Home World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 6)

by B. V. Larson

  “McGill,” she said, breathing hard, “that was so strange. I was torn apart and reassembled, wasn’t I?”

  “That’s about the size of it.” I replied.

  “What’s it like to travel to the stars?” she asked me, her eyes half-closed in fear.

  “Very strange. It’s like you die, but instead of going to heaven or hell, you just drift for a while until you get where you’re going.”

  She shuddered. “Give me the key.”

  “I can’t. I can’t fly without it.”

  “Damn you! We made a deal!”

  “I know, and I will give it back. I have to borrow it for one last trip.”

  She looked wild, desperate. “You might not come back. I’ll lose it forever.”

  “That’s possible,” I admitted. “But I’ve done this several times before. Your property will be in good hands.”

  She made another grab for it then, but she couldn’t pry my fingers off of the smooth object in my palm.

  “Imperator,” I said gently, “I’m going to charge up, and I’m going to fly. When I get back, I promise I’ll give you the key again.”

  “I’ll have you shot.”

  “Won’t matter. You’ll just be risking the thing you’re trying to protect.”

  Her eyes were wild with worry, exasperation and hate.

  “Why did Claver bring you back into this?” she demanded. “He should have left you dead!”

  “I’ve been wondering about that too,” I said calmly as I walked over and attached my suit to a power outlet with an adapter the techs had worked out over recent weeks. “Maybe we’re still playing his game, even now. Maybe he—”

  I felt a tug at my hip. She’d taken my pistol from my belt. She aimed the gun at the suit’s power-pack determinedly.

  “Aw now, come on,” I said. “Listen, Galina, that’s not a good idea. We need this suit, don’t damage it.”

  “I won’t if you cooperate,” she said.

  She looked up at me defiantly, and I could see she was dead-set on not letting me teleport out with the key. My first thought was to do it anyway, fast and mean, before she could fire. That might work, or it might get us both turned into charred ash.

  “What’s the big deal?” I demanded in frustration. “Just let me go.”

  “No, you’re not taking my key away! I’m going with you.”

  -49-

  Now, you have to understand that Imperator Galina Turov was probably the last human on Earth I wanted to take along on a commando mission, but I didn’t have much choice. She had the gun.

  She aimed the pistol at the power intake on my suit.

  “I’ll blow it off,” she said, indicating the power box, “so help me.”

  “Then I’ll destroy the key.”

  “Just take me with you.”

  “Why?”

  That made her pause for a second. She bared her teeth, and her fingers were white where they gripped the gun.

  “Because, I know where the last position on the dial goes. You’ll probably be killed out of hand if I don’t go with you.”

  This surprised me in several ways at once. “You know where—?”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “Are you going to tell me, or—?”

  “Will you believe anything I say at this point?”

  I thought about that, and shook my head. “Probably not.”

  I considered killing her. I could do it real fast if I had to. But after a moment’s reflection, I passed on the idea. If she really wanted to teleport into the blue with me, well, she could damned-well come along and enjoy the ride.

  Galina watched me closely as I considered my options.

  “Your mission is hopeless,” she said, “but I know you. Without seeing reality with your own stupid eyes, you’ll never let go of this fantasy you have of saving Earth. I can’t stop you from porting out—but I can make sure you come back and give me my property. Now do you understand?”

  “Not entirely,” I admitted, “but I’m willing to take you along if you want. Hop in.”

  She looked at me blankly. “What?”

  “You’ve got to get inside this squid-suit with me. It’ll be a squeeze, but there’s an extra set of arm and leg holes I’m not even using. If you just—”

  “Are you insane?”

  “It’s a funny thing, but people ask me that all the time.”

  She glowered at me doubtfully.

  “Why would I get into that suit?” she asked. “Why can’t I travel with you as we did when we came down here from upstairs?”

  I shook my head. I’d done that before. I explained how a squid hitch-hiker had turned into fried calamari on just such a trip not long ago.

  She shuddered.

  “Okay,” she said, “and thanks for telling me.”

  Only then did I realize that I could have let her hug my leg or something and then burn her to death in the interstellar void. But that wouldn’t have sat right with me.

  We found helmets and attached them to our uniforms. Like all legion uniforms, they were airtight and could function in vacuum in a pinch. That would give us some protection and a small air supply for the trip.

  “Just get in,” I said, helping her into the jump suit. I pulled it over our bodies and our uniforms together.

  People stared at us in growing concern. There were twitters, and Turov ordered them all to report upstairs. They cleared out in a hurry.

  When we were all charged up, she looked at me seriously.

  “James McGill,” she said, “if I find out that this entire thing about sharing the suit was proposed to get your body into contact with mine for a cheap thrill, I’m going to have you castrated.”

  “Got it,” I said, giving her a smirk. “It’s just a fringe benefit. Now, buckle up. This is going to be quite the ride.”

  I touched the shell to the control unit and twisted the dial. We jumped into the void.

