Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (14 page)

The odd thing was the room was mostly empty. With only half the cohort with us, there was half the usual number of officers. I could have snagged a comfy chair, if I’d had the balls to.

Did that mean Graves had wanted me up here and decided to let Harris down easy with an excuse? Or was this just his way of slapping Harris around for complaining about his orders back when we were in the face of the enemy on Blue Deck?

I didn’t know the answer, so I tried to push these thoughts from my mind and listen closely to Winslade. He tended to be overly dramatic, but he seemed to be serious today.

“That’s right,” Winslade said. “I think we’ve lost the rest of the legion.
Minotaur
hasn’t blown up or lost orbit, but she’s dead as far as we can tell from the ground. There’s no response to any transmissions we’ve made requesting their status.”

That was a punch in the gut for me. I’d had no idea things were that bad. Sure, there’d been venting from the engine core…but all of them? Dead?

“Primus,” Graves asked, “is this speculation, or is it confirmed?”

Winslade eyed him. “Confirmed. Their computers acknowledge our requests, but nothing other than preprogrammed responses have come back. The Skrull crew must be dead as well. Only the AI remains active, and it’s of limited usefulness. What we have gotten from it amounts to statistical data showing onboard conditions. The engines are disabled, and the atmosphere aboard is deadly—where it exists at all. The regions that remained pressurized are toxic. The radiation levels are serious. Even in suits, any survivors must be in dire straits.”

Graves considered. “So, we’ve lost ninety percent of our force. What about the troops that came down via drop-pods?”

“Most of them made it. Better than sixty percent, in fact. They’ll be gathering into units and proceeding to our position over the next twenty hours.”

“Ninety-three percent of the legion lost,” Graves said, shaking his head. “I have only one more critical question, sir: Do we have a revival unit on this lifter?”

Winslade smiled. “We do. A single unit. So far, it’s automatically queued itself up with cohort losses and those of us who were confirmed dead during the drops. Now people, I need input. What’s our strategy?”

Right about then, despite the fact I was in a mild form of shock, I had to admire Winslade. He was arrogant. He was sometimes petty and always dramatic. But here he was again, doing the right thing. He knew Graves had five more decades of experience fighting in space than he did. He wanted to live, so he was asking for help. He was flat out admitting he needed it. That made it harder to hate the man.

Graves took in a deep breath. “Let’s talk about our revival strategy first. We should keep reviving our own people until we have firm knowledge of
Minotaur’s
state. We don’t want to duplicate personnel here on the surface if they’re not confirmed dead in space.”

Winslade nodded. “Agreed. How do we proceed tactically?”

Graves turned to the central display. A few others huddled up with him. All of them were centurions, so I hung back.

They talked for about half an hour. In the end, it was decided that we’d have to scout the enemy base. Supposedly, it had been annihilated by our broadsides, but that hadn’t been confirmed.

After we’d dealt with the enemy on the planet, we had to come up with a way to recapture
Minotaur
. Without that ship, we had no way to get back home.

But taking her back…that sounded like it was going to be a tall order.

-16-

Leeson popped out of the revival system and began to hassle me almost as soon as he was able to draw breath. He couldn’t do it very well as he kept having coughing fits.

“What’s this I hear from Harris about you usurping my platoon, McGill?” he demanded.

I looked him over speculatively. “Sir, you’re swaying a bit. Maybe you should catch your breath.”

“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head and going into another coughing spasm. “That’s how it starts. That’s how a man finds himself replaced. I’m not falling for that—especially after what you did to Harris.”

“Adjunct, all I did was follow Centurion Graves’ orders.”

“Yeah, right. Sure. You want me to believe you’re just some kind of country slap-dick, right? That there’s not a scheming thought in your mind? Forget it, McGill. I’m not falling for that one.”

“Your orders, sir?” I asked, suppressing a sigh.

“Just stay the hell out of my way. Those are your orders. No—hold on. I’ve got a better idea. I want you out on patrol.
Deep
patrol. See if you can find some of the stragglers from the drop pods. Barring that, maybe you can find yourself a sweet way to get killed.”

I spun around on my heel and headed out of the lifter. Angry but resigned, I gathered up my team and we took a hike in the brush.

“What was the officers’ meeting about, James?” Natasha asked me.

