Green World

by B. V. Larson

  I could have ordered him to shove-off, but I didn’t feel like it. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet, he was just mildly irritating by nature.

  “It’s Turov, right? That’s it, isn’t it? She’s coming aboard today, and you’re hoping for some sugar.”

  “Wrong. She won’t come until we’ve almost reached the target world.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she can wait on Earth until the last minute. Would you rather be aboard Dominus or back home sitting in some restaurant, if you had the choice?”

  He nodded. “Hmmm… good point.”

  Still, he didn’t leave. He lingered, watching me and the crowd.

  About five hundred folks filed by before one officer in particular caught my eye. Her name was Jenny Mills, a centurion in the same cohort I was in, under our dear Primus Graves. Jenny and I had shared a night or two way back, but I hadn’t talked to her much for years. Still, I figured she was the best shot I had today.

  “Hey Jenny!” I shouted as soon as she walked onto the deck plates. “Hey look, everybody! It’s Centurion Mills. We can get the party started now.”

  She looked around in some confusion, then walked over to where I stood. Carlos wisely melted away, but I saw him tossing appreciative glances at her from behind.

  “McGill?” Jenny asked. “I was told you’re one of the primary instigators of this fuster-cluck. Is that true?”

  “Guilty as charged. How about we have dinner tonight? I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Um…” she said, and she flicked her eyes to the left. That might be a good sign. If a girl looks at the ceiling, that usually means she isn’t interested. If she looks at the deck, she probably is. But a glance to the side? Well sir, according to the James McGill bible of female responses, that indicated she wasn’t sure.

  In short, she was telling me I had a chance.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Five years back—or was it ten now? Jenny had been in action with me on Armor World. We’d had a few moments, a few dates, but then she’d caught me texting another girl and promptly dumped me. All of that was ancient history at this point, so maybe she’d forgotten about being mad.

  “All right,” she said finally. “What the hell. I know a shit-storm when I smell one, and you’re always in the middle of these things when they happen.”

  “I’m like a force of nature! Let’s go.”

  Jenny followed me off Gray Deck. As we left I glanced back, and I saw Carlos shaking his head and making obscene gestures with his fingers. Was that annoying? It sure as hell was. But he hadn’t interrupted. He hadn’t come over and tried to warn Jenny off, or made some kind of loud joke. I considered that to be major progress on his part. If he kept this up, Carlos was going to have to be reclassified as fully human.

  Jenny dropped off her stuff at her module, then she walked the quiet passages of the big ship with me. I gave her the whole story—with a few key edits, naturally. She listened to me with big eyes, and before either one of us knew how we’d gotten there, we were standing on Green Deck.

  “You remember when I burned this place down?” I laughed.

  “Yes. My unit couldn’t exercise for a week.”

  I guffawed and carried on. Jenny watched me, but her arms were crossed and her eyes were kind of slitty. That wasn’t a good sign, but I pretended not to notice. It wasn’t until I got to the juicy parts, like when I’d revived Raash and Armel back on Earth, that she seemed impressed.

  “So… do I have this story straight? You’re claiming that you not only went out to Rigel and killed two of the enemy—”

  “Hold on! It was four, if you count those two watch-lizards Armel had with him.”

  She nodded. “Four then, right. After all that, you get two of these traitors revived on Earth? Why?”

  I had her going now, I could tell. Her eyes were big, blue and round. Her arms weren’t crossed anymore, either, and I was glad to see it. They’d been squeezing her breasts down so hard I thought they’d go flat.

  “That’s just it, see. Big stuff is happening in the cosmos. These two knew the inside story, and I knew they’d both like to get back into the good graces of mother Earth. Accordingly, I brought them home and got them to confess their worst crimes. Central was so grateful to them—and to me—that they were allowed to continue breathing.”

  “Really? No prison time? No punishment at all?”

