Machine World (Undying Mercenaries Book 4) (26 page)

They were like two computer salesmen, listing facts and figures and demonstrating the product. But they did this in a rather lackluster way. They were focusing completely on the machine while missing the bigger picture. Finally, I’d had enough of it.

“Hold on,” I said. “Let me show Natasha one more thing.”

They looked at me with suspicion. A couple of times since we’d gathered around the globe, Carlos had made shooing motions in my direction. I hadn’t taken the hint.

“What have you got, James?” Natasha asked.

I showed her the top of the vid collection I’d saved previously. I played the most meaningful one. The movie I’d chosen displayed the world that was different from all the others.

“Look,” I said, “see the skyline? There are more buildings up on the landmass, structures that are completely dry.”

“So what?” Carlos demanded. “Maybe their oceans dried up. Maybe they’ve got global warming or something.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think those buildings aren’t built like the rest of them because they’re built for different beings. Land-based aliens of some kind.”

Natasha was fooling with the controls and rubbing her hands on the clear surface of the globe.

“What are you doing?” Carlos asked.

“The surface of this device is touch-sensitive,” she explained, “but the interface doesn’t operate in quite the way we’re used to. They have tentacles, not fingers. I think the squids—there! I’ve got something!”

The image blurred and zoomed. We were taken away from the street scene we’d been watching, which showed squids wandering their spires over the waves on ramps between the buildings. We were taken over the ocean at an alarming pace to the landmass nearby. We zoomed in on a cluster of squatty buildings that were entirely dry.

“How’d you do that?” Kivi asked Natasha. She sounded jealous to me. “I’ve been working with this thing for hours. It never let me select a portion of the image and jump to that focal point.”

“You have to think like a cephalopod,” Natasha said. “They have tentacles, which are a lot different than hands. I laid my hand down like a single curling appendage, using my forearm, actually, to simulate—”

“What the hell?” Carlos interrupted. “I know that guy! See that freak? He’s one of the slavers from Dust World!”

Sure enough, we were treated to a shambling giant of a man. He was tall and thin, almost nude, and I knew from experience he smelled
bad
.

“That’s one of their slavers all right,” I said. “I’d know their kind anywhere. Let’s look for a littermate. Humans—just think of it—altered humans are living among the squids on this planet.”

We kept working with the system and found evidence not only of the humans they’d specially bred as slaves, but also a dozen other types of beings. They all seemed to live in relative squalor on the land.

“Let’s go over what we have so far,” Natasha said in her best imitation of a college prof. “This world does seem different. It’s more built up than the others we’ve seen. Far more of the areas are urban and they have enslaved beings from many other planets living there with them. I’ve noticed many of the enslaved aliens are wearing collars and working at manual tasks.”

“Just like the machines here in this mine,” Kivi said. “The squids are consistent, at least. They seemed bent on enslaving others.”

I nodded thoughtfully, remembering the words I’d heard in conversations with various squids over the last few years. “I remember the guy we met up with on Tech World,” I said. “We were calling him an ambassador, but he told us that was wrong. He called himself the Conqueror or something like that. He said he wasn’t an ambassador or an emissary. He made it very clear his job was to enslave all aliens he encountered. He seemed to think the idea he was a friendly, talkative representative of his race was amusing and maybe a little insulting.”

“A slave culture,” Natasha said, nodding. “A kingdom based on slavery and expansion. It’s nothing new, but it might help Hegemony understand what we’re up against. This is an excellent find, Carlos. And you Kivi, you’ve shown real progress. I bet when the next exams come around for elevation into the ranks of the techs, you’ll be chosen.”

Carlos and Kivi both beamed. This made me smile. Natasha was anything but dumb. She had to know that such praise was exactly what they were seeking. I couldn’t see any harm in it, all the way around. They were doing exactly what their officers wanted, bettering themselves and making themselves more useful to the legion they served.

Earth’s Legions didn’t handle promotions quite the way militaries of the past had done. In the old days, most armies depended on a steady diet of new recruits. The best of these became experienced and were elevated in rank. The rest were discharged as they got older and they were no longer in top physical condition.

In our small independent legions, people didn’t age. You could stay a regular in a combat unit more or less forever. Eventually, most people got sick of fighting and dying and left the service. Some did stick with it and eventually rose in rank.

The difference was we didn’t use seniority as the primary means for deciding who was promoted. Sure, it was a factor. But the promotional system was largely based on skills and performance. As anyone could stay young and useful to the legions for decades on the front line, an individual had to demonstrate they were special to gain rank. Kivi and Carlos were attempting to do just that, and I had to agree with Natasha, they’d shown promise.

“As your veteran,” I said in a formal voice, “I’d be willing to sign any letter of candidacy you might be awarded. Based on what I’ve seen today, you two have shown you’re ready to move up in rank.”