Not knowing what to say, I just shook my head and grunted. Sometimes, that works.

We were almost out of sight of the lifter, a thousand paces into the forest. No matter what anyone said about megaflora, I couldn’t help thinking of this place as one giant forest. Sure, the trees looked weird, and they were as much purple as they were green and brown, but they might as well be trees. They had trunks, branches and thick flowering sprouts on top. Their crowns were so distant overhead, however, they looked like mountains seen through a haze of cloud cover.

I turned around and stared back at the lifter where Graves and the rest of them had remained.

“Look at that,” I said. “That lifter looks tiny in this forest. The trees dwarf it like a toy.”

Natasha looked back as did a few others. One of them was Carlos. He turned me a suspicious eye.

“So how come we’re out here marching around in the undergrowth instead of camping with the rest of the cohort?”

I shrugged. “Harris complained, that’s why.”

“That bastard. He’s worse than Winslade in his own way.”

“Now, now,” I chided. “None of that. He’s nowhere near that bad.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Natasha said at my side. “What happened in the meeting?”

This time I stopped dodging and laid it out for her. She was smart, and her face was squinched up with worry by the time I finished explaining.

“So…we’re screwed?” she asked.

“Well and truly,” I admitted. “The only good news is that Winslade brought along a revival machine.”

Carlos hooted at that and joined us. “You know why he did that, don’t you? He never leaves home without a revival machine in close proximity. I bet that thing is programmed to spit him out the second he croaks.”

“Could be,” I admitted. “But in this case, his caution has benefited us all. We can take a few losses and still keep going.”

“A few losses?” Carlos demanded incredulously. “Have you somehow failed to notice we’re as good as wiped right now? This has got to be the biggest fiasco we’ve ever been part of.”

“Nowhere close,” I said, shaking my head. “Remember back on Tech World? It was down to Galina Turov and me alone at one point. Everyone else was as dead as a mackerel on a dock—including you. Now
that
was a fiasco.”

That shut Carlos up for some reason. He frowned, not liking talk of his nonexistence, even though it’d been temporary.

Natasha stepped close to me again. “What are we looking for?”

“Survivors from the pod-drops. Those sorry bastards did even worse than we did.”

“What else did the officers say in the meeting? What’s their plan?”

“They were talking about reviving people: What order, who should go first, who they could be sure was really dead, that sort of thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I know what I would do.”

“What?”

“I’d revive the crew of the freighter. They might know what happened back on Earth. They might know who our enemy really is.”

I halted and frowned at her. “Who our enemy really is? What do you mean?”

“I mean I want to know who’s making these plant-constructs and sending them at us in droves. And who came along and blew up the freighter in the first place.”

Shrugging, I continued to march. “I don’t know why it matters much. They did it, and we’re here to find and destroy them.”

“But they’re putting up quite a fight, wouldn’t you say? It would help a lot to at least know why they did it.”

The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe she was right.

“Okay,” I said, “but do we even have the freighter crew’s data?”

“We do. I checked.”

I chuckled. Of course Natasha had checked. She wasn’t supposed to have access to the bio-database—but that sort of thing had never stopped her before. If she was curious about what a given computer knew, she would dig it up whether she was authorized to do so or not.

“So we have their data. How do we know the crew wasn’t already revived back on Earth?”

Natasha hesitated. She looked over her shoulder to make sure the others in the patrol were out of earshot. They weren’t—but Carlos was telling a loud story, and no one was listening to us at the moment.

“I happen to know that Turov was given the data with instructions to revive the crewmembers if she felt they might be useful.”

We were coming into a dense region of undergrowth where huge waxy pods hung down from the nearest tree. They didn’t sprout from the crown, but from much lower down, just above the gnarly roots.

The pods themselves were odd things—the color and general shape of a jalapeno pepper. Fresh, shiny and dark green. Just like poison.

I halted and poked at the nearest of them with my rifle. “You think these things are seed-pods or something?”

“Yes. Probably part of their reproductive cycle.”

The pods were over thirty meters tall. They hung from fresh-grown tubers until they touched the forest floor. It was startling to think a seed could be so large, but it made sense. The adult mega-growths, after all, were a hundred times as big.

