City World (Undying Mercenaries Book 17) Read online

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  CITY WORLD

  (Undying Mercenaries Series #17)

  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

  Ice World

  City World

  Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2022 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.

  Author’s Note: I wrote the vast majority of this book in 2021. At the time, it wasn’t intended to be allegorical or prophetic concerning real world events in 2022.

  History is the only crystal ball I have.

  -BVL

  “The army in the field is useless without wisdom at home.”

  —Cicero, 63 BC

  -1-

  After coming home from Ice World, the warm swamps of southern Georgia Sector felt good. Instead of being chilled to the bone all the time, I was sweating in the late spring heat. Being native to the area, I didn’t mind a bit.

  By the time the spring wore on into summer, however, warm turned to downright hot. I was still good with this, mind you, but I was considering upgrading my army of powered fans into a real cooling unit. They had better air conditioners these days than ever before, systems that used alien technology and some odd tricks of physics.

  Captivated by an advertisement on my tapper, I considered a small, expensive box that just plain sucked up heat from around it without noise or fans or anything. After a particularly sweaty night, I woke up early and tapped in my authorization code. The unit was on the way, being drone-shipped straight to my sagging porch that very afternoon.

  When the drone arrived, the sight attracted my dad to make a rare visit to my shack. I went up to the main house all the time, mind you, but my parents made a point of avoiding my more modest domicile. After all, they never knew who or what they might encounter if they dropped in unexpectedly.

  My dad tapped on the door diffidently, peering into the dark interior of my place through the screen. He looked this way and that, clearly uncertain as to what his eyes might witness.

  I was in a good mood, so I threw the door wide and invited him in. I took him straight to the new cooling unit, which I’d set up on the coffee table. It was a bluish metallic color, but I wasn’t sure if that was just a paint job or what.

  “See this, Dad? This thingamajig hardly uses any power, but it feels like a block of ice if you put your hand on top of it.”

  “Careful, I’ve heard those things can burn you like dry ice if you touch them.”

  “Only if you turn it way up. This one is set to winter mode, not arctic or glacier.”

  Cautiously, my dad put his leathery fingers near the unit. He waggled them there, making satisfied noises.

  “It’s nice,” he said, “but it won’t chill a whole room like that, will it?”

  “You’re supposed to put a fan next to it if you want more cold. If you crank it and blow air over it, it’s supposed refrigerate an entire apartment.”

  “Well, let’s set it up, then. I never did understand how you could stand living out here without air conditioning all these years.”

  We did some fixing, and we soon had two fans blowing over the cube, which was about as big as a six-pack of beer. One of its functions was to cool down your drink if you put it on top.

  I set the box to “arctic” and things quickly got a lot nicer. With two fans going, one aimed at each of us, we were completely comfortable.

  It didn’t take long for my dad to get an idea. He went to the house and came back with a six-pack. He placed this on the flat top of the cooler, and after a minute or two we dug into a couple of icy brews.

  The next half-hour passed by in a very pleasant fashion, but then someone else rattled at my door.

  My mom poked her head into the living room and wrinkled her nose. She’d never yet learned to knock—at least not in the daytime.

  “There you are, Frank. What are you two doing out here…? Oh, I get it. Is that one of those iceboxes? I’ve heard a lot about them. We should get one for the house.”

  “What for?” Dad objected immediately. “We’ve got traditional air conditioning. It works fine, and we just had the repair bot out to juice it up again.”

  “It’s old fashioned and boring. James, you tell him.”

  “Huh?” I asked in surprise. I’d only been half-listening. There was a game on, and I was quietly watching it on my tapper with the sound turned down.

  Seeing as she wasn’t getting any help from me, Momma came to the table and messed with the cube for a bit. She found after a while she didn’t like it.

  “It gets too damned cold. It’s dangerous. A kid or a pet might burn themselves,” she said, reaching a final verdict.

  “That’s right,” Dad said excitedly. He sensed he was slipping out of a major purchase with very little effort. “It’s dangerous. What if Etta has a baby someday? It’d take the kid’s arm off.”

  My dad often invented imaginary grandchildren to justify just about anything he wanted. The tactic always seemed to work on my mom.

  “Well… if you two are done drinking and goofing off, I’d like to see you work on knocking down that old barn in the woods before it gets dark.”

  We both looked up in alarm. It was Saturday, but around most farmsteads that wasn’t a day of leisure. Both my parents were notorious for coming up with something vital for me to do on weekends.

  “Today?” my dad asked. “The day’s half-gone.”

