Steel World

by Larson, B. V.

  I decided I didn’t care whether he’d planned this or not. His explanation had brought home to me the importance of this mission. The alien had to be identified—we had to know what we were up against.

  “That’s an excellent suggestion, Recruit,” he said. “That’s just the sort of thing that earns a man rank in my legion. I’ll arrange everything immediately. But, before you go, I’d like you to look at the heads on the wall. Do any of them appear to be familiar?”

  I looked up again. “The centipede thing is the closest, but no. It was definitely not like any of these creatures.”

  I explained briefly how the creature had appeared: Six legs, all with hands of their own. It was able to scuttle on all of them or lift them up and hold a weapon. I gave him every detail I could remember.

  When I was done, the tribune scrawled a few notes but shook his head and frowned. “This is a very consistent report. That’s what we got from Harris the first time. I can’t say that we’ve met up with anything like it.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t unusual to meet up with new alien species when the Galactics brought us a new product they thought we might wish to spend our hard-won credits on. Humanity wasn’t allowed to wander around exploring on its own, naturally. That was forbidden. Only the aliens who ran the scout ships did that kind of thing. They were the experts, and the rest of us weren’t permitted to compete with them in any way.

  There was no empire-wide internet service to inform us about our neighbors, either. Each star system was effectively cut off from all the others and wasn’t allowed to interact except for conducting approved trading missions—such as I was on right now.

  “I’ve got to go to a meeting with the owners of this mine,” the tribune told me. “I’ve relayed your request to Primus Turov. She’ll organize the details.”

  I marched up the steps and out again into the blazing heat of Cancri-9. The interior of the tribune’s bunker seemed blissfully dim and cool in comparison.

  Primus Turov was waiting for me. “Follow me. Veteran Harris, you and Adjunct Leeson will be in charge of the sweep. Take your best troops. I’m sending two bios with you. See they don’t die. Everyone else is expendable. The sample must be brought in. Are we clear on that?”

  “Uh,” said Harris.

  I could tell he was far from happy. Accepting hazardous missions into the middle of a forest overrun with aliens couldn’t have been his usual operating procedure. He hadn’t become famous for staying alive by pulling stunts like this one.

  “Yes?” asked the primus, turning and staring at him. It was immediately obvious from her tone and manner he wasn’t going to worm his way out of this.

  “Nothing, sir,” he said, letting a small sigh escape. “It shall be as you command.”

  She left and Harris gave me a hard reproachful stare. “What the hell did you do in there?”

  “We talked. He showed me his trophies and explained what Varus is really doing on this world.”

  “Yeah? And then what?”

  “Then I volunteered to go out and find a trace blood sample, anything that would help us identify this new competitive species.”

  Harris threw an arm around me and half-dragged me toward our unit’s section of the wall.

  “Are you nuts?” he demanded, booming the words into my ear. “I should ice you right here, right now. That’s got to be the dumbest thing—I never thought you’d come up with that!”

  He let go of me, and I straightened myself.

  “This is bigger than a recruit’s possible death,” I said. “I know where it happened, and I think I can locate the exact spot where I shot the thing down. If we just scoop up some of the dirt—”

  “I don’t give a shit about that!” Harris said. “Haven’t I taught you a damned thing? You’ve got some kind of a death-fantasy going, don’t you, boy? You’re one of the weird ones, aren’t you?”

  I frowned at him, not quite sure what he was talking about. Then I caught on: he didn’t want any part of a dangerous mission in the bush.

  “I know you pride yourself on staying alive, Veteran,” I said. “But I honestly thought this situation warranted the risk.”

  Harris hunched his bulky shoulders and grumbled. “You still have it in for me, don’t you? I thought we were squared up after training back on the ship. But here you are, trying to blow my record right out of the water.”

  I almost laughed, but I caught myself. He wasn’t in the right mood to see any humor in the situation.

  “Listen up, McGill,” he said, halting and facing me. “I’m not going down out there before you do. Remember that. You’re not going to be winning any more points with the brass today. If things go bad—you die first.”

  I didn’t know what to say to calm him down, so I let him stomp away. I looked after him wonderingly. The man was vouching for me one minute and then threatening my life in a lowered voice the next. And he thought I was the crazy one.

  -11-

  Carlos found me soon after my strange encounter with Harris. He listened to my story with his head cocked and his eyes narrowed. First I detailed the mission we were going to be enjoying this evening. Then I told him about Harris’ reaction.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked when I was finished.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He wagged his finger at me. “You sucker. Harris was right. He should shoot you. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “We have to find that alien,” I said firmly. “You were out there. Something big is going on. You should have volunteered, too.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Did you enjoy that little ride we both took through fifteen hungry lizards’ guts? They’re still digesting us out there, you know that don’t you? Maybe tonight, they’ll crap out—”

  “I don’t care about the dinos,” I said. “It has to be done, and you and I are the best two for the job. I need you to back me up on this. If I get nailed, you have to lead them to the spot. Are you in or not?”

  He grumbled and cursed for a time but finally he nodded.

