Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) Read online

  “No shit,” Carlos said in a low voice.

  I didn’t even bother to shout at him. What was the point? We could all see it now. A ship as big as a skyscraper was bearing down on us. She wasn’t even flying straight anymore, her nose was turning to starboard, and the whole ship was doing a slow barrel-roll.

  People began to run in all directions, but I stood my post. Harris did, too. He held onto the pennant of Legion Varus, which flapped in a growing maelstrom of wind.

  Harris looked over at me. “This is bullshit!” he said. “Did you do something to that ship, McGill?”

  “That’s right, Harris. I jury-rigged the engine myself.”

  The freighter broke up after that. I saw burning cubes of metal coming out of it at the end, I swear I did. They came down like a shower of meteors, spreading over the vast spaceport like shrapnel. They reached the ground ahead of the ship’s tumbling, burning hull. The ingots of hard metal caused a thousand deafening explosions that knocked everyone off their feet.

  People ran around screaming. Some threw themselves on the ground. Harris and I…we didn’t bother. We knew we were screwed, so we watched the show wearing grim expressions. The burning ship came right down on top of us, growing impossibly large and loud during the final moments—that was a sight worth remembering.

  My final thoughts as I died along with thousands of others were of my parents. I regretted having brought them anywhere near Legion Varus. If there was ever a bad-luck outfit in history, we were it.

  Bringing my folks out here hadn’t been the brightest thing I’d ever done, but it might well have been my last. A burning cube struck the tarmac a hundred meters away. The shockwave knocked my dragon flat, and I couldn’t get it to stand up again.

  As I died, burning in my dragon’s cockpit, I thought about my mama. She’d never get to see her only granddaughter. That was a crying shame.

  -4-

  Eventually, I did manage to catch a revive. As you can imagine, there was quite a backlog of dead people in line ahead of me.

  Coming back to life is akin to awakening from a dream that won’t leave your mind. I could feel my memories…they were like cobwebs on my face. The past was a veil of hazy unreality.

  Somehow, when I opened my bleary eyes again, I knew it had been a long while since I’d drawn breath—don’t ask me how I knew, I just did.

  “He’s breathing,” said a female voice I didn’t recognize. “What are his scores?”

  “Nine point one.”

  “Good enough. Get him off the table.”

  The first clear image that came in from my retinas was that of an orderly with a few days stubble on his chin. He gave me a grim smile.

  “Welcome back, Veteran,” he said.

  “Where am I?” I croaked, gripping his shoulder for support.

  “You’re aboard Minotaur. We’re in warp. Could you let go for a second? You’re bruising my shoulder.”

  I peered at him and blinked, trying to absorb this information with my newly grown brain. Everything was still a bit fuzzy.

  “How long have I been gone?” I managed.

  “I don’t know—about ten days, I’d say.”

  Ten days. I’d been nonexistent for ten days while the universe had marched onward. It wasn’t as if I’d slept in a coma—I’d been as dead as a doornail. Ten long days were lost forever in time.

  It was just this sort of thing that could eat at a legionnaire’s mind if he let it. Fortunately, I wasn’t the kind of person who dwelled on much of anything.

  I stood, leg muscles trembling a bit, and slowly staggered toward the equipment lockers. I pulled a smart tunic over my naked, slimy body, and it began to worm its way over my bulk. My clothes were always stretched thinner than those worn by smaller people. It was a natural hazard endured by any man who was two meters tall.

  When I was dressed I looked for weapons in the locker, but there were none.

  “We’re not in combat?” I asked.

  The unfamiliar bio looked at me. I didn’t recognize her even though she wore the Wolfshead patch of Legion Varus. At least I was with my own outfit.

  “No,” she said. “We’re in pursuit of an enemy, however, and we might come out of the warp bubble at any time. You have time to recover, but you should maintain readiness. Those are Turov’s orders.”

  Imperator Turov? Could she be on this ship too? Great.

