Storm World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 10)

by B. V. Larson

  My heart sank another notch lower. It was down somewhere inside my ball sack by now, if I had to guess.

  “Uh…” I said. “Soviet Order 227, sir?”

  “That’s right. Not one step back. Die well, McGill.”

  Fike disconnected, and I withdrew off the wall and into the gatehouse. Back in World War II, Stalin had given Soviet Order 227, commanding Russia’s defensive forces to hold the Germans back at all costs. The order had become the slogan of the war for their side.

  I could only dream I’d manage to execute it as well as the Russians had.

  “All right,” I said. “Churn, I want every Blood Worlder heavy we’ve got to the bottom floor of the gatehouse. You’ll hold them there, fighting hand-to-hand if you have to. Here’s how—”

  “But sir,” Churn objected, flapping his limbs around in an agitated fashion. “The enemy troops are shrugging off our weapons just as they do yours. I don’t think our swords will fare any better against their impenetrable armor.”

  I got up into Churn’s face, and a couple of his eye-groups glared at me.

  “Listen, squid,” I said, “I’ve got a new plan for your men.”

  Walking toward a Blood Worlder, I grabbed his rifle from his hands, reversed it, and aimed it into his guts.

  They all watched with alarm. His eight brothers twitched and stared. They didn’t like me threatening their relative, but they were too disciplined to attack me outright.

  “See that?” I demanded. “That’s what you’re going to do. Don’t shoot them. Don’t hack at them. Grab their guns out of their hands, turn them around, and blast them in the belly. You got that?”

  They shuffled and stared at me with piggy eyes—but a few of them nodded.

  “Outstanding! Churn, lead these heroes downstairs. If you come back up before this is over, I’ll make calamari out of you.”

  With poor grace, Churn led his troops downward, and I pulled all the humans back upstairs. From the walls, we did our best to make the Rigellian troops hate life. We dropped grenades, popped shots off at them to kick them around and generally behaved like apes in trees.

  They fired back now and then, but they were well-disciplined. Their weapons were very short-ranged and probably required heavy ammunition. Those bears could only carry so much, and their transports were way up in the sky. They couldn’t afford to waste it by missing their targets.

  The door went down with a crash in less than a minute. That was impressive all by itself, as the door had been built out of puff-crete and crystalline steel. Some of the hardest substances Humanity had access to.

  I wasn’t down there as it was cramped, and I didn’t want to get in the way. But due to the beauty of drones and tappers, I got to witness the action up-close and personal.

  The bears blew the big door’s hinges off with charges—but things didn’t go the way they were supposed to after that.

  First off, the door was damned heavy, and the squad of Blood Worlders behind it shoved hard in unison when it came free of the hinges. That sent the doors out and down, instead of inward.

  Two of Rigel’s finest were squished right then. I didn’t know if they were still alive under those two-ton planks of metal and condensed mass, but it probably didn’t matter. They weren’t going anywhere even if they were still kicking.

  Snarling, the invading team rushed inside to meet our defenders. As I’d ordered, the littermates stood off to the sides and snatched the little guys up like ogres grabbing children.

  A vicious, strange fight broke out. Sometimes, a Blood Worlder would manage to pluck a gun from one of the smaller troops and blast him with it. But almost as often, the growling little monster would manage to tear up the bigger man.

  “They’ve got force-blades!” Harris shouted. “Just like ours, but shorter. They use them like claws. Nasty!”

  It was true. The Blood Worlders were massive and powerful, but they couldn’t tear an arm off the smaller enemy. About the only thing that worked was taking the guns away and shooting them, point-blank.

  Unfortunately, my guys were simple-minded. Once they’d lost a few of their number, they went berserk with rage and forgot about killing them with their own guns. They tried to use their traditional tactics—and got themselves killed by these vicious dynamos.

  “That’s it!” I shouted. “Heavy troops, on me! All of you sling your rifles and extend force-blades. Set them for about a meter in length. We’re going down there!”

