Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (22 page)

-27-

Claver walked up to me like he hadn’t a care about what I might do to him. A wall of fire wasn’t a hundred meters behind him. A throng of dying, burning, screeching spiders was out there too, in the fields all around us. On top of all that, he had a dozen rifles aimed at his chest. Any one of us could have cut him down with the twitch of a finger, but he didn’t care.

He approached me with an angry air, like he was an officer who’d just found the dumbest recruit in the legion and planned on a giving the boy a thrashing.

“You,” he breathed, staring into my faceplate. “I should have known. No one else could have screwed this up so thoroughly. What’s wrong with your brain, son?”

“They say it’s genetic,” I said, “but I don’t believe them. My parents were more or less normal.”

“Listen,” Claver said. “We don’t have much time. You’ve caught me—that’s what you wanted, right? Just leave the nexus alone, and we’ll move out. We can still make it out of here.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the massive, barrel-like plant. “What’s so special about this giant cactus?” I asked.

“That’s one of them—one of the megaflora.”

“I thought the trees were the megaflora.”

He shook his head. “We don’t have time for this—”

I reached out with my rifle barrel and tapped him meaningfully on the chest. “We have enough time for a few more answers. We can outrun these spider things. They only wake up when they get lit on fire.”

Claver’s eyes rolled up in his head. It was an expression of disbelief and exasperation. I’d seen it countless times before, but usually on the faces of women I’d dated.

“I don’t even know what they’ll do—this is unprecedented,” he said.

“In that case, you’d better start making sense,” I said. “Sargon over there has an itchy trigger finger. Since you seem to care more about the cactus than you do your own life, you should probably talk faster.”

Claver’s eyes went to Sargon then back to me. “All right. I didn’t think you’d go this far. I guess I’d forgotten that Legion Varus is the scourge of the known galaxy.”

“That’s us.”

“Can we at least start walking out of here?” he asked.

I considered. “All right. Squad—move out. Walking pace.”

Claver clearly wanted to move faster. He began to trot every dozen steps, but I reached out and yanked him back to a walking pace. I figured it was an incentive to get his facts straight.

“Okay,” Claver said, “this is big, McGill. Bigger than a patch of alien spiders. You’ve done a lot of damage out here, but we still might be able to convince them that you didn’t know who you were dealing with. We might be able to get out of this alive.”

I shrugged. “I’ve died before.”

“No, I’m not talking about individual deaths. I’m talking about the death of our species, not just you and your squad. You see, this nexus isn’t just operating a few spiders and spiny plants. This is a brain. A central node in a vast nervous system that covers most of this planet.”

I frowned at him, not entirely understanding.

“A brain?” I asked. “Since when do plants have brains?”

“These creatures are cellulose, mostly, and some of their forms do use photosynthesis. But they aren’t plants as in our classic definition. They don’t just sit around and soak up sun all day. They can move—and they can think.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll buy that after what I’ve seen them do.”

“Right, they coordinate. They organize. They can build things too, if they want to.”

“Like spaceships?” I asked.

“Yes, even that,” he said. “But that’s not what you have here. This is a brain node—think of it that way. This central node has been spawning smaller directive creatures to handle others. Think of them as shepherds that herd flocks of dumber plants.”

“You’re talking about the spiders, right?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Why didn’t you tell us all this back at the damned lifter?” I demanded. “This information would’ve been more useful at that point.”

Claver laughed. “I told that fool Drusus just enough to get thrown out of his camp. Why would I tell him more? He didn’t pay for more.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because the situation has changed, and you’re screwing up my plans. If you destroy a nexus, well, God help us all.”

Frowning, I kept walking with him. The fire behind us reached the edge of the central nexus. A few more spiders were caught up in the flame and died horribly.

“Uh…” Carlos said, walking up to us. “I don’t want to interrupt you two lovebirds, but that nexus thing is about to get roasted.”

“Nah,” Claver said. “It’ll be okay. The vines already ripened on this field, see, and it’s stopped distributing water to the pods. That’s done to trigger the spiders to hatch.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Carlos demanded suspiciously.

Claver shook his head and spoke carefully as if Carlos was a slow child. I knew the feeling. “That big central thing you call a cactus? It’s full of water, and that means it’s too green to burn. Nothing right around it will burn, either.”

