by B. V. Larson
“That’s why I came here, you dumb-ass,” I told him, grunting and straining with effort.
He shot at me then, as I hunched over the metal stalk. My back popped—but it was just my straining bones, not an injury. The bolt had been frozen in space, just like the other one.
“Ha!” I boomed as I heaved with renewed effort. “This field can come in pretty handy. Where’d you find it?”
Growling, Claver marched down toward me. He had a knife in his hand.
“What are you going to do with that, Claver?” I demanded. “Don’t come too close, or you’ll find it sticking out of your guts.”
He stopped, breathing hard. He looked around in concern.
The projector in my hands had shifted a little. It was now out of kilter. Maybe just a centimeter, but when something depends on a series of concentric fields working in harmony, that can be more than enough.
Already, the bolt I’d fired earlier was wobbling in space. It was flickering like live fire, crackling and shining with uneven light.
“It won’t do you any good,” Claver said. “See you in hell, McGill.”
“I’ll give my regards to your mama,” I told him.
He ported out. I realized I was standing alone in the forest. The bolt he’d fired was sizzling less than a meter from my back.
Then, I thought to look at the bomb.
It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. The bomb was going off—but in slow-motion. The side had ruptured and come away from the rest. Two other regions, the rounded tips of the watermelon-shaped device, were now exploding as well. They were releasing fantastic forces, but at a tiny fraction of normal speed.
How long would it be before the bomb consumed me and presumably the projectors? Less than a minute, I’d wager. Maybe a lot less, if the reaction sped up as it escaped the field.
It was then and only then, that I went off-script. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I let self-preservation take over.
I reached up to my chest, and I twisted the dial to go home.
Imagine my surprise when nothing happened.
“Damn… not enough power.”
I wasn’t sure why the suit didn’t work this time. The jump was a short one. But it did occur to me that the stasis field was stopping it. Reaching down, I fumbled under the projectors. There had to be a power-source—something I could plug into.
When I found it, a big grin split my face. I shoved a power lead home and… well… all hell broke loose.
The projectors lost their grip on the world very quickly. The power I’d taken from them had probably disrupted whatever tenuous balance they had left.
The first thing that I noticed during the next tiny slice of time was the sensation of teleporting. The wavering light, the ripping apart and coming back together, it was all there.
In the brief instant I was teleporting, I couldn’t believe what a series of lucky strikes I’d had. Sure, none of it meant much to anyone else since they could have made a new James McGill in half an hour. But I appreciated the gesture from Lady Luck.
First off, I’d managed to get the suit to work with a cannibalized power-supply. Second, the effect beat the bomb, and I wasn’t blown up. Third, the key had been applied about five minutes ago and left behind with Lisa. Apparently, the security was still disabled.
Such a series of fortunate events. It was almost like someone was watching over me this time.
Back at the LZ in Central, I pitched forward on my face. It was only then that I felt a searing pain in my back.
“McGill?” Graves asked, rushing to my side. “What went wrong?”
“I’ve been shot,” I said, reaching to claw at my back.
“I don’t mean that!” he shouted. “What happened to the bomb? We’ve had observers watching for several minutes, and they’ve seen nothing. We assumed that you’d screwed up somehow. Now you show up here with a smoking hole in your back. Let’s hear your best excuse!”
I was through listening to him. Gasping for breath over the pain in my back, which was from catching the tail end of Claver’s frozen power bolt, I worked my tapper while I lay on the floor.
“What are you—oh…” Graves said.
His hands seized my tapper and his searching eyes ran over the vid that was playing there.
“The forest is gone,” Graves said. “The whole region went up.” Then he looked at me again. “How did you hack into that vid? That’s a priority feed from the front lines.”
I shrugged. “Some of my best friends are techs.”
“Right,” he said, releasing my arm, “your new girlfriend. All right, you performed your mission successfully. Now get your ass off that floor.”
Painfully, I did as he ordered. My hand went to my back, and my lips curled away from my teeth.
“Permission to hit blue deck, sir,” I asked.
“Granted. But you’d better have the decency to recycle yourself this time if you’re disabled. You’re supposed to have died today, anyway.”
“You’re all heart, Centurion.”
I gave him a copy of my tapper recordings and left. I didn’t feel like making any flashy reports. They could watch my body-cam feed if they wanted to know what had happened.
-33-
The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital bed. For a second, I thought they’d gone and recycled me without permission.
But then I saw Lisa’s worried face, and I smiled. No one worries much over a fresh grow.
“Is my back fixed up?” I asked her.
“Anne was here a minute ago. She said she patched you up, but that you might be stiff and sore for a while. She said you can’t let on, or they’ll recycle you. Is that true? Is Legion Varus that callous with their heroes?”
I laughed painfully. “Nah. They treat us like kings. I’ll have dancing women, free booze, and all the candy I can eat tonight in the barracks.”
She finally smiled and shook her pretty head. “Doesn’t anything get you down?”
“Sure, but not dying. Takes a lot more than that. What’s happening? What day is it?”
“It’s night—the night after you came back. The enemy is on the move.”
