Armor World Read online

  The imagery on the display began to swoop, zoom and pan. We saw the spherical ship, which had been hanging around in far orbit over the Peg planet for days now. We saw the great door I’d damaged too, hanging open like a sleeping giant’s mouth.

  On the planet, we saw strange cities that were oddly quiet. There was little in the way of traffic or radio signals.

  “They aren’t all dead,” Turov said, looking things over. “We’re getting some life readings, but they aren’t transmitting much. Maybe radio emissions attract the aliens. Maybe they’ve all gone into hiding—or maybe all their transmitting devices have been silenced. We just don’t know.”

  The display showed empty roads and oddly shaped puff-crete buildings that were seen from a great height. We had to have spy drones down there to get that kind of intel.

  “Since the enemy is ignoring us,” she continued, “we’ve decided not to provoke them until we must. We’ll send a team to the planet. They will then be in a position to have a direct path to the open door on the alien ship. Right now, it’s turned away from us—we believe the aliens have positioned their ship that way purposefully.”

  All of these things were rapidly displayed in a series of images on the screen. We saw the quiet Peg cities, and then the new moon with the toothless mouth in their sky.

  “The plan is to send our team to the Peg planet first,” she said, “if possible, we’ll then jump from there into the gap again—”

  A few gasps and a general buzzing of conversation went up around me. Moller and Sargon stomped around, shouting “shut up!” at all of them.

  My eyes and ears were glued to the big screen. Were they seriously talking about sending us up there into that ship again? The last time, we’d all died and nearly been permed.

  “Teleportation won’t work to invade the ship if we don’t have a clear line-of-sight through that gap,” Turov continued. “Eventually, the enemy will repair it. Then what?”

  The briefing continued, explaining how we would scout several locations on Pegasi, most of them communications and military sites. I didn’t give a shit about that and neither did anyone else in my unit. We’d heard enough.

  “We’ll do this all at once,” Graves said as he stepped onto the stage to sum things up. “We’ll use coordinated attacks by small groups in teleport suits. With luck, our recon teams will land, investigate, and teleport back here before the enemy knows what’s happening.”

  Some of my people were hanging their heads. They knew 3rd Unit was likely to be picked for this “special duty” nightmare. We were, after all, every officer’s personal whipping boy.

  The briefing went on, but I’d heard enough. I tuned out and began coming up with a roster and a plan.

  When it was over I got the call from Graves. I was more than ready to suck it up and serve legion Varus and Earth by that time.

  My troops were shell-shocked, however. They were crying to each other and anyone else who might listen.

  “McGill,” Carlos implored me, “you’ve got to do something, man. They’re going to perm us for sure this time. They can’t even teleport through that hull. What makes anyone think that we can do it with a gateway if we can’t do it with a suit? That’s crazy.”

  He had a point there, but I wasn’t qualified to judge the validity of his complaints.

  “Turov just said the technology is different,” I told him.

  “No… no way, I’m not buying that. We got the teleport equipment and the gateway systems from the Rogue World people. They both move people around over long distances. How can they not be related?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but neither do you. It takes a certain amount of trust just to put on one of those crazy suits and blink away to another distant point in the cosmos, doesn’t it?”

  Shaking his head sadly, he wandered away.

  Drusus was speaking again on the big screen, so I shouted for everyone to hush up so I could hear him.

  “…one final thing,” he said, “we’ve discovered that the biomass that was used to build the hybrid creatures back on Earth wasn’t all human.”

  He paused to let that sink in. “In fact, some of the—for lack of a better term—meat the aliens used wasn’t from Earth at all. We’ve traced it down using the Galactic data core and found a genetic match here, in the Pegasi system. We believe it came from the Pegs themselves.”

  Carlos finally spoke up again. He looked horrified. “Is he saying that we’re fighting some kind of stitched-up monsters built with spare parts from all over the place?”

  Moller came to discipline him again, but I waved her off. Carlos looked truly disturbed.

  “Some of those things we fought—they didn’t look remotely human, did they?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, shuddered in disgust, and we turned back to the presentation.

  “These aliens…” Drusus said, “they’re something new. They aren’t a single homogenous species. They are more of a disease—a scourge that consumes anything it finds and builds an army with the spare parts. We believe it came from somewhere outside Province 921.”

  “No shit…” Harris whispered quietly.

  “—and the invasion ship arrived at 51 Pegasi first. This world is optimal for their purposes, containing a biotic species that’s famous for their development of artificially intelligent hardware and software. After feasting here, they built an army to invade Earth.”

  “And we beat them!” I shouted, deciding to get a little positive morale going. My people were looking pretty glum.

  A few of my troops cheered, but it was without much enthusiasm.

  “After being repelled,” Drusus said, “they’ve returned here to rebuild and—probably—to try to take Earth again. They must be stopped. Do better than your best, troops. Dismissed.”

  The screen darkened, and I was left with a hard job. Even Moller, Sargon, Harris… they all looked kind of sick.

  Smashing my hands together and grinning, I walked among them, giving them the hard sell.

