Rogue World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 7)

by B. V. Larson

  “Right…” Toro said, catching on. “Then the fleet will know we joined the rebels, and they’ll bomb Earth instead of this worthless rock we’re orbiting.”

  “Bingo,” I told her. “There’s no use holding any secrets from you people at this point. Everything depends on us being successful. We board, we move fast, and we take out the comm module. At that point, our mission will be complete. The rest of the legion will take care of the rest of the ship.”

  “The plan is insane,” Harris said. “We’re supposed to be commandos, but we’ve got no idea where we’re going. Does anyone even know where the comm module is located?”

  “We do,” Floramel answered. “At least, once aboard we’ll be able to detect it.”

  Harris laughed bitterly. “We’re trusting the rebels? We were dying all over their dome like bugs on a windshield just yesterday!”

  “This isn’t an optimal solution,” I admitted, “but command thinks it’s our only shot. All right, I want everyone kitted up. Pack light, we’ll do or die pretty fast. No sense weighing yourself down with useless gear.”

  As everyone moved to obey, Harris approached me. Seeing his move, Toro and Leeson joined him.

  “Sir,” Leeson said, “with all due respect, this plan seems half-baked.”

  “Half-retarded more like,” Harris snapped.

  I gave him a glare, and we locked eyes. He looked down at the deck after a second or two, but he still looked pissed.

  “We’ve been chosen because we have more experience than any other group with boarding ships via teleportation,” I explained.

  “That’s only because you went crazy two years back against the squids,” Harris pointed out.

  “Be that as it may, we’re it.”

  “Centurion,” Toro said, “I’d like a transfer. I’ve got no experience with this sort of mission, and I’ve got heavy troopers in my platoon. We’ll just slow you down.”

  Harris laughed bitterly.

  “Request denied,” I said firmly. “We’re sending a full unit. We’re not sending more, or less. Our group has fought and died together now through some hard times. We’ll do okay—and we might need heavy troops to win through. There’s no telling what kind of onboard defenses those Galactic sludge-bags will have.”

  None of them were happy, but at least Leeson didn’t argue with me. He beat his hands together until his troops were hustling to the second gateway unit, which was still inactive.

  Floramel approached me next.

  “It’s time,” she said, “who will teleport through and set up the gateway on the destroyer?”

  Looking around the group, I shook my head.

  I wanted to delegate this duty, but it didn’t feel appropriate. When something’s got to be right, you do it yourself—that’s what my dad had always said.

  “I’m doing it,” I told her, and I suited up.

  -50-

  Floramel gave me a tiny kiss before I teleported out. That made me smile. She was human—mostly—but I’d only just taught her about kissing the night before. That made the gesture all the sweeter somehow.

  Holding the heavy gateway unit in my arms, with my plasma carbine dangling from straps, I had her tap the start button on my chest.

  The world shifted blue and wavered. It was a familiar effect to me by now.

  For a second, I was in two places at once. That was the weird thing about short hops. If you flew over lightyears, teleportation gave you plenty of time to think and worry—but not when it was just a ship-to-ship jump.

  One instant I was on Nostrum watching the lights waver and my vision dim, the next I was on the broad deck of the Nairb ship at the same time. Over a period of about a second, that transition changed again, when the deck of Nostrum and the staring faces of my unit faded away. At the same time, the hazy image of the Nairb ship grew stronger and more substantial.

  Then, it was over. I stumbled, but my footing was only off a little. I looked down and saw my heel was fused with a cable.

  Cursing, I put down the gateway unit and drew my combat knife. I’d have to trim my boot down, or the cable, in order to walk. Fortunately, my foot hadn’t merged up, just my boot.

  My natural instinct was to cut the cable, of course, but I hesitated. Where did this cable go? What was it powering? Who would come to check if I cut it?

  Baring my teeth in a moment of indecision, I looked around. The hold was dim-lit and cavernous. It was full of doodads from a thousand worlds. There were odd machines, crumbling pottery statues and these weird baskets woven with what looked like strands of steel surrounding me.

  Instead of cutting anything, I removed my boot carefully and left it there. Walking with a hobbled gait, I searched for a power coupling to plug in the gateway—but I wasn’t finding anything.

  I began to sweat in my suit, even though my exposed foot was stinging from the cold of the deck. Already, this mission was off to a clumsy start. I feared it was only a matter of time until it went tits-up completely.

  Deciding to follow the power cable I’d landed on, I finally found a terminus. I unplugged an environmental meter of some kind that was probably meant to keep the atmospherics in the hold stable for the benefit of the trophy collection.

  The coupling fit—that wasn’t a surprise, as the rogues had known where I was taking this thing and counseled me accordingly. Both fittings were Galactic standard.

  Shoving them together, I felt as much as heard a satisfying click in my hands. The gateway poles began to glow.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, realizing I hadn’t set them up right.

  I hobbled forward, trying to push the two poles apart. They were supposed to be aligned with a precisely measured meter of separation between them. Feeling an urgency of purpose, I kicked the farther pole away—and it fell over instead of sliding over the deck.