“Thanks for your support,” Kivi said to me. This time, I could tell she meant it.

Carlos looked like a kid who’d finally gotten the cookie jar out of the kitchen. But he wasn’t completely satisfied yet.

“We’ve still got to get an officer in our chain of command to kick things off in the first place,” he said. “I think that’ll be the hardest part. Leeson is a prick and Graves only cares about capturing points on maps. But first, we have an arrangement of our own to conclude.”

The two left, but they didn’t head down to the main chambers. Instead, they went into the dark, unexplored tunnels behind the water tank. There was machinery back there that pumped and heated the water in the tank, making it slosh and gurgle.

I looked after them, smiling. Just before they turned the corner and disappeared, they kissed.

“That’s cute,” Natasha said, looking after them with me. “Looks like Carlos has learned a few tricks from you.”

I glanced over my shoulder at her, eyebrows upraised. She went back to curling her arm into odd positions, trying to get the globe to recognize various touch-commands. Carlos and Kivi were making out in the tunnel for a minute, but then vanished.

“He’s bettered himself,” I said to Natasha. “He’s made himself more useful to the legion. He’ll get rank, just as I have.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Natasha said. “Carlos isn’t out to become a tech. He’s after Kivi. He’s hunting tail not stripes, and to me it looks like he’s managed to get what he really wanted.”

“Oh—that. I don’t think he learned that from me. I never had to work so hard to get with a girl. Women just come and go naturally.”

Natasha gave me a wry glance. Somehow, I figured my words hadn’t made her happy.

She might have said something rude, but right about then a big ruckus began in the room with the squid tank. Carlos was shouting, and Kivi was making a strange, screeching sound.

I ran into the tunnels with Natasha right behind me. In my mind, I figured Carlos had gone too far with Kivi. Maybe he’d grabbed the wrong part of her, and pissed her off so badly she was killing him for it. That’s what I honestly thought.

The truth was far stranger. When Natasha and I got to the chamber with the pumps and filters, we found Kivi was in the curled tentacle of a massive squid. The thing must have been hiding somewhere—probably down in that stinking mess at the bottom of their bathing pool, or maybe it had managed to cram itself into the pipes to hide.

Either way, the tank of water must have run deeper than we thought. I didn’t care where it had come from at the moment, because a squid the size of a school bus was killing Kivi before my eyes.

Without our dragons, riders like us didn’t have much in the way of armor or weapons. We had less equipment than your average light trooper, in fact. But what I did have was the knife I’d always carried at my side. I drew it now, climbed up onto the edge of the tank and slashed at the tentacle that held Kivi aloft.

The whole tank sloshed wildly as the squid shivered in pain. I got the feeling it wasn’t used to being cut like that. The giant squid dropped Kivi, who lay limply on the edge of the tank. Natasha and I backed away, dragging Kivi with us. The foot-thick tentacles lashed overhead, but didn’t strike us. I figured the massive squid hadn’t liked getting a limb amputated.

On a hunch, I raised my knife again, letting it glitter in the monster’s eyes. Those eyes showed a malevolent intelligence. But unlike every other squid I’d ever met, this one seemed less interested in self-sacrifice. It didn’t want risk being injured. Normally, squid troops were more than ready to die to kill a man.

“That’s right,” I said to the squid, even though I doubted it could understand me. “Don’t even think about whacking one of us. I’ll cut you apart.”

Waving my knife to keep it at bay, I dared to glance at Natasha. “Is Kivi still alive?”

“Yes. She might have some broken ribs, but she’ll live.”

“What do you think this thing is?”

“A fantastic opportunity. Hold it here, James. I’ll run down to the main chamber and get a translator. We have the squid language loaded on our bigger computers. We can interrogate it.”

“Okay, go,” I said, backing away further and standing over Kivi. Unless the squid came out of its tank, it couldn’t reach me now.

Natasha ran off, and I looked around quickly. “Where did Carlos go?” I asked Kivi.

She groaned in response, trying to stand. I helped her to her feet. She had both arms wrapped around her mid-section, where the squid had squeezed her with its powerful tentacle.

The squid watched us balefully from its tank, one eye lifted up into the air with a hump of brown flesh around it that looked wet and slimy.

Carlos returned to the scene shortly after that. He had a belcher with him—lord only knew where he’d gotten it. Before I could say anything, he charged up to the tank and blasted the squid in the face with the weapon.

The creature popped, sending chunks of flesh, steaming entrails and boiling blood everywhere.

“Boom! I got that fugly mother!” Carlos exclaimed in triumph.

“Was that necessary?” I demanded.

“What? Seriously, McGill? The biggest ugliest squid of them all shows up and you’re suddenly in love? Is that it?”

“I didn’t think it was dangerous, that’s all. It was unarmed. Natasha wanted to talk to it.”

