Mech (imperium)

by V. B. Larson

  The Great Lady herself watched the entire enterprise on live holo. It seemed to be over with too soon. She sighed as the man expired. She needed more intense relief from the stresses represented by Lucas Droad and the bumbling General Steinbach. She needed relaxation, a diversion, and a release of tension. The execution had not quenched her thirst for sensation. She tapped her nails on the control console thoughtfully, watching as the dismembered corpse was dragged away leaving a pink trail in the sand. Her penciled-on eyebrows jerked up, and would have risen above her hairline had she not gone completely bald over a century ago. She smiled for the first time in a week as she thought of her battlesuit hidden beneath the castle. This scandal in the village might be just the thing for a little sport. She would have to clip all her nails down to the quick in order to drive the suit again, but it would be worth it. She believed, as her father had before her, that peasants were best dealt with in a heavy-handed fashion. Occasionally, a reminder of their status was in order.

  Long after darkness had fallen over the village that huddled beneath the castle walls and the cookfires had died down for the night, a team of four barrel-chested brutes from the palace guard stalked through the narrow mud-splattered alleys. The gorilla-like men were unarmed, but as they weighed over three hundred pounds each and were exquisitely combat-trained, they needed no weapons. At the house of the criminal family, almost everyone slept except for a young boy that couldn’t so easily forget his big brother. He lay huddled at the foot of the family shrine, breathing the last of the incense.

  Because he was still awake, he caught sight of the men outside the hut and tried to climb out a window, shrieking in alarm. He surprised one of the small-brained brutes that struck him with a bit too much force, snapping the thin neck and killing him instantly. The boy’s body was tossed back through the window, landing on a mat with his three sisters. Then the giants forced the doors and immediately the rapes and beatings began in earnest.

  Mai Lee drove her battlesuit out from under the castle and up into the courtyard via a secret tunnel that slanted down into the deeps. The tunnel opened at the base of the fountain that dominated the mosaic gardens in front of the main keep. Anyone who might have witnessed her appearance would have seen a black monster in the shape of an ancient, terrestrial allosaurus materialize in the gardens. Standing over seven feet high and weighing several tons, the collapsium-armored battlesuit indeed resembled a reptile. It had huge rear legs, stubby gun barrels that thrust from the chest like foreclaws and a computer-controlled rear tail that moved incessantly to balance the machine. With a heavy stride that crushed vegetation and cracked flagstones, she set off down the hill toward the village.

  The battlesuit had been custom-made for her on the distant Nexus, back before such things had been rigorously recorded. She had ordered it partly for protection against assassination and partly for sport. The proud technicians that had brought it with them over so many light-years had trained her in its use and helped her set up special security codes so that no other could operate it. As a precaution, she had turned the chest-guns on them at the end of the final operator’s lesson. Since then, countless murders had been performed in the guise of the estate dragon, which had become something of a folk legend in the region over the years.

  Hearing the terror-stricken cries of pain coming from the hut of the criminal family, the villagers had reacted by extinguishing all fires and artificial lights and bolting their pathetically thin doors. When the first rasping, crashing footfalls of the dragon were heard and recognized, however, the mood changed to one of panic.

  “Gi!” they cried, voicing the local name for the legendary monster. Many of the villagers fled for their lives into the fields, others buried themselves in makeshift hiding places, trembling in fright. Only the bravest and the most foolhardy snuck to their darkened windows to catch a glimpse of Gi.

  The monster walked directly through the town square itself. The fore claws thrust into the empty windows of the shops with vicious swipes, its tail whipped about, striking down tent poles and smashing trade goods. From the great head a blue glow was visible where the eyes and mouth should be, and a faint blue radiance could be seen outlining the major plates in its armored body.

  Purposefully and unerringly, it strode directly to the alleyway where the family of criminals lived and struck down the front door of the hut by simply walking through it. Inside the huts, the cries of woe took on an even more chilling note, the note of people faced with imminent death.

  Mai Lee was enjoying herself more than she had in years. For too long, she realized now, she had been willing to content herself with watching the video-feed of her bumbling minions artlessly executing her will. Tonight was different. Now the blood was on her hands directly, now the victims looked directly at her as they screamed in mortal terror. Inside the suit, her eyes were wide and staring, her heart pounded with true excitement, her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a death’s head grin.

