by B. V. Larson
And that was exactly how the veteran appeared to have been affected. One moment, he’d been standing around cheering for Omega Team, and the next he’d been blasted off his feet.
He slammed the deck with his face, his body quivering and smoking. The bios rushed forward to help, but I could have told them it was pointless. Hell, the poor man’s hair was on fire.
He’d been struck dead.
-13-
Graves didn’t look horrified. He looked annoyed.
“Is that suit damaged?” he demanded in concern.
“Not that we can tell, sir,” said the tech officer.
“Call in the revive,” he ordered, then he turned on the tech girl. “Now, what the hell did you do wrong?”
She pushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes and shook her head. The tech looked upset. Hog techs weren’t used to frying people.
“I don’t know… I’m so sorry.”
“That doesn’t cut it, Adjunct.”
He turned to me next. The look on his face indicated he thought this was all my fault somehow.
“What did you do, McGill?” he demanded.
“Come on, Centurion,” I said. “I stood right here and watched them electrocute that poor hog, same as you did.”
He nodded and looked down at the body again. I could tell he was thinking hard.
“Sir?” Harris said. “May I make a suggestion?”
“What is it, Veteran?”
“I think McGill here is the most experienced man present in regards to this alien equipment. Hell, he’s fooled around with more alien tech than both of us combined. Maybe he should go next.”
I gave Harris an irritated look. He caught that and grinned back. There was almost nothing that man liked better than to see me die. We had a history, and he’d never gotten over the fact he’d lost most of the battles between us.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Graves said, “but I’ve got other plans for McGill.”
He walked up to Omega Team again. “I need another volunteer.”
This time, there was a wave of hesitation. Earlier, they’d all been gung-ho, but behind Graves they could see a scorch mark and a twitching, partially-cooked corpse.
I raised my hand. Harris pointed at me hopefully.
Graves ignored both of us.
“You,” he said, pointing toward a big, red-headed guy with blue eyes that were closer together than a ferret’s.
The startled man stepped forward. He’d been volunteered—Legion Varus style.
“Try another suit,” Graves told the techs. “That one might be damaged or something.”
The techs apologetically brought in another suit and helped their next victim into it. He kept up a brave front, but I could tell he was scared.
“This time, dial the power way down,” Graves said.
“Got it,” said the tech officer. She was shaken, but she’d put back on an air of professionalism.
I watched her work, and I decided she was the most attractive girl in the room. That might seem like a small thing, but I consider myself to be something of an authority on that topic. Call it a hobby.
They hooked up the ginger test subject, and the generator began to hum again.
Ferguson raised his fist, and his team did the same. This time around, their cheer seemed a little ragged. They didn’t have the heart to give him a full-throated shout.
Feeling bad for the hog, I filled in, roaring “VARUS!” at him at the top of my lungs.
He looked at me, startled—and then they flipped the switch.
Obediently, the guinea pig tapped at the dial on his chest and cringed—but nothing happened.
“What’s wrong now?” Graves boomed.
“Not enough juice,” the cute tech said. “The suit didn’t activate.”
“Try again,” he ordered.
She turned to her crew. “Reset it and bump the power up ten percent.”
Sweating, the hog in the kill-suit hesitated when he put his hand on the dial the second time. I felt a measured degree of sympathy. I know from experience that it’s hard to murder yourself.
“Come on, come on,” Graves complained.
The poor guy did it. He nudged the dial—but again, nothing happened.
“Bump the power up again!”
The fourth time finally did the trick. As before, there was a loud snap and a puff of acrid smoke. The hog was broiled alive.
Possibly due to the reduced power levels, this guy didn’t die right away. He flopped and puked, skin peeling up like it had been microwaved.
Graves shot him in the head and put his hands on his hips.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Next!”
This time, none of the hogs moved. They were white-faced. They looked like they were going to make a run for it.
Stepping forward, I faced Graves.
“Give me my shot, Centurion.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “What makes you so anxious to die?”
“I’m not sir,” I said. “But I’d like a chance to redeem myself, if only in your eyes.”
He narrowed those eyes. “You’re going to teleport right out of here, aren’t you? Somehow, some way, you know how these suits operate, and you’re engineering your escape right in my face.”
“I’m not, sir!” I said, and I meant it. “That’s the God’s-honest truth.”
He released a heavy sigh. “All right, what the hell. Suit up Adjunct McGill.”
The techs swarmed me. Their hands shook. They were freaked out by now. They’d just killed two men, and they didn’t want to do it again.
“Hey,” I asked the cute lead tech. “What’s your name?”
She glanced at me. Her hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it back.
“Lisa,” she said.
“Lisa? How about this: If I manage to teleport, will you go out with me?”
She snorted in disbelief. “Hold up your arms.”
I did as she asked, and she worked on strapping the suit onto my person. I’m a tall man, fully two meters in height, but the suit was still hanging off me like my daddy had let me borrow it. I felt the nano-tech fabric sense my dimensions and cinch up slowly.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re about to fry my ass. The least you can do is give me some hope.”