  The trip was bizarre. I knew Galina was there, despite the fact I couldn’t really hear or see her. There was just a sense of pressure, of a presence that wasn’t my own. I was left with the impression that our molecules were being mixed together and interwoven during the trip. That thought was more than a little disturbing.

  When we arrived, I looked around with my rifle upraised. We weren’t outside—not exactly. I got the feeling of a vast, enclosed space. The building—if it was a building—was huge. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it was the size of a football stadium at least. It was so big, it had a haze of misty air that hung around us like a cool fog.

  Looking up, I saw the ceiling was conical and had a spiraling organic texture to it.

  My tapper beeped then and displayed a green symbol, suggesting the atmosphere was safe. I didn’t open my helmet anyway, just to be sure.

  She was held up against me, and her body felt warm and tight. This version of James McGill had yet to be laid, and I found her closeness quite distracting.

  Then Galina began retching, and the spell was broken.

  “That trip made me sick,” she said.

  She popped open her faceplate, and I could feel her muscles tightening up. I heard that awful gulping, hitching, gagging sound.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, turning her away and aiming her toward the ground. “Don’t puke in my suit!”

  While she threw up, I plucked my pistol from her fingers. She didn’t seem to even notice.

  “It’s not your suit,” she managed to gasp out a minute later. “Let me out of here.”

  She started to wriggle, but I wrapped a hand around her and pinned her.

  “James!” she complained.

  “Shhh! Look!”

  I pointed toward a looming shape that wasn’t all that far off. It was a massive growth of gnarled fibers and veins. Because of the hanging mists, I couldn’t see the beginning or the end of it.

  “This atmosphere is thick,” I said. “It’s hampering our vision.”

  “What the hell is that?” she whis
pered, staring at the shape that looked like an alien root.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I think it’s alive. Stop fighting me. We might have to port out of here in a hurry.”

  She looked up at me over her shoulder. “You’re rubbing against me.”

  “Sometimes you like that,” I said, tossing down a smile.

  Her face soured further. “Not today. Let me out.”

  “What if I find a power outlet? What if I have to port out on you?”

  She thought about that. “Then you can tell them to revive me from the memory banks in the data core. We can’t walk around like this. We’ll be slow and ridiculous.”

  Figuring she was right, I let her squeeze out of my suit. She stood stretching and panting. It was only then that she noticed she’d been disarmed. She reached for the pistol on my belt again, but I caught her wrist and brushed her away.

  “You’re not pulling that one again,” I told her.

  “I’m your superior officer,” she said. “I should be the one who’s armed.”

  Shaking my head, I stepped past her and took a really good look around. The floor was like sand, but it was very fine and gray. It was almost ashy.

  “What do you make of this material?” I asked her.

  “How should I know? I’m not a tech. Sample it and take it home to the nerds at Central.”

  Following her suggestion, I scooped up a tiny amount into a sample bag and moved uphill.

  I was suddenly struck by an overpowering odor.

  “What’s that stink?” I asked.

  “There’s a breeze in here, and it shifted,” she said. “Something is rotting. Something big is rotting.”

  I had to agree with her. It smelled like all the whales on Earth had washed up on the same shore and died at once.

  “Well,” I said, “for all we know this is what a squid city smells like. Think about it, we’re inside a large structure with heavy humidity and overpowering sea-odors. That sounds like heaven if you’re a squid.”

  She began to explore diffidently. I noticed she didn’t move too far from my side. Imperator Turov was no chicken, but she wasn’t a martial artist either. She’d won her way to the top of the heap through careful calculation rather than by shooting the bad guys.

  “Let’s go downhill,” she said, “I want to see something.”

  I followed her with misgivings. After about a hundred steps, we found water. It was as brackish and as black as a squid’s ink.

  “You think they live in there?” I asked her.

  “Either that, or they use it for a toilet. Let’s go back uphill.”

  We moved away from the gnarly tentacle thing, but it didn’t matter. It seemed to follow us. After a few minutes, we both realized we were surrounded by its mass.

  When we got closer, I recognized it.

  “I know what this thing is!” I said in surprise.

  “Shhh!”

  “It’s a root. A Wur root. This whole interior space is some kind of fetid den. Maybe the biggest nexus brain-plant of all time is down here.”

  “Yes…” she said. “I think you’re right.”

  “But where are we?” I asked. “You said you knew where this teleport setting went—where is this?”

  “It’s not what I expected, but Claver said it would take us to the cephalopod home planet. They call it their Throne World.”

  “Ah. That makes sense. But it seems like a strange place to land. Why’d you want to come along if you knew we were headed here?”

  She shrugged. “I thought perhaps I could talk to the cephalopods. It never hurts to meet your new leaders in person.”

  “Oh… so Claver has been doing all the deals, has he? You thought maybe you could get a better arrangement for yourself if you talked to them personally?”

  She made a dismissive gesture.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, holding out her palm. “We’ve seen enough. There’s no one here. Hand over the key.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve kept up my part of the bargain. We’re porting back to Earth.”

