Storm World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 10)

by B. V. Larson

  I stared at the puff-crete floor, visualizing what must have happened. Legion Varus had arrived while I was dead, and they’d built this camp with their usual lack of concern for the environment or the locals who lived here. Apparently, they’d unwittingly paved over a Scupper tube station.

  Snapping my fingers repeatedly, I rapped my knuckles on Harris’ chest. He frowned down at this intrusion.

  “Can I help you, Centurion?”

  “Get Sargon.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Get any weaponeer we’ve got left. If we don’t have any—find a belcher in that busted-up armory.”

  Grumbling, he marched off to obey. He was saying something about swamp-fever, but I didn’t care.

  There was the light of hope in my eyes again.

  -41-

  After we’d managed to drill our way about two meters deep into the muck under the bunker, Turov showed up.

  Her hands were on her hips, and her lips were twisted into a tight sneer. “McGill! You’re flooding the entire bunker with the most awful fumes!”

  “Right there, Moller,” I said, directing my veteran to blast a new exploratory hole into the shifting wet dirt. “Burn me a new hole.

  She nodded and went to work.

  “McGill!” Galina exclaimed.

  I stood up and looked at her.

  That changed her expression. She put her fingers to her lips, gasped, and took a step back.

  “Your face…” she said. “Half of it’s missing.”

  “Nah,” I said, giving her a painful grin. That effort sent a trickle of blood into my mouth. “It’s just a scratch.”

  “Jesus… here…”

  She got out a spray-can of nu-skin, and she started spraying.

  That felt surprisingly good. Nu-skin is a liquid mix of artificial stem-cells, pain-relievers and disinfectant. We’d run out of medical supplies and bio specialists hours ago, so I hadn’t had a chance to do much about my injuries up until now.

  She clucked her tongue and gently worked the foamy stuff into the burns and crack of my cheek. The men behind her shook their heads and smirked.

  I didn’t mind. Everyone knew Turov and I had had our moments. It was about time she treated me with a touch of kindness in public.

  “All right,” she said. “Explain this to me. Why are you digging a hole in the bottom of my last bunker?”

  “Last?” I asked.

  The other men looked at one another.

  “Well… there are survivors. But we are the last one that hasn’t been broken into yet. Fortunately, I had the doors here overbuilt. They’re way beyond required specs.”

  “I see,” I said, and I did see. Turov never stinted herself when it came to government expense budgets. It made perfect sense that she’d built her own command bunker to withstand more punishment than the rest.

  Now that my skin wasn’t so sore and tight, I was able to talk to her and explain the nature of our plan. As I did so, she looked at the blue-skinned Scupper at my side in growing alarm.

  “Are you insane?” she demanded when I’d finished.

  “Some would say so,” I admitted.

  A small hand terminating in an even smaller index finger aimed itself at my second-man. “We can’t trust this… this being. What if it’s all a trap? What if we go down there into a dungeon these lizards have dug, and we’re all captured?”

  “First off, sir, they’re salamanders. Not lizards.”

  She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. Not a good sign. I decided to take a different approach.

  “Okay,” I said. “Moller, stand down. Let’s wrap it up, boys. We’re going back to the front entrance. We’ll kill one or two of those pod-walkers when they break in. After that, well, they’ll have the run of the place.”

  Turning to Harris, I thumped him with my knuckles again. He frowned at me.

  “What is it now, sir?”

  “How long have we got? Until they break in?”

  “I’m no expert on Wur psychology,” he said. “But the minute the spiders get here, they’ll coordinate the efforts of the tree-things. Then… we’re goners.”

  I grinned, even though it split some of the nu-skin and burned.

  “There you have it! The kind of death every Varus man dreams of. We’ll fight to the last, and we’ll sell every life down here dearly.”

  I turned and began marching up the stairs.

  Turov called me back. “Hold it!”

  Feigning reluctance, I turned to face her with a quizzical look.

  “Do you really think you can get us out of here, McGill? All I see is a steaming, scorched mud-hole.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Should we try? It’s your call, sir.”

  She hissed and paced for a few seconds. Turov didn’t like this kind of decision-making. She liked employing standardized plans that had been approved by Central back home. She liked designing fortifications and giving orders that had no chance to fail—but she didn’t like going off-script into the weeds.

  All that said, she didn’t like dying, either.

  “All right. Do it. But if they do break in, you’ll rush up to the entrance and fight them off. Clear?”

  “Clear as a mountain lake, sir.”

  She left, shaking her head. I watched her go, and so did the other guys. No one could help themselves. Whatever she’d paid to update her hindquarters, it was worth it.

  “Hey, back to digging,” I ordered.

  They rushed to do so, and twenty long minutes passed without much in the way of results. We’d blasted the hole bigger by now. It was maybe five meters in diameter, with rough edges that were glowing hot.

  We heard a crash and some screeching upstairs.

  “That’s it,” Harris said. “They’re breaking in!”

  I waved to him. “Go up there and do what you can. Moller, hand over that belcher.”

  Reluctantly, she did so. Most of my men raced off, and I heard a firefight begin in earnest. The rasping and shrieking of the Wur acid-creatures answered our fire in the corridors. They were assaulting the entrance.