  Only half knowing what was going on, I was able to walk straight by the time I made it to my unit’s module. My mind was working again, too.

  A thought struck me then. A horrible thought. It hit just as I opened the hatch into my module’s unit and was met with a chorus of shouted greetings from my comrades.

  They were all there: Carlos, Kivi, Natasha and Leeson. Sargon was polishing a heavy weapons kit, and Della was talking to Harris. She gave me a smile and a nod when I stepped inside.

  I would have smiled back, but a horror had just been released in my mind. I should have felt glad to see them all again—but I didn’t. The thought in my brain, the terrible realization, didn’t allow me to have any happiness.

  “My parents,” I said aloud to the assembly. “My folks were there, at the ceremony. Is there any word…?”

  The enthusiasm of the group dampened immediately. Smiles turned to frowns, and most of them looked down at their work.

  Della stared at me, troubled. Natasha dropped what she was doing and walked up to me. She looked me in the eye.

  Every time I faced her lately, I couldn’t help but think of her copy back on Dust World. Knowing that Natasha 2.0 was taking care of Etta for Della and I made me feel like I owed her something, too. It was a weird situation, and we all tried to ignore it most of the time so Natasha wouldn’t get in trouble. If the Empire officials ever figured out there were two of her running around, well, one of them would have to be deleted.

  “I’m sorry James,” she told me sincerely. “Everyone in the crowd—they were killed. The whole spaceport was devastated. We lost thousands: visitors, politicians, reporters, troops and ship crews. It was a disaster.”

  “It was more than that,” I said firmly. “It was an attack.”

  I stared at nothing. My parents were gone. Only military people and rich, important folk got revivals. The rest weren’t copied and tracked in the data cores.

  “You might be right,” Natasha said. “Our entire unit has been revived over the last twenty-four hours. We haven’t been told much yet but from what the techs are saying privately online, the consensus is the destruction of the freighter was deliberate.”

  We’d wiped. That’s what she was telling me. We’d been standing around on the ground like a bunch of fools, holding onto flags and playing martial music while an enemy stalked us and wiped us out.

  “That’s why we’re flying now, isn’t it?” I asked. “Who are we following? The saurians?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know yet. Centurion Graves will tell us more soon. He’s with Imperator Turov and the Tribune now, getting the details. He’ll brief us after that.”

  I wanted to put my face in my hands, but I didn’t. Everyone was watching, and I was a veteran now—a man who wasn’t allowed to feel anything when faced with loss.

  Mentally, I corrected that thought as soon as I had it. I was allowed one emotion: rage. I could safely apply that to any enemy, at any time.

  “Well,” I said grimly, “when we catch up with them, they’ll rue the day they came to Earth’s skies whether they turn out to be squids, lizards, or something else entirely.”

  The group gave me a ragged cheer, and I moved to my equipment locker. Veteran Harris and Della came up behind me.

  “Yes?” I asked, trying to stay civil. In the past, Harris and I had rarely seen eye-to-eye.

  Harris cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I wanted to express my sympathies, McGill,” he said.

  I looked at him. “I didn’t think a few civvie deaths could faze an old soldier like you.”

  “Well, we
’re talking about family. Family is different. And getting permed while attending a parade isn’t the same thing as a legionnaire dying on the battlefield. What happened back on Earth was wrong. But we’ll put this right when we catch them—whoever they are.”

  I nodded and watched him walk away. When he’d left, Della stepped close and put her arms around my neck. She had to reach really high to do that, standing on her tiptoes. She put her cheek against my chest and didn’t say anything.

  Awkwardly, I patted her on the back. Then she hugged me and walked away. That was it—grieving done Dust Worlder-style. At least she’d understood I’d suffered a loss, as had our daughter Etta, who would never meet her grandparents now.

  I spent the rest of the day drilling my squad—but not in their dragons, because we didn’t have any aboard Minotaur.

