Green World

by B. V. Larson

  She blinked a few times, and she nodded. “All right, Praetor. Is this a firm order? If so, I must withdraw and make immediate arrangements.”

  He waved for her to go. She saluted and ran off.

  That left just me, Armel, and Drusus.

  The Praetor’s eye became hard—even squinty. He was more than a little suspicious.

  “What did you promise this man for this information, McGill?”

  “Jack-squat, sir. I told him I’d get him breathing again and give him the chance to make his case. Now that he’s done that, I’m out.”

  So saying, I spun on my heel, turning toward the door. I was already planning my lunch.

  “Not so fast. Stand and wait.”

  “Yessir.” Slowly, I turned back to face him. Sometimes, a man just couldn’t slip away fast enough.

  Drusus turned back to Armel, who wasn’t smiling or goofing off. He knew Drusus wasn’t dumb. He was decisive—and he could be mean.

  “What do you expect from us for this good turn, Armel?”

  “Nothing absurd. I don’t expect a command of my own. I merely wish to return to normal society. I want to be a common man again. A retired soul on Old Earth.”

  Drusus snorted. “That’s hardly possible. You’re a renown criminal—worse, you’re a traitor on a grand scale.”

  Armel pursed his lips and shrugged. “I might require… facial surgery? Whatever it takes.”

  Drusus shook his head. “No. You’ll go with us. You’ll stay a prisoner until this campaign is seen through to the end. If I’m satisfied with your efforts at that point, I’ll see that all charges are quietly dropped.”

  “You can do that?” I burst out. “That’s pretty cool.”

  Drusus glanced at me, but he didn’t answer. “What do you say, Armel?”

  “I accept your terms, Drusus. I’m at your service to the bitter end.”

  Drusus then summoned some hogs and had Armel taken to Blue Deck for some more patching up.

  When we were alone, he turned to me at last. “Looks like we’re launching a new campaign together, McGill.”

  “It’s like my birthday and Christmas came all at once, sir!”

  “What do you think of Armel? Can we trust him?”

  “Not half as far as I could throw him. Nowhere near that far, actually…”

  Drusus nodded and paced a bit. I let him get the pacing-thing out of his system without interrupting.

  “I want you to keep an eye on him,” he said at last. “Turov too. I don’t quite know what’s going on, but I don’t like any of it. We’ll go out to Green World, we’ll erase whatever’s there, and we’ll pray that’s the end of it all.”

  I nodded. “I sure hope the good Lord plans to give us a break this time, sir.”

  He smiled faintly. “Me too.”

  -27-

  The next dozen hours were a whirlwind of action. It took us longer to get Dominus underway than we’d hoped—nearly twice as long.

  That said, it was amazing we could get a ship so large fueled and loaded with cargo when the voyage hadn’t even been planned. Hogs and yard-dogs were working hard, sweating and humping and bumping.

  At last, we had enough gear and personnel to cast off. The big ship turned toward the Moon, slid out just past the satellite’s orbit—then Captain Merton hit the gas. We entered warp and hummed along nicely.

  Immediately, I found a hard bunk and flopped on it. That gained me some well-earned shuteye. The break didn’t last long, however. By about 0600 hours, my tapper was beeping and people were hammering on my flimsy cabin door.

  Staggering awake, I threw the door open. A group of officers stood there, and they were shocked by what they saw. The main problem was I was naked from the waist down.

  “McGill?” Graves asked. He glanced sourly around my cabin, but he saw I was alone. “Did you get the update on your tapper last night, McGill? About the breakfast meeting this morning?”

  “Uh… sure did, sir!” I lied with enthusiasm. Night-time messages rarely got read by my eyes, unless they’d been sent by a pretty girl.

  Graves glared at me. “The meeting is right now, and you’re out of uniform, soldier. Put some clothes on. We’ll wait.”

  Behind him, several curious necks craned to look. Centurion Leeza was there, plus Winslade and a few others. She looked amused, while Winslade was disgusted. As for Graves, well, he looked just as annoyed with me as he usually did.