I stopped poking the pod and turned to Natasha. “This isn’t an accidental conversation, is it? You want me to go back there and kick around the idea of reviving the crew, is that it? How do you think that’s going to go over? Turov could have done it at any point on the flight out here—but she didn’t.”

“Exactly,” Natasha said, looking up at me with a gleam in her eye. “That’s a mystery, isn’t it? Why avoid an obvious resource of data on an unknown enemy?”

“Hmm…I don’t feel like reviving Turov to ask her about that.”

“She’s the last person I would ask,” Natasha admitted. “But she’s not around, is she? Remember the chain of command, James. Who’s in charge now? Who has every right to sate their curiosity in this desperate situation?”

I stared at her for a second. “Winslade. Winslade is in charge.”

She nodded, watching me.

Sighing and shaking my head, I could already envision my fate. She’d put these thoughts into my head. Shoving them in one at a time, until my mind was full. She’d known exactly what she was doing, too.

“You’re a sneaky one,” I said. “You’re trying to get me into trouble again, aren’t you?”

“Ninety-six percent of us are dead, at last count. I’d say you’re already in trouble. We all are.”

“Why don’t you march into Winslade’s office and tell him all this? Why don’t you do it your damned-self?”

She laughed quietly. “I’m good at a lot of things, but I can’t stir a pot like you can, James. No one can.”

I opened my mouth, planning to agree with her, but right then we heard a sharp, cracking noise.

Frowning, we turned toward the pod that hung close enough to touch.

It had split open a fraction. As we watched, the crackling turned into a ripping noise, and a seam in the plant gave way, tearing with the sound of a splitting tree-trunk all the way up to the stem overhead.

Inside the split, which was now several centimeters wide, we saw movement.

-17-

Needless to say, my squad was surprised by the thing that tore its way out of the pod. Its appearance was disturbing—I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say it was man-shaped. It looked like a gigantic, lanky humanoid with limbs of brownish green and skin like wet bark. There were no eyes or other obvious sensory organs, but there were fronds here and there hanging from the body. These pulpy, sickly-orange fronds ended in polyps that flopped and pulsated. I wasn’t sure if they were organs, like lungs, or eyeballs, or what.

“Fall back!” I shouted, taking my own advice and stumbling away from the massive creature. “Don’t fire yet, we don’t know if it’s hostile.”

“Should I let it eat me first, Vet?” Carlos called out. “Just to be sure?”

The creature took two sweeping strides forward and stood in our midst. The fronds hanging from its body shivered and drifted up and down like bouncing hair as it walked.

“This is amazing!” Natasha said in a delighted voice. “I’ve never seen anything like it. How does it move? What kind of musculature does it have? I’m dying to find out.”

“Keep backing up,” I ordered. “Sargon, have you got a bead on that big bulbous pod on top?”

“Got it sighted, Vet.”

About ten seconds passed, during which the newborn creature stood and swayed. The orange fronds hanging from it kept swelling and lifting higher like slowly inflating balloons.

“Did you see that?” Natasha asked. She was the only one staying close to the monster. She was walking around it in a circle.

“See what, Specialist?”

“One of those external growths—I’m sure it’s tracking me. I’m getting the impression it’s a sensory organ of some kind.”

I saw it now. It
was
tracking her. The orange, floating polyps were drifting, but with more purpose. They’d locked onto Natasha, and when she walked around the standing monster, they followed her movements.

“I don’t like it,” I told her. “Back off, Specialist.”

“It’s shown no hostile intent,” she insisted. “I’m going to try to get a sample. If it’s a plant, plucking a low-hanging frond shouldn’t—”

Now, I’m not a rule-follower as such, but Natasha’s idea alarmed me. I knew her well, and she was the type that could only be brought to break rules and laws when she was curious or to help a friend. In this case, it was the former.

Before I could order her back yet again, she trotted in close to the two monstrous feet and plucked a frond.

It was only a small one, attached to what might be the monster’s toes. In my opinion, it shouldn’t have hurt any more than plucking a single hair out of a cat’s paw might—but I was wrong.

The creature reacted as if stung. Torpid and confused before, it moved with sudden purpose. A hooting sound erupted from far above us. It was as if someone had activated a foghorn and left it on. Long, low and loud, a single note  of noise rolled out over the forest and made our ears ring.

