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  EDGE WORLD

  (Undying Mercenaries Series #14)

  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

  Clone World

  Glass World

  Edge World

  Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2020 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.

  “I hate the Roman crowds… if they all had one neck, I’d hack it through.”

  —Emperor Caligula, 41 AD

  -1-

  After Abigail Claver left me, I spent a few months relaxing. It was a wonderful feeling. My folks were happy, and Etta even came back down to Georgia Sector to visit. Breaks between deployments were usually good times, and we all enjoyed this one.

  In my long and storied life however, I’ve come to learn that such moments were always short-lived. It’s just part of the nature of things that when the universe seemed whole and hale and full of promise, fate liked to swoop down and take a sudden shit on your head.

  “James? James? I know you can hear me.” I knew the voice well. It was my tribune, one Galina Turov.

  “Aw damn…” I whispered, looking down at my tapper. Someone had finally found me.

  Hiding from one’s own tapper is quite a feat. You should try it sometime. I mean, the damned thing was embedded in my forearm, so avoiding it was nigh on impossible—but that never stopped a man like me from trying.

  My efforts to block my tapper began months back. First, I’d turned off every notification service, every tracking app, and every location finder I could without performing physical surgery. That was just the beginning, however.

  Winslade had shown me his tapper about a year ago, and he’d wrapped it in honest-to-God aluminum foil. Now, if you ask me, that was straight-out ingenious. After having seen this extreme effort on his part, I’d been itching to try it myself.

  Accordingly, along about mid-September, I went for it. I built myself a tape-and-glue wrap for my tapper, covering that whole section of my arm with foil. To pretend I wasn’t a weirdo, I followed up with a layer of sports tape, the kind you wrapped up your ankle with after taking a fall in football.

  For about a week, it worked like a charm. Not one damned message got through to me. My parents took the trouble to relay things I really needed to know about—messages from Etta and such-like.

  It was heaven to be off the grid. But with all such miracle cures, it had failings. One critical flaw was based in my own lackadaisical personality. You see, I tended to let things go, if letting them go was at all possible. Few things in my life couldn’t be left until tomorrow—or better yet next week.

  So, after having built my contraption and taping it down, I pretty much forgot about it. I went back to my daily habits without another thought on the topic. This included sleeping, eating, exercising and bathing—with the wrap in place.

  It was this last one that got me. Soaking something in water and rubbing at it—that can do all kinds of damage. Just about any adhesive eventually slips off with the application of enough sweat, soap and water applied over time.

  I sort of noticed this degradation of my wrapping over the weeks, and I made a few small efforts to pull it tight again. This was like pressing a band aid back into place after it started to curl up and get dirty.

  Due to my minimal maintenance, strips were dangling and flapping by the end of the third week. Since it still seemed to work, I ignored the damage and led my life of leisure and seclusion. I watched projected shows on my ceiling, boated around on the Satilla River and pestered girls in the pool halls of Waycross. Somehow, I felt confident the good times would never end.

  But today was a dark day. My arm had started talking to me again. Somehow, Galina had not only managed to call me, she’d pressed the override that allowed superior officers to invade the privacy of their underlings, bypassing my option to answer.

  “Dammit James,” I heard her muffled voice. “I know you’re there listening. Don’t pretend you’re asleep, it’s only three pm.”

  “Huh…” I said, frowning at my filthy, wrapped-up arm. Even after a shower, the adhesive seemed to attract black Georgia dirt like flies to a cow pie. “Is that you, Tribune?”

  “You know damned well who it is. Stop fooling around. I have an assignment for you.”

  I winced, and I honestly considered doing the whole “I can’t hear you right” routine. But, after a heavy sigh, I accepted the fact that such tactics were bound to fail. Galina was many things, but she wasn’t a woman who gave up easily.

  Grumbling, I began to unwind the tape, then tore off the foil. Galina’s surprised face watched the world as it was revealed in streaks.

  “What the hell did you do? Stuff your arm into a roll of foil?”

  “That’s exactly right. I was eating some leftover chicken from last night, see, and—”

  “Shut up. I don’t care. You have a new assignment.”

  “Sir, the legion has been deactivated, I checked only a week back.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that, McGill? I run Varus.”

  “Yeah… so what’s this about?”

  “We’ve chosen some of our best officers to participate in an exciting new experiment.”

  I blinked once, then twice. “Have I been volunteered for something awful, sir?”

  “Not at all. This assignment amounts to an expensive vacation—on the Moon.”

  This threw me. Oddly enough, I’d been to a couple dozen star systems—maybe more. But I’d never been on the Moon.

  Without thinking about it, I began to smile. “The Moon, huh?”