  “We’re going to finish them right here,” I said firmly. “We kicked their butts back on Earth, they’ve run back here to lick their wounds—but they won’t get any rest. We’re going to finish the job.”

  There were smiles, nods and a few quiet high-fives, but mostly, people looked kind of sick.

  -31-

  After his first dozen solid deaths, no legionnaire worth his salt was terrified about getting killed. That was just part of the job, an unpleasant thing that happened to everyone now and then.

  But… the prospect of going back inside a super-dense shell of matter was something else entirely. The invasion ship prevented all signals—even teleportation—from working. That meant there was no escape, no way of reporting a death. It was a perming scenario, and we all knew it.

  Worse, we in the 3rd Unit, 3rd Cohort knew that we had the most experience with teleportation attacks. That meant we were destined to be Graves’ first-line commandoes with all the grim realities that went with that job.

  “This is going to be the shit-show to end all shit-shows,” Harris said glumly in the officers meeting after the briefing. “You mark my words.”

  “I can’t argue your point, Harris,” Leeson said. “We’re as good as permed already. There’s no winning this. If we screw up, we’re permed. If we nail it, they’ll just keep sending us first until we’re permed anyway.”

  “All you can think about is getting out of doing this?” Barton asked incredulously.

  “Damned straight!” Harris said. “If I thought there was a way out, I’d take it in a flash. The odds are high we’ll get our asses permed. Does that make you happy or something?”

  “Of course not,” Barton replied. “But we’re the best shot Earth has to stop this menace.”

  They eyed her coldly. “Playing the goody-goody to the hilt, eh, lady?” Leeson said. “You won’t last forever with that attitude.”

  She returned their stare with an angry look of her own. She c
rossed her arms over her breasts and turned to me.

  “These men are going to ruin morale, sir.”

  “Yes…” I said, “and no. This is Legion Varus. We don’t like to lie to ourselves. Let them get all the bitching out of their bellies. In the end they’ll come around and do their jobs.”

  Harris and Leeson continued to grumble. We drained a coffee bot and reviewed every frame of the briefing. But sure enough, about an hour later they got off their asses and got moving.

  They still weren’t happy, mind you. Not by a long-shot—but they’d go, and they’d fight, and that was the most I could ask from hardened men that knew the stink of a bad mission when they smelled one.

  We thought at first they’d give us the day to prep and gear up—but that didn’t happen. Right after lunch, the first launch was announced—and yours truly was leading it.

  “McGill, your unit is on point,” Graves said. “Remember, you’re on radio silence on this trip. You’ll jump down to the planet surface, sniff around and jump back—that’s it. Pick your order of battle. I’m leaving the details up to you but remember to move quickly. We can’t take the chance the enemy will detect what we’re doing and take steps to stop us.”

  “Roger that, sir. We’ll hit Gray Deck in thirty minutes.”

  “Make it twenty. See you there.”

  Graves closed the connection, and I had to hit the ground running. I’d been half-joking about thirty minutes—but he’d called my bluff.

  Twenty-five minutes later we were all on Gray Deck, which was a new region down in the laboratories for things like teleport-attack launches. An army of techs worked the place. They outnumbered my entire unit.

  I didn’t know them all, but I knew a few. There was one little adjunct tech that I recognized right off.

  “Lisa?” I called out. “Is that really you, girl? When did you sign up with Legion Varus?”

  Tech Adjunct Lisa Smith approached, moving almost shyly. A few unfriendly glances were tossed her way as I had plenty of women I’d known intimately in Legion Varus over the years. Most of them didn’t like each other.

  She reached up, pushing a lock of hair out of her eyes. Her gaze met mine briefly, then she dropped it and blushed.

  “I’m surprised you remember me, Centurion,” Lisa said. “It’s been years.”

  “Of course I remember you, girl!” I boomed. “We defended the Home World together, just you and I. We made this whole teleporting racket famous!”

  “Infamous, more like,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not part of Varus. I’m still Hegemony. But they sent me along as a T-port expert.”

  “That you are,” I said, “that you are…”

  We had quite a history. Back when teleporting was a new thing, we’d killed dozens—no, hundreds of sad-sack hogs in the suits while we worked out the bugs. They’d fried in the suits, mostly. Cooked in a high-powered metallic skin that didn’t jump a single meter.

  But then I’d come along and helped out with the Galactic Key. It was a small, incredibly illegal device that broke security on anything made by Imperial planets. It was the security systems that had been frying the hogs, and Lisa and I had broken that tech roadblock together.

  “We’re going to do it again,” I said to her softly.

  Her eyes flashed up to meet mine. She was a bit older than the last time we’d met, some ten years earlier, but she was still one of the cutest girls in the room. As something of an authority on the topic, I should know.

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Make history. Kill aliens. Save Earth—all that stuff.”

  She smiled, but she also seemed slightly disappointed. “Oh yeah, all that.”

  We suited up, and we stood on raised circular pedestals with wires hooked to our suits. Right before launch, they would break away and fall to the floor, having charged our harnesses as fully as possible.

  These new, lighter rigs were more efficient for small jumps, but they couldn’t teleport you lightyears away to another star system. For our purposes, they were perfect.