“Typical bleeding hearts,” he said. “I’ve got news for you: aliens with tree trunk-thick tentacles don’t need weapons. It would have killed you all if I hadn’t shown up and blasted it.”

And thus ended my one and only chance to converse with a super-squid on Machine World.

-35-

After we’d searched the place carefully and made sure no other squids were hiding anywhere, Natasha and I went back to examining the data-displaying globe. Carlos took Kivi down to the main chambers to get her some medical help.

Whatever I thought of Carlos’ actions, Kivi seemed impressed by his efforts to defend her. She was smiling at Carlos, and even gave him a hug as she limped back down the tunnels.

Natasha and I watched them go, and we exchanged smiles. We both figured Carlos might get lucky more than once after all.

The alien globe was a fascinating device, but I sensed I was distracting Natasha somehow. Usually, she’d have been so interested in a new bit of alien tech like this she’d think of nothing else. But she kept bringing up remarks that were strangely off-subject.

“You’ve been doing pretty well for yourself on this campaign,” she said wryly, “as usual.”

I didn’t bother to say anything because I could see where this was going already. She’d always been the jealous type. She’d never liked the way I wandered from one girl to the next on a whim.

Her next question, however, surprised me.

“Have you ever fallen in love, James?” she asked.

“Uh…yeah. Sure. Lots of times.”

She shook her head. “Forget I said that. It was an unfair question.”

“Okay,” I said, and I really did forget.

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence between the two of us. Finally, I thought of another thing to ask her.

“What are you doing with the globe-thing now, anyway?”

“I’m trying to get a good look at their sun. If we can get a spectroscopic reading and a few other elements of data, we might be able to pinpoint where the star is. That’s critical intel, in case this war expands.”

“Ah, great thinking,” I said, and I meant it. We worked together on the globe for a while, and Natasha got her readings.

“I’m not getting an easy match-up,” she said. “Damn the Galactics. If they would only let us use their computers and their nets, we’d have this figured out in seconds.”

“You’ll get it. I’m confident in your technical abilities.”

She rewarded me with a thin smile and a glance. It was the first smile I’d seen on her face lately.

“You want to go back to camp and have dinner?” I asked. “It’s getting late, and I’m hungry.”

She snorted. “Don’t you have a date with Anne going?”

“No, probably not. On this planet I’m always fighting, and when I’m not, she’s busy reviving the aftermath of battle.”

“Right,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s like you work on opposite shifts.”

“Exactly. So, how about dinner?”

She sighed resignedly. “All right.”

We had dinner, and it was better than our usual fare. When a battle was over and we’d won, the legions always brought out the good stuff. The Legion Solstice people had the best food of all. They had shipments of real meat, like whole hams, plus bottles—real glass bottles—of wine and liquor.

One of the best parts of camping in the mines was the increased privacy. We had space and warmth to spare. I’d pitched a private tent in an alcove that once held an alien smelter, and we’d enjoyed the relative seclusion. Natasha used her transmission blocker, and we were on our own all night.

Natasha and I ate, drank and kissed a little, but in the end we didn’t make love. Natasha had given me mixed signals on that front, but I’d ignored them. After all, it had only been a few nights since I’d been with Anne. I would have been with Anne tonight if I’d been given the chance, but I’d tried to find her and discovered she was dead tired after reviving hundreds of dead soldiers.

I didn’t mind missing out on making love to Natasha. Just being with her was good enough. She was different than the other women in my life. She was passionate, and she felt like home to me.

I woke up the next morning feeling great. Natasha was still there, sleeping off the wine we’d consumed together, and I let her sleep in. I stretched out my toes in my spider silk bag, sighing in comfort. The morning was a lazy affair. I figured we were done on Machine World.

Slipping out of our shared cocoon hours after my usual waking up time, I dressed and passed through the flaps of the tent into the cool tunnels. I walked a few steps away, looking this way and that. No one was around.

I kept walking down toward the mess tents, where I was hoping to find some breakfast leftovers. No sooner had I done so than my tapper began beeping.

“McGill?” demanded Graves. “Where the hell have you been? We figured you managed to get yourself killed or fell down a shaft of titanium.”

“No sir,” I said. My mind raced, and I came up with a dodge instinctively. Even first thing in the morning, I was always ready with a glib excuse. “I pitched my tent in a private spot. Maybe I was too close to one of those stacks of titanium bricks, and my tapper was off the grid. Sorry, sir.”

The real truth, of course, was we’d used one of Natasha’s toys. Techs like to build things, and one of the things they built the most often was a cloaking device that scrambled signals in their immediate vicinity. They knew all too well that officers could check on them twenty-four-seven, and they didn’t like it. They knew how to turn off their cameras, their tappers—the works. Whenever Natasha slept with me, she did this as a matter of habit.

“Dammit man, we need you. Our situation has changed. Get to the command module right now.”