Thinking back, I had noted a large barren area without pods growing in it around the plant. Maybe Claver was right.

“Okay, keep talking,” I said. “My inclination is to turn around and blast that cactus to fragments. Tell me why I shouldn’t do it.”

“You
can’t
do that,” Claver said. “Seriously, McGill, I know you’re a man of limited intellect. But that doesn’t mean you’re completely incapable of logical thought.”

“Thanks,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “Let’s give my substandard brain a workout, shall we? You said these plant aliens like to seed forgotten star systems such as this one. You described them as rebels in the Cephalopod Kingdom. Was that story bullshit too?”

“Not entirely. They do live among the cephalopods. But I did withhold one critical piece of information about their conflict.”

“What’s that?” I demanded.

“The cephalopods are losing their war with these creatures. These plants are winning. That’s why I don’t want to off-handedly kill one of their brains. They don’t have billions of brains among them—only a few. Are you capable of comprehending the distinction?”

I wanted to punch Claver. Hell, I wanted to shoot him dead. He’d set traps for us, insulted us, and he’d gotten Earth into God-knew-what kind of danger.

With a growl in my throat, I turned to Sargon.

“Weaponeer?” I called out.

“Vet?”

“You see that cactus-looking thing behind us? There’s a lot of smoke, but it’s a big target.”

“I see it,” Sargon said, squinting and putting his belcher up to his shoulder.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Claver said, reaching for Sargon.

Sargon, wearing powered armor, batted him away easily since Claver was in a light, smart cloth suit.

“Take aim and punch a hole into that cactus for me, weaponeer,” I said. “I want to see what a plant-brain looks like on the inside.”

“With pleasure, Veteran McGill!”

-28-

The belcher hummed and the air crackled for an instant. A bolt of energy leapt from Sargon’s weapon to the big nexus brain. An uneven hole opened with a puff of what looked like steam. Liquid poured out. Claver had said it was full of water, but the stuff that came out was more of a thick, discolored goop.

“There you go, Vet,” Sargon said. “One plant-brain, cooked to perfection.”

“Excellent.”

Claver fell to his knees. I wasn’t sure if that was from Sargon smacking him down or due to shock. He stared, slack-jawed at the nexus thing. More and more goop kept flowing out of the smoking hole in its surface.

Walking up to him, I proudly surveyed my weaponeer’s work. Claver seemed to be beyond words.

“I thought you said they were full of water,” I told him. “That looks more like snot to me.”

Claver turned to me, his face displaying vast disbelief.

“You
idiots
,” he said, almost as if he was out of breath. “Not since Napoleon fired a cannon at the Sphinx…you have no idea what you’ve done. You’re like children playing with matches, unaware the town is burning.”

I grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. I gave him a shaking that made him look like a kid’s ragdoll.

“If that’s true,” I said, “it’s your own damned fault, not mine! You’ve been full of crap every word, every step of the way. If you ask me, you’re too clever by half for your own good. Now we’re marching out of here. You can come with us, or sit in this cactus patch and play with the spiders.”

I left him there, and I didn’t much care what he did. I’d had enough of Claver and this weird, deadly planet. If we ran into any new menaces, I planned to blast them first and ask philosophical questions later.

Eventually, Claver followed us. He walked as if in a dream.

Sargon came up to me and voiced his concerns. “Claver seems to be taking this hard,” he said.

“Yeah, well…he’ll get over it.”

“I mean, he seems dejected and even a bit nuts.”

Glancing back, I could see what Sargon meant. Claver was staring at the ground—and talking to it.

“I figure he’s probably overwhelmed by the strain of being alone on planets like this one,” I said. “Imagine living without the joy of human companionship for so long.”

Sargon gave me an odd look. “Are you joking, Vet?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. What if the crap he was spouting is true? What if we just started a new war with these plants? We can’t just keep doing that kind of thing without paying the piper eventually.”

“Listen,” I said, “don’t let Claver get to you. Remember what Turov did? She blasted this planet with
Minotaur’s
broadsides. That flattened an area the size of Connecticut. What difference does one cactus make in comparison to that?”

Apparently, Claver had been listening to our talk. He snapped out of his reverie and rushed to catch up to me. He reached for my arm, but I twisted away from him.