  “Well… there was a solid flogging in the deal for old Armel. I did the honors personally. And that crazy lizard—he died kind of hard on the way back here. Sure, we brought him back to life and all, but I don’t think he’s totally happy with his new circumstances.”

  “Why not?”

  “Uh… he’s kind of blue, now. I mean his scales, his skin. It’s a different color.”

  Jenny shrugged. “So what? If I was permed, and I came back as a redhead, I wouldn’t complain about it.”

  “That’s what I said! But, according to that big crybaby lizard, there aren’t any blue raptor-types on Steel World. Only the big guys, the juggers, are sometimes blue.”

  Jenny blinked a few times as she thought that over. Then she looked up, and she registered horror. “You don’t mean that he’s been genetically altered, do you?”

  I shrugged. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “But how could that have happened?”

  “Well, you have to understand, out on Dust World they don’t have all the same fancy equipment that we do on Earth. The Investigator has to make-do, see?”

  She blinked some more, and then her eyes became squinty again. I hated that look on her face—on any girl’s face.

  “You did some kind of bootleg revive on him? With a stew of genes that you somehow got wrong? Why the hell did you do that?”

  “It wasn’t me, it was the Investigator.”

  “Yeah, but why him? What was wrong with a proper revive at Central?”

  I winced a little. I’d hoped to avoid this topic, but Jenny was too smart, too inquisitive. I tried a few dodges, offering her some wine I had in a picnic basket, and such-like. It was all no-dice. She wanted answers, or this date was going to be dead-on-arrival.

  “Okay, okay. The problem involved two things. First off, all I had left was one of his claws. There was a little meat on it, but it was kind of messed up by the time I got to Dust World—”

  “That’s awful!”

  “That’s what I said! But see, the hogs back at Central didn’t want to help much. They claimed all kinds of nonsense about tissue damage and unreadable DNA and whatnot. Anyways, I had his mind in my tapper, so all I needed was a body. The only man in the cosmos who was willing to do the trick was the good old Investigator.”

  Jenny looked away, and she gave a little shudder. I hadn’t meant for her to be imagining herself under these awful circumstances. That wasn’t going to buy me squat. In an effort to switch things up, I told her there was something amazing and new at the lagoon.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  There you go. Curiosity was her weak spot, always had been. She wasn’t curious about tech stuff the way Natasha was, but she couldn’t stand the idea that some cool event had happened without her knowing the details. She liked a good story, and I could spin-up the best of them.

  She followed me to the beach, and we walked along together, with me talking a mile-a-minute. Eventually she noticed that there was absolutely nothing new or different at the lagoon, but by that time, we were sipping drinks and smiling at each other.

  The long and short of it was she figured I’d given her enough gossip to pay my debts, and we had a sweet time out on the beach when the fake sun went down.

  -29-

  The next morning we were rolled out of our beds—literally.

  A new wake-up-and-scramble system had been installed since our last campaign out to Edge World. Apparently, the brass had done some timing studies and decided we weren’t getting our
hindquarters down to Red Deck fast enough.

  Accordingly, they’d installed servos that whined and pitched everyone out of our bunks and onto the floor. Grunting and cursing up a blue-streak, I got to my feet and dragged on my uniform. I straggled out into the passages with everyone else in my unit’s module.

  “What the hell was that?” Carlos demanded. “I landed on my dick!”

  “No harm, no foul,” Sargon told him.

  That earned him a dark look. They were still butting heads over Kivi, who was undoubtedly just messing with both of them for fun.

  Slamming my hands together, I called the troops to roll-call. Everyone was present and accounted for, so when the floor lit up with red arrows—that meant the combat forces were to follow these indicators—we hit the passages hustling and moving at a trot.

  I checked in with Graves, just in case. “Is this a real emergency, Primus?” I asked. “Or a drill—or is it just bullshit?”

  “Follow the arrows, McGill.”

  I tried to say more, but he’d dropped the connection.