Spinning its vast bulk around with a speed that belied its behavior thus far, the monster dipped one of those seven-fingered hands toward Natasha.

“Fire!” I roared, having seen enough.

The squad opened up, lashing the trunk and legs with explosive pellets. Sargon’s belcher had been craned to a medium-wide aperture, and he used it to burn away a dozen clumps of those strange, orange fronds. A few of the big ones even caught fire.

The creature went absolutely berserk after that. It missed Natasha with its scooping sweep of a claw-like hand, but then it switched tactics and began to stomp. Hansen died, then the rookie Lau. It went after Carlos next, but he dodged away and ran off, screeching and firing over his shoulder.

“Sargon, narrow that beam and take its head off!”

“Not sure it’s got a head, sir!”

“You know what I mean.”

Sargon fired, but just took a burning chunk out of the shoulder. The beast spun around and crashed onto the forest floor. Carlos was still running, almost out of reach.

That long, long arm shot out again. It caught Carlos as a man might catch a fleeing rat. Lying on its side, the monster lifted him to its upper body and seemed to study him briefly before popping him into its maw and crunching down methodically.

Carlos only screamed once before he died in those massive jaws. The hole was a little small, so the creature had to shove to get him in there, all the while chewing enthusiastically. I would have thought his armor would have saved him, but the creature exerted such great pressure on the breastplate it collapsed with a wet popping sound.

The creature’s distraction gave Sargon time to take aim. The monster’s slavering jaws and eyeless face gave it a slack, idiotic expression. It chewed with mechanical efficiency.

Sargon blew the bulbous head clean off. Before he did, however, I was treated to the sight of blood running down the sides of the tree-trunk face.

After being shot, it didn’t die right away. We had to blast away every sensory frond and destroy its limbs one after another. Even after that, the burnt carcass still twitched and rolled around on the forest floor like a haunted log that’d been struck by lightning.

Breathing hard, I grabbed Natasha by the shoulder and spun her around. She was still examining the thing.

“Happy now?” I demanded.

She blinked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. The odd thing was—she
did
look sort of happy.

“That was amazing,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve never even read about anything like this. Do you know what this means, James? They aren’t constructs. They’re grown this way, by these trees. All this time I was under the impression that the creatures that attacked
Minotaur
were a form of genetically engineered bio-weapon. Something cooked up by a scientist like me. But I was wrong. The megaflora—they grow these monsters. I think they’re a natural form of defense.”

Peering at her then looking at the carcass, I had a hard time understanding her words.

“I lost three good people because you didn’t follow orders,” I told her. “That’s what I know. You’re on report, and you might be on your way to the brig.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Can I complete my investigations first?”

Giving up, I made a sweeping gesture with my arm toward the fallen monster, which was still flopping this way and that. “Be my guest, girl! Have at it. But the rest of you: if Natasha gets rolled on or squirted with acid, do not endanger yourself to save her. That’s an order.”

I stomped away to check on the dead and the wounded while Natasha busily poked and probed at the dead creature.

While she worked, I reported the encounter to my superiors. Graves came on a few minutes later.

“That’s the second report we’ve had of pod-growth. What does Natasha think they are?”

“She says they’re some kind of natural defense for these plants.”

“Right… Makes sense. Bring samples back to camp—and you should be heading back soon. Darkness is coming, and the word is that there are more of these creatures moving around out there.”

An hour later we dragged ourselves back to the lifter with samples of the monster on our backs. Natasha made her report to Graves while I stood near.

“The blood and digestive fluids are acidic,” she said, “but not dangerously so. They aren’t the same manifestation as the creatures that attacked
Minotaur
. Still, we have to assume they’re related.”

“But they’re plants,” Graves said. “Have you figured out yet what makes them move? What kind of musculature they have?”

“Think about them as something akin to a beetle or a crab,” Natasha said. “What I mean is they have a shell, rather than bones. They have a tough cellulose exoskeleton, but they keep all the organs and muscle inside. They have an alien form of muscle, it’s not like ours.”

“So, do you still think the megaflora is growing them on purpose?” Graves asked. “As a defensive mechanism against us?”

