by B. V. Larson
“I don’t think anyone fully understands it all yet. But I know that we’re the only local species with two populated worlds in this slice of the frontier, which makes us somebody special. This far out along the galactic rim most species are discovered before they get to the point of colonization. After you join up with the Empire, it’s illegal to colonize a second world, and therefore illegal to qualify as a level-two civilization.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what are we enforcing? Who do we get to lord it over?”
I frowned at him. Leave it to Carlos to start right in with an immediate plan to abuse our new position.
“Basically,” I said, “we’re not mercenaries anymore. We’re regional sheriffs. We’re supposed to help other races when they get in trouble—and that doesn’t just mean beating on them.”
“This is so weird. We’ve been doing this mercenary thing for like, a century. How can that all have changed overnight?”
“It’s still the same day, actually.”
“Funny,” he said, “very funny. Spoken like a true Nairb at heart.”
“Hardly,” I laughed.
Later, I spoke with Natasha. She was in a far more convivial mood now that the Nairbs had left Dust World.
“You know, James, I was certain you were going to be executed when you were summoned into that ship.”
“It’ll never happen,” I assured her.
“It already did back on Steel World!”
I shrugged and smiled at her. She was sitting beside me, and the stars were out. We were on a boulder near the lakeshore. The rock-fish blew bubbles and stared at us from the inky black water.
“What I want to know is how we’re going to get back to Earth,” I said.
Natasha laughed. “We’re not going in that ship,” she said, indicating the cephalopod vessel that sat like a pool of shadow near the shore.
“Why not? Does it smell too much like rotting squid?”
“All the techs have new orders. We’re to help the colonists figure out how to fly it. We don’t own the ship anymore. Drusus gave it to them. That’s why they opened the hatches again and came out.”
I eyed the ship thoughtfully. Natasha watched me.
“Are you getting ideas about that Della character?” she asked.
I was startled, but I covered smoothly. This girl was telepathic.
“Don’t worry,” I laughed. “If I get near her again, I’m keeping my armor on. She killed me twice, you know.”
“Good.”
* * *
When I finally did approach the cephalopod ship, I didn’t run into Della right away. Instead, I met up with Centurion Graves. He was there, watching the colonist fighters walk back and forth to their caves. They seemed to be carrying a lot of equipment out of the hollowed out Hydra to this new ship.
“Was I supposed to report here for duty, sir?” I asked him.
“No, McGill. I purposefully didn’t call you.”
It was dark again, and the bizarre insects of Dust World were creaking and blatting in the brush at our feet.
“I understand, sir. I have a history with these people.”
“That’s right. We didn’t want them to get upset again. The truce is working for now. I heard some crazy things about your little conference with the Nairbs, by the way.”
“All encouraging words, I’m sure.”
Graves laughed. “Yeah, right. Everyone said they could taste their own balls, they were so scared. When you started mouthing off, they all thought they were dead. But somehow, our whole planet got promoted at the end?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “Diplomacy is an underappreciated art.”
“Okay, all bullshit aside McGill, do you know anything about the pull-back? I’ve heard that the Empire is falling apart.”
I shook my head. “I really don’t know. The Galactic said Battle Fleet 921 was ordered out of our area and sent to the Core Systems. That does seem kind of strange. Do you think all the Battle Fleets have been pulled back home?”
“Yes, I think that’s exactly what’s happened. We’re on the fringe. If you’re calling in reinforcements from the very edge of your territory, you’re calling in everything.”
“Yeah…you don’t think it’s serious, do you? The Inspector said something about millions of ships like raindrops.”
“That sounds pretty serious to me. Worse, they put us in charge locally. That’s got to mean something. Why put an irritating species like ours in charge of local law and order?”
“Because you don’t have anyone better who can do the job?” I suggested.
“Exactly. What else did the Inspector say?”
“Nothing much. Are we talking about a civil war in the Core Systems, sir?”
“I hope not, for the galaxy’s sake. It probably hasn’t gone that far yet. I’m hoping they’re just getting nervous. Maybe some of the ancient races are having a little squabble over who gets what.”
“You know what I think?” I asked him. “I think the Empire is going to fall apart. How can it survive forever when it’s so damned big? In Earth’s history, huge empires always fell apart eventually.”
“Yeah, well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes.”
“Why not? I’m sick of Nairbs and snooty Inspectors.”
“You’d rather have rolling fleets annihilating populations? Destruction on a planetary scale? Black holes nudged toward inhabited systems for the purpose of swallowing entire stars?”
I stared at him but didn’t answer.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t think you wanted to see that. No one does. We all hate the Empire. It sucks. But it does provide order. Don’t ever believe chaos is better, McGill. We aren’t all from the same species. There won’t be anything holding us back once we start going for our neighbor’s throat. You see how the cephalopods treated the local humans?”
“We’re just animals to them,” I admitted, “dogs to be domesticated and enslaved.”
“Right.”
