Green World

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  Visit BVLarson.com for more information.

  GREEN WORLD

  (Undying Mercenaries Series #15)

  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

  Green World

  Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2021 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.

  “Never was there a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves.”

  —Cicero, 66 BC

  -1-

  After our Edge World campaign ended, I hung around Central for a solid month. This time was mostly spent with Helsa, a lady-friend I’d met out at 91 Aquarii. She and her mom ruled the most advanced people from her unlucky planet, and they’d been given the incredible job of moving their entire population to Earth.

  If that sounds like a tall order, it surely was. Thousands of refugees with all their pets, aunties and family portraits were transported via several sets of gateway posts to the western deserts—areas we used to call Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. Nowadays, people just called the region “The Desert” without making it more complicated than that.

  Now, before you go and start cussing at our government for ditching these sad-sacks in a godforsaken wasteland, be advised that the not-so-good people of 91 Aquarii liked that kind of land. After all, they came from a world with a slowly creeping sun that never let anything as grandiose as a tree grow. To them, a lot of spiny shrubs and sand seemed positively homey.

  After about a month, which I have to confess was a pretty fun time for old McGill, the semi-wild girl Helsa got bored. Or maybe she succumbed to the call of her people. It could have been either, but regardless, I awoke one morning to find she’d cleared out. She’d left the east coast and moved out to the deserts to sit in a tent with her own kind.

  On that fateful morning, I noticed she was gone and shrugged. I climbed out of bed and took a shower. Was I all broken-up about it? No, not really. After all, I hadn’t figured I’d found the one and only true love of my overly-long lifetime.

  “She ditched you, huh?” Galina asked a few hours later.

  She was a voice and a face on my tapper, but I was only half paying attention. I was deep into a four-egg breakfast with a double-helping of bacon, and I wasn’t in the mood to entertain anyone. I had half a mind to tap out of the call, and I would have, if she hadn’t been my C.O. and long term lover of the last decade or so.

  “I guess so,” I said, talking around a mouthful of hash browns.

  “Can you stop eating long enough to talk to me?”

  “But I’m hungry, and these hash browns are at their very best right now. They’re all crispy. If I don’t eat them straight away, they’ll get soggy with grease.”

  She folded up her lips and sighed. “I don’t see why I bother to check up on you. You can follow that whore out into the desert for all I care. I—”

  “Hey, hey, relax. I knew she would leave sooner or later. Her people are nomads. After three weeks, she started getting kind of itchy. I could tell she wanted to move on. So… you can forget about Helsa.”

  Galina was quiet for a moment, then she sighed. “All right, fine…”

  “Is that the only reason you called?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and so I let the question linger. It gave me the perfect opportunity to catch up on my hash browns. They were already starting to wilt a bit, and I didn’t want to have to resort to the microwave to spruce them up. That sort of thing might ruin the whole flavor.

  “You realize that we haven’t found a new home planet for your lady-love, don’t you?” Galina said.

  “Uh… I guess so. But I haven’t kept up with the briefings lately…”

  “You never read the frigging briefings. All right, I’ll come right out and tell you: we’re considering putting them on L-374.”

  “Huh? Oh… that place? Death World, wasn’t that what everyone called it?”

  “An unfortunate nickname,” she snapped. “Don’t use it around Helsa or her mother.”

  “Okay,” I said, figuring I was unlikely to meet up with either of the women anytime soon. “But… Death World? Really? They might just prefer to camp in our deserts…”

  “Well, they can’t do that. That’s government land, you know. All of it.”

  “What the hell does the government need all that empty land for anyway? They’ve kept it off-limits for centuries. Why don’t they just sell it off, pay down some debts and call it even?”

  “That sort of thing isn’t for us to decide, McGill.”

  I shrugged and moved on to my eggs. I liked to dig into the eggs last. The bacon had gone first, then the hash browns, now for the eggs.

  “…McGill? Are you even listening to me?”

  “Of course I am. Uh… what was that last thing again?”

  Galina glared at me for a few moments. “I’ve got a new duty for you.”

  “Really? I thought you were telling me something about getting out to training grounds and rounding up my unit.”

  “So you did hear some of it, huh?” she asked. “Good, but not good enough. I’ve been given an unpleasant duty here at Central. I’ve been asked to help with local investigations.”

  I blinked twice, then I hooted and pointed my finger at my tapper. “That’s a hog’s job! You’re on somebody’s shit-list, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up. As I’ve got a new duty, you’re going to help me. There’s an investigative task topping the charts right here in the northeast.”

