by B. V. Larson
“He did. But he wasn’t happy about the place after you fried him a week ago. I took over the spot for its ascetic beauty.”
“It sure has a pretty view.”
She waved a finger in my face. “You have ruined it for me forever. In fact, I hate the Moon now. I was burned, James. I felt it—I can remember it. It was like being trapped in a microwave.”
“Oh… I’m sorry.” I lifted a hand and put it on her shoulder in a comforting fashion, but she brushed me off.
“You dick, I’ll never believe you didn’t do that on purpose.”
“Listen, Galina… I did get myself killed. I did set off the signal again—but I did all that to kill the Nairbs. I had no idea you would be hurt.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I admitted to a few very interesting things while the governor listened. Then I decided it was time to get the Nairbs out of the way. Sure enough, the governor emerged from hiding, and I got to talk to her personally.”
“Such scheming…”
I shrugged. “It’s all good now. She’s convinced I didn’t kill Xlur. She’s not going to punish Earth.”
Galina’s eyes searched mine. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“You always do things like this, James. You killed everyone who got in your way, and then you romanced some nasty, pregnant alien! I’m disgusted!”
“She’s not pregnant. That’s a pouch, see. She’s carrying a baby Mogwa in there.”
Galina shuddered. “Whatever. I… I need a shower.”
She stomped off, and I watched her go. She had a nice walk, even when she was on the Moon and angry. The thought of her in the shower got my mind to wandering.
Was she so pissed off because I’d upstaged her with the Mogwa? I wasn’t sure. That was reasonable on the face of it, but there seemed to be something else. Something personal.
She was hurt, I think, because I was carrying on with Dawn instead of her. That didn’t make any kind of sense, but I thought it was true.
Hmm. The situation was going to take some thinking about.
-20-
The next day I was walking around the Moon base like I owned the place. To my way of thinking, I pretty much did.
“McGill?” Adjunct Bevin asked me in a whisper when he found me at breakfast. “How do you do it?”
“Uh… do what?”
“Things like pissing on Galactics and getting away with it. Not to mention shagging half the chicks on every base you’re assigned to—stuff like that.”
“Whoa, whoa! First off, nobody has touched any Galactics. You forget all about that, and you should never speak of it again, okay?”
“Right, right, sorry. I’m sure it’s some kind of crime to even utter such words.”
“It sure as hell is. Secondly, I’ve only got one girlfriend on this base, and that’s way less than half of the women on this big-ass moon.”
Bevin twisted up his lips. “Come on, mate. Carlos has been talking to me. I know how you operate.”
Carlos. Of course.
“Don’t ever listen to that bitter, jealous little man. He’s just mad because I, uh, I once interfered with one of the girls he liked.”
“You mean Specialist Kivi, right? He told me all about that, too. I met her—what a hot package. I can hardly blame you for hitting on her.”
I blinked at him. “Kivi is here? On base, you mean?”
“They all are. Your crew. The teleport squad you were supposed to invade the Skay with has finally arrived. I guess they won’t be needed now. They’ll probably send them back to Earth. Too bad, in Kivi’s case.”
I stood up and left my breakfast half-eaten.
“Cheers,” Bevan said. The minute my back was turned, he stole my food and helped himself.
Hardly noticing, I went in search of my “crew” as Bevan called them. I found them below decks. They’d been given quarters in the least hospitable part of the facility—the basement they’d dug out when they’d originally found the Skay’s hull.
“Here he comes at last,” Harris said as I walked up to the group. A full squad sat dejectedly on a pile of emergency gear. It looked like they had a heated tent and few other amenities.
“Wow,” I said. “I can scarcely credit my eyes. How did you ladies score these first class accommodations? Did you have to bribe the dock boys to put you up down here in the Moon dust?”
They all looked like they smelled a sewer. Perhaps they did—they’d been cooped up in their suits for a full day now.