  Galina smiled as well. “That’s right. The Moon. You’ve never been up there, have you? I checked.”

  These days, the Moon wasn’t just a simple gray-white rock in the sky. It was a vacation spot for millions of visitors from Earth. It had become almost a pilgrimage to go up there and see the sights. For most people, it was the only place outside of Earth’s atmosphere they’d ever been.

  In addition to the touristy spots, there were a whole bunch of experimental bases up there on the Moon. It served the government and military as a testing ground for weapons and the like—afte
r all, when you had no atmosphere and precious few inhabitants, anything goes.

  My face faltered as I thought about this. I realized I wasn’t going to be stirring a Moon-fizzy in the crystalline craters, or attending the bounding Moon-races they held every day for the tourists. No, I was probably going to be on the wrong side of that rock—the dark side.

  Walking outside and blinking in the sunshine, I gazed overhead. The Moon always looked kind of weird in daylight. It was a ghostly blue-white disk hanging over the roof of my shack.

  The Moon…

  “Centurion McGill? Damn you James, is that your ass I’m looking at?”

  “Uh…” I said, lifting my arm back up to my face. “I was just having a scratch. Sorry.”

  “Get yourself up to Central. Your contract has been reactivated. You fly at nine a.m. tomorrow. Don’t be late, or I’ll send the MPs.”

  “I’m sure you will, sir,” I said, losing interest.

  I shaded my eyes and stared up at the sky again. It was kind of weird to think I’d be going to the Moon in the morning. Despite all my concerns, a smile tugged at the corner of my lips.

  After all, how bad could it be?

  -2-

  A day later, I strapped myself into a seat aboard a Hegemony lifter. The spacecraft was one of those older, louder jobs. It shook like a palm frond in a hurricane as we left the Earth and plunged upward into the sky.

  “Feels like your ass is coming out of your ears, huh?” shouted a noncom who sat next to me. Hegemony types rarely got off the ground, and he seemed bemused by the launch.

  “Nah,” I told him. “For a Varus man, this is positively homey.”

  His nametag identified him as “Bevan” and he had an accent that told me he was some kind of brit. Welsh, maybe—but I didn’t really care where he was from.

  A minute later, I nudged him with my elbow. “I’ve heard on good authority that you dirt-huggers have spines that are shorter than what’s natural. A full two centimeters shorter on average by retirement, they say. Is that right?”

  He looked at me like he smelled shit. “How the hell could that be true?”

  “Well hog, it’s simple physics. You’ve spent all your years under the cruel force of continuous gravity. Makes a man hunch over eventually.”

  He seemed bemused again. “I know a few things about physics. I doubt your story—but I suppose it’s possible.”

  That was kind of an odd response for a hog. I’d expected outrage and loud denial, but Bevan seemed like a thinking man. This surprised me, as Hegemony didn’t often put uniforms on men like that.

  Shaking his head, Bevan turned away and stared down the long line of jump-seats. Not all of them were full, and I had the feeling this fellow was already sorry he’d sat next to me.

  “Apparently, gravity sours a man’s attitude as well,” I remarked, but he still didn’t reply.

  I decided to stop poking at the hog and turned to my tapper. It was in better shape now, with all the aluminum foil peeled off. There were just a few tape stains on the inside of my arm to show that I’d ever covered it up in the first place.

  The hog started spying on my tapper when I brought up my orders from Central. They were simple enough: I was to get on this lifter and head out into space.

  “If you’re really a Varus man,” the hog said at last, “not some internal security spook, you must know the real reason we’ve been ordered up to the bloody Moon.”

  I glanced at him, and I seriously considered making up some cock-and-bull story to scare the bejesus out of him—but I didn’t. I decided to go with the truth. After all, I’d already messed with him from the start, and he hadn’t gotten pissed off. That kind of self-control was rare in a hog, and it deserved some civility.

  “I’ve got no idea what Central has in mind for us, if that’s what you’re asking. It’ll be something grim though—you can count on that.”

  He nodded and grunted unhappily. Then he tried to go to sleep, and he actually managed it. I was impressed. Usually, it took a real starman to sleep on a lifter as it flew up into orbit, ground-pounders were too freaked out.

  The lifter coasted in freefall for a time, then thumped into something big. The lights flickered and motors whined. We docked onto the belly of another ship, but they didn’t let us out of the troop module. We stayed strapped in and the sensation of acceleration began again—but more gently.

  “What the hell is happening now?” the hog asked me.

  “You scared?”

  “No,” he lied. “Just bored and annoyed that they aren’t telling us what’s happening.”