  The two poles were now about a foot apart, and one was laying on the deck itself, sparking. A stream of curses and one hopping, frozen foot slowed me down, but I squatted and got a grip on the second pole to stand it upright again.

  Just then, the poles interacted. There was a flickering of released energy. Someone—something—stepped through them.

  Instead of a clean transmission, the traveler came through… garbled. There was a gauntlet holding a rifle, and a face, sort of. The face was merged up with its faceplate.

  Dragging the squirming, smoking soldier out of the way in case more were coming, I righted the two poles and looked down into the still-living eyes of this mission’s first casualty—it was Sarah.

  Damn! That cold bastard Leeson had found a use for her, I guess. He’d sent her through as a scout.

  She tried to talk, but her words never made it out of her throat. There was no air in her lungs to push with.

  Fortunately, the girl died fast. I grabbed her left arm, which was relatively intact, and I worked her tapper. I erased her last minute of life from her memory.

  That was a trick Natasha had taught me. In Sarah’s case, I figured it was a mercy.

  Pissed off, I picked her twisted body up and stepped back through to Nostrum’s deck.

  “Here,” I said, handing Sarah to Leeson.

  His face screwed up into a grimace. He’d seen plenty of gruesome deaths, but few soldiers had been twisted into a smoldering pretzel before.

  “I wasn’t finished setting up the poles yet,” I said sternly. “The plan was for me to walk back, proving the connection was valid.”

  Leeson hung his head. “I’m sorry, Centurion,” he said. “You were gone a long time. We’ve only got eleven minutes left.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “The timer starts when we’re all across. Let’s not frig this up any further, all right people?”

  No one argued. Leeson left Sarah on the deck for the bio people to dispose of.

  Shoving on a fresh boot, I led the march back onto the Nairb vessel. Every member of my unit had a good look at Sarah as they passed through the poles.

  It did them good, in my opinio
n. It sobered them up. This was no game, and it was time for everyone to act like the pros we were.

  “Okay,” I said on tactical chat. “Are we all through?”

  Harris, Toro and Leeson reported their counts. We were all in the enemy ship’s hold—minus one. The last to report in was Floramel and her team of rogue nerds.

  “If we get separated by more than a hundred meters,” I told them, “we’ll have to use hand-signals. Our stealth transmissions won’t reach further than that.”

  Our latest communications tech was pretty good for clandestine work like this. We’d long ago perfected radio packets that simulated background emissions. Our techs carried computers that could relay signals that were virtually undetectable. The system automatically linked us into a network that measured and mirrored our environment, making the whole thing dynamically adjust itself.

  As a secondary advantage to our tech, the signals quietly jammed other communications coming into and out of our local area.

  Taking a second to mark our destination, I put a green arrow on top of the chamber we were trying to get to. Fortunately, it wasn’t far. We had about a kilometer of boxes to walk through, then we’d reach the communications module.

  It was located on the belly of the ship, to the stern. There wasn’t much of an antenna to worry about, just one big transformer and a power supply that could feed the deep-link.

  Interstellar communications were possible, but expensive. The Galactics had a monopoly on the technology—no surprise there. They allowed worlds to talk to one another in real-time, but ships almost never had the tech—at least not among human starships.

  What was too expensive for an Earth fleet was no problem for a Galactic ship. They’d never seemed to lack for budgetary funds until recently, when civil war had broken out among the Core Worlds.

  Particularly in the case of a scout ship, there was no point to its operation without a deep-link. But even when you had one of these pricey gizmos that used entanglement theory to communicate over lightyears instantly, the systems took a lot of power and had a slow baud rate. The signal was thready, and messages were usually done with text and small low-resolution images rather than full-motion video.

  “Okay,” I said, looking over my team. “Toro, you stay here and guard the gateway. Harris, you take point with your light troopers. I’ll be right behind you with Leeson’s weaponeers and our techy guests.”

  “Got it,” Harris said, trotting off toward the green arrow on the horizon.

  I let him get ahead of me a ways before following. In the meantime, I left instructions for Toro.

  “Don’t break radio-silence once we’re out of range for the stealth network. Not even if you get discovered. Just destroy everyone who comes at you and hold your position.”

  “You don’t want to know if we’re getting hit?” she asked me in surprise.

  “No, Adjunct,” I said. “The stealth will break at range. The enemy will then know there are invaders in more than one part of the ship, and with a little triangulation, they could figure out what our goal is. We can’t afford for the deep-link to report they have boarders from Earth.”

  “Understood,” she said.

  Wheeling around, I ran after Harris. Leeson and Floramel followed me.

  The whole mission felt crazy already. It was such a risk. We hadn’t detected any automated surveillance equipment down here among the dusty trophies—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t here. The Galactics were advanced, after all.

  But there wasn’t any time for second-guessing now. It was time to do or die—or both.

  -51-

  We caught up with Harris in short order. Technically, his team was faster than ours, but since they were on point they had to advance more cautiously. My group moved with the relative certainty of being second in line.

  “Harris,” I contacted him. “Any sign of anything?”

  “Not really,” he called back. “There’s lots of dusty junk in here, but most of it is inert. So far, I haven’t seen a single monitoring system. But they could have flying drones or something.”

