Machine World (Undying Mercenaries Book 4) (6 page)

More and more of them joined in, adding their weight to ours.

I couldn’t see—I could barely hear. So much blood had splattered my cracked faceplate, and everyone was roaring in my ears so loudly I didn’t even realize I was near the edge until I went over.

There was a sick feeling at the final second. It was a moment without parallel when I realized I was falling through the air and crashing down to certain death.

The dragon I’d been struggling with all this time was under me, and I was riding it down. It felt like I was falling all the way to Hell itself.

I don’t remember hitting the bottom. I think I was knocked out at least for a few seconds.

I came awake groaning. I flipped up my faceplate painfully, and I could see again.

A tangled mass of death lay all around me. One of the machines and three or four troopers squirmed, but most were still.

On impulse, I reached up and opened the faceplate of the nearest machine—of the one I’d ridden over the side.

To my shock, I recognized the face inside.

“Della?” I asked in a coughing whisper.

She didn’t answer me because she was as dead as a stone. I stared into her face. It was strange meeting up with her again—it was even stranger to know I’d just killed her.

A cheer swelled louder and louder above me. I flopped and rolled onto my back, looking up. A line of Varus troops stood along the edge, shaking their fists and whooping.

“Look at McGill!” Carlos shouted. “He’s still alive!”

More cheers went up. Grinning through bloody teeth, I forced one gauntlet to wave at them before I passed out.

-8-

Bio people are lazy. They don’t like to fix the bodies of the badly injured. They preferred to recycle broken flesh and start new. Theirs was a throw-away culture, and I was therefore surprised when I woke up in the infirmary in my old, badly damaged body.

“Seven broken bones, not counting ribs,” Bio Specialist Anne Grant read from her tapper while standing next to me.

I had to turn my head pretty far to see her as my right eye had swollen shut.

“Contusions, punctures and a collapsed lung,” she went on. “We even had to remove your spleen. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve bothered to do that, James?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me,” I said with stinging, cracked lips.

“Eight years, I would guess. That’s how long ago I signed up with this crazy outfit. We just don’t do organ removal. Not from a living person, that is.”

“Sounds like it would be boring, just running the revival machine all day.”

She gave me a reproachful look. “And you, you’re hurting aren’t you? Is this better than a fresh revive?”

I didn’t know why she was giving me a hard time, but I was getting tired of it. After all, I was the one in agony. She’d only suffered inconvenience. Then again, maybe I was just feeling sorry for myself.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m feeling pretty good. I figured I might go for a jog around the top of those modules later today. I’ve got a few kinks in my legs I need to work out.”

She shook her head and huffed. “Those aren’t kinks, they’re staples. I nu-skinned the hell out of them, but they’ll still sting for a week. They’re sunk in all the way to the bone.”

Groaning, I levered myself into a half-sitting position. Her small hands pushed on my chest.

“Lie back down, please. You’ll pass out if you get out of bed now. Graves wants to talk to you. I think that’s why you’re still alive.”

I let her push me back down. In truth, it felt a lot better that way. I was a mess. As a person who’s been killed and injured countless times, I could tell this was a bad one.

Graves showed up about ten minutes later. His face blocked out the medical lights that were glaring into my eyes, and he examined me with all the tenderness of a rancher poking at his prize bull.

“McGill? Are you lucid yet?”

“Right as rain, sir.”

“Good. I wanted to talk to you. With all the revives going on today I knew it would be a while if I let you stack up in the queue with the rest. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind that you stopped me from being recycled? No sir, I don’t mind.”

He slapped my thigh, and I winced. He didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s the spirit! I want to thank you, McGill. That was a fine bit of improvising you did out there on the field today. We didn’t expect that play. Sure, Winslade and the rest of his auxiliary people are screaming about the damage you did to their machines—but do you know what I said to that?”

“Uh…what sir?”

“That they could go screw themselves, that’s what. It was Winslade’s idea to prove how powerful his machines were by abusing all the new troops who arrived to train on them. I’m sure he didn’t expect much in the way of damage, but that’s just too damned bad.”