  “This is bullshit, right sir?” Harris asked me. He was jogging at my side, listening to the call.

  “That’s more than likely. Still, as we’ve gotten no orders calling this a drill, and we’re passing the armory on this deck, I think we should override the locks and help ourselves.”

  Harris chuckled, and we handed out weapons. Normally, we kept our rifles in the armory when we weren’t in a combat zone. That was to keep down the odds of an argument turning into a fire-fight between the boys.

  Talking to all my officers, I made an announcement. “Since we’re clearly on an emergency footing, I feel more than justified to issue weapons and live ammo to my troops in this moment of uncertainty.”

  Barton and Leeson exchanged worried glances, but they shrugged and handed out the guns. A few minutes later, we were jogging along armed and dangerous.

  Manfred spotted me at the next junction. His eyes fell on my full armament, and his eyebrows shot high. “What’s this? We’re really going into action? I thought this was some kind of exercise—or worse, a briefing.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” I told him.

  He nodded, and after frowning a bit, he ordered his troops to make a pit stop as well. As we followed the arrows farther, I saw more units doing it.

  “Monkey-see, monkey-do,” Harris quoted to me. “The brass is going to shit bricks.”

  “Maybe.”

  After another minute passed, Jenny contacted me as well. She confirmed that I was wearing my full gear, and she assumed I knew something she didn’t.

  That’s one of the dangers of being a maverick who involves himself in constant conduct-unbecoming. People tended to start rumors over every random thing you did. They saw me as a trend-setter, rather than a loose cannon.

  In this case, however, I was happy about the fact half my cohort was arming themselves like it was the end-times. It gave me excellent cover. If everyone had misunderstood the situation, how could I catch all the blame?

  The arrows finally converged somewhere unexpected. Instead of heading to Green Deck for an exercise, or to the mess hall for chow, or even to the lifters for evacuation, they led us to an area we hadn’t stepped into for a long, long time.

  A set of big vacuum sealed doors let us into the outer hull of the ship. Or rather, the space between the outer hull and the inner.

  A long time ago, I’d fought a battle in this airless region of a different transport ship. That was on the way to Death World. The Wur had set up a surprise for us back then: invading pods that adhered to the outer hull, ate through the metal with powerful acids, and weird creatures had slipped through to attack us.

  When we got to our rally-point, I looked around and saw most of the cohort was here. Two of the units in the zone had no weapons—just two.

  Graves was already there. He walked around, eyeing us with disdain. “You look like grannies,” he assured us. “But at least you’re armed—except for Johnson?”

  “Hey, is that Johnson?” I crowed. “When did they make you an officer? I remember when you were noncom, and I seem to recall—”

  “Shut up, McGill,” Graves said.

  Johnson was frowning at me and Graves. He’d always been an unimaginative man. Not a bad sort, just kind of a dull blade.

  Graves gave him a lecture, telling him he’d forget his cock if it wasn’t glued on and such-like. Harris and I grinned ear-to-ear.

  “I remember when he punched you in the kidneys,” Harris said, “and you had your knife all set-up, and you cut half of them off for him.”

  “Oh yeah…” I grinned harder and cupped my hands over my mouth to make a megaphone. “Did you forget your fingers too, Johnson?”

  “Fuck you, McGill!”

  Graves shook his head and marched around angrily. Johnson asked to go back and arm his unit, but Graves didn’t give him permission. “We’ve been ordered to man this station. We’re hitting the border to Province 926, and we’re passing the first of their many robotic defenses.”

  “Oh, I get it. The friend-or-foe thing. Is Armel for real, or is he not? That’s the billion credit question.”

  Graves eyed me. “You’d better hope that he’s on the level.”

  “Why me in particular, sir?”

  “First off, because he’s your pet. You brought him back, and if anything goes wrong, I’ll make sure everyone remembers that.”

  “You’re all heart, sir.”

