Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World

by B. V. Larson

  “McGill!” shouted Drusus suddenly, bringing me out of my thoughts. “Are you on this channel? My tapper says you’re here, lurking.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m here.”

  “You’re hereby ordered to get that revival unit working. Stay on the lifter, and work with the tech until it starts popping out fresh troops.”

  “But, sir?” I asked. “I don’t know how to operate the system, and all the bio people are dead.”

  “Figure it out. Grow a bio first and get their help.”

  I must have looked sick at these orders, because Harris was grinning at me.

  “Harris!” Drusus barked.

  “Sir!”

  “Keep the enemy off that lifter. I’ll have Turov send a unit back to support you. Hold out until they get there. Do you have any questions?”

  “Tribune?” I asked. “What about the other valleys? How are things out there?”

  “We’re holding out,” he said noncommittally.

  “How long until we can expect relief, sir?” Harris asked.

  “You’re on your own for now. Expect nothing from the other cohorts. I’ve grounded all the lifters.”

  “Can I ask why that’s the case, sir?” Harris asked.

  Drusus was quiet for a second. “There’s a ship coming. The techs we left on Corvus spotted it, and now we have as well. The configuration is unknown. I don’t want to fly any of our lifters up out of these valleys until we know the score. Our landing ships don’t have much in the way of weaponry.”

  Harris nodded grimly, twisting his lips. I could tell he was worried. The tribune signed off and the connection broke.

  I looked at him. “Another ship?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “Who do you think it is?” I asked. “Squids? Galactics?”

  “I have no idea, McGill. If the Tribune wanted us to know, he’d have told us. Now, we need to—”

  I got to my feet.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Harris demanded.

  “To help Natasha. Those are my orders.”

  He grumbled but let me go. Left with only two able-bodied grunts, he had a lot of bodies to sort through and a lot of equipment to check.

  I headed straight to Natasha’s side, where she was working on the revival machine. She jumped up and came around with a pistol in her hand when I pushed the hatch open. Fortunately, she recognized me before firing.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m jumpy. These bio machines—they creep me out.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said, stepping carefully over the gory deck to her side. I poked at the biological innards of the revival machine. To my surprise, it shivered at my touch.

  Revival machines are probably the strangest things I’ve ever encountered. They look sort of like old-fashioned pot-bellied furnaces. But instead of producing heat, they form flesh out of raw materials. They were metal on the outside, with a data entry panel over the primary exit maw, but inside they were as fleshy as the people who came back to life inside them.

  “How does this damned thing work, anyway?” I asked.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Natasha admitted. “This isn’t our kind of technology. Human technology is pretty much machine-based. We have some bio-tech, and can handle things like viruses, medicines and surgery. But this—this is like understanding your own reproductive system and having full conscious control over every aspect.”

  “It seems to be alive,” I said.

  “Yes, they are very hard to kill. I used a small EMC blast to kill the nanites and I’ve been using flesh-printers to heal the wounds, but the unit is in shock. The internal nervous system is giving me nothing but warning lights. I’ve tried to get it going by charging all the plasma bays and injection ports—but they still register empty.”

  I looked the machine over carefully. I couldn’t help but curl my lip in disgust. If you’ve never worked in a slaughterhouse with animal guts all over the floor you probably can’t imagine the smell and the mess.

  “I still don’t get how it can make any person it wants to,” I commented as I tried to help her.

  “Controlling biological output isn’t new,” Natasha said. “Some species on Earth can control their biological output, you know,” Natasha said as she poked and prodded, trying to get the machine to operate. So far, most of the indicator lights were a cautionary yellow, and a few were red.

  “Like what kind of animals?”

  “There are hundreds of mammal species in which the female is capable of manipulating the sex of her offspring.”

  I looked at her, my eyebrows upraised in surprise. “Why would they do that?”

  “Strategic reproductive reasons. For example, a strong female that’s likely to produce an attractive male will select sperm that will grow into a male. But weaker females play it safe and are more likely to produce female offspring.”

  My jaw sagged a bit. “Really? Can you do that?”

  She blushed and turned away.

  I smiled and went back to tapping around under the dripping innards of the machine.

  “It would be a neat trick if you could,” I said. “If you want to give it a shot, I’d be willing to donate—”

  “Just shut up,” she said. “Forget I said anything.”

  I did shut up, but I found forgetting her words to be an impossible task.

  “Ants can do it too, can’t they?” I asked a minute or two later.

  “What?”

  “A queen ant—she can decide to make soldiers if she needs them. Or drone males, or even new queens.”

  “Yes, they have that ability. But this tech is so far beyond anything of that kind. I suspect it’s done through extremely long organic molecular chains. Through programming, essentially, that can grow cells to order by creating DNA and allowing natural cell division to take place. It’s as advanced compared to our bio tech as a computer is to a shovel.”