I was fuzzy, but I was pretty sure he’d mentioned a name that I didn’t think should be mentioned when talking about combat units.

“Sir?” I asked. “Did you say Winslade? As in, Adjunct Winslade?”

“The one and only. Turov’s sidekick has finally cashed in his marker. He’s a primus now—hadn’t you heard?”

A primus was in charge of a cohort in a regular legion or in some cases an independent auxiliary cohort. Commanding an auxiliary cohort gave a primus more prestige and independence than a regular commander who was permanently the subordinate of a legion’s tribune. Usually, such special cohort assignments went to people who’d held the rank of primus for several years and who had done well in that capacity. Winslade was none of these things.

“I’m not surprised he managed to swing a command rank,” I said, “but isn’t this a stretch? A primus is two jumps above an Adjunct. Last I’d heard, he still didn’t have much in the way of combat experience to begin with.”

“I know,” Graves said, “I know. I’ve been with this legion for decades, and they’ve always promoted one snot-nose or another over me. That’s the way of things sometimes. When forming up a new auxiliary cohort, you would think they’d look for officers from the existing fighting forces, but no.”

“They took and promoted a Hog right over you? It’s just not right.”

“Well, let’s forget about that,” Graves said. “Let’s talk about your tactics. What inspired you to try to shove the dragons over the side?”

I explained how I’d seen a group along the edge which had managed to throw one down. I then quickly ordered my followers to charge into the melee before the dragons could finish butchering the first group.

“Excellent,” Graves said. “That’s what I’m talking about, right there: Leadership on the field, improvisation—and victory. I don’t regret a thing.”

I frowned. “What would you have to regret, sir?”

“Your upcoming trials have been challenged. The 3
rd
Unit veterans came to me, and they told me I had to pull your advancement to candidacy. Did you know they were against it?”

“I had a feeling, sir.”

“Well, I won’t lie—this might go badly for you, but I think you might be able to pull it off somehow. See you on the other side, McGill.”

He stood up and gave me a grim nod. Then he left the infirmary. I looked after him and tried not to worry.

* * *

The trip out to Gamma Pavonis was a long run. I had plenty of time to heal up and join in the training exercises with the rest of my unit.

Driving the dragons around turned out to be fun. I’d seen Turov do it back on Tech World, but at that time I hadn’t known who had built these machines. Apparently, the colonists from Dust World had produced the prototypes when seeking a system they could sell to other planets. They’d settled down as nanite vendors in the end but not before producing some pretty interesting designs to share with the human-only market.

What got me most was the inventiveness of the colonists on Dust World. They’d been a splinter group cut off from Earth for nearly a century. They hadn’t known they shouldn’t be making new tech devices freely, that it was against Galactic Law. What impressed me the most, however, was how many cool things they’d invented with such a small group. During the same interval, Earth had pretty much stagnated technologically. Due to its very nature, the Empire progressed very slowly.

I knew from my new-history courses back in school that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had been a time of explosive growth in human knowledge. We’d invented all kinds of things that were taken for granted today. Humanity had been quite innovative back in the days before the Galactic bureaucrats came and put a damper on all our creativity. In order to legally make a product in the Empire, you had to first make sure that no other civilization held the patent. The colonists from Zeta Herculis hadn’t known about these restrictions and had plowed along inventing whatever they damn well pleased. I had to admire their spunk.

The dragons were one such invention. As they were already producing nanites as a trade good to cement their position in the Empire, they’d decided to use the battle vehicles as a trade good with Earth itself. It was just as illegal for a single planet to have multiple interstellar trade goods as it was to have none or to trade something that someone else did. But, apparently, no other planets produced suits like these and so humans were in the clear to build and sell them among themselves.

Over the last month or so, I’d come to understand how the new auxiliary cohort fit in with the rest of Legion Varus. My Legion had gone into space this time with a lot of extra recruits. These troops now served to swell the ranks of all ten of Varus’ existing cohorts. In the meantime, veteran troops were moved into the new auxiliary cohort. My unit, being one of the ones trained in the use of heavy armor, was a natural choice to learn how to fight in dragons as they were essentially larger, heavier, self-powered battle armor systems.

