Machine World

by B. V. Larson

  Frowning, I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide and they searched mine intently.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “What’s true?”

  “I’d heard rumors. Someone told me Della is pregnant. It’s got to be something like that. The James McGill I’ve always known would of moved on by now to find another girl if it was anything less.”

  I shook my head and smiled ruefully. “Wrong,” I said. “She’s not pregnant. She already had the baby.”

  Kivi’s mouth fell open comically wide. She punched me then, right in the gut. I grunted and grabbed her small fist before she could do it again.

  “What kind of an asshole are you, James?” she demanded in a harsh whisper. Her mood had shifted as quickly as an autumn wind—but that was Kivi for you.

  “Why are people always asking me that?” I wondered aloud.

  She scooted away from me about a foot and crossed her arms over her ample breasts.

  “So,” she said, “let me guess how this happened. Back on Dust World you met Della, screwed her, and left her there. Now, she’s out here in space trying to make a living training out legions to use these dragons while your kid is back on Dust World growing up alone.”

  “You make it sound like I did this as part of some kind of evil plan. Well, I didn’t. She was the one who wanted to get pregnant. She chased me on Dust World for that express purpose. Now I find out I’ve got a kid, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

  Kivi was quiet for maybe ten seconds. To be honest with you, it was kind of nice.

  “It was her idea?” she asked suddenly. “The getting pregnant part, I mean?”

  “Yeah, sure. Think about it. Those colonists were living separated from Earth with a limited gene pool. To their way of thinking procreating with new humans was almost a duty.”

  Kivi nodded thoughtfully. She scooted back toward me and threw one leg over mine. I jumped a bit reflexively not quite knowing where she was going with this.

  But then she kissed me, and I figured it out. The winds had shifted back the other way.

  We made out on the observation deck as I hadn’t done for years. Kivi, as I’ve said before, is not a shy girl. Even though we were in semi-darkness, I didn’t quite feel comfortable with some of the things she did while climbing over me on that couch. But it’d been a while since I’d made love to a woman, so I let her open our tops and kiss me passionately.

  At one point, I heard some giggling off to my left. I put a gentle hand on Kivi’s cheek and lifted her face away from my neck.

  “How about we go someplace else?”

  “Screw them,” she said hotly. “It’s nothing they haven’t seen before.”

  “Yeah well, we’re giving them a live show, here.”

  She made a frustrated sound and hopped up off the couch. She tugged on my hand until I followed her. There were more whispers and giggles from the dark around us as we left the observation deck.

  I figured she would want to go to Green Deck, but we didn’t make it that far. When Kivi gets hot, she gets really hot.

  We made love in an ammo storage compartment. The metal containers were unevenly surfaced cold planes against bare skin, but Kivi didn’t seem to care. After a while, neither did I.

  -11-

  When we arrived at Gamma Pavonis, we came down directly from above the local plane of the ecliptic. In other words, instead of moving from one planet to the next, getting closer and closer to the central star, we dove straight down toward the target world’s northern pole.

  It was no secret we were coming. Three Imperial capital ships, dreadnaughts all, can’t hide on approach. Once we turned off the Alcubierre drive and transformed from glowing blue-white spheres of light into what looked like a trio of comets with hundred-kilometer long plumes of exhaust, any alien watching the scene would have to be blind not to know what was coming next.

  The good news was that they couldn’t have detected us until we came out of our warp bubbles. As I understood it from the techs, we were technically visible as a bubble of light while the drive was active, but since that effect was moving faster than the speed of light in relative terms, there was no time for the light thus produced to reach the eyes of anyone watching. We were, effectively, out-running our own shadows.

  But once we turned off the big drives—well, that was it. There isn’t much in space to occlude the view of a sensor, and any kind of traditional engine produces heat, light and other energy readings that were very visible. I wasn’t sure what kind of sensors the squids might have, but I was pretty sure they knew we were coming in hot.

  About the squids—I had no doubt that they were at least watching this system. If both the Empire and their Kingdom were interested, they had to have a survey team out here at the very least. I said as much to Natasha, who gave me a look then sighed and answered civilly.

  “You’re right,” she said. “You’ve got to be right, if you think about it. They will have seeded this system with sensors and listening posts. We only hope that they didn’t—”

  That was as far as she got. An alarm went off. It wasn’t a ship-wide klaxon, but it was a flashing yellow-orange bar on her tapper. She looked at it then glanced at me in alarm.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re summoning all the techs to battle stations.”

  She looked scared, and I didn’t blame her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her. “Should we be preparing for action?”

  “I don’t know. Follow your tapper and the arrows on the deck. You know the drill.”

  She turned to go, but I put a hand on her shoulder. I gave her a hug—no kiss, no rude squeezes, just a friendly hug. After stiffening up for a second, she relaxed, hugged me back and wished me luck. She left smiling.

  I watched her race off down the passage toward the weapons deck. There were arrows now, just like she’d said. Green ones meant tech-only. Those lit up first and stayed lit, glowing on the deck plates.

  As I walked farther down the passages and ramps, the red arrows lit up. Red indicated combat arms, which meant me. I watched, but the other colors stayed dark. Blue was for bios, in case of a medical emergency. Golden arrows meant everyone should follow them, and they were usually reserved for abandoning the ship.

