta didn’t say anything. She just handed me a beer and opened up one for herself.

  I frowned at that, as she was technically underage, but I let her drink it anyway.

  “What are you thinking about on this fine evening, girl?” I asked in a cheery tone.

  She still didn’t look at me. “I’m fine,” she said.

  A new frown grew on my face. She wasn’t even hearing me.

  It had been months since she’d come back from her adventures abroad, and she hadn’t told me squat.

  All at once, I lost patience and decided to push, just a little.
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  “I see the light of the stars in your eyes, Etta,” I told her. “That’s not a good thing—not to a starman like me. What ghosts are haunting you tonight?”

  Slowly, she turned to look at me. She tilted her face, opened her mouth—but then stopped and shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing’s bothering me, Daddy.”

  I laughed at her. “You big fat liar!”

  A smile flickered on her lips, but it went out.

  I waited patiently, and we both sipped our beers.

  “I…” she said at last. “I don’t want to join the legions. Not anymore.”

  “Oh?” I said, trying to keep the pure joy out of my voice. “And why’s that?”

  “I saw you,” she said, staring at the weathered floorboards of my porch. “I saw you dead. I saw you as a blob in a tank. I saw you growing back… That tank… the stink of it…”

  “Ah…” I said, feeling relieved.

  Back on Dust World, I’d died shortly after arriving. Then Etta’s grandfather had regrown my body in a home-brew tank—a Galactic crime if I’d ever seen one.

  Etta had witnessed all this firsthand. She’d seen her own father, crushed and dead, being slowly reborn out of a vat of slime.

  I guess that could feel creepy to a young girl.

  “Yep, I get it,” I said. “Life and death—then more life, then another helping of death. It’s a cycle that takes some getting used to for any of Earth’s real soldiers.”

  Her eyes met mine fully. “Are you really my father? Or are you some freakish mutation? Some construct of flesh that Grandpa shocked into life? A biochemical robot that—?”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I complained. “You can’t go and talk to a legionnaire like that! That’s plain rude.”

  “How do you handle big questions like that, then?” she asked me.

  I squirmed a bit in my seat and downed my beer in a guzzling motion to buy myself a little time. After a belch and a long sigh, I started again.

  “Listen, I’m an old-fashioned legionnaire, and I play by the rules of such men—the rules we’ve lived by for about a century now.”

  “Meaning?” she asked.

  “Meaning we don’t talk about crap like that.”

  She studied me intently. “You don’t think about it, or dream, or—”

  “No,” I said flatly. “Not anymore. Early on, say before you were even born, I fussed a bit. But I got it out of my system.”

  “I’m almost the same age you are now, Dad,” she said quietly. “That’s another thing that’s bothering me.”

  “Nah,” I laughed. “I might look young, but I’m as old as dirt. I don’t mean that I’m physically weak, but my mind is older than it would appear. That’s a blessing, a curse, and a twist of fate all wrapped into one.”

  I was telling her the truth now. My mind had moved along in years somewhat—but not my person. My skin was still smooth as glass. My eyes could see everything, and my muscles could twitch like a jackrabbit’s if I was in a fighting mood. That’s what dying and being reborn over and over did for the body.

  But my mind was older, wiser. My brain could remember witnessing thousands of deaths, for example—millions, if you count aliens.

  “So dying doesn’t bother you at all?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that legionnaires don’t dwell on death. If we did… why… I suspect we’d all go crazy.”

  Etta shrugged and turned to look out over my overgrown yard and upward, above the shaggy trees. The sky was darkening, and the stars were just beginning to pop.

  “That’s odd,” she said, pointing to the brightest pinpoint of light in the sky.

  “That must be Jupiter,” I said. “The king of the Roman gods.”

  “I guess… but it seems almost too bright.”

  “What else would it be? You want another beer?”

  Etta didn’t answer right away, so I waited. Finally, she sighed. “You were right, Dad. About the legions, I mean. You tried to protect me. You tried to tell me the service wasn’t right for me, but I didn’t believe you. I thought you were trying to smother me.”

  “Yeah… well.”

  “I just had to go out there and watch you die twice, didn’t I?” she continued. “My grandfather wanted to resurrect you a second time, you know. He said he would control the experiment better on the second try, that he’d done it improperly the first time around.”

  “Hmm…” I said thoughtfully. “Control it better? I don’t like the sound of that. I did break the needle he was trying to stick me with when I woke up…. Do you think that upset him enough to make him want to keep me sedated or something?”

