Edge World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 14) Read online

  “I’m going to jump!” I broadcast. “Can you still hear me?”

  There was no answer.

  “Ladies?”

  There was nothing. The thread signal they’d used to communicate with me had died completely.

  Maybe I was out of time. Hopefully, they wouldn’t get all persnickety and call me permed. Getting worried, I decided to hurry things up. It was time to die.

  I stepped to the very edge of the cliff and teetered there for a second, looking down. Right then, I got the biggest shock of this McGill’s brief lifetime.

  A gloved hand came up over the edge of the cliff I was standing on, and it grabbed the ankle of my left boot. I don’t mind telling you, it scared the bejesus out of me.

  -13-

  “James?” I asked, recognizing the glove.

  It was mine.

  A familiar face came into view. That old rat-bastard McGill, the previous incarnation, was laboriously climbing the cliff face.

  “Hey,” he said. “I wondered if it would be you. No breaks at all from the brass, huh?”

  “None whatsoever. At least they didn’t call me permed when you disappeared.”

  “Yeah… give me a hand up, will you?”

  I hesitated. His gloved hand was reaching high, wavering. If I grabbed it, he could yank me right over and off the cliff.

  Shrugging, I took his hand and hauled upward. If he wanted to pull me over the edge, well, so be it. I’d hold on and we’d both die. That would at least ensure there wouldn’t be a third McGill born up on the Moon base, giving us further headaches in the future.

  He didn’t pull me down. Instead, he scrambled up to stand on the ledge beside me.

  Panting, he nodded to me. “Thanks. You’re all right for a McGill.”

  “So far, I feel the same way.”

  I think some people wouldn’t get along with a copy of themselves. They’d just rub each other the wrong way. Two Galinas, for example, or two Winslades—it just didn’t bear thinking about.

  “You got anything to eat?” McGill asked me.

  I handed over the contents of my pockets. There wasn’t much there. Some cough drops and a half-eaten sugar-bar. He took and ate them.

  “I suppose eating some spit from my future self is harmless,” he said, chewing methodically.

  “I suppose.”

  After he’d finished his meal, we both sat down on the ledge. Our boots dangled over the edge.

  “Did you find anything interesting down there?” I asked him.

  “Not really. This Skay seems to be about as dead as they get. There are some automated systems still going—but nothing to indicate it can be brought back to life.”

  I checked my tapper and did some math. “What do we do now? The next McGill will be coming out of the oven any time now.”

  The other James shrugged. “I know. Seems like a big waste. I’ve been down here for twelve hours wasting time. I hung out here, because I knew you’d be coming—it was the first thing I thought to do, after all.”

  I nodded. If there was one person in the universe who could predict my next move, it was another James McGill.

  “Want to do it together?” I asked.

  He nodded, and we both got to our feet.

  We didn’t sing, or hold hands, or nothing like that. We just jumped at the same time. We hurtled down into the void. The stale dead air blasted up into my face, moving faster as we fell.

  It was a long way down. Wanting to get it over with, I turned on my boot-jets, aiming head first for the bottom. Beside me, the other James did the same. I could see the flare of his jets, two blue plumes like mine, not far away.

  We sailed down into utter blackness, speeding up every second, aiming into the unknown and yearning for a quick, painless death.

  * * *

  “McGill?” asked a sweet voice. “Is that really you? Again? Do you know that I haven’t revived anyone all week except you—twice now?”

  “…urble…” I said.

  It was Dawn, and her voice released a flood of relief that coursed through me.

  I’d made it back to life. Did she say it had only been twice? That news made me feel better, too. There was no third James McGill lurking.

  “His signs are good,” a male orderly said. “Should I get him off the table?”

  “There’s no hurry. Give him a second.”

  The orderly mumbled something.

  “What’s that?” Dawn said sharply.

  “I said maybe I should leave you two alone.”

  “Fine then, get out.”

  He left with poor grace. I couldn’t blame him for feeling jealous. Dawn was a hot little number.

  When I could talk and sit up, I smiled at her. “I’m glad to be back. I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  “You weren’t. They were arguing about leaving you permed, the last I heard, until that radiation blast went off. They figured no one could have survived that.”

  I blinked at her. “Uh… what radiation blast?”

  “Were you already dead by then? That thing—that ship, or whatever is under our feet—it sent out a signal. It was a strong one. A single blast of radiation that was so strong it fried a lot of circuits all over the base.”

  I squinted and thought that over while she suggested various dinner plans. I said “uh-huh” until she stopped talking. Then I gave her a kiss on top of her head before I left, and I marched straight up to where Graves had been holding court on the observation deck.

  But when I got there, I was in for a surprise. Graves was there all right, with his crowd of primus-ranked courtiers. Unfortunately, they were all stone dead.

  Keying my tapper, I contacted Dawn. “Hey… you might want to check your revival queue again. Your break is over, girl.”

  She was quiet for a second, then she started cursing. “Our dinner date is off, McGill, sorry. Do you know how they all died?”