  Roaring, we rushed to the defense of our near-human comrades. By the time we got down there, most were dead. Churn was standing to one side of the smoking room, firing over and over with a gun he’d wrestled from a Rigellian. He worked the weapon like a pro with his tentacles, despite the fact two of them had been blown half-off.

  I was glad to see the enemy had taken serious losses too. At least fifteen of them were down.

  My heavies tramped onto the floor, and we squared off with the bears. To my surprise, they fought like martial arts masters. Force-blades slashed and sizzled. Thrust, parry, and thrust again.

  Every trooper on my side was well-trained with these weapons. We had one on each arm, and we used them to block as well as attack. It was like a good, old-fashioned sword fight.

  We soon learned that we had a single advantage—and it wasn’t skill. These guys clearly were well-trained with these weapons. They were quick, accurate, and instinctual killers. Several heavies fell with their guts steaming on the floor before they realized these bears weren’t kids, no matter how short they were.

  But then we discovered their blades didn’t extend. They were a fixed length, about half a meter long.

  All we had to do was engage a bear, trade a few cuts, then surprise him by extending a hot blade into his guts. My first bear was a whirlwind of blows, I caught them all, reeling back, but then turned a parry into a sliding disengage and—zap, I extended my blade and ran him through the skull with it.

  That armor had held back every ballistic weapon we’d thrown at it. No grenade fragment, burst of radiation, or plain old accelerated sliver of metal had penetrated. Maybe it was reactive armor, triggered by high-speed kinetics to realign molecules into a solid—I don’t know. But whatever the case, it was a sucker for a force-blade.

  We killed them all, in the end. We’d lost six of my men, and fourteen out of eighteen of Churn’s platoon—but we’d won.

  After the fight, I spread the news as fast as I could. The Rigellian troops could be beaten. They were at least equal to a human in heavy gear, or a Blood Worlder littermate. There was a downside since a light soldier stood no chance at all, but I was quite pleased to share that our foes could be killed with the right tactics.

  -51-

  All over the fort, there were reports of hard fighting. Others had come up with strategies that worked—but my gun-snatching idea was probably the most effective.

  The key was in the arm strength of your average Blood Worlder. Their size, reach, and vitality allowed them to disarm the smaller troops. Even if they often received mortal wounds in the process, they were still able to complete the job of murdering their unarmed opponents before they sagged down, joining them in death.

  Overall, there was a hell of a lot of dying going on. The fight was bloody, and corpses were everywhere. Part of that was due to the natural ferocity of the opposing sides, but it was also related to the simple fact the Rigellians had nowhere to retreat.

  They’d dropped right into the middle of our walls. That took brass balls, as they must have known they weren’t going to walk out alive unless they won.

  Fortunately for us, they didn’t win. They’d dropped an estimated three thousand troops, and they’d lost them all.

  “The enemy troops aren’t the only ones taking this hard,” Harris told me.

  Glancing at him, I saw he was leaning on his rifle, but I didn’t admonish him for using it as a prop. That was about all it was good for today.

  “The littermates?” I asked.

 
“Yeah. They’re despondent. Virtually every square of nine lost half or more.”

  I shook my head. “We had to use them—yeah, even overuse them. They took the brunt of the losses in the end.”

  “Have you checked in with Graves and Armel?” he asked. “We need reinforcements. In fact, I’d like to send any squad that’s lost more than two back to Blood World. Let them switch out for a fresh group.”

  I thought that over. “I’ll ask.”

  When I talked to Armel, he laughed at me.

  “Are you kidding? Build new squads. Every group of nine—since they seem so fascinated with that number—can form into an effective force again.”

  “But sir,” I said, “the Blood Worlders don’t want to fight without their real brothers. How many revival machines do we have that can handle big bodies?”

  “This nonsense again? I don’t have time for your hand-wringing, McGill.”