  “Your special brand of crazy must be rubbing off on me,” he complained. “I’m doomed.”

  Less than half an hour later we were walking quietly through the trees retracing our steps. Carlos was at my side.

  “It’s a good idea to do this at night,” I said, eyeing each landmark and checking my GPS frequently. The device had recorded the position of our firefight when we reported in. “Everything will look the same this way.”

  “Whatever you say,” Carlos muttered.

  Behind us were twenty other light infantry and the two bio specialists. Adjunct Leeson was in command, and Veteran Harris was at his side. We hadn’t brought any heavy troops or weaponeers. The commanders had wanted us to rush in and rush out, not stand and fight.

  Adjunct Leeson pushed his way up to me and looked at my GPS.

  “This is it,” he said. “This has to be the spot.”

  “Just a little farther out, sir,” I said.

  He glared at the GPS. “What’s your angle, McGill?” he asked me.

  “Sir?”

  “If you think the primus is going to love you because you kissed her ass on this one, you’re going to be in for a surprise.”

  I blinked at him. “We’re almost there, sir.”

  “We’d better be.”

  He fell back ten paces. I marched on, shaking my head slightly.

  Carlos slapped my shoulder. “You’re always making friends in high places,” he said. “I can really pick my buddies, can’t I?”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  I halted suddenly, and everyone in the unit halted a second later. No one spoke.

  I looked around at the landscape, frowning. There were so many broken branches and black regions, torn up by the passage of a thousand taloned feet. It did look different—not quite as I remembered.

  “This is it, I’m pretty sure,” I said.

  That was too much for Harris. He charged up behind m
e and rammed the butt of his heavy weapon into my pack. I staggered and turned to face him.

  “You’re pretty sure? That’s it? I’m telling you, kid, we’re taking our samples right here, and afterward we’re running all the damned way back to the wall. And when we get there, your ass is going through the gate dead last!”

  “Yes, Veteran,” I said. “Don’t you think we should get to work?”

  The bios scrambled forward when I identified the spot where I thought the enemy had died. They scooped up dirt, leaves and blades of grass.

  I watched them work, scanning the area and frowning. “It’s a big area. Carlos, what do you think? Is that the right spot? The GPS on the report and the photo were right here, but they could be up to twenty meters off.”

  “This is your show, McGill. I have no freaking idea. I was too busy shitting myself and being eaten to memorize the scenery.”

  I walked ten paces back toward the wall, and found a fern bush with a fallen log nearby. “Here! Look here!”

  “Shhh!” hissed Harris. “Quiet!”

  “Sorry. Carlos, come over here and have a look. You were on your knees behind this log when we fought later. But, first, when I met the weird thing, I was standing in this big fern. I used it to hide myself. The alien came out—right there!”

  I walked forward and found a spot I felt far more confident was the correct one. I waved for the bios, who reluctantly got up and came to my new position. They were as nervous as cats. They knelt and scooped frantically.

  I knelt with them and grabbed a few leaves and scraped soil into my pockets.

  A familiar form hulked over me. “Okay, that’s it,” Harris said. “We’re moving out.”

  “Just one more minute, please.”

  “No-go. Move out or be left behind.”

  I got up reluctantly. The bios were already rushing away toward the distant walls.

  I looked at Harris. “Your heart really isn’t in this one, is it, Veteran?” I asked.

  “Don’t you give me that crap. I’ve been doing this since before you were born.”

  I stared at him, wondering if that could be true. Dying and coming back—if you kept getting new bodies, sometimes rolling back a year or more…

  “But Veteran,” I said, “what about the aliens? Don’t you care if they take Cancri-9 from us?”

  “Tomorrow, a thousand of your freaks might show up, and we’ll know who they are then. Besides, if they’re going to kick us off this world in the end, then this fiasco will probably make no difference.”

  “But it might make a difference.”

  Harris made a frustrated sound. He walked away, and I followed him. I didn’t feel good about it. I wasn’t sure I’d found what had to be found. It was harder than I thought it would be to find a particular spot in the woods—even after I’d died there.

  It was then that I heard footsteps. Not human steps but those of something larger and heavier.

  No one needed to say anything. They’d all heard it. Maybe it was just one scouting lizard, sniffing us out. Maybe he was as scared as we were…but we ran anyway.

  We’d been ordered to retreat, after all, not to engage. I was very glad to have that order to fall back on. We ran like the devil himself was chasing us all the way back to the tall, blue-white walls. The gates opened when we got there then clanged behind us the second I made it through.

  I bent and put my hands on my knees. My sides heaved. The air was so thick here—it made it hard to run.

  I glanced at Harris and saw he was grinning at me.

  “I told you you’d be the last one to drag your sorry ass through that gate,” he said.

  I stared at him, and I realized he was right. He’d made sure I was the last man in line. If the lizard had chased us, I was sure I couldn’t have outrun it. The raptor-types were often clocked at better than forty miles an hour. If anyone had died tonight, it would have been me.

  I suppressed the urge to shudder. Instead, I straightened up and gave him a tough-guy nod.