  “Not for certain, but I’ve got some ideas…”

  I walked over to the thin crystalline walls of the observation deck. I poked at them gently. They were solid enough, and good at keeping out stray cosmic rays. But apparently, the glass couldn’t keep the blast of radiation that had been released by the Skay under our feet. It had fried all these officers while they sat in their chairs.

  Borrowing a cup of coffee from the table circled by dead men, I sipped it gratefully. It was only lukewarm, but scavengers can’t be choosy.

  I waited around the observatory, poking at things and admiring the view. I managed to get a pretty good look at the computer data from the radiation blast, and I talked to Floramel about it. I showed her the circle of bodies, but she didn’t seem overly impressed. She’d seen a lot of death in her day.

  “Intriguing… we’ve been tracing the signal. It’s not just a radio burst, nor just a gamma burst. It was more than that.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  She looked up at me out of her tapper. She licked her lips and seemed uncertain. “It was a deep-link transmission too, James.”

  “What? You guys can trace those? I had no idea,” I lied. Natasha and I had recently figured out deep-links could be traced, but we’d never managed to do anything with that information as yet.

  “That’s classified. Don’t pass it on.”

  “How could I, when I barely understand how it works in the first place?”

  “Good enough then… the trouble is, James, I did manage to find out where the radiation was targeted.”

  “Well girl,” I said, “don’t keep me in suspense any longer. Where did it go?”

  “Toward the galactic center—toward the Core Worlds.”

  We looked at each other for a few seconds. “Uh…” I said. “Do you think it might actually be heard that far out?”

  “Not the normal radiation. That will take millennia to travel the distance. In fact, I think they probably sent a signal like this out thousands of years ago. Without the deep-link element, however, it must still be on the way.”


  “How’s that?” I asked, baffled.

  “Our galaxy is about a hundred thousand lightyears across—you know that, right?”

  “Sure do,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel at all.

  “Well, at this range away from the center, it would take about thirty thousand years for such a signal to get from here to the Core Worlds in normal space.”

  “Ah!” I said, catching on. “So, if the Skay sent out a signal before, it might be getting there right about now.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Huh… that’s wild. Anyways, what makes you think the Skay might have sent a message out before?”

  “All those dead combatants around the central tower that you found made me think of it. What could have killed them? What could have killed them all, in the middle of a deadly struggle?”

  “Uh…” I said, and my poor mind a total blank for a few seconds. Then, I thought I had it. “A burst of radiation? Like the one I triggered? Like the one that fried poor Graves, here?”

  “Exactly.”

  Floramel signed off, and I sipped another coffee. It had gone cold, but I didn’t mind. I was thinking. Thinking hard.

  Graves showed up about a half hour after I reported him dead. He walked in and his mouth twisted up into an unpleasant snarl when he saw me.

  “McGill? I might have known.”

  “Take a seat, sir. Oh wait… I’ll just push the old Graves out of the way for you. Sorry about that.”

  He watched impatiently while I moved the corpse out of his chair. It was a longstanding rule of courtesy among legionnaires that a man shouldn’t have to deal with his own corpse. In Graves’ case, however, I got the feeling he didn’t care.

  He sure didn’t bother with the other bodies before he sat down and went to work on the battle computer embedded in the conference table. Whenever one of the other dead primus-types got in the way, he kicked over their chairs.

  As it seemed like he was in a sour mood, I took it upon myself to tidy-up, loading the corpses on a floater and programming it to carry them down to Blue Deck. Dawn might not be happy to see that cart-load of death, but that was part of her job, after all.

  “Did you kill me, McGill?” Graves asked after he’d reviewed all the reports and discovered that a burst of radiation had done the deed.

  “Not on purpose, sir. I’ll swear to that.”

  He didn’t look at all happy with my answer. “Right… you did something that killed me and my entire staff. I would have you up on charges, but I don’t think they would stick.”

  “Aw now, don’t talk like that, Primus! It’s embarrassing!”

  “What?”

  “Real legionnaires don’t fret about who killed who. Not in an accidental situation, at least.”

  “You’re right… if it was an accident.”

  There it was. Yellow suspicion filled his eyes. I swear, every time something went a little bit cock-eyed in this legion, everyone came looking for me.

  “Wasn’t me, sir,” I said, crossing my chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “You already did die—all of us did.”

  “Right… well, sir, if you don’t need anything else, I’ll be—”

  “Sit your ass down. I just got Floramel’s report about the signal, and its direction.”

  “Uh… oh… that.”

  I sat down with a sigh. We went over data and reports all over again. I tuned out all the boring details, as I already knew the important parts. The dead Skay had sent out some kind of urgent message. Probably, someone out there had heard that call for help.

  Maybe they would come looking, or maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, there wasn’t a damned thing me or any of Graves’ flunkies could do about it. To my way of thinking, we should all just have a beer and stop worrying about it. What was done was done.

  But no, that’s not how the brass ever looked at the universe of events. No, they had to jaw and complain and carry on for hours. In fact, by the time I was finally dismissed and sent packing, every one of Graves’ seven dwarves were back at it, each having arrived about a half hour after the last one.

  Each of them demanded to hear the whole story over again, which was pure torture for me. They all carried on and complained. What little of this I listened to eventually created a gray wave of sheer boredom between my ears.

