Storm World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 10)

by B. V. Larson

  The saurian still gripped her in his powerful claws.

  “You see?” he rasped in her ear. “He flails with pointless words. He is wicked. He seeks to hurt our minds, and he is forever untruthful.”

  Floramel lowered her head to look at the deck for a moment, but then she looked up again and met my eyes.

  “You have to go, James. Whatever we had before—it’s gone now.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m out of here!”

  I threw up my hands. The gesture made them both flinch.

  Marching away, I left Blue Bunker. The air outside wasn’t exactly fresh, but at least it was laced with honest stinks.

  Armel contacted me the second I left Blue Bunker.

  “Ah, McGill!” he purred smugly. “I see by your location tag that you’ve exited the revival chambers. Here’s hoping you’ve had an enlightening discussion with Raash, hmm?”

  The delight in his voice was obvious. Right off, I knew the truth: I’d been set up. Armel had known about Floramel and Raash. He’d sent me down there, not for any information about revival rates, but to rub my face in the clear light of failure.

  What a devious bastard he was. I could only wonder, as I returned to the gatehouse to await the arrival of the Wur army, how this new feud between us would end.

  In the past, such things had never gone well for anyone.

  -52-

  Returning to the gatehouse, I was feeling low. Far from the hero’s welcome I’d hoped for, I’d been booted out of Floramel’s presence. Sure, we’d won the battle, but Armel had gotten the best of me. Raash had also gotten to take a turn at kicking old McGill in the tailpipe.

  Shaking it off, I took stock of the tactical situation. Now wasn’t the time for introspection, heartache or any other form of self-indulgent mental masturbation. A legionnaire on the front lines couldn’t allow his brain to get tied up with nonsense.

  I ordered Kivi to project a tactical map on the puff-crete walls with her computer. The display showed the Wur, who were clearly using the same tactics they’d used before against Fort Alpha.

  And why shouldn’t they? That effort had been successful. Even a race of oversized plants were smart enough to stick with a winning formula.

  Within an hour of my return, the Wur spiders scouted us. These spiders were the smartest form the Wur took—except for their Nexus plants, which looked like giant cacti.

  The spiders came poking up out of the brush to peer at our walls warily—and we gave them a hot greeting.

  Unlike past encounters with these creatures, we were ready for them. Snipers began peppering their ugly faces the moment they appeared.

  Hissing and reeling back, they quickly faded into the ferns again.

  The troops hooted and whooped, as if we’d won some kind of major victory. Those who’d fought and died on the walls back at Fort Alpha, however, presented a different mood: they were tense, quiet, and fatalistic.

  “Another bug-hunt,” Harris complained. “I can’t wait for the full on piss-party to show up and educate Armel’s fools.”

  Counting noses among my troops, I came up with a paltry number. We’d lost so many fighting the Rigellians, we’d been left somewhere below half-strength. Reinforcements were trickling in from the revival machines of course, but it seemed like too little, too late. The worst part was the Scuppers had abandoned us entirely. They hadn’t been all that useful, but it was always demoralizing to have friends run out on you.

  Tapping on Kivi’s helmet, I got her to contact HQ for me.

  “Get Graves on the line.”

  “He’s dead. Didn’t you hear?”

  I blinked at her. “Nope… Did the Rigellians get him during that landing?”

  “Yes. He tried to hold the entrance to Gold Bunker using your new tactics. I guess he pulled a gun out of a teddy-bear’s grip—but he got shot in the process.”

  “Teddy-bears…” I laughed. “That’s the opposite of what those snarling little bastards are like. Teddy-bears from Hell, maybe.”

  “Yeah.”

  My eyes narrowed. “If Graves is dead… who do I ask for reinforcements?”

  “Primus Fike is your immediate commander, sir.”

  My face twisted up into a grimace. “Primus Fike won’t give us shit.”

  She squirmed. “You’re probably right. If you want to go over his head… it has to be Armel.”

  “Damn.”