  “Probably. Grandpa doesn’t like chaos. He likes order, and he likes to do things right.”

  “And by ‘right’ you mean things need to be done exactly like he wants them to be done?”

  Etta shrugged.

  Instead of railing on her grandfather, who was a strange man by any accounting, I decided to pat her and fake another smile. Her mouth flickered in response.

  “So that’s it then,” I said. “You saw what death really looks like—and you didn’t like it.”

  “No, I didn’t. Not when it’s someone close to me. I can’t imagine making friends and watching them die… Even worse, dying myself. Finding my own corpse later…” She gave a little shudder. “Did that ever happen to you, Daddy?”

  “Uh…” I said, envisioning a half-dozen horrific scenes. I decided to lie and kept on smiling. “Nope—but it could have. Anyway, what do you want to do now that you’re out of high school?”

  “I think I’ll try to go to the university.”

  I brightened for real then. She’d always been a clever student, when she cared to apply herself.

  “That sounds great, honey. What would you major in?”

  She looked evasive again. I braced myself—but when the answer came, it didn’t sound bad.

  “Medical stuff, I guess. Biology. Something experimental…”

  “That sounds perfect! But Sector U isn’t cheap. Real university tuition… that can cost upwards of a million credits a year, you know. I’ve got enough cash in my accounts to get you started, I guess.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry, Dad, I can pay for it myself.”

  “What…? How?”

  “I, well… I’m not talking about the Sector University in Athens. I’m talking about going to the biggest school. Up in Central.”

  I blinked a few times, baffled. “Central City?”

  “Yes… I signed up for a research center internship. I’ll play lab-rat and do whatever needs doing. They’ll cover my college as long as I can get good grades.”

  My frown returned. “You’ve already… wait a minute, what do you mean you signed up? With who?”

  “Hegemony. They liked my test scores… If everything works out, I’m going to be working at Central in the defense labs.”

  My mouth hung open for several stunned seconds.

  I thought of Floramel right off, one of my ex-girlfriends who worked down there in the secret labs under Central. She hadn’t had such an easy life.

  With an effort of will, I stopped gaping and forced that smile to come back. Because even this new life Etta had signed up for, locked-up in a secret vault where the sun never shined and never would, that was better than seeing my little girl die over and over again as a grunt in the legions.

  “You’re not upset?” she asked.

  “No,” I said honestly. “I’m happy for you.”

  She hugged me then, and I could tell I’d made her evening.

  As for my own thoughts… I wasn’t delighted. Certainly, disaster had been averted, but I hoped against hope she wouldn’t come to regret her choices someday.

  -2-

  Bright and early the next morning, my summer vacation came to a sudden end with a call on my tapper.

  “James?” Galina Turov asked. “We need you up at Central.”

  “Uh… What’s up, Tribune?”
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  “Just get on a sky-train and be here by morning—faster, if you can.”

  She dropped the channel before I could ask for more information. The official activation notice came through a few minutes later. I was furloughed no longer.

  That was the legion life in a nutshell, I guess. You never knew when you might be called upon to solve a crisis or just to shine someone’s shoes. At least they were paying me double now.

  Shrugging on a jacket and pulling out the duffle I kept under my couch, I didn’t make it across the yard before my family spotted me. They knew the truth right off.

  They were upset, of course. My family always was when I was called back to duty. But, they didn’t fuss about it overly much. We’d lived this way for decades.

  Eyeing my parents, I had to marvel… they were doing pretty well. A few years back, I’d freshened them both up with a good killing and an illegal revive. That had erased lots of long term wear-and-tear—scars, organ damage, stuff like that.

  But their aging had been checked more recently by a different technology. There were over-the-counter longevity drugs in every market now. Cell-stim, Nu-cream and the various injectables. Altogether, if a person was careful not to get too banged up, a decade could go by and you looked like it had only been a year when you examined yourself in the mirror each morning.

  We all hugged, and I headed to the family tram. To my surprise, Etta was sitting in the driver’s seat when I got to the garage.

  “Uh…” I said. “I don’t really need anyone to drop me off, honey. We’ve got the autopilot. She’ll drive herself home.”

  “I’m not going home—I’m going with you.”

  “Uh… what?”

  She looked at me seriously. “I’m checking into Central U in a few weeks, Dad. I might as well have a look around.”

  Naturally, I was worried that having my daughter along might cramp my style when it came to evening activities… but I couldn’t think of a good reason to leave her behind.

  “Hmm…” I said. “Okay.”