  “That’s because you’ve both been sitting in here for hours. You promised, Frank.”

  “All right,” he said, standing up and walking toward the door. “Come on, James.”

  “Huh?” I shot my dad a look of genuine betrayal. I should’ve known there was a job lurking under those beers.

  “Aren’t you listening, boy? We’re going to go knock down that old barn.”

  I blinked at both of them in confusion and a growing sense of alarm. “We are?”

  “Yes. Right now. Today.”

  “But why?”

  My mother sighed and put her fists on her hips. “Because, as I’ve told you about a hundred times, we’re going to sell that land. They’ve got a new ro
ad in with some proper sewer pipes. People are going to want to buy and develop it.”

  “They are?” I asked, honestly baffled. I wasn’t sure if I’d not listened to my parents—not an uncommon thing—or I’d simply forgotten. Either way, I wasn’t happy.

  Standing up, I felt a fresh worry creep into my mind. That barn… I’d done things out there.

  The land was swampy in our backwoods. All the land surrounding ours was a bog for the most part. I’d figured no one would ever go out there. Accordingly, I’d hidden things there… dead bodies and such-like.

  “Uh…” I said.

  “Come on, come on,” Dad said, heading out the door and waving for me to follow. “Don’t even try to come up with an excuse. There’s no point. We’ve been listening to your excuses for around sixty years now, and we’ve heard them all by now.”

  “Uh…”

  In the end, I followed my dad to the toolshed. We got out an automated walker and a power-axe. I could tell right away my dad meant business.

  “I think this is a really bad idea,” I said. “That land isn’t safe, pop. Besides, if people move in back here… well, it just won’t be the same.”

  My dad wasn’t listening. I knew him well, and I knew he wanted mom to ditch the idea of buying an alien icebox so badly he was willing to do actual work. What’s more, he probably thought he was going to get rich off some otherwise worthless land. That was my dad for you. If you wanted to know which way he’d lean on any topic, you just had to follow the money trail, whether it was real or imagined.

  Even though I knew all this, I kept on complaining during the walk through the bog. Finally, he pulled up short and looked at me crossly. “I’ll do it myself if I have to, James, but I’d rather have the help. Which is it going to be?”

  The thought of my dad going out there alone and finding something evil concerned me greatly. I sighed and agreed to help.

  “Come on then, boy. The sun will fade in another four or five hours. I want to get this done tonight.”

  We made our way through the bogs and the bugs until we came near the barn. It was really old, hailing back two centuries, maybe more. It was a sagging ruin with the roof partially caved in and the stone foundation overgrown.

  “We don’t have to take out the stones,” Dad said. “Just the timber.”

  “Why don’t we just let the new buyers do it themselves?”

  “It’s a matter of marketing, son. There are all kinds of regulations that govern a structure like this. For one thing, it’s considered an historic landmark.”

  I looked at him, then the barn, astonished. “What the hell…? Are you serious?”

  “Yep. The rules say anything that predates Hegemony is protected—but only from development. If we destroy it now and claim it was done for safety reasons, we’ll get away with it. The inspectors will come and see it as a done deal. No one will ask any questions.”

  “What if we sell it as-is?”

  “Then the new owners will have to bring it up to code.”

  My jaw sagged. That would cost a million credits, easy, and no one would even want a barn out here anyway. I could see how it could screw up a land deal right-quick.

  Thinking fast, I decided to try another dodge. I pride myself on always having more than one lie in my hip-pocket for emergencies. I caught my dad by the arm.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll work on this today, alone, and you can go back to my shack and test the hell out of my new icebox. There’s another game starting, you know.”

  I showed him my tapper, which was playing highlights from last week already.

  My dad frowned. “Are you saying I’m too old and good-for-nothing? Is that it, boy? You really don’t want my help, do you? Fine.”

  Tossing down his power-shovel, he turned and began to walk dejectedly toward home.

  Torn for a moment, I bared my teeth. I came up with one last move.

  “Hold on, hold on. I welcome your help—I can’t really do it all alone in one afternoon. I just wanted to do the front yard area myself. You know, where that old well used to be. You can do the rest.”

  My dad stopped walking. He stood there, facing away from me. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, so I waited.

  Finally, he turned around. Instead of a grin, he had a suspicious expression on his face. His head was canted to one side, and his eyes were as narrowed down as a hissing cat.

  “James… is there something about this old place you aren’t telling me?”