  I’d been hoping someone else from Legion Varus would have taken on the role of quartermaster or executive officer—but there was no such luck. Eventually, after complaining to an army of snotty staffers, I got through to Armel.

  “Again with the sniveling?” he asked. “What is it now? Do you wish I should wipe your tears for you?”

  “Tribune, we’ve got problems. We’re being scouted by spiders—that means an attack is imminent.”

  “So? Repel the invaders! You’ve got new weapons courtesy of Rigel. Grow a spine, man!”

  I closed my eyes. Armel never made these things easy. I wanted to disconnect and curse up a streak, but I held my anger in check. It would only make him happy and leave my troops in the lurch.

  “Sir,” I said patiently, “the enemy broke the gates at Fort Alpha, and we were full strength then. Once they get past these walls—it’s over.”

  Armel made a pffing sound. “I will send you a full unit of heavy troopers from my reserves.”

  “That’s excellent, sir. But I need more. I need giants.”

  “Impossible!”

  The wrangling went on for a time, but I eventually shared a few choice vids from the battle at Fort Alpha, and a few more from Death World. I showed him what a full-on pod-walker charge looked like from the ground. He was grudgingly impressed.

  “These walking trees are unnatural,” he complained. “Do you think our walls can hold them?”

  “I suggest we seal the exterior gate with fresh puff-crete. Anything that makes it over the wall after that, your giants can deal with.”

  “I only have a force of sixty here… I will give you half. But do not fail me, James McGill!”

  “I won’t, sir.”

  Harris eyed me after I’d finished the negotiation. He looked impressed.

  “You played that straight, McGill. No lies, no shit, no nothing.”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes the plain truth can be useful.”

  He grunted, and we went back to waiting. We didn’t have to wait long.

  Right on schedule, the forest floor began to shake again. The pod-walkers were coming.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle, allowing our troops to see a decent distance into the forest. Our snipers began to plink away. I could have told them it was pointless, but they wouldn’t have listened.

  “Hey!” Leeson called out excitedly, slapping my armored shoulder. “I see giants! On our side, I mean.”

  The biggest near-humans of all came marching toward the gatehouse from the middle of the compound. There were thirty of them, just as Armel had promised. They marched two abreast from the center of the fort, and I quickly realized, without any surprise, that they were coming directly from Gold Bunker. Perhaps Armel had been keeping them down there as his personal Praetorian Guard.

  These giants weren’t the small kind like the littermates. They were much taller and heavier. True monsters, they stood six meters tall or more. A glittering shield of force created a glassy nimbus over their bodies, and they each carried a massive energy projector that was bigger than a belcher.

  My heart swelled to see them despite their disturbing faces. They wore idiot grins on heads that were slightly too small for their swollen bodies.

  Somehow, despite all that, these stinking primitives always lifted the spirits of the men who fought with them—and caused those who opposed them to feel real fear.

  My troops began to cheer as the giants took up positions behind the walls and around the gates. They were too big to enter the gatehouse itself, but their job was to destroy anything that broke
inside, so it didn’t matter. They were my back-up, my reserve, my ace-in-the-hole.

  Turning my attention back to the forest, I saw a charging line of Wur outside the walls. There were a lot of them. We were going to need every asset we had.

  Steadfast, we braced ourselves for the initial shock. The Wur soon broke out into the open, and the battle began in earnest.

  This time, I played it smarter. I ordered our light troops to get off the battlements. Armed with snap-rifles, they were only good for shooting spiders and acid-monsters. I redeployed the light troops well back inside the compound. I wanted them to act in support of the giants, killing anything that made it inside.

  The pod-walkers strode into the open, leaving the trees behind. But this time they didn’t pick up acid-monsters and throw them over our walls. Instead, they just rushed right at us.

  The 88s sang, and a dozen pod-walkers warbled in agony as their trunks caught fire—but they still charged toward us.

  Blind, but determined, they reached the base of our walls. The tallest of them couldn’t reach the top of the walls, not by five to ten meters. Construction crews had measured it out that way months ago.