“What do you want?” I asked dangerously.

“That’s it!” he said. He was smiling now. “I can blame it all on Turov. That woman is a bigger fool than you could ever be.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said, “but what are you on about now?”

Claver turned and trotted off into the ferns. We’d passed the edge of the spider-pod field and now marched through the endless undergrowth of the forest again.

“Halt!” I said authoritatively. I drew my sidearm and aimed at Claver’s legs. “I’ll put you down if you take another step.”

One side benefit of blasting aliens you weren’t supposed to was that people tended to take your threats seriously. I’m not sure if I would have shot Claver as he ran off into the forest—but then again, I might have.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to make that choice. His pace faltered, and then he stopped.

“Get your butt back here,” I demanded.

“What’s the point? You’re all as good as dead—and me with you if I stick around.”

His comment made me eye the wild land around us with fresh concern. Then I turned back to Claver. I took careful aim.

“Explain why, and maybe I’ll let you go,” I said.

He turned around to face me with a calculating look in his eye. I’d seen that look before, and I knew it meant he planned to bamboozle me. That didn’t worry me at all, though. Every time I’d met up with Claver, he’d pretty much had that same plan in mind.

“All right,” he said, coming back to me. He walked right up to my gun barrel, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He might be a liar, a thief, a schemer, and a general scourge on the soul of humanity—but Claver was no coward.

“Talk,” I ordered.

The rest of the squad halted and gathered around, listening. Some looked amused, some worried, and some were pretending to be bored, like Kivi. But mostly, they were interested in what Claver had to say.

“The broadsides Turov fired didn’t hit any of the nexus nodes like this one. Her guns knocked out their construction yards. That’s where I usually come to do business. To trade metals and other refined goods with the locals.”

“Okay then, tell me this: why would shooting a nexus be a bigger deal than blasting apart a large section of the planet?”

“Admittedly, destroying a valuable facility from space is an attack. But invading this world and executing a gestating nexus just as the pods are ripening—that’s an entirely different level of evil according to their way of thinking. You see, the megaflora you keep calling ‘trees’ are less than sentient for the most part. They’re like animals, just intelligent enough to fulfill their orders. The nexus is what gives those orders. Killing one of these cactus-looking creatures is a much bigger deal. It’s like the difference between cutting down your neighbor’s rosebush and shooting his wife.”

I could understand what he was saying, but I frowned in confusion about a number of other points.

“Okay, I get that,” I said. “Maybe I acted hastily. But why the hell did you lead us here without explaining yourself if it was such a big deal?”

“Leading you here wasn’t my intention. I did everything I could to evade pursuit. But not even I can survive forever on Death World without gear. I had to get help, to cut a deal with one of the nexus brains. So I came here to make that deal—then you showed up and began burning the place down!”

“Hmm,” I said. “Look, Claver, I appreciate that you probably had a lucrative contract going with these beings. But the last I heard, they followed you all the way to Earth, running you down and knocking your ship out of the sky. How does that make you their best buddy?”

Claver scowled. “That was a misunderstanding. They wanted metals, so I brought them metals. Unfortunately, they could tell that my ship had more cargo aboard. They demanded it all. I tried to explain that it wasn’t all for them, that I had other deliveries to make. They didn’t get it and tried to take the remainder by force. I resisted and ran. The rest is history.”

“Okay…” I said, thinking it over. It did make a kind of sense. If there was ever a race of aliens that might take things the wrong way due to cultural differences, it had to be these plant-creatures. “I can see that, but then how did you plan on making things nice with them here? Our ship hit them, and they can’t be in a good mood after that.”

“In their minds, you and I aren’t the same. You represent the Empire. I represent a free-trading consortium of enlightened individuals. Therefore,
I
didn’t attack them. The Empire did. My plan was to blame the lack of a full shipment on your violent kind. It was working, too. The nexus was pissed after the broadside attack and ready to blame anything on your ship full of aggressors.”

“You managed to make contact then?” I asked, eyes narrowing. “How?”

Claver waved his hand dismissively. “A translation device of no importance. What matters is that—hey, get off me!”

I grabbed him almost as fast as Sargon did. Despite his threats and complaints, we searched him thoroughly. Nothing special could be found.

