Steel World

by Larson, B. V.

  “Why would she make a big deal out of it?”

  “This was probably the first time she’s been in command in a combat situation. By dying in the field, she’s probably blown her chances of advancing to veteran anytime soon. Veterans aren’t supposed to get their heads bitten off from behind while the rest of the team survives. It looks bad.”

  I understood. It was the type of logic the Legion Varus used all the time when considering people for advancement. They didn’t believe in luck, and they didn’t reward failure.

  -7-

  When we made it to base camp at the foot of the black cliffs, Anne Grant,. I found that to be amazing. The technology was so far beyond anything we could do on Earth. The system that grew a new body for the dead was a benefit of Galactic trade. Some planet somewhere made the machines and sold them for credits. Since copying fallen soldiers was extremely useful to a military unit that sees a lot of death, our legions all had at least one.

  Varus, I’d learned, had several. One additional unit stayed aboard Corvus at all times. The other was deployable and had been brought here by means I didn’t understand yet. The light troop regulars weren’t interested in talking to me about it, either. I suspected legion officials had shipped the unit to our target world under guard, to be set up by whoever had signed the contract. Once in-system, Corvus dropped the troops and downloaded our data. The revival units always had work to do after we’d dropped.

  I didn’t get to see the machine itself. It remained under heavy guard inside a puff-crete bunker they’d just fabricated and sunk into the ground. I was curious, but no one cared to satisfy the curiosity of a recruit.

  The freshly revived bio specialist, on the other hand, was interested in us. As soon as Grant came staggering out of that bunker, she wanted us all hung.

  When we reached the camp, tired and haggard, she didn’t let us reunite with our units and have a shower and something to eat. She pounced immediately. In her wake was Centurion Graves.

  While we were still out of earshot, Sargon leaned close and said: “She’s not going to let this go easily. She has to blame it on someone—other than herself.”

  I saw what he meant. The bio was furious. Graves, however, wore his usual stern, impassive expression.

  “You two?” the centurion asked, looking at Weaponeer Sargon and myself. “I might have known.”

  “Is there some kind of problem, Centurion?” Sargon asked innocently.

  I decided to keep my mouth shut. In this situation, the weaponeer knew what he was doing better than I did.

  “Yes, there is,” Grant said. She glared at each of us, but seemed to hold an extra dose of venom for me. “That’s the recruit. I sent him out on point, and he led us right into an ambush. He’s your man, Centurion. I expect him to be disciplined.”

  “I discipline all my recruits when it’s required,” he said. He turned to Sargon and demanded a report.

  Sargon stood at attention and gave his recollection of the events that transpired. Grant glared throughout this time, and I suspected her report wasn’t matching up with what Sargon was saying. His tale emphasized the use of his big weapon to personally bring down two of the three theropods.

  At last, Centurion Graves turned to me. His eyes were dead gray and his face seemed to hold no expression at all.

  “Which of these two accounts more closely resembles the truth in your eyes, Recruit?”

  I hesitated. I could support Sargon, or I could say I didn’t see the details, as I was too busy dodging fifteen-foot tall lizards. I certainly wasn’t going to support the bio specialist’s story as it had me in the starring role of the village idiot.

  I decided to make a dangerous play.

  “Everyone sees a combat action through different eyes,” I said. “What I saw was three saurians chasing me. One of them was smarter than the others and circled around. She caught the group by surprise while we were dealing with the first two. If you ask me, we were outmaneuvered, that’s all.”

  Nobody looked happy with this statement. Graves didn’t react at all. He just stared at me, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “You were cut off, you were a straggler group and you encountered the enemy. The team won the fight and returned with only one casualty. I say that sounds about average given the situation. Dismissed.”

  He turned around and walked away. Grant glared at both of us, but she turned on Sargon, not me.

  “You could have covered for me. Why the grandstanding about how big your cannon is?”

  Sargon shook his head. “What are you complaining about? No one is in any kind of trouble. Your record will be clean. Next time, just stick to the facts, good or bad, if you’re dealing with Graves. He’s very businesslike.”

  She still seemed agitated but less so than she had been. I could tell she was relieved. She’d been expecting to be chewed on, but it hadn’t happened.

  “Keep your pet recruit. I’m going back to the 3rd,” she said, then marched away.

  I was glad to see her go.

  “Just hope you never need her to call in a revive for you!” Sargon told me, laughing. He wandered off to find the rest of the non-coms. I went to my assigned bunker and joined my fellow recruits in the dimly lit interior.

  I could tell right away our post wasn’t the best. There were already vermin crawling in from the jungle. I saw mean-looking twelve-legged spiders everywhere. These things were the size of gophers, and they weren’t afraid of humans either. Even after we’d smashed a score of them, the rest kept rearing up like angry snakes, hissing and spitting at us.

  Other bunkers were equipped with sealed doors, repellants and bug-zappers. The message was clear: we were the lowest of the low. My unit was made up largely of recruits, and it was part of a cohort of light troops, the least respected and most poorly equipped troops in the legion. I felt like we were still in boot camp. No one trusted us with anything important. I would have to see my second planet to earn the privilege of moving up.

