by B. V. Larson
“Don’t,” she said. “Everyone will think I can’t take orders from a man.”
“Leeson’s platoon, then.”
She nodded, looking stunned, sorrowful, and a little crazed.
“But…” she said after a moment, “I’m still alive.”
“Yeah… about that… we’ll need to fix it.”
She stared at me. “Are you going to shoot me?”
“Can’t be me. That wouldn’t play into the narrative of the bad-grow.”
“Well then… you want me to shoot myself?”
“No, girl! You’ll simply have to follow Harris’ last orders and march down into those caves again, solo. That should do the trick.”
She turned slowly and looked at the rocky valley below. There was no way to cross it alive. She nodded with sober resolve.
“I’ll remember this, Centurion,” she said, without meeting my gaze. She began to run downslope into the open.
“In a good way, I hope!” I called after her.
Sarah didn’t answer. She just jogged down into the smoke and rocks. She soon reached the valley floor. Fifty meters later she was caught and ripped apart, just like that.
After she was gone, I had to wonder if I’d done the right thing. The revival machines weren’t working for now. There was no way to bring her back unless that changed.
Still, it was the only solution I could think of. If we could stop the Nairbs and the battle fleet, we’d revive her later on and all would be well.
If we didn’t manage to do all that… well… in that case we were all as good as permed anyway. At least Sarah had died quick, free of guilt, and with happy thoughts in her brain about the future.
What more could a legionnaire ask for?
-39-
“James,” Natasha whispered in my headset. “I think I found what we’re looking for.”
“Great, I’ll be right there.”
Harris was standing in front of me with his big hands on his hips. We were standing over his fallen body. I knew how he felt. Being faced with your own unjust death was a hard pill to swallow.
“This is unacceptable!” he said for what had to be the fifth time in a row. “I want this taken to the top. I want Primus Graves, Primus Winslade—even Deech to know about this.”
“Look,” I said, “she’s awfully young. She lost it, that’s all. She said she’d been revived three times yesterday alone. That’s a lot for a rookie to take in. A bad grow could have—”
“Don’t even start with that ‘bad grow’ bullshit on me, McGill. Don’t even go there. I know all about your ‘bad grow’ murders, and I’m not buying any of it today.”
“Well,” I said, “your vendetta will have to wait.”
“Why’s that? You sweet on this girl? Another one, McGill? Isn’t she a little young this time, even for you?”
“Nope. But she’s dead anyway, and she’s not coming back anytime soon.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Centurion?”
“The revival machines—they aren’t working right now. Almost nothing is—most of our Galactic-made gear has been shut down.”
Harris stared at me for a second, then he looked up at the skies. “They’re here?” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Already?”
“Not the whole battle fleet—just the Nairbs.”
“Those green snot-bags? They shut us down right off? How are we supposed to clean up this mess without guns? Why don’t they just drop the bomb on us right now?”
“They might just do that, Adjunct. They just might. Anyway, support Leeson. You’re one of the last people to catch a revive. Enjoy life while you can.”
“Where are you off to, sir?”
“I have to fix this—if it can be fixed.”
He squinted at me suspiciously. “I don’t know whether I should wish you luck or not. You could save us—or kill us all.”
“You’re right about that, so, you’d best wish me luck.”
Harris muttered, but he never did wish me luck. I headed toward Natasha’s location. She was a green contact on my tapper. I reached her about six minutes later.
“Where are they?” I demanded when I found her. “The teleport suits can’t be here.”
We were standing in front of Winslade’s lifter. Not a hundred meters off, his bunker yawned open. A few robot pigs stood around, frozen like statues. They were ugly, mechanical things on the best of days, like headless bulldogs the size of draft horses. But today, they weren’t buzzing and walking around. They were as dead as our guns.
“Don’t tell me the suits are down there in the bunker?”
“No,” she said. “It’s worse. I’m getting a reading from this lifter.”
I took a look at the looming vessel. “Where?”
“Upstairs—on the lifter’s Gold Deck.”
“Winslade rode down on this thing. How could he not have known Claver and those teleport suits were aboard?”
Natasha shrugged. “You can ask him, if you want.”
“I’ll pass. Let’s go.”
Marching into the gloomy interior, I led the way. The rank of centurion had already made my life easier in any number of ways. For one thing the odds of being randomly stopped and ordered to leave an area dramatically dropped off with each new level of rank I’d attained.
Aboard this ship was no different. The veteran guards and occasional wandering adjuncts who served as aides didn’t say a word. They looked at us, sure, but they didn’t stop us. They assumed we knew what we were doing simply because I outranked them.
All the way up through the hatches to the lifter’s Gold Deck, I sweated about running into a primus. Any of them would have questioned me for certain. Even another, more senior centurion might have given me trouble—but we didn’t run into either type. I figured they were all busy in the bunker, or marshaling troops—or dead.
Whatever the case, I managed to get onto the lifter’s small Gold Deck unchallenged.
“Where to now?” I asked Natasha.