  Lisa came to check on me before launch. I found it hard to believe that was an accident.

  She fluffed my collar a bit, just like the old days. Back then, she’d been using the Galactic Key to bypass the suit’s security and send me on my way. These rigs didn’t need that anymore of course, but it was nostalgic to see her make the move.

  “Remember this?” she asked.

  “I sure do!”

  So saying, I grabbed her up and kissed her. Everyone looked shocked—and I do mean everyone. I think most of the people in that chamber were watching us.

  “Let’s go, people!” I shouted as I let her back down to the floor. “First squad, port out! Second squad, stay here until you get the go-signal.”

  We’d planned the attack carefully. The first squad would hit the ground, recon, then signal back whether the rest of the operation was a go or a bust.

  As was my usual style, I went with the first squad. In the old days that would have been considered reckless behavior on the part of a unit commander. After all, if the top officer got killed right off the bat, the rest of the operation may be compromised.

  My thinking was different these days. Sure, I might die in the next few seconds, but then again I might gain valuable intel. Nothing beat seeing the situation on the ground with your own two eyes.

  And what if I did die? Well, they’d print out a new McGill an hour or so later, and he’d take another shot.

  That was life—and death—in the legions.

  There was a blur in the air, a ripple in space. A moment later I winked out with a dozen others. When I opened my eyes again, I was in a different place.

  Teleporting was far easier on the mind and body when you traveled a relatively short distance. Long trips, like from star to star, took several minutes in perceived time. That was pretty harrowing.

  You felt like you were dying, breaking apart—dissolving in a thousand threads and coming back together again like twisting tendrils of smoke.

  But none of that really struck me this time. We were pretty close to 51 Peg, and it seemed like a blink of the eye between Gray Deck on Legate and the wide open vistas of the planetary surface.

  Sure, I was a little disoriented. You always stumbled a bit and landed off balance when you suddenly hit with a slightly different cant to the ground, or a different gravitational tug. Even the air pressure felt wrong, making my ears pop.

  I was wearing combat armor and a teleport harness—but I hadn’t bothered to close my visor. After all, 51 Peg had a breathable atmosphere.

  It was night, but it was pretty warm out. A puff of warm wet air gusted into my face, and into my suit, and I was taken aback.

  “Damn, that’s a funny smell! You smell that, Carlos?”

  “Nope, I’m not a moron. I’ve got my faceplate closed and sealed, Centurion. Just the way it’s supposed to be.”

  I cast a dark glance his way. Damn if that boy hadn’t constantly begged for a beating from the very first time I’d met him all the way up to today. Some people never seemed to change.

  The smell wasn’t unpleasant… it was just kind of… Earthy. Like something you find in a farmer’s field. An enchanting mixture of green growth, blossoms and manure—all of that, mixed up with a fresh, bell-peppery scent.

  “Smells like home to me,” I said, stepping forward through some tall grass and putting my gauntlets on my hips.

  We were on a hilltop outside a major city. We’d decided not to land in town directly, as according to the habits of these invaders, they liked to make towns into flesh-factories.

  I could see the town lights, what few of them still burned. Our intel from the Galactic data core said the Pegs liked it dark as they had excellent night vision—but the sight of their city so nearly blacked out didn’t give me a confident feeling.

  “Squad, spread out and recon the area. Stay within a hundred-meter radius for now. See if you can find anything we haven’t already spotted from
space.”

  Moller was the noncom I’d chosen to go on this flight, and she trudged off, tossing out orders. The squad fanned out, weapons at the ready. They were all heavies, with a few specialists like Carlos thrown in.

  “Kivi, what have you got on your buzzers?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “We’re in the Peg equivalent of the boondocks, as far as I can tell.”

  Overhead, I scanned the skies. Our ships were too far off to be visible, but I saw something big hanging up there. The sunlight from 51 Pegasi glared on its side in a crescent shape. The enemy ship was the only moon in sight.

  “If there are any Pegs alive to see this, they must be freaking out,” Carlos commented. “They only have two small moons, like Mars. This big new bastard, playing the part of the scary intruder—I bet they scat themselves every time they see it.”

  “I couldn’t blame them,” I said, twiddling the controls on my helmet’s visor. I had put it down now so it could amplify my vision. The screen inside zoomed and focused—then I frowned.

  “Uh…” I said. “Isn’t there supposed to be a hole on the side of that ship? Facing the planet?”

  Kivi came close and dug out an optical instrument. “It’s still there…” she said.

  I sighed with relief. “Good. I’ll report in to Legate. This looks like—”

  She put her hand on my arm, and she tugged hard. She was still gazing up at the big moon-sized ship.

  “McGill, call them fast. The door—the one we broke—it’s closing! I can see it. they must have fixed it. The damned thing must be halfway rolled up already.”

  A chill ran through me. I glanced over to the gateway posts a team of two techs were setting up in the wind-blown grass. The posts glowed with an odd, electrical pulsation.

  “Is that thing operable yet?” I asked the techs that were fooling with it.

  “Yes sir, Centurion. Just let us align the—”