  We weren’t allowed to lounge around in the bunker, either. As this was a defensive mission against indigents, we started by building up barriers around the entrances to the mines. There was a single main entrance tunnel and a few minor ones. The main entrance had thick steel doors. Some air-shafts led out to the cliffs in places high above, but we were told not to worry about those.

  We learned over the next day that the enemy was made up of pissed-off dino miners who wanted to raid the mines to recoup unpaid wages. The saurians had a feudal society. The local lord was what we might have historically called a “landed baron” on our world. As the miners had started things by rebelling and eating all their overseers, the baron refused to pay them their wages. He’d decided to call us in to protect the mine instead.

  “This could turn out badly,” Sargon told me.

  This wasn’t news to me, but I wanted to know if he had any special insight. “What’s so bad about this situation?”

  “The saurians on both sides have a reason to be angry. They think they have the right to kill one another or anyone else who stands in their way.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that pretty much describe both sides in any conflict?”

  “Normally, yes. But saurian minds don’t work quite the way ours do. They seem almost like smart beasts, but they have their own cultural norms. In this situation, both sides think they’re right, and that means it will be a blood-bath.”

  Carlos came near and perked up at the term “blood-bath”.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s special about this fight?”

  “Well, it goes back to saurian psychology,” began the weaponeer.

  “I take it you’ve served here before?”

  “Yeah. This is Steel World. Here, they hire legions all the time. My second deployment was on this planet.”

  “I see,” said Carlos, standing close to us.

  As he so often did, Carlos had joined the conversation without being invited.

  “I still don’t g
et—” he began.

  “If you shut up, I’ll tell you!”

  I smiled. Carlos had done it again. He was a miracle-worker of irritation, but he did shut up after being yelled at, I’ll give him that much.

  “A man can’t even think with you around,” muttered Sargon. “What I was trying to say is that the saurians don’t think the way we do. They often pull dirty tricks on one another. They might raid each other’s egg-laying nests, or steal mates, or rob their bosses. But in those situations, if they’re caught, they’ll run. A thieving saurian is a cowardly saurian. He won’t risk his life for a quick score.”

  “So you’re saying they will fight harder because they both think they’re in the right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. They won’t give up. They won’t run. The miners know the juggers don’t deserve their pay—and the juggers know they haven’t been paid.”

  I joined the talk at this point. “What are the odds both sides will come to their senses before things get ugly?”

  “Zero,” Sargon said. “Saurians don’t come to their senses. They’re driven by their emotions. They’ll do what their heart tells them is fair—and right now, fair means killing the other side.”

  “It’s a wonder there are so many of them around.”

  The weaponeer laughed. “Have you seen one of their nesting sites? Females lay thirty eggs a year. Three years later, you have a new crop of full-grown lizards.”

  “What do they all eat?” Carlos wanted to know.

  “The smaller ones—the smart guys who hired us—they’re omnivores and eat leaves and meat, mostly. The big theropods eat whatever they can catch. Usually, that’s one form of plant-eater or another.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Carlos. “That seems like an inherently dangerous combination. You have big, dumb meat-eaters working for small, smart omnivores? I’m surprised they can get along at all!”

  The weaponeer smiled. “Now you know why there’s always a fight to be had on Steel World.”

  We might have talked longer, but we were called to the walls at that point to do some “shoring up”. At least, that’s how it was described to us.

  Naturally, the recruits got the worst possible job as we erected our defenses. The puff-crete machines churned and grunted out reams of raw building material. We were given the task of trying to guide the flow and keep it in the desired shape and location.

  Puff-crete was an invention of an alien race called Vellusians. They were from a star system that was about two hundred lightyears from Earth, and we rarely had direct dealings with them. But they did have the market cornered when it came to construction. According to all accounts, the Vellusians were very successful and their homeworld was rich. Like all member worlds, they had a monopoly on their single trade good: machines that churned out puff-crete.

  Puff-crete was usually bluish in color and was the closest thing to a perfect building material anyone had yet discovered. The goopy stuff was amazing and irritating at the same time. Most of Earth’s buildings—anything built after the middle of the twenty-first century—were made primarily of puff-crete. Through a seemingly magical process, squatty metallic machines produced a gout of bluish-gray stuff whenever you turned on the switch. You had to feed in certain raw materials at the other end—water, silicon and a few other elements—but what came out was a thick, paste-like material. When formed into a given shape and allowed to cure for a day, a puff-crete structure was all but indestructible. Harder than concrete or steel, puff-crete buildings were there to stay once you molded and cast them.

  “You know,” Carlos told me as he slathered and stirred a river of the stuff into a downward sloping trough, “they say that if you measure all the materials you put into one of these puffer units and then weigh all the stuff that comes out, you’ll have gained nearly forty percent of mass.”

  I frowned at him. “How’s that possible?”