“Speaking of which, what are we supposed to do about the cephalopods?”
“They’ve attacked an Imperial ship. They aren’t part of the Empire. They must be put down. What did you think the burden of the Enforcer meant? It means no mercy, no quarter.”
I looked up into the sky. I could see the warm-water planet that shared the Goldilocks Zone with Dust World. Reportedly, it was far more temperate and friendly than this planet. Unfortunately, it was inhabited by a particularly mean species.
“How can we even reach them?” I asked. “We only have a single legion, and nothing but lifters.”
“You’ll see,” he said.
Troubled, I left him there manning the ramps. A shadow approached me soon after I left the ship.
“I thought you were coming to see me,” Della said.
“I ought to burn you down where you stand.”
“Would you revive me, if you did?”
I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure what I’d do. I knew I was angry with her.
“Don’t try to stab me again,” I said. “I’m wearing my full kit now.”
She walked alongside me in the dark as I headed back toward camp. She didn’t speak.
“Della, I don’t know what you want, but I’m tired and I’m going to bed.”
“I accept your offer.”
“Ha! No way.”
“You’re angry?” she asked in surprise.
“Hell yeah, I’m angry! You killed me, girl. I trusted you, and you stabbed me in the back—literally.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Of course it hurt. Are you crazy?”
“You remember the pain?”
“Yes.”
She walked in the dark beside me for a time. Finally, she sighed softly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew you would come back. I didn’t think you would remember the final moments.”
I heaved a sigh as well. “It’s nice that you apologized and everything, but I don’t think I can get over being murdered so easily.”
“You were turning away from us. It was my duty.”
She stopped and stood in the dark. I stopped a few paces farther on and looked back at her.
“Good bye, Della,” I said.
“Good bye, James.”
And that was it. I marched back to camp, flopped onto my bunk and tried to go to sleep. Even though I was bone tired, my mind wouldn’t shut down for a long time.
When my dreams finally did come, they were troubled.
* * *
About a week later, we left Dust World. On the second day of the journey, Graves called me up to the top deck of the lifter without telling me why.
I knew that we were scheduled to fly to a rendezvous point where we would be picked up by a transport flown by the Skrull. It wasn’t going to be a nice, custom-built ship like Corvus—God how I missed that ship. It was just going to be a no-frills cargo vessel. But it was reportedly big enough to carry all of us back to Earth.
“Come over here,” Graves said, leading me to a porthole.
I gazed out into the dark beauty that we called space. Timeless, silent and infinite—I was immediately captivated.
“The ship is going to roll over,” Graves said. “Look down.”
I did, and the disk of a blue world hove into view. It was covered in oceans and streaked with white clouds.
“Is that the cephalopod planet?”
“No,” he said quietly. “Not anymore it isn’t.”
I saw them then. Hell-burners. They fell from the aft end of each of our nine surviving lifters. They weren’t very big—but I guess they didn’t have to be.
Hell-burners were something I’d read about, and I knew that few humans from Earth had ever seen them fall on a world. They weren’t fusion bombs—they were much more terrifying than that.
Back in school I’d read of neutron warheads, weapons that killed by burning an area with intense particulate radiation. Neutron weapons left buildings upright, but killed everything that lived and breathed on the surface. The hell-burners were like that, but they worked on a global scale. Most forms of plant life, microbes and buried insects would survive. But anything sophisticated, anything with a brain, was wiped out.
The atmosphere glowed redly until I couldn’t see the oceans below us anymore. The destruction of life so complete and yet silent. Stunned, I watched as a species was erased forever.
I swallowed, stared and swallowed again.
Graves clapped me on the shoulder. “Remember hating the squids?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about them anymore. That Nairb ship wasn’t entirely empty. They brought just enough bombs to do the job.”
“What I just witnessed—it was so wrong, sir,” I said.
He frowned at me. “It was them or us, soldier. The Empire lost a ship in this system. Somebody had to pay. Just be glad it wasn’t either of our two planets.”
I didn’t answer. I nodded and went below. There, I stared at a rusty bulkhead while the rest of the regulars around me slept and played games on their tappers, oblivious to the dead world in our wake.
Did I feel sorry for the squids? No, not exactly. They’d been vicious bastards who would have done the same thing to us in a heartbeat. But to wipe out an entire living world…
I had to admit to myself, I now hated the Empire even more than I hated the squids.
* * *
Earth changed after we reached home. Mostly, it was a good change.
There was energy in the air, and ships came down from space almost every day to deliver exotic goods. Wealth was flowing again, wealth like we’d never seen before.
I learned that part of becoming the local Enforcement world involved an Imperial stipend. I’m sure the credit amounts would have been sneered at in the Core Systems, but out here in our little ghetto of stars, it was an undreamed of fortune.
People had jobs again and hope. We were building things everywhere: Spaceports on the ground and shipyards in space.