“Can’t do it,” she said.
“Come on. I’m just talking about dinner in the cantina. A snack, even.”
“Soldier, I—”
“We’ll all be squid-meat in a week, anyway,” I said.
That line got to her. She met my eyes, and we locked stares for a moment.
“All right, sure,” she said, “but you have to jump, not fry.”
Smiling hugely, I let them power me up. Then I pulled a little trick I’d been planning all along. I took the Galactic Key out of my pocket and applied it to the dial.
It was a long-shot, sure. Maybe the squids had developed this suit on their own. Maybe the Empire’s universal hacking device wouldn’t work for some other reason. Or maybe—the failures had nothing to do with a security system but were due to any one of a zillion other possible causes.
But I had a shot, so I took it.
After touching the key to the dial, I tapped the dial a tiny, tiny bit. The pressure I applied was so infinitesimal, I hardly felt the contact.
The room wavered. I felt a thrill of exhilaration. This was it. I was about to discover Claver’s secret. Maybe, with luck, I’d find Natasha and bring her back. I was glad I had my laser pistol on me. I wasn’t fully geared, but sometimes a single armed man in the right place at the right time—
All those thoughts rippled through my mind in a fraction of a second. But then, the shimmer faded.
Staring, I realized I was in the same room, but about twenty meters away from where I’d started. I’d done it, I’d jumped!
There were people rushing toward me. I tried to take a step toward them, but my legs wouldn’t move. They were confined somehow, as if they were stuck in cement.
Harris was one of the first people to reach me. He didn’t look happy or pissed—he looked disgusted.
The others all had the same expression. The tech girl, Lisa, she had her hand over her mouth in outright horror.
I looked down then. At first, I couldn’t sort out what I was seeing. It looked like I was sitting on another man’s lap maybe—but I was clearly standing.
Then, over a period of several seconds I began to feel faint, and I realized what I was seeing.
I’d teleported into the space another person had been occupying. I’d merged, in fact, with one of the hogs. He’d been sitting on a bench in front of the lockers, watching the experiments from what he must have thought was a safe distance.
But he’d thought wrong. I’d teleported all right—smack dab into him. Our bodies were a single disgusting mass.
The odd sensations I was feeling now made more sense. It wasn’t pain, not exactly. But I could feel swelling as our two pools of blood mixed in my veins and his. My heart was still beating, as it was above his body, but since his head was about where my hips were—well, it was pretty upsetting.
My blood vessels were blocked. My guts were intertwined with his skull. My breathing quickly became short, and I fell over, taking us both down.
I couldn’t even hit the floor properly. My legs, at about the knee level, had merged with that damnable bench.
Harris’ face came into sight, and he peered down at me.
“Freaky,” he said. “I have to admit, boy—that took balls. Where are your balls, anyway?”
“Feels like they’re locked inside a hog’s brain,” I replied.
He grinned, and I grinned back weakly.
Lisa appeared next. I reached out toward her. She took my hand, her face twisting.
“Hey,” I said hoarsely. “I jumped. We got a date, remember?”
She nodded weakly.
“Here,” I said, pressing my Galactic Key into her hands. “Give this back to the new James McGill, will you?”
“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“My lucky sea shell,” I lied. “My mama found it for me years back.”
Graves pushed his way through the crowd a moment later. He looked me over critically.
“You want me to do the honors, McGill?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
His pistol came up.
I took a breath and held it.
He shot me then, and I died immediately.
Shot twice in the head within less than twenty-four hours. That had to be some kind of a record, even for me.
-14-
The revival process went normally… if coming back from the dead can be called normal.
The first thing I did was hunt down Lisa. I found her in a lab full of weird equipment. A lot of it looked alien-made, and I had no idea what any of her gizmos did.
The tech adjunct seemed startled to see me. She moved to hide whatever was on a table behind her.
“Hey,” I said, smiling. “Can you take that break yet?”
“Um…” she said. She had a funny look on her face. “I don’t know if I can do it, McGill.”
“Call me James. What’s the problem?”
She squirmed as if she didn’t know how to tell me. Looking around, I caught sight of the thing on the table behind her. It was a squid jump-suit, and it was a bloody mess. Three techs were working on it, scratching off bits of gore.
I caught on immediately. They were scraping away the merged bodies of two legionnaires. It had to be the suit I’d been wearing when I died. I understood as the suit was too valuable to be discarded.
Looking back at Lisa, I could see the strained look in her eyes. This situation was uniquely troubling to her—and to me. How was I going to capture the interest of a girl who’d just had the horrid experience of watching me die, then cleaning my innards out of the suit I’d been wearing at the time?
“Oh,” I said in disappointment. “I get it. I understand. Maybe some other time.”
Normally, I’d have cajoled her, but after a grim death and my second revive of the day, I was out of gas to chase her any further.
I turned away, dejected. I walked toward the exit and pushed open the door. It had one of those negative air-pressure systems on it, and it sucked a breeze up into my face.