  That was a surprise—a bad one. Primus Winslade’s auxiliary cavalry cohort had been attached to Legion Varus. We’d been riding the best cavalry units we had left in the parade, but they’d naturally been destroyed along with our bodies. The spare units, the most battered dragons in the legion, had been sent back to Dust World for servicing before our next mission assignment. The long and the short of it was that we’d been reduced to an infantry cohort once again.

  Disappointed but no less determined to find those who had permed my family, I readied my troops as heavy infantry. Someone had scared up enough breastplates and exoskeletons for that.

  “At least we aren’t down to running around in our panties with snap-rifles,” Carlos said. “Sorry about your parents, big guy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You think it was the lizards? I think they hate us the most. Or maybe it was the squids. Hard to tell.”

  “That’s right, it’s hard to tell.”

  My flat, expressionless answers got through to Carlos. Even he could tell I just wasn’t in the mood for banter. He offered me a hit on a flask he had in his locker, against regs, but I passed. I was too upset to drink. It would rip up my fresh-grown guts right now, and I wanted to stay sharp for the briefing.

  My tapper beeped about a half-hour into the exercise regimen, and my people sighed in relief. They seemed to think I’d been working them hard right after a revive, but I didn’t care. We had to be ready for anything. That was my new motto.

  The message on my tapper was from Centurion Graves. I’d been summoned to his office. I put my squad on break and left them breathing hard with their backs on the deck. None of them had complained, but they were more than ready for old McGill to take a hike.

  When I reached Graves’ office, I honestly expected the other adjunct officers and noncoms to be there, but they weren’t. We met alone in his stark chamber.

  Graves’ office had always been neat and dimly lit. Today was no exception. Unlike other officers, he didn’t adorn his workplace with pictures of comrades, defeated aliens, soothing forest holos or anything else. There were only four steel walls, a big computer desk, and Graves sitting ramrod straight in the middle of the room.

  He stood up as I entered and gestured toward his desk. He’d cleared it of computer scrolls and had a star-scape displayed from edge to edge. “I thought you might have a particular interest in our destination this time out.”

  “You’d be correct in that assumption, Centurion.”

  Graves nodded. He tapped his desk, and the image shimmered in response. “This is Sol, ringed in green. Thirty lights out toward the core is Zeta Herculis—Dust World. See this new green addition? That’s Machine World, circling Gamma Pavonis.”

  I followed along easily enough. As a star traveler, I’d had occasion to consult maps of the systems I traversed. Within the vast region of space known as Frontier 921, there were thousands of star systems, most of which were uninhabited. The hundred-odd systems that did support life had all been subjugated by the Galactic Empire.

  But Graves’ map showed more than that. He scrolled a little and zoomed out. A blue line appeared, then a red one. The two met in places, but not along a perfectly smooth border. Machine World was in one of those gray areas, right between the outer limits of the Empire and the red-lined territory, which I already knew delineated the Cephalopod Kingdom.

  “This map…” I said, eying it with growing interest, “this is the best star-map I’ve ever seen, sir. Have the Mogwa finally supplied us with better intel?”

  “Hardly,” Graves said. “This is our own creation. This comes straight from Central. They’ve got a few thousand eggheads working on stuff like this down there. For once, they’ve earned their paychecks.”

  I had to agree. I leaned over and my hands touched the edge of the desk. The screen rippled where I touched it, but didn’t change as I was careful not to give it any gestures it might take as a command.

  “I thought the squids only had three hundred stars,” I commented. “There must be a few thousand inside that red squiggly line.”

  “That’s right, over two thousand stars are inside their territory, in fact. But you have to remember that they said they had three hundred worlds, not star systems. They meant inhabited colonies and conquered planets, not just sterile rocks in space.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. The Cephalopod Kingdom was dwarfed by the Empire. Even Frontier 921 by itself was larger than the squids’ entire region of home space. But all the same, when compared to them, Earth’s three occupied worlds were a joke.

