Machine World (Undying Mercenaries Book 4)

by B. V. Larson

“Dragon pilot,” he said, stabbing his chest with his thumb. “I’m marked in the book as a top priority for this push. I don’t know who made that choice, but I’m sure glad they did. If they’d known I’d died as infantry, I’d probably be stuck in the slime tanks for another week.”

  Grinning, I welcomed him back to the squad and shook his hand. More of my people showed up after him, including Harris and Sargon.

  “Wait a minute,” I asked Sargon. “How’d you guys get up here from base camp so fast?”

  “They said the battle was over,” Sargon explained, “so they sent a lifter down to move people uphill fast. I’m sure as hell glad I didn’t have to walk up the side of this rock. Can you imagine how much that had to suck?”

  He grinned at me, and I laughed.

  “You’re glad you died right off,” I assured him.

  When we were done shining up our dragons, we found a good place to camp within the mining complex. Except for a few recon patrols, most of us were brought into the mines for shelter. That night, I was completely comfortable for the first time since I’d landed on Machine World. I was even issued a cot to fold out under my sleeping bag. That was heavenly when compared to stretching out on gravel.

  Besides the cushy cot, the mines were more livable than the exposed slopes. The interior of the mountain was much warmer than the surface. It had to be about minus ten degrees C in here. That was toasty when compared to what we’d been enduring out in the open.

  A storm blew up that night and powdered the land and all the frozen, dead bodies with fresh snow. In the morning, I stood outside on the steep mountainside and admired the view. This world had a strange, crystalline beauty all its own.

  Carlos and Kivi found me out there. They had a funny look on their faces.

  “What have you two done now?” I asked.

  “We found something,” Kivi said. She was fidgeting, excited and worried at the same time. “You want to see?”

  “All right.”

  I followed them back into the depths of the mountain. They led me into the offices the squids maintained on the second level above the main entrance. They showed me a big mess of equipment and heated tanks of dark liquid.

  “Squid beds?” I asked. “I’ve seen them before. I’m surprised they’re still being heated up.”

  “The whole thing is on automatic,” Carlos said. “We could go swimming, but the water is disgusting. What kind of intelligent creatures float around in their own filth?”

  “Well, they filter it and all. It’s kind of like a big fish tank.” I eyed the cloudy water. I wasn’t impressed. “This is why you clowns brought me up here?”

  “No, no, we’ve got a real find,” Kivi assured me.

  They led me to the squid computers. The cephalopods were nothing if not technologically advanced. Their tech was different than what was standardly available in the Empire, but I was no less impressed by it.

  The best thing that Carlos and Kivi found was a computer display system. It looked like a big glass sphere. About two meters in diameter, it played images and sounds from what must have been fully populated squid worlds.

  I had to admit after watching the vids in the globe, I was blown away. Say what you want to about the cephalopods, these creatures had an advanced civilization all their own. They had buildings, cities, starships—they were the real deal. Most of the shots were underwater and wavering, but you could still make out what was going on.

  “Huh,” I said, watching one vid after the next. It was hypnotic, like discovering a new full-fledged version of the internet you’d never seen before. “You realize the Galactics must have planets like these. World after world full of a single proud race of beings. No wonder the squids aren’t knuckling under to the empire willingly. They’ve got too much to be proud of.”

  “We think we’ve made a major find, here,” Carlos said. “What we want to know from you is how best to play it.”

  “Play it?”

  “Yes, James,” Kivi said. “To get rank. What did you think this was all about?”

  I looked from one friend to the next and shook my head. “That’s all you guys think about. Call me old-fashioned, but I really don’t work on schemes to gain promotions. I just do the job the best I can. If someone in my chain of command notices and decides to move me up a notch, well, that’s good enough. But I’m no expert in digging for such opportunities.”

  “Oh please,” Carlos said. “You’re almost as bad as Winslade or Turov, the wizards of rank-climbing.”

  A frown formed on my face. “Well then, you’d best go ask them how to do it. I’ve just gotten lucky a few times.”

  “Hmm,” Carlos said, looking at me thoughtfully. “That could be, you know. Kivi, we could be asking a dog how to wag a tail. He does it all the time, but he’s clueless about how. Maybe we should talk to Winslade.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “We’re not asking anyone else. Winslade would steal the credit for this discovery. We’ll take this to the techs directly, with an agreement from them that we’re to get the credit when they report it to the brass.”

  “Sounds like as good a plan as any,” I said.

  “Thanks for all the help,” Kivi said sarcastically. She walked away down the tunnels with Carlos, who put his hand on her butt. She slapped it away playfully.

  That got me to thinking. Had Carlos managed to pull off his real goal? I knew he’d been actually digging for rank—but he’d been digging for Kivi, too. I shook my head. Maybe he was getting a little better at achieving his goals in life. He’d failed so many times that I couldn’t begrudge him a win now and then.

  After they left, I hung around and kept watching squid videos. It took a while, but I found one vid that was different from the rest. It depicted a world of unrelenting splendor. Spires were thrusting up into an orange sky, coming right out of the sea.

  I’d figured out by now that squids built cities that were mostly underwater. In fact, they seemed to live on worlds that were largely covered by oceans. This didn’t seem strange to me as Earth was mostly covered by water as well.

  After watching a few dozen little movies they’d made, I became fascinated by their architecture. The cities were sitting on the bottom of the sea—almost every planet they had seemed to be covered in a lot of water, and only the tallest buildings poked out above the waves into the open air. How did they get those structures to withstand the constant storms and erosion effects?

  Reviewing vid after vid, I learned quite a bit. After about an hour, Kivi and Carlos returned. They had Natasha in tow.

  “This had better be good,” she told them. “I’ve seen tanks of sludgy wastewater before.”

  They assured her they’d found a gem, and when they showed her the vid-playing globe, she was impressed.

  “James?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m playing with this gizmo. Watch this one. I’ve queued up the best clips for us.”

  Kivi and Carlos looked alarmed.

  “Hold on,” Carlos said, stepping between me and the console. “I’ll show Natasha.”

  I didn’t object. He’d made it plain that they wanted to grab all the glory they could from finding this device. I stepped back and let Carlos do the honors.

  Kivi came alive as she narrated Carlos’ clips. She sounded just like a tour guide. She explained how they’d found the display system and figured out how to work it. They even knew a few tricks I hadn’t figured out yet.

  Staying quiet with difficulty, I let them show off the system. They ignored my queue of key videos and concentrated on system operation. They could zoom, pan and even bring out localized audio from any location on any of the three-dimensional vids. I’d never seen the like of it.

  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.