  Second-man tried to hump his way after them, but I reached out a big hand and snagged him. He almost did a facer right there, but I helped him up.

  “You are dishonoring me,” he said. “You are dishonoring yourself as well. We must defend the bunker.”

  “That’s a damned nice gesture, Lieutenant,” I said. “But we all know those men are doomed to die. Now, I’ve gone and dug your hole for you. What I want is for you to find that entrance you promised would be here.”

  “I told you, it is difficult to be precise. The entrance should be here, but it has been obscured by human foolishness.”

  I still had a grip on his skinny arm, and I did a little march-around, taking him with me.

  “Let’s give it our best guess, shall we? Since this is about to be our final moment on this mud-pit you call home. Which spot is the most promising?”

  He pointed to the far side, and I marched over there with him in tow. He struggled to get away and head upstairs to the battle, which was growing louder every second, but I hung onto his arm. My fingers were like a vice on his limbs, and he didn’t even slow me down.

  “Right here?” I asked, standing over the spot. “That’s your best guess?”

  “Yes, First-man.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” I said, and I kicked him in the ass.

  He toppled forward into the hole, and, as I’d dearly hoped, he vanished as if the steaming earth had swallowed him up.

  Clapping my hands and howling, I called for the rest of my men to fall back. They weren’t listening, so I contacted Galina on my tapper.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “We found it!”

  “You found what? Get your ass up here and defend me!”

  “I’ve got something better. You get your ass down here and survive with me. Bring everyone down. Withdraw everyone you’ve got to the basement.”

  She didn’t listen at
first, so I marched up the stairs. There she was, standing at the top and breathing hard. She was close to a panic. Galina Turov was a lot of things, but she wasn’t much of a front-line combatant.

  “Boo!” I said.

  She jumped and squeaked, then she put a pistol in my face. “Jokes? Now? I should shoot you on principle.”

  “Come down here, sir,” I said. “Just for one second. I found a way out, honest.”

  She narrowed her pretty eyes at me. Now, in her defense, I didn’t have the best reputation when it came to truthfulness.

  “You’d better not be bullshitting me, McGill. I’ll rip off your centurion’s crest and staple it to your balls.”

  “Well deserved and purely expected, sir. Right this way.”

  I jogged back to the spot with Turov in tow. When we got there, she arched over the hole and peered in suspiciously, the way a cat might eye a pet cage.

  “I don’t see a damned thing,” she said. “You’re crazy. It must be the toxins in your blood or something. In fact, if you won’t fight, I’m going to have to put you down—”

  Her speech ended with a screech of dismay. I’d swept her feet out from under her and given her a shove. She fell into the hole, right where my second-man had vanished.

  To her credit, a beam flashed up and almost nailed me. As it was, I felt the heat of it on my scalp, and a number of hairs stank up the already foul air with that unique smell hair always produces when it’s turned to vapor.

  But she had vanished. The Scupper trick of interdimensional physics had saved the day again.

  Patting at my hair to make sure it wasn’t on fire, I contacted everyone on tactical chat.

  “This is Centurion James McGill,” I said. “Tribune Turov is down. Repeat: Turov is down. Everyone is ordered to fall back to the basement. Perform a fighting withdrawal. We’ve found an escape tunnel—get down here as fast as you can, boys.”

  That did the trick. Less than a minute later, I was tossing recruits into the hungry earth. Harris was one of the last ones to go.

  He looked at me with vast suspicion. In fact, he seemed angry.

  “If there’s some kind of threshing machine down there, McGill, I swear I’ll haunt you until the end of your days.”

  “Fortunately, my days are about done with. I hear something out in the hall.”

  A strange, hooked limb appeared in the doorway. It clung to the doorway and pulled itself closer.

  It was one of the acid-monsters. Injured, it hadn’t given up the ghost yet.

  Harris and I blasted it, but it kept crawling closer. It was determined. Like all Wur creatures, it didn’t die easily.

  When it expired at last, there was no time for celebration. More were in the hall, rasping and whispering in alien speech.

  Harris and I looked at each other.

  “They’re planning to rush us,” Harris said. “Does this hole really go someplace?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I told him, and I jumped in.

  Looking up, I saw Harris. His eyes were big, and I think he was realizing he was the last man in Gold Bunker.

  As I fell, I saw him leap after me. His big boots were heading right toward my upturned face.

  And then, everything changed.

  -42-

  I fell backward into the tube. Someone under me grunted in pain. Just in time, I rolled to one side and dodged Harris’ boots.

  The figure below me turned out to be Moller. When Harris landed on her, she roared and kicked him off.

  “I broke a rib already,” she grunted.

  “Get off the LZ, girl!” I shouted, helping her to her feet. “First lesson of any drop!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll be fine. I just got the wind knocked out of me for a moment.”

  “Right…” I said, doing a quick headcount. “Harris was the last man. What’s our total strength?”

  “Sixteen, sir—humans, that is.”

  I whistled long and low. That was pretty bad. I wondered how many of the thousands we’d left behind had made it out somehow. I suspected there weren’t many survivors.

