Green World

by B. V. Larson

  “How could I? I’ve been watching dogs piss on my bars for a week.”

  Her eyes got all squinty. “I wouldn’t put anything past you at this point. It seems like too much of a coincidence that your transport showed up a week after you did, and they took us out like they knew exactly what they were doing.”

  I shrugged. “It hardly matters now. Let’s just lie low.”

  She glared at me, full of suspicion.

  “Say,” I said, smiling. “How about after this is all over with—”

  Abigail shook her head. “Don’t even try asking for a date in my prison cell. That’s not how things are going to happen—not this time. I’ve got to move on, James. It was nice seeing you again.”

  Then, she showed me what she had in her hand. It was a plasma grenade, and it was pulsing brightly.

  Scrambling away, I ran over the beach on all fours like a crab. There wasn’t time to get up and run properly—in fact, there wasn’t any time at all.

  The explosion caught me right in the tail-feathers. I was kicked and rolled, and my ass burned like hell. A thousand tiny grains of sand had sprung up and shot as many holes in my posterior.

  Groaning, bleeding, and gasping for breath, I rolled onto my back. I could hear myself wheezing and giving long slow moans. I was breathing my last.

  A trooper showed up less than a minute later. He approached me rifle-first and poked me in the ribs with the muzzle.

  “Who are you?” the kid demanded. He looked like a fresh recruit, yanked off the streets of Brooklyn or Miami, scared and dangerous to anyone who wasn’t wearing the same uniform he was.

  “Centurion McGill, third cohort, third unit,” I managed to wheeze out.

  “Centurion?” Confused, the kid looked around. He signaled a veteran, who trotted over and eyed me critically.

  “What’s this?”

  “A human prisoner, sir,” the recruit said.

  “We don’t take traitors as prisoners, son. Shoot him!”

  “But sir…”

  “Shoot him now, that’s an order! I won’t have any softies in my squad.”

  The kid raised his snap-rifle to his shoulder and spoke to me. “Sorry, dude. I hope you really aren’t a Varus centurion.”

  The snap-rifle ripped out a series of pellets, and I surely expected to be struck stone dead. But the rounds missed. Instead of tearing up my fool skull, they kicked sand up into my ear. I put my bleeding fingers over the side of my head, which was stinging in a new spot now.

  “What’s this crap about him being a centurion?” the veteran demanded. He’d shoved the kid’s rifle aside at the last moment.

  “That’s what he said, Vet. He said he was from the 3rd.”

  The veteran came close now, and he peered at me. His face was a mask of suspicion, and never did he allow the muzzle of his rifle to leave the vicinity of my skull.

  “Whoa! I know this crazy bastard! James McGill, right?”

  “That’s me,” I croaked out.

  “Well, what a surprise! Well met, sir.” Then the veteran turned toward the recruit, and his expression transformed into stern rage. “Why didn’t you tell me he was a legionnaire, fool?”

  “I tried to, Vet. I—”

  “Shut up. Go check on those dead monkey-men with the snouts over there.” He gave the kid a boot in the ass and sent him on his way.

  Then he knelt beside me and looked me over critically. “You’re in a bad way, Centurion.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “What can I do for you? My suggestion, if you don’t mind me making one, is to take a bolt right now. There’s no way the bio people will do anything less when they get around to you.”

  I nodded, and he lifted his weapon.

  “Wait,” I said, stretching out my wrist toward his. “Here, touch my tapper.”

  He frowned, as such a formality shouldn’t be necessary. If I’d landed with the drop-pods, I wouldn’t need to have my death recorded separately. It should all have been automatic.

  “Uh…” he said as our tappers kissed and my vital data was passed over, “just how did you get out here, sir? I mean… this is weird. You’re out of uniform and everything… I don’t get it.”

  I struggled up onto one elbow. “Let me explain it to you.”

  Then I reached out a long arm and pushed his finger down on the firing stud. The gun jumped in his hands, releasing a spray of bolts.

