Machine World (Undying Mercenaries Book 4) (8 page)

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

Harris slumped forward. He looked surprised, like he was going to vomit or something. Then he slipped onto his face in the water. A few last bubbling, bloody snorts came out of him—then he died. It was blood loss that done the trick, if I had to guess.

Uncertain as to where this left matters, I retrieved my knife, wiped it clean, and walked up the path.

When I got the top I was met by four officers. Centurion Graves, Adjunct Leeson, Adjunct Toro, and Adjunct Mesa were all standing up there together. I realized they must have watched the trial from the edge of the cliff surrounding the canyon.

Swaying a bit, I saluted the group.

“Specialist McGill reporting, sirs.”

“Don’t you mean Veteran McGill?” asked Adjunct Leeson.

“That’s ridiculous,” Adjunct Toro snapped, her face was red and her teeth were clenched in anger. “McGill didn’t follow instructions.”

“Hell,” Leeson said, “he never does that.”

“Well, I vote that he be disqualified,” Toro said. She’d never liked me much, so I wasn’t surprised.

Graves turned toward the last adjunct. “What do you think, Mesa?”

Mesa looked me over like he smelled bad meat. “I don’t think I want this man as a veteran in our unit,” he said.

My heart sank, but I stood there, resolute. If they were going to kick me back to specialist, I wasn’t going to cry and whine about it. Sure, the game had been rigged. There’d been no way I could win outright with the vets distributing weapons to the other contestants. But complaints weren’t going to convince anyone to change their verdict.

Graves shook his head thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to overrule the majority of my adjuncts in this instance,” he said. “For me, the deciding factor came to light when the last candidate attacked Harris. It was apparent through that action that he believed the fight to the death announced by Harris included the veterans themselves.”

“Not so,” Adjunct Toro piped up again, “all that proves is that McGill’s bizarre actions confused everyone.”

Graves shrugged. “You’ve got a valid complaint. But the fact is, and you can check the vid recordings to back this up, Harris
did
say the last man to walk out of that canyon alive would be a veteran. He did not specify that the veterans themselves were not participants. I don’t think any of you can argue that McGill isn’t the last man standing.”

The two who voted against me grumbled but didn’t say anything else.

“McGill?” Graves asked, turning to me. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Well sir,” I said, “you described the situation pretty well. Harris inserted himself into the contest when he began to distribute weapons at random to the candidates. At least, that’s how I saw it.”

Graves nodded. “Very well. As far as I’m concerned, you’re our newest man with the honorable rank of veteran. Congratulations.”

He reached out a gloved hand, and I shook it.

Just like that, I’d achieved a new rank. I knew there would be no love lost between Harris, myself, and the rest of the noncoms, but I didn’t much care. They’d never been too sweet on me to begin with.

-10-

I found my new rank to be a little bit daunting. Sure, I was far from a rookie, but I knew there were soldiers with more experience than I had in this unit. They looked at me with a strange mixture of jealousy, curiosity and maybe, just maybe, a hint of respect.

It was that last item on the list that worried me. I had to
earn
that respect in order to keep it. I had to prove myself worthy of it. Yes, I’d pulled a fast one during a simulated battle with the dragons from Dust World, but that was a far cry from leading a squad throughout a campaign on an unknown planet.

One of the nice things about my new position was the command structure the auxiliary cohort had embraced. Rather than being made up of infantry with units led by centurions with the strength of one hundred twenty men each, Winslade’s cohort was more limited in size. We were considered to be cavalry. Each squad was led by a veteran, like me. The squads were broken up into two maniples of five troops each, just like the Roman cavalry of ancient times. One of the maniples was led by a specialist, making him second in command, while the other was led by the veteran directly. That meant each squad was made up of an even dozen riders and their dragons. The specialists placed in charge of a maniple were mostly weaponeers, but there were also a number of bios and techs in the mix.

Because all of us were outfitted with large, walking, fighting machines, we didn’t have as much need for our traditional infantry-oriented roles. I was a little sorrowful I wasn’t going to be carrying a belcher into battle this time, but I got over it quickly the more I worked with the dragons. They were quite obviously superior weapons systems.

Harris took the other squad in our platoon, and Leeson commanded above him. Although I was effectively just one more trooper piloting a dragon, the difference this time was I’d been placed in charge of eleven other guys riding along behind me.