Silently, she pointed down the narrow passageway to the end.
I headed that way, but I halted at the door. “Not in here?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s got to be the tribune’s office.”
“Damn…” I rattled the door, but it didn’t open.
Normally, a noncom would have intercepted us. But since Tribune Deech had been dead for quite some time, and everyone was short-handed, there was no one to greet us or to tell us to piss-off.
“Hack it,” I told Natasha.
She compressed her lips and crunched up her nose like something stank, but she did it. I could tell it bothered her. She was one of those rule-following types of girls. I never could understand what she saw in a man like me.
The door clicked and opened. We hustled inside—and found a corpse on the floor.
It wasn’t just any corpse, and it wasn’t fresh, either.
“That’s her—that’s Deech,” Natasha said.
“Yeah… I’ve got a bad feeling about this. She was supposed to have died back onboard Nostrum.”
“McGill,” Natasha said, “there’s someone coming.”
We stepped away from the door, standing on either side of it.
A sharp rapping sound began. Someone was knocking on the door.
Natasha and I exchanged confused, wide-eyed glances. She gestured, as if wanting to know if she should open it. I shook my head vigorously.
“Come now, McGill,” Winslade called out. “Aren’t you going to invite me in to the party?”
“Sure thing, Primus,” I said, and I flung open the door.
Winslade stood there with a shitty grin on his face. There was a veteran standing on either side of him, and a female adjunct just behind his shoulder.
“Hmm…” he said. “This is very convenient. We have the victim, the murderer, and the motive all in one spot.”
“Motive?” I asked. “I was lost, looking for the head. Isn’t that right, Natasha?”
“Yes, motive,” Winslade said. “You’re here to steal the teleport suits. Most likely, you planned to run from this doomed world because the Nairbs have arrived.”
“Uhh…” I said, “that wouldn’t be a bad idea, actually. But we came here to check on Deech. Did you kill our tribune and take her place, Primus?”
His eyes flashed at me angrily. The two veterans shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t know them personally, but they knew who I was well enough—thanks to many long years of building up my particular reputation.
“It is you who are under suspicion here, McGill. Drop your weapon. You’re under arrest.”
I smiled. “I surely will. This is all a misunderstanding.”
Carefully, I lowered my plasma rifle to the deck. It was useless anyway. Natasha slowly drew her laser pistol and dropped it as well.
The veterans made a mistake then. They moved forward confidently to handcuff us. One upward stroke with my combat knife—that was all it took. The lead veteran lost his hand just below the elbow.
He looked at his arm and the blood pouring out. He was in a state of shock. Everybody was, I think, except for me. My blade shifted and came up through his guts next, slashing his diaphragm and heart in one stroke.
“Sorry,” I told him as he sagged down to the deck.
The second veteran made another serious error. All his training told him to make a bad move—he stepped back, raised his rifle, and pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened. The plasma rifles we used in this legion were Empire-made. They didn’t work anymore.
“Idiot!” Winslade hissed, seeing the mistake and scrambling out a needler.
Earth made her own needlers, so I knew it would operate as intended. Rather than trying to kill all of them, I slammed the door shut again, and rammed my knife into the bulkhead, spiking the door.
It was a temporary fix, and it had pretty much disarmed me, but it was all I could think of.
“What now?” Natasha asked, breathing hard.
I grabbed her and kissed her. I don’t completely know why—it just felt like the right thing to do.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“For trusting me. Now, get into one of these suits. They’ll pry the door open pretty soon.”
Looking harried and confused, she helped me climb into a teleport suit. It was technologically complex, but simple in appearance and operation.
“It’s charged,” she said. “Should I get into the other one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hurry.”
She didn’t quite make it. By the time she had her legs in and the zipper in her hand, the door went down.
Winslade burned a neat hole in her throat then flicked his wrist horizontally. The beam sliced through her soft neck and took her head mostly off. She sagged down to the deck and died.
“Now McGill,” he said, stalking forward, “get out of that suit. I don’t want to damage it, but if I have to—”
That was all I heard. Rather than hanging around to find out what he had planned, I touched the jump button on the suit.
The room wavered. It blue-shifted downward, then up. Winslade fired his beam, but I was no longer completely in the same space he was.
I teleported out without the slightest clue where I was going. Sometimes, my whole life felt like it did in that moment.
-40-
There wasn’t much time to regret or celebrate my move. About a second after I’d launched, I landed again.
I knew right off I was aboard the starship Nostrum. Everything around me looked like our new, sleek transport. She’d been decorated in dark purple, beige and puke-green, with plenty of steel tubing to accent everything.
Activating my tapper, I tried to contact the crew. The only crew members who’d been left behind when the legion had been fully deployed were still on Gold Deck.
They didn’t answer my call. Not even the AI beeped at me. I didn’t like that one bit.
Running through the ship, I saw systems in operation everywhere, but no living people. There were plenty of dead ones, though.