  I flopped back on the beach, just as dead as Abigail and every dog-boy on the island.

  -38-

  It felt like my revival took a long time to come, but that was purely subjective. Dying was a lot like sleeping after a really bad day. When you woke up, it often seemed like you’d been tossing and turning for hours.

  As it was, I woke up tired instead of refreshed. My mind was churning long before my bare, slimy feet hit the cold deck.

  “You should stay down a minute, Centurion,” a business-like bio told me. “Your APGAR score was only an eight—and that’s because I rounded up.”

  “Using the recycled stuff today, huh?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Nothing toxic, but not the best. If you would just give it—”

  But I was already up and moving. I was all done with snoozing on a cold plank. Staggering toward the showers to spray off, I got that done as fast as possible then pulled on a uniform. Afterward, I felt halfway respectable. It would have to do for now.

  By the time my senses operated fully, I’d figured out I was aboard Dominus, and that we were parked in orbit in what was still considered a hot warzone. This surprised me somewhat, as I’d figured it was all over after we’d knocked out Claver’s little depot. That should have put an end to the rebellion he was supplying—right?

  I hit my unit’s module first but found it empty. My own unit had moved on. I figured they’d probably made Leeson the acting CO. That was worth a shudder, right there. The man wasn’t bad at his job, but he lacked the imagination and determination it took to run a unit in this legion, in my humble opinion.

  “McGill?”

  My tapper was talking to me. I stopped marching around the passages, and I stared down at it. The caller had to be one of my direct superiors, or they wouldn’t have had the super-user permissions it took to break into someone else’s tapper at will.

  “Uh… Primus Graves?”

  “What’s wrong? Are you drunk or something?”

  “No sir. There hasn’t been time for that yet.”

  His face peered up at me, and he looked a little disgusted with what he saw. “You seem sickly.”

  This set off alarm bells in my thick skull. If there was one thing you didn’t want to admit to around Graves, it was any form of illness or disability.

  “No sir!” I said. “The bio told me they were using some recycled stuff in the revival chamber, but I feel right as rain.”

  “All right, all right. Save it. Get to the briefing room on Gold Deck. I’ll give you ninety seconds to get here. Graves out.”

  Cursing, I accelerated into a shambling run. I needed some food, or better yet some booze. Unfortunately, I had the sneaking suspicion I wasn’t going to see either one for hours. I was probably going to have to listen to some self-important tool giving us the day’s play-by-play after-action analysis. Being an officer wasn’t always the better deal in the legions.

  When I reached my destination, I found a seat in the back and almost plopped my butt into it—but then I noticed a snack buffet just left of the main door.

  Some primus with the bony hands of an undertaker was standing up there, droning on and on. He had a big display of the planet behind him, with the island battle playing out in real time. As I recently died in the middle of the depicted action, I couldn’t care less.

  My eyes drifted to the snacks over and over. Without asking, I got up and walked over there. As fast as I could, I filled up a tiny plate with whatever I could balance on one over-sized palm. There were little cheeses, some baked crackers, and some multilayer
ed bean-dip. I ignored the fruit and veggie tray, as that wasn’t going to fill the void in my gut. I took a double-helping of the bean-dip instead. Once I had a plateful, I slipped back to my chair and dug in.

  The whole mess was gone inside of two minutes. I heaved a sigh of relief. The food was just what I needed, and it was hitting me right—but that’s when I heard my name mentioned at the front of the room.

  “McGill?” Graves called out. “Centurion, come up here and finish the briefing.”

  I froze. At this point, I’d been in the room for several long minutes, but I hadn’t heard a word that had been spoken.

  “Uh… yessir.”

  Setting down my plate and rubbing the crumbs from my hands, I walked up to the front of the room with a confident air.