I frowned at that. “What do you mean? I thought they were pretty much wiped out.”
Her face fell. “No, not entirely. Command thinks you got some of them, and they’re sure you destroyed a lot of their shields. But that just got them moving. They’re marching now instead of waiting to gather more strength.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe Claver was lying about moving the gateway. Maybe they couldn’t do that so quickly. It was pretty big. If they’re coming for Central—well, that’s an act of desperation. Our legions will take the battlefield and wipe them out!”
She smiled and kissed me, and I enjoyed the kiss. But inside, I was worried. The real battle had started. Not everyone knew it, but this was going to be decisive. It was going to be a battle for Earth herself.
Earth had a pretty good-sized military. Our fleet had been knocked out, but we had plenty of ground forces. Most of them were hogs, but they could learn to fight quickly enough.
The professional legions were our only troops with real experience, and there were a lot of them. Over the past few weeks I’d seen people from Victrix, Germanica, Iron Eagles and Solstice. They were all gathering here to protect the capital.
The trouble was I’d seen the enemy using tech I knew we couldn’t handle. From teleport suits to gateways, stasis field projectors and more, I knew we were outclassed. It was going to be like the Zulus fighting the British—and that hadn’t worked out well for the Zulus.
“McGill?” Graves asked from the doorway. He’d just stepped in without knocking. “I’ve been buzzing your tapper for over an hour. You missed the first briefing—get your ass out of that bed.”
“Yes sir,” I said, heaving myself to my feet. The fresh nu-skin on my back ripped with the sudden movement. I winced, but forced myself to stand tall. “Ready to move out, Centurion!”
He eyed me critically then looked at Lisa. “Say goodbye. We’re headed to the front.”
“What?” I asked in surprise. “What front?”
“The legions are assembling. The primary Hegemony forces are already out there, but Central wants us to advance. We’ll play the part of skirmishers, slowing down the enemy as the main battle force assembles.”
“That’s Drusus’ idea? The man’s all heart.”
Graves glanced at Lisa again then frowned at me. “Meet me upstairs in five.”
He left then, and I encircled Lisa with my long arms. She squeaked, but then melted against me. We made out, and I pulled her onto the hospital bed.
“What are you doing? You only have five minutes.”
“That’s plenty of time,” I said.
She was all knuckles and elbows for a few moments, but then she melted. She complained someone else might walk in, but we did it anyway, right there on those thin, hospital sheets. Both of us knew it might be our last chance on this Earth to make love of any kind.
Afterward, she tried to give back the Galactic Key, but I pushed it away. She stared at it in awe.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not forever—I hope. But how are you going to send anyone else teleporting without it?”
“Okay,” she said.
We kissed goodbye, and I trotted out of the place. The whole way up in the elevators to the briefing room I cursed about how slow things were going.
When I finally burst into the briefing, every other officer in the unit was already there. They glanced at me, rolled their eyes, and went back to discussing tactics.
“The region the bomb strike destroyed was in the north,” Graves said, adjusting his tabletop tactical display to show a blasted zone. “As you can see, that section of New York Sector was flattened almost up to the old Canadian border.
In the south, however, the land remained undamaged. The enemy used some kind of ablation effect, which dampened the bomb and reduced its yield.”
“Reduced?” Adjunct Leeson huffed. “That’s crazy. You must have flattened twenty thousand square kilometers of trees as it was. At least a tenth of the Adirondack mountains was scorched!”
“Yes, but the original yield of the bomb was around a gigaton. We think their shielding and some kind of stasis effect kept the weapon from operating properly.”
“A gigaton?” I asked, feeling a little sick for some reason. To think I’d been carrying that much explosive power all sealed up in one tiny egg… it was downright freaky. “Centurion, I didn’t think any kind of nuke could contain that kind of power in such a small package.”
Graves eyed me in irritation. “No one ever said the bomb was nuclear. At least, it wasn’t fission or fusion.”
To my mind, that didn’t leave a lot ground. Could he be talking about anti-matter? Or something even more exotic? Whatever it was, it didn’t make me feel any better to know I’d been carrying it.
“All of northern New York Sector was supposed to have gone up,” Graves said, “all the way down to Albany.”
“What?” Leeson demanded before I could. “That’s crazy. A lot of folks would have died.”
“Acceptable losses,” Graves said without any change in attitude. “This invasion is a cancer, gentlemen. When you burn out cancer, you don’t fool around. Besides, the region is largely uninhabited.”
I’d begun to catch on. Back in the early days after the Annexation, there had been certain people who’d fought against the government’s decision to surrender to aliens. Some of those people had gathered up in the old forests in that region and built camps there. They’d been beaten, but not without taking quite a few of the original Hegemony troops with them.
The survivors, described in every textbook as arch-villians, had stayed in the area and eked out a difficult existence as pariahs on Earth. The rest of the population had abandoned the area and it had become mostly wilderness again.
As a kid, I’d been taught to hate those rebels. Now, I felt I understood them. Maybe they’d even had the right idea from the start, a century back.
The idea that Claver had decided to set up camp in this spot seemed less and less like a coincidence. Maybe he thought he could find some rebels to join his army. Or maybe he’d just seen it as the only wilderness close enough to Central to make a good hidden start for his campaign.