Still in vac suits in many cases, they were sprawled out or curled up in fetal balls. They were very dead, a week-gone if I had to guess—and I’ve seen more than my share of dead people.
Apparently, no one had bothered to clear the dead from the cubes. They’d been left here—not to rot exactly, because the microbes in their bodies were as dead as they were, but to chemically age at least, like freeze-dried meat.
When I reached Gold Deck, I found more dead—everyone was dead.
My eyes flashed over the scene, I have to admit, it left me ill at ease. How could so many have died without me hearing about it? Had this happened recently, or hours ago?
Checking the chronos built into the tappers, and the public logs, I read that the ship had suffered a recent attack from the ground. It was another round of missiles from our friends under the dome, of course. They’d used X-rays again, and they’d neatly killed the crew.
At that moment, I felt hope slipping away. The rogue scientists down in that dome were tough, mean, resourceful, but they had no idea what they were up against. Battle Fleet 921 was coming, and the Galactics were here right now with their scout ship. The tech-smiths couldn’t hope to beat them all, even if they could take down my legion.
Making a fateful choice, I reached for the comm systems. I’m no tech, but our systems aren’t built to be hard to use. Centuries of design advancement had made most computers fairly accessible to any person with decent skills. They all had the same kind of interface, you just had to know what you wanted to do and how to search for it.
“Native people of Arcturus IV,” I said, beaming out a general call. “This is the starship Nostrum. We wish to discuss terms to end this conflict.”
They didn’t answer right away. In fact, they weren’t the first to answer me at all.
The big forward screen on the bridge lit up instead. It was Winslade, and his face was bigger than it had any right to be. His teeth were each a meter across, and his hairy nostrils were flaring as big and black as tractor tires.
“McGill!” he screeched at me. “Get off this channel. You’ve got no authority—”
“Excuse me, Primus,” I said, “but are you aware that everyone aboard Starship Nostrum is stone dead?”
“Stop broadcasting immediately!” he ordered. “You—”
I was tired of him by now, so I muted him and continued to hail the planet below. At last, a signal came back in response.
Another face loomed, and this time I found it a pleasant one. The sad, lovely visage of the woman I’d met inside the dome looked at me curiously.
“Why are you calling us, James McGill?” she asked.
“I’m glad to see it’s you,” I told her. “I never asked your name when we met before.”
She blinked slowly, then answered me after a moment’s thought. “I’m Floramel, she said.”
“Floramel…” I said, letting the name linger on my lips. “A lovely name for a lovely woman.”
“I’m not strictly a member of humanity, McGill.”
“No ma’am,” I agreed, “but I’m hoping you have compassion and good sense to go along with your natural beauty.”
“I don’t understand why you’ve contacted us.”
“I really wanted to talk to the leader of your people…”
“We’re researchers. We have a lot of independence, and we operate with a loose framework. That said, I’m an allocator of resources.”
“Um…” I said. “Does that make you a leader? A decision-maker?”
“Yes, as far as we have such functions.”
“Okay then, let’s talk. We need to end this conflict.”
“Do you wish to surrender?” she asked. “To beg for your life?”
“Normally, that might seem like a good idea. But you don’t fully understand the situation. There’s another ship here, in this system. It’
s hiding, but they can see us even if we can’t see them.”
Floramel nodded. “We know of this vessel. It lingers back, out of our reach. We have made no move to attack or establish contact with it, as it appears to be a harmless observer—unlike you and your legion.”
“I know,” I said, “it looks that way, but looks can be deceiving. The ship is from the Empire. The crew are Nairbs, agents of the Galactics.”
“I see… Why are they here, visiting this remote lab colony?”
“Because you represent a violation of Galactic Law. The advances in technology you’ve made here are illegal.”
“We had no idea Earth cared about such a distant power and its laws.”
I smiled. She was wise, thoughtful, and out of her depth all at once.
“Like most people,” I told her, “we humans have our masters, too. We serve the Galactics. They’ve dispatched a fleet to this system—a vast armada of ships known as Battle Fleet 921. When it gets here, they will destroy you utterly.”
She blinked again, and she looked troubled. “This is grim news, if it is true. Why wouldn’t the Galactics visit destruction upon Earth instead of our world?”
“They might,” I admitted, “when they get around to it. The bigger problem right now is your survival.”
“And what would you suggest that we—?” she began, but there was an unexpected interruption.
A beam sang past my ear. I’d just moved my hand up to scratch, as my faceplate was off for the first time in days. A man can build up a powerful need to scratch after spending a long time in a vac suit.
That small movement, combined with the low accuracy of a needler at a range of some twenty meters, saved my life. As it was, the beam burned a line into the rubbery material of my neck guard and slashed downward, drawing a hot line across my teleport suit.
Fortunately, Earth techs had seen fit to construct these valuable suits with very tough materials. The suit was scorched, but it wasn’t burned through.
My first reaction was to drop to the floor. The consoles and crash-seats provided me cover, and I scrambled on all fours for the nearest exit.