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  “Gunner and spotter. You guys did good back there,” Leeson said sincerely. “You, Ortiz, you took it in the face, but not until you two had cut a few grim lines of death through the enemy. Did you know none of the other gunners did half as well? And McGill—damn, boy! They tell me that after you crawled out of that bunker, you shot down fifty more with a frigging snap-rifle. And you did it while carrying a blood clot the size of my fist inside your brain!”

  I don’t know which of us looked more surprised, Carlos or me. We weren’t used to praise of any kind, and I hadn’t known I’d been carrying around a blood clot. I counseled myself to take better care of the bio people next time I had the opportunity. Anne could have had any kind of accident with my person she’d wanted to, and no one would have doubted I needed a fresh grow. I owed her one, seriously.

  “Thanks Adjunct,” said Carlos, suddenly beaming. He stood straighter and puffed up a bit, like a cobra spreading its hood. “We did rip them up, didn’t we James?”

  “Yeah,” I said uncertainly. “Uh, Adjunct, did you hear anything from Tribune Drusus?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, laughing tightly. “Why do you think I’m kissing your asses?”

  We blinked at him and one another. “Uh, sir? What are my orders, sir?”

  “What?” Leeson said, giving me a mocking look of surprise. “McGill is asking me for mission orders? I didn’t think you bothered with lowly adjuncts.”

  “Come on, sir,” I said. “We’re under your command.”

  Leeson heaved a heavy sigh and eyed us both. His mood had shifted. He wasn’t like Graves. Usually, Graves didn’t display his emotions outwardly. Leeson was a lot more moody and excitable.

  “We’ve been assigned to head into the streets and poke around with the Tau rebels. Dead or alive, we’re to find out what makes them tick. Are you happy? Maybe you want to call some more brass and get us an even better assignment.”

  Carlos shook his head in disbelief, staring at me and waving his hands in front of himself as if warding off a bad smell. “Oh man, I should have known. McGill, whatever you did, I don’t even want to know. Keep your crazy off me. Can you reassign me to a new partner, Adjunct?”

  “No. Shut up,” Leeson said without even looking at him. “Well, McGill? Are you going to answer me? I asked you a question. Are you happy now?”

  “I’ll be happy if we can figure out why these people are rebelling,” I said, getting a little steamed. “Rather than trying to kill a few million of them, I thought maybe someone could spend some time figuring out how to stop the riots. They shouldn’t be acting like this, sir. There has to be a reason.”

  Adjunct Leeson chuckled and shook his head. “There’s no stopping these people. They’ve had shit all their lives, and now they see us as weak. They mean to take whatever they can get their hands on. It’s the have-nots tearing down the haves. The oldest story in the book.”

  I frowned at him, not quite following his reasoning. “Who’s weak? There are only ten thousand of us in the legion, but we’re doing our job pretty well.”

  He shook his head. “I mean the Empire is weak,” he explained. “Out here on the frontier we’re now the sole representatives of law and order. That isn’t looking like such a sweet deal anymore, is it?”

  I shrugged. “Better than getting our whole race permed,” I said.

  “They wouldn’t have done that. The fleet was already gone.”

  I had my doubts, but I kept quiet. The Nairb ship had permed the squids in the Zeta Herculis system, and Earth didn’t have a defensive space fleet that I knew of. Just one ship could have dropped those hell-burners over Earth instead of the squid planet. I don’t know that we could have stopped them.

  “You’re a bright boy,” Leeson told me. “Haven’t you been expecting something like this? We’ve been given the title of ‘Enforcers,’ remember? Did that sound like some kind of promotion to you? Well, it wasn’t. There are a dozen powder keg planets like this one in 921 that are just waiting to blow up. Peace isn’t a natural state of affairs on any planet. Don’t worry, McGill. As we travel around the stars ‘enforcing’ things, you’ll learn the truth.”

  I didn’t know quite how to respond to his bitter little speech, so I didn’t say anything. Carlos looked like he wanted to talk but kept his mouth clamped shut for once.