  “What? I was planning on heading back to Georgia and—”

  “Then you should have spent less time screwing that cat-woman of yours and enjoyed your vacation while you had the chance.”

  I was catching on at last. Galina was “jobbing” me. That was a frequently-used and nearly foolproof way to keep a man like myself out of trouble.

  She’d done this sort of thing before, having planted my sorry ass in the Mustering Hall some years ago to recruit unfortunates for the legion’s grinders.

  I groaned a bit, and I knew right off that was a mistake. Galina’s face lit up, showing me she was happy to sense my pain. There were few things in this universe I hated more than make-work—and she knew it.

  “What did you have in mind, sir? Another stint at the Mustering Hall?”


  “Nothing so grandiose. I’m going to make you a field investigator.”

  “A what?”’

  “An investigator. An inspector. A man who figures out why vital supplies aren’t getting to where they’re supposed to go in this town.”

  “Ah jeez. Are you serious? That’s no job for a fighting man. Call one of your hog-buddies. They’d probably bust themselves to get away from a desk for ten minutes.”

  Galina frowned for a moment. “I would do that, honestly—in fact it’s been done several times already. But every team of investigators we’ve assigned has vanished.”

  “How’s that?”

  She shrugged. “No one knows. Here’s what you do have to know: we’ve been running a lot of supplies through Central lately. Most of that has to do with the migration of millions of Shadowlanders from Edge World. But somewhere, somehow, a fairly large amount of these materials have been vanishing with regularity.”

  “Vanishing how? To where?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care, either. I just want it to stop. Head down to the docks and figure it out.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Get to the docks and find someone named Dross. That’s the only name I know.”

  “Uh… I didn’t ask who I should look for. I asked when I should start.”

  Galina snorted. “You started yesterday, officially. Get moving.”

  “Outstanding…” I said.

  She closed the connection, and I scooped up the last of my fourth egg. Then I got to my feet and stretched. Yawning and grunting a bit, I moved to my closet. I’d been staying at a mid-range hotel in Central lately, and I had a full kit stashed here for emergencies.

  After a few minutes of pawing at my clothes, I strapped on a gun belt. Next, my legion Varus cap went on my head at a precise angle. I was just taking a glance in the bathroom mirror and brushing my teeth when my tapper lit up again.

  It was Galina, doing a repeat performance. She didn’t even give me the chance to swipe away her call. As my C. O. during regular hours, she had the right to contact me without my permission. There had been a court case arguing over this point recently—but the good guys had lost.

  “James? Why are you still loafing around in that hotel room?”

  “I’m just leaving, sir.”

  Her quick eyes scanned my oversized person in the mirror I was standing in front of. She hissed when she spotted the gun at my hip.

  “Did I say you could take a weapon into the city with you?”

  “You didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  “Well, I’m saying it now. No outward displays of force. Investigate without threatening people—and take that cap off as well. Don’t wear any insignia. You’re going as a private citizen, not an official legionnaire.”

  I rolled my eyes. If she wanted the velvet-glove treatment, she’d called the wrong man. “All right, sir. Good-bye now.”

  I tapped her off the screen and waited a few seconds to see if she’d angrily call me back. She didn’t—at least not right off, so I paused to consider my options.

  That gun on my hip felt right somehow. I didn’t want to part with it. I still had my combat knife, of course, but that didn’t compare to a service beamer. Hell, if I had my druthers I’d sling a full-blown morph-rifle over my shoulder.

  Thinking about it for another moment, I moved to my wardrobe again and dug out a long winter coat. Sure, it was March and the coat was overkill, but who was going to bug me about it?

  It took a bit of work, but I managed to tape my pistol into a slit I cut into the inner lining. Then, on second thought, I found a nasty little needler and put it into my outer pocket as well. After all, Galina had said something about people vanishing.

  Did that mean people had been permed? I didn’t know, but I was certain I didn’t want to find out while I was walking the docks unarmed and helpless.

  -2-

  Call it pride, but I didn’t bother to call anyone. Sure, there were several of the best fighting men in Legion Varus within an hour’s run of Central. For me, they’d probably drop whatever boring stuff they were up to and come along for the ride. The whole thing had the air of mystery about it.

  Just one call, maybe three, and I knew I’d have had a team to back me up—but I still didn’t do it. As things turned out, I would later reflect upon that fateful decision. Was I too cocky? Or just plain dumb? It was probably both, I supposed. Especially that last one.

  Anyway, I stepped out of an autocab and touched my tapper to the door handle. It drained my accounts of about two hundred credits, and the car whizzed off back to town.