  He laughed at me. Deciding to ignore him, I followed Adjunct Leeson and the bios back to their lab. It was time to dump dirt out of my pockets and theirs and find out if we’d wasted our time or not.

  The bio-lab was interesting. It wasn’t like any other bunker or tent in the camp. It was clearly designed to do serious science. There were machines there—things that didn’t come from Earth. I’d been in here before when I’d been revived, but I hadn’t been in any condition to pay attention to my surroundings then.

  “I didn’t know we had stuff like this,” I said.

  “Most people don’t,” said the bio working the equipment. It was Anne Grant.

  Grant turned away from me to work on her equipment. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties—but in Legion Varus, that could have meant almost anything. She had brown eyes, brown hair, and for the first time I noticed her perfect posterior. I kept a quiet eye on that while she worked.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry about what happened back when we first landed. It was my first drop, my first real combat action. Maybe I could have done better as the point man.”

  She sighed. “I wish you hadn’t brought that up.”

  “Painful memory? I mean—of course it is. No one likes to die in the mouth of a dino.”

  “It’s not that. You did fine given the circumstances. I was at fault. I was in command, and you were a splat. I should have put a more experienced man on point.”

  “Well, I just wanted to say—”

  “Forget about it, okay?”

  “Right,” I said, happy to do so.

  There was a brief, awkward silence.

  “What’s that one do?” I asked, pointing out the main machine she was working with.

  “It compares known genetic strands to anything you give it. We’ve got a lot of samples to run through this baby.”

  “Will it know about our alien friend?”

  Grant shrugged. “Possibly. This isn’t a first class scanner. The best ones are hooked up to the Galactic databases, cataloging everything known galaxy-wide.”

  “Why don’t we have the best?”

  She laughed. “This is Legion Varus, and believe it or not, we get one of the biggest budgets from Hegemony that any legion gets for specialized equipment. But a forensics device like that just costs too much.”

  I asked if I could stick around while the machine ran the tests, and she said I could. We chatted for quite a while. I found that I liked her, and she seemed to have gotten over her rage at having died during the dino rush when we first landed. Having died myself recently, I now better understood how such an experience could leave one in a bad mood.

  When the tests were finished, she read the results carefully. She let out a sigh.

  “The tests are inconclusive,” she told me.

  I tried to hide my disappointment.

  “What’s that mean? Are we out of options?”

  “It means that the unit isn’t sure. There is biotic material in the samples—lots of it.”

  “Including blood?”

  “Yes. But most of that is from known sources. The few unknowns might be alien to this world, or they might be from a species this device can’t identify. The point is, nothing definite showed up that we can say for sure should not be on this world.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I’ll send the readings up to Corvus, and on to Earth. That will take a while. But you know, there is one element we’ve identified with certainty.”

  I nodded encouragingly. “Tell me.”

  “We found your blood, James.”

  I stared at her, uncertain how to take this news. She looked happy about finding my DNA in the jungle dirt.

  “Actually,” Grant said, “that’s a good thing. It means you did find the right spot. There are samples we haven’t identified yet—there’s still hope. The problem is we don’t have data on every species indigenous to this world. We’re a combat unit, not a scientific exploration team.�
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  I nodded, understanding. “Thanks,” I said, and I turned to go.

  Grant called me back. “Look, McGill… For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with Harris and Leeson. It was a good mission, it went well, and it needed to be done.”

  I gave her a smile, but I had to wonder if she’d be talking like this if a pack of lizards had eaten her for a second time.

  Next, I headed back to my squad’s quarters where people weren’t as happy with me. Kivi was the first one to declare this without any soft-pedaling.

  “Hey,” she said, coming up to me and sitting on my bunk. “I hear you’ve been brown-nosing the brass.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “I thought you knew me better than that.”

  Kivi gave me a hard stare. “The gang has decided collectively that we don’t like special missions. We could have wiped out there hunting for your bug or whatever it was you thought you saw. I’m here to ask you not to do anything like that again—ever.”

  I felt an angry heat rising up in me. It usually took a while, but I could get pissed off eventually. “If this kind of situation comes up again, I’ll do the same damn thing. You can bet on that.”

  She stood up beside my bunk and ripped open her shirt. The smart cloth struggled in her hands, trying to close again, but she held the two leaves open and flashed her chest at me. I couldn’t help but stare. After a few seconds, she covered herself quickly.

  Kivi leaned close and whispered in my ear harshly. “Then you can just forget about getting anything from me when the lights go off around here.”

  “All right,” I said. “If that’s how it has to be.”

  She stormed away angrily.

  I realized we’d just broken up. I told myself I didn’t care—but I did. During training, we’d hooked-up occasionally, when we both felt like it. Every time had been memorable. Now, that was history.

  I flopped down on my bunk and stared at the one directly above me. I boiled inside thinking of a hundred rude things to say.

  A head popped over the side of the bunk above mine.

  “You screwed that up pretty bad,” Carlos observed in a whisper. “I could have kept that going, you know. You went straight-up against her. Never do that with a woman, buddy, especially with a woman who is that hot.”