  First, she killed the oldest male by shoving one of the chest-mounted gun barrels into his belly and ramming him against the wall of the hut. The gun barrel ran through him like a spear. He was already dying but she loosed a burst of forty rounds into his chest cavity anyway, blowing a hole through the back wall of the hut.

  She turned the machine around and reached with one foot to crush the life from a boy that lay supine on the floor, but halted. From the impossible angle of the boy’s neck, it was clear that he was already dead. A rush of wild rage swept over her.

  “My instructions were quite clear,” her amplified voice boomed inside the hut. “I was to perform all the actual executions myself. Who is responsible for this?”

  “Oh great Gi, forgive him, but Jin killed the boy,” one of the brutes ratted quickly, gesturing toward a giant that was in the act of brutalizing a young woman. The other giants, a worried look in their eyes, quickly assented, pointing to the slack-jawed Jin.

  “They lie-” he began.

  He got no further as the dragon’s mouth opened and the blue glow inside grew in intensity. With a sudden gush of burning superheated gas, Jin, the girl, and two other peasants were engulfed in searing blue vapor. The surviving palace guards vaulted out of the windows and through the ruined door, running through the mud toward the castle.

  Mai Lee, enjoying herself thoroughly again, continued her work in the hut until it was leveled. The sound of the chest guns ripped the air; the flares of livid blue ignited the horizon. Before she marched Gi back up the flagstones to reenter the garden, three huts had been burned and twelve people lay dead.

  Five

  The hot little water-world with its swampy sister planet had grown from a speck to a fat blue-white disk over the last two days. Less than a million kilometers out and coming in fast, the Parent began a hard three-gee braking to bring it into a safe descent pattern. Landfall was only hours away. The larvae had been hatched and birthed and now crowded the tiny ship with their humping, glistening bodies. They ate liberally of the protoplasm supplies, and the Parent estimated that soon the tanks would be sucked dry. At that point they would enter the pupae stage. They would transform and awaken as adult offspring less than an hour before the invasion began.

  The Parent herself ate sparingly, taking in only enough to keep her ovaries working. Her external egg sacs were already distended with the seeds for more offspring, and every hour they swelled further.

  The Parent heard a rustling back in the cryogenics chamber. Extending a pseudopod to investigate, she found two of the larvae had climbed through the hatch and had gotten into a death struggle inside. One of them had killed and half eaten the other, to her chagrin. She could not, of course, blame the surviving youngster. It was quite possible that the dead larvae had been defective genetically in some way. It shouldn’t have been so easily bested. Yet it was vexing to have to birth another so soon.

  Reaching out with her tentacles, she herded the surviving youngster out of the chamber and sealed it. The others romped about
in the control room and chased one another up to the ceiling on their sticky-padded feet. One of the larvae had bitten a chunk of sticky flesh from the other, causing it to run a little faster.

  The Parent sucked up the carcass of the dead larvae with her foodtube and ruffled her tentacles in amusement at the antics of her offspring. Then she turned back to the ship’s data-interface. She shifted the ship’s approach path to bring it in directly behind the smaller planet, interposing the satellite between the planet and her ship. Orbiting the moon were many of the small ships that seemed to sneak down to the planet’s surface so easily. She targeted one that was just picking up speed and falling out of orbit toward the planet. Her dark, silent ship locked onto the target and rapidly closed the distance between them.

  Once this was done, there wasn’t much left to do other than to enjoy the last frolicking of the larvae before they settled down and spun their fleshy, egg-shaped cocoons.

  “Come on, come on, you poor wretches,” muttered Sarah Engstrom under her breath, sitting in the cockpit of her flitter.

  Sarah’s flitter sat in the middle of the vast swamps of Gopus on an illegal saber-reed farm. Daddy and his son Mudface lived on the huge triangular-shaped island, a lump of mush called Sharkstooth. Their huge moldy stockade was visible through the trees, built out of tough mangrove-like timber. At each of the seven guard towers that lined the walls of the stockade bearded thugs slumped over their rattler turrets. Sarah eyed the walls with trepidation, although it looked primitive, she knew the electronics and weaponry employed by the drug kingpins were unsurpassed. They maintained a facade of simple-mindedness because they liked it that way.

