Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (2 page)

“Sorry Dad, she took me by surprise.”

He snorted in amusement and shook his head. He usually didn’t drink much, and he was on his third beer already. I put another one in front of him on my floating coffee table. After a moment of thought, he cracked it open.

“You know what your mom’s talking about?” Dad asked me. “Already?”

“What?”

“Moving out there. Emigrating. Hegemony has a new government policy, you know. If you buy a one-way ticket out there and promise to colonize, you can go for half-price. That’s a quarter the price of a round trip. We might be able to afford that if we sell this place.”

My eyes widened another notch. “But…”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’d be going with her. Now you know why I’m drinking every beer you put in front of me.”

I was beginning to understand. My mom was a hard one to dissuade once she got an idea stuck in her head. I was the same way—but this was crazy.

“You can’t move to Dust World,” I said. “That’s nuts. The place is like a giant Death Valley. Even worse than that.”

“I know. But most of the colonists are settling on the other planet in the system, the ocean world.”

My eyes widened. “That’s where the squids were wiped out! That’s an even worse idea. The squids still think they own that planet. They might show up any day and eradicate whatever humans they find squatting there.”

My dad shrugged. “They might do that here on Earth, too. In fact, most people think it’s only a matter of time. If the Empire doesn’t send the Battle Fleet back to Frontier 921, we’re all toast someday soon. Maybe your mother is right. Why not see the child before that happens?”

“We’re building our own ships,” I said in a confident, boastful tone. “We’re building up Earth’s home fleet every day. And our ships can take theirs, two to one. I’ve seen them do battle.”

“Imperial warships can, not Earth’s ships,” my dad said. “People keep making that mistake. Galactic ships from the Core Systems are built by aliens who know what the hell they’re doing. An Empire-built ship can take down cephalopod ships easily. Every news vid shows that. But our homegrown designs are totally different. Have you seen them? Big balls of puff-crete laid over wire ribs—our ships look like crap, and they’re untested. Some experts say they’ll pop like balloons in battle.”

My dad was right, of course. Hegemony
was
building ships as fast as they could, but our initial designs resembled lop-sided dog turds floating in space. The ships were constructed more like barrels with guns sticking out than anything else. The hulls were formed with puff-crete layered over a titanium grid-work to give it shape and something to stick to. The process reminded me of the way people built in-ground pools. Concrete with rebar buried inside like metal bones. The new Earth ships were slow, heavy and ugly. Could they fight? That was conjecture.

With remarkable speed, my dad and I finished the entire twelve-pack I’d been saving in my fridge for the weekend. After that, we were both in a markedly better mood. Cracking jokes, we walked back to the house together where we found my mom watching another video of Etta. She’d managed to find a clip of the baby taking her first steps.

We sobered up immediately. My dad and I exchanged glances.

“I’ll talk to Della about this, if she’s still on Earth,” I told him.

“If she’s on Earth, wouldn’t Etta be here too?”

“No. Dust Worlders are different. They raise their kids as a group. Della joined the legion, but she didn’t bring Etta with her.”

My dad shook his head. “They sound like they don’t think the way we do.”

“True enough,” I said. “But listen,
if
it’s possible to go out there, I’ll help with the return fare. You guys wouldn’t make it as colonists on such a harsh planet.”

My dad gave me a hug, and I stared over his shoulder at the big screen in the living room. Etta had sandals on, but her feet were still black with grit. None of the colonist adults around her seemed to care, or even to notice, that she was dirty.

I stepped back outside. Standing in the dark with gnats and mosquitoes buzzing near, I tapped a fateful message to Della. I didn’t know if she was on Earth or not, but as soon as I hit
send
and the little twirling icon began to rotate I felt my heart speed up a notch.

The note I sent said simply:
Della, we need to talk.

The wait was longer than usual. I’d begun to think she’d left Earth and gone back to Dust World after all. Hell, she might well have ditched life in the legions entirely and gone home, calling the whole thing a bad dream.

But she hadn’t. My tapper screen stopped twirling, and a tiny chime sounded in the dark. She’d gotten my message.

-2-

A day or two later, in the middle of the night, I heard someone in my room.

Della had never responded to my message. She’d gotten it—that much I knew. But I couldn’t tell if she’d read it or not. She had that information blocked, as most people did.

To tell the truth, I’d done my best to forget about the whole thing. I knew my mom was still tense about the situation. Every time I saw her, she asked me questions I couldn’t possibly answer.

How tall was Etta now? What did she weigh at birth? Were there complications during the delivery? What was the name of this husband fellow, this faceless stepfather who was supposedly caring for the child while her crazy parents were off getting themselves repeatedly killed on alien planets?