“I’m almost certain of it. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. These creatures weren’t here until we landed, and now they’ve been growing and breaking out of their pods. What’s even more interesting is their chosen physiology. In my opinion, they’re mimicking human anatomy.”

“Hmmm,” Graves said. “Why?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m certain it’s by design. The initial creatures that assaulted our ship were less humanoid. These are bigger but more like a man. Whatever shape they take, they’re dangerous.”

“You have my complete agreement there,” Graves said, reviewing the video showing Carlos being eaten.

Graves turned toward me then. “McGill? What was the count of pods on that tree where you found this abomination?”

Hesitating, I at last shook my head. “I didn’t take a firm count. I would say there were less than a dozen, sir.”

Natasha raised her tapper and pointed to it. “I was taking streaming video the whole time. I count fourteen, including the one that we destroyed.”

“Thirteen more monsters in the forest,” Graves said thoughtfully. “That’s my lucky number. Did you know that, McGill?”

“I’m not feeling so lucky today, Centurion.”

Graves walked away and left me with Natasha.

“Seriously Specialist,” I told her. “I need you to follow orders when we’re under fire.”

“When have you ever—?”

I halted her with an upraised hand. “That’s not true. I follow the orders that matter—orders that are justified and which will save my fellows and my mission. You endangered all of us to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Veteran McGill,” she said, drawing herself up straight. “I don’t think you’re being fair. We discovered an amazing new life form. Don’t worry about Carlos. He’ll pop back out of the oven in a few hours.”

Shaking my head, I turned to go. She wasn’t getting what I was saying, and I was tired of repeating it.

“Just a moment,” she said. “Aren’t you going to go talk to Winslade?”

“About the revival queue? I guess it doesn’t seem all that important to me after the events of the afternoon.”

“James, the freighter crew may have information that’s vital to the success of this mission. Let’s not have all this turn out to have been a waste because I got curious.”

She knew how to get to me. She knew I hated the idea of suffering and dying needlessly.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

She nodded while I tramped up to the officer’s deck.

As far as I was concerned, I was on a fool’s errand. Winslade didn’t even want to listen to me, much less take any advice I had to offer.

After I’d explained to the primus about the dead crew of the freighter and that we had reserved the right to revive them during this pursuit, he gave me an odd look.

“Claver,” Winslade said. “You’re talking about Claver, right? I knew you had a shady past with that snake, McGill, but I didn’t think you’d go this far.”

Blinking, I stared at him for a moment.

“What’s Claver got to do with this, sir?” I asked.

“You’re going to play it that way again, are you? The hulking ignoramus routine? It gets old, McGill. It really does.”

“Uh…”

“Claver was on the freighter. You arranged that part yourself according to legend, helping him get the titanium delivery contracts.”

“I don’t remember anything about delivery contracts.”

Winslade rolled his eyes at me. I hated that, but I waited for him to explain.

“How else did you expect Claver to cash in on the lucrative deal you helped set up for him if he wasn’t flying cargo back and forth from Machine World? Didn’t your best friend at least send you a text?”

I frowned, thinking hard. Claver had been given the right to trade titanium from Machine World but only to other parties. Not to Earth. We got our share for free.

“I’m confused, sir—” I began.

“To put it mildly.”

“Well…I mean the last I knew of Claver he was on Earth. He was arrested, you know, and put on notice by Central. I didn’t know he was released to go out to Machine World and do business.”

Winslade crossed his arms and huffed. “Central arresting Claver? You’re talking about Equestrian Nagata. That man has no idea what will stick and what won’t. He’s honorable, but stupid. Central wasn’t going to let anyone hold Claver. Earth
needs
that titanium. Who better to get it than a snake like your friend?”

I followed his logic to a degree. Apparently, Claver had been authorized to transport and deliver titanium from Machine World. It wasn’t surprising that I hadn’t heard about that. I’d ducked out of legion politics as quickly as I could once I’d returned home to Earth. But now here I was, back in the middle of it all.

“But sir,” I objected. “Claver was given the right to trade titanium with other worlds, not Earth.”

“Right,” Winslade said in a condescending tone. “Let’s go over the logic of that statement, shall we? One trader was given the right to transport and sell some of the titanium to other worlds while the balance went to us. Now, how do you think the actual delivery went down?”