  “Sir,” I said, “this is intensely interesting, but could you get to the part displaying our target world? I want to know who we’re about to exterminate.”

  Graves looked at me for a second. “I understand you had a private loss back on Earth.”

  “That’s right, sir. My family was in the audience.”

  “I don’t want to give a man false hope,” Graves said. “It’s very unlikely anyone in the audience survived. As far as we can tell, those people were all permed.”

  I frowned. “That’s what I figured. Is there any way to confirm who’s among the dead?”

  He shook his head. “Not now. We’re in a warp bubble, and even when we come out of it, we won’t be using the deep-link to talk to Earth. We’re off the grid on this one. Communications blackout. You’ll have to wait until we get back home.”

  Slowly, I nodded my head. “Let’s talk about the enemy then. Who did this, sir?”

  I looked at him with hungry eyes, but he shook his head.

  “We honestly don’t know the exact nature of the enemy. All we can do is follow this line into space.”

  A white line appeared, cutting across home space. One end started at Earth, and the other headed toward the red region on the map—cephalopod space.

  “The squids,” I said. “I knew it.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Graves said. “Not yet. Look at the angle of attack, for example. If it was deep-thrust assault from the squids, why didn’t they head directly back toward their territory?”

  I looked, and I saw he had a point. The line we were following didn’t go straight from Earth to the border and then on into squid space. It cut off at about a forty-five degree angle.

  “I’m sure the techs have been working hard,” I said, “but how do we even know we’re on the right path?”

  “We’re not one hundred percent on that. Here’s what happened: the freighter was hit by weapons fire after it came out of warp, indicating a ship had followed it. We received distress calls, and the word came down that they’d been boarded.”

  “Boarded?” I asked in alarm. “By who?”

  “We don’t know. Alien invaders of some kind. The freighter crew was knocked out almost immediately. The one thing we do know is that shortly after they came out of warp, they were attacked. A significant portion of the titanium cargo was stolen. The ship kept following its original course, but without pilots, it struck the atmosphere and blew up over the spaceport.”

  “Right. How did we get a trace on the enemy ship?”

  “The second warp-signature was detected. The attackers we
nt back into warp and slipped away. By definition, a warp bubble moves faster than light and is hard to trace. We were fortunate enough to get a course heading from sensors in its path after it had already left our system. We couldn’t see where they were at that moment, but we could see where they had been as the light of their bubble moved away from Earth.”

  “I see. So, we extrapolated their course and attempted to follow. How many ships are in pursuit?”

  “Just Minotaur. She was the only dreadnaught on station over the spaceport, so she responded immediately. She didn’t have any troops aboard. We were all dead on the ground, but Nagata figured we could revive the legion on the run. No one else could load up and move out faster, so Varus got the assignment.”

  I nodded again, unsurprised. Legion Varus had never been blessed with luck.

  “It sounds to me like we’re chasing ghosts, sir,” I said. “The enemy could come out of warp anywhere, change course, and we’d never know it while we’re in warp.”

  “We’ve thought of that. We’re coming out now and then, checking data, and continuing. So far, we’ve seen no evidence indicating they’ve deviated from their original path.”

  Frowning, I looked at the white line on the map. “So, where are they going?”

  “Three systems loosely intersect this course. None of these harbor noteworthy civilizations.”

  “Are the stars in squid space?”

  “No, all of the stars the course intersects are within the borders of Frontier 921.”

  Scratching my head, I stared at the data. Graves had added three golden circles around star systems that were strung along our course. None of them held worlds of significance.

  “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I asked. “If they are squids, why aren’t they running to an occupied squid world? If they’re not squids, why aren’t they going to an inhabited world, like Cancri-9?”

  “That’s a puzzle, and we’re working on it. But that’s about all the time I have to chat, McGill. Return to your squad and carry on.”

  I hesitated before I left. “Sir? May I ask why you gave me this private briefing?”