In answer to all these queries I could only shrug and shake my head. She growled at me every time I did that, accusing me of a dozen forms of idiocy and negligence. I took it all in stride. I knew she was upset—and with good reason. Della and I were far from ideal parents.

A sound in my room alerted me to the presence of an intruder. It was the crinkle of loose paper on dirty carpet. I knew the sound well as I often made a similar noise every time I crossed my littered floor.

My big-knuckled fist twitched reflexively on the neck of the bottle of Kentucky bourbon that was still in my grasp. I’d fallen asleep with the bottle in my hand because I’d run out of beer yesterday.

For all my faults, I’m a legion-trained Veteran who’s been physically assaulted more times than I can count. Such experiences never fail to change a man. I think, in truth, I was never fully asleep anymore. Some part of me was always awake, watching, listening for the smallest hint of danger.

The part of my brain that was still operating set off alarm bells tonight, and I released the bottle with a sudden splaying of my fingers. The bottle thumped down and the contents began to glug out onto the carpet—another in a patchwork of innumerable stains.

That same hand flew upward with unerring aim. My fingers found a throat, and they squeezed.

My eyes cracked open, and I coughed. The action caused a tiny line to be cut into my windpipe. Someone had a knife at my neck.

“Drop the knife,” I said to the intruder. Blood ran down my neck, warming it in twin lines.

For a brief moment, the intruder and I struggled in the near blackness. I wasn’t about to let go of that throat. Sure, the knife-wielder might well kill me—but it would take a few seconds for the life to run out of me. You ever seen a pig with a cut throat? Often, they wriggle for a long time before they stop twitching.

The neck my fingers were wrapped around didn’t feel all that thick or strong to me, and I figured I could probably squeeze my assailant half to death before I lost consciousness.

I was okay with dying for a good reason. Sometimes, putting a good scare into an attacker gave them pause the next go-around.

Sure, I was probably the one who was going to take an unscheduled trip through the revival machine by the end of this fight. But my murderer was at least going to know it hadn’t been easy.

For about five seconds, the two of us grunted and strove. Then I heard a sound that surprised me. A thump and a metallic clatter. My attacker had dropped the knife—it was gone from my throat, no longer sawing there.

But I didn’t let go of my assailant just yet. I groped with my other hand and clicked on the light.

Della’s pale face grimaced at me. She looked pissed off. I let go of her and sat up. She gasped and rubbed at her throat. There were finger marks there that would bruise up by morning.

“If it was anyone but you, James,” she said, “your head would be lying on the floor.”

“You should have knocked,” I replied. “Normal people on Earth do that—you know about knocking, right?”

“I like to be in control when I enter an unknown situation,” Della explained.

“That’s not a good enough reason to sneak into a house and put a knife in someone’s face, girl.”

“If you’d only relaxed and let me control the situation, you wouldn’t be bleeding now.”

“I’ll have to try out that theory next time I come over to your place.”

We both took deep breaths and tried to calm down. It took longer for Della to settle down than it did for me. She had a bit of a temper.

Della and I had always had a strange relationship. She was paranoid, and so was I. We’d killed one another on several occasions. When a person has a history like that with another person, there are always trust issues afterward.

“Why did you send me that note?” she demanded.

“Because I wanted to talk to you.”

“I know that. About what?”

“Etta—and my parents.”

That surprised her. She blinked and frowned thoughtfully. “I thought it was about Turov and Claver. About some new scheme you’d hatched to take over the world with those two.”

“Now hold on,” I said, “I’m no rebel. I just tend to accidentally get involved in the plans of others.”

She chuckled. “Yes, and then you screw them up. All right then…tell me what your parents want with Etta.”

“They want to see her, of course. My mom’s talking crazy about going out to Dust World on her own.”

I explained the situation at length. She seemed baffled by some points, such as my mother’s extreme desire to meet her one and only grandchild. But at the same time, she seemed pleased that they were taking such an interest.

“Maybe I should have brought Etta to Earth to be cared for by them,” she said thoughtfully. “That had never occurred to me.”

“That’s an idea,” I said.

Della shook her head, frowning. She picked up her knife and sheathed it while I watched her hands carefully. Della and I had killed one another just about the same number of times as we’d made love. I didn’t like those odds, so I always kept my eyes open when I was with her.

“I don’t think I’d like to raise a child here, on Earth,” she said at last. “It’s too different. Your people are soft and lazy, James.”

“Not me.”

She looked up at me and laughed. “No,” she admitted. “Not you.”

“So that’s what I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “I wanted your permission to visit Etta.”

She gave me a baffled look. “Permission? No permission is required. You and your parents are blood-related. You have the right.”