A little over a third of the infantry who tried out qualified on the dragons, and I was proud to note that almost everyone in 3
rd
Unit had survived the winnowing process. That was due in large part to our success with the initiation trials on the rooftop battlefield. Most units had been slaughtered. In fact, my group was given the grim task of annihilating the last units to come over from
Minotaur
to kick off their training. I wasn’t proud of it, and the butchery was intense, but I had to admit afterward that it was a valuable lesson to both sides. No trooper could fail to appreciate the power of a dragon after being killed by one. The pilots working the controls were undeniably impressed as well.

The troops that performed badly during the training exercises were sent back to
Minotaur
to fill out other ranks as needed. Once we were down to the best of the best, the training commenced in earnest. During a period of about three weeks, we trained hard every day. In all that time Veteran Harris never spoke to me. In fact, he did his damnedest not to even look at me.

I understood. After all, I’d made a fool out of him and the other veterans in my unit. That wouldn’t sit well with anyone.

Della and I had had lunch together a few times over the weeks following our first encounter, but I’d made sure things didn’t go any further than that. If she was married, I was determined to respect her vows—even if she didn’t.

During my fourth week aboard
Cyclops
, the brass announced that the target star system was now easy to see with the naked eye directly ahead of our three ships. This wasn’t exactly true, as we were in a warp bubble and vision was interpolated, but it was still an exciting change.

Going up to the observation deck the night before we arrived at Gamma Pavonis, I sat quietly with many others and watched the white star grow fractionally larger every hour. Kivi joined me that night as I maintained my vigil.

“James?” she asked. “Are you up here by yourself?”

I made a vague, waving gesture toward the numerous couples that surrounded us. It seems the observation deck on any warship tended to attract people who wanted romance if not privacy. They lined the walls up against the curving hull because the couches arrayed there were darker than those in the center. That left me with a big central couch.

“I’m hardly by myself,” I said, smiling.

Kivi smiled back. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t seem to be as popular with the ladies this time out.”

Kivi cocked her head and looked at me curiously. “That’s not what I hear.”

I shrugged. I turned to examine the white star again. Was it a pixel or two larger now? Maybe.

“Depression?” Kivi asked. “Can this be for real?”

Chuckling quietly, I shook my head. “I’d hardly call it that. Can’t a man question his place in the universe without people thinking there’s something wrong with him?”

“No, they can’t. At least, not in your case. Other people can be self-possessed and introspective—but not James McGill. I have to admit I’m curious as to the cause of your unprecedented mood. Let me guess, it has something to do with Natasha and Della. Am I right?”

“Maybe.”

Kivi climbed onto my couch without asking. She scooted across it until she bumped her hip into mine.

“Oh yes,” she said, “the view from here is much better. Now, tell an old girlfriend what this is all about.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then I’ll have to guess.”

I shrugged. “Go for it.”

“Okay. Let’s see… Natasha always has believed deep down that you’re her private property. And Della…well, that girl is just plain crazy. I can see plenty of ways that a man might get caught between those two and yet shut out by both.”

I liked Kivi, and I liked how she felt all warm and vital laying there next to me. But her words were starting to make me feel a little uncomfortable. I squirmed a bit. I couldn’t help it.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded. “The McGill I know would’ve grabbed me by now. Oh my God…”

Frowning, I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide and they searched mine intently.

“It’s
true
, isn’t it?” she asked.

“What’s true?”

“I’d heard rumors. Someone told me Della is pregnant. It’s got to be something like that. The James McGill I’ve always known would of moved on by now to find another girl if it was anything less.”

I shook my head and smiled ruefully. “Wrong,” I said. “She’s not pregnant. She already had the baby.”

Kivi’s mouth fell open comically wide. She punched me then, right in the gut. I grunted and grabbed her small fist before she could do it again.

“What kind of an asshole are you, James?” she demanded in a harsh whisper. Her mood had shifted as quickly as an autumn wind—but that was Kivi for you.

“Why are people always asking me that?” I wondered aloud.

She scooted away from me about a foot and crossed her arms over her ample breasts.

“So,” she said, “let me guess how this happened. Back on Dust World you met Della, screwed her, and left her there. Now, she’s out here in space trying to make a living training out legions to use these dragons while your kid is back on Dust World growing up alone.”