My dreams of breakfast ham vanished. Moving at a fast trot, I reached the command module about five minutes later. Frost and loose gravel crunched under my feet with every stride.

As I ran, the cohort server downloaded all the texts and emails and warnings I’d apparently accumulated while I’d enjoyed myself with Natasha. My arm was vibrating and beeping like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t even bother to stop and read them all, I just kept running and saying “shit” to myself every few steps.

“There’s McGill,” Graves said the second I came in. “Get over here, Veteran.”

I trotted to his side. Grim-faced officers were everywhere. I was beginning to worry. What kind of crap was I in the middle of this time?

“It’s the Nairbs,” Winslade said, staring at me with hooded eyes and crossed arms. To me, he looked like my dad when I came home extremely late on a Friday night. “They’re in-system, and they want you on the line before they’ll talk.”

The Nairbs.
Those words struck me with a chill. They were the bureaucrats of our Empire, the proxies of the Mogwa. They were pitiless and precise. If there was a tin credit-piece missing when they finished up their accounting, they’d order everyone in town permed. I’d dealt with them before on several occasions, and I’d have to say that neither the Nairbs nor I had ever enjoyed the experience.

On the tactical display the officers had set up in their command module, I could see the Nairb ship. It was the real deal. I knew those Imperial lines. The ship wasn’t equipped for a pitched battle, but I knew they often carried hell-burners—bombs that could extinguish all life on a planet. I’d even seen them in action once, when they’d exterminated a squid colony world.

Feeling little tickles of sweat sprouting all over me, I turned toward Winslade. “Anything you want to brief me on before I talk to them?”

“I don’t want you to talk to them at all,” Winslade replied. “No sane man would. But Turov has already tried, and failed, to get them to tell us what this is about. They just keep talking about a ‘clear violation’ and mentioning your name.”

Every officer’s eye was on me now. I could feel it. The truth was, the Nairbs had a half-dozen good reasons to be pissed off at me personally, and everyone here knew it. Hell, I couldn’t even be sure which of my crimes they’d finally figured out and pinned to my name.

“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding, sirs,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

Winslade snorted and rolled his eyes. Graves sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “McGill, I want you to
think
before you speak. Whatever the Nairbs hit you with, you can’t give them an excuse to take drastic action.”

“We should perm him,” Winslade said suddenly. “Right now.”

“Say, what?” I asked, startled.

Winslade didn’t even look at me. It was like I wasn’t even there.

“We can’t take the chance of putting him on line with the Nairbs,” he went on. “He’ll blab something. We can’t risk the erasure of all Earth over one specialist.”

“That’s already occurred to me, sir,” Graves said. “The idea was discussed and rejected before you even got here.”

“Rejected? Why?”

By about this point, I had my breath back. Open talk of perming me by my own officers had taken the wind out of my lungs. I wanted to speak up, to object to this line of reasoning, but I managed to contain myself. Maybe Graves had a strong point in my favor. I judged it would be best not to mess that up by opening my big mouth.

“To do so would be a violation,” Graves explained. “After reviewing Turov’s initial conversation with the Nairbs, one critical element stood out: She admitted to them McGill was present and alive. They asked that question first, before revealing their intent. It’s standard prosecutorial procedure designed to entrap the guilty. They know he’s alive and with us. If we kill him now, it’s tantamount to an admission of guilt.”

“We can still do it,” Winslade said doggedly. “If he’s dead, they can’t talk to him. What can they do?”

Graves shook his head. “No offense, sir, but you’re out of your league. To the Nairbs, it will smell like a cover-up. They’ll widen the investigation. They’ll draw up new charges. Frankly, it’s the worst thing we could do.”

Winslade slid his eyes toward me at last. He looked at me the way I’d looked at my plate of ham last night—only, he didn’t seem to like ham.

“I don’t know,” he said. “He might widen this investigation all by himself.”

“Our orders from Turov are to open the channel and present him to the Nairbs as they’ve requested,” Graves insisted.

“I’m in command here, not the Imperator. I think we might have an accident first.”

“You’re wrong, sir,” Graves said firmly. “The Imperator is in-system, and she outranks you.”

Winslade’s eyes returned to Graves. “So that’s how it is? I see. I thought you were starting to care about your career again. Very well, open the channel. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into fiasco that results our collective funerals.”

Once the channel opened, I knew I was in the clear. Winslade couldn’t very well off me while I was talking to the Nairbs live. But I was filled with tension anyway.

An ugly green sack of alien flesh known as a Nairb swam into view on the display. I immediately felt I knew how all fugitives felt when the authorities finally caught up to them and made that fateful arrest. There were too many crimes on my rap sheet for me to sit easily in their presence.

As the Nairb began squawking into his interpreting machine, I began to wonder if Winslade had been right. If he’d gotten his way and permed me, things might have turned out better for everyone.