  “I’ve got Kivi laying out buzzers,” I said. “They’re reporting back nothing—so far.”

  “They’re probably too snooty to run security systems down here,” Leeson said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Well, you know the Galactics and the Nairbs as well as anyone, Centurion. They think they shit chocolate. Who would dare to come aboard one of their ships and sneak around?”

  “I have…” I said. “A couple of times.”

  There was some snickering on command chat in response, but nobody called me a liar.

  “McGill!” Harris hissed out about a minute later. “We’ve reached a hatch. There’s no apparent way to open it.”

  “We’ll be right there.”

  When we arrived, we realized he was right. The Nairbs had built a ship without a door handle on the inside of the hold.

  “Now we know why they didn’t bother to put security systems in here,” Leeson commented. “Should I have Sargon burn it down, sir?”

  “Hold on—Floramel? Have you got a way we can get through this short of destroying it?”

  She examined the hatch with interest.

  “We don’t have much time, sir,” Leeson said, “seven minutes.”

  “Floramel? Talk to me now, or the hatch is going down.”

  “That will make a lot of noise,” she objected. “Any sensor in the passages beyond would register a change in heat, pressure—”

  I waved my arm at Sargon. He was already shouldering his belcher and sighting on the hinges.

  “Focusing tight,” he said. “Stand clear, please.”

  Floramel continued to run her hands and an instrument box over the hatch, not listening to us.

  “Maybe she’s trying to delay us,” Sargon said on a private line to my helmet. “I’ll burn her right through, sir. Just give me the word.”

  “Stand down.”

  “You better get your girlfriend away from that hatch, Centurion!” Leeson complained.

  “Girlfriend?” Della asked, looking back at them. Apparently, she hadn’t heard the rumors yet.

  “Floramel,” I said, ignoring them all. “Either open that hatch on the count of ten, or I’m taking it down. We’ll revive you back on Nostrum—if we get there again.”

  She kept probing, and suddenly she paused, reaching for her bag.

  Sargon tensed up. “I bet she’s blowing our cover. This smells like a trick. I don’t trust these rebels an inch.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Hold your fire. That’s an order.”

  He relaxed slightly, and we all heard a loud click. That was followed by a groan of metal on metal. The hatch probably hadn’t been opened in years. It swung wide, and we surged into the passageway beyond.

  I caught up to Floramel in the shuffle. “How’d you do that?” I asked her.

  “The hatch wasn’t locked,” she explained, “it was meant to be opened by touch. The temperature changes and aging—the hinges were bound up. I sent in nanites to worm between the leaves and lubricate them.”

  I laughed, and I thought about how we’d almost blasted her unfairly. All’s well that ends well, I figured.

  We rounded a bend in the passage, which was a good six meters wide, and ran right into something we weren’t expecting at all.

  There was a machine of some kind. A robot, I guess. It was bulky, built like a steamroller with arms. The arms were welding along the bottom deck.

  “It’s a maintenance drone!” Floramel called out. “Don’t—”

  But it was too late. Varus legionnaires are notoriously trigger-happy. I count myself as one of the worst, in fact. The light troopers scattered while weaponeers fired shafts of energy into the unit. It buzzed and ceased functioning, pouring out smoke.

  “It’s transmitting a distress signal!” Kivi told me.

  “Burn it down!” I ordered.

  Several weapone
ers crisscrossed the thing with beams and plasma bolts. It finally died.

  “What now?” Leeson asked me.

  “Keep moving, that’s what,” I told him. “Double-time, we’re really on the clock now.”

  We raced past the ruined machine and approached our goal. It was another big hatch—but this one was locked.

  “Explosives,” I ordered, “take it off its hinges.”

  A team of techs pasted nanite-gel and bombs to each hinge. They stepped back, and a pressure-wave rolled over us. The sound was deafening, even through my helmet.

  Harris led a rush of light troopers into the chamber beyond, and snap-rifles began chattering on full automatic.

  “All clear!” he called out.

  I stepped inside and found three Nairb techs on the floor, leaking green fluids.

  “They said something about us self-executing,” Harris joked, “but we must have heard them wrong. Is this what it always feels like, McGill?”

  “What?”

  “To kill a Nairb. I know you’ve done it before, and now I get it. Feels great.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “There’s hope for you yet, Harris. Floramel, shut down that deep-link.”

  She advanced into the room and pulled a power coupling. “We should retrieve this—take it back to Nostrum. It’s very valuable.”

  “Not more valuable than this mission,” I told her. “I’m not lugging anything with us other than our own dead—if we have any.”

  With our primary mission objective accomplished, we raced out of the module and back up the passageway. I’d marked a new, green waypoint on our HUDs. The gateway wasn’t far, and time seemed to go by faster than it had on the way in.

  “Sir…” Harris called to me as we picked our way through the vast stacks of goods. “I’m seeing smoke up here.”

  Concerned, I pressed forward. We were too far for the stealth communications system to work for sure, but I didn’t care. With the deep-link down, the Nairbs couldn’t call for help anyway.