  -14-

  A few days went by after the Skay sent out that fateful signal. Fortunately, the expedition team seemed so upset about the threat from the Core Worlds they mostly forgot about me.

  I took this rare opportunity to goof off and made the most of it for a few days. Dawn and I had our second date, then a third one, and we were planning our fourth when an unwelcome interruption dashed our plans.

  Galina Turov has a small fist, but she can hammer nails with it when she wants to. She gave the door to Dawn’s tiny cabin three short thumps, then threw it wide open.

  Startled, the two of us began pulling on clothing, and Dawn’s face reddened. She was about to yell, but she recognized the rank insignia and swallowed instead.

  “Tribune?” she asked in that sweet voice of hers. “Is something wrong?”

  “Damned right something is wrong, and that overgrown ape in your bed is in the middle of it all, as always. Adjunct, take my advice: You should stay away from McGill. He’s driven more officers insane than you’ve enchanted with those tiny boobs of yours.”

  Dawn pulled up her clothing a little higher. Her smart-cloth straps cinched over her bare skin by themselves.

  “What can I do for you, Tribune?” I asked in a cheerful tone.

  Galina gave me a shot of her death stare. “For starters, you can remove the tape and foil from your arm and report to duty, Centurion.”

  As I began peeling off the fresh cover I’d put over my tapper, Galina did a U-turn and stalked out the door.

  Dawn watched me with big eyes. “You told me your arm was injured.”

  “And so it was, little lady. But it’s all healed-up now. Protective bandages are miracle-workers, aren’t they? I’ll tell you what: I’ll be right back after this is sorted out. Don’t worry, and keep the bed warm for me.”

  Dawn looked a little put out, but she wasn’t outright pissed. That’s how sweet she was. She was a breath of fresh air after putting up with huffy Varus women for decades.

  Stumping along down the passages, I followed Galina. She moved fast and never looked back at me. By the time we reached her office, my clothes had knit themselves together again.

  “McGill,” she said, waving me to a seat. “I want you to explain how you triggered Earth’s possible extinction—yet again.”

  “That’s a sheer exaggeration, sir. The worst we should expect would be an investigation party coming out from the Core Worlds. There’s no way even the Galactics will blame us for this mess. After all, the Mogwa and the Skay fought here many centuries ago.”

  “It would seem that you’re not up on current events, are you?” Galina asked. “Graves? Enlighten him.”

  “If you would refer to the memo of yesterday, 0500 hours, McGill.”

  “Uh…”

  Graves looked at my tapper. I hadn’t bothered to take the last of the tape off yet.

  “That’s a violation, soldier. You’re not even on leave.”

  “Just a mistake,” I assured him. “My tapper was growing a few crazy hairs, and it was itching something awful. The bio people suggested I—“

  “Wrap it in tin foil?” Galina interrupted. “ Is that what that girl told you to do? We will investigate. I’ll have your little friend arrested, if it’s true.”

  I glanced at her in alarm. From her behavior, I hadn’t really gotten the idea she was jealous—but maybe I’d thought wrong.

  “There’s no need for that, sirs,” I said, tearing the remainder of the foil and tape all off with a single, ripping sound. “See? It’s only bleeding a little. It works fine!”

  I poked at my sore arm and found the me
mo Graves was talking about. It flooded into my inbox along with about a thousand other messages, but I kept the things that came from Graves in a separate folder.

  “The Chief Inspector of Province 921,” I began reading aloud, “hereby informs the servile inhabitants of Earth that an investigatory commission has been dispatched from Trantor…”

  I trailed off, as it got worse from there. I looked up at the two officers in alarm. “Nairbs? They’re sending out a commission of Nairbs?”

  “Oh yes, and that’s not all,” Galina said. “The Skay sent us another message, just today. That’s why I was ordered to come back here from Earth. Somehow, the stink of this has been traced back to me personally. I don’t like that, McGill. I don’t like that at all.”

  “Uh…” I said, “I don’t seem to have that one.”

  “It’s top secret. Here, read it.”

  She flicked her hand over her tapper, transmitting the message in my direction. It was a violation to send me a secret document, but I wasn’t going to report her.

  I began reading again. Before I was halfway through, I slumped back into my uncomfortable seat.

  “The Skay are coming too? We’re talking about hosting two Galactic investigation teams?”

  “That’s right,” Graves said. “They both want to learn what happened in every detail. The Mogwa are calling this a salvage situation—that means they want to steal the Skay ship and tear it down, spying on everything.”

  “And the Skay are calling their dead brother ‘a missing citizen.’” Galina said. “They say they lost a soldier in an old war, and they want him returned.”

  “Ha! What are they going to do with our Moon? Take it out and bury the thing in space somewhere?”

  “It’s no laughing matter, McGill,” Galina told me. “Think about it: if either one of these aliens gets their way, they’ll be confiscating our Moon.”

  “Uh… that’s bad.”

  “Yes, it is. No more tides on Earth. Losing our moon will disrupt our climate, maybe even our orbital path. The planet will probably survive, but it will be drastically altered in the process.”

  I stared at them. Right off, I could tell that neither one of them was joking.