  “It’s far from that, sir. I’m concerned about the readiness of my troops. The Wur are approaching, and I’m sure there are more than three thousand troops on those transports.”

  “All right, all right,” Armel said irritably. “I’ll put you in contact with Raash.”

  I blinked when I heard that name. Raash was a saurian who’d once killed me and Floramel back on Earth. He’d died at my hands too, and that didn’t leave us on the best of speaking terms.

  I’d heard that old Raash was working revival machines for Blood Worlders again. The legions used saurians because they were larger and stronger than humans, as well as more technologically competent than Blood Worlders. The bodies of the troops being birthed by these extra-large revival machines often weighed a metric ton or more. Hegemony had seen fit to employ Saurians like Raash to man these outsized machines for them.

  “Uh…” I said, but by the time I considered objecting or maybe disconnecting, Armel had switched me over.

  “Raash speaks,” an oddly familiar, raspy voice said. It was his translator, but I still recognized it.

  “Raash…?” I said. “So, you’re really on Storm World?”

  “This is the McGill? Ah yes, I see the identification on my com unit. You are correct, I’m on Storm World. However, you are not wanted in my vicinity, McGill.”

  I blinked twice, letting that flip over in my mind a few times. Raash always seemed to have an odd turn of phrase, and today was no exception. Figuring he was saying he wasn’t glad to hear my voice, I decided to press ahead anyway. After all, orders were orders.

  “I’ve been directed by Tribune Armel to talk to you about revival rates.”

  “Your complaints are uninteresting. I have work. This call ends.”

  He disconnected before I could say more. That left me a bit ticked off. Glancing at my tapper, I had him pinpointed inside the bunkers on my mapping app.

  “Kivi!” I called out. “How long until those Wur hit the walls?”

  “They’re not in too much of a hurry. They’re massing up in the forest. If they behave as they did up at Fort Alpha, we probably have an hour at least.”

  I glanced at the dreary sky and thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t hurricane time. “An hour… They’ll hit us just before the local version of dawn then, right?”

  “That’s what I expect.”

  Nodding, I set Leeson in charge, with Sub-Centurion Churn backing him up. Then, I marched out into the smoldering battlefield inside our walls.

  As I trudged through the mud, I noted that I couldn’t find a single undamaged structure. They’d tried to pry their way into every bunker, even Blue Bunker where I was headed now.

  A solid ten minutes after I’d started walking, I found my way down into what served the bio-people as a basement. There, I found Raash and about thirty other lizards, working oversized revival machines.

  As I watched, they birthed a giant. The process was both impressive—and disgusting.

  Then I caught sight of the last person I’d expected to meet down here—Floramel. She was lingering in the brightly-lit hallway behind me.

  “Floramel?” I boomed, throwing my arms wide. “Sorry I never got a chance to look you up. So you’re serving with the Blood Worlder legion?”

  “It’s a near-human formation,” she said. “Isn’t that where I belong?”

  “Um… sure. I guess. As long as you’re happy…”

  Floramel and I had had a strange, on-again, off-again relationship for years. Now, that could rightly describe my entanglement with any number of women, but with her, the pattern seemed even more pronounced.

  She studied the floor with down-cast eyes. Every now and then, she glanced up to look at me squarely, before going back to studying the deck again.

  “Sure is good to see you,” I said, and I meant it. She didn’t quite have the raw sexual intensity of a girl like Kivi, or the cute youthful looks of Galina—but she did have the regal, queenly look nailed.

  Taking a chance, I stepped forward and extended my arms. For a long time, we’d had a private means of communication. I would touch her shoulders lightly, giving them a squeeze.

  Since physical contact among Rogue-Worlders only happened when they were suggesting a willingness to mate, what might look like an innocent gesture of friendship to a human was really an open invitation to her.

  “Stop!” boomed a voice behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder in surprise.

  Raash stood in the doorway of the revival chamber. His jaws were open, and his nasty-looking tongue was squirming inside his mouth.