“You make it sound like I did this as part of some kind of evil plan. Well, I didn’t. She was the one who wanted to get pregnant. She chased me on Dust World for that express purpose. Now I find out I’ve got a kid, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

Kivi was quiet for maybe ten seconds. To be honest with you, it was kind of nice.

“It was
her
idea?” she asked suddenly. “The getting pregnant part, I mean?”

“Yeah, sure. Think about it. Those colonists were living separated from Earth with a limited gene pool. To their way of thinking procreating with new humans was almost a duty.”

Kivi nodded thoughtfully. She scooted back toward me and threw one leg over mine. I jumped a bit reflexively not quite knowing where she was going with this.

But then she kissed me, and I figured it out. The winds had shifted back the other way.

We made out on the observation deck as I hadn’t done for years. Kivi, as I’ve said before, is not a shy girl. Even though we were in semi-darkness, I didn’t quite feel comfortable with some of the things she did while climbing over me on that couch. But it’d been a while since I’d made love to a woman, so I let her open our tops and kiss me passionately.

At one point, I heard some giggling off to my left. I put a gentle hand on Kivi’s cheek and lifted her face away from my neck.

“How about we go someplace else?”

“Screw them,” she said hotly. “It’s nothing they haven’t seen before.”

“Yeah well, we’re giving them a live show, here.”

She made a frustrated sound and hopped up off the couch. She tugged on my hand until I followed her. There were more whispers and giggles from the dark around us as we left the observation deck.

I figured she would want to go to Green Deck, but we didn’t make it that far. When Kivi gets hot, she gets
really
hot.

We made love in an ammo storage compartment. The metal containers were unevenly surfaced cold planes against bare skin, but Kivi didn’t seem to care. After a while, neither did I.

-11-

When we arrived at Gamma Pavonis, we came down directly from above the local plane of the ecliptic. In other words, instead of moving from one planet to the next, getting closer and closer to the central star, we dove straight down toward the target world’s northern pole.

It was no secret we were coming. Three Imperial capital ships, dreadnaughts all, can’t hide on approach. Once we turned off the Alcubierre drive and transformed from glowing blue-white spheres of light into what looked like a trio of comets with hundred-kilometer long plumes of exhaust, any alien watching the scene would have to be blind not to know what was coming next.

The good news was that they couldn’t have detected us until we came out of our warp bubbles. As I understood it from the techs, we were technically visible as a bubble of light while the drive was active, but since that effect was moving faster than the speed of light in relative terms, there was no time for the light thus produced to reach the eyes of anyone watching. We were, effectively, out-running our own shadows.

But once we turned off the big drives—well, that was it. There isn’t much in space to occlude the view of a sensor, and any kind of traditional engine produces heat, light and other energy readings that were very visible. I wasn’t sure what kind of sensors the squids might have, but I was pretty sure they knew we were coming in hot.

About the squids—I had no doubt that they were at least watching this system. If both the Empire and their Kingdom were interested, they had to have a survey team out here at the very least. I said as much to Natasha, who gave me a look then sighed and answered civilly.

“You’re right,” she said. “You’ve got to be right, if you think about it. They will have seeded this system with sensors and listening posts. We only hope that they didn’t—”

That was as far as she got. An alarm went off. It wasn’t a ship-wide klaxon, but it was a flashing yellow-orange bar on her tapper. She looked at it then glanced at me in alarm.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re summoning all the techs to battle stations.”

She looked scared, and I didn’t blame her.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “Should we be preparing for action?”

“I don’t know. Follow your tapper and the arrows on the deck. You know the drill.”

She turned to go, but I put a hand on her shoulder. I gave her a hug—no kiss, no rude squeezes, just a friendly hug. After stiffening up for a second, she relaxed, hugged me back and wished me luck. She left smiling.

I watched her race off down the passage toward the weapons deck. There were arrows now, just like she’d said. Green ones meant tech-only. Those lit up first and stayed lit, glowing on the deck plates.

As I walked farther down the passages and ramps, the red arrows lit up. Red indicated combat arms, which meant me. I watched, but the other colors stayed dark. Blue was for bios, in case of a medical emergency. Golden arrows meant
everyone
should follow them, and they were usually reserved for abandoning the ship.