  “This is no commercial flight. There’s no peanuts, ginger ale or cute stewardesses up here. We’re no better than cargo. You don’t tell a side of beef which market he’s heading for, do you?”

  The hog was wide awake now. He looked around, and he was kind of twitchy.

  “You think they’ll shut off the air? To test us, or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How can you tell?”

  I reached down and popped his harness button. He immediately began to float and curse at me.

  “Looks like we’re in the clear,” I said. “If this were a death-test, they’d lock us down and we’d have to cut our way out of our harnesses.”

  The hog flailed around. We were in a near freefall, with only a bit of acceleration to send him drifting toward the aft of the lifter, but I could tell right off he wasn’t an accomplished spacer. He flapped around with his arms, and he tried to grab the back of his seat, but missed. He kind of smacked it. That sent him into a mild spin.

  “Whoa!” he said, flailing around. “McGill you cunt, get me down!”

  Sighing, I popped my own harness, hooked an ankle under my seat and reached out with one long, long arm. I caught him by the breathing hoses and pulled him back down. I tossed him into his seat and sat down myself.

  All this activity had garnered the attention of a primus-ranked hog girl. She came swooping by, and I was impressed by how easily she moved in zero-G. You could tell right off this wasn’t her first rodeo.

  “What’s going on here? Veteran Bevan, why are you out of your seat?”

  “Well… I was just trying to figure out the harness, sir.”

  The primus looked him over coldly, then turned her unsmiling eyes on me next. “And you… McGill, isn’t it? I might have known. I was told to expect trouble from your direction. Straighten up if you want to stay alive on the Moon, Centurion. No one will shoot at you up here, but there are still plenty of ways to die.”

  “Looking forward to it, sir,” I told her in a cheery tone.

  Shaking her head, she drifted away. She tossed us a sour glance over her shoulder every now and then.

  “Veteran Bevan, huh?” I asked. “How come she knows you?”

  He slapped at his nametag and rank patches. “Maybe she can read. And you’re McGill? I’ve heard about you.”

  “All good, I hope.”

  He grinned. “Not exactly…”

  “Hey, nice of you not to mention I was the one that set you loose. You’re okay—for a hog.”

  Oddly, he seemed pleased with my backhanded compliment. I’d always harbored the theory that hogs were people who wanted to be real legionnaires, but who, for one reason or another, had decided to play it safe. Bevan definitely seemed to be in that category.

  In my long history of meeting up with hogs, I’d never gotten along with them well. But Bevan seemed okay so far. He had a sense of humor, and he lacked the stick-up-the-butt attitude most of them had.

  The rest of the flight to the Moon was pretty dull. It took six hours in all. I’d forgotten how big the Solar System could be if you didn’t have an Alcubierre warp drive to cheat with.

  After a long flight, the tug—or whatever it was that had picked us up in Earth orbit—finally released our lifter and tossed us toward the Moon’s surface. There weren’t a lot of windows on a lifter, but we used our tappers to get an external view. The stark,
gray-white surface of the Moon shined up into my eyes so brightly it made me squint.

  “I thought we were landing on the dark side,” Bevan complained.

  I laughed. “The dark side of the Moon isn’t really dark. At least, no more than the side that faces the Earth. They call it that because normal Earth people have never seen it. The Moon is tidally-locked with Earth, meaning it always shows the same side to us no matter what.”

  He nodded as if he got it, but I suspected he didn’t. This didn’t bother me. I was a well-practiced man when it came to living in ignorance and pretending I understood things.

  We landed in a huge crater, which I recognized from what little study I’d done on the topic. “That’s Aitken basin under us. The biggest crater on the Moon. It’s one of the biggest impact craters in the entire Solar System, actually.”

  “You mean that entire dark circle at the southern end? That’s like a quarter of the Moon’s face.”

  “Yep. It’s about six thousand meters deep, with eight thousand meter high walls around it. Must have been a real shocker when they first saw it way back in the nineteen hundreds.”

  “An impact crater? What hit the Moon hard enough to make that big of a dent?”

  I shrugged. “No one really knows.”

  We watched as we came in for a landing, and Bevan seemed to study the place with growing unease.

  “I just realized something,” I said. “I never asked what you know about this mission.”

  He glanced at me sidelong. “They found something up here,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

  “Found something? Like what?”

  “Like… something they’ll only talk about in whispers. Something they don’t want to tell the public about.”

  “Something bad?”

  Bevan shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “I’ve been puzzling on that point. Why a Hegemony veteran? Why not some kind of nerd in a white coat?”

  I nodded, looking around. If the truth were to be told, most of the people in sight on the lifter fit that description—nerds from the labs and vaults deep under Central.