  Walking the barren, stained streets I wondered at the sidewalk itself. It was a survivor, that was for sure. A few wars had swept over this place, leaving soot-stains and ragged glossy patches where the old puff-crete had melted a bit. That must have happened when the Skay ship came and bombed us during the Armor World campaign.

  “Hey, freak!”

  I glanced up. There was a man shouting at me, and he was huddled on the top of a barrel. He wore a jacket with his hands rammed into the pockets. A hoodie covered most of his face, but his nose and scruffy mouth were poking out.

  The man wasn’t all that big, so I was kind of surprised he had the balls to address me in such an unpleasant fashion. After all, I had to be a foot taller than he was.

  Forcing a friendly smile, I turned toward him. He watched me take a few steps toward him, then suddenly he let his cool-guy façade fade away. He jumped off the barrel and ran.

  “Freak!” he shouted over his shoulder. “There’s nothing for you here!”

  I considered chasing after him, but I soon thought the better of it. After all, he seemed harmless enough. Maybe he was just a homeless loon. That kind was common enough down around the docks.

  Trudging along, I walked closer to the big warehouses. Each one perched on a creaking pier, and together they formed a long row of buildings. The warehouses themselves were a random mix of the old and the new. When the Skay had bombed us, they’d cleaned out half of them at least. You could still see the edge of the devastation down here, and when I passed over that line, there was no more new construction—just dirty pavement and cracked glass.

  I came to an open area where the harbor filled my view. The railing had been painted once, but the paint had been worn down to the shiny metal. I put my big hands on the seagull-crap encrusted steel and gazed out at the ships.

  Long ago, they’d started building big ships. Supertankers, ocean liners and battleships—stuff like that. But these monsters were something else again.

  They were like leviathans from legends past. The very largest was over two kilometers long. They were tall, too. Many swayed gently, their superstructures reaching to a height of twenty stories—sometimes more.

  I whistled at the sight, long and low.

  “They’re miraculous, aren’t they?” asked a feminine voice to my side.

  I’d been unaware anyone was nearby. Oh sure, there were workers in the warehouses. The places were noisy with four-armed haulers tramping around and crowds of bustling men in coveralls. But here at the seagull-poop covered railing, I’d thought I was all alone.

  My instinct, as a Varus man, was to whirl around and crouch. If the speaker had been too close and looked threatening, she might have found herself swimming in the oily waters that were just a few meters below.

  But I controlled all that. I just slipped my hands into my pockets—gripping my needler—and gave her a friendly nod.

  “Miraculous? Yes, Miss. They surely are.”

  The woman looked past me toward the towering ships. She walked calmly up to the rail and kept gazing out to sea. She didn’t even let her eyes land on me.

  “You know what they’re made of?” she asked. “Or how they can float like that when they’re so big?”

  “Uh… I can’t say that I do.”

  “They’re made of puff-crete, essentially. A lot of people think puff-crete is only good for making r
oads and tall buildings—but that’s not true. It’s very versatile stuff.”

  “Yeah… I know a man named Bevan. He spent most of his life studying the material.”

  For the first time, she looked up at me. “Bevan…? I don’t know him.”

  “There’s no reason why you should.”

  We gazed at each other for a moment. She was older, thirty-something. She would have been attractive, but her face seemed a trifle too hard. Too careworn.

  “Are you just sightseeing down here, soldier?” she asked.

  At that moment, I became wary for the first time. How did she know I was a soldier? Sure, there were thousands of us in this town. Central practically crawled with military people of every type, but still…

  “How’d you know I’m an off-duty legionnaire?” I asked her.

  She seemed to relax a fraction at these words. She looked me over again, nodding. “A legionnaire…? Not Hegemony?”

  “Bite your tongue, girl! I’m no hog who’s strayed out here from Central.”

  She licked her lips. “Okay. I believe you. You want to know how I can tell you’re military? Well, for one thing, you all walk like you’re marching. For another, your kind is rare down here.”

  “Yeah… I bet. These ships are cool, but the docks themselves are kind of dull.”

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  I hesitated, but then I decided to go with my instincts.

  “I’m Centurion James McGill, ma’am. From Legion Varus.”

  She nodded, and she looked me in the eye. Was that a sparkle? Did she like the military type? It was my impression that she did.

  At that moment I heard something behind me. Unfortunately for my would-be assailant, the puff-crete walkways out here weren’t what they used to be. They were worn down and crunchy in places. In others, they were outright damaged.

  I’d noted that jagged stains had liberally splattered the streets and sidewalks. They’d been created when fragments of burning debris had come to rest from the big city itself, melting a permanent mark into the pavement.