The way shipboard actions worked on an Imperial vessel was, well—odd. The Skrull who crewed the ships weren’t allowed to fire the weapons systems. In Frontier 921, only humans were licensed—literally—to fight in star system beyond their own. Because of this, a tech like Natasha was invaluable because she had the skills required to run the ship’s sensors and operate the broadsides in a battle.

Natasha herself was not part of my dragon-riding squad. She’d failed to impress the brass while operating a combat machine. She just didn’t have the killer instinct, or at least not enough of it to satisfy Graves and the rest. But she was a good tech, so they’d decided keep her aboard
Cyclops
to operate the guns if we needed them.

Watching Natasha vanish around a corner, I decided not to wait around for the brass to deploy us. I knew the battle decisions were being made right here aboard
Cyclops
. Of the three ships, this one had the smallest complement of troops as it only housed the cavalry. For that reason Turov had brought her command staff here and had taken over Gold Deck, making it her operations center for the entire task force.

Knowing my fate was being decided by staffers up on Gold Deck didn’t make me happy. Sometimes, it seemed like the officers treated us like hamsters in cages. They ignored us until it was time to give us orders, then provided arrows and instructions a moron could follow. They only noticed failure after that—or that we weren’t moving fast enough.

I trotted after the red arrows to my squadron’s prep room. We didn’t have a formal service deck, not yet, but we had our own section of the module with bunks all around and a row of tough polymer crates that enclosed our dragons.

“All right, listen up!” I shouted, slamming my hands together.

It was gratifying to see troops hop off their bunks and gather around. Even Carlos hustled, and when I had everyone’s attention I went into my routine.

“We’re going to prep up like this is a hot action. We haven’t gotten the official call yet, so don’t wet your pants, but who knows? It could come at any time.”

“Is this a boarding action, Vet?” demand Carlos excitedly.

I smiled. “We can only hope. I would like nothing better than to meet up with a pack of squids while riding these sweet machines.”

The others echoed my sentiments. We’d been training for more than a month, and we were itching to try out our new equipment on an honest-to-God enemy.

We dressed in thin smart-suits not unlike those I’d worn as a light trooper. They were vacuum-tight in a pinch, but really, it was like wearing a garbage bag. If our dragons failed us, we’d probably die fast.

Opening up the crates, we coaxed out our machines and climbed over them, checking gauges and—

Wham!
A tremendous sound rang through the ship. I knew that sound. There was only one thing that could have caused it.

“Broadsides have fired!” I shouted. “Be on your toes, we must be in fleet action!”

“This is bullshit,” Carlos said, picking himself up and trying to get his machine into a squatting stance for mounting. “They should tell us what’s going on!”

“If we need to know something, we’ll be told,” I said firmly with a conviction that I didn’t feel. I knew from long association with the legions that the brass was perfectly capable of forgetting about ground troops in the belly of a transport. In fact, if they figured it would be easier to let us all die and be revived later, they might well engineer our deaths for the sheer convenience of it.

But I was a veteran now. I wasn’t supposed to whine or complain. I was supposed to reassure those who did. It felt a little odd, but I thought I could get used to it.

Finally, someone felt the urge to tell us what the hell was going on outside our ship’s hull. A voice and a face appeared on one wall. It was none other than Primus Winslade.

“Troops,” he said, looking a little flustered. “
Cyclops
,
Minotaur
and
Pegasus
are in action. We’ve met up with unexpected resistance. There appears to be some kind of fortification on the smallest of the target world’s three moons. The moment we exited warp and showed ourselves, this moon fired missiles at us. They’re currently inbound. Everyone is to prep their equipment and march to the lifters. I want my cohort off this ship and in transit
now
!”

Winslade sounded nervous. He didn’t say how many missiles or what kind of warheads they had. He probably didn’t know.

Carlos slapped my shoulder. “Hey, do you realize what’s going to happen if those missiles get through our defenses and blow up one of these ships? That’s it. Permed! A whole legion. Or maybe it will be our lucky turn to get cleaned out. After all this training, too. I want—”

“Shut up, Ortiz!” I boomed. I realized I should have said those words about a full minute back, but I was a little slow sometimes. I wasn’t used to being the veteran. “Get your rig walking—with you inside of it!”

Everyone went back to prepping their machines. About ninety seconds later, I rolled up the big bay exit door, and we went clanking down the passageway toward the lifters.

Red arrows lit up the floor. That was us—combat arms. I hoped they’d load up the rest of our support people, too. We needed everyone on this drop.