  “What are they doing?” Harris laughed. “Permission to use our heaviest guns to shoot them in the face, sir?”

  Harris wanted to deploy the shotguns we’d captured from the Rigellian troops. I thought that over for about a second, but I shook my head. “We have to keep every round we have that can penetrate Rigel-made armor. Morph-rifles only, set for assault mode.”

  Disappointed, he ordered his troops to advance, and I joined them. Together, we poured fire down the wall into the confused, scrabbling enemy walkers.

  But then, a second line of pod-walkers appeared at the tree line. They too, charged our walls.

  Howling and beating their great fists on the puff-crete, the first group met their dooms one at a time. Concentrated fire chipped and tore leaking holes in their bodies. Like real trees, the flesh inside the rough exterior was white. Inside their hollow trunks and limbs, I knew, were strings of nano-fiber that resembled corn silk. These strings reacted to stimuli as did our muscle fibers, contracting to cause movement.

  Two went down, then four—but the party didn’t last long. The second wave of Wur soon reached the first.

  These monsters were already scarred by our 88s, but they kept coming. They seemed more purposeful than they had been during the previous attack. Could it be they were learning? Could the spiders have taken careful notes and worked out a new strategy?

  I wasn’t sure, but their inexplicable behavior was beginning to worry me.

  “Are these walls going to hold?” Leeson asked. “There’s no way they can beat down puff-crete, right?”

  “No way in Hell,” I told him with absolute confidence. I forced a grin. “This is a turkey shoot! Burn them all down before they run back into the woods!”

  Leeson smiled back weakly. He wanted to believe my overconfident boasting—but he couldn’t quite do it.

  Still, we kept firing, killing them one at a time. What else could we do?

  That’s when the third wave of pod-walkers thundered out of the forest. This group was made up of the largest of their kind.

  “Burn the new ones!” I shouted. “Take down those big bastards in the rear!”

  “Can’t do it, sir!” Leeson shouted back.

  The 88s were too busy buzzing and scorching what they could of the enemy at the base of the walls. They’d all tilted over, nearly ninety-degrees, doing their best to nail the enemy that were so tantalizingly close.

  The fresh wave of monstrous Wur made it to our walls with only a few dark stripes on their hides. Most of them still had orange fronds out, whipping like snakes. Their sensory organs had stayed intact, and that meant these new giants weren’t blind like the rest.

  Coming upon the frothing mass of their smaller brethren—who were maddened by pain and beating themselves to a pulp on our walls—they touched them.

  The survivors of the first waves reacted strangely to this touch, which was almost a caress. They froze their bodies into place.

  Looking down from the wall-top, the frenzied invaders all seemed to pause at once. They soon resembled a forest of trees swaying in a winter breeze. Those who had taken the worst of our defensive fire had taken root.

  A curious transformation took place. Ladders were formed—or at least what looked like crude scaffolding. The survivors interlocked arms and transformed themselves into a series of living, smoking ladders.

  Then the third wave of pod-walkers, the greatest of them all, began to climb their brothers’ backs.

  “Burn their fronds!” I shouted. “Blind the big ones!”

  My men hastened to obey, but I already knew it was too little, too late. The taller walkers soon managed to reach the top of our walls—which were, after all, carefully measured to be out of reach for the biggest known walker we’d ever seen.

  Unfortunately, the Wur had learned to climb.

  -53-

  The skies overhead seemed to know we were fighting hard. They darkened, the winds gusted up, and rain began to pour down with sudden fury.

  Feeling a sense of desperation, my wall-defenders gave their all. We blasted, cut and stabbed. Leeson pulled back his 88s, waiting until a climbing pod-walker was inside point-blank range before unleashing a deadly spray of radiation. This last effort had a serious effect. Out of the initial wall-climbers, only half made it over the top.

  When they got there, a fierce thirst for vengeance overtook them. No longer were they struggling painfully, stung by a thousand tiny burns and pinpricks. Instead, they slapped us from the walls with greedy abandon.