  The undertaker-looking primus offered me his pointer, so I took it and began to draw on the big display. After pausing it, I scrolled around to look for the area where I’d died. “That’s it, that beach. You see that crashed aircraft? That’s the weirdest kind of copter I’ve ever been on. I managed to hotwire it and take off, but not before our fighters got to the island. Unfortunately, I was taken out and died in the waves, right about… here.”

  I made a red circle on the frozen image, and turned around to grin at the audience.

  Everyone in sight looked confused, even baffled. Everyone but Graves, that was. He looked pissed.

  “That’s not very helpful, McGill. We want to know what you learned on that island. Where are the other bases the enemy has placed in strategic locations?”

  “Uh… how’s that again? Who said they had other bases?”

  Graves eyed me unhappily. A few of the audience members snickered. “Maybe you came in too late for that part of the briefing. Primus Gilbert, here, has discovered with forensic analysis that this base was linked to others. Several gateway posts were setup, but they were destroyed during the attack.”

  “That’s a crying shame, sir! We’ll probably never be able to puzzle out where they linked to.”

  “Are you telling me, McGill, that you spent the better part of the week living at this encampment, and you have no idea where the other rebel facilities are?”

  “Well sir, I actually spent most of that time in a cell, see. I did have a barred window and a nice view of the beach, but those the monkey-dog guys, well… they kind of used it as a latrine.”

  People were laughing, but not Graves. “Skip all that. Your body was found in the immediate vicinity of Abigail Claver, a wanted criminal. Are you claiming that you weren’t romantically involved with her?”

  “Uh… are we talking, like, recently?”

  Another wave of amusement swept the room. I flashed Manfred and some of my other friends a grin.

  “Yes, recently.”

  “No sir. I was a prisoner. The only reason I got out of my cell was because Dominus was sighted. Abigail wanted to talk to me about the incoming attack. It came in so fast, however, there wasn’t much time to do more than die.”

  A few of the crewmen applauded at that. I nodded to them, giving them their due. The navy boys were sissies, but they had a few good pilots among them.

  Graves still seemed unhappy. There was just no pleasing some people. “So… are you spying for them, or for us?”

  “I’m purely in the employ of Earth, sir. Don’t forget I found this rat’s nest. I brought Legion Varus right to it.”

  “All right, all right. Any idea of who else is involved, and what their aims might be?”

  I squinted in thought. “Abigail did say something about hitting Earth directly. This is all connected to the docks at Central City. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those gateways led there.”

  “Every super-cargo ship back home has been impounded, searched, and turned away from the port since we left. It has to be something other than that.”

  “Well, they could already have delivered the posts and setup the gateway. But I’m not sure what we’re worried about. These monkey-dogs aren’t that bad, or that bright.”

  “No, they’re not. But that’s not who we’re going up against. Those are only some minor players, slaves to the Claver Clan. Don’t you remember these warehouses? In your previous visit, they were full of weapons and gear.”

  “They surely were.”

  Graves waved impatiently to the undertaker guy, Primus Gilbert. He stepped up and plucked the briefing controller out of my fingers. I let him do it without a fuss.

  He sped through the files, clicking backward in some app. At last, he brought up an image from my last visit. The warehouses were chock-full of gear of all kinds.

  “That was the original intel,” Gilbert said. “But that’s old news. Here’s the state of the storage units now.”

  He flicked to the end of the files and played a vid showing the interior of the same warehouses. This time, they were mostly empty.

  Many sets of eyes moved to me. I could feel them.

  “Uh… looks like they moved the stuff. I never was allowed in there—I was in this cell in the ground, see—”

  “Yes, yes. The dogs pissed in your face. I got all that, McGill. Thanks for the useless report.”

  He waved for me to return to my seat, and I did so with troubled thoughts.

  Where had all that gear gone? They could have outfitted a small army with all that stuff. It occurred to me that maybe, by going out there and visiting Abigail twice, I’d managed to spook the Clavers. Just maybe, they’d taken all their stuff and stashed it someplace else.