  “Uh… yessir. I’ll get right on that. I like to sleep in the buff when I’m hot, see—sorry about that.”

  I slammed the door in their faces and whipped on some clothes. As soon as I had myself half-covered, I opened the door again and waved for them to enter.

  “Welcome to my humble abode… if you think you’ll all fit, I’ve got a foldout table right here.”

  Winslade snorted. “That’s not our intention, McGill. Come with us.”

  That’s when I realized Winslade was in charge of this little delegation. I didn’t like to see that, but he’d been given command of Legion Varus’ sidekick legion again. Apparently, after Fike had shit the bed at the tribune level out on Edge World, the brass had lost confidence in him. He was just another primus now.

  That meant the job of running what we called our “zoo” of aliens was wide open, and the duty had fallen on Winslade’s skinny shoulders once again.

  In all honesty, that made him a sub-tribune, and I didn’t think he should be lording it over an accomplished man like Graves. But I didn’t make the rules—bureaucrat hogs back on Earth did that. They’d ruled a sub-tribune was a half-step below a full tribune in rank. Essentially, he was in-between the level of a primus and a real tribune. Every sub rank worked like that now. It was good to have a clear chain-of-command, but it did leave a bad feeling in some people’s butts when it resulted in moments like this.

  We dutifully followed Winslade on his rounds. He was gathering up a number of officers, mostly of the centurion and primus rank.

  “Did someone say something about breakfast?” I asked when we were a throng of about thirty people. “I’m getting kind of peckish.”

  “Come, come,” Winslade said, flicking fingers over his shoulder. “Refreshments are this way.”

  Lured like children following the Pied Piper, we made our way down to Yellow Deck and were served a decent meal. Officers filled half the cafeteria, and I had to figure that everyone who’d been in the immediate neighborhood of Central had been shanghaied and shipped out on an emergency basis.

  “I’m going to brief you all on this mission, then our… guest will take over.”

  My hand shot up, and my fingers fluttered in the air.

  Winslade rolled his eyes. “Seriously, McGill? A question already? I haven’t even started yet.”

  “Sir? Why are you doing the briefing instead of Turov?”

  Winslade formed a tight little butthole with his mouth—at least, that’s what it looked like to me. “Because she’s not aboard. She stayed back at Central to organize the transmission of troops from Earth to this ship—and before you ask about Praetor Drusus, you should turn your brain on. He has no intention of wasting his time on this lengthy flight. He’ll join us when it suits him, probably when we’ve arrived in orbit over Green World.”

  I thought that over for a good half-second, then I waved my hand around some more.

  Winslade sighed loudly. His skinny hands moved up to rest on his hips. “What now, McGill?”

  “Who’s our special guest?”

  Winslade smirked, and he made a flourishing movement. It was the sort of thing a cute magician’s helper might do—but Winslade wasn’t cute.

  We all looked toward the kitchen doors he was indicating. The doors swung open, and out walked the disgraced traitor, Maurice Armel.

  The reaction was swift and universal. The crowd howled with hate and anger. People stood up and shook their fists. More than a few apples flew, striking him.

  Armel stood proudly, weathering it all with h
is nose in the air.

  Surprising me, I saw Leeza draw her pistol. She lifted it, but I knocked it down again, pinning her hand to the table.

  “McGill! Let me kill him. You want to do it too, don’t you?”

  “Uh… yeah. But I already did kill him once recently. I flogged his ass good, too. So it’s sort of out of my system.”

  Leeza blinked at me in confusion. I understood the depths of her anger. She’d been Armel’s girlfriend for years. She’d even gone off and joined him in his most recent, most treacherous adventures. Eventually, she’d had enough of it, and she’d left him.

  Coming back to Earth hadn’t been easy for her. She’d had to eat crap—about a mile of it. Somehow, after a good showing at Edge World, she’d been given a second chance. I thought that was strange… but I’d seen weirder things in my long and storied lifetime.

  “Just hear him out,” I urged her.