Even more suspicious to my mind was the use of an overpowering secret super-bomb on the region. I could just hear the Ruling Council approving that option for Central. They must have grinned while they signed off on it. What a stroke of luck to get rid of two problems with one big bomb.
“The squids were moving their forces south before the bomb-strike went off,” Graves continued. “They’re now in the southern region of the Adirondacks. The area is heavily forested and rugged with glacially formed mountains.”
“You know what?” Leeson said, speaking up again. “That’s tough country. I used to go hunting up there, back in the day. The Mohawks owned it, centuries back.”
“What’s a Mohawk?” Graves demanded.
“Some kind of primitive native American,” Leeson explained. “They gave people trouble and had to be rooted out of the area—same as the rebels. Now we’ve got an army of genetic freaks up there that the squids have dropped on us. History repeats itself.”
“I don’t think you know what the hell you’re talking about,” Graves said. “Shut up.”
Leeson grumbled, but he did shut up.
Graves looked around as if he expected more interruptions. When none were forthcoming, he continued.
“The Hogs are already in the area, forming up outside Albany. We’re going to be their skirmishers and give them the time they need to dig in.”
“You mean we get to play cannon fodder!” Leeson said.
He was right, of course, but he earned himself a meaningful glare from Graves. I was glad that it wasn’t me who was getting that kind of look this time. I’d done enough dying lately.
“We’re going to be advancing in the center,” Graves said, “along with Solstice and the Iron Eagles. Germanica and Victrix will take up the left flank, while—”
“Hold on, sir!” I interrupted. “Did you say we’d be advancing?”
“How the frig do you think we’re going to defeat this enemy, McGill? We’re going to advance into the southern Adirondacks and engage the invaders.”
I was stunned. All along, I’d been thinking the plan was to set up ambushes in the trees—Hit and run, booby-traps and the like. But to march into that army and go toe-to-toe with giants? That sounded pretty crazy to me.
“Uh…” I began, but Graves shut me down.
“All right, listen,” he said. “I know this isn’t going to be a popular battle plan, but we have our orders. We’re accustomed to operating as an independently commanded legion, but that’s not how this is going to go. We’re part of an army now—Earth’s army.”
“Who’s in charge?” Leeson demanded. “This new plan doesn’t sound like Imperator Drusus’ style to me.”
“It’s not,” Graves admitted. He ran his eyes over each of us. “They revived Nagata somehow. Most of the rest of the hog brass was permed—but someone found his backup. He’s calling the shots currently.”
I frowned at that news. I knew Nagata pretty well. Suiciding his troops in an important battle—that didn’t sound like him. He wasn’t a terribly experienced commander, but he wasn’t insane.
“Sir?” I said. “I know Nagata. Maybe I could go upstairs and—”
“Absolutely not. We’re being flown out to the front right after this briefing is over. Our light cohorts are already in the air. The lifters are working non-stop.”
The briefing continued, but I didn’t bother to listen to the rest of it. I’d escaped death in those mountains just a few hours ago, and now it looked like I was going to get a fresh shot at dying out there.
-34-
In a way, it felt good to be harnessed
up and packed like meat in a can alongside my buddies. It was like going home. The sounds of the lifter, the roar and whoosh, the bitching and whooping, it all brought back memories.
I’ve died so many times on alien soil that I’ve lost count over the years. But I’d only died a handful of times on Earth. It’d never been in a pitched battle, either. Usually, I’d been ambushed by some kind of bureaucrat. This time, it would be very different.
On my right sat Carlos. He’d put on a few pounds somehow—but that would melt off the first time he died in the field and caught a revive. They called it a “legionnaire’s diet” and there were even rumors that if you got fat enough, Graves would recycle you just to make sure you could keep up when the unit went out for a jog.
Right now, Carlos was arguing with Kivi, who sat on my left. She wasn’t in the best mood—but then she rarely was. She’d found out that Carlos had put her down when she’d been injured on one of our missions.
That was just fine with me, but their bickering was beginning to get on my nerves.
“You know,” I said to Kivi, interrupting the two of them as they argued across my chest, “my grandma always told me never to get into a fight with a pig.”
“What?” Carlos demanded. “What are you saying, McGill?”
“Don’t you want to know why?” I asked Kivi, not even looking at Carlos.
Kivi was grinning.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me why I should avoid fighting with this pig, McGill.”
“Because you’ll both get dirty, but the pig will like it!”
Kivi laughed. Carlos looked at me for a full second, deadpan. Then he shook his head slowly. “McGill, you’ve got to be the biggest fucking hayseed left alive on planet Earth. Seriously…”
“You want to hear another pig joke?” I asked him.
“No, I really don’t.”
That worked. The two of them finally shut the hell up. I felt like a true leader of soldiers in that moment. Not only were they finally quiet, one of them had even laughed at my joke.
The lifter began to shudder and make a singing sound. Servos whined and groaned—the landing gear was being deployed. All our tappers lit up, and we were ordered to button-up our suits and prep for a hot LZ.