  “I don’t know, but if I did, I’d try to run the aliens who made it out of business.”

  I shook my head. “Wouldn’t work. The Galactics would never allow it.”

  “I can dream, can’t I?”

  We kept working. We were constructing the basis for a semicircular wall that would protect the front of the mines, allowing only narrow paths to the tunnel entrance.

  We used force-shields to hold the puff-crete material together for churning. It was really the most convenient way to do it. All you had to do when the wall was cured was turn off the shields. Unlike wooden molds, the force-shields wouldn’t be stuck to the new walls.

  One thing struck me as odd as I worked on this project all day and into the night. The force-shields left marks on the walls of puff-crete. I wasn’t entirely sure how this happened, but the effect was undeniably visible. Strange swirling patterns were etched forever into those walls we’d hastily built. To me, the patterns looked like ripples on the surface of a slow, muddy river.

  Dusk came, and a deep umber twilight fell over the land. Unseen insects and chirping creatures in the underbrush began to sing. Their natural calls were alien but not loud or annoying.

  In the break before dinner and my next shift, I stood staring at the details in the walls I’d spent all day building.

  Someone came up to me from behind and surprised me. I turned and saw it was Natasha. I smiled down at her.

  “The walls are strange, aren’t they?” she asked. “I noticed you looking at them. We just snapped the force shields off and all these lovely patterns were revealed.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I couldn’t help but notice.”

  “They never have these patterns on our buildings back home. But then, we don’t use force shields to hold them into place on Earth.”

  “Why don’t we just use force shields permanently?” I asked. “That would save a lot of time. Just align the projectors, switch it on, and snap—you have an instant wall.”

  “It has to do with power levels,” she said with certainty. “We can’t move a powerful enough generator down here to make a strong shield. These shields have just enough juice to hold back a gelatinous mass like puff-crete. A bullet or a charging saurian would go right through.”

  I nodded. It made sense to me. Her knowledge on the topic made me realize something else.

  “You’re working toward becoming a tech, aren’t you?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Does the nerd show through that clearly? Yes, they recruited me for tech work.”

  I frowned. “But if you have that kind of background…”

  “Why didn’t a reputable legion pick up my contract? Was that what you were about to ask?”

  “Well, I…”

  “You’re right. There is something wrong with me—with my record. I was caught hacking in school. I took a few parts from the genetics lab—it was only harmless fun, you have to understand. But I built an illegal pet. They found it in my dorm and expelled me.”

  I nodded in total understanding. She’d been kicked out of college too, and under circumstances that would make a snooty legion turn her down.

  “I get it,” I said, turning back to the walls again.

  “What’s your story? I told you mine.”

  “I killed a guy,” I said, keeping my face deadpan.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he was trying to steal my wallet, so I beat him to death with a hammer.”

  She stared at me in shock, but I couldn’t keep a straight face. When I started laughing, she punched my shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t joke about a thing like that!” she complained.

  I turned back to the walls again, running my hands over the smooth, swirling patterns on the surface.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t do anything cool, like build my own freak pet in school. I got kicked out because my family ran out of money. Also, they didn’t seem to like my psych evaluation.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Too assertive, too independent. Most of the legions want a bowl of jelly to mold—th
ey could tell I had my own ideas.”

  She’d stepped away from me when I’d told her I was a killer, but now she came closer. She reached out and ran her fingers over the patterns on the wall.

  “They’re so perfect, like they were created with careful artistry,” she said. “Strange to think they’re only the random twists of a force field.”

  I could feel her presence close beside me. It was nice—almost as if I could feel her body heat.

  “It’s an odd place for beauty,” she continued. “The walls themselves are ugly. I wonder what the saurians will think of us when they see them.”

  “They’ll think we’re crazy for making fancy walls of puff-crete. And then they’ll try to eat us.”

  “That sounds pretty accurate,” she agreed with a sigh.

  -8-

  When we finally finished the wall, it looked pretty impressive. Two cohorts of light troops had managed to put up about five hundred meters of puff-crete in a series of one hundred-meter runs. The structure was ten meters high and three meters wide. There was a rampart you could walk the length of, with crenulated battlements all along the top. Unlike fortifications from the past, this wall had a roof. The roof shaded us and provided cover from any type of aerial assault.

  At the midpoint of each hundred-meter run of the wall, there was a tower. Four of them stood along the circumference in all. On top of each of these towers, there was a heavy weapon emplacement. These tripod-based plasma guns were manned by weaponeers, naturally. Recruits were only allowed to haul them into place. We couldn’t touch the guns after that.

  The division of duties was fairly strict in the legion while under non-combat conditions. The weaponeers tended their weapons. The bios tended the wounded and people coming out of the revival unit. The techs did mysterious things with strange-looking devices. I wasn’t told, but I assumed they were motion-sensors, radar-arrays and the like.

  The most interesting gizmos the tech specialists had were the drones. They hovered, buzzed and zoomed all around the camp. After testing their equipment on us, a few flew over the walls and out into the jungle, but these were quickly retrieved.