  Reluctantly, she sat back down beside me. I took the moment to examine her speculatively. She was an attractive woman, but not a raving beauty. I happened to know she had unusual habits in bed, and I couldn’t help thinking of such things now, while she scowled at Armel in a fury.

  Armel proceeded to stand with Winslade and explain he had no official role with the expedition—that he was merely, as he put it “a guide” for Legion Varus.

  That didn’t hold much water with the crowd. They wanted him drawn and quartered. I volunteered to do the honors, if it came to that. This sentiment scored me a mean smile from Leeza.

  At last, Winslade got us to settle down and listen. Armel explained that the Skay ran a tight province out at 926, not like our loosey-goosy Mogwa masters. “In comparison,” Armel said, “the Mogwa are like bad pet owners that don’t even feed their animals or repair the garden fences.”

  “Huh?” I asked aloud.

  “I mean, McGill, that the Mogwa ignore us. They shirk their duties when it comes to protecting Earth, and give us no resources to work with. I served as the enforcer for the Skay in Province 926. They’re radically different. They’re both more effective and less arbitrary. Unfortunately, they’re also as heartless and off-handedly cruel as you might expect a race of planet-sized machines to be.”

  “So… which is better?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Probably the Mogwa. At least we can do what we want in this province—most of the time.”

  “All right, all right,” Winslade interrupted. “Stop distracting him, McGill. Please, finish your briefing.”

  “Of course, Sub-Tribune. Although I’m now only a private citizen—”

  This was too much, so I had an outburst. “A private citizen? You’re a prisoner, not a citizen!”

  Both Armel and Winslade gave me a sour glance, so I shut up.

  “As I was saying,” Armel continued, “I don’t have any official business with the legions. But, I know things…”

  He brought up a star map, and he showed where the border of Province 926 was. Essentially, it was the next chunk of space over, an area about a thousand lightyears wide and half that vertically. Our galaxy was only about five hundred lightyears thick in Earth’s neighborhood, despite being over a hundred thousand across. The shape of the whole thing was kind of like Saturn, with a fat round belly in the middle and rings of stars circling on the outside. That’s where we were, on the rim of the tire, so to speak.

  He went on and on, going into more detail than I cared to listen to. He explained that the border had a line of automated sentry bots—asteroid-sized things.

  “What? Are you kidding me? Are those baby-Skay I’m seeing?”

  Armel looked at me for a moment, then back at the images he was playing with on the big screen. He nodded once. “Yes… they are sort of like that. But they’re not offspring. They are smaller, dumber AI beings. They lack both the firepower and the brainpower of their larger cousins. As a result, they’re not considered citizens. Think of them as guard-dogs.”

  “Ha! Skay guard-dogs! All right.”

  Armel went on, showing how we’d sneak past them, then fly for about a hundred lightyears, going deep into enemy territory. At last, about a month from now, we should arrive at Green World and slide into orbit.

  Here, he flashed up some stills that I thought were even more interesting than the guard-dogs. They were real shots of Green World from orbit. The planet was almost entirely covered in water, one giant sea of dark green. Here and there, islands dotted its surface. There couldn’t be more than five percent of the surface that was land, however.

  “The largest island is about the size of Greenland,” he said, tapping a smudge of land on the endless green sea. “It is located here, near the equator. The weather will be balmy—but the reception will be quite cold, I’m afraid.”

  “Few people are happy when Legion Varus visits their planet,” Winslade remarked, then he gestured for Armel to continue.

  “Just so. I’m not able to help you with the details of any tactical operation after this point. I have not walked the surface, nor have I personally seen the facilities that McGill’s video feed has revealed.”

  Here, he brought up a second window. It showed the inside of the big warehouse I visited, and the rocky beaches surrounding it.

  “I was right there!” I burst out. “That’s from my body-cams!”

  “Yes, yes, McGill… Anyway, as you can plainly see, this island isn’t extremely large. I see no mountain range in the middle of it. The whole place appears to be relatively flat and devoid of major features. Was it hot there, McGill?”