“Centurion, sir,” Harris said, “I was chosen to lead this sorry-ass platoon until you arrived. Now that you’ve decided to join us, I fully and gratefully relinquish my command—”
“Whoa! I’m not here to relieve you, Adjunct. I’m here to take stock of an operational asset. Are you all ready to march into combat in ten minutes flat?”
They looked around at one another. A few of them scratched at their suits, but that was pretty pointless. It was like trying to scratch an itch through a sleeping bag. These spacesuits were just too bulky.
“Not exactly, Centurion,” Carlos said. “We’ve been kind of busy breathing our own farts since we got here.”
I whirled around to face him. My eyes were wide and staring. “There you are, my favorite specialist. You’ll be happy to know I’ve got a very unique duty for you to perform tonight, Ortiz.”
Right off, Carlos looked worried.
Cooper laughed aloud, catching both our expressions. “Whip his ass, McGill! He’s been as funny as a butt pimple since we got here.”
“That’s an accurate assessment, sir,” Harris chimed in.
I could tell Carlos had been working hard to make friends from the very start. That was just his way. He’d never been killed without someone privately cheering when it happened.
Reluctantly, Carlos gathered his kit and followed my crooked finger. We walked out of the pit and up to a higher level of the base. At least it was clean up here, all metal instead of raw rock.
“Carlos, what is your frigging problem?” I asked him.
“What do you mean, sir?” he asked in a tone that told me he knew exactly what I was talking about—and he didn’t care.
“You’ve been going around telling people stuff you shouldn’t be talking about.”
“What? Is your ego stung, McGill? All I did was warn a few innocent women. If that—”
I grabbed him and gave him a shake. He broke free, and we squared off.
“No, you idiot,” I said. “I’m talking about mouthing off about Galactics. I just spent all frigging day getting our new Mogwa governor off our butts.”
“What? You did? The governor is here? And you talked to him?”
I hesitated. “Yeah, I talked to the governor—and he’s a she this time, by the way. I had to do it just right. They found out some things, see. Some things that went wrong back at the Core Worlds.”
Carlos squinted at me. “You went to the Core Worlds?” he said, figuring things out immediately.
That was the trouble with trying to talk to Carlos. He wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. Worse, he had a sixth sense when it came to lies, secrets and scandals. To top it all off, he had the biggest mouth in the legion.
“That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “The point is I can’t have you talking to anyone about what you heard, or you think you heard. Forget all that stuff for the good of Earth.”
“For the good of McGill, more like,” he said, laughing. “But yeah, sure. I get it. You don’t have to spell it out. You like your privacy. You like your free-wheeling ways with the ladies. As your humble specialist, I shouldn’t get in the way of your happiness.”
“Dammit, Carlos, just don’t talk about dead aliens—not to anyone.”
“No problem, Centurion…” he said, then he nudged me with his elbow. “But you have to tell me, did you nail her?”
“What? Who?”
“You know. I bet you had to get down on all
fours to do it, didn’t you? I bet you threw up afterwards, too. All that hair and those eyes looking everywhere at once. Gives me the creeps.”
I blinked at him for a few seconds, then I noticed he was grinning and I got it.
“I didn’t screw the Mogwa, Carlos. That’s just sick.”
He laughed. “I didn’t think so, but then you had that funny look in your eye when you mentioned it was a lady Mogwa, and I began to wonder. Part of me said: ‘yeah, sure, why wouldn’t he? He’s McGill after all.’ But then, my rational brain rejected the idea. I mean, I know you’re a goat, and all, but even—”
I grabbed him by the scruff of his spacer suit and gave him a shake. It wasn’t much of a punishment, but he stopped talking. If he’d been out of that helmet, I might have punched him.
“You hear the crap coming out of your mouth right now? That’s what I’m talking about! No more talking shit about aliens!”
Carlos grumbled, but he did finally shut up. I left him there and walked off in irritation. A moment later, I realized he was following me.
“Don’t you have to go back to your platoon, Specialist?”