  “What about Scuppers?” I asked Harris.

  He pointed with an expression. I walked a few paces and stared down a side-passaged. To my surprise, it was chock-full of Scuppers.

  “What the hell…?” I asked. “How did all you guys survive? I didn’t have this many with me in Gold Bunker, not even at the beginning.”

  Second-man approached. His blue skin had a few cuts in it, but he was easy to recognize and he could still move normally enough.

  “First-man,” he said. “This is your army. Do you not recognize them? They are your faithful followers.”

  “Yeah, but how did they all get down here?”

  Second-man spread his odd, sucker-cup fingers. “It is easy to understand. Many were left behind at the wall when you left to defend Gold Bunker.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Without you, sir, they lost heart. Scuppers do not fight well without their leader.”

  “But what does that…?” I trailed off, because I was catching on at last. “They ran out on the gate defenders, didn’t they? They knew where the entry points were to these tunnels, so they found them and bugged out.”

  “We are nothing like insects,” Second-man objected. “Insects are stupid, and they fight to the death like pod-walkers. These loyal troops waited for you here. Now, they have rejoined you, and they will serve you faithfully.”

  I wanted to give the crowd a good reaming, but I decided not to. After all, they were volunteer native levies, not regular soldiers. They were serving me and me alone. That meant I couldn’t let them get out of my sight if I wanted them to fight hard.

  Galina walked up to me about then. She stared around at the curving walls in wonderment—then she noticed the Scupper army in the side passage.

  “Good Lord! Where did all these colorful frogs come from?”

  “That’s my personal army, sir,” I said with a touch of pride. “They’re here to help.”

  “I don’t get how they knew to meet you down here… but I don’t care. We need all the help we can get. I’m impressed by your army, and your tunnels. When I heard your report about an underground system of tubes, I figured the story was bullshit.”

  “Just goes to show you,” Harris said. “You can’t even trust McGill to lie properly.”

  He laughed at his joke, but I cast him a dark glance. He finally shut up and wandered off.

  “McGill,” Turov said. “Since you’re familiar with this alien rat-hole, I’m putting you in operational command. Get us out of here.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  I quickly explained how to use the tube system. As I did so, the human troops stared at me with growing alarm.

  “We have to fall sideways?” Galina asked. “For kilometers?”

  “Yep. But don’t worry, it’s kind of fun once you get the hang of it.”

  “Unless you touch the sides by accident and get smashed to a pulp,” Harris said bitterly.

  “Yeah, well… there is that.”

  “Lead,” Galina urged.

  After talking to Second-man for a minute, I got a handle on which way to go. We jumped into the air and shot in the correct direction.

  Not long afterward, I landed and heard a distant, growing wail behind me.

  Galina came tumbling out of the tube and slammed into me. Fortunately, she didn’t weigh much more than an infantryman’s ruck.

  I caught her and set her on her feet, laughing. “It seems like lighter flyers go a little further down any given tube.”

  “Yes,” my blue friend confirmed. “That’s how it works, First-man.”

  “I must be the lightest person here…” Galina said, gasping for breath. “That means I should go first next time. Shit.”

  “Aw, come on. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “It was terrifying,” she complained.

  But, despite her misgivings, she jumped first at the next junctio
n point. Trusting me and Second-man, she demonstrated she had guts. She was whisked away into the distance at about two hundred kilometers an hour.

  Second-man followed, tucking himself into a perfect ball. His fellows followed him, as they were skinny people without much gear. The bulk of the human troops went next, one at a time. Lastly, Moller, Harris and I jumped, as we were the heaviest.

  About three minutes later, we were deposited safely at the next station. No one had had a serious accident.

  “This way,” Second-man said, pointing up a long shaft. “This one goes to the surface.”

  “Where are we going to come out?” Galina asked.

  I looked at her in surprise. “There’s only one destination that makes sense,” I told her. “This shaft leads up to the near-human legion camp.”

  “That’s great,” she said bitterly. “I’ll be the laughing stock of the entire planet. When doesn’t Turov wipe her entire legion?”

  I didn’t say anything, because she was probably right. The truth was people already said stuff like that about her without factoring in this fresh disaster. Galina had presided over several of the worst military defeats in modern history. Hell, we’d wiped on Dark World just last year under her leadership.

  “Um…” I said. “You want me to go first?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I’ll do it.”

  Setting her lips in a tight line and looking straight up the shaft above us with determination, she squatted and then launched herself.

  She jetted straight upward and soon vanished.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we all followed one at a time.

  Our entire group soon came popping out of the ground like gophers exiting a flooded hole. We were noticed almost immediately.

  There was a spat of gunfire, and several of the Scuppers were shot down. The rest had the good sense to hug the mud.

  “We’ve activated automated turrets!” Harris hissed as I came out of the ground and did a little flip.

  I landed on my ass near the exit point, and I started to get up.

  “No! Don’t!” Galina urged. “Stay motionless!”

  All around me, our entire makeshift army of survivors was freaked out and kissing dirt. About the only good news was the storm was more of a drizzling rain here. We crouched on a layer of dead, wet leaves that frosted the thick mud.