  I looked at her in amazement. “But we’re so close to figuring things out.”

  “No, we’re not. We don’t know a damned thing! We’re messing around in some kind of alien chamber on or near an alien capital. There have to be guards of some kind. Someone has to know we’re here by now.”

  “Look,” I said, “there has to be a reason why all these points are presets on the teleport dial. Going back to Earth won’t do anyone any good. We’re going to lose to the squids at Central within days.”

  She stared at me from under hooded eyes. “Don’t you think I know that? What have I been trying to tell you all along?”

  Ignoring her outstretched palm, I headed directly for the tentacle-like root.

  “McGill, damn you!” she hissed, following in my wake. “Why don’t you ever listen? I’m ordering you to stop and take us out of here.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing, sir,” I said. “But we have to have power to recharge, remember? Have you seen any sources yet?”

  She growled in frustration and followed me.

  Naturally, I hadn’t been looking for power outlets. If we did find one, well, that would be luck. But I almost didn’t care right now. If we died here on this nameless world, at least I’d tried to do something besides surrender.

  We reached the root, and we found it formed an effective wall we couldn’t pass. We marched along it, heading uphill to the highest point we could reach. From there, it spread out in two directions, both heading downhill.

  “We’re trapped,” Turov said, “between this tangled growth and the water. What are we going to do? There’s no power here.”

  “There has to be something. Keep looking.”

  We followed the root the other way until I could hear and smell the water again. That’s what finally gave me an idea that might explain everything.

  “Hey Galina,” I said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Listen, the squids are aquatic, right? Why would they put a teleport landing spot on an empty beach?”

  “I don’t know, you fool.”

  “Because this beach isn’t important. The beach isn’t where we’ve got to look.”

  She followed my eyes. I was gazing out into the brackish, stinking water.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m not going in there.”

  “We’ve got faceplates and pressure suits. It’s no worse than going into space. In fact, it’s a lot safer than that.”

  She complained, but in the end, she followed me into the water. It wasn’t like wading into the ocean, not exactly. It was thicker than that and more still. The only waves were lapping, rippling ones like you might find on a quiet lake at midnight. I figured that maybe this world didn’t have a moon to stir things up like Earth did.

  The inky water was cold, nasty and almost like swimming in black snot. If I had to compare it to something I’d experienced, I would say it reminded me of training in the mud pits back on Corvus, my legion’s old transport ship.

  Damn, I missed that ship.

  -50-

  What we found under the water was freaky. First of all, it was dark as hell. We had to turn our suit lights on but kept them at minimal level—like high beams in the fog, we were blind otherwise. Floating everywhere in the liquid were clear globules. They were round in shape and full of some kind of jelly. Holding one up to Turov’s headlamp, I saw each of the globes had a dark core you could make out inside. We pushed these strange objects aside, groping ever deeper into the murk.

  Turov had attached a line to my suit, which she tugged on irritatingly. She also used it to communicate privately on a closed circuit. It wouldn’t do to broadcast radio packets on our suit’s normal com channel in the middle of a hostile alien camp.

  “McGill—this black pond is full of eggs!” she said with a mixture of disgust and fascination. “I can see things squirming inside these globular sa
cs.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I noticed that.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before we sank ourselves three meters deep into this mess?”

  “Are you any happier now that you know the truth?”

  “No,” she admitted, “but we have to get out of here. If these are cephalopod-eggs, there must be guardians. We must find a power source and teleport home.”

  For once, we were in agreement. This location didn’t seem to be helpful at all. An egg hatchery? All we could hope to do here was piss off the watchers of the nursery.

  “You know what I don’t get?” Galina said as we shuffled along the bottom, pressing our way deeper still. We had to be four meters down now. “I don’t understand why the cephalopods would have that root-thing growing over their hatchery. That seems like Wur technology.”

  “True, but I can tell you why. The Wur rule the squids. It’s probably part of their agreement. The squid officer I met on Death World told me all about it. The Wur have enslaved the squids, just as the squids enslave others. For all we know, this is how they did it.”

  “By growing some kind of dome over their hatchery?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  We saved our breath for plowing through the eggs for a while. I would have been worried we were going to lose our way if I hadn’t had a depth meter and compass built into my tapper. I could only tell we weren’t going any farther down now, and we were moving in a more or less straight direction.

  At last, the wet ashy sand under my feet began to slope upward. The gloom lessened as we made our way to shallow slime, so I killed the lights. With great care, we pushed our helmeted heads out of the muck to take a look.

  Through the thick streaks of jelly running off our faceplates, we saw something that resembled civilization. I was relieved. Sure, it wasn’t a human-looking type of civilization, but it was better than another empty beach.

  There were small buildings here that looked kind of like clam-shells. They were quite large, about five meters across and two high. They were crusty with growths. Fluids leaked out and ran toward the lapping waves. I walked to the nearest of these shells and tried to pry it open.

  “What the hell are you doing now?” Galina whispered behind me. “Can’t you leave that alone?”