“Aw come on, McGill. It sucks down there. When those dogs at the docks saw we were a full combat unit, they ordered us to camp in the dirt under their precious base. It was like we weren’t good enough to walk on their rattling ramps and sleep in aluminum modules dug into the side of a frigging crater. Oh sure, they talked a good game about the overuse of their oxygen and state of their carbon dioxide scrubbers—”
“Whatever. Shut up and follow me.”
Eagerly, Carlos trailed in my wake. “Where are we going?”
“The bar, I guess. I need a drink.”
“Cool. If you want to get me drunk, I’ll be easy tonight. I swear it.”
That was Carlos in a nutshell. He was the most annoying asshole of a friend I’d ever had. Somehow, he’d never quite pushed me enough to ditch him, but I’d thought about it more than once.
We’d joined up together, enlisting in Legion Varus on the very same day. We’d also died our first times together—we were like brothers, in a way. No one else could figure out why I put up with all his shit, but it was due to our long history, I guess.
We had a few drinks down at the spacers’ bar. Carlos became happy, then buzzed. He hit everything that even looked like it was a girl under that baggy spacesuit. I mulled over my beers, thinking hard.
Three females were on my mind tonight. Galina, Dawn… and Governor Nox. The last one was the most important.
Sure, I’d thrown her off the scent. She’d been talked into barking up various other trees instead of the one I was perched in.
But that Nairb of hers… her chief investigator. He’d made a career out of hunting me down. I knew he’d never give up. Never.
Along about five beers later, my tapper began to itch. I took a second to look down at it, and I realized it had been buzzing and filling with red messages.
I poked and swiped through the most recent of these, and Galina’s face popped up. I grinned, immediately entertaining certain ideas. After all, when a lady calls a man relentlessly after quitting time… well sir, sometimes that can be a good thing.
One look at her panicky face melted my fantasies in a hurry. She wasn’t hot and bothered—she was freaked out.
“Uh… what’s wrong, sir?”
“McGill…? McGill… you did it again. You really are a moron.”
“Huh?”
“The second message you triggered—it’s been received. Another ship is coming out from the Core Systems.”
“Yeah, so?”
“This time, James, it’s one of the Skay…”
She said a bunch of other stuff, but I didn’t listen to any of it. I just drank my beer and said “uh-huh” now and then.
Finally, at long last, I knew what Galina was upset about. The Skay weren’t like the Mogwa—they were worse. A lot worse.
-21-
Governor Nox summoned Primus Graves, Tribune Turov and little old me to a meeting the next morning. To top it all off, we were ordered to meet on Nox’s ship.
That was unusual. Most of the time, the Mogwa acted like humans were dirty animals. They didn’t like to see us aboard their ships any more than a housewife wanted to see a herd of goats in her parlor.
Right off, we all suspected we were walking into an execution. Galina was fully convinced of this.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “We all know McGill is guilty of any sin any of us can imagine. So, they’ve been digging a little deeper, and they found something very ugly. Whatever it is—they’ve traced it back to him. To top that all off, we’re both his immediate supervisors.”
Graves perked up at this. “You think that’s why we’re tagging along? To suffer the same fate as McGill?”
“It seems likely, doesn’t it?”
“That’s a good thing then. If they keep the executions down to just McGill and the next two officers in his direct chain of command—well, we’ll be getting off lucky.”
“I don’t call that good luck,” she snapped. “Earth might, perhaps—but I don’t.”
“Ladies, ladies!” I said, putting up what I hoped were two big calming hands. “Let’s not lose it just yet. Let’s hear what our most excellent Governor Nox has to say.”
They fell into a moody quiet, and we followed the lit arrows on the deck to a large chamber. Stepping inside, we found Lady Nox holding court with six Nairbs. These lesser beings were scattered around the base of her throne-like chair. None of their twitching noses were lifted higher than her six nasty-looking feet.
“Humans,” Nox said, “we have unfortunate news.”