  Now, as anyone who knows me can attest, I’m a gifted liar. I consider the practice an art form, in fact. No one I’d ever met could do better. No one.

  The trouble was this was my father. He knew me better than anyone, and he knew bullshit when it came on the wind from any direction. Accordingly, I didn’t tell any tall tales. I didn’t dare.

  “Uh… no,” I said.

  His voice became stern. “There better not be some kind of drug-stash or alien spaceship out here on my land, boy.”

  “No, no! Nothing like that!” I laughed at the idea, but Dad didn’t laugh with me.

  We stared at one another for a bit. Finally, my dad walked around to the back of the barn. He fired up the power-axe and began working on the rear walls, which were relatively intact.

  Taking this chance to work fast and dirty, I took the power-shovel and the automated-walker around to the front. I began cracking the stones on the well as fast I could and casting them down into the black round hole in the middle. I figured that anything buried under a few tons of rock would stay buried forever.

  Not eight minutes went by before someone tapped my sweating shoulders. I whirled to see my dad, standing almost as tall as me with his arms crossed.

  “What’s in that well, boy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. Are you really going to make me dig it up to find out?”

  Several lies came to mind. I used them all, one after the other—but it was no dice. My dad smelled a two-meter-tall rat, and he wasn’t going to let him slip away. Not this time.

  I was caught red-handed. There was nothing else to say. Heaving a sigh, I considered my options.

  Normally, I would have just killed whoever had caught me. That had been my tried-and-true approach for decades. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option with my dad… so I confessed instead.

  “It’s aliens,” I said. “There are aliens down there.”

  Frowning, my dad leaned over the black circular hole. He sniffed experimentally. “Doesn’t smell like anything weird.”

  “I mean there are dead aliens down there.”

  He looked at me, eyebrows riding high. “You killed aliens and tossed them down my frigging well?”

  “Yeah... A long time ago. You remember those guys who came out here to the farm in air cars and threatened the family?”

  “Yes, of course. The Tau died in a fiery air car crash—along with you, as I recall. Why would you toss burned bones down my well?”

  I stepped up and lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Not all of them went down in that crash, see. Some of them came back later…”

  His jaw sagged low. I could see he didn’t know what to think. This made me happy, because there weren’t any aliens in the well. The dead down there were all quite human.

  “But you said it was a long time ago,” Dad protested. “Those Tau fellas were here just months back.”

  I shrugged. “A long time is a relative thing, I guess.”

  The next thing I knew, he was grabbing me by the shirt and shaking me—or trying to. “You idiot! How can I sell this land with dead aliens in the frigging well? Environmental inspectors have gizmos that will sniff out a fish-fart!”

  “Relax dad, this is a swamp. Everything smells like decay. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just give me a couple of days.”

  I promised to work on the problem and get it done fast—but he didn’t believe me. I could tell.

  Dejected and def
eated, my dad decided to knock off work for the day. He took a few of his tools back home, but I got him to leave the digging machines with me.

  After he left, I got to work. The day wore on and darkness began to fall. I cranked up the lights on the walker and shined them into some bad places. Sometimes, in twilight, a bright light worked better than sunshine to show the worst things on Earth.

  I ended up working until midnight and then some, but the job still wasn’t done. Along about one a.m., a voice spoke to me. It was a familiar voice, and it startled me, because I thought it must be a ghost I’d disturbed.

  “What are you looking for out here, McGill?”

  Whirling around and casting a bright light in the direction of the speaker. I saw a familiar round face.

  It was Carlos.

  -2-

  “What are you doing on my land, Carlos?” I demanded.

  “Relax, cowboy. Your dad said you were out here farting around in the swamp. He said I should know all about why. When I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, he scoffed at me.”

  Carlos and I blinked at each other for a minute. My mind was tired and swirling, but I soon caught on.

  My dad had bought my bullshit about more buried aliens, apparently. He’d bought the story hook, line, and sinker. Accordingly, he figured Carlos was in on the secret. After all, Carlos had been in one of the two air cars we’d brought down.

  The truth was that Carlos didn’t know anything about this private mortuary of mine. No one but me really knew what had happened out here in these dripping woods.

  Now I had a whole new problem to solve, and it was frowning up at me, wanting answers.

  Automatically, my mind conjured up my usual solution: murder. It was my knee-jerk reflex when I needed to exit any difficult situation—one might even say that killing people had become a crutch for me to lean on.

  But after a moment, and for the same reasons as before, I passed on the option again. One lie had already caromed into a second one, and murders had a way of doing the same thing.