  Several hundred swamp-folk lived with them in and around the stockade, doing all the work and getting off-handedly abused for it whenever Daddy or Mudface had a little too much reed-whiskey.

  She pushed her dark hair back from her face and wiped sweat on her jumpsuit. She wanted to move fast because Mudface was showing signs of getting amorous again, and worse, Daddy would be back any minute.

  “You sure are pretty today, Sarah. You sure you don’t want another hit off the reed-juice?” asked Mudface, leering at her. He was rail-thin, with a stupid-looking grin that belied the malevolent cunning behind it. He flicked at the dark flies that encrusted a patch of filth on his cheek.

  “No time for it, but thanks,” Sarah said, managing to smile back at the man. She knew that it was best to keep on the good side of Mudface and Daddy, especially when visiting their island. Despite their rustic appearance and manners, their illegal harvesting of selective varieties of swamp reeds had made them wealthy and powerful. “Your people have gotten almost all the cargo aboard now.”

  Mudface nodded, watching the swamp-folk load Sarah’s flitter with bales of dried bluish saber-reeds. “Ground up into blur dust, this load will make a lot of people happy down there,” smiled Mudface. “We grow the best here on Sharkstooth, you know.”

  “Yes, you can’t get a better hallucinogen anywhere in the system.”

  “This is the good stuff. Our customers rarely go blind,” said Mudface proudly.

  Sarah’s stomach twisted at the thought. Blur dust induced euphoria with the usual vicious side effects such drugs had on the chronic user. The drug was named for the side effect of temporary blindness, which sometimes became permanent. “I just can’t help but take on a load now and then,” Sarah said defensively. “Every free-lance spacer in the system does it, if only to make ends meet when the stiff spaceport usage fees, and the even stiffer graft premiums, come due. The colony is growing the demand for the drug is growing with it, inflating the price.”

  Mudface looked at her in askance. “I think I missed your point, Missy.”

  “Nothing,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

  Mudface turned a sharp eye back to the swamp-folk, which were carrying heavy wicker cases to the flitter on their permanently crooked backs. One man, even thinner and less healthy-looking than the rest stumbled and sagged down beneath the weight of his burden. He struggled desperately to get up, feet slipping in the loose mud. Despite the generously low gravity on Gopus, he couldn’t stand. There was a wild look in his black-circled eyes. An old woman and a boy came forward to help him up, but Mudface waved them back. He pulled his short-barreled shotgun out of his belt and hit the old woman with it. It was a Wu hand-cannon automatic, loaded with high-velocity shells. She staggered away with blood running out of her bedraggled hair.

  “I said leave him be! Y’all never listen!” shouted Mudface. Then he bent down beside the fallen man, prodding him with the barrel of his shotgun. The man struggled harder, and got one corner of the wicker case off the ground. “You sick or somethin’ boy? You ain’t got the fever, now do ya?”

  Sarah squirmed in her cockpit, biting her lip.

  “Can’t have you spreading no fevers,” said Mudface, cocking his hand-cannon.

  “I’ve changed my mind about that drink, Mudface,” Sarah called from the cockpit of the flitter. “It’s quite hot out here.”

  Mudface turned away from the man struggling in the mud and beamed his idiot’s grin at her. “Now, you’ve got that right, girl,” he said and sent the bleeding old woman into the stockade to fetch a fresh bottle of chilled reed-whiskey. As soon as his attention had shifted, the other swamp-folk helped the sick man to his feet and finished loading the flitter.

  Then Daddy showed up, riding his sagging one-man flyer over the tops of the Red Hork trees and landing in the glade next to the flitter. Daddy was hugely fat, with a belly that protruded over the rim of his stained greasy workpants. His mean eyes protruded from their sockets, matching his belly. He had a trailer behind the flyer with a load of dead waterfowl in the cradle. Feathers, beaks and claws stuck out here and there between the slats.

  “Looks like a nice catch,” said Mudface.

  “Must be fifty, sixty black-beaks in there, plus a good dozen of those noisy gronk birds,” rumbled Daddy as he climbed off the flyer’s saddle. The flyer buoyed up a few feet in obvious relief, then the roaring engine shut itself off and the vehicle sank to the muddy surface. A group of bearded thugs gathered around the craft, slinging their weapons over their backs and whistling at the catch.