  Men flew from the rain-slick walls, wailing and broken. The lightning that now played overhead lit the frantic scene periodically. Every flash of brilliance brought a new horror to my eyes.

  I saw a littermate snatched up. His guts were squeezed by thick brown fingers until his eyes popped from their sockets. Even so, his sword arm kept hacking with rhythmic determination.

  Then two blinded walkers grab hold of a single slaver at the same time, pulling the lanky near-human apart in their frenzy. They must have each thought the tugs of their comrade were desperate efforts by their prey to escape—but since his head was missing, I knew they were mistaken.

  “Retreat!” I roared, sounding a bugle call on tactical chat. “Withdraw to the base of the wall!”

  The survivors scrambled to obey. Six of the walkers now stood on the walls themselves, reaching with their long, long—impossibly long arms to pluck weaponeers from those hated 88s. The artillery pieces were cast down in their great fists to crash into the soggy earth far below.

  Rappelling down the inside of the wall and casting off the emergency lines, I retreated with the rest. Some men didn’t get their lines cut fast enough, and they were snatched back up to the howling monsters on the battlements above them.

  That’s when our giants got into the game. I didn’t order them to do so—perhaps one of the squid sub-centurions had picked up on the opportunity and given the fateful command.

  Reaching up with fists the size of a man’s torso, they grabbed hold of the lines that we’d used to escape. Far above, the pod-walkers were still in a frenzy, and they yanked on these monofilament ropes with greedy intent.

  The giants yanked back.

  Breathing hard, bleeding, I stared with my mouth open. Watching the giants in action was always a fearsome vision. They were humanity taken to a logical extreme, a breeding experiment in genetics and hydraulics. They were as big as a human could be, requiring with massive hearts and comparatively tiny brains.

  Veins popped out in purple ropes on those fists. The muscles were unnaturally strong, even accounting for their vast weight. They had to be. With our natural muscular density, no normal human could have grown so large and lived.

  The Wur, so far above us, were caught by surprise. Tangled on lines they’d been hauling upon like fishermen pulling in net
s, they found themselves overpowered by groups of giants. One at a time, they came crashing down to the mushy dirt. Brown waves of mud surged like ocean waves, flattening and choking regular troops who were too close to the impact point.

  Heedless of the smaller figures fleeing between their legs and rolling to dodge their monstrous feet, the giants advanced. Drool ran from their mouths, and their eyes stared without blinking. They were hungry for battle, and they made grunting noises of obscene excitement.

  The Wur were far from finished, however. Some had suffered snapped limbs, but they struggled to stand anyway.

  Our giants closed in, and a horrible melee began. The giants thumped the Wur with massive fists, burned away their organs with chest-mounted projectors and tore their branch-like limbs from their flailing bodies.

  The pod-walkers killed a few giants, usually by finding a wattled neck and throttling it—but it was too little, too late.

  “Hold your fire!” I ordered, and those of my men who’d been spraying rounds into the mess halted. The chance of hitting our own giants was simply too great.

  Harris and Leeson high-fived one another. I grinned at them both. Even Carlos was impressed.

  “That’s got to be the best mud-wrestling free-for-all I’ve ever seen, McGill,” he said. “You must feel right at home.”

  “Get in there!” I shouted in his ear. Placing my hand on his shoulder, I shoved him and sent him staggering toward the fight

  He glanced back in shock.

  One look at my laughing face, and he relaxed.

  “Evil sir,” he said. “Positively evil—and well-played!”

  We all enjoyed the show, but it didn’t last. More Wur had climbed up onto the battlements, and they weren’t content to watch us dismember their comrades.

  Acid-monsters had joined their ranks. First a dozen of them—then two dozen.

  “Fall back!” I ordered, and my men began to pull out.

  The giants, however, didn’t withdraw.

  “Sub-centurion Churn!” I called out. “Get control of your men. Pull the giants out—the Wur at the base of the wall are all dead.”