  Leeson walked away from us, counted heads, and engaged the unit-wide chat channel.

  “All right people, this is it,” he said, waving his arms for attention and cranking up his audio-pickup to an earsplitting level. “We’re half-strength, but that’s all the revives we’re getting today. Walk out the front and load up on the trucks waiting outside. We’re heading to the front lines—courtesy of McGill, here.”

  Carlos fell into step behind me, and we marched to the waiting ground transport. There were three trucks, and they barely held us and our equipment. Carlos and I got into the second one, and I had to hold my belcher unit hugged up against my gut tightly.

  “This is crap,” Carlos complained. “Ground transport? What the hell? We’ll take forever to get across this choked-up city. There must be a turtle flying around out here in something that’s better than this.”

  I looked up, but I didn’t see the usual level of air traffic. When I’d first come to Tech World, there had been lights, buzzing vehicles, and throngs of people in every street. Now, there were more debris piles than people and more wrecks than working vehicles.

  Ignoring Carlos, who went right on complaining anyway, I worked on my tapper. I messaged Natasha, and she answered right away.

  We’re looking for answers, I texted her.

  I know, she sent back. I’m in the third truck, and everyone hates me.

  Leeson pushed his way through the crowd and came up close to me, helmet to helmet.

  “I’m taking you to the front,” he said resentfully. “Anywhere special you want to go, your holiness?”

  I felt awkward. As a specialist, I shouldn’t really be calling the shots. Maybe this was why Natasha had been so hesitant about walking over the ranks and requesting this assignment.

  “I know where we could start,” I said after thinking it over for a second. “Let’s go back to where those first six Tau came from. The ones packing crates of weapons.”

  “What?” squawked Carlos. “You’re taking us back to the shit-river? I don’t want to go for another swim, McGill.”

  “Why the sewers?” Leeson asked.

  I shook my head. “Not there. Not exactly. Remember how they came down to where we were on an elevator of some kind? Well, there has to be a building above that location in the sewers. Which building is that? Who works there? I think we should find out.”

  Leeson stared at me for a second then nodded.

  “Good call, McGill. We’ll head there. But you’d better hope we find something important. I’m looking for a way to pull the plug on this, and I won’t be happy until I do.”

  “I never doubted you, sir.”

  He gave me a dark look and waded back through the crowded troops to the driver. The truck lurched and swayed sickeningly. We all stumbled, but no one fell out as the vehicle swerved onto a new course.

  I watched the rusting buildings flash by, noticing the streets were empty and silent except for the distant thud and boom of combat. At least the power was back on, and pseudo-sunlight was streaming down again from the fake sky above.

  -23-

  We rolled and swayed until we reached the coordinates where we’d met up with the Tau smugglers days ago. We were on the street level this time, however, not down in the sewers. It smelled better, and as I climbed out of the back of the second truck in line big drops of condensation splattered my helmet from the distant “sky.”

  “It’s raining?” Carlos asked, aiming his face into the air. He was quickly splattered by another drop. “Ew. Doesn’t feel quite right. It’s warm and kind of…I don’t know…thick.”

  I didn’t turn my head up to catch a drop. “You sure that was
a raindrop?” I asked him. “Sounds like bird poop.”

  “No, no. Not that bad. But I wouldn’t drink it. There are substances in it besides water. Polymers, maybe. Or some kind of grease.”

  “Yum,” I said, slapping him on the back and laughing. “Thanks for playing taste-tester.”

  “Yeah, great.”

  We pressed onward into a tall cubical building that sat at the coordinates we’d been beneath when we’d first gotten our assignment. The interior was nicer than the exterior, and my hopes soared when I saw a sprinkling of Tau civilians. They had normal attire for their kind, shimmering blues and oranges. That was the correct setting for the acquisition of goods and indicated they were nothing more than sedate shoppers.

  A beltway of small shops surrounded a central torus which loomed high overhead. In the center were the premium shops—the places only the rich could afford to frequent.