  The way shipboard actions worked on an Imperial vessel was, well—odd. The Skrull who crewed the ships weren’t allowed to fire the weapons systems. In Frontier 921, only humans were licensed—literally—to fight in star system beyond their own. Because of this, a tech like Natasha was invaluable because she had the skills required to run the ship’s sensors and operate the broadsides in a battle.

  Natasha herself was not part of my dragon-riding squad. She’d failed to impress the brass while operating a combat machine. She just didn’t have the killer instinct, or at least not enough of it to satisfy Graves and the rest. But she was a good tech, so they’d decided keep her aboard Cyclops to operate the guns if we needed them.

  Watching Natasha vanish around a corner, I decided not to wait around for the brass to deploy us. I knew the battle decisions were being made right here aboard Cyclops. Of the three ships, this one had the smallest complement of troops as it only housed the cavalry. For that reason Turov had brought her command staff here and had taken over Gold Deck, making it her operations center for the entire task force.

  Knowing my fate was being decided by staffers up on Gold Deck didn’t make me happy. Sometimes, it seemed like the officers treated us like hamsters in cages. They ignored us until it was time to give us orders, then provided arrows and instructions a moron could follow. They only noticed failure after that—or that we weren’t moving fast enough.

  I trotted after the red arrows to my squadron’s prep room. We didn’t have a formal service deck, not yet, but we had our own section of the module with bunks all around and a row of tough polymer crates that enclosed our dragons.

 
“All right, listen up!” I shouted, slamming my hands together.

  It was gratifying to see troops hop off their bunks and gather around. Even Carlos hustled, and when I had everyone’s attention I went into my routine.

  “We’re going to prep up like this is a hot action. We haven’t gotten the official call yet, so don’t wet your pants, but who knows? It could come at any time.”

  “Is this a boarding action, Vet?” demand Carlos excitedly.

  I smiled. “We can only hope. I would like nothing better than to meet up with a pack of squids while riding these sweet machines.”

  The others echoed my sentiments. We’d been training for more than a month, and we were itching to try out our new equipment on an honest-to-God enemy.

  We dressed in thin smart-suits not unlike those I’d worn as a light trooper. They were vacuum-tight in a pinch, but really, it was like wearing a garbage bag. If our dragons failed us, we’d probably die fast.

  Opening up the crates, we coaxed out our machines and climbed over them, checking gauges and—

  Wham! A tremendous sound rang through the ship. I knew that sound. There was only one thing that could have caused it.

  “Broadsides have fired!” I shouted. “Be on your toes, we must be in fleet action!”

  “This is bullshit,” Carlos said, picking himself up and trying to get his machine into a squatting stance for mounting. “They should tell us what’s going on!”

  “If we need to know something, we’ll be told,” I said firmly with a conviction that I didn’t feel. I knew from long association with the legions that the brass was perfectly capable of forgetting about ground troops in the belly of a transport. In fact, if they figured it would be easier to let us all die and be revived later, they might well engineer our deaths for the sheer convenience of it.

  But I was a veteran now. I wasn’t supposed to whine or complain. I was supposed to reassure those who did. It felt a little odd, but I thought I could get used to it.

  Finally, someone felt the urge to tell us what the hell was going on outside our ship’s hull. A voice and a face appeared on one wall. It was none other than Primus Winslade.

  “Troops,” he said, looking a little flustered. “Cyclops, Minotaur and Pegasus are in action. We’ve met up with unexpected resistance. There appears to be some kind of fortification on the smallest of the target world’s three moons. The moment we exited warp and showed ourselves, this moon fired missiles at us. They’re currently inbound. Everyone is to prep their equipment and march to the lifters. I want my cohort off this ship and in transit now!”

  Winslade sounded nervous. He didn’t say how many missiles or what kind of warheads they had. He probably didn’t know.

  Carlos slapped my shoulder. “Hey, do you realize what’s going to happen if those missiles get through our defenses and blow up one of these ships? That’s it. Permed! A whole legion. Or maybe it will be our lucky turn to get cleaned out. After all this training, too. I want—”

  “Shut up, Ortiz!” I boomed. I realized I should have said those words about a full minute back, but I was a little slow sometimes. I wasn’t used to being the veteran. “Get your rig walking—with you inside of it!”

  Everyone went back to prepping their machines. About ninety seconds later, I rolled up the big bay exit door, and we went clanking down the passageway toward the lifters.

  Red arrows lit up the floor. That was us—combat arms. I hoped they’d load up the rest of our support people, too. We needed everyone on this drop.

  I didn’t even bother to look back to see if the rest of the dragons were following me. If they weren’t stomping after me with their tails lashing, well, they could die in the module with the bio people.

  Wham!

  The broadsides had fired another salvo. I was nearly thrown off my artificial feet. Servos whined, and I drew a three-clawed gash on the closest metal wall. But I stayed up and marching. My team was behind me, and I could see there were no stragglers. My HUD showed they were all there—a row of wicked marching machines right behind me.