“What’s that, Governor?” I asked loudly.
Nox slid her eye-groups over me, then moved them to Galina.
“I was under the impression that you were in command here, Tribune.”
“I am indeed.”
“Very well. Tell your beasts to be silent until called upon.”
“Gladly.”
Galina turned and drew her sidearm. Nox shrank back a little, and the Nairbs squirmed.
“You were asked to leave all weapons behind!” the Nairb chattered.
But Galina aimed the pistol at me, not the Galactics. “McGill, be silent on pain of death.”
I almost opened my big yap to say “yes sir,” but I stopped myself with my mouth hanging wide.
Galina nodded in approval. “Excellent. You can be taught to take instructions—but only at the point of a gun. I shall remember this moment fondly.”
She turned back to Nox and holstered her weapon. “What can we do for you, Governor?”
Nox relaxed a fraction. She eyed us the way a child might look at scorpions in a glass cage. “You are here to be instructed. There is another ship coming out from the Core Worlds.”
I almost opened my big yap and said something like “we know all about that” or something equally improper. Fortunately, I was able to quell the impulse.
All of us stood there with stony faces. I was probably the only one who even twitched a little.
“Do you know anything about this ship?” Nox asked quietly.
Galina looked evasive. “We do now, your Excellency. Is there anything else you can tell us?”
Nox looked like a black widow as she crouched on her throne. Her eye groups scanned us carefully. Nox looked at us each in turn. She tilted her head toward the Nairb next. The chief inspector waddled forward a few centimeters.
“The enemy vessel is headed to the border of Province 921 and Province 926. This is a ceasefire line between the Mogwa and the Skay empires.”
“Uh…” I said, not getting it at all. “Why the hell are they flying out there?”
Quick as a cat, Galina drew her pistol and put it against my temple. It seemed to me like she wanted to shoot.
Nox watched this with interest.
“He’s spoken out of turn again, my Lady,” Galina said. “Should I exec
ute him?”
“It would be the sensible thing to do… unfortunately, I have plans for him. Taking drastic action now would upset them.”
Galina nodded and she put her pistol away again.
I glanced down at her in alarm, but she didn’t look me in the eye. There it was, a hostile attitude showing itself. It wasn’t just my imagination. She was pissed off at me.
“To answer your poorly-timed question, McGill,” Nox continued, “we’ve analyzed their target, and we believe there is reason for concern.”
None of us said a thing. I didn’t even move a muscle. I’d come to this meeting feeling kind of floaty after a half-dozen rocket-beers, but now that buzz was draining away. I was sad to feel it go.
“Explain it to them,” Nox snapped at her top Nairb.
He lifted his snout high and addressed us. “The approaching Skay vessel is headed toward the 91 Aquarii star system. It’s our belief they intend to create a border incident there. We’ve already laid claim in district court to this satellite—and they know it. Oddly, they have not bothered to do more than file a stay of judgment—that’s an entirely illegitimate action, of course, but it will tie things up for quite some time and—”
“Get to the point, Inspector,” Nox interrupted.
The Nairb ruffled himself before beginning again. “The point is that they’re irritated and see it as in their best interests to push back in some way. The Skay are programmed to overcome all obstacles and to meet aggression with aggression. In this case, they see themselves losing something of value. Accordingly, they seek to make a claim of their own in the 91 Aquarii star system.”
“How so, overlords?” Galina asked. “I’m not sure I understand how they can make the claim stick, if the system in question is clearly in Province 921.”
“That’s the problem,” the Nairb continued. “Star systems move, you know. They travel at many thousands of kilometers an hour. Because of this, over the centuries, one system might move enough to legally be located in a different province.”
“Ah…” Galina said. “So, the 91 Aquarii system borders their space?”
“It’s worse than that, I’m afraid,” Nox said, coming back into the conversation. “It’s on the very edge. Half in, and half out of the two provinces. It is, in effect, transitioning into Skay territory.”