  “I get that,” I said. “I can understand how these machines could build a cell to order and start incubating it. What I don’t get is how they work so damned fast. It takes less than an hour for a full-grown human to come out of one of these. I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  Natasha frowned at the machine. “That’s been puzzling me as well. But I think I know the answer. They use time dilation. There’s some kind of stasis field that operates to speed up time inside these units. It’s the only answer I can think of.”

  “If you’re right, these machines are incredibly advanced.”

  She nodded. “Any luck down there?”

  I came out from under the machine and wiped away goo. “Not really. I suggest we take a tried and true approach.”

  “Name it.”

  “Let’s cycle the power—turn it on and off again. This system needs a reboot.”

  Natasha shook her head worriedly. “That might not work,” she said. “What if we kill it? They have an internal source of power, and they never get switched off. You can’t just stop a person’s heart and start it again without knowing what you’re doing.”

  “Well, what do you suggest then?” I asked.

  She heaved a sigh. “I think we’re just going to have to wing it. We’re going to have to operate the machine despite the fact every indicator is scrambled. A few are green now, but most of them are still yellow.”

  I stared at her for a long second. “I don’t like that idea, but I have to admit it’s less likely to kill the thing by accident.”

  “Should we contact the other bio people and inform them of our plan?” she asked.

  I eyed her, then shook my head. “I don’t think so. They’d totally freak out. They did everything they could to get me permed the last time I messed with their equipment.”

  “I know they’re a little jealous of their tech,” Natasha said. “But this is a matter of life and death.”

  “They’d just say we should wait until an authorized operator got here,” I said. As soon as I’d spoken those words, they sounded
like pretty good advice to me.

  Natasha’s face became stubborn. I realized then that she wanted to run this machine. She was tech, sure. But she’d built her own life form in college and been punished for it. She had a streak of curiosity about technology—any kind of technology.

  “Let’s just do it,” she said quietly, as if whispering a secret. “The Tribune ordered us to. We’ll stand on that.”

  I wasn’t sure that would fly with the bio people. Some of them could be downright crazy. But I was game to give it a try anyway.

  I stood up and approached the data terminal. That was the one piece of this monster that looked positively homey to me. The aliens who’d made this contraption had sewn an interface on it that we humans felt at home with, and I, for one, thanked them for their thoughtfulness. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the experience of stimulating its nerve endings manually to get it to do what I wanted. Instead, there was a touch screen, a keyboard and even a few buttons.

  Cracking my knuckles, I reached for the terminal. Natasha put her hands on mine and pulled me away the way a mother might have removed a toddler’s hands from the knobs of a stove.

  “Let me do it, James,” she said gently.

  I nodded. She was the tech, after all.

  “Who are you going to revive first?” I asked.

  Natasha licked her lips. “No choice there, really. I’m going to have to bring back Specialist Grant.”

  I grimaced. The choice made sense, of course. Anne was the one who would have the best chance of repairing the machine and getting it back to normal. But I didn’t like the idea of doing that to a friend.

  “What if—what if it goes wrong?” I asked Natasha.

  “You mean, what if she’s a bad grow?”

  I nodded. We were both speaking with lowered voices. We weren’t bio people. We still had hearts and stomachs that were built of flesh, not iron.

  “Don’t think about it,” I advised her. “Just do it. We don’t have any choice, really.”

  Natasha reached for the controls and began to tap at them. I watched with a growing sense of unease.

  -18-

  Anne’s revival took many long minutes. The alien machine gurgled and hissed as it suckled on tanks of liquid and sent up odd vapors that lingered near the ceiling.

  During that time, the bombardment along the cliffs had shifted. The Primus wasn’t getting the results she wanted, I figured, and was now walking her cannons across the walls of the valley blasting apart rock where she imagined the enemy might be hiding. For their part, the colonists weren’t reacting. They hadn’t made any more attacks—but they hadn’t surrendered, either.

  When the revival machine finished its strange incubation process, the primary maw yawned open. I hunted around for the scoop you were supposed to insert to help slide the body out.

  Natasha gave a little shriek, and I turned back in alarm. She was crouching in front of the steamy maw looking inside. She shined her flashlight into the dark opening.

  “I can see her feet in there!” she said with a noticeable degree of fascination in her voice. “Bare feet—and they look normal.”

  “Aren’t babies supposed to come out headfirst?” I asked. “Maybe we’ve screwed up already.”

  “Just get the shovel-thing. We have to get her out of there, or she might suffocate.”

  I realized right then we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We were criminally incompetent. Without a bio to help out, we might as well be two cavemen trying to operate a computer—only in this case a human being’s life depended on us.

  I approached with the shovel-like tool extended in front of me. It looked like one of those things they use to take pizzas out of ovens. It had a handle and a flat metal scoop in front. But this tool was longer and had a tip that was wrapped in soft polymers. I imagined this was to prevent tearing up the soft internals of the machine—or the newborn human.

  Sliding that scoop in there was a teeth-gritting experience all by itself. Natasha tried to help, lifting Anne’s bare feet with her hands and saying: “Careful! Careful!” about thirty times in a row, while I worked the scoop into the maw.