  “Damn…” I said out loud. “That girl is six kinds of tricky, just like all her brothers.”

  -39-

  The general consensus among the brass was that somehow, some-way, this was all my fault.

  “McGill,” Tribune Turov told me sternly during the after-meeting. “This sort of thing simply has to stop.”

  She was in fine fettle. After not attending the open briefing, she showed up to the second one, all full of piss-and-vinegar. To me, the situation seemed plain unfair. Not only was I being blamed for the fact Legion Varus had done a bang-up attack on a pretty much empty base, but then there was the fact that we were in Skay territory with our dicks out—for no apparent reason.

  “Are you entirely sure that vast stash of gear was here, in these very warehouses?” Graves asked me.

  I made an exasperated sound. “Sirs, just look at the video I brought back from the first trip. I’m sorry if that didn’t convince you—it certainly did convince me.”

  Just for laughs, Graves replayed my initial visit’s recordings. He even ran it up to where I got shot in the face by Abigail.

  “We should have left you permed,” Galina said angrily.

  I threw up my hands, and everyone at the table flinched, except for Graves. “All right, I’m out then. If you don’t want me to breathe, you don’t need me at some all-day long meeting, do you?”

  Managing to stand up and stage an angry walk-out, I got as far as touching the door before Galina growled at me. “Get back here and sit down, James. We’re not finished yet.”

  With slumping shoulders, I flopped into my chair again.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said. “Drusus is due in an hour, and we’ve got nothing to show him but an empty island full of craters.”

  That’s what this was really all about. Winslade, Graves, Turov—they didn’t care about me at all. They just wanted to come up with some pretty bullshit to tell Drusus. Unfortunately, he was a very hard man to fool, and we all knew it.

  For my own part, I wasn’t overly interested in the gloomy mood of the upper officers. I wasn’t going to be chewed out or demoted—at least, no more than normal.

  “Look—how about this,” I said, slamming a big hand on the conference table to stop the videos, which had looped around to the beginning to start playing again. “How about we just all agree to get publicly flogged? The brass will usually go for that. It’s an easy way out.”

  “Publicly flogged?” Winslade asked incred
ulously. “That’s for recruits, McGill.”

  “Nonsense, I get flogged regularly.”

  Winslade rolled his eyes at me and crossed his arms. “It unbecoming for an officer. Even you should know that.”

  “You’re chicken.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Galina said. “This isn’t funny, McGill. We’ve gone out on a limb way out here in Province 926, and we’d better find those damned weapons.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, the way I see it, the gear was stashed here for an army. A force that’s somewhere else, see? That army must have come and taken the gear. Or it was sent to them with the gateways, or something…”

  “Obviously, McGill,” Winslade said in his usual, snooty tone. “All you’re saying is the gear has been deployed somewhere. Fine. What difference does that make?”

  Graves looked thoughtful. “McGill has a point. We’ve been scanning this planet for a hidden cache of weapons and gear. Instead, maybe we should be looking for a large enemy encampment.”

  “How is this vague nuance useful in any possible way?” Winslade demanded. “We haven’t seen any gear, or any troops—nothing. We’ve been scanning the islands, the ocean and even a few undersea caves. We haven’t found anything.”

  “Right,” Graves agreed. “The conclusion is therefore inescapable.”

  “What conclusion?”

  “The enemy is no longer here. We’re wasting our time, and we need to pull up stakes and retreat to Earth before the Skay figure out we spoofed their security.”

  That sentence perked me up. I realized, all of a sudden, that I’d forgotten to tell the assembled officers something very, very important.

  “Uh… sirs?”

  Galina looked at me tiredly. “What is it now, McGill? Don’t tell me that you’re hungry again. We just had lunch brought in.”

  I opened my big mouth, sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I wasn’t good at delivering bad news. It was a weakness of mine. My mind was racing, therefore, to find a way to do it without taking the blame—or possibly to lie about it entirely.