“Wait…” she said. “James?”
Turning back around hopefully, I found she’d followed me. She pressed something into my hand. It was the Galactic Key. I couldn’t believe I’d almost forgotten about it.
“Your mother’s shell,” she said, giving me a strange look.
“Oh yeah, thanks.” I shoved the key into my pocket and moved again to leave.
I made it about a dozen steps down the corridor when I heard small, slapping feet behind me. I looked back.
Lisa fell into step beside me. I slowed down so I wouldn’t outpace her.
“I thought you were grossed out,” I said.
“I was, I was,” she admitted. “But then I thought about what you did back there—it was such a sacrifice. So brave. My part seems trivial in comparison. I decided to swallow my reaction and fulfill my promise.”
“Great,” I said.
I felt like Lady Luck had finally smiled on me—just a little.
“There’s just one thing, James,” she said.
“Name it.”
“We’ll need to start off with a strong drink.”
My smile broadened into a grin. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all damned day,” I told her.
One thing swiftly led to another. I’ve found over the years that women decide pretty quickly if they like you or not. They tend to put a man in a box they have designed for him, too. Sometimes, it’s a pretty box with a bow on it. That special space is reserved for friends a girl likes to talk to. Sorry bastards who head into it rarely escape their fate.
That box was never the one I wanted to be placed into. The trick I always employed was to reject the box right off, without compunction.
Lisa figured out very quickly I wasn’t going to be painting my nails with her. I was dangerous, aggressive, teasing. I took her hand even before we reached the end of the corridor and entered an elevator. She shook my touch away and gave me a headshake.
A few minutes later though, by the time we were having our first adult beverage, my hand was again lingering on top of hers.
This girl wasn’t like Kivi. She wasn’t as lusty and direct. She didn’t have that half-crazy desperation that a lot of Legion Varus girls had driving them. I guess that was because she hadn’t experienced death over and over again—not yet, anyway.
But there was some of that pressure in her mind today. She was a hog, sure. She was a non-combatant used to doing dry experiments on equipment at Central. But she knew—everyone did—that the grim wars fought among the stars were about to come home to Earth.
Normally, our legions hired out and went purposefully beyond the sky in great ships to seek adventure. That had been our pattern for about a century now. But this time, death and destruction had decided to pay a visit to us instead.
“James,” she said huskily after her third drink, “do you really think the cephalopods will come here? Will they break past our fleet?”
Her question startled me. I’d seen the boards in the command room. Our fleets were on the run. They’d already been beaten. There was no question that the enemy was coming here, but she didn’t know it.
How widespread was the truth? Graves had mentioned this reality to everyone in the testing room, but maybe they didn’t all know how grim the situation really was.
Forcing a smile, I gave her tiny hand a tiny squeeze.
“Maybe we’ll stop them in space,” I said, “or maybe we won’t. Doesn’t matter. When they get down here, the legions will finish the job.”
“Won’t they just bomb us?”
In my opinion, that was exactly what they’d do. But I could tell right away reality wasn’t going to make th
is girl happy.
“Nah,” I said confidently. “I know the squids personally. I’ve fought them and killed them with these hands. They’re slavers. They want to conquer us. That’s a lot harder to do than blowing up the planet. We’ll stop them on the ground.”
She nodded and then stared at my hands. “You’ve killed cephalopods?”
“Yep,” I said. I thought about telling her I’d offed several just today, but that was supposed to be kept quiet. Apparently, she didn’t know about my role in ambushing the squid-jumpers who were trying to take out the data core.
“Tell me about them.”
Shrugging, I proceeded to do so. I described their fighting males, and their vicious queens who were much larger. I’d fought and killed quite a few squids, and my stories had her eyes and mouth wide open before I’d gone half-way through the list.
At last, she shook her head and threw up her hands.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she said. “I had no idea. It sounds like we’ve been at war with the Cephalopod Kingdom for years. The news vids always omit details.”
“It’s been a low-level conflict,” I said. “We’ve fought on a dozen worlds. It’s an age-old story. Two empires meet and collide. They grind against one another along the edges—but eventually, one side decides it can’t live with the other. At that point, it’s on!”
I laughed and tossed down my drink. Looking stunned, Lisa did the same.
“I’ve had enough,” she announced. “What do you want to do next?”
There was a funny look on her face. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking—but I didn’t entirely care, either. I took her question in the way I wanted to.
Together, we left the bar and went up to her apartment just outside Central. The rent here had to be astronomical.
We made love in the dark, and she turned out to be as hot in bed as she was reserved and professional while on duty.
The bed was too small for two—but we didn’t care. We fell asleep in a tangle of sheets and limbs.
-15-
In the morning, Lisa and I woke up late. We showered fast and reported back to the testing center with wet hair.
I could tell right off Graves was in an even worse mood than yesterday. When he saw the two of us walk in together he twisted up his lips. He gave me a slow shake of his head.