  I finally had it all the way in and started to withdraw the scoop.

  “She’s not coming out!” Natasha said. “She’s stuck!”

  “Well, pull on her feet for God’s sake!”

  A few moments later, Anne came loose. She gushed out with the scoop. There was a lot of fluid and other stuff—I didn’t even want to look.

  “Oh my God!” Natasha said. “She’s got an umbilical cord!”

  I felt my stomach heave a little, but I tried to keep it together.

  “So far so good,” I said. “First, let’s check her vitals.”

  “Heart beating—but I don’t think she’s breathing. What are we going to do, James?”

  “Uh…hold on.”

  I wrestled Anne’s flopping, nude body onto a gurney. The umbilical cord was pulsing, still beating with purplish blood. I had to wonder what was at the other end of that hose-thick blood vessel. Did the machine have a heart of its own beating somewhere inside?

  I tried not to think about that—I tried not to think about anything at all. I tilted Anne’s head to one side and fished in her mouth.

  “There’s like a plug in here—something rubbery.”

  “Rip it out!”

  I did it. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had to do anything worse, but I did it. A lot of liquid flowed out, but I didn’t see any blood.

  Natasha pushed her fingers on Anne’s chest. Anne’s small, perfect breasts shivered.

  “I think she’s dead,” Natasha said. She bent forward and gave her mouth-to-mouth.

  “Keep trying. I’ll try to figure out how to work the defibrillator.”

  Fortunately, I never had to shock Anne with the defibrillator. I’m sure that if I had, I’d have jolted myself to death somehow.

  “She’s breathing again!” Natasha said. “We’ve got a pulse and breath. I think we did it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She looks a little green.”

  “That’s just the afterbirth.”

  “Maybe.”

  Anne started to cough then. She wheezed, spasmed and shifted into a fetal ball. I felt for her. She’d been revived by two amateurs and spit out of a broken machine. If there was any possible way we could have screwed this up—we’d probably done it.

  Natasha and I looked on helplessly while Anne’s eyes fluttered open. She coughed with a deep, lung-ripping sound.

  “Anne?” Natasha said gently, running her fingers over her face to push back the lank, wet hair that was plastered to her forehead.

  “What the fuck are you two doing in here?” Anne gasped, then went into a fresh round of wet coughing.

  Natasha and I grinned in relief. Her heart was beating, her lungs were working, and she could talk. We felt like proud parents at that moment.

  A few seconds later we weren’t so happy. Anne slipped off the gurney head first. She’d passed out.

  We lifted her limp form as gently as we could and put her back onto the table. We tried to awaken her again.

  “Anne?” Natasha kept saying. “You have to tell us what to do. What’s wrong, Anne?”

  Anne’s mouth worked, but she didn’t say anything intelligible. Natasha bent close to listen.

  “She’s talking about the cord,” she said.

  I looked and immediately noticed that the umbilical had grown dark and was no longer pulsing.

  “I bet it’s killing her,” I said. “We have to cut it. Get the flesh-printer!”

  I reached for my father’s knife and drew the blade, quickly wiping it on my suit. I didn’t have time to sterilize it or even to think about what I was doing.

  “She’s going, James,” Natasha said urgently. “Do it.”

  I began to saw at the cord. It was slippery and tougher than it looked, but the blade was insanely sharp. A surgeon’s scalpel couldn’t have done a better job. A moment later,
Anne looked like she had a pumpkin stem sticking out of her belly.

  Just as with a newborn baby, the cord had a valve in it that prevented heavy bleeding. We pinched it closed anyway and sprayed fresh cells over it like there was no tomorrow.

  After another minute or so, Anne was conscious again. She wasn’t happy, however.

  “You two shouldn’t be here. Where are my people?”

  “They’re dead,” I told her. “All of them. The tribune ordered us to revive you. We’re supposed to get you started on reviving the rest of our troops.”

  Anne looked around in confusion until she saw the bodies that still littered the deck.

  “The colonists…” she said, then turned an accusing eye toward me. “You said they were harmless peasants hiding under rocks! They came in here like a pack of wolves! They tore us apart!”

  “I never said they were harmless,” I said. “And they don’t have much in the way of tech, just nanite-blades and tools.”’

  “That was plenty. They came at us so suddenly… The drones and trip-lines on the perimeter around the lifter didn’t work—there was no warning. You techs failed us, too!”

  Anne wasn’t being reasonable, but I knew how she felt. I often came off the table fuming after a bad death. The fight that ended your life was often still fresh in your mind.

  One of the odd things about revival technology was the fact you could often remember your own dying moments. Our neural connections were constantly recorded whenever we were in range of the legion networks. Updating a person’s mental state wasn’t as data-heavy as it sounded because the system only recorded changes to your synapses and neural pathways, not your entire mind. Like many large databases, the system saved only the parts of the mind that differed when compared to the last refresh. Most of the contents of any human brain were fairly static, such as long-term memories and basic skills. Only our most recent memories needed to be stored on a continuous basis.