  “Gronks are crap to eat.”

  “Yeah, but these aren’t making noise anymore,” laughed Daddy, slapping his flabby thigh. He pulled out his hand-cannon, the twin to Mudface’s, and began reloading it with shells. He walked up to Sarah, still loading. A trickle of sweat ran down from his huge hands onto the hot barrel, producing a wisp of steam.

  “What’s taking so long with the loading?” demanded Daddy.

  “One of the swampers came down sick,” said Mudface.

  “Sick? Has the fever, does he?”

  Mudface nodded. He swatted a buzzing insect that chewed at the tough skin of his neck.

  “Can’t have him giving it to the others,” said Daddy grimly. He headed toward the huts. Two of his thugs sauntered after him with grins splitting their dark beards.

  “Can’t you just give them all some antibiotic?” asked Sarah in concern.

  “Nope,” said Mudface. “It’s viral. No easy cures. There’s only one sure fix for a bad case of swamper fever.”

  From inside the hut a shotgun boomed. Daddy came out again, looking satisfied. His thugs dragged the flopping body out and deposited it in the swamp.

  “Now, you have our deal real straight, don’t you girly?” rumbled Daddy. He kept his eyes on his gun, shoving another shell into the magazine with a fat thumb.

  “No question about it, I’ll transport this stuff down, hide it in the caves, then you deposit my share of the cash at First Stellar.”

  “Nice and simple,” said Daddy. He raised his head and bored into her with hard little eyes like glass chips. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “We’ve got friends with ways of fixin’ people who screw us,” said Mudface, his eyes were big and serious. He nodded to the thugs who wandered
around the place. “I like you, Sarah. Wouldn’t want to see you get messed up.”

  “That’s right,” added Daddy. He finished loading his hand-cannon and the breech snicked shut automatically. “I don’t like comin’ into town to do business. It’d be a shame to have that kind of business with you.”

  “I assure you, gentlemen,” Sarah told them with her hands raised and open. She spoke with deep sincerity. “I have absolutely no intention of screwing up this deal.”

  They both nodded, and the tension eased. Later, after they all had a cool glass of reed-whiskey, a surprisingly clean glass, Sarah made ready for lift-off.

  “Awe now, look at that. That damned swamper got mud all over your flitter with that last case,” complained Mudface. “I’ll have ‘im beat for you, girly. Beat real good!”

  Sarah’s mouth opened and she found herself about to say thanks automatically. Her tongue caught in her teeth and she said nothing.

  Mudface just waved at her, grinning his idiot grin. Sarah pressed the automatic return button on the flitter’s control panel and soon his face was lost in the glade around the stockade. Then the glade was lost on the mold-green carpet of Sharkstooth and finally even the triangular island slipped away beneath the fluffy white clouds of Gopus. The flitter slid up into orbit and docked with her ship.

  As she made her way through the airlock and climbed into the rotating shower to wash the sweat from her body, she thought about Mudface’s words beat real good, and shuddered in the warm water.

  “Hello mom,” Bili Engstrom shouted into intercom. The sound startled her.

  “Hello Bili,” she replied, “how’s your arm, any change?”

  “Nope, the heal-bag’s still brown and just a little cloudy. How’s old Mudface? Still a pervert?”

  “Bili, let’s not talk like that.”

  The connection was cutoff for a minute or so while she removed her pressure suit and made her way in Zero-G up to the passenger section of the boat. Bili, who sat in the tiny galley section working on a model of Garm’s star system and getting glue everywhere in the process, took the time to examine his injured arm. He poked and prodded at the limb through the tough clear plastic bag that encased it in liquids until he could feel the pressure with his new, tingling nerves. His right arm had been crushed just above the elbow in the same accident that had killed his father out in the asteroid belt six months ago. His mother had gotten him to a clinic in time and they had amputated the mutilated arm. Without full medical, they couldn’t afford a really professional regrow, just one of those kits you could buy at the survival supplies department, alongside the jungle ape venom kits and the do-it-yourself amputation packages. It just wasn’t coming out right, though. The bag was supposed to remain clear and colorless, but had turned a nasty, hazy brown over the last two weeks. Bili gave it another hard poke and winced.