  “No… it was just a nice normal warm temperature. Something like you’d expect on the coast of the Mediterranean or the Caspian Sea, I guess.”

  Armel nodded. “Just so. Dry hot land, but pleasant sea breezes… Hmm. We’ve done some work trying to locate the exact area. There is a large bay with a chain of small islands on the south end of the big island—but that is just a guess on location.”

  Winslade cleared his throat. “I’ve put several techs on the topic. Judging by the tilt of the sun and various other readings from McGill’s tapper, we believe the location is indeed somewhere in the southern tropics. In other words, your guess might be correct.”

  Armel smiled. “That summarizes my briefing at this point. Are there any questions?”

  My arm shot up like a jack-in-the-box, but both Winslade and Armel ignored me.

  Winslade pointed into the crowd. “Yes? No, not you, McGill.”

  I turned to see Leeza standing behind me. Winslade had been pointing at her.

  “I would like to know why we’re trusting this man to lead us into Province 926,” she asked. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest, and her eyes angry. “This could be a trap. What if that friend-or-foe transmission of his attracts the Skay, alerting them to our presence?”

  Armel’s mouth twisted up badly. I could commiserate. There wasn’t anything worse than being publicly confronted by your ex-girlfriend—especially when she was butt-hurt about your old relationship.

  The whole situation wasn’t even fair, to my way of thinking. Armel hadn’t ditched her, for one thing. She’d murdered him with a needler and helped me escape his grasp by teleporting out of his quarters at Rigel. To my way of thinking, that made him the injured party.

  But you couldn’t even try to tell that to a woman like Leeza. She was hell-bent on making it all Armel’s fault. You could just see it in her blazing eyes.

  “I’m trusting that he wants to survive,” Winslade told her. “If we are destroyed, he will be permed.”

  Armel’s lips twitched at the mention of a perming, but otherwise, he had no reaction.

  Finally, Winslade sighed and pointed at me. All this time, I’d had my hand up, waggling my fingers for attention.

  “All right, McGill. What pearls of wisdom do you have for us today?”

  My big hand came down, and it leveled off to point at the big spread of food behind him. “When do we get to eat, sir? I’m starving.”

 
-28-

  At first, the voyage was relatively uneventful. About a week went by, during which I tried hitting on every girl aboard ship, but I wasn’t very successful.

  Leeza straight-out wasn’t interested. She seemed to be all flustered-up because Armel was around. Worse, she was convinced his very existence was entirely my fault. To her mind, I’d brought her old boyfriend back to Legion Varus just to haunt her. No amount of wheedling, boasting, or offers of wine and companionship could budge her.

  Accordingly, I moved on. I tried Natasha, but she wasn’t having any either. That’s the trouble with turning to the second girl in line. She’d watched me follow Leeza around, what with the ship being mostly empty. It was hard for a man to hide his intentions when there were only like five hundred people in a tight amount of space.

  Kivi, on the other hand, was too busy teasing Sargon and Carlos to bother with me. There was nothing unusual about that.

  Galina wasn’t aboard at all, of course, and… well sir, there just weren’t too many other women left in the passages after all those strike-outs. The ship was damned-near empty.

  After the first week, however, more people came aboard. On the morning of the eighth day they set up a direct link to the Mustering Hall. This allowed us to take thousands of fresh faces aboard that had been gathering back on Earth.

  I made certain I was on hand for the opening rush the very minute the gateway posts became active, and I stood right up front, too. The column of marching troops was a welcome sight. They were wearing their full kits and carrying their rucks. Marching two abreast, they appeared to be ready for action. We greeted them with cheers and waves.

  Carlos found me in the middle of this meet-and-greet. He looked me up and down suspiciously. “Waiting for someone special, Centurion?”

  “I sure am, Specialist, and you’re it. You’re going to be my butler today. Go back to my cabin and press one of my spacer suits or something.”

  Carlos looked like he might back off—but he didn’t. He knew I had an angle for being here, and it probably wasn’t just to meet randos walking aboard ship from Earth. He tried hard to figure out what I was up to.