Centurion Graves became a unit commander under Winslade. It seemed unfair, even downright mean, to put him in that position, but Turov had never been one to worry about justice when she made a decision.

And so I learned how to drive the strange dragons. Probably the most difficult part was learning how to operate the hand controls manipulating the grippers at the same time I was directing the twin chest cannons.

The chest cannons operated in two modes. You could use them on full-auto, which essentially meant the suit’s computer system chose its target and fired the cannons wherever it wanted to, or you could manually control both the arms and the cannons with your own hands. This was accomplished by squeezing metal triggers with your palms and three smaller fingers, while at the same time using your thumb and forefinger to make pinching motions to control the grippers. In reality, most troopers chose the middle ground of letting the computer aim the cannons while they chose the moment to fire by either verbally commanding it or by using their fingers.

It was all pretty much as difficult as it sounded. I remarked about it to Carlos while we were undergoing our final trials.

“Tell me about it,” Carlos said. “I feel like I should have a bugle hanging out of my ass. I’m a one-man band, here.”

Throughout the days of training I was naturally in close proximity with Della. We were both wearing monster suits, of course, but I could still see her face. I had to wonder what she was thinking.

I knew without asking what Natasha was thinking. She didn’t leave me any mystery about it. Every time I looked at Della or watched her climb in and out of her dragon, Natasha seemed to notice. I didn’t know how I was supposed to avoid noticing Della all that time, so I didn’t bother to try. After all, we took showers together, dressed together, and sparred together all day long.

Since Natasha seemed to care so much, I decided to make a play for her at dinner the night before we finished our training.

“Natasha,” I said, “hey…how about you and I—”

“Forget it,” she snapped.

“What? You haven’t heard what I was going to say.”

“James, I’ve heard it all. We all have. All of the women in this unit.”

“Sheesh. I was just going to—”

“I know. I suggest you go ask Della instead.”

“Wait,” I said, “Della doesn’t even look at me. Haven’t you noticed that?”

“Of course I have. That’s why I’m angry. She’s still very aware of you. Go talk to her. She wants you to.”

I shrugged. “Fine. Just fine. I’ll do that.”

I found Della in the colonist module which was in the lowest tier of the stack aboard
Cyclops
.

“Hi Della,” I said, “I just thought I’d come down here and—”

Della put a finger to her lips. She walked toward me, smiling. When she came close I checked her hands for weapons, and I became alarmed. She had one hand behind her back.

Like I said, Della and I had a strange relationship. We’d made love and fought to the death about the same number of times. It could go either way with this woman.

When she got close, I backed up a little. Laughing, she lifted both her hands, palms out. They were empty.

I smiled sheepishly. “Just checking,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I’ve changed, James.”

“Listen,” I said hesitantly, “I wanted to apologize for pushing you off the stack of modules and killing you the other day. I didn’t know it was you inside that metal monster at the time. You understand that, right?”

“Yes. You shouldn’t feel any remorse. After all, I
did
know it was you, and I still tried to clip your arms off. It was all part of the exercise.”

“No hard feelings then?”

“None at all.”

I smiled. “Good. We can be friends again. Say, how about—?”

That was as far as I got. She cut off my words by jumping on me. That’s the only way I can describe it. One second I was unsure how I stood, even fearing for my life, and the next we were in a lip-lock.

We found a place off by ourselves on the Green Deck, which was pretty easy to do on
Cyclops
since the ship had only about twenty percent of the usual number of troops aboard.

Green Deck was like a public park, a place traditionally built aboard all large ships to simulate an outdoor environment. It was always popular with couples seeking a get-away during off-hours. During the day it was used for combat training.

Overgrown with trees and riddled with sheltered nooks behind rocks and bushes, there was always a spot you could find that was secluded and at least semi-private. Artificial birds sang and brooks babbled, giving people the exact level of cover-noise they needed.

We made love, and the sex was as good as it had always been with Della. She was possibly the most uninhibited girl I’d ever been with. I chalked that up to her upbringing on an alien world.