It was my turn to look her over in appraisal. I realized, at that bleary moment, just how little I knew about how she would respond in different situations. In a way, I’d picked the most culturally diverse person I could possibly have found to mate with. That hadn’t been my plan, but that’s how it had turned out. Hell, she wasn’t even from Earth. We spoke the same language, but that was where the similarities ended. A girl from any continent on my home planet would have been more comprehensible to me than Della.

“Okay then,” I said. “So you wouldn’t mind if we traveled out there to see Etta. But there’s another party involved. What about your husband?”

Her eyes flicked to my face, then dropped away. She shook her head. “Don’t worry about that.”

“What? How can I not worry about it? He’ll have thoughts of his own. I’m sure you realize that. He might not appreciate seeing me and my parents. You have to warn him, or send him a note at least. What’s his name?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Why not?”

She looked up at me again, troubled. She heaved a sigh and sat on my couch. I sat beside her, puzzled.

“My husband,” she said finally, “he doesn’t exist.”

“He doesn’t…? What?”

“There is no stepfather, James. No marriage.”

“You lied?”

“I didn’t lie. I’m not a liar.”

“What would you call it, then?” I demanded.

She looked uncomfortable. “I don’t like to be called a liar. I’m a scout, an honorable member of my—”

“Look, let’s forget about that. Who’s taking care of Etta if there’s no stepfather? Is your father doing it?”

“The Investigator?” she asked incredulously. “No, he’s much too busy guiding my people for such a trivial thing.”

“Who then? Don’t tell me she’s out eating rockfish on her own.”

She squirmed. “Natasha. Natasha is doing it. She wanted to help—she volunteered.”

That left me scratching my head. “Okay,” I said. “Natasha is caring for Etta—oh.”

“What?”

“Now I understand why you lied. You told me about Etta back on Machine World, but at that point you hadn’t confessed about Natasha yet. So you made up the stepfather story to cover for Natasha. But then later, you told me about Natasha’s copy. Why didn’t you confess then?”

“A scout does not lie—at least, we’re not supposed to.”

“I see. You had to cover up one lie with another. That’s the kind of thing I understand. I get into trouble that way myself sometimes.”

Della stood up angrily. I couldn’t help but admire her body as she struck a sleek pose without trying. I don’t think I’d ever met a woman who was more fit and graceful. She wasn’t like an Earth girl that worked out all the time—it was all natural with Della. She was like a feral cat, possessing a body built of tight muscle through natural means.

“I don’t see why I even came here,” she said. “All you offer is insults.”

She took a step toward the door, but I gently caught her hand. She stopped and frowned back at me.

“You’d best let go,” she said.

“That’s why you kept coming to my bed back on Machine World, isn’t it?” I asked, hanging onto her lightly. “You weren’t really married—but you couldn’t tell me. I shouldn’t have rejected you back then, but I didn’t know the truth.”

“What’s done is done. Mistakes were made. Now, I must go.”

My mind worked with unusual speed. I only had one move left, I could tell that. Then I’d have to let go of her hand before she cut mine off for me.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “your honor is safe with me.”

I could tell by the look on her face that was the right thing to say. Some people think I’m as off-key as a hound in a firehouse, but with women, I’ve often managed to turn a bad situation around at the last moment. We all have our gifts.

Della smiled. The whole mess between us had been about her honor. She’d been lying about one thing or another since I’d met up with her again on
Cyclops
, and it had been grating on her. By assuring her I wasn’t going to run around talking crap about her, she was instantly relieved of her greatest fear.

She sat back down on my couch decisively.

I’m not going to claim I’m a master of timing, but I
am
an opportunist. I rarely pass up women who are smiling and within easy reach, for example. I put my hands on her gently, and she didn’t resist.

We were in a lip-lock inside of five seconds. I had to mentally congratulate myself. Della had been converted from a murderess stalking me in my sleep into an urgent lover inside half an hour.

But it wasn’t all my doing. That’s just how things tended to go between the two of us. There was no middle-ground.

Things progressed quickly. She bared her breasts and then her teeth as we made love. I’d seen that last part about the teeth before, and it’d always freaked me out a little. She turned animal when we had sex—every time. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.

Afterward, I inspected my bloody throat in my bathroom mirror. Damn, that girl had come closer than I’d realized to severing my carotid. I put a band aid on the wound and gave a long whistle. I was impressed.

I was glad she hadn’t pressed her sharp blade into me another few millimeters. A morning meet-and-greet with my parents would have been awkward if she’d killed me the night before.

After I washed all the blood off, we curled up on the couch together. We slept in a warm tangle of limbs until the gray light of dawn cut through my tattered curtains.