Friends and relatives had done a one-eighty in their opinion of the legions. We were no longer failures; we’d brought home the bacon and then some. They understood that troops in steel ships had dragged this bounty back to Earth, but I don’t think any of them appreciated how hard-won our new wealth was, or how difficult it might be to keep the money flowing in the future.
For me and my comrades, none of this had come easily. For us, this new era wasn’t about spending credits and building new buildings. We’d paid a price in blood to bring back good economic times—the best Earth had yet to see in all her storied history. But would it all be worthwhile in the end? What would the Galactics make us do to keep our status? To my knowledge, no one had even thought to ask the Chief Inspector what had happened to the last Enforcers who we’d been chosen to replace. Maybe nobody wanted to know.
I didn’t have any answers, only questions. I found solace in beer and companionship during my second shore leave. I guess in the end that’s all any of us ever really have.
I looked up Natasha and she made a special trip to Atlanta to see me. That was never a bad sign, when a girl spent money to come visit you.
Natasha and I went out after I introduced her to my folks, who were busy looking at houses out in the suburbs. They both had jobs again, and I knew that made them happy. They had dreams of buying some land with trees and a half-dozen songbirds—real ones—if they could scrape together enough credits.
After taking Natasha to a few places we ended up at a bar full of military types. I don’t know why—I guess I felt most at home in that kind of place now.
“How are you holding up, James?” she asked me when we were alone and settling into our second round of drinks.
“Pretty well. At the end of the first month, I got a happy surprise. My pay-mail arrived, dinging on my tapper. When I checked the amount I discovered it hadn’t been reduced. Graves had told me he was demoting me from Specialist to grunt again—but apparently, he never did fill out the official screens.”
Natasha smiled and squeezed my hand. “I guess that was his little way of saying thanks for negotiating the legion out of mass perma-death.”
We laughed and had another round. We’d saved two planets while utterly destroying a third. All in a day’s work for Legion Varus. Seen from that perspective, I guess I did deserve to keep my rank and full pay.
“I’ve been wondering about one thing,” I said to her about an hour later.
“The answer is ‘yes’,” she said, eyes shining.
I laughed. “Great—but that wasn’t what I was going to say—not yet, anyway. I was wondering what kind of trade good the Dust World colonists could possibly come up with. If they can’t figure that out, we’ll be busted back down to a single-system species again.”
“Haven’t you heard?” she asked. “They have an excellent trade good. The Nairbs have already approved it, and they’re making shipments by now.”
“What did they come up with?”
“Nanites,” she said, “what else?”
I thought about that, and it made perfect sense. They had managed to steal some advanced nanotech from the squids and fine-tune it. Now, they were selling their wares to the Empire at large. I was glad to hear humanity’s position as a two-system civilization was secure for now. It did seem ironic that the squids could have done the same thing, but had chosen to end their existence rather than knuckle-under to the Empire. I guess some species were too proud for their own good.
Natasha and I got a hotel room and spent several intense nights together. By the time she had to leave, I was feeling better about life.
Before our next deployment orders came a month or so later on, I’d had time to reflect on how much Earth’s role in the Empire had changed since I’d joined Legion Varus. I now suspected that this wasn’t all due to chance. Looking back on recent events, I’d begun to see a pattern.
Why had the Saurian peoples of Steel World tried to take our single trade good from us? S
uch things did happen from time to time, but the brazen behavior of the Saurians and Legion Varus itself during the conflict went beyond the norm. The Nairbs had let both sides get away with it, too. Could this lax attitude on the part of the Empire be due to internal weaknesses far, far away in the Core Systems?
I daydreamed of vast armadas floating in the cold void between the close-knit stars at the center of the galaxy. I imagined millions of vessels struggling, striving for dominance. Seen from the fringe of the Empire, the distant upheavals all seemed remote and yet ominous at the same time. It was like watching a thunderstorm on the horizon and imagining how it must be furiously lashing the ground with lightning.
The part humanity played in this galaxy was an infinitesimally small one. Frontier 921 was a tiny, far-flung province that meant almost nothing to the commanders of those vast fleets at the Core. If they thought of Earth at all, it was in terms of a category of planets and beings. We were ants to them, and they were a herd of elephants having themselves a stampede.
If I’d learned anything during my brief adulthood, it was that being the ant in such situations could be dangerous.
The End
From the Author: Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed DUST WORLD, the second book in the Undying Mercenaries Series. If you liked the book and would like to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review to support it. Let new readers know what’s in store for them.
P.S. Star Force fans, book ten will be out soon!
-BVL
More SF Books by B. V. Larson:
UNDYING MERCENARIES SERIES
Steel World
Dust World
STAR FORCE SERIES
Swarm
Extinction
Rebellion
Conquest
Army of One (Novella published in Planetary Assault)
Battle Station
Empire
Annihilation
Storm Assault
The Dead Sun
Outcast
IMPERIUM SERIES
Mech Zero: The Dominant
Mech 1: The Parent