  The shoppers we passed along the way hurried to get out of our way without asking our business or offering any details about their own. Doing either would have been considered rude in their culture, so we kept quiet as well and pressed through the throng to the inner doors.

  Past the small outer shops was a larger central plaza. We marched through the doors following Natasha whose GPS was capable of pinpointing our former location—and the exit point below where the gunrunners must have met us days ago.

  Our tappers were all equipped with GPS systems naturally, but as we weren’t on a planet our tappers operated differently. They were built to work when closer to the ground. Even though the orbital city we were located within was directly above a more or less fixed location on the planet and anchored by the umbilical, it wasn’t perfectly still. Like a tall building in the city breezes, it swayed and swung. The interior was rolling around to provide gravity via centrifugal force and even local signal repeaters were often mobile in the city, changing locations to better serve the area.

  In short, our tappers had a hard time pinpointing our location down to meters, but Natasha had the processing power in her pack to figure it out. It was times like these that having a tech along paid off.

  “This is it—as best as I can determine,” she said at last. She came to a halt and looked around. The confused expression on her face was mirrored on everyone else’s.

  “This is what?” demanded Leeson, pressing to the front of the group. He’d been hanging back letting us ferret out a possible ambush. “All I see is a fountain.”

  And that was indeed what we’d found. A simple fountain of puff-crete with a dribble of water still bubbling out of a pyramid-like central obelisk. There weren’t any fish in the surrounding circular pool, and no plants, either.

  “Should I thrown in a coin and make a wish?” asked Carlos loudly.

  “Let’s all have a look around,” I suggested. “There has to be some kind of way down to the sewers from here. Our Tau clients did it—we all saw them.”

  Leeson frowned around the chamber we stood in doubtfully. “I don’t think so. I think Natasha’s lost.”

  The rest of the group searched everywhere while Leeson looked bored and annoyed. Natasha was running some kind of instrument that resembled a toothbrush over the walls. Carlos spent his time kicking things. He kicked the trash receptacles, a puff-crete bench, and even the fountain itself.

  I looked at the fountain and decided to take a different approach. I walked right into it. Clanking sounds turned to splashing, and I was up to my knees after two steps.

  “I remember water,” I said aloud. “Dribbling and running down from above. When the Tau were slowly lowered into our midst, the platform they were on was wet.”

  Reaching the central pyramid looking thing with water dribbling out of the top, I fooled with it. Touching the top did the trick—the entire fountain began to drain away.

  “Whoa cowboy!” Carlos called after me. He laughed heartily. “You broke it, you big idiot!”

  I had to admit that was my first thought too. But after the water had vanished, the bottom of the fountain fell away slowly. I clanked to the edge and almost didn’t make it. Within a few seconds the bottom of the fountain was gone, showing a dark hole.

  The odors that rushed up to greet everyone from below left no doubt where the revealed shaft led.

  “Could someone give me a hand?” I asked, hanging onto the rim of the fountain.

  A few strong arms lifted me up and we all gazed down into the darkness together. After a minute or so, the elevator reversed and came back up. The fountain sealed itself and began to fill again with fresh water.

  “That’s really weird,” Carlos said.

  “Great,” Leeson said, slapping his gauntlets together. “A dead end. We know the Tau came down that shaft, and so they must have come from this shopping mall. But that’s all we know. How does that help?”

  Natasha waved for attention. “There’s another secret opening,” she said, indicating a blank, curved wall of puff-crete. “I can sense an empty area of space behind this wall, but there’s no way in as far as I can see. Help me find it.”

  In the end, it didn’t take long. The builders were cunning, but they’d chosen a rather obvious trigger. The automated lighting systems did the trick. When you passed your hand over it, the lights turned on the way they were supposed to. But if you did it several times in succession, a door yawned open.

  “Okay,” Leeson said, stepping forward and peering into the dark interior. “I’ve got to admit, I’m impressed now. Carlos, Kivi, on point. Weapons hot. Get in there and scout this hole.”