  “What’s more, did you happen to notice our post? We’re guarding the vacuum between the two hulls. That’s got to be the first thing that will be destroyed if something goes wrong.”

  “Oh…”

  Graves was right, of course. If those border forts—mini-Skay, they’d called them—decided in their AI brains to fire upon us, well sir, anyone in this airless zone could kiss his ass goodbye.

  My grin faded as I thought that over. I looked toward Harris, and he was no longer laughing, either.

  “This sucks,” he said.

  I didn’t even bother to answer.

  Instead of talking to the other officers, I went to find Natasha. That was pretty easy, as I had a special HUD inside my helmet that allowed me to track and pinpoint anyone in my unit, dead or alive.

  When I walked up, she didn’t look overjoyed to see me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Lots of things. To start with, we’re passing into Province 926 right now.”

  “I know that much. What do you want from me?”

  Right there, I caught it in her voice. She was miffed, unfriendly. Had she heard about Centurion Mills already? Damn, this legion was like five hundred blackbirds peeping on a wire. Gossip traveled faster than orders.

  “I need to know what’s happening,” I told her.

  She shrugged. “We’re in a warp-bubble, James. What can I do from here with a field computer and a tapper? Our sensors are whited-out by the Alcubierre warp field.”

  “I know that. I want to know how things are going with Armel. How he’s performing with the friend-or-foe transmission? Are the techs on the comms deck buying it?”

  “Oh… oh no, I’m not going to hack into the sensor op people! That’s crazy!” Her voice had down-shifted into a panicky whisper.

  “Shhh… Listen, you don’t have to hack into anything. Just listen-in a little.”

  “That’s a highly secure channel, James. That’s the definition of hacking.”

  “Whatever. Look, if Armel is blowing it, I’d like to know. Wouldn’t you?”

  “We probably won’t know until one of those mini-Skay things locks on and blows us out of space.”

  “Yeah, probably. But wouldn’t it be better to know now rather than later? Besides which, I might be able to do something about it.”

  She eyed me the way a cat eyes a stray dog. “What do you mean? Have you got a lever on Armel—even now?”

  I shrugged. “Might be. After all, I’m the one who brought him
in, remember?”

  She made a frustrated huffing sound and started working on her computer. “These people are dangerous, James. The sensor-ops guys are very touchy about their data.”

  “I bet. Try to be discreet.”

  Natasha gave me a venomous glance and worked for a while. Finally, she flicked something to my tapper. It was a video feed. I lifted my arm to my face and tapped up the volume.

  “For God’s sake,” she hissed, “cover it up with your hand or something!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Standing side by side, we both watched our tappers together. I turned down the audio until it was tinny and quiet. That wasn’t the best, but you couldn’t hope for perfection when you were leeching off another man’s secure feed.

  We watched a crowd on Gold Deck. Armel was in the center of it. “If you would all give me a little breathing room, please?” he asked the officers that were swarming around him.

  I chuckled. “Look at all that brass! They’re practically climbing over each other. It looks like he’s feeding pigeons in the park.”

  The crowd backed off a step, and Armel cracked his knuckles. Then he began to peck at an old-fashioned, honest-to-God keyboard. I couldn’t even imagine where they’d scared-up that thing.

  Whatever he was typing, the code was a long one. Several times he stopped, cursed, erased it all and started over again.

  Winslade couldn’t take it anymore the third time this happened. He waded in close, elbowing subordinates out of the way.

  That’s when I got a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. With Galina back home at Central, and Drusus playing hooky as well, Sub-Tribune Winslade was in charge of this operation. I should have known this, but somehow it’d slipped my mind.

  “Damn… we might be screwed,” I said aloud.

  “Just tell me the code,” Winslade was saying. “I’ll type it in for you.”

  Armel slapped his hands away from the keyboard. “Fool. I’m not making mistakes. I’m working a sequence. Each time, the numbers change. I’m in the middle of the process. If you interfere, this ship will be marked as hostile.”