  Among all the squads to reach the lifters, we were third. I felt proud. Veteran Harris was there ahead of me, however. He gave my team a glance but didn’t nod or wave. He looked like he smelled something foul.

  Leeson waved me closer. He was inside one of the dragons as well. His claw-arm looked strange as he made a human-like gesture. I hurried and clanked up to him.

  “Good job, McGill,” he said. “You’re right on time. We’ll be the first lifter to abandon this ship if Toro’s platoon gets down here.”

  Graves came clanking in next. I thought he looked uncomfortable in his dragon. He didn’t ride it, it rode him.

  “This damned thing fell on its nose when the broadsides fired the second time,” he complained. “Where the hell is Toro?”

  Leeson threw up his grippers. “She’s late.”

  The broadsides boomed a third time, and about one second later, Toro and her team arrived. She was leading all of them with her two veterans right behind her. I recognized Johnson and Gonzales. I wondered how glad they were to lay eyes on me.

  “About time, Toro,” Graves said. “Get your machines secured. We’re dropping.”

  “Sir?” Leeson said. “The pilot wants to know if we can fly. The missiles, sir—”

  “Tell him to decouple in twenty seconds. Positions, everyone!”

  We dropped our visors all around, and we backed our machines into the hanging clamps that were supposed to secure us during flight. Moments later the floor became the wall, and then it became the ceiling.

  About half of Toro’s group wasn’t ready. Their machines went sliding and crashing across the deck, slamming in a pile-up against the hull a hundred meters down. Some managed to grab onto things with their grippers, and a crewman was crushed.

  “Toro, dammit,” Graves fumed. “Get your people under control!”

  “We must be in trouble out there,” Leeson said, grunting and hanging on to his clamps with his grippers. “What’s the word from Winslade?”

  “There isn’t any,” Graves answered.

  I noticed Leeson hadn’t moved an inch during the inversion. He was using his grippers to hang on, like they were arms. He instinctively hadn’t trusted his clamps. I thought that was a pretty good idea, and privately ordered my squad to do the same. Pretty soon, every machine in sight was hanging on for dear life.

  The lifter righted itself after about a minute. We pulled hard Gs during a slewing turn, then there came that undeniable feeling of falling at high speed. My stomach was in my mouth, and my heart was pounding in my ears.

  Could Cyclops have been hit? What about Natasha and the rest? I didn’t know anything except that I was about to land on an alien world I hadn’t even had the time to lay eyes on yet.

  “Hey, McGill,” Carlos said. “I’m sorry, I mean Vet. Look at this stream—I’ll pipe it to your tapper.”

  He sent me a streaming feed. Lord only knew how he’d gotten access to it. The image was grainy, and it skipped and fuzzed out now and then, but the scene was unmistakable.

  Three ships hung over a gray-white, mist-clad world. Distantly, a moon of dark rock floated. It was covered in puffing explosions. Were those our strikes or more missiles firing up from the moon base? It was hard to tell, but I figured it was our own broadside shells slamming home. I’d seen them strike before, and their power was daunting. Whatever missile base was firing on us was sure to be toast with three of these ships hammering at it.

  The one worrying thing, however, was displayed as the view shifted. I realized then that the vid was from someone aboard our lifter. Probably a tech who’d released a buzzer and had it fly to a porthole. Buzzers were insect-sized drones that were often used for scouting or even spying by legion techs.

  One of the three capital ships was on fire. It was Pegasus, Solstice Legion’s transport. Normally, fire wasn’t possible in space, but with the released oxygen escaping with other gasses, she was a briefly
lit torch. She’d been hit—hit bad. My heart sank to see that.

  Out of the bottom of Pegasus, tiny capsules were firing like bullets. Hundreds of them shot out as if the ship was bombarding the planet below.

  I knew those capsules didn’t contain explosives. They were carrying troops. Each one was a drop pod firing down through the atmosphere into the murky clouds of this new world.

  My heart went out to the Solstice legionnaires. What a way to enter a war! There was no way they’d reached their optimal drop point. The legion commanders had to be panicking to order a general drop from such a height, trying to save their—

  That’s the point I’d reached in my thoughts when Pegasus exploded. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer for the thousands that still had to be aboard her.

  -12-

  I’ve been to war in three star systems over the years, with Gamma Pavonis being my fourth deployment. That doesn’t make me some kind of grizzled old-timer, but it does mean I’ve been around the bush a few times.

  I could tell already, this campaign felt different.

  In the past, there’d always been a certain degree of restraint. There’d always been orderly rules applied, to some degree, to each battle I’d witnessed. Hiring out as mercenaries to various planets with internal problems, one never knew when things might get hairy, but there were certain things you could trust would or would not happen.

  One such rule was the sanctity of Empire ships. No one, I mean no one, fired on Imperial warships. To do so not only meant your own destruction but very likely would result in the destruction of your entire species.

  I found myself commiserating with some of those old-time European generals. This must have been how it had felt for them when they met enemy troops who didn’t line up in colorful costumes and fire their guns all at once. There was no sense of honor or reticence in these aliens. They meant to kill us all. They didn’t care about our contracts, our revival machines or the consequences of their actions. They meant to kick our collective asses anyway they could.