  Grumbling, the two moved forward. Somehow, these two often were picked for “special” duties. They were both complainers and trouble-makers. In Legion Varus, the more irritating you were the more likely your commander was to risk your life.

  Kivi was first. She stalked up the steps inside the opening. She crouched at the first bend, and Carlos rushed ahead of her.

  I moved forward to follow them, but Leeson held me back. He didn’t let Natasha go in, either.

  “Wait,” he said. “I need you two breathing—for now.”

  “That’s mighty considerate of you, Adjunct,” I told him, and I almost meant it.

  Natasha released a buzzer, which was a tiny spy-bug the size and shape of a flying beetle. It followed Carlos and Kivi up the switchback stairway and passed them. The stairs led to a chamber above the fountain. It was large, dark, and full of junk.

  Natasha linked the buzzer to our tappers so we could all watch its exploratory effort.

  “What is that equipment on the far wall?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I’m dying to check it out.”

  A bomb went off about twenty seconds later. It was triggered by Kivi as she stepped onto the floor of the chamber above us.

  The charge wasn’t a big one, but it was shaped and positioned well. Her armor was ruptured, and she lost a foot. Carlos came tumbling back down the stairs dragging her and breathing hard. Ignoring Leeson, I rushed up to greet him and grabbed Kivi’s other arm.

  The bio people came up from the rear of the group and knelt over Kivi who was white-faced and hissing in pain. They applied the internal choppers—every suit had blades that could sever a man’s limbs if necessary—but I could tell it was too late. She’d lost too much blood all in a rush.

  Her breath was shallow and came in gasps. She looked at Natasha angrily.

  “Should have been you up there,” she rasped. “This is your bullshit hunt. You and McGill should have eaten this bomb, not me!”

  “I’m sorry, Kivi,” Natasha said with feeling.

  “Bitch,” Kivi gasped. Then she stopped talking. She puffed about three more times, but her breaths came with greater pauses between them.

  Then, she died.

  Leeson sucked in a gulp of air and let it out slowly. “All right. Who’s up? Haggerty, get up those stairs.”

  “Sir, let me,” I said.

  “You’re my weaponeer,” Leeson complained.

&n
bsp; “Yeah, but Kivi was right. This was my idea. Besides, I have the thickest armor.”

  Leeson shook his head for a while but finally waved me forward. Before he could say anything else about it, Natasha followed me up the stairs.

  We went carefully using Natasha’s sniffers and buzzers every step of the way.

  “Your bug should have detected that trap,” I told Natasha.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she asked tightly. “They’ve got good tech here. The trap was hidden from my sensors.”

  “Great.”

  We did things the old-fashioned way when we got to the top. I took out my belcher and used the butt of it to poke and prod every inch of ground ahead of me, wincing as I did so. The explosion had been very tight and focused. If I set it off with my long weapon, I’d probably survive inside my heavy suit.

  Just when I’d begun to figure we were in the clear, I found the second bomb. It was to the left of the entrance, cunningly placed where a man might step if he were warily circling away from the steps.

  My belcher was wrecked, and the tube jumped in my hands. It shot up right into my chest plate making a bright gouge in the metal.

  “McGill!” roared Leeson in my headset. “Status?”

  “My weapon is totaled, sir. But I’m fine.”

  Leeson told me to get my ass back down the stairs, but I assured him there couldn’t be more traps—not without endangering the precious objects they were intended to protect.

  “I think he’s right, sir,” Natasha said. “The bombs were placed in open areas of the floor. There isn’t much room up here. It’s like an attic full of junk. If another bomb goes off, it’s sure to break the objects they stored so carefully.”

  While she argued things out with Leeson, I wandered off down a narrow passage. Natasha moved to follow me, but I cautioned her to stay back with an upraised hand.

  “No sense in both of us finding the big one,” I said. “Just use your buzzer to find things you want me to pick up for you.”