I didn’t even bother to look back to see if the rest of the dragons were following me. If they weren’t stomping after me with their tails lashing, well, they could die in the module with the bio people.

Wham!

The broadsides had fired another salvo. I was nearly thrown off my artificial feet. Servos whined, and I drew a three-clawed gash on the closest metal wall. But I stayed up and marching. My team was behind me, and I could see there were no stragglers. My HUD showed they were all there—a row of wicked marching machines right behind me.

Among all the squads to reach the lifters, we were third. I felt proud. Veteran Harris was there ahead of me, however. He gave my team a glance but didn’t nod or wave. He looked like he smelled something foul.

Leeson waved me closer. He was inside one of the dragons as well. His claw-arm looked strange as he made a human-like gesture. I hurried and clanked up to him.

“Good job, McGill,” he said. “You’re right on time. We’ll be the first lifter to abandon this ship if Toro’s platoon gets down here.”

Graves came clanking in next. I thought he looked uncomfortable in his dragon. He didn’t ride it, it rode him.

“This damned thing fell on its nose when the broadsides fired the second time,” he complained. “Where the hell is Toro?”

Leeson threw up his grippers. “She’s late.”

The broadsides boomed a third time, and about one second later, Toro and her team arrived. She was leading all of them with her two veterans right behind her. I recognized Johnson and Gonzales. I wondered how glad they were to lay eyes on me.

“About time, Toro,” Graves said. “Get your machines secured. We’re dropping.”

“Sir?” Leeson said. “The pilot wants to know if we can fly. The missiles, sir—”

“Tell him to decouple in twenty seconds. Positions, everyone!”

We dropped our visors all around, and we backed our machines into the hanging clamps that were supposed to secure us during flight. Moments later the floor became the wall, and then it became the ceiling.

About half of Toro’s group wasn’t ready. Their machines went sliding and crashing across the deck, slamming in a pile-up against the hull a hundred meters down. Some managed to grab onto things with their grippers, and a crewman was crushed.

“Toro, dammit,” Graves fumed. “Get your people under control!”

“We must be in trouble out there,” Leeson said, grunting and hanging on to his clamps with his grippers. “What’s the word from Winslade?”

“There isn’t any,” Graves answered.

I noticed Leeson hadn’t moved an inch during the inversion. He was using his grippers to hang on, like they were arms. He instinctively hadn’t trusted his clamps. I thought that was a pretty good idea, and privately ordered my squad to do the same. Pretty soon, every machine in sight was hanging on for dear life.

The lifter righted itself after about a minute. We pulled hard Gs during a slewing turn, then there came that undeniable feeling of falling at high speed. My stomach was in my mouth, and my heart was pounding in my ears.

Could
Cyclops
have been hit? What about Natasha and the rest? I didn’t know anything except that I was about to land on an alien world I hadn’t even had the time to lay eyes on yet.

“Hey, McGill,” Carlos said. “I’m sorry, I mean
Vet
. Look at this stream—I’ll pipe it to your tapper.”

He sent me a streaming feed. Lord only knew how he’d gotten access to it. The image was grainy, and it skipped and fuzzed out now and then, but the scene was unmistakable.

Three ships hung over a gray-white, mist-clad world. Distantly, a moon of dark rock floated. It was covered in puffing explosions. Were those our strikes or more missiles firing up from the moon base? It was hard to tell, but I figured it was our own broadside shells slamming home. I’d seen them strike before, and their power was daunting. Whatever missile base was firing on us was sure to be toast with three of these ships hammering at it.

The one worrying thing, however, was displayed as the view shifted. I realized then that the vid was from someone aboard our lifter. Probably a tech who’d released a buzzer and had it fly to a porthole. Buzzers were insect-sized drones that were often used for scouting or even spying by legion techs.

One of the three capital ships was on fire. It was
Pegasus
, Solstice Legion’s transport. Normally, fire wasn’t possible in space, but with the released oxygen escaping with other gasses, she was a briefly lit torch. She’d been hit—hit bad. My heart sank to see that.

Out of the bottom of
Pegasus
, tiny capsules were firing like bullets. Hundreds of them shot out as if the ship was bombarding the planet below.

I knew those capsules didn’t contain explosives. They were carrying troops. Each one was a drop pod firing down through the atmosphere into the murky clouds of this new world.