  Now, I’m no expert in saurian facial expressions, but seeing as he’d exposed just about every tooth inside his toothy head, I figured he was upset about something.

  “Hey, Raash!” I said, lowering my outstretched hands.

  I’d hadn’t touched Floramel, but it’d been a close thing.

  “I didn’t come here to dispense sexual functions, James,” Floramel said unhelpfully.

  “Uh…”

  “You’ve been rebuked, human,” Raash told me. “It is time to withdraw while you still possess a tail.”

  Raash had always had a weird thing going for Floramel. He’d followed her around, spied on her, and eventually killed her back on Earth. All of that hadn’t quite soured her on the crazy lizard.

  I threw up my hands and laughed. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m glad to see you both breathing again.”

  “That does not match my own thinking,” Raash said. “I enjoyed every moment of your most recent interval of nonexistence.”

  “Still full of love and biscuits, aren’t you, Raash?”

  “Your statement concerns sex and food, but it is nonsensical. I will assume it is an insult.”

  So far, I wasn’t losing my temper. Raash was just the kind of alien you had to acquire a taste for—but I’d never acquired it.

  But then he did something I really didn’t like. He pushed past me, knocking my shoulder with his, and put his big claws on Floramel.

  My own teeth made an appearance. My hand went to my morph-rifle—but Floramel stopped me.

  She put up her hand, palm out. “James… I see you don’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  Raash put his scaly hands higher, gripping Floramel. He reached up and gave her a squeeze at the shoulders. She winced a little, as if he’d hurt her, but she said nothing. She just stared at me.

  Finally, that dormant organ inside my skull got the message. It was loud and clear. Raash and Floramel were… intimate.

  “Aw now…” I began, feeling disgusted. “Don’t tell me…! That’s just wrong, girl!”

  “Why?” Raash asked. “Over time, we’ve become physically compatible.”

  “Jeez,” I said, not wanting to think about it. “A human woman and a lizard? That’s not right. He’s an alien, Floramel! You’re not even from the same food-group!”

  “I thought you of all people, James, might understand. After all, you and I mated many times, and I’m not completely human.”


  “That’s not the same thing at all,” I argued. “Besides, he’s an abuser. I’ve never hurt you.”

  “Not physically perhaps,” she said. “But all couples fight.”

  She shrugged, and Raash’s claws rode her shoulders. He maintained a constant possessive hold on her.

  “He’s worse than an abuser,” I continued. “He’s a murderer! This lizard killed you back on Earth!”

  “I killed you when we first met,” she pointed out. “And you told me stories of your odd relationship with Della. And let’s not forget you and Turov. Or—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah… Okay. I get your point. Some of my relationships have been imperfect as well. But this…”

  I gave a little shudder. I couldn’t help it.

  “Wait a minute...” I said, my eyes narrowing with a fresh suspicion. “Did you two have a thing going back on Earth? Back when I first met Raash?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Well then… Why didn’t you damn-well tell me, girl?”

  She lifted her hands toward me, palms upturned. “Isn’t that obvious? Look how you’re reacting. You can’t even deal with the news years later.”

  I sighed, shaking my head. “Whatever. I hope you two are happy together.”

  “You hear that?” Raash rasped. “I told you he would lie. He lies constantly. The truth will burn his throat, if he ever dares to utter it.”

  My finger came up, and I pointed it at him accusingly. “Raash, you told me you were an agent. You said you were trying to get back to Steel World, back into the favor of your prince. You expressed contempt for Floramel then—for all humans.”

  Raash’s face twitched, as did his tail. Was that a sign of surprise? Perhaps he’d hoped I’d forgotten our conversation in Floramel’s apartment. There had been plenty to distract me, as we’d fought over her dead body.

  “What’s more,” I continued, “Claver told me you worked for him. You were his agent. You were after the book, weren’t you? Maybe you still are…”

  Floramel frowned, and she looked up over her shoulder at Raash.