Afterward, he stood there with his smart cloth suit down to his knees. The fabric rustled and shivered as a result of the violation. I knew it would reknit itself in time, so I didn’t worry about it.

“You lied,” I said. “There’s no translation device.”

“There’s nothing internal, either,” Kivi said. She’d been scanning him with more sophisticated instruments, using buzzers with emission-detection gear. “He couldn’t have one, anyway. We just revived him, and we certainly didn’t bring down this phantom translator on the lifter.”

“No, no, no,” Claver said irritably. “You people lack any kind of imagination. The translator runs on my tapper. That’s why it was reconstructed along with my body.  My translator is an app, not a physical device—morons.”

Kivi stepped forward and grabbed his arm. She scanned his tapper carefully, browsing menus and plugging in a more powerful computer she kept in her ruck. All techs had access to computer systems that were far better than a man’s tapper.

“Good encryption software—but not good enough. You’ve hacked this device, Claver.”

“Like any pro would. Look, don’t tear it up. I’ll share the app just to save time.”

He did so, and Kivi looked intrigued. “It appears to use liquid injections and scents—disgusting.”

“That’s how you talk to a plant-creature. You generate the right organic molecules in the right sequence, and it responds. A few droplets of blood and spit are all you need. The program takes what it needs and dribbles out words. The process takes a long time, unfortunately. These plants don’t have an efficient, brief means of communication like we do.”

Curious but a little grossed out, I examined the program and what it directed a person to do to communicate. I could see why Claver needed time to talk to the nexus and work out a deal.

“Okay,” I said at last, letting go of his arm. “I believe that you have a way to talk to them. You had a dodge worked out to blame us for the attacks. But now that deal is blown because we shot the nexus. What’s plan B?”

“What’s next? Claver laughed. “You tell me, ape. You shot my plans in the head. Now do you get it? Now do you grasp just how screwed we all are?”

Unfortunately, I did.

Kivi discovered something else as she examined all the data she’d pulled off Claver’s tapper. She learned that his tapper, unlike our own, hadn’t been disconnected from the Legion’s network.

When she informed me of this, I gave a little war whoop and laid hands on Claver again.

“What the hell?” he complained. “What, didn’t you get enough fun the first time you pantsed me?” By now, his smart cloth had covered him again.

“Arm out, man. You have something we need.”

He looked confused, but held out his arm. Kivi went to work on it immediately, hot-linking us to his unit then using her more powerful machine to boost the signal.

“We’ve got a connection!” she shouted within three minutes.

“You really are the squad’s tech,” I told her. “Not even Natasha could have done better.”

She beamed with pride, and I relayed a message to the one man I knew I could trust to give me real information: Centurion Graves.

“The rest of you stay off the net,” I told them. “They’ve shut us down before, and I don’t want them turning off our little work-around until I’ve had a chance to report in.”

“But you’re signaling Graves,” Kivi said. “Tribune Drusus is the one who sent us on this mission.”

“Exactly. Maybe old Drusus decided to cut us off after watching us wander off into the bush. I know Graves didn’t order that, so I’m playing my best odds.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked suspiciously.

“You think you’re better at dodging and bullshitting than I am, girl?”

Kivi shook her head seriously. “Only Claver might be—no one else that I know.”

I took her words as a compliment and kept trying to get Graves on the line. It took a while, and I began to worry. What if Graves refused to talk to me? What if he was asking Drusus what to do next?

After a full minute, which can be a very long time when you’re sweating and staring at a spinning icon embedded in the skin of your enemy’s arm, the connection was finally made.

“McGill? Is that really you or is it some tech having fun?”

“A little of both, I guess, sir,” I said.

His face slid out of view to the left and right. I could tell that he was checking to see if anyone was within earshot. The camera in his tapper wasn’t perfect, and neither was the signal. It was coming from a long ways off.

“Talk,” he said. “Quickly.”

“Sir, somehow we’ve been cut off from Legion Varus, but I came up with a way around that technical problem. I’m reporting in.”

Graves chuckled. “Same old McGill. I know it’s you now. You’re full of shit.”

“Thank you, sir. Do you want to hear what I have to say? I’ve got critical intel from the field.”

Graves looked like he was seriously weighing his options for a second. I didn’t like that. If he shut me down then told the techs to block this channel—well, we were pretty much screwed.